Hasta La Gadget!

Since Steam Deck went on sale at the end of February, Valve has emailed reservation holders about once a week to tell them they can purchase its handheld PC. That’s meant a lot of people have been patiently waiting to get their hands on the highly sought-after gadget, but that wait could soon be shorter.

On Monday, the company said it was ramping up Steam Deck shipments. By just how much, Valve didn’t specify, but what it did promise is that it would start sending more order availability emails each week. If you’re on the fence about buying a unit, Valve has also updated the Steam Deck’s product page to clarify what timeframes like Q2 and Q3 mean in terms of months. If you were to place a reservation today, the page now says you’ll have the chance to order a unit sometime in October 2022 or later. Bottom line: it sounds like Valve is doing its best to get Steam Deck units to customers more quickly. 

Between Discovery (which just concluded its fourth season), the ongoing second season of Picard, the hype ahead of Strange New Worlds, and the spiffy new release of 1978’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, one might start to feel a little overstuffed on all things Trek. But here’s something to change your mind.

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In what the DOJ calls one of the largest cryptocurrency civil forfeiture filings in US history, the Southern District of Florida has successfully seized around $34 million worth of coins and tokens from a seller on the dark web.

According to a recent release, the illicit crypto was seized from a South Florida resident who used an online alias to sell more than 100,000 illicit items across marketplaces on the dark web. The bulk of the sales is said to be hacked account info from a number of major services including HBO, Netflix, Uber and others.

Prosecutors from the Southern District of Florida say the resident used TOR (The Onion Router) to access the dark web, before using a series of tumblers to convert one cryptocurrency to another in order to hide its source. This series of actions is often called chain hopping and is considered a form of money laundering, which obviously a big no-no at both the federal and state levels. 

Eventually, proceeds from the illicit sales were deposited in random increments at random times in designated crypto wallets, which were later recovered by law enforcement. Between May 16th, 2017 and June 19th, 2017, authorities seized approximately 919.3 Ethereum, 643 Bitcoins, 640 Bitcoin Gold, 640 Bitcoin Cash and 640 Bitcoin SV

The DOJ says the civil forfeiture filing comes as a result of Operation TORnado, which is a joint investigation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) across multiple federal, state and local agencies.

However, while that $34 million sum (which was worth as much as $47 million at one point based on court docs) is certainly a lot, given the growing popularity of crypto, it almost certainly won’t be one of the largest seizures for long. 

Last year, researchers discovered what they thought was a small black hole not too far from Earth. A reanalysis has found that may not be true.

The manga world was rocked last May when it was announced that Kentaro Miura, best-selling writer and author of Berserk, had passed away due to acute aortic dissection, leaving his incredibly dark magnum opus unfinished. But at least the series’ many American fans will finally get their chance to see Miura’s final…

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