GREENVILLE, N.C. (WITN) – A company that has faced community pushback on plans to open a crypto-mining facility has paused its project development in Eastern Carolina.

Compute North said that its decision to put on hold plans on the facility in the Greenville area surrounds uncertainty regarding energy costs in North Carolina.

“Based on legislative and regulatory actions that may impact the cost of energy in North Carolina, Compute North made the decision in early April to pause development plans in Greenville. We appreciate the engagement and support from the Greenville Eastern North Carolina Alliance, City of Greenville and Greenville Utilities Commission and expect to continue our dialogue with community representatives and state legislators,” Compute North said in a statement.

The company did not put a timeline on when it would reconsider resuming its project development plan.

The crypto-mining facility has been a point of contention with many in the community complaining about noise and other potential impacts.

The project was originally planned for construction across from Belvoir Elementary School in Pitt County but the company cancelled that plan after opposition from many residents.

Greenville’s city council voted earlier this year in favor of letting the company pursue the project with stipulations concerning schools or homes.

Copyright 2022 WITN. All rights reserved.

KOWLOON, HONG KONG, May 14, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ChickenFast is a platform that makes cloud mining simple to perform and offers extremely efficient and dependable service for customers without any need for advanced equipment or knowledge. Folks aren’t required any specific software or hardware or even keep their systems on to organizing cloud mining.

ChickenFast has an easy design. Users are required to make deposit as they do normally in their bank accounts and receive dividends automatically in Bitcoin in their accounts everyday. These rewards are paid at any time, and after 52-week timeframe they can conduct withdrawal of their initial deposit.

Profitability here is independent and steady of the Bitcoin rate.  Moreover, ChickenFast is extremely effortless mining mechanism on market. This extremely profitable mechanism automatically chosen, and all that work is done via artificial intelligence. Payments are provided on a daily basis, is steady and isn’t influenced by shift in Bitcoin rate.

How Is ChickenFast So Profitable?

Folks aren’t required any specific software or hardware as mentioned above. They are required to enter desired amount in profitability calculator. ChickenFast mechanism will chose the best blend of assets for you, and eliminates the hassle of doing the research regarding mechanisms, miner types and best crypto assets to mine.

You need to choose the income rate you want and initiate production of Bitcoin. Check out the approx. profit and make a deposit.

Profit calculator takes all the expenses into account. There’s a nominal maintenance fee for management of all the mining hardware, which includes administrative expenses and electricity costs.

One more thing to take into account is the monthly lottery for active and loyal ChickenFast customers, where they can bag a plethora or rewards Live. What makes it trustworthy? It is the video broadcast from studio of the organization.

What’s Going On In The Crypto…

The Wikimedia Foundation will stop accepting crypto donations after months of pressure from members of the Wikipedia community. The foundation said on Sunday it will close its BitPay account, which facilitated crypto gifts.

Members of the community had asked for the foundation to end crypto donations last month following a debate among 400 Wikipedia users. The group opposing the foundation’s crypto policy was primarily concerned with the negative climate impacts of crypto mining and the foundation’s reputation.

The majority of those participants ultimately decided that Wikimedia Foundation should stop taking crypto gifts. Although the foundation wasn’t obliged to respond, it did, saying it would discuss whether to stop taking crypto payments internally and provide an update by the end of April.

“Times change and situations change,” Megan Hernandez, Wikimedia Foundation’s VP of Advancement, said at the time.

Molly White, who goes by GorillaWarfare on Wikipedia, helped lead the push to stop crypto donations. “I’m really happy that the Wikimedia Foundation implemented the request from its community, and I’m really proud of my community for making what I feel was the ethical decision after a lot of thoughtful discussion,” White told the Verge. “There are just too many issues with crypto for any potential donation revenue to be worth the cost of helping to legitimize it.”

Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the foundation’s chief advancement officer, wrote on Sunday that Wikimedia Foundation will continue to monitor the issue and “appreciate the feedback and consideration given to this evolving matter by people across the Wikimedia movement.”

“We will remain flexible and responsive to the needs of volunteers and donors,” Seitz-Gruwell said.

The foundation has accepted donations in bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether since 2014. The foundation received $130,000 worth of crypto in the last fiscal year, which accounted for about 0.08% of its annual revenue.

Crypto mining has become…

A notorious cryptocurrency mining botnet has begun targeting misconfigured Docker APIs, according to CrowdStrike.

LemonDuck has been observed exploiting ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server and using EternalBlue and other exploits to mine cryptocurrency, escalate privileges and move laterally inside compromised networks.

Now its attention has turned to one of the world’s most popular containerization platforms.

The botnet is targeting exposed Docker APIs in order to gain initial access, CrowdStrike explained.

“It runs a malicious container on an exposed Docker API by using a custom Docker Entrypoint to download a ‘core.png’ image file that is disguised as Bash script,” it said in a blog post yesterday.

Before the payload – an “a.asp” file – is downloaded and mining can begin, it performs several actions, including killing the processes, IOC file paths and C&C connections of competing crypto-mining groups.

The a.asp file also has the capability to switch off Alibaba’s cloud monitoring service in order to fly under the radar of network defenders.

LemonDuck attempts to move laterally by searching for SSH keys on a filesystem, using them to log into additional servers and run its malicious scripts.

The researchers also found multiple campaigns running from many of the C&C servers associated with LemonDuck, including ones targeting Windows and Linux machines.

“Due to the cryptocurrency boom in recent years, combined with cloud and container adoption in enterprises, cryptomining is proven to be a monetarily attractive option for attackers,” CrowdStrike concluded.

“Since cloud and container ecosystems heavily use Linux, it drew the attention of the operators of botnets like LemonDuck, which started targeting Docker for cryptomining on the Linux platform.”

The campaign highlights the need for administrators to ensure their container environments are correctly configured according to industry best practices, and…

Another spicy week of crypto news heads into the weekend, with Mexico’s third-richest billionaire advising “save your skin” from hyperinflation by buying bitcoin, Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary predicting that bitcoin mining will “save the world,” Bitcoin.com News noting eerie similarities between the current great monetary shift and the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and SHIB achieving some notable burn statistics. Without further ado, this is your bite-sized digest of the week’s hottest crypto news, the Bitcoin.com News Week in Review.

Buy Bitcoin, ‘Save Your Skin’ — Mexico’s Third Richest Billionaire

The third-richest billionaire in Mexico, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, has shared his experience of living through hyperinflation. He warned that the U.S. and several other civilized countries are “going exactly the same route” his country went through in the 1980s. He warned: “The bad news is that the U.S., and Japan, and the U.K., and the euroblock — they are going exactly the same route my country went in the 80s.”

Read More

The Eerie Similarities of Today’s Great Monetary Shift and the Panic-Led Creation of the Federal Reserve System

While many Americans believe the U.S. Federal Reserve is the caretaker of the country’s monetary system, it’s also believed to be one of the worst financial institutions ever created. In 2022, amid a gloomy economy, war, and a number of global crises, the possibility of a great monetary shift has increased.

Read More

Kevin O’Leary Predicts Trillions of Dollars Will Flood Into Crypto — Says Bitcoin Mining Will ‘Save the World’

Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, has predicted that trillions of dollars will flow into cryptocurrencies, particularly bitcoin. In addition, he said bitcoin mining will “save the world.”

Read More

Shiba Inu Burn Rate Hits 26,000%, 1.4 Billion SHIB Burned in 24 Hours

Last Saturday, the second-largest meme-based cryptocurrency,…

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Fidelity Investments^® today announced the launch of two new thematic exchange-traded funds (ETFs) — Fidelity Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF (FDIG) and Fidelity Metaverse ETF (FMET) – and five new fixed income sustainable funds and ETFs – Fidelity Sustainable Core Plus Bond Fund (FIAEX), Fidelity Sustainable Core Plus Bond ETF (FSBD), Fidelity Sustainable Low Duration Bond Fund (FAPGX), Fidelity Sustainable Low Duration Bond ETF (FSLD), and Fidelity Sustainable Intermediate Municipal Income Fund (FSIKX). These seven innovative new funds will be available on or about April 21, 2022, for individual investors and financial advisors to purchase commission-free through Fidelity’s online brokerage platforms.

The two new thematic ETFs expand Fidelity’s lineup into the crypto and metaverse industries. Fidelity Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF, which will not offer direct exposure to cryptocurrency, delivers the opportunity to invest in companies that support the broader digital assets ecosystem, including those involved in crypto mining and trading, blockchain technology, and digital payments processing.

Fidelity Metaverse ETF can help investors invest in the evolution and future of the internet by providing access to companies that develop, manufacture, distribute, or sell products or services related to establishing and enabling the metaverse, such as computing hardware and components, digital infrastructure, design and engineering software, gaming technology and software, web development and content services, and smart phone and wearable technology​. Fidelity also released a new Viewpoints article about the metaverse: Enter the metaverse.

“Leveraging Fidelity’s decades of investment expertise, we are focused on growing our broad product lineup with innovative strategies that offer choice, value and new opportunities to investors,” said Greg Friedman, Fidelity’s Head of ETF Management and…

Cado Security says it has discovered a strain of malware specifically designed to run in AWS Lambda serverless environments and mine cryptocurrency.

The team admitted it doesn’t quite know how the software nasty, dubbed Denonia, is deployed, though you’re welcome to take a guess.

“It may simply be a matter of compromising AWS access and secret keys then manually deploying into compromised Lambda environments,” Cado’s Matt Muir suggested in a technical write-up on Wednesday.

While the security firm has only seen the malware running in AWS Lambda, it can be made to run in other Linux-flavored environments, Cado Security CTO and co-founder Chris Doman told The Register this week.

And although Denonia isn’t being used, as far as we know, for anything worse than illicit mining activities, “it demonstrates how attackers are using advanced cloud-specific knowledge to exploit complex cloud infrastructure, and is indicative of potential future, more nefarious attacks,” wrote Muir, who thanked Doman, Al Carchrie and Paul Scott for their help in probing the code.

When asked about Denonia, an AWS spokesperson told us it’s pretty much on you, the customer, as to what runs in your cloud environment:

Under Amazon, and other cloud providers’, shared-responsibility security model, AWS secures the underlying environment — Lambda, in this case — while the customer is responsible for securing their own data and the Lambda functions themselves. In other words, if you get Denonia in your Lamba environment, you probably didn’t safeguard or protect it fully.

Muir highlighted Lambda’s security benefits. “The managed runtime environment reduces the attack surface…

USK, Wash. – The old Ponderay Newsprint Company is now home to thousands of cryptocurrency mines. 

Merkle Standard says it wants to make money for the region and bring back industry jobs using Washington’s hydroelectric energy. 

The once-booming paper mill turned on the lights once again in January. 

“Specifically this year, for the first two months in January and February of 2022, we’ve paid over $292,000 in taxes that’ll go directly to Pend Oreille County,” said Chief Operating Officer Monty Stahl. 

The machine that converted pulp to paper provided jobs for so many in Usk, like former engineer and now-general manager Todd Behrend. 

Next to it are over 2,000 cryptocurrency mines. They are small, but a more powerful processor than you would find on your computer. 

These hold the equivalent of a digital ledger and algorithms. 

“That algorithm then determines what coin you’re mining and you point it to that communication with the internet to a wallet,” Behrend said. 

The two cryptocurrencies mined at the facility are Bitcoin and Ethereum. The machines generate revenue, but also give off energy that Merkle Standard says will be used to warm up the building. 

While Stahl says Merkle Standard is promising a carbon neutral footprint by the end of the year, neighbors in the area are concerned about the heat and environmental impacts that could be generated from all the power. 

The Natural Resources Defense Council says the crypto boom poses a big problem given the world’s tight timeline to reach net-zero emissions. 

Crypto has a massive carbon footprint that stems from the extreme computer power needed to carry out the buying and selling of crypto coins. 

A petition started by neighbors demands a study be done to look at Merkle Standard’s…

A recovery in the price of bitcoin should fuel gains for mining companies that process transactions on the crypto’s network. Yet the stocks face hurdles beyond the digital currency’s price.

Bitcoin miners operate the computers that process transactions on the blockchain, receiving payment in bitcoin itself for their work. The process works through brute-force computing to solve a mathematical puzzle for each block of transactions. Miners consume vast amounts of electricity to try to win a block reward, competing against other miners around the world for each block.