Silk Road owner charged in second assassination plot

Torture and murder, oh my:

Less than a day after the FBI seizure of Silk Road and the arrest of alleged founder Ross William Ulbricht, a Maryland indictment has been released charging Ulbricht with 1) conspiracy to commit murder of a witness; 2) use of interstate commerce in murder-for-hire; and, of course, 3) conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.

This morning’s criminal complaint alleged that Ulbricht sought to murder a user named FriendlyChemist in March 2013 because of apparent extortion. The FBI says that Ulbricht, using the screenname Dread Pirate Roberts, paid $500,000 to have the man killed in Canada, but no records of such a murder have been found so far.

This indictment brings new charges into the fray.

Read more at the Daily Dot.

The Syrian uprising is the first social media war

This is how we see war in 2013: next to like buttons and view counters.

As a battle flared just west of Idlib, a contested city in northwest Syria, a camera was mounted on an old Kalashnikov rifle so the audience would have nearly the exact same perspective that a video game player has in blockbuster first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike.

The sound of gunfire mixes with an army of young men screaming “Allahu Akhbar!” Dozens of armed Syrian rebels sprint across an open field to storm a well-defended government checkpoint. An editor would later alternate between first-person action and a cameraman on a nearby hill filming the battle from a bird’s eye view.

When the rebels won, the video was guaranteed to be a viral hit.

Read more at the Daily Dot.