Googlers? (Photo: ConferenceBike)

The bizarre tale of Google's takeover of Provo's fiber network is getting even weirder. The search giant billed the Utah city $500,000 to locate where the wires are hidden since the company that installed them didn’t keep proper records of where they were buried. [Ars Technica]

Matthew Keys, the beleaguered former Reuters deputy social media editor, pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges that he conspired with Anonymous to break-in and attack websites of his former employer, Tribune. His next court date is June 12. [Huffington Post]

“Anytime I’m at a dinner or an event, social or business, people are buzzing about Tinder." And with those words spoken, a Times profile of the dating app was born. [New York Times]

Google houses more than 1,300 colorful bikes in a warehouse near its Mountain View headquarters for employees to use because there's no perk not offered there. Were you expecting anything less? [Wired]

PayPal said that it's "kinda thinking about" introducing Bitcoin as a form of payment in its system. [Silicon Angle]

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is officially on Twitter. No word if he's #TeamFollowback. [TNW]

(Photo: flickr.com/jaxed)

Several big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Intel have publicly declared their support for gay marriage. They're part of a corporate group that's reportedly planning to file an amicus brief in support of overturning California's Prop 8. [Bloomberg]

Yahoo would like you to know that its new, anti-work-from-home police has absolutely nothing to do with you (unless you work at Yahoo). [Mercury News]

"While hanging with my 12 year old cousin the other day, I unknowingly entered into the world of Tweenstagram, a vastly different space than the Instagram I have grown to know and love (and refresh too often)." Do go on. [Wisdom of Pearls]

Max Levchin, one of the cofounders of PayPal, is launching a new mobile payments startup with the chipper name of Affirm. “You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back." [AllThingsD]

Former Square COO Keith Rabois, who left in the wake of sexual harassment accusations, has landed at Khlosa Ventures as a VC. [AllThingsD]

Mr. Zuckerberg, please collect your chump change. (Photo: ITechBook.net)

However broke the state of California may be, it's also sitting on a treasure trove of unclaimed property that's valued at over $6 billion. Holders like "corporations, business associations, financial institutions, and insurance companies" are required to report any unclaimed property annually to the state comptroller's office. That means if you've forgotten about bank account contents or uncashed money orders, they're sitting around with the comptroller.

Houston Rockets quantitative analyst Christopher Long searched the database for some bold-faced names and came up with some pretty amusing results. For one, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is apparently owed paychecks from Stanford University worth over $1,000. (No word on whether Rockets player and Harvard grad Jeremy Lin helped sift through the bold-faced names.)

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has a $269 check waiting for him from the California Automobile Association, and the state of Pennsylvania appears to owe Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk $408.

The most interesting, however, is that according to the comptroller, PayPal owes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg $308.62. The address listed on the form is for 1743 Westbrook Ave. in Los Altos, CA, the house Zuck and Co. rented [PDF] while building Facebook. As a struggling entrepreneur in 2004-2005, he probably could've used that money.

Misters Zuck, Brin, Woz and Musk can fill out a Claim Affirmation Form to collect their money, though we're guessing it's chump change to the cadre of millionnaires at this point.

(Photo: IMDB)

If Singularity lover and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel can't have Mars, he will instead control earth. Business Insider reports that the early Facebook investor has bestowed a $300,000 investment upon Canadian inventor Louis Michaud so that he can create man-made tornadoes.

Of course, these wouldn't be just any old tornadoes; if executed properly, they could actually use vortex-power to produce energy at a cheaper cost than sources like coal. Mr. Michaud's company AVEtec is building "a prototype of its Atmospheric Vortex Engine to create tornadoes about 40 meters high that can produce energy from waste heat."

The seed grant comes from Breakout Labs, a sector of the Thiel Foundation that invests in early-stage science companies. As the tornadoes will be created for energy purposes, sadly we don't think we'll see Mr. Thiel starring in a Twisters remakes any time soon.

The Guardian/Yui Mok/PA

A British student named Christopher Weatherhead was convicted today for his part in a series of cyber-attacks against companies that froze payments to WikiLeaks following its release of classified documents in 2010.

Mr. Weatherhead, who adopted the moniker "Nerdo," was charged with playing a central role in an Anonymous DDOS campaign against companies such as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, as the hacker collective joined the fray when the payments companies clamped down on WikiLeaks fundraising.

Dubbed "Operation Payback," the attacks were said to have disrupted PayPal for 10 days, leading users who tried to visit the payment company's website to a page displaying the text, "You've tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung."

According to the Guardian, the 22-year-old Mr. Weatherhead denied the charges:

He refused to admit that he had been part of the actual attacks, claiming to have been the communications manager for Anonymous and the creator of online chatrooms where the attacks were planned.

The jury convicted the 22-year-old student, who apparently dreamed of working for Amazon or Google, after deliberating for little more than two hours. He will be sentenced along with three co-conspirators who had already pleaded guilty at a later date.

Website seized! (ICE)

Anyone searching for cheap, counterfeit sports memorabilia, media, clothing and jewelry today may be disappointed. In conjunction with other law enforcement agencies around the world, U.S. authorities have taken down 132 domain names as part of their Project Cyber Monday. This marks the third year for the project, which goes after sites identified as sources for fake, illegal goods.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a statement about the take-downs, which noted authorities targeted sites meant to fool unwitting consumers "into unknowingly buying counterfeit goods as part of the holiday shopping season."

ICE's statement indicates authorities also followed the money to hit site owners where it hurts:

In addition to the domain name seizures, officials identified PayPal accounts utilized by the infringing websites. Proceeds received through the identified PayPal accounts, in excess of $175,000, are currently being targeted for seizure by the investigating [Homeland Security Investigations] field offices.

Since 2010 authorities have seized 1,630 domains. ICE reports that the banners used to alert potential customers that the site has been seized have received a total of 110 million views.

As for those Canal Street guys peddling knock-off Rolexes? We're probably still stuck with them for the time being.

(Photo: Wordpress)

Wordpress.com, which hosts close to 58 million blogs across the world, announced last night that it will now accept payments for upgrades via Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency. The blog hosting platform says its mission is to "make publishing democratic," and because PayPal and other payment companies block access in a fair amount of countries, the company has decided to accept Bitcoin, enabling users without access to PayPal to still purchase Wordpress upgrades.

According to the blog post:

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Wordpress has made paying with Bitcoins extremely easy, creating a Bitcoin section on the checkout screen that shows the price of your purchase in Bitcoins as well as an address to a wallet unique to that purchase.

By accepting Bitcoin, Wordpress is helping to legitimize the notion of open source digital transactions, a move that Reddit is also considering. Bitcoin has long been sequestered in a darker corner of the Internet, painted as the favorite currency for hackers and black market drug dealers. With more and more sites adding a Bitcoin payment option, along with the creation of the Bitcoin Foundation, the currency is making strides towards being accepted by the mainstream.

Writes Wordpress: "With Bitcoin we join a new digital economy that doesn’t leave anyone behind, essentially making financial transactions open source — something WordPress.com is behind 100%."

Mr. Taub and Mr. Schonfeld

The Credit Card Killers

With an ever-crowded financial tech market and companies like PayPal and Google Wallet elbowing for industry dominance, the race to kill the credit card is heating up. But among the standouts is Iowa-based mobile payment startup Dwolla, thanks to an innovative pricing structure and a growing New York presence helmed by Michael Schonfeld and Alex Taub. Dwolla has raised money from two New York venture capital firms, Union Square Ventures and Thrive Capital. (Josh Kushner, a Thrive principal, is also part-owner of Observer Media Group.)

Much like PayPal, Dwolla seeks to disrupt the traditional money-wiring business and enable users to send payments with ease. Users set up a Dwolla profile, link it directly to their bank account, and can then instantly send money to friends and businesses through an iPhone or Android app.

The company also processes bank-to-bank transactions, eradicating the need for slow and costly credit card processing. “We’re building a human network based on how we think the future of payments will work,” CEO Ben Milne told Business Insider. “The current model needs to be blown up.”

PayPal, Dwolla’s main competitor, is far more established and is a trusted brand name in online payments, but its fee structure makes it expensive to use. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of each transaction, instead charging a 25 cent fee for any payment over $10 (under $10 is free), making it much cheaper for businesses and consumers.

“PayPal is a pioneer, but it can only innovate so much on the backs of these 40- or 50-year-old networks that they’re using,” Mr. Milne told The Observer. “Dwolla is a new conduit to move money in a better way that anyone can use.”

Next: Mike Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare: The Principal of New York

Back to the beginning

Jon Carin rocks (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Brain Boost This morning, Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company announced, a $35 million series B round of funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). By investing in Braintree, new investors join Accel Partners and others and the company’s total funding is now set at $70 million.

Braintree acquired the beloved bill splitting app, Venmo, back in August and has kept it independent so far. Braintree allows businesses to accept payments from costumers, but Venmo allows consumers to make payments to anyone. It's a natural fit for both parties.

Braintree's client list includes fast-growing startups like Uber, Fab.com, Airbnb, who use it, "through periods of rapid growth without disruption to their ability to accept payments," the company said in an email to Betabeat. They also name-checked competitors like Stripe and PayPal, noting that one "big difference is that merchants receive their funds typically in two days with Braintree, vs. seven days with Stripe."

Be A Fellow The New York City Economic Development Corporation is now accepting nominations for its third class of “NYC Venture Fellows.” Previous fellows of the program include Foursquare, Etsy, and Warby Parker. Winners will be set up with mentors like Ben Lerer and the President of MTV, Stephen Friedman, to guide them through the next stage of their business and to connect them to powerful insiders. Submissions are being accepted now and the deadline is November 30, 2012.

Trippy Ted Talk TEDxSiliconAlley 2012, will be held on December 3rd, at Terminal 5. "How to Create a Mind" author Ray Kurzweil will be headlining the event and thhere will be keynotes by Makerbot founder Bre Pettis and philosopher Francessca Ferrando. Pink Floyd keyboardist Jon Carin will perform some of his music live, which is sure to make this the first TED Talk that makes people want to spark up a joint.

Side Piece SideTour, the company that sends you on fun group adventures, has now expanded its efforts to Chicago. CEO and co-founder Vipin Goyal told VentureBeat that the company is now booking three SideTours a day and plans to launch their service in Washington D.C. by the end of the year. Private chef dinners and small group art tours are ready for the masses!

Buy Everything Now Landlord is a new game that uses Foursquare to let you "buy" any location that your adventurous checking-in heart desires. Owners of property get rent paid to them based off of the number of checkins to the venue, so that they can buy more property and expand their empire. We're going to rush out to Staten Island and buy out the entire island, so then we can come back to Manhattan and rule the world.

We Love Those Lady Pilgrims Hacksgiving, the Thanksgiving themed Hackathon, will take place on November 9-10^th. Technology and design firm, The Control Group, is putting the event with Hack'n Jill and it will be the first hackathon with NY Tech Meetup that has at least 50 percent females in attendance. You can register on Hack'n Jill's website. Startups in search of tech talent should try to cop a ticket, these ladies can code.

A Personal Assistant With Your Pepsi? Pepsi is partnering with TaskRabbit to bring an extra hour of the day to drinkers of their new soda, Pepsi Next. Over the next four weeks, the two companies are giving 200 people a dedicated TaskRabbit for one hour to tackle errands of their choosing. This can include waiting in line for something, cooking dinner, or a bunch of other really helpful things. TaskRabbits show up with a can of soda for you too which is a bonus if you're thirsty. All it takes to enter is a simple registration.

Like For Old Ladies, But Better If you're into planning your shopping trips from home snagging deals while you shop, Shopkick already had you covered. But if you're into browsing Sunday circulars, then the app's newest update will make you happy too. The app just got a complete redesign that now features themed lookbooks that resemble glossy coupon circulars. They should just partner with TLC and make "Extreme Shopkicking" already.

Watch Those Tweets Fly HootSuite just launched a new product for their Enterprise clients. It's called the HootSuite Command Center and it functions like a virtual situation room for all of your company's social media efforts. So ChartBeat for the Twitter and Facebook set? Every social media manager in New York just swooned.

Look Here Cheap Bros Buystand, a startup which uses a name-your-price model for active lifestyle goods, launches in beta today. Customers browse merchandise from from brands like Burton, Vans, and Puma, and then name what they want to pay. Buystand sets up the customer with a retailer willing to pay that price. Instead of using wholesale markdowns, the company gets to have sales on customers terms. Mark October 17th in your calendars as the days that outdoor bros started saving money.

(Photo: Gawker)

Violentacrez, a notorious Reddit user who moderated controversial subreddits like Creepshots and Jailbait, was revealed by Gawker on Friday to be a Texas-based IT worker named Michael Brusch. Adrian Chen's post, "Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web," painstakingly detailed Mr. Brusch's dark online history--including the fact that he has created subreddits for submission of racist, sexist and borderline pedophiliac content--and served as the apex of a brewing inter-website war.

Now, Violentacrez has returned to Reddit under his "clean" handle--mbrutsch--in an attempt to explain his side of the story. In a subreddit for point and click adventure games, Mr. Brutsch surfaced, publishing an innocuous link entitled "Tea Break Escape." But comments on this link quickly turned to Mr. Brutsch and how he is dealing with the fallout from the Gawker article.

In the thread, Mr. Brutsch announced that he was fired on Saturday from his IT job, and that he is worried about being able to acquire health insurance for his sick wife. He has also begun to refer to Violentacrez in third person, perhaps in an effort to distance himself from the online persona he created. "I'm a boringly nice person IRL," he wrote.

"VA was a character I played on reddit," he added.

Mr. Brutsch also posted an extensive rebuttle to what he believes are "lies, innuendos, distortions and half-truths" in Mr. Chen's expose. Here are a handful of those explanations, with quotes from Mr. Chen's article and Mr. Brutsch's comments italicized:

"'Jailbait,' that Violentacrez had created on Reddit dedicated to sexualized images of underaged girls."

Jailbait was for pictures of attractive teens. We actually removed overtly "sexualizing" comments when we were made aware of them. SRS has had great results using the term "sexualizing" to attack my reddits. I've actually gotten emails from people wondering why people masturbated over "pics of dead kids". What kind of sick mind thinks anyone finds that sort of image "sexual"?

"Users posted snapshots of tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis and skirts."

Tweens were against the rules. People might have posted them, but we removed them as we became aware of them.

"They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls."

He says "underage girls" to conflate pictures of high-school girls with children. Very effective.

"for someone who once created an entire subreddit dedicated to pictures of dead teenage girls (Picsofdeadjailbait)."

Actually, they were links to news articles, not pictures.

Though the expose was widely lauded among journalists, not everyone considers Mr. Chen's piece about Violentacrez an important act of journalism. Despite his actions outlined in the article, some Redditors are supportive of Mr. Brutsch. One user suggested setting up a PayPal account where Mr. Brutsch could solicit donations after losing his job.

"Just saw this. Can you establish a paypal account for anonymous contributions?" wrote one user. "I may not agree with all of your speech, but I agree with your right to say it and to troll til your heart's content. And I will send enough money to buy a decent bottle of booze."

Mr. Brutsch responded by providing his PayPal email address.

"Dude I just want to say, you are a pleasantly fucked up guy and everyone here has done completely weird, totally socially unacceptable shit on the internet. Most of us just look at porn in isolation, you have had the misfortune of getting caught being more open and forthright with your habits," wrote another user.

Reddit moderators, who are free to create and change subreddit rules as they see fit, are also still banning Gawker links as retaliation for Gawker's decision to run the piece. Today I Learned, a popular subreddit that boasts over 2 million users, announced its intention to ban all Gawker Media links, a few days after other high-profile subreddits declared the same.

Chat logs leaked to Pastebin over the weekend also revealed that moderators were actively lobbying Reddit admins to ban Gawker links site-wide. Reddit's community manager David Croach (Dacvak) initially sent out a message saying that the link to Mr. Chen's piece had been banned across the site. Reddit's general manager Erik Martin confirmed to Betabeat that this was a mistake, and the link has since been reinstated. "Mods may ban whatever they choose but that specific link is not being blocked by the site now," he said.

Despite the life-shattering repercussions spawned by his behavior online, Mr. Brutsch's faith seems unshaken.

"Everything that happens is a test from God, and how you respond to that test determines whether you pass or fail," he wrote.

Update: Mr. Brutsch announced in a Reddit comment that he has a "CNN interview scheduled for tomorrow evening." Could this be an Anderson Cooper revival?