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Tech investors lauded Mr. Bankman-Fried and helped fund his FTX crypto exchange. The tech industry has since done what it does best: move on.

There comes a moment in the development of a new technology when the hype is so common it passes for common sense. Lawyers, accountants and regulators are nowhere to be found. Investors insist entrepreneurs take their money. The world trembles on the brink of change.For dot-coms, the moment was 1999. For artificial intelligence, it was just over nine months ago. For cryptocurrency, it was 2017.Six years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried knew little about alternative currencies. But he correctly bet there were huge opportunities in grabbing a tiny piece of millions of crypto trades. In the blink of an eye, he was lauded as being worth $23 billion. Only Mark Zuckerberg had accumulated so much wealth so young.The Facebook co-founder has his critics, but he looks like Thomas Edison next to Mr. Bankman-Fr...

Sam Bankman-Fried, the tousle-haired mogul who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted on Thursday of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy after a monthlong trial that laid bare the rampant hubris and risk-taking across the crypto industry.Mr. Bankman-Fried became a symbol of crypto’s excesses last year when FTX collapsed and he was charged with stealing as much as $10 billion from customers to finance political contributions, venture capital investments and other extravagant spending. A jury of nine women and three men took just over four hours of deliberation on Thursday to reach a verdict, convicting Mr. Bankman-Fried of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.Together the counts carry a maximum sentence of 110 years. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, is expected to appeal. He’...

Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks.For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth’s rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called...

Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto’s Icarus, was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy on Thursday night after a trial that generated 10 million pages of documents and only a few hours of jury deliberation. As ever, it is perhaps best to start from the very beginning.As a boy coming of age in the most rarefied quarters of the achievement class, he grew up in a family that viewed the celebration of birthdays and holidays as an inefficiency easily forgone. From such a childhood emerged an adult who worked 22 hours a day and submitted the prospect of any interaction with another person to a cost-benefit calculation that frequently left him canceling meetings and other obligations at the last minute, because, as Michael Lewis writes in “Going Infinite,” his book about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s ri...

Chris Caputo stood on the tarmac at Burlington International Airport in Vermont in early October and looked to the clouds in the distance. He had piloted military and commercial aircraft over a long career, racking up thousands of flight hours, but the trip he was about to take would be very different.That’s because the airplane Mr. Caputo would fly runs on batteries. Over the next 16 days, he and his colleagues flew the plane, an CX300 built by their employer, Beta Technologies, down the East Coast. They would make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge, flying through congested airspace in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities.When the journey came to an end in Florida, Beta handed the plane over to the Air Force, which will experiment with it over the next few months. The t...

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubePresident Biden’s new executive order on artificial intelligence has a little bit of everything for everyone concerned about A.I. Casey takes us inside the White House as the order was signed.Then, Rebecca Tushnet, a copyright law expert, walks us through the latest developments in a lawsuit against the creators of A.I.-image generation tools. She explains why artists may have trouble making the case that these tools infringe on their copyrights.And finally, it’s time again for HatGPT. We get a taste of the tech headlines you may have missed from the week.Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land, Rachel Cohn and Emily Lang. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Rowan Nie...

Eloise Smith, 23, posted a reaction video on TikTok immediately after listening to “Now and Then,” the Beatles song released on Thursday.“Can’t believe it’s 2023 and I get the joy of hearing a new Beatles song for the first time ever,” Ms. Smith, who has a forearm tattoo rendering of the band’s “Abbey Road” album cover, wrote in the video’s caption.In an interview, she added that she was a third-generation fan: Her grandmother introduced her father to the Beatles, and her father introduced them to her.“I was 1 when George Harrison died,” Ms. Smith said.Ms. Smith, a civil servant who lives in Manchester, England, said she was “thrilled” weeks ago when she heard about “Now and Then.” The ability to immediately react and connect with other fans of the band through social media has made the ex...