Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Mt. Gox had this old wallet, see, and didn’t know it had a bunch of money in there.

It could happen to anyone, I suppose. Or anyone with one of those wallets with a secret compartment, so well hidden the owner forgets how to find it, but in a moment of dire need searches pockets and old wallets and lo!—

Mt. Gox? Don’t bother checking maps for it; it’s not in the Cascades, or the Alps or the Himalayas. It is in Japan, but it’s barely a molehill now. The name is an acronym for Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange. How cute and catchy! If only it had caught on.

In its heyday, from 2010 to 2013, it handled the major portion of Bitcoin transactions. But last month it took down its website and closed its exchange, and filed in Japan for the equivalent of Chapter 11. A week or so ago the company also filed for bankruptcy protection in a federal court in Texas.

It seemed that 850,000 Bitcoins, give or take, were missing and presumed stolen. Some belonged to the company, some to customers. At the time this was revealed, the missing Bitcoins were worth at least $450 million.

Thursday Mt. Gox announced that it had found 200,000 Bitcoins in an “old format digital wallet.”

Oh, good. Now Mt. Gox is missing only about 650,000 Bitcoins. At this point they are worth about $116 million.

In this context, wallets are software programs used to hold Bitcoins and other exchangeable currencies. The wallet where these Bitcoins turned up had been used in the past but not recently, and Mt. Gox had thought it no longer contained Bitcoins, according to the Mt. Gox’s CEO, Mark Karpeles.

It had been thought the 850,000 Bitcoins had been stolen by hackers using a bug in the Bitcoin exchange algorithm. Wallets were being rescanned and this old-format one, not used since June 2011, was checked again, and that’s when these Bitcoins were discovered.

Still unknown is what happened to the rest of the Bitcoins, but investigation continues. I am sure some version of this caper will turn up in a TV series.

In other news, it looks as if a Softie might be doing hard time before long. “Softie” is the insider term for a Microsoft employee, and one of them has just been arrested, suspected of stealing Windows-related intellectual property. He had received a poor performance review, and it is supposed that he snitched the secrets in retaliation.

All RIGHT! Way to go, Microsoft! ::smack::

Oh-oh, what sounds like high-fives are slaps upside the head, as privacy advocates hear that the way Microsoft nailed this company secret snitcher was by looking at his Hotmail account, which is how the intellectual property was sent.

True, the terms of service for Microsoft’s, and some other companies’, online services give the company the right to access accounts in such situations. Still, privacy advocates are lathered because Microsoft invoked those rights.

Another communication service company, whose email service I will use to send this column to our favorite weekly, has been having probs with its instant messaging tools, Hangout and Google Talk, and its spreadsheet app. Last Monday there were outages galore. Last month Gmail and Postini were similarly afflicted.  

Across the Pacific, Acer has been embarrassed by an insider trading scandal. The Taiwan-based company’s headquarters were searched by prosecutors, and two employees were arrested.

Acer share prices had been hammered after news of an insider trading scandal emerged. Some fund managers are said to have sold Acer shares before the abrupt resignations of Jim Wong, president, and J.T. Wang, CEO, this past November.

I still like Acer quality. The best monitors I have had have been Acers, and the company has turned out some excellent notebooks and tablets with good price points. But stock prices often reflect emotions more than they correspond to product quality, sales and profitability.