The hosting company
Linode
was compromised: someone attacked a web-based customer service
portal to specifically take control of machines belonging to customers
running Bitcoin-related services. Linode claims that 8 customers were
targetted. 4 of them have revealed that a total of 46653 BTC (about $220k)
were stolen. The 4 other victims are still unknown.
-
43554 BTC
were stolen from the Bitcoinica exchange. This up from the previous estimate of
10000 BTC stolen.
-
3094 BTC
were stolen from Marek Palatinus (slush)'s Bitcoin mining pool. He shared
quite a few more details in this post.
-
5 BTC
were stolen from Gavin Andresen's Bitcoin faucet.
-
The TradeHill exchange was compromised, but according to them no bitcoins were stolen, although a more thorough audit is in progress...
This makes it the largest Bitcoin theft ever (in terms of number of bitcoins),
eclipsing the unrelated 25k BTC theft of June 2011 in which a single
user had his computer compromised.
However, if the other Linode victims come forward, they may confirm that today's
theft was perhaps even higher than 47k BTC.
Bitcoin is diametrically opposed to all existing electronic currencies,
a radically new concept that is quite difficult to explain,
to a point that many articles on Bitcoin mistakenly compare it to
Beenz,
e-gold,
Flooz,
PayPal,
Pecunix, etc,
This is always a sign that the authors do not comprehend the main pillar of Bitcoin's design.
Bitcoin is the
world's first invention of a decentralized electronic currency,
with no central authority or trusted parties whatsoever,
as
its inventor originally describes.
Not even the Bitcoin developers themselves have special control of Bitcoin.
Compare this to other e-currencies that are operated
by central authorities that are single points of failure:
they have a history of regulating transactions (Paypal blocking donations
to Wikileak, etc), or simply failing and shutting down (Beenz, etc).
If Bitcoin is confusing to you, that is normal. Bitcoin is best explained
by this list of analogies. Read carefully:
Read More
The current 140-character limit of Twitter is a main pillar of its success.
Brevity makes writing and reading effortless. Their users love it.
Well, most do. Some want the limit to be raised or dropped altogether. But I
believe doing so would kill the very essence of the service.
So what if Twitter offered the option to pay a small fee, say $1/month, to
double the limit to 280 characters? If only 10% of their users took the offer,
that would be about 30 million users bringing $360 million per year, increasing
the company's annual revenues by +260% (estimated at $140 million in 2011).
This would solve Twitter's profitability problem for good. It would preserve
the sweet shortness of most of the tweets. Those who want to be more
eloquent can now be, because anybody can afford $1/month.
And we are all happy ever after?
Surely, I must not be the first one to have come up with this idea.
It sounds too obvious.
I unsubscribed from the qemu-devel mailing list, and deleted all the archived emails —spanning a few years— from my Gmail account.
According to Gmail this represented 39794 conversations (threads).
- My mailbox's size decreased by 752 MB: the average space consumed by a conversation was 19 kB.
- It took 60 seconds to move all messages to the trash.
- It took 250 seconds to empty the trash, or 6 ms per conversation, which suggests only one HDD seek per conversation on Google's servers.
This is good performance. Can you delete this quantity of emails just as quickly from your company's email server?
An amateur photographer friend and I went on a building roof with a good view on the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to make a time-lapse video of the planes landing at night. The frames are separated by 10 seconds:
Read More
The Newegg price charts on Camelegg sum this up illustratively:
Read More
I was initially very dubious when hearing about
E-Cat, a cold fusion reactor
supposedly invented by Andrea Rossi. The first 1 megawatt unit was
reportedly
sold to a secret customer two days ago. Mainstream press has mostly ignored the
invention so far. However, I found out there is a
surprisingly rich history of scientific research and experiments
about the mechanism it employs, nickel–hydrogen fusion.
Evidence proving that the device is working keeps piling up and up.
This is to a point that I am now personally convinced that this is one of
the greatest (accidental) discoveries in human history.
Read More
Are you sometimes in need of a network diagnostic tool to verify if your Internet Service Provider, or company, or home network is blocking outgoing connections to certain port numbers? No problem. Walk to open.zorinaq.com.
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