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Submission + - An Ethereum Startup Just Vanished After People Invested $374K (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A startup on the Ethereum platform vanished from the internet on Sunday after raising $374,000 USD from investors in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) fundraiser. Confido is a startup that pitched itself as a blockchain-based app for making payments and tracking shipments. It sold digital tokens to investors over the Ethereum blockchain in an ICO that ran from November 6 to 8. During the token sale, Confido sold people bespoke digital tokens that represent their investment in exchange for ether, Ethereum’s digital currency. But on Sunday, the company unceremoniously deleted its Twitter account and took down its website. A company representative posted a brief comment to the company’s now-private subforum on Reddit, citing legal problems that prevent the Confido team from continuing their work. The same message was also posted to Medium but quickly deleted.

“Right now, we are in a tight spot, as we are having legal trouble caused by a contract we signed,” the message stated (a cached version of the Medium post is viewable). “It is likely that we will be able to find a solution to rectify the situation. However, we cannot assure you with 100% certainty that we will get through this.” The message was apparently written by Confido’s founder, one Joost van Doorn, who seems to have no internet presence besides a now-removed LinkedIn profile. Even the Confido representative on Reddit doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, though, posting hours after the initial message, “Look I have absolutely no idea what has happened here. The removal of all of our social media platforms and website has come as a complete surprise to me.” Confido tokens had a market cap of $10 million last week, before the company disappeared, but now the tokens are worthless. And investors are crying foul.

Submission + - Dark Web Shops Are Leaking IPs Left and Right (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The takedown of three major Dark Web markets (AlphaBay, Hansa Market, and RAMP) by law enforcement officials over the summer has driven many vendors of illegal products to set up their own shops that, in many cases, are not properly configured and are leaking the underlying server's IP address. People with no technical skills that previously relied on point-and-click account setup tools are now installing their own servers and websites and the results are the ones you expect.

In the past two months, a Japanese security researcher has been hunting Dark Web shops that leak IP details and reporting them to authorities. For example, the researcher tracked down a cannabis shop to a Dutch IP, a multi-drug store to an Ukrainian IP, a hacking forum to a Moldovan IP, and a performance enhancing drug store to another Ukrainian IP.
Science

Submission + - 'DNA Tracking Chamber' Could Detect Dark Matter (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: An unlikely group of physicists and biologists plan to build a dark matter detector out of DNA that will outperform anything available today

Perhaps the greatest and most fiercely contested race in modern science is the search for dark matter.

Physicists cannot see this stuff, hence the name. However, they infer its existence because they can see its gravitational influence on the structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. It implies that the universe is filled with dark matter, much more of it than the visible matter we can see

If they're right, dark matter must fill our galaxy and our Solar System. At this very instant, we ought to be ploughing our way through a dense sea of dark matter as the Sun moves towards the constellation of Cygnus as it orbits the galactic centre.
Iphone

Submission + - The surprising impact of the iPhone on AT&T and Verizon's rivalry (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: AT&T paid dearly for iPhone exclusivity that started in June 2007 and ran for nearly four years. What did it buy? Back in 2Q07, AT&T Wireless generated $10.4 billion in sales, and Verizon Wireless did $10.8 billion. Verizon Wireless edged out AT&T by just 4%. This was a very interesting point in time to inject a revolutionary new smartphone — and the iPhone debuted just two days before the end of 2Q07...
Debian

Submission + - Next Debian Release Takes Up 73 CDs, 11 DVDs (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Debian developers shared from their annual Debian conference that Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" is going to take up 73 CDs or 11 DVDs if choosing the i386 or x86_64 architecture. This is a large increase (20+ CDs) over the current Debian 6.0 release. If not needing the whole archive, one can get by using the net installer or the first few CD/DVDs, but has Debian grown too large? At DebConf they also began formalizing their UEFI SecureBoot plans.

Comment Messy, Messy, Messy. (Score 1) 575

Javascript is just messy. When you intersperse it with html, it is just like the bad old days of interspersing your layout with the html. CSS was created to separate the layout from the html. Javascript libraries do the same thing. Look into JQuery. The separation of the Javascript from the html makes it a lot easier to see what is going on. Also, use debugging tools like Firebug and Firequery to track down what is going on in the code. Good luck.
Businesses

Submission + - Lunch, Anyone?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'I've been on teams that eat together every day,' writes Joel-on-Software Spolsky, and it's awesome. I've been on teams that don't, and lunch every day is, at best, lonely.' Spolsky is firmly in the camp that believes where and with whom we eat lunch is a much bigger deal than most people care to admit. 'There's a lot of stuff that's accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange,' he concludes, 'but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.'
NASA

Submission + - NASA wants public to join in Hubble's 20th party (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Hubble Space Telescope has taking snapshots of the universe for 20 years this week and as part of that anniversary, the space agency is looking to crowdsource new galaxy images and promote social network celebrations. Specifically, NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute and the online astronomy project Galaxy Zoo are making almost 200,000 Hubble images of galaxies available to the public at Galaxy Zoo: Hubble. What they want are volunteers from around the world to help astronomers classify these photos by answering simple questions about what they are seeing — for example, identifying the number of spiral arms visible, shape of galaxy, or spotting galaxies in the process of merging, according to NASA.
Security

Submission + - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by skids
skids writes: File this under "no, really?" CBS news catches up with the fact that photocopiers, whether networked or not, tend to have a much longer memory these days. When they eventually get tossed, very few companies bother to scrub them. Coupled with the tendency of older employees to consider hard-copy to be "secure", and your most protected secrets may be shipped directly to information resellers — no hacking required. "The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas — loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore."
Google

Submission + - Samsung's ARM roadmap leads to quad-core 'Aquila' (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung's semiconductor division is working on an lengthy roadmap of ARM-based processor up to the so-called Aquila, which has four cores, according to this EE Times story. The roadmap targets netbooks, mobile internet devices and even smartphones. It is based on the premise that Microsoft Windows running on Intel microprocessors will gradually give way to Chrome browser on the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system running on ARM-based microprocessors.

But like Intel, the forthcoming application processors have to have exciting names. In Samsung's case they are Orion and Pegasus due in 2011 and Hercules sampling in 3Q11 and set for mass production in 1Q12. Mercury is due in 2010/11 while Venus, Draco and Aquila are slated to arrive in 2012 or 2013.
NASA

Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US 139

Posted by kdawson from the boom-boom dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."

Submission + - Gartner Issues Smackdown on Open Core (gartner.com)

Submitted by
Sortova
Sortova writes: "Those of us who are concerned about the growing prevalence of the open core (or fauxpen source) business model are often ignored when those VC-backed companies have much more to spend on marketing, as well as the few but profitable acquisitions accomplished by VCs such as Benchmark. We're often labelled as open source "zealots" and enterprises are told to ignore us.

However, enterprises tend not to ignore the advice of Gartner, one of the most respected analyst organizations out there. Today, Brian Prentice posted Open-Core: The Emperor's New Clothes which is a scathing critique of the business model, not as a road to VC riches, but as a solution that enterprises should consider.

There are way too many good quotes to pick just one, but he sums things up with "You see, when you start peeling back some of the value propositions being attached to open core business models what starts to appear is a picture of a bog standard software provider trying to use the latest phraseology to cut through the noise of a crowded marketplace".

In a similar blog post back in 2008 I wrote "The emperor is naked, folks." It is nice to see someone with influence agreeing with me."
IT

Submission + - The Black Art of SQL Performance Tuning (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Sean McCown offers SQL developers 7 performance tips for faster SQL queries in hopes of smoothing the transition of the 'relatively immature' database field from development to production systems. 'I don't expect SQL developers to become administrators, but they must take production issues into account when writing their code. If they don't do it during initial development, the DBAs will just make them go back and do it later — and the users suffer in the interim.' Chief among McCown's tips are favoring CASE over UPDATE, avoiding the temp table double-dip, and deleting and updating in smaller batches. 'There's a reason why we say tuning a database is both an art and a science. It's because very few hard-and-fast rules exist that apply across the board. The problems you've solved on one system aren't issues on another, and vice versa,' McCown writes. 'But these techniques should give you a little more insight into the minds of your DBAs, as well as the ability to start thinking of processes in a production-oriented way.'"

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