Technically correct, since bitcoin does not exist in physical form and therefore cannot be counterfeited in physical form.

But can transactions involving bitcoins be counterfeited? Most certainly!

Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, and other Bitcoin exchanges have temporarily suspended withdrawal transactions after coming under a form of a denial-of-service attack that abuses weaknesses in the way they keep track of fund balances, a security expert said.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos, chief security officer of digital wallet developer Blockchain, said the attacks work by flooding exchanges with a large number of malformed transactions that are similar, but not identical, to legitimate transactions that were already made. Exchanges that trust one or more of the fake records instead of the entries in the official Bitcoin blockchain quickly fall out of sync with the rest of the network and must recalculate their fund balances once the mistakes become apparent.

The net effect is the same. Counterfeit paper currency deprives its holders of the value of that currency. Counterfeit bitcoin transactions deprive the owners of the bitcoins involved in that transaction of the value of those bitcoins.

Except that the current banking system has failsafes to protect the depositor, even if the bank is at risk. For those who still use it, bank books and pass books record how much is in your bank account. Ditto for the monthly statements sent to depositors who have an electronic account, which is a hard copy in your hand. In many jurisdictions, these are legal evidence of a debt owed by the bank to you. Most banks are insured, both privately and by their respective governments.

If you are just a normal depositor stashing your cash in a bank account, you are much more likely to recover something in the event a bank is (electronically) robbed. Take for example the relatively recent collapse of Barings Bank - according to the Bank Of England Report on the Collapse of Barings, the interests of depositors and creditors were still protected although the bank was closed. Compare this with the uncertain fate of the Bitcoin depositors of Mt. Gox which just recently filed for bankruptcy.

The truth is that depositing funds in Bitcoins right now involves taking a substantial risk which is much higher than putting it into the current banking system. Deluding uninformed investors that investing in Bitcoins is "no different" from putting it in a bank is untrue and is likely to greatly harm the Bitcoin cause once these investors are burnt.

To the "anonymous reader" who posted the main article : If you link to TFA, at least post the less misleading title it used:

"F-Secure: Android accounted for 97% of all mobile malware in 2013, but only 0.1% of those were on Google Play"

Makes a world of difference. And yes, shame on you.

Don't understand how she's held as capable of holding to terms she's not legally compelled to honor.

That is a misunderstanding. Her parents were the ones bound by the contractual obligation, which they broke by telling their daughter who then told the world.

Since she was the focus of the case, hard to see how she'd not be told.

Her parents should not have agreed to settlements which they could not honor/keep. They could have inserted into the settlement agreement a stipulation that their daughter be told.

These "shut-up" congrats are vile; Scientology uses them to silence people they sue and harass. Then sometimes they keep harassing, but the victim is bound under insane penalties not to complain. And the non-ethics of business blames the victim for agreeing to terms.

This point is irrelevant as this case has nothing to do with Scientology. If you sign a contract agreeing to do something, you are contractually (and most people agree honor-bound) to carry it out. Why agree to a contract with "insane penalties" in the first place ?

Read the article.

Snay, however, immediately told his daughter that he’d settled and was happy with the results. He said in depositions that he and his wife knew they had to say something because she suffered “psychological scars” from issues during her enrollment at the school and was aware that they were in mediation with Gulliver attorneys.

Man flaps mouth, man loses money.

There's so much spin and misinformation in above post.

It's not as simple as "data transfer" where peering agreements are involved. The fees you pay aren't there to allow Cogent to dump tons of data on one link of your ISP, forcing them to carry it on their backbone across the country to the end user there, rather than upgrading their own backbone to handle the traffic properly.

No, the fees you pay are for your ISP to provide a service, i.e. the transmission and delivery of digital content you choose over their network. And if you request Netflix to stream movies to you, your ISP by golly is contractually obliged to deliver that data to you . When Netflix/Cogent sends that data which you requested to your ISP, calling that transmission "dumping" is clearly 1. untrue and 2. BS.

That's exactly what they're doing. As Cogent dumps more traffic on them, they're just not upgrading the peering points, so Cogent customers see congestion and slowdowns going to/from other ISPs.

Not only Cogent customers. The customers of that ISP will also notice the slowdown . Take Verizon for instance. When/if Verizon refuses to upgrade peering points, all of Verizon's paying customers who use Netflix will be affected. So, what do you call failing to deliver a paid for service to your own customers?

Stop taking the ISP's side and look at the average consumer's point of view for once.

The reverse sadly is true today. Local governments, likely under the influence of paid lobbyists working for existing corporate/telco interests, are actively writing laws to block the spread of broadband. Read for yourself the story of how the Kansas Legislature is trying to stop Google Fiber from expanding in Kansas.

Best part is: the Senate bill states that the goal is to

"encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates; and ensure that video, telecommunications and broadband services are each provided within a consistent, comprehensive and nondiscriminatory federal, state and local government framework."

And the other cable companies are free from NSA surveillance, is that what you're saying? Don't be naive. NSA has its fingers in ALL of them.

Heck, they're not even bothering with individual companies and are plugged right into the main trunk.
 

Very true. It stores your phone number and contact details in the cloud, which is very useful when you change phones. Just install the app on your new phone and boom! All your contacts are there.

Perhaps in your part of the world, but outside of the US, Whatsapp is big in some countries. As in used by practically everyone kind of big.

Not all their users pay the $1 a year. Some of them get free renewals after their year is up, for instance.

While I broadly agree that reasonableness has to be taken into consideration, I don't think that it's fair to say that there's no victim here simply because the store went under. I'm pretty certain that the store owner (and his partners, if any) for one will disagree with you- he was angry enough to file a police report. Also, applying your logic, all murders are victimless crimes since their victims are dead, which statement I think many people will find hard to agree with.

And now it's apparently alive again .

Actually, there is a real life building analogy of the type you seek- large scale projects such as the expansion of the Panama Canal, which currently appears to have ground to a halt amidst massive cost overruns.

So, it is not always true the builder fixes any problems on his own time and costs. In some cases, the client pays (hence the cost overruns) or if there is a dispute, a mess ensues as in the example above.

All search engines should just let all the search results show and let the user decide what he wants/ does not want to see with the use of filters, etc.

Any censorship of the results is clearly an attempt at mind control, a prime example being censoring all bad news relating to a country to make it come up smelling like roses.

Yet another reason to avoid Bing like plague.