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China

China Bans Financial Companies From Bitcoin Transactions 110

Posted by timothy from the best-argument-yet-for-using-it dept.
quantr writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg: "China's central bank barred financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions, moving to regulate the virtual currency after an 89-fold jump in its value sparked a surge of investor interest in the country. Bitcoin plunged more than 20 percent to below $1,000 on the BitStamp Internet exchange after the People's Bank of China said it isn't a currency with 'real meaning' and doesn't have the same legal status. The public is free to participate in Internet transactions provided they take on the risk themselves, it said. The ban reflects concern about the risk the digital currency may pose to China's capital controls and financial stability after a surge in trading this year made the country the world's biggest trader of Bitcoin, according to exchange operator BTC China. Bitcoin's price jumped more than ninefold in the past two months alone, prompting former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to call it a 'bubble.' 'The concern is that it interferes with normal monetary policy operation,' said Hao Hong, head of China research at Bocom International Holdings Co. in Hong Kong. 'It represents an unofficial leakage to the current monetary system and trades globally. It is difficult to regulate and could be used for money laundering.'"

Submission + - World's largest Wikipedia evaluation finds: Finnish Wikipedia largely error free (helsinkitimes.fi)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat evaluated 134 articles in the Finnish-language version of Wikipedia with 96 experts, most of them professors and other academics. That is said to be the most extensive individual investigation on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia in the whole world.
According to results, Wikipedia is better than it’s reputation: seventy per cent of the articles got good points for accuracy. But in many ways the Finnish Wikipedia is also far from flawless.
Read the story in English (17 000 characters) here. You can also download the result dataset as an open data here.
The story also states that Finnish Wikipedia is largely written by only three hundred active writers, and could use some more.
Oracle

Tech Companies Set To Appeal 2012 Oracle Vs. Google Ruling 198

Posted by samzenpus from the what-do-you-think-now? dept.
sl4shd0rk writes "In 2012, Oracle took Google to court over Java. In the balance hung the legalities of writing code to mimic the functionality of copyrighted software. The trial was set to determine how all future software would be written (and by whom). Oracle's entire case boiled down to an inadvertent 9 lines of code; an argument over a simple and basic comparison of a range of numbers. The presiding judge (who had some background in writing software) didn't buy it stating he had 'written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before.' A victory for more than just Google. This week, however, Microsoft, EMC, Oracle and Netapp have filed for appeal and seek to reverse the ruling. It's not looking good as the new bevy of judges Indicating they may side with Oracle on the issue."

Submission + - Cryptography to be export-controlled again, now under Wassenaar Arrangement? (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by spuk
spuk writes: Apparently, the 41 states signatory of the Wassenaar Arrangement, lead by the UK, are planning to try to control international negotiation of cryptography and other security related software (particularly "deep package inspection" software). Such software would be treated and internationally regulated as weapons.

Submission + - Elegant Solution Found For Vexing von Neumann-Day Math Problem (cornell.edu) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: A famous math problem that has vexed mathematicians for decades has met an elegant solution ... Graduate student Yash Lodha, working with Justin Moore, professor of mathematics, has described a geometric solution for the von Neumann-Day problem ... in the early 20th century ... mathematicians first proved that a ball that exists in three-dimensional space can be chopped into a finite number of pieces ... and can be reassembled, like a jigsaw puzzle, into two balls, each the size of the original ball. This is known as the Banach-Tarski paradox. von Neumann ... was the first to describe the reason behind it: He attributed it not to the geometry of 3-D space, but to the algebraic properties of the symmetries inherent to the sphere. ... von Neumann further observed that if a group contains free groups, which are groups that have a finite alphabet and no rules, then it must be non-amenable. He posed the question of whether the opposite is true – are there groups that do not contain free groups and are also non-amenable? ... mathematician Alexander Olshanskii cracked it, although Olshanskii’s group had an infinite set of rules. ... Lodha describes a group that has only nine rules, a natural geometric model, is non-amenable and does not contain free groups. ... among his most valuable insights was one first described by ... Bill Thurston, Fields medalist ... which involved a way of expressing the group ... as a “continued fractions model.” — The academic paper.

Submission + - Bitcoin (Probably) Isn't Broken

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: In the wake of the publication of a new academic paper that says there is a fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin protocol that could allow a small cartel of participants to become powerful enough that it could take over the mining process and gather a disproportionate amount of the value in the system, researchers are debating the potential value of the attack and whether it’s actually practical in the real world. The paper, published this week by researchers at Cornell University, claims that Bitcoin is broken, but critics say there’s a foundational flaw in the paper’s assertions.

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency that depends upon the honesty of its users to publish each of their transactions in a central, public ledger. The Cornell paper, written by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer, says that if a group controls one third of the Bitcoin mining resources, it can then begin mining “selfishly” mine blocks and keep them secret from the rest of the miners. Then, when the chain that this group has mined is longer than the public one, it can publish its chain and have the authoritative one, since Bitcoin will always ignore the shorter block chain when there’s a fork.

The idea of a majority of Bitcoin miners joining together to dominate the system isn’t new, but the Cornell researchers say that a smaller pool of one third of the miners could achieve the same result, and that once they have, there would be a snowball effect with other miners joining this cartel to increase their own piece of the pie. However, other researchers have taken issue with this analysis, saying that it wouldn’t hold together in the real world.

“The most serious flaw, perhaps, is that, contrary to their claims, a coalition of ES-miners [selfish miners] would not be stable, because members of the coalition would have an incentive to cheat on their coalition partners, by using a strategy that I’ll call fair-weather mining,” Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, wrote in an analysis of the paper.

Submission + - Ars Technica writer plagiarizes space history posts

Submitted by Greg Lindahl
Greg Lindahl writes: Last May, I really enjoyed reading an Ars Tecnica post “The secret laser-toting Soviet satellite that almost was” [down, see mirror at archive.org.] It turns out that most of the details were taken from an article titled Soviet Star Wars published in the Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine in 2010. Here are the details of the plagiarism, including some other space history articles with similar copying by the same author. Ars Technica's response? Unhistory! They've removed the posting, but haven't published a retraction or explanation.

Comment Unhinged minority? (Score 1) 1144

by Ellie K (#45056323) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Does the US Gov't Budget Crunch Affect You?

You believe that the GOP represents an "unhinged minority"? I don't think that is true. Or rather, I think that there are many, maybe even the majority, who aren't well represented by either party. The current Democrat regime is all about deregulation, privatization, anti-labor and ceding wealth to Wall Street. By "Wall Street", I don't refer to the financial sector. Consumer finance, life insurance, small business banking, accountants and actuaries do productive work and contribute positively to the economy. Most of Wall Street isn't even Wall Street any longer, just a few massive investment banks, private equity partnerships, hedge funds and Carl Icahn-types. All of Obama's second term cabinet members are scions of very wealthy families, his ambassadorial appointments were chosen from financiers who were major campaign contributors, with zero diplomatic experience. It wasn't like this in 2008, but it is now. They call themselves Democrats, but they are more venal and corrupt, in terms of (selectively) favoring big business and other special interests than we've had in a long time.

The GOP has not offered an appealing alternative, though they would be wise to try.

One could just as easily say, "If the Democrat Party wins, then American democracy loses". Everyone loses if we have one-party rule.

Comment An address on the steps of the Capitol... (Score 1) 1144

by Ellie K (#45056239) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Does the US Gov't Budget Crunch Affect You?

Ah man, now I want to see Boehner give an address on the steps of the Capitol holding a sawed-off shotgun...

I know this will sound terrible, but I felt a frisson of delight at that image. I don't know about Boehner; Any honest Congressman giving an address on the steps of the Capitol while holding a (fully intact) shotgun, saying something genuinely constructive... yes, that would make me very happy.

Comment Re:As a non-American... (Score 1) 1144

by Ellie K (#45056185) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Does the US Gov't Budget Crunch Affect You?

... it only affects me by having too many stories about it on /.

Similar to Eurovision on Twitter :o) but grim instead of fun. I hope this won't go on for as long as the Eurovision contest. Many critical parts of the U.S. government have about four weeks of reserves, then they'll have exhausted all operating funds.

Comment Slashdot demands recognition! (Score 1, Interesting) 130

by Ellie K (#45056107) Attached to: Newly Discovered Meltwater Streams Flow Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet

Altmetrics is a new-ish bibliometic service for scholarly journal articles, including Nature, which is where this was published. Altmetrics includes mainstream media coverage as as well as social media appearance counts e.g. SciBlogs, Twitter as valid data. Physorg is mentioned but I do not see Slashdot. We, the Slashdot collective, demand recognition!

* Unless we are deemed insufficiently social? Anti-social? Of course not.
** Altmetrics is beta-ish, possibly open source, so my indignation is mostly insincere.

Submission + - We don't want your Coffee (ponyfoo.com) 1

Submitted by bevacqua
bevacqua writes: It isn't JavaScript, it just compiles down to it. Stop trying to subjugate people on StackOverflow by answering their JavaScript questions with CoffeeScript code. Stop trying to get JavaScript help posting Coffee code we don't understand.

Submission + - Fighting Zombies? Chevrolet Reveals New 'Black Ops' Concept Truck (motorauthority.com)

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Whether its the Mayan calendar, a rough economy, or a fear of zombies, there are people who are currently preparing for the end of the world, coming, like, soon. And they can attract some fringe elements. So maybe those elements are worth a little truck marketing. Yesterday at the Texas State Fair, Chevrolet unveiled a "Black Ops" concept truck that it says will "explore the extremes of preparedness." The truck comes with a vault storage unit, solar power pack, gas masks, gloves, a military first aid kit, a folding shovel, a generator and some rope. Twinkies apparently not included.

Submission + - Shoe thrown at Iran's President Rouhani while rhyton returns home (cnn.com)

Submitted by Ellie K
Ellie K writes: Upon his return to Tehran Airport today, an Iranian threw a shoe in the Iranian president's direction. According to CNN and Fararu, the semi-official media of Iran, it was an act of protest over President Rouhani's recent conversation with U.S. President Obama.

The historic conversation between the two world leaders was associated with more positive activities as well, including the return of a 2700-year-old Persian artifact in the shape of a rhyton. The rhyton was smuggled into New York in 2003, but languished in a U.S. customs warehouse for decades:

Customs officials had wanted to return it to Iran... but frigid relations between Washington and Tehran kept it in bureaucratic limbo.

* A rhyton is a mythical beast with a lion's body and the head of a bird of prey.

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