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+ - How Silk Road Bounced Back from Its Multimillion-Dollar Hack ->

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "“I am sweating as I write this I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked.” That is what Defcon, the current administrator of the infamous black market site Silk Road (the 2.0 version), wrote back in February on the site’s forums. In total, an estimated $2.7 million worth of bitcoin belonging to users and staff of the site was stolen. Some in the Silk Road community suspected that the hack might have involved staff members of the site itself, echoing scams on other sites. Project Black Flag closed down after its owner scampered with all of their customers' bitcoin, and after that users of Sheep Marketplace had their funds stolen, in an incident that has never been conclusively proven as an inside job or otherwise. Many site owners would probably have given up at this point, and perhaps attempted to join another site, or start up a new one under a different alias. Why would you bother to pay back millions of dollars when you could just disappear into the digital ether? But Silk Road appears to be trying to rebuild, and to repay users' lost bitcoins."
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+ - How Apple's billion dollar sapphire bet will pay off-> 1

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg (971356) writes "Apple is making a billion dollar bet on sapphire as a strategic material for mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and perhaps an iWatch. Though exactly what the company plans to do with the scratch-resistant crystal – and when – is still the subject of debate. Apple is creating its own supply chain devoted to producing and finishing synthetic sapphire crystal in unprecedented quantities. The new Mesa, Ariz., plant, in a partnership with sapphire furnace maker GT Advanced Technologies, will make Apple one of the world’s largest sapphire producers when it reaches full capacity, probably in late 2014. By doing so, Apple is assured of a very large amount of sapphire and insulates itself from the ups and downs of sapphire material pricing in the global market."
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+ - Parents' Privacy Concerns Kill Bill Gates' $100M inBloom Initiative

Submitted by theodp
theodp (442580) writes "As things turn out, All Your Child's Data Are Not Belong To inBloom, the Bill Gates-bankrolled and News Corp. subsidiary-implemented data initiative that sought to personalize learning. GeekWire's Tricia Duryee reports that inBloom, which was backed by $100 million from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others, is closing up shop after parents worried that its database technology was violating their children's privacy. According to NY Times coverage (reg.), the inBloom database tracked 400 different data fields about students — including family relationships ("foster parent" or "father's significant other”") and reasons for enrollment changes ("withdrawn due to illness" or "leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident") — that parents objected to, prompting some schools to recoil from the venture. In a statement, inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger said that personalized learning was still an emerging concept, and complained that the venture had been "the subject of mischaracterizations and a lightning rod for misdirected criticism." He added, "It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse, even though inBloom has world-class security and privacy protections that have raised the bar for school districts and the industry as a whole [although it was still apparently vulnerable to Heartbleed]." As far as Gates goes, the world's richest man has a couple of irons left in the data-driven personalized learning fire via his ties to Code.org, which seeks 7 years of participating K-12 students' data, and Khan Academy, which recently attracted scrutiny over its data-privacy policies. Khan Academy — which counted the managing partner of Gates' bgC3 think-tank and Google CEO Eric Schmidt as Board members in a recent tax filing — just struck an exclusive partnership with CollegeBoard to prepare students for the redesigned SAT."

+ - Hands on with the New Lytro Illum Light-Field Camera-> 1

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth (903542) writes "Earlier today Lytro introduced a new light-field camera called Illum. This is the second camera with this innovative technology from the California based company founded in 2006. The new camera is a more advanced version of the first camera introduced in 2012. It has a much larger sensor with 4 times the resolution (Lytro still uses the term megarays instead of megapixels), a much larger and longer zoom lens with an impressive f/2 constant aperture and of course the ability to refocus after you take a picture (the new Illum can refocus on many more points in the image compared to the older version). You will also have more control of the camera, larger screen, and the ability to create regular JPEG images or videos made from the refocused images you capture."
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+ - Reddit Punishes Itself Due to Censorship 1

Submitted by thatpythonguy
thatpythonguy (1726724) writes "The Daily Dot reports that Reddit has stopped automatically subscribing its technology section to new account users due to the section's overzealous moderators using a bot to censor posts with certain keywords:

Say what you want about Reddit's r/technology, one of its most popular forums. Just don't say "NSA," "net neutrality," "Comcast," "Bitcoin," or any of the roughly 50 other words that will secretly get your post deleted.

The BBC picked up the story."

+ - Tech People Making $100k a Year on the Rise, Again->

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes "Last month, a report suggested that Austin has the highest salaries for tech workers (after factoring in the cost of living), followed by Atlanta, Denver, Boston, and Silicon Valley. Now, a new report (yes, from Dice, because it gathers this sort of data from tech workers) suggests that more tech people are earning six figures a year than ever. Some 32 percent of full-time tech pros took home more than $100,000 in 2013, according to the findings, up from 30 percent in 2012 and 26 percent in 2011. For contractors, the data is even better: In 2013, a staggering 54 percent of them earned more than $100,000 a year, up from 51 percent the previous year and 50 percent in 2011. How far that money goes depends on where you live, of course, but it does seem like a growing number of the world's tech workers are earning a significant amount of cash."
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+ - Will The Nissan Leaf Take On The Tesla Model S At Half The Price?

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy (2660665) writes "Ask most people why they won't consider an electric car, and they talk about range anxiety. And I can easily imagine why 84 miles of range isn't enough. Now it sounds like Nissan is listening, as well as watching Tesla's success. The company plans to boost the Leaf electric car's driving range with options for larger battery packs. Not long ago Nissan surveyed Tesla Model S owners, and they probably heard loud and clear that longer driving range is very, very important. So it looks like the Leaf might get up to 150 miles of range, possibly by the 2016 model year. The range increase will come from a larger battery pack, possibly 36 or 42 kWh, and more energy-dense cells. Either way, clearly Nissan is looking to expand the appeal of the world's best-selling electric car, and increasing its driving range is pretty clearly a key to doing so. I just wish Nissan would ditch the weird styling while they're at it."

Google News Sci Tech: Simple Way to Mass Produce Graphene Found - Austrian Tribune->

From feed by feedfeeder

Austrian Tribune
Simple Way to Mass Produce Graphene Found
Austrian Tribune
Jonathan Coleman and team of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland have done fabulous work by coming up with a way to mass produce the unique material graphene. Wonder material graphene could now be made with just soap and blender. Pure graphene...

and more

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Google News Sci Tech: AT&T Expanding Fiber-Optic Internet to 21 Major Cities - Mashable->

From feed by feedfeeder

MiamiHerald.com
AT&T Expanding Fiber-Optic Internet to 21 Major Cities
Mashable
AT&T Inc. plans to extend its fastest fiber-optic Internet service to 21 major cities, further ramping up competition with Google Inc. and cable providers. The largest U.S. phone company said in a statement today that it plans to expand its GigaPower fiber-optic...
Expansion will start with 21 new citiesDailyTech
This Is AT&T's Plan to Smother Google FiberTIME
Jacksonville included in AT&T's expansion plans for super high-speed internetFlorida Times-Union
Hot Hardware-Decatur Metro-Chron.com (blog)
all 281 news articles

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Google News Sci Tech: Graphene 'wonder material' made with kitchen blender - BBC News->

From feed by feedfeeder

BBC News
Graphene 'wonder material' made with kitchen blender
BBC News
Scientists have outlined how they managed to make the "wonder material" graphene using a kitchen blender. Graphene is thin, strong, flexible and electrically conductive, and has the potential to transform electronics as well as other technologies. An Irish-UK...
Graphene Mass-Production by Kitchen Blender and Washing-Up LiquidInternational Business Times UK
Make Super material Graphene at HomeAustrian Tribune
Now a kitchen recipe for grapheneDelhi Daily News
ExtremeTech-LiveScience.com
all 58 news articles

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Google News Sci Tech: This Is AT&T's Plan to Smother Google Fiber - TIME->

From feed by feedfeeder

MiamiHerald.com
This Is AT&T's Plan to Smother Google Fiber
TIME
AT&T's plan to examine ways to deliver gigabit Internet service to 21 U.S. cities was greeted with skepticism on Monday, as some prominent critics accused the broadband giant of misleading consumers.
AT&T Eyes Major Gigabit Internet ExpansionPC Magazine
Jacksonville included in AT&T's expansion plans for super high-speed internetFlorida Times-Union
AT&T To Expand Its Gigabit Fiber Network To 100 US CitiesHot Hardware
Decatur Metro-FierceCable-seattlepi.com (blog)
all 278 news articles

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+ - VK CEO fired, says company under Kremlin control->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The embattled founder of VK, Russia's largest social networking site, said this week that the company is now "under the complete control" of two oligarchs with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. In a VK post published Monday, Pavel Durov said he's been fired as CEO of the website, claiming that he was pushed out on a technicality, and that he only heard of it through media reports."
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+ - Nanoelectronic Circuits Reach Speeds of 245 THz->

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula (1870348) writes "Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have designed and manufactured circuits that can reach speeds of up to 245 THz, tens of thousands of times faster than contemporary microprocessors. The results open up possible new design routes for plasmonic-electronics, that combine nano-electronics with the fast operating speed of optics."
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+ - Rich now work longer hours than the poor->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo (2519492) writes "Overall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure.
The reasons are complex but include rising income inequality but also the availability of more intellectually stimulating, well-remunerated work."
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"If that makes any sense to you, you have a big problem." -- C. Durance, Computer Science 234

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