Amazon.com is jumping on the blockchain wave with new cloud services that help customers build the technology needed to record transactions. From a report: Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy on Wednesday announced Amazon Managed Blockchain, a new service underpinning blockchain networks that record millions of transactions. The company spent the past year studying the needs of customers interested in blockchain solutions before creating the new products, Jassy said.

The service can be used to manage peer-to-peer payments, process loans and help businesses transact with distributors and suppliers, Jassy said. AWS announced a string of other new or updated cloud offerings, seeking to maintain its lead in the market for internet-based computing. The company also announced a new service called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or QLDB, which is a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The service, which is launching into preview today, offers an append-only, immutable journal that tracks the history of all changes, Amazon said. And all the changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable.

angry tapir sends along this excerpt from PC World: "A Seattle man has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for using the LimeWire file-sharing service to lift personal information from computers across the US. The man, Frederick Wood, typed words like 'tax return' and 'account' into the LimeWire search box. That allowed him to find and access computers on the LimeWire network with shared folders that contained tax returns and bank account information. ... He used the information to open accounts, create identification cards and make purchases. 'Many of the victims are parents who don't realize that LimeWire is on their home computer,' [said Kathryn Warma of the US Attorney's Office]."

grigory writes "GameStop's business model depends on a healthy flow of used games: incredibly '[GameStop] enjoys a 48 percent profit margin on used games.' Game publishers do not see a cut of the secondary sale because it falls under the first sale doctrine. Now, some publishers and manufacturers want a piece of the pie. 'One marketing executive, who did not want to be identified for fear of angering GameStop and other retailers, said the used game sale market is still depriving publishers of money because it gives consumers an all-too-easy alternative to buying a new game.' Interesting picture of companies fighting for your business, and (surprise!) complaining about being left out of the money stream."

An anonymous reader writes "What do you get when you mount a Nikon D200 with a standard rifle stock? Why a Tactical Camera of course! One that no reporter would be caught with in a war zone or covering any armed action anywhere. What started out as a tongue in cheek project for April Fools wound up being quite the successful demonstration of concept. It features a fully functional trigger; it has controls for operating the shutter and auto focus; and for the patient shots, it has a mounted bipod. Carry sling optional."

Death Metal writes "Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on." (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)

miller60 writes "Are you ready for the 100-degree data center? Rackable Systems has introduced a new enclosure that it says can run high-density racks safely in environments as hot as 104 degrees (40 degrees C), offering customers the option of saving energy in their data center. Most data centers operate in a range between 68 and 74 degrees. Raising the thermostat can lower the power bill, allowing data centers to use less power for cooling. But higher temperatures can be less forgiving in the event of a cooling failure, and not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center."

The Opposable Thumbs blog reports that Guitar Hero III has reached a financial milestone, becoming the first individual video game to reach $1 billion in total sales. The number is even higher if you consider the rest of the franchise. In addition to helping drive the video game industry during tough economic times (much like the Wii), it's helping other industries as well: "... aside from the fact that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith had sold three times as many copies as the band's last album during their respective first weeks, musicians whose music is featured in the game has seen a rise in music sales to the tune of 15-843 percent." And CVG notes, "... two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years." Also, Rock Band creator Harmonix may be looking into a partnership with the record labels to sell music for use outside of the games.

PeterAitch writes "According to Reuters, Potsdam University in Germany is now teaching social skills as part of their IT courses. This is intended to 'ease entry into the world of work'. The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection(s)." The class is taught by a superficial model, who will fall in love with the nerdiest student at the end of the semester after realizing that he is beautiful on the inside.

CWmike and other readers alerted us to Google's announcement that it was making available 10 million images from Life magazine's archives dating back to the 1750s. (Most of the news accounts covering this announcement refer to Life's "photos," and none mention that photography wasn't invented until early in the 19th century.) Only a small percentage of the images — including newly digitized images from photos and etchings — have even been published. The rest have been "sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints." At this point about 20% of Life's archive is online; the rest is promised within months.

Toren Altair writes with this excerpt from a story at The Space Fellowship: "NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit communicated via the Mars Odyssey orbiter today right at the time when ground controllers had told it to, prompting shouts of 'She's talking!' among the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This means Spirit has not gone into a fault condition and is still being controlled by sequences we send from the ground,' said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a landmark ruling, a Canadian court has ruled that a web site's publication of hyperlinks to an allegedly defamatory web site is not in and of itself a 'publication,' and therefore cannot in and of itself constitute defamation. In a 10-page decision [PDF], Crookes v. Wikimedia, Sup. Ct., British Columbia, Judge Keller dismissed the libel case against Jon Newton, the publisher of p2pnet.net, which was based on the fact that his article contained links to the allegedly defamatory site, since hyperlinks, the Court reasoned, are analogous to footnotes, rather than constituting a 'republication.' Mr. Newton was represented in the case by famous libel, slander, and civil liberties lawyer Dan Burnett of Vancouver, British Columbia."

hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the US debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."

jonbryce writes "The court of appeal in England has ruled that companies should be granted patents for 'complex' software products. In this particular case, Symbian had written something that makes mobile phones run faster. The court case has received very little attention because of the bank crisis, but it can be appealed to the House of Lords and then the European Court of Justice."

notthatwillsmith writes "On Friday, Microsoft invited members of the Windows Feedback Program to try out a preview of a new application, the Microsoft PC Advisor. The new tool promises to 'continuously monitor your PC for problems and give you the solutions to fix them, in real time.' After testing on several Vista machines with a variety of problems, Maximum PC has written a full report on the Microsoft PC Advisor. The short version? Like every other 'PC Repair' tool they've tested, the new apps signal-to-noise ratio is quite bad, and it misses the obvious and important problems, like out-of-date videocard drivers."

FiReaNGeL writes "Researchers conducted a genome-wide association study of 1,125 Caucasian men who had been assessed for male pattern baldness. They found two previously unknown genetic variants on chromosome 20 that substantially increased the risk of male pattern baldness. They then confirmed these findings in an additional 1,650 Caucasian men. 'If you have both the risk variants we discovered on chromosome 20 and the unrelated known variant on the X chromosome, your risk of becoming bald increases sevenfold. What's startling is that one in seven men have both of those risk variants.'" So maybe gene therapy will finally have a real purpose.