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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.

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.'
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."
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."

Comment Re:I live there (Score 1) 483

by getagrip (#29998070) Attached to: Computer Failure Causes Gridlock In MD County
Rockville Pike can be faster to travel on in morning and evening rush hour than nearby 12 lane Interstate 270. When the synchronization is working it works very well. Of course, during the day, all the shoppers driving on the Rockville Pike just turn it into an extended parking lot no matter what the traffic signals are doing.
Social Networks

Submission + - we're in the midst of a literacy revolution(Wired)

Submitted by
Mike Sauter
Mike Sauter writes: ""Andrea Lunsford... is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples--everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions." http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson"
Patents

Submission + - i4i Says OpenOffice Does Not Infringe Like MS Word (gcn.com) 2

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "With all the armchair lawyers and pundits out there, it's interesting to see that i4i believes that OpenOffice does not infringe upon their patent. As you may remember, i4i's patent is the one that lead to a permanent injunction barring Microsoft from selling, using, encouraging the use of, testing, marketing or supporting any copies of Microsoft Word which can open files containing custom XML, subject to a bit of leniency for supporting infringing copies already sold and with respect to removing the feature in future versions. Lest anyone think that the ODF will win over OOXML because of this, keep in mind that Microsoft has its own broad XML document patent, which issued just two weeks ago (and filed in December 2004), and they're telling the Supreme Court to apply the Bilski ruling narrowly, so that it doesn't invalidate patents like theirs (and i4i's). After all, Microsoft can afford $280 million infringement fines in ways that most companies and individuals cannot. Then again, given that Microsoft's new patent has only two independent claims (claim #1 and claim #12), and both of those claims 'comprise' something using an 'XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features', maybe they wouldn't be that hard to work around if you just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application that doesn't have a rich set of features."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Pi calculated to record 2.5 trillion digits (examiner.com) 6

Submitted by
Joshua
Joshua writes: "Researchers from Japan have calculated Pi to over 2.5 trillion decimals using the T2K Open Supercomputer (which is currently ranked 47th in the world according to a June, 2009 report from Top500.org). This new number more than doubles the previous record of about 1.2 trillion decimals set in 2002 by another Japanese research team. Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern."
Portables

Submission + - Dell selling ARM based SmartBooks? (pcworld.com)

Submitted by wonkavader
wonkavader writes: According to the Article: "In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. ... The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. ... Smartbooks are netbook-type devices that are powered by chips designed by Arm."

I don't think Finch said "ARM" but he apparently did say "SmartBook". Then again, he also said "researching the possibility".
Google

Submission + - Google Wave: 'Like Real-Time E-Mail. On Crack.' (bnet.com) 1

Submitted by
Michael_Curator
Michael_Curator writes: "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's "probably the most advanced 'application in a browser' that I've seen." Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. "It's like real time email. On crack," he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, "It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.""
Censorship

Submission + - Apple backs off DMCA threats against wiki

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "A wiki operator who was pressured by Apple's legal team into removing anonymous discussions about circumventing the company's music-playback software for iPods and iPhones says he is relieved that Apple has backed off and he'll be able to restore the disputed material. Apple dropped its claims of copyright and DMCA violation against BluWiki only under legal pressure of its own in the form of a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/43762"

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