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Submission + - More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake (forbes.com)

Submitted by rrconan
rrconan writes: From the "we already knew" department, Forbes is reporting that ore than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.

There is no universally accepted method of calculating bitcoin daily volume, even among the industry’s most reputable research firms. For instance, as of this writing, CoinMarketCap puts the latest 24-hour trading of bitcoin at $32 billion, CoinGecko at $27 billion, Nomics at $57 billion and Messari at $5 billion.

Submission + - Chinese Behemoth Pinduoduo To Take On Amazon In US (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Americans addicted to Amazon could soon be wooed by a Chinese tech giant most of them have never heard of. Pinduoduo is planning to expand its reach to the US next month, according to reports in Bloomberg and Reuters. The company is known for delivering goods at rock-bottom prices – while putting its employees through conditions that a prominent labor activist says should horrify Americans. Described by its founder, the former Google employee Colin Huang, as a cross between “Costco and Disneyland," Pinduoduo has ridden a wave of meteoric Chinese tech growth to become one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world since its founding in 2015.

Pinduoduo targeted China’s smaller cities and more rural areas, where consumers tend to be less wealthy and more cost-conscious, says JS Tan, an MIT graduate student who researches the Chinese tech industry. Its signature feature is “group buying," which allows users to organize people to make mass purchases directly from manufacturers at a steep discount. Because Pinduoduo is heavily integrated with WeChat, China’s top social media platform, it’s a snap for users to gather up friends, family and internet strangers to order big batches of everything from electronics to baby formula to groceries – something that became a lifeline during China’s strict Covid lockdowns.

“Pinduoduo is known for its extreme overtime,” said Li Qiang, a veteran labor activist and founder of the non-profit China Labor Watch. “The competition is extremely intense, and the conditions are much crueler than in America.” Two Pinduoduo employees died within a two-week period from December 2020 to January 2021, igniting a national scandal. The first worker, 22-year-old Zhang Fei, died on 29 December, when she was heading home around 1.30am after a series of extremely long shifts. The second worker, an engineer in his 20s, jumped to his death on 9 January after abruptly asking for leave from the company and traveling home the same day. The controversy grew when days later, a Pinduoduo employee who called himself Wang Taixu said he had been fired by the company after posting a photo of a colleague being taken into an ambulance after collapsing. Wang subsequently published a lengthy video on the video-sharing site Bilibili detailing labor abuses he had witnessed at the company; he alleged that some workers were made to work as many as 380 hours a month, which the company denied.

Submission + - No privacy expectations for data on P2P networks (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A federal judge in Vermont has denied a motion to suppress evidence filed by three defendants in a child porn case. The three had alleged their Fourth Amendment rights were violated when police used an automated PTP query-response tool to gather information from their computers. That info subsequently led to their arrest and indictments. The judge held that the defendants had either inadvertently, or otherwise, made the information available for public download on a P2P network and therefore couldn't assert any privacy claims over the data.

Submission + - Puzzled Scientists Say Strange Things Are Happening on the Sun

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Robert Lee Hotz reports in the WSJ that solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync. Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," says Jonathan Cirtain. "I would say it is the weakest in 200 years," adds David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Researchers are puzzled. They can't tell if the lull is temporary or the onset of a decades-long decline, which might ease global warming a bit by altering the sun's brightness or the wavelengths of its light. To complicate the riddle, the sun also is undergoing one of its oddest magnetic reversals on record with the sun's magnetic poles out of sync for the past year so the sun technically has two South Poles. Several solar scientists speculate that the sun may be returning to a more relaxed state after an era of unusually high activity that started in the 1940s (PDF). "More than half of solar physicists would say we are returning to a norm," says Mark Miesch. "We might be in for a longer state of suppressed activity." If so, the decline in magnetic activity could ease global warming, the scientists say. But such a subtle change in the sun—lowering its luminosity by about 0.1%—wouldn't be enough to outweigh the build-up of greenhouse gases and soot that most researchers consider the main cause of rising world temperatures over the past century or so. “Given our current understanding of how the sun varies and how climate responds, were the sun to enter a new Maunder Minimum, it would not mean a new Little Ice Age," says Judith Lean. "t would simply slow down the current warming by a modest amount."

Submission + - Aging Linux kernel community is looking for younger participants

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: Time has been good to Linux and the kernel community, with the level of participation and volume of activity reaching unprecedented levels. But as core Linux kernel developers grow older, there's a very real concern about ensuring younger generations are getting involved. In this post, Open Access supporter Luis Ibanez shares some exciting stats about recent releases of the Linux kernel, but also warns that: "Maintaining the vitality of this large community does not happen spontaneously. On the contrary, it requires dedication and attention by community members on how to bring new contributors on board, and how to train them and integrate them alongside the well-established developers."

Submission + - Sunlight Helps Turn Salty Water Fresh (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: With energy-efficient desalination techniques, water-starved communities could produce fresh water from salty sources such as seawater and industrial wastewater. But common methods like reverse osmosis require pumping the water, which uses a substantial amount of energy. So some researchers have turned to forward osmosis, because in theory it should use less energy. Now a team has demonstrated a forward osmosis system that desalinates salty water with the help of sunlight. The method uses a pair of hydrogels to absorb and squeeze out freshwater.

Submission + - Porn Surfing Execs Infecting Corporate Networks With Malware (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: According to a recent survey of malware analysts at U.S. enterprises, 40% of the time a device used by a member the senior leadership team became infected with malware was due to executives visiting a pornographic website. The study, from ThreatTrack Security, also found that nearly 6 in 10 of the malware analysts have investigated or addressed a data breach that was never disclosed by their company.

When asked to identify the most difficult aspects of defending their companies' networks from advanced malware, 67% said the complexity of malware is a chief factor; 67% said the volume of malware attacks; and 58% cited the ineffectiveness of anti-malware solutions.

Comment Re:No one see's a problem with this? (Score 1) 278

by npwa (#39176857) Attached to: US Military Working On 'Optionally-Manned' Bomber

Yes, we have reports of Taliban groups intercepting video streams from current surveillance drones, but there's no suggestion that they have access to the control links in any fashion.

No, of course not. ...No, wait - the Iranians only hijacked a surveillance drone, not a remotely operated nuclear bomber. no problem then... http://bit.ly/vVkpes

Comment How to install it? (Score 1) 488

by npwa (#39121929) Attached to: Obayashi To Build Space Elevator By 2050
even when technology is mature enough to manufacture a carbon nanotube cable of this magnitude, how can it be set into the required position? An outline that is confirmed to work once it is built is nice, but I have seen no plan how to actually install it... How does one get started to place the first part of the cable?
Chrome

Submission + - Google Chrome: The New Web Platform? (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "The Chrome dev team is working toward a vision of Web apps that offers a clean break from traditional websites, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister, in response to Google's new Field Guide for Web Applications. 'When you add it up, it starts to look as though, for all the noise Google makes about Web standards, Chrome is moving further and further apart from competing browsers, just by virtue of its technological advantages. In that sense, maybe Chrome isn't just a Web browser; maybe Chrome itself is the platform — or is becoming one.'"
Data Storage

Submission + - SSD Latency, Error Rates May Spell Bleak Future (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A new study by the University of California and Microsoft shows that NAND flash memory experiences significant performance degradation as die sizes shrink in size. Over the next dozen years latency will double as the circuitry size shrinks from 25 nanometers today, to 6.5nm, the research showed. Speaking at the Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose this week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, said tests of 45 different types of NAND flash chips from six vendors using 72nm to 25nm lithography techniques showed performance degraded across the board and error rates increased as die sizes shrunk. Triple-Level NAND performed the worst, followed by Multi-Level Cell NAND and Single-Level Cell. The researchers said MLC NAND-based SSDs won't be able to go beyond 4TB and TLC-based SSDs won't be able to scale past 16TB because of the performance degradation, so it appears the end of the road for SSDs will be 2024.
The Courts

JPL Background Check Case Reaches Supreme Court 112

Posted by timothy from the faster-boys-if-you-want-your-pay dept.
Dthief writes "A long-running legal battle between the United States government and a group of 29 scientists and engineers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has now reached the US Supreme Court." At issue: mandatory background checks for scientists and engineers working at JPL, which they allege includes snooping into their sexual orientation, as well as their mental and physical health.

Comment Re:don't believe it (Score 1) 539

by npwa (#28792425) Attached to: Artificial Brain '10 Years Away'
from the article: "...may also give researchers new insights into diseases of the brain."

yes, but these are insights into diseases of the artificial brain. I'd rather call this "debugging" followed by far fetched conclusions...

Comment Re: I do care how it works (Score 3, Interesting) 176

by npwa (#28588855) Attached to: A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention
...because it's actually not working - Gmail spam filter recently became very ineffective - i have to classify about 5-10 Viagra spams daily. (Google, have you heard of it? geez!) then it occurred to me that a while ago Gmail captcha was cracked, so I imagine spammers send themselves hundreds of spams only to classify them as "non-spam". - as a consequence, spams are now slipping through the crowd-sourced filter because the crowd is infiltrated. c'mon google this can't possibly that hard to fix!

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