Some mixed messages from Google regarding Bitcoin. From Forbes:
Google’s Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra . . . Gundotra wrote [Malik] back. He also forwarded Malik’s
query to another Google staffer and started a series of email exchanges
that led to one Googler telling Malik that the company is indeed
pondering how it can make use of the world’s first form of decentralized
digital cash.
“We are working in the payments team to figure out how to incorporate
bitcoin into our plans,” wrote Google Senior VP of Ads and Commerce
Sridhar Ramaswamy at one point in the email exchange that Malik
forwarded to me. He promised to get back in touch “when we are a little
more sure.”
However, the company told a slightly different story to Forbes:
I reached out to Google, and the company responded in a very different
tone, but didn’t deny that the comments Malik posted to Reddit were
real. “As we continue to work on Google Wallet, we’re grateful for a
very wide range of suggestions,” a spokesperson writes. ”While we’re
keen to actively engage with Wallet users to help inform and shape the
product, there’s no change to our position: we have no current plans
regarding Bitcoin.”
The so-called "underbanked" segments of the population will be well served by such a service. Hopefully it and similar services will help to undermine the parasitic banking sector. From Engaget:
T-Mobile's latest service seems to fit its 'UnCarrier'
agenda perfectly, since it has little connection to wireless and
doesn't actually require users to have the company's phone service.
Called Mobile Money, the personal finance product combines a smartphone
app (iOS or Android)
with a branded prepaid Visa card. Without paying a single fee, T-Mobile
wireless customers can deposit checks into their Mobile Money account
by taking a picture of them with their smartphone, withdraw money from
42,000 in-network ATMs and reload the cards with cash at T-Mobile stores
(non-T-Mobile customers would pay additional fees). There are also no
maintenance fees, minimum balances or activation fees.
Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they
felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated
415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to
disguise their identity or location.
On these figures, Tor could be regularly used by as many as 45.13
million people. Its biggest userbase appears to be in Indonesia, where
21% of respondents said they used the tool, followed by 18% in Vietnam
and 15% in India.
Indonesia also has the world's highest penetration of general
anonymity tools among its internet users, with 42% using proxy servers
or virtual private networks known as VPNs, which disguise the location
of the user's internet connection - their IP address - and therefore
bypass regional blocks on certain content.
The US, UK, Germany and Ireland meanwhile all report 17% penetration,
with Japan the lowest at 5%. The data includes those aged 16-64 for the
last quarter of 2013.
Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a
crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library
heard a crashing sound and rushed to the s
cience fiction section,
expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a
handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with
light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to
apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most
mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the
F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and
most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the
government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion
worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD.
This is the third post in our recent series for beginning Python programmers. In the first post, I detailed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers. The second post then laid out learning benchmarks for the project on the basis of MIT's Introduction to Computer Science course. Today's installment provides a categorized list of Python resources for beginner to intermediate programmers. Add any others you've found helpful in the comments and I'll update the list. Enjoy!
And here you thought you felt guilty because of what you were eating. A press release from Proofpoint:
outsideperception.wordpress.com
Proofpoint, Inc, a leading security-as-a-service
provider, has uncovered what may be the first proven Internet of
Things (IoT)-based cyberattack involving conventional household
"smart" appliances
. The global attack campaign involved more than
750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000
everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected
multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that
had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks. As the
number of such connected devices is expected to grow to more than
four times the number of connected computers in the next few years
according to media reports, proof of an IoT-based attack has
significant security implications for device owners and Enterprise
targets.
Why won't these children think of the children?! From the BBC:
Filters put in place by
parents to stop children viewing inappropriate content are easily
bypassed by the youngsters themselves, according to a nreport from regulator Ofcom.
It found that 18% of 12-15-year-olds know how to disable internet filters.
Almost half of children aged 12-15 know how to delete their
browsing history and 29% can amend settings to mask their browser
activity. Some 83% of eight to 11 year-olds said they knew how to stay safe online. . . .
According to the report, many parents feel their computing skills are far inferior to their children's. Almost half (44%) of parents with children aged between eight
and 11 say their child knows more about the internet than they do. That
rises to 63% for parents of 12-15-year-olds.
In other words, hysterical helicopter parents and safety fetishists have succeeded only in preventing themselves and their technophobic peers from accessing "objectionable" content online.
