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Bitcoin! It’s wild! It’s crazy! It’s all the rage! But what if instead of bubbling up to the surface and making waves here in the twenty-teens it had gotten popular way back in the 90s? Well, it would have looked a little something like this. This mock-up by the ever-talented SquirrelMonkeyCom who has talked similar…
It’s not a bad idea to measure a room before you go out and buy a bunch of new furniture. And if you’ve got an iPhone, that becomes less of an ordeal because you can trade your tape measure for this slick app called RoomScan. It automatically generates floorplans by simply tapping your phone on…
These days, we think of tall buildings as profitable, if predictable, tools of real estate. But at one time, skyscrapers were as technologically exciting as the Space Race. The eVolo Skyscraper Competition, now in its ninth year, aims to recapture some of that excitement. The annual competition asks designers to imagine new ways in which…
In a bid to avoid another Mt. Gox, the software which drives Bitcoin transactions on the Internet has been updated to fix the weakness which contributed to digital vault’s downfall. https://gizmodo.com/the-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-has-disappeared-1530395202 Version 0.9.0 of the “Bitcoin Core” software includes five significant changes to help prevent attacks on the currency. The weakness which appears to have…
Turkey’s Internet watchdog has blocked Twitter, following threats by its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan fuelled by the network’s ability to carry rumors about government corruption. It’s a bold and draconian move from a country desperate to join the EU—which means it joins the ranks of Syria, North Korea and Iran on a list of…
A new report from The Intercept reveals that the NSA has been hunting and hacking system administrators the world over in order to gain access to the networks they control. A handful of screengrabs supplied by Edward Snowden reveal that the endeavor was probably worth it for them. Seems the NSA was able to monitor…
Medium has finally launched an iPhone app for reading its stories on the hoof—though there’s no search function, and you can’t write content through it. Interesting.
Bitcoin is big money. When Mt. Gox went belly up, hundreds of millions in bitcoin up and disappeared. Now, the troubled exchange just happens to have stumbled into 200,000 ‘coin it thought was lost, or roughly 116 million dollars. https://gizmodo.com/the-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-has-disappeared-1530395202 According to documents from Mt. Gox Chief Executive Officer Mark Karpeles and cited by the…
Here’s a wide ranging film montage that shows the evolution of film from its conception in 1878 to the whizbang movie trailers of today. It covers over a hundred years of film, with a new movie representing a new year starting from 1920 and on. Made by Scott Ewing, the compilation clip comes quick at…
I don’t know if this makes me an awful human but I can’t stop laughing and saying aww (also known as awwwfu-laughing) when I watch this video of a group of penguins tripping over a rope. Those poor guys can’t fly so to cross the beach they just have to trip. Imagine the conversation. “No,…
Here’s a fascinating 3D animation short from Malek Rizkallah. Called Crush, it entertains the idea of crash test dummies becoming sentient from a timely spark in the precious moments before the car crashes. The execution is crisp and clean but the concept is so interesting that it makes you feel real emotions in the eyes…
You’ve probably heard Katy Perry sing her song Dark Horse before. But you probably never heard Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra or Metallica or Nirvana give their rendition of that pop song. Don’t worry, they never did. But if you close your eyes and listen to this guy sing Katy Perry while doing the impersonations…
Earlier today, Google took to Google+ to debunk what it claims to be the “Top 10 Google Glass Myths.” But while there are plenty of Glass half-truths swirling around the internet, Google’s list doesn’t contain any of them. Instead, it’s a sky-high pile of strawmen that confirms just one thing: Google’s fully on the Glass…
Last week, the smog in Paris got so bad, city officials made public transit free and banned half the city’s cars from the road. The vehicle ban only lasted a day, with the reduced traffic and changing weather patterns alleviating the smog situation. But why did the smog get so bad in the first place?…
The wonderful thing about internet communities is that it’s very hard to artificially build them, but they arise organically in the strangest ways. And sometimes The Teens, those rapscallions, find the strangest places to commune online. This little farce explores the weird places we decide to talk online. But is it really so far-fetched? [The…
There’s something about looking at these photographs of Australian salt mines that… I don’t know, they’re like a visual chill pill or something. Photographer Emma Phillips snapped these beautiful shots in the Nullarbor Plain of Western Australia, but they look like a landscape from outer space. Even the industrial elements—conveyer belts and caravans and the…
If you’re a hardcore gamer, you probably know Snowdrop, the new game engine used in the new Tom Clancy’s The Division. I’m not, so I learned about Snowdrop through this new video just released for the Game Developers Conference 2014. It’s unbelievable. In the words of one of the artists who used it to create…
An indictment filed in federal court today reveals that Microsoft snooped through a blogger’s Hotmail account trying to plug an internal leak of pre-release Windows 8 software. That sounds like an outrageous violation of privacy because that’s exactly what it is. Microsoft claims they had the legal right under its terms of service. BI reports…
Energy-efficient LEDs have only just started replacing the energy-wasting incandescent bulbs we’ve been using for decades. But did you know that LEDs date all the way back to 1962? Most people don’t, but this modern lamp designed to look like Nick Holonyak Jr.’s original LED design should help educate the masses—or anyone who visits your…
It’s no mystery that government agencies compel tech companies to give them (totally legal) access to user data. It’s also pretty well known that the tech companies charge the government for the trouble. We’ve just never really known how much—until now. Long story short, Microsoft charges the FBI (read: taxpayers) hundreds of thousands of dollars…
