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Bitcoin mining just became more difficult, on purpose

If you have computers chugging away as bitcoin mining machines , don’t be surprised if your output just fell through the floor. Reuters notes that code built into the digital currency system has cut the mining reward in half as of July 9th. Where there were previously 25 bitcoins (roughly $16, 000) to be mined every 10 minutes, you now have to fight over 12.5. The measure automatically kicks in every four years as part of an attempt to curb inflation that would come from both a growing number of miners and ever-faster computers. To no one’s surprise, reducing the reward could have serious consequences for dedicated miners. As you have to work twice as hard to get the same money, companies with not-so-efficient operations may have no choice but to restructure or even close shop entirely. KnCMiner , for instance, declared bankruptcy in May after warning about the impending profit loss. Those miners most likely to survive are the ones that keep costs to a minimum through lower-power computers and minimal staff. You’d think that the industry would have anticipated the halving given that it will happen every four years like clockwork, but that’s not necessarily the case. Although bitcoin isn’t quite as celebrated as it was a while back, it’s still far more mainstream than it was in 2012. There are many more people mining than there were four years ago, and not all of them realize that they’ll have to factor in those reward cuts. The bigger question is whether or not the bitcoin business will be better-prepared when 2020 rolls around. Miners will either have to trim costs yet again or hope that they can make money from transaction fees. Source: Reuters

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Bitcoin mining just became more difficult, on purpose

Amazon’s Chinese Counterfeit Problem Is Getting Worse

A report on CNBC, citing sellers, says that counterfeit problem on the platform has gotten worse after it made it easier for Chinese manufacturers to sell goods to U.S. consumers. The report gives an example of a seller Jamie Whaley who started a bedding business on Amazon that reached $700, 000 in annual sales within three years. Her patented product called BedBand consists of a set of shock cords, clamps and locks designed to keep fitted bed sheets in place. Whaley found quite an audience, selling up to 200 units a day for $13.99 a set. BedBand climbed into the top 200 selling products in the home and kitchen category. That was 2013. By mid-2015, the business was in a tailspin. Revenue plummeted by half and Whaley was forced to lay off eight employees. Her sheet fastener had been copied by a legion of mostly Chinese knockoffs that undercut BedBand on price and jumped the seller ranks by obtaining scores of reviews that watchdog site Fakespot.com determined were inauthentic and “harmful for real consumers.” The report adds:Spend any time surveying Amazon sellers and Whaley’s narrative will start sounding like the norm. In Amazon’s quest to be the low-cost provider of everything on the planet, the website has morphed into the world’s largest flea market — a chaotic, somewhat lawless, bazaar with unlimited inventory. Always a problem, the counterfeiting issue has exploded this year, sellers say, following Amazon’s effort to openly court Chinese manufacturers, weaving them intimately into the company’s expansive logistics operation. Merchants are perpetually unsure of who or what may kill their sales on any given day and how much time they’ll have to spend hunting down fakers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon’s Chinese Counterfeit Problem Is Getting Worse

NVIDIA’s GTX 1070 is a mid-range GPU that feels high-end

As impressive as NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 GPU is, its high price of $599 is tough to stomach for even the most dedicated gamers. That’s where the mid-range GTX 1070 comes in: It’s almost as fast as its more powerful sibling, but it starts at a more reasonable $379. That’s still a hefty chunk of change, but for the money it can tackle pretty much every game today (and likely for the next year or two) without breaking much of a sweat. That’s not too shabby for a mid-range video card. Due to travel ( Computex was quite the trip) as well as limited supply from NVIDIA, it’s admittedly taken me a while to put the GTX 1070 through its paces. But now that I’ve had some time with it, I can say without a doubt that the 1070 is an intriguing GPU. Even NVIDIA admits that among this generation of cars, this is the one most consumers will likely end up going for. Rounding out the lineup, the company also announced the lower-end GTX 1060 this week, which is quite the bargain at $249. The GTX 1070 is NVIDIA’s second card based on its 16 nanometer Pascal architecture, and it packs in 8GB of GDDR5 RAM and clock speeds between 1.5GHz and 1.7GHz. The company claims it pumps out 6.5 teraflops worth of computing power, compared with the 1080’s nine teraflops. I tested the slightly pricier $449 Founders Edition of the card, which sports the same elaborate metallic heatsink design as the 1080 Founders version. It has three DisplayPort connections, one HDMI port, one DVI port and is powered by a single eight-pin connector. 3DMark 3DMark 11 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Standard 13, 918/ Extreme 7, 703/ Ultra 4, 110 X7, 778 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Standard 15, 859/ Extreme 9, 316/ Ultra 5, 021 X9, 423 AMD R9 Fury X Standard 13, 337/ Extreme 7, 249/ Ultra 3, 899 X, 6457 AMD Radeon RX 480 Standard 10, 279/ Extreme 5, 146/ Ultra 2, 688 X4, 588 Let’s get to what you’re really here for: benchmarks! Not surprisingly, the GTX 1070 sits right between AMD’s $240 Radeon RX480 8GB card and the GTX 1080 in terms of performance on my rig (a 4GHz Core i7-4790K CPU, 16GB of 2400Mz DDR3 RAM and a 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD on a ASUS Z97-A motherboard). But it also consistently bests the Radeon R9 Fury X, which was AMD’s flagship card from last year. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have a GTX 970 or 980 Ti to benchmark.) 4K benchmarks Witcher 3 Hitman Doom NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 38 35 48 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 43 48 N/A AMD R9 Fury X 35 38 N/A AMD Radeon RX 480 20 25 35 Average frames-per-second performance in 1440p with all graphics set to maximum and NVIDIA HairWorks turned off. On the 4K front, it performed around the same as the R9 Fury X. It was noticeably less capable than the 1080 — in Hitman I saw around a 13 frames-per-second performance drop — but it’s still playable if you’re just looking to reach 30 fps at the minimum. It also reached an impressive 48 to 55 fps in Doom , a game that scales pretty well across GPUs of all types. 1440p benchmarks Witcher 3 Hitman Doom Overwatch NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 60 60 55-65 60 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 N/A N/A N/A N/A AMD R9 Fury X N/A 70 N/A N/A AMD Radeon RX 480 43 45 58 60 Average frames-per-second performance in 1440p with all graphics set to maximum and NVIDIA HairWorks turned off. Rather than pining for 60 fps 4K performance, I’ve settled on 1440p (2, 560 by 1, 440 pixels) as my ideal gaming resolution. It’s noticeably sharper than 1080p, and it’s easy to get high frame rates even with every graphical nicety imaginable turned on. With the GTX 1070, I consistently reached 60 fps with ultra settings (which will still look pretty great on a 4K display). Of course, it also had no trouble scoring well in 1080p benchmarks, but that’s no surprise. If you’re getting a new GPU today, you’re better off aiming for 1, 440p performance. Given that AMD’s cheaper RX 480 had no trouble with VR, I didn’t expect any hiccups with the GTX 1070. Indeed, it didn’t disappoint. Dogfighting in Eve: Valkyrie was fast-paced and didn’t show any sign of slowdown, and exploring alien environments in Oculus’ Farlands felt as immersive as ever. In fact, I didn’t notice any performance difference from the GTX 1080 with VR. When the GTX 1070 was announced, it seemed like the ideal affordable choice for PC gaming. Since then, though, we’ve seen the $200 AMD RX 480 debut, and NVIDIA announced the GTX 1060 , a $249 option of its own. So where does that leave the 1070? Based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s still a better option than the RX 480 and 1060 if you want to play at 1440p, or simply want a GPU that can handle next year’s games. And, of course, you’ve also got the option of picking up another GTX 1070 to run in SLI mode in a year or so, as well as overclocking to get some extra performance free. It’s hard to call a $379 video card affordable, but when you’re comparing it to a $599-and-up card, it seems a lot more palatable. And when you put it in context, as a GPU that trounces the cream of the crop from last year, the GTX 1070 is undeniably a great value.

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NVIDIA’s GTX 1070 is a mid-range GPU that feels high-end

George Takei Opposes Gay Sulu In ‘Star Trek Beyond’

HughPickens.com writes: Seth Abramovitch reports in the Hollywood Reporter that actor and LGBT activist George Takei says Paramount’s plans to have Sulu’s character in the upcoming ‘Star Trek Beyond’ the first LGBTQ lead character in Star Trek history is out of step with what creator Gene Roddenberry would have wanted. [Roddenberry] “was a strong supporter of LGBT equality, ” says Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Takei says he’d much prefer that Sulu stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character, ” says Takei. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.” The timeline logic of the new revelation is enough to befuddle even the most diehard of Trek enthusiasts, as the rebooted trilogy takes place before the action of the original series. In other words, assuming canon orthodoxy, this storyline suggest Sulu would have had to have first been gay and married, only to then go into the closet years later. Simon Pegg, who has co-written the latest Star Trek movie, as well as starring as Scotty, has responded to criticism by the actor George Takei at the film-makers’ decision to make the character he used to play openly gay. “He’s right, it is unfortunate, it’s unfortunate that the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn’t featured an LGBT character until now. We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the ‘gay character, ‘ rather than simply for who they are, and isn’t that tokenism?” says Pegg. “Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details. Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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George Takei Opposes Gay Sulu In ‘Star Trek Beyond’

Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Schneier on Security: Two researchers have discovered over 100 Tor nodes that are spying on hidden services. Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing reports: “These nodes — ordinary nodes, not exit nodes — sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over. The researchers used ‘honeypot’ .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions’ existence. They didn’t advertise the honions’ existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits. No one knows who is running the spying nodes: they could be run by criminals, governments, private suppliers of ‘infowar’ weapons to governments, independent researchers, or other scholars (though scholarly research would not normally include attempts to hack the servers once they were discovered).” The Tor project is aware of the attack and is working to redesign its system to try and block it. Security firm Bitdefender has issued an alert about a malicious app called EasyDoc that hands over control of Macs to criminals via Tor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services

Mandalay Bay installs America’s biggest solar roof

The Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV is now home to the largest roof-top solar array in America. The array consists of 26, 000 individual panels and produces enough power to meet roughly 25 percent of the convention center’s energy requirements. The two other largest casinos along the strip, presumably The Venetian and the Wynn, have also reportedly installed solar panels in efforts to reduce their electricity bills. The state of Nevada as a whole has set an ambitious goal of producing a quarter of its electricity from clean sources by 2025. That’s no small feat given that the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay alone consume more electricity annually than all of Key West, FL, a city of 2.5 million. Source: Fortune

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Mandalay Bay installs America’s biggest solar roof

A Screenshot Tour of MacOS Sierra, Your Mac’s Newest Operating System

The newest version of Apple’s operating system, macOS Sierra , won’t drop until fall, but a public beta is open to anyone gutsy enough to install it right now. If you’d rather leave your Mac alone but you’re still curious about what’s new, don’t worry, we’ll take a look at all the new features. Read more…

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A Screenshot Tour of MacOS Sierra, Your Mac’s Newest Operating System

In time warping study, people unconsciously controlled blood sugar levels

(credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom ) Ideas can be powerful drugs. If a person is simply convinced that a pill or treatment is going to yield real results, it can—even if that pill or treatment is completely bogus. Those results can be pretty substantial, too. Mental maneuvering, or placebo effect, can improve pilots’ vision , help people lose weight , and even up their IQ by a few points . And, according to a new study, it may also be able to help patients manage a chronic illness. In an experiment in which researchers duped participants about how much time had passed, the researchers found that participants’ blood sugar levels tracked with perceived time rather than actual time. That is, blood sugar dropped faster when the participants thought more time had passed. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, support the idea that mindsets and psychological processes, like the abstract internal representation of time, can have profound influence over what our bodies do, the authors conclude. Moreover, it raises the idea of using the mind to help manage certain chronic conditions, particularly type 2 diabetes, which causes periodic and dangerous rises in blood sugar levels. “Official standards for care and treatment of diabetes make no explicit mention of the influence of subjective cognition on diabetic metabolism, but our results indicate otherwise,” the authors argue. They suggest that mindfulness, coping strategies, and trained cognitive styles may prove useful in controlling blood sugar levels in further studies. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In time warping study, people unconsciously controlled blood sugar levels

Virulent auto-rooting malware takes control of 10 million Android devices

Security experts have documented a disturbing spike in a particularly virulent family of Android malware, with more than 10 million handsets infected and more than 286,000 of them in the US. Researchers from security firm Check Point Software said the malware installs more than 50,000 fraudulent apps each day, displays 20 million malicious advertisements, and generates more than $300 million per month in revenue. The success is largely the result of the malware’s ability to silently root a large percentage of the phones it infects by exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in older versions of Android. The Check Point researchers have dubbed the malware family “HummingBad,” but researchers from mobile security company Lookout say HummingBad is in fact Shedun, a family of auto-rooting malware that came to light last November  and had already infected a large number of devices. For the past five months, Check Point researchers have quietly observed the China-based advertising company behind HummingBad in several ways, including by infiltrating the command and control servers it uses. The researchers say the malware uses the unusually tight control it gains over infected devices to create windfall profits and steadily increase its numbers. HummingBad does this by silently installing promoted apps on infected phones, defrauding legitimate mobile advertisers, and creating fraudulent statistics inside the official Google Play Store. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Virulent auto-rooting malware takes control of 10 million Android devices