When the biggest file-sharing site on the internet first came into existence, it was entirely in Swedish and boasted just a few hundred torrent files. But the very first of those, the one that started it all, was uploaded almost exactly 10 years ago and, shockingly enough, wasn’t porn. It was a recipe book. Read more…
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The Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent Is Turning 10 And It’s… A Recipe Book
Bennett Haselton writes with a bit of online detective work done with a little help from some (internet-distributed) friends: “A website that was temporarily inaccessible on my Comcast Internet connection (but accessible to my friends on other providers) led me to investigate further. Using a perl script, I found a sampling of websites that were inaccessible on Comcast (hostnames not resolving on DNS) but were working on other networks. Then I used Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay volunteers 25 cents apiece to check if they could access the website, and confirmed that (most) Comcast users were blocked from accessing it while users on other providers were not. The number of individual websites similarly inaccessible on Comcast could potentially be in the millions.” Read on for the details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast
Behold the future, my friends. It isn’t hoverboards or laser swords or transportation hailing apps or drone deliveries, it is this: a gigantic touchscreen that lets you build your own pizza on the table that you will eat it on. Use the touchscreen to perfectly customize your order, play games while you wait and pay from your smartphone. The future looks delicious. Read more…
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I’ve seen the future and it’s this touchscreen Pizza Hut menu table
Dropbox is easily the internet’s favorite cloud storage provider—at the very least it’s our favorite . There are plenty of clever things you can do with it right out of the box (get it?). However, there’s also no shortage of apps and extensions you can get to make using Dropbox itself even easier. Read more…
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Seven Downloads and Extensions to Make Dropbox Even More Awesome
Qatar’s overtly yonic World Cup facility has also been the cause of a staggering number of construction deaths : More than 500 Indian migrant workers have died at the site since January 2012. This week, the stadium’s architect Zaha Hadid said, well, it’s not her problem. Read more…
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Architect Zaha Hadid Says 500 Worker Deaths Are Not Her Problem
It’s incredibly noisy in the cockpit of a helicopter, and you’d assume the sounds you hear in any YouTube police chase video were just the deafening whine of the chopper’s engine. But as one hacker discovered , that monotonous drone can actually hide some useful data, like the helicopter’s GPS coordinates. Read more…
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A Hacker Found GPS Data in the Audio of This Police Chase Video
The third installment of the Riddick franchise may have turned our favorite antihero into a peeping tom, but that didn’t stop it from being a huge hit on DVD. And because of that, Riddick is getting another movie! Read more…
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Vin Diesel announces a fourth Riddick movie is coming
An anonymous reader writes “Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by performing complex calculations, also known as ‘mining.’ If a single mining pool gains 51% of the overall computational power in the network, various forms of transaction manipulation become possible. Only a few years into Bitcoin’s existence, this existential threat appears to be at hand, with Bitcoin mining pool ghash.io approaching 51% of mining power. ghash.io has now assured the Bitcoin community in a press release (PDF): ‘GHash.IO does not have any intentions to execute a 51% attack, as it will do serious damage to the Bitcoin community, of which we are a part.’ But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute ‘51% Attack’
Web: To beat the pressure of gift-buying, we recommend you give experiences instead of objects . So how do you find these experience-based gifts, and which one is right for whom? Unstuff Gifts makes it easy by aggregating, sorting and recommending the best “non-stuff” gifts for the holidays. Read more…
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Unstuff Gifts Picks Experiences, Not Stuff, for Holiday Presents
An anonymous reader writes with news of the latest major fluctuation in the price people are willing to pay for Bitcoins. From the article: “China’s ban on its financial institutions handling bitcoin causes world’s largest exchange to cease trading, halving the value of the currency from $1, 000 to less than $500 in a matter of days. The country’s central bank took a hard line on Bitcoin in early December when it banned financial institutions from handling the decentralized crypto-currency, and as a result BTC China, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, has stopped accepting deposits from its users.” Just watch that line trend downward. Read more of this story at Slashdot.