An anonymous reader writes: In another intraday jump of more than $200, bitcoin surged to a record Thursday on strong Asian demand overnight. Bitcoin jumped more than 10 percent to an all-time high of $2, 752.07, more than twice its April 30 price of $1, 347.96 according to CoinDesk. The digital currency last traded near $2, 726. At Thursday’s record, Bitcoin has now gained more than 45 percent since last Thursday and more than 180 percent for the year so far. “There is no question that we are in the middle of a price frenzy, ” said Brian Kelly of BKCM, in a note to clients Thursday. “There will be a correction and it could be severe, but it’s unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bitcoin Surges 10% To All-Time High Above $2,700, Has Now Doubled in May
the_newsbeagle writes The $10 million Tricorder X-prize is getting to the “put up or shut up” stage: The 10 finalists must turn in their working devices on June 1st for consumer testing. At SXSW last week, the finalist team Cloud DX showed off its prototype, which includes a wearable collar, a base station, a blood-testing stick, and a scanning wand. From the article: “The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions. Grant Campany, director of the Tricorder XPrize, said he’s looking forward to getting those devices into real patients hands. ‘This will be a practical demonstration of what the future of medicine will be like, ‘ said Campany at that same SXSW talk, ‘so we can scale it up after competition.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptime, 99.9%, which beats London’s tube or NYC’s sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10, 000 people would be carrying out 2, 600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the one carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn’t a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chan of Hong Kong’s City University, who designed the AI system, says, “Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen.” Chan’s AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedules less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chan’s team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong’s AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chan. “We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works, ” he says. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
krakman writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: “Bitcoin plunged more than 8 percent [Friday] after a Tokyo-based exchange halted withdrawals of the digital currency, citing technical malfunction. Mt. Gox, claimed in a blog post it needed to ‘temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests to obtain a clear technical view of the currency processes.’ It promised an ‘update’ — not a reopening — on Monday, Feb. 10, Japan time. This is day after Russia’s Prosecutor General concluded Bitcoin and other digital currencies are illegal under current law.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
PolygamousRanchKid writes “Turkey’s prime minister on Sunday rejected claims that he is a ‘dictator,’ dismissing protesters as an extremist fringe even as thousands returned to the landmark Istanbul square that has become the site of the fiercest anti-government outburst in years. With Turkish media otherwise giving scant reports about the protests, many turned to social media outlets for information on the unrest. ‘There is now a menace which is called Twitter,’ Erdogan said. ‘The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.’ ‘The people are finally standing up, speaking up and fighting for their rights,’ said Hakan Tas, a deputy for the Left Party in Berlin’s local assembly, who took part in the protest.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
hypnosec writes “The ozone layer seems to be on a road to recovery over Antarctica; according to Europe’s MetOp weather satellite, which is monitoring atmospheric ozone, the hole over the South Pole in 2012 was the smallest it’s been in the last 10 years. The decrease in size of the hole is probably the result of reduction in the concentration of CFCs, especially since the mid-1990s, because of international agreements like the Montreal Protocol.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Mephistophocles writes “Ever since the beginning of Operation Pillar of Defense, hackers have been working overtime to strike a blow against the Israeli government’s computer systems, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said Sunday. No fewer than 44 million attacks have been recorded since the operation began five days ago — with nearly all of them failing, thanks to the recent strengthening of computer defense systems in Israel. Speaking at a special press conference at the Government Computing Center in Jerusalem about the cyber war against Israel that has accompanied Hamas’s rocket attacks, Steinitz said that hackers ‘are trying to disable the symbols of Israeli sovereignty, to enter web sites and install anti-Israel content, thus compromising information and data and damaging the government’s ability to serve the public.’ Most of the attacks, he said, were against government sites, like the Prime Minister’s Office site, and security-related sites, such as that of the Home Front Command, the body charged with informing Israelis on how to protect themselves in the event of an attack. Out of those 44 million-plus attacks on government and defense related sites, said Steinitz, only one succeeded – partially. One site, which he did not name, was ‘wobbly for a few minutes,’ but quickly recovered. Even though the government has been successful in warding off hack attacks, Steinitz said that government sites were fully backed up and mirrored, meaning that they could be replaced by a duplicate site instantly if the original site were compromised.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.