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If you bought something on Silk Road with bitcoin, the blockchain will remember it forever and possibly reveal your identity

A common misconception is that bitcoin transactions are anonymous. The truth is, unless you are very careful about covering your tracks, your bitcoin transactions can be connected to you. And the transaction records on bitcoin’s public database (the blockchain) can never be changed or deleted, meaning they will forever be searchable by authorities or anyone else. Andy Greenberg of Wired reports that researchers were able to “connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account.” [T]he Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk. By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites’ accounts — very likely with the intention of preserving the senders’ anonymity — that they could easily link to public accounts. Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don’t reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user’s registration details or private messages. “You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service,” says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study’s authors.

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If you bought something on Silk Road with bitcoin, the blockchain will remember it forever and possibly reveal your identity

Floating 1,600dpi 3D projections made by pushing around flecks of cellulose and hitting them with a laser

Physicists at BYU have demonstrated a volumetric projection system that works by using a laser to unevenly heat single cellulose molecules in order to shove them around in 3D space, then painting the positioned molecules with lasers that cause them to glow; by choreographic both sets of lasers, extremely high-resolution moving images can be attained. (more…)

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Floating 1,600dpi 3D projections made by pushing around flecks of cellulose and hitting them with a laser

Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

In Ankara, Turkey, one person’s trash is literally another’s treasure. Garbage collectors started saving books once destined for the landfill and opened a public library. CNN reports : For months, the garbage men gathered forsaken books. As word of the collection spread, residents also began donating books directly. Initially, the books were only for employees and their families to borrow. But as the collection grew and interest spread throughout the community, the library was eventually opened to the public in September of last year… Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction. There is also a popular kid’s section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research. Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors. The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters… The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons. ( For Reading Addicts ), image via CNN

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Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

Self-destructing thumb drives with smoke loads, glowing elements, tiny explosives

MG’s Mr Self Destruct project takes the USB Killer to new levels, combining a $1.50 system-on-a-chip with a variety of payloads: smoke bombs, “sound grenades,” and little explosives, cleverly choreographed with keystroke emulation, allowing the poisoned drive to first cause the connected computer to foreground a browser and load a web-page that plays an appropriate animation (a jack-in-the-box that plays “Pop Goes the Weasel” with the drive’s explosive detonating for the climax). (more…)

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Self-destructing thumb drives with smoke loads, glowing elements, tiny explosives

The war over apostrophes in Kazakhstan’s new alphabet

There’s a fascinating linguistic fight brewing in Kazakhstan, due to the president’s decision to adopt a new alphabet for writing their language, Kazakh. The problem? It’s got too many apostrophes! For decades, Kazakhs have used the Cyrillic alphabet, which was imposed on them by the USSR back in the 30s. Now that Kazakhstan has started moving away from Russia — including making Kazakh more central in education and public life — the president decided he wanted to adopt a new alphabet, too. He wanted it based on the Latin one. But! Kazakh has many unique sounds that can’t be easily denoted using a Latin-style alphabet. Kazakhstan’s neighbors solved that problem by following the example of Turkey, where they use umlauts and phonetic symbols. But Kazkhstan’s president didn’t want that — and instead has pushed for the use of tons of apostrophes instead. Kazakhstan’s linguists intellectuals think this is nuts, as the New York Times reports: The Republic of Kazakhstan, for example, will be written in Kazakh as Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy. Others complained the use of apostrophes will make it impossible to do Google searches for many Kazakh words or to create hashtags on Twitter. “Nobody knows where he got this terrible idea from,” said Timur Kocaoglu, a professor of international relations and Turkish studies at Michigan State, who visited Kazakhstan last year. “Kazakh intellectuals are all laughing and asking: How can you read anything written like this?” The proposed script, he said, “makes your eyes hurt.” [snip] Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye. “When scholars first learned about this, we were all in shock,” Mr. Kazhybek said. What’s particularly interesting are the technological and geopolitical reasons behind the president’s embrace of apostrophes. He claims it’s about making the language easy to type on computers; no need to have a keyboard equipped with umlauts and other special characters. But critics say it’s about something else — the president’s desire to not alienate Russia, which doesn’t like the idea of the various former Soviet satellites adopting Turkic styles … The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that “there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer,” he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English, when the same combination of letters designates entirely different sounds. But others saw another possible motivation: Mr. Nazarbayev may be eager to avoid any suggestion that Kazakhstan is turning its back on Russia and embracing pan-Turkic unity, a bugbear for Russian officials in both czarist and Soviet times. Oh, and a director shot a video parodying the apostrophe-ridden words the president’s new language would produce . The image above is from it. It’s a great story , with fascinating nuance into Kazakhstan’s politics; go read it in full! A very good reminder of how deeply political language is, was, and probably always will be. (There’s a cool video embedded where you can learn Kazakh phrases , too.)

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The war over apostrophes in Kazakhstan’s new alphabet

Nile Rodgers shares unreleased, bare bones demo of Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’

To celebrate what would have been David Bowie’s 71st birthday, Chic’s Nile Rodgers shared this newly-mixed demo of the 1983 hit single, “Let’s Dance.” Rolling Stone reports : “I’ve been blessed with a wonderful career but my creative partnership with David Bowie ranks very, very, very high on the list of my most important and rewarding collaborations,” Rodgers said in a statement. “This demo gives you, the fans, a bird’s eye view of the very start of it! I woke up on my first morning in Montreux with David peering over me. He had an acoustic guitar in his hands and exclaimed, ‘Nile, darling, I think this is a HIT!'” Bowie was so eager to lay down the track that a makeshift band made up of local musicians was formed specifically for this recording of “Let’s Dance”; the identities of the drummer and second guitarist on the recording are still unknown. (“If you played 2nd guitar or drums let us know who you are,” Rodgers added.) Thirty-five years after recording the demo, Rodgers unearthed and then mixed the track at his Connecticut studio specifically for its digital-only release. The demo concludes with Bowie exclaiming, “That’s it! That’s it! Got it,” as if he knew he had just recorded one of his biggest hits. The demo was recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland on December 19th and 20th, 1982.

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Nile Rodgers shares unreleased, bare bones demo of Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’

Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

Yuzu is an experimental emulator for Nintendo’s Switch console. No, it does not run commercial games. It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and macOS. The emulator is currently only useful for homebrew development and research purposes. yuzu only emulates a subset of Switch hardware and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics.

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Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.

This board game was found in Poprad, Slovakia inside a German prince’s tomb that dates to 375 C.E. Now, researchers at Switzerland’s Museum of Games are trying to figure out how to play it. From Smithsonian: It’s likely the board is designed to play Latrunculi or Ludus latrunculorum, which translates as “Mercenaries” or the “Game of Brigands” or some variant. That game was originally derived from an ancient Greek game called petteia which is referenced in the works of Homer. There are a handful of vague descriptions of how the game was played in ancient sources, but researchers have not successfully figured out the complete set of rules so far, though many gamers have come up with their own guesses. “There were plenty of board games in ancient times with many variants, but reconstructing the playing technique is a very complicated process that only top experts can solve,” Karol Pieta, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, tells the Spectator. ” Researchers Are Trying to Figure Out How to Play This Ancient Roman Board Game ” (Smithsonian)

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How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.

Ocean waves can hurl boulders 2.5X the weight of the Statue of Liberty

That rock you see above? It’s 620 tons, over 2.5 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Yet some powerful wave in the North Atlantic was mighty enough to lift it out of the sea and plop it onto land. Everyday ocean waves are way more powerful than we ever thought: This is the conclusion of a fascinating paper by geoscientist Ronadh Cox and her research group . Scientists long knew there were unusually huge rocks hurled ashore around the world, but generally they assumed they’d been tossed up by tsunamis, rare tectonic events. Nope. It looks like regular ‘ol storm-waves can manage these sorts of feats. Cox and her group took a bunch of before-and-after photos of the northwest coast of Ireland around the time of a 2013-2014 storm cluster, and identified several boulders that the storms had thrown ashore. They were huuuuuuuge! No wonder Homer called Poseidon the “earth-shaker” . The paper is here online in full , and is both layperson-parsable and seriously gripping. Given that global warming is pouring evermore energy into the oceans, we’re going to need to reassess just how powerful coastal waves can get, as Cox points out in this story about her work: “Why bother with this study?” Cox knew members of the audience might be asking. If these deposits are formed by storms, then we can better understand storm dynamics and coastal processes. This information will be important as global climate changes cause storms to become more frequent and intense. The research could also help to constrain tsunami models elsewhere. “But from my perspective, it’s just cool. It’s just fun,” added Cox.

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Ocean waves can hurl boulders 2.5X the weight of the Statue of Liberty