There’s a fundamental rift over what bitcoin should become. Many of the currency’s original proponents—call them crypto-libertarians—see it as a step toward an entirely new economy, one that can’t be influenced by an overweening federal government or rapacious financial industry. …
On Monday the Internal Revenue Service finally said what it thinks of Bitcoin, and on first blush, it looks like it could cause hassles for some bitcoin owners. But it will be a gold mine for companies offering bitcoin wallets.
Flynn is an open source project that aims to make it easy to build and deploy apps across many servers — whether they’re virtual machines on public cloud services like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or physical machines in your …
There have always been two kinds of cloud computing. One was called an infrastructure cloud. The other was called a platform cloud. It was a distinction that frustrated and confused many software developers. But this morning, Google took a step …
Many people complain that renting computer power from Amazon and other cloud companies is too expensive. But Google wants to change this. Today, the tech giant significantly reduced the prices attached to several of its cloud computing services, seeking an …
Much like Amazon and Microsoft, Google has long offered cloud services that let outsiders run software on its infrastructure, so that they needn’t set up their own computer servers and other hardware. But whereas in the past these were treated …
The mountain of broken down televisions and computer screens caught fire at around 11 am, sending a thick plume of black smoke over a Utah town called Parowan. Soon, about ten fire trucks from neighboring towns Paragonah and Brian joined …
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Ashton Kutcher want to build an artificial brain that thinks the way you think. As reported by Wall Street Journal, the Facebook CEO, the co-founder of Tesla, and the dude from That 70s Show were …
We miss Steve Ballmer. Last month, Big Steve stepped down as Microsoft CEO, and although we have few qualms with his successor, Microsoft veteran Satya Nadella, no one could ever match the enthusiasm Ballmer brought to the job. In fact, …
How often are the cloud companies snooping on their customers themselves? You can now read polished and detailed “transparency reports” that explain how often Google, Facebook, and Microsoft respond to government requests for user data, but these reports don’t …
Facebook engineers Bryan O’Sullivan, Julien Verlaguet, and Alok Menghrajani spent the last few years building a programming language unlike any other. Working alongside a handful of others inside the social networking giant, they fashioned a language that lets programmers build …
GitHub wanted to change the way businesses operate. But it may have gone a little too far.
The National Security Agency has many secrets, but here’s a new one: the agency is refusing to say how much water it’s pumping into the brand new data center it operates in Bluffdale, Utah. According to the NSA, its water …
Mark Zuckerberg was angry enough to phone the President when he read recent reports that the NSA was using fake Facebook websites to intercept the social network’s traffic and infect private computers with surveillance software. But Joe Sullivan — the …
David Cole is treating his congressional campaign like a piece of software.
Daniel Imrie-Situnayake says that cockroaches taste pretty good. He also eats crickets and mealworms, and his favorite insect dish is something called silkworm patties. You can think of them as bug burgers.
The giants of the net are already working to encrypt data, not only as it moves across the public internet but as it travels through private lines that run between the massive data centers that drive their myriad web services. …
Google’s ultra-high-speed internet service is on the fast track in another American city.
Monastic scribes, printing presses, Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution, planes, trains, automobiles, cargo ships, Einstein, satellites, astronauts, and, finally, moon rovers. What does this centuries-long arc of technological and cultural progress eventually lead to? Too much paperwork. That’s the message delivered …
The patent system. Online privacy law. Bitcoin regulations. Net neutrality rules. In the coming years, policy makers may have as much influence on technology as the world’s hackers do — if not more. So it should come as little surprise …
When you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can do things a little differently from everyone else. Worried about a pesky construction project next-door? Drop $30 million and buy up a four-pack of your neighbor’s homes. Worried that the NSA’s widespread surveillance may …
The tech world has now applied 3-D printing to data centers, those massive computing warehouses that underpin the internet and the software services that drive our largest corporations. An outfit called IO is using a 3-D printer to prototype “data …
Tim Berners-Lee believes the open web is under constant threat from the governments and corporations that want to control the internet. And to fight back, he’s calling for the creation of a kind of constitution for the internet.
Inside the massive data centers that run the most popular web services — from Google to Facebook to Amazon — beams of light may soon move data from machine to machine. This week, Intel and its partners announced that they …
The Mt. Gox death spiral continues. The big-name bitcoin exchange has now filed for bankruptcy protection here in the U.S., as well as Japan, and hackers are saying they’ve uncovered evidence of fraud at the Tokyo-based company, after allegedly breaking …
Today’s neuroscientists need expertise in more than just the human brain. They must also be accomplished hardware engineers, capable of building new tools for collecting and analyzing the brain.
The bitcoin community has now rejected the article because so much evidence has piled up against it. But underpinning the immediate and categorical rejection of Dorian S. Nakamoto is another phenomenon: Bitcoin is — by design — a leaderless project.
It’s bad enough that the state of Oregon has paid software giant Oracle over $100 million to build a healthcare exchange site that doesn’t work. But it now appears that Oregon is stuck with Oracle, unable to simply hire another …
A mere two years before President Reagan appointed him to the Fed, you see, Greenspan was the star of an 1985 TV commercial dubbed The Apple IIc and Money. No joke. You can see it below. “People in high places …
After a bizarre media scrum and brief car chase, the man identified this morning as the creator of bitcoin by Newsweek magazine has denied that he was involved with the digital currency, according to a reporter who spoke to him …
