Tag: techeeye

Bitcoin Foundation is out of cash

irony31The Bitcoin Foundation is ironically bankrupt and has shed most of its staff.

Olivier Janssens, who was elected to the board last month wrote in his bog that the foundation has almost no money left, and just fired 90 percent of its people. Some will stay on as volunteers.

“The Bitcoin Foundation hates transparency,” he added. “If they would have been transparent then everyone would know there is no money left.”

Janssens attributed the foundation’s financial straits to two years of “ridiculous spending and poorly thought out decisions,” adding that the board has tried to remedy the situation by finding a new executive director. He called for the replacement of the entire board.

Janssens is a bitcoin millionaire and he wrote that he will donate “several 100k” to a special trust fund aimed at supporting core development of the digital currency and supplemented by crowdfunding efforts.

Patrick Murck, its executive director, wrote in a response to Janssens’ post, “The foundation is not bankrupt, but a restructuring is needed. Olivier basically jumped in front of our announcements on that and our annual report on the 2014 finances to be released next week, and he spun it very very negative.”

Admitting that the money has run out, board member Gavin Adresen wrote in another response that that the foundation was not bankrupt.

“The board needs to decide whether the responsible thing to do is to continue the organization with a much smaller organization and vision or to dissolve it.”
The Bitcoin Foundation has a few problems going for it.

Among its founding members are Charlie Shrem, who pleaded guilty to transmitting money linked to the Silk Road online drugs site, and Mark Karpeles, who presided over the collapse of MtGox, once the world’s largest trading place for bitcoin.

In May 2014, a number of Bitcoin Foundation members quit in frustration over the organization’s direction and issues related to a board election.

AMD warns virtual reality is a long way away

 virtual-realityA true virtual reality machine is a lot longer away than many believe, warns AMD.

AMD’s chief gaming scientist Richard Huddy said that getting photorealism in games is impossible in the  current virtual reality hardware.

Talking to DevelopHuddy said that virtual reality was a staggeringly exciting field.

“But hardware companies need to produce something 100 or 200 times more powerful than current hardware if we’re going to get to the stage where we have complete photorealism in virtual reality headsets. It starts with the facts that, for a person with 20:20 vision, they will need a screen with a resolution of about 8k-by-6k to enjoy photorealism.”

This sort of statement flies in the face of many of the claims of the tech press who have been looking at the current generations of virtual headset.

Huddy predicts about 35 million pixels per eye should suffice for VR photorealism. That’s still 75 million pixels, taking us to a 35-fold increase compared to a standard 1080p monitor.

To get an indication about how far you have to go to get close to that Huddy you will need to get a 400x-to-1000x increase in horsepower to engender true, convincing VR photorealism that is indistinguishable from the real world.

 

Microsoft accuses US of double standards

janus1Software giant Microsoft has accused the US government of operating a system of double standards when it comes to snooping on other countries.

Microsoft’s executive Vice President and General Counsel, Brad Smith said that by demanding companies hand over customer data stored overseas the US government was operating a double standard that it would not accept from other countries.

Writing in his blog, Smith said: “Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei.”

Microsoft has applied to the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals in its ongoing case challenging a US government search warrant for customer data stored in Ireland. Microsoft filed the appeal after a US district court judge rejected the company’s argument that the warrant is illegal because it calls for the seizure of emails stored outside the United States.

If the situation was reversed the US government would be furious if a foreign government attempted to sidestep international law by demanding that a foreign company with offices in the United States produce the personal communications of an American journalist.

He pointed out that the Secretary of State would fume that he or she was outraged by the decision to bypass existing formal procedures that the European Union and the United States have agreed on for bilateral cooperation.

And then, if the Germans had responded the way the US had done,  they would claim that they did not conduct an extraterritorial search – in fact we didn’t search anything at all.

“No German officer ever set foot in the United States. The Stadtpolizei merely ordered a German company to produce its own business records, which were in its own possession, custody, and control. The American reporter’s privacy interests were fully protected, because the Stadtpolizei secured a warrant from a neutral magistrate,” Smith said.

That would not satisfy the Americans because the documents held by the foreign company for safekeeping are private letters, not business records.

“And any attempt to take possession of those letters through a warrant – even one served on the company entrusted with those letters – would constitute a seizure by a foreign government of private information located in another country,” Smith wrote.

As far as the US Government is concerned, your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the Government claims it can use a different and broader legal authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world.

Sweden to give games sexism rating

558_L-narikoThe macho gaming world is about to be turned on its head by moves in Sweden to rate games on the basis of the way they treat women.

A video game trade group, inspired by the Bechdel Test, will study games’ portrayals of women and give each game a rating.

It is being seen as a precursor to a government-backed programme considering creating specials label for video games based on whether or not the games’ portrayals of women are sexist.

Inspired by the Bechdel Test, Vinnova is paying the Swedish video-game trade organisation Dataspelsbranchen approximately $36,672 to study the industry’s female characters.

“I do not know of any other project in the world asking this question, and of course, we want Sweden to be a beacon in this area,” said project manager Anton Albiin, who notes that it has not been determined whether all Swedish games would be graded on their treatment of women or whether only games with positive portrayals would receive special labels.

Only 16 percent of people working in Sweden’s growing, $935 million gaming industry are women, according to Dataspelsbranchen.

“Of course games can be about fantasy, but they can be so much more than this,” Albiin said. “They can also be a form of cultural expression — reflecting society or the society we are hoping for. Games can help us to create more diverse workplaces and can even change the way we think about thing.”

Moves to rate women as equals in games have been contested by male gamers who have aggressively been shouting down those wanting to reform the industry.

Conservative social network killed by trolls

ronald_reaganAn attempt by US conservatives to set up a social networking site has collapsed under a sea of trolls and spam.

Ohio Republican Janet Porter pre-launched ReaganBook – “Facebook for Patriots”. The move was a reaction against employees from the better known social media site took part in a LGBT rights demonstration in San Francisco.

To be fair it was more a reaction to those “evil homosexuals” thing rather than an attempt at a real site. But several “left-leaning sites” (for European readers that is the same as centre right) gave the site more attention than it was read for.

Soon the real social network’s members were drowned out by a flood of phony accounts including Vladimir Putin, Sarah Palin, and Manuel Noriega and more sock puppets than a Muppet Theme Park.

Even Conservative blogger Amy Jo Clark thought the idea was half baked. She said that they should not have used Reagan as a brand.

Many users posted profane criticisms of former President Ronald Reagan, while others posted pornographic images.

Porter, who is president of the anti-abortion group Faith2Action, pledged to cull out all the duff posts.

She is claiming that what users saw was actually the pre-launch which gave the site the chance to tighten our security for the real launch.

Porter said that the fact that so many leftists have invested so much time in the site, “it provides confirmation that we’re on the right track,” she said.

We would have thought that actually all she has done is given “leftists” an avenue to give conservatives a good kicking.

Attempts to weed out the trolls and socks proved a little different. In the end it looks like Porter gave up. The site was taken offline by Wednesday afternoon. All this happened about 24 hours after the site launched.

Without a shred of understanding the PR implications, Porter asked users to be patient while we make the necessary changes to keep the site free from obscenity, pornography, and “those intent on the destruction of life, liberty, and the family”.

She promised that when the site opened it would have additional protections in place. “As Reagan taught us, trust, but verify,” the site said.