forum

Need Bitcoins? This ATM takes dollars and funds your account

NASHUA, N.H. -- Zach Harvey has an ambitious plan to accelerate adoption of the Internet's favorite alternative currency: installing in thousands of bars, restaurants, and grocery stores ATMs that will let you buy Bitcoins anonymously.

It's the opposite of a traditional automated teller that dispenses currency. Instead, these Bitcoin ATMs will accept dollar bills -- using the same validation mechanism as vending machines -- and instantly convert the amount to Bitcoins and deposit the result in your account.

"It's even easier than just using a regular ATM," says Harvey, 33, who demonstrated the device … Read more

Google Reader goes haywire for many users

Sometime over the weekend users of Google's RSS feed reader started issuing complaints on the Google Reader forum: "my feeds don't mark as read," "reader subscription and folders mysteriously reverted back to old settings," "feeds keep refreshing," and "my subscriptions keep disappearing."

Apparently, a number of users experienced sporadic service with their accounts, while others remained unaffected.

Google did not respond to user comments until this morning when it said it was looking into the problems. The delay in response caused panic in some users. One desperate person took to … Read more

Ito: Think twice about immortality and the singularity

Ray Kurzweil's vision of the "singularity" -- when nanobots make humans immortal and computer progress is so fast that the future becomes profoundly unknowable -- is a bad idea.

That's the perhaps surprisingly contrary opinion of Joichi Ito, who as a high-tech investor and director of the MIT Media Lab might be expected to be a natural ally. The lab, after all, aims to be at the center of today's technology revolution.

Ito, speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he believes the singularity vision puts the wrong priorities first.

"… Read more

Web founder Berners-Lee: Share info, improve the world

He stopped well short of saying information wants to be free, but Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, said today the world would be better with some judicious liberation.

Speaking at the 2013 World Economic Forum today in Davos, Switzerland, Berners-Lee called on social-networking sites, academics, musicians, and governments to share more information online.

In earlier days of computing, people had full control over their own information because it was all stored on their own computer in front of them. Now, people store data with online services that deprive them of that control.

"They put their … Read more

At Davos, the self-important get a leaderboard

For most of us, it's just Tuesday. But over in Davos, Switzerland, the elite of the elite are gathered at the annual World Economic Forum for several days of important talks, unbelievable networking, and presumably, a fair amount of social drinking.

Not surprisingly, Twitter seems to be the organizing principle at the event, and in a bid -- perhaps unintentional -- to pit the attendees (who after all didn't make it to the top of the heap by being wallflowers) against each other, the folks running Davos are keeping track of who's tweeting the most.

The result? … Read more

Branch makes its conversation threads available to all

Billed by Twitter's inventors as a new platform for high-quality public discourse, Branch today opened it doors to anyone who wants to fork off into conversations of more than 140 characters in length.

Branch is essentially a modern, user-friendly version of the Internet forum. People create "branches" to discuss topics or links and invite their friends to participate. Thread participants can also branch off into their own separate but related conversations.

The small, San Francisco-based startup is backed by Obvious, the incubator-investor hybrid machination of Twitter creators Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Obvious announced last March that … Read more

Adobe suffers database leak, user forum taken offline

Adobe has temporarily closed one of its user forums after a hacker caused a data breach.

The forum, Connectusers.com, allows Adobe customers to share information and opinions about its Connect online conferencing service, which is used to host Web conferences, e-learning, and webinars.

However, after a hacker hailing from Egypt posted a purported file dump containing user details from the site on Pastebin, Adobe pre-emptively took down the forum and said it will reset the passwords of affected site members.

The file dump, posted by the alleged hacker using the alias ViruS_HimA, apparently contains over 150,000 e-mail addresses … Read more

Mars Curiosity rover team prefers Macs to PCs

If there was anything Curiosity fans wanted to know about Mars, the rover, and the scientists behind the Martian landing, they were able to ask it today.

Reddit hosted a lengthy "Ask us Anything" Q&A with 12 members of NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover science and engineering team. And, yes, it included the "Mohawk guy."

Dozens of topics were covered, from whether there is life on Mars to how far Curiosity will roam within the Gale Crater to specifications of the equipment on the rover. At the time of this writing, there is a … Read more

Android forum site hacked; data swiped on 1 million users

Phandroid is urging members of its Android forums to change their passwords immediately after discovering that the server hosting the forum site was hacked this week, ZDNet reported today.

The data includes the user names, e-mail addresses, hashed passwords, and registration IP addresses of the forums' more than 1 million users. To change your password, go to UserCP, or use the "forgot your password?" page. As always, if you use the same e-mail address and password combination on other accounts, change those too.

A community manager for the site posted the news earlier this week, informing members that … Read more