Month: April 2013

Using Buttcoin as a database

people are “abusing” bitcoin to embed their own data into a distributed store:

if you are willing to waste money — albeit very small fractions like 0.00000001 bitcoins — by sending that money to invalid bitcoin addresses, you essentially have created a channel for random data transmission. The bitcoin blockchain is in one sense a massively replicated ~7GB database that stores data for all eternity.

Who has your back?

In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies — including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.

Whale culture

a new study finds strong evidence that a group of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the Gulf of Maine (map) is sharing a newly observed feeding behavior via their social networks. (See related blog: “Sharks Have Social Networks, Learn From Friends.”)

That behavior, called lobtail feeding, was first recorded in 1 whale in the Gulf of Maine in 1980. Since then, 278 humpback whales—out of 700 observed individuals that frequent the Stellwagen Bank (map) area—have employed the strategy