2020 Monsoon Season and Dam Stress Threatens Chinese Bitcoin Miners
Digital currency proponents have been discussing the 2020 monsoon season in East Asia and how there’s a possibility it could wreak havoc on large bitcoin mining operations located in China. Recent estimates note that China has 50% of the world’s bitcoin mining capacity but if mining facilities are taken out by heavy rainfall and flooding, Bitcoin’s hashrate could plummet fast. During the first week of July, the...
Russian Government Mulls Fines to Prevent Camming in Cinemas
Despite an increased desire to download and stream only the best quality copies of pirate movies, a significant number of pirates are still prepared to obtain so-called ‘cammed’ movies. These copies are mostly obtained in cinemas by pointing a recording device, usually a camcorder or mobile phone, directly at the screen. The end result is often less than optimal but despite the regularly abysmal copies, people flock to...
Google Takes No Action for 99.2% of Copyright Notices Targeting Internet Archive
The Internet Archive (IA) is a massive content resource by any metric. In addition to its Wayback Machine that archives 330 billion web pages, IA operates a huge media repository too. According to the site’s data, it currently offers 20 million books and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos, (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images and 200,000 software...
Charter Demands More Evidence from Anti-Piracy Tracking Company
Internet provider Charter Communications is one of several companies being sued for turning a blind eye to pirating subscribers. These lawsuits, filed by dozens of major record labels and music companies, allege that Internet providers fail to terminate accounts of repeat infringers. This is no trivial matter, as a similar suit resulted in a billion-dollar damages verdict against Cox late last year. This is a fate rival ISP Charter...
Why the future of AI is open source
Artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is the next phase of artificial intelligence, where computers meet and exceed human intelligence, will almost certainly be open source. AGI seeks to solve the broad spectrum of problems that intelligent human beings can solve. This is in direct contrast with narrow AI (encompassing most of today’s AI), which seeks to exceed human abilities at a specific problem. Put simply, AGI is all...
