Hello and welcome to the second edition of my weekly review of technology news. Today I am writing about: the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", League of Legends has been hit by hackers, Facebook has been sued, Nasa have been using Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect, and the NSA are developing a code-cracking Quantum computer.
Ok so the first piece of news this week that amused me was the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", as you can probably guess this is a Kanye West based cryptocurrency. If you go to coinyewest.com you will be taken to there website where there is a countdown to when you can start mining this coin as well as some other information. However, despite being named after him, Kanye West actually has no affiliation with the cryptocurrency. This made my weekly review this week is because, for me, it epitomises how ridiculous this whole cryptocurrency thing has gotten. There are so many new different currencies to mine now that it has become stupid. There have been a lot of new cryptocurrencies hitting the market over the last few months since Bitcoin went big but they have not got as much publicity as this but still have been mined heavily. People have been taking these new currencies as a kind of get rich quick scheme. This is because if you mine early on in a cryptocurrency's life then it is much easier to mine and so you get more coins of the currency but as more coins are mined the difficulty increases and so you are less likely to find coins. This means that if the price of the currency does go up later on it in its life time there is the possibility that you could earn a lot of money. This happened for people who caught on early with Bitcoin back in 2009 when it launched but it is becoming less and less likely now that these currencies values are going to go up as much Bitcoin did as there are so many of them.
So the second piece of news this week is gaming related. The very popular on line game League of Legends was targeted by the hacker group Derp. Derp began the attack on Monday by DDOSing US and European servers to get them offline and then later on they did the same to the Asian servers with the same result. One popular League of Legends player PhantomL0rd was documenting the attack on daily Twitch stream and this led Derp to begin to target him. This eventually led to the hacker group to follow him to every game he tried to play and take their servers down. This meant that EA, Blizzard, Battlenet, DOTA 2, Quake Live, Club Penguin, and Reddit all had problems. Also PhantomL0rd's personal details were leaked onto the internet which then led to someone prank calling the police and saying that there were hostages being held at PhantomL0rds house. I think some of what they did went too far, such as releasing personal details onto the internet and causing problems with lots of websites rather than specifically targeting one website/game. However, I do find it amazing that one hacker group can cause this amount of issues.
So Facebook has got itself in trouble this week. They have been sued over allegedly sharing the content of private messages with advertisers and marketers. Apparently as people have been sending messages which includes links to websites, Facebook has been scanning the content of the message, following the link and looks for information so that they can get an idea of the message senders internet activity. This is very useful information for advertisers as they can provide adverts to that user that they are more likely to click on and buy things from. This violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California Privacy. The people who are accusing Facebook of this are trying to get Facebook to stop doing this and they are looking for as much as $10,000 in damages for each user who has been affected so you could be coming into some money soon. This is another example of how out of control the internet has got in recent years with pretty much all of the big companies spying on us or selling our personal information to advertising companies.The penultimate piece of news is quite an exciting piece of news I think. NASA have been using the Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect to control a robot arm. You can see a video of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNC72fgetc
NASA has been using these two pieces of technology to control a robot arm called JACO in real time. NASA say that it works by using the position tracking of the Kinect and rotational tracking of the Oculus to create a first person view for the user. Once it has been set up the user can do simple tasks with the robot arm. If this is successful it could have huge implications for NASA and space exploration in general as we could use the technology to operate things like the Curiosity Rover more accurately and be able to pick up things of interest. The immediate implications of the tests being successful would be using the technology on the Robonaut 2 humanoid on the International Space Station.
My final piece of news is the most interesting and shocking in my opinion. Edward Snowden has been at it again leaking more information about the NSA, this time saying that they are developing a quantum computer which will break the encryption which makes messages secure. It is believed that the NSA has spent $79.7 million on it but that they have not got a working machine yet. Once working the computer would be used to break encryption systems used on line and by foreign governments to send private messages and keep them secure. There have been many revelations about the NSA over the last year and many of them have been shocking, this is another one of those. Once again they are going too far and in my opinion America is becoming less of free country because the NSA is spying on everyone.Well that is the news for this week, I hope you have enjoyed and if you have remember to share it on Twitter and Facebook and follow me here:
https://twitter.com/TechRandN.
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