Month: January 2018

Jim Resnick

Let me pre-empt you.

"Why?" you ask. "You're Lamborghini, not Range Rover!"

Enlarge (credit: Oliver Mallich)

Bitcoin fell below the psychologically significant level of $10,000 on Wednesday morning, marking a second day of double-digit declines for the virtual currency. One bitcoin is now worth $9,700, less than half its peak value of $19,500 achieved just last month.

Bitcoin's fall is part of a broader cryptocurrency sell-off. For the second day in a row, every major cryptocurrency has suffered double-digit declines over the previous 24 hours.

Ethereum is now worth $810, down 42 percent from its peak above $1,400 just four days ago. Litecoin has fallen to $150—down 58 percent from its peak of $360 on December 19. Bitcoin Cash, a rival version of bitcoin, was worth more than $4,000 on December 20. It's now down to $1,500, a 65 percent decline.

(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

After a tumultuous 2017, YouTube is making yet another change to its guidelines surrounding channel monetization and advertiser approval. In posts to its Advertiser and Creator blogs, YouTube details how it's changing the threshold for monetization through its YouTube Partner Program (YPP), from 10,000 lifetime views to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months. That means that small creators who already passed the previous 10,000 lifetime view milestone, but not the new goals, will be removed from the YouTube Partner Program starting February 20 and will be unable to monetize their videos in that manner,

As of yesterday, any channels that newly apply for YPP will have to pass this new threshold in order to monetize videos. On its Creators blog, YouTube explains that the new required milestones "will allow us to significantly improve our ability to identify creators who contribute positively to the community and help drive more ad revenue to them (and away from bad actors). These higher standards will also help us prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing which can hurt revenue for everyone."

The company made a point of noting the types of channels that will be affected by the new rules. "Though these changes will affect a significant number of channels, 99 percent of those affected were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90 percent earning less than $2.50 in the last month. Any of the channels who no longer meet this threshold will be paid what they’ve already earned based on our AdSense policies."

Enlarge / The early disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre by Google and the fumbled responses by hardware vendors left cloud companies scrambling to react. So they united to fight the dumpster fire of poor communication and bad patches. (credit: US Air Force)

Meltdown and Spectre created something of a meltdown in the cloud computing world. And by translation, the flaws found in the processors at the heart of much of the world's computing infrastructure have had a direct or indirect effect on the interconnected services driving today's Internet. That is especially true for one variant of the Spectre vulnerability revealed abruptly by Google on January 3, since this particular vuln could allow malware running in one user's virtual machine or other "sandboxed" environment to read data from another—or, from the host server itself.

In June 2017, Intel learned of these threats from researchers who kept the information under wraps so hardware and operating system vendors could furiously work on fixes. But while places like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were clued in early because of their "Tier 1" nature, most smaller infrastructure companies and data center operators were left in the dark until the news broke on January 3. This sent many organizations immediately scrambling: no warning of the exploits came before proof-of-concept code for exploiting them was already public.

Tory Kulick, Director of Operations and Security at the hosting company Linode, described this as chaos. "How could something this big be disclosed like this without any proper warning? We were feeling out of the loop, like 'What did we miss? Which of the POCs [proofs of concept of the vulnerabilities] are out there now?' All that was going through my mind."