Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Reykjanes is just southwest of the capital, Reykjavik. (credit: Jennifer Boyer)

Eleven people have been arrested in Iceland as a result of what local media are calling the “Big Bitcoin Heist”—600 mining computers were recently stolen from Icelandic data centers in four separate burglaries between December 2017 and January 2018.

According to the Associated Press, which cited Icelandic authorities, it is “the biggest series of thefts ever” in the island nation.

So far, a Reykjanes District Court judge ordered two of the 11 arrested individuals to remain in custody. Apparently, the specialized machines have not yet been located and are worth approximately $2 million.

Enlarge / Google Hangouts Chat running on a laptop. (credit: Google)

Slack, Stride, HipChat—workplace chat apps that integrate with various project management and collaboration services are all the rage. It's surprising, then, that Google hasn't jumped on board yet. Workers are using Google Hangouts in offices all over the world, but it doesn't offer the kinds of features that Slack does. Now, Google has launched Hangouts Chat, its Slack competitor—sorry, "messaging platform built for teams." It's part of the G Suite at every pricing tier, though the features vary by plan.

Announced last year, Hangouts Chat looks and behaves just like regular Hangouts, but it has several enterprise features. It integrates more deeply with various other productivity products in the G Suite like Google Drive, but it also offers some features and integrations for popular third-party services like Salesforce and Trello, just like Slack does. Google says you can "schedule meetings, create tasks, or get updates from your team right within Chat."

Google also promises that it works without any plugins, and that includes the expanded Hangouts feature, Hangouts Meet, which went live a while ago. Hangouts Meet has a leg up over regular Hangouts in the form of tighter integration with Google Calendar and automatic inclusion of old-fashioned conference line call-in numbers. Below, find images from the initial announcement of the service.

Enlarge (credit: Newegg/Gigabyte)

As anyone wanting to put together a high performance PC has likely discovered, the self-build PC market is in a terrible state right now. DDR4 RAM prices are more than double what they were 18 months ago, as demand from smartphones has pressured supply. As for GPUs... well, they're a mess. High-end video cards are being bought in their dozens by cryptocurrency miners, leaving those who want a video card to actually do graphical things high and dry. It's enough to make you want to shout with rage.

This situation has made pre-built PCs unusually competitive—components bought at scale, as part of long-term supply agreements, likely have more price stability than those sold directly to end users—but that's small consolation to those who truly want to build their own machine.

But all hope is not lost; Tom's Hardware Guide has found another source of, if not exactly cheap, at least cheaper video cards: external GPU graphics docks with preinstalled video cards.

Enlarge / Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee Lamar Smith, R-Texas, seen here in 2013. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

By now, there's very little disagreement that the Russian government has been pursuing an organized social media campaign within the US. But there are still significant arguments regarding the goals and impacts of that campaign. Most of these center around the presidential election, but the Republicans on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology are doing their best to get people to consider an additional topic they argue has been specifically targeted by the Russians: the US energy economy.

According to a report released Thursday by Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the Russian efforts were part of a specific campaign to suppress US development of fossil fuels. But the evidence presented in the report is pretty weak, and it seems to indicate the Russian troll farms were simply trying to get Americans to argue with each other.

The report released by the committee is a majority staff report, which means it was prepared without the Democratic members of the committee. And it's an odd mixture of reasoned argument and selective interpretation of evidence.