Month: February 2021

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Officials in Germany have seized a digital wallet believed to contain $60 million in bitcoins obtained by fraudulent online activity. The original owner of the wallet was convicted of installing bitcoin mining malware on peoples' computers without permission and has served more than two years in prison. But the wallet is encrypted, and the fraudster has steadfastly refused to disclose the password protecting the 1,700 bitcoins.

"We asked him but he didn’t say," the prosecutor from the Baravarian town of Kempten said to Reuters on Friday. "Perhaps he doesn’t know."

The value of bitcoin soared during the two years that the fraudster was behind bars.

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  Like Minisforum's earlier designs, the U8x0 packs a lot more expandability into its tiny form factor than you might expect—including room for two internal 2.5-inch SATA SSDs or HDDs. [credit: Minisforum ]

Hong Kong-based miniature PC specialist Minisforum announced two new models of its signature NUC-like minis available for pre-order this week; the U820 and U850. These sibling models share the same basic form factor and specifications—they're palm-sized boxes crammed with input, output, and storage ports as shown below. The U850 offers an Intel i5-10210U CPU, and its less expensive U820 sibling sports an i5-8259U.

These systems measure 5x5 inches, at 2.5 inches tall, and come with VESA mount hardware that can be used to mount them directly to the back of most monitors. They support up to three simultaneous displays (HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C), and can make great homebrew routers thanks to their dual Ethernet interfaces.

We should note that these systems are available for pre-order now, with shipping expected in April—but this is not Minisforum's first rodeo; it has been shipping miniature PCs like these for several years through direct sales and Amazon.

Snapchat on an iPhone. (credit: Maurizio Pesce)

Social media company Snap (which runs Snapchat) and game development software company Unity have joined Facebook in warning their investors that Apple's imminent ad-tracking change will negatively impact their businesses.

As previously reported, Apple plans to use the next iOS update (iOS 14.5, due out in early spring) to implement a requirement that all apps on the platform gain user opt in to track users with IDFA (ID for Advertisers) tags. IDFA tags are used to track what users do across multiple apps in order to target advertising more effectively.

Social media giant Facebook has told its own investors that the coming change to Apple's operating system could very negatively impact its advertising revenue, because this kind of tracking-based ad targeting is one of Facebook's main ingredients for success.

Enlarge (credit: Person-with-No Name)

The Arctic Ocean is many things. Cold and icy come to mind, of course, but "salty" should as well—it’s an ocean, after all. Yet a new study suggests that during certain ice age periods, the Arctic Ocean and the adjacent Greenland and Norwegian Seas (you can guess where those are if you don’t know) were filled with freshwater.

The paleo evidence for this idea is pretty subtle. The isotope thorium-230 is produced from the decay of uranium-234, which exists in seawater proportionally to its salinity. While the uranium dissolves in seawater, thorium tends to precipitate and fall to the seafloor. Bring up a core of seafloor sediment, then, and rising or falling concentrations of thorium-230 can tell you about rising or falling salinity in that region over time.

A new study led by Walter Geibert at the Alfred Wegener Institute analyzed a pair of sediment cores taken from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. In those cores, there are two time intervals during which thorium-230 fell to zero—one interval about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago and another about 130,000 to 150,000 years ago.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Getty Images)

It's still early, but Apple's new tracking restrictions on iOS sure seem to be causing headaches for the Internet ad industry. Just last week, Google told partners to expect a "significant impact" to ad revenue, while Facebook has launched an all-out war against Apple's tracking initiative and is reportedly considering legal action. Now, a new report from Bloomberg claims that Google, the world's largest Internet ad company... wants to do a similar thing on Android?

The report says that "the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution." This "less stringent" solution will be made after "seeking input" from stakeholders, over which Google's ad division will probably have a large influence.

Citing "people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg says the feature "won’t require a prompt to opt in to data tracking like Apple’s" and that "to keep advertisers happy while improving privacy, the discussions around Google’s Android solution indicate that it could be similar to its planned Chrome web browser changes." Bloomberg also warns that the idea is in the early stages and might not happen at all.