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Venezuelans flock to BTC, the digital currency as inflation has spiraled to the triple digits, debasing the the venezuelan currency, the bolivar (VEF) and depleting savings. Citizens struggle to find everything from food to medicine on store shelves. Ryan Taylor, chief executive officer of crypto currency Dash Core says "If you're going to be in something volatile, you might as well be in something that's volatile and rising than volatile and falling,". Crypto currency Dash Core is the third-largest digital coin by number of transactions. Bitcoin (BTC) trading volume in Venezuela jumped to 1.3 million US$ this week, about double the amount that changed hands two months ago, according to LocalBitcoins.com.

Venezuela's currency has become nearly worthless in the black market, where it takes more than 6000 bolivars (VEF) to buy 1 US$, while bitcoin surged 53% in May-2017 alone. But it's not just about shielding against the falling bolivar, as some Venezuelans are using crypto currencies to buy and sell everyday goods and services, according to Jorge Farias, the CEO of Cryptobuyer.

For those desiring a faster transaction time the crypto currency Ethereum exists with an average block settling time of 14 seconds since April 2016 according to themerkle.com.

Venezuela has 47e9 m³ in proven oil reserves, more than any other nation in the world. So now the only thing missing is to start the sale of oil using crypto currencies so that a military intervention can be justified..
All this happens while since at least 2014, hundreds of thousands of citizens have protested high levels of criminal violence, corruption, hyperinflation, and chronic scarcity of basic goods, arrest of opposition leaders, laws to force citizens to work in agricultural fields and farms for 60 days or longer, 40 inmates dismembered and consumed three fellow inmates, 200 prison riots in Venezuela in 2016 and so on. Tourist hotels probably have an all time low now for that super bargain..

http://www.snopes.com/breatharians/

http://www.babwnews.com/2017/06/crazy-couple-says-they-no-longer-need-to-eat/

Some videos on Xerox Alto from 1972:
Seminal Xerox Alto arrives for restoration (video)

Alto restoration in text.

Quick specification:
CPU: TTL-based, 4x 74181 ALU chips. User programmable microcode (1-3 kB), big-endian. @ 5.88 MHz.
RAM: 96-512 kB
Graphics: 606×808 pixels
Storage: 2.5 MB one-platter cartridge

Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:

He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].

He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.

1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).

(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html

2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s

Femtocomputing, please.

Interesting Wikipedia talk page.

This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:

Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs

AOMedia Video 1:

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?

Apple is adding HEVC support to its products.

Samsung computer phones used to have a stock app called S Suggest. Then Samsung didn't renew the domain that control it. And made it possible for villains to register the domain and malware infest millions of computer phone users had they spotted the opportunity.

On parity in severity with CVE-2015-2865 from 2015-06-17 which will not crypto sign computer code sent in clear text.

That is unless the phone goes into mission impossible flight mode of self destruction as in 2016-09-08.

Germany is planning a new law giving authorities the right to look at private messages and fingerprint children as young as 6, the interior minister said on Wednesday after the last government gathering before a national election in September 2017. Ministers from central government and federal states said encrypted messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Signal, allow militants and criminals to evade traditional surveillance. "We can't allow there to be areas that are practically outside the law," interior minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in the eastern town of Dresden.

It's not even sure that messages will be obvious to be.. well anything like they don't want to. A quick look how this can be done is "The Saint" from 1997 where the contractor gets jobs that way. The hard quote is "where authorities install software on phones to relay messages before they are encrypted" suppose the phone knows nothing. Not even the destination because another unit tells it via junk voice modulated with actual bits what to do. This is so incredible stupid technology wise and dangerous design of society. The last time themes like this were current. Neighbors told people in uniform that so and so did bad things. So they could snatch their belongings like a house for themselves. And the whole society went down the drain. Oh wait, actually it was repeated after the mustache times with the sickle times. Both failed. This also shows why bootloader locked phones is detrimental to real security.

Another way to do it is like this:
"is planning new law planning giving"
Lexicon:
r - law
s - is
t - giving
e - planning
c - new
It would be trivial to get the encoded meaning. But now suppose something like base64 etc is added on top with input data being something true binary etc.

For some mysterious reason Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech, Slovakia, and Hungary almost all of them seem to have been spared the latest string of violent attacks. How can that be, Nobel prize awaits! ;)

China plans to send a 3 kg miniature ecosystem biosphere to the surface of the moon by using Chang’e 4 mission, incorporating a robotic lander and rover. When it departs in 2018.

The container will send potatoes, arabidopsis seeds and silkworm eggs to the surface of the moon. The eggs will hatch into silkworms, which can produce carbon dioxide, while the potatoes and seeds emit oxygen through photosynthesis. Together, they can establish a simple ecosystem on the Moon, says Zhang Yuanxun, chief designer of the container. The whole event with the development of plants and insects on lunar surface will be live-streamed to the world, says the project’s chief designer Xie Gengxin.

Suitable temperature for plants and insects to survive and thrive is between +1 .. +30 ⁰C. But the moon’s surface temperature ranges between -170 ⁰C at night to +120 ⁰C in the day. To get around this problem, the container will be equipped with a insulation layer and light pipes to ensure the growth of the plants and insects inside. Specially designed batteries will be used to provide a consistent energy supply.

Meanwhile researchers at the International potato center (CIP) and UTEC, Peru technical university in Lima, investigates if it's possible to grow potato on the planet Mars.

In the future all you base are owned by China?

Trump's Name Will Be Bleeped Out In The Next "Broad City" Season

Would I have seen this important news if I hadn't accidentally opened BuzzFeed? I'm not so sure.

Russia protests: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny sentenced

Russia protests: Kremlin critic Navalny jailed, hundreds arrested

Will Navalny make it into the Kremlin or get shot in the night?