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American Is Killed by Bow and Arrow on Remote Indian Island

John Allen Chau had dreamed of returning to the Andaman Islands.

Mr. Chau, an American thought to be in his 20s, was fulfilling that dream last week when he set off by kayak for a remote island inhabited by a tribe whose members have killed outsiders for simply stepping on their shore.

Fishermen warned him not to go. Few outsiders had ever been there. And Indian government regulations clearly prohibited any interaction with people on the island, called North Sentinel.

But Mr. Chau pushed ahead in his kayak, which he had packed with a Bible. After that, it is a bit of a mystery what happened.

But the police say one thing is clear: Mr. Chau did not survive.

Also at NPR.

New York Parents Are Turning to Reiki Healers for Their Stressed Kids

Wikipedia: Reiki

Tomorrow, November 15 @ 04:40UTC, the biggest computer battle that has ever happened will take place.

The Bitcoin Cash network is secured by about 5EH of compting power (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 dSHA256 hashes/second). At the moment, a malicious actor, Craig Wright, is controlling about 75% of that power. He intends to cause a hard fork on November 15 and make BitcoinSV the leading Bitcoin Cash implementation.

His goal appears to be to destroy Bitcoin Cash. His twitter feed (seriously, check this out) has become crazy over the last few weeks. He appears to want to take away the permissionless aspect of Bitcoin Cash. Transactions that use 'non-allowed' op codes would become recoverable by miners (of which, he is conveniently, the majority miner). He also talks of recovering funds from addresses that have been inactive for a long time. I believe that the end goal is to recover Satoshi's coins.

In just under 24 hours, the war will start. It is likely that hashrate will be diverted from BTC to defend this attack. This will result in lower hash rate for BTC, slower block times, and likely transaction congestion.

During this time, block reorgs on the bitcoin cash network are likely. Transactions may be undone during the attack. It is also possible that only empty blocks will be mined, preventing any transactions from occurring.

There is also speculation that 'poison blocks' will be used as part of the attack. The new SV client allows upto 128MB blocks. However, the current software only has a throughput of ~22MB before other limits come into play. It is speculated that Craig Wright will use malicious pre-computed blocks to 'poision' the network. These blocks would take a long time to validate on honest nodes giving CW an advantage.

This is going to be an epic battle. It's the most expensive computer attack to ever be launched and is going to be a critical moment for the future of all cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin Cash.

It's going to be interesting... information during the attack can be found here: https://reddit.com/r/btc and here: https://cash.coin.dance/

EDIT: Ars just picked it up.

4 green cabbages
4 lbs carrots
2 bunches of green onions (about 10-11 oz total)
1 lb radishes

Sauce contains:

8 tbsp soy sauce
8 tbsp sugar
1 cup canned crushed pineapple
12 tbsp ginger paste
3 heads garlic
2 onions
1/2 cup red pepper flakes
Some MSG

I'll put in some store bought kimchi to use as a starter.

1 cabbage makes about a gallon, so I'm using a 5 gallon food grade bucket. I bought these silicone grommets. Drilled a 9/16" hole in the bucket lid, popped it in. Airlock fits great. I'll put some vodka in it to ward off bugs (they probably won't get in, but could drown in the airlock).

In The Lab: Double Capacity 2x32GB DDR4 from G.Skill and ZADAK

One of the interesting things to come out of the news in recent weeks is the march to double capacity memory. In today’s market, memory modules for consumer grade computers have a maximum of 16GB per module. This is unbuffered memory, and the standard for home computers and laptops. However recently there have been two major announcements causing that number to double from 16GB to 32GB: Samsung has developed double capacity ICs to drive up to 32GB per module with the same number of chips, but also a couple of DRAM vendors have found a way to put two times as many ICs on a 16GB module to make it up to 32GB. Both G.Skill and ZADAK fall into that latter category, and now we have both of these kits in the lab for review.

Related: HP Footnote Leads Intel to Confirm Support for 128 GB of DRAM for 9th-Generation Processors

Edinburgh's road signs hacked by artist

I have used Google to look for previous SN stories for a year or two now. Mainly because there have been inconsistencies with SN's own internal search engine in the past (that may have been fixed since). I use the "site:soylentnews.org" search parameter, plus the keywords, and I have a textbox that automatically adds the "site:soylentnews.org" bit to the query.

While writing this submission:

China Still Has Trouble Staffing the World's Largest Radio Telescope

I'm pretty sure that the following story exists on site, although I don't know where it is or know the headline just yet:

China Can't Find Anyone Smart Enough to Run its Whizzbang $180M 500 Meter Radio Telescope

So I search for stuff like "china radio telescope" and "aperture spherical telescope". No dice.

I use SoylentNews internal search, looking for "Aperture Spherical Telescope", and it works.

Let's try "china radio telescope smart enough". Nope, nothing.

Let's try the exact title of the submission. Welp, there it is, finally. Except that that just before finishing this journal entry a few minutes later, it no longer works (I checked to see if it was a special character issue, and it doesn't seem to be).

This isn't the only example that I've come across, and it seems to have gotten worse in recent weeks. IIRC I had trouble looking for previous stories for an opioid-related submission. These have been popping up often enough that I may just ditch the GOOG for this purpose, especially since SN's search seems to work just fine.

AMD Investor Relations Announces “Next Horizon” Event for November 6th

On Election Day? Gee, what's the bad news?

Anyway, this is likely related to "7nm" Zen 2 Epyc server CPUs, which will debut well before desktop or mobile variants. They might also announce a Radeon RX 590 "12nm" Polaris GPU or talk about "7nm" Vega GPUs.

If Zen 2 Epyc has 64 cores, and Zen+/Zen 2 Threadripper has 32 cores, then Zen 2 Ryzen could have up to 16 cores.

On or around November 15, 2018 Bitcoin Cash will undergo its 3rd hard fork. There has been quite a bit of drama over this upcoming fork. On one side we have Bitcoin ABC, and the other we have BitcoinSV.

When Bitcoin Cash was forked from the original Bitcoin on August 1, 2017, it did so with the Bitcoin ABC code. When that happened, the Bitcoin ABC implementation became the de facto reference client. In my opinion, while Bitcoin ABC has done great work on progressing the Bitcoin protocol, their communication and community involvement leaves something to be desired.

Bitcoin ABC has proposed and implemented a few changes for the upcoming fork. The biggest and most controversial of these changes is something called Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR). In the current implementation, transactions can be included in a block in any order. If/When CTOR is accepted, then transactions will have to be ordered in a specific way.

CTOR offers some advantages with block propagation. There are a number of technologies (Compact Blocks, Thin Blocks, Graphene) that allow faster block propagation. Essentially, when a block is found, the block needs to be propagated to the rest of the network. As blocks get larger, the time to transmit the block also increases. In order to propagate blocks to the network in a timely fashion, Bloom Filters are used. Having a fixed order of transactions inside a block means that the order of transactions don't have to be transmitted to propagate a block. This results in a significant (>50%) reduction in data required to transmit a block.

On the other side, we have BitcoinSV. Craig Wright is BitcoinSV's Lead Scientist. He has been claiming for several years now that he is the real Satoshi. Gavin Andresen (one of the earliest Bitcoin coders) even agreed that Craig Wright was Satoshi. Craig started a company called nChain that has been working on their own implementation. They are closely affiliated with Coingeek who operates a mining operation/pool.

There have been criticisms of both sides. Criticisms of Bitcoin ABC's CTOR include that it's too big of a change too fast. Changes to consensus rules should happen very slowly and be tested very thoroughly. Impact on CPU usage is not fully understood at this time and if there are any bugs in the CTOR implementation that could result in an unintended chain split.

On the other side, we have BitconSV and Craig Wright. Craig is a character. He constantly makes outrageous claims and consistently fails to provide any proof to his claims. Any papers he produces contain mostly plagiarized content. His personality would definately fall into the 'asshole' category. BitcoinSV did not have any publicly released code until several weeks ago -- Way too late to be taken seriously IMO.

Craig has made claims that there will be no chain split. He has stated that his BitconSV implementation will win and he 'will prevent' a chain split from happening and will use his hash power offensively if required.

So here we are, two weeks away from the date the fork must occur, and no one really knows what will happen. We are about to witness the first true 'Nakamoto Consensus' hash war. It's going to be exciting to watch.

My predictions: Bitcoin ABC will easily win (will be clear winner in less than one hour). BitcoinSV was released way too late in the game to be taken seriously. They do not even have a testnet. How can we even know that it will work as advertised?

However, will the minority chain persist? There is intentionally no replay protection as part of this fork, so a transaction submitted to one chain will be valid on the other chain. People have stated that they will be replaying transactions from each chain to the other. There are still ways to force your coins to split however.

My prediction on persistance is that the minority chain will persist for quite some time (months-years), much like Bitcoin Gold persisted. It will have very little value, but it will have some value.

There's never a dull day in Bitconland.

DRAMA UPDATE!!!: Craig Wright says that he will blacklist any address that uses a new op code introduced by Bitcoin ABC. Very un-satoshilike.

Mike, assuming you have a normal sized kidney, tomorrow you will be approximately 150g lighter... Unless the surgeon leaves some tools inside you, then it will be a little less.

I'm sure you are in good hands and I hope everything goes well and I look forward to you getting back on here and posting random Unix commands and updates on your current mental state.

Godspeed MDC, godspeed!