The Gig Economy Comes for Software Development

Send Gigster your app idea and it sends you back that app. No coding. No hiring. No wrangling freelancers. Just a fundamental shift in how software gets built. That’s why Andreessen Horowitz has led a new $10 million Series A for Gigster just 18 weeks after its launch.

The lauded venture firm was impressed with Gigster’s artificial intelligence engine. It converts a client’s product proposal into a development plan, and helps Gigster’s army of remote developers plug in pre-made code blocks to efficiently build the app. Built by co-founder and CTO Debo Olaosebikan, Gigster’s AI perfectly fits Marc Andreessen’s investment thesis that “software is eating the world“, and Andreessen partner Chris Dixon’s thoughts about “software eating software development“.

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DARPA Completes Persistent Close Air Support Testing

PCAS is a package of technologies designed to speed close air support to soldiers on the battlefield, enabling ground troops, Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) and combat aircrews to share real-time situational awareness and weapons systems data. Executed in three phases, the four-and-a-half year program included flight testing during the first six months of 2015.

"The PCAS program was able to reduce close air support response times from nearly one hour to less than six minutes," said Tom Bussing, Raytheon vice president of Advanced Missile Systems. "By speeding critical information to decision makers, PCAS could save lives in the battlespace."

During the U.S. Marine Corps' Talon Reach V exercise in March, the program demonstrated end-to-end, fully digital weapons release of a Griffin missile from a modified MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. In May, an A-10C Thunderbolt II attack aircraft and a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) on the ground, both using PCAS' real-time digital communications and situational awareness capabilities, successfully employed 10 GPS- and laser-guided weapons in a second series of flight tests.

The PCAS system is designed to be platform-, digital radio-, sensor-, and weapons-class agnostic, and to be portable from platform to platform. The two main parts of the system are PCAS-Air, which consists of smart launcher electronics and a pilot tablet, and PCAS-Ground, which comprises the equipment used by the JTAC.

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Self Replicating Android App Source Code Released

Researchers from the Netherlands are working on a communications app so resilient that it can survive communications and power outages, natural disasters, and can self-replicate, mutate and spread virally between clusters of mobile phones, eventually across all mobile OSes.

In the paper Autonomous smartphone apps: self-compilation, mutation, and viral spreading [PDF], lead Paul Brusee and co-researcher Johan Pouwelse detail the development of a smart phone tool so resilient that it can compile itself, enabling a daisy-chained mesh network of smartphones which in effect act collectively as cell towers – which might themselves either have been destroyed by earthquakes or other disasters, or else have been turned off, monitored or interfered with by governments concerned about civilian aggregation.

The app replicates within the Android OS at the moment, though future work is anticipated to enable it to spread as easily between iOS and Windows phones, since it does not require root access in order to reproduce, and is not intended to be spread via stores such as Google Play or other centralised app repositories.

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You can totally guess what I downloaded and started messing with.

Oh and brace yourselves.  With the source code release, there will probably be several bits of malware using this by the time you are this post.  This can't YET spread itself.  However...

Robopocalypse #20: If the Bots Open a Restaurant, Will the Economy Notice?

Welcome to the Robopocalypse Report!  

This is my periodic round up of the news of what's going on in robotics and other disruptive automata coming to our economy.  I call it the 'pocalyse out of sense of joke, not because I think the economy is going to be pilfered by the bots.  It will be a big change to our economy and one with challenges, but its also an enormous opportunity, as big as the DotCom boom, if not more so.  One you will have to grab with both hands and hold on tight. 

Drones are turning into a menace of sorts.  People need to use common sense, but aren't.  I suppose it goes back to the 'common sense isn't' mantra, but...A drone crashed into the stands at the US Open. The pilot has been arrested.  Drones have been sighted near a NC airport.  British Columbia is joining the attempts to restrict drones near fire fighting.

Aerial dog fences are proclaimed to be insufficient to stop drones.  True, but its the aerial equivalent of a "do not cross" line.  Rather than blanket banning of drones in places, placing ADFs like regular fences ought to be required.  Cross the line below the max height and its criminal trespass. 

We are now up to *TEN* attempts to smuggle contraband into prisons in the last six months...in Britain!

The outlook for drones in Latin America is rather cloudy.

For self driving cars, let's start with a bit of humor.  Google's self driving car had an encounter with a granny in a motorized wheel chair chasing ducks.  Wuh?!

Toyota is investing $50 million into self driving car technology and hired the guy who ran DARPA's Robotics Challenge.

Regulators are being rather tolerant of Google's self driving cars.  This is a good thing.

Google is more optimistic than the traditional car makers about self driving cars.

The first obnoxious flaw in self driving cars has been found: using low power lasers, you can trick the car into seeing objects not really there.

In 3d Printing, UNLV has teamed up with Local Motors to work on 3d printed cars.  Here's another commentary on 3d printed cars.  A Vancouver man designed a 3d printed car as well.

WASP unveiled the world's largest 3d printer...for houses!

A cookie dough printer is going on sale in asia next year and will follow once it has approval in the US and Europe.  Another food printer was unveiled in China.  3d printing may revolutionize the food processing industry.  In Singapore, they want to take it further and bioprint meat.

There will be 3d printed clothing.  Or erm, its already started.

In the robots in the restaurant side of Robopocalypse, Eatsa is the first automated restaurant to open.  It reminds me more of the old automats, but with, well, quinoa. 

There is an argument over whether or not the minimum wage hikes will speed up the introduction of the bots in the fast food kitchens. The Washington Post says, 'yes.'  Others are stating the Robopocalypse in the Restaurant was coming anyways.  I'm in the latter camp.

In the traditional robotics side, a physicist and custom robotics maker claims we will have a 'human-like' robot within 8 years.  He uses the Moore's Law fallacy though.  Moore's Law is toast.

The mobile robotics market is expected to grow.

In the software bot side, the next generation of virtual assistants has almost arrived.

IBM is running ads promoting Watson.  The end is nigh, folks!

In the cyber warfare side, China is laying out its positions with respect to sovereignty and the internet.

On the philosophy and economics side of things, Forbes declares the future is more Ironman and less Terminator.

Will the bots create or destroy more jobs?  Isn't that the question.

Robopocalypse Report #11

This time we have a droneless report!  Woo!  A first!  So we'll start with the next most photogenic of the Robopocalypse: the self driving car.

CNET runs an article about how the self driving car is driving innovation in computer objection recognition.

Future producer of self driving cars (well, almost there for highway driving now) Tesla had its Model S hacked.  This required physical access to the car unlike the other car hacks recently.  However, this is my greatest concern with the self driving car.  I would love to use it as a way to pick up my kids and drop them off for lessons and whatnot.  I cannot, not just because of the foreseeable requirement to have an adult 'driving' because I can all too easily see a hacker-kidnapper taking control of the car to deliver the kids inside wherever rather than to where they were supposed to go.

Would be self driving taxi car company Uber is apparently bleeding out money rather quickly and if reports are true, you have to wonder if they are going to survive long enough to field their fleet for the robopocalypse.

Moving away from the self driving car, MIT is working on improving the teleoperation of robots.  In some ways this is not new technology: it was even used for the Johnny 5 robot in Short Circuit 2.  However, I can only imagine with modern computers its far, far better.

There have been increasing calls to ban autonomous weapons.  Everyone is invoking the Terminator for this.  Others have started calling them weapons of mass destruction in their calls for a ban.  I had an essay I was working on about the overuse of the term 'mass extinction' on an old computer, but the computer was lost and I didn't have a backup.  It seems WMD is hitting that level, too.  OTOH, autonomous weapons?  What are we talking here?  The mythical forever flying machines with solar powered lasers?  Or a mine?  Anything which requires human permission before firing?  Or a 5th generation atlas with an AK?  The definition above is really, really broad and will never make it into reality based on what is being proposed here.  

The Japanese have their robo hotel with the really odd kiosks for checking in.  The brits have taken their own version of the hotel of the robopocalypse.  Here's a review of the "Hub by Premier Inn."

And to round out the Robopocalypse Report #11, IBM has purchased Merge Healthcare, a medical imagery company, for use with its Watson AI system for a cool BILLION dollars.  Watson is either going to make IBM incredibly wealthy or crash the company.  Is this IBM's 747 moment?

Robopocalypse Report #4

I will probably not do this more than one per week in the future; however, we have a spate of interesting news this week.  So join me as we run through the heralds of the coming Robopocalypse and

A guy mounted a handgun on a little quadcopter and took it into the woods to shoot.  This has caused some controversy.  However, this should not be seen as new, so much as different in kind: the Russians trounced us with weapons armed quadcopters.  However, handguns are cheap and common whereas machineguns are not.  Hence, the outcry.  The day will come, folks, when there is a murder by drone. 

Speaking of drones, Flirtey's delivery service for the Wise County, Virginia fairgrounds is going ahead.  Flirtey teamed with NASA and the FAA granted the license.  I've mentioned it before, but this really does have the chance to be the Kitty hawk moment for US drone delivery services.  OTOH, this has the chance to be the proverbial turkey shoot if someone gets hurt, too.

In exoskeleton news, Rewalk has their next gen version ready.  The US Army Research Lab also has a new proof of concept exoskeleton for the purpose of improving soldiers aim.

OCRobotics has also produced a snake arm robot.  That'd be awesome - in a smaller form - for fishing keys out of tight places.  No exporting it to Japan though!

Normally, I focus on the robotic side of the Robopocalypse, but there's also a software side.  There are a lot of programs out there which will automatically do what people do today or will shortly.  Machine learning, big data and near real time analysis can have some serious impacts on the job market of the future.  It might also have a major impact on fashion trends as well.  If this were adopted, this could end up making fashion quite chaotic.  OTOH, I could also see a case where it might actually tamp down changes.  OTGH, I bet it will cause people to pick their clique and follow their separate trends: a filter bubble for the fashion trends!

DARPA's Project to Make Software Never Become Obsolete

One unfortunate fact of modern life is that functional new software becomes non-functional old software with depressing regularity. For most people, this means predictable episodes of frustration, but for the US military, it's a more serious problem. DARPA's new Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) project aims to take a major shot at avoiding this obsolescence by developing software systems that can still operate properly a hundred years from now.

As systems become more complex, the problems of compatibility and obsolescence become more important. Perfectly good devices may be unusable, vital data may be inaccessible, and communications may be impossible. A simple example of this is the BBC Domesday Project of the 1980s, which digitized the famous 11th century Norman census of England's assets. The project was successful, but the LaserVision discs that the data was stored on were almost forgotten until 2002 when it was realized that their formatting was obsolete and would soon be impossible to access, resulting in a major preservation effort.

For the US military, the problem is more than just frustration; it can have an impact on national security. Even when updates are available, installing and configuring them is costly both in terms of money and time as the problems of backwards compatibility and degraded interoperability in military systems becomes more apparent.

BRASS is a four-year research project that looks at the computational and algorithmic requirements needed to build software systems that can remain functional for over a century. The idea is to produce systems that can actively adapt to changes in the computer environment. According to DARPA, this will require going back to a very basic level, developing new linguistic abstractions, and creating resource-aware program analysis aimed at monitoring changes in computer environments and making the software react accordingly.

Currently, applications work on a software stack made of many layers of abstractions. Getting to through these layers means using different program interfaces. Unfortunately, these interfaces are often informally and incompletely documented inside the interface software itself – if at all. This makes understanding the system extremely painstaking and difficult, it not almost impossible at times. In addition, this makes keeping applications working properly over time without automatic updates difficult, costly, and leads to premature obsolescence.

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The Future is *NOW*: Using DNA to Generate Face Shots

While still somewhat primitive, this is something out of a science fiction book and, of course (!), already controversial.

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Part One of the Radical Robopocalypse for Fast Food Industry

Starbucks launched Mobile Order & Pay in Portland, Oregon and expects to introduce this feature nationally beginning in 2015.

Mobile Order & Pay allows customers to place orders in advance of their visit and pick them up at their chosen Starbucks® store. The mobile ordering experience is seamlessly integrated into Starbucks world-class mobile app and My Starbucks Rewards® loyalty program. Mobile Order & Pay is available for customers using a Starbucks® app for iPhone® (version 3.2)* in markets where the feature is available.

Store locations appear based on the GPS functionality of a customer’s iPhone®. Upon first use, customers will be asked to accept location services allowing Starbucks to identify the nearest location offering Mobile Order & Pay. If customers choose not to accept location services, they will not be able to use the Mobile Order & Pay feature but will have access to the Starbucks® Mobile Menu.

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Robopocalypse: Walk Like a Man!

The Robopocalypse has Come for the Outsourced IT Workers

Remember when a majority of new tech jobs were going to India and China? Well, increasingly, those jobs are going away altogether. Outsourcing, it turns out, is in the early stages of being automated.

This morning, news broke that Yahoo would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Cisco has been considering cuts in India as well.

Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: Wages in India have increased about 10 percent annually over the last five years, according to Cliff Justice, an analyst who studies outsourcing.

"The traditional low cost arbitrage markets have been India, China and other parts of Asia," Justice wrote in a paper he called "The Death of Outsourcing." "However, the success of outsourcing and global manufacturing has spawned a rapidly growing middle class in these regions, which is both increasing the cost of labor and broadening the potential customer base for many companies."

A late 2012 report by IT analysts HFS Research suggested that "robotic automation has the potential to wreak some dramatic, painful changes on the Indian outsourcers who are the current bulwark of the industry," and analyzed several instances in which an automated IT program has already started doing important work for several (unnamed) companies.

That discussion of automation is becoming much more common in the tech industry, with tech jobs in Asia having at least the potential to be on the chopping block, said Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings.

"The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now," Muro said. "The next generation of robots, the next generation of computer learning, is going to be much better than they were at handling things like customer service."

"I think it's going to create some disruptions not only here, but also in the emerging world, where the whole appeal is that labor is cheaper," he added.

Unsurprisingly, robots are and will be cheaper. Meanwhile, Yahoo and other major tech firms are trying to consolidate their human operations to larger offices centered in urban centers—most often in the United States.

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DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! One in Three Jobs to be Lost to Robopocalypse by 2025

Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

This is Gartner being provocative, as it is typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.

Take drones, for instance.

"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.

"Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world -- these are smart machines," said Sondergaard.

Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.

"Knowledge work will be automated," said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots.

"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."

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New Jersey Subpoenas Source Code, Documentation, Evidence of Criminal Activity for Nonfunctional Tidbit Bitcoin Mining Software

Four MIT students behind an award-winning Bitcoin mining tool will face off against New Jersey state authorities in court today when they attempt to fight back against a subpoena demanding their source code.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing 19-year-old MIT student Jeremy Rubin and three classmates in a remarkable case that stands out for the measure of aggression the state is using to obtain the code and identify anyone who might have tested the mining tool.

The case is reminiscent of a federal one that targeted Aaron Swartz after he was arrested by MIT police in 2011 for downloading more than 4 million scholarly journal articles from the JSTOR digital library, offered to MIT students, to make them more widely available. Swartz faced multiple charges for his activity and killed himself as he was preparing for trial. Although there is currently no indictment or pending criminal charges against Rubin and his friends, state authorities have indicated that they believe the researchers may have violated state laws. The case marks a disturbing trend among authorities to go after researchers, innovators, tinkerers and others who try to do cutting-edge projects to help the tech community, says EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury.

“It’s a very broad subpoena that hints at criminal liability and civil liability,” he says. “For a bunch of college kids who put something together for a hackathon—they didn’t make any money, the project never got off the ground and now is completely disbanded—there are some very serious implications.”

The mining tool, known as Tidbit, was developed in late 2013 by Rubin and his classmates for the Node Knockout hackathon—only Rubin is identified on the subpoena but his three classmates are identified on the hackathon web site as Oliver Song, Kevin King and Carolyn Zhang. The now defunct tool was designed to offer web site visitors an alternative way to support the sites they visited by using their computers to mine Bitcoins for them in exchange for having online ads removed.

“We believe our utility for the end user comes in freeing up real estate on web pages,” King wrote about their program on the Node Knockout site. “Imagine a web where your amazon shopping cart doesn’t follow you around to every website you visit. We believe there should be more options than advertising for monetizing a website, and we believe we have a novel and non-intrusive solution. In this way, we provide utility to developers who can now include higher quality content on their websites, and utility to end users who are spared the wasted time in looking at ads.”

The clever design won the award for innovation in the programming competition.

“This is a very intriguing idea that could really transform online economics if it works,” one supporter wrote on the hackathon site. “There is a much broader discussion to have about mining bitcoins vs doing other useful tasks (e.g. a friendly form of mechanical turk).”

But the program never got beyond the proof-of-concept stage before Rubin and Tidbit, as an entity, were hit with subpoenas from the New Jersey

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Mapping Sauropod Paleodiversity Geographically

In modern scientific researches of biological direction the geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly used. For example, GIS technology is successfully applied in the study of patterns of spatial and temporal distribution of biological objects with taking into account the unique features of the environment. Typically, a GIS is used for the analysis of current events and / or the future forecast, but they are also useful for the study of the fossils, living conditions in the distant past, changes in biodiversity and for determining historical patterns of biosphere evolution.

Convenience of GIS for integrated paleontological studies is due to the combination of database management systems functionality, editors of raster and vector graphics and a variety of analytical tools.

Over the last decades of paleontological researches a huge number of fossils belonging to a variety of species of animals, plants and microorganisms has been found. For a comprehensive qualitative analysis of this information it is not enough to draw on the paper map a certain amount of points. Maximum efficiency of the analysis can be achieved by creating a database and its integration with GIS. But if not so long ago each individual researcher or a research institute tried to do their own, as a rule, small databases containing information gathered only by them, but now there is a fundamentally new approach to automate many operations and combine the efforts of many scientists and research teams from all over the world. The projects that implement in practice, such approaches already exist. Paleobiology Database (Paleontological database) can be considered as one of them, 350 specialists from 133 institutions in 24 countries took part in this work. Currently this database contains information on more than a million found fossils, and it is open and available for use under the license of Creative Commons.

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US Navy Testing "Universal" Operating System for Unmanned Aerial Systems

The US Navy has begun testing the software that eventually will control all of its maritime unmanned air vehicles and will initially be installed in the unmanned carrier-launched surveillance and strike (UCLASS) vehicle.

US Naval Air Systems Command announced on 10 September that engineers at NAS Patuxent River had installed the latest version of the common control system (CCS) software on a simulator based on the Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton control station. The common software will eventually be the baseline for navy UAS, including the Triton and MQ-8 Fire Scout rotary wing UAS.

CCS is the control and connectivity leg of the three-part UCLASS programme. The other two legs are the UCLASS air vehicle and its physical control station aboard a carrier. Integration and testing of all three systems will be done at Pax River’s laboratory.

The navy already has demonstrated the feasibility of a stealthy, tailless carrier-based UAS with the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat air systems demonstrator (UCAS-D) programme. That aircraft in August successfully launched from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, flew in formation with a Boeing F/A-18D Hornet and returned to the ship’s deck.

A final request for proposals from industry was expected following a meeting of a defence acquisition board scheduled for 10 September, but the meeting was delayed as the Navy reviews how to proceed with UCLASS in regard to the 2016 budgeting process. Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems already were awarded preliminary design review contracts for the air vehicle last year.

“One of the premises that started CCS was not rebuilding the software that we needed for every UAS every time,” CCS team lead Jeff Davis says in a statement. “We focused on using existing products that we have within the Navy inventory to provide that first baseline going forward for the next UAS, in this case UCLASS. As a result, this allows development investment to focus on the future — the new capabilities that you can bring to the fleet.”

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Viv: Watson's Robopocalyptic Little Sister

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6:30?” or “Call Diane’s mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. “My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,” she’d say.

Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use Open­Table. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her.

Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

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Medical Researchers Develop Soft to Track all the Cells in a Developing Embryo

Recent advances in imaging technology are transforming how scientists see the cellular universe, showing the form and movement of once grainy and blurred structures in stunning detail. But extracting the torrent of information contained in those images often surpasses the limits of existing computational and data analysis techniques, leaving scientists less than satisfied.

Now, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus have developed a way around that problem. They have developed a new computational method that can rapidly track the three-dimensional movements of cells in such data-rich images. Using the method, the Janelia scientists can essentially automate much of the time-consuming process of reconstructing an animal's developmental building plan cell by cell.

Philipp Keller, a group leader at Janelia, led the team that developed the computational framework. He and his colleagues, including Janelia postdoc Fernando Amat, Janelia group leader Kristin Branson and former Janelia lab head Eugene Myers, who is now at the Max Plank Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, have used the method to reconstruct cell lineage during development of the early nervous system in a fruit fly. Their method can be used to trace cell lineages in multiple organisms and efficiently processes data from multiple kinds of fluorescent microscopes.

The scientists describe their approach in a paper published online this week in Nature Methods.

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Cornell Unversity Researchers Propose Two Phase Proof of Work for Bitcoin

Researchers have scuttled Bitcoin mining mammoths such as GHash with a proposed system alteration that would end the money-making collectives and return fairness and stability to the crypto currency.

Cornell University academics (@IttalyEyal) Ittaly Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) say their "Two Phase Proof of Work (2P-PoW)" is a simple solution to de-incentivise large Bitcoin mining pools.

The problem the pair hope to address is the fact that big mining pools can cheat the system with selfish mining. The duo point out that pools with more than 25 percent of the total network could earn more than their fair share, more so for those with 33 percent. Even larger pools could 'double-spend' with low confirmations, while those with over 50 percent control, as in the case of GHash, were an "unmitigated disaster", they said.

The 2P-PoW scheme aims to make collective mining less attractive by making proofs of work delegation harder without erasing a miners' fortunes or negating their hardware investments.

The 2P-PoW platform was developed after the GHash behemoth collective was found to dominate Bitcoin mining by scooping about 51 percent of all coins uncovered to date. The feat was a breach of etiquette -- the pair dubbed it "armageddon" -- as it undermined the key decentralised feature of Bitcoin.

GHash apologised and promised never to repeat the "51 per cent attack", but not before the website was hit with distributed denial of service attacks.

Eyal and Sirer said their platform would help miners by slowing hardware obsolescence which they peg at an astonishing 99.3 per cent loss of value within 28 weeks, leading to a huge turnover of equipment.

The two phase PoW introduced a second crypto-puzzle alongside the unmodified current quiz. Miners would continue the usual routine to solve the current puzzle but would then need to sign the block with the private key that controlled the payment address.

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Robopocalypse has Come for....TWITTER!

If you have a Twitter account, the chances are that you have fewer than 50 followers and that you follow fewer than 50 people yourself. You probably know many of these people well but there may also be a few on your list who you’ve never met.

So here’s an interesting question: how do you know these Twitter users are real people and not automated accounts, known as bots, that are feeding you links and messages designed to sway your opinions?

You might say that bots are not very sophisticated and so easy to spot. And that Twitter monitors the Twittersphere looking for, and removing, any automated accounts that it finds. Consequently, it is unlikely that you are unknowingly following any automated accounts, malicious or not.

If you hold that opinion, it’s one that you might want to revise following the work of Carlos Freitas at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil and a few pals, who have studied how easy it is for socialbots to infiltrate Twitter.

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Another Bitcoin Flaw?

One thing cannot be disputed about the person (or persons) responsible for creating Bitcoin: they were skilled in math, and expert at coding. Five years after the Bitcoin software was first released, no major fixes have been needed to the core code, which uses cryptography to generate and transfer virtual money.

Yet signs are emerging of more subtle flaws in the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto (which may or may not be a pseudonym), with analysis suggesting the rules governing how Bitcoin operates as a currency may be far from perfect. Some researchers claim that these rules leave room for cheats to destabilize Bitcoin. Others have concluded that major changes to the currency’s rules will be needed as the number of bitcoins in circulation increases.

“In the real world, people don’t always follow the rules—they do what’s best for them,” says Joshua Kroll, a researcher at Princeton. “Understanding this is the key to understanding whether and how Bitcoin survives—it tells you whether the system can last for a long time, [and] how robust is it in the face of shocks.”

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