This year’s E3 is finally here, and to celebrate, we’ve teamed up with HP to give one lucky winner a brand-new HP Omen gaming PC. This beefy desktop pairs powerful modern hardware with a super-sleek chassis.
The post Giveaway: Win an HP Omen, the gaming PC powering the Fortnite Pro-AM tournament appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Coinbase may be one of the most-lauded crypto exchanges, but it supports just four coins right now which is far fewer than most others. That’s about to change a little after it announced plans to add Ethereum Classic (ETC), an alternate version of Ethereum, to its service “in the coming months.”
Ethereum Classic was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum is the second-highest valued token after only Bitcoin while ETC is number 19, according to Coinmarketcap. The value of ETC jumped is up nearly 20 percent over the past 24 hours after spiking following Coinbase’s announcement.
A date for the introduction of ETC will be communicated via Coinbase blog and Twitter account in due course, according to the company.
Coinbase is announcing its intention to list Ethereum Classic ahead of time so that it can test integrations as part of its new policy on adding new tokens, but that move is also in response to concerns that around inside trading when the exchange added Bitcoin Cash last December.
Coinbase went so far as to investigate the incident which saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange.
Indeed, the price hit a high of $8,500 on Coinbase and its GDAX service for professional investors, which was almost three times higher than the $3,500 price on all other exchanges. That led to speculation that Coinbase staff and insiders could have profited by buying BCH on other exchanges in the knowledge that it was about to be added to Coinbase, thus raising the price significantly.
This time around with ETC, Coinbase will hope that its statement of intent to list the token further down the line will avoid the potential for foul play.
This listing could be the first of many for Coinbase this year.
In today’s announcement, the company again reiterated its intention to add support for ERC20 tokens — the type that are generated by an ICO — and Bitcoin forks in the future.
Outside of adding new tokens, Coinbase is exploring how it can work with new blockchain technology including atomic swaps, sharding, proof of stake and more, according to CTO Balaji Srinivasan who joined earlier this year.
More generally 2018 is seemingly a year for growth and development at Coinbase. Beyond hiring Srinivasan as its first CTO through the acquisition of his startup Earn.com, the firm has introduced an investment arm and begun doing deals.
On the services side, it added services for institutional investors and recently bought a securities dealer that it hopes will eventually allow it to trade ICO tokens. Other acquisitions this year alone have included decentralized browser and wallet service Toshi, trading platform Paradex and Memo.ai.
Update: The original version of this story was corrected with details about the creation of Ethereum Classic. Hat tip @ciscoguru.
Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.
Source: TechCrunch
If you had trouble accessing Netflix earlier today, you weren’t alone. Netflix tweeted that it was “aware” of streaming issues, but said soon afterward that they had been resolved.
We are aware of members having trouble streaming on all devices. We are investigating the issue and appreciate your patience.
— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) June 11, 2018
The streaming issues we reported earlier have now been resolved. Thank you for your patience, and as always, happy streaming!
— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) June 11, 2018
A map from Outage.Report shows that Netflix was down for users around the world, with outages going on for a couple of hours.
Outage.Report map
TechCrunch has contacted Netflix to ask what caused the issues.
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook’s hundreds of pages of follow-ups to Senators make for decidedly uninteresting reading. Give lawyers a couple months and they will always find a way to respond non-substantively to the most penetrating questions. One section may at least help put a few rumors to rest about Facebook’s role in the 2016 Presidential campaigns, though of course much is still left to the imagination.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), whose dogged questioning managed to put Mark Zuckerberg on his back foot during the questioning, had several pages of questions sent over afterwards. Among the many topics was that of the 2016 campaign and reports that Facebook employees were “embedded” in the Trump campaign specifically, as claimed by the person who ran the digital side of that campaign.
This has raised questions as to whether Facebook was offering some kind of premium service to one candidate or another, or whether one candidate got tips on how to juice the algorithm, how to target better, and so on.
Here are the takeaways from the answers, which you can find in full on page 167 of the document at the bottom of this post.
It’s not exactly fire, but we don’t really need more fire these days. This at least is on the record and relatively straightforward; whatever Facebook’s sins during the election cycle may have been, it does not appear that preferential treatment of the two major campaigns was among them.
Incidentally, if you’re curious whether Facebook finally answered Sen. Harris’s questions about who made the decision not to inform users of the Cambridge Analytica issue back in 2015, or how that decision was made — no, it didn’t. In fact the silence here is so deafening it almost certainly indicates a direct hit.
Harris asked how and when it came to the decision not to inform users that their data had been misappropriated, who made that decision and why, and lastly when Zuckerberg entered the loop. Facebook’s response does not even come close to answering any of these questions:
When Facebook learned about Kogan’s breach of Facebook’s data use policies in December 2015, it took immediate action. The company retained an outside firm to assist in investigating Kogan’s actions, to demand that Kogan and each party he had shared data with delete the data and any derivatives of the data, and to obtain certifications that they had done so. Because Kogan’s app could no longer collect most categories of data due to changes in Facebook’s platform, the company’s highest priority at that time was ensuring deletion of the data that Kogan may have accessed before these changes took place. With the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had notified people whose information may have been impacted. Facebook has since notified all people potentially impacted with a detailed notice at the top of their newsfeed.
This answer has literally nothing to do with the questions.
It seems likely from the company’s careful and repeated refusal to answer this question that the story is an ugly one — top executives making a decision to keep users in the dark for as long as possible, if I had to guess.
At least with the campaign issues Facebook was more forthcoming, and as a result will put down several lines of speculation. Not so with this evasive maneuver.
Embedded below are Facebook’s answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the other set is here:
Source: TechCrunch
Ubisoft showcased 10 games during its press conference leading up to the E3 gaming show. Some of the goodies making an appearance included Fox McCloud in the Nintendo Switch version of “Starlink: Battle for Atlas,” and more.
The post Here’s everything Ubisoft showcased during its E3 2018 presentation appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The widow of Steve Jobs is running what the Washington Post describes as “the most influential product of Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of.”
Source: CNET
Facebook finished its homework. In a pair of newly uploaded letters, the two Senate committees that grilled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in April have published the social media giant’s written answers to their considerable body of questions.
Zuckerberg faced criticism for not answering many of the more intricate or controversial questions from members of Congress in the moment, but by playing it safe the company bought two months’ worth of time to craft its answers in perfect legalese. If you’re interested in combing through the 454 pages worth of explanations on everything from accusations of conservative censorship to Cambridge Analytica, you can dig into the documents, embedded below.
Facebook’s answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee:
Facebook’s answers to questions from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation:
Source: TechCrunch
We’re expecting more details at Sony’s E3 2018 event, but until then, here’s everything to know about Hideo Kojima’s next game.
Source: CNET
Become a Spartan on Oct. 5, 2018, as the Assassin’s Creed series becomes even more of an RPG.
Source: CNET
The social network received more than 2,000 questions.
Source: CNET