12 Million historic images being uploaded on Flickr by Kalev Leetaru which can be downloaded and used without permission

In perhaps what is a boon to historians, researchers, bloggers and image enthusiasts, American academian, Kalev Leetaru is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images. Leetaru says that anybody and everybody can copy, paste and use these images for any purpose.  Do remember that many of these images are of historic and archival value and would cost you a bomb if you did want to buy them for other sources.

Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.  Leetaru's database contains photos and drawings which are are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation. As said above, these images of ancient artifacts and historic value were difficult difficult to access up until now.

Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.  Which means that the images are tagged with proper labels making the search easy for a wannabe downloader.

"For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works," he told the BBC. "They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that. Stretching half a millennia, it's amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time."  Interestingly  Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.

Leetaru was able to circumvent the copyright provisions by uploading images only upto 1922 the year when copyright restrictions started.  He said that these huge database will range images from 1500 to 1922. Mr Leetaru began work on the project while researching communications technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC as part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of photo-sharing service Flickr.

The Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to convert the image of each word into searchable text.

So next time you want a historic image, you know were to find one.

Bitcoin made Anonymous and off the blockchain by BitcoinDark’s Cryptocurrency Teleport Technology

Tracking Bitcoin based transactions will get that more difficult with the launch of next generation anonymous Teleport technology. Being implemented BitcoinDark, the new technology will ensure all transactions made through this portal will be completely private and off the blockchain.  

The company, BitcoinDark today in a pressers, says that it aims to create a decentralized currency and payment system with supporting decentralized trading, a P2P asset exchange and constructive collaboration across the cryptocurrency ecosystem. As of now bitcoin transactions can be tracked through the blockchain which give Bitcoin wallet information.  BitcoinDark’s exclusive anonymous teleport technology will also make Bitcoin itself fully anonymous. 

BitcoinDark  is already available for trading on cryptocurrency exchanges Bittrex, Atomic Trade, Cryptsy and Poloniex.  To have the teleporting capabilities, Bitcoindark is getting the infrastructure in place.  The technology will use BitcoinDark’s open source Teleportation technology to keep the transactions away from prying eyes and keep them fully confidential.  Once the network and infrastructure is in place, it will give coin developers access to all of BitcoinDark’s cutting edge tools such as the being able to trade on decentralized exchange InstantDEX, run tradebots for their coin, auto convert bridges to get their coin accepted anywhere BTC is accepted, and earn dividends from InstantDEX.

BitcoinDark is a peer-to-peer Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency. 1.2 million BitcoinDark coins were mined during the PoW phase. With 5% new coins per year from staking, it will take until the year 2020 to reach 1.5 million coins. With an ultimate maximum of 22 million coins, BTCD will generate 5% annual staking revenue for holders for more than 60 years. In addition, BTCD holders will earn revenue from InstantDEX and Teleport fees: BitcoinDark is the only cryptocurrency that will reward holders with income denominated in Bitcoin.

“I want to openly reach out to other coins to join BTCD revolution. I am making libjl777 that can be integrated into any coin in a few days and this will allow the creation of a super network that will dramatically increase privacy levels, not to mention InstantDEX trading volumes and revenue sharing that will be earned by these other coins. BTCD will help other coins teleport for a minimal fee and it is quite possible that with the revenue sharing that they would actually get paid for integrating into BTCD network!” explains BTCD head developer jl777.

Anonymous teleporting of funds occurs off the blockchain but is verified using the blockchain utilizing the benefits of a public record without leaking any personal information. 

The dark world of Bitcoins may get darker with the implementation of the teleporting protocol.

@evleaks, the smartphone industries most prolific leaker retires due to financial pressure

For a man who gave the entire mobile crazy world a clue into the next launches of smartphone majors like HTC, Motorola and Microsoft, this must be a sad day.  @evleaks aka Evan Blass who had been giving us engrossing tips about smart phones and tablets today announced retirement due to financial pressures.

Evan Blass who leaked major smartphone and tablet news to the world under the handle @evleaks had revealed his identity last year. He ended his prolific leaking career with announcement on Twitter saying, “All good things must come to an end. Thank you for an amazing two years.” Check out his tweet below.

All good things must come to an end. Thank you for an amazing two years. [RETIREMENT]
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 3, 2014

Though Blass leaked news about almost every smartphones manufactured in last two years, he says his proudest leak was the HTC M8 Prime.  His first leak was the HTC Inspire 4G AT&T model.  He was nostalgic on Twitter about his past career and seen thanking everyone

.@noo7na7 Actually, first leak was here: http://t.co/Qbn5CtCd7Y
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 3, 2014

You guys rock. The amount of support and well-wishing I've seen today have been truly humbling and uplifting. pic.twitter.com/AgTBJ9hssQ

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 4, 2014

Giving reasons for his retirement in an interview to The Next Web, Blass said that he had arrived at this decision due to monetary pressures. He told the website, “These matters are always somewhat complicated, but like many things, it mostly comes down to money. Trying to monetize a stream of Twitter leaks is not easy. First I tried monthly sponsorships. Then weekly. Then single sponsored tweets. I took donations — felt like online panhandling.”  He added that, “Most of my tech-savvy-heavy audience seem to be pretty heavy ad-block users.”

Sadly Blass was also diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and is in need of funds. Evan Blass, worked with the popular technology blog Engadget from 2005 to 2008 and later he was Managing Editor at Pocketnow.com.

BTC.com domain sold for a record $1,000,000 to a Bitcoin mining hardware company called GAWMiners

Bitcoins have been a favorite subject in technology sector for a while now and to own a domain called BTC.com is amazing for all purposes but to buy it for 1 million USD is a differnt ball game all together.  As per a report published on domaininvesting, the BTC.com domain was sold to a Bitcoin mining hardware company called GAWMiners owned by Josh Garza for $1,000,000 by domain brokering company, Domain Guardians.

Domain Guardians announced the sale through Twitter with this tweet :

We are very excited to announce the sale of http://t.co/n0SeSwq00N to @GAWMiners for US$1,000,000! #bitcoin #domains
— Domain Guardians (@domainguardians) August 4, 2014

As per Domain Investing, btc.com domain name registration remains under privacy, and the landing page is being set up.  The new owner of btc.com says that "Something Amazing is coming soon."  The news of the sale was leaked by Domain Investing two month back but the deal took place over this weekend. Jen Sale, Co-Founder of Domain Guardians while commenting on the sale said that, “Your domain name is the foundation of your online brand.” Sale further added the virtues of owning a domain like btc.com, “Flagship domains like BTC.com solidify brands by empowering users to easily discover, remember, share and recognise your company online. The right domain name can take your brand to new levels.”

According to Domain Guardians, this is the largest public Bitcoin-related domain name sale of all time. BitcoinWallet.com sold for $250,000 back in February, and the domain name is already being used for a startup in the Bitcoin space. There have been a number of other Bitcoin-related domain name sales in the last several months, and CoinDesk published an article about this market.

Domain Investing also made a interesting observation that it now appears to me that most of the best exact match Bitcoin.com domain names are owned by end user companies.

Hackers can control your smart phones with tools already built in according to wired.com

In this day and age of surveillance everywhere from your traffic signal to your lobby and now thanks to NSA's snooping on your personal communications with your near and dear ones, a article in Wired has made matters worse.  Wired article says that the built in tools or embedded software as its technically called,  in the smart phone offer unrestricted access to the the carrier, and of course a potential hacker. A study by Mathew Solnik and Marc Blanchou, two research consultants with Accuvant Labs took just a few months to discover the vulnerabilities and exploit them. It goes on to say that almost all smart phone that the researchers examined would allows a potential hacker to change all its cellular network functionality and in many cases, they could also control firmware updates.

HTC One M7 one of the easiest phone to compromise

All this was discovered by two researchers who have uncovered such built-in vulnerabilities in a large number of smartphones that would allow government spies and sophisticated hackers to install malicious code and take control of the device.  As per the article the  attacks would require proximity to the phones, using a rogue base station or femtocell and a high level of skill to pull off.  A Femtocell is a low power cellular base station usually set up by service providers for small offices/businesses or to pitch in if there is a network black out. 

The two researches say that the vulnerabilities lie within a device management tool carriers and manufacturers embed in handsets and tablets to remotely configure them. Though some design their own tool, most use a tool developed by a specific third-party vendor—which the researchers will not identify until they present their findings next week at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.  The tool is used in some form in more than 2 billion phones worldwide. The vulnerabilities, they say, were found so far in Android and BlackBerry devices and a small number of Apple iPhones used by Sprint customers. 

Two phones that provided the highest level of exploitation were the HTC One M7 and the Blackberry Z10. Among iOS devices, they found that only iPhones offered by Sprint and running an operating system prior to version 7.0.4 were vulnerable. The 7.0.4 version of the software, which Apple released in November, partially solved the issue.

You can read the full story here. 

Oracle ends Java support for Windows XP operating systems, further use of Java on XP PC will be at users risk

Oracle today ended the supported for Windows XP range of operating systems.  In a FAQ published on the Java website, Oracle said that it has stopped support of Java for Win XP OS as Microsoft had officially stopped supporting Windows XP from April 8, 2014.

With Microsoft stopping support for  Windows XP, Oracle says that Java will no no longer an officially supported platform. It also said that Windows XP users may still continue to use Java 7 updates on Windows XP at their own risk. It also means that Windows XP users cannot install Java 8 or subsequent patches that Oracle releases from time to time. Which means any flaw or vulnerability which may result through the use of Java on Windows XP will not be addressed by Oracle. Oracle said that support will only be provided against Microsoft Windows releases Windows Vista or later.

The following answers are given on the FAQ for Windows XP users

Can I still use Java on Windows XP?

Users may still continue to use Java 7 updates on Windows XP at their own risk, but support will only be provided against Microsoft Windows releases Windows Vista or later.

Can I install Java 8 on Windows XP?

Windows XP users will be unable to install Java 8 on their systems. Windows users must upgrade to Windows Vista or later to install Java 8.

Further information can be had from this PDF file put up by Oracle.

California legalises Bitcoin usage with Bill No.AB 129, users can now legally purchase goods and services with bitcoins

Here is good news about Bitcon users, bitcoins have now been legalized in California, USA. California lawmakers approved making bitcoins legal on 28^th June, 2014. Governor of California Jerry Brown signed the Bill No. AB 129, which states alternative currencies including bitcoin, is legal to use in the state.

Remember this is a big news because the old legislation, prevalent upto the passing of the above bill, banned the use of anything other than the lawful money of United States. The Bill AB 129 states that various forms of alternative currencies such as digital currencies, coupons, and points are legal to use to purchase goods and services in state.

Assembly member Roger Dickinson, author of the bill said “In an era of evolving payment methods, from Amazon Coins to Starbucks Stars, it is impractical to ignore the growing use of cash alternatives,” Dickinson said. “This bill is intended to fine-tune current law to address Californians’ payment habits in the mobile and digital fields.”

Almost a year ago state of California told bitcoin foundation to stop operations or to face hefty penalty. Bitcoin has suffered lots of downfall in present year due to various reasons. Earlier this year Tokyo based bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox had to shut down its website because of hacker attack and exchange lost about around 850,000 bitcoins ($500 million at current prices) and later, company announced that they recovered 200,000 bitcoins. Mt.Gox filed for a bankruptcy and received the approval for the bankruptcy proceeding just a few days ago and waiting for the settlements with U.S customers and right customer to sell its business. Another glitch in the surging bitcoin market was the recent incident in China, where 2 Chinese national banks and Tenpay banned all cryptocurrencies. After all the ups and downs, Bitcoin Foundation is hopeful with the new amendment and financial experts also giving the positive feedback about Bitcoin’s growth.

Australia has not yet lifted its restrictions on either Bitcoin or other digital currencies. Australian Tax Office (ATO) has not yet come for any conclusion regarding treating bitcoin as a currency. Bitcoin industry in Australia has been hoping for ATO to issue its taxation guidance before the end of the financial year. Though the financial year ended today (Australian FY), the ATO has not issued any instructions/guidelines regarding bitcoins.

Now that Bitcoin usage is legalised, you can Play with Bitcoin Casino in California

Google's Motorola to close its Moto X plant in Texas by the end of the Year

Google’s Motorola Mobility Smartphone unit in Fort Worth Texas is being closed by end of this year. The unit which is barely a year old unit is being closed because of weak sales and high manufacturing costs. This particular factory employs about 700 workers who assemble the Moto X smart phones for American market.  Now the fate of these 700  workers is unknown. Motorola’s spokes man Will Moss declined to comment on retaining the employs but he stated “sales of its flagship handset the Moto X were too weak and the costs of running the plant too high to keep operations going.”

Google’s attempt to build smart phones in USA has ended in finger counting days. Former Motorola’s chief Executive-Dennis Woodside had stated soon after the opening of the Unit that it would be very expensive to manufacture in the USA and a great challenge to sustain in U.S Market. And his statement has been proved right.

"Manufacturing or assembling Smartphone’s in the U.S. was always going to end in tears for Motorola," Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said. "The U.S. is well positioned to design smartphones, as Apple does successfully, but manufacturing them is a whole different ballgame."

China censors WeChat to 'clean up' the instant messaging space in an internet crackdown after bombings

China’s hugely popular social media App ‘’WECHAT’’- Chinese version known as-Weixin is being censored by Chinese government under a operation called "Clean Up". The Chinese govt has started this new campaign to prevent and eradicate malpractice of going against the state and PLA on instant messaging services. Further it is reported that this ‘”clean up” campaign will affect almost  all the instant messaging services massively.  Weixin or Chinese version of Wechat has more than 300 million users in China. Apart from private account used for personal use, there are many public accounts, which are owned by companies, organization or an individual for mass communication being used on WeChat and this popularity is the main reason for China shuttering WeChat. Pages such as Truth channel, Phoenix We Media, activist Xu Dane’s newsletter which has 200,000 subscribers has been blocked. Users who attempt to open this page are being greeted with a message “This account deleted”.

The Chinese IT censorship authority, State Internet Information Office (SIIO) stated that it believes that some people or organizations are using these popular services to distribute illegal and harmful information and also circulating rumours contrary to the policies of Chinese central leadership. They are expecting to trace down those people who are responsible for spreading rumours, information relating violence, terrorism and pornography, any kind of fraudulent act using instant messaging services. Authorities also encouraging the public to tip off the authorities through emails, phone calls or the website net.china.com.cn. The statement released by SIIO stated ‘we will firmly fight against infiltration from hostile forces at home and abroad,"

Wixen (weChat) is not the only service which is affected by Chinese government’s clean up campaign; other messaging services which will be affected include Alibaba’s Laiwang, Xiaomi’s Mi Talk, and China Telecom’s Yixin, among others  The above crackdown comes just days after the recent attack by Islamic fundamentalists operating in restive Northern regions of China.

NYPD's social reach Twitter campaign #myNYPD hijacked by protesters to post police repression images

A social reach campaign by the New York Police Department (NYPD) went pretty awry for their own comfort.  On Wednesday the New York Police Department launched a campaign to enhance the NYPD image among users.  The plan was to use Twitter to boost its image.  Users were asked to tweet a photo of themselves with officers and add the hashtag #myNYPD as part of a social media campaign.  The start of the campaign was good with Twitter users posting images of themselves with the NYPD members

Do you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook. pic.twitter.com/mE2c3oSmm6
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) April 22, 2014

This was the original tweet was posted on the NYPD's Twitter feed @NYPDnews on Wednesday.  The tweet featured a selfie of two smiling officers and a member of the public.  The NYPD then encouraged Twitter users to send in similar photos with the hashtag #myNYPD.

All was working as per the plan but somehow instead of a steady stream of friendly photos, the hashtag was quickly adopted by users posting images of police aggression.

thanks #mynypd for beating up octogenarian jaywalkers. I feel safer. pic.twitter.com/ihmcmSFRwn
— Layla Sola (@ljsola) April 23, 2014

You know you live in a police state when every 3 seconds a new #NYPD police brutality photo is being tweeted. #myNYPD pic.twitter.com/P9B361h7wc
— Occupy Congress (@OCongress) April 22, 2014

Be safe out there. #myNYPD http://t.co/OV1iKZ0GSM pic.twitter.com/Ziw1ScK11b
— Hammond Morris (@OnionAdCzar) April 22, 2014

By Wednesday, the hashtag had become one of Twitter's top trending hashtags. One photo showed a man being pushed down on to a car bonnet. It was from March 2013 and followed protests in Brooklyn over the death of 16-year-old Kimani Gray who was shot by police.  

WCGW NYPD asks for photos with cops for their news feed @KimaniFilm @NYPDnews: Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD pic.twitter.com/oyHXO39b35 #Fail
— benAmerica (@ben__America) April 22, 2014

Soon enough the Anonymous protest group Occupy Wall Street also took part in NYPD bashing and  tweeted an image of an NYPD police officer advancing towards a crowd with a baton raised during the recent peaceful Occupy Wall Street protest against the capitalism.

Backlash against #myNYPD social media campaign spills over into user-generated #myLAPD hashtag http://t.co/m77VyfiCdb pic.twitter.com/J8ggytEdhK
— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) April 23, 2014

So much for the NYPD social outreach !!!

Investigators finally state that the WORLD May Never Know What Happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Exactly after 25 days of search operations involving almost all of the world navies, the Malaysian investigators finally admitted that the whereabouts or remains of whatever is left of Malaysian Airlines MH370 may never be found. This was stated by Chief investigator from Malaysia, Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar told the news persons that, "Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing. At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident."

The Malaysian investigators just recently concluded their investigation into all the 227 passengers on board the plane and their investigations have cleared all the 227 passengers of suspicion. As of today, Malaysian investigators are still investigating into the background and criminal antecedents of senior pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53 and his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.  FBI has been investigating the records of  senior pilot, Shah's flight simulator but is yet to find any misdeeds. 

As the days passed the investigators included the possibilities that MH370 may have been hijacked, sabotaged or even some kind of psychological problems among those employees of Malaysia Airlines on the flight at that time.  Investigators are even said to be looking into the plane's food to somehow ensure that it wasn't poisoned.

Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar added that there was much more information available but cant be revealed to the reporters due to the ongoing criminal investigation. “I’m sorry, there are things we cannot reveal to you … not that I don’t want to reveal to you, but we cannot do that because it’s a criminal investigation, ongoing,” he said. “We have not concluded the whole thing and we are still awaiting reports from experts overseas and internally. Who knows, maybe there will be prosecution later on. So this will affect the prosecution’s case, if we start revealing our findings."

It may be recalled that Malaysian Airlines MH370 which had taken off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing China on 8th March, 2014. It disappeared from the radar less than one hour after taking off with the pilot signing off, saying, "Good night Malaysian 370."  The twist in this sad accident is that after this conversation of the pilot somebody on board deliberately turned off the plane's transponder thus making it impossible to track.   Authorities have concluded that the plane's journey ended seven hours later somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, and there are no survivors as of now because no debris has been found.