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  • Illustration by D. Thomas Magee

    The first ‘blockchain baby’ is here

    by 
    Violet Blue
    Violet Blue
    07.27.2018

    When you read the news that they put a baby on the blockchain, your reaction makes you one of two types of people. Either you think, Mon dieu, is there anything the magical fairy dust known as blockchain can't solve? Or you think: Surely, this is child abuse. For the past few years, techies have frothed and proselytized over the potential salvation of blockchain, the tech behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. So it's hard to even know what babies and blockchain could even have to do with each other. Typically, outside of grifter circles, blockchain is associated with vaporware, shady fraudulent ICOs or solving things that aren't suited at all for blockchain's "distributed ledger" system. Oh, and largely solving things that aren't even problems.

  • Google donates $850,000 to restore home of the codebreakers

    by 
    Daniel Cooper
    Daniel Cooper
    12.14.2011

    Google has donated £550,000 ($850,000) towards the £15 million project to renovate Bletchley Park. The donation from Mountain View is part of a $100 million charitable program that's previously helped rescue Alan Turing's personal papers. The country estate is the former home of Station X and the British Government's Code and Cypher School, which was where the World War Two model of the Enigma Machine was decrypted. Turing, its most famous alumnus went on to pioneer computer science and artificial intelligence during his short life and the complex now houses the National Museum of Computing. Unfortunately the buildings are rapidly collapsing and enormous investment is still required to transform the site into a museum, attraction and fitting tribute to the work of the codebreakers.