Weekly Roundup: Bitcoin founder unveiled, Apple CarPlay hands-on and more!
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Bitcoin’s elusive founder reportedly discovered living in California
Ever heard of Satoshi Nakamoto? He’s the mysterious individual said to be the creator of Bitcoin, and Newsweek claims to have found him. Indeed, a man by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto lives in California, but whether he’s really the father of the digital currency is still up for debate.
Apple CarPlay hands-on
This week at the Geneva Auto Show, Apple unveiled its new in-car interface called CarPlay. So naturally, Engadget’s Matt Brian hopped into a nearby Ferrari for a test run. Read on for our video and hands-on photos.
10 Years In: The birth of Engadget
Since March 2, 2004, Engadget has been keeping people from all four corners of the globe in touch with the latest and greatest gadget news. And wow… what a ride it’s been. Whether you’re a casual techie or hardcore early adopter, we hope you’ll join us in celebrating Engadget’s 10th anniversary!
Hands-on with Samsung’s Milk Music internet radio service
Samsung’s getting its own piece of the internet radio pie with Milk. Milk Music, to be exact. The company’s new adless music service brings a unique, Slacker-powered way to explore online radio. The catch? It’s only available for Galaxy devices.
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Filed under: Misc
Mt. Gox CEO’s blog hacked, database leak claims there should be a 951k Bitcoin balance
The latest twist in the fall of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is here, as CEO Mark Karpeles, personal blog, MagicalTux.net (along with his Tumblr and Reddit accounts) has apparently been hacked. Whoever has control now used them to post a “MtGox2014Leak.zip” that claims to show “relevant database dumps, csv exports, specialized tools, and some highlighted summaries compiled from data.” We wouldn’t recommend downloading the file or running its included executable (pictured above, it claims to be from Mt. Gox parent company Tibanne Ltd.), but some already have. Several posters on Reddit and Twitter report they’ve verified their personal account balances with the data in it — also available as an Excel spreadsheet — tied to the user id included in their first Mt. Gox registration e-mail.
[Image credit: Reddit]
If the leaked information is valid (and, if valid, accurate, considering Mt. Gox’s vulnerability and accounting issues), it reports a sum of 951,116.21905382 Bitcoins deposited by users. During a news conference in Japan, Karpeles claimed 850,000 Bitcoins (worth around $549 million at current prices) had disappeared due to “weaknesses in the system,” while bankruptcy filings claimed a debt of $63.6 million. How many Bitcoins were really left in the vault, what happened to the rest and whether or not account holders will ever get their currency back is still unknown.
Forbes points out a (now deleted) forum post that offered a 20GB Mt. Gox database file for sale at a price of 100 Bitcoins. The poster claimed it holds personal details and even passport scans of the site’s users, which only adds to the concerns of anyone who had an account before the exchange shut down last month. Meanwhile, Bitcoin watchers have noticed $113 million in coins linked to Mt. Gox accounts moving through the blockchain (check out our Primed article to find out how mining and trasaction verifications work) recently, which Coindesk suggests could be preparation to use them “for a high volume of transactions.”
Filed under: Internet
Source: Reddit, MagicalTux
Neil Young’s music player for audiophiles reaches Kickstarter on March 15th
We now know how Neil Young plans to make his dreams of high-quality digital music come true: crowdfunding. The artist’s company PonoMusic is launching a Kickstarter campaign on March 15th that will let you reserve the PonoPlayer, Young’s long-teased, audiophile-grade portable jukebox. The 128GB device will set you back a whopping $399 when it goes on sale (less with the Kickstarter discount), but its creators are promising audio fidelity worthy of the price tag. The hardware will offer natural-sounding digital filtering from Ayre Acoustics, ESS’ most advanced digital-to-analog converter and “perfectly flat” frequency response with most any set of headphones. As you might expect, there will be a matching online store that delivers high-resolution tunes. The PonoMusic team hasn’t said just when its media player will reach your pocket, but it shouldn’t be too long before you’re listening to a pristine version of Harvest while on the move.
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Internet
Via: Pitchfork
Source: Computer Audiophile (1), (2)
Download the All New HTC One wallpapers here Now!
The All New HTC One is now only a mere 2 weeks away and many of us are eagerly waiting for its announcement. While there are basically no secrets about the appearance of HTC’s new flagship, thanks to an abundance of leaks, we’re still interested to see what the software and general user interface of the device might entail. And some of us just want to see what the All New HTC One wallpapers look like. Thanks to various sources around the internet, it appears these wallpapers might have been found, and you can check out all 18 of them down below:
We spotted these wallpapers in quite a few places today without a solid source, so we can’t be sure that they’re real, but the set of wallpapers does include two of leaked wallpapers that we’ve seen before (see here and here). Furthermore, the wallpapers do come in the 2160×1920 resolution we’re expecting from the All New HTC One as we suspect the device has a 1080p display.
Whatever the real story is, we have a set of fantastic looking wallpapers to use, and if they’re from the All New HTC One, that’s even better. Let us know what you think about the wallpapers in the comments.
Source: Google+ (1), (2), XDA
AIVAnet 