Just when you thought the saga of the Bitcoin wallet lost in a Welsh landfill was over, another chapter of the story appears to be starting. Regular readers will recall the years-long efforts of Bitcoin early adopter James Howells to recover a hard drive tossed out by his ex back in 2013. The disk, which contains a wallet holding about 8,000 Bitcoin, is presumed to be in a landfill overseen by the city council of Newport, which denied every request by Howells to gain access to the dump. The matter looked well and truly settled (last item) once a High Court judge weighed in. But the announcement that the Newport Council plans to cap and close the landfill this fiscal year and turn part of it into a solar farm has rekindled his efforts.
Howells and his investment partners have expressed interest in buying the property as-is, in the hopes of recovering the $780 million-ish fortune. We don’t think much of their odds, especially given the consistently negative responses he’s gotten over the last twelve years. Howells apparently doesn’t fancy his odds much either, since the Council’s argument that closing the landfill to allow him to search would cause harm to the people of Newport was seemingly made while they were actively planning the closure. It sure seems like something foul is afoot, aside from the trove of dirty diapers Howells seeks to acquire, of course.
When all else fails, blame the monkey. The entire nation of Sri Lanka suffered a blackout last Sunday, with a hapless monkey being fingered as the guilty party. The outage began when a transformer at a substation south of the capital city of Colombo went offline. Unconfirmed reports are that a troop of monkeys was fighting, as monkeys do, and unadvisedly brought their tussle over the fence and into the substation yard. At some point, one of the warring animals sought the high ground on top of a transformer, with predictable results. How turning one monkey into air pollution managed to bring down an entire country’s grid is another question entirely.
From the enshittification files comes this horrifying story of in-dashboard ads. Stellantis, maker of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and other brands that can reliably be counted upon to be littered with bad grounds, has decided to start putting full-screen pop-up advertisements on infotainment systems. As if that’s not atrocious enough, the ads will run not just when the car is first started, but every time the vehicle comes to a stop in traffic. The ads will hawk things like extended warranties, at least initially, but we predict it won’t be long before other upsell attempts are made. It would be pretty easy to pull in other data to customize ads, such as an offer to unlock heated seats if the outside temperature gets a little chilly, or even flog a pumpkin spice latte when the GPS shows you’re near a Starbucks. The possibilities are endless, and endlessly revolting, because if one car company does it, the rest will quickly follow. Ad-blocking wizards, this may be your next big target.
And finally, calling all hams, or at least those of us with an interest in digital modes. Our own Al Williams will be making an appearance on the DMR Tech Net to talk about his Hackaday recent article on Digital Mobile Radio. The discussion will be on Monday, February 17 at 00:30 UTC (19:30 EST), on Brandmeister talk group 31266. If you’ve got a DMR-capable radio, DMR Tech Net has a handy guide to getting the talk group into your code plug. If none of that makes any sense, relax — you can still tune in online using this link and the Player button in the upper right. Or, if ham radio isn’t your thing, Al will be making a second appearance the next night but on a Zoom call to discuss “How to Become Rich and (almost) Famous on Hackaday,” which is his collection of tips and tricks for getting your project to catch a Hackaday writer’s eye.
I think you mean Monday 17th 19:30EST (Tuesday 00:30UTC), because Monday 00:30UTC passed a few hours ago :D
Hold off on the ad blockers for a while. The general public needs a reminder of what they’re signing away, when they buy a new car.
I’m probably just wishing, but maybe a few folks will be awakened and push for a minor rule change somehow.
It’ll probably go away quickly when there’s numerous accidents due to badly timed ads. Such as still stopped at green light and someone rear ends the stopped Jeep. Or worse, a topless woman hawking adult novelty toys.
isn’t there a usa law stating it’s illegal to watch video in the front seat? but yeah there needs to be a class action lawsuit.
There may well be but that law, if it exists, is ignored by about 100% of people by my observation. The number of people I see straight doing face time video calls one handed selfie-style is incredible.
In New Jersey there is a law that says it is illegal for an automobile to have a television screen visible to the driver.
Maybe Sri Lanka was taking notes on Venezuela strategic blame on animals for massive blackouts.
“According to local press, in 2010 an iguana was blamed for outages in Anzoátegui state. In 2011, a flock of swallows was the alleged culprit for a blackout in Mérida. And last year, an opossum left parts of Zulia without power.”
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0904/Lights-out-in-Venezuela-as-nearly-70-percent-lose-power
A month ago I rented a recent VW car. It kept displaying useless and distracting “eco tip” popups on the dashboard every couple of minutes WHILE I WAS DRIVING. They even partially covered speedometer. Imagine my surprise when I googled it and found that there’s no outrage. I didn’t find any petition to keep car makers from doing it. I didn’t find any EU investigation into this. No national safety boards discussing the issue. Just casual “how to disable” advices. We are doomed.
Regarding hard drive: how long can they survive in a landfill surrounded by rain water and various discarded chemicals? I am sure the chips on PCB has long corroded off, the body possibly damaged if it was crushed and exposed the platter to elements. And also how would one be sure they got the right hard drive? Without label and firmware chip, they could spend several hundred dollars in an HDD recovery service only to find the one they found were full of old Real Video encoded porn, another one with some text and email from high school kid trying to woo someone to prom.
After 14 years, I wouldn’t count on finding complete intact wallet data off the hard drive, if they even find the right one.
But would you bet $750M on it?
The smart money says that the city council – or the girlfriend that allegedly “accidentally” threw away the hard drive to begin with – has had the drive all along and are just leading him on to make him look even more stupid…
I am under the possibly mistaken concept that Block chain was supposed to store all transactions so your trade was backed up to preclude this scenario In many other machines
Bought a 2018 Toyota Camry Hybrid without a remote start. The a year later got a message from Toyota – Now you start your car from a keyfob”. Yes it worked for a year or more and just recently stopped. I have to pay now. No thanks.
Story #2. Same Camry. Got a popup on screen to download an update for my infotainment system. OK. Pressed OK. Update downloaded and installed. The vehicle power steering stopped working. Dealer asked $800 to replace steering column. Later Toyota sent me a letter there was a glitch in the firmware recently installed. Dealer reprogrammed and it works OK now.
round these parts squirrels like to become unwitting resistors when they dismount from the squirrel highway system (aka the power lines) wrong. a raven bought it too on a pole near my house.
Since I was knee high I wanted to build my own car. There are at least a couple companies that make pretty much legit race car kits sometimes using a donor car, sometimes not. Anyway one YouTube guy had a great video where he broke down the entire process and more importantly cost once you factor in paint all the other stuff. It was $71k. For that,though, you could also get a pretty great modern factory sports car.
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One of the issues I have is all the safety features of modern cars are really good- collision detection, radar cruise control, lots of airbags, all that. As I get older and have to worry about people other than myself (that’s hard too haha) that becomes more important. But with it comes with all the infotainment garbage. A kit car doesn’t have any of the safety features but also none of the garbage.
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I do miss the days of my old car that you get in, ignition on, off you go. Now I get in and play with a bunch of switches like starting a 747 first. But I’m also not going to get impaled by a steering column nor have my skull cap sheared off and die from a low speed collision either.
At end of the day it not hard to chose a modern car but boy I wish we could opt out from half of it.
Sorry, I call BS. There’s no way you’re “playing with a bunch of switches like starting a 747” to drive your car. I push a button and select a gear and drive, even simpler from the method of 100+ years of push in the clutch, turn a key, select a gear, gently feather the accelerator and release the clutch. WTF are you doing?
get in car. push seat position button. push ignition. change to sport mode. turn off “auto off,” select R to back out, push e-brake button. and that isn’t even turning on the various HVAC functions like seat warmers, steering wheel warmer (I’m fancy), messing with defrost or whatever.
Old car- get in using physical key. turn ignition. R. go.
I’m happy for you that your experience is better than mine (presumably).
So in your old car you drove with your seat in the wrong position, with the e-brake on, and freezing cold and unable to see? I agree with [Dubious], your comparison is BS.
Believe what you want, man.
Your description is pretty accurate for an old car. I regularly drive a model A. Get back to me when you can double clutch an unsynchronized transmission while adjusting spark and mixture. That is a ton of effort. Then my 60’s ford was as described. An automatic that I didn’t bother to use ebrake because it sucked anyway. The defroster sucked and yeah. Drive it as is not being able to see well. Not saying it’s good thing. Now we have swung the pendulum back the other way. I have a modern BMW.
Also
Seriously. You’re massively missing the point of my original comment. Call BS all you want.
Don’t need a radio to drive. Turn it off if it still has a switch, turn the volume to minimum, otherwise yank the fuse or pull the power wire. Set a CEL light, see if i care. Phone works well as a radio if i have to
The “infotainment” system in my car controls the heater and fan, I live in England, I NEED the de-mister.
(slightly) Modified my car to take car radios from the 70s and 80s. I prefer cassettes over CDs, especially in the car. Also helps that pretty much every cassette I own mostly contains music I like so I don’t have to fast-forward often (almost never). I know such a thing as USB or Bluetooth exists. Still prefer tapes. Get off my lawn!
Also helps my car is an old compact.
Well – that used to be my theft protection. Owning a car that is pretty much worthless to thieves. Looks like it’ll soon become very valuable indeed – as a car with physical buttons for climate control, AC and power steering being the most luxurious items, and besides that it’s the most basic car you can think of and no modern BS (although it does have those obnoxious ginormous C-columns (rear roof support) where you can’t really see much when going in reverse – these are all the fashion since the late 90s)
It just does the job of getting me where I need to be and a little more than half the time it gets me where I want to be.