Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are recommended to be changed frequently in order to increase transaction unlinkability. 
We present an efficient method to deanonymize Bitcoin users, which allows to link user pseudonyms to the IP addresses where the transactions are generated. Our techniques work for the most common and the most challenging scenario when users are behind NATs or firewalls of their ISPs. They allow to link transactions of a user behind a NAT and to distinguish connections and transactions of different users behind the same NAT. We also show that a natural countermeasure of using Tor or other anonymity services can be cut-off by abusing anti-DoS countermeasures of the bitcoin network. Our attacks require only a few machines and have been experimentally verified. We propose several countermeasures to mitigate these new attacks.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has begun to supplant human decision-making in a variety of fields, such as high-speed stock trading and medical diagnostics, and even in self-driving cars. But technological advances in three particular areas have made self-governing weapons a real possibility.

Don’t be afraid (yet) but big data is coming to your job. While it is unclear whether it will make life better or worse, it is almost certain to change the way companies function.

Workday, a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations, has announced it is putting into its products the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you.

In the workplace context, however, this is a much bigger deal than whether you want to see “Rango” or get tempted to try pomegranate juice. Instead of relatively trivial transactions, even in its early days this data analysis is aimed at shaping organizational charts, spotting financial behavior, or increasing competitiveness for jobs.

One version of the Workday predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets.

Subjective wellbeing and health are closely linked to age. Three aspects of subjective wellbeing can be distinguished—evaluative wellbeing (or life satisfaction), hedonic wellbeing (feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, stress, and pain), and eudemonic wellbeing (sense of purpose and meaning in life). We review recent advances in the specialty of psychological wellbeing, and present new analyses about the pattern of wellbeing across ages and the association between wellbeing and survival at older ages.

London’s Metropolitan Police is using software to identify gang members who are most likely to commit violent crimes. 

Software that predicts crime is an increasingly important tool for law-enforcement … but some worry that innocent peoples’ privacy will but at risk. 

Our tech columnist Jesse Hirsh is here with the story … 

In this study, we examined the effects of an increased share of motorcycles in commuting traffic.  A modal shift from private cars towards motorcycles affects the propagation of traffic flows and traffic congestion.

Recent research has confirmed what many motorcycle riders have known for years. “Lane splitting” – or riding in between lanes of traffic – obviously saves riders a lot of time, but it’s also considerably safer than sitting in traffic and acting like a car, as long as it’s done within certain guidelines, and contrary to what many drivers think, it actually speeds up traffic for everyone else on the road. Riders, please pass this information on to the drivers in your lives.

PDF of “Safety implications of lane-splitting among California motorcyclists involved in collisions”