The other night my good friend & fellow cryptoenthusiast Ryan Shea suggested we head to a new Bitcoin meetup neither of us had been to before. I agreed to meet him there, and though the conversation was stimulating, much of the experience was pretty demeaning.  

I walk in and a group of people are already sitting at a long table. I say hi and hover for a second, determining where to sit. Entirely uninvited, and before I even have a chance to react, one guy proceeds to grab me by the waist and pull me into an awkward, grope-y side hug next to him on the bench. To reiterate, I’ve never met this man in my life. I try giving him the benefit of the doubt and make some quip about his being a friendly sort, but it gets uncomfortable pretty quickly when he puts his hand on my leg and leaves it there until I squirm uncomfortably. 

Unsurprisingly, this type of treatment wasn’t specially reserved for me. The person who actually suggested the event to Ryan was another young woman (the only other woman at the event), a VC who was in town from San Francisco and was interested in checking it out for the first time. The aforementioned groper knew Ryan vaguely from other Bitcoin events, and greeted their arrival with a warm “Oh, nice to see you! I see you brought your girlfriend this time.” When the two of them try to point out that a) they are not together and b) she was actually the one who had brought him, they are cut off with a swift “Sure, sure, I just wanted to see what the dynamic was between you two.” Apparently that’s code for “checking if you’re ok with my hitting on her,” as that’s exactly what he proceeds to do.

The guy sitting on the other side of me turns and introduces himself. Turns out, he’s the organizer and leader of the meetup. He follows with a swift, “So, how did you find out about this?” I’m honestly not sure if he means the meet up group or Bitcoin in general, so I go with the latter and tell him I’ve been interested (ok, obsessed—my friend Sam Smith may or may not have nicknamed me Cryptoqueen) since around mid 2013, which is when I started buying some.

He then starts to look at me like I’ve suddenly morphed into a unicorn. Literally: bulging eyes, mouth slightly agape, the whole nine yards. Apparently the expected response would have been that I was Ryan’s  friend/girlfriend/sister who had somehow accidentally ended up there. “Seriously? You mean you actually own bitcoins? You don’t look like someone who would even know about Bitcoin!”

Err…thanks? It’s not a reaction I’m unfamiliar with (I usually get the same one when people hear I have a motorcycle-and no, it’s not a vespa) so I just smile it off and start explaining my interest in the international implications of widespread bitcoin adoption, especially in countries where currency manipulation by corrupt governments has caused rampant hyperinflation and a host of other economic woes. I conclude the thought, and he (again, staring like I’m some sort of extraterrestrial creature), goes, “Wow. Women don’t usually say that type of things”.

I mean, what do you even respond to that?

Undeterred, I try to sidestep it and go on with my argument, concluding that what I am describing is “much more effective and efficient” than the current system. “Well,” he says looking at me knowingly, “Women don’t usually think in terms of efficiency and effectiveness”. 

A few minutes later he starts describing an app he is working on to someone else at the table. “You see, women don’t care about crypto currencies, so we don’t have to design for them”. When I tell him he’s wrong, he smartly replies, completely in earnest, “Oh ok cool, so if we start dating I can use the app with you!” 

The irony here is that he actually meant these things as compliments. But what he was implying that the bar for women is so low that my entirely unremarkable comments put me lightyears ahead of the “average woman” (whatever that even means).

Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I’m pretty thick skinned. My self esteem remained intact throughout the exchange; if anything, it made me more determined to learn. I was not even made to feel unwelcome; these fellows were clearly thrilled at the presence of two women at the event. The problem lies in the conditions under which our company was desired. We were not treated as peers or individuals who might be able to contribute intelligently to the discussion. We were ogled and clearly assumed to be someone’s girlfriend, or someone’s potential future girlfriend.

Was either of us mistreated? Technically, no. But the conditions under which our presence was accepted were such that from the moment we entered the room, the other attendees’s preconceptions were at a distinct disadvantage. Perhaps this would be a good time to recall Warren Buffet’s comment that one of the reasons for his great success was that he was only competing with half of the population. We can view it as an opportunity. Being underestimated can be a surprisingly effective tool in the appropriate context, but perhaps that’s just me being overly optimistic. I know many women, many of whom are far smarter than I am, who would have felt seriously out of place there. Would they go back to the next meet up? I doubt it.  If the organizer of the meetup makes people feel so unwelcome, it sets the tone for the rest of the conversation.

I’m not bringing these comments up because my feelings were hurt, and the last thing I need is sympathy. I’m also not concerned that one particular guy thinks women couldn’t possibly know about Bitcoin, or that another grabbed at me, but unfortunately this is representative of a larger trend. The current generation of hackathon organizers (largely led by the singular efforts of Dave Fontenot —hellllllyeah) is making a concerted effort to encourage the participation of women at their events, and while I’ve still gotten my share of off-color comments, the situation is gradually improving. Since Bitcoin is still so new, we have the rare opportunity to get onboard before the ship has sailed, becoming knowledgeable before a vast majority of people have ever even heard of it. Learning about it now, instead of trying to play catch-up as it often seems like we are in terms of women in STEM fields, programming, or traditional finance, will surely reap great benefits. 

I think my experience at the meetup is worth sharing because Bitcoin lies at the heart of both finance and tech, two industries that carry tremendous weight and which have traditionally struggled to attract women. Given the events of the other night, this is hardly surprising. I am undeterred and if anything will be even more proactive about attending these events. In my mind, it’s a little preposterous that if I want to do so, however, I have to be ok with being felt up and indirectly insulted. If women fail to take an active interest in Bitcoin now, when it is still in its infancy and its potential is largely untapped, we will have yet another sector in which the gender is underrepresented and trailing. Bitcoin as a currency has the ability to revolutionize the banking and financial system, but the implication of Bitcoin as a protocol extend much further than that. I’ll write a post of my own on that soon, but in the meantime I recommend you check out Mark Andreessen’s excellent post on why Bitcoin matters.  

Anyways ladies, ignore the naysayers and get out to those Bitcoin meetups! If you want to attend a meetup or chat crypto anytime, shoot me a line on Twitter.

Heh. Worst. timing. ever.

About an hour ago, a bunch of the engineers responsible for keeping Google alive sat down to answer questions on reddit.

Know what else happened about an hour ago? Gmail and Google+ went down around the world.

According to their previous AMA from a year ago, the team (which Google calls the ‘Site Reliability’ team, or SRE) is “responsible for the 24×7 operation of Google.com, as well as the technical infrastructure behind many other Google products such as GMail, Maps, G+ and other stuff you know and love.”

A coincidence, almost certainly. But a pretty damn funny one. Only four members of the reliability team took place in the AMA, and you can be damned sure that Google employs more than four people to keep their many millions of servers from catching on fire. As you might expect, the very top comment in the post (and dozens of others down the page) pokes fun over the unfortunate timing.

Impressively, the team didn’t seem to break much of a sweat. Each member of the team contributed answers to the thread, yet things were on the up-and-up within 50 minutes, with many users reporting that things were back within the hour. This question from the AMA gives a bit of insight as to how that could be:

Looks like that process is, indeed, pretty well-oiled (though one David S. Peck probably isn’t too impressed).

20 hours ago

STOCKHOLM — Newly crowned Norwegian world chess champion Magnus Carlsen took just nine moves to checkmate Bill Gates in a speed game to be aired later on Friday.

Challenged to a game in a chat show hosted by well-known Norwegian television presenter Fredrik Skavlan and due to be shown in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, Microsoft founder Gates said before the game that the challenge had "a predetermined outcome."

Gates, 58, who was ranked by Forbes magazine this year as the world's second-richest person behind Mexico's Carlos Slim, had 2 minutes to make his moves against just 30 seconds for Carlsen. He lost to the 23-year-old in around 1 minute 20 seconds.

"Wow, that was fast," he said to Carlsen, whose rockstar appeal has won him the moniker the "Justin Bieber of chess."

The program was recorded on Wednesday in London, Norwegian TV NRK said.

Asked by Skavlan under what circumstances he felt intellectually inadequate, Gates answered: "When I play chess with him (Carlsen)."

Carlsen, a grandmaster since he was 13, received non-stop television coverage in Norway when he beat defending champion Viswanathan Anand of India last November to take his first world title.

Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters.

David S. Peck is getting a lot of emails. In a glitch possibly related to the massive Gmail outage underway right now, there’s an odd bug in Google search which is pointing users directly to his personal email address. The address appears in a “Compose” window that pops up when the top search result for Gmail is clicked. Yes, it’s bizarre. Very, very bizarre.

Several of us at TechCrunch have been able to duplicate this bug, first brought to our attention by a tipster. Given whatever is going on with Gmail right now, your mileage, as they say, may vary. 

To reproduce the bug, first search for keyword “gmail” on Google. The top organic search result says “Gmail – Email from Google,” and beneath that are two other sub-links, one that says “Email” on the left, and the other which reads “Gmail – Google.” Click the one on the left (where the text reads “10+ GB of storage, less spam, and mobile access. Gmail is email …”)

A Gmail compose window appears, and the email address dsp559 at hotmail – which none of us have in our address books – is automatically filled in.

Another Google search surfaces who this address belongs to: one David S. Peck of Fresno, California. We even found his resume.

We spoke to Mr. Peck on the phone just now, and he says he’s been receiving thousands of emails, the majority of which are blank.

“I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails,” he says. “500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them.”

The issue actually started yesterday, he says, and he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.

Peck will not see their reply anytime soon, it seems.

The Hotmail address is his main account, and he’s now missing his important emails while under this deluge. “They’re coming so fast, I want to stop them. I deleted everything last night and woke up this morning and had 1,900 new emails” he says. “Only two of them were emails I cared about,” he says. 

Though most of the emails are blank, a few say things like “who is this?,” or “why are you sending me these emails?,” something which has Mr. Peck concerned his address has been used in a hack or attack of some sort. Most of those who have written something to him appear to be foreign, based on their names.

We’re trying to reach someone at Google about this, and will update with more as we have it.

Update: This article and headline were edited to clarify this is a glitch and related to Gmail, but until we can confirm with Google we won’t assume it’s the same glitch that caused the Gmail outage or is related to that outage. A variation of this bug was spotted earlier, according to Search Engine Land.

Since publication, we’ve received tips that a number of other users may be affected in similar ways as Mr. Peck – that is, it’s their address that is appearing when the link is clicked by Google searchers.

UPDATE, 6 PM ET: A Google spokesperson provided the following:

“Due to a technical glitch, some email addresses on public webpages appeared too prominently in search results. We’ve fixed the issue and are sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Google has also confirmed that today’s glitch was not related to today’s Gmail outage.

—-

More Top Stories From TechCrunch

Gmail And Google+ Go Down Across The World, Service Returns After Roughly 50 Minutes

Talk About Timing: Google’s Reliability Team Sat Down For An AMA Right Before Gmail Exploded

Facebook Hilariously Debunks Princeton Study Saying It Will Lose 80% Of Users

Snowden Answers Our Burning Data Collection Question: What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Apple Said To Be Working On Two Larger iPhones

Google Awarded Patent For Free Rides To Advertisers’ Locations

Where do you find the time for side projects?

Ever since I published the revenue numbers for my side-projects, I’ve been getting this question a lot:

When I answer, I’m tempted to make up something that sounds really impressive:

But I don’t do that. I also don’t currently use a really complicated time management philosophy. There’s a few things that I’m doing right now that have been helpful for me. If you’re like me (a parent and/or someone who has a full-time job) they might be helpful for you too:

1. Where are you going?

One of the best things I did this past year was making a decision to launch my book ”by the end of the summer”.

Setting a goal is so helpful; once you have a destination it really clarifies how you should be spending your time.

Your first step is to define what you want to achieve. I personally like 3 month projects – they’re smaller in scope, and easier to get going.

2. Jump aboard the inspiration train

If I get inspired, I try to start working on that idea right away. If I wait longer than a day, I lose the momentum.

This is especially helpful for cranking out an initial draft of your project. When you’re inspired, you have a lot of energy, you’re mentally alert, and you’re motivated. The first draft of many of my blog posts are written in fits of inspiration. I’ll blurt it all out as fast I can. Then, I’ll try to sit on it overnight, and come back and tweak it the next day.

3. What do I want to accomplish this week?

I don’t always keep this habit, but when I do, it’s really helpful. I use a Kanban board to write out a list of achievable tasks for the week. I put all those items in the “Backlog” column. Then, each day I pull up the list, choose one task (by moving it to the “Current” column), and work on it until it’s done.

Bonus: I’ve also found it helpful to have a shared Kanban board with other side-hustlers and JFDIers. I do this in Sprint.ly, but you can use Trello this way as well.

4. Ok, but where do you actually find the time?

I mentioned setting goals, using inspiration, and Kanban first because setting a good foundation is important. I’ve found having this foundation is more helpful than the actual logistics (which actually aren’t that exciting).

The short answer is: I work on side-projects whenever I have a spare moment. I sacrifice other things (watching TV, reading the newspaper, playing video games) so that I can do creative work.

I get most of my work done in the evenings, right after my kids go to bed, or early in the morning. My regular routine is to wake up early on Saturday and Sunday, and get 2-3 hours of work done before anyone wakes up.

I’ve also found it helpful to take my lunch hour (during the work week), head to a cafe and give myself 50 minutes to just write.

During these times, I eliminate distractions (Twitter, open tabs, notifications) and I focus on achieving just one thing.

Cheers,
Justin Jackson
@mijustin

Why Dogecoin is Important

What’s most interesting about Dogecoin is that it created a new way for cryptocurrencies to compete: on branding, rather than on technical merit. The dozens of preexisting Bitcoin alternatives had all changed a number here, an algorithm there. Their creators proclaimed them to be more secure, user-friendly, or economically fair than Bitcoin. Instead, the main contribution of Dogecoin’s creators was to name the coin after a silly internet meme and plaster pictures of shiba inu all over the place.

Frankly, it’s brilliant. It’s not surprising that there was a marketer involved in the coin’s creation, rather than a team of all software developers. And Dogecoin has shot up the ranks — at the time of writing, it has the 7th highest market cap out of the 80 cryptocurrencies listed at coinmarketcap.com, many of which have been around for much longer. In daily exchange volume, it has recently reached as high as second place.

Among all the possible brands to build a coin on, the doge meme has several advantages. First among them is that the currency can pretend to be a joke. As one friend put it: “Dogecoin pretends to be a joke currency pretending to be serious, but it’s actually a serious currency pretending to be a joke.” This lets its fans support it enthusiastically without looking unintentionally foolish; they merely look intentionally foolish. Doge is also fun and accessible, and there’s no threat to the brand from, for example, being associated with an online drug marketplace. If anything, that would make it funnier.

What other kinds of brands could work? Two imitators, Catcoin and CoinyeWest, have already come and gone. They aren’t different enough from Dogecoin to gain traction. But they do point in two interesting directions. For the first one, cats are a more generic and broadly familiar brand than the doge meme. Perhaps more people could get behind it. In that line, you can imagine coins based on national pride (USACoin!), ideology, sports teams, etc. And what CoinyeWest points us toward is coins backed by private, commercial brands. Pizza Hut could release a pizza-backed currency — far tastier than the gold standard. A DisneyCoin would be in trouble when the Silk Road decided to start accepting it. It’s not immediately clear that companies would ever prefer a decentralized virtual currency to a centralized one, but it’s worth thinking about.

The long-term success of Dogecoin is beside the point. It doesn’t have anything close to Bitcoin’s developer backing. And basing a currency on an internet meme presents its own risks: for example, the joke might get old. Those are two of many reasons that Bitcoin will keep its lead for now. But it will be interesting to see where and how smarter branding gets incorporated into new efforts.

Mondrian

Mondrian is a free vector graphics web app like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, available atmondrian.io.
Today I'm open-sourcing it.

Why?

I've spent the last year building Mondrian in private. It's at a pretty solid level of usability. It has been the most fun and interesting thing I have ever worked on, but I'm getting frustrated with the slow rate of progress I can muster by myself on weekends.

Come Help Build It

Artur Sapek
me@artur.co

New York City
January 24, 2014

I love San Francisco. I moved here from the UK about 4 years ago to start my last company, DailyBooth. It’s a wonderful city filled with interesting people doing amazing things.  It’s the city I grew up lusting over and when I moved here I wasn’t disappointed.

If you’re doing a startup and planning on raising money there’s probably no better place in the world to do it. However….

It’s no secret that rent in San Francisco is starting to get a little crazy. After living here for a while you start to lose context. Let me give you some.

The average price of a 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco is now $2,800 a month. This is for a pretty standard, unexciting, ~700 SQFT space. That’s $33,600 per year. The average yearly income in 2012 was $44,321. I’ve been here for about 4 years. 4 * $33,600 = $134,400.

Enter St Louis.

The average rental price for a 1 bedroom apartment in St Louis is $720. 3.8x cheaper than San Francisco. Moving to St Louis is going to almost quadruple my company’s runway. You can buy a really nice 1 bedroom apartment in downtown St Louis for less than renting in San Francisco for 4 years.

Cheap cities are startup friendly

The leading cause of startup death is running out of money. Moving to a cheap city and doubling (or more!) your company’s runway will more than likely vastly increase your chances of eventual success.

There’s a tech scene here!

Sure, it’s not quite on the same level as San Francisco but it’s something.

• There’s this thing called Arch Grants which aims to attract entrepreneurs by giving them $50,000 in equity free funding. Marshall‘s last startup won one of these before being acquired. Applications are currently open for the next 20 grants!
• There are over 75 startups in our building alone.

Something to think about

We’re an internet company. We don’t need to be tied to a specific location. Hiring remote and having a distributed work force is far cheaper than hiring locally and making everyone come into an office.

If you’re based in San Francisco (or any other big, expensive city) and thinking of bootstrapping a company there are other options. I invite you to seriously consider St Louis. You’re even welcome to come and work out of our ($275 per month) office for a few days and we’ll show you around.

You’re not giving up living in a cool city

St. Louis isn’t just ridiculously affordable, there’s also a lot to keep you entertained.

St. Louis is neighborhood-y. We’ll be living and working downtown (pictured), but St. Louis boasts 78 other neighborhoods, each with their own flair.

Big money is going into the city. All the time. In only the past few years, billions of dollars have gone into renewing some of the City’s most recognizable institutions. The Peabody Opera House, Downtown Central Library, the St. Louis Art Museum  — up next, even the Arch itself — have all gotten updates and restorations in the past couple of years alone.

St. Louis repurposes things well. The exquisite restaurant and cocktail house Olio came out of an old gas station. You can take in your new movie releases on a couch in the Moolah Theater, an old Masonic Temple that also has a bowling alley in its basement . World-class climbing can be found at Climb So iLL, which used to be a hospital power plant building.

St. Louis has a great culinary scene. After a flourishing of microbreweries like Urban Chestnut, when the city’s original beer entrepreneurs got bought out, food trucks caught on, and then coffee roasters started a scene (including one of @jack’s favorite spots, Sump Coffee).

Most attractions are free. From spring to fall, weekends are chock-full of free festivals. Plus, its top-ranked Zoo, Science Center, History Museum, and all of the art museums are free to the public. The attractions that aren’t free — like the world-class Missouri Botanical Garden, the seriously unbeatable City Museum, or even the surprisingly relevant World Chess Hall of Fame — are more than worth the cover charge. And you never have to wait in line.

 Special thanks to Marshall‘s girlfriend, Tara Pham for the St. Louis tips.

If you found this post interesting you can follow me on twitter @jon and Need/Want @NeedWantInc.

Here in the eastern part of the United States, we’re huddling in subzero temperatures and dealing with the aftermath of a snowstorm. Still, there’s nothing to brighten our moods like the pristine beauty of a freshly fallen release–no, make that TWO releases. jQuery 1.11.0 and 2.1.0 are ready to keep you warm on these dark winter nights.

You can get the files off our CDN as always, and either use them directly or download them to your own server. Our download page has all the files and information you need, including pointers to the other CDNs that carry the files. Just give those folks a few days to update!

For those of you not following along for a while, both the 1.x and 2.x branches of jQuery support all recent modern browsers and have the same API. The 1.x branch, this time 1.11.0, adds support for the older versions of Internet Explorer (IE6, 7, and 8). The 2.x branch, today played by 2.1.0, adds support for non-traditional web environments like node.js and browser plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

jQuery went through a major house-cleaning with the 1.9 release that removed some features. If you haven’t yet moved from an earlier version, see the jQuery 1.9 Upgrade Guide and let the jQuery Migrate plugin do all the heavy lifting for you.

What’s New?

You may be wondering what great new things await you in these releases. Perhaps you’re fearing that they hold a bunch of breaking changes. You just know the project lead will suggest updating things right now. There goes your whole damn week and that trip to Florida. Well fear not! We’ve fixed quite a few bugs, but the other features and changes are mainly organizational ones that don’t affect the behavior of APIs. Your code shouldn’t break, it should just run a little faster. Here are the highlights:

Fewer forced layouts: In this release we declared war on places where we might inadvertently force the browser to do a time-consuming layout. We found a few and eliminated one in particular that could occur when changing class names. This can result in a big performance boost for some pages.

Granular custom builds: Our modularity is now defined by AMD, and it is easier to build small subsets of the library when space is at a premium. If you want to know more, we’ve hidden the details in the README file where nobody ever looks.

Lower startup overhead: The new modularity and avoidance of forced layouts led us to refactor our feature detects so that they run the first time they’re needed. If you never call the API needing that feature detect, you never run that code. Previously we ran all feature detects when the page loaded, that led to delays that were generally small, but added up–especially on mobile platforms.

Published on npm: Our releases will now be published on npm so that you can use them with node or browserify. Both the 1.x and 2.x branches are available on npm, but remember that only the 2.x branch is supported to run in node.

Published on Bower: We’re now using Bower for our internal dependency management including Sizzle, so you’ll see jQuery releases on Bower as soon as they’re available.

Some people have asked about supporting other package managers inside the jQuery library, but we’ve decided to only support the two that we use internally at the moment. There are more than a dozen package/dependency managers, it would be handy if they all could agree on a single format for projects to publish information. We don’t want the package manager’s overhead to be pushed off to individual projects like jQuery.

Although the glamor always seems to be in the new stuff, we don’t like to ignore the bugs and inconveniences that people have run across while using the last version. We worked hard to knock down our bug list and tackled quite a few of them. We even fixed a bug that only occurs in IE6, better late than never!

Sourcemap changes

This release does not contain the sourcemap comment in the minified file. Sourcemaps have proven to be a very problematic and puzzling thing to developers, spawning hundreds of confused developers on forums like StackOverflow and causing some to think jQuery itself was broken.

We’ll still be generating and distributing sourcemaps, but you will need to add the appropriate sourcemap comment at the end of the minified file if the browser does not support manually associating map files (currently, none do). If you generate your own jQuery file using the custom build process, the sourcemap comment will be present in the minified file and the map is generated; you can either leave it in and use sourcemaps or edit it out and ignore the map file entirely.

We hope to bring back and improve sourcemap support in the future, but at the moment neither the design nor the implementation seem suited for situations like jQuery’s, where there are widely distributed files on CDNs. We’d like sourcemaps (and browsers supporting them) to gracefully handle situations like file renaming or missing files. See our bug ticket for more information.

Acknowledgements

This release would not have happened without the hard work of many people. Thanks to everyone who reported bugs, tried out the prerelease files, or provided constructive criticism. Particular thanks are due to Alex Robbin, Amey Sakhadeo, Anthony Ryan, Aurelio DeRosa, Chris Antaki, Chris Price, Christopher Jones, Corey Frang, Daniel Herman, Domenic Denicola, Dominik D. Geyer, Forbes Lindesay, George Kats, Guy Bedford, Ilya Kantor, Jakob Stoeck, Jeremy Dunck, John Paul, Julian Aubourg, Jörn Zaefferer, Lihan Li, Marian Sollmann, Markus Staab, Marlon Landaverde, Michał Gołębiowski, Mike Sidorov, Oleg Gaidarenko, Richard Gibson, Rick Waldron, Ronny Springer, Scott González, Sindre Sorhus, T.J. Crowder, Terry Jones, Timmy Willison, and Timo Tijhof. Colin Snover’s commentary in #jquery-dev is also a source of rare humor for the team.

Changelog

jQuery 1.11 and 2.1 (common to both)

Ajax

Attributes

Build

Core

Css

Data

Effects

Event

Manipulation

Misc

Selector

Support

jQuery 1.11

Ajax

Attributes

Build

Core

Effects

Support

jQuery 2.1

Ajax

Build

Core

Event

Gett, an Uber rival, is accusing Uber of questionable tactics regarding its competition.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

A rival car service says Uber has been using questionable tactics to recruit its drivers.

Gett, which allows users to order cars with a smartphone app, claims that Uber employees in New York ordered and canceled over a hundred of its cars during a span of three days last week.

The Uber employees received the Gett drivers' cell phone numbers from the order. On Tuesday, an Uber employee texted the drivers in an attempt to recruit them. In screenshots of the texts provided to CNNMoney, Uber offered Gett drivers money to come work for their company.

Uber acknowledged the tactics went overboard.

"Our local teams can be pretty determined when spreading the word about Uber and how our platform opens up new economic opportunities for drivers," Uber said in a statement. "In this instance, the New York City team was a bit too ambitious and we'll make sure they tone down their sales tactics."

Related: Uber 'price gouging' complaints are silly

Gett CEO Jing Herman likened the incident to a "denial of service" attack, saying the cancellations disrupted the company's business.

"During a very short period of time when we had a hundred cancellations that took up a hundred drivers, those hundred drivers could have served a hundred of our legitimate customers who weren't able to get a car or had to wait much longer to get a car," Herman told CNNMoney.

In some cases, Herman said the Uber employees waited until the cars had showed up to cancel the order. Uber said the orders were all canceled immediately.

Order forms provided to CNNMoney show that more than a dozen Uber employees were involved, including community managers, operations managers, Uber's general manager, and the company's social media strategist. Some booked and canceled as many as twelve rides over the two-day period. A couple Uber employees canceled rides in December as well.

Related: Uber starts on-demand deliveries

Herman said Uber's tactics didn't end there: Many of Gett's employees are blocked from using Uber.

"Personally, I've been blocked for the last few months," she says.

Uber may be a fast-growing company competing with several players for business, but San Francisco-based attorney Drexel Bradshaw says the company could face legal problems for these type of practices.

"If Uber employees intentionally diverted Gett drivers from legitimate business by making phony calls, that is an unfair business practice, illegal under California law," he said. "It is also an intentional interference with Gett's business which makes them liable for money damages."

Gett declined comment on whether it will pursue legal action against Uber.

Uber spokesman Andrew Noyes said Uber ultimately paid cancellation fees for the rides its employees ordered on Gett. For its part, Gett says many of those charges are still pending.

Herman says Gett, which is known as GetTaxi in several countries, will continue to expand in New York.

"We believe that in a very short amount of time, we've proven that we are, for the first time, real competition for Uber at least in New York City," she says.

First Published: January 24, 2014: 9:55 AM ET

Join us as we live the time-traveler's dream—the deep, lucid, Orwellian vision of hope, fear, and nostalgia that is 1984. Just in time for its 30th anniversary, we laid hands on an '84 original: the Macintosh 128K. And, you guessed it—we're tearing it down like it's the Berlin Wall.

Today's blast from the past is brought to you with some awesome help from Cult of Mac and The Vintage Mac Museum. Cult of Mac will have us note that no vintage Macinti were harmed in the making of this guide. Our 128K had already passed beyond the veil before its noble sacrifice.

Fire up the flux capacitors and find our Facebook, track our timely Tweets, and get a dose of nostalgia from our filter-friendly Instagram.

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The defining characteristic of a black hole may have to give, if the two pillars of modern physics — general relativity and quantum theory — are both correct.

Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that “there are no black holes” — at least not in the sense we usually imagine — would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, it’s worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Peter van den Berg/Photoshot

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, but quantum theory enables energy and information to escape.”

In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”

Hawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January1. He titled it, whimsically, 'Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes', and it has yet to pass peer review. The paper was based on a talk he gave via Skype at a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013 (watch video of the talk).

Fire fighting

Hawking's new work is an attempt to solve what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years, after it was discovered by theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute and his colleagues (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the hole!').

In a thought experiment, the researchers asked what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole. Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity that were first pointed out by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in a letter he wrote to Einstein in late 1915, less than a month after the publication of the theory. In that picture, physicists had long assumed, the astronaut would happily pass through the event horizon, unaware of his or her impending doom, before gradually being pulled inwards — stretched out along the way, like spaghetti — and eventually crushed at the 'singularity', the black hole’s hypothetical infinitely dense core.

But on analysing the situation in detail, Polchinski’s team came to the startling realization that the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern particles on small scales, change the situation completely. Quantum theory, they said, dictates that the event horizon must actually be transformed into a highly energetic region, or 'firewall', that would burn the astronaut to a crisp.

This was alarming because, although the firewall obeyed quantum rules, it flouted Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to that theory, someone in free fall should perceive the laws of physics as being identical everywhere in the Universe — whether they are falling into a black hole or floating in empty intergalactic space. As far as Einstein is concerned, the event horizon should be an unremarkable place.

Beyond the horizon

Now Hawking proposes a third, tantalizingly simple, option. Quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause space-time to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist.

In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can reach only as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill. However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.

Conversely, in the 1970s, Hawking also showed that black holes can slowly shrink, spewing out 'Hawking radiation'. In that case, the event horizon would, in theory, become smaller than the apparent horizon. Hawking’s new suggestion is that the apparent horizon is the real boundary. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” Hawking writes.

“The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable,” says Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who collaborated with Hawking in the 1970s. “You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”

Although Page accepts Hawking’s proposal that a black hole could exist without an event horizon, he questions whether that alone is enough to get past the firewall paradox. The presence of even an ephemeral apparent horizon, he cautions, could well cause the same problems as does an event horizon.

Unlike the event horizon, the apparent horizon can eventually dissolve. Page notes that Hawking is opening the door to a scenario so extreme “that anything in principle can get out of a black hole”. Although Hawking does not specify in his paper exactly how an apparent horizon would disappear, Page speculates that when it has shrunk to a certain size, at which the effects of both quantum mechanics and gravity combine, it is plausible that it could vanish. At that point, whatever was once trapped within the black hole would be released (although not in good shape).

If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inward owing to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.

“It would be worse than trying to reconstruct a book that you burned from its ashes,” says Page. In his paper, Hawking compares it to trying to forecast the weather ahead of time: in theory it is possible, but in practice it is too difficult to do with much accuracy.

Polchinski, however, is sceptical that black holes without an event horizon could exist in nature. The kind of violent fluctuations needed to erase it are too rare in the Universe, he says. “In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space,” says Polchinski. “We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”

Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Hawking's, says that this latest contribution highlights how “abhorrent” physicists find the potential existence of firewalls. However, he is also cautious about Hawking’s solution. “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls,” he says. "But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

Forget about bitcoin. The latest go-to cryptocurrency is called dogecoin, a digital denomination that began life less than two months ago as a jokey tweet made by 26-year-old Australian Jackson Palmer.

But his joke has now taken on a life of its own. The total value of the market for dogecoin (pronounced dough-je coin) has just topped $US60 million ($68 million) and it has spawned a community comprising thousands of buyers, sellers, merchants, beggars, speculators and "miners", the people who mint the money.

Virtual economics: Jackson Palmer's jokey tweet took on a life of its own. Photo: Tony Walters

The current value of the bitcoin market is $US10 billion.

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This week, transactions worth a total of $US14 million were made, including one Chinese investor who bought $US5 million worth of the virtual currency. And on a daily basis dogecoin transactions are outstripping those in the more established bitcoin market, albeit for a smaller overall value.

Mr Palmer, who is a product manager based in the Sydney office of the software company Adobe, is both amazed and elated by the experience of introducing so many newcomers to virtual economics.

The dogecoin market has become a networked, self-regulating, peer-to-peer community. Photo: Tony Walters

"If the world's got a problem at the moment, it's that people don't understand how economies operate, how scarcity works. And, if by joining the dogecoin community, they gain a better appreciation, then that's great."

To cap off a frenetic January, the community has also chipped in chipped in 27 million dogecoins - or $US30,000 - to help send the Jamaican bobsled team to compete at the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympic Games. (Based on exchange rates at the time of writing, one dogecoin is equal to $US0.0018.)

The Carribean team, immortalised in the 1993 movie Cool Runnings, is competing at its first Winter Games since 2002, after failing to qualify in 2006 and 2010.

Viral content: An example of the doge meme.

"We're supporting the under doges," Mr Palmer quips.

While there are still question marks about the long-term viability and security of these alternative currencies, associate professor David Glance from the University of Western Australia's Centre for Software Practice, for one, believes they have a big future - especially if they gain the backing of the official banking system.

"Ultimately, cryptocurrencies are no more crazy than shares in terms of investments," he says. "We can pretend that there is some logic behind valuations of shares but, in reality, most of it is just whim."

Mr Palmer's co-conspirator is Billy Markus, a software developer at IBM, based in Portland, Oregon. They have never met in person. But, after coming across the joke website Mr Palmer cobbled together after the tweet, he suggested adapting a prototype virtual currency he had been toying with, which was based on the bitcoin DNA.

At this stage, you may think that here are two smart alecs who have just invented and launched a virtual currency, so surely they must have helped themselves to a vault full of coins before opening for business.

Yes, they wrote the algorithms that manage the currency and set a market capitalisation limit of 100 billion. 

But on December 8, 2013, when dogecoin launched, they effectively lost control. Now the dogecoin market has become a networked, self-regulating, peer-to-peer community. 

These computer-generated currencies are produced through an activity known as mining where computers are used to process and solve mathematical puzzles and equations.

As the currency pool grows and heads towards its capped limit, more computational power is required putting the activity outside the reach of amateurs using standard equipment. Eventually, this activity is dominated by miners using supercomputers or banks of networked computer known as server farms.

"That's true virality," Mr Palmer says. "[Dogecoin] grew a mind of its own."

But that was not an issue for the founders. Mr Palmer says he and Mr Markus never intended that dogecoin get too serious or appeal to the spivs and get-rich-quick types who have gravitated more towards the bitcoin micro-economy.

In part, this is due to the large following dogecoin enjoys among users of reddit, a popular website known for its diverse and socially active community.

This is undoubtedly because dogecoin takes both its name and mascot from one of last year's most viral internet memes - or running jokes.

The doge meme takes its name from a reference on an episode of a popular 1990s internet cartoon series called Homestar Runner. The term "doge" was revived, mashed-up with a quirky photo of a pet Shiba Inu dog and then sprinkled with a few ungrammatical phrases written in the much-maligned comic sans font. Last year, it exploded across the internet.

Mr Palmer, who was born and raised in Gosford on the NSW central coast, believes the doge theme has helped to make this cryptocurrency market appear less menacing, more accessible and a place in which he hopes philanthropists will outnumber the profiteers.

"What I'd really like to see is for dogecoin to become the default tipping currency of the internet."