Boot up: Nakamoto's protegé?, computers v Go, Jobs on Ethernet, and more

Plus Toshiba's new smaller white LED, strange goings-on at Reddit, tablet non-owners unbuying, and more

A simple connector rather than a screw fitting? Why? Photograph: Jon Feingersh/Blend Images. Corbis

A burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Nakamoto's neighbour: my hunt for Bitcoin's creator led ro a paralyzed crypto genius >> Forbes

Andy Greenberg:

A week earlier, I was following clues that seemed to point to either Finney's involvement in the creation of Bitcoin or one of the most improbable coincidences I'd ever encountered. Today, I believe those connections were in fact random, that Finney is telling the truth when he denies helping to invent Bitcoin, and that I am only the most recent of a long string of journalists to succumb to the mirage of a Satoshi Nakamoto-shaped pattern in a collection of meaningless facts.

But in following the clues that led me to Finney, I found something equally significant: a dying man who had been something like a far-more-brilliant Forrest Gump of cryptographic history: a witness to and participant in practically every important moment in the recent history of secret-keeping technologies. From the development of the first widely used strong encryption software known as PGP, to early anonymity systems, to the first Bitcoin transaction, Finney was there.

Must-read.

---

Facebook announces that it acquired Oculus. Shill gets caught defending Facebook by forgetting to switch his accounts and posting identical messages with other accounts (WITH EVIDENCE) : HailCorporate > Reddit

Search on "Facebook" or "Google" or "Samsung" yields odd results.

---

Tablets' value proposition still unclear to mainstream users >> Kantar Worldpanel

In 4Q13, tablet penetration in the US reached 37%, a growth of 54% compared to the same period in 2012, according to data released today by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. Growth, however is slowing down year over year and the task of convincing consumers who have not yet invested in a tablet to take the plunge will become increasingly more difficult. 53% of US consumers interviewed in 4Q13 said they will not buy a tablet in the next 12 months while 34% were unsure.

In many cases they fretted about the absence of a keyboard - though about two-thirds of Americans use a touchscreen phone.

---

Apple to push for more diversity in emoji characters >> SiliconBeat

There are more than 400 characters in Apple's emoji library, but good luck finding a face that's non-Caucasian (I counted two). That may soon change. Responding to an MTV query regarding that lack of diversity, Apple says it hopes to expand the emoji universe to be more racially inclusive.

---

The electronic holy war >> The New Yorker

In May, 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer prevailed over Garry Kasparov in a series of six chess games, becoming the first computer to defeat a world-champion chess player. Two months later, the New York Times offered machines another challenge on behalf of a wounded humanity: the two-thousand-year-old Chinese board game wei qi, known in the West as Go. The article said that computers had little chance of success: "It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go – maybe even longer."

Last March, 16 years later, a computer program named Crazy Stone defeated Yoshio Ishida, a professional Go player and a five-time Japanese champion. The match took place during the first annual Densei-sen, or "electronic holy war" tournament, in Tokyo, where the best Go programs in the world play against one of the best humans. Ishida, who earned the nickname "the Computer" in the 1970s because of his exact and calculated playing style, described Crazy Stone as "genius".

The victory was not quite a Deep Blue moment; Crazy Stone was given a small handicap, and Ishida is no longer in his prime. But it was an impressive feat.

Terrific piece by Patrick House.

---

40-pound calculators, the birth of Ethernet, and a $100bn mistake: a conversation with Bill Krause >> Andreessen Horowitz

Krause explains the birth of the Ethernet jack:

When we did demos we also explained the technology this way: Ethernet worked the same way as human beings having a conversation. We are using the same medium, we are sharing the air. You talk, then I talk. If we start talking at the same time, we both stop, and someone re-initiates one side of the conversation. The reporters got it right away, and understood the advantage over other technologies, but it was Steve Jobs that added a critical piece that led to Ethernet's success.

We had put Ethernet on a card, and instead of having to screw a tap we had a connector that looked a lot like the one you screw into your cable box and TV. And were all excited about it. We set up four PCs, and we called Steve Jobs who was a good friend and told him, "You have to come over and see this demo." Steve comes over and we hook it up and show it to him.
It was a classic Steve response: "Who's the brain-dead asshole that came up with this shit? This is dreck, this is crap. You want to make it easy to install, just plug it into the telephone jack for cryin' out loud."

Why didn't we think of that? No one knows to this day that Steve Jobs deserves the credit for creating Ethernet the way it is today, and it is a part of why it beat out other competing technologies. It was another one of his brilliant insights around user interface.

Whole interview is great.

---

Toshiba unveils 'industry's smallest' white LED chip >> Tech-On!

Toshiba Corp developed what it claims is the industry's smallest (0.65 x 0.65mm) white LED for lighting applications.

With the company's wafer-level CSP (chip scale package) technology, the footprint of the LED, "CSP-LED," is 50% or more smaller than those of its competitors' LEDs. Because the new LED allows to drastically reduce the size of light source, it enables to design lighting equipment more freely as well as to make use of space in which a conventional light source cannot be installed.

Toshiba will start shipping samples of the LED in late April 2014.

Way better than CFL.

---

You can follow Guardian Techblown.com
To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with techblown.com on the free Delicious service.