An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: On Feb. 2, the city of Miami cashed out its cryptocurrency MiamiCoin for the first time, depositing $5.25 million into city coffers. Miami mayor Francis Suarez hailed it as a "historic moment" and predicted the cryptocurrency could one day even replace municipal taxes as the government's primary source of funding. MiamiCoin's creator, an organization called CityCoins, has been no less enthusiastic, portraying the coin as a financial experiment th…

I often remember fondly the days of the waterfall software development life cycle. Each task had a beginning and an end. One work product was the input for the next documentation or code, and while it took much longer and had very little opportunity to change directions, it was easier to plan around. Those days are over. Today’s cloud development—or development altogether—is iterative, agile, and can change at a moment’s notice. Often amplified by very robust devops toolchains, our approach to …

There are many ways to extract substrings from lines of text using Linux and doing so can be extremely useful when preparing scripts that may be used to process large amounts of data. This post describes ways you can take advantage of the commands that make extracting substrings easy. Using bash parameter expansion When using bash parameter expansion, you can specify the starting and ending positions for the text that you want to extract. For example, you can create a variable by assigning it a…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When you turn off an iPhone, it doesn't fully power down. Chips inside the device continue to run in a low-power mode that makes it possible to locate lost or stolen devices using the Find My feature or use credit cards and car keys after the battery dies. Now researchers have devised a way to abuse this always-on mechanism to run malware that remains active even when an iPhone appears to be powered down. It turns out that the iPhone's Blue…