Author: root

Privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Verge (symbol: XVG) was apparently hacked Wednesday, with the attacker making off with around 250,000 coins with a value of roughly $15,000 (though some reports go as high as $1 million). Compared to some recent crypto-related hacks, this attack was particularly nasty as it compromised the integrity of Verge’s blockchain. The attack was discovered by ocminer, a poster on Bitcointalk forums (via Bitcoin.com), on Wednesday afternoon. According to him, a hacker used “several bugs” in Verge’s code to mine an extraordinarily large number of new blocks in Verge’s blockchain, thus rewarding himself with a lot of Verge coins.

Ocminer and several media outlets called this a “51% attack,” which is frightening as this type of attack is theoretically possible on other blockchains which rely on a proof-of-work (PoW) validation mechanism, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But even though this attacker technically managed to capture the majority of mining power on Verge’s network, this type of attack wouldn’t work on Bitcoin.

In plain terms: In PoW-based cryptocurrency systems, miners are people who use computing power to validate the transactions on the network and are awarded in new coins. These systems are typically quite robust, but if any one miner (or mining pool) should capture the majority (hence the 51%) of the network’s mining power, then they can do all sorts of bad things on the network, including spending coins that were already spent (this is called doublespending).

In Verge’s particular case, it’s a little more nuanced. Verge uses five different cryptographic algorithms for mining, switching to a new one for every block, but the attacker figured out a way to fake timestamps of his blocks and mined them all with one algorithm. In this way, he was able to capture the majority of the network’s mining power with far less computing power than he’d normally need.

Nevertheless, the attack is serious as it requires a hard fork (cryptocurrency lingo for a very big upgrade that leaves the old blockchain behind and requires all participants to switch to new software) to exclude the blocks the attacker had mined.

Verge’s official Twitter account tried to downplay the severity of the attack by calling it a “small hash attack” that’s been “cleared up now.”

Amazon just brought one of Google Home’s more useful features to the Echo. The company introduced Alexa Announcements, a feature that effectively turns your Echo into an in-home intercom system if you have multiple speakers in your house.

Rolling out to Echo devices in the U.S. and Canada today, the new feature lets you broadcast a message to multiple Echo speakers at once. Just say “Alexa, tell everyone to come upstairs,” and “come upstairs,” will play on every Echo in your house. The command also works with “Alexa, announce…” and “Alexa, broadcast…”. If you only have one Echo, you can take advantage of the feature by using the Alexa app, provided you have an Android phone or Fire tablet. (The speaker has to be linked to the same account you’re using on your phone.)

Amazon’s update comes five months after Google introduced a similar feature called Broadcast, which lets you, well, broadcast messages to your Google Home speakers using Google Assistant.

Of course, one of Amazon’s relative strengths over Google is the number of third-party Alexa-enabled devices. An Amazon spokesperson says they don’t yet have a way for third parties to integrate the Announcements feature, but it’s something the company’s working on.

In five and a half years Avada has become one of the most popular WordPress themes in the world. Today, it has sold over 400 thousand times on Envato’s ThemeForest. In this article, Luke Beck, co-founder of ThemeFusion, the creator of Avada, tells its story.

As I think back on our time with Envato, it all goes back to August 16th, 2012. It was an exciting day, the day we submitted Avada to Themeforest for review. The excitement was purely from the fact our new theme was complete, approved and ready to be sold. Every author who submits items on the marketplace knows and understands this feeling. A feeling of accomplishment and pride in what you have created and a little apprehension because you don’t know if all your hard work is going to pay off. Little did we know how quickly that excitement would change into complete awe, with a little bit (technically a lot) of chaos thrown on the side.

Avada sales picked up very quickly. I can recall refreshing the item page many times an hour and seeing the sales jump by several numbers. It was incredible to watch! We had no idea what was starting to happen … a customer base was growing at a rapid pace. Suddenly, we realized that we had something very special, and more importantly that we needed help!  While there have been many speed bumps along the way, I cannot imagine it being any different and wouldn’t change it for the world.

Fast forward 5 and a half years and we now have over 400,000 sales, 20 team members and the most active, helping and thriving customer base anyone in the industry could ask for.

Currently our 20 team members are spread across the globe, each working in their own remote location. We have always strived to have a family atmosphere even though everything is online. Open communication, collaboration and dedication to the team as a whole is something each of us have and it makes a real difference. Everyone on our team understands the importance of their own personal responsibility because they know if they do their job well, collectively we succeed as a team. We have a lot of fun while working, and spending work time with each team member has been one of my own personal favorite things to do. Every day brings new challenges for all of us and we love it.

Our team is split across 4 departments: development, support, design and documentation. We have a Senior Team with myself and 2 managers to help organize individual projects and oversee everything on a daily basis. Our team members are incredibly intelligent, very unique, strongly opinionated, and diverse. This always makes for interesting meetings and collaborations, which in turn provide us with better solutions for whatever current problem we are trying to solve.

Markus our Development Manager and Michael our Support Manager have both been with us for 5 years and are tremendous assets to ThemeFusion. We’ve become very good friends and I recently asked them to share a few thoughts about what it’s like working with ThemeFusion and Avada in celebration of our 400,000 sales.

“What you’d usually expect in such a statement is direct praise for the company, the working attitude, the team and of course the products beyond compare. And you expect that because you’ve read it probably a hundred times and because each company expects to hear it! So, how exactly is ThemeFusion any different?  I’ve been working at ThemeFusion for 5 years now and can proudly say that we put our efforts and energy daily into a product and a customer base that speak for themselves. You don’t have to simply trust our words. You can check out Avada yourself and find out why it has been the #1 selling theme for over 5 straight years and why over 400k customers love to use it. Our creative play instinct is what drives the constant innovation in Avada and our complete commitment to our customers are what make us do what we love and make us love what we do!”

Learning a new skill is a wonderful thing to aim for, so why not add it to your goals for April? It doesn’t have to take time either—the tutorials and courses in this roundup break everything down into easy-to-follow steps that you can quickly master.

So here’s a roundup of some great courses and tutorials on graphic design, web design, coding, photography, and business. Many of these resources are free, and others are included in a subscription to Envato Elements. So there’s nothing stopping you from picking up a valuable new skill this month.

Artificial intelligence is no longer in the realm of sci-fi movies and TV shows like Star Trek or Westworld. It has well and truly jumped into the mainstream news headlines.

And the headlines are often contradictory. AI is either a technological leap into a prosperous world filled with sophisticated tools enhancing human endeavor. Or mass unemployment in a society where robots rule, reminiscent of Skynet in the Terminator movies.

Whether you’re on Team Zuckerberg and support this futuristic technology or you’re on Team Musk and want to ban killer robots, artificial intelligence has already crept into the world of web development. In fact, there are many WordPress plugins that are using artificial intelligence.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI is technology that enables machines to carry out tasks that humans need intelligence to do. There are plenty of examples of AI in real life – self-driving cars, smart home devices, and music and movie recommendation services.

Most AI examples you hear about rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, machines can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns in it. This subset of AI is known as machine learning,

Before machine learning came along, computers could only be given a set of rules to follow and operate within a defined set of parameters. Now, thanks to AI and algorithms, machines can learn from data and adapt to the environment they’re operating in.

This means that the more data fed to a machine, the more it learns and improves.

Unlike humans, AI doesn’t have to sleep and won’t make the same mistake twice. It can also access vast amounts of digital data in seconds, while our brains cannot.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. AI is being used in productive ways to improve how we use and manage WordPress websites.

WordPress Plugins That Use AI

While AI is certainly an exciting field of technology, it’s still pretty new. As such, there are few plugins that use AI and machine learning. The ones listed below are still fairly experimental but do provide advancements in SEO, customer service, and security.