Bitcoin’s march into mainstream American culture turned into a giant leap on Thursday, with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings announcement that it will soon accept the virtual currency as payment for game tickets and team merchandise. It is the first professional sports team in the US to accept Bitcoin.
“We are maniacally focused on creating the most seamless experience for our fans in all facets,” Vivek Ranadivé, the Kings’ owner, said in a statement to the press. “A major tenet of the NBA 3.0 philosophy is about utilizing technology for the betterment of the fan experience, and this is another step in that process.”
Kings President Chris Granger explained the decision to jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon further, saying in a statement that the team “has a growing number of tech-oriented fans and we think [Bitcoins are] yet another way to make the experience for those fans more seamless and hassle free.”
Ranadivé has a history in the world of tech, as founder of Silicon Valley-based business intelligence software firm Tibco. ESPN reporter Darren Rovell says Ranadivé is also experimenting with coaches using Google Glass during games.
Purchases made using Bitcoin for Kings tickets and gear will be processed by BitPay, which earlier this week launched the Bitcoin Payroll API to allow employers to easily pay their full-time employees in the digital currency.
Thousands of businesses now accept Bitcoin, which has a current market cap of about $10.3 billion. A single Bitcoin is trading at just under $850, though it’s possible to purchase Bitcoin in extremely small denominations. If you’re new to Bitcoin, learn more here. The Kings will officially begin accepting Bitcoin on March 1.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.