ALEX BRUMMER: If this is a fixed economy, I'd hate to see a broken one
Nearly half a century has passed since Margaret Thatcher skewered the incumbent PM James Callaghan at the 1979 election with her famous ' Labour Isn't Working' poster, which showed...
'Bitcoin Baby' Soon To Be a Teenager
"Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF," writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. "I, for one, welcome..."
Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 -- almost two years after Laszlo's pizzas -- a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in his window, and then a Reddit post.
"Jumping in to do my part to support the BTC economy. This may be a historic first?" Lee wrote in a post on the BitMarket subreddit, titled: "[WTS][USA] Male Fertility Evaluation." Lee was offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss fertility questions and a sperm analysis in exchange for 15 BTC, valued at $70 or so at the time. "Actual value over $100," he wrote. Within three months, he'd found a Bitcoin customer.
"The patient turned out not... so much having a burning desire to know about his fertility, but he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he liked the idea of participating in history, in this ritual ceremony of what could be perhaps the world's first Bitcoin medical transaction," Lee explained at a 2013 conference in San Jose. "So we chatted about Bitcoin. He taught me a lot about mining. That's how he acquired bitcoin. And we did a sperm test, and it turned out he had really good sperm ... after it was done he sent me 15 bitcoins... "
Lee changed up his strategy to only quiz his most trusted patients. There was one couple, who, on their fourth attempt at IVF, agreed to pay in bitcoin for a 50% discount, with Lee walking them through exchanging U.S. dollars for bitcoin via CryptoXChange, a now-defunct exchange operating out of Australia. The sperm stuck, leading CNN to reveal, on this day in 2013, "the world's first Bitcoin baby" -- a baby bought entirely with bitcoin. Thirty bitcoin to be exact, an amount then worth $500, or $3 million today.
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The £39 Next dress in 5 prints perfect for holidays that makes shoppers 'feel summery'
'Lovely dress, great price too'
My mother killed my dad by hitting him on the head with a hammer - here's why I campaigned for her to be freed
When Mum drove me to work that Sunday morning, I thought she seemed subdued - but then she hadn't been her usual chatty self for more than a year, ever since she and Dad split up...
PROF ROBERT TOMBS: British tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass immigration is destabilising our country
Last weekend, my cousin's lovely daughter, not long out of medical school, married her sweetheart - a handsome young doctor from an Indian family.
Why stopping HRT has changed my life in the most radical way possible. I know it runs counter to all medical advice... but if you're taking it, hear me out: SARAH VINE
All my life I cared what people thought of me. As a teenager I cared that my feet were too big to be a ballerina and that I wasn't blonde like all the pretty girls.
Girl, nine, and her father, 38, who died in house fire are named by police
Mother Asifa was not at the family home in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, when the blaze took hold on Sunday morning as she was on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google's New AI Tools
"It is true, Google AI is stomping on the entire internet," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79, sharing a report from the Wall Street Journal. "From HuffPost to the Atlantic, publishers prepare to pivot or shut the doors. ... Even highly regarded old school bullet-proof publications like Washington Post are getting hit hard." From the report: Traffic from organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb. Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.
At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. [...] "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine," Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We have to develop new strategies."
The rapid development of click-free answers in search "is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated," said William Lewis, the Washington Post's publisher and chief executive. Lewis is former CEO of the Journal's publisher, Dow Jones. The Washington Post is "moving with urgency" to connect with previously overlooked audiences and pursue new revenue sources and prepare for a "post-search era," he said.
At the New York Times, the share of traffic coming from organic search to the paper's desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier, according to Similarweb. The Wall Street Journal's traffic from organic search was up in April compared with three years prior, Similarweb data show, though as a share of overall traffic it declined to 24% from 29%. Further reading: Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say
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Huw Edwards slashes price of his £4.75million family home AGAIN and his 'divorce has been delayed'
The six-bedroom detached property in Dulwich, south London, was put on the market last October after wife Vicky Flind filed for divorce from the former TV front man.
Treasures of 300-year-old shipwreck finally FOUND... as stunning photos reveal contents of $20BN trove
Astonishing treasures not seen for three centuries have been discovered deep on the seabed - but a furious dispute is already brewing over a US firm's claim to the trove.
Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses
Wants to let AI do the boring bits so his team can invent more cool stuff
Cisco Live Cisco president Jeetu Patel wants the company’s engineers to halve the amount of code they write.…
Bystanders jump in front of ICE vehicles with arrested migrants inside after raid on meat packing plant
Horrified locals threw themselves in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans which had been loaded with dozens of illegal migrants picked up in a raid on a food plant.
I watched on helplessly as thieves took off with £250k of luxury handbags after drilling through a wall to break into my designer boutique
Christine Colbert, 58, could only watch on helplessly as live CCTV footage showed three intruders ransacking Dress Cheshire in Prestbury, Cheshire, on Sunday night.
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Surviving Syria's Prisons: Bravery of two brothers who exposed the atrocities of Assad's evil regime
What a strange power the television camera exercises over people. Point a lens at them and they will confess to crimes that, in court or under police questioning, they'd deny to their dying breath.
We all needed disgraced Harvey Weinstein, says Amanda Seyfried - as she admits stars ignored rumours because of his influence
The Mamma Mia! actress admitted 'we all needed' him, and told how she gave Weinstein a hug when he revealed to her he had backed one of her independent films.
Israel's fury over British sanctions on ministers: Pair accused of inciting violence against Palestinians hit back against government bars
Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich will be subject to a travel ban and asset freeze. Foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar said it was 'outrageous'.
Amazingly there are 12% of voters who think Rachel Reeves does a GOOD job! Survey gives damning insight into Chancellor's policy backlash
The YouGov survey, published on the eve of the Chancellor's spending review today, showed widespread disillusionment with her performance since taking office last year.
Trump scores temporary victory over Newsom as Marines and National Guard troops swarm riot-torn LA
LIVE UPDATES: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass taunted Donald Trump over the looming World Cup while denying that the city is 'in flames.'
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Kate Middleton's former boss wins his three-year battle to host weddings at his £12million Cotswolds estate
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Fashion tycoon John Robinson, who employed Kate Middleton before she wed Prince William , has won a three-year battle to host weddings at his Cotswolds estate.
Trump Quietly Throws Out Biden's Cyber Policies
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: President Trump quietly took a red pen to much of the Biden administration's cyber legacy in a little-noticed move late Friday. Under an executive order signed just before the weekend, Trump is tossing out some of the major touchstones of Biden's cyber policy legacy -- while keeping a few others. The order preserves efforts around post-quantum cryptography, advanced encryption standards, and border gateway protocol security, along with the Cyber Trust Mark program -- an Energy Star-type labeling initiative for consumer smart devices. But hallmark programs tied to software bills of materials, zero-trust implementation, and space contractor cybersecurity requirements have been either rescinded or left in limbo. The new executive order amends both the Biden cyber executive order signed in January and an Obama administration order.
Each of the following Biden-era programs is now out the door or significantly rolled back: - A broad requirement for federal software vendors to provide a software bill of materials - essentially an ingredient list of code components - is gone. - Biden-era efforts to encourage federal agencies to accept digital identity documents and help states develop mobile driver's licenses were revoked. - Several AI cybersecurity research mandates, including those focused on AI-generated code security and AI-driven patch management pilots, have been scrapped or deprioritized. - The requirement that software contractors formally attest they followed secure development practices - and submit those attestations to a federal repository - has been cut. Instead, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will now coordinate a new industry consortium to review software security guidelines.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.