#-we have technology to break encryption (unlikely but not impossible)

[practicalsolutions]

In case you were wondering what it looks like to get pwned as a global megacorp.

[theblockchain10]

Blockchain & Digital Identity: The Future of Secure Verification

Blockchain is no longer just a buzzword—it’s actively transforming industries, from finance to healthcare. Global spending on blockchain technology is projected to skyrocket from $5.3 billion in 2021 to $34 billion by 2026, proving its growing adoption.

But how does blockchain impact digital identity? And why is it so crucial in today’s world? Let’s break it down.

What is Blockchain Technology?

At its core, blockchain is a decentralized ledger that records transactions across multiple computers. It consists of interconnected blocks, each containing encrypted data and a unique hash that links it to the previous block—forming a secure and unchangeable chain.

Unlike traditional databases controlled by a single entity, blockchain is tamper-proof, transparent, and highly secure, making it a game-changer for digital identity management.

How Blockchain is Revolutionizing Digital Identity

1. Unmatched Security for Personal Data

In today’s digital world, data breaches are common, exposing sensitive information like addresses, bank details, and ID numbers. Blockchain offers next-level encryption, ensuring that personal data remains secure and accessible only to the rightful owner.

Unlike centralized systems, which hackers can infiltrate through a single point of entry, blockchain is distributed across multiple nodes, making unauthorized access nearly impossible.

2. Seamless Data Portability

Imagine having all your identity credentials—driver’s license, credit score, employment history, and travel tickets—stored in one universal digital wallet. No more searching for documents or dealing with lost paperwork.

With blockchain, digital identities can be easily transferred and verified across different platforms, simplifying everything from signing up for services to making online transactions.

3. Self-Sovereign Identity: Take Control of Your Data

One of the biggest flaws in today’s identity verification system is data overexposure. When proving your age at a bar, for example, you share your entire driver’s license instead of just confirming that you're over 18.

With blockchain-powered digital IDs, users can selectively share only the necessary information—enhancing privacy and reducing risks of identity theft.

The Future of Digital Identity is Here

Blockchain is more than just cryptocurrency—it’s the key to a safer, more efficient digital identity system. As businesses and governments adopt blockchain-based solutions, we move closer to a world where identity verification is secure, seamless, and entirely user-controlled.

Are you ready for the future of digital identity? 🚀

[igminresearch]

Quantum Computing: Unlocking a New Era of Innovation

Introduction Quantum computing, a revolutionary field in technology, is set to transform industries and redefine how we solve complex problems. Unlike classical computers, which rely on bits to process information as 0s and 1s, quantum computers leverage qubits, which can exist in multiple states simultaneously. This quantum superposition enables immense computational power, far beyond what traditional systems can achieve.

The Power of Quantum Computing Quantum computing offers unprecedented capabilities in areas such as:

Cryptography: Breaking traditional encryption methods and creating virtually unbreakable security protocols.

Optimization: Solving large-scale optimization problems, from supply chain logistics to financial modeling, in real-time.

Drug Discovery: Accelerating the development of new drugs by simulating molecular structures and interactions.

Climate Modeling: Enhancing the accuracy of climate predictions to better understand and address global warming.

AI and Quantum Computing The integration of AI with quantum computing is expected to create breakthroughs in data analysis, pattern recognition, and machine learning. By leveraging the processing power of quantum computers, AI algorithms can analyze vast datasets at speeds previously unimaginable. Explore how quantum computing is revolutionizing AI applications here.

Challenges in Quantum Computing Despite its promise, quantum computing faces several hurdles:

Hardware Stability: Quantum systems are extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances, leading to errors in calculations.

Scalability: Building larger and more stable quantum computers is a significant engineering challenge.

Cost: The high cost of developing and maintaining quantum computers limits accessibility.

The Future of Quantum Computing As researchers overcome these challenges, the potential applications of quantum computing continue to expand. In the near future, we can expect:

More robust quantum cryptography methods.

Enhanced AI models capable of solving previously insurmountable problems.

Greater insights into fundamental questions in physics, chemistry, and biology.

Conclusion Quantum computing is not just an incremental step in technology—it is a paradigm shift. As it continues to develop, it will open doors to innovations that were once thought impossible, shaping the future of industries and society.

If you have an active research ongoing kindly visit our journal website

[transponderisland]

Unlocking Convenience: What Clever Keys and Car Key Fob Locksmiths Are Changing Vehicle Access

The automobile sector has seen a significant change recently toward more clever and safe vehicle entry solutions. Two developments that really stand out in this respect are vehicle key fob locksmith services and smart keys for automobiles. For owners of vehicles, these technologies have improved convenience, security, and safety. We investigate in this post how these developments are altering our interactions with our vehicles and the reasons they are so important in the fast-paced environment of today.

What is car smart keys?

Modern solutions meant to make automobile access and ignition as smooth as possible constitute a Smart Key for Car. Unlike conventional keys, which need actual insertion into the ignition, a smart key lets the driver unlock, start, and run the car without ever pulling the key from their pocket or purse. The key fob uses proximity sensors to connect wirelessly with the automobile, therefore allowing keyless access and ignition. Smart keys are much more difficult to copy or hack than conventional mechanical keys as they rely on radio signals to guarantee security.

Improved Smart Key Security Mechanisms

Smart keys for automobiles stand out mainly for their improved security. These keys are made using sophisticated encryption technology that almost makes it impossible for thieves to clone or circumvent the security system. Unlike conventional keys that one can readily copy at a locksmith’s shop, a smart key needs specific equipment to copy, so illegal entry is far more difficult. For automobile owners, this extra layer of protection guards against any theft or break-ins, therefore offering piece of mind.

Car Key Fob Locksmith’s Function

Although smart keys for automobiles provide many advantages, problems might develop should the key fob breaks or disappears. This is where a vehicle key fob locksmith is useful. These experts concentrate on offering key fob replacement, repair, and reprogramming services. A vehicle key fob locksmith has the knowledge and skills to assist whether your key fob breaks by accident, you need a spare, or you misplaced it. They can rapidly evaluate the problem and provide answers, therefore sparing you the trouble and cost of a dealership replacement visit.

Why Would You Possibly Need a Car Key Fob Locksmith?

You can want the services of a vehicle key fob locksmith for a number of different reasons. Should your key fob fail, the internal electronics might be the cause; a qualified locksmith can either fix or replace them. Furthermore, should you lose your key fob, a locksmith may assist program a replacement for your car, thus preventing you from being left without access. In an emergency when you are locked out of your automobile, a key fob locksmith may help you quickly and effectively get back into your car without damaging it.

Locksmith Services and Smart Keys: Perfect Match

Smart key for vehicles and expert car key fob locksmith services have made automobile ownership safer and handier than it has ever been. Smart keys provide unmatched conveniency as they let you unlock and start your automobile without ever touching a physical key. Lockers that specialize in key fob services make sure that, should issues develop, answers are simply a phone away. This alliance guarantees never compromise of the security and accessibility of your automobile.

Final Thought

Smart keys for automobiles and auto key fob locksmiths will only become more vital as technology develops. These developments have made our entry to our automobiles safer in addition to simplifying it. See transponderisland.com for dependable key fob solutions and services; professionals there can assist with all your key fob and smart key requirements.

Tags: car key fob locksmith, Smart Key for Car

Source url :https://auto-alley.com/unlocking-convenience-what-clever-keys-and-car-key-fob-locksmiths-are-changing-vehicle-access/

[oliverethanrobin]

Is Blockchain the Missing Link for Supply Chain Transparency?

Introduction: 

Consequently, supply chain has emerged as the key area of interest in an environment where consumers are more concerned with transparency and trust. However, a number of challenges such as lack of supply chain visualization, trust and security are some of the drawbacks of the conventional supply chain models. Hence comes blockchain, an innovation that has gained widespread popularity in making a shift in how organizations monitor, authenticate and control the supply chain.

By the same token at Justtry Technologies, we hold that blockchain is the key link that can help ensure we have the most accurate, efficient and secure information related to supply chain. Curious to know why? Let’s dive in.

So, first off, let’s define what blockchain really means: What is Blockchain and how it can be applied to Supply Chain?

In a nutshell, blockchain can be described as a distributed ledger containing data of transaction across the connected network. Unlike traditional systems where data is centralized and owned by a specific group or company, blockchain possess a database that is spread across different computer systems, and hence almost immutable.

Well, how does this help supply chains?

Think about having an idea of how materials get into a company and end up as a final product with every step between included in a record that cannot be altered at all. Now let’s take a look at what blockchain actually supplies, and I believe that is contained in the statement above. It makes consumers gain a transparent supply chain that enhances trust between companies and suppliers.

Key Benefits of Blockchain for Supply Chain:

Increased Transparency: Perhaps sometimes people interest how their product looks like in the moment when it is breaks the seal and gets on the transport? Due to the implementation of blockchain, it becomes possible to track every transaction from and to its completion. There is no guess work or depending on other people’s information again.

Improved Security: Hearsay is devastating to companies through leakage of company information through data breach and manufacture and sale of fake goods. According to blockchain, every transaction done is encrypted so hacking or even attempting to alter it becomes almost impossible. This assists you to have assurance with the supplies that every product in the supply chain is genuine.

Cost Efficiency: Due to the removal of intermediaries and application of smart contracts to make procedures more efficient, blockchain reduces costs and la Yue. An improved and effective supply-chain with minimized costs; every organization seeks for this.

Real-Time Updates: It’s the end of an era of receiving information with a certain time lag and updating it manually. Blockchain will ensure that a business is able to monitor real time data such as inventory, deliveries and even interruptions.

How Justtry Technologies is Leading the Blockchain Revolution in Supply Chain:

Here at Justtry Technologies, we are for providing solutions to enhance the productivity of blockchain for organisations. Regardless of whether you are starting a new supply chain or if your company is in the fort数字���化 stage of supply chain management, our solutions are designed uniquely to serve your purposes.

Our approach is simple:

Consulting: Here, it is our intention to give you an insight on how this technology known as blockchain could transform your business.

Development: Our team will develop a set of individual blockchain solutions that will harmoniously complement your IT environment.

Implementation: We help you to easily implement blockchain so that you can quickly begin benefiting from the new platform.

Blockchain Game Development Companies: Challenges Addressed The supply chain is an important concept in most organisations; however, it has limited applications when it comes to innovation.

Blockchain is not limited to being used in supply chain systems, but blockchain game development firms utilize it to build decentralized gaming structures that will enable players to have more authority and understandability. Blockchain has made its mark from supply chain to gaming and more proof of how it is beneficial in a number of industries.

Conclusion:

If you are willing to make the supply chain more transparent, faster and trustworthy then blockchain is the solution. This is Justtry Technologies and we’re here to help you through the entire process. The future is transparent — and it can be created with the help of blockchain.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html

[supersecure-blog]

Something awesome - cryptography chapter

Below is what I’ve completed for the cryptography chapter which includes the research and write-ups which I blogged about earlier. Altogether this chapter was about 2.7k words (yikes)

What is cryptography?

Cryptography is the art of encrypting data. If you ever developed a secret code as a kid, so you and your friend could communicate without anyone else knowing what you’re saying, then you’ve already had experience with writing your own secret code!

Cryptography is done in many ways, with some of the most common being through the use of codes and ciphers. This guide will cover a few of the more basic ones, and provide pointers to more complex ciphers for those who are interested.

Why do we need cryptography?

If we didn’t encrypt any of our sensitive information or messages over the internet, then potential attackers could easily steal your private data or read confidential messages. This is why cryptography is so important - because it provides us with confidentiality. 

Cryptography is already being used in many ways in your daily life - you just don’t see it happening. For example, one of the key aspects of cryptography is what is called a hash. These are used to authenticate log-ins like your passwords whenever you log in to an account.

Below are some of the main examples of how you can encrypt your data:

Ciphers

The basic concept of a cipher is you have a message, usually in plain english, that you want to make secret (called encrypting your message). This is called your ‘plaintext’. You then apply the rules of your chosen cipher to a plaintext, to get a secret message which is called your ‘ciphertext’. 

Then, you send your secret message to your friend who also knows the rules of the cipher you chose to use. Using that knowledge, they then decrypt the ciphertext you gave them, to reveal the original message in plain english.

You can think about this like something that you might be more familiar with. If you know what pig latin is, for every word that you say take the first letter of the word and move it to the end of the word and add the sound “ay”.

So if I wanted to say “pig latin”, which is my plaintext, in pig latin I would use the above rule to transform “pig latin” into “igpay atinlay”, which is my ciphertext. For someone to understand my ciphertext, they would have to know the rules of pig latin in order to decrypt and find my original message.

In this section we’ll be covering some of the most common ciphers:

Caesar Cipher

A secret ‘key’ is chosen between the people who want to communicate secretly,  which will be a number between 0 and 25. Then, each letter in the message is shifted forward or backward by that key to receive the encrypted message. 

For example, “This is an example” with a forward shift key of 1 gives the encrypted message: “Uijt jt bo fybnqmf”

Although the message may seem very secret, in reality it’s actually very easy to break! All you have to do is just apply all possible 26 forward and backward shifts and only one key will likely give an answer which looks like plain english.

While this may take a lot of time for someone to do by hand, because of computers, this process can be done a lot faster.

You can find a tool to encrypt and decrypt your own messages using the Caesar cipher here. Simply change the message in the left box to what you want to make secret, and then use the + or - buttons to choose the ‘key’ for which to shift your message. You should find your secret encrypted message in the right box!

Substitution Cipher

Unlike a Caesar cipher, where you are shifting the whole message by a certain amount, in a Substitution Cipher you choose each different letter in your message, and shift that by a different amount.

Basically what this means is for each letter in the alphabet, you choose a different letter that you will replace it with when you encrypt your message. For example, you could choose to substitute the letter ‘a’ with the letter ‘p’ when performing your substitution cipher. You would then do this process for every letter in the alphabet until you get something like:

plain alphabet : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

cipher alphabet: phqgiumeaylnofdxjkrcvstzwb

An example encryption using the above key:

plaintext : defend the east wall of the castle

ciphertext: giuifg cei iprc tpnn du cei qprcni

You might think that this way of encrypting your messages is way better than the Caesar Cipher, because it would be much harder to figure out. After all, if an outside person was trying to decrypt your message, the would have to go through every possible substitution. 

However, something that we don’t consider is that this cipher actually preserves letter frequency. In the english language, some letters appear in words more than others. However, when it comes to cracking substitution ciphers, what we can do is count through all the times we see a certain letter, and try and compare that to what we see in normal english.

Remember this little name: “etaoin shrdlu”. This tells you the most frequently occurring letters in the english language in descending order. So if you see a certain letter like ‘z’ appearing a lot more frequently than others, chances are it could be either an ‘e’ or a ‘t’.

Substitution ciphers also don’t do anything to hide the length of words in your message. So if you have a three-letter word like ‘zcy’ in your message, chances are it would be a word like ‘the’.

Using all the above, it actually becomes a lot easier than you think to decrypt a substitution cipher. You can have a try for yourself using this link.

Vignere Cipher

The Vignere cipher uses a special table and a key to generate the ciphertext.

In addition to the plaintext, the Vigenere cipher also requires a keyword, which is repeated so that the total length is equal to that of the plaintext. For example, suppose the plaintext is MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY and the keyword is HOUGHTON. Then, the keyword must be repeated as follows:

MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

HOUGHTON HOUGHTONHOUGH TONHOUGNTO

We then remove all spaces and punctuation, and convert all letters to upper case, finally dividing the result into 5-letter blocks. As a result, the above plaintext and keyword become the following:

MICHI GANTE CHNOL OGICA LUNIV ERSIT Y

HOUGH TONHO UGHTO NHOUG HTONH OUGHT O

To encrypt, pick a letter in the plaintext and its corresponding letter in the keyword, use the keyword letter and the plaintext letter as the row index and column index, respectively, and the entry at the row-column intersection is the letter in the ciphertext. For example, the first letter in the plaintext is M and its corresponding keyword letter is H. This means that the row of H and the column of M are used, and the entry T at the intersection is the encrypted result.

Repeat this process to generate your ciphertext!

Caesar Cipher

If you want to have a further look into different ciphers, try these resources:

Affine Cipher 

Wheel Cipher 

Playfair Cipher 

Hashing

To summarise what a hash is, it  requires two things: 

A hash function, which is any kind of mathematical function that takes input and produces some output 

A message that is given as input to the hash function. 

There are three main requirements of a good hash function: 

It should be easy to calculate the hash value (output of hash function) given a message. 

It should be very hard (ideally impossible) to calculate the original message given a hash value.

No two messages should have the same hash value. 

Example of the hashing process:

In the above image, the ‘input’ is the message and ‘Digest’ is our hash. 

Our ‘cryptographic hash function’ above could have been something as simple as f(x) = 10, where x is the message. It’s easy to calculate the hash value, which fits the first criteria, but it breaks the third criteria. This is because no matter what our message is, the hash will always be the same!

Also, something like f(x) = x, would not be a good cryptographic hash function. With this function It is easy to calculate the hash, and we also avoid collisions, meeting the first and third criteria. However using this function, our message is the exact same thing as our hash, which kind of defeats the purpose of using a hash in the first place!

What do we use hashes in?

As you will see below, hashes are used to store passwords. If we just stored the actual password itself in something like a database, if a hacker or an outside person were to gain access, the would be able to easily gain access to everyone’s accounts. We uses hashes as an extra layer of security.

Even if people see the hashes, the point is that it is a super long and tedious process to try and figure out a password from a hash. You need to know the hash used, and then match every single different input to your unique hash which would take an extremely long time - so much that even trying to get your password wouldn’t be worth the time.

Passwords

Have you ever thought about how the password you use to log in to your computer is stored? etc/passwd is a text file, which contains a list of the system’s accounts, giving for each account some useful information.

What is in a etc/passwd file?

Typical output would include a line like: root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

Fields separated by columns in order are:

Username: root

Encrypted password: x

UID: 0

GID: 0

Comment: root

Home directory: /root

Shell: bin/bash

Encrypted password found in etc/shadow file

What is in a etc/shadow file?

Example output of shadow file: root:$6$IGI9prWh$ZHToiAnzeD1Swp.zQzJ/Gv.iViy39EmjVsg3nsZlfejvrAjhmp5jY.1N6aRbjFJVQX8hHmTh7Oly3NzogaH8c1:17770:0:99999:7:::

Fields separated by columns in order are:

Username: root

Encrypted password - Usually password format is set to $id$salt$hashed, The $id is the algorithm used On GNU/Linux as follows:

$1$ is MD5

$2a$ is Blowfish

$2y$ is Blowfish

$5$ is SHA-256

$6$ is SHA-512

So for the example above, we can see that the password is hashed using the SHA-512 algorithm.

You can have a further look into how passwords are stored here

picoCTF writeups - Cryptography:

See my previous blog post here

[orbemnews]

The Next Level in Office Amenities: Wild Horses STOREY COUNTY, Nev. — You can’t ride the wild mustangs at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Nevada, but you’re nearly guaranteed to see bands of them loping over sagebrush in a scene that feels straight out of the 1800s. At least until the dust clears and Tesla’s 5.3-million-square-foot “Gigafactory” comes into focus. Welcome to the Silver State, where Elon Musk, a cryptocurrency tycoon and a brothel owner are using a symbol of Americana as a social media recruiting tool. The water cooler used to be the spot in the office to talk shop. Then came on-site cafes, fitness and yoga studios, rooftop gardens, fire pits and rock-climbing walls. “The overarching trend of the last five years has been the hotelification of the office,” said Lenny Beaudoin, an executive managing director at CBRE. For employers, the newest amenities to wow workers are ideological, with environmental commitments topping the list, said Jason H. Somers, the president of Crest Real Estate, a Southern California real estate consultancy. “Health and wellness have become the ultimate luxury,” he said, including access to nature. “Adding value to an employee’s well-being has a significant impact in a compensation package.” In Nevada, wildlife advocates say efforts to market the wild mustangs to bolster a “green” image are interfering with the space and resources the animals need to survive. To attract talent, a green message is easy to promise, but hard to fulfill. There has been progress by corporate giants, but most efforts remain so opaque that it’s tough to spot greenwashing, the use of sustainability efforts to appear more attractive. Embracing high environmental standards can be challenging and expensive. Some companies pay others to reduce emissions. Others plant trees, which can take years to grow and rely heavily on water and care. Protecting large mammals can be even harder. A good example is roaming the Nevada desert. The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, a 107,000-acre office park, is home to more than 150 companies with a combined annual payroll of $750 million. Tesla, which broke ground on its battery factory there in 2014, says it will be the biggest building in the world when completed. Mr. Musk has used the wild horses as a selling point to lure workers. “Come work at the biggest & most advanced factory on Earth! Located by a river near the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains with wild horses roaming free,” he wrote on Twitter. Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “They’re all kind of rogues out there in the tech world, but so are the horses,” said Kris Thompson, the office park’s project manager. But how does a wild horse help productivity in the workplace? “I think they’re symbolic of what America was, and they’re just beautiful,” said Jeffrey Berns, 58, a former consumer protection lawyer and the chief executive of Blockchains, a blockchain software development company. He added that his company’s “DNA cares about the environment, and that includes the animals and wild horses on our land.” He spends around $300,000 a year on five water tanks and feeding programs for the herds, and maintains that unlike Tesla, he’s not marketing them. The animals support a vision that began with a handshake with Lance Gilman, the owner of the Mustang Ranch brothel and a Storey County commissioner, who bought this land from Gulf Oil in the late 1990s. Today in Business Updated  April 12, 2021, 10:12 p.m. ET “Lance is an old cowboy,” Mr. Thompson said. “His word means something. Tech entrepreneurs see that.” Cheap land, space and transportation corridors were draws for Amazon, Walmart and PetSmart, which turned the vacant land into a fulfillment hub. Tesla used a $1.3 billion state tax break to build its $5 billion factory, tapping into a local work force still reeling from the Great Recession and ushering in a wave of Silicon Valley heavies. Switch, a technology infrastructure company, set up three data centers, then Google gobbled up 1,200 acres. Blockchains bought 67,000 acres for $170 million in 2018, becoming the park’s biggest tenant. Mr. Berns hoped to transform the expanse into an experimental city run by his encrypted digital systems. He pledged to build 15,000 homes, turning it into a huge innovation zone, with his company overseeing everything from schools to courts, law and water. “I want this to become the greatest social experiment in the history of the world,” he said. “It’s going to be a cross between Disneyland and the chocolate factory from Willy Wonka.” He’ll have to rethink the scope: In March, the county voted against the secession plan. Mr. Berns says he plans to develop around 25,000 of his 67,000 acres, but for now, it will remain an outpost for wild horses. Nevada is home to more than half of the country’s 95,000 wild horses and burros, descendants of animals brought to the continent by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. Managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management to the tune of about $100 million annually, wild horses live on protected and private land crisscrossed by freeways. Around 1,000 resident horses in Storey County regularly come down from higher elevations for food and water and face what can be fatal traffic from workers and lookie-loos itching for the perfect picture. With just 15 percent of the industrial park occupied, and Mr. Thompson expecting occupancy to double in five years, it’s a far more complicated experiment than advertised. “We get about five emergency calls a month in the slow season,” said Corenna Vance, the founder of Wild Horse Connection, an advocacy group. “Horses in traffic, on the wrong side of fencing, vehicular, train accidents, sick or ill horses.” Rescues triple once mares start foaling, said Ms. Vance, whose annual budget is about $100,000, including small donations from the office park and tenants. She says further expansion depletes open spaces and decreases grazing areas. “Horses have migration patterns, and when a development comes in, it cuts that off and there’s more interactions with people,” she said. One solution is humane horse fertility so the animals, which can spend up to 16 hours a day eating, don’t overpopulate and overgraze. Suzanne Roy, the executive director of the nonprofit American Wild Horse Campaign, has worked with the office park since 2012, spending more than $200,000 on fertility control, water and feeding in the last three years. “Development displaces wildlife,” she said. Water stations help, she said, as does an underground crossing built by Switch. But the horses will not offset the park’s overall carbon footprint, said Simon Fischweicher, the North American head of corporations and supply chains at CDP. Tenants like Tesla, whose lithium-ion batteries are costly to mine and nearly impossible to recycle, require a lot of energy. Switch is installing its own solar panels, and there are two green fuel plants on site, but distribution and data centers use large amounts of water for heating and cooling, and “supply chain emissions are on average 11.4 times higher than operational emissions,” Mr. Fischweicher said. Others question the need to use the horses as a lure. Mr. Thompson says most of the roughly 25,000 workers at the office park are blue-collar Nevadans living within an hour commute. They’re here for jobs, not because of horses. Growth for the industrial park means luring workers from out of state, expanding limited housing nearby and developing more land — all of which jeopardize the wildlife incentive. “Quality of food, retail choices and housing are going to shape those decisions more than having wild horses nearby,” Mr. Beaudoin of CBRE said. “I would never bet against someone like Elon Musk, but there are other factors to attract workers.” Source link Orbem News #Amenities #horses #level #office #Wild

[siamcomputing]

How to unlock the important mobile app development cost factors?

Gone are those days when prime importance was given just to the website design and development process. The advent of the Google App Store paved the way for a new aspect of the digital world to be born. Web application (Web-App) became a mandated entity as digitalism notched up. Whatever domain you are in, you need an ‘App’ today and that is how today’s digital journey has evolved. This has boosted the mobile app development process and thereby more mobile app development companies are booming day by day. With that stated, it is essential to have an insight into the mobile app development budgeting factors. Let’s dive into this article to learn how to unlock the important mobile app development cost factors and figure out the app development cost breakdown process.

1. Factors that determine the cost of the mobile app development process

The key to unlocking the important mobile app development cost factors lies in determining the factors that contribute to the cost of the mobile app development process itself. The cost to build an android app depends on the following factors:

1.1. App Features

The app feature is the primary factor that majorly determines the cost to build an android app. Depending on whether you are a product development company or service providing company, your app features are to be designed. The more complicated the feature, the more work is involved. Also when the number of features is more, more amount of work is involved. Therefore the sophistication involved in the features and the number of features play a crucial role in the mobile app development cost breakdown process.

1.2. App Functionalities

Next, the app functionality plays a major role when it comes to calculating the cost to build an android app. When a particular function is to be executed in an app, the factors that are inclined towards making that functionality work, come into the picture while budgeting. For example, if you need more graphics and animation to enhance the UI/UX of your mobile app, then that adds up to the total cost to build an android app.

1.3. App Development Platform

When it comes to the app development platform, you need to make sure if you are developing your app for android alone or both android and iOS platforms. People from the UK and US majorly utilize iOS platforms but the rest of the world predominantly uses the android platform. Technologies differ when it comes to building an app on the android platform and iOS platform. The cost of developing your app depends on the platform that you choose to build your app. And when you go for mobile app development on both the platforms, then the overall cost will depend on the app development companies.

1.4. App Hosting Platform

Your choice of app hosting platform decides whether your mobile app development cost will be budgeted under a sharing basis or a single-user basis of the server. The following criteria will be helpful to choose the best fit:

The transmission capacity per user

Bandwidth per MAU

API request of the backend process

1.5. Integration of Niche Third Parties

Mobile app development is almost impossible without the integration of third parties. This is due to the fact that while developing social apps, GPS is required to figure out the location of the user and when building an app that has checkout functionality, then the payment gateway needs to be incorporated, and enabling that into the app adds up to the cost of the mobile app development process as well.

1.6. Native/Hybrid Development Process

If you are specifically focusing on building your app on the iOS platform, (integrating higher-end technologies like augmented reality) it is better to go with the native mobile app development process. But, if you are planning to have your app built on both the platforms, then, hybrid mobile app development process pays off. Building a cross-platform app can be pulled off with minimal engineering and moreover the essential aspect in the case of the hybrid development process is cost-effectiveness.

1.7. Hardware for IoT oriented App Design

When you develop an app that requires pieces of information like the heartbeat rate, temperature, etc then the sensors that help in sensing this information need to be incorporated and that adds up to the mobile app development cost itself. Therefore when you build an app that requires such information and data, the cost of hardware for IoT oriented app design needs to be counted in while budgeting the cost to build an android app.

1.8. UI/UX

User interface and user experience play an important role in having an app up and running successfully in the longer run. The visuals of your app starting from the content, alignment, layout, design, color theme, navigation inside the app, graphics, and animation determine the overall user experience and how smoothly these factors interface says all about the proper functioning of your mobile app. Each factor contributes to the cost to build an android app. It is up to you to choose these factors according to your budget.

1.9. Backend Integration

So basically the backend process involves maintaining an up-to-date database that keeps getting updated in real-time. The frontend of your app needs to compute in accordance with the database available in the backend in real-time and has to give an updated output. Authentication, data storage, and synchronization, data analytics, etc are the processes that happen in the backend. To make sure that your app is fully working fine, you need to use the latest technology that establishes a 100% smooth backend integration which adds to the overall costing.

1.10. Security Features

When you work on the digital platform, security matters a lot. Users need to be assured that the information that they share over the app is protected and is not used for any other purposes. So, while developing the app you can follow these steps to ensure maximum safety:

Always code securely

Incorporate data encryption protocols

Use the libraries carefully

Ensure the authorization of the APIs that you use

Implement tamper detection strategies in your app

Make use of higher-level authentication protocols (biometric, passwords, etc)

Use proper session management protocols

Assign limited privilege access

Make use of advanced and updated cryptography tools and techniques

Keep testing continuously

The above-mentioned security protocols are mandatory since the security of your mobile app can never be compromised at any cost. But again, implementing these security protocols means investing in them. In addition to the other factors that contribute to the overall budget, implementing security protocols adds up too.

1.11. App Development Team

Building an app requires an interdisciplinary talent pool. App development companies today have a mixed talent on-board unlike before. If a specific skill set is required, freelancing options are also available. So, when it comes to hiring an app development team, you need to pay a good amount to get the best talent on-board, and hiring the best team means getting a quality output in the end. Upon the mobile app development cost breakdown process, you will see that hiring a good app development team will cost you significantly.

1.12. Agility and Maintenance

Agile methodology is proven to be effective these days. In the present day scenario, we have updates happening now and then. Technologies become outdated and newer ones come into the picture. So, in order to stay updated, it is essential that your app has the option to adapt to new updates and has scope to add on new features and functionalities if and when required. You need to make sure that you add agility and maintenance into account when you make the budget for your mobile app development.

2. Mobile App Development Cost Breakdown

When you break down the cost of building your mobile app you need to be able to unlock the important mobile app development cost factors in the first place. And for that, the above-mentioned factors will help you to make an estimate roughly. Each and every factor has a unique contribution to the overall budget. Depending upon your requirements you can add or delete the features that are needed for your mobile app and the cost varies accordingly

3. Finally…

Ever since the mobile app became an inevitable asset of a successful business, special attention needs to be given to the mobile app development process. Whether you are an established or a budding business person, once you decide to build an app, you need to know the mobile app development cost breakdown. The above-mentioned factors play a crucial role when it comes to framing a budget for your mobile app development. Depending on the complexity of your mobile app, the overall costing is done. The more the app features and functionalities, the more it costs to implement them in your mobile app. And this is how you unlock the important mobile app development cost factors.

To get a free consultation in regard to customized mobile app development strategy and budget write to us at hello@siamcomputing.com

[north-west-nine]

6 Best External Hard Drives to Store Anything xternal Hard Drives vs. The Cloud When it comes to choosing between cloud storage and external hard drives, it really comes down to preference. On one hand, cloud storage is typically more convenient, providing a reliable and safe option that allows you to keep adding more storage capabilities. It also has the advantage of being accessible almost anywhere, allowing you to sync and reach your materials so long as you have a device with Wi-Fi connection. But you may incur monthly fees for extra storage, so putting everything on the cloud will be far more expensive in the long run. It is always best to look into the security info on the cloud option that you choose: Apple iCloud, Microsoft Dropbox or Google Drive. You’ll want to know what will happen to your data in every sort of situation—especially in the event that they (though unlikely) go out of business. On the other hand, external hard drives have the upper hand as a tried-and-true technology, which puts information security in the hands of the owner. Hard drives also have a fixed cost, instead of a recurring fee. However, if your hard drive were to physically break, it may be difficult or impossible to get back the information you lost. It is also worth mentioning that advancements in technology mean the type of USB ports that these drives use may become obsolete, requiring you to use adapters to connect them to your latest devices. GizmoHeadz Channel brings you cool, new and very useful gadgets and inventions. We aim to show the latest and new inventions that you might enjoy, From Must-have items to Inventions and New Technology that will blow your mind! Including new technology, factory machines, hand made gadgets, latest tools, next level inventions, car engines, planes, scavengers, metal workshops, satisfying technology for camping, unboxing the latest in engineering. What to Consider Storage: The average user will often find 64GB to be more than enough, especially if you’re using it simply to store extra photos and documents. For storing larger files, many smaller SSD models go up to 1-2TB, while still remaining reasonably priced. For gamers or professionals looking to store commercial documents, some HDD models will hold up to 24TB of storage, but they cost a pretty penny. Speed: HDDs tend to run around 100MBps to 200MBps, and SSDs run about two times faster, with an average of 400MBps. This determines how quickly you will be able to access the data stored on the hard drive. HDD: Hard disk drives are less expensive than SSDs and can store much more than a SSD. The downside is they are much bigger. They can also be a bit more delicate—if you move the drive while it’s in the process of reading or downloading files, it could damage the interior disks and make some of your information unreadable. SSD: Solid state drives are faster, smaller, and tend to be more expensive. They usually cannot hold as much memory, but for most basic needs, they are more than adequate, many able to hold up to 5TB. If you are looking for storage you can take with you, some of these can even fit in the palm of your hand. As well as Amazon Products, Inventions and Gift Ideas for him and for her. Also future tech and other cool stuff. *FEATURED PRODUCTS* *AMAZON US AND UK LINKS* 👇👇👇LINKS TO PRODUCTS BELOW👇👇👇 Samsung Portable SSD T5 AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3aCYVr3 AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2VeoqIX ADATA SD700 3D NAND AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2UHpVjC AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2UEJYiK iStorage diskAshur2 Encrypted Hard Drive AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2UFfg8Y AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2JDFdQ6 WD My Passport Wireless Pro AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3dQTQgJ AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/3bNmiyj Seagate Expansion Desktop AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3aIlISf AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2w9sn90 WD My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2wSJJaR AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2UZfUNH -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you enjoyed; Like, Share, Comment and Subscribe! 👉Subscribe to Gizmo Headz :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9vcUw8PkWpnwWwTnsxpFcQ👈 🔴👉 Also Please Subscribe MegaData Channel - https://www.youtube.com/megadata 🔴👈 #Subscribe #GizmoHeadz #Inventions #TechGadgets #Latest DISCLAIMER: This video description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Any CopyRight Issues Please Contact Us here - https://www.facebook.com/GizmoheadztV-100379948233342/

[pangenttechnologies]

Argentina.

How did this all even happen?

I'm probably repeating myself. I do that.

It was December, 2016. Technically Alexander Schreyer was my assistant then, because his father didn't know what to do with him. In practice he was what he always was - an outsized pain in my ass. He embarrassed himself while answering questions on Twitter. My Twitter. Unprofessional doesn't describe it. I'm unprofessional. He was worse.

This led to meetings about how we needed to rethink our social media strategy. Somehow this became my problem. Like I was in marketing instead of research. I got to deal with bullshit while Alex failed upwards. Every inch the boss's son. I guess that was his plan.

So I had to delete everything from the Twitter and my personal Tumblr. My job depended on it, and if they read through everything I posted on Tumblr I'd be in more trouble than I was. Seems silly now. Seemed silly then. I wrote a script to delete everything and, well, it deleted everything. I fucked up, I really did. I guess that was his plan.

They fired me. Then they wanted me back. On the condition that I sign a new contract. I should have shoved it down his throat. Six sheets of paper and they owned me from that point on. Any work I did, any thought that came through my mind was theirs. How did they put it? Oh yes. "Any information may be duplicated, edited, and/or exploited in whole or in part by Pangent Technologies, in all media, throughout the universe, in perpetuity, and may be incorporated into other works in any form, media or technology now known or hereafter developed."

They owned my mind, right down to writing emails or writing a diary or shitposting on Tumblr. I kept doing that, by the way, once I had the Tumblr mostly on private, or encrypted somehow. I don't know if they noticed but I never learned how to stop.

It's not unusual when working for a big company that they want first refusal rights to your every thought. But Pangent London wasn't a big company. And I was walking into a trap. I knew that even then. Like I said, Alex had a plan.

I said yes, because the trap I was walking into was a really interesting one.

Now you might ask, with a contract like that, what happens later when I learn how to say no?

Alex had Leslie sign the same contract. I would put a bullet through his head today for that alone. I wouldn't hesitate for a moment.

And he sent me a photo of something.

He'd seen me working on Percival, one of my many outrageous failures. A project to translate a person's dreaming thoughts into computer data. The requirements for data storage were impossible. So was the processing power it required. I set the damn lab on fire.

Lancelot, Dean Schreyer, Alex's father, he forgave me for a lot of things. Too many. He could be a real creep but he let me follow my thoughts to their illogical conclusion. He didn't care how many labs I set on fire as long as I was onto something.

My specialty was using science to understand the human brain. And if you've ever met me in real life, you should be laughing right now, because I don't understand people. I'll admit that. I keep to myself and I don't make friends easy.

Leslie was my friend. And I wish I'd been a better friend to her because there's nothing about her I don't love.

My closest friend was Sharon Pacana, and she followed me around for years, like a walking shadow, before I realized I liked her company. Nobody else has ever been that patient.

Well, two men were that patient with me. They waited for me to love them and I married both of them as a thank you.

It never lasts, you know. You think something will last forever. You've got to find your happiness while you can. Every story ends. We've all got an ending coming to us. That's how it works. You've got to teach your children to enjoy life, in spite of it all, and to love somebody because who knows if we'll still be here tomorrow? But we don't, you know? We do our jobs and let inertia and anxiety take over our lives, and we don't make time to enjoy it because it gets too hard. Like Joni Mitchell said, you don't know what you've got til its gone.

I'd done a thing at Pangent that we just called Project Four. It started as something more high-minded, but became a stress test on the human brain. Pushing it to the boiling point. It was about sleep cycles and sleep deprivation and chemicals, so many chemicals. We stopped valuing our lives for awhile, in order to see how the brain really works when you don't mind a little bit of torture. It ended up involving some of the worst people at Pangent. I don't think that was an accident. I made every wrong decision I could have possibly made. On purpose, maybe. Subconsciously. We staffed the thing with a lot of over-ambitious backstabbers. They were the fire and the water that Project Four boiled in.

I should have been fired. I should have been arrested.

Instead I got fired over temporarily breaking our Twitter. And Alex used the time to search through my files.

Alex was just smart enough to know that if I hadn't been fired before, it was because I was following his father's plan. Consciously or not, I was getting approved to do research that Dean Schreyer thought was important. Even I didn't understand that then. I had a history of disastrously failed projects, but to Dean Schreyer, it was all the same thing.

It was about understanding the brain.

Alex knew that his father saw something in my work that even I didn't. So he pretended he saw it too. He pretended to understand. He figured whatever it was, he could profit off of it. Make his daddy proud. He learned just enough to get his father to tell him the truth.

There was something I wrote, for the personality test. I think I wrote it. And I never figured out the answer.

They would ask me, should technology be free? Does progress belong to the people? I could have been a billionaire if I’d only sold my soul. I really could have. Dean and Alex saw dollar signs in the wreckage I'd left behind me, if I could actually make it work.

Dean Schreyer had been planning this for a long time. And there's a point where that plan became very dangerous.

It was all just science. Research. But so was the atom bomb. Dean knew that too. He knew there was a line I didn't want to cross. He knew my projects tended to fail at the point where they could have become dangerous to the survival of the human race.

Project 555 started out dangerous, and it never got any less so. It made me lose all perspective on what dangerous even is.

To Dean Schreyer, I was his star student. The teacher's pet. I think he thought he loved me.

555 could have killed me. It was killing me. He didn't care about that, if I got results.

I was fired and far away from Pangent when Alex sent me a photograph of a Cube.

When I saw it, I somehow was filled with a paralyzing fear. I lost consciousness. I became very ill. Immediately. But there was something thrilling about it too. It didn't take long before I got used to that fear. Before that fear became a friend to me.

It came in a glass box. A shimmering blue, or black if you shined no light on it. Somewhere between solid and liquid. Always rippling but never moving. About a hundred folds in it per inch. I don't know where they got it, or how they made it, if they made it. I don't think they made it. I no longer had the clearance to ask. I guess I'll never know now, though it's hardly left my side since. Especially now. It had properties unlike anything I've seen before or since. It almost seemed alive. No, forget the almost. Whatever it was they couldn't duplicate it. That would be my job, if I could figure it out. But they saw the potential immediately. Data storage.

Enough storage to take the ideas I'd failed with in the past - Percival, Project Four - and make them work. The potential was there, if I could live through it.

I'd always cut myself off from the world. I'd lived inside my own head. Boxed in. I worked alone, not wanting to ask anyone else for help.

Dean Schreyer was counting on that. That I would push myself to the limit of my sanity. Thanks to Project Four he knew exactly what those limits were. We'd sealed those records. I'm sure now that he opened them. I was always at the breaking point but I never broke. I never consciously realized it, but Dean was always in control. Alex could be spiteful and vicious, and the project was stressful as hell, but somehow there was always just enough room to breathe and keep going.

That's why Project 555 succeeded under me, and failed when Leslie took over. It's not because I'm any smarter than Leslie is. It's because Dean Schreyer was dead, and Alex didn't know or care about Leslie's limits. There was nothing to stop him from breaking her.

Except for us. The Spice Girls. I stopped being Leslie's friend for far too long, but Sharon never did. She kept an eye on things. That was the promise we'd made. Project Drinking Bird.

The idea was to keep an eye on the Cube. Really, we were keeping an eye on each other. As friends. I wish I'd realized that then.

It's helpful to think of the Cube as being under constant stress. It is capable of learning. You can teach it things, and set it to work on problems that aren't particularly important. You have to, because it wants to constantly be moving. It wants to play, like a child.

If you have a cup of water that's 90 percent full, the cup can hold the water and function the way it's supposed to. The Cube is the same way. At a 90 percent stress level the Cube is still mostly harmless. But if you pour 20 percent more stress into that cup, it will overflow. It can no longer function. It might shut down. It might explode. It might never stop exploding.

When I first talked about this with Sharon, she said, "My God, Lottie, it's you. The Cube is you."

I was a cup filled 90 percent of the way with stress. I could still function, but if anything else went wrong I'd be useless for days. I figure Dean Schreyer knew that. I figure he had printouts and graphs about it.

Dean Schreyer wanted to own me, and Alex made that happen. I believe now that that was literally true, and that we were lucky to escape with our lives.

I learned before too long that the Cube has some unusual properties, when it comes to time.

I will tell you something now that I've never told anyone.

I own a drinking bird. A plastic toy, weighted with liquid to bob up and down. Little crack on the bottom. It came in a box, so I couldn't see what color it was. But it's red, with a black top hat.

When I bought it, it was blue.

There's lots of things like that. Wrong in little ways from how I remember them.

Maybe my brain's just broken. Maybe the Cube broke me after all.

Or maybe reality changes all the time around us, in silly little ways.

And we're not supposed to notice.

I'm looking at the Cube right now. I shouldn't. It could kill me. I've got my special glasses on.

Hello 555.

You thought I wouldn't notice, did you?

I did.

[magaroni-n-beese]

6 Best External Hard Drives to Store Anything xternal Hard...

6 Best External Hard Drives to Store Anything xternal Hard Drives vs. The Cloud When it comes to choosing between cloud storage and external hard drives, it really comes down to preference. On one hand, cloud storage is typically more convenient, providing a reliable and safe option that allows you to keep adding more storage capabilities. It also has the advantage of being accessible almost anywhere, allowing you to sync and reach your materials so long as you have a device with Wi-Fi connection. But you may incur monthly fees for extra storage, so putting everything on the cloud will be far more expensive in the long run. It is always best to look into the security info on the cloud option that you choose: Apple iCloud, Microsoft Dropbox or Google Drive. You’ll want to know what will happen to your data in every sort of situation—especially in the event that they (though unlikely) go out of business. On the other hand, external hard drives have the upper hand as a tried-and-true technology, which puts information security in the hands of the owner. Hard drives also have a fixed cost, instead of a recurring fee. However, if your hard drive were to physically break, it may be difficult or impossible to get back the information you lost. It is also worth mentioning that advancements in technology mean the type of USB ports that these drives use may become obsolete, requiring you to use adapters to connect them to your latest devices. GizmoHeadz Channel brings you cool, new and very useful gadgets and inventions. We aim to show the latest and new inventions that you might enjoy, From Must-have items to Inventions and New Technology that will blow your mind! Including new technology, factory machines, hand made gadgets, latest tools, next level inventions, car engines, planes, scavengers, metal workshops, satisfying technology for camping, unboxing the latest in engineering. What to Consider Storage: The average user will often find 64GB to be more than enough, especially if you’re using it simply to store extra photos and documents. For storing larger files, many smaller SSD models go up to 1-2TB, while still remaining reasonably priced. For gamers or professionals looking to store commercial documents, some HDD models will hold up to 24TB of storage, but they cost a pretty penny. Speed: HDDs tend to run around 100MBps to 200MBps, and SSDs run about two times faster, with an average of 400MBps. This determines how quickly you will be able to access the data stored on the hard drive. HDD: Hard disk drives are less expensive than SSDs and can store much more than a SSD. The downside is they are much bigger. They can also be a bit more delicate—if you move the drive while it’s in the process of reading or downloading files, it could damage the interior disks and make some of your information unreadable. SSD: Solid state drives are faster, smaller, and tend to be more expensive. They usually cannot hold as much memory, but for most basic needs, they are more than adequate, many able to hold up to 5TB. If you are looking for storage you can take with you, some of these can even fit in the palm of your hand. As well as Amazon Products, Inventions and Gift Ideas for him and for her. Also future tech and other cool stuff. *FEATURED PRODUCTS* *AMAZON US AND UK LINKS* 👇👇👇LINKS TO PRODUCTS BELOW👇👇👇 Samsung Portable SSD T5 AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3aCYVr3 AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2VeoqIX ADATA SD700 3D NAND AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2UHpVjC AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2UEJYiK iStorage diskAshur2 Encrypted Hard Drive AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2UFfg8Y AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2JDFdQ6 WD My Passport Wireless Pro AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3dQTQgJ AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/3bNmiyj Seagate Expansion Desktop AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/3aIlISf AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2w9sn90 WD My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive AMAZON US - https://amzn.to/2wSJJaR AMAZON UK - https://amzn.to/2UZfUNH ————————————————————————————– If you enjoyed; Like, Share, Comment and Subscribe! 👉Subscribe to Gizmo Headz :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9vcUw8PkWpnwWwTnsxpFcQ👈 🔴👉 Also Please Subscribe MegaData Channel - https://www.youtube.com/megadata 🔴👈 #Subscribe #GizmoHeadz #Inventions #TechGadgets #Latest DISCLAIMER: This video description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Any CopyRight Issues Please Contact Us here - https://www.facebook.com/GizmoheadztV-100379948233342/

source https://north-west-nine.tumblr.com/post/614455243874385920

[neptunecreek]

The Graham-Blumenthal Bill: A New Path for DOJ to Finally Break Encryption

Members of Congress are about to introduce a bill that will undermine the law that undergirds free speech on the Internet. If passed, the bill known as the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, will fulfill a long-standing dream of U.S. law enforcement. If passed, it could largely mark the end of private, encrypted messaging on the Internet.

The Department of Justice and the FBI have long seen encryption as a threat. In 1993, the Clinton administration promoted the installation of a “Clipper Chip” in consumer devices that would allow for easy government eavesdropping using key escrow. When researchers repeatedly demonstrated that this flawed idea would compromise privacy and security for everyone, not just criminals, the idea was scrapped. But U.S. law enforcement agencies spent the next 25 years villainizing the widespread adoption of encryption and highlighting a series of awful criminal acts in their efforts to scare elected officials into requiring backdoors.

You shouldn’t need to get a pass from a commission of law enforcement agencies just to set up a website.

In recent years, they’ve used acts of terrorism like the mass shootings in San Bernardino and Pensacola to press for draconian changes to the law. More recently, officials like Attorney General William Barr have blamed encryption for sexual crimes against children. Not only are these crimes horrific to hear about, but they are nearly impossible to get objective information about. Nearly all information that the public gets about these crimes is filtered through law enforcement and organizations that work closely with law enforcement. Because of that, it’s very hard for policymakers to make informed decisions that address both public safety and civil liberties concerns.

Meanwhile, we face immense challenges to building secure systems, and strong encryption is one the best tools we have available to protect ourselves. Encryption preserves the ability to have private, secure communications in an increasingly insecure world. Members of the government, the military and law enforcement themselves use encryption to protect their communications, as do journalists, activists and those at risk of domestic abuse, among many others. We should not sacrifice the power of these fundamental technologies, even in the name of important law enforcement goals.  

Take Action

Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Attack on Encryption

A Commission Custom-Designed to Break Encryption

We’ve written many times about Section 230, the most important law protecting free speech online. Section 230 simply states that, in most cases, speakers should be responsible for their own speech, not Internet intermediaries who host that speech.

According to a draft published several weeks ago, EARN IT would strip away Section 230 protections, offering them only to Internet companies who followed a list of “best practices” set up by a government commission of 15 people. This commission, set up in the name of protecting children, will be dominated by law enforcement agencies.

The first three members would be chosen by the heads of the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Trade Commission, two of which have law enforcement responsibilities. The remaining 12 members will be chosen by Congress, but have to fulfill specific roles. The bill states that:

Two commission members “shall have experience in handling internet crimes against children in a law enforcement capacity.” So, more law enforcement.

Two commission members “shall have experience in handling internet crimes against children in a prosecutorial capacity.” Again, more law enforcement.

Two commission members “shall have experience in providing victims services for victims of child exploitation.” These will inevitably be organizations that work hand-in-hand with law enforcement, like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Two commission members “shall have experience in computer science of software engineering.” That sounds like a good start. It shouldn’t be two out of fifteen.

And finally, four commission members will have experience working for online services of varying sizes—but must have “experience in child safety.” So, these four commissioners will be drawn from the groups within tech companies who work most closely with law enforcement. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hardly a balancing force on this lopsided commission.

So out of a 15-person commission, we have seven members who have been actively employed by law enforcement agencies and two from private organizations whose specific role is to assist law enforcement agencies. Even in the unlikely event that all of the other members of the commission dissented from a policy, law enforcement and close allies will have a 9-person majority.

What “best practices” would that commission demand in the name of protecting children? We know that offering backdoors to encryption would be high on the list. Attorney General William Barr has demanded “lawful access” to encrypted messages, over and over again. So have his predecessors. The practical result would be to force companies like Apple and Facebook, which offer encrypted messaging services, to choose between protecting user security and privacy and risking unlimited liability for crimes against children committed using these services. Some have likened this anti-encryption scheme to holding car manufacturers liable for injuries caused by defective designs. But really, it’s more like making Toyota pay when a bank robber makes a getaway in a Prius.

The ability to have a private conversation is fundamental in a democratic society, and Congress should not be disincentivizing these companies from developing secure platforms.

The Next Anti-Encryption Bill Might Claim It’s Not About Encryption

It’s possible that law enforcement may try to amend this bill in a way that sidesteps the damage they’re doing to encryption and privacy. It could be as straightforward as putting a clause in the bill explicitly saying the bill doesn’t apply to encryption.

Politically, there’s good reason for law enforcement agencies to do this. If they seek in an obvious way to damage encrypted services, other government agencies will be negatively impacted, and could speak up. International diplomats from many countries, including the U.S. State Department, rely heavily on encrypted services to get their work done. The U.S. military also relies on encryption, and Congressman Ro Khanna has spoken up about the importance of encryption to national defense.

But sidestepping that issue wouldn’t be sufficient to make it a good bill—and it likely won’t even be true. That’s because the DOJ is likely to “define down” what encryption is. It will simply say that something like client-side scanning, for instance, doesn’t into the realm of encryption. That would be patently false, since client-side scanning very much does break end-to-end encryption. But with 11 out of 15 commission members being law enforcement or those who work with them, you can bet their definition of “encryption” will differ in important ways from those of computer scientists.

Even if the bill actually did avoid encryption issues, it would be a bad idea. The Internet isn’t just a few big companies. It’s billions of people, speaking across more than a billion websites. Section 230 doesn’t give tech companies a free pass. It makes people responsible for their own speech and their own behavior online, just as we all are in the offline world. Section 230 isn’t broken, and we’ve explained elsewhere how the EARN IT bill would also undermine online speech.

You shouldn’t need to get a pass from a commission of law enforcement agencies just to set up a website. That’s the type of system we might hear about under an authoritarian regime. Yet, in the name of protecting children, U.S. lawmakers might be about to set up such a system here. That’s what the EARN IT bill comes dangerously close to prescribing.

Take Action

Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Attack on Encryption

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Oh for fuck's sake, not this fucking bullshit again (cryptography edition)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data.

In a recently released Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption, the Five Eyes powers have demanded, again, that strong cryptography be abolished and replaced with defective cryptography so that they can spy on bad guys.

They defend this by saying "Privacy is not absolute."

But of course, working crypto isn't just how we stay private from governments (though god knows all five of the Five Eyes have, in very recent times, proven themselves to be catastrophically unsuited to collect, analyze and act on all of our private and most intimate conversations). It's how we make sure that no one can break into the data from our voting machines, or push lethal fake firmware updates to our pacemakers, or steal all the money from all of the banks, or steal all of the kompromat on all 22,000,000 US military and government employees and contractors who've sought security clearance.

Also, this is bullshit.

Because it won't work.

Here's the text of my go-to post about why this is so fucking stupid. I just can't be bothered anymore. Jesus fucking christ. Seriously? Are we still fucking talking about this? Seriously? Come on, SERIOUSLY?

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What these leaders thinks they're saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. These officials don't understand technology very well, so they doesn't actually know what they're asking for.

For this proposal to work, they will need to stop Britons, Canadians, Americans, Kiwis and Australians from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of their jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Australia is not alone here. The regime they proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Australian governments have already shown that they believes they can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the 5 Eyes nations are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other states are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or Mexico could come to the 5 Eyes countries with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what the Five Eyes are proposing:

* All 5 Eyes citizens' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of a 5 Eyes government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked in the 5 Eyes

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the 5 Eyes must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of 5 Eyes countries, and within those countries, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting a 5 Eyes country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

The Five Eyes officials will say that they doesn't want to do any of this. They'll say that they can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the every 5 Eyes nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/illegal-math.html

[emergentmedia-zhangyi]

Theme 6:Fintech(post1)

The subject of this research is Fintech. Literally, Fintech is a combination of financial + technology, that is, finance and technology. What is the use of this word in the real world? Answer: The real Fintech company takes science and technology as the core driving force, and applies technology to finance, so as to improve the efficiency and income of the company.

 Although we understand what it is, we still need to know why it is so important. Forbes has an article called 3 Reasons Millennials Should Enter Into Digital Finance and FinTech. Obviously, I'm one of Millennials and I read it carefully with strong curiosity. First of all, we all know that people traditionally have to pass through banks or similar intermediaries for mobile funds, but anyone who has done this knows that banks will charge fees from them, and mobile funds must also generate a waiting time, which wastes human and material resources. The existence of Fintech has great potential to centralize this issue, to achieve individual point-to-point transactions and direct contacts without intermediaries. According to Gerald Fenech, "individuals are still looking for ways to optimize their financial scenarios, even if it means convenient and efficient banking. With better and more improved mobile banking services being introduced into the market, the trending shift towards these digital avenues "Oninues." There are now such financial technology products, such as Alipay and Paypal,very popular. Alipay is a mobile payment software for almost everyone in China, regardless of their age, as long as they have mobile phones. When you walk into the streets and alleys of China, whether you go to the mall to buy clothes or go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables, businesses will provide two-dimensional codes for consumers to pay for scanning codes. Ma Yun, the founder of Alibaba, once shouted the slogan "Build a Cashless City", which is exactly the case.

 Next, we will talk about the technology to be used in the realization of financial science and technology. Block chain, as explained by Gerald Fenech below, "In short, it is a decentralized digital ledger that provides a transparent, but encrypted means to upload and view information across the supply chain of almost any industry. Unlike most of the centralized systems we are using to, no party mai." Ntains control over the information, making it seamless for any two or more parties to engage in transactions with one another. "When a hacker attacks an independent banking system, it's easy, but it's almost impossible to break in to a block chain system, because he's not only attacking a block, but also attacking a block. Attacking all the blocks connected before this block is too difficult. With such technology, we can safely manage such important information as property and economy.

 Cryptocurrent is also a big part of Fintech, which is actually "digital money". "Similar to the stock market, this is a unique way in which millennials who may not have invested in the stock market, find new ways to invest in companies that understand or prefer to learn more about, spea" "King their lingo." Gerald Fenech wrote. For example, Bitcoin is one of the Cryptocurrency. Unlike most currencies, Bitcoin does not depend on a specific currency institution. It is generated by a large number of calculations based on a specific algorithm. Bitcoin economy uses a distributed database composed of many nodes in the entire P2P network to confirm and record all transactions. Behavior, and the use of cryptographic design to ensure the security of all aspects of currency circulation. The de-centralization of P2P and the algorithm itself can ensure that the value of the currency can not be manipulated artificially by making a large number of bitcoins. Cryptographic design allows bitcoins to be transferred or paid only by real owners. This also ensures the anonymity of currency ownership and circulation transactions. From Henry Brade: "In 2017, it peaked at the current all time high of approximately $19500 per bit coin." So virtual money is also very powerful.

 As for Fintech's creative industry, in addition to two examples that Mar introduced to us in class, Crypto Kittie and Crypto-artwork, I also found a Fintech industry. Cryptonic Universe, the world's first block-chain game that combines cryptographic collections platforms with video games, allows users to use their own Cryptons and put them into video games. Synthesize (reproduce) any two robots and use special hatching capsules to create their own unique Crypton. Each new Crypton is unique and unique, and it is impossible to replicate the genetic code. Users can buy, sell and synthesize your own robots and items at the fair. The game uses block chains and virtual money technology in Fintech.

 Through these investigations and studies, financial technology can bring new inspiration to the digital media industry. As artists and designers, people still need to pay attention to the development of financial technology. This helps us create and make our ideas a viable business plan.

 Reference

 Brade, Henry. (2018).10 good reasons to buy bitcoin now

https://medium.com/@Technomage/10-good-reasons-to-buy-bitcoin-now-2018-edition-8e990a50a9e1

 Fenech,Gerald.(2018).3 Reasons Millennials Should Enter Into Digital Finance and FinTech

https://www.forbes.com/sites/geraldfenech/2018/12/08/3-reasons-millennials-should-enter-into-digital-finance-and-fintech/#49744d3f7e08

 https://cryptonsgame.com/

[thegloober]

Dutton frames Encryption Bill debate as battle between protecting Silicon Valley or protecting Australians

With Australia’s encryption-busting Assistance and Access Bill sitting before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, and the Department of Home Affairs having already made a small number of changes to its wording between the draft release and the Bill’s introduction to Parliament last month, Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton has said the Bill is already compromised.

“I think there is a common-sense approach here. I think the government has crafted that common-sense approach, but it can only be enacted if it is supported in the Senate,” Dutton told the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday. “We can’t have on key national security Bills compromises because we’re dealing with five or six or eight different senators all with different motivations, and pulling in every direction.”

Dutton said Opposition Leader Bill Shorten needs to decide whether he is on the side of Silicon Valley multinationals or with “law enforcement and intelligence agencies in this country who want to protect Australians”.

The Home Affairs minister added that tech giants need to be hounded to pay more tax in Australia, have breached user privacy for commercial advantage, and are protesting moves to force them to help law enforcement in Western countries while simultaneously doing business in authoritarian growth markets.

“It is essential. Given we are talking about nine out of 10 national security investigations now being impeded because of the use of encryption, we need to deal with it. It doesn’t go as far as some people would want, but it is a measured response,” he added.

Read also: Australia’s anti-encryption law will merely relocate the backdoors: Expert

While once again avoiding any specifics on how companies could meet their obligations under the proposed law without weakening their systems or breaking into their own software, the minister argued that the law does not go beyond other laws relating to data collection, and that the debate is, at its heart, about how to deal with encryption.

“We are talking about trying to cope with a technological change here, not talking about creating backdoors, not talking about weakening their product or trying to undermine their business model; quite the opposite,” Dutton said. “Encryption is an important part of our community, but it is being used by some for for the wrong reasons and we need to deal with that.”

Dutton further said the Bill should be dealt with sooner rather than later.

For her part, Labor Shadow Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said in a speech on Tuesday that unlike other national security laws that are entirely domestic in their effect, the Assistance and Access Bill will impose obligations from Australia on multinationals, and it would have global ramifications.

“Despite being 176 pages in length, and containing near 43,000 words, it has been pointed out to me the text of the Bill only contains the word encryption once,” Rowland said.

“Whilst I remain unclear on what the full scope of the Bill is in terms of its practical application, and I’m yet to have someone articulate it to me, the proposed assistance framework does appear to go beyond encryption and potentially into the sphere of modifying devices and software at different points in the service stack.”

Rowland said the Bill is entering new territory, and as a result needs to be “scrutinised rigorously”.

“The implications of such scenarios need to be tested. To do this, we need time,” she said. “Labor was and remains concerned at the haste with which the Bill was introduced to Parliament.”

See: Australian encryption Bill raises bar for outrageous legislation: Comms Alliance

According to Rowland, the complexity in the current debate is not due to balancing security and privacy, but in dealing with trade-offs between security and security.

“That is, the pursuit of one security objective, through the development of measures to bypass encryption to access information on a device, as one example, being traded off against the security of a broader system that may now have greater vulnerability as a result of being modified, temporarily or permanently, to facilitate that access,” Rowland said.

“These will become judgments about competing forms of technical risk to systems and devices, which are complex and can vary from circumstance to circumstance.”

The shadow minister also called on the government to engage further with industry and other stakeholders.

“This engagement should include a series of industry workshops to develop scenarios and stress test them against the processes and mechanisms set out in the Bill,” she said.

“This will help to develop a better understanding of where legitimate objectives encounter technical barriers, or when there is an absence of limiting factors, or adequate accountability, in circumstances where requests can be issued.”

In response to questions from ZDNet, Rowland declined to expand on how these workshops would work.

Under the proposed law, Australian government agencies would be able to issue three kinds of notices:

Technical Assistance Notices, which are compulsory notices for a communication provider to use an interception capability they already have;

Technical Capability Notices, which are compulsory notices for a communication provider to build a new interception capability, so that it can meet subsequent Technical Assistance Notices; and

Technical Assistance Requests, which have been described by experts as the most dangerous of all.

Submissions on the Bill to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security must be made by Friday October 12, with the first hearing set for Friday October 19.

Related Coverage

Australian industry and tech groups unite to fight encryption-busting Bill

The new mega-group has called on Canberra to ditch its push to force technology companies to help break into their own systems.

Encryption Bill sent to joint committee with three week submission window

Fresh from rushing the legislation into Parliament, the government will ram its legislation through the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

Home Affairs makes changes to encryption Bill without addressing main concerns

Services providers now have a defence to use if they are required to violate the law of another nation, and the public revenue protection clause has been removed.

Internet Architecture Board warns Australian encryption-busting laws could fragment the internet

Industry groups, associations, and people that know what they are talking about, line up to warn of drawbacks from Canberra’s proposed Assistance and Access Bill.

Australia’s anti-encryption law will merely relocate the backdoors: Expert

If the Assistance and Access Bill becomes law as it stands, it could affect ‘every website that is accessible from Australia’ with relatively few constraints in the government’s powers.

Five Eyes governments get even tougher on encryption

Official statements from the Five Country Ministerial meeting make it clear: Voluntarily build lawful access into encrypted messaging systems, or else. It’s not a good look.

5 tips to secure your supply chain from cyberattacks (TechRepublic)

It’s nearly impossible to secure supply chains from attacks like the alleged Chinese chip hack that was reported last week. But here are some tips to protect your company.

(Image: APH)

Source: https://bloghyped.com/dutton-frames-encryption-bill-debate-as-battle-between-protecting-silicon-valley-or-protecting-australians/