I sure hope US, Canada, UK, etc. are already for a Quantum Net China.
China is set to become the first nation in the world to launch a quantum communications satellite, which might make its data hacker-proof.
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Category: encryption – Page 53
“The individuals who do these types of attacks are well aware of the pressure points and pain points, economic-wise,” says Dr. John Hale, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Tulsa. “They know what they can extract, how much they can extract.
“They prey upon two things: an organization’s reliance on information systems and two, the common situation, where an organization is a little bit behind on backup procedures and policies to prevent these types of things. It really is easy pickings for the bad guys.”
Crypto ransomware is designed to encrypt data stored on the computer, making the data useless unless the user obtains the key to decrypt it. A message details the ransom, which is typically paid in digital currencies such as bitcoin. Locker ransomware locks the computer or device’s interface — save for the ability to interact with the hacker — and demands money to restore it.
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Steve Forbes sits across Brian Singer, a partner at William Blair, as Blair explains the potential of blockhain encryption to empower individuals. He also explains why credit card companies are beginning to embrace a technology that undermines their high fees.
I am glad that D. Whyte recognizes “If quantum computers are developed faster than anticipated, certification would mandate insecure modules, given the time to approve and implement new quantum resistant algorithms. Worse, it is conceivable that data encrypted by a certified module is more vulnerable than data encrypted by a non-certified module that has the option of using a quantum-safe encryption algorithm.”
Because many of us who are researching and developing in this space have seen the development pace accelerated this year and what was looking like we’re 10 years away is now looking like we’re less than 7 years.
Dr. William Whyte, Chief Scientist for Security Innovation, a cybersecurity provider and leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Awareness Training, will be presenting at the Fourth International Cryptographic Module Conference in Ottawa, Ontario.
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Privacy is practically a joke anymore.
A hacker known as “Peace” is selling what is reportedly account information from 117 million LinkedIn users. The stolen data is said to include email addresses and passwords, which a malicious party could use to gain access to other websites and accounts for which people used the same password.
LinkedIn says it has about 433 million members worldwide, so this data could represent 27% of its user base.
The hacker says the credentials were obtained during a LinkedIn data breach in 2012 that saw 6.5 million encrypted passwords posted online, according to Motherboard. But the leak now appears to be much larger than was thought at the time. Peace is selling the data for about $2,200 (5 bitcoin) on the Dark Web, the part of the internet accessible only with a special browser that masks user identities.
Making Holographic Apps more secured and efficient.
Since its birth, holograms have been extensively used to serve security systems and related purposes. The making of a hologram, dissecting it to pieces and again rejoining the blocks involves a steady orientation of lenses which encodes the information with depth perception that could be deciphered later according to requirement.
It’s hard to imagine a 21st century city running smooth without an immense use of holograms, small or big sized 2D cards with 3D engraved pictures that are present in credit cards, grocery objects, books, biomedical devices and in other objects requiring retrievable information to be stored.
In terms of concealing product information, these sticker based fancy stuffs were up to the mark, until technology escalated beyond imagination. Even a previously measured safe encryption suffered from threat and these tools became fragile. Researchers initialized various approaches to hit the safest and complex path, among which nanotechnology had an answer in store for them. A research team from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences had recently forced polarization to concise holograms, comprising of tiny light-polarization sensitive nanostructures to generate numerous ones depending upon the polarization configuration of light.
The question breaks down into two parts:
- For what public benefit? —and—
- No, it cannot be achieved in this way
Governments are in the business of regulating certain activities—hopefully in an effort to serve the public good. In the case of business methods and activities, their goal is to maintain an orderly marketplace; one that is fair, safe and conducive to economic growth.
But regulation that lacks a clear purpose or a reasonable detection and enforcement mechanism is folly. Such regulation risks making government seem arbitrary, punitive or ineffective.
«— This is money. It is not a promissory note, a metaphor, an analogy or an abstract representation of money in some account. It is the money itself. Unlike your national currency, it does not require an underlying asset or redemption guarantee.
Bitcoin is remarkably resistant to effective regulation because it is a fully distributed, peer-to-peer mechanism. There is no central set of books, no bank to subpoena, and no central committee to pressure (at least not anyone who can put the genie back into the bottle). In essence, there is no choke point or accountable administrative party.
Sure—it is possible to trace some transactions and legislate against ‘mixers’ and other anonymization methods—but there is no way to prevent a transaction before it occurs or to know the current distribution of assets. Bitcoin can exist as a printed QR code and it can be transmitted from a jail cell with a blinking flashlight. Sending bitcoin from Alice to Bob has no intermediary. Settlement requires only that one of the parties eventually has access to the Internet. But, there is no credit authority or central asset verification. [continue below image]…
If you are thinking of legislating against the use of Bitcoin, you might as well pass laws to ban the mating of feral cats or forbid water from seeping into underground basements. These things are beyond the domain of human geopolitics. You can try to shape the environment (e.g. offer incentives to cats and water levels), but you cannot stop sex or seepage.
Fortunately, Bitcoin is not a threat to governments—not even to spending or taxation. A gross misunderstanding of economics and sociology has led some nations to be suspicious of Bitcoin, but this improper perception is abating. Governments are gradually recognizing that Bitcoin presents more of an opportunity than a threat.
I have written more extensively on this issue:
Philip Raymond is co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association, MC for The Bitcoin Event in NY and board member for Lifeboat Foundation. This fall, he will teach Cryptocurrency and The Blockchain in Massachusetts.
Here in the Lifeboat Blog, I have the luxury of pontificating on existential, scientific and technical topics that beg for an audience—and sometimes—a pithy opinion. Regular Lifeboat readers know that I was recently named most viewed Bitcoin writer at Quora under a Nom de Plume.
Quora is not a typical Blog. It is an educational site. Questions and numerous answers form the basis of a crowd-sourced popularity contest. Readers can direct questions to specific experts or armchair analysts. A voting algorithm leads to the emergence of some very knowledgeable answers, even among laypersons and ‘armchair’ experts.
During the past few weeks, Quora readers asked me a litany of queries about Bitcoin and the blockchain, and so I am sharing selected Q&A here at Lifeboat. This is my professional field—and so, just as with Mr. Trump, I must resist an urge to be verbose or bombastic. My answers are not the shortest, but they are compact. Some employ metaphors, but they explain complex ideas across a broad audience.
As you browse some recent Bitcoin questions below, click a question for which you know the least. (Example: Do you know what the coming ‘halving event’ is about?). Leave a comment or question. I am interested in your opinion.
If aliens sent you an encrypted binary message, could you answer? René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, wants to hear from you.
Last month, Heller posed a hypothetical question as part of the #SETIDecryptChallenge: “Suppose a telescope on Earth receives a series of pulses from a fixed, unresolved source beyond the solar system,” he wrote. “It turns out the pulses carry a message.”
The encrypted message is a vast sea of 0’s and 1’s. You can see it here, but here’s a GIF for your convenience.
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My verdict will continue to be out on this version. Unless we truly see a QC environment where the full testing of Cryptography, infrastructure, etc. is tested then at best we’re only looking at a pseudo version of QC. Real QC is reached when the infrastructure fully can take advantage of QC not just one server or one platform means we have arrived on QC. So, I caution folks from over-hyping things because the backlash will be extremely costly and detrimental to many.
IBM has taken its quantum computing technology to the cloud to enable users to run experiments on an IBM quantum processor.
Big Blue has come a long way, baby. IBM announced it is making quantum computing available on the IBM Cloud to accelerate innovation in the field and find new applications for the technology.
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