Hillary Clinton will hold a lavish fundraiser Wednesday night at Jay-Z’s exclusive New York City nightclub The 40/40 Club, inviting well-heeled donors and attracting left-wing protesters outside the club.
Month: September 2015
L.A. Has Bloody Weekend as Murders Soar in 2015
19 people were shot last weekend in Los Angeles, and five were killed, as the city’s homicide rate continues to rise, despite a program instituted and championed by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti to reduce crime in the city.
Why Was the Pope’s Meeting with Kim Davis a Secret?
To many observers, it may seem strange that the Vatican would choose to keep a secret of what has been called “the most significant meeting” of the Pope’s entire trip to the United States: his 15-minute encounter with Kentucky County Clerk, Kim Davis. Why would the Church wish to hide such a symbolically important gesture from the public eye until after the Pope had returned to Rome? The meeting occurred on Thursday, September 24, and the news wasn’t released until Tuesday evening, September 29. Why the lag? One answer could be that Vatican officials were embarrassed about the meeting and didn’t want to make it look like the Pope was weighing in on the contentious issue of gay marriage and supporting a figure who was standing up for her religious rights against the Supreme Court, which had ruled in June that same-sex marriage was now the law of the land. If that were the case, however, the Vatican wouldn’t have released the news at all, not even after the Pope returned to Rome. If they were clever enough to keep it secret for nearly a week, they could have made sure it never got out. Moreover, though the Pope’s meeting with Davis
2nd Palo Alto Library Has Bedbugs; 3rd in Bay Area
A second library has closed in Palo Alto following the discovery of bedbugs there. It is the second bedbug-related closure in Palo Alto, and the third in the Bay Area, in the past week.
McCaskill Remarks ‘Somewhat Sarcastically’ That Hillary’s Server The ‘Only One’ Not Hacked By China
Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), a Hillary Clinton supporter remarked, “somewhat sarcastically, as an aside, I think her [Hillary’s] server is the only one that wasn’t hacked by the Chinese” on Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” McCaskill stated that a statement by House Majority Leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that Hillary Clinton’s numbers had dropped because of discoveries made by the Benghazi Select Committee “was a startling admission by the speaker-in-waiting. I think he forgot that, just because you’re on Fox News, doesn’t mean that the rest of the country’s not going to hear about it. And what he really did, Andrea, is lay out for the American people that this is a taxpayer-funded, political hit job, and the most disgusting thing about it is that it’s being done on the deaths of four brave Americans, and I think people should be outraged that this is now out in the open. We all believed that’s what this was. They’re not even going to finish their work, they say, until next year. Now what are we doing next year? Could it be that we’re electing a president next year? So, this is outrageous, and I hope that other people are upset as
Poachers Hunt Small Vaquita Porpoise to near-Extinction
The imminent extinction of the vaquitas, AKA the “Gulf of California porpoise” or “Cochito,” the smallest known cetacean, is due to poachers hunting another endangered fish, the totoaba, according to ABC 10 San Diego.
Beyond Bitcoin: How the Blockchain Can Power a New Generation of Enterprise Software
This is a guest post by Jesus Rodriguez.
Bitcoin has become one of the most intriguing and revolutionary technologies created in the last few years. From a functional standpoint, the cryptocurrency has challenged the most fundamental principles of the world’s financial systems by providing a decentralized, secured and trusted model to process financial transactions. To enable its magic, Bitcoin relies on an architecture powered by a groundbreaking technology known as the blockchain.
While bitcoin has clearly become the most important implementation, it is just one of many practical applications that can be powered by the blockchain. From the conceptual standpoint, the blockchain provides a series of capabilities that can change some of the well-established architectures in the enterprise digital world.
How can the blockchain redefine enterprise?
The decentralized, autonomous, trusted and secured capabilities of the blockchain can redefine the foundational patterns of enterprise applications. While the principles of the blockchain are well-understood patterns in enterprise solutions, until now we have lacked practical implementations that validate its functionality at an enterprise scale. The blockchain opens a new set of opportunities to enterprise scenarios that weren’t possible before. However, in order for blockchain solutions to be embraced in enterprise, they will have to develop a series of key capabilities to get past traditional IT compliance and regulatory practices.
What’s needed to adopt the blockchain in enterprise?
Despite its unique value, the process of adopting blockchain solutions in enterprise is far from trivial. Like many other technology trends, blockchain solutions will have to develop a series of enterprise-ready capabilities to be adopted in mainstream business scenarios. Those enterprise-ready capabilities are called to address many requirements in areas such as management, operational readiness, or compliance, which are essential to adopt solutions on different industries. The following list includes some of the key capabilities required to adopt the blockchain in mainstream enterprise scenarios.
- Development Platform: The blockchain is a very complex architecture modeled in terms of transactional exchanges. To mitigate that complexity, we need programming frameworks and languages that allow average developers to build general-purpose applications against the blockchain.
- Monitoring Tools: To be adopted in enterprise settings, the blockchain community should produce solutions that can actively monitor the health of a blockchain network and recover from unexpected failures. These capabilities will allow organizations to monitor the runtime behavior of blockchain solutions.
- Private Cloud Deployments: Facilitating the deployment of the blockchain in private cloud topologies using mainstream enterprise infrastructures is a key element to facilitate the wide adoption of blockchain solutions in the enterprise. In that sense, the blockchain should work seamlessly with technologies such as Docker, VMWare vCloud, Open Stack among other mainstream enterprise infrastructure platforms.
- Standards: As organizations start adopting blockchain solutions, the need to have standards will become increasingly relevant. Standards will facilitate the interoperability between different blockchain platforms while also enabling important security and compliance requirements of enterprise solutions.
- Interoperability with Well-Established Enterprise Platforms: Like any other enterprise software trend, blockchain solutions will be required to integrate with established enterprise platforms like databases, line of business systems, etc. Enabling that interoperability will be essential to power the adoption of blockchain solutions in the enterprise.
10 Enterprise Scenarios that can be Redefined by the Blockchain
Decentralized IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming one of the most important trends in modern enterprise software. While many IoT platforms are based on a centralized model in which a broker or hub control the interaction between devices, this model has proved to be impractical for many scenarios in which devices need to exchange data between themselves autonomously. That specific requirement has been the fundamental principle behind decentralized IoT platforms. Those decentralized models are fundamentally powered by a trusted ledger of exchanges between smart devices fundamental to power real-world IoT solutions.
The blockchain provides foundational capabilities of decentralized IoT platforms such as secured and trusted data exchange as well as record-keeping. In this type of IoT architecture, the blockchain will serve as the general ledger, keeping a trusted record of all the messages exchanged between smart devices in an IoT topology.
Keyless Signature
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been one of the fundamental technologies powering data signatures. PKI models rely on a central authority to stamp and validate signatures on a data payload. While PKI models have been incredibly successful, the dependency on a central authority presents serious limitations for large-scale scenarios and is also vulnerable to attacks involving quantum computation.
The characteristics of the blockchain can help to overcome some of the limitations of PKI models with a keyless security infrastructure (KSI). A KSI model uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash functions and the availability of a public ledger commonly referred to as a blockchain.
Data Archiving
Archiving historical data in a secure and trusted manner has been a permanent challenge of enterprise IT. Companies like EMC have become one of the most iconic enterprise software companies in history by providing robust storage and archiving solutions. More recently, cloud platform vendors such as Amazon have provided alternative data archiving solutions. However, in both cases, data archiving solutions rely on a centralized storage model, which has well-known limitations in enterprise scenarios in areas such as security and privacy.
Decentralized and autonomous data archives models, such as the ones provided by the blockchain, can be an interesting alternative to centralized data storage solutions. This model will eliminate the dependency on a centralized authority and will allow distributed and trusted storage across nodes in a blockchain network. More importantly, using the blockchain as a data archive will allow any nodes to validate the authenticity of the archived data without relying on central hub.
Decentralized B2B Auditing
Business-to-business (B2B) exchange models are one of the foundations of modern commerce. In those scenarios, transaction tracking, auditing and reconciliation processes are essential capabilities of B2B processes. Traditional B2B platforms enable these capabilities by providing centralized transaction tracking models that will be used by the different B2B endpoints to log relevant events of a specific transaction. These centralized tracking models have proved to be impractical to address many of the typical challenges of B2B transaction tracking processes in areas such as auditing and reconciliation.
Leveraging the blockchain as a decentralized, secured and trusted transaction ledger could be a more effective model to address the challenges of B2B transaction tracking solutions. Using the blockchain, each party in a B2B process could autonomously track the events related to a B2B transaction without the need to rely on a centralized authority. Additionally, the security capabilities of the blockchain will facilitate the implementation of more sophisticated reconciliation and auditing processes.
Legal Proof of Existence or Proof of Possession
Validating the existence or the possession of signed documents is an incredibly relevant element of legal solutions. The challenge of traditional document validation models is that they relied on central authorities for storing and validating the documents, which presents some obvious security challenges, but also becomes more difficult as the documents become older.
The blockchain provides an alternative model to proof-of-existence and possession of legal documents. By leveraging the blockchain, a user can simply store the signature and timestamp associated with a document in the blockchain and validate it at any point using the native blockchain mechanisms.
Distributed File Storage
Cloud file storage solutions such as Box, Dropbox or One Drive are becoming regular citizens of modern enterprise environments. Despite its popularity, cloud file storage solutions typically face challenges in areas such as security, compliance and privacy in order to be adopted in enterprise environments. Those concerns are all rooted behind the fact that enterprises need to trust a third-party cloud system with their confidential documents.
Security Trade Settlement
Central Security Depositaries (CSDs) have been an essential element of modern equity and bond trading. In the U.S. equity market, following frequent bottlenecks during the late 1960s in the settlement of securities trades, CSDs smoothed the post-trade process for transferring share ownership by eliminating the exchange of paper certificates and recording transactions in central, computerized book-entry systems. The international CSDs Euroclear and Cedel (now Clearstream) played a similar role in the Eurobond market from the 1970s onward.
The centralized nature of CSDs is essential to successful bond and equity trades. However, the settlement process via CSDs is incredibly expensive and slow, averaging two or three days per trade settlement.
The blockchain offers an interesting alternative to traditional CSDs as a decentralized ledger that can keep records of transactions without relying on a central authority. The query capabilities of the blockchain will allow the settlement of trades in minutes or even seconds and at a fraction of the cost of the current CSD solutions.
Anti-Counterfeiting
Counterfeiting remains as one of the biggest challenges in modern commerce. Segments like luxury goods, pharmaceutical or electronics are constantly affected by counterfeiting. As a result, the demand for anti-counterfeiting remains one of the hottest topics in the digital commerce world. Unfortunately, most solutions in the market require a trust in the third-party authority, which introduces a logical friction between merchants and consumers.
The decentralized and security capabilities of the blockchain can enable an interesting alternative to traditional anti-counterfeiting platforms. In that sense, we can envision a model in which brands, merchants and marketplaces are part of a blockchain network with nodes storing information to validate the authenticity of specific products. In this model, brands don’t have to trust a central authority with their product authenticity information and can rely on the security and decentralized trust models of the blockchain.
eGoverment
Governments all over the world are investing deep resources to digitize many of their existing processes. Many of these processes deal with sensitive information that require sophisticated levels of traceability, privacy and security. Inevitably, the digital collaboration process relies on trust on centralized authorities.
The blockchain capabilities provide a robust option to enable the digital collaboration between government agencies and citizens. In this model, different government agencies can store records in blockchain nodes so that it can be accessed and verified by other government parties and citizens in a secure and trusted way.
P2P Commerce
Traditional ecommerce business models are based on the presence of a centralized entity that control activities such as order processing, inventory management, catalog access, etc. In order to buy and sell goods, ecommerce marketplaces need access to sensitive user information such as credit card information, user profile data etc. This information often becomes the target of cybersecurity attacks and many other security and regulatory challenges.
The architecture of the blockchain can enable the first effective peer-to-peer (P2P) ecommerce network in which buyers and sellers can interact directly without the need of a central authority. The absence of a central marketplace eliminates many of the restrictions of ecommerce models such as fees, regulated transactions, etc.
Summary
The blockchain represents one of the most important advancements in computer science of the last few years. The ability to enable decentralized, secure, trusted and highly scalable architectures opens the door to a new group of enterprise software solutions on a large number of industries. Blockchain-powered solutions have the opportunity to challenge some of the fundamental architecture principles of enterprise solutions in areas such as security, data storage, trust, etc. Similar to Bitcoin, we should expect to see spectacular platforms in the enterprise software space powered by the blockchain.
The post Beyond Bitcoin: How the Blockchain Can Power a New Generation of Enterprise Software appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.
Artist Murdered in Oakland While Painting Non-Violence Mural
Mural artist Antonio Ramos was shot to death in broad daylight on Tuesday morning in West Oakland while working on a community art project.
Kerry Views Russian Bombing of Syria as ‘Opportunity’ For U.S.
Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry described Russian action in Syria as a potential “opportunity” for the United States, suggesting the Russians ought to follow President Obama’s agenda in Syria.
Dueling Pro- and Anti-Fracking Movies Debut Oct. 1
With faux-science video producer Josh Fox about to release his Gasworks video on Thursday, it appears his incendiary claims will get same-day competition from a new film called Gashoax by Phelim McAleer, the cinematographer who made Frack Nation.