Bitcoin And Crypto Investors: Avoid This New Cryptocurrency Like The Plague – Forbes

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have crashed in the face of the global market rout sparked by the spreading coronavirus.

But one new bitcoin-rival, created by a group of mostly unknown cryptocurrency developers last month and styling itself as "the world's first crypto backed by death," allows traders to bet on the coronavirus epidemicwith the token's value rising as more people fall ill or die.

The World Health Organization has said more than 70% of those infected with coronavirus in China ... [+] have recovered but the virus is still spreading around the world, bringing global stock markets and commodities, as well as bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies, to their knees.

Coronacoin, which is currently being priced at less than $0.01 according to its developer's website, will see its supply fall every two days based on the rate of new cases and the number of people the virus has killed.

There is a fixed supply of the coronavirus-fueled token based on the world's human population: just over 7.6 billion.

"Some people speculate a large portion of the supply will be burned due to the spread of the virus, so they invest," said Sunny Kemp, who was named as one of the developers of the morbid bitcoin-alternative by Reuters, adding: "There are currently active pandemic bonds issued by the World Health Organisation. How is that different?"

The coronacoin team currently counts seven developers, mostly in Europe, according to Reuters, with Kemp indicating more are about to come on board.

Coronacoin is being traded on the allegedly decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Saturn Network, with coronacoin making up almost 60% of its meager volume.

An investigation by cryptocurrency news and analysis website Decrypt found Saturn Network to fall well short of common standards and recommended against using it.

Coronacoin claims that as tokens are burnt when the number of people infected with the coronavirus ... [+] or killed by it rises means it is likely the token will increase in value.

The number of coronavirus infections worldwide is now more than 111,000, with about 3,890 deaths, however the spread of the virus appears to be slowing in China, where it originated.

Italy yesterday extended its coronavirus quarantine measures, which include a ban on public gatherings, to the entire country, while in the U.S. the number of confirmed cases now exceeds 500.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the threat of a pandemic is "very real."

Despite the virus spreading around the world in recent weeks, governments are working hard to contain and minimize it.

Coronacoin is a macabre gimmick, designed to make its developers a quick bucknot to serve as a long-term store of value.

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Bitcoin And Crypto Investors: Avoid This New Cryptocurrency Like The Plague - Forbes

Chinese Nationals Charged with Laundering More Than $100 Million in Cryptocurrency | Chief Investment Officer – Chief Investment Officer

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

Two Chinese nationals were charged by the US Justice Department with laundering more than $100 million worth of cryptocurrency that was part of more than $230 million hacked from a virtual currency exchange by North Korean co-conspirators.

According to an indictment unsealed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong were charged with money laundering conspiracy and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.

The hacking of virtual currency exchanges and related money laundering for the benefit of North Korean actors poses a grave threat to the security and integrity of the global financial system, US Attorney Timothy Shea said in a statement.

Nearly $101 million was laundered through hundreds of automated cryptocurrency transactions in order to prevent law enforcement from tracing the funds.

According to the legal complaint against Yinyin and Jiadong, in 2018, an employee of the exchange communicated with a potential client via email. While communicating with the potential client, the employee unwittingly downloaded malware that attacked the exchange. The malware provided remote access to the exchange and unauthorized access to private keys controlling wallets to seven virtual currencies.

Yinyin and Jiadong engaged in nearly $101 million in virtual currency transactions, which primarily consisted of their exchange of virtual currency traceable to the hack of the exchange, the complaint said. The two allegedly converted the virtual currency into fiat currency and transferred it to customers for a fee. The funds were laundered through hundreds of automated cryptocurrency transactions aimed at preventing law enforcement from tracing the funds.

The North Korean co-conspirators circumvented multiple virtual currency exchanges controls by submitting doctored photographs and falsified identification documentation, according to the complaint. A portion of the laundered funds was used to pay for infrastructure used in North Korean hacking campaigns against the financial industry.

North Korea continues to attack the growing worldwide ecosystem of virtual currency as a means to bypass the sanctions imposed on it by the United States and the United Nations Security Council, IRS-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Chief Don Fort said.

The complaint also alleges that the North Korean co-conspirators are tied to the theft of approximately $48.5 million worth of virtual currency from a South Korea-based virtual currency exchange in November. As with the prior theft, they allegedly laundered the stolen funds through hundreds of automated transactions and submitted doctored photographs and falsified identification documentation.

The civil forfeiture complaint specifically names 113 virtual currency accounts and addresses that were used by the two defendants and unnamed co-conspirators to launder the funds. The forfeiture complaint seeks to recover the funds, a portion of which has already been seized.

The US Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control also imposed sanctions on Yinyin and Jiadong for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, a malicious cyber-enabled activity.

View: Why it’s better for RBI to just wait and watch on cryptocurrency – Economic Times

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

By Ateesh TankhaImagine an Indian hotel chain thats mortally afraid of the coronavirus. No cases have yet been reported at any of its properties, but, lacking sufficient information and medical infrastructure, the chain instructs its properties to cancel all guest bookings in line with what hotels abroad have done. A set of disgruntled guests take the hotel to court, claiming that the chain has taken disproportionate action.

Should the law rule be in favour of the guests because the hotel lacks empirical evidence that proves that the properties would have suffered reputational or other damage if the bookings had not been cancelled? A March 4 Supreme Court judgement overturning an earlier 2018 Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ruling on cryptocurrencies seems to suggest as much.

In April 2018, after five years of unregulated trading in cryptocurrencies, RBI issued a ruling to its member banks not to deal in virtual currencies (VCs) or provide services for facilitating any person or entity in dealing with or settling VCs.

Subsequently, a governmental committee urged GoI to ban and criminalise the use of unofficial virtual currencies in India. The reasons for this are neither so outrageous nor so far-fetched.

There are two parts to a cryptocurrency. First, theres the distributed ledger technology (DLT), like blockchain, thats a system of replicating, sharing and synchronising digital data personal details, transactions, etc without the need for a centralised authority or trusted service provider. The many advantages of this technology relate to activities ranging from the efficient collection and authentication of KYC (know your customer) and batch-processing micro-payments, to expediting cross-border payments and sharing defaulter data.

In short, DLT can make many processes in the world of payments and financial services cheaper, faster and more reliable. But then, theres the token, the actual virtual currency. As a store of value and as a medium of exchange, there are a few challenges that exist.

The least of these relates to the creation of technology integration and transaction processing speed. Over time, and with enough investment and innovation, these issues will be overcome. Far greater concerns exist in two principal areas fraud, and money laundering and illegal transactions.

Consumers have been the victims of virtual currency fraud for some time now. Let alone the 2018 Gain Bitcoin scam that defrauded the public of Rs 2,000 crore, there have been scams like OneCoin that make the former look like loose change. Add to this the fact that even legitimate exchanges like Bitpoint and Binance have had tens of millions of dollars stolen by cybercriminals. It is estimated that $4.2 billion was stolen from cryptocurrency users and exchanges in 2019. Its no wonder that RBI wishes to err on the side of caution.

An even greater regulatory and oversight challenge, however, exists when it comes to controlling transactions related to money-laundering and other nefarious activities.

Early on in the cryptocurrency saga in the US, it quickly became apparent that VCs were mainly used for completing transactions related to narcotics. Similarly, thanks to the Dark Web, many regulators have banned, or severely restricted, the use of VCs to control activities like terrorist financing, sanction circumvention, and other forms of illegal trafficking.

Which brings us back to RBI. As the official entity that oversees the health of the financial system in India, it is only to be expected that it will take a more conservative approach to enabling and regulating something as protean as cryptocurrency.

Critics complain that RBI does not fully understand the technology, or the power of VCs. This may be true. They also say that the purpose of RBI is to build a regulatory infrastructure around technology so that consumers are not defrauded.

This is true, but easier said than done. The recent debacles with both public and private sector banks should serve as cautionary tales for those advocating less stringent oversight.

And until RBI is comfortable with a way forward, it should not need to show empirical evidence of how its member banks have suffered any loss or adverse effect directly or indirectly on account of enabling VC transactions. There is sufficient global evidence and precedence for the stance taken by RBI.

As with the coronavirus, if you dont know what you dont know, and you are still likely to be held liable for an outbreak, enforcing a quarantine may be the best way to wait and watch developments.

(The writer is former head, partnerships and Citi merchant service, Citibank, US)

Will Japan have a National Cryptocurrency? – Asia Crypto Today

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

Countries around the world are increasingly formulating or finalising plans to launch a national cryptocurrency. From China to Palestine, nations are seeing the benefits of digital currencies.

One country that had been surprisingly slow in its steps towards a national cryptocurrency in Japan. Often seen as the home of cryptocurrencies, with a population that is crypto-friendly and a decent regulatory framework in place, it would seem that this would be the leading nation in future nation based crypto.

Yet, since the past few months, Japan has been relatively quiet on the national cryptocurrency front. However, with Asian rivals China increasing the pace of its digital RMB plans which will be implemented by the Peoples Bank of China, Japan has looked to counter it.

The Bank of Japan is leading the talks, with meetings held in January between them and the Ministry of Finance (MOF), and Financial Services Agency (FSA). Notable names were in attendance. These include Ryozo Himino, FSA vice-minister for international affairs, Yoshiki Takeuchi, vice-minister of finance for international affairs, and Shinichi Uchida, BOJ executive director for international affairs.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has expressed the intentions of the Bank in its central bank digital currency (CBDC) plans but said there was not a huge motivation or need currently:

We are advancing research and study from the technical and legal perspectives so that we will be able to move in an appropriate way when there is a growing need.

Overall, it would appear that Japan is joining an ever-growing list of nations and their central bans looking to add a central bank digital currency to their ecology.

The Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Central Bank of Sweden, Canada and the Swiss National Bank have all announced their crypto intentions alongside Japan after signing a group partnership with the Bank of International Settlement.

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Will Japan have a National Cryptocurrency? - Asia Crypto Today

Lloyd’s syndicate partners with cryptocurrency broker to protect online wallets – Insurance Times

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

Lloyds syndicate Atrium has partnered with Welsh broker Coincover to launch a new liability product that protects cryptocurrency held in online wallets.

The policy, which offers flexible limits from 1,000 upwards, aims to protect individuals against losses arising from the theft of cryptocurrency or other malicious hacks on virtual wallets.

The new product is backed by a panel of Lloyds insurers, which are all members of the markets Product Innovation Facility (PIF). This includes TMK and Markel, to name a few.

Prospect Insurance Brokers was also involved in the development of the policy.

Matthew Greaves, underwriter at Atrium, said: There is a growing demand for insurance that can protect cryptocurrency as it becomes increasingly popular.

It is a testament to Lloyds that the market has put together an innovative solution to mitigate these new risks and protect against theft from physical as well as online vaults thereby providing customers with piece of mind that their assets are safe.

The liability insurance policy uses a dynamic limit that will increase or decrease in line with the price changes of crypto assets this means that policyholders will always be indemnified for the underlying value of their asset, even if this fluctuates over the policy period.

David Janczewski, chief executive at Coincover, described the product as a unique and timely solution.

He continued: As the crypto asset market heats up again at the start of 2020, a new wave of crypto-curious customers are standing by at the ready to jump in, having previously been put off by the lack of adequate protection against theft and loss.

With this innovative new policy, we can remove these barriers and broaden the appeal of crypto. It represents another step forward in enabling cryptocurrency adoption.

Trevor Maynard, head of innovation at Lloyds, added: As more money flows into the crypto asset market, losses from hacks are on the rise.

Nevertheless, cryptocurrency companies have found ways to protect their digital assets from theft and, by working closely with Lloyds underwriters, to insure losses that do slip through the net.

This liability product marks the second new insurance product to be backed by PIF members.

Last September, PIF members supported the launch of a profit protection policy for hotels this uses an event-based triggered.

Coincover has received significant support from the Development Bank of Wales, as well as Welsh angel investors.

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Lloyd's syndicate partners with cryptocurrency broker to protect online wallets - Insurance Times

Chinese nationals sanctioned and charged with laundering over $100 million in cryptocurrency from hacked exchange – Lexology

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

On March 2, the U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions pursuant to Executive Orders 13694, 13757, and 13722 against two Chinese nationals for allegedly laundering over $100 million in stolen cryptocurrency connected to a North Korean state-sponsored cyber group that hacked cryptocurrency exchanges in 2018. According to OFAC, the two individuals materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, a malicious cyber-enabled activity or in support of the North Korean cyber group, which was designated by OFAC last September (covered by InfoBytes here). OFAC stated that it closely coordinated its action with the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia and the Internal Revenue Services Criminal Investigation Division. As a result of the sanctions, all property and interests in property of these individuals that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to OFAC. OFAC further noted that its regulations generally prohibit all dealings by U.S. persons or within the United States (including transactions transiting the United States) that involve any property or interests in property of blocked or designated persons, and warned foreign financial institutions that knowingly facilitating significant transactions or providing significant financial services to the designated individuals may subject them to U.S. correspondent account or payable-through sanctions.

On the same day, the DOJ unsealed a two-count indictment against the two individuals, charging them with money laundering conspiracy and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The indictment claims that the individuals converted virtual currency traceable to the hack of a cryptocurrency exchange into fiat currency or prepaid Apple iTunes gift cards through accounts in various exchanges linked to Chinese banks and then transferred the currency or gift cards to customers for a fee. According to the indictment, neither individual was registered as a money transmitting business with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is a federal felony offense. The complaint seeks forfeiture of 113 virtual currency accounts belonging to the individuals.

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Chinese nationals sanctioned and charged with laundering over $100 million in cryptocurrency from hacked exchange - Lexology

Will We See Real Surveillance Reform This Week? – Reason

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

By the end of the week, Congress is supposed to decide whether it will renew some federal surveillance regulations, reform them, or let them expire.Many legislators would probably prefer either to kick the can down the road with another temporary renewal or to pass a modest set of reforms. But several members of Congress are opposed to ketting the status quo continueenough members, in fact, that we may well see reductions in the feds' power to secretly collect data about Americans without our knowledge, as well as more oversight over the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.

The USA Freedom Act expires on Sunday. Passed after Edward Snowden exposed the ways the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly collecting telephone and internet metadata of millions of Americans, the act both retroactively authorized the data collection and added some stricter rules to the process. Privacy and civil rightsfocused lawmakers and activists have been trying since then to rein in domestic surveillance even further. Sen. Rand Paul (RKy.) has been using his positive relationship with President Donald Trumpand the president's anger at the surveillance of his campaign, which ultimately led to a failed impeachment attemptto push for reforms.

The Hill reported on Sunday that Paul is, as he has been in the past, the loudest voice stopping Congress from quietly keeping things the way they are:

Paul says he won't support a short-term extension and appeared skeptical that he would back a larger deal that paired a USA Freedom extension with reforms to FISA, though he added that he could support some of the surveillance reforms if they get standalone votes, as amendments, for example.

He's also pushing for an amendment vote to prohibit FISA warrants from being used against American citizens and to prohibit information obtained in the FISA courts from being used against a U.S. citizen in domestic courts.

"I'm not for any extension. I'm for fixing it.I'll vote no on any extension," Paul said.

He's not alone among Republicans in the Senate, and he's got plenty of support from Democrats in the House as well, to require that there be changes. Rep. Doug Collins (RGa.) went on Fox Business yesterday to say that there weren't enough votes in the Democratic-controlled Congress to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act unless there were reforms.

Reform-minded members of Congress aren't focused entirely on the same reforms. The Democrats want to make sure that the records collecting program is officially dead. (NSA has unofficially stopped doing it, but the authorization still exists.) Paul and some other Republicans are using the problemswith the warrants used to wiretap former Trump aide Carter Page to call for more independent oversight to review and advise the FISA court on warrants. Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) prefer renewal without changes.

Nothing in these reforms is likely to have prevented what had happened with Page, since it's not the USA Freedom Act's authorities that were used to snoop on him. And based on the angry reaction of the FISA Court's judges when they found out the FBI had misled them in parts of the warrant applicationand their decision to call for an independent reviewerit's not clear additional oversight of the court itself would have stopped what happened with Page. The problems seemed to have originated from within the FBI itself.

But this is probably the only way to get Trump to care about restraining the use of secret surveillance on the rest of us. That is surely why Paul is hammering on about what happened to Page and Trump.

Paul's proposed reforms are probably a bridge too far to actually pass, but it's an admirable effort. Paul seems unlikely to be able to convince Congress to eliminate domestic FISA warrants entirely. But just as the USA Freedom Act was a compromise reform forced in part due to Paul's stubborn refusal to shut up about Americans' rights after Snowden's reveal, his prominent status in Trump World will guarantee that at least the broadest reforms will be considered.

But will they actually be debated? That's not so clear. There was already an aborted effort to attach reauthorization to a coronavirus emergency bill last week. With a deadline looming, there's sure to be an effort to roll reforms of some sort into other must-pass legislation. It's just not clear as yet how far those reforms will go.

Opinion: Berkeley reaches out to Puerto Rico, part of its tradition of helping others – Berkeleyside

Posted on March 11, 2020 by admin

Buffeted by hurricanes, earthquakes, a hostile White House and decades of exploitation and ecological destruction, many view Puerto Rico as an ongoing disaster. Some, however, see Puerto Ricos plight as an opportunity. Tired of waiting for solutions from the top down, a nascent Puerto Rican grassroots movement supported by widespread social unrest is attempting to change its society and economy from the bottom up and Berkeley is lending a helping hand.

Instead of waiting for disaster assistance that never comes, this new generation of Puerto Ricans is looking for ways to work together and build their own independent, sustainable future. Hurricane Maria was the catalyst that ignited the cooperative grassroots movement. Maria changed everything island residents constantly recount.

The devastating storm showed clearly that the emperor had no clothes, and that Puerto Ricans were on their own with regard to extreme vulnerability to climate change, food insecurity (90% of its food is imported) and economic recovery.

Realizing they could not wait for government action, Puerto Ricans reacted to events by creating food kitchens, emergency search groups and shelters. These actions helped raise consciousness about the strength and need for grassroots community action. Many of these operations became ongoing activities and many people have chosen to stay on the island and contribute to the back to the land movement to produce more healthy food locally.

Berkeley residents have been involved in supporting these grassroots community groups, just as they have been throughout the decades on trips to Cuba, South Africa, and Vietnam. Green Cities Fund, established in 2005 by myself and my journalist wife TT Nhu (known as Nhu) is supporting projects in the new Puerto Rico.

Soon (when the coronavirus subsides) a team of chef graduates of Chez Panisse including Dominica Saloman and Melissa Fernandez, and restaurateur, chef, winemaker and author Narsai David will join organic Farmer Al Courchesne, owner of Frog Hollow Farm (a major Chez Panisse supplier), and others on a solidarity tour of Puerto Rico in support of its local organic sustainable food movement Local street artist Anthony Holdsworth, whose son is building microgrids in Puerto Rico to enable farms and villages to become energy independent, plans to join the group to record the journey. A similar tour to Cuba in 2012 led to innovative improvements in its cuisine.

These people-to-people efforts have long been part of The Republic of Berkeleys DNA as its citizens and City Council have a long tradition of taking political action on matters far beyond Berkeleys borders which affect the nation and the world. The Free Speech movement began in Berkeley and Berkeley resident Bob Baldock was one of the few U.S. citizens to participate in the Cuban Revolution as a combatant in Fidel Castros unit based in the Sierra Maestra in 1958. The man who released the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, and, filmmaker Judith Ehrlich, whose Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America inspired Edward Snowden, are also part of this Berkeley tradition.

In 1972, Nhu and I assisted UNICEFs expansion into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam and, in 1975, when thousands of Vietnamese orphans arrived in the U.S. at the end of the war, Nhu and her friends discovered that many were not orphans and had families searching for them. This resulted in a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government and adoption agencies, which ultimately resulted in many childrens return to their Vietnamese families in the United States. Daughter from Danang, a documentary on one of the orphans by Berkeley filmmaker Gail Dolgin was voted best documentary at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar.

Our work has also extended to Afghanistan, where we established Parwaz, the first Afghan-run microlending organization. Much earlier, in 1961, I had the privilege of helping to train, at U.C. Berkeley, the first group of Peace Corps volunteers and, in 1966 I worked with plastic and reconstructive surgeon Arthur Barsky, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, to establish a hospital in Vietnam to treat war-injured children. Nhu and I recently visited the hospital on the 50th anniversary of its official founding (having operated for several years in a Saigon apartment house liberated from the American embassy). It was a journalist, Martha Gellhorn, who alerted me to the plight of children in Vietnam, and an article in the New York Times which brought our attention to the new movement in Puerto Rico.

Berkeley resident Eric Leenson, co-founder of Progressive Assets Management the first socially responsible investment fund, is spearheading Green Cities Fund work in Puerto Rico. In 2019, Eric helped organize the first national gathering of the new grassroots cooperative organizations. Over 240 people from 130 organizations, 25 of whom were non-island experts from seven regional countries, attended in a truly multigenerational environment to address a variety of key topics including agroecology, sustainable tourism, and the construction of a stronger cooperative movement.

The Christopher Reynolds Foundation funded the gathering and also donated an Oggun, a small, inexpensive, easy-to-fix tractor suitable for small organic farms. The design for the tractor is open source, most of the parts can be manufactured locally, and it can be assembled in a day by a mechanic. It will soon be manufactured in Puerto Rico.

California is also contributing to survival and sustainability in Puerto Rico through innovative earthquake-proof superadobe housing developed by the California Institute of Earth Architecture (CalEarth) Much of the housing in Puerto Rico is substandard and unable to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. The well-insulated superadobe earthquake-proof construction is easily built from earth and other local materials. Heres a local TV story on project.

The Green Cities group soon visiting Puerto Rico will meet with innovative Puerto Rican chefs who are substituting local foods into the islands cuisine. The group will also visit the farms producing these foods. They will meet with the organizers of the grassroots movement and also visit Plenitud, an organization devoted to the grassroots rebuilding of communities and making them sustainable through agriculture, home and infrastructure rebuilding, community organization and energy independence. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of an ongoing program of exchange and assistance.

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Opinion: Berkeley reaches out to Puerto Rico, part of its tradition of helping others - Berkeleyside

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very – The Register

Posted on March 10, 2020 by admin

Column How well does Intel sleep? It's just rounded off a record year with a record quarter, turning silicon into greenbacks more efficiently than ever, redeeming recent wobbles in the data centre market and missteps in fabrication with double-digit growth.

The company should be slumbering with all the unworried ease of Scrooge McDuck on a mattress stuffed with thousand-dollar bills. Yet the wake-up packet of unease should be pinging its management port with some insistence right now.

Intel remains a one-trick pony, entirely dependent on the x86 ISA. It has no game in GPUs, it is tuning out of its 5G interests, it has long handed over handsets to Arm. It has memory, it has Wi-Fi, it has wired networking, but compared to the cash cows of edge and central x86, these are barely cash coypu.

One barbarian is at the gates with a refurbished siege engine. AMD has finally got its architectural, process node and marketing acts together and is making up for lost time while Intel is still recalibrating from 10nm disappointment. Yet this is familiar turf for Intel, which remains a very formidable machine with enormous resources and flexibility. When AMD still had its own chip fabs a decade or so ago and was having its own process woes, it suffered: Intel is making record profits. It knows how to sell chips on its own turf. It'll have some bumps getting out of 10nm and the next couple of years may not be quite such record-breakers, but x86 remains its to lose.

The smaller, nimbler and more exciting competitor is going to be harder to defend against in the long term. As it prepares to celebrate the 10th year since its inception, RISC-V is showing the most dangerous trait in any competitor, the ability to redefine the ecosystem.

RISC-V has its conceptual roots in 1980s Berkeley, in part as a direct reaction to the trend towards increasing CPU complexity exemplified by Intel's development of the 8080 via the 8086 into the 80386 during the same epoch. That added instruction set features in silicon as Moore's Law made more transistors affordable; RISC went the other way, keeping the core features small and using Moore's Law to speed them up.

RISC-V, as a collaborative foundation of semiconductor companies, was formed in 2015.

As an architecture, it came into being in 2010, again at Berkeley, in the Parallel Computing Laboratory funded oh, the irony by Microsoft and Intel. It absorbed all the lessons of the previous 30 years, not just architecturally but in how the industry itself worked. The RISC idea saw some success among traditional processor companies, but the big winner was the British upstart Arm technically clever and with what proved a killer processing power per watt advantage, but which really shone because it was licensed, not made. Manufacturers bought the design, not the chip, and mixed it in with their own circuitry. Couldn't do that with Intel.

RISC-V takes that further. The obvious advantage over Arm is that RISC-V's instruction set architecture is open source; you can just use it as you wish without paying royalties. But like open-source software, the fact its free is misleading. You can buy a feature phone with an Arm-based chip in it for a tenner: whatever pennies of that go in CPU licensing don't matter. What RISC-V has that Arm doesn't is extensibility. If you need to add features in the instruction set, go ahead. If you need to tune for very low power or very high throughput, you can.

Even that wouldn't be much of an advantage by itself. Designing architectural innovations in silicon is like architecture in brick; easy enough on paper, but until you build the bugger you can't be sure it won't fall down. The process of checking a design for reliable operation is called verification, and when you have a billion-transistor-class CPU with near-infinite permutations of state you only get to verify as much as you can afford: nowhere close to the whole thing. ARM, Intel, AMD, IBM et al spend a lot of time and money in verification so they can sell a complete design with a plausible "Trust us" stamp on it. If you're building your own RISC-V design and can't afford equivalent verification, how do you trust yourself?

The good news for the RISC-V ecosystem is that verification tools are appearing that automate the process as far as possible. Open source means the majority of your CPU design has been very well tested; your innovations live in an understood and exercised environment, just as open-source software has produced an exceptionally stable yet extensible environment. Conversely, the "Trust us" stamp is looking quite tarnished. Heart Bleed, Spectre and the very latest Intel Management Engine vulnerability are all either signs of verification failure or, even worse, problems that came out during verification but were too expensive to fix and too dangerous to admit. That's why buildings fall down.

So, at the same time as the monolithic approach to CPU design is looking the most vulnerable, the RISC-V approach is getting the same momentum as open source software did in the Noughties. It's in supercomputers. It's in IoT. Samsung is making it. The tools are appearing, the people are learning it, it's becoming the right answer to a lot of questions.

To be fair, Intel shouldn't be losing as much sleep over RISC-V as Arm, which now runs the risk of being another of SoftBank's brilliantly timed investments. Yet the openness and expanding ecosystem of RISC-V has the potential as no other competitor does of restricting Intel's home-turf advantage, much as Microsoft lost the web and mobile to open-source software based on common architectural ideas.

It doesn't matter how good a dinosaur you are if your environment changes. That's what RISC-V represents.

Sponsored: Quit your addiction to storage

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Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very - The Register

GitHub’s Plan to Freeze Your Code for Thousands of Years – thenewstack.io

Posted on March 10, 2020 by admin

Recently I discovered some computer code Id written will outlive me for many centuries. A copy of it has been stored in a chilly cave in the Arctic Circle.

Its part of a fascinating project by GitHub, the 2020 Arctic Vault program, which brings modern technologies into a surprisingly primitive environment to deliver an unexpected honor for a wide swath of the 100 million code repositories currently hosted on GitHubs servers, by archiving of all this material in perpetuity in an exotic archipelago in Norway, near the northernmost town in the world.

GitHubs vice president of special projects, Thomas Dohmke, tells news.com.au that GitHub is uniquely positioned for the archival, and has the responsibility to protect and preserve the collaborative work of millions of developers around the world. On its webpage for the project, GitHub strikes a similarly grand tone, calling open source software a hidden cornerstone of modern civilization, and the shared heritage of all humanity.

We will protect this priceless knowledge by storing multiple copies, on an ongoing basis, across various data formats and locations, he said.

On a visit, GitHubs CEO Nat Friedman described the storage location, a decommissioned coal mine, as more mine-y and rustic and raw-hole-in-the-rock than I thought it would be, according to a recent article in Bloomberg. The news service goes on to note that, to Friedman, its a natural next step. Open source software, in his view, is one of the great achievements of our species, up there with the masterpieces of literature and fine art.

And its not the only priceless knowledge being stored in this remote location. According to Bloomberg,the other shelves in the mine include Vatican archives, Italian movies, Brazilian land registry records, and the recipe for a certain burger chains special sauce.

But whats the rationale for this massive effort? The projects page cites the threat of code being abandoned, forgotten, or lost. Worse yet, how would the code be otherwise saved in case of a global catastrophe?

There exists a range of possible futures in which working modern computers exist, but their software has largely been lost to bit rot. The GitHub Archive Program will include much longer-term media to address the risk of data loss over time, the site notes.

Of course, the code repository services has also given some thought to how the future might use our code. There is a long history of lost technologies from which the world would have benefited, as well as abandoned technologies which found unexpected new uses, explains the project web page. It is easy to envision a future in which todays software is seen as a quaint and long-forgotten irrelevancy until an unexpected need for it arises.

Future historians might see the significance in our age of open source ubiquity, volunteer communities, and Moores Law.

Which code blocks make the cut? According to GitHub: The archive will include every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on Nov. 13 and 02/02/2020, every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot (02/02/2019 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars. Plus, gh-pages for any repository that meets the aforementioned criteria.

The Norwegian data-storing company Piql, whose custom film and archiving technologies will allow the project to store terabytes of data for over 1,000 years, brags that code is now headed into the gold standard of long-term data storage.

But besides offering vault storage services, Piql also offers a unique form of data digitization. Piql is storing the code on hundreds of reels of film made from polyester and silver halide. Bloomberg points out theyre coated with an iron oxide powder for added Armageddon-resistance. Each of its microfilm-like frames holds over 8.8 million pixels. Piql explains that its method involves converting 1s and 0s into QR code. No electricity or other human intervention is needed as the climatic conditions in the Arctic are ideal for long-term archival of film, explained a Piql web page.

By using a self-contained and technology-independent storage medium, future generations will be able to read back the information, according to Piql. The project also includes instructions on how to unpack and read the code.

Bloomberg even notes that theres a treaty in place which keeps Svalbard neutral in times of war. Because its all stored on offline film reels, GitHub doesnt have to worry about power outages. An added layer of security comes from its remote location. One GitHub video points out that the Svalbard archipelago is home to the northern-most town in the world as well as thousands of polar bears. The videos description notes that though its called the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, its actually closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle.

Its been fun to watch the reactions to GitHubs video. The future will be amazed by my JavaScript Calculator, joked one comment.

Others couldnt resist commenting on the Arctic location. (Now my code can freeze before it even gets run) Another naysayer even quipped, When your code is so bad that you need to bury it under the permafrost

GitHubs FAQ says the company plans to re-evaluate the program (and its storage medium) every five years at which point itll decide whether to take another snapshot.

And if youre curious what its like in a Svalbard mine, a nearby coal mine is offering tours. Most of Svalbards old Norwegian and Russian coal mines have shut down, explains Bloomberg, so locals have rebranded their vast acres of permafrost as an attraction to scientists, doomsday preppers, and scientist doomsday preppers.

Link:
GitHub's Plan to Freeze Your Code for Thousands of Years - thenewstack.io