IBM and Raytheon Technologies have formed a partnership in order to establish advanced artificial intelligence, cryptographic and quantum solutions for the aerospace, defence and intelligence industries.

The partnership agreement will also include the federal government, as part of a strategic collaboration.

According to the official announcement, AI and quantum technologies give aerospace and government customers the ability to design systems in a faster manner and better secures their communications networks.

IBM was an early investor in cryptography and, 50 years later, it is following suit with blockchain technology.

By combining IBMs breakthrough commercial research with Raytheon Technologies own research, plus aerospace and defence expertise, the companies will be able to crack once-unsolvable challenges.

Dario Gil, senior vice president of IBM and director of Research, said the rapid advancement of quantum computing and its exponential capabilities have spawned one of the greatest technological races in recent history one that demands unprecedented agility and speed.

Our new collaboration with Raytheon Technologies will be a catalyst in advancing these state-of-the-art technologies combining their expertise in aerospace, defence and intelligence with IBMs next-generation technologies to make discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever, he said.

Together with AI and quantum, the companies will jointly research and develop advanced cryptographic technologies that lie at the heart of some of the toughest problems faced by the aerospace industry and government agencies.

Mark E Russell, Raytheon Technologies chief technology officer, stressed that encrypted communications were at risk of becoming too exposed.

Take something as fundamental as encrypted communications. As computing and quantum technologies advance, existing cybersecurity and cryptography methods are at risk of becoming vulnerable, he said.

IBM and Raytheon Technologies will now be able to collaboratively help customers maintain secure communications and defend their networks better than previously possible.

Both companies said they would be building a technical collaboration team to quickly insert IBMs commercial technologies into active aerospace, crypto, defence and intelligence programs.

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IBM partners Raytheon Technologies on AI and cryptography - Yahoo Finance

PROSPER, Texas, Oct. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Is Applied cryptography your passion? Then, you've come to the right place, Encryption Consulting has something for you. Encryption consulting is hosting the first ever Encryption Consulting Virtual Conference 2021 on Nov 3rd and 4th, 2021. #ECconference2021

Encryption Consulting's Virtual Conference 2021 will provide you with an opportunity to keep up with widespread changes in cryptography, PKI, Encryption, Data protection, Cloud key management, and other cryptography-related topics. The event is a unique, technical event that brings together cyber security leaders worldwide.

There will be 30 minute presentations from 18 experts at leading global companies such as Thales, Protigrity, Entrust, Comforte, DigiCert, AppviewX, Primekey, Utimaco, FutureX, Fortanix, Akeyless, and many other reputed and leading organizations. There will also be a live Q&A session after the presentation on the virtual conference day.

Hurry up and register for your favorite topic(s).

We also have hands-on lab sessions scheduled on Nov 3rd and 4th, 2021 for our code signing tool (CodeSign Secure 3.0) and deploying a PKI on an AWS environment.

For information about the speakers, schedule, and conference,

visit http://www.encryptionconsulting.com/ecconf/

Media contact: Ashleigh Nalley, ashleigh@encryptionconsulting.com

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/encryption-consulting-announces-their-first-ever-virtual-conference--encryption-consulting-virtual-conference-2021-301396178.html

SOURCE Encryption Consulting

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The term decentralized finance, or DeFi, goes back to a Telegram chat in 2018. Thats when a group of software developers and entrepreneurs were trying to decide what to call their movement of new-breed financial services that would be automated, built on a blockchain, and capable of stripping out traditional banks.

Three years later and DeFi is big business. A user with a crypto wallet can trade digital assets, get loans, or take out insurance, among many other things. Some $90 billion of collateral is locked up in these services, and more than 10 million people have downloaded MetaMask, one of the most popular digital wallets used to open up access to these networks.

The roots of decentralized finance come from the 2008 bitcoin whitepaper that set out the framework for a novel system for digital cash; those creation exploded into something bigger when Ethereum was invented a few years later. Bitcoin wanted to be peer-to-peer money, Camila Russo, founder of the crypto news service The Defiant, wrote in her book The Infinite Machine. Etherum wanted to be peer-to-peer everything.

DeFi is an amalgam of cryptography, finance, and software development, and it tends to be shrouded with its own lexicon and jargon. Lets take it one piece at a time.

One of the core tenants of decentralized finance is that its, well, decentralized. Take bitcoin, for example: The original crypto asset is basically a ledger (its blockchain) that is decentralized because the transactions are recorded in databases on many different computers. That single record (stored across many databases) is secured with cryptography and the computers keep tabs on each other to make sure it hasnt been tampered with.

Decentralization is part of what makes bitcoin hard to kill. No single party is in charge, so its nearly impossible for someone to go rogue and change the rules that govern the virtual coin. Likewise, even if a government manages to prevent a bunch of computers from supporting bitcoin, the digital asset can continue functioning because other computers on the network retain a full record of transactions and can carry on running the show.

Story continues

DeFi takes this concept a step further. Decentralized exchanges and lending systems use blockchains like the Ethereum network, which was proposed by Canadian-Russian programmer Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Whereas the bitcoin blockchain was designed to keep track of bitcoin transactions, Ethereums blockchain was created to host programs. Think of Ethereum as a decentralized computer that software developers can make applications (dApps) for. The computers that provide processing power for Ethereum are rewarded with ether, which is now the second-most valuable crypto asset behind bitcoin.

Like bitcoin, the Ethereum network is hard to shut down or corrupt. Anyone with an internet connection can access it.

The decision making, or governance, at DeFi organizationsfrom the fees they charge users to the products they offeris often meant to be decentralized. (If the US political system is a representative democracy, think of DeFi as direct democracy.) A single person or a small group of people might be driving a decentralized application at inception, but they often seek to step away as the project gains momentum, handing control to the community that uses it. That transition could be in the form of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which has its rules and regulations embedded in programming code and may issue governance tokens, which gives holders of those coins say in decisions.

One of bitcoin's key innovations was the capacity for two users to make digital payments directly with one another. This is easy to do in the physical world using paper or metal money. But until bitcoin came along, the only way to do so electronically was through a bank or payment company like PayPal.

Going through these third parties leaves a digital footprint that can be surveilled, and those companies could potentially be "censored" by the governmenti.e. pressured to prevent transactions for political or other reasons. Bitcoin was envisioned to get around this, as a digital form of cash for peer-to-peer payments.

DeFi apps can also be peer-to-peer. In a traditional stock-trading transaction, an order might be processed through a series of intermediariesa broker and an exchange, among otherswhile the shares themselves are held at a custody bank, which is expected to keep the securities from getting lost or stolen.

By contrast, a DeFi exchange (DEX) doesn't have those intermediaries. If you use Uniswap, a decentralized exchange built on the Ethereum platform, to trade crypto tokens, those assets will end up right in your crypto wallet, facilitated by Uniswap's automated programs known as smart contracts. That means there are fewer parties taking a cut of your transaction.

Blockchain has enabled a series of digital gold rushes since it was invented 13 years ago. Two of them are initial coin offerings (ICOs) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs):

ICOs are a type of crowdfunding, and they're often used to raise money for open-source software projects. In exchange for capital, ICO investors get a unique token that might give them access to the software's special features... or might not give them access to much at all.

ICOs can sound a little bit like a stock offeringtoo much like stock offerings, in fact, for the US Securities and Exchange Commission; coin offerings may lack guardrails like disclosure and auditing that an initial public offering (IPO) would be expected to provide in the regulated stock market.

ICOs raised more than $7 billion in 2018, before plunging around 95% to $371 million in 2019, the latest year data was available, as regulators cracked down, according to CB Insights.

NFTs are kind of like a limited-edition trading cardonly online. Just as blockchain enables users to prove ownership of their bitcoin holdings, so too does it enable people to make unique digital assets like collectibles and art. One of the best known NFT sales was a work by Beeplethe artist also known as Mike Winkelmannwho sold a collage through an auction at Christie's for $69 million. Unlike a music MP3, which can be copy-and-pasted to infinity, NFTs are designed to be one of a kind, and to have one owner at a time.

A digital art fair in Hong Kong with works by Andy Warhol and Mike Winkelmann.

These acronyms are more than just a gold rush, says Matthew Leising, author of Out of the Ether. ICOs gave startups and software developers a way to raise money without the help of an investment bank or the backing of a venture capital firm. Likewise, NFTs can give musicians and visual artists a new way to monetize their work. "NFTs are really interesting because they've proven that a digital item can be scarce," Leising says.

DeFi's strength can also be its weakness:

Decentralization makes DeFi difficult to censor or stamp out, but it requires some heavy-duty computing. Maintaining a database and records across a network of many computers slows things down and can make transactions more expensive. Ethereum is the most popular blockchain for DeFi applications, but the sheer amount of computing now taking place is driving up fees and bogging down the network. As Ethereum developers try to find ways to make it more scalable, other chains like Solana and Avalanche are picking up momentum. "It's genuinely hard to get performance out of blockchains," says Emin Gn Sirer, a computer scientist at Cornell University and an advisor to Avalanche.

DeFi strips out intermediaries like custody banks, which are expected to keep assets (usually digital tokens) safe. That means you don't have to worry about a financial institution failing and taking your holdings with itor a government seizing your tokens and confiscating them. On the other hand, the only thing keeping your holdings safe is you and your passcode. If you lose that passcode (or someone steals it), your assets are gone for good.

The DeFi upstarts often purport to be available to anyone. You may be able to get a loan or trade virtual coins without traditional financial credentials like identification or a credit score. That freedom promises to extend financial services to parts of the world that haven't always had them, or where the services are expensive or prone to fraud or confiscation. But you can easily see the downside: If there's no entity keeping track of who is using a service or where they are located, the systems could be used by criminals or run counter to sanctions. The regulatory crackdown has already begun.

Blockchains have proven pretty tough to crackbut the smart contracts and apps that run on top of those chains are only as smart as the people who designed them. The code is typically open-source, which means it's there for everyone to see and to innovate with, but that also makes it easier for hackers to attack. Much more programming code these days is audited for bugs and vulnerabilities, and a growing number of people understand the need for formal verification (a process that uses algorithms to analyze other algorithms for glitches), but plenty of money is still going into code that hasn't been shored up in that way, Cornell's Sirer said.

Uniswap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), was created by Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer from New York. The idea sprung from posts written by Ethereum founder Buterin about developing an automated market maker and decentralized exchange. These days, Uniswap facilitates $1 billion or more in daily crypto trading, and its governance tokens, UNI, have a market value of about $12 billion according to CoinGecko, a crypto-data website.

Aave was founded by law student Stani Kulechov in 2017 (originally called ETHLend). The platform lets users lend and borrow crypto tokens; users have put about $14 billion worth of collateral for loans on the network, according to Defi Pulse.

MakerDAO is a lending and borrowing platform that uses Dai, a stablecoin linked to the US dollar. MakerDAO was started in 2014 and co-founded by Rune Christensen. On its website, MakerDao says it's one of the largest decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain and the first DeFi application to get serious adoption. Users have put up about $6 billion of collateral on the system.

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Everything you need to know about DeFi - Yahoo Finance

Banks have cryptocurrency issues. Insider trading desks and a wide range of clients are pressing senior executives at large banks to launch cryptocurrency services.

Compliance departments and boards are less enthusiastic, but there is a growing desire to do something to avoid being left behind. It is not clear what to do and how to do it.

The rise of companies built around Bitcoin and other digital assets can make dealers look like Wall Street executives are anxious to look at the hackathon.

And, apart from the potential danger of dragging a good crypto name into the mud at some point, banks face very real challenges in their digital efforts. They cant move fast. You need to comply with regulations that are currently unclear or have not yet been enforced. Finding and maintaining talent is becoming increasingly difficult. And what if it all turns out to be a big scam?

Despite the potential challenges, big banks can no longer shrug digital coins. The market has grown to a scale of $ 1.8 trillion.

The world of digital assets is too big to ignore. We believe that crypto-based digital assets have the potential to form a whole new asset class, said Bank of America, the first research dedicated to crypto. It is stated in the note.

Several major US banks have announced their involvement in or planned ventures in the digital market, but many European dealers have quietly followed suit.

Some, like Goldman Sachs, have chosen to make a splash with the effort around cryptography. Intentionally create a lot of noise about that babys steps. European banks are more tortured and, as a result, messaging is mixed.

In February, a research team at Commerzbank, a German lender, sent a note explaining why analysts do not cover Bitcoin. . By September, the lender had set up a digital asset team.

Its hard to decide where the traditional financial giant fits in the crypto world. A complex, highly technology-driven process of preserving digital assets, custody is risky and extremely difficult to insure.

Currently, banks can only buy and sell futures and other non-cash contracts, and transactions are similarly suspicious, making it difficult to generate the returns that crypto-speaking trading companies can. Rental is off-limits for now. And companies operating in the digital asset market are never afraid.

Cryptography is expanding into The traditional financial services market, said David Kinitsky, CEO of Kraken Bank. Companies [native to crypto] It will beat the existing companies in this new media, as seen in other industries when the Internet was introduced.

Part of the problem is that everything related to cryptography is related to cutting-edge technology far from the kind of kits that traditional financial advocates are usually associated with. After years of consolidation and mergers, the technology underlying the banking giant is awkward, fragmented, and often esoteric.

Banks arent really advances in technology, said Diogo Monica, co-founder of banks and cryptocurrency technology provider Anchorage Digital.

Banks arent as cool as they used to be, so talent is also an issue. Investment banks are looking for retired coders to run esoteric and intertwined computer systems because young people are no longer learning the language needed to run some of Wall Streets largest institutions. Recruiters say they are forced to do so.

Banks definitely have problems, said a financial market expert recruiter, saying young coders are enjoying better wages and more flexibility in companies focused on cryptocurrencies and technology. I did. And in many cases, the job is simply more interesting.

However, not everything is lost. Reputation and the significant customer base they already have are valuable, especially when more conservative investors such as insurance companies are involved. Lending and borrowing may also be opened in the future.

Christine Trent Parker, a partner in the financial industry group at law firm Reed Smith, said: And if their technology doesnt support it, banks can buy it at any time.

eva.szalay@ft.com

Traders at banks fear missing out on the crypto party Source link Traders at banks fear missing out on the crypto party

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Traders at banks fear missing out on the crypto party - Californianewstimes.com

Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, deep fakes and unfortunately ransomware are the future cybersecurity threats according to a panel of experts at IT World Canadas second online MapleSec conference.

The predictions were made during Tuesdays opening session entitled, The Threatscape 2023 and Beyond.

AI-generated malware will be one of the emerging threats in the near future, said Hadis Karimpour, associate professor and chair in secure and reliable networked engineering systems at the University of Calgary.

Unlike conventional malware, she said, AI-generated threats will use intelligence to infect computers or deploy malicious applications faster than happens now.

As organizations deploy AI applications, infosec pros will face more of these threats, she added.

Quantum computing and the transition to post-quantum cryptography will be the biggest challenge organizations will have to face in the next five years, said Jennifer Fernick, New York City-based senior vice president and global head of research at NCC Group.

Cryptography is fundamental to the security and privacy of everything we do online, she pointed out. But quantum computing will crack current algorithms. Fortunately, she added, researchers are now creating and testing quantum-resistant algorithms that can run on conventional computers.

Initially, quantum computers will be available to a select few, she said, but will spread more widely once quantum-safe cryptography is established.

For her part Cara Wolf, CEO of Calgary-based Ammolite Analytx, said having a CISO or CSO in the C-suite is an emerging priority at many organizations and not just large firms.

As cyber threats get more sophisticated and the number of ransomware attacks increase cybersecurity must have its own corporate entity with enough governance and authority to make a difference in decisions made by business units, she said.

On ransomware, Karimpour said its a failure of both awareness training and credentials management. Online training is not enough, she added. Organizations need to develop an effective training program to make sure employees are engaged and aware of the threat of ransomware.

Wolf said statistics she sees on successful ransomware attacks are quite alarming: Sixty per cent of small businesses that are hit go under, she said. Meanwhile some firms cant get cyber insurance because they have been victimized.

Prevention, she added, is key to blunting ransomware attacks.

Looking into the future, Fernick said ransomware doesnt need to evolve much further to keep doing tremendous damage. Ransomware attacks happen most commonly on networks with unpatched vulnerabilities, she added, However, she also noted that organizations arent installing patches fast enough.

Until we as an industry can radically improve vulnerability triage and remediation I think ransomware actors will continue to count their bitcoins, she said.

In the short term, government sanctions against ransomware payment operators like cryptocurrency exchanges will have more of an effect on checking the spread of ransomware than anything else, she said.

The trio agreed that so-called deep fake content the manipulation of video, audio or other digital material designed to impersonate people will rise.

Fernick warned that AI-based deep fake detection models could spawn content that will be undetectable in a never-ending cycle: Deep fakes get better, detection gets better, and it never ends.

Awareness training is key, responded Wolf. Employees have to be taught to look for things that are suspicious, such as a message from the CEO late on a Friday asking that millions of dollars be transferred to a foreign account.

The session wrapped up with the trio being asked to predict what cyber mistake people will still make five years from now:

Clicking on phishing links from unverified sources, said Karimpour.

Application developers still treating security as something to be done at the end of product development, said Fernick.

Gullibility of humans, said Wolf.

I think were going to see the trusting nature of people diminish, she added, which is unfortunate because you need trust to do business with others.

MapleSec continues Wednesday and Thursday starting at noon Eastern time. The theme of Wednesdays sessions is Building Resilience, while Thursdays sessions are around Privacy and Governance.

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The future of cybersecurity is AI, deep fakes and ransomware, MapleSec conference told - IT World Canada

Last month, when digging through a library of Satoshis writings, I found an email thread that piqued my interest.

Anonymous Writer: You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.

Satoshi: Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

To this day, Satoshi remains anonymous as the founder of Bitcoin. His anonymity is the key feature of Bitcoins design and, presumably, a crucial piece in the assets decentralization. Satoshis continued anonymity has prevented governments from truly controlling the supply of Bitcoin, making it akin to a commodity rather than a financial instrument. Even with China continuously making efforts to regulate and ban Bitcoin, the asset continues to come back stronger.

But can anonymity benefit other crypto currencies and even stablecoins?

In the same way we are all Satoshi, we are all John, Paul, George and Ringo, says John L. of Float Protocol.

I first met with the founders of the decentralized stablecoin protocol FLOAT, over Zoom to ask a few questions about their project. During our conversation about team development, it became apparent that John and Paul were not their real names. After a brief inquiry, they explained to me that the team drew inspiration from the Beatles, using their names as pseudonyms.

As the project outlives us, there may be another John and another Paul. What matters is that they step in the same role and continue to serve the project in a similar way, says John L. of Float Protocol.

Over the last year we have seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of stablecoins. From USDT, with a market cap of $70 billion, and USDC, with a market cap of $32 billion, to other exchange-specific coins such as Binance-USD and the Gemini Dollar, it seems stablecoins are becoming increasingly more integral as DeFi outpaces the legacy financial system. Even central governments have started taking note, rolling out their own government-sponsored digital currencies - most notably, Chinas Digital Renminbi.

These digitized alternatives, however, are still pegged to fiat, and with it, carry the flaws of the centralized financial legacy system. First, anything tied to the dollar will face increasing regulatory scrutiny. Just this week, the SEC subpoenaed Circles records, the company behind USDC. Second, most stablecoins are U.S. centric in a time when much of the world is looking for opportunities to avoid the pitfalls of hyper-dollarization. Third, the value of the dollar is at the mercy of the decision-making capabilities of just a few individuals leading the Federal Reserve. Since the dollar was unpegged from gold in 1971, the expansionary monetary policies implemented by the Federal Reserve has steadily eroded its value.

In answer to this, many new stablecoins are displaying a design paradigm shift. Algorithmic stablecoins are unpegged, and collateralized by a diverse collection of assets. Several notable projects have been deployed over the last two years including RSR by Reserve, XST by SORA, OHM by Olympus, RAI by Reflexer Labs, and most recently, FLOAT by Float Protocol.

Float recently completed a $1.2 million raise, aptly referred to as a treasury diversification round. Participants included Eden Block, AAVE founder Stani Kulechov, Akropolis founder Ana Andrianova, and popular DeFi investor Santiago Santos, along with several DAOs, including MCV and the LAO. According to the team, Float is designed to be a native internet currency, functioning in a way that satisfies the three major properties of legitimate money - as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, and is designed to provide a decentralized alternative to inflationary, dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Float Protocol answers the problems of USD inflation, crypto volatility, and regulator scrutiny of stablecoins with groundbreaking elegance and simplicity, says Dermot ORiordan of Eden Block.

The protocol utilizes a two-token system - FLOAT, the stablecoin that ties its value to a collection of digital assets, and BANK, the protocols governance token. BANK can fluctuate in price, absorbing volatility, while FLOAT aims to be relatively stable while still reflecting market conditions. The starting price during issuance was set, very cleverly, at $1.618 - the golden ratio in mathematics. Notably, the protocol reached a record total value locked of $1.5 billion, one of the highest of its peers. Since then, the price has floated, as its collateral is ETH, expanding in a bull market and contracting during bearish periods, but with smoothness and low-volatility.

The protocol utilizes Dutch Auctions, which are not only efficient due to their game-theoretical nature but they are also flash-loanable. This allows for a capital efficient and profitable opportunity for traders and arbitrageurs alike, says Paul M, lead developer at Float Protocol.

In an increasingly heightened regulatory climate, it seems that anonymous teams are onto something. Stablecoins have been drawing the attention of the Biden administration, due to the perceived risks for consumers and the traditional financial system. As U.S. officials continue to make stablecoins the focal point of regulatory control over crypto markets, many predict that stablecoins will soon be the first to face comprehensive regulation. And with the wounds of the 2008 financial crisis still fresh in the minds of many officials, it seems likely that stablecoins will be declared systemically important and, therefore, placed under strict regulation.

If DeFi hopes to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional financial system, it is important that stablecoins move away from being tied to those same traditional systems. Collateral diversification, algorithmic design and anonymous founding teams might just make the perfect combination to make decentralized finance a reality.

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Meet Float Protocol - The Algorithmic Stablecoin Built By An Anonymous Team - Forbes

According to law enforcement agencies, the Zodiac case is still unresolved, but new theories are refocusing on the cold case decades ago.

A group of former law enforcement members, intelligence agents, and others, called Casebreakers, nominated a man who was seen by the media on Wednesday, the so-called Zodiac Killer.

The group states that physical and forensic evidence and recovered photographs and other information have identified recently dead suspects.

This theory has not been approved by the authorities as of Thursday night.

The FBIs investigation into the Zodiac case remains unresolved, the FBIs San Francisco office said in a statement to USA TODAY on Thursday.

Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation and in respect of the victims and their families, we do not provide any further comments at this time, the agency added.

The FBI previously confirmed on Wednesday that investigations into historic incidents remained open.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that law enforcement is skeptical of the groups theory. In particular, the groups suspects were involved in the killings in Riverside, California.

Is it possible that (Casebreakers) killed Sheri Joe Bates? No, Chronicle quotes Riverside police officer Ryan Reynoldsback. If you read what they (case breakers) put out, its all circumstantial evidence. Not much.

Casebreakers said in a statement Wednesday that they would like to share the results with the riverside police.

Fact check:False claim that the FBI ranked the most dangerous constellations

2020:Zodiac Cryptography settled in 50 years after serial killers terrorized Northern California

Authorities across California have been trying to hunt down the Zodiac Killer for decades. The murderers who hunted down the inhabitants in the 1960s are clearly associated with the killings of five.

However, the murderer claimed responsibility for more than 30 murders and sent a series of strange and detailed letters containing ciphertext to the press, where he called himself the Zodiac. During his feast, the murderer also left behind two survivors who helped provide the explanation.

The disturbing and embarrassing incident was a staple of pop culture and influenced David Finchers 2007 film Zodiac. Cases regularly make national headlines, especially as amateur detectives are making progress in resolving cryptography related to the case.

The irony that Zodiac might have lived to see Zodiac become famous was not lost to social media commentators who responded to the latest theory.

Contribution: Christal Hayes, USA TODAY

Source link The FBI says the case is unresolved after the group has identified the suspect

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The FBI says the case is unresolved after the group has identified the suspect - Texasnewstoday.com

Telecommunication network above city, wireless mobile internet technology for smart grid or 5G LTE ... [+] data connection, concept about IoT, global business, fintech, blockchain

In 2015 The Economist magazine hailed blockchain as the trust machine, capable of replacing governance structures, displacing institutions, and bringing a new level of transparency to transactions and information, with implications across public life.

In the years since, the technology has produced trillion-dollar decentralized financial markets and a slew of innovation over blockchains especially in financial services, with the rise of bitcoin, stabelcoins, decentralized finance or DeFi, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and other industries such as shipping, logistics and supply chains are starting to scale use cases.

OECD research, however, shows little breakthrough in blockchain innovation in government and minimal impact in the public sector - the technology is often described as a solution in search of a problem. While the technology is rapidly maturing, we are starting to see governments take an interest in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in areas such as tax, standards and certification, digital identity, and data privacy.

For governments, assessing blockchains disruptive potential is both a practical challenge and a philosophical one. The raison detre of many public institutions is the provision of public goods, and the underwriting of rights and the social contract functions that blockchains pioneers sought to replace with cryptography, networks, and protocols. Whether this technology will be used to displace or complement traditional governance models is an open question, as is its ability to deliver such transformation.

This years opening discussion at the OECDs 4th Annual Blockchain Policy Forum addressed several the main opportunities and challenges at the intersection of technology and governance to disentangle blockchains promise from reality and explored the extent to which the technology can and should be guided by governments towards better models of social and economic connection.

In global trade, the leaders in blockchain technologies are the Indo-Pacific based governments like China and Singapore. Trade is the lifeblood of this region which is considered the global trading hub. China and Singapore have been early to understand the benefits of the blockchain for supply chain management, not just for the provenance and tracking of goods, but for tax, customs, and digital rights.

Blockchain has dramatically scaled the 14th century Venetian innovation of the double-ledger into a theoretically infinite multidimensional ledger which is public, open, transparent, and immutable, and secures access using cryptography. Its like another layer of the Internet, with greater resilience against cybercrime, and integrates multiple stakeholders in much better management of the economy, says Alex Sandy Pentland, MIT professor and director of MIT Connection Science.

In a world with geo-political turbulence and trade headwinds, digital leadership in sectors like central bank digital currencies and supply chains using new digital technologies really matter welcome to the digital space race. The intellectual property, technologies, and standards in blockchain are now being used to gain a global foothold in trade. Importantly, this is helping to drive rapid adoption with low friction use cases and easy to access services.

Blockchain is helping counties that are early movers and leaders in this space to position themselves to generate decades of industrial, societal, and economic growth.

Governments need to learn how to adopt and adapt to polycentric governance models to better engage the broad range of actors and stakeholders required to compete in the digital world without having to create new overarching bureaucratic institutions, says Primavera De Filippi, permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris (CNRS) and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Most of the blockchain DLT technologies are developed in open source with large pools of developers participating by voting through digital protocol governance models which extend in many protocols to other entities becoming governance nodes. This is akin to a large mutual society and is risk adjusted both by the volume of experienced participants and stakeholders and its polycentric nature.

There are two big benefits for governments building out their programs on the blockchain; the first is COLLABORATION governments can attract a larger and more diverse range of stakeholders to build out and adopt the digital infrastructure for trade, tax, identity, financial services, etc., and use the power of the crowd this is markedly different to large enterprise software projects which have significant concentration risks including the number of commercial stakeholders that can engage. The second is CERTIFICATION governments can move away from using sticks by offering carrots to stakeholders that exhibit measurable compliant behaviors this could dramatically change the way we look at regulation and compliance.

This is all achievable through smart contracts on the blockchain and can be accomplished now without new contract law if we adopt functional equivalence for smart contracts, just as we adopted it moving from paper to electronic contracts. The only big decision that governments need to make upfront is whether to use public or private blockchains, or a mix, and this decision merits significant consideration of the specific use case, says De Filippi.

Adds Pentland, there is a great transfer of soft power taking place with blockchain technologies, and when it comes to trade, it is Indo-Pacific led. It is important as the systems grow that they focus on a level of interoperability with each other through standards, to ultimately deliver the benefits that distributed ledger technologies offer multi-dimensional participation. If countries seek to go down the walled garden route, interoperability will go down the drain and the global trade system will be open to further arbitrage opportunities by those that seek to exploit this situation.

Governments and industry must recognize that blockchain is now mature, here to stay, and ready to use, today. The technology is more than a decade old and the underlying technologies of distributed databases, cryptography, and peer to peer networking have been with us since the dawn of computing.

Software developers are delivering blockchain use cases to market quicker than most industries, governments, and regulators can keep up with that is the power of the polycentric networked crowd. There is more innovation going on outside your four walls than inside, and you need to know how to plug into it.

As is often the case, it is the systematic factors coupled with institutional bias that are barriers to governments and managers understanding how and when to mobilize new innovative technologies and methods for society, and in many instances, few are really incentivized to make it happen.

The blockchain revolution provides the platform to engage large numbers and dimensions of stakeholders in the economy through shared mutual governance the major incentive is already there, it is baked into the governance model greater and more efficient economic participation in the economy.

Governments would be wise to be serious about prioritizing the digital space race. If the revolution is tokenized, it will be because large public blockchain consensus protocols are tokenizing it, and large swathes of global business and consumers are using it.

You can watch this panel and learn more about this and much more from the OECDs 4th Annual Blockchain Policy Forum.

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Will The Revolution Be Tokenized: Governments, Blockchain, And The Digital Space Race - Forbes