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The government wants to talk cyber security, but does it want to listen? – Computerworld Australia

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The federal government is seeking public input on updating its cyber security strategy. However, the parameters it is using to frame the discussion ignore the detrimental impact on infosec from legislation that has enjoyed bipartisan support, according to a prominent cryptographer.

A discussion paper released as part of the governments public consultation on cyber security strategy is infused with the unshakeable belief that more active government involvement must be a good thing for cyber security, according to Vanessa Teague.

The government in September released the paper as it prepares to issue the 2020 update to its cyber security strategy.

Teague, a high-profile security researcher and associate professor at the University of Melbournes School of Computing and Information Systems, noted that a key theme was the governments role in addressing cybercrime.

The paper asks, for example, whether the government could do more to confront cybercrime and protect the networks that underpin our way of life, or whether you think the current arrangements are right.

Now, whether you agree with my perspective on this issue or not, just as a matter of pure logic... weve been given two options here, Teague said during a panel at NetThing, an Internet governance conference held last week in Sydney.

Number one government should take a more active role in our cyber security and the networks and computers, or the current balance is about right. Now, can anybody think of a third option that might be worth considering at this point?

Teague said that for many years a key characteristic of Australian cyber security policy has been bipartisan support for a series of very bad policies. One example the Defence Trade Controls Act which made it a crime to export new cryptographic ideas or cryptographic software without permission from the military. The Melbourne Uni academic has previously criticised elements of Australias defence exports regime because of its impact on collaborative cryptography research.

Teague told NetThing: We all know about the TOLA Act, otherwise known as the bill that makes it compulsory to assist in undermining the security of your own system if you are able to re-engineer your system to extract more data.

The TOLA Act Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act is legislation that introduced a new legal framework for law enforcement to compel cooperation from online service providers, including in some circumstances introducing new capabilities into their systems to facilitate investigations.

I think were not just looking at a government that is, you know, well-intentioned but a little bit ineffectual, Teague said. Were actually looking at a series of policies that have actively done damage.

I don't think theyre deliberately doing damage, she added. I think theyre pursuing an agenda oriented around surveillance and control, which inevitably has a by-product of damaging our cyber security.

The government has pursued a national insecurity agenda, Teague said.

If it's undermining our technology industry... if it's causing companies to move offshore that would otherwise have built been building secure products here and training people in cyber security here, then its actually... not just neutral, its actually making it harder for us to do a good job of defending ourselves, she told NetThing.

She said its unlikely that there would ever be specific evidence that a particular cyber attack was a direct consequence of the TOLA Act. Instead Australia is likely to suffer a gradual failure... to grow in the cyber security space, and were going to be more vulnerable over the long term.

We're probably not going to be able to point to direct evidence that some particular data breach or some particular failure of security was a direct result of some company that moved away or some person who didn't have the skills to defend it, Teague said. But that doesn't mean that the consequences aren't real, just because they're not explicit and easily pointed to.

She also questioned the effectiveness of ongoing engagement with the Department of Home Affairs. Civil liberties organisations, the local ICT industry, security pros, and major international tech companies including Apple, Google and Amazon expressed major objections to the TOLA Act in the lead-up to it being waved through parliament on the final sitting day of 2018.

The government, however, has rejected claims that the legislation could have a detrimental impact on cyber security in Australia (although Home Affairs has acknowledged there has been some impact on the tech sector, but argued that is the fault of misconceptions about the legislation rather than the TOLA regime itself).

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The government wants to talk cyber security, but does it want to listen? - Computerworld Australia

5 Myths About the National Security Agency – ClearanceJobs

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Writing about the National Security Agency myths is a tough task because the rules are always changing and whole agency is shrouded in secrecythough in the case of the latter, a good deal less than it once was, thanks in part to its empowerment after 9/11, and because of revelations by Edward Snowden. Anecdotally, when I was in high school (very pre-9/11), I wanted to write a report on the NSA, and when I asked the librarian about it, he ridiculed me, saying scornfully that the NSA was a fake spy agency on TV, and that it didnt exist in real life. I think the NSA would have approved, but any organization that secret is bound to gather a few urban legends along the way. Here are five myths about the National Security Agency.

Compared to the Central Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency, no, the NSA doesnt have that many field agents. Most of its thirty thousand or so employees work at Ft. Meade, MD. (There are 18,000 parking spaces at its headquarters, and enough office space that four U.S. Capitols could fit inside of it.) Still, the agency does have men and women who work in the field. They belong to the NSAs Special Collection Service, a group of signals intelligence spies who work jointly with the CIA abroad to penetrate foreign communications networks.

Because the SCS is so secretive, what, precisely they do in the field is likely a moving target. When a hard drive needs to be stolen, that assignment is probably going to go to the CIAs National Clandestine Service. But things like plugging into embassies overseas, planting antennas to intercept communications, and using state-of-the-art technology in the field to acquire signals are almost certainly jobs for the SCS. Though techniques and procedures change, as of a few years ago, small teams called Special Collection Elements, made up of two-to-five members of the Special Collection Service and National Clandestine Service, rotated into foreign embassies and operated abroad under the guise of business persons.

As a matter of technology, yes, most likely. And if you encrypt your messages, it can hang onto those emails forever, or until the encryption is cracked (see below). NSA software is integrated tightly with telecommunications switches for AT&T and, most likely, other such companies. When the companies arent knowingly doing the integration, the NSA does the integration themselves, surreptitiously intercepting routers to targeted facilities and implanting surveillance devices and firmware.

But legally, the NSA needs a lot more than simple ability if they want to start reading your letters to grandma. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to surveil non-U.S. persons abroad. Each year, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit certifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court stating the types of intelligence they would like to collect, and the way they will do it that is consistent with the law (i.e., heres how we will make sure we dont target Americans). Once the certifications are approved, the government goes to industry and compels them to assist with the surveillance. The court reviews these certifications annually.

Thats the basic legal process at work. In practice, if a non-U.S. person abroad fits the certified surveillance standard (e.g. he likes to make bombs for ISIS), and his communications are found to have foreign intelligence (e.g. hes corresponding with ISIS about where to send the bombs), his communications can be collected.

So if he happens to email yousay hes a fan of Game of Thrones, and you begin a robust correspondence on that seriess awful endingthen your email can only be searched in pursuit of foreign intelligence information, or, if the FBI gets involved looking for evidence of a crime. Only the attorney general can authorize the use of information collected under Section 702 in criminal proceedings against U.S. persons.

The upshot is that the NSA doesnt just type bomb into SpyGoogle and start vacuuming up anyones emails describing Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Which was mostly a pretty good movie, but dont get me started on The Force Awakens.) The whole thing is monitored by the court, senior analysts at the agency, and the Department of Justice.

Under Presidential Policy Directive 28 and its supplemental guidelines, information gathered from the bulk collection of non-U.S. person data must be related to foreign espionage, terrorism, threats to U.S. military forces, cyber warfare, and transnational criminal threats. In other words, if Cuervo Jones of Guadalajara is caught in the net, but isnt doing evil, his communications arent being used against him for other purposes. Moreover, information collected can only be held for five years. If, however, Cuervo has encrypted his correspondence, that can be held indefinitely. Its worth noting that the NSA is not allowed to collect trade secrets from foreign companies in order to give U.S. firms a competitive advantage.

Pretty Good Privacy is a popular encryption standard that uses hashing, compression, and public and private keys for encryption and authentication. (ClearanceJobs previously described how hashing works here.) As of 2014, leaked documents reveal that the NSA was unable to break PGP. A lot has changed in five years, and look, anything is possible, but not that much. As the PGP frequently asked questions document states for a PGP 128-bit encryption: Lets say that you had developed a special purpose chip that could try a billion keys per second. This is far beyond anything that could really be developed today. Lets also say that you could afford to throw a billion such chips at the problem at the same time. It would still require over 10,000,000,000,000 years to try all of the possible 128 bit keys. That is something like a thousand times the age of the known universe!

Well maybe. But probably not. Under Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA is allowed to build contact chains of telecommunications metadata. Not the calls/emails/etc. themselvesbut call detail recordsinformation about the contact in question. This year, the NSA stated that it has ended the CDR program. In the old days of building those CDR chains, however, the agency used a method called hops. If I am John Terrorist and I appear on the NSAs radar, the agency can use my call detail records to start looking at the people I call (hop one), and the people they call (hop two). So if I call 10 people, those ten people are now in the NSAs metadata surveillance crosshairs. Moreover, the people those ten people call are now in the NSAs web of watchers as well. If each of those people contacted ten people, youve now got 101 people being monitored. The NSA is limited to two hops, though previously could go out as far as three hops, which meant that one person could lead to the monitoring of 1001.

So is the NSA spying on you? Even if the agency has secretly restarted the program, its still highly unlikely, though if you were an Uber driver and John Terrorist called you to give you directions, its possible that you might be in the system. And if you hired a local landscaper to mow your lawn, he or she might be in the net as well. There is no way for you to find out, and nothing you can do if you are. But as a matter of numbers, youre probably safe. Last year fewer than ten thousand queries of American communications stemmed from this program.

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Democrats Make a Huge Mistake If They Just Focus Impeachment on the Ukraine Scandal – CounterPunch

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Photograph Source: Shealah Craighead, The White House Public Domain

The impeachment theater on display today in the House, bracketed by Speaker Nancy Pelosis maudlin reading of Article I of the Constitution, and by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys ludicrous evocation of the Stalin purge trials to characterize the full House vote to establish impeachment rules and procedures, is increasingly looking like the first act of an almost certain impeachment of President Trump.

Unfortunately, if Democrats impeaching Trump on just the effort to extort an investigation of the Bidens by Ukraines government their goal, theyll get their impeachment vote, but it will end up like the Clinton impeachment as a farcical trial in the Senate, perhaps even strengthening President Trump in next years presidential election contest.

The Democrats, that is to say, are following the Republicans disastrous impeachment model, set in 1998-99 when they sought to oust President Clinton over a blow-job in the Oval Office, and ended up making him one of the most popular presidents in the history of the job.

Democrats should be looking instead to the Nixon impeachment, which obtained the desired result removing a criminal president from office without even having to go to a full vote of the House following passage of articles of impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee.

When one looks back at that impeachment effort, it almost seems incredible that Nixon was forced out of office. This was a president, remember, who in 1972 was re-elected to a second term by a landslide 60.7 percent of the popular vote to just 37.5 percent for his Democratic opponent Sen. George McGovern. Nixon won the electoral votes of 49 states, with only Massachusetts going for McGovern.

Congressional investigation into Nixons crimes began with the establishment of the so-called Watergate Committee, headed by Senator Sam Ervin. That committees public hearings into that scandal started on May 17, 1973, just six months after Nixons electoral triumph.

At the time, while Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress, Nixon was still hugely popular, even as the early details of the Watergate break-in and of the cover-up of that tip-of-the-iceberg corruption in the Nixon White House and re-election campaign were starting to come out. At the time of his inauguration, Nixons popularity was at a peak of 67% in a Gallup poll.

By the time the Watergate Committee started its hearings, four months into his second term, his popularity had slumped to the mid-40s, about equal to his disapproval rating. As those hearings continued, his support continued to sink.By October 30, 1973, just short of a year after Nixon won re-election, when the House Judiciary Committee beganinvestigating possible impeachable crimes by the president, his support had slumped to 27 percent. (Contrary to assertions by todays CongressionalRepublicans, who claim that an impeachment must start with a full vote by the House,it wasnt until February 6, 1974, more than three months after its investigations began, that the Judiciary Committee went to the full House for a vote designating it as an Impeachment Committee.)

More importantly, though, even after the empowered Judiciary Committee began its work, and began issuing subpoenas for documents, tapes and testimony, it wasnt until late July that it finally voted out three articles of impeachment. Those articles were for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress, but they each included a number of examples of the presidents impeachable (though perhaps not all criminal) behavior. Along the way, the committee also investigated and considered other impeachable offenses, drawing up but rejecting two other articles of impeachment.

This is important. When talk of impeaching Nixon first began, Republicans were up in arms defending the president, and even many Democrats were nervous and unconvinced. They had, after all, been trounced in the last election, and Nixon had won re-election decisively. But the hearings, with their dramatic testimony from Nixon White House andcampaign staff, both in the Watergate and in the impeachment committees, provided a steady stream of disturbing information and criminality on the part of the president and his acolytes and appointees. It was a process that led to a steady decline in his popular (and Congressional) support until by the time those three impeachment articles were voted for by the Judiciary Committee, his approval ratings were down in the mid-20 percent range. Not surprisingly, those articles won the backing of even some Republicans on the committee.

There was no further action on Nixons impeachment because Republican leaders did some head-counting and went to the president with word that he would be impeached by the full House on those articles, with significant Republican support, and that he would lose a trial in the Senate, after which he would likely be indicted and likely convicted and sentenced to jail for his crimes.

It was an agonizing political process, though also gripping not just for those who wanted Nixon gone, but even for his backers, or former backers among the electorate.

It is precisely this process which Democrats need to copy in pursuing the eminently impeachment-deserving President Donald Trump.

It would be an historic mistake of epic proportions to go after this congenitally criminal and morally appalling president for just one issue one which many Americans who have backed him will readily excuse him for. Indeed Trumps withholding of Congressionally approved military aid to extort a foreign criminal investigation of a potential political opponent pales in comparison Nixons interference with the Vietnam peace talks or Reagans successful effort as a candidate to get Iran to delay release of the US embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, neither of which led to any impeachment hearings.

Thats not to say that Trump is not a uniquely dangerous threat to Constitutional government.

What the now fully empowered House Judiciary Committee needs to do, though, is to significantly expand its hearings to examineall the myriad impeachable crimeswhich this president is known or strongly suspected of having committed. That would include everything from lying to the American public, cheating on his taxes, obstructing justice on myriad occasions, suborning perjury from witnesses, paying bribes, profiting personally from his powers of office, violating election laws, and perhaps rape and assault as well.

The American people need all these impeachable deeds and misbehavior laid bare in all their gory detail over the next six-12 months. Trumps support, currently languishing around 40 percent, will sink as time goes on, as the shameful behavior gets continuous exposure. As the evidence of his crimes mounts, the risk of his ending up in the clink, at least after he leaves office, will grows. Meanwhile, the likelihood of his winning re-election and escaping that fate will fades. The odds will then grow that he will choose the same option that Nixon chose: resignation with a pardon.

I obviously would like to see Trump removed from the White House, either by impeachment and conviction in the Senate, or by resignation. But I also believe, as I did in the case of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that even if he survives impeachment, it is crucial for US democracy that impeachable crimes be called out for what they are, even if the perpetrator cannot be convicted by the Senate. (It is my contention, for example, that Obama committed serious impeachable crimes such as refusing to prosecute known the war criminals Bush and VP Dick Cheney, as well as violating the First and Fourth Amendments with his expanded use of NSA spying on Americans, as well as his illegal war on Libya. For these actions or non actions, he should have been impeached by the House.)

So far, it looks like the House, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who single-handedly stymied efforts to impeach G.W. Bush (as well as crushing the sales of my 2006 bookThe Case for Impeachment!) by declaring in May 2006 that impeachment is off the table, is keeping a lid on any widening of the impeachment case against Trump.

If she persists in this wrong-headed strategy, she must take the blame for the disaster that will likely ensue, of a triumphal Trump declaring that he had been cleared by the Senate, and campaigning through next summer and fall against a Democratic Party he will accuse of being obsessed with overturning the results of the last election.

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Governments race to beat Facebook’s cryptocurrency, libra, at its own game: Don Pittis – CBC.ca

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Facebook's scheme to create its own money in the form of the libra digital coin has set off a globalrace to beat the social media colossus at its own game, and Canada maybe an importantplayer.

Since the initialmild reaction from U.S. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell the day after thelibraproject was announcedin June, the world's governments and central banks have realized what somesuggested at the time, that with its global reach and technological savvy, Facebook was blazing a path to dominate money.

Canada has been one of theleaders in researching how to create and managea digital coin backed by a national central bank. But the arrival of thelibra idea, with its persuasive scheme to launch what was essentially a credible new global currency, kicked off a flurry of fresh activity that could transform the way we think of money.

Not only are the world's governments gathering at bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, theBank for International Settlements and the G7 group of large industrial economies toworkon the idea, but there are signs that individual governments, notably China, are racing to be the first to create a functional, tradable government-backed digital coin.

And while the final results are difficult to predict, it is not clear that ordinary citizens, who have grown used to money in its current form,will be happy with the outcome.

"It's interesting how exciting these developments can be," enthused Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Carolyn Wilkins at last week's monetary policy news conference.

Introduced by her boss, bank governor Stephen Poloz, as "one of the world's foremost experts" on the subject,Wilkins has attended global conferences, armed with several years of groundbreaking Canadian research.

As Wilkins explained, what central banks hope to create is not a digital coin like bitcoin and its many imitators. With thatcurrency rising and falling as inexperienced investors triedto make a killing, critics, including me, pointed out years ago that the volatility of such cryptocurrenciesmade pricing goods in bitcoin impractical.

Far more interesting and functional, according to people like Wilkins, is a kind of digital money called a "stablecoin," which is how the libra is conceived. Rather than shooting up in value and plunging like bitcoins, a stablecoin is managed to maintain a relatively constant value.

"There's a whole class of crypto assets called stablecoins," said Wilkins last week. "What's exciting about it is the fact that these kinds of innovations can address what I think are important issues in global payment systems, particularly the cost of cross-border payments."

Wilkins suggested a stablecoin could be used, for example, for people from the Philippines trying to send money home from elsewhere in the world. And in developing countrieswithout a stable banking system it mightbe used domestically as a reliable unit of exchange.

That innovation is exactly what the libraproject has proposed, offering a service to millions of the world's "unbanked" so that they too can buy and sell and save up the value of their labour in a place they know won't be wiped out by inflation or governmentmismanagement.

But the more the world's central banks and the governments they represent thoughtabout the libra, theless they liked it.

To oversimplify, the two main objections to having a private company with such monetary clout were the wrenchingof monetary power out of the hands of central banksand the worry that eventually, without the backstop of a government, a private sector currency would collapse, creating global chaos.

"We know that innovations never come without risk," said Wilkins.

There are benefits to such a stablecoin system, but there are dangers: "The costs that we all know that are related to money laundering and terrorist financing, but also, with respect to safeguarding the value of that stablecoin properly, as well as potentially getting in the way of monetary sovereignty of different countries," she said.

By current thinking, that sovereignty is important. With people using something like libra, the currencies ofsmaller countries such as those in the Caribbean, or notoriously unstable currencies such as those of Rwanda or Argentina would be completely upstaged, aspeople use libra as a better alternative.

"I think Facebook hadn't thought through carefully how important control of currencies is for governments and central banks," said longtime U.S. central banker Simon Potterin an online video interviewby the Financial Times.

Globally, digitization of nationalcurrencies is already underway. Sweden is well on the road to phasing out conventional cash. Canadians have been world leaders in paying with alternatives like chip cards.China, with its powerful centrally controlled state, is ideally placed to push through a digital stablecoin that will also help it keep track of themoney flows of everyone who uses it.

Watch the International Institute of Finance discuss the future of money:

As reported by CBC Radio's The Current, access to information requests by the tech news site The Logicshow that the Bank of Canada has looked into the possibility of following Sweden and gradually eliminating those polymer bills, but such a plan would require a decision of the federal government to proceed.

Unlike China, a Canadian government might be unwilling to take such a radical step when such obvious moves asreplacing low-denomination bills by coins and eliminating the penny attracted such popular wrath.

But the difficulty for governments is that commercial stablecoins such as libra arenot the only competition. If one country creates a functioning state-backed digital stablecoin, it may be difficult to stop thecitizens of other countriesfrom using it.

For Wilkins, no doubt, working out a solution is part of what makes it all so exciting.

But whatever the final outcome, it does seem that our concept of money is changing. Just last month, Bank of Canada deputy governor Timothy Lane participated in a discussion at the International Institute of Finance titledThe Future of Money. The fact is, as cash disappears, digital stablecoins may become an essential alternative for certain purposes.

Lane pointed out that as merchants, banks andconsumers increasingly stop using bank notes for transactions, we may reach a tipping pointwhere those notes effectivelydisappear from circulation so that even people who want to use bills don't have the option.

"In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell," quipped Lane, "'You don't know what you've got till it's gone.'"

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis

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Governments race to beat Facebook's cryptocurrency, libra, at its own game: Don Pittis - CBC.ca

US fines founders of worthless cryptocurrency over $4.25M binary options scam – The Next Web

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A US federal court has ordered defendants to pay $4.25 million in penalties as a result of operating a virtual currency scam known as ATM Coin.

Blake Harrison KantorandNathan Mullins, both from New York and corporate entities Blue Bit Banc, (UK); Blue Bit Analytics, (Turks and Caicos); andMercury Cove Inc and G. Thomas Client Services, (New York) are accused of committing fraud and misappropriating customer funds.

According to the court, Kantor, Blue Bit Analytics, and G. Thomas Client Services, took customer funds and illegally actedas Futures Commission Merchants without having registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The case was first submitted in April last year and charged the defendants with fraud in connection with a binary options scam.

The CFTC said defendants asked public customers to invest in binary options,promising the opportunity to earn predetermined amounts based on the price of the commodities at specific points in time.

Although customers could trade for themselves, or have a Blue Bit Ban representative do so for them, Mullins and Kantor failed to tell customers that a computer software program used by Blue Bit Banc fraudulently changed the data associated with their binary options investments.

This meant that the probability of customers earning a profit favored Blue Bit Banc, rather than investors.

Kantor and Mullins told most investors to transfer their funds to a bank account located in the island nation ofSt. Kitts and Nevis, making it harder to trace investor funds.

In addition, the defendants also converted Blue Bit Banc investments into ATM Coin, a worthless cryptocurrency that Kantor had misleadingly told victims was worth a substantial amount.

Even though prosecutors have indeed ruled against the dodgy firm, it might not mean much for victims, with the CFTC warning them that the wrongdoers may not have sufficient funds or assets to reimburse their losses.

Published November 4, 2019 11:39 UTC

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US fines founders of worthless cryptocurrency over $4.25M binary options scam - The Next Web

EOS Leading the Charge in Chinese Cryptocurrency Project Rankings – BeInCrypto

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Chinas Ministry of Industry has been releasing its rankings of cryptocurrency projects for quite some time, having released a total of 14 versions of the rankings. In the most recent version, EOS was on top of the list, followed by TRON and Ethereum.

The projects are ranked in three categories;

Previously, it is likely that these lists have been ignored. However, with the recent endorsement of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies by President Xi, these rankings might have an actual impact on the market.

Many investors are paying close attention to the news coming from China perceiving it as the future leader of the blockchain industry. This is also visible with the large funding done by local Chinese governments for blockchain-related projects.

Crypto trader Daniel Larimer (@bitemaster7) posted the full list of the project rankings in the tweet below:

EOS ranks first in the Basic-Tech category and second in Creativity, trailing only Ethereum.

Lets take a look at the technical outlook and see if it affirms its leading position.

Short Summary: The technical outlook for EOS looks bullish, especially is it breaks out above the resistance outlined below.

The EOS price has been decreasing since May 31, when it reached a high of $8.65.

It reached the $2.80 support area and created a double bottom, which is considered a bullish pattern.

Afterward, it moved above the peak between the bottoms then came back to validate it as support.

Both momentum indicators, the RSI and the MACD support further upward movement.

The double bottom was combined with a bullish divergence in both and the latter has moved into positive territory.

A breakout above the current descending resistance line would confirm this upward movement.

If not, it is possible that the price decreases to the support area and creates a triple bottom.

Disclaimer: This article is not trading advice and should not be construed as such. Always consult a trained financial professional before investing in cryptocurrencies, as the market is particularly volatile.

Images courtesy of Twitter, TradingView.

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Edward Snowden kicks off Web Summit / Uber posts Q3 earnings / PayPal gives evidence on political donations – Verdict

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Good morning, heres your Monday morning briefing to set you up for the day ahead. Look out for these three things happening around the world today.

Web Summit, one of Europes largest technology conferences, gets underway with a keynote from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Also speaking on day one is Huawei president Guo Ping, who will outline his vision for the 5G era. Other speakers at the four-day event include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the EUs commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager and CEO of Wikipedia Katherine Maher.

The annual event takes place at Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies posts its third-quarter earnings for 2019.

Last quarter Uber reported earnings per share of -$4.72, the largest quarterly loss in its history. This was largely due to stock-based compensation following a much-hyped but ultimately lacklustre IPO in May.

Investors have raised concerns about the loss-making firms ability to become profitable. Analysts predict losses to narrow compared with the previous quarter, with revenue rising by as much as 16% and earnings per share standing at -$0.85.

The UK governments Digital, Culture, Media and Sport sub-committee on disinformation hears evidence from PayPal executives about how online payments are changing the way people donate to political parties and campaigns.

Under political campaigning laws, any contribution of more than 500 must come from a UK-based company or individual. However, it is unclear how payment services such as PayPal can always be sure that someone isnt circumventing these rules, for instance by making multiple smaller donations without handing over their details.

The session, which takes place at 1:15 PM, forms part of a wider investigation into how disinformation and data privacy abuses affect democracy.

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Get the Verdict morning email

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Edward Snowden kicks off Web Summit / Uber posts Q3 earnings / PayPal gives evidence on political donations - Verdict

Tiny, privately owned satellites are changing how we view the Earth – NBC News

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SAN FRANCISCO In recent months, satellite photos have streamed into a former textile factory here revealing a build-up of potent Russian air defense systems in Ukraine, a serious new threat to NATO aircraft.

This is not a secret CIA facility, and the images didn't come from a billion-dollar surveillance satellite.

They were taken by private spacecraft some the size of a loaf of bread operated by Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley company that is leading a revolution in how humans glimpse Earth from space.

A short stroll from the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Yelp and LinkedIn, Planet operates the largest and least expensive fleet of satellites in history the first to take pictures of the entire landmass of the globe, once a day, and sell them to the public. The company is part of a fast-growing commercial satellite industry that is democratizing insights once available mainly to people with Top Secret government security clearances.

In May, one of Planet's satellites captured a white plume of smoke from an illegal North Korean missile test, an image that rocketed through the next day's news cycle, undercutting President Donald Trump's insistence that the North Korean regime is negotiating with the U.S. in good faith.

"I think it's so important that the pictures don't lie," said Will Marshall, one of Planet's co-founders and a former NASA spacecraft designer. "The picture is what it is. And sometimes that can be inconvenient. But it also will help us to transition away from this post-truth world, towards one more grounded in facts."

The U.S. intelligence community is a Planet customer, but so are environmental groups, farmers, Wall Street traders and journalists. Planet's fleet of imaging satellites documents climate change, natural disasters, the growth of refugee camps and the number of cars in the parking lots of a national retail chain.

When floods inundated Western Iowa in March, state officials didn't have a handle on the severity of the damage until they saw Planet's overhead imagery. They say the data helped them better coordinate the response.

As last year's Camp fire raged across California, Planet's imagery helped officials decide where to send firefighting crews.

"Earthquakes, fires, floods, typhoons, tsunamis We can help, because we have an image the day before, an image afterwards, to help responders quickly get in there," Marshall said.

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

The first spy satellites weighed nearly a ton and sent back pictures by dropping giant film canisters into passing airplanes. These days the most sophisticated government photo satellites can be the size of a school bus, and cost billions.

Marshall and his partners built their first satellite in a garage, applying the principles of the smart phone, stuffing a sophisticated camera and telescope into a rectangular box that weighs as much as a bowling ball.

Then they began blasting dozens of them into space at a time, piggybacking on commercial launches of larger satellites.

Planet won't say how much each one costs to make, except that it's "orders of magnitude" cheaper than traditional satellites.

Commercial imaging satellites are not new; Americans have been looking at pictures from space of their houses on Google maps for years. But those pictures tend to be several years old, because there are only so many commercial satellites and they can only cover so much ground.

Planet has changed the game.

The company's satellites are lined up in orbit like a Saturn ring, taking a photo of the same spot at the same time at least once every 24 hours.

Never before have humans been able to document change on the planet's surface in quite this way. Marshall, who has given two Ted Talks on his technology, has a tag line for what he hopes this new imagery will mean for Earth: "You can't fix what you can't see."

The company's fleet of 140 satellites beams back 1.2 million images a day. That is so much data that customers are turning to artificial intelligence to make sense of it. That technology is in its infancy, which means this could be the beginning of a new age of insights about the Earth. One day, there could be enough satellites in orbit to provide total persistent overhead coverage an-on demand photo of any spot on the earth at any time, weather permitting.

Other U.S. commercial satellite firms, including BlackSky and Maxar, operate more expensive satellites with better resolution than Planet's, but they don't have as many in orbit.

Planet's small satellites stay in orbit only two or three years before burning up as they fall form the sky. So the company is constantly building more of them, with newer and better technology.

"Last year we built roughly as many satellites as the whole world put together, outside of us, here in this little lab in San Francisco," Marshall said.

The company, which has yet to go public, is now valued at $2 billion.

As with any surveillance technology, the proliferation of commercial imagery can be put to ill use, by both governments and the private sector. The U.S. government limits the resolution of commercial satellite photos to ensure American spies still have the best pictures, and so the satellites cannot be used to snap close-ups of backyard sunbathers. But commercial satellites are not without privacy risks, and industry experts are only beginning to grapple with the implications. How long before a satellite photo of a straying spouse's car, parked where it should not be, is used in a divorce case?

Robert Cardillo, who until last year led the U.S. spy agency that processes satellite imagery, says the leaders of his field are now grappling with the same sort of influx of new data as the National Security Agency did when human communication migrated to the internet. And he wants to avoid an Edward Snowden moment revelations about surveillance that alarm the public.

"We're awash in pixels," said Cardillo, the former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or NGA, which has contracts with Planet and other private satellite companies. "Who controls the data? Where is it stored? How do you protect privacy? We have an opportunity to have this conversation now with the American people."

Biking and walking to work in downtown San Francisco, Planet's hoodie-and-jeans-wearing employees argue that their products are not designed for spying. They named their small satellites "doves" for a reason, Marshall said they believe they are a force for good.

A New Zealand livestock company is using Planet's imagery to monitor the grass in its pastures and send the cattle to the areas where the grass is higher. Arizona State University, the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and the University of Queensland partnered with Planet to map the world's coral reefs. Humboldt County, California has used the pictures to dramatically improve its enforcement actions against illegal marijuana farmers.

For Sarah Bidgood, who researches U.S.-Russia arms control issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, Planet's images have been invaluable, helping her track those new Russian weapons in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014.

It's better for everyone if private analysts can study the world's geopolitical hotspots, she said.

"That's one of the things that Planet is doing that I think is so essential to the work of analysts like myself," Bidgood said. "It is placing information that gives us insights into granular changes on the ground into our hands. And that's what allows us to do good, nuanced analysis that can lead to good policy."

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Tiny, privately owned satellites are changing how we view the Earth - NBC News

Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, LTC, And XLM RallyIs It For Real? – Forbes

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INDIA - 2019/10/23: In this photo illustration a popular decentralised digital currency Bitcoin logo ... [+] displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A rally in major cryptocurrencies that began at the end of the previous week continued last week, spreading to smaller cryptocurrencies.

As of Saturday evening, Bitcoin had gained 1.7 % over the previous seven days, ETH 2.66%, XRP 1.91%, LTC 4.91%, and XLM 12.71%, with 78 out of the top 100 cryptocurrencies advancing and 22 declining.

A strong advanced-decline ratio indicates that the rally is for real, fueled by new money flowing into the cryptocurrency markets, rather than rotating from one cryptocurrency to another.

Then theres the news that China is ready to embrace blockchain technology, and develop its own digital currency.

Thats something markets expected to hear, as Facebooks Libra has been falling apart.

Nicholas Pelecanos, Advisor toNEM Ventures, thinks that BTC has the potential to break out, as trades near the top of its range.The tremendous 40% rally we witnessed at the end of last week certainly shows the market participants are still bullish, he says.

But he thinks that Chinas renewed interest in blockchain favors protocols like Ethereum and NEM rather than Bitcoin. Personally, I believe the news that China will embrace blockchain is not as bullish for Bitcoin as the rally may have hinted to; I dont believe giving Chinese citizens sovereignty of wealth is high on the current regimes agenda, he says. The news is however bullish for protocols like Ethereum and NEM that can support the applications the Chinese government may be looking to embrace.

Ryan Uhr, CEO and co-founder of Coinplug Inc., thinks that China will always keep a firm control of cryptocurrencies that allow citizens to hide assets. Cryptocurrencies that are developed and managed independently of the Chinese government provide the means for citizens to hide assets, he says. This means that the government will most likely keep cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Libra, under tight control in the domestic market.

Simply put, Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies wont see any meaningful impact from Chinas cryptocurrency embrace. And that will eventually deflate the hype behind the recent rally, and the return to the old sideway pattern.

But that may not be a bad thing. A sideways BTC doesnt mean opportunities will cease to present themselves, says Nicholas Pelecanos.

One area where he sees such opportunities is short LTCUSD, as its hash rate has been falling. I dont see LTC making any meaningful pull back until the hash rate begins to climb again, he says.

Meanwhile, Pelecanosis concerned about the volatility in BTCs hash rate. Speaking of hash rate, while everyone was distracted by the China embracing blockchain news, the Bitcoin hash rate slid over 30% from its high, he says. The hash rate has since rallied around 10% but further destabilization to the hash rate could cause BTC to head back down to the bottom of its range."

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Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, LTC, And XLM RallyIs It For Real? - Forbes

Bitcoin Price Diary: How Everything Went 100% Right With My $7.3K Long – Cointelegraph

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The sixth installment of my trade journal features one of my best Bitcoin (BTC) swing trades ever, catching much of the 40% move that caught many traders off guard.

This was a straightforward trade for me, filling bids in an area that I was expecting to be near the potential bottom. The entire trade is immortalized in a twitter thread. After closing this trade, I opened a new one on the retrace, which is still active.

Setting up the trade

Entries: $7,390, $7,450 ($7,420 average entry)

Targets: $7,712, $8,535, $10,000

Stop loss: I set the stop loss at $7,240, below the 61.8% fib and recent swing low. This would result in a 2.4% loss on the position and a 1% portfolio loss.

Risk / reward: Target 1 = 1.62, Target 2 = 6.19 Target 3 = 14.33

As discussed in my previous journal, after a significant break down from the bear flag on Oct. 23, Bitcoin price approached a buy order that I had set in June 2019. There was no rational reason for me to remove this order as doing so would be an emotional decision based on the recent drop. I filled my bids at $7,390 in the highlighted zone below.

This also amounted to an almost perfect 61.8% retrace of the entire move from the $3,100 bottom to the $13,800 top, considered by many to be an ideal entry.

XBT USD daily chart. Source: TradingView

Further, Bitcoin was flashing a bullish divergence on every time frame ranging from the 4-hour to the 3-day time frame. These divergences eventually confirmed on all time frames, shown below on the daily chart.

BTC USD daily chart. Source: TradingView

I doubled down on this position on Oct. 24 after price showed a clear swing failure pattern (SFP), wicking below a key swing low from months ago and closing above.

This is viewed as a sign that liquidity has been engineered by a large party, who has likely moved priced below a certain level to sweep stop-loss orders and fill bids by enticing traders to go short. This SFP is shown below, both on the daily and 4-hour time frames.

BTC USD daily chart. Source: TradingView

BTC USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Oct. 25th and 26th saw one of the largest daily moves in 24 hours in the history of Bitcoin, and the largest since 2011 a 40% pump.

All 3 of my targets were hit, which are illustrated below. The first target was just below the bottom of the previous trading range, a likely point of resistance. Considering the 40% move, this was a very early place to start taking profit, but I was comfortable locking in gains in an area where the price was likely to stall, if not reverse back down. I sold of my position here.

BTC USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

BTC price moved quickly through the first target, and in a matter of hours had reached the top of the range, filling my second round of asks at $8,500. This accounted for another of my position closing.

At this point, I did not have an exact take profit set, as I wanted to watch price action for a good spot to close the remaining of the position Price ultimately moved above $10,000 quickly, so I moved a stop loss to just under this psychological level. It was night time where I live, so I went to sleep and woke up stopped out at just under $10,000.

This trade (alongside a massive move on Tesla) accounted for a large enough gain to fulfill my profit quota for the rest of 2019. As I always say, the less I trade, the more I make.

Entry: $8,995

Targets: $9,600, $9,809, $10,379.15, $10,943, $12,700 and some higher!

Stop loss: $8,775

As chronicled in the previous trade, Bitcoin made a massive move and then began to retrace. For me, the 40% Bitcoin pump was a sign that the downside was likely over for good, and that it was time to continue looking for long entries.

On any impulsive move, it is common to see a 50% retrace, a knee-jerk selling reaction to a massive change in market conditions. For this reason, I was eyeing the 50% retrace for an entry.

BTC USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Price dropped to the 50% level, filling my bids for a new Bitcoin position. The chart below shows fresh areas of interest I highlighted for a new trade, including the swing high ($8,995) on the 4-hour chart, immediately after the move down from late September. This is why I chose to set my bids on this line.

BTC USD 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

The lines drawn on the above chart account for likely short-term targets, as well as area below to use for stop losses (with a bit of room beneath for a wick). I will continue to update this trade as it continues.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the (@scottmelker) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.

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Bitcoin Price Diary: How Everything Went 100% Right With My $7.3K Long - Cointelegraph