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Ether, Litecoin and More: Overstock Now Accepts Cryptocurrencies as Payment – CoinDesk

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Online retail giant Overstock has partnered with blockchain startup ShapeShift to accept more than 60 cryptocurrencies as payment at its online stores.

With the announcement, Overstock.com shopperscan now use ether, litecoin, dash and bitcoin cash at checkout, a move that follows Overstock's early embrace of bitcoin as a payment method. Overstock first began accepting bitcoin for payment in 2014, and it has remained active in developing the technology, even launching a dedicated subsidiary to focus on applications.

In statements, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne sought to portray the decision as one that gives its customers greater freedoms outside of the traditional financial system.

Bryne said:

"Overstock is pro-freedom, including the freedom of individuals to communicate information about value and scarcity without relying on a medium created through the fiat of unaccountable government mandarins."

The move further comes at a timeof broader diversification in the cryptocurrency market, which has seen bitcoin's share of the total asset class slip below 50%.

As such, Overstock framed the move as one that keeps it in line with new developments in the blockchain market. Butwhether the company believes this trend will continue remains unclear.

Notably, Overstock said it intends to convert the cryptocurrency it receives to bitcoin, as well as issue refunds using the protocol.

Disclosure:CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in ShapeShift.

Overstock image via CoinDesk Archives

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at [emailprotected].

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Ether, Litecoin and More: Overstock Now Accepts Cryptocurrencies as Payment - CoinDesk

There’s a house full of cryptocurrency gurus in San Francisco, and it’s like a modern-day commune – CNBC

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"When we first got this place, I was the only girl who was here and I actually got involved with this place because I have amazing friends," said Toni Lane Casserly, a faculty member at Singularity University, a collaborative technology learning platform.

Lane-Casserly has seen a shift in her years in the space. When she first got there, people were telling her that Bitcoin was used for bad ends. Now people are asking her how they could get involved in the ecosystem.

Another roommate, Viviane Ford, had a similar experience.

"It's funny to see this slowly just gain more and more ground. We used to have a Bitcoin predictor on the window up there and we would guess by the end of the year it's going to hit a thousand or something." said Ford, vice president of Operations at Comma.ai.

"There was one moment where we had a big white board upstairs, a bunch of us were talking about different things and I think Bitcoin hit $2,000," she said, adding that "at that moment we popped a bottle of champagne and celebrated."

Whether Bitcoin or other crypto currencies are flying high or sliding backward, for the visitors and tenants of the Crypto Castle, it's about the game and not the score.

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There's a house full of cryptocurrency gurus in San Francisco, and it's like a modern-day commune - CNBC

WikiLeaks founder offers job to Google employee fired over diversity memo – Washington Examiner

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WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said on Tuesday that WikiLeaks is offering a job opportunity to the former Google employee who was fired after writing an internal memo condemning the technology company's approach to diversity.

"Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore," Assange said on Twitter. WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, releases classified government documents and publishes leaks from anonymous sources.

James Damore was fired on Monday for "perpetuating gender stereotypes," according to Bloomberg, after he said in his memo that biological differences are one of the reasons for the gender gap in the technology sector and in leadership positions. The 10-page memo, titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," details Damore's views that the company alienates conservatives and has discriminatory policies.

"'Shut up and think' while the taboo of the day may change the fate of workers under cognitive capitalism remains the same #JamesDamore," Assange added.

There has been a range of reactions to Damore's firing, from those who applauded his removal because of his statements and those taking a similar stance to Assange, who view the firing as a censorship of opinions. Assange tweeted a hypothetical conversation between Google and one of its engineers.

"Google: Any ideas on how we can decrease wages? Engineer: The job is lonely & stressful. Maybe women don't like it Google: You're fired," Assange said.

The U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Google earlier this year and requested compensation data to see if it is following equal employment laws.

"Women & men deserve respect. That includes not firing them for politely expressing ideas but rather arguing back," Assange said.

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WikiLeaks founder offers job to Google employee fired over diversity memo - Washington Examiner

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Just Offered Google’s Fired Anti-Diversity Employee a Job – Fortune

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WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has offered a job to James Damore, a Google employee who was fired after he wrote a scathing internal memo criticizing the company's diversity policies .

"Censorship is for losers, WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore," Assange wrote on Twitter Tuesday. In the same post, Assange also linked to a WikiLeaks article he wrote called "Google Is Not What It Seems."

Damore, a now-former engineer at Google, accused the Silicon Valley web giant of suppressing conservative voices in a 10-page memo called Googles Ideological Echo Chamber ," which was circulated over the weekend.

[W]hen it comes to diversity and inclusion, Googles left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence," the memo, which was initially published anonymously, said. He later confirmed in an email to Bloomberg that he had been dismissed for "perpetuating gender stereotypes."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees on Monday that parts of Damore's memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace."

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Wikileaks' Julian Assange Just Offered Google's Fired Anti-Diversity Employee a Job - Fortune

WikiLeaks Now Accepts ZCash Donations – The Merkle

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WikiLeaks is now accepting ZCash donations. The organizationstill accepts Bitcoin donations as well. However, there have been requests from donors who prefer more privacy-oriented donation methods for this particular site. Given that, Zcash makes a lot of sense. This is an intriguing decision that will probably inflate the ZEC price for some time to come.

The story of WikiLeaks and cryptocurrency donations goes back some time. In the beginning, the platform survived thanks to donations made usingPayPal. However, given the sensitive nature of the website and the parties it exposes on a regular basis, PayPal madethe (wrong) decision to freeze the organizationspayment processing account. This created quite a backlash against both PayPal and the U.S. government alike, yet WikiLeaks used the time wisely to searchfor alternative solutions.

That solution wasBitcoin, which was still a relatively underappreciated cryptocurrency at thetime. However, thanks to WikiLeakss embrace ofBitcoin, the cryptocurrency gained significantnotoriety. So far, WikiLeaks has continued to accept Bitcoin donations, and it does not appear they have any plans to change that. It is good to see organizationsstick with what they know will work out best in the long run.

WikiLeaks is keeping all of their donation methods open for now. In fact, it plans todouble down on accepting cryptocurrency payments. As of today, you can use ZCash to contribute to WikiLeaks as well. This makes Zcash the third cryptocurrency accepted by the sitein recent years. Not too long ago, itenabled Litecoin deposits as well. Some people may wonder why Ethereum is not on thatlist just yet, but it seems unlikely that will happenanytime soon.

Zcash users have two different donation addresses from which to choose. They can send a regular transaction, or they can move funds to a private address. It is interesting to see WikiLeaks supporting both options, andit makes a lot of sense for them to work with more privacy-oriented cryptocurrency solutions. Neither Bitcoin nor Litecoin provides any privacy or anonymity when moving funds. It will be interesting to see how many people choose todonatetheir ZEC.

Once WikiLeaks made theannouncement on Twitter, itimmediately receiveda lot of feedback from the overall cryptocurrency community. It did not take long for certainaltcoin supporters to come out of the woodwork and claim thattheir favorite coin isbetter than ZCash when it comes to privacy. Those comments are always great to see, asit shows there is a fair bit of competition in the privacy and anonymity race. Some users even feel Monero would be a better choice, sinceit would prevent anyone from seeing how much XMR the group holds in the first place.

It does not appear as if this decision will affect the ZCash price all that much. There are not too many use cases for ZEC, and donating to WikiLeaksis not something everyone does regularly. It is still good news for the currency as a whole, seeingas WikiLeaks values itswork in the privacy department. It will be interesting to notewhetherother cryptocurrencies areadded to the organizations donation page in the future. WikiLeaks continues to make waves in one way or another.

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WikiLeaks Now Accepts ZCash Donations - The Merkle

WikiLeaks: Riyadh Flirts with Tel Aviv through Normalization – Middle East Monitor

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A highly classified press release by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was published by WikiLeaks, reveals the level of rapprochement between Riyadh and Tel Aviv. Saudi Arabia initiated discussions on the issue of normalization with Israel and the 2002 Saudi peace initiative that was adopted by the Arab League at the Beirut Summit in the same year.

This was followed by a media propaganda in 2006, the year in which influential people in Saudi Arabia started speaking out that Israel was no longer among the enemies of the United States, but was the closest to an unofficial ally. This discourse has developed and turned into Saudi initiatives to establish ties between the two countries in 2008. Since that date, the effectiveness of the ties between Tel Aviv and Riyadh and the support of the rapprochement between the two are clearly noticed.

The WikiLeaks documents added some credibility to what Saudis saw as talk without evidence, whether regarding the Saudi relations with Israel or other issues. But what is new in the Saudi Israeli relations is that Riyadh has launched a new phase of rapprochement with Israel, but not at the intelligence and security level. In one of the telegrams, dated 27 April, 2005, which was sent by the Under Secretary of State for Economic and Cultural Affairs to the Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, regarding the receipt of a telegram from the Head of the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, to clarify the Saudi dealings with Israeli companies, the Saudi Under Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs referred to the Decision of the Saudi Cabinet No. 5 of 13 June, 1995.

The decision concerns the suspension of the boycott of Israel at the second and third levels, and the preservation of the first level, which stipulate that the Kingdom boycotts the totally Israeli companies and does not boycott the ones that Israel or persons holding Israeli nationality own a share in, or foreign companies that deal with Israeli companies according to the first level. This means that the Saudi authorities have allowed companies, which have relations with Israel, to work in the Kingdom in various fields, since the mid-nineties, and that the review is only restricted to special cases related to information security.

In this context, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that direct Israeli investment, whether banking or commercial, is witnessing steady growth that started slowly with the beginning of the new millennium.

Read: Israel will attend conference with Saudi Arabia

In mid-2012, Major General Nayef bin Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz, one of the most important Saudi military commanders who is specialized in the fields of special operations and electronic warfare, published an article in the magazine of the American Joint Forces, which spoke positively about Israel and the need to strengthen relations between his country and Tel Aviv.

He stressed the need for the two sides to invest in strengthening the bonds of cooperation and convergence between Palestinians and Arabs in general on the one hand, and Israelis on the other. A telegram from the Under Secretary of State for Information and Technical Affairs to Saud Al-Faisal showed that the Saudi side is interested in the Israeli reaction to this article, which can be described as one of the test balloons to strengthen ties between Tel Aviv and Riyadh.

Another telegram included an article written by the Israeli author in Haaretz, Amir Oren, which referred to Nayefs article that pointed out that Riyadh is flirting with normal relations with Israel under certain conditions. This confirms that Naifs article was a test balloon for the reactions of Israel firstly and the Arab media secondly. There is another telegram from the Under Secretary of State for Information and Technical Affairs to Saud Al-Faisal about the interest of Arab media in the article of the Israeli writer and his comments on the whole matter.

The Wikileaks leaks on Saudi foreign correspondents also confirmed the existence of signs of relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv not only at the official level but also at the grassroots level. One of these documents sheds light on an unofficial protocol brokered by the United States that fosters relations between the Kingdom and the UAE under an academic cover. This comes in the context of what international relations experts call the establishment of normal relations rooted at the bottom. The telegram sent by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs demands the completion of information on a delegation of tens of Saudi students who were hosted by the Israeli Embassy in Washington as part of a training program for the preparation of leaders, under the auspices of the US government.

The telegram, which was sent in August 2008, refers to the demand of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to see the content and purpose of the visit, as well as the questionnaires filled out by the students, in addition to the content of the articles that were written and printed by the Israeli Embassy and granted to the students. It also refers to the inquiry of Saudi Arabia about the purpose of the visit and what was going on. The document said that Saudi students listened to an explanation by the Israeli embassy staff, posed questions and took photographs.

What is remarkable is that the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not raise any objections or warnings in the telegram about this visit, and that it dealt with it routinely, exactly as is the case when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asks its embassies around the world about a specific event. This suggests that similar activities occur routinely and it is not a separate act of a person or group of people who hold Saudi citizenship and reside in the United States and who have acted in an individual way.

It rather comes under the auspices of a US government program involving most of the friendly countries of the United States including Saudi Arabia and Israel and aware of its objectives and stages. The participation of Saudi Arabia in the program started when Prince Turki Al-Faisal, who is considered the godfather of the rapprochement between Tel Aviv and Riyadh, took up the post of ambassador to the Kingdom in Washington.

Read:Saudi links to Israel revealed

Given the content of the US program, the plan has the objective of training young people on leadership within their communities and on international cooperation with their peers in other countries. The program aims also to create a new generation of young leaders who are active at both the social and political levels, specifically to be specialized in international relations and how to manage them. This complies with the Saudi policy which aims, since a date close to the date of the visit, to deepen the process of normalization with Israel at the popular level. This has taken a rising trend since 2011, and reached the final acceptance of Saudis of normal relations with the Zionist entity.

In 2014, a survey conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on the Arab Israeli conflict and on the future of the peace process revealed that the majority of the people surveyed in Saudi Arabia, about 1000 people, supported making peace with Israel and the two state solution. The Saudi sample, when compared to UAE and Kuwait, topped the list, in terms of the number of supporters of peace with Israel among the three samples, at 61 per cent. In this context, Salman Al-Ansari, the founder of the Saudi lobby in the United States, called for a cooperative alliance between Riyadh and Tel Aviv based on common regional and economic interests.

He pointed out also that there is a historic opportunity for a new era of peace and prosperity. According to the news website Times of Israel, Al-Ansari, head of the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee, wrote in The Hill that Israel is uniquely positioned to help its neighbour in economic development in the coming years. He considered that the political dialogue between the two sides is not only in the interest of the two countries, but also in the interest of the Middle East and the international allies of Saudi Arabia and Israel.

According to Al Mayadeen, Al-Ansari wrote that Israel is one of the most developed and technologically advanced countries in the field of mining, and added that it is one of the worlds leading countries in the water engineering industry, which are two issues of great importance to Saudi Arabia.

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WikiLeaks: Riyadh Flirts with Tel Aviv through Normalization - Middle East Monitor

How Chelsea Manning Covertly Made a High-Tech Art Exhibition While In Prison – W Magazine

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Besides grabbing a slice of hot, greasy pizza and sipping on champagne, one of the first things that Chelsea Manning , famed whistleblower and trans activist, did following her release after seven years of a 35-year prison sentence was go out to brunch for some avocado toasta normal enough activity for someone getting reacquainted with contemporary American society, but one that held extra significance for Manning. The meal marked her first real-life encounter with Heather Dewey-Hagborg, the artist to whom shed been sending DNA samples for years.

Before that, the pairs collaboration, which is now publicly on view at New York's Fridman Gallery through September, had been largely clandestine. The former U.S. Army intelligence analysts spell at five different facilities over the last seven years, which a United Nations expert called cruel and inhumane, allowed for little outside contactwhich is why, in 2015, when Paper wanted to publish a portrait of Manning along with an interview conducted via email and encrypted web platforms, the magazine resorted to unusual methods and called on someone who was then arguably one of the industrys least popular artists.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Radical Love, Chelsea Manning, 2016. Installation at World Economic Forum.

Courtesy the artists and Fridman Gallery, New York. Photo by Monika Flueckiger

At that point, Dewey-Hagborgs infamous portraits constructed out of the DNA extracted from found items like cigarette butts and chewing gum had attracted the artist her fair share of flack, but in this case, they provided the perfect phenotypic opportunity: A couple of ear swabs and hair clippings later, she was able to create two 3D-printed portraits of Manningthe first images of her seen since 2010. They were also the first images of Manning, who was known as Bradley Manning at the time she was sentenced, since she announced that she was transitioning. "The only thing, really, was that she was concerned about appearing too male, Dewey-Hagborg recalled recently of her early interactions with Manning.

Dewey-Hagborg's infamous, intentionally provocative DNA works were always intended not only as a warning about the risk of surveillance, but of the potential harm of the emerging technology of DNA phenotyping and its reductionism when it comes to identity, particularly stereotypes and biases. Essentially, her interests lined up neatly with those of Manning, a dissident who's also vigorously campaigned for humanparticularly transgenderrights. The pairs correspondence continued long after the Paper project, even though it had to be mostly via letters, written on actual pen and paper.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, DNA Extraction Process, Radical Love, Chelsea Manning, 2016.

Courtesy the artists and Fridman Gallery, New York. Photo by Thomas Dexter

Together, their previous collaboration grew to 30 more portraits of Manning, which called for much more immediate actionand more swabs and hairs smuggled via Mannings lawyer. Dewey-Hagborg fed these samples into the software she wrote back in 2012, which analyzes the DNA extractions to create a probable face based on the genetic data. (The possibilities are almost endless: Mannings DNA alone could result in light skin or dark skin; brown eyes or blue eyes; freckles or no freckles; and so on and so forth.)

The resulting 30 faces Dewey-Hagborg chose now make up A Becoming Resemblance, the Fridman Gallery exhibition that, for the most part of its making, was actually just a dream. In 2016, Manning's already brutal time in custody took a turn for the worse: She tried to kill herself, was sentenced to solitary confinement, tried to kill herself again, and went on hunger strike to protest her mistreatment and the mishandling of her gender dysphoria (which she ended when the military granted her request for gender transition surgery). At that point, obviously I was really worried about her, and I was trying to send positive messages however I could, Dewey-Hagborg said.

Installation view of "A Becoming Resemblance," 2017, at Fridman Gallery.

Photos by Paola Abreu Pita, courtesy the artists and Fridman Gallery, New York

And, with President Obamas term coming to an end then, she also made a plan: Working with the illustrator Shoili Kanungo, Dewey-Hagborg and Manning set about creating a comic book envisioning Obama commuting Mannings sentence, and a freed Manning visiting an exhibition of her portraits in-person. The resulting book, Suppressed Images , was published three days before the end of Obamas term, on the morning of January 17, 2017the same day that, a matter of hours later, Manning ended up being freed. I have no idea if Obama actually saw [the book], but it felt like magic, Dewey-Hagborg recalled.

Last week, Manning did indeed get to visit the exhibition, whose mission to illuminate the importance of identity issues has only magnified since Mannings more recent struggles. Its about uniting us, Dewey-Hagborg said. Were 99 percent the same on the genomic level, and were focusing on that molecular solidarity instead of divisivenesspointing out that we have so much that brings us together and that connects us.

Manning is still limiting her contact with reporters, but that didnt keep her from accepting hugs and posing for selfies with her admirers, whom Dewey-Hagborg said turned the opening night into a love festone that the pair definitely seems like they'll continue themselves, even if that means just sitting in the park or running errands to Home Depot. Its so wonderful now that I can just send her a text message, Dewey-Hagborg said of their friendship. Its incredible.

Related: Chelsea Manning Makes Her Case in First Post-Prison Interview

Meet the Women Who Made History as the Organizers of the Women's March on Washington:

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How Chelsea Manning Covertly Made a High-Tech Art Exhibition While In Prison - W Magazine

Security means knowing your network better than your attackers or your users: ex NSA head – CSO Australia

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Australian debate on encryption based on a very thoughtful question about visibility of governments own insider threat

Governments must be held to higher standards than commercial entities when it comes to protecting citizens privacy, a former deputy head of the US National Security Agency has said while noting that increasingly complicated threats have nonetheless necessitated a fresh look at security and privacy.

Few know this better than Chris Inglis, a career US military officer who served as deputy director of the NSA for 8 years and presided over the ignominious mass information leak by Edward Snowden. Snowdens actions which Inglis has previously said showed a lack of courage drew attention onto the NSA and its mass surveillance programs, which eventually led to changes in the NSAs remit and even bigger problems when NSA-developed exploits were this year leveraged to enable the mass WannaCry and Petya malware attacks.

Snowdens compromise, and the significant shift in government transparency that Snowdens revelations about mass surveillance occasioned, has been a defining force in reshaping the information-security dialogue between public and private sectors. Recent years have seen governments in Australia and elsewhere moving to formalise their cybersecurity defences, as well as the rapid maturation of a security community that has tapped novel technologies to respond to the growth in low and slow infiltrations used by malicious insider like Snowden.

Because they are familiar with installed defences, such insiders have proven uniquely able to avoid tripping conventional alarms. And this, says Inglis, has laid out the extent of the problem facing companies and government agencies alike.

Weve got to move from episodic defence at choke points, to a continuous understanding of whats happening on these networks such that we can detect anomalies or bad activities the first time it happens, he explains. Its no longer good enough to react well; you have to anticipate well.

Inglis comments mirror those of Australian government cybersecurity advisor Alistair MacGibbon, who has frequently and publicly called for change in our collective approach to security. Security vendors have been on the same page, with analysts warning years ago that Australian companies are thinking reactively more than in an agile way. This requires engagement from the business yet even as hackers get more professional about their approach to breaching security, some CSOs had struggled to make the same progress in getting the executive support they need.

This had led many companies into a similar situation as the one that Inglis and his peers faced at the NSA where companies find themselves compromised and trying after the fact to figure out where they had gone wrong. With Australian businesses recently ranked as the most likely in the world to deploy data loss prevention tools after a breach rather than before one its a lesson that many companies will continue to learn the hard way.

Inglis, for one, has put his money on user entity behavioural analytics (UEBA) technology that watches users online behaviour on an ongoing basis, quietly searching for behavioural anomalies that might indicate suspicious behaviour by otherwise-trusted users.

Shortly after leaving the NSA, Inglis joined the advisory board of UEBA vendor Securonix, which this month opened shop in Australia to tap into a land rush for ANZ businesses that are shoring up their defences in anticipation of a perfect storm of new legislation and governance requirements they will face in 2018 and beyond.

UEBA is just as important in catching outsiders as it is in catching Snowden-like insiders. Outsiders Holy Grail is to become someone or something that has privileges inside the system, Inglis said. Youre looking for a baseline that says that there is actually a different entity behind this privilege, and you want to catch that to defend the integrity and reputation of the person whose privileges have been stolen.

Once that theft happens, the damage can be considerable and fast. We have put more and more power into the hands of fewer individuals, Inglis said. Computers allow you to have much higher leverage based on a single person; the scope and scale attendant to what somebody can do is now much bigger. And your ability to catch it in time to restore things to good order easily, is much harder.

Varying narratives about Snowdens legacy years later, he remains a traitor to some and a hero to others shouldnt distract from the importance of embracing new technologies to stop what he did, Inglis said, arguing that everything should be on the table at this point.

Despite his call for stronger government oversight, Inglis called for a level-headed approach to the current controversy around the governments plans to force software giants to figure out a way to provide access to otherwise inaccessible communications.

While mass brute-force decryption remains mathematically challenging and the details of how such access might be provided remain sketchy, Inglis said its important to remember that the government is effectively fighting its own insider threat. And while discussion about the mechanisms of such a policy are still in early days, he sees them in large part as an extension of long-standing policy around police access to potential evidence of criminal activity.

The Australian governments push to gain access to secure private messaging was an example of the type of considerations that had to be weighed given the current security climate, Inglis said. The question is whether we can take advantage of the capabilities that are there under the rule of law as it has existed for time immemorial, he explained.

The question now is how do we not force ourselves into a place to choose between one and the other, he said, but to ask the right policy questions and come up with the right framework.

The further question, he continued, is whether you want to begin to alter technology trends so you can continue to have a collective defence with secure domestic and national security and individual rights? The government is held accountable by its citizens to deliver those. Its a very thoughtful question.

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Tags cybersecurity adviser Alistair MacGibbonNational Security AgencyEdward SnowdenPetyaprotecting citizensWannaCryChris Inglismalware attacks

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Security means knowing your network better than your attackers or your users: ex NSA head - CSO Australia

RedHat: Open Source driving innovation and digital transformation – Business News Americas (subscription)

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Slow growth in Latin American countries in recent years has stood open source software giant RedHat in good stead as companies seek to reduce costs and innovate to create new business models.

"Often what is a limitation to certain companies during an economic downturn, like budget cuts, is favorable for us. We're not so exposed to economic fluctuations. We're counter cyclical," Adrin Cambareri (pictured) Latin America region manager for Red hat's infrastructure business group, told BNamericas, speaking on the sidelines of the RedHat Forum in Santiago, Chile.

According to the executive, RedHat has been growing 20% yearly globally and at a similar rate in Latin America.

The executive said that open source is no longer seen as something taboo "that you hide under the desk" or which does not provide the same guarantees for corporate users as proprietary software.

"Now it is seen to be just as robust, secure and capable of meeting compliance standards as proprietary software," Cambareri said.

In today's world of digital transformation, open source software has come to be seen as the best bet for rapidly adapting to new technology trends as it allows a large community of developers to create new applications that can then be converted into enterprise grade products. This contrasts with the "lock-in" mentality of proprietary software where the only innovation can come from the company that created it.

"Typically companies reinvest a maximum of 10% of the their income in R&D. With open source there is no limit, the whole community is constantly innovating," Cambareri said.

"It's no surprise that 12 of the top 20 companies worldwide in terms of revenue are digital native companies whose technology is based on open source," he added.

"If traditional companies want to compete with these digital natives they have speed up their rate of innovation through open source software."

"Open source used to be just seen as the more economical option to do things, especially for governments. Over time that perception has changed and open source has taken the lead in terms of innovation."

Adoption is being seen across the board but in particular in the financial services (fintechs), retail healthcare, telecommunications and government.

Brazil, Mexico and Peru have been among the fastest adopters.

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RedHat: Open Source driving innovation and digital transformation - Business News Americas (subscription)

Mozilla’s new file-transfer service isn’t perfect, but it’s drop-dead easy – Ars Technica

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Mozilla is testing a new service that makes it dead simple and quick for people to semi-securely share files with anyone on the Internet.

Send, as the service is called, allows senders to encrypt any 1-gigabyte or less file and upload it to a Mozilla server. The service then creates a link with a long, complex string of letters in it that's required to download and decrypt the file. Mozilla will automatically delete the encrypted file as soon as it's downloaded or within 24 hours of being uploaded, even if no one has downloaded it.

Send offers reasonable security and privacy assurances. The service uses an algorithm known as AES-GCM-128 to encrypt and authenticate data on the sender's computer before uploading it to Mozilla servers. And it also uses the Web crypto programming interface, which is one of the better-tested ways Internet applications can perform cryptographic operations without having access to decryption keys. Still, Send shouldn't be trusted with the most sensitive types of data, such as files that might land a dissident or whistleblower in prison.

"Of course, you'll probably hear from naysayers who say doing crypto in the browser with JavaScript is a terrible thing," Justin Troutman, a cryptography and privacy expert and program manager at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Ars. "But they're using the WebCrypto API, which is probably the sanest way to do it, if you're going to do it."

Another potential weak point: a quick test by researchers at antivirus provider Bitdefender found that the one-download limitation can be bypassed when two users access the link at the same time. The researchers found that there's a delay of a few seconds for servers to be notified that a download has completed. That delay, they discovered, is longer for bigger files. In certain cases, the delay might allow an attacker to download a file the legitimate parties believe was no longer available.

Another drawback: Send will store basic information on the sender's local device. This information includes the Send identifier for the file, the filename, and the unique download link for the transmitted file. The information, however, is deleted once the sender deletes the uploaded file or visits the Send service after the file has expired. Users are also subject to Mozilla's privacy policy, which, among other things, allows the service to temporarily retain IP addresses in server logs.

Send also collects performance and diagnostic information, including how often users upload files, how long the files remain before expiring, any errors related to file transfers, and what cryptographic protocols a user's browser supports.

Last, the security of the service requires the generated download to remain private. Anyone who obtains it can download and decrypt the uploaded file.

Those weaknesses or limitations aside, Send may be a better way to transmit files. Many e-mail services limit attachments to 100 megabytes or less. And unless the sending and receiving parties clear special hurdles, the transmitted data can sit unencrypted on e-mail servers indefinitely. Besides the crypto and self-expiration happening automatically, the service also provides an extremely simple interface.

At the moment, Mozilla is describing Send as a test-pilot experiment.

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Mozilla's new file-transfer service isn't perfect, but it's drop-dead easy - Ars Technica


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