EASTON, Md., Feb. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- TeraWulf Inc. (Nasdaq: WULF) ("TeraWulf"), which was formed to own and operate fully integrated environmentally clean bitcoin mining facilities in the United States, today announced it has appointed William "Sandy" Harrison as Vice President of Investor Relations, effective immediately.

Mr. Harrison brings to TeraWulf significant experience in financial and marketing communications, equity research, financial analysis and strategic planning. Most recently, he served as Vice President of Investor Relations at Semtech Corporation for eight years, with responsibility for leading the company's investor relations program and establishing its environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) team. Before joining Semtech, Mr. Harrison held analyst positions with increasing levels of responsibility at Wunderlich Securities, Signal Hill Capital Group and Pacific Growth Equities. Mr. Harrison holds a Master of Business Administration in finance & accounting from Loyola University and a bachelor's degree in industrial psychology & history from Washington & Lee University.

TeraWulf began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market LLC in December 2021 after completing its business combination with IKONICS Corporation. The Company is developing two fully integrated environmentally clean bitcoin mining facilities, Lake Mariner in New York and Nautilus Cryptomine in Pennsylvania, with the objective of 800 megawatts of mining capacity deployed by 2025, enabling over 23 exahash per second of expected hashrate. The Lake Mariner facility is expected to begin mining operations in the first quarter.

"Sandy's unique blend of experience is a natural fit for TeraWulf, bringing an expertise in investor relations and ESG programs, a comprehensive understanding of the financial markets and deep investor connections," said Paul Prager, Chief Executive Officer and chair of the board of TeraWulf. "We are pleased to have him join the team as we finalize preparations to begin mining operations at Lake Mariner this quarter. With a fully integrated, environmentally clean platform, we expect to be able to offer attractive economics and advance towards or our goal of providing domestically produced bitcoin powered by 100% zero-carbon energy."

"With a seasoned team of energy industry experts who understand the complex logistics required to undertake bitcoin mining at an industrial scale, as well as a genuine commitment to strong ESG values, TeraWulf truly stands out as best-in-class," said Mr. Harrison. "I look forward to putting my skills to work as we establish TeraWulf as the leader in fully integrated environmentally friendly bitcoin mining."

About TeraWulf

TeraWulf (Nasdaq: WULF) was formed by an experienced group of energy entrepreneurs to own and operate fully integrated environmentally clean bitcoin mining facilities in the United States. The Company is developing two mining facilities, Lake Mariner in New York and Nautilus Cryptomine in Pennsylvania, with the objective 800 megawatts of mining capacity deployed by 2025, enabling over 23 exahash per second of expected hashrate. TeraWulf will generate domestically produced bitcoin powered by nuclear, hydro and solar energy with a goal of utilizing 100% zero-carbon energy. With a core focus of ESG that ties direction to its business success, TeraWulf expects to offer attractive mining economics at an industrial scale.

For more information on TeraWulf, please visit http://www.TeraWulf.com or follow @TeraWulfInc on Twitter.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Such forward-looking statements include statements concerning anticipated future events and expectations that are not historical facts. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as "plan," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "outlook," "estimate," "forecast," "project," "continue," "could," "may," "might," "possible," "potential," "predict," "should," "would" and other similar words and expressions, although the absence of these words or expressions does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are based on the current expectations and beliefs ofTeraWulf's management and are inherently subject to a number of factors, risks, uncertainties and assumptions and their potential effects. There can be no assurance that future developments will be those that have been anticipated. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by forward- looking statements based on a number of factors, risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, among others: (1) conditions in the cryptocurrency mining industry, including fluctuation in the market pricing of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and the economics of cryptocurrency mining, including as to variables or factors affecting the cost, efficiency and profitability of cryptocurrency mining; (2) competition among the various providers of data mining services; (3) changes in applicable laws, regulations and/or permits affecting TeraWulf's operations or the industries in which it operates, includingregulation regarding power generation, cryptocurrency usage and/or cryptocurrency mining; (4) the ability to implement certain business objectives and to timely and cost-effectively execute integrated projects; (5) failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and/or on acceptable terms with regard to growth strategies or operations; (6) loss of public confidence in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and the potential for cryptocurrency market manipulation; (7) the potential of cybercrime, money-laundering, malware infections and phishing and/or loss and interference as a result of equipment malfunction or break-down, physical disaster, data security breach, computer malfunction or sabotage (and the costs associated with any of the foregoing); (8) the availability, delivery schedule and cost of equipment necessary to maintain and grow the business and operations of TeraWulf, including mining equipment and equipment meeting the technical or other specifications required to achieve its growth strategy; (9) employment workforce factors, including the loss of key employees; (10) litigation relating to TeraWulf, IKONICS and/or the business combination; and (11) the ability to recognize the anticipated objectives and benefits of the business combination. Potential investors, stockholders and other readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward- looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they were made. TeraWulf does not assume any obligation to publicly update any forward- looking statement after it was made, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law or regulation.

Contacts

TeraWulf

Michael Freitag / Joseph Sala / Lyle Weston

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher

(212) 355-4449

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TeraWulf Names William "Sandy" Harrison as Vice President of Investor Relations - Longview News-Journal

IoT development has been regarded as the most promising area of the digital world in recent years. This is unsurprising, given how Internet technologies have become ingrained in daily lives.

The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the technology environment. Automation, data mining, and machine learning (ML) are being used by businesses more than ever before, and the convergence of several technologies is causing a surge of innovation. Against this backdrop, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining traction, offering real-world competitive advantages to enterprises in a variety of industries.

Here are some IoT forecasts for the year 2022, according to industry experts.

SIMs are being digitized for IoT deployments, allowing enterprises to remotely activate SIMs implanted in their endpoints. Without needing to order and swap physical cards, users may install global SIM profiles into compatible devices in seconds. This greatly simplifies and shortens the provisioning process, while also avoiding shipping expenditures and putting delivery issues in the past.

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Companies should combine it with an embedded universal integrated circuit card (eUICC) and a remote SIM provisioning platform, whether its a compatible pluggable SIM or an embedded SIM card. Even large-scale worldwide deployments can use a single SKU strategy and switch profiles later if necessary. Roaming limitations are removed, and carrier profiles can be changed remotely.

Digital twins are not a new concept, but the nomenclature is starting to make its way into common tech jargon. The ability to translate physical objects into digital form and overlay data to create a digital twin enables very complex simulations. However, when this digital representation is entrenched within the metaverse, the business benefits multiply enormously.

A company can now digitally reproduce anything from a single endpoint to a complete factory or ecosystem. And embedding the digital twin in the metaverse, complete with live feeds, enables everything from more precise predictive maintenance to increased productivity based on nearly infinite scenarios. Smart cities, too, can be successfully, precisely, and in real-time modeled.

Sensor data takes on a whole new dimension when IoT and the metaverse are merged. The puzzle pieces are starting to fit together, and the new reality is not far away.

Also Read: Why CIOs May Fail to Support Hybrid Work in 2022

As larger and more complicated IoT deployments become the norm, the focus is moving to secure networking configurations and tougher device regulations. IoT ecosystems can cause organizations potentially irreversible damage if they are breached, in addition to providing a slew of benefits to a variety of industrial applications.

The weakest links in the security chain are usually humans and manual processes. When a security breach happens in an IoT environment, cybercriminals can not only misuse IoT devices, but can also compromise or damage data, trigger physical activities, and create destructive scenarios in the real world. As a result, discussions in 2022 and beyond will be dominated by a renewed focus on private networks and sophisticated security measures.

Check Out The NewEnterprisetalk Podcast.For more such updates follow us on Google NewsEnterprisetalk News.

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Stanford University will offer an online Machine Learning with Graphs course in the fall of 2022. The training will be free of charge for anyone who wishes to attend.Lectures will be held on Tuesday and Thursday, from 1:30 pm to 3 pm in the NVIDIA auditorium. Stanford professors will keep posting the lecture slides and assignments online as the course progresses.The complete schedule and details on the course can be found at the official website: web.stanford.edu/class/cs224w/

Anyone having a basic understanding of computer science principles sufficient to write a reasonably non-trivial computer programme can apply for the course. As per the eligibility criteria, one should be familiar with the fundamentals of probability theory and have a basic knowledge of linear algebra to understand the online course.

Read |From Yale to Harvard: Online Courses That Offer Degree From Top US Colleges

In the online course, students will be trained to grasp complicated data that may be represented as a graph of relationships between objects as part of the course. These networks are critical for modelling social, technical, and biological systems.

The course focuses on the computational, algorithmic, and modelling challenges associated with massive graph analysis. Students are taught machine learning techniques and data mining tools that could provide insights into a variety of networks by studying the underlying graph structure and its properties.

The course covers the following topics: representation learning and graph neural networks; algorithms for the world wide web; reasoning over knowledge graphs; influence maximisation; disease outbreak detection; and social network analysis.

The machine learning course by Stanford University was the most popular course in 2021, according to Coursera - one of Indias leading ed-tech platforms. In 2020, Science of Wellbeing by Yale University was the most opted for the course by learners on the platform.

How to learn math - a course which teaching approaches to learn the subject is also among of the most favourite online courses offered by Stanford followed by artificial intelligence: principles and techniques.

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Assembly Elections Live Updates here.

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This week, European authorities struck a massive blow to the digital data-mining industrial complex with a new ruling stating that, quite simply, most of those annoying cookie alert banners that sites were forced to onboard en masse after GDPR was passed havent... actually been compliant with GDPR. Sorry.

The ruling, announced on Wednesday by Belgiums Data Protection Authority, comes at the tail-end of a years-long investigation into one of the biggest advertising trade groups in EU, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (or IAB Europe, for short). In 2019, about a year after GDPR rolled out, the Data Protection Authority reports it started getting a stream of complaints against the IAB for breaching various provisions of the GDPR and countless peoples privacy with the technical standards it created to govern those consent pop-ups.

Now, three years later, it looks like those tips were right; the Authority fined IAB Europe $280,000, ordered the group to appoint a data protection officer, and gave a two-month deadline to get its tech into compliance. Any data that the group collected from this illicit tech also needs to be deleted.

The ruling is great news for privacy buffs that have been calling out those ugly, oftentimes downright manipulative cookie pop-ups from the get-go, but its also not necessarily a surprise. In an apparent attempt to get ahead of the bad press, IAB Europe issued a statement last November that the upcoming ruling would apparently identify infringements of the GDPR by IAB Europe, but that those infringements would be fixable, and those cookie consent banners would keep on chugging within months of the Belgium ruling.

But that statement came in 2021. For those who work on the so-called sell-side of the digital ad industrytech operators who work hand-in-hand with digital media outlets and other sites across the webthis decision was inevitable. I spoke with three of these industry experts, all of whom asked to not be cited by name for fear of professional retribution thanks to the sway IAB holds over the industry.

While the ruling showed that GDPR is very much still in effect, it doesnt do a lot to explain how blatant some of these infringements were, or how loudly critics inside the industry had been raising red flags. Simply put, when the GDPR asked the adtech industry to get consent from users before tracking them, the IAB responded with a set of guidelines with loopholes large enough that data could still get through, anyway, without consent. And now that these practices are out in the public, nobody seems sure how to make them stop.

But to really explain how IAB Europe fell afoul of GDPR is complicated, even by adtechs already impossibly confusing standards. So instead, Im going to explain it using an analogy that pretty much everyone can understand: a bad date.

I know it sounds wild to compare a sweeping piece of European tech legislation to someones nightmare Tinder experience, but both are centered around the same thing: consent. Thats why regulatory types will often champion GDPR as the gold standard of privacy lawswhile laws like CPRA in the U.S. allow people to claw back their data from the companies after theyve mined it, the California law doesnt change the fact that this mining happened in the first place, regardless of whether users wanted it to happen or not. GDPR, on the other hand, mandates that sites obtain users consent to track them before that tracking happens, the same way a decent date would (hopefully) ask to make out before slobbering all over you at the bar.

On paper, consent is just an agreement between two people (or a person and a website). But your Tinder date might have different thoughts about what an agreement means than you do. If they ask to do some slobbering and you brush it off with a laugh, they might take that lack of no as a yes. They might also ply you with drinks or intimidate you into getting out the yes theyre looking for, which isand I cant stress this enoughnot consent. And even if you cant articulate whatconsent looks like in the moment, you probably know in your gut what it feels like: Consent is a yes thats unambiguous and freely given.

Thats exactly how GDPR defines the term, too. In order for a site to track you, Article 4 of the regulation notes that it needs to obtain a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subjects wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her. And no pre-ticking consent boxes, either, buster.

But that little tick is, quite literally, just a tiny pile of snow at the top of a massive iceberg. On every page youre visiting, there could be a few, or dozens, or even hundreds of tiny tech companies working together to take whatever data gets exposed through the webpage youre visiting into some kind of targeted ad. By the time that annoying ad for some ugly t-shirt pops up on a blog youre reading, there have already been countless algorithmic bidding wars on that ad spacethe spot on the page where an ad appearsthat are each their own Olympic feats of Big Tech gymnastics. If this all wasnt so invasive and upsetting, it would almost be kind of impressive.

This is just a basic setup. Some sites can have dozensor even hundredsof players plugged in at a time Graphic: ad-exchange.fr (Getty Images)

In other words, the way web tracking works isnt really like a single guy being a sleaze at the bar; its more like a conga line of sleazes. And in order to get your consent, this Tinder guy (lets call him Devin) that you just met is being legally required to go with you down the row and, one by one, consent to smooching up on each of these other guys before a single smooch could ever happen.

You might be thinking, Geez, if I was the Devin in this scenario, Id just give up on getting consent for all my weird friends, and just try to be sleazy on someone with lower standards. And youre not alone! In the leadup to GDPR going into effect, countless recipe blogs, news outlets, and just regular-old personal blogs looked at this seemingly impossible standard EU regulators were now mandating from them and just... panicked. Who could blame them?

The thing that almost every publisher was worried about was that they were going to do all this work and get hit by regulators anyway, said one adtech engineer who also asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution from the IAB. The language of the law didnt get clear about how the technical method was supposed to work, what you could or couldnt block off, what level of ID you were allowed to ask a user for, etc.

Rather than try to parse a law that was, as he put it, both not specific enough and too specific, to actually be effective, some publishers just left. In GDPRs immediate aftermath, more than 1,000 news sites were suddenly unavailable trying to visit from the EU, with the bulk being smaller, local outlets, according to a list that one researcher compiled at the time. Thats not a coincidence; while the New York Timeses and Washington Posts could afford a legal team and tech setup to stay put without being threatened with GDPRs massive fines, local outlets were already struggling.

But this still left countless websites active in the EU that needed consent from their visitors once GDPR came into force. Enter the IAB. Because a lot of adtech is pretty much unregulated, the massive influential trade group has come to be accepted as the one to set the guidelines for advertisers, publishers, and everyone else to follow in order to keep them from running afoul of privacy laws. Both the IAB and its European wing are really, really serious about lobbying, which means thatideallythe organization would know exactly what makes these laws tick, and how the industry could accommodate them.

So, naturally, IAB Europe was responsible for coming up with the standards for websites that wanted to obtain user consent without effectively breaking their site in the process. And then, according to the industry experts I spoke with, they kept waiting. In April 2018literally a month before GDPR was set to come into effectIAB Europe debuted its new standards: the so-called GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework (or TCF) that websites were told would collect consent in a comprehensive, standardized way, while also funneling that consent back to the third-party partners each site works with.

This framework, to be blunt, looked like a hot mess. There were a few glaring issues critics pointed right off the bat, but one of the biggest was that the framework encouraged sites to bundle all their requests for consentfrom every third party they work withunder a single accept all button, without the need to actually disclose every one of the many, many partners that were hiding under that button.

In other words, these guidelines suggested that Devin just hide all his buddies inside a trench coat, with the implicit understanding that if you agreed to smooch him, youd agree to smooch all of them, too. But thats not how consent works IRL, and thats not how consent is supposed to work under GDPR.

So, when these new TCF specs were dropped in their laps with a month to go before European laws changed in major ways, website operators were faced with a pretty crummy choice: go through the expensive and mind-numbing legal process of bringing their site to compliance on their own, or going with what the IAB was presenting.

As one person in charge of advertising revenue at a major publication put it, IABs standards seemed bent on adhering to the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of the law. Another industry expert thought the TCF standards seemed purposefully complicated to allow publishers to skirt regulation.

But without other options, publishersbegrudgingly or otherwisedecided to follow the TCF standards anyway. As one expert explained, the implicit understanding was that if anyone would take the fall for shoddy privacy compliance, it would be the IAB, and not them. And so far, at least, thats exactly whats happened. While the Data Protection Authority fined IAB Europe, it hasnt gone after publishers themselves, even though theyre also breaking GDPR by using the TCF standards.

To follow the framework, publishers were required to onboard another third-party piece of ad software called a consent management platform, or CMP, that would be responsible for collecting consent from users and beaming it where it needed to go. Those CMPsand there are dozens of different onesneed to be registered with the IAB for compliance purposes, which also means forking over a roughly $1,700 fee upfront, and again each year theyre on the list.

These CMPs are the ones responsible for plopping the dreaded cookie banner on the site. Behind the scenes, when you press yes or no on a sites request to track you, that choice gets stored in the form of a consent string on your browser. Unless you clear your browser cache (which, lets be honest, you should probably do), that webpage will load up that string every time you visit and pass it on to any third parties involved with serving an ad on the siteyou know, that aforementioned chain of sleazy dudes.

Pretty quickly, though, it became clear that the rules laid out by TCF werent going to cut it, and the cookie banners created in its wake were blatantly violating some of GDPRs core rules in all sorts of shady ways. Some would share peoples consent preferences on a single site with every company that was partnered with the IAB, while others would leave site visitors with the option to accept cookies, but not the option to reject them. Others would just not work at all.

What eventually brought Google onboard was the IABs new and improved TCF 2.0, which debuted about a year and a half after GDPR rolled out. We wont go into every change (you can read about those here), but in a nutshell: This new framework promised more power to publishers, more privacy to end-users, and less of a legal shitshow overall. But when digital advertising is a field thats flush with hundreds of billions of dollars per year and not nearly enough legal oversight, bad actors are going to be bad. Dark patterns continued to be dark even with the update, and middlemen further down the daisy chain from the CMP started offering alternatives meant to bypass these cookie banners entirely, meaning that the need for consentwhich, again, is the core tenant of GDPRwould no longer be part of the equation.

In some absolutely cursed scenarios, CMPs began forging consent signals from end-usersliterally turning their requests not to be tracked into a yes, please track mewith nobody, even the IAB, checking in initially. Even after the trade group started auditing the vendors it worked with last fall, researchers outside the adtech sphere found that consent fraud was still very much happening, with seemingly no easy way to get bad actors to stop.

As one adtech executive speaking about the issue to Digiday put it, not many businesses are incentivized to completely clamp down on it because everyones motivations are commercial. No one gets a bonus for being legally compliant, they get a bonus for hitting their numbers. Its a frustration for any exchange thats following the rules because it puts them at a massive commercial disadvantage. Were sticking to the IABs rules, but it is hurting us to do so.

You could say their dilemma is a microcosm of regulators attemptsin the EU and abroadto get the digital data industrial complex under control. When regulators set standards that are too tough for anyone to practically follow, talking heads within the industry create their own response that ticks every legal box while also enabling anyone creative enough to continue with business as usual anyway. And when publishers are literally stuck between too easy to cheat, and impossible to adhere to, which one do you think theyll choose?

The full ruling against IAB Europe doesnt address the bad behavior of these downstream parties. Instead, its going after IAB Europes awful standards, and its consent strings, specifically. Contrary to IAB Europes claims, the Litigation Chamber of the BE DPA found that IAB Europe is acting as a data controller with respect to the registration of individual users consent signal, objections and preferences by means of a unique Transparency and Consent (TC) String, which is linked to an identifiable user, the Authority wrote in a statement about the new ruling. This means that IAB Europe can be held responsible for possible violations of the GDPR.

Based on this, the Authority was finally able to go after the IAB directly for what it describes as a flurry of infractions. For starters, the ruling alleges that IAB Europe failed to establish any sort of legal basis for the processing of these consent strings under GDPR, and failed to keep that data confidential, by GDPR standards, once it was collected. On top of that, the new ruling agrees with the same complaints a lot of us have had about those cookie pop-ups for years: Theyre too vague, too hard to opt-out of, and just clearly dont do what theyre promised to do.

The information provided to users through the CMP interface is too generic and vague to allow users to understand the nature and scope of the processing, especially given the complexity of the TCF, the Authority wrote, noting how difficult this makes it for any user to actually have the control over their data that GDPR warrants,

So what comes next? Well right now, nobody seems to know. IAB Europe put out a terse statement on the ruling that noted how the group [looks] forward to working with [the Belgian Data Privacy Authority] on an action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months that will ensure the TCFs continuing utility in the market.

As previously communicated, it has always been our intention to submit the Framework for approval as a GDPR transnational Code of Conduct, the group wrote. Todays decision would appear to clear the way for work on that to begin. Well, good luck with that. In the meantime, were stuck with essential parts of the entire ad-serving market in the EU being rendered... entirely illegal. At least for now.

Its impossible to say whats going to come next, but given the adtech industrys lengthy track record of sweeping bad actors under the rug instead of stopping them cold, and with those bad actors facing the huge financial incentive to keep being bad, I think its safe to say thats what theyll keep doing. When a major part of the online economy is just a big race to the bottom, you just need to pray that lawmakers get there first.

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The Hidden Failure of the World's Biggest Privacy Law - Gizmodo