The Hindu | Why bitcoins are a bit risky The Hindu Bitcoin value hits a life-time high,; bitcoins are now more expensive than gold,; Winklevoss twins make a bid for an exchange traded fund based on bitcoin. Headlines such as these are making everyone sit up and take notice of the virtual currency ... |
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Why bitcoins are a bit risky - The Hindu
A lot of bitcoin Ponzi schemes make people believe their offering is legitimate. This is part of the reason why these scams are sosuccessful, although users are smartening up and are trying to avoid HYIP schemes. CryptoBusinessWorld has been getting some traction lately, even though their plans are anything but legitimate. It is best users avoid this platform altogether.
While this particular bitcoin HYIP scam has a nice website design, it is anything but a professional operation. Any program offering different investment plans for users to take advantage of need to be scrutinized. CryptoBusinessWorld is an obvious Ponzi scheme that will only pay out as long as new capital is coming in. Unfortunately for them, that revenue stream may dry up a lot sooner than anticipated.
CryptoBusinessWorld is one of those bitcoin HYIP scams focusing on plans with daily earnings. Most people know there is no way for anyone to guarantee fixed returns on a daily basis. This is not possible in the financial sector and it will certainly not work in the world of volatile cryptocurrencies. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying through their teeth.
CryptoBusinessWorld investors can earn anywhere from 3% to 9% per day. While three percent may seem manageable, nine percent is simply ludicrous. There is also a plan to earn 20% weekly for one full year, resulting in a 1,040% return of investment. Bigger numbers will always entice novice users to make an investment sooner or later, yet no one should fall for these tricks by any means. There is no way anyone can provide such returns in a legitimate manner.
If that isnt enough to prove this platform is a scam, look at the referral commission users can earn. CryptoBusinessWorld users can earn 8% commission from level one referrals, 4% from level 2 and 2% from level 3. Once again, these numbers are extremely unrealistic. If one of your referrals invested US$500 worth of bitcoin as a level 1 referral, the affiliate will earn US$40. A very high amount considering the company would need to repay at least 3% of the original investment back every single day.
Another dead giveaway of CryptoBusinessWorld being a scam is how they accept the traditional payments involved in HYIP scams. Bitcoin is accepted, of course, as are Payeer and Perfect Money. All three of these payment methods have irreversible transactions, making them a perfect solution for people looking to defraud others. It is not hard to see why platforms like these cant be trusted with your money.
As one would expect, the business is registered as a company in the United Kingdom. The registration number is legitimate, although it takes little to no effort to get such a number. The address listed on the site does not resemble the home of a business that will help others make money by any means. Keep your money safe and dont fall for these cheap HYIP scams.
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Bitcoin Scam Site Warning CryptoBusinessWorld - The Merkle
Every cryptocurrency in the world needs a team of developers to take things to the next level. It is no surprise to find out people take a liking to specific developers, simply because they create new features or bring improvements to a particular cryptocurrency ecosystem. Below are some of the most respected cryptocurrency developers listed in a random order.
Most people will know Evan Duffield as the person responsible for creating the Dash ecosystem. The project was formerly known as XCoin and DarkCoin before switching to a more marketable name. Even though some people still question initial coin distribution once the project launched, Evan Duffield has become one of the most recognized developers in cryptocurrency. Given the recent price increase Dahs has gone through, it is evident his efforts as well as those made by all of the other contributors are receiving well-deserved recognition.
The infamous creator of Litecoin has proven time and time again to be a valuable member tothe cryptocurrency community. Even though little changes have been made to Litecoin over the past few years, Charlie lee remains an active developer to this very date. Moreover, he often weighs in on discussions pertaining to bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies. One of his latest feats of development revolves around porting Segregated Witness to Litecoin, although it remains to be seen if this solution will ever be activated.
Better known as Fluffypony, Riccardo Spagni has made quite a name for himself for being involved in cryptocurrency projects since 2012. Most people know him for his role in the development of Monero, a popular cryptocurrency focusing on anonymity and privacy. Riccardo is also a well-respected speaker at various conferences and meetups, during which he tried to explain the intricate working of Monero.
When talking about cryptocurrency developers, it is impossible to overlook Gavin Andresen. He has been one of the most prominent members of the bitcoin developer team ever since discovering the cryptocurrency project in 2012. He also used to operate a bitcoin faucet in those early days, through which he helped distribute this now-popular cryptocurrency to novice users looking to get acquainted with the ecosystem
Although most people have nothing but respect for Gavin Andresen as a developer, his reputation took a small hit during the entire Craig Wright debacle. Wright had seemingly convinced Andresen that he was the one and only Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin. When Wright failed to produce the evidence validating his claims, some people briefly questioned Andresens role in the bitcoin development team. Despite what some people may think, Gavin is still one of the most-respected bitcoin developers and his expertise is invaluable.
The career path of Vitalik Buterin is quite interesting taking note of. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine many years ago and later on became the well-respected for developing the Ethereum protocol. Ever since inventing this ecosystem, he has been working on the project full-time. Moreover, he is a popular speaker at all types of events, including Ethereums very own Devcon conferences. Buterin is also known for his contributions to open source software projects, including DarkWallet, Egora, and Kryptokit.
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Top 5 Respected Cryptocurrency Developers - The Merkle
People active in bitcoin and altcoin circles are often referring to a trend known as the flippening. it is evident the cryptocurrency landscape is undergoing some major changes, even though some users remain oblivious to what is going on. Now is a good time to explain the flippening and how it can affect bitcoins position as the top cryptocurrency in the next few years.
Truth be told, it took some time to figure out what people mean by referring to the flippening. Consumers, investors, traders, and speculators have shown an appreciation for bitcoin these past few years, despite the cryptocurrency being far from perfect. Any other currency, or altcoin if you prefer that term, seemingly derives its value from being paired to bitcoins price. Over the years, this caused the value of altcoins to go down if bitcoins price took a hit.
That being said, things are changing in the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Bitcoin maximalists have held onto their BTC supply in the hopes of everything turning out to be alright. So far, there has been no evidence proving these people wrong, yet that does not mean bitcoin is in a good place right now. Particularly speculators are actively diversifying their portfolio by investing in altcoins, as they grow concerned over bitcoins scaling issues.
Altcoins, on the other hand, have always been looked at as second-rate projects by bitcoin maximalists. One could argue there was an air of disdain between most pro-bitcoiners and those whose see the merit of alternative cryptocurrencies. Multiple years of friction have caused a paradigm shift in the cryptocurrency world, an effect known as the flippening. To be more specific, it is evident most altcoin traders no longer base individual coins value on the bitcoin price.
As a result of this paradigm shift known as the flippening, it is very well possible bitcoin may not be the dominant cryptocurrency in the future. Or to be more precise, it may not hold such a big lead over other cryptocurrencies moving forward. Bitcoins share of the total cryptocurrency market cap continues to dwindle, allowing altcoins to rise in value, regardless of what is happening to the bitcoin price. Until a year or two ago, such a change seemed impossible, yet the charts speak for themselves.
This does not mean people will lose faith in bitcoin by any means. Instead, a more competitive cryptocurrency ecosystem will be created, and altcoins are expected to significantly rise in value over the next few months and years. Ethereum, Monero, Dash, Factom, and others are all trying to find their place in the world right now. Nearly all of these currencies have risen in value despite bitcoins price either stagnating or going down. While it is possible this is just a temporary change, the flippening is not a trend that should be ignored by any means.
Leading the charge during the flippening is Ethereum. Several dozen ICOs are offered on top of the Ethereum blockchain, rather than using Bitcoins technology.It is evident Bitcoin will not be suitable for every project one can think of, or at least not in its current state. Competition in the cryptocurrency industry can only be a good thing. The flippening indicates this shift towards a more competitive industry in which bitcoin will not necessarily be the center of focus any longer.
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What Is the Flippening? - The Merkle
It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the ever changing world of physical information storage. New hard drives and flash drives are constantly hitting the market and obsolescence is inevitable. There has never been a better time to store your data in the cloud, and cloud security has also never been better.
Cloud services, however, can be costly or they just don't offer enough storage. You need a service that'll securely back you up for life, and you need a service that won't cost you thousands a year because you need terabytes of storage. This is especially prudent in a business scenario where you may have to provide cloud storage to multiple employees.
Zoolz cloud storage is the perfect solution. Through Android Central Digital Offers, you can get 1TB of Instant Backup and 1TB of Archive Backup for $49.99. Zoolz regularly charges $360 per month or a lifetime fee of $3,600 for 1TB, but you get lifetime access to 2TB for 99% off.
Zoolz Instant Backup is where you can store everything you'll need on a regular basis. You can retrieve files instantly and all your data is encrypted before it even leaves your devices, so you know it's safe and secure. Zoolz Archive Backup is where you store the data you won't need for a while but may need to pull out at some point down the line. You can just dump up to 1TB and leave it, know it's secured with military-grade 256-AES encryption, just like your Instant Backup, so it's safe. You can get $7,200 worth of cloud storage for only $49.99 at Android Central Digital offers.
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Get 2TB of lifetime cloud storage for $50! - Android Central
Cloud computing has become more than just a technology trend. According to Forrester research, the global public cloud market will raise from $146 billion this year to $236 billion in 2020. Cloud computing offers many benefits to companies: the need for hardware and software is reduced drastically, costs for energy, employees, software licenses can be scaled down almost immediately after data or applications have been moved into the cloud.
Most cloud providers offer all three kinds of services Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) und Software as a Service (SaaS). Additionally there are three different kinds of cloud variants to choose from: public, private and hybrid cloud. While the public cloud is a term for moving all data outside the company to a cloud service provider platform, private cloud is managed entirely by the company using cloud technology. To get the best of both strategies a lot of companies use the hybrid cloud approach. This involves storing some files (or using some services) over the internet with a public cloud service, while more business-critical data, applications and services are run inside the company on the private cloud. The challenge when running a hybrid cloud is the clear separation of the two processes in business-critical and non-critical workflows. This can only be achieved when all files that are available and processed are classified consistently as business critical or not.
Another aspect that private users as well as companies should be aware of is that cloud service providers mostly use different technologies. Even in todays world, almost every cloud service provider uses their own technology to offer their clients data storage and accessibility over the internet. Amazon Web Services for example are based on several technologies they combine to their cloud services offer. EC2 (Amazons Elastic Cloud Compute) is a service to run applications in the cloud on virtual servers and is based on either Linux or a Windows Server distribution, whilst S3 is Amazons own file hosting service. The company doesnt publish any details about its design or structure in public, but it is clear that it manages data by an object storage architecture. For their file server cloud services Amazon offers several APIs Application Programming Interfaces to link for example company backup software products like Commvault or Veritas NetBackup to S3. Another big player on the scene is Microsoft Azure. It uses several Windows Server and .Net technologies that make it difficult to run non-Windows applications. Which brings us to the next challenge
There is one factor that should be seriously considered before deciding for a cloud service provider and before moving data, services or applications into the cloud: The problem of the so-called vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in means that a customer of a cloud service often has to stick to this vendor because of the massive challenges that appear if a migration of data, services or applications to a new cloud provider is intended. This vendor lock-in challenge is caused due to the fact that, as described before, cloud service providers use so many different cloud platforms.
If you only use the cloud as a live secondary backup storage, you just need to change the destination to the new cloud provider and store the new backups on his cloud space. Additionally the older on-premise backups should be copied to the new provider. Or if you only have the backups or data in the cloud (with the old cloud service provider, which is not a good idea anyway) you could use several tools that are available on the market to migrate and transfer the data. But beware that most of these tools are only useful when you have not a very large amount of data to be migrated; otherwise you end up transferring data for days, months or years!
When the migration is finally completed and everything works fine, the old backup files on the existing cloud space of the former service provider can be deleted. But again, beware: a deletion should only be started when there are enough onsite copies of your backup to meet your retention policy. Besides that, you are all set and ready to go.
While migrating data from one cloud service provider to another technically might not be a problem, it will be most likely be (when there is a large amount of data) a timely and costly effort. The same can be said about changing network services from one provider to another. The real challenge still remains; the migration of applications from one cloud service to another.
In many cases the technologies cloud providers are using are not the same so that it is almost impossible to seamlessly migrate an application that was customised to run on one cloud service providers platform technology to another cloud service. In most cases the application must be programmed and customised again to meet the needs of the technology used by the new provider. Since the usage of open source cloud platform technology like OpenStack is not very common among cloud service providers, companies are forced to invest a lot of money into application development when they intend to use their custom build, business-critical applications on a new cloud platform again.
With most cloud providers the importing of data and applications is an easy act, but switching applications to a new cloud platform is way more complicated and costly. Enterprises that are evaluating cloud solutions should give some more thoughts to a back out strategy when they evaluate cloud vendors. Companies should be aware of how complicated it could be if they would have to get out of the deal for any reason, including dissatisfaction, high costs, cloud provider going out of business or changing strategy, poor performance and more. All of these factors should be considered by companies at best as early as their beginning of their cloud endeavor.
Does your organisation use cloud storage? Have you ever had difficulties when migrating data? Let us know by commenting below, or tweet @DrDataRecovery
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The challenges of switching your cloud storage provider - Kroll ... - Kroll Ontrack UK (press release) (blog)
A new report by Symantec on the state of enterprise cloud security shows that employees are sharing more data more securely through the cloud than ever before. On the other hand, the number of unsanctioned applications running on network cloud infrastructures, known as "shadow IT," has also continued to rise.
The findings were published in Symantecs 2H 2016 Shadow Data Report, which covers the second half of 2016. The report is based on anonymized meta data analysis of over 20,000 cloud apps, 175 million cloud documents, and 1.3 billion emails, according to Symantec.
More Data Sharing, But More Security, Too
On the whole, things seem to be looking up for enterprise cloud security. While companies are increasing their uses of cloud applications and file sharing, they are also doing so more responsibly. Research shows a significant reduction in the percentage of broadly shared files in the cloud that contain confidential or compliance related content, the company wrote in a blog post about the report.
Symantec said that in the second half of the year, 25 percent of all files stored in the cloud were broadly shared, with just 3 percent of these files containing compliance-related data.
To be classified as "broadly shared," a file is shared to the public, the entire organization, or an external third party. In the past, Symantec said that it was normal to find that 10 percent or more of broadly shared files contained sensitive data.
Still Room for Improvement
But the news is not all good, Symantec warned. "We are still not out of the woods because while it looks like a lower percentage of files in cloud file sharing contain compliance data than before, a surprising percentage of files with Protected Health Information (PHI), Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and Payment Card Information (PCI) data that make it to the cloud are potentially exposed, the company reported.
In file sharing applications, PHI data led the pack with 82 percent of all files at risk of exposure, followed by 43 percent of files containing PII and 42 percent of files containing PCI data, according to Symantec. Email risk exposure was generally higher than file sharing exposure. Meanwhile, 27 percent of emails and attachments were broadly shared and 8 percent of emails contained compliance-related data.
Meanwhile, the rise of shadow IT continued to be a challenge for most enterprises. Employees were using many more cloud applications than what IT professionals typically assumed they were using, according to the reports findings. Shadow IT discovery research indicated that organizations used 928 different cloud applications on average in the second half of 2016, a 10 percent increase over the first half of the year, according to Symantec.
And there were still plenty of attempts to penetrate network security. Symantec said that 66 percent of risky user activity that it analyzed represented attempts to extract data from an organization.
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Enterprises Are Sharing More Data Securely in the Cloud - CIO Today
Vic Daniels @vicdanielsHITC Published now
Societe Generale is embracing the cloud.
Bloomberg News reports that the Paris-based bank is working with Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to become one of the first large European banks to adopt cloud computing for the bulk of its operations.
Societe Generale will start using external cloud services by June for some non-client content, such as financial research and marketing data, said Carlos Goncalves, the head of global technology services. By 2020, the bank intends to have 80 percent of its infrastructure on internal and external cloud networks.
We are ready to go to scale, Goncalves said. According to the European Central Bank, we have put in place the benchmark for the industry.
French bank is among the first large financial firms on the continent getting ready to shift most of its operations to the cloud. The decision signals an accelerating evolution in how banks handle one of their most valuable and sensitive assets: information.
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SocGen Floats Toward the Cloud as European Banks Target Costs
Valeant Slumps as Longtime Backer Ackman Exits With a Loss
And the Best Place to Work in the global financial markets 2016 is...
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Societe Generale to adopt cloud computing - Here Is The City - HITC
IoT edge computing presents next big challenge for cloud TechTarget Snowball Edge enables some computing capability on the edge of the network and facilitates the transfer of data back to the cloud. Is Snowball Edge a representation of the future of public cloud? Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine argues that IoT ... SEC FORM 4 |
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IoT edge computing presents next big challenge for cloud - TechTarget
Main TERM Q
First proposed in the 1970s, quantum computing relies on quantum physics by taking advantage of certain quantum physics properties of atoms or nuclei that allow them to work together as quantum bits, or qubits, to be the computer's processor and memory. By interacting with each other while being isolated from the external environment, qubits can perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers.
Qubits do not rely on the traditional binary nature of computing. While traditional computers encode information into bits using binary numbers, either a 0 or 1, and can only do calculations on one set of numbers at once, quantum computers encode information as a series of quantum-mechanical states such as spin directions of electrons or polarization orientations of a photon that might represent a 1 or a 0, might represent a combination of the two or might represent a number expressing that the state of the qubit is somewhere between 1 and 0, or a superposition of many different numbers at once.
A quantum computer can do an arbitrary reversible classical computation on all the numbers simultaneously, which a binary system cannot do, and also has some ability to produce interference between various different numbers. By doing a computation on many different numbers at once, then interfering the results to get a single answer, a quantum computer has the potential to be much more powerful than a classical computer of the same size. In using only a single processing unit, a quantum computer can naturally perform myriad operations in parallel.
Quantum computing is not well suited for tasks such as word processing and email, but it is ideal for tasks such as cryptography and modeling and indexing very large databases.
Microsoft: Quantum Computing 101
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What is Quantum Computing? Webopedia Definition