Frank Abagnale, the once-notorious confidence trickster portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me If You Can, said blockchain is the future of secure information processing and data settlement.
A video has surfaced from Abagnale’s speech at a blockchain conference in April in which he shares his thoughts on the burgeoning technology.
“I think you have to be pretty ignorant not to realize that blockchain is the way of the future,” he said at the Blockchain Nation Miami conference. “It is the best way to secure information, to secure it 100%.” For more than 40 years, Abagnale has worked with and advised hundreds of financial institutions, corporations, and government agencies. In his opinion, these institutions will begin embracing the technology. Blockchain is often defined as “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.” Communication occurs between peers instead of through a central authority, and every transaction is visible to anyone with access to the system.
“I think you’ll see banks—especially accounting practices and accounting firms—all move to blockchain,” he said about keeping records on the decentralized network technology. “You cannot break the blockchain. You cannot hack into the blockchain. You can’t change anything on the blockchain.”
He outlines some privacy issues that need to be worked out when using the technology, but Abagnale said it is a technology that will “eventually be adopted by all types of governments, businesses, and corporations.”
Abagnale is alluding to a trend that is already in motion.
HSBC recently said it performed the world’s first trade finance transaction using blockchain technology. Santander last month launched a foreign exchange service that uses the distributed ledger tech to make same-day international money transfers. J.P. Morgan recently applied for a patent to facilitate payments between banks using the blockchain.
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Chinese internet and cyber security research firm 360 reported a series of high risk vulnerabilities in the EOS blockchain platform a couple of hours ago. According to China’s version of Twitter, Weibo, some of these vulnerabilities can remotely execute arbitrary code on the EOS node, meaning that remote attacks can directly control and take over all nodes running on EOS.
The Weibo post went on to state; “On the early morning of the 29th, 360 first reported the vulnerability to EOS officials and helped them repair the security risks. The person in charge of the EOS network said that the EOS network will not be officially launched until these issues are fixed.”
Defective Digital Blockchain Vulnerability
Security vulnerabilities in digital currencies tend to have far greater impacts than those associated with regular software. Due to its decentralized nature a security breech in one node can rapid spread across all others on the network and cause thousands of them to be attacked. During the attack the hacker can publish and distribute a smart contract containing malicious code targeting the vulnerability. According to the post which was translated from Chinese; “The EOS super node will execute this malicious contract and trigger a security hole. The attacker then re-uses the super node to package the malicious contract into a new block, which in turn causes all full nodes in the network (alternate super node, exchange reload point, digital currency wallet server node, etc.) to be controlled remotely.”
The attacker then has full control over the nodal system and can steal private keys, user data, and control all cryptocurrency transactions according to the report. Additionally the attacker can turn a node on the EOS network into a member of a botnet, launch a cyber-attack, or become a free “miner” and mine other cryptocurrencies.
The report elaborated that;
“The series of new security vulnerabilities discovered by the 360 security team in the smart contract virtual machine on the EOS platform is a series of unprecedented security risks. Security researchers have not found such problems before. This type of security issue affects not only EOS but also other types of blockchain platforms and virtual currency applications.” At the time of writing the news had only just made it out of China and onto Twitter and Reddit. The EOS team has yet to release an official response but the price of the token reacted instantly dropping by 7% in less than an hour. EOS is currently trading at $11.20, down from its monthly high of $19.3 on May 3rd.
A British computer hacker was jailed for 10 years and eight months after being found guilty of selling 63,000 stolen credit and debit cards on the dark web. Police seized an amount of Bitcoin worth over $600,000.
UK Judge Sentences Hacker to 10 Years, Police Seize Over $600,000 in Bitcoin
26-year old Grant West, a computer hacker from Kent, United Kingdom, was described as a “one man cybercrime wave” for having stolen the personal data of approximately 165,000 people through a “phishing” scheme. The prosecution stated that he profited over £180,000 (approximately $240,000) from the scam and converted the proceeds into Bitcoin, which would then be stored in multiple accounts. West would send emails pretending to be from Just Eat, an online food order and delivery service, to extract credit and debit card details from his victims. He was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after admitting charges, which included conspiracy to commit fraud, computer misuse, and drug offences. Judge Michael Gledhill presided over the trial.
Cryptocurrencies have been increasingly used as means of payment and store of value by criminals, as cases brought to justice seem to prove. In March 2018, a Ukranian-Russian cybercriminal gang was caught after allegedly stealing up to €1 billion from banks in Spain, which then were converted into Bitcoin.
As these activities prove that Bitcoin is regarded as a safe store of value, criminals are also increasingly targeting the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In Malaysia, a criminal gang of nine members was arrested for stealing Bitcoin mining equipment, of at least 58 machines. In February 2018, the first Bitcoin robbery in Taiwan was attributed to four men who posed as potential Bitcoin buyers in order to steal the equivalent of $170,000.
Masquerading as Just Eat, Grant West offered a voucher in return for answering questions between July 2015 and December 2015. The phishing scam cost the firm over £200,000 (approximately $267,000), but there is no evidence their servers were hacked by West, according to the prosecution. Other high profile hack victims include British Airways, Barclays, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Uber, Argos, Coral.
The Police seized £25,000 (approximately $33,000) in cash and £500,000 (approximately $666,000) in Bitcoin. Judge Michael Gledhill said £1.6 million (approximately $2.3 million) worth of cryptocurrency is unaccounted for.
“When such inadequate security is confronted with a criminal of your skills and ambition it is totally unfit for purpose and worthless. This case should be a wake-up call to customers, companies and the computer industry to the very real threat of cybercrime.”
Once the hacker had a set of customer details, he would then sell them on Alpha Bay, an online dark web market 10-times larger than Silk Road which was taken down by the authorities in July 2017.
Mahathir Mohamad, who led an opposition coalition to victory in Malaysia's election, said Thursday his group is entitled by law to form a government immediately.
In fact, he said he expects to be sworn in as prime minister today, and his coalition will have the support of 135 members of the 222-seat parliament.
"There has been some delays over a lack of understanding of the constitution, but we'd like to make it clear that there is an urgency here: We need to form the government now — today," Mahathir said. "That is because currently there is no government of Malaysia."
That statement follows tepid comments from sitting Prime Minister Najib Razak, who said earlier Thursday he accepted the verdict of the vote, but noted no individual party had achieved a simple majority, so it will fall to the country's king to decide who would be appointed the next prime minister.
"I accept, and my friends also accept, the verdict that has been delivered by the people," he said, according to a translation of the address, noting that his coalition was committed to respecting the principles of democratic parliament. "And because no party has gotten a simple majority, therefore the king will be making a decision as to who will be the prime minister," he added.
Mahathir is expected to replace Najib, and he was set to be sworn in as the world's oldest elected leader after his opposition alliance pulled off a stunning election win, ending six decades of rule by a coalition he had once led. "Najib's role as an interim government is now over," Mahathir declared on Thursday, noting that "if the government is not appointed immediately, the country will be ... without a government."
Various news outlets cited official sources saying there would not be no swearing in of a new prime minister on Thursday, but Mahathir was resistant to that schedule.
"We hope that by 5 o'clock today we will have a prime minister," he said. "Any delay will mean that we will have no government. And when you say you have no government, you have no law, you have no constitution, and you don't have all those institutions which are created to give form to the government of this country."
"We need to have this government today, without delay," he added.
The 92-year-old led an opposition coalition to an unexpected victory over Najib, whose popularity had declined over rising living costs and in the wake of a multi-billion-dollar graft scandal at 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Mahathir led the Southeast Asian nation for 22 years and his unexpected return to the prime ministership ends the previously unbroken rule of Barisan Nasional (BN), the coalition that had governed Malaysia since independence from Britain in 1957. The stunning election outcome was expected to ruffle financial marketsthat were expecting a comfortable win for Najib and the BN. The national stock market was set to be closed on Thursday and Friday after Mahathir declared a public holiday, but the ringgit currency weakened in offshore trading.
As with nearly every industry supposedly ripe for disruption by blockchains, the vision of a manufacturing sector making use of the technology is a heady one: machines whose performance metrics are never in doubt, that are networked together and perhaps even share or trade new design specs among themselves. These swarms could be scattered in factories across the globe, churning out new and ever-improving products with nary a human in sight.
At a research lab at North Carolina State University, that future has just taken a small step toward becoming reality.
Using a permissioned version of Ethereum, researchers there hooked up a computer numerical control (CNC) machine, a versatile piece of equipment that spits out parts on factory floors everywhere, to a small blockchain network. Then they showed that smart contracts could be used to program the machine to automatically record data about itself and share it to the blockchain—in this case, verification that the machine had been operating continuously for eight hours.
It’s a simple prototype, but Binil Starly, who led the study, says it has helped answer a big question: how do you actually get a machine to record data to a shared ledger?
As for why you’d want to do that in the first place, imagine that a small biotech startup in Boston has a novel design for a bioelectronic device it needs made, and the best value can be found with a boutique manufacturer in rural North Carolina. Makers of medical devices must satisfy strict regulatory requirements, often including extensive and specific certifications, says Starly. Typically, the device’s designer has to go through a costly process of verifying that the manufacturer it’s using meets every requirement, while the manufacturer is subject to a similarly laborious set of compliance checks. And if the product design is changed later on, everyone gets to do it all over again. This has been called manufacturing’s “trust tax.”
A shared cryptographic ledger—that is, a blockchain—could lower the trust tax, making crucial information like machine certifications more accessible and transparent, says Starly. That would also make it much easier for the Boston startup to discover its ideal manufacturer. Smart contracts could come into play, too, for things like advertising a given machine’s capabilities to the rest of the network, or limiting the conditions under which it will take a job. Machines could even use the ledger to help coordinate activities with other machines in different facilities.
Starly acknowledges that there is a lot more work to be done—like, for example, making sure there’s no way a machine’s data can be spoofed. Then there’s the question of how to incentivize participation in a decentralized network (Bitcoin and Ethereum solve this by offering a currency reward for maintaining the ledger). That will require determining exactly which data businesses are actually willing to share, and with whom—a challenge that might be more complicated than any technical ones. Sources: MIT Tech Review
Typically investors who go into downtrodden neighborhoods with the intention of making a profit from the area’s affordable housing stock don’t have a good reputation, but then again, Larry Odom Bonds Jr. isn’t like most investors.
“Some of the other people who (own) rental properties, just buy them and they don’t care,” Bonds said. “They get by with the minimum, because they don’t live here and it doesn’t make any difference to them.”
But that’s not the case for Bonds, who actually lives in the heart of the Greenlaw neighborhood in Uptown Memphis.
“We bought our first piece of property in 2000, then I just started buying up everything around it,” Bonds, who is also lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, said. “My concept was to get it if it was touching it, so I could control what was around me.”
While the Greenlaw neighborhood still has a long way to go, the neighborhood was in far worse shape when Bonds first moved there. He said it was so bad that some of his properties still bear the faint scars of past drug deals gone wrong and gang-related firebombings from a time before he owned them.
So for the past two decades, Bonds has been quietly buying up properties in the area, fixing them up and either selling them or renting them out to his neighbors. He currently owns about a dozen properties, with plans in the pipeline to acquire several more.
Recently his business model has shifted some as the demand for fully-furnished Airbnb properties has increased. “My goal is to turn these houses into Airbnbs,” Bonds said. “I get to meet people from all over the world.”
Bonds and his family live in a small, two-story quadruplex apartment building that has been modified into a flat that would fit equally well in the South Main Arts District, while he uses the bottom two units as Airbnbs.
Renovating properties that have seen better days is nothing new to Bonds – the Army engineer has multiple tours of duty under his belt helping displaced locals rebuild. “I’ve been over in Afghanistan three times doing this,” Bonds said. “Last time I was over there I was helping the Afghans renovate some of their buildings.”
Now he puts that experience to work in the Greenlaw area, where he likes to use recycled materials from the neighborhood to retrofit and decorate his properties.
“I recycle everything,” he said. “When they remodel, they throw this stuff out on the street, so I’ll get it. I try to keep everything I can in the neighborhood.” In addition to readapting what he can, Bonds scours yard and estate sales to help stock some of his themed Airbnbs, which include a “cool ’60s pad,” a blues house, and of course, an Elvis-themed property. “So now instead of selling, I keep it because of what you can do with it,” Bonds said of the latter property. “When I bought this it was used as a rooming house. Now people from all over the world stay here.”
Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) recently began putting cryptocurrency exchanges under the microscope, causing two to shut down and others to permanently leave the country. While the agency may have had good intentions—to create regulations that would protect consumers—some of their policies were viewed as exaggerated. One financial company is willing to swallow the regulations and has announced that it will open a cryptocurrency exchange sometime this summer.
SBI Holdings, one of the largest financial services companies in Japan, will launch its SBI Virtual Currencies exchange, allowing investors to trade in Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), and BTC. The company’s president, Yoshitaka Kitao, anticipates using BCH as the settlement currency, given the fact that BTC is expensive and “tiring as a settlement currency.” Kitao added that the exchange’s remittance currency would be XRP.
The official launch date has yet to be announced; however, Kitao said, “When we do it, it will be number one in the blink of an eye so quickly, so even if a tremendous number of customers come, we can build a system that can bear. [sic] We have to pursue safety thoroughly.” The exchange comes after SBI initially announced plans for the SBI Virtual Currencies platform about a year and a half ago. In December, SBI said that it would be partnering with BTC trading platform Huobi and expected the exchange to be ready at some point early this year.
Following the FSA’s crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges, SBI was forced to delay the launch once more as it worked on ensuring that the platform would function in accordance with the new regulations.
SBI was established in 1999 and has several business entities. It is involved in Financial Services, Asset Management, biotechnology-related research and development and a wellness bank. The company reported revenue of just over $3 million for its latest fiscal year ending in March, representing an increase of just under $700,000 from the previous fiscal year. Two months ago, SBI purchased 40% of cryptocurrency hardware wallet company, CoolBitX, out of Taiwan. The wallet company’s main product is the CoolWallet, which has the ability to interact with other devices over Bluetooth.
Four of the world's largest automakers are part of a new group working to bring blockchain technology, which underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, to your car.
BMW, Ford, Renault and General Motors are among the 30 companies in the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative. Founding members also include IBM, Bosch and Blockchain at Berkeley, MOBI said Wednesday. The group's mission is to speed up the adoption of blockchain, and make sure the industry is on the same page with use cases ranging from autonomous payments to ride-sharing, according to MOBI's website.
Brian Kelly, founder and CEO of digital asset investment firm BKCM, called the automakers' effort "very, very interesting" because it adds a new battleground for tech companies: your car.
"This is a tectonic shift in the tech landscape, that has the potential to disrupt the growth plans of legacy tech into the auto," Kelly said in a note to clients Wednesday.
Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are already making the move into connected cars. Amazon expanded Alexa's presence to autos, Microsoft Azure has a car system and Apple offers Carplay for iOS. Google parent Alphabet, meanwhile, is working on an autonomous-driving car through its subsidiary Waymo.
Kelly said the most important part of those initiatives is data. "MOBI is doing the end around and making that data self-sovereign and giving the consumer the control over their data property rights," he said. Blockchain technology is what's known as "decentralized" and considered by advocates to be unhackable. Bad actors would need to hack multiple systems to alter any information, making the data almost tamper-proof.
Some are less convinced. In a recent column, economist Nouriel Roubini called blockchain "one of the most overhyped technologies ever."
While there are countless uses for that technology, bitcoin was one of the first applications. The cryptocurrency jumped more than 1,300 percent before losing almost half of its value in the first three months of 2018, according to data from CoinDesk. The MOBI working group is headed up by car industry veteran Chris Ballinger, who left his role as CFO and head of mobility services at Toyota Research Institute last month. Sources: CNBC |
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