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Blockchain & Money: Session 3: Blockchain Basics & Cryptography by M.I.T. Sloan School of Management with Professor Gary Gensler
Session 3: Blockchain Basics & Cryptography Session 3 Study Questions: What are the design features–cryptography, append-only, time-stamped blocks, distributed consensus algorithms, and networking– of Bitcoin, the first use case for blockchain technology? What are cryptographic hash functions, asymmetric cryptography and digital signatures? How are they utilized to help make blockchain technology verifiable and immutable? What is the double spending problem and how it is addressed by blockchain technology? Session 3 Readings: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System; Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper. ‘Blockchain Technology Overview’ NIST (pages 9-23, sections 1 & 2) ‘Blockchain 101-A Visual Demo’ Brownworth; Youtube video. Bitcoin is just the first use-case of blockchain technology. We’re going to look…
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Current Events Breakdown: To unlock a terrorist’s iPhone, the FBI turned to an obscure company in Australia; a technique called an “Exploit Chain” was used.
So there’s quite a juicy, drama-filled story in the Washington Post that could be a Hollywood plot line about Apple, the FBI, a terrorist’s iPhone, and HACKERS!!! Azimuth Security, a publicity-shy company that says it sells its cyber wares only to democratic governments, secretly crafted the solution the FBI used to gain access to the device, according to several people familiar with the matter. The iPhone was used by one of two shooters whose December 2015 attack left more than a dozen people dead. So, yeah Azimuth is a hacking firm for the better good you can say. Azimuth is a poster child for “white hat” hacking, experts say, which…
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What is Hurricane Electric? Let’s Find Out Whilst Learning About Some Computer/Cyber Network Fundamentals!!!
Hurricane Electric (corporate website here) is a global Internet Service Provider (ISP), offering IP transit, colocation, dedicated servers, among other services, based in Fremont, CA, USA and founded in 1994. Referring to themselves an the “Internet Backbone and Colocation Provider”, Hurricane Electric operates its own global IPv4 and IPv6 network and is considered the largest IPv6 backbone in the world, as measured by the total number of customer networks connected and by the total number of customer prefixes announced.[2] Hurricane Electric IP Transit Network Hurricane Electric has connections ranging from multiple 10GigE (10,000 Mbps) to multiple 100GigE (100 Gbps) that form these rings that connect H.E. core routers. [NOTE: Gigabit…
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Blockchain & Money: Sessions 1 & 2: Introduction and Money, Ledgers & Bitcoin by M.I.T. Sloan School of Management with Professor Gary Gensler
There’s a great course available for free about Blockchain & Money. The semester long course is taught by Professor Gary Gensler (yes, the S.E.C. Gary Gensler), offered by M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, and, freely available via video-lecture. I pored over the videos and studiously took notes as I watched. The course is for students wishing to explore blockchain technology’s potential use–by entrepreneurs & incumbents–to change the world of money and finance. The course goes through a review of the technology’s initial application, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and then lays an understanding of the commercial, technical and public policy fundamentals of blockchain technology, distributed ledgers and smart contracts in both open…
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What is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)?
Border Gateway Protocol is one of those foundational, core infrastructure protocols used by Internet users everyday but not top of mind for the average consumer or end-user. Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, is a routing protocol. BGP is the primary protocol for the Internet, and is a Layer 4 Transport protocol that sits on top of TCP [2]. It’s purpose is to keep the various systems on the Internet up to date with the information needed to send and receive data traffic correctly. So, real quick in a nutshell, when information is sent around these Internets, it’s broken up into chunks of data called ‘packets’. Packets sent on the Internet…
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News & Links
The Latest Chapter In IBM’s Quest To Build A Cloud For Banks Yesterday, IBM announced the latest chapter in the IBM Cloud for Financial Services, a public cloud capable of overcoming the stringent cybersecurity and regulatory challenges for a bank. [via Forbes] Bitcoin & Blockchain Gain Prominence: 4 Top Stocks to Buy…Ok, forget the link bait about the stocks to buy and just read this article for the sense of the built-in utility of blockchain. Blockchain is enabling enterprises and government agencies to tackle prominent issues, including data tracing, security, visibility and management, and supply chain supervision. [via Yahoo! Finance] Also, in more IBM news…IBM bets on FHE (Fully Homomorphic…
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Blockchain & Money: Session 20: Primary Markets, ICOs, and Venture Capital, Part 2, by M.I.T. Sloan School of Management with Professor Gary Gensler
Blockchain & Money: Session 8: Public Policy by M.I.T. Sloan School of Management with Professor Gary Gensler
Function Templates–Functions–STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING Course Notes
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What is “Shadow IT”??
Wikipedia describes Shadow IT as: In big organizations, shadow IT (also known as embedded IT, fake IT, stealth IT, rogue IT, feral IT, or client IT) refers to information technology (IT) systems deployed by departments other than the central IT department, to work around the shortcomings of the central information systems. Shadow IT systems are an important source of innovation, and shadow systems may become prototypes for future central IT solutions. On the other hand, shadow IT solutions increase risks with organizational requirements for control, documentation, security, reliability, etc. via Wikipedia [1] My first thought after digesting some basic information is that Shadow IT sounds like people coming up with…
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Hackers Add a Backdoor to PHP Source Code; 79% of Websites Use PHP
According to the Bleeping Computer new service, PHP’s Git server was hacked via a backdoor to the PHP source code. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. Typically a server-side programming language, PHP powers many sites on the internet including big players like Wikipedia and Facebook. In this latest attack the official PHP Git repository was hit and the code base was tampered with. Yesterday, two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src Git repository maintained by the PHP team on their git.php.net server. The threat actors had signed off on these commits as if these were made by known PHP developers and maintainers, Rasmus Lerdorf …
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Blockchain & Money: Session 14: Blockchain Payments, Part 2 by M.I.T. Sloan School of Management with Professor Gary Gensler
The Essentials of Networking–NETWORKING, SECURITY, & MORE ESSENTIALS—CompTIA A+ (220-1001) A-PLUS Certification Prep Course Notes
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Protected: What is Equinix? And Why Are They So Important??
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Post-Quantum Cryptography: The Race Is On
Quantum computers and quantum cryptography have become hot industry buzzwords that are popping up more in the press. With that, the question becomes what happens to the security of our data covered by today’s pre-quantum cryptography technology? This Forbes article helps highlight solutions on the way in the race to post-quantum cryptography: The good news is that solutions are on the way. Recognizing the urgency of the task and the time needed to formulate, choose, standardize and deploy new systems, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process in 2016. In July 2020, NIST announced seven third-round candidates, covering both public-key encryption (PKE) and digital…
