Japan's Mizuho Bank is considering using blockchain technology to speed the cross-border transfer of financial instruments.
It has just concluded a three-month trial of the technology with Japanese IT company Fujitsu.
Mizuho used the Open Assets Protocol in its trial to encapsulate the type and number of financial instruments being traded, the amount due and the currency used, the country of settlement, and the transaction date. The encapsulated data was then added to a blockchain as a new transaction, providing a tamper-resistant record of the trade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Legislators in France are trying to make the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation jealous of its French counterparts.The poor old FBI has to rely on a loosely drafted law two centuries old in its effort to compel Apple to help it unlock data held in a dead terrorist's smartphone.In France, refusing to hand over encrypted information in terrorism cases could lead to a fine of €350,000 (US$385,000) and five years in prison, under proposed legislation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems is buying in some chip expertise that could help it in the datacenter.The networking giant's latest acquisition target is Leaba Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel.The company is "in stealth mode," according to its website, which indicates only that it develops semiconductors to address "significant infrastructure challenges."Cisco had little more to say concerning Leaba's field of work in its blog post about the acquisition by Rob Salvagno, head of its mergers, acquisitions and venture investment team.However, according to information provided by Israel's Ministry of Economy, Leaba specializes in the design of chips for connecting memory, storage and compute in data center environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems is buying in some chip expertise that could help it in the datacenter.The networking giant's latest acquisition target is Leaba Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel.The company is "in stealth mode," according to its website, which indicates only that it develops semiconductors to address "significant infrastructure challenges."Cisco had little more to say concerning Leaba's field of work in its blog post about the acquisition by Rob Salvagno, head of its mergers, acquisitions and venture investment team.However, according to information provided by Israel's Ministry of Economy, Leaba specializes in the design of chips for connecting memory, storage and compute in data center environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although Apple does not exhibit at Mobile World Congress, the giant trade show in Barcelona, the company casts a long shadow over it.The iPhone maker's influence there extends to app developers, accessory vendors and, now, the debate about securing digital identity.In a keynote session on security at the show, moderator Michael O'Hara asked presenters whether they sided with Apple or the U.S. government in the legal dispute over whether Apple should help the Federal Bureau of Investigation unlock an iPhone belonging to the employer of one of the San Bernardino attack suspects.For Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, the company that designs the microprocessors found in most smartphones, "It's a complex situation, there are rights and wrongs."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Add shareholder voting to the list of applications for blockchain technologies.Later this year, Nasdaq plans to record stockholders' electronic votes on its own blockchain system for companies listed on one of its exchanges. By digitizing the entire process, it expects to speed and simplify the proxy voting process.Blockchains -- the best known of which is the public ledger of bitcoin transactions -- are distributed records of events, each block in the record containing a computational "hash" of itself and of the previous block, so that all are connected like links in a chain.A hash, or digest, is a short digital representation of a larger chunk of data. Hash functions are designed so that calculating (or verifying) the hash of a chunk of data takes little computing power, while creating data with a particular hash is computationally expensive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAP's February round of critical software updates includes one for SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII) that may be of interest to hackers and spies.
The software is widely used in manufacturing industry, where it connects factory-floor systems to business applications for performance monitoring -- but a flaw in it meant that restrictions on who could see what were not enforced.
The patch for xMII fixes a directory traversal vulnerability, SAP reported Tuesday in security note 2230978.
The vulnerability could have allowed attackers to access arbitrary files and directories on an SAP fileserver, including application source code, configuration and system files and other critical technical and business-related information, security researchers at ERPScan said Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some of the more popular sports wearables don't just let you track your fitness, they let other people track you.That's what Canadian researchers found when they studied fitness-tracking devices from eight manufacturers, along with their companion mobile apps.All the devices studied except for the Apple Watch transmitted a persistent, unique Bluetooth identifier, allowing them to be tracked by the beacons increasingly being used by retail stores and shopping malls to recognize and profile their customers.The revealing devices, the Basis Peak, Fitbit Charge HR, Garmin Vivosmart, Jawbone Up 2, Mio Fuse, Withings Pulse O2 and Xiaomi Mi Band, all make it possible for their wearers to be tracked using Bluetooth even when the device is not paired with or connected to a smartphone, the researchers said. Only the Apple device used a feature of the Bluetooth LE standard to generate changing MAC addresses to prevent tracking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two days from their deadline, U.S. and European Union negotiators still have no replacement for the transatlantic data-transfer agreement overturned last year by the EU's top court.The original Safe Harbor agreement enabled companies to store and process EU citizens' personal information in the U.S. in compliance with strict European data protection laws, and its invalidation by the Court of Justice of the European Union last October in a case relating to Facebook's activities has called into question the operations of companies large and small.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Consumers should have the right to inspect the source code for connected devices they own, to ensure it doesn't contain bugs or backdoors, one U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner believes.As we connect our homes, our vehicles and our clothing to the Internet of Things, "We need to be very mindful of consumer data security and be very careful of anything that undermines that data security," said Commissioner Terrell McSweeny.McSweeny was speaking in a personal capacity at the State of the Net conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday, but her position as one of four Commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission could allow her to influence policy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Google tells us it blocked 780 million bad ads last year, is that a sign that things are getting better?In one way it is, as the 49 percent increase in bad ads blocked outpaced Google's overall advertising growth, indicating that the company has been blocking a greater number of bad ads as a percentage of the whole. Clicks on its ads grew at a slightly more leisurely pace, rising 23 percent from a year earlier in the third quarter last year, the most recent for which figures are available.But we don't know how many bad ads slipped past the 1,000+ Google employees charged with detecting them, nor how many bad advertisers simply moved to other advertising networks with less sophisticated detection systems or fewer qualms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sigfox, operator of a low-power, wide-area radio network for the Internet of Things, expects to be connecting objects on every continent by year-end, and has just checked off the most challenging of those: Antarctica.The company's first base station in the southern hemisphere could be a little further south, but not by much: It's at Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station, 200 kilometers in from the Antarctic coast, at an altitude of 1,382 meters.In Antarctica, Sigfox is far from offering the coast-to-coast coverage its networks in France, Spain and Portugal provide: The Princess Elisabeth antenna has a range of about 50 kilometers, which means it would take over a hundred similar transmitters to cover the Antarctic coast, and over a thousand of them to cover the entire landmass -- and that's without worrying about how they would all be installed, maintained and powered. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is going to apply machine learning to fraud busting with Iris Analytics.While that makes it sound as though it will be using Watson AI systems to identify fraudsters by gazing deep into their eyes, this is really about its acquisition of a German software firm called Iris Analytics.Iris monitors banking transactions and uses machine learning to spot previously unknown patterns of fraudulent transactions in real time. The system can work alone or in conjunction with human analysts, according to IBM.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords
With only one bank in six equipped with real-time fraud detection systems, and even those taking a month or more to learn to stop new attacks once they are identified, IBM sees a big market for integrating systems like that of Iris with its existing antifraud products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Police believe they have nabbed a key figure behind a series of online extortion attacks that have taken place around the world over the last 18 months.
Operation Pleiades, a joint operation by police forces from around the world, led to the arrest of a "main target" and the detention of another suspect, Europol said Tuesday.
The denial-of-service attacks on webservers and the like made by group going by the name DD4BC (Distributed DoS for Bitcoin), are followed by an email threatening that the attack will be stepped up unless a payment is made in bitcoin.
Attackers using the name DD4BC have targeted businesses large and small -- and also email addresses leaked from the Ashley Madison website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
UK police arrest man suspected of Vtech toy hackingPolice investigating the hacking of Chinese toy company Vtech have made an arrest in the U.K.In the attack on Nov. 14, someone gained access to information about Vtech customers, including names, email addresses, birth dates, photos and weakly encrypted passwords, the company said.The information was stored in a database for its Learning Lodge app store, used by many of the company's educational toys.Later last month, Vtech said the data breach affected around 4.8 million of its customers, but by early this month the figure had risen to 11.6 million, including 6.4 million children.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Police investigating the hacking of Chinese toy company Vtech have made an arrest in the U.K.In the attack on Nov. 14, someone gained access to information about Vtech customers, including names, email addresses, birth dates, photos and weakly encrypted passwords, the company said.The information was stored in a database for its Learning Lodge app store, used by many of the company's educational toys.Later last month, Vtech said the data breach affected around 4.8 million of its customers, but by early this month the figure had risen to 11.6 million, including 6.4 million children.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four weeks: That's how long Swedish bitcoin mining company KnCMiner takes to build a new datacenter, from breaking ground to beginning operations."The longest part is signing the agreement," CEO Sam Cole said Friday, announcing plans for another 20MW datacenter in the Swedish town of Boden, part of the "Node Pole" technology cluster near Lulea where Facebook built one of its most energy-efficient datacenters.One reason for the speed is that KnC doesn't have to worry about air conditioning. The Node Pole is on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where cooling can be as simple as opening a door.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
French police have made their Christmas wish-list, and it includes banning Tor and public Wi-Fi.As legislators debate new antiterrorism laws, police and security services have been studying how technology hinders their enquiries, according to French newspaper Le Monde.In the hours following the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris the French government declared a state of emergency, granting police sweeping powers to impose curfews and conduct warrantless searches.A week later, legislators voted to extend the state of emergency from 12 days to three months, and extended police power of search to include the contents of electronic devices and cloud services accessible from them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
GCHQ, the British signals intelligence service, is in the dock accused of hacking computers without individual warrants in order to tap communications.The allegations, made by messaging providers and campaign groups GreenNet, RiseUp Networks, Chaos Computer Club and Privacy International, among others, concern the use by the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters of "thematic warrants" to hack computers. They began making their cases to the U.K.'s Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London on Tuesday, in hearings scheduled to run through Friday.GCHQ first admitted to hacking in February following Privacy International's initial legal challenge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kalinin nuclear power plant's new neighbor will be a data center.The plant, near the city of Tver, is close to fiber-optic lines between Moscow and St Petersburg, providing the future data center with the double advantage of reliable power and fast communications links.When completed, the data center will be the largest in Russia, with a capacity of up to 10,000 racks, the company claims.Construction work will begin shortly, plant director Mikhail Kanyshev said Monday. The first phase is due to enter service in March 2017, and the second a year later, he said.Nuclear reactors need to run continuously, and so are a good match for loads that, like many data centers, run 24 hours a day. RosEnergoAtom expects the Kalinin data center to consume about 80 megawatts. That's just 2 percent of the neighboring power plant's generating capacity: Its four reactors are rated at 1 gigawatt each.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Peter Sayer