Silk Road Rises
Even Wikipedia knows about this place. So there’s nothing more to add, except the combination of screenshots below. May 2011 on the left, March 2012 on the right.
Paycoin? Bitpal?
Each age has its own universal goods exchange equivalent, the money. In the early ages it was salt, fur of a rare animals or even coloured stones.
We are living in the age of digits and electronic circuits, so it is no wonder that the purely digital money has emerged.
In 1998, Mr. Wei Dai proposed concept of cryptocurrency, he named it B-money. Although, idea of B-money was not implemented, it inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to create his own implementation of digital currency - Bitcoin. Which, in its turn, recently gained a huge popularity mainly due to the references in the media and involvement of the mass audience.
One of the main delusions about Bitcoin, is that Bitcoin is just another digital equivalent of paper money. As it usually happens, this delusion is being followed by another delusions. For example, if Bitcoin is analogue of paper money, then bitcoins worth nothing, they can be easily created, destroyed or even faked. But the main goal of Bitcoin was not to create another analogue of paper money, which represents real values, like gold. The goal was to create equivalent of gold itself. The goal was to take those characteristics of gold, which make it valuable and create digital currency which could hold those characteristics.
To get a credit card or to create a PayPal account, people have to address some kind of central facility, which controls card emission or validates person’s ability to pay his credit line in time. It is impossible with Bitcoin, due to its anonymity and decentralised nature. You just can not tell for sure who stands behind some particular Bitcoin wallet. Payments are made directly, from wallet to wallet, so there are no specific financial organisations behind it. The other important feature of Bitcoin, is inability to cancel payment. Though, time to verify transaction could take from 10 minutes up to several hours, once transaction is made it is impossible to cancel it in any way.
There are no transaction fees in Bitcoin system, it is cryptographically secure and everyone can verify its security. It was proved to be a reliable and technically correct solution and now it lacks just a few steps to expand to all the other areas, to become a widely used currency and payment system. So far Bitcoin became hot topic within IT forums and news boards and just recently, one of the major Bitcoin adopters, released complete checkout solution, which works with bitcoins. I might be wrong, but it seems like there should be an epic battle soon, between Visa/Mastercard and decentralised, community-driven crypto-currency.
P.S.
Yes, I know that the post turned out to be somehow crumpled, since I was trying to avoid getting into technical details.
Achtung, Pozor, Uwaga!
Все много пишут про ACTA, я тоже хочу.
Похоже латвийские политики знают английский на уровне “насинг спешиал”, раз в один голос уверяют что в ACTA ничего страшного нет и что никаких изменений в законодательстве не потребуется. Да там весь документ – сплошные заявки на изменения в законодательстве.
Статья 11. Черными английскими буквами, по белому английскому pdf:
each Party shall provide that, in civil judicial proceedings concerning the enforcement of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities have the authority, upon a justified request of the right holder, to order the infringer or, in the alternative, the alleged infringer, to provide to the right holder or to the judicial authorities, at least for the purpose of collecting evidence, relevant information as provided for in its applicable laws and regulations that the infringer or alleged infringer possesses or controls. Such information may include information regarding any person involved in any aspect of the infringement or alleged infringement…
Я мало разбираюсь в юридической терминологии, но “…upon justified request provide relevant information regarding any person involved…” звучит как раз как “а теперь нам можно будет получать от провайдеров любую возможную информацию о пользователях”.
А вот еще статья 12, пункт 3:
each Party shall provide that, in civil judicial proceedings, its judicial authorities have the authority to order the seizure or other taking into custody of suspect goods, and of materials and implements relevant to the act of infringement…
Выходит, если вдруг какого-нибудь дядю Витю заподозрят в нарушении копирайта, то у него арестуют все, чем он этот копирайт нарушал. Это те самые проверки айподов и ноутбуков на границах? Хотя нет, про границы и личный luggage там отдельная статья.
Всего 25 страниц, но даже при чтении по диагонали возникает острое желание скачать TrueCrypt, если он еще не скачан.
Cloud formation and around
When people talk about cloud computing, they often refer to the good old phrase, that history repeats itself. But, as Mark Twain once said: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
It all started with mainframes. Giant, complex and powerful machines which were accessible to users through terminals. Terminals, in their turn, were just boxes for receiving user’s input and displaying processed output. All the demanded calculations were made by mainframes. Then personal computers, or PCs, appeared on the stage and became commodity and everyone was delighted that it is no longer required to stay late at work to upload needful data to the mainframe, no need to wait for mainframe’s resources to become available and no need to kick himself because mainframe is down for maintenance, but research deadline is after a few hours. It became possible to comfortably sit in a cubicle in the office, or at home, sipping beer and continue work or research without any worries.
About 15 years ago Dot-com bubble happened. The Internet, portable devices and cheap airlines spread like autumn’s flu, so people became more flexible. They wanted to have their photos, flowcharts and documents always available, no matter where they were at the moment and no matter what kind equipment they had on hand. The same thing happened to commercial structures. In the old days they were happy to have a bunch of physical servers, each responsible for its own unique function, even if those servers were loaded only at 5 percent all the time. Nowadays no one can afford such a resource and money waste. Companies have to be flexible and reliable, they have to be confident that their services are available to customers round-the-clock and at the same time, companies do not want to invest millions to build infrastructure from zero.
Taking care of physical servers, switches and routers, consumes wast amount of time and therefore money. You have to hire professional administrators to install and configure devices, to apply patches timely, to monitor servers performance. But after 3 or 4 years you have to throw all this expensive equipment away and replace it with the new one. Because, even if it’s still capable to perform required functions, annual support and subscription for outdated equipment usually costs like a half of a new server price.
People were tired of synchronising their content between multiple devices and companies were mad about investing another money portion to buy expensive hardware. Idea of centralising everything was in the air, so cloud services appeared. And here is another place for Mr. Twain’s quote: “No occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often”. People just had looked back at the mainframes, took some inspiration from them and applied well known, time-proven concepts, to the new technologies. Ta-da!