First, let me explain why I’m the perfect candidate to advise you. People are often surprised to learn that I often feel uncomfortable in groups or around strangers. They’ve seen me on a huge stage, addressing a crowd of thousands at our events, and can’t imagine someone who’s not afraid to speak on stage could be shy.

The truth is that speaking on stage is easy, once you get used to it. People forget that it’s a monologue, which means no anxiety about uncomfortable silences, no missed social cues, and no keeping up with appearances. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a recluse; I enjoy going out and socialising, but there are also occasions where I’ll feel nervous and want to hide in a corner.

Over the years I’ve learned to deal with my social anxiety using three simple tricks. I’m sharing them with you now in case you ever find yourself in a situation where small talk is required.

Tip 1: find something to do

The first thing I do when I arrive at a party is volunteer to be the DJ, cocktail shaker, dishwasher or BBQ chef. Anything that will give me something to do. This has a few benefits: if you get stuck in a conversation that causes anxiety, you will always have the excuse of needing to change the music/check the fire/wash a few more dishes. The host of the party will also think you’re a great person for helping out, and, if you’re good at your job, the rest of the guests will also appreciate your effort and will have something to talk to you about.

Tip 2: focus on the other person

Sometimes the social situation calls for you to entertain people, which normally comes with the pressure of feeling you have to tell great stories. Instead, focus on what the other guests can offer instead. Find out what they do, why they do it, what they want to do next, and what they’re excited about. People love talking about themselves, so if you spend an hour simply letting other people share there’s a good chance they’ll thank you for a great conversation — even if all you did was listen.

Tip 3: practice talking to strangers

A few years ago I started practicing talking to strangers. I’d just walk up to anybody at a party, say ‘what brings you here?’ and take it from there. You might think you don’t have the courage to do that, so that’s why you need practice. From now on, try to say at least one thing to one stranger everyday. It will feel super awkward in the beginning, but before you know it you’ll be talking to strangers and enjoying it. You’ll quickly find out that most people, even at parties, are just as shy and uncomfortable as you, and were waiting for someone to connect with. All you have to do is seem interested, and the rest will work itself out.

If you’re feeling confident, join me at our New York event on December 12th. The whole event is dedicated to networking and knowledge-sharing, and is the perfect opportunity to test your new skills. Apply for your invite now.

This story was written by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, and was originally published on The Next Web.

How to deal with your own social awkwardness at events was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nvidia’s researchers explain the difference between its novel method for inpainting images with deep learning and currently existing tech in a whitepaper published earlier this week:

Previous deep learning approaches have focused on rectangular regions located around the center of the image, and often rely on expensive post-processing. The goal of this work is to propose a model for image inpainting that operates robustly on irregular hole patterns, and produces semantically meaningful predictions that incorporate smoothly with the rest of the image without the need for any additional post-processing or blending operation.

As you can see in the above video, Nvidia’s technology doesn’t suffer from the same problem as current market techniques for filling in missing spaces in images. There’s no granular degradation or blurred edges which require fiddling with different brushes and levels of smoothness or opacity.

According to the researchers, they’re the first to successfully train a neural network to process irregular shaped holes in images.

Nvidia’s AI does, almost instantly, what could take even a seasoned graphic designer minutes or even hours to accomplish. The way it works uses a deep neural network to create masks and partial convolutional predictions — in essence it creates an invisible layer that it manipulates until it ‘feels’ as though the image is complete.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had our minds blown by the amazing results of one of Nvidia’s AI projects. Last year we were awestruck by the company’s ability to create realistic photographs of people who don’t exist, and even more impressed with its AI that can change the weather or time of day in a video.

Reality is becoming more subjective by the breakthrough. There’s a pretty good chance that, within a couple of years, the only way to tell the difference between AI-generated imagery and ‘real’ pictures will be checking the digital signature or having individual pixels evaluated by a computer.

The Next Web’s 2018 conference is just a few weeks away, and it’ll be 🔥. Find out all about our tracks here. This story was written by Tristan Greene, and was originally published on The Next Web.

Read more trending Next Web stories at HackerNoon.com/TNW

AI to recontruct partially-erased images with mindblowing accuracy was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In order to make it easier for film, VR and other visual content creators to work with individual frames on screen, Facebook has created a new unit with which to measure time, that divides more neatly than standard units like seconds.

The unit is called a Flick, and it’s equivalent to 1/705600000th of a second. The company explains how this works in relation to common frame rates as follows:

When working creating visual effects for film, television, and other media, it is common to run simulations or other time-integrating processes which subdivide a single frame of time into a fixed, integer number of subdivisions. It is handy to be able to accumulate these subdivisions to create exact 1-frame and 1-second intervals, for a variety of reasons.

(This can) in integer quantities exactly represent a single frame duration for 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, 120hz, and also 1/1000 divisions of each.

The idea with Flicks is to easily divide frame rates when working with visual media — something that’s not easily achieved with seconds and nanoseconds.

For example, most movies and TV shows are displayed at 24 frames per second, and each frame is .04166666667 seconds long. If you had to edit your content precisely or figure out exactly how many frames of animation are needed for overlaying on your video, it could get difficult to sync everything up while calculating the duration of these clips in seconds. With flicks, a single frame at 24 fps equates to 29,400,000 flicks. A single frame at 120 fps is a lot less: 5,880,000 flicks — and these are nice, round numbers that are easy to work with.

The unit was created by Christopher Horvath, a former Facebook employee at Oculus’ Story Studio. The company hopes to popularize it and make it an industry standard, but it’s up to professionals to decide if they’d care to use it.

Find out more about flicks in this GitHub repository.

This story was written by Tristan Greene, and was originally published on The Next Web.

Hacker Noon republishes trending TNW stories every week. Read more at hackernoon.com/tnw.

A Flick is 1/705600000th of a Second was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

John Donne once said, “no man is an island.” If he lived in the 21st century, he might have said the same thing about software. Programs which, on the face of it, appear to be completely distinct entities, actually consist of dozens of other components made by other developers and companies.

There are millions of third-party libraries and software development kits (SDKs) on the Internet. Developers download them and integrate them into their software, thereby saving them time when building features and functionality. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for each thing they want to do.

But are they also a security Achilles heel? Bay Area security expert Felix Krauseexamined several of the most popular SDKs, and found many lacked transport-level security. Or, to put in plainer terms, they were being served in an insecure fashion, allowing a malicious third-party to intercept and modify the contents.

Your app is grass

Before we go any further, I want to say that Krause’s research is platform-agnostic. It affects software of all stripes. Windows. Linux. MacOS. Android. iOS. Amiga too, probably.

That said, in this section, I’m going to talk about iOS apps because it’s familiar to most people, and because it’s a particularly interesting case study. It also happens to be Krause’s major area of interest, and the platform upon which he’s based much of his research.

Let’s suppose you want to infect a million iPhone users with malware. I don’t know why, but you do. It’s a tricky proposition. For starters, Apple’s locked down iOS tighter than Fort Knox. Grabbing an iOS zero day is a non-starter, too; those start in the six-to-seven figure range.

So, as a last resort, you sneak a developer a compromised SDK, who then inserts the dodgy code into their app (we’ll talk about how this works later). You then get the keys to the kingdom, more or less. Although Apple’s killjoy sandboxing stops the real fun, the malicious code can still access:

• Any files and folders the app has access to
• Any permissions the app has access to (hello, microphone and location services!)
• The iCloud container belonging to the app
• All Keychain data the app has access to
• All information exchanged between the application and a remote server.

Yikes. In short, you could turn an ostensibly-legitimate application into an Orwellian spying machine that records every tap — every keypress — made within it. It could even record where the user has been. And it could harvest credentials, which could be sold to other bad actors.

And it’s all done at an unimaginable scale. An individual SDK might harvest hundreds of apps, which in turn ensnare thousands of users apiece.

How this works

Man-in-the-middle attacks are nothing new. This research isn’t about them, but rather about how important pieces of software are transported, and how that affects the broader software security ecosystem. It’s important to touch on how this attack works, however.

This attack requires a third-party to position themselves either between a developer’s computer and the rest of the network, or between the network and the server providing SDK downloads. This allows them to observe and modify traffic as it goes from the computer, to the outside world. The finer technical details can be read on Krause’s blog, if you’re curious.

The victim could be anywhere: at a hotel, a cafe, or an airport. It doesn’t matter. Once the attacker is positioned, they can start serving bogus SDKs. Krause pointed out that it’s trivial to replace text in an HTML document. So, they could change the link location on a download page to one that points elsewhere.

An example given by Krause explores changing the location of Localytics’ SDK to one that’s visually similar, and unlikely to arouse suspicion. See if you can spot the difference:

• https://s3.amazonaws.com/localytics-sdk/sdk.zip
• https://s3.amazonaws.com/localytics-sdk-binaries/sdk.zip

The former is the legitimate SDK, while the one containing “localytics-sdk-binaries” serves the malicious code.

Krause has also created a proof-of-concept that allows him to switch the contents of ZIP files and binaries in real-time. This works by downgrading traffic from an encrypted format, to one that has no such protections, through a tool called sslstrip. Step-by-step, here’s how this works:

• A developer downloads an SDK
• T then modify it, inserting their own malicious code
• The attacker compresses the code.
• The attacker watches over the network traffic and waits for the developer to download an SDK.
• They then replace any ZIP file matching a certain pattern with their own payload.

Vendors are serving insecure SDKs

The avenue of attack highlighted by Krause’s research is a threat because of one thing: vendors are serving SDKs in a wholly-insecure fashion.

Krause looked at 41 of the most popular SDKs. Thirteen of these were potentially vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, while five offered no way to securely download the SDK at all. Many of these belong to big-name tech companies.

Take Amazon (which, to its credit, fixed the problem within three working days), for example. The Seattle-based tech titan served its AWS (Amazon Web Services) SDK downloads over ultra-insecure HTTP.

Another major SDK provider, Localytics (which has also resolved the problem), had an unencrypted documentation sub-site, which linked to its SDK. An attacker could have intercepted this and replaced the link to a malicious substitute, as mentioned earlier.

In line with ethical disclosure procedures, Krause gave the affected SDK developers a meaningful opportunity to resolve the issue before disclosure. This meant he contacted the relevant stakeholders within each organization, and gave them three months to resolve the issue to his satisfaction.

The issue is remarkably trivial to fix. Unlike many vulnerabilities, which require weeks worth of legwork, vendors only need to ensure their SDKs are downloaded through encrypted channels.

Depressingly, however, vendors have failed to take any meaningful action. Five days before the publication of this article, Krause wrote to me and told me that nearly two-thirds of the affected SDK providers had failed to protect their SDK downloads. He said:

I just went through the list and checked if the SDK providers fixed their sites:

I notified all affected in November and December 2017, giving them enough time to resolve the issue before publicly blogging about it. Out of the 13 affected SDKs, 1 resolved the issue within three business days, 4 resolved the issue within a month, and 8 SDKs are still vulnerable to this attack at the time of publishing this post. The SDK providers that are still affected haven’t responded to my emails, or just replied with “We’re gonna look into this” — all of them in the top 50 most most-used SDKs.

Which is shocking….

The software food chain

When you think about it, software isn’t too dissimilar from a piece of steak you might buy in a supermarket. You purchase it with the assumption that it’s safe to eat. For that to work, it needs to have been handled appropriately during each stage of the manufacturing process. From farm to fork, everyone needs to do their job properly.

Software is a bit like that. The end-user purchases a piece of software from their supermarket (in this scenario, the App Store) with the assumption that it won’t harm them. But for that assumption to be true, everyone needs to adhere to security best-practices: not just developers.

This story was written by Matthew Hughes, and was originally published on The Next Web.

SDKs Could be the Trojan Horse for Millions of IPhones was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I heard the 60th annual Grammy Awards show was going to feature artificial intelligence, I immediately thought “this is a marketing ploy.” But then I found out IBM’s Watson was the AI in question.

Watson, you see, doesn’t have a problem rolling up its non-existent sleeves and doing some good old fashioned hard work. Don’t expect a silly robot rolling around doing a human impersonation on the red carpet, IBM’s machines show up to solve problems and optimize workflows.

And while that isn’t very sexy — hard work seldom is — it’s incredibly important.

The chances are pretty good you’ve encountered Watson without knowing it. It’s embedded in the healthcare system, it makes music, picks the lunch menu, and understands us better than you might think.

It makes sense for IBM to bring Watson to the Grammys. Not only does it have the capability to provide back-end support for staffers, but it’s also perfectly designed to handle the mass amounts of data the event produces.

It’s data

Watson brings things to the table that humans simply can’t. As IBM Vice President of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships, Noah Syken told TNW:

The content “expires,” to some extent at least, or at least becomes less relevant as time goes on. Speeding the time to market will affect how quickly it can draw fans in.

The content itself — the images, videos, fashion, and even song lyrics — that’s all data, and AI is faster at handling millions of pieces of information than humans are.

What this means is IBM’s AI-powered insights into fashion and lyrics will be made available to fans live, through interactive dashboards, during the event.

The same insights will also enable the event staff to find and produce content without having to manually sort through hours of video and hundreds of thousands of images.

IBM program manager John Kent told TNW:

We’re serving Watson right into the existing photography workflow, for example, which will give staff photographers greater efficiency and the ability to work at larger scale.

Of course, the Grammys aren’t exactly the world’s most challenging AI showcase — even if it is music’s biggest night. We’re not talking about optimizing the New York traffic grid in real-time or simulating collisions at the sub-atomic level. Yet, with the entire world watching, there’s very little doubt Watson will perform with computer-precision. And I’ll even risk a little crystal-ball-reporting: it won’t embarrass the entire industry.

In 2018 there are plenty of “Wizard of Oz” AI constructs which promise to be great and powerful, but usually turn out to be nothing more than puppetry. In order for the public to accept AI, it’s important that it understands AI.

Ambassador Watson

IBM’s Watson is the perfect ambassador for the field of artificial intelligence. It doesn’t exist to give its developers a platform to practice their one-liners, it’s not snarky or weird. It won’t harass you in the grocery store. It just does what it’s supposed to do.

If you’re not impressed by its chatbot functions, take a look at its record in oncology. If you don’t like the fact it doesn’t come in robot form, you might be misunderstanding the purpose.

AI should make the world better for humans.

This isn’t to say Watson is the best, the most powerful, or even the most useful AI there is. Arguably, Google’s DeepMind has more brains. But Watson isn’t just riding the cutting-edge to see where it goes; it’s a boots-on-the-ground AI that already has a bazillion jobs across every industry you can think of.

We need Watson to continue providing the example for other AI (developers) to look up to because, despite its lack of sex appeal, it represents both the present and future of the field.

Watson knows how to shut up and do its job — which is to make all of ours easier.

You can check out Ambassador Watson’s work at the Grammy Awards live, and learn more here.

This story was written by Tristan Greene, and was originally published on The Next Web.

IBM Watson: AI’s Signature Ambassador was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And over the past few years, a myriad of startups have emerged with products that promise to deal with the morning after the night before. The most notable is Silicon Valley success story Morning Recovery, which got off to an ostentatious start when it raised $250,000 on Indiegogo in just one month.

The weirdest one is in Las Vegas. There, you can find Hangover Heaven, which is a converted bus stocked with rehydrating IV drips. For $159, you can flood your veins with “Dr. Burke’s Redemption 3.0 IV Hangover Cure,” which comes with a choice of either nausea or headache medicine. If you want both, it’s $199.

Hangover cures are a big business, and it’s getting bigger. A couple of weeks ago, a tech publicist emailed me about a new product called YourSaint. Drinking this, she explained, would ensure a hangover wouldn’t get in the way of a productive day after a heavy night on the sauce. I was intrigued, so I requested a review unit.

The Product

The following week, two packages arrived at my door. The first of which came in a single faux-leather cardboard box, and contained four bottles of the YourSaint VIP Concentrate.

Using this felt almost like I was doing a high school science experiment. YourSaint actually requires you to measure out a serving with the included pipette (between four to six drops), and place them in a glass of water. It also gives instruction how you’re supposed to consume it.

The side of the bottle listed just three ingredients: water, sulfuric acid, and cupric sulfate. When added to a bottle of mineral water, it gave it a strange flavor. I’d describe it almost like an Alka Seltzer, but without the effervescence, and quite a bit more sour. It tasted medicinal, almost.

The second package to arrive was a small box of YourSaint shots. I couldn’t help but notice they looked like miniatures of Skyy Vodka — at least at first glance. That made me laugh.

The bottle’s label made some big promises, saying it “neutralizes the effects of alcohol,” and how it “provides the necessary components for the complete metabolic pathway of alcohol in the body.” Drinking it, the bottle said, will remove the “effects of hangovers.”

It also listed how the beverage is to be consumed. Either drink it no more than six hours after the first drink, or with a large glass of water before going to bed, or one before you go out and another before you go to bed (along with a large glass of water.)

In addition to what’s already in the concentrate, the shot contains seven active ingredients: ginger, taurine, vitamin C, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, grape seeds, and shiitake mushrooms. Most of these should sound reasonable if you’ve ever looked at the side of a Red Bull can, or a 5-Hour Energy shot. And indeed, many (myself included) turn to energy drinks in order to abate the worst of a hangover.

The shot had tasted strongly of ginger. It was palatable, but not exactly moreish. It definitely could have used a bit of sweetness.

In the name of journalism, I roadtested both after heavy nights of drinking. I wanted to give the product a fighting chance, so I adhered by two rules: the first was I’d get to sleep at a reasonable time.

I also didn’t drink too heavily, figuring that if I get to the point where I’m puking up pieces of my own stomach lining, there’s probably not a lot it can do for me. Both nights, I had five cans of crap French lagers (Kronenbourg, if you have to ask), a few steep glasses of bourbon, and a couple of White Russians. It’s a lot, sure, but it’s not exactly what you’d call excessive.

And did it work for me? It’s hard to say. Both nights, I didn’t wake up with a headache — but then again, I seldom do. Nor did I wake up with an upset stomach that left me chained to the toilet for hours. For me, hangovers present themselves as an unbreakable sense of lethargy, and both days I felt really sluggish.

But could I read too much into that? Aren’t hangovers (and hangover cures) unique to the person experiencing them? I know people who wake up with raging headaches, and some people who don’t get hangovers at all. Some of my friends believe a full English fry-up to be the superior hangover cure, while others swear by energy drinks and cigarettes.

I was curious about the science behind YourSaint, so I spoke to Dr Joris Verster. Verster is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Utrecht who specializes in the science of hangovers. He has published countless academic papers on the subject, and is as close as you’ll get to an authority on the subject.

Verster was skeptical, saying “any claims with regards to the individual ingredients are not substantiated by any scientific research.”

“I am not aware of any scientific study that investigated the efficacy or safety of YourSaint,” he added. “In short, any claim that the product is effective or safe is not supported by scientific evidence.”

For what it’s worth, YourSaint says it is approved by the UK’s Food Standards Agency and the Danish Food Association.

The overlap between tech and drinking

So, scientifically speaking, the jury is out. But what I find most interesting is the link between tech and alcohol.

These hangover cures aren’t coming from the labs of Bayer, or GlaxoSmithKline, or any other big pharma company. They’re coming from those who’ve worked in the technology industry.

Remember Morning Recovery, which I mentioned at the start of the piece? That company was founded by a product manager at Tesla, who had previously worked at Uber and Facebook.

Similarly, the resume of YourSaint’s founder, Jorgen Koefoed, lists an incredible number of technology companies. Furthermore, YourSaint was pitched to me by one of the most well-known tech PR agencies around — Blonde 2.0. So, what is it that draws those working in the technology industry into trying to solve this problem?

Most people I spoke to said that the reason is most technology networking events are ultimately centered around the copious consumption of alcohol. Go to any conference or workplace party, and you’ll find free bars, and even drinking games.

This is something I’ve experienced personally. I was at a tech conference in London in November, which concluded with a two-hour open bar. I was with a friend, and we used the opportunity to drink as much as possible without having to pay London’s extortionate prices. We each drank about eight beers and several (I stopped counting) glasses of wine.

We weren’t alone. I saw some people double-fisting drinks, and others drunkenly trying to play Dance Dance Revolution. It felt like a gin-soaked version of The Purge, but without the murder. People were purging themselves of… what? Thought? Stress? Contemplation?

While writing this piece, I heard some legendary tales of debauchery. I’m conscious of the fact that it’s inappropriate to have ‘favorites’, but the best story I heard involved a workplace party at an airport hangar, where some employees got shitfaced and ended up breaking into a decommissioned passenger aircraft. Once inside, they sat in the pilot’s seat of the aircraft, which was a big no-no.

When the venue found out, they removed the employees from the plane, and grassed them up to their employer. The employer is no longer welcome to hold their Christmas parties at that particular venue.

I also heard stories of people getting drunk at conferences and missing flights and presentations. Of people getting fired and arrested. For awkward techies, alcohol might make them feel a bit more confident and gregarious, but it can also bring out a darker side to them.

Given there’s a lot of overlap on the venn diagram between tech and alcohol, it makes sense that some might try to hack the aftermath. But I can’t help but feel this is merely sticking plaster over what amounts to a glitch in tech’s culture.

This story was written by Matthew Hughes, and was originally published on The Next Web.

The Greatest Mind of Our Generation Just May Hack the Hangover was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Microsoft is out to prove blockchain naysayers wrong. In an effort to show the potential of the technology beyond its applications in cryptocurrency, the Redmond giant has announced plans to use blockchain tech as the foundation for storing and processing digital identity data.

Following a collaboration with the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), Microsoft has revealed its plans to rely on blockchain technology to solve some of the challenges we face when managing our identities and personal data digitally, such as improving privacy and security across the physical and digital world.

“We believe it is essential for individuals to own and control all elements of their digital identity,” the company said in a blog post. “Rather than grant broad consent to countless apps and services, and have their identity data spread across numerous providers, individuals need a secure, encrypted digital hub where they can store their identity data and easily control access to it.”

To this end, the company is developing an off-chain solution — akin to the Lightning Network — that will allow it to process massive volumes of ID data without congesting the blockchain network.

While the company has yet to demo working prototypes of its solutions, it has shared some findings from its jointly research with the DIF. In addition to its uses for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Windows-maker concludes that blockchain tech is well-suited for a number of other applications.

A key takeaway is that — instead of relying on third-party services and solutions — blockchain could prove instrumental in putting control back into the hands of the customer as well as securely storing personal data.

“Today, users grant broad consent to countless apps and services for collection and retention of their data for use beyond their control,” the post reads. “With data breaches and identity theft becoming more sophisticated and frequent, users need a way to take ownership of their identity.”

How it actually works

For this reason, the company has proposed several new services:

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) — a W3C spec that defines a common document format for describing the state of a Decentralized Identifier
• Identity Hubs — an encrypted identity datastore that features message/intent relay, attestation handling, and identity-specific compute endpoints
• Universal DID Resolver — a server that resolves DIDs across blockchains
• Verifiable Credentials — a W3C spec that defines a document format for encoding DID-based attestations

“After examining decentralized storage systems, consensus protocols, blockchains, and a variety of emerging standards, we believe blockchain technology and protocols are well suited for enabling Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs),” the company writes.

According to Microsoft, these solutions “can enable developers to gain access to a more precise set of attestations, while reducing legal and compliance risks (such as, GDPR, KYC/AML) by processing such information instead of controlling it on behalf of the user.”

The legendary software provider is quick to point out that, while blockchains are indeed suitable for such applications, current solutions like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Litecoin still lag behind standard centralized alternatives — especially when it comes to matters of speed, convenience and network stability.

“To overcome these technical barriers, we are collaborating on decentralized Layer 2 protocols that run atop these public blockchains to achieve global scale, while preserving the attributes of a world-class DID system,” Microsoft says.

The Redmond behemoth says it will share more technical details and proof of concept implementations in a series of upcoming posts.

The Decentralized Identity applications are slated to land on the Microsoft Authenticator app, which is already used by millions of people to prove their identity.

“With consent, Microsoft Authenticator will be able to act as your User Agent to manage identity data and sign attestations,” the blog post explains. “In this design, only the ID is rooted on chain. Identity data is stored in an off-chain, encrypted data store that the user has full control over.”

Microsoft has long shown support for blockchain tech on a number of occasions.

Indeed, the technology titan was one among several corporations and banks to show ambition in developing commercial applications on the Ethereum network.

More recently, Microsoft was said to be partnering with the IOTA Foundation over its “next-generation blockchain” solution. The partnership ultimately proved to be nothing more than an informal collaboration between a client and a software provider.

This story was written by Mix, and was originally published on The Next Web.

Microsoft’s Building on the Blockchain to Manage Digital Identities was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Although we at TNW love new tech, we’re also a bunch of cynics that view it with a certain scepticism (I mean we’d be lousy journalists if we didn’t). We, like you, know what practices we consider bad — such as irresponsible handling of personal data — but it’s harder to pinpoint what’s good.

That’s why I asked Torben Friehe, co-founder of the Good Technology Collective, a European forum for piloting technological advances, what exactly is goodtechnology?

“I don’t know.”

Well, that was somewhat underwhelming. (But worry not, I only chose this as the first quote for dramatic effect and to remind you that nothing in life is easy — the truth is that this article is actually worth reading.)

The GTC was founded to bring together leading figures in tech from different disciplines — e.g. science, politics, journalism, etc. — to offer counsel on the societal impact of new tech, such as AI, data surveillance, and IOT. So how come Friehe can’t simply say what good technology is?

“The thing is that the GTC is founded on seeking the answer to that question. We don’t just want perspectives we agree with, we want to foster real discussion on which direction we want to take tech. The answer could be that all technology is bad in principle and we should go back to our caves, I don’t know,” says Friehe and adds laughing “if someone convinces me that’s the right approach, I might live in a cave.”

But jokes aside, Friehe has strong opinions on what good tech is, even though he acknowledges that he alone doesn’t hold all the answers.

Intentions, purpose, and accountability (you know, all the fun stuff)

“Whether technology is good or bad depends on the people that create it — and I think that’s one of the things that’s neglected. Technology doesn’t appear out of thin air, there are people behind that create it. These people are the ones deciding whether the tech has positive or negative qualities,” says Friehe and emphasizes that engineers also need to become more deeply involved, and question the purpose of the tech they contribute to.

Friehe calls for increased accountability among engineers, not just the ‘decision makers’ that form the original intentions or the purpose of a product — whether it’s military tech or data products. “There are a lot of people that are working on technology that don’t even know about the intention behind the product they’re developing. And that’s particularly the case with, and always has been, with engineers.”

In Friehe’s opinion, engineers working on frontier technologies are too free to approach their task with almost a child-like zealousness. They can focus solely on the engineering challenges and the joys of solving them, without questioning or even thinking about the end-use of the tech.

“The intention of the product is rarely influenced by the engineer. The engineer receives directions and executes them, but we need to change that,” says Friehe. The entire development chain of tech needs to be more interactive and influential and the first step towards that is having engineers have more say.

Technology with a purpose — and built with restraint

Tech is developing so fast that there are hardly any limits to what we can do, that’s why we need to create the restraints — because computing power doesn’t anymore. In Friehe’s opinion, the best way to do that is to educate engineers in ethical related issues and give them more power in forming the purpose of the product.

“The input that engineers give on designing certain solutions influences the design, for example the extent of data collection. Engineers, at least at my company, have a lot of influence on what data we should or shouldn’t record,” says Friehe. The reason for that is that the purpose of the product will ultimately guide where we employ restraint in tech.

“It might be a stupid analogy but if you’d collect all the paper documents that you get at home — and literally not throw away anything — your apartment would be flooded with letters.” Friehe feels that engineers of data products need to think about data collection in a similar way. We have the capacity to fill our apartment with letters, but it’s not a smart thing to do, especially if it can be harmful to other people.

Although Friehe doesn’t mention it explicitly, I can’t but help but to think about purpose as a reaction to the mentality of advancing tech for tech’s sake. Of course it can be argued that uninhabited innovation has given humanity great gifts, but that’s an attitude that better suited in academia.

The reason is that businesses in the private sector (where most technological innovation happens nowadays) always have an underlying and inherent purpose. Whether it’s creating wealth for shareholders or ‘disrupting’ a market, the purpose is there — so it’s important that everyone that participates in making it a reality is a aware of it.

So for me, good technology might frankly be as simple as technology for the sake of people. But I bet that corporate big wigs could find a way to twist that into something ugly and, for example, argue that people need tech overlords to monetize their personal data to provide them with a platform to argue with their racist uncles.

However, Friehe and the members of GTC are bigger people than me and recognize the need to include all perspectives to reach a meaningful conclusion — because no one group can dictate tech.

“There is no single authority that can determine which technology is good or bad,” says Friehe. “And to be clear, it should never be the GTC’s role to determine whether particular tech is good or bad. It should be a forum to discuss what individuals and organizations think is good or bad.”

The first step in answering what’s good tech

“One of the objectives of the GTC is identifying the threats to good technology. Of course I have an opinion there, but I need to find out whether it’s valid or not. The problem is that people don’t talk about these things, maybe sometimes at pubs — but unfortunately, most influential tech people don’t spend that much time in pubs.”

That’s why Friehe and his co-founder Yann Leretaille formed the GTC along with its Expert Council, which includes influential people in different areas of tech, such as:

• Luciano Floridi, professor of ethics of information and the head of the Oxford Internet Institute
• Anke Domscheit-Berg, member of Germany’s parliament with the Die Linke party and activist with ties to WikiLeaks
• Annie Machon, former MI5 counterintelligence officer, data activist and whistleblower
• Rachel Coldicutt, CEO of Doteveryone, a London-based think tank fighting for a fairer Internet
• Gerd Leonhard, a top-rated futurist, author and strategic advisor
• Matt McMullen, founder of RealDoll and Realbotix, the leading AI companionship startup
• Ida Tin, founder of the internationally acclaimed female health app, Clue

Friehe feels that now, for the first time, we actually have the capacity as a society to discuss whether we want new technology, whether we need it, how we want it to be, and what we should do with it. He genuinely believes that if you have a forum to display arguments on good tech — and if you get intelligent people to listen — then people will eventually make up their minds.

The GTC will officially open its doors in Berlin on December 15 and you can attend by registering here. But despite it only being officially launched now, TNW has been monitoring its inception for the last few months. We’ve even published a few articles by some of their experts — e.g. on algorithms, spies and digital privacy, problem of disruption, and AI sex dolls — and it looks like the collective is off to a good start.

All the original costs of GTC were funded by member donations and in 2018, the collective will operate as an e.V., a nonprofit according to German law, funded through grants and non-corporate donations. But the GTC still needs to be careful with its co-operation with big tech if it wants to make a meaningful contribution to answering what is good tech.

Friehe acknowledges that it isn’t just up to him, but the intention is to keep GTC as independent as possible and make sure that future partners cannot influence the agenda of the collective too much. Big tech, just like any other participants, have a right to their opinion on good tech, but it needs to clear that it’s their stance, and not masking it with GTC.

Just like you, I’d hoped that this article could’ve given an definite answer to what exactly constitutes as good technology, but it’s too big of a question for now. One thing though is for sure, we’ll never know what good tech is unless we keep asking the question.

This story was written by Már Másson Maack, and was originally published on The Next Web.

To read the weekly trending TNW story on Hacker Noon, visit Hackernoon.com/tnw.

Technology is Agnostic. The People Who Make it Aren’t. was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tell them the tears in your eyes are from witnessing the beauty of Bitcoin as art, not because the dip below 10K has you curled into a corner crying.

Symphony of Blockchains is a mesmerizing live 3D visualization and audio experience that’s not just gorgeous, but also incredibly informative. IOHK, the creators of Cardano, and digital art studio Kuva, have combined efforts to create something that you just have to see to believe.

Users at the IOHK.io website are invited to explore the concept of Bitcoin through interactive art featuring imagery, text, and music. Bitcoin blocks are represented in a chronological funnel which, when interacted with, move and expand. Each block when clicked on, opens to elicit soothing tones and detailed information.

According to IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson:

IOHK has a commitment to both education and design and this captivating and complex data visualization is the perfect combination of both. It’s beautiful as much as it is functional and our hope is that it will help make blockchain truly understandable for a whole new audience.

To create the work, designers studied crystals in nature and the Merkel Tree in cryptography for inspiration. Once developers decided on a basic structure, they built the fascinating Symphony of Blockchain as an educational tool that’s, arguably, a piece of living fine-art.

Mark Lundin, Creative Partner at Kuva, says:

The best part is that it’s only the beginning and we will continue to work with IOHK to unveil further blockchain visuals that capture the unique essence of this complex technology.

Blockchain may be one of the most transformative and disruptive forces in the tech world, but it’s a notoriously difficult concept to get across.

This project makes it a bit easier to understand Bitcoin, and the fact that it’s pretty enough to meditate in front of doesn’t hurt. Now just breathe deeply and hodl.

This story was written by Tristan Greene, and was originally published on The Next Web.

The Symphony of Blockchains Will Mesmerize You was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it reached a high of $19,771 yesterday, Bitcoin made the creator of the cryptocurrency the 44th richest person on the planet — if you go by Forbes’ list, noted Quartz. The problem? Even after eight years since it was launched, we still don’t know who that is.

Over the past few years, many people have been suspected to be the inventor, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The list includes cryptography student Michael Clear, Finnish game developer Vili Lehdonvirta, and even a trio identified by Fast Company.

The closest the world might have got to unmasking Nakamoto was back in December 2015, when businessman Craig Steven Wright’s home was raided by Australian police in Sydney over his taxes.

Wright was identified by Wired and Gizmodo by numerous emails, blog posts and leaked transcripts of legal interviews. Wright didn’t confirm it at the time, but later claimed to indeed be the Nakamoto the world was looking for. He subsequently failed to prove he was the creator of Bitcoin, as he was unable to cryptographically sign the first block of data generated while growing the cryptocurrency — something the real Satoshi would’ve been able to do.

Once again, we’re back to square one in the search for the real inventor of Bitcoin. Whoever they are, Quartz notes that with their estimated fortune of 980,000 BTC, they’d be worth $19.4 billion, and rank above billionaire Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and below Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs.

Of course, with Bitcoin being as volatile as it is, the currency’s value has now dropped to $18,981 at the time of writing — bringing Satoshi’s net worth down to $18.6 billion. That’s still a pretty penny, and it keeps them on the top 50 list, just one position below the Saudi prince, and one ahead of Russian gas and chemical billionaire Leonid Mikhelson. Is now a good time to cash out?

This story was written by Abhimanyu Ghoshal, and was originally published on The Next Web.

Satoshi Nakamoto is One of the 50 Richest People in the World was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.