A Short History of the Blockchain Technology When an unknown scientist under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper about Bitcoin – a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”– in 2008, it was not the cryptocurrency itself but its underlying mechanism, known today as the blockchain, that was considered revolutionary. But overall awareness of the blockchain technology remained rather limited, as Bitcoin itself was not yet widely known. Starting in the year 2012, increasing activity surrounding Bitcoin could be observed, as the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization grew and start-ups in the field of payments and coin wallets started to emerge. But still, Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain remained subject to a general scepticism, being associated mainly with the financing of rather sketchy online activities and other misconceptions. Nonetheless, by the year 2014, over 80 uses of blockchains had been reported. Slowly, the initial scepticism gave way to the increasing efforts of Continue reading
Business and Technology
E-Learning at the Workplace
Globally, the e-learning market has been growing rapidly, and e-learning is beginning to emerge as the new model of training and education across a wide range of different sectors and industries. This growth has resulted in part from extensive changes in the working environment, and from a shift from a product-based economy to a knowledge-based one, meaning that there is a more pressing need to train and educate workforces in new technologies and services. In addition, technological advancement and challenges in technology-oriented working life have paved the way for new forms of electronic learning. Consequently, e-learning now accounts for a significant proportion of corporate investment in workforce training. E-learning is a learning experience that is delivered by electronic technologies including for example, the use of the internet, intranets, interactive TV, virtual classrooms and so forth. For some scholars, e-learning is considered only as a mechanism for delivering training and education Continue reading
Social Engineering – Meaning, Types and Defenses
Living at the height of the Information Age means information security has never mattered more. With a greater amount of people and businesses going paperless, there is an ever-increasing need and demand to keep digital information secure. The CIA triad or the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of a company’s data is a general model designed to guide security policies for information security inside an organization. Confidentiality refers to the privacy of data – making sure that only people who are allowed to access data are able to access it. Integrity refers to maintaining a data’s accuracy and trustworthiness – making sure that data cannot be altered by an unauthorized person. And lastly, availability refers to the ability to access data when an authorized person tries to access it. Cybercrime is a billion-dollar industry, which is built upon hackers breaking an organization’s CIA triad. This includes but is not limited to: Continue reading
How Does Blockchain Technology Work?
The ability to own and to transfer assets via transactions is at the heart of economic value creation. And to keep track of these business agreements, market participants have always relied on ledgers. But to make sure that these ledgers remain accurate and are not being tampered with by fraudulent market participants, most business networks rely on central, trusted parties, such as banks or other intermediaries, to oversee these business ledgers and to validate each transaction that is taking place within the network. This need for an intermediary has become even more important in the modern age, as assets have increasingly been digitalised and central third parties are required to make sure that a digital asset is not duplicated and spent more than once by the same party. But while the use of such a central intermediary brings the major benefit of introducing trust into the system, it also comes Continue reading
What Is Augmented Reality?
Augmented reality refers to the utilisation of computers to modify reality, usually in order to provide additional assistance when a human user is interacting with the real environment. The real world around humans provides a wealth of information which the human user must absorb and process through their senses. The most useful and informative of all human senses is the sense of vision and a huge amount of information about the ambiance is required to be sensed as well as processed by the human visual system. Computers are useful because they can provide an overlay of information to assist with the human processing of the information which they perceive through their senses, mostly the visual sense. As an example, a human who is walking around an urban area can be provided additional information through a head mounted display which superimposes textual information about identification of buildings and other important landmarks Continue reading
Individual Privacy – A Right Masked as Luxury
Personal privacy is a concept not foreign to most, if not all individuals. Whether it is to keep certain details about themselves private or to stray away from the societal obligations tied to themselves, individuals tend to isolate themselves to prevent things close to them from becoming public. Though in the last twenty years, information technology has essentially erased the barrier dividing what personal and private information should be. Large tech companies have imposed a risk on individuals’ privacy with the way personal information is handled and distributed within those companies. Companies such as Google and Facebook constantly track an individual’s behaviours online and use their data in immoral ways that most individuals are not aware of. Google is notorious for this, and even explicitly states in their terms of service that their “…automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized Continue reading