Decred - A new Digital currency by core developers of bitcoin

Some of Bitcoin’s Core developers have left the Bitcoin project and started building their separate cryptocurrency called DECRED.

Decred aims to prevent the issues Bitcoin is currently facing regarding project governance and development funding.

CEO of 'Company 0', Mr. Jacob Yocom-Piatt, who has funded Bitcoin development since early 2013, said the actual development of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is funded by external entities that forms a conflict of interests between the groups and the project's core developers.

According to Bitcoin's developers, these group puts limitations on input in Bitcoin's governance, selecting options that are favorable to their own interests only, and generally ignoring the developers' and project's best interests.

"The Bitcoin software is controlled by a small group of people who decide exclusively what can and cannot be changed," Jacob says in a press release.

"This is in part due to a lack of mechanisms and pathways for funding development work directly from the community, and, as a result, Bitcoin development is funded by external entities that create conflicts of interest between the developers and the representative power of the community that uses Bitcoin."

So, in order to address this issue, some of the Bitcoin developers have joined hands with the makers of the widely used BTCsuite and are now building their own new digital currency called DECRED.

What is DECRED?

Decred, managed and funded by Company 0 LLC, is an open and progressive cryptocurrency that will adopt a more decentralized community-based governance integrated into its blockchain.

The team has the advantage to make Decred a really great product as they already have experience with Bitcoin.

Some Highlights of DECRED

Decred intends to include a long list of features such as:

• Implementation of consensus system based on proof-of-work and proof-of-stake system
• Decred development is self-funded and open with block subsidy
• Decred uses Blake-256 hashing algorithm
• Decred may be compatible with Bitcoin
• Decred community members will be involved in making bottom-up non-financial decision making easier
• It will use secp256k1 signature scheme or Ed25519/secp256k1-Schnorr for better integration into existing software and make good use of the features offered by Schnorr signatures respectively
• Decred uses Go as a codebase for development

Decred has an Airdrop scheduled for next month (20 days and a few hours from now) where they’ll be giving out 4 percent of the total Decred supply to all participants.

Interested developers can take part in the Airdrop by filling in their details on Decred website.

Offer Money to install Malware on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is now gaining attention from malware distributors who want the popular mini-computers to deliver with pre-install malware.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a shocking revelation that the charitable foundation has been offered money to install malware onto the Raspberry Pi machines before they were shipped out to users

The Raspberry Pi is an extremely simple computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into many geeky projects. Due to the low-cost appeal of the Raspberry Pi, the Foundation has sold over 4 million units.

Just Last month, Raspberry Pi unveiled its latest wonder: The Raspberry Pi Zero – a programmable computer that costs just $5 (or £4), may rank as the world's cheapest computer.

Last Wednesday, the Foundation tweeted a screenshot of an email in which "business officer" Linda effectively asked Foundation's director of communications Liz Uptonto to install a suspicious executable file onto Raspberry Pis for which the officer promised to offer a "price per install."

The email further explained that installing the executable file would create a shortcut icon on the user's desktop and opening the shortcut would take the user to the company's website. "Then this is our target,"the email reads.

Here's the screenshot of the full email:

However, the name of the company represented by Linda was not revealed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Obviously, the paid-for-malware distributor pitched the wrong organisation, who declined the offer, describing the company as "evildoers," but the incident once again raises the question about this common, widespread issue.

FBI Directors Pleadge to Tech companies don't offer for End to End Encryption

FBI declared War against Encryption.

Encryption is defeating government intelligence agencies to detect terrorist activities and after the recent ISIS-linked terror attacks in Paris and California, the issue has once again become a political target in Washington.

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan plans to make it Mandatory for its Citizens to Install Internet Backdoor, allowing the government to intercept users' traffic to any secure website and access everything from web browsing history to usernames and passwords.

FBI: For God's Sake, Don't Use End-to-End Encryption

At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, FBI's Director James Comey called for tech companies currently providing users with end-to-end encryption to reconsider "their business model" and simply stop doing that, reported The Intercept.

Yes, instead of asking companies for a "backdoor" this time, Comey suggested them to adopt encryption techniques that help federal agencies intercept and turn over end-to-end encrypted communications when necessary.

"The government doesn't want a backdoor, but [it] hopes to get to a place where if a judge issues an order, the company figures out how to supply that information to the judge and figures out on its own the best way to do that," said Comey.

Comey: Keep Readable Version of Customers' Messages

End-to-end Encryption is a secure communication that encrypts the data on the sender's system before passing it to a company server. The company then passes the encrypted data to the intended recipient, who is the only person who can decrypt it.

Nobody in between, be an application service provider, an Internet service provider (ISP), hacker, or even law enforcement officials, can read the data or tamper with it.

However, Comey is asking for the technology companies to retain a readable version of that initial data, just in case the authorities need it.

"There are plenty of companies today that provide secure services to their customers and still comply with court orders," he said. "There are plenty of folks who make good phones [and] are able to unlock them in response to a court order."

MacKeeper Hacked- 13 Millions Users - 21 GB data Breached

MacKeeper anti-virus company is making headlines today for its lax security that exposed the database of 13 Million Mac users' records including names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, IP addresses, phone numbers, and system information.

MacKeeper is a suite of software that claims to make Apple Macs more secure and stable, but today the anti-virus itself need some extra protection after a data breach exposed the personal and sensitive information for Millions of its customers.

The data breach was discovered by Chris Vickery, a white hat hacker who was able to download 13 Million customer records by simply entering a selection of IP addresses, with no username or password required to access the data.

21 GB Trove of MacKeeper Customer Data Leaked

31-year-old Vickery said he uncovered the 21 GB trove of MacKeeper customer data in a moment of boredom while searching for openly accessible databases on Shodan – a specialized search engine that looks for virtually anything connected to the Internet – that require no authentication.

"The search engine at Shodan.io had indexed their IPs as running publicly accessible MongoDB instances (as some have already guessed)," Vickery said in a Reddit post. "I had never even heard of MacKeeper or Kromtech until last night. I just happened upon it after being bored and doing a random "port:27017" search on Shodan."

As a result, four IP addresses took him straight to a MongoDB database, containing a range of personal information, including:

• Customer Names
• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Password hashes
• Mobile phone numbers
• IP addresses
• System information
• Software licenses and activation codes

Security Product Using Weak Algorithm to Hash Passwords

Although the passwords were encrypted, Vickery believes that MacKeeper was using weak MD5 hashes to protect its customer passwords, allowing anyone to crack the passwords in seconds using MD5 cracking tools.

The company responded to the issue after Vickery posted it on Reddit, saying that the company had no evidence the data was accessed by malicious parties.

"Analysis of our data storage system shows only one individual gained access performed by the security researcher himself," Kromtech, the maker of MacKeeper, said in a statement. "We have been in communication with Chris, and he has not shared or used the data inappropriately."

Though the company claims Vickery was the only person to access the MacKeeper users’'information; you should still change your MacKeeper passwords and passwords on websites that use the same password.

Google Quantum Computer : 100X Faster than a PC

Announcing the results of its experiment, Google says Quantum Computer is More than 100 Million times faster than a regular PC.

Two years ago, Google and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) bought a D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which they have been experimenting at the U.S. space agency's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California for the past two years.

The goal is to create a better way to solve highly complex problems in seconds rather than years.

Now, a Google's Quantum AI team appears to have announced the results of its latest test on D-Wave 2X quantum computer, demonstrating that quantum annealing can outperform simulated annealing by over 108 times – that is 100,000,000 times faster.

What is Quantum Computers?

Quantum computers can theoretically be so much faster because they take advantage of quantum mechanics. While traditional computers use the "bits" to represent information as a 0 or a 1, quantum computers use "qubits" to represent information as a 0, 1, or both at the same time.

In turn, this allows Quantum computers to achieve a correct answer much faster and efficiently through parallel processing.

Google's D-Wave 2X Quantum Computer:

Now, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab has announced that its D-Wave machine is considerably much faster than simulated annealing – quantum computation simulation on a classical computer chip.

"We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core," said Hartmut Neven, Google's director of engineering.

Google: Our Quantum Machine is 100 Million Times Faster

Google has also published a paper [PDF] on the findings, claiming that the team was able to perform a calculation with the quantum computing technology that was significantly faster than a conventional computer with a single core processor.

The researchers emphasized that their research on quantum computing is still in the early stages and has yet to be commercialized which could take decades.

"While these results are intriguing and very encouraging, there is more work ahead to turn quantum enhanced optimization into a practical technology," Neven wrote.

However, the team of Google and NASA researchers announced on Tuesday that the tests on D-Wave machines using Quantum Monte Carlo algorithm simulates running an optimization problem on ordinary silicon, and again the results were more than 100 Million times faster than a conventional computer