Tech News

Central Bankers Raise Bitcoin Policy Questions

Commonwealth central bank governors say they want to look more closely into the impact of digital currencies on monetary policy before adopting a stance toward the technology.

The comments came earlier this week during a meeting of about 30 central bank governors from the Commonwealth – an intergovernmental organization composed of 53 member-states. Held on 6th October and chaired by Bangladesh Central Bank governor Aitur Rahman, the event centered on bitcoin in the context of global remittances.

Commonwealth of Nations

Government ministers and other officials were also in attendance.

The topic of digital currencies and cross-border payments served as part of a broader conversation about the negative impact of regulation on remittances, particularly the closure of accounts for money-related businesses that banks deem too risky to work with.

Many startups working in the digital currency industry today, even in countries with more advanced understandings of the technology like Australia and the US, continue to struggle to gain access to even basic banking services.

The meeting was intended to look at “the potential of virtual currencies to decrease costs and improve the efficiency of transfers” and included a presentation by London School of Economics historian and CoinDesk contributor Garrick Hileman on the state of digital currencies.

While the potential for digital currencies to address remittance pain points was acknowledged by those in attendance, some governors at the meeting raised questions “about the implications for monetary policy and financial stability”, according to the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Jwala Rambarran, central bank governor for Trinidad and Tobago was quoted by the Commonwealth Secretariat as saying:

“The Commonwealth Secretariat has a key role to play in sharing knowledge and developing research on the potential and implications of this new technology. If we decide to regulate virtual currencies, we are unaware of the financial instability risks posed by this currency. This is an area we need to determine carefully.”

During the meeting, representatives also discussed best practices for describing the technology.

Hileman characterized the meeting as a positive one, telling CoinDesk:

“There was significant interest shown by many Commonwealth member countries in the potential of cryptocurrencies to have a positive impact on reducing costs and other inefficiencies in traditional remittance services.”

Tech News

Line Adds End-To-End Encryption

Line App

Japan-based Line is finally bringing end-to-end encryption to its mobile messaging service, which is used by over 211 million people worldwide each month.

The company said today that a new security feature, dubbed ‘Letter Sealing’, will bring encryption to messages and features on the service, starting with one-on-one chats and the service’s location-sharing feature, on its mobile and desktop apps.

“This method of secure communication facilitates uncrackable encryption by scrambling the chat content with a key, which is stored only in user device instead of a centralized server. With the advanced security system, it is technically impossible for the chat content to be disclosed in the server or to a third party,” Line said in a statement.

The feature is only activated when all parties interacting have it present on their device. Initially, users must switch on encryption themselves — the setting is buried inside menus — which could impact the initial rollout. But Line plans to switch it on by default for all users soon, initially it is only default for those with one Android device registered to their account. There are plans to add encrypted sealing to Line for desktop and other operating systems over time, too.

Still, the move is a much needed one. A number of Line’s messaging rivals have already embraced end-to-end encryption, including WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, and Telegram. Line did add an encrypted chat option last year, but it requires users to open a different kind of chat window, which almost certainly means it is not widely used.

Line has previously denied claims that it shares user data with the government in Thailand, its second largest market with over 30 million users. Adding end-to-end encryption should help the company argue that keeps data locked up, secure, and out of the hands of third parties.

It’s worth adding that, while this news looks good on paper, members of the security community are yet to have a go at disproving the security.

Tech News

Adobe Releases Lightroom Fix

In a quick turnaround, Adobe patched a bug causing its Lightroom program to crash after a software update.

“I’d like to personally apologize for the quality of the Lightroom 6.2 release we shipped on Monday”, stated Adobe Product Management Photography Director Tom Hogarty on the company’s official blog this past Friday, “in our efforts to simplify the import experience we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug”. However, the apology wasn’t met with enthusiasm, as the bug-fixing patch also eliminated some desired features of the program. The update, aside from improving the import process, was intended to enhance several other features of the program including improving haze elimination. It was originally intended to simplify and streamline the program, however this may have been overdone, according to rising user responses expressing discontent with the deleted features.

Hogarty explained that Lightbox’s very birth was based on an open dialogue with photographers and artists who would be most interested in the program, and that a breach of such communication as with these past several updates created many of the issues Adobe is now dealing with. Historically, Adobe has been very responsive with patches, however users have been frustrated in the past with a lack of compensation (such as the ability to back out of a long Adobe Creative Cloud contract), or as with this case, a bug fix which also carries undesirable results with it, which Hogarty addressed with his explanation that “we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality”. Whether or not those features were indeed ‘low usage’ is coming to the surface after a weekend with the new update.

Tech News

AWS unleashes ‘Snowball’ appliance for physical migration to clou

Aside

Also signs pact with Accenture.

Amazon Web Services has released a rented device that physically migrates data from on-premises hardware to its public cloud. Amazon senior vice president of web services Andy Jassy launched the new Snowball service in front of 19,000 attendees at the vendor’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. “Even for companies that have pretty good connections, it’s very unlikely you want to saturate the network with moving data to AWS,” Jassy said, adding that it would take 100 days to move 100TB of data to the cloud even if 10 percent of bandwidth was dedicated from a 100Mbps corporate network. “That’s why people say: never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck.” AWS vice president of engineering Bill Vass then showed the crowd a tamper-proof, shock-proof device that looks like a large briefcase. The 50TB storage device, lent out by AWS, is delivered to the customer’s premises for ten days to copy the data on. The Snowball is “rugged enough to withstand a 6G jolt” and weighs 23kg. The device has an external electronic ink display panel, which Jassy described as “a Kindle”, that dynamically changes the delivery address for the courier. The self-contained units have a 10GB network connection for fast data transfer, and the data is encrypted as it is copied onto the device. The Snowball units are then sent back by the customer for AWS staff to decrypt the data and “copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request”, according to an AWS blog post.

Bill Vass explains the end-to-end process for Snowball

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