When a plaintiff receives a payout to indemnify them for their loss, their law firms take a big cut

Justpoint

I describe myself as an Agile Fundamentalist because I really like the ideas of the Agile manifesto, and I also confidently state that I am an AppSec snooper, because in my day job I tend to look at other people’s code, logs and systems and break them. I happen to think that agile and application security go together rather well! I had two different Slack conversations recently. One was on the UK cross-governmental Slack channel and the other one was on the Equal Experts Slack channel (yes I’m a consultant, and our Slack channels have hilariously got in their names). #security #securit-ee ee I wonder whether you can tell which is government and which is private sector: Conversation A Me: Hello, I was wondering whether I could garner some opinions. Personally, I think that Agile and AppSec go hand in hand well, particularly at scale, but I’d love to hear from people that disagree with me there (or agree) Them: By in large, I suspect you’ll find yourself in an echo chamber in this forum. if you can find someone that is willing to stand up publicly and say they disagree it’d be a really fascinating debate to run! Conversation B Me: (same as before) Them: Ooooh, it would be nice but I think you’ll find that a lot of places really don’t think that agile and security go together well, and will baulk at developers automating scheme changes and having access to production logs for fear of bad actors but think nothing of giving the DBAs full control over the database. It did surprise me a little bit that the resistance to doing security in an agile way was more coming from the private sector rather than the government. In fact, now in the cabinet office co-wrote a book about . MBS Agile Application Security Then again, it should not surprise me that agile security (or DevSecOps to give it its proper buzzword) feels a bit strange. I’m not sure whether you’ll have read which got ripped to shreds rather well , and especially but for me the biggest trigger was this diagram: that McKinsey article here here here McKinsey was basically saying that security is an afterthought and developers should minimise spending time on it. Yes, that’s going to end well… Why can’t someone else fix security for me? So I have been on both sides, I’ve been a developer for over 20 years, and I’ve been in security for the last few years. Still, I have never really understood the attitude that groans and moans about security. Why is it an issue? Well, usually because security checking is left to the last minute all too often. How many times have you worked in a place that calls itself agile, but works in big releases. Where security is left to a tickbox exercise and pentesters are brought in 2 weeks before the release date to make sure that the blame can be pointed at someone else when things go tits-up. If agile has taught us anything, we should know that iterating and fast feedback loops are crucial when it comes to delivering software. I’ll just point to as he’s much better at explaining why this is important. Dave Farley’s YouTube channel So why should security be any different? No tool or vendor is going to come in a magically “fix security”. No buzzword or process is going “solve security”. Wait, you mentioned agile! So let’s have a look at the : agile manifesto Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan This to me is agile. Not Scrum, not Kanban, not (god forbid) SAFe. Work from the basic principles and find what works in your context. How does it apply to AppSec? If I was to write an agile AppSec manifesto, what would that look like? I’d probably just start with the agile manifesto and iterate, geddit? Individuals and interactions over processes and tools I think this one is straightforward. If your security relies on long check lists or tools that evaluate vulnerabilities, then I think you are going to drown. Particularly at scale. My go-to example are supply chain vulnerabilities, where vulnerabilities are now getting published at a pace of . We’re also reaping the whirlwind of CVEs getting raised to or getting . How do we expect developers to stay on top of this? Usually teams are under pressure to deliver new features and fix bugs, not deal with a tsunami of dependency updates. 78 new ones a day gain notoriety badly misclassified Now, security software vendors love to come into this space and sell fear. If you don’t patch everything with CVSS score of 8 or higher within 48 hours, it’s doom. And that is - politely put - . bollocks My own take is that an AppSec team should work hand in hand with developers, and that automatic dependency updates are . If developers were to follow processes and not leave a single CVE unpatched, I believe fatigue would set in very very quickly and soon nobody would look at the reports anymore. When I was a dev, I remember when I first added the to a build pipeline. Very quickly we switched it to reporting only as the pipeline was failing all the time. And then nobody looked at the reports for months. curate vulnerabilities not always desirable OWASP dependency checker Secure software over security checklists One of my biggest peeves is when security and software development do not go hand in hand. I forget where I saw the quote, but “security is just QA” is an important piece of the puzzle. And a good tester will always want to understand the software that needs to be tested. Personally, I despair when external pentesters are engaged for usually a lot of money and because they are lacking context on what the system under test is doing, they fire off Metasploit and generate a report about missing HTTP headers and out-of-date TLS ciphers, and miss the fact that an API can be used to access everyone’s payment data. I also despair when there are AppSec engineers that don’t speak the language used to implement the software. Good AppSec needs help the people who develop the software. It is all about context and collaboration: AppSec engineers, on their own, will not secure a system. Developers on their own will not respond to all the security challenges. But together, there is a chance! Security champions or security community of practice initiatives can be a great way of spreading security skills and sharing the vulnerability analysis load. Lisi Hocke’s is a great place to start. AskAppSec post on Security Champions Secure Software over Security Policies I don’t like the blame game or finger-pointing. It makes no difference whose fault a security breach is. Fact of the matter is, security incidents will happen. Things go wrong, and attackers will succeed. I’d much rather help developers who are under a strict timeline to make compromises, rather than demanding perfect security. I’d much rather be open and approachable than a strict security gatekeeper. Responding to Change over Perfect Security Every security vulnerability is a risk. And not every risk is something that needs to be fixed straightaway or even at all. I think AppSec needs to be pragmatic and work with the developers and “the business” to ensure that software is as secure as it needs to be. I don’t think that every software needs hardware keys and quantum-resistant cryptography for everything (not yet anyway). Conclusion Security is hard. It also is expensive, and from the outside, provides no value. Security only becomes important in hindsight, when that breach happened or when an embarrassing leak occurred. Going back to the McKinsey diagram, the only way to keep on top of it is to embed security into the development processes, not keep it away. As an AppSec engineer, I would much rather find a problem before it goes to production than finding out about it when the brown stuff has already hit the spinny stuff. That means reaching out to developers and helping them write secure software and finding problems. I think that’s where AppSec can learn a lot from the agile manifesto. I hope you found this rant useful. If you'd like to find more of my writing, why not follow me on or ? Twitter Mastodon This post was originally posted . here

Why Can’t Someone Else Fix Security for Me?

In today's digital world, information has become the lifeblood of progress and empowerment. With unprecedented access to vast amounts of data, individuals and organisations can make informed decisions, innovate rapidly, and connect globally. However, the significance of information also underscores the need for responsible dissemination, critical evaluation, and safeguarding of data to ensure that the benefits of the digital age are harnessed effectively while minimising potential risks. But what exactly is information? Can we measure it? How do we actually communicate information over the internet or any other medium? What do social media apps and all electronic communications have in common? How did we get to today’s digital age? The answer to the questions above dates back to the 1940s. A story about a visionary endeavour that proved to be not just successful, but transformative, reshaping the course of history itself. An endeavour that seamlessly intertwined engineering, science, and mathematics. From the crucible of this endeavour arose a nascent discipline known as information theory, which would go on to serve as the bedrock for the communication infrastructure that underpins today’s digital world. While one might anticipate that a realm as expansive as information theory sprang forth from the collaborative synergy of numerous mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, history takes an intriguing twist. In a remarkable turn of events, it appears that this domain was the culmination of a solitary individual's decade-long endeavour. The genius behind this transformative feat was none other than Claude Elwood Shannon. Transforming Circuit Design From Art To Science In a convergence of diverse knowledge and unquenchable curiosity, Shannon's journey unfolded. Armed with dual bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, he took an unexpected turn. A seemingly incidental philosophy course, undertaken to fulfill a university requirement, introduced him to the works of George Boole, the autodidact English logician of the 19th century. Shannon applied Boolean algebra in switching circuits in his master’s degree thesis. According to many people it was the most important master’s thesis of the twentieth century. The starting point of digital circuit design, a transformative work that turned circuit design from an art into a science. Because of this thesis, circuit design is no longer a trial and error process. Designs can be tested mathematically, before they are built. Nowadays, engineers routinely design computer hardware, software and complex systems with the aid of Boolean algebra. Before Shannon's master thesis, small devices that use magnetism to open and close electrical switches, called electromagnetic relays, were used to build circuits that routed telephone calls. However, there was no consistent theory on how to design or analyse such circuits. People thought about them in terms of the relay coils being energised or not. Shannon used Boolean algebra to make abstractions. He shifted the focus from the relays themselves to the function of a circuit. He used this algebra of logic to analyze, and then synthesise, switching circuits and to prove that the overall circuit worked as desired. This is when the AND, OR, and NOT logic gates were invented. Logic gates are the building blocks of all digital circuits, upon which computers and computer science is based. Connections to artificial intelligence But if there is a way to apply laws of thought in switching circuits, we can apply human thought in machines. Shannon’s master’s thesis also lays the foundation of the idea that machines could be made to think. The public response During the 1940’s, applying Boolean algebra in electronic circuits was shocking. It was completely unexpected and many thought that however interesting, it was purely theoretical. Life has proved them wrong, however! When looking under specialised glasses and when our background is not diverse enough, it's often difficult to see the magic that lies underneath. Science, Engineering and Mathematics: The Marriage Science seeks the basic laws of nature. Mathematics is the universal language of logic that searches for new theorems to build upon the old. Engineering builds systems to solve human needs. The three disciplines are distinct, yet interdependent. It is knowledge as diverse as it spans all three disciplines, that resulted in groundbreaking social and technological changes. Turning special cases into a unifying theory Up to the 1940’s, any attempt for electronic communications was considered as a special case that demanded special theories and implementation tools. The huge advance at that time was the discovery of how to use electricity to communicate. For example, remote communication was done using analogue signals. Sending a message involved turning it into varying pulses of voltage along a wire, which could be measured at the other end and interpreted back into words. This works quite well for short distances but for long distances it becomes unusable. Every meter that an analogue electrical signal travels along a wire, it gets weaker and suffers more from random fluctuations, known as noise. One option was to boost the signal but this would result in boosting noise too. Special cases were unified and problems were solved in light of Shannon’s monumental paper in 1948, titled: “A mathematical theory of communication”. A mathematical theory of communication Shannon thought about the problem of communication in a radically new way. The basic problem was how to get a message from one place to another, fast and reliably, even when the two places are very far apart. He asked questions that no one has asked. What exactly is information and is there a universal theory that could allow perfect communication? Here is a snapshot of his thoughts: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.” Information and meaning To make information measurable, Shannon disregarded semantic content. Information has nothing to do with what we understand or not. Let’s say that we’ve learned the news from the media and most of it did not make much sense. We did get information. What kind of information we’ve got was not considered to be a communications engineering problem. Although it may sound counterintuitive and maybe even restrictive that information has nothing to do with content and meaning, treating information as such was a radical idea that made possible what seemed to be impossible. Measuring information According to information theory, information is the amount of uncertainty and it’s measured in bits. Assume for example that we throw a fair dice once. Since a fair dice will give a number from 1 to 6 with equal probability, the information that we get by throwing the dice will be equal to the logarithm of base 2 of 6. This is approximately 2.58 bits of information. The invention of the “bit” catalysed the birth of information theory and ignited an explosion of innovation that continues to shape industries, economies, and societies. The bit's simplicity, in the form of binary code, belies its profound impact, underscoring the adage that sometimes the smallest units of thought hold the power to reshape the entire world. Communicating information If we communicate and say nothing new to each other, we exchange no information. After all, if you knew in advance what I would write in this article, what would be the point of writing it? Shifting the communication problem Traditionally, the problem of communications engineering was primarily viewed as a deterministic signal-reconstruction problem: Given that a transmitted signal is distorted by a physical medium, try to transform the received signal in order to reconstruct the original as accurately as possible. The observation that the key to communication is uncertainty, shifted the focus of the communication problem from the physical to the abstract. It was no longer a deterministic problem but a probabilistic one. This was also a huge shock to the engineering community at the time. Communications engineering Having defined what information is, Shannon found a way to make the communication problem a general problem. He used a diagram like this: The first major contribution from this diagram is that one of the transmitter’s jobs is to convert all information to bits. Having successfully applied Boolean logic (true or false, zero or one) to switching circuits, Shannon generalizes the idea. All information can be represented as zeros and ones. Pictures, movies, and sound, for example, can all be treated the same way. This was one of the most important unifications of the twentieth century. Communications engineering is no longer a set of special cases that demand special theories. The problem of communication now reduces to two questions: How do we convert information to zeros and ones and how can we make sure that the zeros and ones are received accurately. The second major contribution came from realising the important role of redundancy in information. Is there a minimum number of bits that we can shrink our information without losing anything important? Shannon discovered that minimum and showed how to calculate it. His formula was based on the probabilities in the message and it is almost identical to a fundamental quantity in Physics called entropy (which is related to randomness and disorder). Shannon calls his quantity entropy too, and he proves that it's the answer to his question. Entropy in information theory is the minimal size that we can compress our messages without any loss. The very idea that we can compress a large amount of data into something very small, is what makes the information age possible. Shannon’s idea that we should first change information to zeros and ones and then compress it is a huge first step towards a universal theory of communication. The third major contribution is that there is a speed limit in information transmission. Each channel has its own discrepancies and limitations like noise and interference. It could be a wire, air or water for example. Shannon calculated the speed limit beyond which we know that our communication will fall apart. This is known as the Shannon limit. The very idea that there is a speed limit for information communication was another radical idea at that time. The fourth major contribution is the answer to the question how do we eliminate channel noise. We can use mathematical codes, known as channel codes. Noise is eliminated by carefully introducing redundancy with such codes. Shannon proved that this can work at maximum speed, right at the Shannon limit. If we can find the right codes, we can have perfect communication, with as few errors as we want. He proved that there exist codes that can achieve the Shannon limit but he provided little insight on how to find them. This sparked scientific research for decades. Shannon showed that redundancy in communications is a two-sided coin. Depending on what we want to do we may remove redundancy or artificially introduce it or both. While compression requires removing redundancy, channel coding involves carefully adding redundancy in order to eliminate the effects of channel noise. The public response The publication of the mathematical theory of communication was like dropping a bomb. A new scientific field had been conceived, redefining basic ideas. Information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. However, information used to be for example a telegram, a photograph, a conversation, a book, or a song. Now, information was bits. And as if that was not shocking enough, another series of shocks hit the public: the sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, the meaning no longer mattered. Electronically communicating information has limits. How much information, how quickly could it be transmitted? It was all calculated in this work. It used to be common engineering sense that noise was a problem in communication that had to be lived with. That common sense was drastically re-evaluated since channel coding was an option. It has taken decades to understand, extend and answer open questions from findings of the scientific bomb that was dropped in 1948. How Did All This Happen? So how did all that happen back in the 1940s? What made Claude Elwood Shannon one of the greatest electrical engineering heroes of all time? I think it was a mix of skills. When Shannon was asked about the success of his idea to apply Boolean algebra in switching circuits he replied: “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time.” While people who knew him recognise his modesty and humility in this statement, it also explains a wider truth: Diversity of knowledge is key. After all, he was both a genius mathematician and a genius electrical engineer. The persistent generalist His genuine curiosity and his need to understand how things work gave him a large number of interests and activities. This made him the perfect generalist. From each and every part of his work he gained the satisfaction of fulfilling his curiosity. He asked questions from new perspectives and would never stop until he found the right answers. Experts say that he was working on the mathematical theory of communication for a decade. This work survived broken marriages and the second world war. A full cycle specialist He was a conceptual theorist that would redefine ideas if necessary. Whenever he focused on a problem he would become a specialist. His interest and ability in mathematics, his curiosity to explore, learn and discover, his passion for building things would make him work his way through all aspects of a problem. From understanding concepts and designing, to developing and implementing solutions on gadgets and finally testing them. A theorist and a practitioner that would redefine information and calculate its practical limits. Curiosity beyond conventional boundaries Shannon followed his curiosity, asking questions and looking for answers in multiple fields. He didn’t let conventional boundaries define what he could or could not be interested in. “I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity,” he said. Conventionally, the founding fathers in a scientific field are usually the people who lead its developments for years to come. It's all about incentive, I think. Viewing a field as their child is usually the incentive to nurture and help their child grow. Shannon's incentive appears to be simply the joy of fulfilling his curiosity. After his publication of the mathematical theory of communication, people expected him to lead information theory research and practice to new dimensions. MIT hired him for exactly this reason. His curiosity, however, led him to study things like: Gambling games. He built a wearable computer that could improve the odds for Russian roulette. How the brain works. Can we simulate the brain using a machine? How does the brain transform information? This kind of discussions he had with Alan Turing in their quest to understand the brain. He proved that we can make a reliable circuit using faulty components, having enormous applications to brain modeling. The data in the brain is interrelated. There is a huge amount of redundancy. Rules can be developed that depict how neurons connect. The intelligent machine. This idea was also a byproduct of his interest in the brain. He built a chess playing machine. He observed that although there is an astronomical number of possible chess games, we don't have to look all the way to the end of the game to figure out what a good move is. We only have to look ahead a few moves and evaluate the possible moves that we could reach. It is all about finding the path that leads to the best one! This principle is the basis for every chess program that came after. How the stocks work. He did work on the theory of stocks, applying information theory to the stock market. He developed various mathematical models to predict stock performance and has tested them—successfully, he said—on his own portfolio. Biology and genetics. He actually did a PhD in genetics! He found that different genetic possibilities could be mathematically represented in matrices. Using matrix algebra he could predict how traits are passed on through generations. Juggling machines. Juggling relates to patterns according to Shannon. There is a topology and a combinatorial aspect. He wrote a paper on Scientific American and came up with a formula that relates the number of balls we are juggling to how long each is in the air versus in the hand. Claude Shannon was notoriously curious. At home, he had a basement full of gadgets and machines that he spent hours enjoying making. It was his personal workshop for all kinds of curiosities. His friends called it “a gadgeteer's paradise” and Shannon the “master gadgeteer”! Fields and disciplines influenced Shannon revolutionised electronic communications and made the internet, wireless and wireline communications possible, including audio, video and multimedia transmission. Computer programs and apps, gaming, barcodes, QR codes, biometrics, digital clocks, digital photography, streaming services and the like, became a reality. Anytime we store, process or transmit information in digital form, every time we save a file on a hard drive or in the cloud, send an email, load a web page, chat on any social media app, we’re relying on concepts based on Claude Elwood Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. This publication is considered as the main reason why Shannon is known as the father of information theory. The fields that information theory influenced are vast, including applied mathematics, theoretical physics, data science, genomics, linguistics, neuroscience, probability and statistics and telecommunications. From classical complexity theory, stochastic thermodynamics, quantum information theory and processing, cryptography, data compression and storage, channel coding and information transmission, cybernetics and control, biochemical signaling, machine learning and neural networks. According to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google: “I often wonder if Shannon understood how much information there would be after his many discoveries. Did he understand that we would have this information explosion? In the last couple of years we’ve generated more information than in the sum of all human history. Literally, he not only won the lottery, he invented the lottery.”

Shannon: a Hero of the Digital Age

THE GEOTRUPES: THE LARVA

THE GARDEN SPIDERS: MY NEIGHBOUR

Things move fast in the world of infrastructure technology. It wasn’t too long ago when running a database on was considered too tricky to be worth it. But that was yesterday’s problem. Builders of cloud-native applications have gotten good at running stateful workloads because Kubernetes is a powerful way to create virtual data centers quickly and efficiently. Kubernetes The last time I wrote about this, I widened the aperture a bit to consider other parts of the application stack in the virtual data center – in particular, streaming workloads and analytics. With these two moving into the mainstream in Kubernetes, the discussion about use cases gets more interesting. What will we do with these foundational data tools if we have access to them? Thankfully we don’t have to investigate too deeply, because the industry has already picked the direction: AI/ML workloads. What’s driving this is the need for faster and more agile MLOps to support , otherwise known as real-time artificial intelligence (AI). Companies like and have been early adopters, but a host of great projects are available to get you going faster with Kubernetes. online prediction Uber Netflix Feature Serving with Feast Building and maintaining machine learning (ML) models are moving out of the back office and closer to users in production. A feature store acts as a bridge between data and machine learning models, providing a consistent way for models to access data in both offline and online phases. It manages data processing requirements during model training and provides low-latency real-time access to models during the online phase. This ensures data consistency for both phases and meets online and offline requirements. is an example of a feature store running in Kubernetes. It’s open source and enables organizations to store and serve features consistently for offline training and online inference. Feast goes beyond traditional databases by providing specialized features like point-in-time correctness. Feast Model Serving with KServe is an API endpoint for deploying machine learning models in Kubernetes, handling model fetching, loading, and determining whether  CPU or GPU is required. It integrates with eventing for scale-out and offers observability features like metrics and logging. The best part? It’s simple to use. Just point KServe at your model file and it will create an API and handle the rest. KServe KNative The explainer feature provides insight into why a decision was made for each prediction, offering feature importance and highlighting factors in the model that led to a particular outcome. This can be used to detect model drift and bias, which are some of the “important but hard” parts of machine learning. These features reduce the effort involved in MLOps and build trust in the application. KServe recently split away from the Google KubeFlow project and has been by Bloomberg as part of its efforts to build an ML inference platform. highlighted Vector Similarity Search Augmenting the traditional ways we find data, vector similarity search (VSS) is a machine learning tool that uses vector mathematics to find how "close" two things are to one another. This is done through the K-nearest neighbor ( ) algorithm, which expresses data as a vector. The data is then vectorized using a CPU-intensive KNN algorithm and indexed for less CPU-intensive searching. End users can provide a vector and find things that are close to it using the query mechanism provided by VSS servers. Open-source VSS servers that you can deploy in Kubernetes include and . Both provide everything you need to add a similarity search to your application stack. KNN Weaviate Milvus Assemble the Team Combine my with this one and you have a recipe for the full stack deployed in Kubernetes. The outcome every organization should try to realize is increased productivity and reduced costs. Recent show that leaders in the data space are finding both when deploying data infrastructure in Kubernetes. previous article surveys workloads may be something you’re just starting to explore, so now might be the best time to start on the right foot. The three areas mentioned — feature serving, model serving, and vector similarity search — are all covered in the book I co-authored with Jeff Carpenter, “ .” The bigger picture for AI/ML in the application stack: Real-time requirements will soon become prevalent in most AI applications. Using Kubernetes to go fast and build reliably is no longer an AI hallucination. AI/ML Managing Cloud-Native Data with Kubernetes Also published here.

3  Key Tools for Deploying AI/ML Workloads on Kubernetes

3 herramientas clave para implementar cargas de trabajo de IA/ML en Kubernetes

3 outils clés pour déployer des charges de travail AI/ML sur Kubernetes

कुबेरनेट्स पर एआई/एमएल वर्कलोड लगाने के लिए 3 प्रमुख उपकरण

AI/ML ワークロードを Kubernetes にデプロイするための 3 つの主要ツール

3 ferramentas principais para implantar cargas de trabalho AI/ML no Kubernetes

3 công cụ chính để triển khai khối lượng công việc AI/ML trên Kubernetes

在 Kubernetes 上部署 AI/ML 工作负载的 3 个关键工具

There are thousands of articles, videos, and courses out there that promise to teach you the secrets of the side hustle. “Just start reselling products on Amazon,” they’ll say, “and you can become rich like me!” This isn’t that. A few months ago, I sat down with Jimmy Esparza for the Success Story podcast. He’s the CEO of Renewable Power USA, one of the most successful companies in America, and a leading member in the charge toward renewable energy. Essentially, Jimmy runs a resale business. His company doesn’t manufacture the solar panels that they install, and they’re not designing new tech. He’s taking products from a manufacturer (companies like Tesla, in this case), and reselling them across the country. Except this isn’t just a side hustle. Renewable Power USA , reporting 1,341% growth over the last three years. now ranks No. 465 on the Inc. 5000 list How did he do it? Well, he was kind enough to share some of his wisdom which I’ve expanded on for this week’s newsletter. Building the brand When you're not manufacturing the product yourself, brand is everything. You need to convince people that: You know what you're doing You're trustworthy You can provide value, or solve their problems That requires real connection and not just a well-designed website. You need to develop relationships, both in the online and offline worlds. That means going out into your local community and talking directly with people, as well as using social media and other digital channels to spread awareness. Remember: you’re not just selling a product; you’re selling yourself. So take the time to invest in building relationships and creating an emotional connection that will draw people in—even when they may be shopping around for cheaper prices or faster delivery times from competitors. Boots on the ground You might think that everything can be done online and in a few certain situations that may be true. But even with today's technology, there's no substitute for getting out into the world, to shake hands and knock on doors. When it comes to reselling products, that means getting in front of your customers and building relationships with them. It could mean bringing a few products to an event or trade show, setting up shop at a local flea market, or simply networking with other business owners on LinkedIn. In other words: get out from behind your computer screen and do some real-world legwork. Make sure you’re visible in places where potential buyers are likely to be—and don’t be afraid to make those connections face-to-face if you can. Differentiate yourself At the end of the day, you’re selling someone else’s product. That means you need to find a way to stand out from your competition—otherwise, why should people buy from you? The key is not just to sell the same products as everyone else but also to focus on providing something unique and different. It could be an added service or an extra perk that nobody else offers, such as free installation or round-the-clock support and maintenance. Okay, those aren't the best examples. Because the focus here can't just point to a simple discount and say "see! We're unique!" It needs to be something that will resonate with your target market and get them to sell your product for you. When they're asked why they decided to go with you, they should be able to blurt out an answer without even thinking about it. The worst answer to that question is "they were the cheapest" because it means they couldn't find anything they liked about your company. The best answer is "I felt like they had my back" or, even better, something more specific. Be local (but not small) There's something that Jimmy said to me that I'll never forget. "People like local, but they don't like for you to be small." This was super interesting to me because local has become such a buzzword over the years. Customers are fickle, and even though they may profess their loyalty to local brands and services, they still want the trust and reliability that comes with a big-name brand. So what does that mean for you? It means you can't be too small, or else customers won't take you seriously. You need to have the capacity and infrastructure in place to handle large orders and provide quality customer service if you want to succeed as a reseller. Build on community That brings us to arguably the most important part, but it's also one that gets misconstrued a lot. Every business guide these days will tell you to build a community. But there is a completely different meaning to building on community. If you want to enter New Mexico, don't just drop a team from New York into an office in Santa Fe and expect them to know the local market. Instead, find leaders from the area to: Join your team Be an ambassador for the brand Help you understand what makes the local customers tick In other words, don't just offer products and services; give people a real reason to connect with you. Give them something they can be proud of – something that speaks to their values and experiences. Make it their neighbor knocking on the door, the familiar face at the local market, or the artist who knows all their favorite songs. Make it something that speaks to them on a personal level. Hire the best Stop. Lowballing. Talent. If you want to build a remarkable business, you need the best people in their respective fields. Make sure everyone on your team is well-compensated for their work. It will not only help you attract top talent, but it will also give them the incentive to stay and excel at what they do. Don't get me wrong. You need to make money. But if you invest in your team, I guarantee down the line you'll be swamped with so many qualified applicants that want to work for you that you won't know what to do. So many of the CEOs that I've met over the years have told me the same story. They took one of their first jobs because the pay was good. They had no experience in the field and no knowledge of the product. They just needed a job. It was the only way to survive. But they worked harder than everyone else because they were compensated well, and they started to see how the company's success translated directly to their own. Don’t run too fast One of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make is to jump at every opportunity that presents itself. I know, that sounds sort of counterintuitive. But it's true, especially with a business model like this. Investors, partnerships, and even certain customers will present themselves as a golden ticket to success, but not all of them are. Sometimes you have to learn to say no to the good to focus on creating something great. Build your brand one customer at a time, one relationship at a time. Remember what made you successful in the first place: connecting with people and providing top-notch service. That's what will make your business remarkable, not a big investor or partner that professes to know all the answers. Final thoughts I'll leave you with one more quote from Jimmy that is important to remember because not all of us do: "One thing that keeps me up at night is providing time for my family. When there's another business challenge and other things coming up – I do not want to lose my family during this next level." Slow down. No matter what a certain engineer-turned-social-media-CEO says, you don't need to work 20-hour days. That is only going to lead to burnout, frustration, and bad decisions. Take time for your people, and yourself. That authenticity will shine through in the rest of your business. If you want to hear the whole talk with Jimmy, head over to the . We discussed lots of other things, including where the renewable energy industry is headed (which is a topic a little too complex for a newsletter, I think) and his story of being a first-generation immigrant. Success Story YouTube page If you enjoyed this article, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this or tweet at me and I'll do my best to get back to everyone! email @ScottDClary Also Published Here

Jimmy Esparza Talks About Building a Remarkable Resale Business

Creating unique content can be a challenge for a lot of freelance writers. This can be attributed to the glut of content available online (which makes it difficult to create something completely unique), or it can be just due to a lack of skill and know-how. In this post, we’ll be looking at some steps and measures that you can take to create unique content for your clients. But before that, let’s actually go over some general stuff about content, its uses, and its importance in today’s age. Content, its Uses, and Importance Nowadays, we find ourselves in the ‘era of the internet’; an epoch that is characterized by the overriding adoption of digital means and measures for the attainment of various goals and objectives. Okay, that was needlessly sophisticated. Let’s start over. Basically, nowadays, all types of people utilize the internet for their needs and requirements. Doing this, as compared to other conventional means, is a lot easier and quicker. Due to this, a vast segment of the world population is now attached to the internet, some way or the other. And the same goes for brands and businesses. Since the majority of people – almost 62% of the entire world populace – are internet users, it only made sense for businesses to take to the online realm as well. The purpose of all this long-drawn discussion about the internet and whatnot is to just point at the fact that since it has become a norm for brands and businesses to create and cultivate an online presence, the need for written content and content writers has increased exponentially. How exactly, you may ask? Let’s enumerate a couple of common scenarios and situations where written content is needed. Suppose a brand creates a website. After creating a website, it needs to publish content on the various service pages, the about page, the contact page, and so on. So, what does it do? It gets in touch with content writers to get written content for its website. Let’s look at another example. Suppose a business creates a website. After creating the website, it wants to optimize it for the search engines to get more traffic. So, what does a website need for SEO? In both on-page and off-page SEO, written content is a necessary and vital element. Due to this, the business will once again need to get in touch with content writers to get written content. These were a couple of examples, but I think we’ve made our point. In a nutshell, written content plays a role in a lot of different facets of the online world. Whether it’s for marketing, SEO, or any type of general descriptive purpose, content is an important element. Importance of Unique Content When content has to be used by online businesses and brands for their various endeavors, it has to be unique. If a website utilizes any type of content that has been previously used elsewhere, it can just draw a penalty to itself from the search engine. In other words, if the content used or published by a website lacks uniqueness, it can, far from bringing any sort of benefit, harm it instead. Plagiarism and Its Disadvantages When any piece of content has plagiarism in it, it ceases to be unique. Plagiarism is basically the practice of copying existing content and then utilizing it without giving due credit to the source. There are various types of plagiarism, but we won’t go into all of them right now. Suffice it to understand that plagiarism, in whatever form it may be, is very harmful to a website. It can get them in line for a penalty from the search engines. Search engine penalties can have varying consequences, depending on the severity of the plagiarism committed. A penalty can reduce the ranking of a website for a certain keyword, and if the offense is severe enough, it can remove it from the listing altogether. But, apart from penalties, plagiarism can also have an adverse effect on the reputation and integrity of the website. If the website of a particular business gets popular for plagiarizing content, it can become a life-long blemish for them. How to Produce Unique Content? Now that we’re done looking at some of the basic concepts about content, plagiarism, and whatnot, let’s move on to actually discuss some ways in which you can create unique content. Do Thorough Research The first thing that you have to do in order to create unique content is to do proper research. Here’s the thing, writers. If you don’t have proper knowledge and know-how about a certain topic, you can’t really explain it in your own way. You’ll start using the same type of phrases, terms, and words as other websites dealing with the same topic. This can lead you to commit some unintentional plagiarism. So, before you start writing, you should open up a whole bunch of different sources related to the topic that you want to write on. Then, you should study each source and try to understand the concept. Here, you should take care not to only do your research from one or two sources. This can also be a stepping-stone to accidental plagiarism since you can involuntarily use their words and sentences in your own content. Once you’ve studied the subject matter, you’ll be able to write about it in your style and using your own method. Create a Unique Title The title is pretty much a part of the overall content, so it makes sense to focus on a unique title when trying to write unique content. However, there’s a different reason why we’re mentioning it here. Basically, when you try and mooch off a title from an existing source, and then just add or delete a couple of words to make it ‘unique’, it won’t work out well for you. Since the title will be along the same lines as the existing one, you’ll unintentionally start to talk about the same type of things as the original source. Ehhh…that was a bit confusing. Let’s take an example to understand this. Suppose an online source had an article or a blog with the title ‘Best Backlit Keyboards for Typing in 2022’. Now, if you were to just copy it and make a few changes (like this: ‘Top Backlit Keyboards for Typists in 2022’), you would just start talking about the same things. Why? Because both topics are about backlit keyboards and typing. On the other hand, if you were to get a little creative, and make a title like ‘Best Backlit Mechanical Keyboards for Content Writers and Programmers’, you’d be able to talk about a whole lot of different things. You’d be able to talk about why content writers and programmers need good keyboards, how mechanical ones can be useful for them, etc. This can help you in finding plagiarism in your content. link Don’t Copy Content Structure During your research phase, you’re going to go through a lot of different sources such as blogs, papers, articles, and whatnot. After completing your research, when it comes to writing your own content, you should never copy the structure and layout of any pre-existing material on the same topic as yours. You could be thinking that “plagiarism is about copying content and using it. The structure is just an abstract element so what’s wrong in mimicking it?” And that is true to some extent. The content structure is an abstract element. But, if you end up copying the exact structure of an existing article or post on the same topic as yours, you can accidentally mimic them in the write-up as well. For example, suppose an article has a structure in which it starts with an introduction, then goes on to add a general heading before moving on to discuss the main subject, and then wrapping up with the conclusion. If you were to only copy the structure, i.e., the way the content is written, you could accidentally commit some plagiarism because you would also start with an introduction, add a general heading before moving on to discuss the main subject and then end with a conclusion. Get the point? Use Hyperlinks and Quotes to Your Benefit Oftentimes, writers are faced with situations where copying a source verbatim becomes inevitable. However, even when faced with such a need, you can still manage to keep your content unique and plagiarism-free. Here’s how. Suppose you want to cite a statistic or the results of a study posted on a particular website. In this sort of situation, you can simply hyperlink the particular fact or figure and mention the source as well. You can mention the source either before the hyperlinked fact/figure or you can do it after. Here’s an example: According to so-and-so website, X% of people eat sugar every day.
X% of people eat sugar every day, according to so-and-so website. In the example above, only a single statistic is mentioned. You can quote a couple of facts or figures at once if you want. The good thing about hyperlinking sources in this manner is that it actually helps to improve your reputation and integrity as a writer. However, if you don’t leave a link to the source and if you don’t acknowledge them in the preceding or the following text, it can count as plagiarism. It can damage your reputation and also get you in trouble with search engines. Make Use of Paraphrasing Paraphrasing is also a good technique that you can try when you find yourself in a situation that requires you to copy content verbatim from a source. However, unlike using quotes and hyperlinks, paraphrasing does not actually entail accrediting the original author in any way. While it can be good to quote the source even when you paraphrase some content, there’s no compulsion to do it, nor is there any consequence if you abstain. However, this applies if the paraphrasing is done thoroughly. Basically, if you copy some content and then just lightly reword it in such a way that it is easily comparable to the original, then in such a case, you will have to cite the source. If you don’t, you will face the consequences of plagiarism. On the other hand, if you paraphrase properly, i.e., in such a way that the content structure, words, and phrases all get properly rearranged and rewritten, then in such a case, it won’t be recognized as plagiarism even if you don’t cite the source. Want to paraphrase your content? Check here Cultivate and Use Your Own Styles This point is for you junior and rookie writers reading this. When you start off as a writer, it’s natural to mimic and copy the style of a particular author or source. That’s pretty much how everyone starts out. However, once you get sufficient know-how about how to write, you have to work on creating and cultivating your own writing style. You can make your writing styles distinct by using signature words and phrases, and also by adhering to a certain method of creating sentences. When you start using your own style in your write-ups, there will be a lesser chance for you to accidentally mimic someone using their crutch phrases and signature transitions words, etc. This will further mean that there will be a lesser chance for you to commit accidental plagiarism…and that is pretty much what your goal should be when creating unique content. Role of Plagiarism Checkers in Creating Unique Content The steps we mentioned above can be helpful in creating unique content, that’s for sure. However, plagiarism checkers also play a vital role in this process. You should get an idea about how important they are judging by the fact that we’re mentioning them here separately at the end. So, the thing to understand about plagiarism checkers is that while they can help in the process of writing unique content, they don’t actually create it themselves. As the name says, plagiarism ‘checkers’ are only used for checking purposes. However, that does not detract from their importance one bit. Without using plagiarism checkers, there’s no way for you to know whether your content is matching with an existing source or not.
There are literally billions of web pages online. You can’t really manually match and tally them all with your written content every time you finish writing a draft. That is where a plagiarism checker steps in. Even if you take all the steps that we’ve mentioned above, you will still have to check your content for plagiarism after you are done writing it. You may have, for example, accidentally copied content from a totally unrelated source that you may not even have thought about avoiding. So, to put it in a nutshell, we can say that plagiarism checkers play a vital role in the process of creating unique content since they enable you to check whether the content is unique or not in the first place. If, after checking your content using a tool, you find that there are certain portions of it that are being recognized as plagiarism, you can edit them or remove them altogether. Suffice it to understand that while the steps mentioned in the post above can be helpful for avoiding plagiarism during the writing phase, plagiarism checkers can be helpful in removing plagiarism after it. How to Choose the Right Plagiarism Checker? While we are lauding so much praise on plagiarism checkers and how they can be useful, etc., we have to also stress the fact that not all plagiarism checkers are worth using. There are some plagiarism checkers available online that can completely ignore whole sentences that are copied from another source. On the other hand, there are also some plagiarism checkers available online that go the other way, and start detecting two-word or three-word phrases as plagiarism. So, since there are such tools in existence, you have to be a little careful when picking one for your use. Here are some things that you can do to see whether or not your contemplated tool is worth using: Give it a couple of test runs. Try copying content directly from a source and see if the tool detects it. See what other users have to say about it on platforms like Capterra, etc. See the data usage policy to make sure that your entered content is not used in any way by the tool. See if it is available for free or not. Unless you have a regular need to use them, investing in paid plagiarism checkers isn’t a wise choice. Conclusion And that’s pretty much it. Creating unique content used to be simple and easy. But nowadays, extra care has to be taken owing to the fact that there is just so much content available online. It’s like walking in a minefield. You can accidentally copy a bunch of sources, and it can end up hurting your credibility. However, by following the steps given in the post above, you’ll be able to significantly decrease the chances for that to happen.

How to Write Unique Content: A Detailed Guide

Politics is complex and its digitalization is a long process that has been occurring in one form or another ever since the conception of computers, even well before the appearance of the World Wide Web.[ ][2] 1 This evolution ranges from the use of modern real-time communications over the internet by public institutions[ ] to the sharing of publications in websites such as those presented by city portals. 3 79% of these portals are linked to social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr! Another use case on the Asian continent; South Korea already successfully deployed a small-scale on-line polling in Gyeonggi-do where around 9000 participants decided the destiny of 527 community projects.[ ] 4 The most impactful change in politics in consequence of its digitalization by whatever measure however, is the shift of the political discourse from official channels to social media platforms. All recent mass protests were, or rather still are, organized on-line inspired by #hashtags![ ] 5 But we will leave the discussion of the huge impact of social media in politics to another time. Lets just point out that in many places around the globe meeting sessions are now recorded and streamed live on YouTube such as those made by the local governmental structures in the city Almada, Portugal in Europe.[ ] 6 According to the World e-Parliament Report 2020 issued by the Inter-Parliamentary Union[ ], more than three-quarters of parliaments now use automatic video recording in their plenary rooms to capture and broadcast proceedings over the internet: 7 Remote sessions in the Argentinian parliament using live communications over the internet In some of these hybrid remote/presential parliaments, secure on-line voting was available. Although still small in numbers, on-line voting saw a significant sixfold increase in its use in recent times. This is perhaps the most challenging feature when one wants to engage in digital politics. Voting is what drives consensus and it absolutely must be cybersecure and fraud proof. Spain, Brazil, the UK followed then by the Argentinian, Chilean, Latvia and Zambia parliaments developed customized voting applications for internal use inside the parliaments. The Parliament of Latvia in particular developed a fully virtual plenary system allowing its members to work entirely remotely. The commissioned programmers found a unique solution for integrating document management, voting and virtual meetings using Jitsi[ ] open source platform. To guarantee cybersecurity and verification, national identity cards were used.[ ] 8 9 An interesting example of the potential of the digitalization of politics could be seen in a now deprecated project made by two portuguese citizens. The project went by the name of Hemiciclo which is portuguese for Hemicycle: Screenshot of deprecated www.hemiciclo.pt In Hemiciclo one could see almost in real time, with data sourced from official websites (with scrapers and RSS feeds), what was going on in the Assembleia da Republica, that is, the portuguese parliament. In the platform it was presented which diplomas were up for discussion, who voted for or against, combined with a simple picture that aided to visualize the voting process. One could follow each deputy individually and with time additional modules were added such as voting statistics or changes in seats, to name a few: Change in seat as reported by the Hemiciclo platform Unfortunately, studies[ ] seem to suggest that although there is progress in the digitalization of parliaments, it has been slow as there is no strong political will to do so, specially in what concerns interaction with citizens. 10 Only 1 in 5 parliaments have formal procedures to evaluate improvements in their digitalization! Even only mere 59% of the parliaments report having a vision in place for their overall strategic direction, which is a decline from 63% in 2018 and from 73% in 2016 statistics. A sad decline. Again, the process by which we can digitalize politics is complex; a number of e-governance services available around the globe in different countries do exist already; the most common being applying for business licenses, requesting birth and death certificates and paying for utilities. Submitting a change of residential address on-line is the least common service with only 66 countries offering it.[ ] At this point a clear distinction needs to be made and that is the difference between electronic (or on-line) governance and digital politics. 11 Governance has to do with the digitalization of services provided by the state which we just listed a few, while politics has more to do with the generation of consensus per se around a particular project or political goal. In this regards and when this is done through official channels, scholars call the later citizensourcing or e-participation; the equivalent of crowdsourcing but organized by public institutions which poll the population on-line. One of many examples of this practice is the California Budget Challenge.[ ] 12 Ultimately what we have to ask ourselves is, how many times have we been called by public institutions to answer relevant questions concerning our social life? Once every 4 years perhaps if we consider that in a lot of political systems the figure of the president is irrelevant compared to the role of deputies and the parliamentarians. Assuming a minimum voter age of 18 years old and a life span of 80 years that means that with our current system in place, in average, you will have the opportunity to directly express yourself 15 times to address complex matters from budgetary issues such as which corporations should get public resources allocated to them (should developed countries still fund coal?), to health care (do you agree that gain-of-function research is legal? what about mandatory vaccines?), military ventures, the education of your children, societal norms, how to solve environmental problems (why are we not building a transcontinental railway system connecting all major urban polis across continents?), to urban planning, migration policy, border control, what subjects science should be investigating, should we build a base on Mars? Should the 1% most rich contribute more to the welfare of society? 15 times... You will be polled to answer a myriad of questions most of which do have consequential impacts in our everyday life. Assuming a minimum voter age of 18 years old and a life span of 80 years, this means you are expected to be polled 15 times throughout your entire life. To mitigate for this obvious flaw in modern democracies different approaches are currently being undertaken in many countries and cities. On-line participatory budgeting and participatory land-use planning are two kinds of initiatives used by cities/municipalities to engage with local communities. Few city portals (17%) offer on-line voting tools or systems to facilitate people’s involvement in local governments decision-making. However there are interesting platforms for e-participation such as those found in South America in Venezuela for example. There, the government founded a platform named Sinco[ ] where any citizen is allowed to publish and vote on policy proposals on-line. An important part of the national budget is assigned to those projects that are consensual. The platform is based on Google Maps where policies are pin-pointed to a geolocation. The platform is still running at the moment: 13 Sinco’s UI In all similitude, Bogotá te escucha[ ] (Bogotá listens to you) is an on-line tool that people can use to submit complaints, inquiries, suggestions, concerns about possible acts of corruption or simple requests relating to issues that affect the interests of the community. The system offers a registration service but also allows people to file anonymous requests as well and to check the status of their submissions. All requests are addressed to the competent authorities. FixMyStreet[ ] is another good example of such intersection between digital tools and politics but created not by public institutions and presented in city portals but is rather an open source endeavour created by the citizens themselves. In Hamburg, Germany, the Finding Places[ ] initiative is also an interesting use case. Digital tools were deployed to help allocate refugee settlement. Instead of putting this task at the hands of bureaucrats the platform made a call for civic participation to discuss these matters on-line. It involved approximately 400 participants who identified 160 locations out of which 44 were accepted by the local authorities. 14 15 16 Such mechanisms are found in a majority of the European countries; there is evidence of e-consultations in the recent past in more than half the region. On-line consultation mechanisms are much rarer in Africa although it does exist. In any case, the trend is clear: the “supply” of electronic consultations by governments has been growing continuously. What is not very clear is why is that the multiplication of these platforms has not been translated into a broader or deeper involvement. In most places it remains low. The reluctance of public institutions to share agenda setting and decision-making procedures seem to play an important role limiting progress, amongst other factors such as a perceived lack of cybersecurity, which is justified up to a point if we consider that most governmental websites do not respect all cybersecurity criteria. In particular, only a minuscule part can prevent a wide range of cross-site scripting and clickjacking attacks (Content Security Policy) and only 3% can prevent third parties from reading or changing content sent between a user and the website by using a secure connection via HTTPS. Likewise, only 1% of governmental e-mail portals are cybersecure! One recent and very harmful situation happened in Argentina where the ID information of the entire population of the country was leaked[ ]: 17 Data of football players Messi and Sergio Aguero leaked on Twitter What is of most interest is of course what concerns cybersecure[ ] on-line voting[ ]. That is considered to be the holy grail of digital politics. The most famous example of its use in politics is the situation in Estonia[ ] where since 2005 main elections have been conducted with the option of voting on-line or in presence. Up until today no one was ever able to prove that there has been fraud or a successful attack to the system![ ] Consequently, there are politicians in the European Parliament at this very moment who were elected by people remotely voting from their home. Another not so known but quite interesting example of the application of remote e-voting in politics was when a peace treaty between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) was polled.[ ] The National Civil Registrar of Colombia took notice prior to the referendum that out of 6 million Colombians living abroad only 600 000 could effectively vote from the consulate in their country of residence. To mitigate for the alienation of such an important part of the population, in cooperation with the non-profit Democracy Earth Foundation, Plebiscito Digital, an on-line voting platform backed by blockchain was effectively setup. In this way Colombian expats who were otherwise unable to participate through other routes had the chance to participate in a plebiscite of whether or not to approve a peace treaty. 18 19 20 21 22 Internet voting in Estonia is based on state issued smart cards who provide the eID One may wonder what kinds of alternative democratic systems will emerge from the evolution of the digitalization of politics. It won't necessarily be the case that each person will have to vote and decide on every single matter.[ ] In fact entirely new forms of democracy will emerge; once you have a cybersecure on-line voting system in place that scales, a new way of doing politics that makes use of both the positive aspects of representative and direct democracy will arise. Scholars call it liquid democracy.[ ] In liquid democracy citizens can either vote directly on a particular diploma or alternatively they can delegate their vote to a proxy voter. With the aid of properly configured digital tools both these processes can occur seamlessly and in security. 23 24 Concluding, while there is a positive correlation between the evolution of electronic governance across the globe and income level, because progress has been relatively slow, we must assert that financial resources are not the only factor. Perhaps more than so, political will and strategic leadership are. Authored by @ nerv Co-published . here Links to Sources [1] entry on Wikipedia, Project Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [2] " ", Kernel Panic, Mashable, entry on YouTube, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACfgc1o3P6o How the CIA Destroyed the Socialist Internet: Cybersyn, Part 1 [3] " " article by Matthew Hodgson from Matrix, Germany’s national healthcare system adopts Matrix! https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthcare-system-adopts-matrix [4] " " by Samburaj Das, CNN, 2017, A South Korean Province Used Blockchain Tech for Resident Voting http://www.ccn.com/south-korean-province-used-blockchain-tech-resident-voting/ [5] " " by Gianluca Sgueo, European Parliamentary Research Service, 2020, Digital democracy: Is the future of civic engagement online? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/646161/EPRS_BRI(2020)646161_EN.pdf [6] , Municipality of Almada, Portugal, Local government meeting sessions on-line https://www.cm-almada.pt/municipio/camara-municipal/reunioes-de-camara [7] " issued by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Andy Williamson et al., Inter-Parliamentary Union Centre for Innovation in Parliament, 2021, World e-Parliament Report 2020" https://www.agora-parl.org/sites/default/files/agora-documents/World e-Parliament Report 2020%2C issued 2021.pdf [8] , Jitsi https://jitsi.org/ [9] , Latvia's eID smart-card https://www.pmlp.gov.lv/en/identity-card-eid [10] " " by Sofia Raquel Serra-Silva, Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisboa, 2020, Parliamentary online public engagement in the 21st Century: A comparative perspective with a focus on Austria and Portugal https://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/45279/1/ULSD638268_td_Sofia_Silva.pdf [11] " " by the United Nations Department of Economical and Social Affairs, 2020, E-Government Survey 2020: Digital Government in the Decade of Action for Sustainable Development https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Portals/egovkb/Documents/un/2020-Survey/2020 UN E-Government Survey (Full Report).pdf [12] , California Budget Challenge https://www.budgetchallenge.org/pages/home [13] " " on Sputnik News, SINCO, el proyecto digital que interconecta al poder popular en Venezuela http://mundo.sputniknews.com/20210415/sinco-el-proyecto-digital-que-interconecta-al-poder-popular-en-venezuela-1111206467.html [14] " ", Bogotá te escucha, Sistema Distrital para la Gestión de Peticiones Ciudadanas https://bogota.gov.co/sdqs/ [15] , FixMyStreet http://www.fixmystreet.com/ [16] , Finding Places https://use.metropolis.org/case-studies/finding-places#casestudydetail [17] " " entry on Real Mi Central, 2021, Argentina’s national population ID information was stolen by hackers and is being sold https://www.realmicentral.com/2021/10/19/argentinas-national-population-id-information-was-stolen-by-hackers-and-is-being-sold/ [18] " entry on IBM webite, "What is cybersecurity? https://www.ibm.com/topics/cybersecurity [19] " " entry on Wikipedia, Electronic voting by country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country [20] " " by Kalev Leetaru on Forbes, 2018, How Estonia's E-Voting System Could Be The Future https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/06/07/how-estonias-e-voting-system-could-be-the-future/ [21] " " by Daniel Harries, China Global Television Network, 2020, I-voting: What can the U.S. learn from Estonia's online elections? http://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-07/I-voting-What-can-the-U-S-learn-from-Estonia-s-online-elections--VcTflh3pdu/index.html [22] " " by Charlotte van Ooijen on The Forum Network, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2017, How Blockchain can change voting: the Colombian Peace plebiscite https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/28703-how-blockchain-can-change-voting-the-colombian-peace-plebiscite [23] " " by Bryan Ford, 2002, Delegative Democracy https://bford.info/deleg/deleg.pdf [24] " " on Medium by Dominik Schiener, 2015, Liquid Democracy: True Democracy for the 21st Century https://medium.com/organizer-sandbox/liquid-democracy-true-democracy-for-the-21st-century-7c66f5e53b6f Appendix

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