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VEASYT Live! is a professional video remote interpreting (VRI) service via the web from computer and via mobile app for tablet and smartphone, in vocal languages and sign languages. Thanks to VEASYT Live!, anyone can have a professional interpreter always available to effectively communicate with foreign people or deaf citizens, in any kind of dialogue. Video: http://www.bit.ly/VEASYT_video_ENG. VEASYT Conference is a remote interpretation service for conferences. Without booths and expensive old style instrumentations; the simultaneous translation of the conference on your smartphone. Video: http://bit.ly/VEASYTconf. VEASYT srl is a spin-off company of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice that develops digital solutions for the removal of communication barriers.

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In this blog post, I want to discuss the importance of starting with a red test. The red-green-refactor cycle is a well-known mantra in test-driven development. To recap: Red - write a piece of test code for the functionality you want to implement. It must be red since the functionality is not there yet. One of the main ideas is that the tests should guide the development process. Green - write a piece of code for the test to pass. Refactor - eliminate code duplicates, enhance readability, improve aesthetics, possibly extract some methods or create new classes, and optimize. Don't forget to refactor both the production code and the test code. Why red? I very rarely do post-code testing (perhaps there is a better-known expression for writing tests after writing production code). I do that when I encounter a piece of code not covered with tests that I need to put my hands on. And I'm happy when the test is green, making me feel the code works as expected. Test-driven development is not only about writing tests to make sure the production code works as expected, but it is rather (as the name suggests) a process of development. A couple of things pop into my head when I think about Red in . First is demand; I produce the production code when it is needed (red test), and I need to meet the demand. Second - YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It), I do not produce the code that is not needed, I do not code too much, because it might not be needed. TDD I'm just a human after all I'm only human, and I make mistakes. I make mistakes in production code and test code alike. The idea for this blog post came last week when I encountered situations where the test was not red, and it was very tempting to leave it as is because it was GREEN. This was especially true when there were already several tests, leading me to think that I might have already covered the case. It may sound like an oxymoron, but a GREEN test in the first step of TDD is a RED flag. In the following sections, I will provide cases that I encountered last week where I made a mistake in the test, causing it to be green, but it was incorrect. it vs if I'm a backend developer and use TDD a lot. However, sometimes I have to work with front-end and do . I do my best to practice TDD while doing JavaScript development as well. JavaScript development For JavaScript testing, I use as a test runner and as a test framework. In , the function sets a test case, and the function defines an individual test. I want to share how I mistyped as multiple times, leading to a false impression of all passing tests. karma jasmine jasmine describe it it if it('Seat map is selected when person of the seat map is selected', 
    function () {
        let seatMaps = result.Seating.SeatMaps;
        expect(seatMaps[0].Selected).toBeTrue();
        seatMaps[2].Passengers[1].select();
        expect(seatMaps[2].Selected).toBeTrue();
    }
); and if('Seat map is selected when person of the seat map is selected', 
    function () {
        let seatMaps = result.Seating.SeatMaps;
        expect(seatMaps[0].Selected).toBeTrue();    
        seatMaps[2].Passengers[1].select();
        expect(seatMaps[2].Selected).toBeTrue();
    }
); In all modern development environments and text editors for developers, is usually highlighted in a different color. I'm not colorblind, but it is still easy for me to miss it. Additionally, I find that my finger muscle memory is used to typing a two-letter word starting with as . It just happens automatically. As a result, there are no errors, and it is a valid sentence. All tests appear green when I run them. It is easy to notice when it is the first test because it will show that 0 tests have been run. However, it is more difficult when there are more tests. In this particular situation, my initial thought was, Fortunately, my experience with treating green tests as a red flag saved me. if i if "aha, I already covered this functionality.". Missing the attribute This example is in C#. While it's not taken from production code, it captures the essence: [DataRow(1, 2, 3)]
[DataRow(2, 3, 5)]
public void SomeFakeTest(int a, int b, int c)
{
    Assert.AreEqual(c, a + b);
} In the MsTest test framework, the attribute alone is insufficient to mark a method as a test. The or attribute is required for the method to be recognized as a test. I have found myself forgetting this attribute a few times, which resulted in tests not being run and creating a false impression of all tests passing. DataRow TestMethod DataTestMethod Missing assertion The following example, which I adapted from my previous blog post, demonstrates the situation. I recall the instances when I write a test - I think of a test case, a test name, arrange it, then act, and then - get distracted. When I return to see where I left off, I usually run the tests to see the red ones and continue from there. But in this particular case, all are green. This case is tricky; it's easy to forget that I left the test unfinished, and it's green because it doesn't have an assertion.ertions. [TestCaseSource(typeof(UnexpectedPaymentMessageIsSentWhenInvoiceIsOverpaidOrUnknownCases))]
public async Task UnexpectedPaymentMessageIsSentWhenInvoiceIsOverpaidOrUnknown(
    Invoice invoice,
    string message)
{
    _invoiceRepositoryResult = invoice;

    await CallCallback();
} Misread Recently, I needed to modify the functionality of a DTO converter to return passengers in order by , rather than in a somewhat random manner. I'm using , which allows passing configuration in the method. I simply typed , and Visual Studio's IntelliSense suggested a list of options. I chose the first one that started with and ended with . sequenceNumber FluentAssertions BeEquivalentTo config.With With Ordering seatMapDto
    .Passengers
    .Select(x => x.FirstName)
    .Should()
    .BeEquivalentTo(
        new[]
        {
            "GUDMARIN",
            "GUDMARIANA",
            "TOM"
        },
        config => config.WithoutStrictOrdering(),
        "should be ordered by sequenceNumber"
    ); I ran the test, and it was green. Since I expected the test to be red, I began by making sure that the input data was unordered in the arrange part to create a nonsequential order for the test to be red. Only later did I realize that I had chosen the configuration instead of . WithoutStrictOrdering WithStrictOrdering Wrapping it up Being human and making mistakes is not easy :). In this blog post, I wanted to showcase how sometimes silly mistakes can give the impression that tests are green, and emphasize the importance of starting with a red test first. Have you encountered similar situations where a mistake in a test led you to believe that production was working as expected? Please share your experiences in the comments. If you enjoyed this post, please click "like" and "follow". Feel free to explore my other blog posts, where I write about test-driven development and my pet project EasyTdd, a Visual Studio extension that makes test-driven development simpler. Also published here.

Why You Should Start With a Red Test in Test-Driven Development

The Easy Way to Begin Test-Driven Development

“A wise ninja does not seek out an enemy who he does not fully understand." - Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles As a technical writer passionate about science fiction, one of the most exciting parts of my job at Sonatype is when I have the opportunity to collaborate with the security research team. Ever since we found that correspond to what we call RAT mutants—novel malware that leverages the capabilities of remote access trojans and information stealers—our security researchers have had a nagging sense of déjà vu. a series of Python packages last month It’s not a rare occurrence: they constantly assess hundreds of suspicious packages from open-source registries to determine if they’re truly malicious. During this procedure, they identify familiar patterns between the packages, and sometimes, upon recognizing strong similarities, they conduct further research to track down the actor/campaign behind them. Between the last week of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, our AI system flagged suspicious packages uploaded to the PyPI registry including and . Our security researchers looked at them and confirmed they were indeed malicious. And after further analysis, they noticed these packages added a series of features not often seen in Python malware. pyrologin , easytimestamp , discorder , discord-dev , style.py , pythonstyles In what has become a de facto strategy, bad actors hide a payload in the file so developers only have to use a simple pip install to get infected. In this case, they’d be inadvertently launching a PowerShell script that downloads a ZIP file to install libraries that let the attacker control the victim’s mouse, the keyboard, take screenshots, and create hidden remote connections. And on top of that, these packages also exfiltrate sensitive information like passwords, cookies, and cryptocurrency wallet data, and even try to install a tool for remote access. Our findings were in line with of the very same packages. setup[.]py Phylum’s technical report Nevertheless, security researcher Carlos Fernandez was having a haunting sense of déjà vu. During the week after we disclosed the packages, memories of having seen earlier versions of this malware flashed through his mind. A threat actor might have been evolving their malware through time, but we needed to make sure, so I put my OSINT hat on to help him see if there was any truth to his intuition. The Origin Story Looking back on our database, on September 25, 2022, a package called was uploaded to the PyPI repository. Our AI flagged it as suspicious and our security researchers confirmed that it contained malware and that it bundled the sources of another package called . Both libraries were authored by , aka BillyTheGoat, aka BillyV3 (with contributions from loTus04 and BlueRed). This author from France (at least that’s what his location in GitHub and the language spoken through his Discord channels suggest) is credited as the person behind , a Python obfuscator that we’ve found often in recently uploaded malware, as well as one of the creators of , an information stealer that’s been active since July in an to open registries. pygradient pystyle billythegoat356 Hyperion W4SP stealer ongoing supply chain attack W4SP stealer boasts persistency (it gets reactivated every time users restart the PC), obfuscation (the author promises it’s fully undetectable), and steganography techniques to hide polymorphic and highly-obfuscated payloads within an image file. The malware sends all the victim’s Discord accounts, credit cards, passwords, and crypto-wallets back to the attacker through a hard-coded Discord webhook address. Bad actors interested in this malware have purchased it by paying about 20 USD in crypto. Originally, did not have a malicious nature—a harmless package to style and color console output to enhance readability and user experience. But according to Phylum research, once it became popular (the package is still active on PyPI and it accumulates more than 40,000 downloads every month), they decided to add W4SP malware in a couple of releases. pystyle Open-source packages like can act as sleeper agents for months only to be activated later by their own author for malicious purposes. A risky move, since their popular package can be discovered by security researchers like us who’ll report it as malicious and have it be taken down forever. That’s why they often create new packages instead where they include the source code of an innocuous library, add some type of malicious payload, and upload it under a new name: something generic, benign-sounding, innocent-looking. A name such as . pystyle pygradient After taking a closer look with Carlos, we found this proto-RAT mutant malware lacked some of the features of the December versions: even though it also launched a PowerShell script and exfiltrated sensitive data, it didn’t use base64 encoded payloads or an allowlist txt file to avoid self-infection. In a way, it was a milder, less sophisticated variant. But then we looked at early-November uploaded packages, including , , and , and after diving deeper, we found confirmation of our suspicion: the malware was truly evolving. paintpy devicespoof devicespoofer A Copycat Chasing Malware Even though BillyTheGoat hasn’t been active on GitHub since November, we’re still finding malware that’s based on his creations or stealing directly from them, mostly by a user that’s apparently based in Portugal called . zeeckt This user uploaded a recently removed package in PyPI called , falsely credited to BillyTheGoat in what looked like —a technique to increase the reputation of their new package by linking it to a popular GitHub library, thus getting associated with its hundreds of stars and forks. pystilez StartJacking Checkmarx this bad actor after finding a W4SP attack in a package called (along with similarly-named variations) that included a Discord server link within their malicious code. The administrator profile linked to a verified Steam account and the name “zeeckt” appeared as one of the attacker’s Steam aliases. has been tracking apicolor also reported that this threat actor was creating fake users by copying the profiles of popular GitHub accounts to increase legitimacy. And one of their victims decided to create warning people about this attack after falling for one of their fake profiles. Check Point a YouTube video A security researcher posted one of zeeckt’s payloads for educational purposes and he received an interesting reply from the co-author of W4SP stealer: How ironic for your stealer to be stolen. The same author, apparently a 17-year-old Python developer, reiterates his frustration in a README file on his GitHub profile: We don’t know exactly what malicious code zeeckt has stolen from other bad actors, but one thing is certain: that name continues to pop up in malware campaigns across open-source registries. Sneakier Variants Gnaw Away at Your Crypto Wealth Carlos recently found four more packages by : , and . After further investigation, he tagged them as malicious and reported them to PyPI to be taken down. The fastest case took about 20 minutes from publication to deletion. zeeckt forenitq forenith , forenity forenitz Looking at in Carlos found the following first-stage payload: setup[.]py forenitq , The attacker creates three temporary files that download and execute Windows binaries from specific URLs using the "start" command. Even though the slugs and are suggestive of malicious intent, we couldn’t confirm that assumption without looking under the hood. /rat /clip At the time of this writing, the page hosted at is still active and it only shows a link to a Discord invite that’s already expired or private. hxxp://20[.]226[.]18[.]203 Carlos noticed that the package was posing as the popular package, using their metadata for a possible StarJacking attempt. Colorama After deobfuscating the RAT file, he found a line that loads a possible clipboard hijacker, but the specifics of it were base64 encoded: Upon decoding, we get a Python code designed to hijack a victim's clipboard to replace the intended cryptocurrency wallet address with the attacker's address: It looks for specified patterns like (bc1), (0x), Monero (4), and l (L or M or 3), and when a pattern is found, it replaces the intended address with the attacker's cryptocurrency wallet address. bitcoin Ethereum itecoin The code uses the library to copy and paste clipboard data. It will install the library if it’s not already installed and then copy the cryptocurrency wallet address to the clipboard. The code is then set on a continuous loop to monitor the clipboard for wallet address patterns. pyperclip Additionally, we uncovered more techniques this RAT mutant uses to evade detection: a first-stage payload added to the file instead of and a second-stage polymorphic payload that changes every time you run the binary. forenitq/ansi[.]py setup[.]py The attacker also added a new command and control with a very complete help menu—and this time se fala português: As you can see, malicious actors are eager to steal your crypto funds and system credentials to further penetrate your infrastructure. Their RAT malware keeps mutating to be more evasive and damaging to developers. So, if you're not safeguarding your software supply chain today, consider taking action to do so as soon as possible. IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) hxxp://20[.]226[.]18[.]203/inject/tCxFLYLT6ViY9ZnP hxxp://20[.]226[.]18[.]203/clip hxxp://20[.]226[.]18[.]203/rat

How RAT Mutants, in Python, Steal Data and Evade Detection

কিভাবে RAT মিউট্যান্ট, পাইথনে, ডেটা চুরি করে এবং সনাক্তকরণ এড়িয়ে যায়

Wie RAT-Mutanten in Python Daten stehlen und sich der Erkennung entziehen

Cómo los mutantes RAT, en Python, roban datos y evaden la detección

Comment les mutants RAT, en Python, volent des données et évitent la détection

पायथन में आरएटी म्यूटेंट कैसे डेटा चोरी करते हैं और जांच से बचते हैं

RATミュータントがPythonでデータを盗み、検出を回避する方法

Python에서 RAT 돌연변이가 데이터를 훔치고 탐지를 회피하는 방법

Como os mutantes RAT, em Python, roubam dados e evitam a detecção

Python'da RAT Mutantları Verileri Nasıl Çalıyor ve Tespitten Nasıl Kaçıyor?

Cách RAT Mutants, trong Python, đánh cắp dữ liệu và trốn tránh sự phát hiện

RAT 突变体如何在 Python 中窃取数据并逃避检测

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Singapore Cake DeFi Hanoi, Vietnam is the Startup of the Year! It came out ahead with 683 votes. DeFi For You Hanoi Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia came out as the Startup of the Year in with 109 votes! Trambellir Kuala Lumpur Pasig, Philippines When it comes to , . is the Startup of the Year with 110 votes! Pasig Quickreach Inc Bangkok, Thailand couldn’t be beaten for Startup in the Year in , it won with 60 votes! Perception Codes Bangkok Johor Bahru In , the Startup of the Year is . Johor Bahru AGR1 Bandung, Indonesia In , is declared the Startup of the Year! Bandung Prosa Portugal The winner in is . Portugal SCEMAI Tangerang, Indonesia In , is the winner Tangerang Yummy Corp Jakarta, Indonesia In , is the winner! Jakarta Tokocrypto Dki Jakarta, Indonesia In , is declared the Startup of the Year! Dki Jakarta Limakilo Bangkok Metropolis In , is the winner! Bangkok Meticuly Medan The winner in is ! Medan DIKA Manila, Philippines In , is declared the Startup of the Year! 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Nutrition Technologies Senai Bekasi Kota couldn’t be beaten for Startup in the Year in ! 8villages Bekasi Kota Top Startup Cities in Middle East Tel Aviv, Israel The Startup of the Year in is with 1,065 votes! Tel Aviv hyro Beirut, Lebanon is the Startup of the Year! It came out ahead with 1,276 votes. Hovi Digital Lab Beirut Riyadh, Saudi Arabia With 350 votes, came out as the Startup of the Year in ! Flicron Riyadh Tel Aviv-yafo, Israel When it comes to , is the Startup of the Year with 167 votes! Tel Aviv-yafo Cymbio Haifa, Israel couldn’t be beaten for Startup in the Year in , it won with 183 votes! Pico Haifa Amman, Jordan In , with 141 votes, is the winner! Amman Edexy Dubai, United Arab Emirates In , the Startup of the Year is with 74 votes. Dubai Ziina Doha, Qatar In , is declared the Startup of the Year! Doha SkipCash Tehran, Iran The winner in is . BeyondBoard AR Tehran Jerusalem, Israel In , is the winner! Jerusalem SolidBlock Rishon Le Zion The Startup of the Year in is ! 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Bet Shemesh Degania Medical Binyamina When it comes to , is the Startup of the Year! Binyamina OncoHost Makkah In , the Startup of the Year is Makkah Scimagine Or Akiva Last but not least, couldn’t be beaten for Startup in the Year in the city of ! WMT Or Akiva More Information: If you’re a winner, please answer ! If you’re a reader, participant, just a curious individual, consider answering one of our interviews . this interview here Read the FAQs about or . Startups here here To see all of the winners you may visit , pick any city and view the name that appears at the top. this site If you’re interested in partnering with us, we invite you to look through some of these or reach out to our business department. unique sponsorship options Perhaps creating your very own tickles your fancy or maybe you have a whole new idea for how we can partner! writing contest Thank you to all of our sponsors! We truly appreciate your contribution to the tech world and thus the future! The Startups Awards are sponsored by: , , , , , , , , , , Blockster Brex FreeCodeCamp LaunchDarkly Coil Udacity Udemy Vercel Asia Pacific Transgender Network Bybit Everscale Network The post was written by Kushal Tamrakar and Valerie Ejegi, edited by Hang Ngo. If you have any questions or concerns or would like to report a discrepancy please email ellen@hackernoon.com.

Meet the Winners of Startups in Asia

In the first two months of the pandemic, we saw two years’ worth of digital transformation. And it’s just one of the examples of how fast the world around us is moving. To keep up with competition and ever-changing user needs, businesses and their IT teams need to rethink the way they’ve been creating software for decades. This is where rapid application development (RAD) comes into play. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this concept, assess rapid application development advantages and disadvantages, and investigate RAD’s connection to low-code and no-code app development. Let’s dive in! What is Rapid Application Development Exactly? The rapid application development concept was invented in the 80s and has since become one of the most popular Agile approaches. Essentially, RAD aims to create applications faster. This is achieved through frequent interactions and continuous feedback analysis. Unlike the Waterfall methodology, which dictates that software teams need a detailed roadmap for their project, RAD does not rely on heavy planning. On the contrary, its goal is to release a working application (or a small piece thereof!) faster, present it to stakeholders, test the application on real-world data and tasks, and tweak the software based on what’s been discovered so far. Another core difference from the traditional software development methodologies is that RAD is driven by interface rather than coding requirements, which helps create applications with a particular user in mind. Rapid Application Development Stages The rapid application development model incorporates four phases: Requirements analysis. At this stage, a business analyst sits down to talk with stakeholders to loosely define software requirements. This is a sharp contrast with Waterfall projects, which rely on thorough requirements elicitation and leave little room for adjustments and change requests once the project scope has been agreed upon. Iterative prototyping. A software development team creates a proof of concept (POC) version of an application containing its essential features. The working prototype is then demonstrated to stakeholders, and critical changes are made. The iterative prototyping approach helps software engineers evaluate the feasibility of a complex app or functional component early on and rule out possible technology roadblocks. Actual development. The development (aka “construction”) stage encompasses coding, application testing, and feedback collection. Since most of the user problems and change requests are addressed during the prototyping stage, software engineers can create applications faster. Product finalization. The RAD paradigm revolves around faster development cycles, meaning developers might have to cut corners to put up an app in a tight timeframe. As a result, technology debt may accumulate — and that’s one of the issues RAD teams address during the product finalization phase. Additionally, they conduct full-scale testing, write technical documentation, and onboard users. How RAD and Low-Code App Development Complement Each Other As we mentioned earlier, rapid application development is interface-driven. Since no-code and low-code app development platforms incorporate well as complete back-end infrastructures, RAD advocates often use them to prototype and build applications. Additionally, most low-code and no-code platforms now offer pre-packaged templates to fast-track app development. builders as drag-and-drop app To choose the optimum technology stack for your RAD project, you should compare the advantages of low-code and no-code application development tools and study the on product review websites like G2. platforms’ ratings Rapid Application Development: Pros and Cons Different approaches to software development have their advantages and downsides, and RAD is no exception. Advantages of Rapid Application Development** The major advantage of rapid application development is that software teams can change the key features and functionality of an application at any given moment. Other reasons to embrace RAD include: Stakeholders communicate frequently, solving issues together and creating a product that best meets the business/technology needs of a company With RAD, you can manage your resources appropriately and avoid running over budget without seeing a glimpse of real value from your new technology RAD helps reduce your time to market, which is key for innovative technology startups and companies undergoing ad-hoc digital transformation In RAD projects, user feedback takes center stage, increasing customer satisfaction levels Disadvantages of Rapid Application Development The core disadvantage of the RAD concept stems from software projects’ shorter lifespan and user-centricity. The larger and more complex your project is, the harder it becomes to collect stakeholder feedback and coordinate developer activities. ** Here’s what you should consider before opting for RAD methodology: To sail through the rapid application development stages, you need a strong, inherently Agile software team whose members collaborated on similar projects in the past and have direct contact with each other. This makes RAD hard to implement in enterprise-grade settings and outsourced projects with many developers scattered around the globe RAD is interface-driven, meaning developers often cut corners during the prototype stage to get the green light from the stakeholders. These workarounds can lead to a huge technical debt on the back-end level, which needs to be addressed later in the development process and may eventually affect release deadlines Unlike Waterfall, RAD requires stakeholder commitment, which seldom suits executives and senior project/product managers at large enterprises due to scheduling conflicts To reap RAD’s benefits, your team needs to choose suitable app building software that combines the power of low-code development with the simplicity of no-code tools When to Use Rapid Application Development Now that we’ve assessed rapid application development’s advantages and disadvantages, it’s time to define instances when RAD should be the go-to methodology to coordinate your project. Creating an MVP to Raise Funding After a turbulent 2020, startup funding is on the rise again, with it’s 1999 all over again. To avoid missing out on the investment frenzy, a software startup must develop a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) version of their applications faster  — and that’s where RAD comes in handy. checks like investors writing huge In addition to speeding up the development cycle, the RAD approach helps put up a decent-looking, full-featured prototype on a shoestring budget and refine the product once you raise funding. Getting Buy-In from a Company’s C-Suite Although pandemic has given a second wind to their digital transformation initiatives, very few companies splurge on a new technology solution with only vague ROI potential. believe the 77% of executives might seem like a waste of money if you go the traditional route, building separate apps for iOS and Android users and sucking the company’s annual IT budget dry. But if you develop a cross-platform prototype using a no-code or low-code app builder, test the software among sales representatives working in the field, and present the results of your experiment to your CEO, your chances of getting a budget will increase exponentially. Creating a mobile version of an agricultural company’s CRM system Prototyping Applications at Hackathons Hackathons are where bright tech ideas take shape and rising stars are discovered. If you don’t believe me, just ask the founders of EasyTaxi and Appetas. What makes hackathons challenging is that you only get a couple of days to __ __or asset management system.** create a novel meditation app With RAD and the underlying technology stack, including visual development tools and website/application templates, it is totally possible to turn your idea into a prototype in mere days. Rapid application development is a powerful approach that helps exercise greater risk control and ensure greater user satisfaction with the final product. When used appropriately and backed up by a suitable technology stack, RAD can work wonders for your business — especially if you’re working on a novel product or toying with the idea of implementing new software in the workplace.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Rapid Application Development 

A facial recognition demonstration using , , python and the drone , from . Keras Tensorflow Tello DJI here: Source code https://github.com/cleuton/drone-facerec This project is based on two other Github projects: , created by ; FaceREC - CNN implementation of facial recognition me , created by . EasyTello Ezra Fielding Overview I ran this using (Linux). To run using or some fixes must be done. Be my guest to convert it and submit a pull request! Ubuntu MS Windows MacOS This software controls a Tello drone, capturing the video streaming generated by its onboard camera. He intercepts each frame and tries to recognize faces that appear on the image, using a that I trained, based on images from the dataset , and some pictures of mine. Convolutional Neural Network Model Labeled Faces in the Wild It is a proof of concept of the use of artificial intelligence with drones and, why not, Internet of Things (IoT). Note that performance can be low, after all, I am using a laptop and a cheap and simple drone. With more resources, better performance of the solution is possible. To use this solution, you will need: A , with Firmware 1.4 or higher; drone Tello A facial recognition model, generated by the project ; FaceRec_CNN The Dlib face prediction file: (see ); shape_predictor_68_face_landmarks.dat FaceRec_CNN I will teach you how to do these 3 things. Before using There are a few things you need to do before using this application. First it was made exclusively for Drone Tello, but it applies to any other drone that has a python programming API. The second thing to do is to be able to control your drone using only the original project and then try to use this project here. Why? Well, it's not as simple as it looks ... easyTello If you just bought your Tello drone, you need to check which version of it has. This can be done through the app (if you haven't downloaded it, it's better to do it now). Firmware Tello Then, turn on the drone, connect to his WiFi network with your Smartphone (TELLO ...), open the app and click on the settings button, as in the image: Then, click on : More Click on the three dots button: Now, check the firmware version number. If it's 1.3... then you'll need to update it! The process is done in two parts: Download the firmware to the Smartphone and update on the drone. To download the new firmware version, disconnect from the drone's WiFi and connect to the Internet. Using the Tello app, click the button to download the firmware. After downloading, connect to the drone's WiFi and click the button again. Update Update After the process, check the new firmware version. : An indication that the API is out of date is when the drone does not recognize the command ! Warning streamon If you have updated the firmware correctly, I recommend that you try to run the original project, following the instructions in that repository. This confirms that the tracking API is working correctly. Then, you can download and run this repository here. easyTello That done, clone this repository and create an environment using the ( : Anaconda script ./ conda-env.yml) conda env create -f conda-env.yml Activate that environment before running this project: conda activate drone-facerec Creating a model file To do facial recognition, it is necessary to train a neural network. I didn't insert the original project here, not even the model file that I trained. I recommend that you clone the original project and train your own model, and then copy the file created to the folder, within this project. FaceREC_CNN HDF5 easyTello Download and extract the , and place it in the FaceRec_CNN project and also inside the folder for this project! file shape_predictor_68_face_landmarks easytello Generating a model is simple: 1. Get multiple photos of the same person's face Use and download several photos of the same person, copying to the folder the FaceRec_CNN project; Labeled Faces in the Wild raw Name the files in this pattern: john-doe.nnnn.jpg (do not use spaces, number photos of the same subject, separating them with dots). For example: "bill-clinton.0001.jpg"; Take several photos of your face (and whoever else you want to recognize) and save it in the folder following the same nomenclature as in step "1/2"; raw Make sure that there is only one face on each training photo! If there is more than one face, crop the photo; 2. Convert the photos The script will rotate and crop the faces, transforming them into monochrome images. It will separate in training and test photos (folders "train" and "test") according to the variable . If it stays at 30%, then 70% of the images will be for training and the others for testing; trainCNN.py train_test_ratio = 0.3 Write down the categories found! The program will display a vector with the names found. Note to change in the prediction script( ) and in the recognition script for this project ( ); predict.py faceprocessor.py ./ easytello / faceprocessor.py If there are 4 people in your folder, it has to separate 4 people in and 4 people in . With few images, fewer people can be in and this will result in error. raw train test test 3. Get people's names and model file People's names are displayed on the console after training. Copy this vector and change it in ; faceprocessor.py The model file will be named copy it to the folder of this project; 'faces_saved.h5' easytello Before trying with the real drone, I suggest that you run a local test using your webcam: ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s x480 -r -i /dev/video0 -vcodec libx264 -f  h264 -an udp: 640 15 //localhost:11111 Use the program that I included ( ) to capture the images and do the recognition. If everything works, if he recognizes you, then everything is ready to run on the Drone. facetest_ffmpeg.py ./ facetest_ffmpeg.py If you want, you can run this project with FFMPEG: python teste.py Controlling the drone : To do facial recognition, do not use the original Easytello project! I modified the project to communicate with my facial recognition script ( ). Warning faceprocessor.py ./ easytello / faceprocessor.py The ( ) script controls the drone. It basically does 2 things: puts it in command mode and starts capturing video. But you can do so much more! You can make the drone take off, go forward, or turn around and then land. There are some commented commands that you can use. If you want to know more about the commands that Tello accepts, . teste.py ./ teste.py see the documentation : Do not try to connect your smartphone to the drone, as it only serves a single connection! Warning Make sure you have placed the file in the easyTello folder! Make sure the name is the same as it is in the file ( ) h5 faceprocessor.py ./easytello/faceprocessor.py : If you make the drone take off, make sure there is room for it! If it hits the ceiling or walls, it could be damaged! And be careful when trying to use Tello outdoors (not recommended). If he moves more than 10 meters, he may be out of range of WiFi and collide with something. Theoretically, if he loses contact, he lands automatically. Warning Previously published at https://github.com/cleuton/drone-facerec/blob/master/english_version.md

Facial Recognition On Drone

Even if all centralized exchanges are closed, leaving us with no option but the decentralized ones (DEXs), can these platforms handle the high liquidity that Binance, Coinbase, or Bithumb are facing today? We’re going to take a deeper look into this question and identify the requirements for DEXs to achieve high liquidity, while at the same time try to spot the potential candidates that can bring a workable solution to the table. Liquidity is a challenge for the entire cryptocurrency market In the cryptocurrency market, refers to the difficulty of an asset to be bought and sold at a fair price. Lower liquidity creates a more volatile market, where prices change substantially in a shorter period of time. Higher liquidity makes for a stable, less volatile market where prices do not fluctuate as significantly. High liquidity is always desirable, not just in cryptocurrency but in any market. liquidity https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin Low liquidity causes price slippage. In a volatile market, the delay between placing a trade and having it executed could be enough for the price to go up or down significantly. If the movement is against your desired trade, you could lose money. Ideally, the order price (the one you asked for) should be close to the executed price (the one you actually get). In an exchange with low liquidity, however, this isn’t possible due to the lack of traders, thereby with every trade. increasing the risk Currently, the most liquid asset is . The market is able to easily absorb any transaction without causing a drastic change in the value of the dollar. There’s almost no risk involved for either the buyer or the seller. The value of the currency (the US dollar, euro, yen, etc.) is known at the time of the transaction along with the costs associated with it. fiat currency For example, one million US dollars will keep its value before and after the transaction, and the commission is calculated based on the intermediary (bank, broker, etc.) in the same stable currency. However, for that same transaction, using one million dollars worth of Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, in a low liquidity market not only has a greater effect on the cryptocurrency’s price but it could end up costing even $100,000 more (or less) than the original price when making the trade. The risk is on both sides. Centralized exchanges In the past few years, the liquidity of the cryptocurrency market had its . In 2017, before the “hype” started, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin) was only $16 billion. In a single year, it went up to over $800 billion. Currently, we are perceiving the prices being at an all-time low even if we are sitting on a and a 24-hour transacted volume of $16 billion. This amount was representative of the entire cryptocurrency market two years ago and is now being traded on a daily basis! ups and downs $120 billion market cap https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ Who is handling the liquidity of this transaction volume? Mostly centralized exchanges with an astonishing of all market transactions. The other 0.2% is on the DEXs. 99.8% With most of the centralized having been in the past, we can’t overlook the benefit of using a decentralized exchange where there is no need to put any trust in the exchange platform itself, as the funds are held by each user in their own personal wallet. Not to mention the increased privacy and the reduced risk of server downtime, which makes DEXs the clear winner between the two. hacked So what keeps traders from jumping ship? The on DEXs. low liquidity DEXs: a deserted market What do the decentralized counterparts need in order to increase their liquidity? There are three requirements and none of them can’t work without the other: Usability Traders Scalability Let’s figure out how close are we to having a solution that checks them all and offers high liquidity. https://www.stateofthedapps.com/ Offering a seamless user experience The easiest issue to solve is offering, at the very least, the same user experience as their centralized counterpart. If they want traders and average users to consider using their platform, the “cost” of switching to a new platform should be reduced as much as possible. There are a few essential points to be consider: The interface should be familiar (the (Binance, Bittrex, and Bitfinex) are currently setting the standard) market leaders Offering the same features for any trader (conditional orders, stop-loss, access to reports, etc.) Integrating trading analysis tools (having their tools incorporated directly into the exchange is a must) Once these points are settled, there are things to consider in order to remain competitive in the market, such as offering lower fees, support for other cryptocurrencies, and various trading pairs. solution was to offer as many tokens as possible by coming up with a permissionless token-listing system to simplify the token submission process. Even if this approach is aligned with their community-driven, open-source vision, the market didn’t embrace the other shortcomings coming with the use of this decentralized exchange. The promise of a new user interface has been around since the beginning of last year, but there are no signs of them being close to implementing it. The liquidity remains low on ForkDelta and reinforces our belief that user experience aspects are an important factor. ForkDelta’s has also had a great evolution, reaching while having every aspect decentralized; from placing the order to matching or executing that order. The ones who will be able to lower the barriers of switching from one exchange to another (allowing users to exchange any token within one platform) can score high marks in overall usability. Unfortunately, BitSquare is not there yet, as they have only sorted these tokens into 11 tradable pairs. The delay of selling one currency for BTC to then use that BTC to buy another token can cost a trader a lot of money. BitSquare 126 tradable cryptocurrencies What looks promising is the solution coming from , which not only eliminates specific trading pairs with cross-chain liquidity pools and comes up with a modern color-driven user interface but, being part of a more complex DAE (digital assets ecosystem), they are making a step forward by offering an analytics engine, , to their users. This engine displays a list of all available coins and a selection of the top-ranked coins based on fundamental, technical, and market sentiment analysis data that a trader can use to their advantage. It’s the first time we’re seeing an intuitive UI interaction in accessing and viewing data for a user’s interest in an exchange and, in terms of user experience, this might just push the standards even higher. VDEX Vespucci https://icons8.ru/ouch/illustration/marginalia-payment-processed Bringing a lot of traders Having all the features in place and offering a seamless user experience could be part of the second requirement: having as many traders as possible on their DEX so the liquidity increases organically. But there is another way that programmatically solves the liquidity problem by sharing it. One solution comes from , which is a service that searches multiple exchanges, protocols, and market makers while trying to ensure the best available price. They are able to achieve this by aggregating the data from other platforms through their APIs (application programming interface). Leveraging their open trades, it might offer the trader the experience of trading against all other users, thus faking internal liquidity. It might sound ideal in theory, although the best price is not always the best available in the open cryptocurrency market. It’s just the best price between the aggregated sources. Dexdex This very approach was also adopted by , pooling orders from multiple DEXs. They actually automated the process for the trader: the user indicates the number of tokens he or she wishes to buy or sell and the AI will execute the order at the best rates from the other exchanges. However, the transaction time is the highest among other DEXs. Having the transaction guaranteed is an important thing for anyone who just wants to buy some tokens at the best rate, but for a professional trader, the delay is unacceptable. Easytrade In this case, we’re seeing the solution somewhere in between. Pooling liquidity from the other DEXs, sharing the traders that are scattered between the multitude of available choices, all while making sure there are enough traders on the platform. Between these platforms we can mention , who are offering a white-labeled solution for any DEX or dApp willing to join their pool, along with , who will use the price discovery formula in order to augment liquidity and bring stability to their tradable assets. altcoin.io VDEX Bancor algorithm Being able to scale Top-notch user experience will bring a high volume of traders which should bring forth the missing liquidity. What’s missing though? It’s not that there’s something missing, it’s more about what’s required when the traded as volume increases way over the DEX’s capacity. A decentralized exchange allows for securely matching and handling order books in a decentralized manner. This is done (on the blockchain). A big volume of transactions means that not all of the orders will fit in the next block. Waiting for the next one can create delays that would bring the price change problem back. We might get the liquidity, but if the placed order is not executed in the shortest time possible then we’re still facing an issue. on-chain One way to fix this is by using “ ” for order matching. An atomic swap is when a trade, instead of being made into two separate transactions (buyer sends first, seller sends second), the order is filled in a single (atomic) operation. Technically, a smart contract acts as a trustless escrow that holds onto one currency until the other user sends their currency. This increases transaction speeds. atomic swaps , a DEX running on the Komodo platform, recently achieved 60,000 atomic swaps, but their trading volume is still low and we’re not sure if their technology will scale by itself. has a similar approach running atop of the Blocknet Protocol, allowing users to maintain control of their tokens and private keys during the atomic swap. Between the examples previously mentioned, is leveraging the same atomic swap technology along with the , using EOS.IO contracts as nodes that allows them to scale off-chain while maintaining the on-chain advantages. BarterDex BlockDX VDEX loopring protocol https://dilbert.com/ Conclusion The major challenge with most DEX’s is liquidity. The one who will have the trading volume of Binance or Coinbase will set the standard. It doesn’t matter if the final solution will be sharing a pool as altcoin.io proposes or combining multiple technologies as VDEX does. In any case, the latter has been rather interesting in our research. Not only is the UI up to today’s standards, but in terms of solving the liquidity problems, they are building an ecosystem with interoperable elements, supporting each other. For example, the comprehensible multi-blockchain information extracted via the Vespucci analytics engine aggregates blockchain timelines to determine block production coincidences between chains to access greater liquidity. How smart is that? Anyway, 2019 could be the year when DEXs will flourish. It’ll be good to keep an eye on the best contestants!

What are the Requirements for Decentralized Exchanges to Achieve High Liquidity?

TL;DR: There are now over 250 decentralized exchanges in the world today. These are the hurdles of what it will take to be #1. , the largest fee-based centralized cryptocurrency exchange by volume ($1.07b per ) its intention to get into the ultra-competitive decentralized exchange (DEX) market. Despite its size and name recognition Binance will not be the leading DEX of 2019. Binance day recently announced Why? Binance will certainly invite its existing user base to its new DEX to help kickstart liquidity. This will not be a competitive advantage however. The liquidity problem is already being solved today by DEX aggregators like (Dexdex) that pools orders from multiple DEXs. According to the site: dexdexplatform Easytrade.io “Dexdex searches multiple exchanges, protocols and market makers ensuring you always get the best available price. It also provides tools for anyone to generate their own liquidity.” Their technology is also open-source and on GitHub. Enter the DEX Aggregators This is important because Dexdex actually aggregates some of the orders of 0x relayers to add to its own virtual liquidity pool. 0x is a protocol for trading Ethereum (ERC20) digital tokens and assets and pooling liquidity. Many of today’s top DEXs use its technology. RadarRelay (runs on the 0x protocol) and ForkDelta are amongst its sources of liquidity. ForkDelta already gets most of its liquidity from EtherDelta.​ So Dexdex is like an aggregator of aggregators. Imagine being able to aggregate the liquidity of all DEXs. It’s not exactly a zero-sum game but an ever expanding pie: The ultra-competitive race for the DEX market (by % of trade volume among DEXs). Liquidity Is a Slippery Slope The two major challenges with most DEX’s today are liquidity and UX. The DEX that will win over the masses in the next couple of years is going to be the one that has the liquidity of Binance and the UX of Coinbase. The problem is that there is a lack of standardization across DEXs — no common trading and liquidity protocol. This is the reason that most DEXs have low liquidity and volume — they simply do not share a common liquidity pool. There are many projects trying to solve this protocol problem today. The leader by number of DEX integration partners in this space currently is the and has a great chance of becoming that standard in 2019. 0x protocol Why? I analyzed a of 258 known DEXs in existence today (yes there are 258!) and removed the 70 DEXs without a known or publicly published protocol leaving 188 DEXs. I then plotted this in the pie chart below for a better visualization. The lack of a standardized protocol for these exchanges is staggering. There are over two dozen different protocols! The leader is 0x which powers of these DEXs today: Github database over 19% DEXs by protocol (Source: ) https://github.com/distribuyed/index Most people don’t want to do their own due diligence when it comes to trusting the underlying settling mechanism. Trade settling is how trades are confirmed and committed to the Ethereum blockchain). does this seamlessly for any of its relays that use the 0x protocol for off-chain orders. In other words instead of hundreds of future DEXs each with their own trade settlement technology the 0x protocol standardizes this “DEX-as-a-service” functionality across the board. This puts 0x in a position to be to a DEX what Ethereum is a smart contract. 0x The Challenges Ahead One major challenge I see with this Dexdex/EasyTrade model is the same problem Expedia had when it became the go-to for finding the price rates on hotels. Anyone can create an aggregator but unless you have millions of dollars in marketing budget you have to add some other value otherwise anyone can become an aggregator. I believe UX will be one of several key differentiators.​ If you have never traded on a DEX its not exactly user friendly. and I would not recommend it if you’re new to the cryptocurrency trading world. Binance will still be a formidable player however as it forays into the DEX space. It plans to monetize by owning many of the nodes that will power its own blockchain. Binance has the name recognition, marketing dollars and trust (if we can define trust being that they already process 1.4m TPS for its users). I believe that in 2019 the DEX that pulls ahead of the pack will: Aggregate liquidity. Have a killer UX. Be trustless. Have low to no fees. Have automatic order matching and instant trades. Leverage network effects for growth. 0x provides that battle-tested protocol and allows the aggregation of liquidity from its relayers. This puts Dexdex (I have no stake or relationship with them) in a position to compete with any “DEX” that Binance creates granted it can get more exposure. Many of today’s DEXs’ fees are two-fold — first a Gas fee to confirm the transaction on the Ethereum network and the DEX fee. The Binance DEX will require fees in BNB token to pay for transactions on its blockchain. ForkDelta charges .03%. Radar Relay just charges for Gas although states that it will charge fees in the future once it gets more traction. The successful and sustainable DEX of the future will charge no user fees just as Expedia charges no user fees. Once an exchange or DEX gets enough volume new monetization opportunities will emerge. In the meantime to avoid massive Gas fees key components of the orders (bid matching, balance inquiries, transaction histories, limit orders) can be side-chained (blockchain side-chain technologies like ZombieChain would be a great fit). Compounded with the lack of speed and functionality for advanced features such as algorithmic or bot trading most DEXs are probably not yet an option for high-frequency or day traders with more sophisticated needs than your average retail HODLer. Loom Network Its still early in the evolution of DEXs and major players such as IDEX, Komodo and Stellar are already breaking ground with clever alternative solutions such as and . hybrid-exchanges atomic swaps Which DEX will get the lion’s share of the market in 2019? Its still a bit early in the game to tell. Tech break-thoughs in DEXs are now becoming the new normal. For now perhaps the best that we can do to predict the DEX of the future is to follow the money. Better yet follow the liquidity.

I Analyzed 258 Decentralized Exchanges and This Is What I Found

, a post-ICO decentralized storage network and data marketplace, is putting personal info back into the hands of its rightful owners. Datum In a previous article about Datum, we discussed what the project is doing and how they’re doing it. You may want to before returning to this page… go ahead… I’ll wait for you right here. check it out You’re back. Great! Now, as you just read, there was some talk of tokenization but we didn’t get into the specifics of how those tokens flow throughout the network. In case the title didn’t tip you off, DAT tokens are the topic of this article. And, if you missed it last time, here’s a little info for you to process… Disclaimer : This is not investment or financial advice. I’m not a financial expert by any stretch of the imagination. Most information within this article is speculative and merely my own personal opinion. Always conduct your own research before contributing to any startup projects. Always remember that what you do with your funds is your decision to make. And if that decision proves too difficult for you alone, seek guidance from a financial professional. I may or may not receive a small allocation of tokens for creating this content. That said, I will do my best to remain unbiased and fair. I try to avoid all FOMO and FUD and never wish to impart those emotions on my fellow crypto-heads. A Gargantuan Stockpile Let’s go over a few DAT token basics. And we’ll start with the DAT token’s towering total. Yes, it’s huge. But it’s also deflationary. Although the lists a total supply of , CoinMarketCap begs to differ. Datum project’s whitepaper 3 billion tokens CMC puts the total at 2.65B, which is close. But a discrepancy of 35M — over 10% under the whitepaper’s figure — is more tokens than the entire stash of some other cryptocurrencies. Screenshot taken August 30, 2018. I fully guarantee a different price by the time you see this Regardless of which source is most accurate — the whitepaper is 10 months old and CMC has a reputation for token supply shenanigans — there will be plenty of DAT tokens flowing through the network. However, even though the DAT token’s overall supply is in the billions, it’s still a supply. After all, we’re talking about crypto and not print-on-a-whim fiat. I much prefer the concept of the former. fixed What CoinMarketCap doesn’t tell you is that the overall DAT token supply will decrease over time. Tokens exchanged for network privileges will be eliminated. Now, when calculating a token’s value, a huge supply is one part of the equation that can drag the price down. But if you’re in the camp that believes coins and tokens with solid fundamentals will one day return to — and hopefully, exceed — their all-time highs, take a look at the current under-a-penny price. Now compare that to the DAT token’s ATH of 13+ cents in January of this year. Remember, I’m not trying to give you any financial advice here. I’m not saying you should go fill a bag with DAT tokens today. I’m merely sharing a little tidbit of info that I found interesting… let’s leave it at that. Current Exchanges Until the crypto market gains additional fiat gateways, it can be a little tricky to pick up certain coins, especially if they’re restricted to decentralized exchanges. The process can go like this: Discover token Research token Decide to fill bag with tokens Hope token is available on an exchange you already have an account with Although you don’t see all of them listed on CMC, here’s the list of exchanges now trading DAT tokens: AEX Airswap CEX CoinW Coss.io EasyTrade EtherDelta ForkDelta Huobi iDEX Joyso KuCoin Lykke OKEx I find KuCoin’s user interface to be fairly straightforward. If you’ve traded on Binance you’ll be at home there. But if you’re after high DAT volume, OKEx is the winner. Earning DAT Tokens Monetizing your anonymized data is at the heart of the Datum project and the main reason for exchange within the platform. When you give an advertiser permission to use your encrypted info, you’re awarded DAT tokens. And, you can also choose to deanonymize certain data to earn greater rewards. Plus, if you’ve taken the time to enrich your data, it carries a higher value on the Datum network. Methods of enrichment include linking your data to social media profiles and Datum’s external partners. Another way to make your data more valuable is by syncing it to a blockchain-based identity verification service. Current choices are uPort and Civic. I’d used Civic in the past — the connection process is quick and you can finish everything using only a smartphone. Storage Nodes Decentralized networks are secured by individual computers — nodes. By definition, these nodes are spread out all over the globe. regular Nodes are responsible for securing a network. Each node can verify transactions and contains a real-time copy of the entire blockchain it’s helping to run. There are no breaks for nodes as they’re expected to have zero downtime while running 24/7. Run one of these for Datum and you’ll get rewarded with DAT tokens. Now, some contributors to networks are content with operating a storage node. But others expect a little more from their computational power. If a standard node wants to achieve Grandmaster status, it’ll have to work a little harder… Yes, Sensei Masternodes are special pieces of equipment that are near and dear to the success of any blockchain project. And in some situations, operating one can be a very lucrative endeavor. Here are a few of the special functions performed by masternodes: Budgeting Creating a Treasury System Enabling Instant Transactions Enhancing Transactional Privacy Participation in Governance & Voting Masternodes don’t come cheap though. Node-runners are essentially hosting a wallet that’s supposed to be accessible at all times. And for that, you’ll need dedicated storage space, your own server or VPS, and a static IP address. On top of it all, you’ll need a minimum number of tokens to ensure the viability of your wallet. Minimum balances vary from project to project. As for Datum, I couldn’t find the lowest amount of DAT tokens needed to run a node anywhere in their documentation. So, today I reached out to the team on Telegram. They let me know that the details of running a DAT masternode — including minimum deposit — are still being ironed out. Spending DAT Tokens The Datum project isn’t made for personal data only. Developers and businesses can pay to have their data secured by Datum’s network. Storing data is paid for in, you guessed it, DAT. But data storage is only one side of the token… The Ad Connection Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle was fed by a burning desire for personal data. Self-curated data — your everyday Internet activities — is invaluable for advertisers. I’m sure you’re familiar with those endlessly annoying sidebar ads that follow you anywhere and everywhere you surf online. By using Google and FB and all the rest, you build a personal profile that advertisers capitalize on by feeding you highly targeted ads. But, Datum’s major upgrade to this system lies in a simple concept: Permission. You want my anonymized data, Mr. Adman? Sure, take it. But it’s gonna cost you some DAT. Thanks for asking first though! That’s how it’s supposed to work within civilized societies. We don’t just take things that aren’t ours, we ask and we share. Final thoughts… Initially, the DAT token’s massive supply was a turn-off. I don’t like to see coins run up into the billions. I made the mistake of brushing the project off. But digging a little deeper revealed a planned system of deflation. Coins with a deflating supply are welcome within the crypto market. Trimming the supply provides the means to adjust value without relying upon a change in demand. In addition to their deflationary nature, DAT tokens have real-world use cases. And, the project is tackling an issue that’s long overdue for a blockchain disruption. We’re in a data-ruled era. Your personal data is becoming your most valuable asset. And it rightfully belongs to you. The Datum project’s mission to put control of data back into the hands of the people is certainly relevant today, and will only increase in relevance as the global adoption rate of technology continues to grow. In this series’ final article, we’ll go over the project’s Android app. But until then… DYOR If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to take a look at the The document is an easy read with colorful illustrations. Datum Whitepaper . And, here are even more resources for you: Datum Website App Download Get Social Facebook Medium Reddit Steemit Telegram ( EN / RU / ZH ) Twitter By the way… If you like what you see here and need help getting your crypto message to the masses, I’d love to hear about your project. Feel free to reach out to me here: blockchainauthor at Gmail

Project Datum’s DAT Token: How’s it Flowin’?

This is a version of an email I sent around to our team this week with minor edits to protect the innocent. We have set a course for an evolved platform, it’s clearly going to take a while to get there but we are building and deploying services on this platform right now. Hello all, I wanted to write one of my long winded emails about the decisions we’ve made so far about “the new stack” — the set of technologies that will power new services and slowly take load from the existing stack. Many of you are already working with elements of it. The primary goal of the new stack is efficiency and horizontal scale. For us, this definition is most appropriate: into your pool of resources whereas . Horizontal scaling means that you scale by adding more machines Vertical scaling means that you scale by adding more power (CPU, RAM) to an existing machine Our technologies must have the capability to scale by adding more (virtual) machines at a cost that the business can sustain. That is the money line in this email, literally and figuratively. By a somewhat recent estimate, if we were to pick up our infrastructure and stick it in AWS, it would cost something like $80,000 per month. This just isn’t a good value for money given our existing workload and our scaling plans. This business can’t sustain a $250,000 a month bill for triple the monthly unique visitors (a lot of assumptions in that projection, but it’s a big number). The bigger problem of course is that much of our functionality is dependent on a very non-horizontally scalable Microsoft SQL Server database, so without major application changes we couldn’t actually GET to that scale even with big money. Obviously there are a number of efforts underway to address this on the existing infrastructure and they are incredibly important for the long term health of our platform. Our cost analysis has to include workload efficiency, software licensing and developer productivity. The technologies, services and partners that make up our infrastructure will change over time, and we have to architect systems to anticipate that change. So we’ve settled on a set of core components and patterns that we hope will set us up for long term success while providing a path for short term improvement. It is not a goal or a reasonable expectation to just “change everything.” We will continue to improve our existing services but look for opportunities to gain meaningful production experience with what we believe to be the right long term platform choices. Microservices In general, one of the bigger things we’re doing is moving away from monolithic services and binary inclusion (i.e. referenced assemblies) to . We’re using Swagger as an API specification format which comes with auto-server and client generation in both C# and Javascript. A service should be responsible for a very narrow band of functionality — as an example geo-serv is solely responsible for non-user-specific geographic data — shape analysis, distance computations, etc. But NOT for searching stations based on those things (for example). In addition, we are moving to a more strict three tier architecture — front end APIs and pages, middle tier services / background tasks, and databases. Authorization happens at the front tier (in fact integrated into the swagger specs for most situations). The middle tier just does what it’s told — it should not be rechecking the user-related rights of operations. This makes orchestration significantly simpler and more powerful. The database should basically enforce service layer access rights. small, composable services Over time — and with the right amount of engineering discipline — the microservices approach yields significantly more flexible components with frequent releases and better code quality maintained by smaller teams. It encodes a lot of functionality in the relationships and call models between services, which is more mentally taxing but less manually taxing. That means if something is confusing or not working as expected, communicate/ask quickly rather than assuming the code is a “golden city on a hill.” Smaller services also mean we can revisit, rewrite and gradually replace services without inordinate fear that it will have broader impact than the service itself. Another minor point with major value — all requests that come into this infrastructure are assigned a unique identifier and that identifier is passed along with all inter-service requests. That “correlation id” allows us to view cross-service logs from an end-user request perspective, which was an immensely valuable tool at PayPal. Like most ideas in software development, the concept of building microservices have both passionate proponents and opponents who offer criticism that runs the gamut in terms of validity and usefulness. It has the added “benefit” of having a muddled definition since becoming one of the buzziest buzzwords in the industry in recent times. Despite , this concept is nothing new. The idea of service oriented architecture has been around for ~40 years and really boils down to building subsystems with well defined interfaces, expecting dependent-services to simply be available. In the past, this often meant little more than a shift in complexity from app-level to infrastructure-level — deconstructing one big problem into 50 little ones. However leveraging modern, battle-tested tooling (as described below) helps us reduce that new complexity, hopefully giving us the best of both worlds. an astronomical uptick in interest in “microservices” over the last two years Containers Containers allow us to orchestrate the microservices as very small and manageable deployment units. We are using Docker as a container platform because it has the broadest industry buy in — AWS, Joyent, Google, pretty much everybody supports it. Docker (the company) has lots of add on products to Docker with varying levels of success, but the core container format is very stable and does what we need. We do need to orchestrate the creation of several non-containery things (like the VMs that host the containers or other non-Docker components), and for that we intend to use Terraform and Ansible. From those tools we expect to be able to version all our infrastructure which provides both change management and the ability to spin up production-like environments (staging, QA, etc) more simply and accurately. AWS They used to say “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM.” I think that’s Amazon’s position in cloud infrastructure at the moment. It’s not the cheapest hosting option by any stretch, and it probably doesn’t even perform the best (Joyent and GCE claim to be a lot better); but pretty much anything you want to do with AWS has been done by someone else already. The number of value added services they offer is staggering — things like Lambda that allow you to run code on external event triggers and just pay for that runtime, Glacier that let you store near-line data for super cheap, RDS that lets you provision databases as services… Most of the other providers just don’t do that — they give you a VM infrastructure and the rest is up to you. Of course this is why the others are cheaper, and as we scale our applications our goal is to be multi-provider and be able to shift workloads across providers as necessary. This is hard with something like a database, but with stateless services like geo data lookups would be pretty easy™. The nearest competitor looks to be Google, and we have our eyes on them. Kubernetes (aka k8s) For some services (like databases), AWS provides external management of the underlying hardware so we don’t really have to “worry about it.” But for the rest of our services, some that we write and some that we use (like RabbitMQ), we have to manage where they run, how many there are, etc. This sort of “container orchestration” has become a market of its own. We have chosen Kubernetes ( . Jean-Charles will send a longer mail at some point explaining it in more detail, but essentially k8s manages a set of virtual machines and a set of services that run on those machines. It can automatically scale them up and down, move them around, and manage their health. It provides service discovery and connectivity between those services as well as to external services like RDS (a database-as-a-service product). It manages secrets and other security primitives and takes us a long way towards versioned infrastructure — meaning our production environment and its changes over time are versioned just like all our other software. http://kubernetes.io/) Postgres I think I’ve sent mail on this before, but to summarize — SQL Server is awesome; SQL Server is too expensive; therefore SQL Server is not awesome. Over time, we will be moving to PostgreSQL. I’m somewhat concerned this might be unfortunate timing as MSFT has announced SQL Server on Linux, which in theory could reduce the total cost. But Postgres is “free as in beer.” It is extremely reliable, with support for replication/clustering and read-only replicas for performance. It has robust JSON support, which allows us to combine the needs of transactional systems with the flexibility of NoSQL like systems. I just finished some work on our identity services that allows “patch based” profile changes in a JSON column with transactional consistency. I’m not even sure SQL Server could pull that off. Postgres is also offered by AWS as a service, where we basically don’t have to configure high availability manually or manage it too much. One other change is that we’re moving towards a higher number of independent logical databases. This is a double edged sword. We will lose foreign keys in many cases and have our data more scattered. I’m hoping this reduces the exposure to single db hacks and helps to enforce proper service boundaries. While there will be some performance loss on application-layer joins and such, we feel the benefits in scale efficiency and separation of concern plus healthy caching (both Redis for shared cache and in-memory for very slow changing data like geo data) are worth it. Kong Lastly, we are using a single “gatekeeper” for all public APIs built on the new stack. That product is called and handles various aspects of authentication (not authorization — just providing tokens and turning those tokens back into user contexts), rate limiting, logging and more. It supports first-party access (I am the user acting on behalf of myself) and third-party access (I am a developer acting on behalf of a user that’s given me permission to do so). Our experience so far hasn’t been perfect — we’ve had to , but the fact that we can is another reason we like it (not that I enjoyed having to write Lua). It will allow us to host all our APIs behind (or maybe , not sure yet) and have it farm out to the appropriate services. It can handle transformations of input and output such that we could handle version migrations with configuration rather than service-layer code. We can also write plugins to do things like favor a particular data center or retry certain types of failed requests in other data centers before failing back to the caller. It also allows us to test more easily because our services can now just get some http headers with user context and the tests can just make those up rather than going through an authentication process. Kong fork and make some changes api.gasbuddy.com api.gasbuddy.io Hooking things up to Kong is currently done in our bootstrap.sh script in the tooling repo. We’ll come up with some better way of tracking precisely what APIs exist and how they’re named and arranged over time. The tooling repo should be enough to get any developer up and running with a personal “GasBuddy” new stack environment in about 10 minutes. If it fails, speak up and we’ll figure out why. Over the next couple weeks I’d like us to work on our “Developer Manifesto” together — what are the expectations of our infrastructure in making our lives easier and what are our responsibilities to each other to make that a reality. The one I just mentioned has always been a big one for me — if I know what an “IDE” is and can use a command line, I should be able to get up and running with just the contents of some README.md and less than a half hour (internet weather dependent). Thanks for sticking with me this long, and hopefully these new services and patterns help us reach our goals more quickly and with less pain than typical. Specifically, we want to get a meaningful percentage of our overall traffic onto these new services by the end of the year. If we can do that, and make a corresponding reduction of the load on our most expensive resource (SQL Server), we may be able to get out of our self-hosted environment around the same time, which gives us a great deal more control over our destiny. One of my favorite sayings and words I try to live by are “have passionate beliefs, loosely held.” Many of you have been involved in vetting the components described in this mail and I think we’re in a good place in terms of collective buy in and engineering headroom. But things change, and that’s ok. Maybe Kong decides Lua is a bad idea and rewrites the whole thing in Java (ewww). We’ll roll with those punches. But our overall architectural philosophy and development practices should endure. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Technologies for GasBuddy’s Future

By Max Miller Take a Pause. There is something heroic and noteworthy about taking a leap. Something superhuman and extraordinary. The idea that we can somehow overcome human limitations,that we can take gargantuan leaps of faith,overcome massive challenges which transcend humankind,sounds ,and truly romantic. heroic We think of:taking ‘leaps of faith,’‘jumping off cliffs,’and ‘burning ship’… All the time. We want tomake epic moves to radically change our lives and career, as if we were superheroes. **I admire the gumption, but let’s take a pause.**The idea that we could overcome our limitations is great…But let’s reconsider for a moment:That we are human, not ,so why do we have to , j_ump_, and , to get from life… what we truly desire? super-human leap burn You see… We get scared of anything that is not habitual.Every time we take one of those leaps, every time we make a heroic move, worthy of media coverage… We humans . scare easily When we quit our job without a plan, when we decide to travel the world with a tight squeeze budget.When we give ourselves one week to make rent’s due,or else we become homeless…It triggers our response. fear or flight The Amygdala,which has been helping us to survive for thousands of years,begins to make large screeching noises, every time we jump off the edge of the cliff, of our lives. The Amygdala, in panic mode. The reality is that:When we ‘jump ship,’ or ‘take a leap’We humans become terrified… and we freeze.Like a deer in front of headlights.We freeze, we run, or we loose it completely.Because we were not designed to make epic jumps. When we make a big scary move, self sabotage, and our limiting subconscious beliefs come up… and they make us miss the jump. Our brains decided long agohow much risk we would be willing to put up with,how much fear and epic change we could experience in our lives, before going crazy. Our human machine is built to keep us safe.Our system is built with safety mechanisms we are not even aware of:keeping us from anything dangerous, epic, abrupt, or radically different. I am not saying that we should resign in one place,that we should not pursue our passions, and overcome our biggest fears.But would you ever throw a baby into an ice-cold bucket of water?**No.**Then, why do you keep jumping into that ice freezing cold bucket yourself?You know it’s not working. The stories of overnight success, champions, heroes, supermen, and wunder-women, who transcended the human specieswith the bat of an eyelash, are stories made up by hopeful people..just like you and me, out of Hollywood. Their stories are mythical, not replicable.Outside of Hollywood, we are all still human. I am not saying that change is not possible.I am not saying that we should all succumb to mediocrity, or to what is. Yes, we are resilient, and we are resourceful.We are capable of much more than we can even imagine. But we have to know how to play, and effectively hack our human systems,if we want to play the game of life… effectively, successfully, in ‘epic’ ways… If we want to be epic, we have to start small. The best way to trick our human systems,is to take small daily action steps,to slowly build habits, toward that epic vision,so we can close the gap between our and our superhuman vision. physiology Daily habits allow the human system toadapt to the epic proportions of your imagination,to take courageous action steps, without setting off our internal alarm system. Success is not made of one big leap after another.It is made up of tiny little steps taken day after day, rain or shine. Rome, Google, and Apple were not built in a day. Larry and Sergey spent seven years working in a garage, before Google became Google. Let’s stop glamorizing the idea of taking leaps, burning ships, and jumping off cliffs,and let’s start to appreciate the art of the slow build, the magic of consistency, and the art of the small daily steps. — — — - Want to be a writer? Start by writing for five minutes a day, then ten minutes… and then three hours a day.If you set out to write your first tomorrow, good luck.I pray that your self sabotage fairies won’t give you a pneumonia or burn your house. book When you think, I will write a book, and become a huge, internationally renown self help author… You freeze. When you think, I will write 1 page of self-help advice today. You do it. The next day, when you think: I will write 2 pages of self-help advice today. You do it. And the following day, when you think: I will write 3 pages of self-help advice today. You do it. Success never looked so easy.The truth is that, success, in most cases is, anything less than glamorous. While taking a leap sounds heroic.Moving steadily toward your dream life sounds real,feasible, and actionable. If you enjoyed this article, remember to ❤ below and share with your friends. & if you would like to stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter here.

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