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Showing posts from June, 2016

Ric's Entreprenuer and Inventor Tips for this week

Here is some ideas for you to chew over this week: If you were the chairman of the board for your own company and you could hire anyone to be CEO of your company, would you hire you? If not who WOULD you hire?.... That person should be your co-founder. Don't think about raising money. Think about your exit. What company will want to buy your company when its at full steam? Then think about someone who has experience in getting THAT done. If you are in security tech, then maybe Symantec should be buying your company. Who has had experience at selling their company to Symantec... THAT is the person that should be our cofounder or at least a close advisor. Rarely is your skill set enough to get a special project done. A balanced team of complimentary skill sets and mutual respect and trust will always execute strongly. In my world you need three things. A great idea, the right team to execute it, and funding to allow us to do the right things first. Many very experienced friends

SWIFT Attack and other nightmares

A very experienced and insightful  friend and advisor, who shall remain nameless for the time being, asked us at Haventec  to consider having a look at the attacks on the SWIFT interbank transaction system, and seeing if there is a way to help plug that incredibly dangerous and large hole. It's nice to think that he feels we could have a go at solving a problem of this magnitude. To be specific, that hole was $81 million dollars large ($81mill still not accounted for of nearly $1 bill initially attacked!) when a Bangladeshi Bank was attacked late last year, and just recently a Vietnamese bank was attacked in a related incident losing over a million dollars in fraudulent transactions. In a nutshell, the attack was initiated by a hacker group modifying a PDF reader so that it modified transaction records when a bank worker reviewed them from an internal computer so that fraudulent transactions could be hidden and then they placed tools on the infected network to modify transact

Photos from Avalon in Sydneys last big swell

My friend Bob McTavish sent me these photos from a mate of his down in Sydney.. I looked around to see who owns them and am happy to point people at the right place... top one is Avalon main beach in monstrous size.. Ive been out when you had to jump the rocks ie no paddle out possible but this looks much bigger... And the shot below looks like it is South Avalon at the pool... good grief! 10 foot only 30 meters from the pool... thats what it looks like anyway.

Encryption and the Quantum computer freight train

Quantum computing is clearly the next phase in computing progress. It's the difference between having a vocabulary of two (Yes and No ie binary) and being able to use millions of words to calculate and communicate... faster, more accurate, efficient and powerful. The problem is that anyone with the advantage of a Quantum computer can totally overwhelm someone relying on old YES/NO technology. Enter Encryption. It's current role is to scramble information so that the processing power of someone with a key can unscramble the information millions of times faster than someone who does not have the key but has to guess it. Quantum computing means that key finding is so fast that encryption as a protection is almost pointless. But Quantum computing (that uses qubit rather than bit) is only coming in the medium term future isn't it? We are a decade off at least... right? Well for a relatively long time IBM's 5 qubit Quantum computer was considered the ceiling for
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