Technology

As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next.

On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we&ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new architecture for computing and new processes for almost every conceivable transaction framework.

For Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, distributed ledger technologies represent a powerful path for the future of networked computing — no matter the underlying technology. Thatwhy Behlendorf &through the Linux Foundation — is investing resources in ensuring that viable open source distributed ledger projects are supported and coming to market for any number of applications for businesses and consumers.

One of the leading lights of the internet revolution, Behlendorfcareer shaping the future of the networked world began in 1993 when he co-founded Organic Inc. — the first business dedicated to building commercial websites. Going on to become one of the foundational architects of the Apache http protocol, Behlendorf has served as the chief technology officer of the World Economic Forum and as an executive director for the technology investment fund, Mithril Capital.

Meanwhile, Parity Technologies is attempting to ensure that businesses don&t need to worry about the underlying technologies at all. Selling a suite of services that are all enabled by distributed ledger technologies and cryptographic computing, Jutta Steiner is giving businesses a way through the maze of competing protocols with a service that can enable the creation and adoption of distributed apps for businesses.

&We see it as a way for people to build blockchains that fulfill their particular needs,& Steiner told our own Samantha Stein at our Blockchain event earlier this year in Zug. &One of the challenges we&re addressing in this is to come up with a scalable framework.&

Before Parity, Steiner was responsible for security and partner integration within the Ethereum Foundation when the public blockchain first launched in 2015. Steiner also co-founded Project Provenance — a London based start-up that employs blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent.

Supply chains are at the heart of Tradeshift offerings — and the company is hoping that distributed ledgers will be too. Thatwhy the company createdTradeshift Frontiers, an innovation lab and incubator that will focus on transforming supply chains through emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

&The use cases we&re working through Frontiers cover a very wide variety of themes, including supply chain financing, asset liquidity, and supply chain transparency,& said Gert Sylvest, co-founder and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, at the time. &There is so much more potential than just cryptocurrencies.&

That potential will be one of the things that Sylvest, Steiner, and Behlendorf discuss. We&ll hope you&ll be in the audience to listen.

Disrupt SF will take place in San FranciscoMoscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy ticketsright here.

IFAone of the yearmost fascinating tech shows — and not just because it means hanging out in Berlin for the week. The conference is primarily targeted at European consumers, but the late-August/early-September timing means plenty of companies use it as the global launch pad for gadgets aimed at holiday shoppers.

In recent years, the conference had taken on more significance for this very reason. Though 2018 did seem to be something of an off year, with larger companies like Samsung and DJI launching their big products weeks before the big show.

The other reason to love the show is its tendency toward the bizarre. Theresomething about IFA that has the tendency to bring out the oddest impulses in gadget design, and this yearevent certainly fit the bill. What follows is a collection of the biggest, best and most bizarre of what IFA had to offer.

Alexa routers

Smart assistants were, naturally, everywhere at the big event. One of the most fascinating entries is the emerging trend of Alexa routers. Both Netgear and Huawei announced devices that essentially transform a routers in a smart speaker. And why not You&ve already got on in your house. Netgear is the more compelling of the two, using a mesh network to place them throughout the home.

Too much TV

How much TV is too much TV As long as consumers are interested in outdoing their neighbors, TV manufacturers will be more than happy to oblige with higher and higher resolution sets. This yearshow was all about 8K. Itstill a young tech — and content hasn&t really caught up, but it was at IFA in full force with sets from Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Sharp and more.

Smartphones, smartphones, smartphones

The smartphone experience is always a bit of a crapshoot at a show like IFA. The U.S. phone market can be a tough one to crack, and many of the phones will never make their way to our shores. That said, there were plenty of fascinating flagships to see at the event. Highlights include:

• -Sony Xperia XZ2: The six-inch OLED is a first for Sony. Thatcoupled with the companystandard focus on cutting edge imaging.
• LG G7 One: A Google One handset with near flagship specs, the G7 One is something of an odd duck. Though LGnever been afraid to get a little weird with its phones
• HTC U12 Life: Like the LG handset, HTCoffering is more about affordability than wow factor. The U12 Life is a mid-range handset on a budget.

Whatever this thing is

Itbizarre, itprobably pricey, and itroughly the size of my New York City apartment. But if you&ve absolutely got to have the most authentic arcade-style flight simulator experience at home, you could probably do a lot worse than the Acer Predator Thronos.

The rest

• Lenovo Yoga Book C930: Arguably more interesting than it is useful, the C930 continues Lenovotrend of pushing the convertible envelope with an E Ink display in the place of a keyboard
• Polaroid OneStep+: A fun return to the instant camera template that features a few new tricks

A pact of five nation states dedicated to a global &collect it all& surveillance mission has issued a memo calling on their governments to demand tech companies build backdoor access to their users& encrypted data — or face measures to force companies to comply.

The international pact — the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, known as the so-called &Five Eyes& group of nations — quietly issued the memo last week demanding that providers &create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements.&

This kind of backdoor access would allow each government access to encrypted call and message data on their citizens. If the companies don&t voluntarily allow access, the nations threatened to push through new legislation that would compel their help.

&Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions,& read the memo, issued by the Australian government on behalf of the pact.

Itthe latest move in an ongoing aggression by the group of governments, which met in Australia last week.

The Five Eyes pact was born to collect and share intelligence across the five countries, using each nations& diplomatic power and strategic locations as chokepoints to gather the rest of the worldcommunications.

Since the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013, tech companies have doubled down on their efforts to shut out governmentlawful access to data with encryption. By using end-to-end encryption — where the data is scrambled from one device to another — even the tech companies can&t read their users& messages.

Without access, law enforcement has extensively lobbied against companies using end-to-end encryption, claiming it hinders criminal investigations.

Security researchers and other critics of encryption backdoors have long said thereno mathematical or workable way to create a &secure backdoor& that isn&t also susceptible to attack by hackers, and widely derided any backdoor effort.

In 2016, rhetoric turned to action when the FBI launched a lawsuit to force Apple to force the company to build a tool to bypass the encryption in an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter, who killed 14 people in a terrorist attack months earlier.

The FBI dropped the case after it found hackers able to break into the phone.

But last month, the US government renewed its effort to set legal precedent by targeting Facebook Messengerend-to-end encryption. The case, filed under sealed, aims to break the encryption on the messaging app to wiretap conversations on suspected criminals.

Itnot the first time the Five Eyes nations have called for encryption backdoors. An Australian government memo last year called for action against unbreakable encryption.

Although the UKmore recent intelligence laws have been interpreted as allowing the government to compel companies to break their own encryption, wider legal efforts across the other member states have failed to pass.