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After selling his company to Facebook for $19B, Brian Acton joins #deleteFacebook

Brian Acton, the co-founder of messaging service WhatsApp (which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion), is now joining the chorus of the #deletefacebook movement. It is time. #deletefacebook — Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018 A tipster alerted us to the fact that Acton made the same call… on Facebook… as well. Since the sale of WhatsApp (which has made Acton an incredibly wealthy man), Acton has been actively financing more secure (and private) messaging platforms for users. Acton has already used some of his WhatsApp wealth to give $50 million to the Signal Foundation. While some may say it’s hypocritical to reap millions from Facebook and then call for users to jump ship, Acton has always had a penchant for supporting privacy. Back in its earliest days, WhatsApp’s stated goal was to never make money from ads: Why we don’t sell ads No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn’t). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake… and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement. Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product. – June 18, 2012 — WhatsApp blog It may be that this latest scandal was the straw that borked the camel’s back. I’ve reached out to Acton for comment.

After selling his company to Facebook for $19 billion, Brian Acton joins #deleteFacebook

Brian Acton, the co-founder of messaging service WhatsApp (which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion) is now joining the chorus of the #deletefacebook movement. It is time. #deletefacebook — Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018 A tipster alerted us to the fact that Acton made the same call… on Facebook… as well. Since the sale of Whatsapp (which has made Acton an incredibly wealthy man), Acton has been actively financing more secure (and private) messaging platforms for users. Acton has already used some of his Whatsapp wealth to give $50 million to the Signal Foundation. While some may say it’s hypocritical to reap millions from Facebook and then call for users to jump sip, Acton has always had a penchant for supporting privacy. Back in its earliest days, WhatsApp’s stated goal was to never make money from ads. June 18, 2012 — WhatsApp blog: Why we don’t sell ads: No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn’t). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake… and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement. Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product. It may be that this latest scandal was the straw that borked the camel’s back. I’ve reached out to Acton for comment.

CEDEX Token Pre-Sale Successfully Raises $20 Million in 3 hours and 54 mins

After raising over $20 million in the private-sale stage, CEDEX followed it up with an incredibly successful token pre-sale. With over 1000 participating, CEDEX was able to sell all of the available 25,000,000 CEDEX Coins in just a couple of hours. The token pre-sale went live on March 16th at 10:00 GMT and finished at 13:54. The quick finish to the token pre-sale was hardly shocking to cryptocurrency investors. CEDEX has been one of the most talked about ICOs in recent memory because of their potentially revolutionary technology that enables diamond tokenization. In February of this year, CEDEX CEO Saar Levi and business development leader Boaz Hilel were recognized with the Audience Award at the Blockchain Economic Forum (BEF) 2018 in Singapore. The award was a good indicator of how positively people in the blockchain space feel about CEDEX. And why wouldn’t they? With an annual turnover rate of $80 billion, the diamond market has the potential to be one of the most lucrative trading markets in the world. However – as Dani Zaharie wrote in his article on CEDEX for Steemit – diamonds presently aren’t even considered an asset. While nobody disputes that diamonds have value and are highly sought after, there is no standardized or fixed pricing for them. In comparison, commodities like gold and silver are fungible and can be easily exchanged, allowing them to have well-developed public markets. The last couple of decades have had a lot of trial and error when it comes to increasing the standardization in the diamond market so that it can catch up to those other commodities, but thus far all of the efforts have come up short in making the market open to general investors. The CEDEX solution has set itself apart from those past trials in two ways. First is the DEX, a proprietary machine learning algorithm for pricing diamonds with unparalleled coherency and accuracy. An article on the major blockchain news outlet coinidol.com explains in depth how the DEX works, as well as how the DEX’s data can ultimately be used for category trading. What really makes the DEX impactful in the diamond market, though, is that it sets the bar higher for standardized and transparent pricing of stones. The result is that it enables investors who don’t have expertise in the diamond business to buy and sell with the confidence of a seasoned trader. In addition to the DEX, CEDEX’s implementation of blockchain technology makes it possible for general investors to carry out peer-to-peer diamond exchanges transparently and trustlessly. The importance of cutting out the middleman in the diamond market is difficult to overstate. You see, that middleman is extremely costly in today’s market. So costly, in fact, that the typical diamond reseller can lose up to 50% of their stones fair market value in the deal. By launching the DEX and the blockchain based diamond exchange together, CEDEX promises to bridge the gap between the traditionally private diamond market and the innovative financial markets that exist for most other noteworthy assets. Doing so will transform diamonds into a publicly tradeable asset and completely revolutionize the entire industry. That’s why CEDEX was listed as one of the Top 5 Cryptocurrency Projects to watch in the entire blockchain space for the month of March by Invest In Blockchain. CEDEX Coin Token Sale If you weren’t one of the lucky investors who managed to buy some CEDEX Coins during the short token pre-sale, you’ll have another opportunity on 17th on 10:00 GMT, where an additional 25,000,000 CEDEX coins will be made available to the public there will be 25,000,000 CEDEX Coins available to the public. Participants on the whitelist will get early access to the token purchase, after which point they will be sold on a first come first serve basis to the remaining investors. It will be critical that you act fast to get your coins, especially considering the high demand experienced so far. Unlike the token pre-sale, the general token sale has no minimum contribution. To learn more about CEDEX and find out why so many people have been talking about it, you can read the project whitepaper, or the lightpaper if you’re short on time. TO get involved in the CEDEX community, you can join them on Telegram, Facebook and Twitter. This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

‘We Need an International Discussion on Cryptocurrencies’: OECD’s Medcraft

Greg Medcraft, Director of the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs of the OECD, recently revealed that he believes we need an “international discussion on cryptocurrencies,” and that blockchain technology will propel the “next revolution.” During an interview on the sidelines of G20 with Brazilian news outlet Criptomoedas Fácil, Medcraft revealed that there are several The post ‘We Need an International Discussion on Cryptocurrencies’: OECD’s Medcraft appeared first on CCN

The NSA Has Been Tracking Bitcoin Users, Snowden Papers Reveals

Not to be mistaken for another Jason Bourne thriller, the Edward Snowden papers show a US government/bitcoin connection. The Intercept is reporting classified documents leaked by Snowden prove that the US National Security Agency (NSA) in fact was keeping tabs on bitcoin users globally, as evidenced by a report that’s surfaced from March 2013. The timing The post The NSA Has Been Tracking Bitcoin Users, Snowden Papers Reveals appeared first on CCN

Zuck and Sandberg go M.I.A. as Congress summons Facebook leadership by name

The bad thing about making your face synonymous with with the company you run: When you go M.I.A., everyone tends to notice. The callout posts began over the weekend. Normal Facebook users don’t always track the tech press outrage cycle, but a flurry of reporting on Facebook’s mishandling of the private data of 50 million users, and Facebook’s subsequent mishandling of that mishandling — this after everything else — it seemed to stick in their craw. Worse yet for Facebook, lawmakers that they’d already pissed off were happy to circle back for a second round after the company weaseled out of the first one. By Monday, a few angry, constituent-rousing tweets had snowballed into the kind of itemized list of questions that comes with a due date. Congress is mad. And it might be as mad about this poorly handled Cambridge Analytica debacle as it is about getting stood up the last time around. Without any kind of public statement from one of the faces of the company, Facebook users are starting to feel stood up too. Where in the world is… anyone? Where does that leave Facebook leadership? So far, it’s nowhere to be found. No semi-intelligible non-apology calling to bring the world closer, if only we could, from Zuck. No lukewarm screed from Sandberg addressing a tertiary and much safer company concern. No nothing. Ever since Facebook scooped the New York Times’ story on its company blog — “after a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action…” — the most vocal company statements have come from Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal and the potentially outgoing head of information security Alex Stamos. It goes without saying that having a lawyer and the noble hacker guy who tried to quit out in front is not the most flattering look for a company so synonymous with its leadership team, namely Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Sandberg specifically was named in a damning bit of the New York Times story on Stamos’s near rage-quit. That portion described how, according to sources, Stamos advocated for an aggressive investigation into Facebook’s Russia headache to the “consternation” of Facebook executives. Sandberg was the only named executive. That language has since been softened, describing how Stamos and Sandberg “disagreed early on over how proactive the social network should be in policing its own platform” but calling their relationship “reproductive.” That's not what happened. Sheryl, Mark, and the other execs supported the investigation and disclosure of our work, and I'm glad we put out what we found. https://t.co/cPuaf084pK — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 20, 2018 Zuckerberg and Sandberg did not attend a Tuesday town hall on the issue (nor were they scheduled to, as the Verge reported) and that’s apparently left employees wondering where their fearless leadership has gone too. Facebook’s feet to the fire: Round One recap Late last year, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch joined lawyers from Twitter and Google to testify on the role the platform may have played in spreading viral disinformation during the 2016 election. In a trio of public hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary and Senate and House Intel committees raked Facebook’s legal stunt double over the coals, occasionally tossing a question to Twitter or Google. It was a lot of careful lawyerspeak and a handful of cooperative gestures with no actual legislative buy-in. No one much was surprised. The spiciest moments came when Sen. Amy Klobuchar got Facebook counsel to admit that, if left unregulated, there would be no one to make them accountable for their actions. Stretch could only agree. Facebook alone in the hot seat This time around, Facebook might not clamber out of the hot water so easily. While the company had ample cover last time thanks to Google and Twitter’s twin implications in the controversy over Russian-bought political ads targeting U.S. voters, this time Facebook stands alone. The revelation that Facebook data on as many as 50 million users appears to have made its way into a political data operation with no consent from users is Facebook’s burden to bear alone. Congress has legitimate interest in protecting users subject to the ad revenue-driven whims of a supposedly self regulating tech platform, and unfortunately for Facebook, big tech regulation is starting to look like something most people can get behind. The calls to get Zuckerberg under oath before Congress are picking up steam across at least three major congressional committees, not to mention the FTC and Parliament in the UK. Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Amy Klobuchar kicked off the Zuckerhunt over the weekend. Now, she’s flanked by colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Facebook breach: This is a major breach that must be investigated. It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I've called for more transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say “trust us.” Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary. — Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) March 17, 2018 “The last time we had a hearing, Google and Twitter and Facebook sent their lawyers, which undoubtedly were expensive because they did a damn fine job of dodging and bobbing and weaving and they didn’t say a damn thing – which is what they were paid to do, or not to do, as the case may be,” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Politico. “This time, I hope the principals come and we can have a frank discussion.” On Tuesday, Senate Judiciary ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein joined lawmakers calling for Zuckerberg himself to testify. JUST IN: Top Senate judiciary Democrat Dianne Feinstein says she wants Facebook CEO Zuckerberg to testify in Congress about use of its users' data $FB pic.twitter.com/4grxeJnYm2 — Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) March 20, 2018 Senate Commerce Committee On Monday, Republican Commerce Chairman John Thune joined Senators Roger Wicker and Jerry Moran to assert its jurisdiction over data privacy and consumer protection issues at the fore of the Cambridge Analytica conversation. The committee will weigh Zuckerberg’s response to a letter it sent in deciding to summon him to testify. “Mark Zuckerberg ought to be subpoenaed if he doesn’t appear voluntarily, to appear under oath, in public, along with other CEOs in the same space,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told reporters on Monday night. Senate Intelligence Committee On Tuesday morning, the ranking Democrat on the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee also called for Zuckerberg to take the stand. Warner, a vocal critic of Facebook’s initial response to the Russian ads revelations, isn’t one to let the company off the hook. It's time for Mr. Zuckerberg and the other CEOs to testify before Congress. The American people deserve answers about social media manipulation in the 2016 election. — Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) March 20, 2018 Before Warner’s call, Senate Intel member Ron Wyden — one of the biggest privacy advocates in Congress — issued a letter to Zuckerberg seeking answers on a number of detailed points on Monday, including how many privacy audits the company has conducted for apps on its platform and if Facebook has ever notified individual users of privacy violations of this nature. It’s likely that Wyden, who issued Facebook an April 13 deadline for his questions, supports Warner’s zeal for getting Zuck under oath. Senate Intel chairman Richard Burr has yet to demand Zuckerberg’s appearance. The bipartisan calls for accountability have been fast and firm. Unfortunately for Facebook, being mad at Facebook is something that brings people together — perhaps another unforeseen risk of building the world’s biggest social network.

Could Indecent Images on the Blockchain Spell the Demise of Bitcoin?

A team of German blockchain researchers have discovered images of child abuse on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since many network participants need to download a copy of the entire blockchain and it is entirely immutable, the legal implications of this might be damning for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. Indecent Content on the Blockchain Could Render it Illegal The Bitcoin blockchain is a record of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. One of its major value propositions is that it cannot be changed or amended by any party. Other data can also be stored on the blockchain. Typically, this includes notes about certain transaction – perhaps what the payment was used for or other trivial information. As well as this harmless data, files and links can be uploaded to the blockchain. Unfortunately, it appears that some users have been using it to record highly illegal data. This includes indecent images of children. The discovery was made by blockchain specialists at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. They managed to find over 1,600 files that exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to reports in The Guardian, at least eight of these were of sexual content. One of these examples is thought to be depicting a victim of child abuse. Another two contain links to dark web repositories of child pornography. Finally, 142 of files link to other illegal services on the dark web. This poses a very real issue for Bitcoin. Since miners and validation nodes need to store the entire blockchain on their computer systems, they are essentially in possession of illegal content. In a recent paper, the researchers explained the implications that the storage of such content on the blockchain could pose for Bitcoin in the future: “Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users.” The idea of storing harmful material on the blockchain isn’t new. Back in 2015, a group of internet security specialists identified the risk of harmful software being uploaded to the Bitcoin blockchain. The fear then was that those downloading the chain would also install malware that could then be used to weaken the security of centralised entities such as cryptocurrency exchanges. However, the research reported today does represent the first proof that the blockchain is being used in such a nefarious way. It seems that mass possession of child pornography would be a worthy enough reason for governments of the world to come down hard on Bitcoin and the technology behind it. The efficacy of such a course of action, remains to be seen though. The post Could Indecent Images on the Blockchain Spell the Demise of Bitcoin? appeared first on NewsBTC.

Russia ‘Secretly’ Helped Venezuela Launch State Crypto Petro: Report

Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurrency, the Petro, was the work of a joint collaboration between Venezuelan and Russian government officials with Putin’s personal approval, Time Magazine said Tuesday. Citing anonymous sources close to the ‘half-hidden joint venture’ between Venezuelan and Russian officials, Time Magazine is reporting that Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on Kremlin aiding Venezuela The post Russia ‘Secretly’ Helped Venezuela Launch State Crypto Petro: Report appeared first on CCN

NEO, EOS, LTC, IOTA, Lumens: Technical Analysis March 21, 2018

It was our expectation that altcoin prices: NEO, LTC, IOTA, EOS and Stellar Lumens will continue edging higher as the market gets a reliever. But really, will the new realization by the G20 that cryptocurrencies doesn’t pose a systemic risk to the establishment continue buoying prices? Well, that’s a question everyone else is asking and we shall see how prices react to that in the coming days. Let’s have a look at these charts: XLM/USD (Stellar Lumens) XLM/USD Bittrex Daily Chart for March 21, 2018 After cryptocurrencies and blockchain endorsement, Stellar Lumens prices are still on their way up. In the 4HR chart, early buyers got in at a bargain while those who did yesterday traded a middle BB bullish break out with favorable entries during pull backs. If you want to have a clear trajectory on price action, the daily chart provides a clear picture. The daily chart’s middle BB is our immediate resistance line and a probable zone where prices might resume their bear trend as the weekly chart shows. Either way, if that happens or not, this week’s price action is obviously definitive for this coin. At the moment though, bulls can look for long opportunities in lower time frames with targets at $0.40 on the upper edge. IOT/USD (IOTA) IOT/USD BitFinex Daily Chart for March 21, 2018 As per our plan, IOTA’s surge continue and so far, our first take profit at $1.45 has been hit. However, here’s the thing and you should consider this in the days to come. IOTA prices are actually turning and it’s likely that there will be a break out today assuming there’s a follow through of yesterday’s bullish pressure. Note that prices are at a periphery and testing the middle BB and the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement line. Because momentum is high-check those diverging %k and %d which are turning from oversold territory-it is likely that there will be a confirmation. If that happens-and odds are it will happen-there will be a change of tide as far as IOTA prices go. I’m net bullish in the short term, recommending buys with targets at $2.2 or the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement as per yesterday’s forecast. EOS/USD (EOS) EOS/USD BitFinex Daily Chart for March 21, 2018 History shows that after extraordinarily long candlesticks-(volatile ones), prices tend to slow down or even move within a consolidation before resuming the original break out trend. That’s what we are seeing now and yesterday can be a perfect example. The slowdown in my opinion a loading opportunity and today, prices might surge past the middle BB in the daily chart. Because of this projection and position, EOS buyers may as well target $9.5 in the short term. LTC/USD (LTC) LTC/USD CoinBase Daily Chart for March 21, 2018 In the daily chart, it’s apparent that LTC prices were net bearish with bulls struggling to break above the March 19 highs at $170. Regardless, I’m still net positive on this pair and I recommend buying with every stochastic buy signal in lower time frames. Any form of higher highs today will end up confirming a 3-bar reversal candlestick, the Morning Star and that will also mean buyers can aim for immediate resistance at $170 as potential targets. NEO/USD (NEO) NEO/USD Bittrex Daily Chart for March 21, 2018 The last time NEO prices were trending above the middle BB was in late February. Since then the liquidation of the middle BB has been visible and with every higher high, prices might experience the same resistance again. This is despite the strong bullish momentum we are currently experiencing. Check out that stochastic buy signal with diverging %k and %d signal lines. Note this though. Even if we can rave about bullish potentials, let’s not enter blindly. Enter at every stochastic buy in the 1HR or 4HR chart assuming you didn’t get in yesterday. All BitFinex, Bittrex and CoinBase charts courtesy of Trading View The post NEO, EOS, LTC, IOTA, Lumens: Technical Analysis March 21, 2018 appeared first on NewsBTC.