Upcoming Travel Bots

Everybody knows the struggle of planning a vacation or trip. From booking flights to finding hotels, it becomes a real hassle. With travel bots, which are said to be “virtual travel assistants,” this process is made a lot easier. A travel bot is an artificial intelligence (AI) design that responds to messages instantly. These bots typically help to find the best flights, hotels, and even gifts. Travel bots are rather new and most have come about around three years ago. You will mainly see Travel bots being used for finding flights or hotels.

Travel bots are rather new and most have come about around three years ago. You will mainly see Travel bots being used for finding flights or hotels.

How Are Travel Bots Useful?

Instead of spending your time trying to search multiple sites for the best hotels or cheapest flights you can spend your time planning what to do when you get there, while a travel bot finds these things for you. For companies, these travel bots save time and money. With the help of travel bots there is less of a demand for customer service representatives. The bots can manage questions and give excellent results. Travel agencies and hotels are also able to be more productive due to these travel bots. Instead of having to notify potential customers of prices and or other information, one can receive this information from the travel bot.

How do you use a Travel Bot?

Some of the first sites to have a travel bot were Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia.com and Cheapflights. For example, Cheapflights works by entering your flight location and destination along with dates and amount of people. Once all of this information is entered, it loads a list of travel sites that you can go on to find the best and or cheapest flight. If one wanted to find a hotel the process would be similar. You would go on a site such as Kayak and search the place you are visiting and then you will receive different hotels that you can look further into. You can even use a travel bot to find and send a gift to anyone. You can buy almost anything such as gift cards, gift baskets, and much more. It is also possible to have gifts sent to or from other countries which makes things so much easier price wise. Although travel bots are recent and there is still some experimentation, they have turned out well thus far. They have made life on both ends more efficient. It is believed that travel bots will develop into an even more hassle free network for safe and easy travel.

Useful Features with Fingerprint IDs

Touch and fingerprint scanning have become essential at protecting our digital identities. Before the technology, entering a passcode was the only alternative to secure your smartphone. Fingerprint scanning has been available to laptops for years. However, the technology had quirks.

Customers demand more stringent security for their digital devices. Apple and other large tech companies stepped in to solve the situation. Fingerprint scanning is now a standard component for every smartphone sold today, except the iPhone. The start of the technology was awkward. Finally, fingerprint ID was located in the most logical place, the home button.

Touch and fingerprint scanning have become essential at protecting our digital identities.

The security of the Touch ID is irrefutable. Incorporate Touch ID into your daily life and you wonder why there were passwords in the first place. From biometric facial scanning to fingerprint ID, there is a security level to match every smartphone user’s personal preference.

Following Apple’s lead, every other smartphone operating system has enhanced their biometric security features. None are quite at the level of Apple’s Touch ID or biometric facial scanning. Customers are demanding better security.

Securing Your Smartphone and Apps with a Fingerprint

The obvious use of a fingerprint ID is to keep others from accessing your phone. However, what if several people need access to that phone? There are plenty of valid scenarios where more than one user needs to access a single phone. Both Apple and Android anticipated this need, with both operating systems allowing multiple fingerprints.

Two outstanding password managers, 1Password and LastPass both allow the use of biometric security. Downloading apps is a breeze when you set up Touch Id for the iPhone and fingerprint scanning for your Android device. Keeping your documents and notes safe can be a headache. Again, securing your digital life can be just as important as a secure car or home.

The need to place a physical signature on paper documents is becoming less and less critical. A secure digital world is evolving. Millions of people and their companies are now trusting electronic signatures. SignEasy and DocuSign are two of the best electronic signature applications, and both have integrated fingerprint scanning.

Alternative Uses for Touch ID and Fingerprint Scanning

Keeping your smartphone secure with a fingerprint is not the only thing the home button does. The obvious choice is buying merchandise from your favorite online store or brick and mortar. Place your finger on the home button make your purchase, and you have less money in the bank. With Apple’s Touch ID, a fingerprint can make purchases from iTunes, App Store and iBook Store. Amazon has integrated Touch ID into its app. You can make purchases, save searches and verify your identity when logging on.

Use Touch ID to protect your Evernote, Mint Personal Money Management and a burgeoning array of credit cards.

Here are some great apps for Touch ID. After a night on the town, a fingerprint scanner can be used to detect your blood alcohol level. The Blood Alcohol Content Analyzer tells you how long to wait before getting behind the wheel of a car. Use Touch ID and turn your iPhone into a scanner. Use Touch ID to protect your Evernote, Mint Personal Money Management and a burgeoning array of credit cards.

Touch ID uses the same technology as their Facial ID scanning. The original copy of your fingerprint is stored in a secure enclave within the hardware itself. Each time you press the home button, Touch ID improves its biometric characteristics. When your fingerprint changes over time, the system recognizes those changes and stores the new copy.

Journaling File Systems

Journaling file systems were created by IBM to ensure that all data on a certain drive had been catalogued correctly. Someone who has lost data due to a crash knows that it can be quite difficult to recover. The purpose of a JFS is to ensure that all the changes were logged correctly. The log that is created has every step included so that data may be rebuilt, and there is no corruption of the data because every step of its rebuilding is included in the system. There is a huge difference between what the JFS does and what a standard file recording system does. Someone who has implemented a JFS will find that their crashes are much less devastating, and they take far less time to recover from.

Journaling file systems were created by IBM to ensure that all data on a certain drive had been catalogued correctly.

The Need For The JFS

The need for the JFS is apparent in any computer system that could crash. There are many programs that will only record data as a single block, and it could be lost in an instant due to a crash or loss of power. Recovering the data is not sequential because the metadata is not included, and the files are often corrupted because they were not put back together in the right way. The JFS uses the information that was recorded during the creation of the content to build each file properly. This is a much faster way to recover from the loss of power or a crash, and it ensure that someone who has lost files may be confident that the corruption of the file will not happen. This is especially important when recording data for a secure system that could lose power. The servers that use a JFS are sure to recover their data much faster simply due to the fact that the JFS has been included.

Hiding Away The Journal

The beauty of a journaling system is that the journal will be placed somewhere that is completely separate from the files that it has recorded. The journal may be recovered because it has been sent to this hidden location, and there are many instances in which files are saved because this hidden location is found only after a crash. The person who wants to have a JFS included in their system must understand that special coding is required to create a JFS. The JFS will take down all the metadata that is used to record every keystroke on the computer or server. All that information will be used to create new files, and it is quite important that all information saved to the system is save from corruption because the JFS will use every bit of that data to rebuild the drive if it is ever lost.

How Does Face ID Work?

Face ID and biometric scanning are now mainstream. The launch of Apple’s iPhone X put security front and center. Manufacturers are scrambling to catch up to the iPhone. There are apps with facial scanning but not as sophisticated as the iPhone X.

Face ID and biometric scanning are now mainstream.

Apple has incorporated facial scanning throughout their product line. The scan can unlock downloaded apps and ApplePay is also participating in the transformation. With certain retailers, you can check out by looking at an installed face scanner.

Face Id is the ultimate form of recognition, just like fingerprint security. The process analyzes individual features and converts those biometric features into computer algorithms. The iPhone X generates a mathematical reproduction of your face. Starting with your first login, the iPhone sets up the original scan. All subsequent logins are measured to this original. Patience is a virtue while setting up your initial scan.

TrueDepth Camera

The entire security system of your phone starts with Apple’s amazing TrueDepth Camera. Depth mapping is utilized when examining your face and there are eight separate functions of the camera which allows for facial scanning. You must face directly at your phone for the Face ID to work.

Biometric identifiers are used to construct the original ID. These identifiers are physiological characteristics. The shape of the face, is it more round or oval? What is the relative size of your chin or nose? How close are your eyes and what color? These are just a few of the structural characteristics that Biometric scanning refers too.

The original scan is not stored in the operating system. Instead, it becomes part of the A11 Biometric chip. The initial scan is impossible to share, even with Apple servers. The company asserts there is virtually no way to bypass the system. When logging into your phone utilizing face ID, the system cannot be tricked. Even identical twins cannot access the system.

Adapting to Change

The original scan of your face is integral to the future success or failure of the security system. There are two modules used to produce the scan. The first module projects a grid onto your face. This grid consists of more than 30,000 infrared dots, generating a 3D map of your physiological identifiers. The second module confirms your identity by matching to the original embedded scan. A secure enclave in the A11 chip is where the initial scan is stored. Hackers always try to find ways around the Face ID scan with next to zero results.

The face ID system is not a photograph, and it will not work if your eyes are closed. The iPhone X adapts to changing details and the embedded neural network learns over time. If you get a haircut or start wearing glasses, the Biometric A11 chip remembers this and makes those adjustments. The basic structure of your face never changes. Physical attributes, such as the shape of your head and the length of your nose, is the original scan embedded into the A11 chip.

The iPhone X includes a Require Attention feature. This function means you must show the iPhone you are cognizant of the scan. This is the reason why you must be facing straight at the screen to log in. This convenient feature prevents others from scanning your face while you sleep or merely are unaware of the scan. Apple’s Facial ID scanning system works exceptionally well to identify only your face.

Drive without Human Driver

In 1870 Siegfried Marcus created the first gasoline powered car. From there engines were further developed, there were different sources of power such as gasoline and petroleum. Years later in 1897 the first motor car was developed in Czech. Once motor cars were developed, the creation of some of the cars we know today began to become popular as early as 1920. Some of these cars were: BMW, Nissan, Bugatti, Ford and much more. Into the 1960’s racecars were beginning to be built. Now, in the modern era, 2012 to present day, there has been a big development in electric cars. The development of electric cars has made just the thought of self-driving cars possible.

The development of electric cars has made just the thought of self-driving cars possible.

Progression of Self Driving Cars

It is estimated that by 2030 25 percent of driving in the United States will be done by self-driving cars. Some may see this as a long time for a minimal percentage reached, but driving is extremely tedious when trying to develop a feat as such. In 2016 driving accidents were classified as the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Knowing this, when trying to make self-driving cars, the testing must be extremely accurate. If a product comes out that causes more harm than good then it would be deemed as useless. The reason self-driving cars are being created is because there has been a huge increase in the interest of electric vehicles. These self-driving cars will also include a huge price increase. It is estimated that those who decide to purchase a self-driven car over a man operated car will be paying around 60 percent more. Due to this, it is also believed that the car sales market will not suffer a bit. There will still be the same amount of interest in man operated vehicles as there was before the self-driving cars.

Testing of Self Driving Vehicles

As stated before, these cars need to be as close to perfection as possible. To ensure safety, there is a thirty month trial of these vehicles. This testing is funded by an 8.6m euro grant. This amounts to a little over 10 million U.S. dollars. There are also re-insurer XL Catlin, and Nominet and the Atomic Energy Authority. These trials began in the beginning of May 2017 in the United Kingdom. They plan to gather data from multiple aspects of these autonomous vehicles. This data can show what needs to be fixed and how. They are being tested on public roads between London and Oxford. The reason behind testing these cars on public roads is to verify that they are able to succeed in real conditions on regular roads. Thus far, it looks as if they are being precautious and considering various factors to ensure the crucial safety expected from higher technology.

Tru64 UNIX®

Tru64 Unix was once known as Digital Unix, and it is now under the ownership of HP. The company picked it up from Compaq, and it belonged to DEC before that. There are many people who still prefer to use Tru64 Unix even though it is discontinued, and they find that it offers much better performance given their personal needs. Systems such as OSX and iOS have been made based on this product, and many people turn to it because they want to go to the source of these modern systems.

Tru64 Unix was once known as Digital Unix, and it is now under the ownership of HP.

The Competition

DEC joined with HP and IBM to create the Unix system, and it was from this that it was born. They wanted to have an operating system that was completely unique from other storage systems that were coming out at the time. their aim was to create something that would be easy to expand, upgrade and build upon. They were successful as the system came to be known as Tru64 Unix long after it had begun. The 64-bit processing made it capable of doing quite a lot, and it inspired many other systems that came after.

Shared Storage

The Digital Unix product became something that was pitched as a part of the new digital revolution in computers. There were many people who wanted to have new digital products because everything in the 90s was called digital to make it sound as advanced as possible. Later on, 64-bit technology was considered much cleaner, and that is when the company chose to move on from the digital name to call it Tru64 Unix. This was an improvement that ensured the product would perform that much better, and it was used many times over to inspire yet more systems that would come after.

The shared servers of today were built on. Tru64 Unix because there was room for many people to be in the clusters that were created in these servers. Every person who belonged to the server or storage unit could see their own data, and they were protected from the others by the processing power of the Tru64 Unix system. It was eventually discontinued when it was no longer powerful enough to manage all the data that was introduced into newer systems, but it had made its mark by creating a way to share space on servers that were popular at the time. The TruCluster was migrated to other products by HP, and the Tru64 Unix system still has its hands on certain products that have been created by this company. Someone who has questions about Tru64 Unix may contact HP as they are not yet done using its technology to advance their systems.

Bots for Social Business

When you want to leave a comment or have a question about a product or on a social media account you are more than likely being responded to or interacting with a bot. With major business and some small ones, some kind automated messaging system is used. A business will use social bots if they want to increase the efficiency of responding to customers. This gives better customer service and can possibly even boost the reviews of your company. A socialbot is “a type of bot that controls a social media account.” The way a socialbot is designed makes it act as if it is an actual human. Their responses are set to convince one that they are being responded to by a representative of your company. Therefore, the purpose of a bot is not to acting like humans but simply to make life for the business and customer a little easier.

A business will use social bots if they want to increase the efficiency of responding to customers.

Why should you use Bots for Social Business?

There are many factors that determine if a bot is necessary. For some businesses, social bots are necessary to keep customer satisfaction high. If you already have a system and it doesn’t include a bot, but your customer satisfaction is high, then replacing it with a bot could be detrimental. The main thing that should be determined is if your company receives a lot of inquiries. Is your business getting multiple messages a day? If so, then getting a bot could help your business. Another factor to consider is if a bot will help improve the quality of customer service. You can determine this by seeing your response time before getting a bot. If you are receiving multiple messages in a short amount of time then having a bot could almost be a necessity.

The Pros of having Bots for Social Business

There are many beneficiary aspects that come with using bots for social business. Some of these benefits are: efficiency, faster service and full control. Your business could be more efficient and provide faster service in the sense that bots would be able to complete tasks and solve problems faster. When things get confusing to the point where you send in a question it is nice to receive a quick response. Bots make this quick response possible and it leads to higher customer satisfactory. What is meant by having full control is that you can decide how your bot responds. Your company has its own brand and you can design a bot that has an attitude that represents your brand. He or she can be flirty, nice, and funny or even mean. This could also improve customer satisfactory because it can draw attention and contribute to customer experience when using your company site.

NetBSD® Program

NetBSD is the place where Theo de Raadt started before he went on to found the OpenBSD Porject. NetBSD was started as a version of the original BSD because they believed that there are many things that could be changed to benefit their customers. There were many who believed that developing in-house without any assistance was a wise choice, but the men who started this project were insistent that they would take input from their open source community. The people who submitted their changes were given the credit they deserved, and these four men worked quite hard on the clear coding they wanted to see and the portability that they believed was necessary across every kind of computer that could be used. They knew at the time that the world of computers would change, but they did not know how much it would change. The only way to respond was to make their program secure.

NetBSD was started as a version of the original BSD because they believed that there are many things that could be changed to benefit their customers.

Portability

The portability of the NetBSD Program became its hallmark as it has been used on a number of computing systems over the years. The men who started the company wanted to know that they could reach everything from someone’s homemade system to the mini-computers that were popular at the time. Each step they took to reach new customers was a way to reach the world at-large, and they continued to work on portability while they created coding that was easier to read. Someone who had questions about adapting to a new system would have been addressed at the time because the NetBSD team wanted to have as many different applications for their technology as possible. The portability gave way to many uses for their systems, and they eventually split over the direction of their company and their brand.

Building In Third Party Software

The portability of the platform was only the beginning of what they wanted to do. There were many new software applications coming out that could be used with a program such as this, and someone who had questions about how the third party software could be adapted to a new program could use the package sourcing additions that were made to the NetBSD platform. This is what made the programming useful to anyone who wanted to be even more adaptable to their own work in programming, and someone who wished to make changes to the platform could do so because it has been open source since the beginning.

Virtualization became a part of the NetBSD program because it allowed the company to expand their storage that much more for each customer. They moved quickly to offer the best storage to all their customers, and their work in virtualization made them cutting edge in that field.

Ditch the Paper, Go Digital

You’re online browsing job boards searching for the perfect employment opportunity. After hours of clicking on different links and reading multiple jobs descriptions and requirements, you finally found the one that you feel is just right for you. From there, you venture to the company website to fill out and submit the application. While completing the form, you notice that there is a section to input your certifications and any other credentials you may have.

The use of digital credentials or badges are becoming highly recognized by most companies as a way to boast qualifications to clients.

However, you know that all of your credentials are still in paper format inside of an envelope somewhere in your office or in a closet. You are now put to the painstaking task of digging out that dusty folder, and scanning each one into your computer, then format them to PDF files in order to upload them to the application form.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you were able to keep all of your certifications on a digital platform and keep them with you virtually anywhere? That is essentially what digital credentials are.

Today is Digital

The world we live in today is operated by technology. We practically live in our computers and cell phones. Most people today have a plethora of important documents such as driver’s licenses, passports, college degrees, membership certificates, as well as work-related certifications. Digital credentials give people a way to have digitally based credentials and going paperless. These digital credentials are displayed as badges that dictate the skills, achievements, and certifications behind them. The use of digital credentials or badges are becoming highly recognized by most companies as a way to boast qualifications to clients.

Anonymous Credentials

The digital world can sometimes be an unsafe place with risks of losing all of your personal information to hackers and identity thieves. When it comes to utilizing digital credentials, there is an option to do so anonymously. Users should have the ability to obtain credentials and show properties without revealing any additional information or allow tracking.

The main idea behind anonymous credentials is the use of digital tokens that allows the user to prove certain statements about themselves privately and without leaking any sensitive information. The paper form of most credentials, i.e. passports, driver’s licenses, and medical cards, have sensitive user information on them such as their name, birth date, a photo of them, and their signature. These are types of non-anonymous credentials. Anonymous credentials would include items such as money, a plane ticket, or game tokens because they don’t have any identifying information on them.

Due to the fact that anonymous credentials have no personal identifying information, they can be shared amongst other users without the original issuer of the item being notified. For example, you can buy a plane ticket to Las Vegas and give it to your friend and the airline would be none the wiser. However, if someone uses a credit card that’s in your name, the credit card company may notify you about unknown charges.

Regardless of your stance on the technological advances of today, digital and anonymous credentials are widely developing into today’s society as a standard form of proof of eligibility.

Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA): A Cryptosystem

The RSA cryptosystem is one of the first of many public-key cryptography algorithms that utilizes prime factorization as the one-way function, or otherwise known as the trapdoor one-way function since it deals with fixed public-key functions.

The RSA cryptosystem is one of the first of many public-key cryptography algorithms that utilizes prime factorization as the one-way function, or otherwise known as the trapdoor one-way function since it deals with fixed public-key functions.

RSA: A History

The RSA cryptosystem was a new concept brought about in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. Along with RSA, Diffie and Hellman also introduced the idea of digital signatures. Their number theory consisted of a shared secret-key formed through the exponentiation of prime numbers. Unfortunately, they could not complete the equation due to the use of one-way functions. Most likely because, at the time, factoring was an arduous process and was not fully studied or practiced. However, for the next year, three men that are known as Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, all of whom studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put in a plethora of man hours and made numerous attempts in order to design a one-way function that could not be inverted. In April of 1977, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman finally completed what is now known as RSA; named so as a tip-of-the-hat to its creators.

In September of 1983, MIT was granted the patent for “Cryptographic communications system and method”, which utilized the RSA algorithm. The patent was only issued for a 17-year use which meant that it would expire in September of 2000. However, MIT released the algorithm for public use two weeks before the expiration of the patent. Since the algorithm was made public, it was granted a U. S. patent. Otherwise, obtaining a patent would not have been doable.

How does RSA work?

The RSA cryptosystem requires four different processes: key generation, key distribution, encryption, and decryption. When speaking of key generation, that is when public and private keys involved. The public key is mostly used for encrypting messages and confidential information and be used by anyone. The private key is, in a way, the skeleton key that can decrypt those messages if done so within a certain amount of time. There is a formula that is used in order to generate the public and private key codes.

Key distribution is sort of like file sharing with a password. To send someone an encrypted message, you need their public key, so they would have to send it to you in order to encrypt a message to send back. Upon receiving the encrypted message, you would then use your private key to decrypt it and read the message. RSA is fairly simple to understand once you remove the mathematical functions from it.

When using RSA to send encrypted messages, you want to be sure that the person you’re sending and receiving messages with is who they say they are. For this reason, there is what’s known as “signing messages.” Since anyone can use your public key, RSA can be utilized to confirm the source of the encryption by “signing” it with your private key. This allows the sender to know that the message was, in fact, from the person of interest.

To conclude, RSA is one of the simplest forms of cryptosystems that can be learned and used by anyone. Most computer programmers learn it while they are in school, and some people are self-taught. If cryptosystems are something that intrigues you, then you might want to try your hand at RSA coding.