Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

Senior C++ developer:
"Writing a custom encryption algorithm from scratch for our communications platform? Every developer knows that is an absolute no go, cryptography should be left to cryptography veterans!"

Same guy, year later:
"Blockchains? Hold my espresso, I can totally write a whitepaper on cryptography, write some shitty code with nice branding, and get millions from an ICO"

Guy: We should build a Blockchain based review website.
Me: Why does it have to use a Blockchain?
Guy: That way we can verify that only real people are leaving reviews and not bots.
Me: That's not really how Blockchains work.
Guy: Blockchain!

*bunch of if statements*

Friend shouts proudly everywhere : I implemented an AI!

Me : but that's not how AI works

Friend : but it works just as an AI, so it is one, who cares?

😥

Encrypted social network based on blockchains

I have read everything available about blockchains and I still didn't understand why a company should need one.

I don't know if the problem is me or them

- "We are Vreo, the company who has just invented the next generation of advertising in video games."
- Oh, cool let's read more.
- "We are using blockchains to store data."
- Holy fck why, no, don't.

I must be getting old. I seem to be the only one confused about 20,000 people successfully paying $60 to buy a digital 3d object from star wars last night. Disney made over a million in 4 seconds.
NFT's powered through blockchains. Feels like a pyramid scheme for the 21st Century. Everyone needs to calm down.

I think blockchains are ridiculously overhyped. What about you?

I see a lot of complaining of managers talking about blockchains, but I would like to know if someone actually had to make a blockchain system because of managers and for what purpose? It seems to be completely useless for most of the cases

Has anyone read any research papers looking into the application of differential cryptanalysis to blockchains and mining, and if so, could you point me in the right direction?

I'm bored and looking for something interesting to read on my day off. More importantly I'm ignorant enough of the subject to entertain the possibility that there might be some possible (if not plausible) cross-pollination of ideas between the two domains.

The college's Dean of Projects, when evaluating my first year project, which was using blockchains.

DoP: "So, we have this cool cloud system, incase you need to mine or something, come contact me and I'll give you access."

ME: "Sir, this project is distributed and uses computers in a network to protect data, it is not cryptocurrency."

DoP: "Yes, I understand, but we have this system here that can mine a lot, I overheard one of my staff talk about how we were wasting money by not using the system to do such stuff."

ME: "Sure, I'll have it setup to mine some altcoin then."

DoP: "Yeah, well I don't know anything about this stuff, can you do it all, yourself. I'll give you Admin access"

ME AFTER GETTING ADMIN ACCESS

"HOLLY F#@%*! Now I know where these sites are hosted!"

NOTE: I know that every other college has this problem, but the staff is the least innocent.

# This isn't THAT bad, but since I never had any collab before this one, this is the worst so far

I'm in a web development school where we need to do a yearly project. At the beginning, we started with the idea of doing an online wallet that would handle crypto-currencied (#blockchains), and other currencies too.
On the paper that sounds good, but the dude decided to create a NodeJS server api, and let's be honest, this was a gas factory. I couldn't help him because he was too fast in his ideas, and the third member was a bit more useful because he was the one creating the mobile app, so all he needed was an url that the dude couln't manage to create.

After a few weeks he started over the project, then over again a few weeks later, before coming to us and saying it was too difficult. We said "yeah, I mean you're own your own since the beginning, no wonders!" "Uh do you guys care if we change the whole project to do something else? Like a CV library"

Went a moment where he tried to over sell some incredible (read "overly common") features that already existed 10 years ago on some famous websites (ie. Monster), and he then eventually told me that this idea came from his new job, and that they needed this library. So we would have to work for his company for free. Nice.
The third guy and me came with a new idea (image recognition with IA and stuff), and we saw the dude maybe 5 times the whole week while we're supposed to work together

EY and ConsenSys announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol with Microsoft which is an open source initiative that combines cryptography, messaging and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project.

Past approaches to blockchain technology have had difficulty meeting the highest standards of privacy, security and performance required by corporate IT departments. Overcoming these issues is the goal of the Baseline Protocol.

John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet added, “A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”

Source : ConsenSys