During Microsoft's Ignite Technology conference in Atlanta their CEO, Satya Nadella, revealed the newest piece of technology. It's a powerful piece of silicon inside their cloud-oriented information centers. It gives Microsoft's Azure platform a tremendous advantage in the artificial intelligence field.

Microsoft has installed Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in 15 countries across five different continents, all within the past two years. Microsoft dubbed the project "Project Catapult". FPGA acts similarly to a computers CPU and GPU, but they can be reprogrammed on the fly to best satisfy a need.

"What this means is that in addition to getting the efficiency of hardware,  you also get the flexibility because you can change their functionality on the fly. This new architecture that we've built effectively puts an FPGA-based AI supercomputer into our global, hyper scale cloud. We get awesome speed, scale, and efficiency. It will change what's possible for AI," a statement from Microsoft said. Microsoft showed the ability to translate five billion words from one language to another in under a tenth of a second. This is half the amount it takes for a human to blink.

"That crazy speed shows the raw power of what we've developed in our intelligent cloud," the statement went on. "Microsoft is the first to have its global hyper scale cloud enhanced with FGPA's. It gives us the most powerful, the most flexible and the most intelligent clouds. It's ten times the AI capability of the largest existing supercomputer. We can solve problems with AI that weren't even possible before."

Riding on the Staten Island Ferry this morning, I checked Coindesk to get my morning fill of recent news in the Bitcoin/Blockchain community. I opened up Bailey Reutzel’s article, which read “post-trade settlement services for small to medium sized enterprises will soon be in development.” e-BIT has decided to halt this discussion in order to inform the masses that a major component of this technology has already been developed and the rest of the components are patent pending.

e-BIT has been in stealth development since 2012, originally a Bitcoin mining company, our path has pivoted in recent years. e-BIT’s beta service ‘xChain’ was developed to revolutionize the way SME and financial institutions use their legacy systems. We’re currently willing to demo this product for any financial institution or private investor in the New York City area.

 e-BIT’s website launched ahead of the Go-Distributed: Trade Conference in St. Louis two weeks ago, and is starting to gain organic traction on social media platforms along with developers and institutions previously contacted by the Blockchain start-up. e-BIT’s 7 person team is working with advisor and investor Bradford Folkens, who is best known for Engineering breakthrough technology for the mobile app CamFind. e-BIT is located at 40 Wall St. in NYC and can be contacted at contact@e-bit.io.

New studies show that the Postal Service is unknowingly aiding the opiate epidemic going on in the United States right now.

Authorities state that packages containing heroin and other opioids are being shipped right to door steps, using the mail systems. Packages that have been intercepted by the USPS have been traced back as far as China and India. “It comes from our postal system and their postal system into the United States. Unbelievable. This poison is coming in the mail to our communities,” Senator Rob Portman of Ohio said. “It’s easy to do because, unlike private carriers, think UPS and FedEx, in the mail system you can send a package without having any information attached to it. It shouldn’t be that easy, and it doesn’t have to be.”

Congress had recently taken action to help fight the abuse of prescription medication and heroin. A recent rise in the number of opiate related overdoses drew attention to the abuse of synthetic opiates that enter the United States from Mexico, China, and India. The foreign manufacturers of these drugs are using their countries mail systems to send the regular looking packages to USPS sorting facilities to be inspected by customs and shipped off. The problem being that most of these packages don’t come with any data attacked to them, making it harder for customs to identify illegal shipments before they’re in the system.

Newton, Ohio police chief, Tom Synan stated he got wind of heroin dealers in his area cutting their product with carfentanil. This is used to sedate sizable animals at zoos. This has been directly linked to over 200 overdoses within a week. It’s no wonder, considering it takes less than 2 ML to fully sedate a 2,000-pound elephant.

“This drug has never been intended for humans,” Synan stated. The Drug Enforcement Administration issued a warning on Thursday to law enforcement saying that it is often shipped direct from China, and has been linked to a significant number of overdose deaths in various parts of the country. In hopes of helping, legislation has been written that would force the Treasury to devise regulations requiring advanced electronic data be attacked to packages entering the U.S. postal system.

“The U.S. provides this advanced data information to foreign countries, and our postal system should require it from them. It will strengthen our homeland security and keep dangerous drugs out of America,” a filing of the bill stated.

“We continue to evaluate the bill’s language and share the goal of Sen. Portman and others calling for expanding efforts to keep illicit drugs and other dangerous materials out of the hands of the American public and maintaining the safety of our nation’s mail system,” David Partenheimer, a postal service spokesman said.

Ever wonder why anyone would want to steal your medical records? Wondering why hackers are targeting medical data instead of going after bank information and credit card details?

Medical records are being hacked, stolen, and sold on dark net markets as part of packages referred to as Fullz, or identity kits. These kits are used to help criminals' open fraud accounts, get credit cards, bank accounts, anything and everything you could imagine; and none of it's good. Private researcher James Scott co-authored a new report called, Your life, Repackaged and Resold: The Deep Web Exploitation of Health Sector Breach Victims. This report was made reality for the U.S. Senate by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

The report tells of the deep web, and how criminals will use this deep web to buy and sell health information, along with other data. Right after a medical data hack, the information won't be seen for days, weeks, even months and years. Eventually it resurfaces in the form of fullz, or identity kits.

"So, it will look like basic short-form ID theft material, but eventually the electronic health record will surface as a 'fullz'; the slang term on the deep web for a complete long-form document that contains all of the intricacies of a person's health history, preferred pharmacy, literally everything," the report states. "What happens is the people who purchase fullz then go to another vendor on the deep web for what's called 'dox', the slang term for documentation, where they then proceed to have passports, drivers' licenses, social security cards, all these things that will help the counterfeit imitation of the victim. So you have electronic health record that will typically go for $20 apiece, and you'll spend a couple hundred dollars on 'doxs' to support that identity, and once it's an identity kit, you can sell it for $1,500 to $2,000."

Recently, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump gave Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin permission to hack the U.S.

“Putin has let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. But we will defend the citizens of this country, and the Russians need to understand that. I think they’ve been treating it as almost a probing, how far will we go? How much will we do? And that’s why I was so shocked when Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans. That is just unacceptable,” Clinton stated.

“Russia, if your listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Lawyers for Clinton have turned over work related emails, but had deleted 1000’s that were about personal issues. James Comey, FBI Director, said that “During that month that Clinton should have known that some of the emails stored on that private server in her New York home were classified, but there isn’t enough evidence that she intentionally mishandled classified information.”

“That gives me a big problem,” Trump said. “After she gets a subpoena! She gets subpoenaed, and she gets rid of 33,000 emails? That gives me a problem. Now if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”

Trump attacked the DNC as well. His attack came after thousands of emails were published on WikiLeaks this past July. The emails showed who was leading, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, favored Clinton over competitor Bernie Sanders. Two days after that, Schultz stepped down from her position.

A campaign spokesman for Trump recently said that Trump had meant his comments to be taken as sarcasm, and not literally.

Microsoft’s newest venture, Project Springfield, has been revealed. It uses in-house testing technology for Windows and Office apps, as well as using whitebox fuzzing technology to sniff out flaws that lead to crashes.

Microsoft started testing a cloud-based bug detector. Microsoft is calling Project Springfield one of its most advanced tools when it comes to finding potentially harmful vulnerabilities. The project uses whitebox fuzzing. This technology is reported to have uncovered at least one third of the million-dollar software bugs while Microsoft was developing Windows 7. Microsoft reported using a component of Springfield called SAGE since 2000, to test its products before releasing them.

Project Springfield has SAGE bundled with other tools designed for fuzz testing. It also features a dashboard as well as other user interfaces to enable people without a security background to use the package with ease. As stated earlier, all tests are running from Microsoft’s Azure cloud online.

Reports state:
“With white fuzz testing, the system throws random inputs at software to find instances in which unforeseen actions cause software to crash. This testing is ideal for software regularly incorporating inputs like documents, images, videos, or other information that may not be trustworthy. Bad actors are sought out that could launch malicious attacks or crash a system. Whitebox fuzz testing uses artificial intelligence to ask a series of  “what if” questions and make decisions about what might cause a crash and signal a security concern.”

Microsoft previously used the name Project Springfield for a Popfly web page and mashup creation service. Microsoft stated that there is no relation to the two in anyway. They also stated that they are going to offer Project Springfield to customers with an evaluation period being offered for free.

The DAO Is An Obvious Success
It is always good to see cryptocurrency projects doing quite well, and The DAO offers something entirely different than we have seen before. As we explained in a previous article, this initiative will make money through ingenious ways, which has attracted a lot of attention from new and existing Ethereum holders.

However, no one expected this amount of money to be raised so quickly, as the campaign has surpassed the US$19m mark already. At the time of writing, close to 2 million ETH was found in the address associated with this crowdsale. Translating that to USD – at US$9.95 per ETH – we see a total of US$19,667,528.2. This is quite a significant amount in its own right, and it well surpasses the total amount of money Ethereum itself has raised in the past. Even though the US$18.5m raised during the Ethereum crowdsale was well above expectation, the numbers provided by The DAO show there is still a lot of room left for growth within this ecosystem.

It is not the first time an Ethereum-based project is raising a lot of money in quick succession, though. Just a few weeks ago, the DigixDAO crowdsale reached the US$5.5m target within the first 24 hours, which was stunning. Since The DAO has no hard cap in place, it remains to be seen where this will end.

Some people have predicted this project will raise over US$50m, and so far, the numbers seem to add up to make this a possibility. Whether or not that will be the case, remains to be seen. However, one thing’s for sure, though: The DAO crowdsale is a massive success, and a lot of money has been invested.