In many ways, and in many countries police investigation has struggled to keep up with the rise of cyber crime. There are numerous issues and challenges and it’s not surprising that most authorities have been under sever pressure to cope with even investigating many of the crimes. Cyber criminals are of course spread all over the world which is one of the primary issues, a victim will likely be in a completely different country than the attacker.
This obviously makes investigating the crimes much more difficult as often the attacker will base themselves in countries with weaker digital laws. They will also use VPNs and proxies in order to hide their real location and circumvent investigations. For example an attacker in Europe could route their internet connection through something like a sneaker proxy (a specialized proxy server with a residential IP address)
Obviously developing digital crime investigation units takes lots of time, effort and of course resources. This is important factor and one in which most countries have put in legislation to assist with. The proceeds of digital crime can be significant and can be used to offset some of the extensive costs.
The German authorities have recently just made about $14 million directly from the sale of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that they confiscated in criminal probes.
It was actually an unexpected emergency sale, according to a Monday report in the Tagesspiegel paper, because the Bavarian justice treasury was concerned about the wild changes in cryptocurrency prices. Emergency sales are normally generally kept back for perishable products, such as food, or items which commonly decrease in market value, for example cars.
The cryptocurrencies which were actually sold off– 1,312 Bitcoins, 1,399 Bitcoin Cash tokens, 1,312 Bitcoin Gold tokens and 220 Ether– were primarily confiscated in a crackdown on a platform called LuL.to, which was unlawfully offering copyrighted ebooks and audiobooks at very low prices. The web site was seized and blocked out last June, its own operators were arrested and its assets entered into a fund which is normally used for law enforcement resourcing.
The sale occurred over a couple of months, in a series of more than 1,600 transactions on a German cryptocurrency forex platform. According to Der Tagesspiegel, the profits totalled just over EUR12 million ($ 13.9 million.).
The selloff kicked off in late February, the moment the price of one Bitcoin had collapsed from its December highs– almost $20,000– to around $11,400. Over the course of the sale, the price dipped below $7,000 and cleared $9,000 once again. Ever since, it has fallen once more to a price of $7,230, therefore the cops’ timing looks pretty good for now, unless Bitcoin produces a surprising bounce back in the future.
This was a record-breaking sale of seized possessions within Germany, but American powers have been making even more money off seized cryptocurrencies for some time. The Justice Department got $48 million in October last year from the sale of Bitcoins which came from Ross “Dread Pirate Roberts” Ulbricht. The sale in fact took place a couple years earlier, when one Bitcoin was actually worth a mere $330 or so, but Ulbricht, the operator of the Silk Road online drug market, had disputed the legitimacy of the forfeiture and took a while to drop his claim.
Solving these crimes can be extremely time consuming especially when the criminals are skilled. Hiding their locations using VPNs and proxies make it very difficult to identify even the origin of the attacker. Even if you can identify individual IP addresses of proxies there’s still problems. Many of the most sophisticated attacks route their connection through multiple layers and even use rotating residential proxies which switch addresses every few minutes.
For many years, computing lessons in schools certainly in the UK where linked directly with the mathematics departments. Indeed I was among the first to experience a UK computer curriculum and this was pretty much dumped on our unsuspecting maths tutors who could barely turn on the console linked to our central mainframe. Obviously there’s a link between maths and computer programming, yet it’s certainly not the case that all mathematicians make good computer programmers.
Maths does form part of many higher education computer courses though, as a high level of numeracy is essential for any meaningful programming. Unfortunately often the history of mathematics is missed in computer linked maths curriculum presumably due to the time pressures. It’s an interesting subject though and one that there are quite a few decent TV shows and documentaries about if you look carefully – my favorite is called the History of Mathematics and was broadcast on the BBC last year. It’s not currently on the archive but is rebroadcast regularly, all you need ais a simple VPN to watch BBC TV abroad so it’s worth checking occasionally.
So what about the history of maths, how did it develop? Well here’s a very, brief introduction. Following on from when human communication develops, the next stage it is safe to assume is that human beings start counting. Even in primitive time, their fingers and thumbs supply nature’s abacus. The decimal system is definitely no accident. Ten has certainly been the basis of the majority of counting systems in history.
The moment any form of record is required, marks in a stick or a stone are the natural solution. In the earliest enduring signs of a counting system, numbers are developed with a repeated sign for each group of 10 followed by an additional repeated sign for 1. Math can not efficiently develop up until an effective numerical system is in place. This is a late arrival in the story of maths, necessitating both the concept of place value and the idea of zero.
As a result, the early past history of mathematics is that of geometry and algebra. At their elementary levels they both are simply mirror images of each other. A number revealed as two squared could additionally be described as the area of a square with 2 as the span of each side. Equally 2 cubed is the volume of a cube with 2 as the length of each dimension.
Babylon and Egypt: from 1750 BC
The very first enduring examples of geometrical and algebraic calculations derive from Babylon and Egypt in about 1750 BC
Of the 2 Babylon is far more advanced, with quite complex algebraic problems featuring on cuneiform tablets. A common Babylonian maths question will certainly be expressed in geometrical terms, however, the nature of its solution is ultimately algebraic (see a Babylonian maths question). Due to the fact that the numerical system is awkward, with a foundation of 60, computation depends predominately on tables (sums already worked out, with the solution given for future use), and numerous such tables endure on the tablets.
Egyptian mathematics is less sophisticated than that of Babylon; but an entire papyrus on the subject survives. Known as the Rhind papyrus, it was copied from earlier sources by the scribe Ahmes in about 1550 BC. It incorporates brainteasers such as problem 24: – What is the size of the heap if the heap and one seventh of the heap amount to 19?
The papyrus does suggest one essential element of algebra, in the usage of a basic algebraic symbol – in this case h or aha, indicating ‘quantity’ – for an unknown number.
Pythagoras: 6th century BC.
Early mathematics has actually reached the modern world mostly through the work of Greeks in the classical period, building on the Babylonian custom. A major figure among the very early Greek mathematicians is Pythagoras.
In around 529 BC Pythagoras relocates from Greece to a Greek colony at Crotona, in the heel of Italy. There he establishes a philosophical sect based on the view that numbers are the underlying and changeless truth of the universe. He and his supporters very soon make precisely the sort of breakthroughs to reinforce this numerical faith.
The Pythagoreans can show, for instance, that musical notes can vary in accordance with the length of a resonating string; whatever length of string a lute player starts with, if it is doubled the note consistently falls by precisely an octave (still the basis of the scale in music nowadays).
The followers of Pythagoras are also in a position to demonstrate that whatever the shape of a triangle, its three angles always add up to the sum total of two right angles (180 degrees).
The most well-known equation in classical mathematics is known still as the Pythagorean theorem: in any right-angle triangle the square of the longest side (the hypotenuse) is equal to the sum total of the squares of the two other sides. It is actually unlikely that the proof of this goes back to Pythagoras himself. But the theorem is typical of the accomplishments of Greek mathematicians, with their primary passion in geometry.
Additional
Accessing international sources of both TV programmes and even educational content is becoming increasingly difficult online. Over the last few years many sites have been putting up blocks and filters in order to prevent access from specific locations or control who their content is available too. Previously you could just access simple and free proxies to bypass these blocks but this has also become more difficult too with many sites restricting access based on the classification of your IP address. Nowadays you need either a sophisticated VPN service for some sites or to invest in blocks of residential proxies like these advertised as Sneaker proxies. These are actually servers with residential IP addresses which can be used to bypass most blocks, they are often called sneaker proxies as they are commonly used to buy limited availability sneakers online.
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