When browsing to a secure website, its customary to find an SSL certificate protecting the communication between the client and the server. This is usually working quite well, until the point of where the certificate on the server side gets stolen or otherwise broken into. The keygen HTML tag solves this problem by adding another layer to the protection by creating a private key that is stored in the local keystore, and a public key that is packaged and sent to the server.

In addition to this, a challenge attribute may be set in the HTML code, to further increase the complexity of the secure connection between client and server. The private key will be stored in the users browser certificate store, which is the only downfall for a regular user, as browsers gets bugged, deleted, flushed and the laptop with the installed browser most likely gets changed every couple of years.

While this may not work on a large scale, such as internet banking, at least at the moment, it would be a perfect fit for companies with staff connecting to internal network applications. The keygen tag in HTML is used this way:

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<form>
<keygen name="pubkey" challenge="randomchars">
<input type="submit" name="createcert" value="Generate">
</form>

A lot of good documentation of how to implement this feature can be found here or here

For internal communication on a private network, when staff is accessing mail or other features on the local network, consider using keygen.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is probably the most talked about subject world wide. Its game changing nature and redefinition of what money is, has completely taken people with storm. Bitcoin is not only just a game changer, but its technical complexity offers innovations that competes with the birth and innovation the internet itself offered us.

Worthy things to know about Bitcoin is the applications themselves, build around Bitcoin or based on Bitcoin. Since the financial instrument, Bitcoin, is a technical project, the understanding will pay off more. Now on to the tools of the trade.

• Vanitygen - Innovative tool for people wishing to generate their own unique Bitcoin payment address
• Multibit – An alternative Bitcoin client
• Electrum – Another alternative Bitcoin client
• Armory – And one more alternative client for Bitcoin
• NCcurses – Want to trade on MtGox with a bot? This is it!
• Eggdrop Bot – Stay online 24/7 with a bot on IRC. Get all news and log all events!
• Mining Explorer – Monitor your miners through this great application!
• Bitcoin SMS Alert – Get an SMS if the price hits a certain number
• BitGit – A ton of open source applications on Git
• Namecoin - A decentralized, open DNS system based on the bitcoin technology.
• FindaBitcoin – A website that lets you add your Bitcoin website for free. A lot of resources can be found here

This list should get most people started and keep you well in the loop of all Bitcoin technical development. In general for all developers the Bitcointalk.org forums as well as Github is the place to find relevant information. Please share any new tools with us and we will put them on our website.

For those that are unaware of what frameworks are, here is a quick rundown.

- Bootstrap framework is a HTML5 based collection of ready made functions

- The framework is pure HTML5 and works with any browser

- The framework comes with its own CSS style

- The framework contains only client side code

- The framework is composed of multiple modules ready to copy and paste where people see fit, as well as Javascript driven events

The main difference of using a framework versus a CMS portal is that the framework is more code and less point and click. This is especially good for developers that want to focus on their server side functions rather than having to go through legacy code and obscure php3 functions that are either defunct or bugged. It also gives developers the peace of mind to work with their server side functions while knowing that all client side interface is neatly build in a hierarchy that has been thoroughly tested by the open source community.

Bootstrap is nice to work with, really really nice actually. Not only is the code at the official site very well explained, and not only is the CSS that comes with it also perfectly integrated, but the Javascripts that comes with Bootstrap makes it stand out as a very versatile framework.

Bootstrap is mostly being used, from the looks of it, for admin interface systems, with a plethora of templates available through places like themefores. Its functional GUI and logical setup allows for some really interesting interfaces to be made for staff that potentially ends up sitting with a system.

Forking Bootstrap has obviously been done, and this is where it really shows value. The numerous hacks, edits and extensive libraries that has spun out of Bootstrap offers front end developers and GUI guru’s a near limitless chance to make complex interfaces client side.

On Bootsnip there is a list of a number of extensions for Bootstrap that should fit any developer. Save time, start using Bootstrap, it works and it works well!

For front end development, if setting up a completely new website, Bootstrap can in certain cases be useful, but in some others be tedious to work with, since its flexibility to skin the style is more or less inked in the fabric of Bootstrap itself. Not to say you cannot use it for a front end development, but CMS portals are more commonly used for front end development.

In our last blog post, DNA storage was looking as a reality to come to our computers, probably being the first technology mix of two carbon based systems and silicon based systems. DNA computers, however would rely on calculating the ones and zeros through biologically build systems, relying on DNA, biochemistry and biomolecular computing.

The problem with traditional computers is multitasking, also known as multi-threading, which lead to multi-core processors in order to meet the demands on calculation parallel processes. Despite the speed of our current transistors, capable of crunching billions of calculations per second, its still far inferior to a biological system, that can treat calculations multi threaded, and concurrent.

Computing using biological molecules or DNA computation was fully realized in 1994 when L. Adleman managed to solve the Hamiltonian Path Problem with the use of DNA. Solving an instance of a directed graph through 7 nodes proved the massive parallelism of DNA molecules. A DNA computer works the same as an electronic computer, which uses digital logic to create the 3 logic gates AND, OR and NOT. This is naturally done using DNA enzymes.

Molecular computation & synthetic biology

Synthetic biology has recently given DNA computers a boost, as biological systems have started to take shape performing tasks they were originally not ment to. MIT scientists have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the cell’s DNA and passed on for dozens of generations.

Ray Kurzweil“Our computers aren’t going to be these distinct rectangular devices we carry around. We are going to merge with them.” I second that.

Cells are nothing but hardware and DNA is nothing but software, and computer-assisted genetic design will give us the ability to make viruses and vaccines. Our bodies can repair themselves and this is also a field that is being explored in bio-molecular computing where a molecular computer can repair itself if it detects a flaw.

This opens up huge opportunities and more specialized fields of computing as the biological world and the electronic world will merge. DNA can build itself up from scratch and become anything it wants and self assemble. We can only shrink silicon so much.

Developing a material that could directly talk to living tissues would dramatically change the game for implants. In the future, it’s not far fetched to imagine how this integrated system could improve implants and be used to monitor and control embedded sensors in living things.

The research field of DNA computers is vast, with several teams making discoveries on a weekly basis, further enhancing the possibility that our computers one day, may be of a more familiar matter to us than ever.

DNA storage has a vast advantage over storing data on a magnetic disk, or a solid state disk. It does not require electricity to be read/written, and it can last for much longer, as well as it stores higher data intensity.  Encoding data into DNA allows for storage space of petabytes, and DNA-based storage scheme could be scaled far beyond current global information volumes and offers a realistic technology for large-scale, long-term and infrequently accessed digital archiving.

While the cost for such data encoding is quite expensive, $12,400 per megabyte, the researchers say that current technology trends are reducing DNA synthesis costs every year, which means that their DNA encoding scheme could be cost-effective within a decade if not less, considering the development being made with synthetic DNA and the need for cheap DNA sequencing and related DNA studies.

DNA storage is long lasting

DNA library does not contain maintenance as it does not change with time, something that cannot be said about how we stored information on floppy drives, cd’s, mini disks and other storage mediums that are obsolete now. As more and more information gets lots due to advances being made in storage space and storage read/write, a more universal approach is needed, and DNA seems to be the logical choice to this.

While the high cost of DNA storage is the obstacle at the moment and the entire process of scaling this up to facilitate all the storage hungry computers, petabyte storage that takes up less space than a dust corn sounds like a solution for data intense groups, such as CERN, SETI@HOME, FOLDING@HOME and other research groups that stores several petabytes of information. CERN for instance is throwing out a lot of potentially important data, due to constrains of storage.

How to read and write the data

Computer data is in binary, while each location in a DNA molecule can hold any one of four bases (A, T, C, and G). Reading the data you simply sequence it, just as if you were sequencing the human genome, and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. The language of DNA is digital, but not binary. Where binary encoding has 0 and 1 to work with, DNA has 4 positions, T, C, G and A.

There is only one way to encode ‘a’ to binary: 10110001. However, there are 256 ways to encode ‘a’ to DNA: cGTaaacG or aTTacccT or aTGaaccG to name a few. A self made hacker has taken a look into how to work with DNA to and from Binary representation here

More storage is the future!

DNA storage promises unheard of storage space compared to our current harddrives, and looking at how computing is turning into hardware driven by more novel inventions DNA is most likely one of those future capabilities our computers will have. Another invention that is currently being looked into is Quartz glass storage, by Hitachi, promising high storage intensity and added benefits such as storing the data in warm locations, whereas DNA needs to be stored cold and dark.

Whichever storage medium wins in the future is most likely up to whomever can mass produce cheap and versatile medium’s of storage, and doing it fast enough. While DNA storage may seem as a solution to bridging the molecular world and the electronic world, quartz holds the leading spot in the race for being versatile and already undergoing development by a multi national company.

ASIC stands for Application-specific integrated circuit, and does exactly what it sounds like, one specific thing it has been designed for. In this case, the new ASIC device is all about mining Bitcoin’s or, hashing blocks on the Bitcoin decentralized network, in order to clear transactions.

While FPGA’s can be reprogrammed to be used in a large variety of different functions, an ASIC device is hardware locked to a certain task . It is brute but it certainly shows its weight when a certain computational task has to be performed over and over again.

While a large number of people were awaiting ASIC devices to come from multiple vendors since last year in the summer, it proved that none of those could deliver, and failed miserably despite their marketing campaigns. The winners came to be BitSynCom, a Chinese company run by a young brilliant man, releasing the so-called Avalon ASIC miner. A second batch is now under way, and preorders are taken by the time of writing of this article.

Originally two test ASIC’s were shipped, one to a leading Bitcoin developer, Jeff Garzik and the Bitcoin foundation both confirming the ASIC devices hashing with pictures and video, finally putting an end to the endless speculation of working ASIC devices, which can be seen here and here

At the same time it was announced by ASICMiner another company, selling shares for ASIC hardware that they are ready to ship their ASIC devices, claiming second throne in the ASIC race if their projections hold.

The Bitcoin network is forever changed and this proves that Bitcoin is at the very limit of innovation and ingenuity. Whole new business are springing up around Bitcoin, created by Satoshi Nakamoto, and driving forth a new era of finance. The ASIC miners are a mayor step in the right direction as they will be a determinant factor to secure the network against abuse from rogue parties in the future. The ASIC miners are capable of hashing an outstanding amount of SHA-256 data, which leaves any FPGA, GPU and CPU completely out of reach to attack, harm or otherwise disturb the Bitcoin network. A great time for Bitcoin, once again proving that it stands even more firm as the world most secure data transaction system.

The Launch Party

On top of the added security there are different plans that offer different level of space.

• Pro I - 500GB of storage and 1TB of transfers for €9.99
• Pro II - 4TB of storage with 4TB of transfers for €19.99
• Pro III - 4TB of storage with 8TB of transfers for €29.99

From the looks of things this dwarfs Dropbox and Google Drive, and on top of that add encryption to everything.

After digging around we found the source files for the javascript that handles the encryption for Mega. They can be downloaded at the following urls:

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/rsa.js

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/crypto.js

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/keygen.js

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/mouse.js

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/base64.js

https://eu.static.mega.co.nz/hex.js

What is however most intriguing about this file storage option is the option for third party to signup and host files in the shared Mega cloud. Said otherwise that means anyone with some serious storage, but without any guarantee for getting a piece of the hosting market can sign up to Mega and earn to host files. Obviously being the host does not mean you have access to the keys, nor giving you access to any of the files.

The new website has been heavily browsed in the past 24 hours and Kim claims that more than 100.000 registrations occurred in its first hour. Right now at the time of writing of this post the website seems down, but for future reference please visit the website here: http://mega.co.nz/

Spintronics studies the properties of the electron spin and improving the efficiency of electronic devices by utilizing a electron’s spin state. Albert Fert, the pioneer of spintronics that discovered magnetoresistance, a phenomenon that has revolutionized hard disks, is working on further improving hard-drive reading/writing by exploring the spin of electrons which makes it possible to control the motion of electrons in magnetic metals like iron or nickel.

Spin is a quantum mechanical property that arises when the rotational momentum of a particle, in this case an electron, creates a tiny magnetic field and acts as a state of storage. It stores data since the spin of the electron can be either up or down, thus representing the binary storage we are familiar with, the ones and the zero’s to represent data. Another interesting side effect from storing data through spintronics technology is however, spin-based storage does not disappear when the electrical current stops.

Spintronics based silicon chip developed by Biqin Huang, and Douwe Monsma, of Cambridge NanoTech in Cambridge.

Obviously people are not researching this technology “just” to create another way of storage. The fundamental  problem we have today with storage is transistors and other components we build on the nanoscale level are so dense that even their infinitesimal individual currents are combining to produce scorching heat.

Researches at Berkley are working on spintronics as well, trying to perfect the technology. MRAM being one of the technologies utilizing spin. Everspin Technologies, is now selling magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM, a kind of spintronic memory. Freescale, Honeywell, IBM, Infineon, Micron, and Toshiba, as well as start-ups and university research groups—are busy investigating MRAM technology of four, rather than two, defined states for a logic bit translates into higher data transfer speed, greater processing power, increased memory density, and increased storage capacity, provided the properties of electron spin can be sufficiently controlled for practical applications. Future MRAM chips could combine all the advantages of existing memories with none of their shortcomings.

Below are the different types of memory/storage and their distinguished differences. Basically its the old vs. new, spintronics vs non spintronics memory storage.

Non-Spintronics based RAM and storage, volatile

SRAM (Static RAM)

• Superfast read and write speeds; low power
• Large memory cells take up considerable space

DRAM (Dynamic RAM) (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, SDRAM

• High density; low cost; fast read and write speeds
• Constant refreshing of data drains power

Spintronics based RAM and storage, non-volatile

NVRAM (Flash), however not spintronics based

• Non-volatile (does not loose data stored once plugged off)
• Slow compared to Dynamic memory, and has short life span

MRAM (Magnetoresistive RAM)

• High density has fast read and write speeds uses low power and can be overwritten unlimited times

Racetrack memory (Experimental Memory Type)

• Storage density higher than MRAM, higher read/write performance
• It is not known if Racetrack memory can offer significant advantages to a later version of MRAM yet though

While digging into the different types of RAM is not something we can cover in this article, it still gives a nice overview of a rather important part of RAM, the spintronics part. While different materials may come in use in the future, such as Graphene or Carbon Nanotubes to create RAM modules, and the scale will be in the nano scale of things with exotic carbon material, a spintronics based RAM type is favored regardless of the material used. A leading company in this field is Everspin

This requires a little explanation before moving on to the best WordPress plugins. First of all WordPress is easy to install, easy to maintain and its documentation throughout the internet on what looks like a billion different topics is far exceeding what any other CMS has ever achieved. Another mayor factor is that very few people actually require a full Python framework, or a full php framework to have their website build around, since most functions in most start up projects are simple and exists for WordPress. Thirdly, if they do not exist, building them is far easier vs. Drupal or a custom framework.

However most of the success that WordPress is enjoying is definitely from its vast amount of plugins. With a brilliant one click install for even complex functions WordPress sets a standard that is hard to follow. Some of the plugins have become so popular in themselves that they have almost completely build themselves into third party projects that themselves offer plugins on top of the original plugin. Other plugins are so well made they in turn become paid for as their functionality is undeniable. And in some instances third party developed premium templates usually offers a number of functions found in plugins, but which have become an integral part of the templates, without further need to look for plugins.  Lets take a look at the plugins that are a must for every new website.

Auto SEO Tags - From a SEO point of view, Auto SEO Tags is one of the most important plugins you can imagine to install. It auto adds SEO tags in a SEO cloud area on your website, based on the words people went to your site by. It also adds a snowball effect to the entire website as search robots will see the tags, and value them into their ranking, as well as more are automatically added, or the current ones are made bigger the more people search them. Install this if you like traffic to your website!

Contact Form 7 – Does this even need any introduction? One of the most widely used plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7. It offers anyone without any know-how of database programming of general php programming a fast and efficient way to create contact forms. Contact Form 7 is one of those plugins that has grown so massive that plugins have been developed to work in conjunction with it.

A plugin worthy to mention is Contact Form 7 Dynamic Text Extension which allows the users to populate the Contact Form 7 with dynamic fields among other usages. This obviously gives you the option to split a form up in multiple pages.

Another plugin allows Contact Form 7 to save the information directly to a database. The plugin is called Contact Form to DB Extension

There is obviously also a CAPTCHA plugin called Sweet Captcha that gives CAPTCHA options to Contact Form 7.

WP-Mail-SMTP – Is a great plugin, especially to work together with the Contact Form 7 plugin, as php-mail fails on most servers or gets caught by firewalls and/or mail assassins. Route all your traffic through SMTP and it should be all fine.

WP Page Numbers – A quite essential plugin if your WordPress is used to blog, which most people use WordPress for. Instead of loosing the option to have ALL your blogs listed on your blog, this will create a page 2, 3 etc. This was no posts get lost, and you keep the linking structure in place.

Show Content Only – A very useful plugin if you want to publish the core functionality of a script, without the CSS and other page influenced objects. For instance you can create a contact form and port it over to other systems and use a different CSS rather than porting over the entire WordPress post/page + CSS and javascripts.

WP Google Analytics – Want to install Google Analytics easily on your website? This is the plugin for it!

Google XMP Sitemap Generator – Another must have Google/Search Engine related plugin. This one generates a sitemap based on your WordPress pagination and pings the most popular search engines.

Custom CSS for Posts and Pages (CCSS) - For some reason some people may want to use custom CSS on certain pages in their template without defining that CSS in the main styles.css This plugin offers easy integration that way.

SEO Ultimate - Is exactly what this plugin will do for you. The more than 100 to-remember-SEO-rules are more or less embedded into this script. Its highly customizable, highly efficient and should in all websites ALWAYS be used.

Twitter, Facebook Like, Google Plus – Same plugin we have working on our website. We activated the “like and share functions” on our page through this script. Gives your users a better way to spread the news about your website.

Twitter Tools – This plugin is a fast track to add all your WordPress posts to Twitter. Once you publish here, you publish on Twitter. Easy and simple.

Redirection – A plugin that is capable of redirecting your dead pages to specific pages. Very useful if you delete old posts or pages and those have been linked to from other sources. This way you dont loose that important SEO juice and your users wont feel they come to yet another dead site on the internet.

Due to the high amount of WordPress plugins we will continue this post into a new post, reserved for Premium Plugins and more complex plugins. The above mentioned should however be a great start for anyone selecting WordPress and their primary engine for a new website or blog.

Another big reason for moving everything to HTML5 is now Google’s unequivocal support for the language, thus HTML5 is going to be a big integral part in most websites for the future. Choosing a framework, that has already laid the foundation and maybe throwing in some CSS3 frameworks would get most web developers quickly up to speed when developing new sites.

The power of HTML5 combined with CCS3 is actually so great that complete web apps for Chrome and Android are possible to build. Throw in some Javascripts and some jQuery and you have yourself the option to make great functionality for any front end application or even games. When picking a framework, keep some things in mind:

• A web framework is NOT a CMS system such as Drupal or WordPress. It is a collection of functions (code) that can be implemented in development environments
• Choose a framework that is documented and supported by a large amount of developers and at least have some activity on stackoverflow
• Make sure the documentation is at least available in some sort for support of scripting such as Python or Perl or php
• Try multiple frameworks and stick to what suits your style and needs, dont go for popularity voting or sheep mentality

One of the most known HTML5 frameworks is the HTML5 boilerplate framework that offers great support and activity by its founders and core developers. It has amazing CCS3 support and offers great custom setup for what you would want to include in your “boilerplate” setup.

Then there is Kendo UI, a HTML5 framework that relies on jQuery and is being used in multiple web apps and mobile applications. The good thing about Kendo UI is that it has a proven concept, since it offers a CMS example, and great dev tools for .NET people.

Last but not least, if you are into CSS then 52frameworks is the choice to go by. It offers magnificent support for CCS3 and the cross browser support is outstanding.

HTML5 is a great reason to why web designers, developers and in general front end designers have a more practical saying in the matters. Especially people that are not well versed in php, .NET, Python, Perl or other server side scripting languages will be of great use as HTML5 finally clearly defines a standard for front end development. And this is not only for the web part of things, but as well for front end designs in apps for multiple environments such as Android, iOS, Blackberry and the soon to come Ubuntu phone system.

At the end of the day it is all about practicality and standardization of code and implementation of code. Especially since multiple developers are assumed to work on successful applications, a framework might be a better foundation for the code instead of everyone chipping in junk code that takes longer to decipher than SHA3.