Arianna Huffington

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty Images

Some Uber employees are frustrated by board member Arianna Huffington’s role overseeing the ride-hail giant’s internal investigation into sexism allegations, citing her close relationship with CEO Travis Kalanick and recent comments to the media.

Huffington, who joined Uber’s board last year, will on Friday afternoon meet with a group of female engineers who plan to raise concerns about whether she can lead an impartial review of the company’s workplace practices, particularly after remarks she made on CNN. CNN posted an interview on Monday that quoted Huffington saying sexism was not a “systemic problem” at Uber. On a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Huffington said she was referring to sexual harassment, rather than sexism broadly, and that CNN had updated its story accordingly. Still, the interview unnerved some Uber employees, who told BuzzFeed News they were already concerned about whether Huffington could help lead an independent investigation into Uber’s workplace culture, given her relationship to the company and friendship with Kalanick.

“Everyone is mad with her. There is no way she is independent,” one employee told BuzzFeed. “Sexism versus sexual harassment — both are really demoralizing. Her correction doesn’t matter. Giving an interview without the investigation finishing was incredibly unprofessional and careless.”

Huffington told Uber employees in an email after her call with press Tuesday that “I want to assure you that whether sexism or sexual harassment is a systemic problem at Uber will ultimately be determined by the investigation that Eric Holder and Tammy Albarrán are conducting. And that the board and management team will act upon whatever their investigation finds so that we can create a completely equitable workplace where there is zero tolerance for both sexual harassment and sexism.”

“She’s on the board. She’s qualified. But she needs to be honest about her conflicts here,” another employee said. Referring to the interview with CNN, the employee said sexism and sexual harassment could be considered on “the same spectrum,” and also noted that it’s troubling she made comments while the investigation is ongoing.

“Arianna made this huge fuss over pedantics,” the employee said. “Before this, people internally were already definitely worried about her not being impartial.”

After Susan Fowler Rigetti published a viral blog post alleging systemic sexism at the ride-hail giant on Feb. 19, Uber hired former attorney general Eric Holder to lead an internal investigation into its workplace environment. Huffington was named to a board subcommittee that will receive and push to implement the results of the investigation, and has become a public face for Uber as it weathers this particular public relations crisis. She appeared alongside Kalanick at the company’s first all-hands meeting after the sexism allegations became public.

On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Huffington said the investigation — which is being conducted with the help of Tammy Albarrán, a partner at Holder's law firm — will be “completely thorough, completely independent,” and presented to a board subcommittee she sits on. “I am not conducting the investigation,” she said. Earlier in the call, Huffington noted that she had spoken to “hundreds of employees either personally or on the phone” in recent weeks.

Several Uber employees told BuzzFeed News that Kalanick’s handling of Uber’s recent scandals has shaken their confidence in him as a leader, noting that they’ve been frustrated by his apologies. “I’m extremely unhappy and disappointed in the leadership,” said one. Other employees raised an eyebrow over Huffington’s recent comments, noting that she publicly described Kalanick as “a close friend” in a post announcing her decision to join Uber’s board and told employees at an all-hands meeting that the Uber CEO had been so upset by allegations of sexism at the company that she had to cook him an omelet. (Huffington also referenced making Kalanick an omelet in her “Why I&039;m Joining Uber’s Board” post.) “Glad she is taking precious care of the CEO while there is a serious disconnect going on,” one employee said of Huffington.

Huffington declined comment.

This isn’t the first time Uber employees have raised concerns about Huffington. In the winter of 2016, sources say, a T-shirt for Huffington’s Thrive Global health and wellness company with the slogan “#SLEEPYOURWAYTOTHETOP” sparked outrage among women at Uber, some of whom believed it was available only in women&039;s sizes. A number of Uber employees, complained to Huffington and Uber senior vice president Ryan Graves. The shirt was ultimately removed from the Thrive website.

Reached for comment, Thrive sent BuzzFeed News a screenshot indicating the company also sold the shirt in men’s sizes.

In her call with reporters on Tuesday, Huffington said part of her goal is to help make Uber “the most admired workplace.”

“I want to say, as I said at the first all-hands with Travis when all this started, that this is very personal for me,” she said. “I want to make sure…no woman ever has to choose between advancing her career and completely unacceptable treatment.”

Uber declined comment.

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram at 732-615-8367. You can also send an encrypted email to priya.anand@buzzfeed.com using the PGP key found here. Find our SecureDrop information here.

Quelle: <a href="Uber Employees Are Questioning Arianna Huffington’s Role In The Internal Sexism Investigation“>BuzzFeed

25. März 201725. März 2017

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Apple Says Hackers Threatening To Wipe iPhones Haven’t Breached iCloud

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

A hacking group that appears to be London-based and calls itself the Turkish Crime Family is boasting to media outlets that it has access to hundreds of millions of iCloud accounts. It’s threatening to wipe the devices associated with them if Apple does not pay a ransom of $75,000 in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or $100,000 in iTunes gift cards by April 7, as first reported by Motherboard. But Apple denies the group’s claims and says it will not pay the ransom.

Apple said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, “There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID. The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.”

“We're actively monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to user accounts and are working with law enforcement to identify the criminals involved. To protect against these type of attacks, we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites, and turn on two-factor authentication,” Apple continued in the statement.

The veracity of the hack is in question, especially since the number of accounts the group said it had access to shifted from 300 million to 559 million during its discussion with Motherboard, and ZDNet reported 250 million accounts. Turkish Crime Family has reportedly reached out to multiple media outlets, a tactic that hacking groups sometimes use to bolster their own reputations as serious threats by gaining attention and inflating panic.

ZDNet obtained a sample — 54 accounts — of the hacked accounts and found that although all of the credentials were legitimate, only a few were unique to iCloud, meaning that some data could have been aggregated from other compromised sources instead of a direct iCloud hack. ZDnet also said that the breach could have occurred between 2011 and 2015.

Hamza Shaban contributed reporting for this article.

Quelle: <a href="Apple Says Hackers Threatening To Wipe iPhones Haven’t Breached iCloud“>BuzzFeed

25. März 201725. März 2017

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President Trump Just Re-Announced Another Old Corporate Hiring Plan

Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge ® outside the West Wing after meeting President Trump March 24.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

In a ritual that is becoming familiar to White House watchers, President Trump, flanked by businessmen, announced on Friday that another American company has told him it plans to go on a hiring and investment spree during his presidency.

And in a detail that has become equally familiar, those hiring and investment plans were recycled from plans first revealed more than 18 months ago.

This time around it was Charter Communications, the cable company that last year bought Time Warner Cable for $55 billion. As Charter was pushing for the detail to be approved by US regulators, it said it would hire about 20,000 new workers if the deal went through, as part of a plan to bring outsourced call centers back to the US. The takeover was approved and finalized in the Spring of 2016.

“We've already begun insourcing efforts for the new company. The process of insourcing will take several years and will require that we hire 20,000 people,” Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said on a call with analysts last August. “That process has already started, as we are building Charter&039;s first Spanish-language call center in McAllen, Texas, with approximately 600 seats.”

On Friday, Rutledge stood behind President Trump as those numbers were re-announced in the Oval Office.

“Today I am thrilled to announce that Charter Communications has just committed to investing $25 billion dollars here in the United States and is committed further to hiring 20,000 American workers over the next four years,” Trump said. “Charter is also committed to completely ending its offshore call centers…and to base 100% of its call centers in the United States…Tom will be opening a brand new, beautiful call center in McAllen, Texas…where they will create 600 new American jobs.”

The $25 billion, four-year investment also seems like business as usual for the company. Charter&039;s total capital expenditure last year, not counting expenses for the merger, was $7.1 billion according to its financial filings. That means that if investments remained at 2016 levels for the next four years, the would invest $28 billion.

On Friday, Rutledge gave the company&039;s ongoing capital expenditure a fresh coat of paint, saying the company was “excited about the opportunity in the right regulatory climate and the right tax climate to make major infrastructure investments.

“We&039;re going to spend $25 billion predicated on the regulatory consistency and efficiency we expect as a country,” Rutledge said.

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Justin Venech, a Charter spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News that today&039;s announcement went above and beyond previous comments.

“We have spoken before about plans to hire 20,000 before, it wasn&039;t a commitment” Venech said, adding that the specific four-year timeframe for the hires was a new commitment. He said that the spending on infrastructure was “based on the deregulatory policies of the administration and the FCC.”

The Federal Communications Commission&039;s new chairman, Ajit Pai, is a longtime critic of many Obama-era regulations on cable companies, including the FCC&039;s net neutrality rules. Congress just voted to lift privacy rules that FCC voted to impose on internet providers last year.

This is far from the first time an old hiring or investment announcement has been given a new lease of life by the white house. In February, Intel said it would invest $7 billion in a Arizona semiconductor factory, again with its chief executive standing text to Trump in the Oval Office. The company had previously announced its investment in the factory almost exactly six years earlier, alongside President Obama.

During the transition, Japanese telecom conglomerate and Sprint owner SoftBank, said that it would invest $50 billion into the United States and create 50,000 new jobs over the next four years. SoftBank&039;s chief executive Masayoshi Son was already working on creating a $100 billion fund for technology investments, with funding from Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this month, a long-running program by Exxon-Mobil to invest in energy facilities in Texas and Louisiana was announced again by both Exxon and President Trump, with a White House statement lifting text word-for-word from Exxon&039;s press release.

Quelle: <a href="President Trump Just Re-Announced Another Old Corporate Hiring Plan“>BuzzFeed

25. März 201725. März 2017

da Agency

Why Uber’s Board Is Standing By Its CEO

Reuters / Danish Siddiqui

Whether to keep Travis Kalanick as CEO of Uber, amid an ever-expanding controversy, isn’t up to his fellow board members. It’s up to Travis Kalanick.

During a call with reporters on Tuesday, Arianna Huffington, the media entrepreneur who sits on Uber’s board, answered a question about whether the board had considered asking Kalanick to step down as chief executive amid a proliferation of scandals that includes — in no particular order — accusations of systemic sexism, a nasty customer revolt against Kalanick's decision to join President Trump’s economic advisory council, allegations of trade secret theft, claims that the company used one of its logistics tools to evade law enforcement, and Kalanick’s embarrassing public admission that he needs to seek “leadership help” and “grow up.”

Huffington’s response was definitive and perfunctory. “It’s not something that’s been addressed,” she replied. “We don’t expect it to come up.”

Uber’s board may profess to have full confidence in Kalanick, but it likely little recourse to do otherwise. Kalanick, cofounder Garrett Camp, and Ryan Graves — the company’s first employee — each hold a significant number of so-called super-voting shares, which carry 10 votes per share, according to sources and Uber’s articles of incorporation.

Together, the trio controls as many as nine of the company&039;s 11 board seats, according to The Information, making the minority of independent directors essentially powerless. If Kalanick were to step down, it would have to be of his own volition. And as Huffington said, that&039;s not something the board expects to come up.

Uber declined comment.

“If he controls the votes to replace the board, it’s pretty unlikely he would be replaced by the board.”

Charles Elson, a professor and director of the University of Delaware’s John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, said that at private companies like Uber, board members are more like advisers than monitors of behavior.

“Put it this way,” he said. “If he controls the votes to replace the board, it’s pretty unlikely he would be replaced by the board. If they disagree, they just leave. You got the votes, you do what you wish.”

In February, Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor wrote in an open letter to Uber’s board that they were “frustrated and disappointed” in the company. “We feel we have hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside,” they wrote.

“Can Travis stay as CEO? I really haven&039;t had any significant discussions with investors in Uber on that subject,” Mitch Kapor told BuzzFeed News earlier this month.

Kapor attributed the lack of discussion on the topic to the idea that Kalanick has proven in his time as Uber’s CEO that he can “revolutionize urban transportation globally.”

“He&039;s already done something that nobody thought he could do. That suggests he has special capabilities,” Kapor told BuzzFeed. “So then the question is, does he get engaged in a sustained way about his self-transformation and a transformation of the culture?”

It&039;s not unheard of for a well-funded Silicon Valley startup to replace its CEO amid scandal. In early 2016, Zenefits, the prominent human resources startup, faced a regulatory crisis so severe that the board moved to oust the founding CEO, Parker Conrad. But the details of that episode help illustrate why such a parting of ways is so unusual.

“Can Travis stay as CEO? I really haven&039;t had any significant discussions with investors in Uber on that subject.”

Like Kalanick at Uber, Conrad had an iron grip on Zenefits. Though he had received funding from powerful venture capitalists, he still controlled three of the four seats on Zenefits&039; board, making it virtually impossible for him to be fired. So even when others at the company recognized that Zenefits faced potentially serious legal and financial trouble, Conrad could dictate the terms of his own departure.

Unlike Uber, Zenefits had a powerful No. 2 executive in David Sacks, who had joined about a year before the scandal erupted, and who led the effort to remove Conrad, according to people familiar with the matter. But Sacks&039;s power was limited, and he had to make a case to Conrad about why the company — and Conrad&039;s sizable stake in it — would be better off without him. Between the time when Conrad verbally agreed to resign and when he actually signed the separation agreement, Sacks feared Conrad might change his mind, according to people familiar with Sacks&039;s thinking.

Conrad, with maximum leverage, was able to secure several sweeteners from Zenefits as conditions of his departure. In addition to keeping his Zenefits shares, he got a $130,000 severance payment and was permitted to keep unvested stock that would vest over the subsequent six months, BuzzFeed News has reported.

Later, Bloomberg News reported that Conrad regretted resigning, underscoring his awareness that the decision to leave was ultimately his alone.

On the conference call with reporters, Huffington outlined the company’s plan to “make Uber the most admired place to work in” and said she is a “big believer in people, leaders, companies being allowed to evolve.”

“I have seen personally Travis’s evolution,” she said. “It’s clear that both Uber and the ride-sharing industry would not be where we are today without Travis.”

Mitch Kapor struck a less conclusive tone as to whether Kalanick, a brash CEO who led the company through its regulatory battles worldwide and to its nearly $70 billion valuation, could bring Uber stability and change its culture.

“I don&039;t think it&039;s impossible,” Mitch Kapor said, but “I think the odds are against it.”

Quelle: <a href="Why Uber’s Board Is Standing By Its CEO“>BuzzFeed

24. März 201725. März 2017

da Agency

The K8sPort: Engaging Kubernetes Community One Activity at a Time

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Ryan Quackenbush, Advocacy Programs Manager at Apprenda, showing a new community portal for #Kubernetes advocates: the K8sPort. The K8sPort is a hub designed to help you, the Kubernetes community, earn credit for the hard work you’re putting forth in making this one of the most successful open source projects ever. Back at KubeCon Seattle in November, I presented a lightning talk of a preview of K8sPort. This hub, and our intentions in helping to drive this initiative in the community, grew out of a desire to help cultivate an engaged community of Kubernetes advocates. This is done through gamification in a community hub full of different activities called “challenges,” which are activities meant to help direct members of the community to attend various events and meetings, share and provide feedback on important content, answer questions posed on sites like Stack Overflow, and more. By completing these challenges, you collect points and can redeem them for different types of rewards and experiences, examples of which include charitable donations, gift certificates, conference tickets and more. As advocates complete challenges and gain points, they’ll earn performance-related badges, move up in community tiers and participate in a fun community leaderboard. My presentation at KubeCon, simply put, was a call for early signups. Those who’ve been piloting the program have, for the most part, had positive things to say about their experiences.I know I'm the only one playing with @K8sPort but it may be the most important thing the Kubernetes community has.— Justin Garrison (@rothgar) November 22, 2016“Great way of improving the community and documentation. The gamification of Kubernetes gave me more insight into the stack as well.” – Jonas Kint, Devops Engineer at Showpad“A great way to engage with the kubernetes project and also help the community. Fun stuff.” – Kevin Duane, Systems Engineer at The Walt Disney Company“K8sPort seems like an awesome idea for incentivising giving back to the community in a way that will hopefully cause more valuable help from more people than might usually be helping.” – William Stewart, Site Reliability Engineer at SuperbalistToday I am pleased to announce that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is making the K8sPort generally available to the entire contributing community! We’ve simplified the signup process by allowing would-be advocates to authenticate and register through the use of their existing GitHub accounts.If you’re a contributing member of the Kubernetes community and you have an active GitHub account tied to the Kubernetes repository at GitHub, you can authenticate using your GitHub credentials and gain access to the K8sPort.Beyond the challenges that get posted regularly, community members will be recognized and compile points for things they’re already doing today. This will be accomplished through the K8sPort’s full integration with GitHub and the core Kubernetes repository. Once you authenticate, you’ll automatically begin earning points and recognition for various contributions — including logging issues, making pull requests, code commits & more.If you’re interested in joining the advocacy hub, please join us at k8sport.org! We hope you’re as excited about what you see as we are to continue to build it and present it to you.For a quick walkthrough on K8sPort authentication and the hub itself, see this quick demo, below.–Ryan Quackenbush, Advocacy Programs Manager, Apprenda
Quelle: kubernetes

24. März 201724. März 2017

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Twitter Is Considering Offering An Enhanced Version Of Its Service — For A Price

A mockup included in a Twitter survey shows an enhanced version of the company's Tweetdeck app.

Twitter

Twitter is considering offering a paid version of its service, the company confirmed Thursday.

The paid version, geared to power users, would feature a number of enhanced features made available in the Twitter-owned app Tweetdeck. It would not supplant the current version of Twitter. The company is still determining what features it would include in such a product, and is surveying some users to figure out what features they&039;d be most interested in.

“We’re conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we&039;re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals.”

Twitter is not currently developing the product, and it would continue to offer a free version of Tweetdeck if it decided to roll the paid product out. The survey used language describing what the product “will be,” making it seem like an inevitability.

“This premium tool set will provide valuable viewing, posting, and signaling tools like alerts, trends and activity analysis, advanced analytics, and composing and posting tools all in one customizable dashboard,” the survey said. “It will be designed to make it easier than ever to keep up with multiple interests, grow your audience, and see even more great content and information in real-time.”

Twitter is trading far below its IPO price and is struggling to grow its revenue, so a subscription product for power users could be one method to squeeze some cash out of those who get the most out of the platform.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Is Considering Offering An Enhanced Version Of Its Service — For A Price“>BuzzFeed

24. März 201724. März 2017

da Agency

Instacart Just Settled A $4.6 Million Worker Lawsuit

Instacart employees fulfill orders for delivery in downtown Los Angeles, California.

Patrick T. Fallon / Getty Images

The Instacart workers who buy and deliver groceries just won a small victory — the grocery-on-demand startup just settled a class action lawsuit to the tune of $4.6 million.

The lawsuit alleged that workers were owed back pay because Instacart should have classified them as employees, not independent contractors; the payout, per Recode, will be as much as $5,000 for three workers named in the suit, while others will receive “a couple hundred dollars” at most, depending on a points-based system that ranks how much they worked. The settlement won’t, however, grant workers employee status.

“We have settled a nationwide class action lawsuit, primarily over the classification of our shoppers as independent contractors. This is a positive, early resolution for the Company, and we look forward to finalizing the settlement,” Instacart said in a statement.

In 2015, workers filed an initial suit against Instacart, claiming they had been misclassified as contractors, and were owed for the benefits and protections they would have earned as employees of the company. At the end of 2016, after the first case was moved to private arbitration, the same firm, Arns Law, refiled a second lawsuit, hoping to get the workers their day in court.

Since the first lawsuit was filed, Instacart has reconfigured its workforce, changing its in-store shoppers status to employees, while delivery workers remained contractors. But it has also repeatedly cut wages, and made it more difficult for customers to tip, which workers say has severely impacted their overall earnings.

Though Instacart workers will remain contractors under this settlement, they have won changes that might alleviate some of their concerns about tipping.

In a copy of the settlement agreement obtained by Recode, Instacart promised to modify its app's user interface to make “the differences between the Service fee and tip” more clear for customers.

Last fall, BuzzFeed News reported that when Instacart added a pooled service fee in addition to tips, some workers wages fell by around 30%, because customers weren&039;t tipping as much. Some workers were so frustrated with the pooled service fee they threatened to strike, and passed out flyers detailing how to tip in the new app to customers. When the second lawsuit was filed in December, it pointed to Instacart’s control over how tips are distributed as evidence that delivery workers should have been classified as employees.

Other on-demand startups that have faced class action lawsuits over worker classification include Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Washio, DoorDash, Homejoy and Caviar. Of those, the most high profile settlements so far have been the Uber and Lyft cases. (Like Instacart, Uber and Lyft successfully avoided trial by jury because workers agreed to private arbitration when they signed their contracts. Instacart has since made arbitration opt-out, as has Postmates.) Uber’s settlement, which could have forced Uber to pay out $100 million, is still being negotiated. Lyft recently finalized its $27 million settlement with drivers.

In October, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta told BuzzFeed News that, in order for the company to continue to grow, some delivery workers were going to have take a paycut. Earlier this month, Instacart finalized a funding round of $400 million, bringing the company’s valuation to $3.4 billion.

In an email to workers announcing the funding, Mehta said he planned to hold a town hall to answer any questions they might have about the news. “This is a big milestone for our company. It will allow us to continue to make our product and tools better for you and the customers,” Mehta wrote. “It will also allow us to invest in marketing as well as rapidly expand, so that many more customers across the country can use our service.”

Some shoppers noted that the influx of cash did not bring with it news of a pay raise. In fact, in some markets, wages for Instacart workers have continued to fall since the beginning of the year. For example, screenshots of pay rates reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that in Hollywood, the per-order base rate has fallen from a little below $10 at the beginning of the year to as low as $7.50 by the end of February.

Deirdre Big, a worker in Boulder, said she “won’t be sticking around Instacart much longer” after rates fell from around $7.55 per order at the end of January to $6.25 at the end of February.

This is a developing story; further details to follow.

Quelle: <a href="Instacart Just Settled A .6 Million Worker Lawsuit“>BuzzFeed

24. März 201724. März 2017

da Agency

Announcing Support for Multi-member Consortium Blockchain Networks on Azure

As your blockchain application development efforts and pilots mature, we realize that the requirements for the underlying consortium network will change, and that you will need to easily and securely create and deploy across multiple regions and support members comprised from organizations that exist within separate administrative and trust boundaries. We are excited to announce expansion of our blockchain support on Azure to be the first public cloud that enables multi-member consortium blockchain networks addressing enterprise scenarios that require a deployment of a private network across Azure regions, subscriptions, and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenants.

As we work with customers, we see scenarios divide into three common topologies:

1. Single organization, multiple subscriptions: This is a common topology when divisions in an organization do not trust each other, for example when one division is auditing another division. Each division has its own footprint, but they are physically separated in different subscriptions across the same Azure AD tenant.

2. Multiple organizations, private: This is the true consortium scenario where each organization will have its own footprint and subscriptions, Azure AD tenants, and regions are all different. Given enterprise IT requirements, the services deployed must not be publicly accessible on the internet, even though communication will occur across organizations.

3. Multiple organizations, public-facing: Similar to the above topology, but in industries, enterprises, or scenarios where IT requirements allow or require the services deployed to be accessible to the public, over the internet. This simplifies the network connectivity requirements for the distributed system.

Today, we are releasing a set of solution templates in the Azure Marketplace that address the first two topologies configuring multi-region and multi-member Ethereum Consortium Blockchain Networks with a simple multi-step process through the Azure Portal or cmdline. The first template deploys and configures the footprint for the initial consortium member (or region), while the second template deploys, connects, and configures additional members (or regions) to form the overarching private network. If you are still experimenting, we suggest using the simpler single subscription deployment solution released in November.

These solution templates are designed to make it easier and quicker to deploy and configure a multi-member consortium Ethereum network with minimal Azure and Ethereum knowledge. With a handful of user inputs and a single-click deployment, each member can provision their network footprint, using Microsoft Azure compute, networking, and storage services across the globe. Each member's network footprint consists of a set of load-balanced transaction nodes with which an application or user can interact to submit transactions, a set of mining nodes to record transactions, and a VPN gateway. A subsequent connection step connects the gateways to create a fully configured multi-member blockchain network.

A multi-member network architecture is illustrated below.

It is important to note that to whom a member connects is not dictated by the template. The consortium should determine the network connectivity model, whether hub and spoke or mesh.

For more information about the solution, you can visit our guided walkthrough.

As with our first blockchain solution, rather than spending hours building out and configuring the infrastructure and networking across organizations, we have automated these time-consuming pieces to allow you to focus on building out the consortium and your production pilots.

Let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or additional requests once you try out these new blockchain solutions. We are excited to help you expand your blockchain deployments to true multi-party topologies.
Quelle: Azure

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram at 732-615-8367. You can also send an encrypted email to priya.anand@buzzfeed.com using the PGP key found here. Find our SecureDrop information here.

T-Mobile said today that it will start labeling scam calls in caller ID.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai said robocalls are the #1 consumer complaint his bureau receives.

Which isn&039;t surprising.