AI Grammar Clean Up

AI Grammar Clean Up — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Rclone

    Rclone

    Rclone is an open source, multi threaded, command line computer program to manage or migrate content on cloud and other high latency storage. Its capabilities include sync, transfer, crypt, cache, union, compress and mount. The rclone website lists supported backends including S3 and Google Drive. Descriptions of rclone often carry the strapline "Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage". Those prior to 2020 include the alternative "Rsync for Cloud Storage". Rclone is well known for its rclone sync and rclone mount commands. It provides further management functions analogous to those ordinarily used for files on local disks, but which tolerate some intermittent and unreliable service. Rclone is commonly used with media servers such as Plex, Emby or Jellyfin to stream content direct from consumer file storage services. Official Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Brew, Chocolatey, and other package managers include rclone. == History == Nick Craig-Wood was inspired by rsync. Concerns about the noise and power costs arising from home computer servers prompted him to embrace cloud storage and he began developing rclone as open source software in 2012 under the name swiftsync. Rclone was promoted to stable version 1.00 in July 2014. In May 2017, Amazon Drive barred new users of rclone and other upload utilities, citing security concerns. Amazon Drive had been advertised as offering unlimited storage for £55 per year. Amazon's AWS S3 service continues to support new rclone users. The original rclone logo was updated in September 2018. In March 2020, Nick Craig-Wood resigned from Memset Ltd, a cloud hosting company he founded, to focus on open source software. Amazon's AWS April 2020 public sector blog explained how the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center were using rclone in their Motuz tool to migrate very large biomedical research datasets in and out of AWS S3 object stores. In November 2020, rclone was updated to correct a weakness in the way it generated passwords. Passwords for encrypted remotes can be generated randomly by rclone or supplied by the user. In all versions of rclone from 1.49.0 to 1.53.2 the seed value for generated passwords was based on the number of seconds elapsed in the day, and therefore not truly random. CVE-2020-28924 recommended users upgrade to the latest version of rclone and check the passwords protecting their encrypted remotes. Release 1.55 of rclone in March 2021 included features sponsored by CERN and their CS3MESH4EOSC project. The work was EU funded to promote vendor-neutral application programming interfaces and protocols for synchronisation and sharing of academic data on cloud storage. == Backends and commands == Rclone supports the following services as backends. There are others, built on standard protocols such as WebDAV or S3, that work. WebDAV backends do not support rclone functionality dependent on server side checksum or modtime. Remotes are usually defined interactively from these backends, local disk, or memory (as S3), with rclone config. Rclone can further wrap those remotes with one or more of alias, chunk, compress, crypt or union, remotes. Once defined, the remotes are referenced by other rclone commands interchangeably with the local drive. Remote names are followed by a colon to distinguish them from local drives. For example, a remote example_remote containing a folder, or pseudofolder, myfolder is referred to within a command as a path example_remote:/myfolder. Rclone commands directly apply to remotes, or mount them for file access or streaming. With appropriate cache options the mount can be addressed as if a conventional, block level disk. Commands are provided to serve remotes over SFTP, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and DLNA. Commands can have sub-commands and flags. Filters determine which files on a remote that rclone commands are applied to. rclone rc passes commands or new parameters to existing rclone sessions and has an experimental web browser interface. === Crypt remotes === Rclone's crypt implements encryption of files at rest in cloud storage. It layers an encrypted remote over a pre-existing, cloud or other remote. Crypt is commonly used to encrypt / decrypt media, for streaming, on consumer storage services such as Google Drive. Rclone's configuration file contains the crypt password. The password can be lightly obfuscated, or the whole rclone.conf file can be encrypted. Crypt can either encrypt file content and name, or additionally full paths. In the latter case there is a potential clash with encryption for cloud backends, such as Microsoft OneDrive, having limited path lengths. Crypt remotes do not encrypt object modification time or size. The encryption mechanism for content, name and path is available, for scrutiny, on the rclone website. Key derivation is with scrypt. === Example syntax (Linux) === These examples describe paths and file names but object keys behave similarly. To recursively copy files from directory remote_stuff, at the remote xmpl, to directory stuff in the home folder:- -v enables logging and -P, progress information. By default rclone checks the file integrity (hash) after copy; can retry each file up to three times if the operation is interrupted; uses up to four parallel transfer threads, and does not apply bandwidth throttling. Running the above command again copies any new or changed files at the remote to the local folder but, like default rsync behaviour, will not delete from the local directory, files which have been removed from the remote. To additionally delete files from the local folder which have been removed from the remote - more like the behaviour of rsync with a --delete flag:- And to delete files from the source after they have been transferred to the local directory - more like the behaviour of rsync with a --remove-source-file flag:- To mount the remote directory at a mountpoint in the pre-existing, empty stuff directory in the home directory (the ampersand at the end makes the mount command run as a background process):- Default rclone syntax can be modified. Alternative transfer, filter, conflict and backend specific flags are available. Performance choices include number of concurrent transfer threads; chunk size; bandwidth limit profiling, and cache aggression. == Academic evaluation == In 2018, University of Kentucky researchers published a conference paper comparing use of rclone and other command line, cloud data transfer agents for big data. The paper was published as a result of funding by the National Science Foundation. Later that year, University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing examined the impact of rclone options on data transfer rates. == Rclone use at HPC research sites == Examples are University of Maryland, Iowa State University, Trinity College Dublin, NYU, BYU, Indiana University, CSC Finland, Utrecht University, University of Nebraska, University of Utah, North Carolina State University, Stony Brook, Tulane University, Washington State University, Georgia Tech, National Institutes of Health, Wharton, Yale, Harvard, Minnesota, Michigan State, Case Western Reserve University, University of South Dakota, Northern Arizona University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, University of Southern California, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and SURFnet. == Rclone and cybercrime == May 2020 reports stated rclone had been used by hackers to exploit Diebold Nixdorf ATMs with ProLock ransomware. The FBI issued a Flash Alert MI-000125-MW on May 4, 2020, in relation to the compromise. They issued a further, related alert 20200901–001 in September 2020. Attackers had exfiltrated / encrypted data from organisations involved in healthcare, construction, finance, and legal services. Multiple US government agencies, and industrial entities were affected. Researchers established the hackers spent about a month exploring the breached networks, using rclone to archive stolen data to cloud storage, before encrypting the target system. Reported targets included LaSalle County, and the city of Novi Sad. The FBI warned January 2021, in Private Industry Notification 20210106–001, of extortion activity using Egregor ransomware and rclone. Organisations worldwide had been threatened with public release of exfiltrated data. In some cases rclone had been disguised under the name svchost. Bookseller Barnes & Noble, US retailer Kmart, games developer Ubisoft and the Vancouver metro system have been reported as victims. An April 2021, cybersecurity investigation into SonicWall VPN zero-day vulnerability SNWLID-2021-0001 by FireEye's Mandiant team established attackers UNC2447 used rclone for reconnaissance and exfiltration of victims' files. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Analysis Report AR21-126A confirmed this use of rclone in FiveHands ransomware attacks. A June 2021, Microsoft Security Intelligence Twitter post identified use of rclone in BazaCall cyber attacks. The attackers sent emails e

    Read more →
  • Wide-column store

    Wide-column store

    A wide-column store (or extensible record store) is a type of NoSQL database. It uses tables, rows, and columns, but unlike a relational database, the names and format of the columns can vary from row to row in the same table. A wide-column store can be interpreted as a two-dimensional key–value store. Google's Bigtable is one of the prototypical examples of a wide-column store. == Wide-column stores versus columnar databases == Wide-column stores such as Bigtable and Apache Cassandra are not column stores in the original sense of the term, since their two-level structures do not use a columnar data layout. In genuine column stores, a columnar data layout is adopted such that each column is stored separately on disk. Wide-column stores do often support the notion of column families that are stored separately. However, each such column family typically contains multiple columns that are used together, similar to traditional relational database tables. Within a given column family, all data is stored in a row-by-row fashion, such that the columns for a given row are stored together, rather than each column being stored separately. Wide-column stores that support column families are also known as column family databases. == Notable examples == Notable wide-column stores include: Apache Accumulo Apache Cassandra Apache HBase Bigtable DataStax Enterprise (uses Apache Cassandra) DataStax Astra DB (uses Apache Cassandra) Hypertable Azure Tables ScyllaDB

    Read more →
  • Comparison of operating systems

    Comparison of operating systems

    These tables provide a comparison of operating systems, of computer devices, as listing general and technical information for a number of widely used and currently available PC or handheld (including smartphone and tablet computer) operating systems. The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers. Because of the large number and variety of available Linux distributions, they are all grouped under a single entry; see comparison of Linux distributions for a detailed comparison. There is also a variety of BSD and DOS operating systems, covered in comparison of BSD operating systems and comparison of DOS operating systems. == Nomenclature == The nomenclature for operating systems varies among providers and sometimes within providers. For purposes of this article the terms used are; kernel In some operating systems, the OS is split into a low level region called the kernel and higher level code that relies on the kernel. Typically the kernel implements processes but its code does not run as part of a process. hybrid kernel monolithic kernel Nucleus In some operating systems there is OS code permanently present in a contiguous region of memory addressable by unprivileged code; in IBM systems this is typically referred to as the nucleus. The nucleus typically contains both code that requires special privileges and code that can run in an unprivileged state. Typically some code in the nucleus runs in the context of a dispatching unit, e.g., address space, process, task, thread, while other code runs independent of any dispatching unit. In contemporary operating systems unprivileged applications cannot alter the nucleus. License and pricing policies vary widely among different systems. Among others, the tables below use the following terms: BSD BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. bundled The fee is included in the price of the hardware == General information == == Technical information == == Security == == Commands == For POSIX compliant (or partly compliant) systems like FreeBSD, Linux, macOS or Solaris, the basic commands are the same because they are standardized. NOTE: Linux systems may vary by distribution which specific program, or even 'command' is called, via the POSIX alias function. For example, if you wanted to use the DOS dir to give you a directory listing with one detailed file listing per line you could use alias dir='ls -lahF' (e.g. in a session configuration file).

    Read more →
  • Online service provider

    Online service provider

    An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup. In its original more limited definition, it referred only to a commercial computer communication service in which paid members could dial via a computer modem the service's private computer network and access various services and information resources such as bulletin board systems, downloadable files and programs, news articles, chat rooms, and electronic mail services. The term "online service" was also used in references to these dial-up services. The traditional dial-up online service differed from the modern Internet service provider in that they provided a large degree of content that was only accessible by those who subscribed to the online service, while ISP mostly serves to provide access to the Internet and generally provides little if any exclusive content of its own. In the U.S., the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) portion of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act has expanded the legal definition of online service in two different ways for different portions of the law. It states in section 512(k)(1): (A) As used in subsection (a), the term "service provider" means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received. (B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term "service provider" means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefore, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A). These broad definitions make it possible for numerous web businesses to benefit from the OCILLA. == History == The first commercial online services went live in 1969. CompuServe (owned in the 1980s and 1990s by H&R Block) and The Source (for a time owned by The Reader's Digest) are considered the first major online services created to serve the market of personal computer users. Utilizing text-based interfaces and menus, these services allowed anyone with a modem and communications software to use email, chat, news, financial and stock information, bulletin boards, special interest groups (SIGs), forums and general information. Subscribers could exchange email only with other subscribers of the same service. (For a time a service called DASnet carried mail among several online services, and CompuServe, MCI Mail, and other services experimented with X.400 protocols to exchange email until the Internet rendered these outmoded.) Other text-based online services followed such as Delphi, GEnie and MCI Mail. The 1980s also saw the rise of independent Computer Bulletin Boards, or BBSes. (Online services are not BBSes. An online service may contain an electronic bulletin board, but the term "BBS" is reserved for independent dialup, microcomputer-based services that are usually single-user systems.) The commercial services used pre-existing packet-switched (X.25) data communications networks, or the services' own networks (as with CompuServe). In either case, users dialed into local access points and were connected to remote computer centers where information and services were located. As with telephone service, subscribers paid by the minute, with separate day-time and evening/weekend rates. As the use of computers that supported color and graphics, such the Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, TI-99/4A, Apple II, and early IBM PC compatibles, increased, online services gradually developed framed or partially graphical information displays. Early services such as CompuServe added increasingly sophisticated graphics-based front end software to present their information, though they continued to offer text-based access for those who needed or preferred it. In 1985 Viewtron, which began as a Videotex service requiring a dedicated terminal, introduced software allowing home computer owners access. Beginning in the mid-1980s graphics based online services such as PlayNET, Prodigy, and Quantum Link (aka Q-Link) were developed. Quantum Link, which was based on Commodore-only Playnet software, later developed AppleLink Personal Edition, PC-Link (based on Tandy's DeskMate), and Promenade (for IBM), all of which (including Q-Link) were later combined as America Online. These online services presaged the web browser that would change global online life 10 years later. Before Quantum Link, Apple computer had developed its own service, called AppleLink, which was mostly a support network targeted at Apple dealers and developers. Later, Apple offered the short-lived eWorld, targeted at Mac consumers and based on the Mac version of the America Online software. Beginning in 1992, the Internet, which had previously been limited to government, academic, and corporate research settings, was opened to commercial entities. The first online service to offer Internet access was DELPHI, which had developed TCP/IP access much earlier, in connection with an environmental group that rated Internet access. The explosion of popularity of the World Wide Web in 1994 accelerated the development of the Internet as an information and communication resource for consumers and businesses. The sudden availability of low- to no-cost email and appearance of free independent web sites broke the business model that had supported the rise of the early online service industry. CompuServe, BIX, AOL, DELPHI, and Prodigy gradually added access to Internet e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, ftp, and to web sites. At the same time, they moved from usage-based billing to monthly subscriptions. Similarly, companies that paid to have AOL host their information or early online stores began to develop their own web sites, putting further stress on the economics of the online industry. Only the largest services like AOL (which later acquired CompuServe, just as CompuServe acquired The Source) were able to make the transition to the Internet-centric world. A new class of online service provider arose to provide access to the Internet, the internet service provider or ISP. Internet-only service providers like UUNET, The Pipeline, Panix, Netcom, the World, EarthLink, and MindSpring provided no content of their own, concentrating their efforts on making it easy for nontechnical users to install the various software required to "get online" before consumer operating systems came internet-enabled out of the box. In contrast to the online services' multitiered per-minute or per-hour rates, many ISPs offered flat-fee, unlimited access plans. Independent companies sprang up to offer access and packages to compete with the big networks (eg, the-wire.com, 1994 in Toronto and bway.net 1995 in New York). These providers first offered access through telephone and modem, just as did the early online services providers. By the early 2000s, these independent ISPs had largely been supplanted by high speed and broadband access through cable and phone companies, as well as wireless access. The importance of the online services industry was vital in "paving the road" for the information superhighway. When Mosaic and Netscape were released in 1994, they had a ready audience of more than 10 million people who were able to download their first web browser through an online service. Though ISPs quickly began offering software packages with setup to their customers, this brief period gave many users their first online experience. Two online services in particular, Prodigy and AOL, are often confused with the Internet, or the origins of the Internet. Prodigy's Chief Technical Officer said in 1999: "Eleven years ago, the Internet was just an intangible dream that Prodigy brought to life. Now it is a force to be reckoned with." Despite that statement, neither service provided the back bone for the Internet, nor did either start the Internet. == Online service interfaces == The first online service used a simple text-based interface in which content was largely text only and users made choices via a command prompt. This allowed just about any computer with a modem and terminal communications program the ability to access these text-based online services. CompuServe would later offer, with the advent of the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based PCs, a GUI interface program for their service. This provided a very rudimentary GUI interface. CompuServe continued to offer text-only access for those needing it. Online services like Prodigy and AOL developed their online service around a GUI and thus unlike CompuServe's early GUI-based software, these online services provided a more robust GUI interface. Early GUI-base

    Read more →
  • Knowledge graph embedding

    Knowledge graph embedding

    In representation learning, knowledge graph embedding (KGE), also called knowledge representation learning (KRL), or multi-relation learning, is a machine learning task of learning a low-dimensional representation of a knowledge graph's entities and relations while preserving their semantic meaning. Leveraging their embedded representation, knowledge graphs can be used for various applications such as link prediction, triple classification, entity recognition, clustering, and relation extraction. == Definition == A knowledge graph G = { E , R , F } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {G}}=\{E,R,F\}} is a collection of entities E {\displaystyle E} , relations R {\displaystyle R} , and facts F {\displaystyle F} . A fact is a triple ( h , r , t ) ∈ F {\displaystyle (h,r,t)\in F} that denotes a link r ∈ R {\displaystyle r\in R} between the head h ∈ E {\displaystyle h\in E} and the tail t ∈ E {\displaystyle t\in E} of the triple. Another notation that is often used in the literature to represent a triple (or fact) is ⟨ head , relation , tail ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle {\text{head}},{\text{relation}},{\text{tail}}\rangle } . This notation is called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A knowledge graph represents the knowledge related to a specific domain; leveraging this structured representation, it is possible to infer a piece of new knowledge from it after some refinement steps. However, nowadays, people have to deal with the sparsity of data and the computational inefficiency to use them in a real-world application. The embedding of a knowledge graph is a function that translates each entity and each relation into a vector of a given dimension d {\displaystyle d} , called embedding dimension. It is even possible to embed the entities and relations with different dimensions. The embedding vectors can then be used for other tasks. A knowledge graph embedding is characterized by four aspects: Representation space: The low-dimensional space in which the entities and relations are represented. Scoring function: A measure of the goodness of a triple-embedded representation. Encoding models: The modality in which the embedded representation of the entities and relations interact with each other. Additional information: Any additional information coming from the knowledge graph that can enrich the embedded representation. Usually, an ad hoc scoring function is integrated into the general scoring function for each additional piece of information. == Embedding procedure == All algorithms for creating a knowledge graph embedding follow the same approach. First, the embedding vectors are initialized to random values. Then, they are iteratively optimized using a training set of triples. In each iteration, a batch of size b {\displaystyle b} triples is sampled from the training set, and a triple from it is sampled and corrupted—i.e., a triple that does not represent a true fact in the knowledge graph. The corruption of a triple involves substituting the head or the tail (or both) of the triple with another entity that makes the fact false. The original triple and the corrupted triple are added in the training batch, and then the embeddings are updated, optimizing a scoring function. Iteration stops when a stop condition is reached. Usually, the stop condition depends on the overfitting of the training set. At the end, the learned embeddings should have extracted semantic meaning from the training triples and should correctly predict unseen true facts in the knowledge graph. === Pseudocode === The following is the pseudocode for the general embedding procedure. algorithm Compute entity and relation embeddings input: The training set S = { ( h , r , t ) } {\displaystyle S=\{(h,r,t)\}} , entity set E {\displaystyle E} , relation set R {\displaystyle R} , embedding dimension k {\displaystyle k} output: Entity and relation embeddings initialization: the entities e {\displaystyle e} and relations r {\displaystyle r} embeddings (vectors) are randomly initialized while stop condition do S b a t c h ← s a m p l e ( S , b ) {\displaystyle S_{batch}\leftarrow sample(S,b)} // Sample a batch from the training set for each ( h , r , t ) {\displaystyle (h,r,t)} in S b a t c h {\displaystyle S_{batch}} do ( h ′ , r , t ′ ) ← s a m p l e ( S ′ ) {\displaystyle (h',r,t')\leftarrow sample(S')} // Sample a corrupted fact T b a t c h ← T b a t c h ∪ { ( ( h , r , t ) , ( h ′ , r , t ′ ) ) } {\displaystyle T_{batch}\leftarrow T_{batch}\cup \{((h,r,t),(h',r,t'))\}} end for Update embeddings by minimizing the loss function end while == Performance indicators == These indexes are often used to measure the embedding quality of a model. The simplicity of the indexes makes them very suitable for evaluating the performance of an embedding algorithm even on a large scale. Given Q {\displaystyle {\ce {Q}}} as the set of all ranked predictions of a model, it is possible to define three different performance indexes: Hits@K, MR, and MRR. === Hits@K === Hits@K or in short, H@K, is a performance index that measures the probability to find the correct prediction in the first top K model predictions. Usually, it is used k = 10 {\displaystyle k=10} . Hits@K reflects the accuracy of an embedding model to predict the relation between two given triples correctly. Hits@K = | { q ∈ Q : q < k } | | Q | ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle ={\frac {|\{q\in Q:q Read more →

  • Shell Control Box

    Shell Control Box

    Shell Control Box (SCB) is a network security appliance that controls privileged access to remote IT systems, records activities in replayable audit trails, and prevents malicious actions. For example, it records as a system administrator updates a file server or a third-party network operator configures a router. The recorded audit trails can be replayed like a movie to review the events as they occurred. The content of the audit trails is indexed to make searching for events and automatic reporting possible. SCB is a Linux-based device developed by Balabit. It is an application level proxy gateway. In 2017, Balabit changed the name of the product to Privileged Session Management (PSM) and repositioned it as the core module of its Privileged Access Management solution. == Main Features == Balabit’s Privileged Session Management (PSM), Shell Control Box (SCB) is a device that controls, monitors, and audits remote administrative access to servers and network devices. It is a tool to oversee system administrators by controlling the encrypted connections used for administration. PSM (SCB) has full control over the SSH, RDP, Telnet, TN3270, TN5250, Citrix ICA, and VNC connections, providing a framework (with solid boundaries) for the work of the administrators. === Gateway Authentication === PSM (SCB) acts as an authentication gateway, enforcing strong authentication before users access IT assets. PSM can also integrate to user directories (for example, a Microsoft Active Directory) to resolve the group memberships of the users who access the protected servers. Credentials for accessing the server are retrieved transparently from PSM’s credential store or a third-party password management system by PSM impersonating the authenticated user. This automatic password retrieval protects the confidentiality of passwords as users can never access them. === Access Control === PSM controls and audits privileged access over the most wide-spread protocols such as SSH, RDP, or HTTP(s). The detailed access management helps to control who can access what and when on servers. It is also possible to control advanced features of the protocols, like the type of channels permitted. For example, unneeded channels like file transfer or file sharing can be disabled, reducing the security risk on the server. With PSM policies for privileged access can be enforced in one single system. === 4-eyes Authorization === To avoid accidental misconfiguration and other human errors, PSM supports the 4-eyes authorization principle. This is achieved by requiring an authorizer to allow administrators to access the server. The authorizer also has the possibility to monitor – and terminate - the session of the administrator in real-time, as if they were watching the same screen. === Real-time Monitoring and Session Termination === PSM can monitor the network traffic in real time, and execute various actions if a certain pattern (for example, a suspicious command, window title or text) appears on the screen. PSM can also detect specific patterns such as credit card numbers. In case of detecting a suspicious user action, PSM can send an e-mail alert or immediately terminate the connection. For example, PSM can block the connection before a destructive administrator command, such as the „rm” comes into effect. === Session Recording === PSM makes user activities traceable by recording them in tamper-proof and confidential audit trails. It records the selected sessions into encrypted, timestamped, and digitally signed audit trails. Audit trails can be browsed online, or followed real-time to monitor the activities of the users. PSM replays the recorded sessions just like a movie – actions of the users can be seen exactly as they appeared on their monitor. The Balabit Desktop Player enables fast forwarding during replays, searching for events (for example, typed commands or pressing Enter) and texts seen by the user. In the case of any problems (database manipulation, unexpected shutdown, etc.) the circumstances of the event are readily available in the trails, thus the cause of the incident can be identified. In addition to recording audit trails, transferred files can be also recorded and extracted for further analysis.

    Read more →
  • NNDB

    NNDB

    The Notable Names Database (NNDB) is an online database of biographical details of over 40,000 people. Soylent Communications, a sole proprietorship that also hosted the later defunct Rotten.com, describes NNDB as an "intelligence aggregator" of noteworthy persons, highlighting their interpersonal connections. The Rotten.com domain was registered in 1996 by former Apple and Netscape software engineer Thomas E. Dell, who was also known by his internet alias, "Soylent". == Entries == Each entry has an executive summary followed by a brief narrative about their life. It also lists date and cause of death if deceased. Businesspeople and government officials are listed with chronologies of their posts, positions, and board memberships. As of 2022, the site is no longer updated. == NNDB Mapper == The NNDB Mapper, a visual tool for exploring connections between people, was made available in May 2008. It required Adobe Flash 7.

    Read more →
  • MetaMask

    MetaMask

    MetaMask is a software cryptocurrency wallet developed by ConsenSys for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain and other EVM-compatible networks. It enables users to manage Ethereum accounts and connect to decentralized applications (dApps) via a browser extension or mobile app. As of early 2026, MetaMask reports over 100 million users worldwide. == Overview == MetaMask allows users to store and manage private keys, send and receive Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies and tokens (including ERC-20 and ERC-721 standards), broadcast transactions, and interact with dApps. dApps connect to the wallet via JavaScript interfaces, prompting users to approve signatures or transactions. The wallet features MetaMask Swaps, an in-app token swap aggregator sourcing liquidity from multiple decentralized exchanges (DEXs), with a service fee of 0.875%. In 2025, MetaMask introduced the MetaMask Rewards program (initially mobile-only), where users earn points for activities such as swaps, bridging, and referrals. Season 1 (October 2025 – January 2026) distributed over $30 million in Linea tokens and other perks to participants. == History == MetaMask launched in 2016 as open-source software under the MIT license. It initially supported browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Mobile versions were in closed beta from 2019 and publicly released for iOS and Android in September 2020. In August 2020, the license changed to a custom proprietary one. MetaMask Swaps launched on desktop in October 2020 and on mobile in March 2021. The Rewards program launched in late 2025 with Linea integration. == Criticism == MetaMask has faced criticism over privacy, including default analytics settings that share some user data (which can be disabled). Its reliance on Infura (acquired by ConsenSys in 2019) has raised concerns about centralization in Ethereum infrastructure. The wallet regularly issues warnings about phishing scams and fake airdrops impersonating MetaMask.

    Read more →
  • Rademacher complexity

    Rademacher complexity

    In computational learning theory (machine learning and theory of computation), Rademacher complexity, named after Hans Rademacher, measures richness of a class of sets with respect to a probability distribution. The concept can also be extended to real valued functions. == Definitions == === Rademacher complexity of a set === Given a set A ⊆ R m {\displaystyle A\subseteq \mathbb {R} ^{m}} , the Rademacher complexity of A is defined as follows: Rad ⁡ ( A ) := 1 m E σ [ sup a ∈ A ∑ i = 1 m σ i a i ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A):={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{a\in A}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}a_{i}\right]} where σ 1 , σ 2 , … , σ m {\displaystyle \sigma _{1},\sigma _{2},\dots ,\sigma _{m}} are independent random variables drawn from the Rademacher distribution i.e. Pr ( σ i = + 1 ) = Pr ( σ i = − 1 ) = 1 / 2 {\displaystyle \Pr(\sigma _{i}=+1)=\Pr(\sigma _{i}=-1)=1/2} for i ∈ { 1 , 2 , … , m } {\displaystyle i\in \{1,2,\dots ,m\}} , and a = ( a 1 , … , a m ) ∈ A {\displaystyle a=(a_{1},\ldots ,a_{m})\in A} . Some authors take the absolute value of the sum before taking the supremum, but if A {\displaystyle A} is symmetric this makes no difference. === Rademacher complexity of a function class === Let S = { z 1 , z 2 , … , z m } ⊆ Z {\displaystyle S=\{z_{1},z_{2},\dots ,z_{m}\}\subseteq Z} be a sample of points and consider a function class F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} of real-valued functions over Z {\displaystyle Z} . Then, the empirical Rademacher complexity of F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} given S {\displaystyle S} is defined as: Rad S ⁡ ( F ) = 1 m E σ [ sup f ∈ F | ∑ i = 1 m σ i f ( z i ) | ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{f\in {\mathcal {F}}}\left|\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}f(z_{i})\right|\right]} This can also be written using the previous definition: Rad S ⁡ ( F ) = Rad ⁡ ( F ∘ S ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})=\operatorname {Rad} ({\mathcal {F}}\circ S)} where F ∘ S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}\circ S} denotes function composition, i.e.: F ∘ S := { ( f ( z 1 ) , … , f ( z m ) ) ∣ f ∈ F } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}\circ S:=\{(f(z_{1}),\ldots ,f(z_{m}))\mid f\in {\mathcal {F}}\}} The worst case empirical Rademacher complexity is Rad ¯ m ( F ) = sup S = { z 1 , … , z m } Rad S ⁡ ( F ) {\displaystyle {\overline {\operatorname {Rad} }}_{m}({\mathcal {F}})=\sup _{S=\{z_{1},\dots ,z_{m}\}}\operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})} Let P {\displaystyle P} be a probability distribution over Z {\displaystyle Z} . The Rademacher complexity of the function class F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} with respect to P {\displaystyle P} for sample size m {\displaystyle m} is: Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) := E S ∼ P m [ Rad S ⁡ ( F ) ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{P,m}({\mathcal {F}}):=\mathbb {E} _{S\sim P^{m}}\left[\operatorname {Rad} _{S}({\mathcal {F}})\right]} where the above expectation is taken over an identically independently distributed (i.i.d.) sample S = ( z 1 , z 2 , … , z m ) {\displaystyle S=(z_{1},z_{2},\dots ,z_{m})} generated according to P {\displaystyle P} . == Intuition == The Rademacher complexity is typically applied on a function class of models that are used for classification, with the goal of measuring their ability to classify points drawn from a probability space under arbitrary labellings. When the function class is rich enough, it contains functions that can appropriately adapt for each arrangement of labels, simulated by the random draw of σ i {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}} under the expectation, so that this quantity in the sum is maximized. The Rademacher complexity of a set A {\displaystyle A} can be rewritten as Rad ⁡ ( A ) := 1 m E σ [ sup a ∈ A ∑ i = 1 m σ i a i ] = 1 m 2 m ∑ σ ∈ { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m [ sup a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ ] . {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A):={\frac {1}{m}}\mathbb {E} _{\sigma }\left[\sup _{a\in A}\sum _{i=1}^{m}\sigma _{i}a_{i}\right]={\frac {1}{{\sqrt {m}}2^{m}}}\sum _{\sigma \in \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}}\left[\sup _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle \right].} Each term in the summation is the farthest distance of the set A {\displaystyle A} from the origin, along a unit-length direction σ {\displaystyle \sigma } . The directions are along the vertices of a hypercube. Thus, we can also write it as Rad ⁡ ( A ) = 1 2 m 1 2 m − 1 ∑ σ ∈ { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m / { − 1 , + 1 } [ sup a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ − inf a ∈ A ⟨ σ , a ⟩ ] {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} (A)={\frac {1}{2{\sqrt {m}}}}{\frac {1}{2^{m-1}}}\sum _{\sigma \in \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}/\{-1,+1\}}\left[\sup _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle -\inf _{a\in A}\langle \sigma ,a\rangle \right]} Here, the set { − 1 / m , + 1 / m } m / { − 1 , + 1 } {\displaystyle \{-1/{\sqrt {m}},+1/{\sqrt {m}}\}^{m}/\{-1,+1\}} denotes half of the vertices of a hypercube, selected so that each diagonal has exactly one vertex selected. In words, this states that 2 m Rad ⁡ ( A ) {\displaystyle 2{\sqrt {m}}\operatorname {Rad} (A)} is precisely the average width of the set A {\displaystyle A} along all diagonal directions of a hypercube. == Examples == A singleton set has 0 width in any direction, so it has Rademacher complexity 0. The set A = { ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 2 ) } ⊆ R 2 {\displaystyle A=\{(1,1),(1,2)\}\subseteq \mathbb {R} ^{2}} has average width 1 / 2 {\displaystyle 1/{\sqrt {2}}} along the two diagonal directions of the square, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / 4 {\displaystyle 1/4} . The unit cube [ 0 , 1 ] m {\displaystyle [0,1]^{m}} has constant width m {\displaystyle {\sqrt {m}}} along the diagonal directions, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / 2 {\displaystyle 1/2} . Similarly, the unit cross-polytope { x ∈ R m : ‖ x ‖ 1 ≤ 1 } {\displaystyle \{x\in \mathbb {R} ^{m}:\|x\|_{1}\leq 1\}} has constant width 2 / m {\displaystyle 2/{\sqrt {m}}} along the diagonal directions, so it has Rademacher complexity 1 / m {\displaystyle 1/m} . == Using the Rademacher complexity == The Rademacher complexity can be used to derive data-dependent upper-bounds on the learnability of function classes. Intuitively, a function-class with smaller Rademacher complexity is easier to learn. === Bounding the representativeness === In machine learning, it is desired to have a training set that represents the true distribution of some sample data S {\displaystyle S} . This can be quantified using the notion of representativeness. Denote by P {\displaystyle P} the probability distribution from which the samples are drawn. Denote by H {\displaystyle H} the set of hypotheses (potential classifiers) and denote by F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} the corresponding set of error functions, i.e., for every hypothesis h ∈ H {\displaystyle h\in H} , there is a function f h ∈ F {\displaystyle f_{h}\in F} , that maps each training sample (features,label) to the error of the classifier h {\displaystyle h} (note in this case hypothesis and classifier are used interchangeably). For example, in the case that h {\displaystyle h} represents a binary classifier, the error function is a 0–1 loss function, i.e. the error function f h {\displaystyle f_{h}} returns 0 if h {\displaystyle h} correctly classifies a sample and 1 else. We omit the index and write f {\displaystyle f} instead of f h {\displaystyle f_{h}} when the underlying hypothesis is irrelevant. Define: L P ( f ) := E z ∼ P [ f ( z ) ] {\displaystyle L_{P}(f):=\mathbb {E} _{z\sim P}[f(z)]} – the expected error of some error function f ∈ F {\displaystyle f\in {\mathcal {F}}} on the real distribution P {\displaystyle P} ; L S ( f ) := 1 m ∑ i = 1 m f ( z i ) {\displaystyle L_{S}(f):={1 \over m}\sum _{i=1}^{m}f(z_{i})} – the estimated error of some error function f ∈ F {\displaystyle f\in {\mathcal {F}}} on the sample S {\displaystyle S} . The representativeness of the sample S {\displaystyle S} , with respect to P {\displaystyle P} and F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} , is defined as: Rep P ⁡ ( F , S ) := sup f ∈ F ( L P ( f ) − L S ( f ) ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rep} _{P}({\mathcal {F}},S):=\sup _{f\in F}(L_{P}(f)-L_{S}(f))} Smaller representativeness is better, since it provides a way to avoid overfitting: it means that the true error of a classifier is not much higher than its estimated error, and so selecting a classifier that has low estimated error will ensure that the true error is also low. Note however that the concept of representativeness is relative and hence can not be compared across distinct samples. The expected representativeness of a sample can be bounded above by the Rademacher complexity of the function class: If F {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}} is a set of functions with range within [ 0 , 1 ] {\displaystyle [0,1]} , then Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) − ln ⁡ 2 2 m ≤ E S ∼ P m [ Rep P ⁡ ( F , S ) ] ≤ 2 Rad P , m ⁡ ( F ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {Rad} _{P,m}({\mathcal {F}})-{\sqrt {\frac {\ln 2}{2m}}}\leq \mathbb {E} _{S\sim P^{m}}[\operatorname {Rep} _{P}({\

    Read more →
  • Data commingling

    Data commingling

    Data commingling, in computer science, occurs when different items or kinds of data are stored in such a way that they become commonly accessible when they are supposed to remain separated. In cloud computing, this can occur where different customer data sits on the same server. Data that is commingled can present a security vulnerability. Data commingling can also occur due to high speed data transmission mixing. In this situation, data of one security level can inadvertently or purposely be mixed with data of a lower or higher security level on the same transmission portal. Portal vehicles can be wire, fiber optics, microwave or various radio frequency transmission portals. This commingling can cause breaches of security and become a source of legal issues to any entity, corporation or individual. Data commingling can also occur when personal computers and personal software programs are used for business, security, government, etc. uses. In the early formulation stages of entities, non-profit or profit corporations, LLC's, LLP's, etc., the creation and use of stand-alone computers and stand-alone networks, "absolutely unconnected" to involved individuals, is the easiest, and safest way to prevent Data Commingling.

    Read more →
  • Computer Graphics International

    Computer Graphics International

    Computer Graphics International (CGI) is one of the oldest annual international conferences on computer graphics. It is organized by the Computer Graphics Society (CGS). Researchers across the whole world are invited to share their experiences and novel achievements in various fields - like computer graphics and human-computer interaction. Former conferences have been held recently in Hong Kong (China), Geneva (Switzerland), Shanghai (China), Geneva (virtually), Calgary (Canada), Bintan (Indonesia) and Yokohama (Japan). == Awards == Starting in the year of 2013, CGI has given yearly a Best Paper Award and a Career Achievement Award. == Venues ==

    Read more →
  • Database

    Database

    In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze the data. The DBMS additionally encompasses the core facilities provided to administer the database. The sum total of the database, the DBMS and the associated applications can be referred to as a database system. Often the term "database" is also used loosely to refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database. Before digital storage and retrieval of data became widespread, index cards were used for data storage in a wide range of applications and environments: in the home to record and store recipes, shopping lists, contact information and other organizational data; in business to record presentation notes, project research and notes, and contact information; in schools as flash cards or other visual aids; and in academic research to hold data such as bibliographical citations or notes in a card file. Professional book indexers used index cards in the creation of book indexes until they were replaced by indexing software in the 1980s and 1990s. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spans formal techniques and practical considerations, including data modeling, efficient data representation and storage, query languages, security and privacy of sensitive data, and distributed computing issues, including supporting concurrent access and fault tolerance. Computer scientists may classify database management systems according to the database models that they support. Relational databases became dominant in the 1980s. These model data as rows and columns in a series of tables, and the vast majority use SQL for writing and querying data. In the 2000s, non-relational databases became popular, collectively referred to as NoSQL, because they use different query languages. == Terminology and overview == Formally, a "database" refers to a set of related data accessed through the use of a "database management system" (DBMS), which is an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database (although restrictions may exist that limit access to particular data). The DBMS provides various functions that allow entry, storage and retrieval of large quantities of information and provides ways to manage how that information is organized. Because of the close relationship between them, the term "database" is often used casually to refer to both a database and the DBMS used to manipulate it. Outside the world of professional information technology, the term database is often used to refer to any collection of related data (such as a spreadsheet or a card index) as size and usage requirements typically necessitate use of a database management system. Existing DBMSs provide various functions that allow management of a database and its data which can be classified into four main functional groups: Data definition – Creation, modification and removal of definitions that detail how the data is to be organized. Update – Insertion, modification, and deletion of the data itself. Retrieval – Selecting data according to specified criteria (e.g., a query, a position in a hierarchy, or a position in relation to other data) and providing that data either directly to the user, or making it available for further processing by the database itself or by other applications. The retrieved data may be made available in a more or less direct form without modification, as it is stored in the database, or in a new form obtained by altering it or combining it with existing data from the database. Administration – Registering and monitoring users, enforcing data security, monitoring performance, maintaining data integrity, dealing with concurrency control, and recovering information that has been corrupted by some event such as an unexpected system failure. Both a database and its DBMS conform to the principles of a particular database model. "Database system" refers collectively to the database model, database management system, and database. Physically, database servers are dedicated computers that hold the actual databases and run only the DBMS and related software. Database servers are usually multiprocessor computers, with generous memory and RAID disk arrays used for stable storage. Hardware database accelerators, connected to one or more servers via a high-speed channel, are also used in large-volume transaction processing environments. DBMSs are found at the heart of most database applications. DBMSs may be built around a custom multitasking kernel with built-in networking support, but modern DBMSs typically rely on a standard operating system to provide these functions. Since DBMSs comprise a significant market, computer and storage vendors often take into account DBMS requirements in their own development plans. Databases and DBMSs can be categorized according to the database model(s) that they support (such as relational or XML), the type(s) of computer they run on (from a server cluster to a mobile phone), the query language(s) used to access the database (such as SQL or XQuery), and their internal engineering, which affects performance, scalability, resilience, and security. == History == The sizes, capabilities, and performance of databases and their respective DBMSs have grown in orders of magnitude. These performance increases were enabled by the technology progress in the areas of processors, computer memory, computer storage, and computer networks. The concept of a database was made possible by the emergence of direct access storage media such as magnetic disks, which became widely available in the mid-1960s; earlier systems relied on sequential storage of data on magnetic tape. The subsequent development of database technology can be divided into three eras based on data model or structure: navigational, SQL/relational, and post-relational. The two main early navigational data models were the hierarchical model and the CODASYL model (network model). These were characterized by the use of pointers (often physical disk addresses) to follow relationships from one record to another. The relational model, first proposed in 1970 by Edgar F. Codd, departed from this tradition by insisting that applications should search for data by content, rather than by following links. The relational model employs sets of ledger-style tables, each used for a different type of entity. Only in the mid-1980s did computing hardware become powerful enough to allow the wide deployment of relational systems (DBMSs plus applications). By the early 1990s, however, relational systems dominated in all large-scale data processing applications, and as of 2018 they remain dominant: IBM Db2, Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server are the most searched DBMS. The dominant database language, standardized SQL for the relational model, has influenced database languages for other data models. Object databases were developed in the 1980s to overcome the inconvenience of object–relational impedance mismatch, which led to the coining of the term "post-relational" and also the development of hybrid object–relational databases. The next generation of post-relational databases in the late 2000s became known as NoSQL databases, introducing fast key–value stores and document-oriented databases. A competing "next generation" known as NewSQL databases attempted new implementations that retained the relational/SQL model while aiming to match the high performance of NoSQL compared to commercially available relational DBMSs. === 1960s, navigational DBMS === The introduction of the term database coincided with the availability of direct-access storage (disks and drums) from the mid-1960s onwards. The term represented a contrast with the tape-based systems of the past, allowing shared interactive use rather than daily batch processing. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1962 report by the System Development Corporation of California as the first to use the term "data-base" in a specific technical sense. As computers grew in speed and capability, a number of general-purpose database systems emerged; by the mid-1960s a number of such systems had come into commercial use. Interest in a standard began to grow, and Charles Bachman, author of one such product, the Integrated Data Store (IDS), founded the Database Task Group within CODASYL, the group responsible for the creation and standardization of COBOL. In 1971, the Database Task Group delivered their standard, which generally became known as the CODASYL approach, and soon a number of commercial products based on this approach entered the market. The CODASYL approach of

    Read more →
  • SWILE

    SWILE

    SWILE (formerly: Lunchr) is a French app-based company that focuses on improving the employee experience. Among others, the platform offers meal vouchers, gift vouchers, mobility vouchers, and business travel solutions. In March 2020, it was renamed SWILE and entered the lunch break and meal voucher market. == History == The company was founded as Lunchr by Loïc Soubeyrand in 2016. Originally, Lunchr was an app for pre-ordering lunch on the spot or to go. In January 2017, the company raised €2.5 million in seed funding from Daphni. In 2018, the company raised €11 million (series A) from Idinvest, followed by another €30 million in February 2019 (series B), notably from Index Ventures and Kima Ventures. In January 2020, Lunchr became one of the first startups to join the French Tech 120. A few months later, in March, Lunchr diversified its services, adding team life management tools and changing its brand name to Swile. In June 2020, the company raised €70 million more in a new round of financing (Series C) from the same investors and the BPI. In November 2020, Swile acquired Briq, a startup specializing in employee engagement. In January 2021, Swile won a tender with Carrefour and distributed 62,000 Swile cards to its employees. In early October 2021, a new $200 million (€175 million) fundraising round, in which Japanese Softbank joined other investors, allowed Swile to capitalize on $1 billion. President Emmanuel Macron cited the company as "a further proof that FrenchTech is at the forefront internationally." In May 2022, the company acquired the travel management start-up Okarito for €6 million. == Overview == Swile operates in two countries (France and Brazil) and has a total of 1000 employees, 5.5 million users and 85,000 corporate customers, including Carrefour, Le Monde, JCDECAUX, PSG, Airbnb, Spotify, Red Bull, and TikTok in the private sector, as well as numerous local authorities and ministerial references in the public sector.

    Read more →
  • Mobile Passport Control

    Mobile Passport Control

    Mobile Passport Control (MPC) is a mobile app that enables eligible travelers entering the United States to submit their passport information and customs declaration form to Customs and Border Protection via smartphone or tablet and go through the inspections process using an expedited lane. It is available to "U.S. citizens, U.S. lawful permanent residents, Canadian B1/B2 citizen visitors and returning Visa Waiver Program travelers with approved ESTA". The app is available on iOS and Android devices and is operational at 34 US airports, 14 international airports offering preclearance facilities, and 4 seaports. The use of Mobile Passport Control operations have increased threefold from 2016 to 2017. == History == Mobile Passport Control operations were launched in Atlanta at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in 2016 and is now available at 34 U.S. airports, 14 international airports that offer preclearance and 4 U.S. cruise ports. The Mobile Passport app is authorized by CBP and sponsored by the Airports Council International-North America, Boeing, and the Port of Everglades. Airside Mobile, Inc. secured a Series A funding of $6 million in the fall of 2017. == How it works == During the customs process at the Federal Inspection Service (FIS) area of a U.S. airport, travelers arriving from international locations typically wait in long lines before presenting passports and paperwork and verbally answering questions made by CBP officials. Eligible travelers who have downloaded the Mobile Passport app can expedite this process by submitting information regarding their passport and trip details, and a newly-taken selfie, via their mobile device to CBP officials, then access an expedited line. Mobile Passport Control users will be required to show their physical passport(s) and briefly talk to a CBP officer. == Locations == === US airports === Atlanta (ATL) Baltimore (BWI) Boston (BOS) Charlotte (CLT) Chicago (ORD) Dallas/Ft Worth (DFW) Denver (DEN) Detroit (DTW) as of 7/2024 Ft. Lauderdale (FLL) Honolulu (HNL) Houston (HOU and IAH) Kansas City (MCI) Las Vegas (LAS) Los Angeles (LAX) Miami (MIA) Minneapolis (MSP) New York (JFK) Newark (EWR) Oakland (OAK) Orlando (MCO) Palm Beach (PBI) Philadelphia (PHL) Phoenix (PHX) Pittsburgh (PIT) Portland (PDX) Sacramento (SMF) San Diego (SAN) San Francisco (SFO) San Jose (SJC) San Juan (SJU) Seattle (SEA) Tampa (TPA) Washington Dulles (IAD) === International Preclearance locations === Abu Dhabi (AUH) Aruba (AUA) Bermuda (BDA) Calgary (YYC) Dublin (DUB) Edmonton (YEG) Halifax (YHZ) Montreal (YUL) Nassau (NAS) Ottawa (YOW) Shannon (SNN) Toronto (YYZ) Vancouver (YVR) Winnipeg (YWG) Sepinggan (BPN) === Seaports === Fort Lauderdale (PEV) Miami (MSE) San Juan (PUE) West Palm Beach (WPB)

    Read more →
  • Tokken

    Tokken

    Tokken is a payment system and mobile app most known for being a legal and secure option for businesses transactions within the cannabis industry, because of its compliance with bank requirements. The startup company was created by Lamine Zarrad, a former regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. == Operability == In order for a person to start using the app, they need to provide evidence, in the form of bioidentification data and mobile carrier records, that they can legally purchase weed. After they have been verified, customers can pay directly through the app at any dispensary that is using Tokken. Tokken turns credit card transactions into a digital token, which can be exchanged back for money that can later be deposited into a bank account. All transactions are logged publicly through a blockchain leger, making the process both anonymous and verified. === Banking services === Tokken has a "pay taxes" function which enables dispensaries to pay their taxes directly to the department.

    Read more →