The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recently drafted new norms to counter the widespread Telemarketing Spam, proposing the idea of using Blockchain Technology to curb the use of Pesky calls and messages. TRAI is planning to use Blockchain to prevent the users from unsolicited telemarketing communications to make sure that the telemarketing calls and messages are sent only by the authorised entities.
TRAI claims that the use of a distributed ledger technology like Blockchainwill help the regulators to effectively track ‘pesky’ telemarketing spammers who are using unregistered phone numbers to evade tracking.
TRAI chairman, R.S Sharma states that the use of Blockchain will ensure two things. I.e Confidentiality and non-repudiation. With the advent of Blockchain, only the authorised entities will be able to access subscriber details and that too, when they need to deliver any service. If at any point, a subscriber feels that the service provider is misusing their authority, he can revoke his consent any time through the TRAI app. Sharma explains that TRAI will possibly be the first organization to implement Blockchain as a RegTech (Regulatory Technology) and that too, on such a large scale.
Once it goes mainstream, the new ledger technology will create and maintain a digital record of all the communications between subscribers and entities. This will further help TRAI to keep a track of all the authorised telemarketing agencies and capture customer consent for information.
Statistics reveal that somewhat around 30 billion commercial messages are sent to various subscribers in India every month out of which a majority of messages are either spammy or insignificant to the recipients. To this date, more than 230 million subscribers have opted for the DND (Do Not Disturb) service offered by TRAI to prevent the users against all sorts of disruptions caused by the unwanted calls and messages.
The norms regarding how the blockchain is going to be used are included in the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations 2018 draft which will be publicized till June 11.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is turning out to be the most sought-after method of crowdfunding which allows the startup owners to effectively raise funds for their cryptocurrency venture. It’s an unregulated way of raising funds by persuading people to invest in the project by purchasing the early crypto tokens associated with the project. An ICO is usually carried out in two phases i.e Pre-sale or Pre ICO and Public sale. Out of these two, a Pre ICO or Pre-sale is the token sale initiated by a company before starting the official crowdsale or the ICO campaign. The investors who purchase crypto-tokens of a company may get bonuses depending on the number of tokens they are purchasing while in public sale, these bonuses are either reduced or not offered at all.
Pre ICO is usually initiated in order to reach the soft cap of the project which is quite lower than the real fundraising goal. On the other hand, public ICO or the main ICO campaign is run to achieve the hard cap which is the actual fundraising goal. An ICO can be successful even if it doesn’t reach the hard cap of the project. But in case, it doesn’t even reach the soft cap, it may turn into failure.
Among many others, internet of things (IoT) or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is only one technology that will bring about a lot of transformation in 2018. With all the advancements, the relation between the internet of things and an industrial internet of things is getting narrower. According to the survey, there will be nearly 20 billion devices connected to the IoT by 2010. Companies are dedicating significant resources to the IoT sector. Following are few IoT trends to watch in 2018.
Security
More and more devices are now getting connected to the IoT which leads to the increase of data. This increases the risk of cybersecurity. Thus the security related to the connected devices has become the major concern now. There is a need to remove all the cyberattacks that take place through public as well as private networks. Currently, the security is not provided to all the IoT devices like laptops, PCs etc. But in 2018, the main task of the IoT system is to look for the security of the data and devices.
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data
There is a great opportunity for the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the IoT sector. AI is used in almost all new apps and devices. The data is growing day by day as more customers are getting connected to the IoT devices. This leads to increase in data processing and analyzing. The whole idea is to get the relevant data from the big data through big data techniques. The improvement in the overall AI field has helped the developers to get the relationship between the data.
Healthcare
Healthcare sector has been affected the most by the IoT and in the coming years, you will see more improvements in the healthcare sector. Not only that, the improvements will be seen in the medical equipment, health instruments, wearable devices etc. The growth of IoT will not only improve the condition of doctors but also the patients.
CONCLUSION:
These are some of the trends that will dominate the IoT ecosystem in this year. The internet of things as well as the industrial internet of things will see a lot of improvements with more people connecting to the connected devices. However, currently the very small amount of it is used but this is changing now.
Blockchain Technology has turned out to be a game-changer in the FinTech industry where it was used to drive the Cryptocurrency landscape. But owing to the high level of flexibility in this distributed ledger technology, Blockchain has gone across the boundaries. Turns out that the technology behind Bitcoin has a number of use cases even beyond the financial sector. The latter is actively being used in Cyber security, Healthcare, Insurance, eVoting, Real-estate, Travel and Tourism.
Blockchain is a publically shared cryptographic ledger that creates a permanent and tamper-proof record of the stored information. It stores data in a series of blocks that are cryptographically linked to form an extensive database. To be more precise and clear about Blockchain, it’s made up of a series of blocks chained digitally together to form a huge database. Whereas, each block in the Blockchain has specified size limit of 1MB and each block is capable of storing a small patch of data.
Spring framework was introduced and designed to build flexible andloosely coupled web applications. The Model-view-controller design pattern helps in seperating the business logic, presentation logic and navigation logic. But one of the key benefits that makes it so popular and useful is dependency injection (DI). DI is a design pattern, that separates an application’s dependencies and configuration from the code that uses those dependencies. Springimplements DI by allowing you to wire together an application from beans, using either an XML configuration file or annotations.
In Spring MVC Framework every piece of logic and functionality is highly configurable. Also Spring can be integrate with other popular Web Frameworks like Struts, WebWork a Java Server Faces.
DispatcherServlet is the core of Spring MVC that handles every request. The DispatcherServlet routes the request to a Controller class authored by the application developer. The controller class handles the request and decides which view should be displayed to the user as part of the response.
Spring MVC Application Flow
Now lets understand the Web Flow and request cycle of typical Spring MVCapplication. The whole lifecycle of an Spring MVC Application can be demonstrated from the following points.
Request is sent to server : User sends request to server by submitting form or by clicking hyperlink etc. TheRequest is initially given to web.xml. The DispatcherServlet configured in web.xml file receives the request and routes the request to DispatcherServlet .
Inside DispatcherServlet : DispatcherServlet is Spring MVC’s implementation of the Front controller pattern. The job of the DispatcherServlet is to take an incoming URL and find the right combination of handlers (generally methods on Controller classes) and views (generally JSPs) that combine to form the page or resource that’s supposed to be found at that location.
Data Layer Operations : If database operation is needed then Model class will route request to suitable DAO. All database operations should be carried out in DAO. Then attach attributes into request/session/application scope and return back to Model. Then the Controller executes the logic business logic (if written by the programmer) and then returns ModeAndView object to the DispatcherServlet.
Presentation Layer : The DispatcherServlet determines the view from the ModelAndView object. Some html or designing stuffs are added to response . The View is rendered and the DispatcherServlet sends the output to the Servlet container. Finally Servlet Container sends the result back to the user.
Inversion of Control
The Spring Framework is used by many frameworks. You can use the existing frameworks such as JSF, Struts 2, Flex with Spring DS to quickly develop and deploy large scale enterprise applications. The Spring framework simplifies the development of complex enterprise applications.
The Container will create the objects, wire them together, configure them, and manage their complete lifecycle from creation till destruction. The Spring container uses Dependency Injection (DI) to manage the components that make up an application. These objects are called Spring Beans.
IoC is also known asdependency injection (DI) .Inversion of control is a technique that allows object configuration to be moved out of code and into a configuration file. With Spring IOC, this is typically done with an XML file. In technical terms IoC is a Software Design Pattern and set of associated programming techniques in which the flow of control of a system is inverted in comparison to the traditional interaction mode. In IoC, instead of an application calling the framework, it is the framework that calls the components specified by the application. This pattern is similar to the one that agents adopt with their clients in Hollywood movies . As they sail ‘Don’t call me, I w’ll call you’ .This is why IoC is also known as the Hollywood Pattern.
There are three forms of Dependency Injection.
Constructor Injection
Setter Injection
Interface Injection
Constructor Injection: In this approach , an IoC container uses the constructor to inject the dependency. All the dependencies (simple or references) are declared in the constructor. One of the advantages of Constructor Injectionis that all the dependencies are declared in one step. This also helps in understanding whether the class depends on too many services.
Setter Injection: In this approach Dependency Injection uses Setters to inject the required resources or dependencies. Each of the objects that the class depends upon will have a setter and the IoC container will use the setters to provide the resource at run-time.
Interface Injection: It is the concrete implementations of an interface to the dependent object according to the configuration. The main difference between Interface Injection and the previous two is that in Interface Injection, any of the implementations of the interface can be injected, whereas with the other two, the object of the class specified is injected. Spring does not provide direct support for Interface Injection.
Here we are done with a brief Introduction of Spring MVC and Spring IOC. In upcoming blogs we w’ll learn How to use Spring MVC to develop flexible applications.
Creating and sharing GIFs is fun. Apart from emojis, GIFs are becoming the favorite choice for the people to express their feelings while in middle of a conversation on a plethora of chatting apps like Messenger, Telegram, Whatsapp and Snapchat. Some popular apps like Whatsapp provide an easy access to thousands of GIFs owing to the GIPHY integration within the app.
Other than that, there are a number of websites including mr-gif, Gifbin and Littleplasticthings. But the thing is, you’ll find most of the GIFs in pretty bad shape. This is primarily because of the availability of enormous content over the web. Since most of the GIFs are created from the video clips, they are compressed to extremely small size which in turn affects their quality. I know what you might be thinking by the time. It’s easy to degrade the quality of an image or video but it seems like an impossible task do the opposite. Well, with Machine Learning, everything’s possible.
How ML Will Fix This?
There’s a similar website called Gfycat that’s working on solving this issue by leveraging the innovative aspects of Machine Learning. The company is working on the technical front to make the low-fidelity GIFs look good by improving their quality. The website features a wide variety of GIFs in every category including sports, entertainment, fun, dance, celebrities, mood, expressions and emotions.
As per the company CEO, Richard Rabbat, the problem with these GIFs is mainly related to the video and is less to do with the image recognition. For this reason, Gfycat will look for the original video source across the web from which the GIF has been created. Most of these videos can be found on YouTube.
The app will analyse the entire video to find out what part of the video has been turned into that particular GIF. Gfycat will then produce a high-quality GIF from that video and will swap it with the low-quality GIF to make it look better.
The Challenges
The biggest challenge is perhaps creating a high-quality GIF out of a shoddy GIF featuring a celebrity or a public figure. As a GIF is uploaded by a person, he seldom tags that celebrity while making the upload. So it gets difficult to identify which celebrity is featured in the GIF. For this, the company has build up a vast library of popular celebrities. With this, the company hopes to identify the celebrity GIFs coming in and tag them automatically.
Another big challenge would be to identify and replace the text shown in the GIFs as caption. In most of the GIFs that we see, the text is grainy and not easy to read. For this, Gfycat aims on building some internal tools that would help identify what the captions say and then machine learning will rewrite the caption with clear text.
Clearly, Gfycat is not the only one with such an endeavor. Several other similar companies like Tenor and Giphy are also working in this direction. Let’s hope things work out well for these companies and we get a robust platform for refurbishing the low-fidelity GIF images.
Decentralization of applications has its perks and beyond any doubts, Blockchain technology has proved it really does. Owing to the increasing popularity of this state-of-the-art digital ledger technology, there has been a drastic incline inBlockchain Based App Development. Different companies and organizations are looking for different ways to secure their business operations and what can be the better way to do that than implementing Blockchain.
What Blockchain Technology Is All About?
Blockchain is the key technology behind Bitcoin which powers the entire cryptocurrency landscape. Apart from that, the technology is also being used in a wide range of applications for security enhancements and transparency. Consequently, the Blockchain Based App Development is largely in demand these days.
Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger which comprises of a series of blocks that are electronically linked together and store records of data. Seeing it this way, Blockchain is a growing list of records that are secured by top-tier cryptographic system.
