04 Anmol Tanubhrt.
An Introduction to Web Monetization.
Can Artificial Intelligence Predict Future Pandemics? Predicting a pandemic is, preventing it 21 Techfastly | September 2020
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All You Need to Know About 5G Niharika Choudhary
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Things You Should Know About Equity Crowdfunding for Your Startup Anjali P Jith
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Microcredit - Loose Change for Real Change. Geoffrey M.
Contents AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2020
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An introduction to web monetization
Anmol Tanubhrt
Promises & 7 The Drawbacks of Blockchain
Abdur Raffey Tariq
A Guid to GANS 10 (GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS) Geoffrey M.
Java Still 13IsRelevant in 2020? Renju Paul Jose
You Need to 14All Know About 5G? Niharika Choudhary
Can Artificial In21 telligence Predict Future Pandemics
“Leveraging the Google PAA (People Also Ask) element on a Search Results Page for Targeted Content Creation with a Python Scraper”
Daiane Babicz
Things You 23 Should Know About Equity Crowdfunding for Your Startup Anjali P Jith
Microcredit AI in Journalism Everything You Google Answer 37 Loose Change for 40 28 Need to Know 27 Box Strategy Real Change. About IPv4 Geoffrey M
Geoffrey M
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Techfastly | August - September 2020
Alagammai Kannappan
Renju Paul Jose
FROM THE EDITOR Introduction to the September 2020 Edition
The face of technology and business has disruptively changed since the COVID-19 pandemic started. We are not in the same world we were in 8 months ago and the indications are the change is accelerating. Infrastructure, retail, travel, banking and many other sectors have experienced a severe negative impact. But the indications are that the recovery will be digital. McKinsey has written a 172 page study titled: The next normal: The recovery will be digital, outlining how digital technologies will stabilize the economy and provide a solid foundation for the future. This issue of Techfastly deals with current issues and technologies. Our featured article ‘Can AI predict the future pandemics’ is a study on how AI can be leveraged to predict future pandemics and minimize the disastrous loss of lives we have experienced in this COVID-19 pandemic. Our article on 5G technology tells our readers everything about the next generation of high-speed wireless communication. We have also featured an article on the role AI can play in journalism in the future. At Techfastly, we are committed to providing highquality content with the intent to give unbiased and useful analysis on technology, businesses, startups, and the future. Stay Informed, Stay Safe Srikant Rawat COO, Techfastly
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SrikantRawat
AN INTRODUCTION TO WEB MONETIZATION Many people often confuse web monetization with advertisements or pay per click.
T
he world is moving at a speed of GB/s, with advancements in technology and communication being rapid! From the decades of .com fiasco to times when digital is the new mantra, our lives have changed, and with the invention of electricity, no one knows what it feels to live without the internet. The movement of people on digital platforms with many now making a living on the internet has introduced us to a new way of moving forward, doing business, and web monetization. In simplest terms, web monetization is a way of converting the existing traffic being sent to a website into revenue. When considered in terms of technological jargon, web monetization is a proposed API standard that allows websites to request a stream of small payments from a user. This framework is an alternative to an earlier form of revenue generation, like pay per click or advertising. Remember the days when you would find multiple advertisements popping up on a website? With web monetization, they are expected to leave, giving you an experience of the website in the most holistic way! Have you heard of the Coil? That is one of the WM providers.
Goal
Business Model With users flooded with multiple sources of data and creators finding it hard to survive to create content, web monetization 4
comes up as a perfect business model. The creators can garner their audience with free content, providing a way to earn money from users in exchange for premium services or content. The Security Security, well, there is nothing I have to tell that needs protection! This is a significant opinion, but imagine you have an opinion on a presidential candidate getting used up or sharing with your friend on WhatsApp, your opinion of a company, and ending up facing issues! With every click, you generate data, and it is getting used, influencing what you see, what you read, and subconsciously how you behave! World wide web is here to stay, and attempts are being made to make it safer. User Experience
it is a waste! Web Monetization platforms like Coil help a great deal. One needs to register for $5 to the Coil, and you are free from registering on every website to read a two-page article, payments are automatically sent to the site.
Non-Goal
Online Purchase Web monetization is geared towards enabling minimal payments. Since most traditional e-commerce websites move forward with large payments, allowing for smaller online ones comes as a distinctive approach. How is it Happening? Many people often confuse web monetization with advertisements or pay per click. However, web monetization differs on this one! There are two paths to how web monetization is being implemented, one is from the user endpoint, the other from the content creator. Pre-requisites
Imagine going to the website of Harvard Business Review and wanting to read an article that demands subscription, but as you start delving deeper, questions of which currency to use, and which payment platform to use start puzzling your mind. If you decide to subscribe, you realize the subscription is required only for that one article, after which
Techfastly | August - September 2020
Users must have an account or subscription with a web monetization provider. The Coil is one of the WM providers present. - Web Monetization agents must be installed in the browser with the necessary authorization to initiate a payment from the WM provider on behalf of the user. - Web sites must run their web monetization receiver. Web Monetization as a User If you are user, you need to register on Coil, here, https://coil.com/ signup. The subscription costs $5. Once you are registered, you need to download the extension for the browser of your choice. Once you
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are set up, when visiting a web monetized website, on the righthand corner of the browser, you will find a pop up with Coil and a dollar sign. Clicking on that shows that Coil is paying for you.
payments cannot be used to track a user across multiple websites.
Web Monetization as a Creator
Payment pointers are used to conveniently and securely express a URL that points to secure payment initiation endpoints on the web. They resolve to an HTTPS URL using simple conversion rules.
If you are a creator, you need to register on Coil as a creator. The next thing is getting a payment pointer from a wallet provider(there are tons of them). Once the payment pointer is set, you need to add that to your website. The following code can do the final set up <meta name =”monetization” content = “Add payment pointer here”> The meta tag is added to the head tag of the website. Why do we Need It? Web monetization offers a standard when several services are providing a means to monetize the web and generate revenue for creators without selling advertisements. Although this is a good idea, most of the services require users and content creators to join a common platform, for instance, Youtube! This results in a fragmented web with closed content and service silos, instead of a free-flowing platform that crosses the physical borders. To add, users often let go of their privacy because the service is collecting information from the user and offering it to the content creator or service provider. This results in a link being created. For instance, when using Amazon, you make a payment to a particular customer, Amazon stores it in its database, your credential along with the purchase you made. This is the reason you often get the suggestion on things that you may like.
Concepts Web Monetization works on two major technologies that enable open and interoperable payments between providers and websites for small amounts: inter ledger and payment pointers. Payment Pointers
Interledger Interledger is a payment processing messaging protocol for making payments of any size that can be further aggregated and settled over the existing payment methods. It is used both by the web monetization providers and receivers. Interledger is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency. The Final Flow Let us now conclude by understanding in simple terms, the flow of how web monetization works. Users sign up with a web monetization sender while websites sign up with the web monetization receiver. Both the sender and receiver are capable of handling a small amount of money. When the user visits the website, the browser parses a <meta> tag containing the receiving address of payment. In the browser, the creator decides how much payment must be received, and the web monetizer receiver is contacted to get the unique receiving address for payment for the current session. The browser begins sending small payments via the user’s WM sender, and for each payment, the browser sends an event that the website can listen to Anmol Tanubhrt ”.
Learn about the latest technology and its implications in business only on Techfastly.
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Web monetization decouples the provider and the receiver. With the browser’s use, the privacy of users is protected, and 6
Techfastly | August - September 2020
The Promises & Drawbacks of Blockchain
By: Abdur Raffey Tariq The blockchain technology might come off as a highly efficient way to share information; however, this is not always true.
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I
f you’ve had an eye on the latest finance and investing trends, you must have come across the term ‘blockchain.’ Blockchain technology has been around for over a decade now, and has been catching a lot of steam in the business world lately. The way it has enabled fast and secure transactions, without the involvement of any middlemen, makes it of great use for business people worldwide. Let’s dig deeper into the topic to see what it is, how it works, and how it can be beneficial for your business.
Blockchain 101: What is Blockchain? Simply put, Blockchain is an automated way of passing information from point A to B in a completely safe manner. All in all, it consists of small blocks of digital data stored in a public database, spread across a decentralized network of computers. Each block contains information about the transaction and has a unique identification code. The transaction is initiated by creating one such block, which is then verified by thousands, perhaps millions of computers distributed across the net. Once verified, it is added to an already existing chain (database) and hence gets associated with a unique history.
ent information. Some of the leading businesses around the globe have been using Blockchain to speed up their everyday tasks, with minimum middlemen costs. VISA and HSBC could be simple examples of their use in the finance sector, whereas Walmart and Unilever have been using it in their supply chain to track the physical movement of goods. It does not stop here. The healthcare industry has extensive use of Blockchain, where companies such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have been using it to manage digital inventories for various pharmaceutical
Since the chain (database) is spread out across many computers, it is virtually impossible to tamper with a block, hence making the Blockchain an extremely secure method of sharing information.
“Most of the data store in a blockchain is immutable”. A simple example to understand this whole process could be that of a train ticket station. Each ticket could be considered a block containing all the information about the departure time, price of the ticket, etc. In contrast, the chain could be the entire train network comprising of every ticket ever sold to each person in the system. Each ticket is uniquely associated with the chain and is only accepted when verified by the entire system. The Promise of Blockchain The blockchain technology has the revolutionary potential to transform how businesses operate and collaborate. It has found its applications not only in the banking and finance sectors but also across the corporate world, enabling information sharing, digital contracts, processing payments, and tracking cli8
Techfastly | August - September 2020
products. Since the transfer of information is fast and completely secure, it has also found its way in international trade and travel. Market giants such as British Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Lufthansa have been using it extensively. The concept of ‘Blockchain for Aviation (BC4A)” was born through this industry. Every stakeholder in the value chain, including aircraft manufacturers, logistics providers, software developers, on-field staff, has been involved in the process. In this sense, Blockchain has been a disruptive force in the industry that no one can tame. It has disrupted marketplaces across the world and has proven its utility in almost all industries. How the Blockchain Fell Short With such a promising potential for the corporate world, there are also some areas the blockchain technology falls short in and hence takes it far from perfect for use in every industry. Here are some disadvantages of using blockchain technology. Not as Efficient The blockchain technology might come off as a highly efficient way to share information; however, this is not always true. As the number of participants in the network increases, the process gets slower as it requires 100s of GBs of space and too much energy to process the transactions. Data is Immutable Most of the data store in a blockchain is immutable. This means that once it is written, it cannot be removed. While this may help in fraud prevention, this can also raise many privacy concerns for the users.
High Implementation Costs The implementation of a blockchain can sometimes be costly. The costs are mainly associated with hiring developers and experts to operate the whole system, while there are some fixed licensing costs as well. Security Concerns Blockchain may be relatively safer than the conventional transactional procedures, yet there is some vulnerability attached to the data stored. If an attacker gets access to 51% or more of the network, all of it is lost. The Birth of Private Blockchains Blockchain technology does spread the data across a broad set of computers across the network, but this does not have to be this way. This is where private blockchains come in. Private blockchains develop a closed network of transactions that operate within restricted parameters. Some basic access controls limit the people who can participate in the network, which leads to reliance on third parties for enabling transactions. Some providers offering private blockchain networks include Ripple, Hyperledger Fabric, and R3’s Corda.
any fraudulent transactions and efficiently track the culprits. Smart Contracts Smart contracts present all the terms of the parties involved in the form of a code. These self-automated programs run without any downtime and make sure you get paid once you’ve held your end of the deal. Tracking Client Data Blockchain provides a unique connection to each block in the chain, making it easy to track where specific data is coming from. This could be implemented in marketing campaigns to see what customers are purchasing what items, and hence the campaign can be personalized. Where does Blockchain go next? While no one knows what the future holds for Blockchain, one thing experts agree on is that the disruptive effect it has had on the world economy is not going away anytime soon. Two industries that will be the most affected by Blockchain soon are International Trade and eCommerce. And this is not only limited to financial transactions. New and innovative use cases will completely transform every aspect of the value chain from manufacturing goods to stocking, supply chain, marketing, and customer care. Furthermore, since a significant part of the world economy will be affected by Blockchain, the governmental regulations will be high. From taxation policies to the rules of international trade, everything will be completely transformed - Abdur Raffey Tariq”.
Companies such as Comcast and the streaming giant Spotify have been using private blockchains to cater to different privacy concerns while still keeping the transactions transparent. Unique Blockchain Use Cases There are several ways Blockchain can be useful for your business. Here are some use cases you should try out. Financial Transactions If you still haven’t tried out cryptocurrencies, you’re lagging way behind your competitors. Blockchain allows you to transact without any additional costs, whether the payments are international or local. Fraud Prevention Since tampering with a single block in the chain requires tampering with the whole network, which is almost impossible, there are zero chances of fraud. Implement Blockchain to take care of 9
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Techfastly | August - September 2020
A GUIDE TO GANS (GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS)
G
enerative adversarial networks (GANS) are machine learning approaches that utilize two convolutional neural networks. These networks contest to generate new data instances similar to the training set. Deep learning experts, Ian Goodfellow, together with his colleagues, were the first to propose GANS in the 2014 NeurlPS paper. GAN is structured into two: The generator that learns to produce plausible data and discriminator that distinguishes fake data from real data produced by the generator. The discriminator also penalizes the generator for generating implausible results. Use cases of GANs Generative Adversarial Networks (GANS) has both positive and negative uses as they can learn to imitate any data distribution. They are widely used in video generation, image generation, and voice generation. In the real sense, GANS are robotic artists with impressive outputs that are usually taught to strangely create similar stuff in almost all domains, including images, speech, prose, and music. GANs can also be used in the generation of fake media content, and they are the technology supporting deepfakes. 1. Image to image translation. Generally, GANs are a perfect solution for the image to image translation problems. They usually learn the input to output image mapping with also the loss of functions for the mapping training. Conditional GANs are used in the generation of photorealistic images from inputs 10
Techfastly | August - September 2020
of sketches or semantic images. Many image-to-image tasks such as translation of photos from Google maps to satellite photographs, translation to color photographs from sketches, and translation of cityscapes semantic images to photographs; use the pix2pix GANs’ approach
2. Text to image generation. The automatic generation of real images from text is very useful and interesting. For instance, the stackGAN is used to produce accurate images relating to the textual description of objects such as flowers and birds.
The Advantages of GANs include:
3. Increasing the resolution of images. GAN can produce high pixel resolution output images with the Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN). This involves the creation of high-resolution images such as street scenes, human faces, and other objects.
zzGANs make the modeling of data distribution better by the generation of clearer and sharper images.
4. Predicting the next video frame. Internal models designed with deep neural networks use a loss-based approach in predicting the future frames of synthetic video sequences with the use of CNN-LSTM—deCNN framework. This aspect is designed for the static elements of video scenes, which can be predicted up to a second.
zzGANs are learning methods that require less or no supervision; they usually don’t need data to be labeled as they are trained to use unlabeled data in the process of learning the internal data representation. This is more efficient when compared to the manual process of acquiring labeled data which is time-consuming.
zzGANs are capable of training all forms of generator networks that are required by other frameworks to attain some specific forms of functionality. They can produce data similar to the real one, which is widely used in the real world in the generation of images, audio, videos, and texts. The images produced by the GANs are mostly used in marketing, advertisement, e-commerce, and games. They are also useful in machine learning approaches as they can easily interpret data into various versions by going into the details of the data. The combina-
Christie’s AI Artwork Selling At $432,000 Christie’s became the first auction house to sell an AI portrait of Edmond Belamy generated by a GAN for $432000 (almost 50 times its high estimate). The GAN was open sourcebased, which was written by Robbie Barrat of Stanford. What makes the artwork unique is that it was created through artificial intelligence by three French students who used a code from the 19-year old programmer, Barrat. The AI community has had a major step through the development of this AI portrait. Image generation with GANs is a multistep process that involves the collection of training data (scraper) that enables your network to replicate, construction of the generative algorithm. Then you begin running the algorithm and sorting out the outputs to pick the best out of the many generated results. From the Belamy story, in combination with their motto, we can truly attest that “creativity is not only for humans” with the creation of art through artificial intelligence. Advantages and Disadvantages of Using GANs 11
Techfastly | August - September 2020
Christie’s became the first auction house to sell an AI portrait of Edmond Belamy generated by a GAN for $432000 (almost 50 times its high estimate).
tion of GANs and ML makes it easier to recognize people, cars, trees, and streets and can also determine the distance between different objects. Disadvantages of GANs zz
GANs are hard to train; they usually need different types of data repeatedly to check if it functions accurately or not.
zz
The generation of discrete data in the form of a text or speech is a very complex process.
zz
Generally, GANs handle a single task at a time, which makes it difficult to accomplish tasks of guessing the values of a single-pixel given another pixel. This can be fixed by the use of BiGAN that enables you to guess the missing pixels by the use of Gibbs sampling.
Other Potential Uses of GANs: GANs are used in image editing. For instance, changing the appearance of an aged individual by changing their hairstyle cannot be accomplished with just the normal image editing tools. Still, with the use of GANs, you will drastically reconstruct and change the appearance of the image. · Application of GANs for security purposes. Cyber threats are one of the major concerns revolving around the AI world, where even the deep neural networks are prone to hacking. GANs are in the front line to directly address the issues of adversarial attacks, which uses a variety of methods for fooling deep learning architectures. On the other hand, GANs increase the strength of the existing deep learning models against those methods through the creation of similar examples and training the models to detect them. · GANs are used in cloth translation as they can produce photographs of similar clothes as they appear in online stores. · They can also be used in photo inpainting (hole filling). This involves repairing and filling a missing section of an image that was reasonably removed with the use of created content. · Generation of 3D objects such as cars, chairs, etc. with the provision of 2D pictures. Game designers also use GANs to generate 3D backgrounds and avatars to develop realistic appearances”.
Geoffrey M.
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Is Java still relevant in 2020? By now, there are millions and billions of lines of code written in Java, which is powering the software that we use every day.
W
hat is Java - A brief history In the early 90s, the software tech domain saw the inception of two of the most influential entities that came into existence, which shaped the Software Industry as it is now. Those were the World Wide Web www(1989) and Java(1995). There's no need for an introduction for the www. Let's talk about the latter.
was repurposed to be something else entirely. This might be a reason for its General Purpose Nature, and currently, Java is being used in some way in every niche domain you can think of.
Most of us know that Java was born in Sun Microsystems lab and was designed by James Gosling. But lesser known is the fact that Java was initially intended to be the language for communicating between Consumer Electronic Devices. As the development of this language started in 1991 and progressed, the www. started to shape up into a global phenomenon. This made the Java language development team rethink the original purpose, and they shifted its focus to accommodate this new niche.
There are several new kids on the block now. The latest sensation is Python. Python is currently topping many of the lists where Java was the uncrowned prince for over a decade. A large share of this popularity goes to the sudden interest in AI and ML domain and its simplicity as a first programming language to learn.
Java's popularity has not fallen ever since. It started with JDK 1.0 on January 23, 1996 and is currently on JDK 14((March 17, 2020) as we speak. What kind of uses is Java best suited for As mentioned earlier, Java was intended to be one thing and 13
Techfastly | August - September 2020
The most common use cases for Java would be Android Apps, Web Applications Backend and also, High-Frequency Trading and Scientific Applications. Java versus other Languages
Another language we can talk about is C++. Java can be considered an improvement over C++ in functionality and ease of use. When it comes to Ruby, both Ruby and Java are object-oriented and not dynamically typed. However, like Python, Ruby is also slower than Java since it is an interpreted language - which means it needs to be compiled on runtime, which adds to the total running time. Another comparison we hear a lot is regarding C#. Be it the case of speed or performance; both perform equally well. However, Java wins the battle since C# is platform-specific. Once the software is built - it cannot be run on all platforms like Java allows you to. Why Java is still a powerful programming language There has been a lot of news that Java is going to be phased out soon, and that it will soon be going out of scope. But the reality differs. First of all, a vast majority of the current systems rely on Ja-
va-specific code, and it is not easy to take Java down anytime soon due to the sheer amount of software that's running on Java, especially across the Web. The recent events regarding the surging interest in COBOL underline the fact that if a language is meeting the use case very well, it is there to stick. Though COBOL is a very old language, and it has highly specific usage in the industry, it is being popularized and promoted like nothing else by IBM as of now. These are a couple of reasons why Java is still one of the dominant programming languages out there and a favorite for the Enterprises Worldwide. Mature and Stable The first and foremost aspect of Java-based software that makes it a winner in the Enterprise Software domain is its Stability and Maturity. It has stood the test of time by enterprises worldwide as the backend for their enormous Tech Stack serving millions of transactions per day. Robust and Secure The Security of Java is based on the following design principles - Sandboxing model( Code runs in a sandbox and doesn't have access to System Resources), Robust Exception handling, Bytecode check by JVM(JVM Feature), Object Access Control, Final modifier, Automatic Garbage collection, and Type safety.
Large Codebase By now, there are millions and billions of lines of code written in Java, which is powering the software that we use every day. As per an estimate by Oracle, 3 billion devices run Java. Those are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even as we speak, more is being added to that repository. Huge Community Since the inception, there has been a steady growth in users for Java until recently. It has a huge community of veteran software engineers, and people who are getting started with the language, and both of them have their reasons to love the language.
Why investing in building Java-based DevOps teams is cost-effective There are at least a couple of reasons why building a Java-based DevOps team is a good idea for the Enterprise. Readily available expertise - The language has been in the Software Industry for a long time - over two decades. During that period, the industry has generated a large number of experts. It is not hard to find extremely skillful engineers who are proficient in Java because of that. And since the demand meets the supply, the cost of procuring resources also remains feasible. Java is one of the oldest mainstream languages in use today. Thanks to this popularity, most of the tooling that would be required in a project is already available. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when we have a 4WD vehicle in hand! There's a huge Free Open Source Software(FOSS) community for the language as well, which consists of a large number of Open Source Projects such as Apache, Spring, Guava, Netty, Jenkins, Logger, JUnit e.t.c. All your building blocks are already there, that too, for free. Real Business Use Cases Here are a few case studies to support the points mentioned above regarding the relevance of Java in Enterprise Environment. Twitter - Twitter migrates core infrastructure to Java Virtual Machine and supports more than 400 million tweets a day
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Techfastly | August - September 2020
"Performance is one of the most important products that any service can deliver to its customers," says Robert Benson, senior director of software engineering at Twitter. "End users want Twitter to be fast so they can get real-time information. Reliability and performance are huge goals for us, and that's why part of our core strategy involves moving to the Java Virtual Machine [JVM] runtime environment. Twitter no longer has the performance issues it previously had, and that's in large part due to our moving to the JVM." -Robert Benson, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Twitter.
Complete Case study of Twitter using Java in production - Twitter and Java Netflix - Netflix powers through 2 billion content requests per day with Java-driven architecture
"The vast majority of the services running within our architecture are built on Java and the Java Virtual Machine [JVM]," says Andrew Glover, director of delivery engineering at Netflix. "Netflix uses a stateless architecture, so as we bring in more customers, we are able to bring up more instances relatively easily. We have thousands of Java processes running all the time. Yet as we grow, we don't have huge infrastructure challenges. We also have a lot of open-source tools that are Java-based, which makes it easy to monitor, upgrade, and scale our services." -Andrew Glover, director of delivery engineering at Netflix Complete Case study of Netflix using Java in production - Netflix Safe Water Kenya - An all-Java mobile app documents Safe Water Kenya's efforts to provide clean water to rural families in remote East Africa
"When the company decided to expand globally, we realized that Microsoft was not a leader in the mobile world." - Daniel Pahng, mFrontiers President. Complete Case study of Safe Kenya Water using Java in production - Safe Water Kenya 15
Techfastly | August - September 2020
The Current State of Java Even in 2020, Java is still popular as a first language or if you just want to broaden your skills set. The TIOBE index still ranks Java as the most popular language. And it is going to stay on the list for a long time”.
Renju Paul Jose
All YOU NEED The Next Generation of High-Speed Wireless Communication What is 5G? The super-fast Internet is just around the corner. 5G or the 5th Generation is the next-gen of the global network. 5G is here not only to give you improved and uninterrupted Internet and cellphone connections, but this will also enable better performance for various innovative activities like driverless cars, delivery drones, improved
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Techfastly | August - September 2020
5G
TO KNOW ABOUT
A.I., and whatnot. Everything in our lives has become Smart – smartphones, smart homes, smart kitchens, smart cars, and all of them need even quicker connectivity for smooth functioning with no room for error. The Internet has reshaped our world in ways that we could never have imagined. Everything is just a snap of your fingers!
conferencing like never before.
Source- oaji.net
On June 13, 2018, the Santiago 3GPP Conference laid the foundation of the first international 5G standard. No company or person owns 5G, and it'll be wise to call 5G the brainchild of some of the leading mobile giants.
History of 1G to 5G 1G – In the year 1979, the first Generation or 1G was launched by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Tokyo, many other countries followed suit. However, 1G suffered from some initial drawbacks like calls not being encrypted, poor network, awful sound quality, and no roaming support.
5G can give you better coverage, can handle large bandwidth, Dalian connection, and low latency.
5G - 5G has brought the evolution of The Internet of Things (IoT) into our pockets and purses in the form of mobile phones. 5G is here to transform everything our homes, our banks, our education, our healthcare, everything!
5G was first launched in a few American and South Korean cities in April 2019. How is it different from 4G? The 4G cellular system is nearly 5000 times faster than the current 3G structure, and it gives a download speed that reaches 100 Mbps. 5G has a download speed of almost 10,000 Mbps, and it can also connect 100 times more devices and gives 100 percent more coverage. 4G gives a download speed of an average of 20Mbps to download an H.D. movie that would generally take around 10 to 20 minutes to download, whereas 5G will download that same movie in an unbelievable 25 seconds with a stunning speed of 500Mbps to 1500Mbps. Not only is this a much better and faster upload and download of any video, but it is 3D/ultra-high definition videos, A.R., V.R. 2020 has promised not only twenty billion plus connection devices such as phones and computers but also captors, cars, drones, medical equipment, smart home devices, and so much more! And this is why we need 5G. What are its advantages?
2G – 2G was launched under the GSM Standard in Finland in 1991, and it promised better structures than 1G. Calls could be better encrypted, and digital voice calls were clearer with less background noise. With some arithmetic here and there, 2G was here to revolutionize the telecom sector. 3G – NTT DoCoMo launched 3G in the year 2001. 3G brought in increased data transfer capabilities and gave rise to more video conferencing, and video streaming became easier. Even the iPhone was launched in 2007 in the era of 3G. 4G –4G took this game of streaming high-quality videos to another level. With multiple deployments in some countries as the Long Term Evolution (LTE), 4G offered unparalleled streaming of gaming services, H.D. videos, and H.Q. video 17
Techfastly | August - September 2020
With the arrival of 5G, smart devices will become adept with improved and prompt connectivity. For instance, your smart kitchen can connect with your smart oven through 5G to inform you about the exact cooking time needed. Education will become more accessible. Students and teachers sitting in any part of the world can team up anytime. Places in the most remote location will have access to better health and medical assistance. The functioning of multiple parallel services will become smoother. 5G can give you better coverage, can handle large bandwidth, Dalian connection, and low latency. Thanks to a faster and more reliable network, any vid-
eo will be downloaded and uploaded in a whiplash. Sending data to a large number of users will become easier. Monitoring a plethora of machines and equipment connected through 5G will guarantee more efficiency without disruption or delay. There's also a possibility that natural disasters like tsunami or an earthquake can be detected faster and earlier. The coronavirus outbreak has pushed everyone indoors, making "social distancing" the new norm. Students, businesses, healthcare, even the number of home deliveries have been affected in some way. All of these need more robust 5G technologies in the U.S. Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC member, said the influx of people working from home is a test for the current networks. "We're going to have a big stress test on our networks," she said. "There are a lot of potential points of stress." Countries that are spearheading 5G World leaders in technology like Japan, Germany, China, South Korea, the USA, England, Spain, followed by France, are theoretically ready for 5G. "According to estimates published in an Informa Tech research paper, 5G technology could be responsible for 22.3 million jobs and $13.2 trillion of global economic output by 2035."
wireless technology. Controversies regarding 5G Since its conception, planning, and execution, 5G has been the favorite child of controversies, be it the stories about its radiation transmission leading to various health hazards, or alleged espionage. Among these, the most dangerous aspect of 5G that the world is worried about and is discussing at almost every Global dais is the enormous radiation it emits. According to some reports, 5G network frequency is extremely dangerous as it is way above the current standard and could be exponentially risky for humans. However, according to another study that counters this view,
5G is not ‘the problem.’ The problem lies in the spectrum and the power it brings along.
South Korea, China, and the United States are already leading the world in building and deploying 5G technology in various cities.
humans emit a high amount of radiation during their lifetime. The frequency of this radiation is at least 5000 times higher than 5G. Let that sink in! Does that mean that humans are more dangerous?
Sweden, Turkey, and Estonia are some names in the league of smaller countries with superior technology that have taken significant steps to make 5G networks commercially accessible to their citizens.
Researchers opine that technology like 5G is not 'the problem.' The problem lies in the spectrum and the power it brings along. To understand this better, the closer you are to the antenna and transmitter, the higher is the power and the better connectivity you get.
South Korea is way ahead of its counterparts and is expanding its 5G spectrum. It has already set up 5G to 85 of its cities as of January 2020. According to government officials, by 2026, around 90% of Korea's mobile users will be on a 5G.
Most devices transmit a very low power to have any effect on the human body. For instance, the Wi-Fi uses a spectrum band of 2.4 GHz, even the microwave at your house uses the same band. The spectrum band is the same here, but the level of power both of these uses is different. The microwave uses more power, whereas the Wi-Fi uses lesser power.
China holds the second position after South Korea, with the deployment of 5G in 57 of its cities as of January 2020. AT&T Inc., KT Corp, and China Mobile are some of the telecommunication giants working relentlessly to build the fifth-generation (5G) of 18
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5G is promising unlimited coverage, which means developing mega infrastructures like putting more number of radio heads closer to people for better connectivity; this will send up the cost for laying such structures. 5G also adheres to the risk of security breach and threat
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of espionage. The U.S. has banned the use of Chinese components in its 5g network, citing a probable chance of espionage. Amidst the Covid-19 stress, the ever-existing race for dominance between the USA and China has also amplified. Supremacy in the 5G revolution has become the absolute goal of the two superpowers, to the extent that the U.S. has banned the use of Chinese components in its 5g network, citing a probable chance of espionage. Recently, the U.S. even blocked Huawei Technologies, which is a leading 5G gear supplier. What is beyond 5G? What lies beyond 5G is up for debate, discussion, more and more analysis, experiments, speculation, and the colossal funding that it needs. 6G is still theoretical, and we may also have 7G or 8G as the future looks quite promising. 5G is the next frontier that combines evolution with innovation for the entire telecommunication industry. The top four carriers in the U.S., Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and At&T are now offering 5G. However, coverage is still limited around the U.S. Verizon spearheaded the 5G revolution in the U.S. and, as of 2020, is offering 5G in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, and in smaller cities like Memphis, Columbus, and Grand Rapids. The Verizon subscribers in Chicago, US have managed to get speeds of up to 1.4Gbps. This is way faster than 4G's theoretical top speed of 300Mbps. As more and more devices connect to the Internet, 5G is the need of the hour, and is here to change people's lives”.
Niharika Choudhary
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Techfastly | August - September 2020
CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PREDICT
FUTURE PANDEMICS? "Doctors cannot digest complete genetic sequencing, but artificial intelligence can." say the experts.
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o you know what telemedicine is and how it can help at predicting future pandemics like COVID-19? Since we got into the severe coronavirus outbreak, people have been talking about the development of technologies that can prevent it. However, we have not seen that much about preventing future pandemics. In December of 2019, an alert was fired by health tech Blue Dot, warning about the risk of a pandemic in China, which we now know as the coronavirus. The company explains that the alert could only be fired due to an algorithm that collects various information from different sources, and crosses it with its database, thus being able to report possible disease outbreaks, whether existing or not. The Blue Dot algorithm uses techniques of natural language processing and machine learning to identify the symptoms present and the number of people who present it. "We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, small murmurs, forums, or blogs with indications of some kind of unusual event happening." according to the CEO of Blue Dot. In fact, this is how the algorithm indicated the risk of contamination in Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo all confirmed and were some of the first places affected by the virus outside China. A major factor responsible for the fast spread and slow prevention of the pandemic was the nine-day delay by the World Health Organization to put the problem in evidence and take the necessary measures. Sometimes, algorithms aren't enough. You need health and medical professionals to take action as well.
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According to Kai-Fu-Lee, ex-president of Google China and the current president of Sinovation Ventures (Chinese venture capital investment company), we can use these algorithms and improve them to help discover new pandemics in the future. Lee talked a lot about the topic of his participation in Brazil at Silicon Valley and said that using telemedicine to create a large database of the health of the population and that it is possible to use artifi-
cial intelligence to predict and prevent pandemics.
and overcome conventional medicine.
"I think that in the long term, pandemic prevention will be possible with artificial intelligence," said Lee. "We will use smart clothes, known as wearables, that will produce data and send it to the cloud where it will be possible to notice anomalies early. So I hope that the next pandemic can be predicted and prevented."
"Doctors cannot digest complete genetic sequencing, but artificial intelligence can." say the experts.
The idea proposed by Lee and several experts on the subject, that through telemedicine - the use of technology to monitor the health of patients from different places - whether through applications or watches with health monitoring, we can generate enough data to create a large cloud with all the information needed to predict a new pandemic. But predicting a pandemic goes beyond AI. It would be best if you had health and medical professionals take action quickly and actively work against it early on. The nine-day delay by the WHO was catastrophic and led to a much faster spread of the coronavirus. The importance of predicting the pandemic is directly linked to its prevention. The faster the diagnosis, the faster the treatment or isolation will be. Several researchers claim that this will be the last major global pandemic if we direct technology to this research. With the information generated, unique genetic sequencing algorithms can be created for each person in the world, being able to personalize treatments
If you really can't imagine this ideal world of algorithms, try to imagine the following: You acquire a watch that monitors your heartbeat and body temperature. Every time it peaks or goes down drastically, the watch triggers an alert and redirects you to a diagnostic application. Within the application, you should answer a simple questionnaire about your symptoms. If the algorithm diagnoses some risk, it asks you to redirect to a health center. Otherwise, the application understands that it may have been a common change due to some other factor. This is already somewhat a reality, think about the new Apple Watch. It can monitor heart rate fairly well in older people. However, further research and development needs to be done to perfect this. The system would have two main benefits: zz zz
Diagnose possible health problems, and redirect you to service as soon as possible. Create a database with the symptoms and health monitoring of the world population, so that it identifies patterns and indicates epicenters of diseases.
As we can see, Artificial Intelligence plays a vital role in our daily lives, and even more so in matters of public health. We can and must use it for our well-being. The current pandemic of COVID-19 has led us to global economic catastrophes, and the deaths of thousands of people in all countries. It is difficult to say whether our planet Earth could withstand yet another great outbreak like this. Several researchers have developed studies of algorithms in disease forecast and prevention, so this can be the last pandemic experienced by us. In addition to it, companies around the world have invested high capital to finance this idea. It is not possible to say with a hundred percent certainty that this idea is perfect, and in fact, it probably is not. However, the big question raised in this article is: how we must use technology and improve it to our advantage? As much as it does not work exactly as we expect, we will undoubtedly have a better scenario than the previous one. If Artificial Intelligence can save us from losing 400,000 lives, do you think it's worth a try?
Daiane Babicz”. 22
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THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EQUITY CROWDFUNDING FOR YOUR STARTUP An accredited investor is one with a special status under the financial regulation laws in Rule 501 of Regulation D of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
I
ntroducing Equity Crowdfunding to Raise Funds for Startups in the USA
Equity crowdfunding is a type of crowdfunding that is primarily concerned with Title III of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. It is an investment type where several investors invest their capital into a specific startup business in exchange for equity shares. Often, this type of crowdfunding is used by the early-stage companies to raise their seed funding. Non-accredited investors can invest in equity crowdfunding as it has the potential for earning profit as the startup succeeds. Besides, it doesn't need a substantial amount of money to get started, as it depends on how much a startup seeks funding. However, there are drawbacks, too, with equity crowdfunding such as inherent risk and timeframe. With no guarantee of whether a new startup will take off or fail, equity shares of the investors would be worthless. Even after the success of a startup, it may take years before investors can sell equity shares. Equity Crowdfunding Regulation in the US As soliciting investments from the public is illegal, so equity crowdfunding can breach different security laws unless it is filed with proper securities regulatory authority. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a regulatory authority having ways such as the Howey Test to determine security in equity crowdfunding. Securities concern the investors who have been asked to contribute money in exchange for profits on funding startups through equity crowdfunding. [1]
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“Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.” - Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
Is Equity Crowdfunding Legal? Under What Law Does it Fall? Equity crowdfunding is legal under the JOBS Act in the US, which was signed by President Barack Obama on April 5, 2012. This law is primarily intended to facilitate funding for startups and small businesses to ease securities regulations. There are three types of equity crowdfunding that comes under the following laws: 1. Regulation A+ Offering This offering falls under Title IV of the JOBS Act, which further has two types of financial raises: Tier 1 Raise & Tier 2 Raise. Both Tier 1 & Tier 2 offerings are open to both ordinary and accredited investors. Moreover, companies can test the waters period in both Tier 1 & 2 raise to determine the demand of the investors, which is a part of Rule 225.
In Tier 1 offerings, you can raise $20 million in 12 months, while you can raise $50 million in 12 months in Tier 2. Tier 1 should meet the BlueSky investing regulations of the state in which the investor resides, whereas, in Tier 2 offerings, you don’t have to worry about the state-by-state regulations under the Blue-Sky Laws. However, audited financials and post-offering reporting are required. 2. Regulation D Offering These are the traditional form of crowdfunding to raise funds for a startup which existed before the JOBS Act came into effect. You can raise as much money as you would like from Accredited investors and up to 35 other investors. It has rules 506(b) and 506(c) which are also referred to as private placements. As per both Reg D Rule 506(b) and Reg D Rule 506(c), you can raise money from accredited investors. However, there is one significant difference: you are allowed to advertise that you are raising capital under Rule 506(c) and must verify the status of accredited investors. 3. Title III or Regulation CF Offering Title III or the Regulation Crowdfunding (RF) of the JOBS Act permits non-accredited investors to purchase shares in startups. Under this rule, you can raise: · $1,070,000 or less in 12 months from ordinary by disclosing audited or reviewed financial statements and tax returns. · $535,000 or less by providing reviewed or audited financial statements reviewed by an accountant. · $535,000 or more for first-time providers, audited or reviewed financial statements reviewed by an accountant. In the case of the non-first-time providers, financial statements audited by a public accountant independent of the issuer are required. Along with the above conditions, companies also have to present annual reporting requirements. Not every company can participate in a Reg CF offering. The securities sold through a funding portal are controlled by the federal securities laws and should be held for a year before they can be resold. Though disclosures are vital in Reg CF, the burden of risk is now shifting to individual investment limits allowing more investors to lose less. [3] Who can be considered as an Accredited Investor in the US? 24
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An accredited investor is one with a special status under the financial regulation laws in Rule 501 of Regulation D of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Many types of equity crowdfunding are permitted only to accredited investors, such as banks, employee benefit plans, and trusts, insurance companies, and individuals considered as affluent to have less requirement for specific protections. You must earn more than $200,000 per year, has a net worth exceeding $1 million, or be a general partner, executive officer, or director for the security issuer to be considered as an accredited investor. [3] Is Crowdfunding of Fundraising Governed at Federal or State Level? Under the federal legislation, the funding portals should register with the SEC and an applicable self-regulatory organization to operate. The SEC approved the progress of the crowdfunding bill to ease online fundraising for startups and small companies and provide fraud protection for investors. Along with the SEC regulations, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) creates additional rules for member businesses involved in crowdfunding. Both Regulation CF and the FINRA has a role in evaluating and approving the applications of these crowdfunding portals. As the federal legislation for crowdfunding seems unworkable for some people, many US states have recently enacted or are considering their crowdfunding exemption laws. This is to enable intrastate investment offerings that are exempted from federal (SEC) regulation. The Invest Kansas Exemption and the Invest Georgia Exemption are instances of crowdfunding exemption laws. [4] Equity Raising Platforms Before the equity crowdfunding bill was passed under Regulation D, it was limited to individuals who met with specific net worth and income levels, called accredited investors, and was conducted by a licensed broker-dealer. However, after the Title III of the 2012 JOBS Act's Regulation CF came into effect, equity crowdfunding was allowed regardless of the net worth or income and conducted by a licensed broker-dealer or via a funding portal registered with SEC. Some of the notable equity raising platforms include: ProFounder- This is the first US company to facilitate equity crowdfunding between startups needing funds to launch and willing investors who were ignored of how to invest in a private firm. This platform closed even before the law on equity investment come into force in the US [5] Wefunder- It is the largest funding portal by many investors and investment volumes. Over the years, it
has become more successful than other portals as it encouraged businesses to use fundraising mechanisms other than equity. [6] StartEngine- It is one of the world's largest equity crowdfunding sites that allow investors to buy equity in companies that are rising to $50 million. [7] AngelList- This is the oldest and most-established equity crowdfunding platform for accredited investors who know the "inside baseball" game in Silicon Valley. Designed for professionals, it is the perfect "operating system" for startups, providing many useful services. [8] SeedInvest- It started to help technology startups get access to capital from people willing to make sizeable equity investments. It allows only US-based businesses and has a picky selection criterion. It has a positive reputation with a growing base of investors and successful companies. [9] Notable Success Beta Bionics, based in Boston that builds bionic pancreas to improve the lives of people who have type 1 diabetes, had a successful campaign on Wefunder. It raised $1 million from 817 investors on a $100 million valuation in August 2016. Hopsters Brewery, a Boston based brewpub restaurant, raised $1 million on a $4 million cost from 713 investors on Wefunder in 2017. Sondors Electric Car, based closer to Silicon Valley in California, has successfully raised $1 million on a $32.4 million valuation on StartEngine. Recently, Hackernoon has completed a $1.07M raise through the equity crowdfunding platform, StartEngine. [10] Notable Failures One of the notable failed equity crowdfunding cases includes Rebus, which was founded in 2010 and raised £816,790 in 2015 on Crowdcube by selling 6.63% of its shares to 109 investors. As per Crowdcube, Rebus is its biggest bankruptcy that shows there is a deficient public understanding of the risks related to equity crowdfunding. Other notable failed equity crowdfunding cases are Buy2Let and Alchemiya Media. [11] Can Non-Accredited Investors Invest in Startups Through Funding Platforms? 25
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As per the rules that went into effect on May 16, 2016, anyone can invest through equity crowdfunding platforms. An ordinary individual can invest in the startup companies that earlier used to be the stuff of Angel and Venture Capitalism (V.C.) investors only. Of course, some restrictions apply, and there are higher risks and potential rewards for early-stage companies. What Are the Rules Around Non-US Citizens Investing Through These Platforms? The participation of non-accredited investors to fund startups on funding portals is not free for all. The SEC has placed a few restrictions on how much investment can be made by the non-accredited investors throughout 12-months based on their net worth and income. This is to prevent the risk to non-accredited investors who are not aware of investments and crowdfunding.
If your net worth and annual income are less than $107,000 per year, you can invest less than 5% of your income or net worth If your annual income and net worth exceed $107,000, you can invest up to 10% of your income or net worth Despite the progress made in the past around equity crowdfunding, the US still operates on archaic laws, and that's why you should ensure to know the rules on different platforms around accepting international investors. Ensure that the US-based platforms comply with the US securities regulations and regulators (SEC and FINRA) and foreign securities laws related to any investor outside the US [12] Benefits of Equity Crowdfunding for the stakeholder, investors, VC, and person in need of funding Equity crowdfunding is a feasible option for the person in need of funding their startups but are struggling to communicate their values to VCs, investors, and stakeholders to finance their idea. A major benefit of equity fundraising is quick access to raise millions without going through the tedious process involved with appealing venture capital. It can foster strong bonds and vital partnerships that could help your startup to succeed. [13] Development on the Horizon Non-accredited investors should keep in mind that although Title III allows universal participation, you should not jump on every crowdfunding platform. Moreover, as you compare different investment opportunities, it is vital to pay close attention to the fees on each platform as these can impact your returns over the long-term. With the governments of the nations across the globe implementing lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, leading to the current economic turmoil, SEC has announced new steps intended to help many small businesses that are facing challenges to access urgently needed capital- Anjali P Jith”.
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Answer Box Strategy
PAA is a Google Answer Box that you may have come across when conducting a Google search.
L
everaging the Google PAA (People Also Ask) element on a Search Results Page for Targeted Content Creation with a Python Scraper
All businesses that are online today are creating content at a furious pace. According to Technavio, a research firm, content marketing will grow by an incremental $269.24 billion. Typically, in companies large and small, there is a challenge around ‘what content to produce.’ In large corporations, this often comes down to who is paying the content, and the content takes a slant towards the specific business unit funding the content initiative. Smaller firms are typically stuck, thinking about what material to create. In early 2020, Ahrefs, an SEO tool provider, analyzed over 1 billion pages on the web and concluded that 90.63% of those pages get 0 traffic from Google, and 5.29% get less than ten visits a month. Here is a link to their complete findings. A visual 27
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depiction sourced from Ahrefs is provided below.
So for any business, the challenge to produce engaging content that ranks well on Google and gathers a respectable amount of traffic is quite significant. It would be a mistake to think that a single strategy would be able to solve this challenge. Depending on your business, your USP (Unique Selling Proposition), your competition, and many other factors, a unique strategy would be required to produce content that engages prospects and customers. One strategy that brands can look to is the PAA (People Also Ask) element on a Google Search Page. I have used ‘red shoes’ as a seed term, which Google chose to associate with the 1948 movie ‘The Red Shoes’ as an example. What is PAA?
And if a user clicks on a question, the answer and other related questions that Google thinks are essential surfaces to the fore, as shown in the screenshot above. If you believe that Google has a sufficiently large data set of what people ask for, then the questions associated with your target search keyword could be an excellent place to look for in terms of content production. Details on how to scrape these questions for a keyword using a Python script is provided below. A word of caution – scraping Google results is against Google’s Terms of Service, so execute this script at your risk. Here is a link to Google’s Terms of Service and the specific section around scraping of their results.
PAA is a Google Answer Box that you may have come across when conducting a Google search. Here is a screenshot of the Google Answer Box.
Typically, the PAA Answer box tends to be four questions with the critical parts of the answer pulled in from the website for the user. From an ROI perspective, we should also consider how prevalent these PAA Google Question and Answer boxes are. To get a sense of that, we should refer to the Mozcast, a collection of 1,000 keywords, and the Google results for these words are tracked every 24 hours to give us a sense of the changes in the Google search results page. The graph below from Mozcast clearly shows how predominant the presence of the PAA Q&A box is on the Google Search results page. Although we do not have a view longer than 30 days, this high incidence of the PAA has been quite common for some time now.
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So now that we have established the powerful presence of PAA and Google’s vast data set that can show questions that users would be interested in, it is time to move to the next stage, which would be to harness these questions for content creation of your website. The steps below describes how you can use Python to do this for yourself. At the very end, we have bonus resources for you too. Setting Up the Python Script to Scrape Google PAA Answer Box (thanks to a freelancer that assisted in the creation of this script) Step 1 Import the required Libraries #import block import requests ##import request library - this is http for humans from bs4 import BeautifulSoup #import BeautifulSoup library import pandas as pd #import pandas for file read dataframe... import time These libraries will form the foundation of the rest of the program Step 2 Create a csv file that has all the words for which you wish to scrape the questions in the PAA Google Answer Box. In my case, I named the csv file as paa-searcha.csv and the contents of the file are a set of keywords in a single column. Step 3 Have Python open a Google.com page and conduct a search for the keyword of your choice. #specify the file name and location file_path="paa-csvsearcha.csv" #open the file to be read df=pd.read_csv(file_path, usecols =["query"],squeeze = True) #block to create a dataframe key_search=list(df) #create an empty output dictionary output_csv={}
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#creating dictionary output_csv... key=1 ##counter variable key for the dictionary... max_ques_val=0 #block for a loop that goes through each keyword one by one and stores the output Step 4 Retrieve the Search Results Page into Python. for searchKey in key_search: page = ‘https://www.google.com/search?q=’+searchKey #url to be searched req = requests.get(page, headers={‘User-Agent’: ‘Mozilla/5.0’}) #avoid acting as a bot soup = BeautifulSoup(req.content,’html5lib’) #soup object to parse the file #print(soup) Step 5 Parse the HTML for the PAA Answer Box Questions. At this point, when I did my first search on red shoes, I used the following manner to find the div class tag in which the PAA questions were tagged in the HTML on Google for me. Chances are, this may be different for you. In order to find the div tag for you, follow the following steps: A. Right click on your mouse and choose ‘Inspect’ (I am assuming you are using a Chrome browser)
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B. Click on the “select an element” icon as shown in the screenshot below.
C. Move the cursor to the first PAA. This will highlight the HTML for the first PAA.
D. Look for the div class ID in here: In my case, the div class id was Lt3Tzc, which I only saw the first time when I was putting this post together. On my subsequent visit, the div class id still exists but is hidden. How do I know this?
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I looked for the div class in the Python output when I uncomment the line ‘print(soup) in the line in the last line Step 3 above and run the program. This div class id is missing from the view in Chrome highlighted below:
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E. Store everything in the target Div class id in an empty list. #block to create an empty list called paa_list and look for content to be added that is within a certain div class paa_list=[] #create empty list div_tag=soup.find_all("div", {"class": "Lt3Tzc"}) #find all data with div tag with class Lt3Tzc and store it in div_tag variable... for tags in div_tag: paa_list.append(tags.text) #add each element to the list.. count=len(paa_list) #print(count) #count total elements... print("searched word:",searchKey) #print searched word on console... print("Questions fetched:\n",paa_list) #print questions fetched on console... print("\n") #next line F. Store PAA in case Google ever shows 10 questions. if count == 1: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 2: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 3: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 4: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3]]; 33
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#check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 5: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 6: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4], paa_list[5]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 7: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4], paa_list[5], paa_list[6]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 8: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4], paa_list[5], paa_list[4], paa_list[6], paa_list[7]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 9: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4], paa_list[5], paa_list[6], paa_list[7], paa_list[8]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary elif count == 10: output_csv[key]=[searchKey, paa_list[0], paa_list[1], paa_list[2], paa_list[3], paa_list[4], paa_list[5], paa_list[6], paa_list[7], paa_list[8], paa_list[9]]; #check the count in the list and accordingly assign it to the dictionary else: print("more than 10 questions for a particular searched word..."); key+=1 #increment key... if count > max_ques_val: max_ques_val=count #update the max. value for the heading value... time.sleep(5) #sleep counter for 5 seconds... 34
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#block that creates an output file if max_ques_val == 1: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1']); elif max_ques_val == 2: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2']); elif max_ques_val == 3: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3']); elif max_ques_val == 4: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4']); elif max_ques_val == 5: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5']); elif max_ques_val == 6: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5', 'Question 6']); elif max_ques_val == 7: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5', 'Question 6', 'Question 7']); elif max_ques_val == 8: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5', 'Question 6', 'Question 7', 'Question 8']); elif max_ques_val == 9: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5', 'Question 6', 'Question 7', 'Question 8', 'Question 9']); elif max_ques_val == 10: output_file_create = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(output_csv, orient = 'index', columns = ['Searched words','Question 1','Question 2', 'Question 3', 'Question 4', 'Question 5', 'Question 6', 'Question 7', 'Question 8', 'Question 9', 'Question 10']); else: print("... more than 10 questions for a particular searched word ..."); Step 6 Store the output in a csv file with a name of your choosing. 35
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In my case, I named the file to be output_csv output_file_create.head() #printing the head of output_file_create file... output_file_create.to_csv('output_file.csv', encoding='utf-8-sig') #exporting the output to the dataframe in output_file_create file... print("Output file created successfully") print("...script ended...") Once the program has run, the output in your file should look something like the following:
Step 7 Once you have the all the appropriate PAA Answer Box questions, you should check the search volume on these questions and associated phrases in a keyword like https://ahrefs.com/. Step 8 Once you have a list of questions with decent search volume, create content that offers relevant searchers something over and above what the current content does. Step 9 Promote the content created. A passive approach where you wait for the content to be picked up by others is unlikely to get you the traffic or provide Google with any signals that such content is worthy of ranking highly. 26% of clicks will go to the first link provided on a search, so you need to make sure yours is at the top. Step 8 and Step 9 are the hardest part of the process and often cause good content to lie un-discovered. Bonus Resources: A. If you want to scrape and visualize the questions that become visible one you click upon each question, you may be interested in this great script written by Alessio Nittoli. B. If you wish to account for any regional variations where Google may be changing the questions based on the city/country that you are searching from, you may want to use some commercial scraping services like https://serpapi.com/, https://zenserp.com/, https://serpstack.com/, https://serpproxy.com/ and many more And with these commercial providers, you eliminate the risk of violating Google’s Terms of Service yourself. Happy PAA scraping. You can get the code above from https://github.com/hkamboe/Google-PAA-People-Also-Ask-Scraping”.
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Microcredit - Loose Change for Real Change There are significant benefits among the “gung-ho entrepreneurs” (individuals who established businesses before microfinance wave). The effects are unsatisfying to those who had no previous businesses (reluctant entrepreneurs).
F
rom the previous decades up to the early 2000s, international development was to be propelled by microloans. The objective was to lend small loans to individuals in developing countries to assist them in developing and also expanding their small businesses hence kicking poverty out of their families. Profits from the returned loans would then be used to lend to more individuals aiming at a very large number of families to do away with poverty. Many microfinance lending organizations began at those times. Very many organizations started to offer loans as potential donors and investors supplied funds to microcredit. By the end of 2013, there was a rise in the number of borrowers to more than 200 million. Accion US Network is an example of one such institution in the US. It is the largest nonprofit microfinance network in the US and works with people to help them grow their business.
What Is Microcredit? Microcredit is an extension of small loans to poor individuals who lack steady, verifiable, or collateral employment or credit history. In the US, it is generally for loans less than $50,000 to entrepreneurs who cannot borrow from a bank. It was designed to alleviate poverty by promoting entrepreneurship. Many of the beneficiaries of microcredits are illiterate individuals who lack the capacity and paper competence needed in the application of conventional loans. Microfinance is deemed to be part of microfinance, although many times they are used interchangeably. It provides a variety of financial services, such as savings accounts for poor individuals. 37
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Successful Examples: In 2009, an estimated 75 million individuals benefited from microloans that totaled to around US$38 billion. The repayment success rate ranges between 95%-98%, according to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in the early 1980s. A study found that more than half of US loan recipients escaped poverty in 5 years. Here are some of the successful most influential and largest microfinance institutions today:
Kiva Kiva is a non-profit microfinance institution operating in the U.S and other 85+ global countries. It is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded in 2005. It uses crowd-funding mechanisms and peer-topeer methods of lending. It allows persons to directly lend to borrowers in other nations who don’t have access to the traditional financing sources. Financing for health services, education, and small businesses are interest-free. Kiva has extended over $1.5 billion microloans to more
than 3 billion borrowers in 2020. This platform has around 2 million borrowers and about 1.8 million lenders.
Grameen Bank
Grameen Bank is considered to be the origin of the modern microcredit then other banks introduced it despite the initial misgivings. The year 2005 was declared the International year of microcredit by the United Nations. By 2012, microcredit became very common in developing nations. It was presented as an enormous tool of poverty alleviation with a focus on feminization poverty. The bank utilized a form of peer group pressure that helped in ensuring every individual was fiscally responsible. The borrowers were supposed to be groups of fives with the other community members who also needed loans. The groups capitalized on ideas of social capital and the notion that the communities have behavioral modes, networks, and links that would encourage individuals to repay their loans. Generally, the loans were sequentially issued and had a weekly or biweekly repayment period with very low rates as possible. In 2006, Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, the founder, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering in that microcredit work.
in many developing nations, from Haiti, Myanmar to the Philippines. It has more than 7 million borrowers, and in 2020 its gross portfolio profit has hit over $4 billion.
the government and has over 30 million clients doing business with the bank through its rural services posts and thousands of branches across South East Asia.
Accion US Network
Challenges Despite Success
Accion is an American nonprofit microfinance organization headquartered in New York. It is the largest and only national microfinance network in the US. Its mission is to give people the necessary financial tools they need to create or grow a successful business. It has made nearly 50,000 loans totaling over $450 million as of January 2014. It also lends over $3.7 million to small businesses a month. 97% of businesses remained open one year after receiving a loan from Accion despite challenging economic times.
Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) This is the oldest Indonesian Bank founded in Jakarta in 1896. It is established to be one of the largest financial institutions in Indonesia, primarily operating in smallscale and as a microloans lender. This bank is majorly owned by
Currently, there are more than 7000 microcredit institutions globally lend around $2.7 billion to borrowers more than 17 million.
Brac
It is another Microfinance Institution founded in Bangladesh in 1972. The institution offers a variety of services in different niches including education, human rights, economic development, and health. Micro savings services, housing assistance, grants, and small business loans are some of the services provided. Brac is known to operate 38
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Microfinance faces operational, strategic, compliance, and operational risks, just like any other industry. There’re risks such as over-indebtedness according to the nature of the markets in which these micro-finance institutions operate that are very inherent and more prevalent to microfinance. Despite the way microfinance is excessively hyped, it does not provide a cure to poverty, but stable job opportunities do. In the journey to help the poor, the focus should not be investing in microfinance but supporting the labor-intensive large industries. A comprehensive study concluded that microloan tends to be more beneficial to the individuals above the poverty line because they are more willing to invest in new technologies that will generate income as compared to the individuals below the poverty line. These individuals only tend to secure a conservative loan that protects their subsistence, and they don’t invest in fixed capital, new technologies, or hiring of the labor force. Another study in India about the limitation of entrepreneurship by credit constraints found that there are significant benefits among the “gungho entrepreneurs” (individuals who established businesses before microfinance wave). The effects are unsatisfying to those
who had no previous businesses (reluctant entrepreneurs). Model technology choices can generate dynamics matching the ones observed in the data in which the reluctant entrepreneurs only access a diminishing returns technology. In contrast, the gung-ho entrepreneurs can access to high fixed costs technology but with high returns. The chief executive of Basix, Vijay Mahajan, observed that microloans reduce the flow of cash to the poor, and even they do more harm than good due to the high-interest rates charged by some microcredit institutions. If the clients don’t earn higher returns on their investments than the set interests to be paid, then they will just become poor, not wealthier due to microcredit.
Failure of Microcredit in South Africa The international development community rushed to South Africa immediately after the end of the apartheid in 1994 to promote the microfinance model. They proclaimed that it would bring new dignity, incomes, jobs, and empowerment to the impoverished South Africans with high expectations of rapid progress. http://ignatianeconomics.blogspot. com/ The result of this market-driven microcredit introduced to post-apartheid South Africa was destructive. It has caused severe damage to the South African society and the economy at large despite being lauded too much. Many investors have left that bloated microfinance sector as it is about to collapse, as argued by many users. The problems induced in the microcredit sector in South Africa were of two forms: First, it is an anti-developmental intervention, meaning that it supports the small scale income generating ideas, but in practice, it supports consumption spending. Its impact on South Africa is that it created a costly and risky way in support of the immediate consumption needs of the poor. There are very few poor people who can repay the 39
microloans using their secure income streams, resulting in very high unemployment rates than it was before the apartheid period. The other major problem with the South African microcredit is the aspect of extensive commercialization. It was introduced in the microcredit sector globally to boost its financial sustainability. It’s estimated that about 40% of the workforce in South Africa is spent on debt repayments. The impoverished South Africans are now trapped in micro debts of unimaginable proportions. The individuals now realize that the objective of these private microfinance institutions wasn’t to help them uplift their lives out of poverty but to reap as much value from them within a short period before getting lost to other business fields. The South African microcredit models and supports have been discredited widely just like their counterparts in other parts of the world. It will be a very difficult task to alleviate the poor from the microcredit sector owing that the country even with the post-apartheid government, has official sanctions of exploiting the most bankrupt black communities.
There is No One Size Fits All Solution In the microfinance sector, there is no one size fits all approaches in the promotion of poverty reduction, empowerment, and development. Practitioners of microfinance need to develop structured approaches on how their target beneficiaries may utilize the services designed to the demographic of the society. A creative approach should be adopted that meets the financial service needs of the low-income
Techfastly | August - September 2020
community segments and the poor. Policies that provide the freedom to set payment conditions and terms for various borrowers are more beneficial to income-generating activities and businesses. The borrowers may be more financially empowered and disciplined by tailor fitting the repayment schemes to specific situations. It also reduces the risks of a borrower defaulting on their loan. Communities and practitioners should possess the virtue of saying no, particularly on conditions and terms that will negatively affect a person’s ability to repay their loan, whether long or short-term. Erase the misunderstanding, learn the trade! According to Youngquist, a world vision official, addressing the misconceptions in such a manner that microfinance is perceived as an integrated social-developmental tool as it’s supposed to be is a very good starting step. Microfinance implementation isn’t for all. The best avenue for success and real opportunities are offered by the development practitioners who have partnered with established microfinance service providers. Microcredit isn’t’ a cure-all and a panacea intervention. Money alone can’t solve all the problems within a household or the community at large Geoffrey M”.
AI in Journalism “In automated or algorithmic or robot journalism, computer programs are used to generate news articles. Computers, rather than human reporters, automatically produce stories through AI (Artificial Intelligence) software”.
AI
is continually making waves in the news and journalism industry. The work of communicating everything that happens in the society seems like it’s something entirely human-dependent. Furthermore, what does a machine have to do with what
happens in the news?
Journalism, as we know, has a large consumer base and is highly dependent on technology from the collection of data from different news sources to the publication of the content. Despite journalism being one of the consumers of technology, technological advancements change the way the news and journalism are carried out. AI is continuously focused on improving news production, publishing, and sharing ideas in particular. In automated or algorithmic or robot journalism, computer programs are used to generate news articles. Computers, rather than human reporters, automatically produce stories through AI (Artificial Intelligence) software. These programs organize, interpret, and also present the data in a readable manner. Artificial intelligence in journalism involves algorithms that scan large amounts of given data, select from pre-programmed articles, order key points and insert information such as places, amounts, statistics, and names. There is also the potential to customize the output to fit a specific tone, style, and voice.
Common Worldwide Data Leaks
In recent years, investigative journalists had a protective duty between the public sphere and their confidential information sources. However, this duty has been undergoing changes in the last two decades with the introduction of new media.
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Some instances like Snowden and WikiLeaks show how contemporary the media allows people to directly release data to the global audience, which raises the question of how the operations of journalists are affected by the recent leaks. •
The Bahamian Files
In the Bahamas, some 400,000 documents were leaked from the register of legal entities on offshore companies, including Ukrainians. There was data of about 60 companies on the Ukrainian part of the Bahamian archive. Massive datasets include information on citizens of more than 100 countries who had applied to one of the globally famous offshore zones, the Caribbean jurisdiction for the registration of their businesses. The Bahamian files were publicly made available on midday. The documents had information on different Germans’ offshore secrets. The DDoS (Distributed Denial of Secrets) published a full archive of the documents, unlike the ICIJ, who posted the Bahamas leaks, with no documents. The archive posted by the DDoS contained much larger data amounts than the Bahamas Leaks with some of it, namely until 2018, relating to a very recent period. As mentioned earlier, the Ukrainian part of the Bahamian archive contained information of about 60 companies. The companies were mostly founded by Ukrainians, low profile businessmen who were not part of the government, but several
names drew public attention.
mated damages in the proceedings against her are more than 5 billion It’s not a crime to register compa- dollars by the state’s estimates. nies in offshore jurisdictions. It is a global exercise that occurs for There have been massive data leaks various reasons, such as conve- in recent years from the offshore junience in the structuring of one’s risdictions like the offshore leaks, business and quality services in Panama papers, Bahamas leaks, and the offshore zones. paradise papers. •
FDA Data Dump
You may have only heard of Panama Leaks or WikiLeaks. However, every few months, there is a leak of information that journalists cover. For example, the FDA data dump revealed breast and dental implant problems among hidden reports. The majority of the reports about the 5.8 medical device problems that the FDA accessed were breast and dental implants.
Incorporation of Machine Learning (ML) in Journalism
In some instances, machine learning cannot do something you couldn’t; but what machine learning does is accomplish it faster than humans. Machine learning has the potential to find emails, the same as the ones you already have, assist you in finding frames of a given video with a senator, etc. The computer needs Many medical device complaints to be fed particular knowledge on are kept at the FDA, where they the questions you are trying to find are accessible to the general pub- solutions. lic. The 5.8 million complaints were the ‘alternative summary This knowledge helps you solve sevreports’ that were hidden for de- eral common problem patterns such cades, and the FDA only could ac- as flagging matching things from cess the files; nurses and doctors given sets of documents, filtering couldn’t even see them. complex data point spreadsheets, searching through picture piles, and • The Luanda Leaks sorting caches of reader tips. Isabel dos Santos, a businesswoman, was accused of making a fortune at the Angola citizens’ expense, as revealed in the Luanda Leaks. She moved billions through her shell empire, which was made possible by consultants, lawyers, and accountants.
It’s up to you to determine whether the images, data points, or the documents found via machine learning are newsworthy or exciting. Still, ML can get you from an unmanageable pile to a manageable one. You should also know that the computer can be mistaken, confused, and fail to understand your question like any other source, so continue with your journalism. ML is continuously being incorporated and advanced in the journalism industry so that it perfectly answers questions that reporters have concerning their data.
The businesswoman claimed that her success was self-made, but an investigation, Luanda Leaks, by 36 media partners and the ICIJ revealed the true source of her wealth. Isabel dos Santos in her defense, accused the Luanda authorities of using falsified doc- Machine learning techniques greatuments to freeze her assets as pre- ly help journalists in daily stories sented in her evidence. and accomplish some investigations that may involve going through The Luanda authorities denied vast piles of documents for months, the claims of Isabel alleging false which can be done in just a week. emails and a fake passport. They Journalists have been known to further stressed that the esti- utilize machine learning tools and 41
Techfastly | August - September 2020
codes like in the following real-world examples: • finding assaults classified as minor but were serious ones • detecting sexual abuse complaints in disciplinary reports • detecting political advertising • finding the discussed topics by the members of congress • detecting toxic comments
Learning ML With Free Hands-on Videos As a journalist, you can learn how to how to incorporate ML in your investigation tasks through several online coding notebooks and videos. Get to try your hands in searching images, analyzing text with AI, and sorting images. You can enter these pre-trained machine learning lessons by John Keefe, an editor at Quartz Al Studio, and a member of the Mauritius leaks. There are 15 lessons which are 4-15 minutes. You’ll get through a series of project examples focused on journalism like sorting docs into piles, detecting objects in images, and also the extraction of individuals’ names from troves of texts. The lessons utilize the fast.ai ML library for python, which makes Machine Learning easy for individuals who are not well versed in computers and math. The videos can be your preferred journalist oriented primer for the free and excellent fast.ai course practical deep learning for coders, which will significantly help you Geoffrey M ”.
Everything You Need to Know About IPv4 and IPv6 “The Internet Protocol’s latest version, IPv6, identifies devices over the Internet to locate them”. What is an IP Address? The IP address is a common term we come across if we speak of the Internet & computers. An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a numerical representation of a particular interface. The Internet protocol is a collection of communication rules via the Internet, including the transmission of messages, streaming video, or a web connection. Internet protocol is a set of internet communication rules. An IP address identifies a network or internet computer. An IP address, or just the "IP," identifies a device on the Internet or local network. It enables other systems connected via internet protocol to recognize a system. There are two primary versions used in the IP address format—IPv4 & IPv6 The IP address for each device connected to a computer network that uses a communication internet protocol (IP address) is a numerical label. An IP address consists of two main functions the host or network interface identification and localization addressing. Version 4 (IPv4) of the Internet Protocol defines an IP address as 32-bit numbers. However, the Internet has grown, and IPv4 addresses have deteriorated. A new IP version
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(IPv6) was standardized in 1998 using 128 bits for IP addresses. Since the mid-2000s, the use of IPv6 has been ongoing. An IPv4 address is 32-bit in size, restricting the address space to 4294967296 (232) addresses. Of this number, specific addresses such as private networks (~18 million addresses) and multicast addressing (~270 million addresses) are reserved for specific purposes. At IPv6, the size of the address in IPv4 was increased from 32 bits to 128 bits and thereby to 2128 (roughly 3.403*1038) addresses. Right now, that is deemed appropriate. Different reserved addresses and other considerations reduce the total usable address pool of both variants. A range of reserved addresses and other concerns reduce the total usable address pool of both versions. IP addresses are binary numbers but are typically represented as decimal (IPv4) or hexadecimal (IPv6) numbers for easier reading and human use.
has an 8-bit address, "192.0.2.0/24" has an 8-bit host address. There is plenty of space for 256 guests. These host addresses are the IP addresses required to connect your computer to the Internet. These bytes are usually referred to as octets, and these octets, bits, and bytes are written in a pointed decimal to be readable. A dotted-decimal separates every IP address octet. For example, a computer in binary notation has a standard IP address (IPv4): w.x.y.z This means pointed decimal: That means: 192.168.1.0 A network component and a node component are two components of an IP address. For instance, our house address has a house number and street name. Likewise, the network number is equivalent to the name of the streets for computer networks, and the house number is the node's address.
The total available address pool of the two versions is that of various reserved addresses and other deliberations. The total available address pool of both versions eliminates a set of reserved addresses and other considerations. IP addresses are binary numbers but are usually represented by decimal numbers for easier reading and human use (IPv5) or hexadecimal numbers (IPv6). Source: www.123rf.com
Understanding the IPv4 Standard In IPv4 address space, there are a total of 32 bits. For example, the number "24" refers to how many bits are found within a network when it has the address "192.0.2.0/24." Therefore it is possible to calculate the number of bits left for space address. Since all of the IPV4 networks have 32 bits, and each "decimal" segment 43
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The earlier implementation of IPv4 split the address space into network and node components with address groups. IP addresses have not adopted this system, but Class A, B, and C are still used. Class A—Net.Node.Node. Node (8 bits for the network address and 24 bits for node addresses) Class B—Net.Net.Node.Node (16 bits for the network addresses and 24 bits for node addresses) Class C—Net.Net.Net.Node (24 bits for the network addresses and 8 bits for node address)
Understanding the IPv6 Standard The Internet Protocol's latest version, IPv6, identifies devices over the Internet to locate
them. In order to communicate online, every device that uses the Internet has its own IP address. It's just as important as the street addresses and zip codes you need to learn to post a letter. In the Internet's 40 year existence, IPv6 is the most significant update. Future carriers and companies will use IPv6 because the Internet runs out of the assigned IP addresses using the current IPv4 standard. Eight hexadecimal groups consist of IPv6 addresses. A 16-bit hexadecimal value is given to each hexadecimal community, separated by a colon (:). An example of the IPv6 format is given below: xxxx: xxxx: xxxx: xxxx: xxxx: An xxxx unit expresses the 16-bit hexadecimal value. A 4-bit hexadecimal value is shown in every single x. An example of a potential IPv6 address is given below: 4FDD:0010:0000:0022:0022:F387:FE3B:AC4E The first 64 bits (4FDE:0000:0000:0002) are network but, the rest is the device ID (device bits). The network component is provided by an ISP (ARIN or RIPE) or by the registry. Exhaustion of the IPv4 Standard Terms like "run-out," "exhaustion," or "depletion" are used interchangeably when speaking of IPv4 addresses. Whatever word is used, they all point to the same problem – the acute lack of unused IPv4 addresses affecting worldwide network operators now. A lack of IPv4 addresses will create many problems for a network that needs new users to expand or attach. Most networks are currently trying to reduce the scarcity of IPv4-based transmitting systems, or use CGNAT-types, for example, by obtaining surplus addresses from other networks. Although these solutions can make sense in the immediate term, either solution does not fix the fundamental problem – that in IPv4, there are not enough addresses to sustain the Internet as wide as today. Has IPv6 solved the problem for good? 44
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IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, making a far greater number of potential addresses than the 32-bit addresses used in IPv4. This creates potentially 340 trillion addresses for each bit corresponding to the ''0'' or ''1.'' IPv4, however, allows 2 ^ 32 combinations with up to 4.7 billion addresses. The number of usable addresses is, in practice, smaller than that of IPv6 addresses for routing and other purposes, while specific ranges are specifically reserved for use. However, there are still vast numbers of IPv6 addresses available. Network operators and big businesses are usually expected to receive a /32 address block, smaller companies a /48, and home users a /56 (where a single IPv4 address is typically available). This offers scalability and potential subnetting and enables a nearly infinite number of subnet addresses. It is commonly misunderstood that assigning large IPv6 prefixes to end customers is wasteful. Still, the IPv6 address space is so large, that a /48 could be assigned to all humans for the coming 480 years before they run out, has been calculated (by Tony Hain). How do I check if I am on IPv6 now on Windows? (Source) Preparation To prepare for this activity: •
Start Windows.
•
Log in if necessary.
•
Activity 1 - Display IPv6 Information
•
To display IPv6 information:
•
Open an elevated/administrator command prompt.
•
To display IP address information use ipconfig. Examine the results. You should see one or more IPv6 addresses, if IPv6 is enabled. A typical Windows 7 computer has a ISATAP tunnel adapter with media disconnected, a Link-local IPv6 Address and a Teredo tunnel adapter. Link-local addresses begin with fe80::/10. ISATAP addresses are specific link-local addresses beginning with fe80::200:5efe/96. Teredo addresses begin with 2001:0::/32.
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show interfaces". Observe the results listed in the interfaces where IPv6 is enabled. All netsh parameters may be abbreviated, but the abbreviation must be a unique parameter. "netsh interface ipv6 show interfaces" may be entered as "netsh i ipv6 sh i".
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show addresses". Now examine the results listing the interface IPv6 addresses.
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show destinationcache". Now examine the results listing recent IPv6 destinations.
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show dnsservers". Now examine the results listing ""IPv6 DNS server"" settings.
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show neighbors". Now examine the results listing IPv6 neighbors. This is comparable to the IPv4 ARP cache.
•
Enter the command "netsh interface ipv6 show route". Now examine the results listing IPv6 route information Alagammai Kannappan”.
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