We regret to inform you that the Marconi Foundation will be shutting down. With the continued crypto winter and increased regulatory challenges, we felt the most prudent path is winding things down and returning the remaining proceeds to all investors.

Even though the Marconi Foundation will be shutting down, the Marconi blockchain and its source code will remain open and available, and anyone can continue to mine and use the blockchain. You can continue to keep and use your tokens, but the foundation’s core team members will be moving on from the project.

Thank you so much for your support this past 2.5 years. We hope you’ll continue to support the project into the next chapter.

Marconi Team

Marconi Foundation Will Be Shutting Down was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As 2019 draws to a close we’d like to share one more update with the community. During the past few months the team has been pushing forward with several enhancements to the protocol that are now ready for release.

Edge Client Support

As discussed in the white paper the future vision for Marconi includes one use case where individuals can share their bandwidth with others creating decentralized internet infrastructure. Today, every node in a Marconi network is a server that shares bandwidth with connected peers, but this latest update adds support for client nodes to be able to consumer bandwidth without sharing it further.

Administrative Network Traffic Optimization

To optimize how individual nodes discover and connect to peers in the network the DHT discovery protocol has been updated to reduce spam and minimize the chance of hitting rate limits.

POA Support

Proof of Work was used in the initial Marconi implementation given that it’s a battle tested consensus algorithm used by many popular blockchains today. There are, however, challenges with this consensus and to lay the groundwork for a future transition options the team has added initial support for Proof of Authority.

Performance Optimizations

To better support the high bandwidth needs of datacenters and large enterprises multiple performance improvements were added for mPipe connections. To unlock further performance improvements there was additional refactoring done to support multiple mPipes in the future and multi-queue support.

This new update can be downloaded from the releases page.

2019 Wrap Up was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Consumers are no doubt becoming increasingly aware about the safety and security of their online activity after many highly publicized studies have shown an uptick in online data theft. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there were 3 million reports of identity theft alone in 2018.

Even though these threats — and the rash of data breaches — continue to grab headlines, consumers still are connecting to public wifi despite the threats and are joining other unsafe networks while traveling. More cautious or tech-savvy individuals know to turn to virtual private networks (VPNs) as a way to safely connect online, and as VPNs become more mainstream, some project the VPN market can grow to more than $35 billion by 2022. We’ve even seen some vendors to capitalize by creating flashy TV commercials that insinuate that they are consumers’ digital doorman.

However, as these companies look to pull back the curtain on the nefarious digital underworld, I can’t help but wonder if the curtain has been sufficiently pulled back on their own operation? I don’t mean this as if they, too, are digital thieves taking oblivious consumers’ data (though some very well do sell your data to third parties), but instead question whether the VPN industry has been transparent about its own security protocols.

It wasn’t that long ago that NordVPN, probably the most well-known vendor, was hacked. An attacker broke into one of its servers in an overseas data center by penetrating a surprisingly insecure remote management system left by the “unnamed” data center provider.

While NordVPN became the latest high-tech hack and even though there’s great irony of being an insecure security system, that’s not the egregious issue here. It’s also not the fact that the breach went unnoticed for a month, though that one does sting a little extra. The real warning here is that NordVPN not only didn’t know the system was being used to support its operation, but it also had no idea the thing even existed. Think about that for a minute; a data-security vendor engaged with a core partner and didn’t audit all of the potential vulnerabilities within their partners.

Was NordVPN just an industry anomaly that had a single lapse in judgement? Nope, we came to find out that this vulnerability not only compromised NordVPN, it also exposed others like TorGuard. Now we have a scary trend. There are already a lot of sketchy VPN providers marketing to a consumer base that is still largely unfamiliar with the technology — including those that may be willing to share your data with authoritarian governments. But now even the most “trusted” have proven that they, too, have either lax or downright sloppy protocols in place to mitigate all points of potential attacks.

Why is this such an issue? The whole situation exposes a huge question mark around whom is auditing these VPN players’ infrastructure. It also completely exposes the lack of transparency that the VPN industry has around its supply chain. Even in the wake of the NordVPN hack, the guilty data center provider was left unnamed.

When I was managing infrastructure at Google to make sure it all ran securely and efficiently, which included dealing with thousands of devices and partners, I experienced firsthand how difficult it was to have perfect visibility into the infrastructure supply chain. We went to great lengths — and had to invest a lot of resources — to map out every single integration, app and extension that our employees and partners used to do their jobs.

While not every organization has access to the same level of resources that I did at Google, many VPN providers claim to have all the best features to keep consumers safe (military-grade encryption, no logging, automatic kill switches, etc.). However, it’s all moot if they fail at keeping their servers secure. What the VPN industry seemingly lacks is a real desire to create backend infrastructure that can automatically see every single vendor supporting their operations — including their partners’ partners — and instantaneously and automatically identify threats.

There’s no doubt that it’s a hard networking challenge to solve, but it’s not without options in the age of blockchain. The supply chain and partner auditing issues are two of the reasons why I was attracted to blockchain-backed networking after leaving Google, because it can offer a more straightforward answer to the problem. Both the infrastructure-auditing and lack-of-transparency issues are key challenges where the principles of blockchain hold promise.

Blockchain can make the entire supply chain and infrastructure more easily audited. Each supplier can record what they did and didn’t do on the blockchain and sign in using their private key. In the NordVPN case, there would’ve been a log of the administration tool left on the server, which would’ve been easily flagged during a review of the supply-chain history.

While blockchain is one possible approach, the bottom line is that it’s time these VPN vendors start minding their own kitchen before they burn the whole house down. It’s no longer enough to simply trust the VPN industry to disclose its supply chains and then assume it’ll self-police. If vendors want to truly provide the utmost transparency and lock down their infrastructure, then a good place to start is either making a tremendous investment in independent auditing or looking to the vigilant blockchain community.

Recent VPN Hacks Reveal Transparency Issues Within The Industry and Its Supply Chain was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are pleased to announce that Yimin Yang has joined the team as a Software Engineer. Yimin will be working on tooling & infrastructure for the Marconi Protocol. As a passionate crypto fan, he is really excited to learn and develop with the rest of Marconi team.

Yimin received his master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He got his first taste of blockchain a few years ago as a member of CMU’s blockchain group. Prior to Marconi, Yimin was working at Sogou and Fujitsu Research & Development Center. In his spare time, he enjoys crypto trading and movies.

Great to have you here, Yimin!

Welcome, Yimin was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To provide a better experience for our mining community we are adding two new regional mining pools with improved infrastructure for better scalability and lower latency. The current mining pool (mine1.marconi.org) will be decommissioned as part of this process so it’s important that miners update to the two new pools. There are two ways to update to the new pools:

1) Self-Migration

Today, miners can start using the new pools to immediately benefit from the improved performance and scalability. It just takes a simple config change.

1) Go to the directory where marconi-stak is installed.

2) Edit pools.txt with your favorite editor

3) In the “pool_list” section of the file

4) Update “mine1.marconi.org” to “mine2.marconi.org” for the US West or “mine3.marconi.org” for Asia region

5) Save the changes

6) Stop the marconi-stak process

7) Start the marconi-stak process

2) Automatic Migration

Anyone still mining via the current mining pool (mine1.marconi.org) will be automatically migrated to one of the new pools on Tuesday, September 3 at 2pm PST. At that time the DNS settings for mine1.marconi.org will be updated to point to mine2.marconi.org (US West). It can take up to 24 hours or more for the DNS update to propagate to a miner and when that happens they may notice a temporary disconnect in their logs. Note that if there are many miners attempting to reconnect at the same time it may take several attempts before a connection is successfully established.

Rest assured that all pool payouts will be completed before the current mining pools is fully decommissioned.

If you have any questions or comments please find us on Telegram.

Mining Pool Upgrade & Migration was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many businesses today operate out of multiple locations that need to communicate with each other and one of the most common ways of connecting them is via site-to-site VPNs. Site-to-site VPNs create secure connections between locations over the public internet and make computing resources in one location available in another location. Connecting over the public internet provides a lot of flexibility, but it also puts these businesses as the mercy of ISP outages which, unfortunately, are fairly common. Outages can be caused by human error, physical cable disconnects/damage, technology failures in the ISP’s network stack or a host of other issues. No matter the cause, site-to-site VPNs can’t operate during an outage which means that the business loses critical access to resources. For many businesses this can mean lost revenue, reputational damage or worse.

How is this solved today?

The only way to reliably achieve fault tolerance when an ISP suffers from an outage is to leverage multiple ISPs. While that sounds simple in concept, it’s not easy to implement with site-to-site VPNs. The VPN software must be configured to detect a failover and then subsequently route traffic from the primary connection to the backup. There is a long established protocol for handling this, but it’s not easy to configure and it’s a proprietary protocol which means you’re locked into using specific hardware which typically comes at a steep cost. Newer solutions exist which are far easier to setup, but those still require proprietary hardware and licenses. Alternatively, businesses with very savvy network engineers can manually configure automatic failover, but that type of expertise is hardly common anymore and it’s likely not easy to maintain anyway.

High Availability Site-to-Site VPN with Marconi

Marconi can be an easy to manage, cost effective solution for businesses needing site-to-site VPNs. However, with just a few additional commands it’s possible to use Marconi to create a fault tolerant network with automatic failover to redundant ISP connections. The Marconi Protocol can create multiple mPipes across different physical connections backed by different ISPs and then, using Marconi’s unique L2 bridging functionality, merge those connections to back a single virtual IP. Each site now has a Marconi virtual IP that apps & services in each site can be configured to use with confidence. Even if primary ISP goes down, that IP will still be operational since Marconi will seamlessly failover to the redundant mPipe connection. This can all be achieved on commodity hardware with Marconi’s open source software. Configuration is also minimal since much of the traditional configuration & information exchange needed for VPN setup is handled automatically through the blockchain.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to set this up in your own corporate network or datacenter today contact hello@marconi.org.

Connectivity Fault Tolerance for Mission Critical Systems was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Problem

As businesses scale today it’s not uncommon for high traffic websites to serve hundreds of thousands, or sometimes millions, of simultaneous requests. To meet this demand organizations spin up new servers to provide bandwidth, redundancy and fault tolerance, but which server should respond when a client makes a request?

The industry standard solution to this challenge is to use load balancers that can listen for client requests and then route them to a pool of servers where the request can be served quickly and reliably. Unfortunately, the industry standard solution has also been to use hardware load balancers which are expensive and inflexible. If more servers are needed or if an environment changes (a common scenario in today’s fast paced environments) then new hardware usually needs to be purchased.

How is this solved today?

Savvy companies today have started shifting to software based load balancers which can address the challenges of elasticity, automation and cost. These new load balancers can be deployed on commodity hardware to reduce costs and built in automation can scale up the number of load balancers as needed. Unfortunately, many of these load balancers still require expensive annual licenses in order to unlock the futures enterprises truly need. Some software based load balancers offered by cloud providers do have lower license / usage fees, but that typically comes at the cost of vendor lock in where you’re required to use their instances for your servers. Many of today’s applications that have high demands (e.g. voice & video chat, real time game streaming) also utilize UDP as the communication protocol.

Load Balancing with Marconi

With the Marconi Protocol organizations can gain many of the benefits of software based load balancers without the expensive per instance licenses or vendor lockin. Marconi’s open source platform can be deployed on any number of systems as needed without any additional costs and the robust development platform means these load balancers can be easily updated with new configuration or functionality as needed. More importantly, a Marconi based load balancer, leverages the built in connectivity & security features so that the upstream servers for the load balancer can live in a multiple data centers or cloud providers without any additional connectivity headaches. Due to the low level at which Marconi is implemented, almost any protocol (including UDP) is supported.

Get started today with a Marconi based UDP load balancer by following the setup guide on the Marconi Wiki.

Software-Based Load Balancing was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(The following article from our Chief Architect, Jong Kim, was featured on Network World.)

In today’s digital-everything world where so much of our personal and professional lives are online, most people seem to have less of an expectation of data privacy than ever before. They know that companies (and governments) are mining their data, but after all of serious breaches of trust, it’s no wonder that a majority are now becoming wary of both their data’s security and how it is used.

In fact, a study by Harris and Finn Partners found that Americans are more concerned with data privacy than they are with job creation. That’s a shocking finding, but maybe it shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise. From the Facebook data scandal, to the horrendous number of retail data breaches to the serious security threats that even come with using public WiFi, nothing seems safe. And now with the repeal of net neutrality, even our internet service providers are free to collect and sell our browsing data.

The heightened threat for some groups

Even though few people take measures to secure themselves, so many have really good reasons to consider protection, which means securing online activity is becoming more essential every day. Imagine for journalists wanting to report news in totalitarian states known to monitor online behavior, the threat couldn’t be more pronounced. Even in the U.S. — with reports about the Homeland Security Department’s plan to keep a database of journalists and media influencers — is it that far-fetched to think a pressured ISP who now has the right to collect traffic data wouldn’t turn something over?

This fact is none truer than for those operating blockchain nodes, a group notoriously vigilant about security and anonymity. Even in the networks underlying blockchain, there is so much information up for grabs, that many blockchain thought-leaders have expressed concerns. The security threats are everywhere. Even crypto’s hottest trend, staking, has plenty of security risks, especially related to the exposure of metadata.

These early realizations have started to take hold in the blockchain community, sparking a hastened pace for research about obscuring data down to the application level, a transparent system that publishes smart contract and transaction data. But, regardless if you’re a blockchain developer or just a concerned consumer who wants to stay anonymous, what can you do?

VPNs aren’t always secure

Today, many people know VPNs as a way to protect anonymity online. These services, whether paid or free, route user traffic through an encrypted connection to the VPN provider’s servers to supposedly never reveal a user’s IP address. But, while they’re a well-known privacy solution, they aren’t without their own issues.

A study by TheBestVPN demonstrated that among the top 115 VPNs, 26 collect personally identifiable information including IP addresses, locations, bandwidth data and connection timestamps. In some cases, VPNs, like many of the free options, sell user data. Then there are absolutely ludicrous instances where VPNs have sold customer bandwidth to third parties, like hacking groups, which will turn unsuspecting users into botnets.

Blockchain as a networking alternative

It’s time to start looking to blockchain to create gateways as an alternative to VPNs. Advances in blockchain applications have made it possible to not only protect against cyber threats, but also obfuscate where a connection originates, ultimately keeping user data encrypted.

Setting up your own mini-relay network that can proxy traffic on and off multiple servers globally is an option, and open-source and peer-to-peer networking implementations are ongoing. This would not only allow people to manage everything themselves, but also allow for traffic to be routed through an encrypted connection and exited through a different node. For instance, say you have ten nodes, with one behind a firewall (not publicly facing), and the other nine are acting as relay nodes, bouncing traffic from server to server. If your primary server is in Bulgaria, that configuration will come across as if it were broadcasting from that location.

If you require even more protection, you can obfuscate even further by using multiple servers and having traffic exiting off of multiple nodes, leaving hardly any ability to trace the server location.

It’s similar to using a personal TOR network, but an important distinction is that you control your own nodes. Not to mention, it’ll probably be faster, as TOR networks can be painstakingly slow. Even creating the most complicated obfuscation topologies is a real possibility because of blockchain’s rapidly advancing development, so if leaving zero digital breadcrumbs is essential to your operation, you’re not without hope.

The bottom line is that we don’t have to accept privacy in the digital age as a thing of the past, even if data exposure exists in the smallest window of opportunity. There seems to be this assumption that if you want to be part of the connected world, the consequence is that you must leave a piece of you behind. But as we’ve seen time and time again within the blockchain community, we aren’t about “accepting” or “assuming” anything to be a foregone conclusion or impossibility.

With net neutrality repealed, how blockchain-based networking can protect online privacy was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re excited to announce that the Marconi mining software is now available on Microsoft Windows. Mining on Marconi offers a platform for the community to support and secure the Marconi blockchain through PoW mining. With this release, a new set of miners will be able to join our growing mining community.

Get started today by visiting our GitHub Mining Page

Also, here is a quick start info for those looking to mine on Windows:

Recommended Equipment Specs:

• Windows 7 or 10
• 1GB Memory
• CPU Mining — Dual Xeons or higher recommended
• GPU Mining — NVIDIA GTX 1060 or higher OR AMD RX 480/580 or higher

General Mining Details:

• Support for CPU and GPU miners at multiple performance level
• Dashboards for tracking miners, block rewards and payouts
• Proportional payouts multiple times a day
• 0% Pool Fees
• Algorithm: CryptoNight v8
• Block Time: 30s

Mining Software Now Available for Windows was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the Marconi Mainnet, network administrators can easily deploy and secure their networks, and developers can build their own compelling networking solutions and security applications. Marconi’s Mainnet comes with many documented applications that work out of the box, including:

• multi-cloud deployments that enable network administrators to leverage unique features, regions and pricing of different cloud providers
• firewalls for securing traffic on a blockchain network from suspicious activity
• secure gateways to preserve the anonymity of online activity whether that’s crypto transactions and staking or even just basic internet browsing

Get Started With Mainnet

We’ve compiled a few helpful guides for getting started with Marconi:

• Setup Instructions
• Architecture Overview
• Quick Start Guide for Network Admins
• Quick Start Guide for Developers
• Sample Use Cases
• Block Explorer

If you’d like to help operate and secure the network check out the Mining Setup Guide to start mining and earning Marcos.

Roadmap

We recently published the high level roadmap for the Marconi Protocol. Here’s a quick recap of what’s complete and what’s still ahead:

• 2018 December — Testnet launch — Completed
• 2019 January — Blockchain Network Security & Multi-Cloud Support support — Completed
• 2019 March — Mining support — Completed
• 2019 May — Mainnet launch — Completed
• 2019 October — Staking on Marconi subnetworks — In Development & On Schedule
• 2020 — Marconi link an extension to Marconi Pipe designed to work with wireless
• 2021 — Networking metering to capture server availability and bandwidth contributions

Check out the White Paper for more details on each milestone.

Technical Advisory Board

To help further the vision of the Marconi Protocol, we recently announced that preeminent cryptographer and co-inventor of public key encryption, Dr. Whitfield Diffie, has joined our technical advisory board. Diffie is a 2015 Turing Award Winner and previously served as Chief Security Officer at Sun Microsystems. “It is encouraging that Marconi is working to add a new layer of security and privacy to the blockchain and Internet ecosystem in their mission,” said Diffie.

Community

For the latest updates on the project you can always follow us on the following channels:

• Telegram
• Twitter
• Medium

A lot of effort went into the development of this smart ethernet protocol and we couldn’t have done it without the amazing support of our community and investors. While this is a thrilling milestone for everyone, we believe that what’s ahead is even more exciting. Please stay tuned over the next few months for more news.

Thanks,
Marconi Team

Our Mainnet is Live! was originally published in MarconiProtocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.