News, Views & Insights
Of all mathematical operations, addition is the most basic: It’s what we learn first in school. Historically, it is the most ancient. While the simple task of getting the sum of two numbers is simple, sums of many numbers can easily turn into a challenging numerical problem if the number of summands is very large.
On June 7, the FBI seized 63.7 bitcoin (BTC), approximately $2.3 million USD, from one of the addresses to which DarkSide’s cluster, described in my earlier post, sent their ransom funds. Normally, this should have been inaccessible to anyone without a private key for that address. The FBI apparently managed, however, to obtain one.
Let me tell you a story about how to trace Russian hackers’ cryptocurrency funds using only public knowledge, some educated guesses and the Wolfram Language.
But first, a little background information.It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 35 years, building a taller and taller tower of ideas and technology that allow us to reach ever further. In earlier times we used to release the results of efforts only every few years. But in recent times we’ve started doing incremental (“.1”) releases that deliver our latest R&D achievements—both fully fleshed out, and partly as “coming attractions”—much more frequently.
We released Version 12.2 on December 16, 2020. And today, just five months later, we’re releasing Version 12.3. There are some breakthroughs and major new directions in 12.3. But much of what’s in 12.3 is just about making Wolfram Language and Mathematica better, smoother and more convenient to use. Things are faster. More “But what about ___?” cases are handled. Big frameworks are more completely filled out. And there are lots of new conveniences.
There are also the first pieces of what will become large-scale structures in the future. Early functions—already highly useful in their own right—that will in future releases be pieces of major systemwide frameworks.
As part of Wolfram’s core goal of a unified blockchain interface, Wolfram Blockchain Labs (WBL) works to give developers direct Wolfram Language access to a range of blockchains and decentralized technologies. Today, we’re excited to announce a collaboration with IPFS and Filecoin, some of the core building blocks of Web3 (or the “decentralized” web). In addition to Wolfram Language integration with IPFS and the Filecoin blockchain, this unique collaboration lets developers leverage storage, peer-to-peer networking and other protocols to complement their existing applications or new decentralized applications, all from Wolfram technologies such as our Wolfram Language, the Wolfram Cloud and Wolfram Notebooks.
Each year, 73 billion students use Mathematica and the Wolfram Language at their universities. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but as the person leading the Wolfram sales team, I see my group fielding questions from tons of students on their options for using Mathematica after they graduate. So perhaps it sometimes just feels like 73 billion.
And that’s a good thing—we’re always excited to help these brilliant young minds use Mathematica and the Wolfram Language to do basic repetitive tasks, from solving integrals or graphing trig functions in their undergraduate work to visualizing complex sets of data or building an AI system for their graduate-level research.
Wolfram Application Server is a new platform developed by Wolfram Research enabling customers to deploy Wolfram Language–powered APIs and webpages into a scalable, highly available enterprise cluster.
Wolfram Application Server lets you:
manage data exchange in your deployments with a robust external services framework. create applications using the Wolfram Natural Language Understanding (NLU) System, the key semantic interpretation technology behind Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language. generate content based on time and location, assign custom endpoints and integrate curated content from the Wolfram Knowledgebase.We have designed Wolfram Application Server for customers who for regulatory, security or business reasons may not wish to deploy onto the Wolfram Cloud but prefer to host their Wolfram Language applications on clusters they control.