October 24, 2015

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill

In general, people are comfortable with the idea that self-driving vehicles should be programmed to minimize the death toll. This utilitarian approach is certainly laudable but the participants were willing to go only so far. “[Participants] were not as confident that autonomous vehicles would be programmed that way in reality—and for a good reason: they actually wished others to cruise in utilitarian autonomous vehicles, more than they wanted to buy utilitarian autonomous vehicles themselves,” conclude Bonnefon and co. And therein lies the paradox. People are in favor of cars that sacrifice the occupant to save other lives—as long they don’t have to drive one themselves.


Prepping for Data Driven Innovation

It is important for businesses to understand that data validates theory and give it a perspective. Acting on a hypothesis without validation is close to flying blind. So, it is important to understand what role data plays. For example – In innovation, we have a tendency of going top-down, but more often than not, innovation fails because it is not backed by detailed data points to validate the assumptions. So, businesses should convince themselves to align in a way that facilitates data in decision making processes. For innovation process, it does a couple of things: it validates the assumption; it helps ideas germinate fast and find their product market fit as well as it helps ideas fail quick. So, businesses end up spending less money and time on failed products and more resources on the ones that are closer to their customer’s need.


Deriving Value from Data Before It Goes Dark

It’s much more efficient to derive value from data before it goes dark by implementing a fast data solution in a data pipeline to ingest and analyze data in real time. This allows the enterprise to take action, automatically implement transactions, and make decisions based on information available in live data streams. Rather than losing time waiting for data at rest to be classified and made available for Big Data analysis, the enterprise can immediately analyze and act on real-time information, based on defined business policies. The enterprise can gain instant insight into sales, production and distribution trends, and capitalize on opportunities to create value by leveraging instant insights to shape products and services and steer marketing and sales campaigns.


As sites move to SHA2 encryption, millions face HTTPS lock-out

"Given that many sites are 75 percent through to SHA2 migration, it's likely that those users with old browsers will start to experience problems with increased frequency throughout 2016," said Ristic. Mozilla found out the hard way last year. Last year, the browser maker updated its website with a new SHA2-hashed SSL certificate. But those who were running a browser or operating system that didn't support SHA2 couldn't get onto the website. The upgrade "killed one million downloads," said Mozilla's Chris More in a bug listing at the time. "A lot of the world is still running old browsers and come to our website to get Firefox," he said. And it won't be the last time it happens.


20 hybrid cloud insights from top industry experts

One cloud does not fit all organizations. That’s true whether it is a public or private cloud. A hybrid cloud option allows your business to create a custom solution that fits your organizational needs. However, there are always questions with new solutions. We reached out to industry thought leaders to answer some of the marketplace’s most pressing questions on hybrid cloud. In this eBook, you’ll learn why thought leaders like Kevin Jackson, founder and CEO GovCloud Network, look at hybrid cloud from the viewpoint of hybrid IT. You’ll also hear from Shelly Kramer, co-CEO, V3+Broadsuite, on what CIOs need to consider when adopting hybrid cloud.


Malvertising – the new silent killer?

For sites that use these ad networks, limiting who can advertise on your site can cut back on the chance you're going to serve up malvertising. "Most of these ad networks allow you a wide array of which type of ads you'll accept," says Wilson. "I'll accept ads from IBM, Dell and Oracle, but I'm not going to accept ads from just any random unknown person."  Websites that use ad networks should also make sure their security is up to date, says Kowsik Guruswamy, CTO of Menlo Security. In a March report, Menlo Security found that of the top million ranked domains on Alexa, one third are running software with security gaps. "There are domains out there running software that hasn't been updated in years," he says. "We're seeing sites that are running software from 2010 that have known vulnerabilities."


You’ve Been Misled About What Makes a Good Password

The results show that making a password longer or adding symbols is a better way to strengthen it than by adding uppercase characters or numbers. That’s because people tend to add uppercase characters at the start of passwords and numbers at the end, and password attacking methods can take advantage of that, says Dell’Amico. “Basically you need to make your passwords less predictable,” he says. The new method could be used to create more accurate ways to give people a sense of the strength of a password, says Dell’Amico. A good way of doing that is important but has long proven elusive, says Mark Burnett, a security researcher who published one of the password research databases used in the study.


The Business Value of (Effective) Architecture – Part 2

So here’s how I went about to measure the value of EA. I started with the premise that if we had perfect information and did perfect planning, each project would cost exactly what we projected, it would finish on time, and it would deliver the expected business results. If we take a simple scenario of a $100M annual budget for capital projects and assume that on average the projects take 12 months, have a 12 month payback (business benefits in the first 12 months of operation equal the initial project cost), and have a maintenance cost of 20% of the original project cost, and the cost of capital or the internal rate of return is 10%, then the net present value (NPV) of the $100M investment is $143M which represents a 43% ROI over a 5 year period.


Developing Test Automation Scripts and Automation Frameworks

Framework is so nice word that when you say it – it makes an impression. For instance, the Zachman Framework is not related to any developed components – it’s a methodology to define enterprise architectures. The same goes for in-house automation built frameworks – they can contain both components for test automation along with approaches, describing how to automate something in the best possible way. This is what test automation experts (including me) show to their customers willing to start test automation for the first time or to understand what is going on their current automation project. One more important framework family to mention. Those are tool specific or project specific frameworks and target less coding experienced staff – to enable them write and support automation scripts.


The New Old: High-Tech and Design for Aging

We are entering an age of “invisibility” — automated solutions are disappearing into the fabric of users’ daily lives and allowing someone to live without thinking twice about using them (think Samantha, the OS in the movie “Her”). More and more innovators are coming to us to create health care products that integrate with mobile technology, the cloud and artificial intelligence. As boomers increasingly demand to age in place, however, we’ve found that creating advanced technology isn’t enough anymore — we must spend time talking to aging users and their caregivers and studying the ecosystems of their lives to understand how the new technologies we develop can best service them.



Quote for the day:

“You never win unless you win the hearts of people.” -- Syed Bokhari

No comments:

Post a Comment