Daily Tech Digest - March 12, 2017

The new European data protection regulation– are you prepared?

The impact of the new regulation on organizations will be manifold and no business will remain unaffected, especially in the light of the ongoing digitalization. Organizations have to understand which of the information they are keeping are impacted by the regulation and how it is handled today, where and why it is kept and how it is protected. It requires understanding and adaption of business rules, business processes, information systems and IT infrastructure. Sounds like a complex and pretty big task to get on top of, and, bad news first, it is for sure not something that is done overnight. But the good news is that now is a good time for getting prepared, and that both methods and tools exist for getting a good grip on the job. Organizations that already have control over the enterprise’s architecture get a head start when it comes to understanding how they should react to changing market dynamics.


AI won’t kill you, but ignoring it might kill your business, experts say

"Amplifying human intelligence, and overcoming human cognitive biases – I think that's where it fits," said Pratt, founder and CEO of business consultancy Noodle.ai. "Humans are really bad probabilistic thinkers and statisticians. That's where cognitive bias creeps in and, therefore, inefficiencies and lost profit."  But machines won't replace humans when it comes to big-picture decisions, he said.  "Those algorithms are not going to set the strategy for the company. ... It'll help you make the decision once I come up with the idea," Pratt said. "But any executive that doesn't have a supercomputer in the mix now on their side – and they're stuck in the spreadsheet era – your jobs are going to be in jeopardy in a few years."


RawPOS Malware Rides Again

As part of a recent forensics investigation by the Cylance Consulting Services team, we uncovered some new RawPOS malware. This family of POS malware has been widely documented in operation since 2008. Numerous retail operations of various sizes have been compromised with this malware and its variants. Rather than rehash old malware, our intent is to discuss ‘signature fidelity’ and explain through technical detail why poorly-written signatures give people a false sense of security. This ‘antivirus is dead’ argument is often presented, but with little technical detail to highlight specifically why this is the case. ... At the end of this post, we’ll provide an updated yara file for identifying all variants of the RawPOS dumper, as well as some sha256 hashes of the new variant.


Digital Transformation Telco Playbook Overview

To thrive in a highly competitive landscape, service providers need to fundamentally rethink their culture. Many of those companies were born as monopolies, and although they have evolved, they are behind webscalers and other innovative companies. Therefore, a fundamental change in their culture is an essential ingredient for their longterm competitiveness: Create an environment where innovation and creativity are encouraged and supported rather than subjected to the frameworks of the existing business; Evolve the business support environment and operations to support a more pioneering and agile environment; Create incentives to reward innovation. Tolerate failure as an opportunity to learn and improve; Create the appropriate financial strategy and metrics that will support innovation, as well as an elastic infrastructure and agile go to market strategy; and Establish the appropriate incentives and rewards for innovation.


How to find the real value in operational big data

Operational Intelligence represents breadth of knowledge—an important and challenging milestone in a company's analytic maturity. If you have 1,000 sites around the world and each site collects, processes, and analyzes its own operational data, then the most any one site can know is what's within its own walls. This is a common situation, as there is typically one site manager who manages data in a way that best helps him or her accomplish the plant's performance goals. Consolidating and standardizing site data broadens the company's information base for the benefit of all. With a centrally organized OI system, site managers can garner insights into how other sites are doing; it opens channels for data-based performance ranking, continual learning from best practices, and accurate benchmarking.


5 Industry Experts on How Technology Will Affect the Future of Recruitment

“It’s about the right mix of technology and in-real-life, human-to-human experiences. It’s important to have regular, reliable, repeatable patterns and good data in your recruiting processes to ensure that candidates are all treated the same way. That said, you can’t use technology to do the work that humans do. It’s got to be the right blend of technology and human interaction. One of the lessons for recruiters is that you can’t Skype your way to an effective hiring decision. You have to bring candidates in and spend some time with them.” ... While technology is playing an important role, personal relationships – the ability to find that visceral connection between your company and the person you’re talking to – is the linchpin.


FBI Chief Calls For Private Sector To Help Battle Cybercrime

"If you are the chief information security officer [CISO] of a private enterprise, and you don't know someone at every single FBI office where you have a significant facility, you're not doing your job. Know that you're pushing on an open door," Comey said. "We're not looking to know your private information, but we need to know you in a way so we can help you in a difficult circumstance." Comey described a multi-pronged initiative underway at the FBI to crack down on cybercrimes that involves recruiting and hiring more cyber experts, improving engagement with outside partners -- including the private sector -- and rethinking the bureau's traditional approach to working cases. The bureaus is also working to bolster deterrence both through hardening systems that might be targeted and winning convictions in more criminal cases.


FinTech Is Not Dying; It Is Evolving

The juggernauts of online lending soon became like the banks themselves. Internally, they regulate themselves to keep shareholders happy. They know they need to pivot and evolve as the industry matures but they still hold to what made them a success in the first place. Unfortunately for our industry pioneers, companies that are slow to evolve in an industry that was built on speed and revolution is not swift or flexible enough to keep up with the changing atmosphere. There are those who study and analyze the good and the bad of these online lenders. While the big companies try to evolve and stay relevant, second generation companies pop up wanting a piece of the market. They tackle the biggest user issues and fix them. FinTech, as we knew it under the first regime, is dying. Evolution has changed online lending.


How Artificial Intelligence Will Invade Classrooms

Educational technology has really struggled. Many incredibly insightful projects that were developed and proven in labs have not succeeded, including AI-powered cognitive tutors that actually understand the mistakes [students] are making and can offer direct supervision. It turns out the wrong way of [integrating AI] is sitting a bunch of kids in front of a computer for hours, marginalizing the teachers. Education is probably ground zero for how the best-intentioned technologies can still really struggle to make a difference. In fact, research indicates that most educational technology actually makes inequality worse, rather than better. Ming: We don’t want just a plug-in education. A lot of edtech uses words like personalization, but the truth is that it does plug every student into a mold, and you just follow a track


Reusing Selenium Scripts in Random Testing

The entire test execution process using a subjective technique is guided by a great deal of solid analytical thinking and a good portion of “randomizm”. With the latter one being a key ingredient, this article is dealing with automation of the yet-unveiled “randomizm”. To make things clear, test automation is not creativity; it’s a well-documented and a clearly defined approach which enables the same test scripts to run over and over again. The question is, how can we leverage those test automation scripts and be more creative at the same time? A product quality model with the documented test scenarios can be outlined with a specific state machine with external attributes. And that’s what test automation loves. Test automation is all about writing test scripts based on a very specific set of test requirements.



Quote for the day:

"Until you cross the bridge of your insecurities, you can't begin to explore your possibilities." -- Tim Fargo

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