Tech Bytes - Daily Digest: August 2017

Daily Tech Digest - August 30, 2017

Citi Speaks: State-Backed Cryptocurrency Key to Blockchain Adoption

State-backed cryptocurrencies are key to the adoption of blockchain technology, according to an executive at investment banking group Citi. In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, the bank's recently appointed head of core cash management for Asia-Pacific, Morgan McKenney, positioned its new CitiConnect blockchain project within a larger context – one in which the ultimate success of distributed ledger technology depends on the advent of fiat currencies issued on a blockchain. According to McKenney, every payment method has an environment in which it's best suited, and to fully unlock the project's potential – and any number of blockchain environments – cryptocurrency is the most suitable payment method.

3 steps to create a corporate vision for digital transformation

Enterprises often transform around the notion of "What should our company look like?", Witcher said. Instead, they need to build a vision around tangible value they can create within customers' experiences along the journey. Leading companies are not building business strategies that have a digital component—rather, they are digitizing every aspect of their business strategy, Witcher said. "When the corporate vision is not clear, that impacts the speed of adoption of both senior management and middle management," said Gianni Giacomelli, senior vice president and business leader for digital solutions at Genpact. "People will not act just because technology is ready. There's a big component of corporate urgency that needs to be created from the corporate vision. It's really important."

The NIS Directive: the implications for UK technology businesses

For digital service providers, the UK government has confirmed that the NIS Directive applies, in a light touch manner, to: online marketplaces, online search engines, and cloud computing services. The government has proposed detailed definitions of each type of digital service provider: An online marketplace is defined as “a platform that acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, facilitating the sale of goods and services.” Online marketplaces are only in scope if sales are made on the platform itself, price comparison sites and online retailers are excluded. ... There should be confidence that the security principles are met regardless of whether an organisation or a third party delivers the service,” says the consultation, emphasising the importance of “ensuring that appropriate measures are employed where third-party services are used”.

How safe are your passwords? Real life rules for businesses to live by

While I find forced password changes annoying, waiting until you know there is a password compromise to change passwords is ignorant. For example, you will not be aware when people use their organizational credentials for Pokemon Go accounts, as many do. If that site is compromised and an employee has reused company passwords on it, your organization is now vulnerable. Even if the employee doesn’t use your organization’s email address, your organization is still vulnerable in a targeted attack if the password was reused across accounts. If you do not force periodic password changes, your organization is vulnerable as long as the employee has a valid account at the organization. The solution to exponentially reduce the risk to these attacks is to implement multifactor authentication.

What Can Manchester United Teach Us About Fintech?

Rather than learning to predict things in a kind of hardcoded, supervised manner, deep learning techniques operate more like a human brain, filtering through data and learning the important signals. For example, a person driving down a road that hits a pothole will probably slow down; they don't have to hit 100 of them. In order to try and encode the social science component of why a person might click on a certain advert, or trade a certain stock, deep learning algorithms use layers of nodes, some of which filter lots of data into summaries and then learn to make assumptions from these. "Actually summarising data is an easier problem than making predictions," said Chakravorty. "It's about trying to learn how people trade ... "

4 Lessons Businesses Can Learn From This Smart Lock Malfunction

Problems stemmed from an over-the-air firmware update that affected the locks’ functionality and prevented the devices from connecting to the company’s servers. Many companies, including Apple, often announce the availability of new updates and let users decide when and if to download them for their gadgets. It’s even possible to schedule updates, so they don’t occur when people are trying to use the technology. According to feedback from people affected by this smart lock debacle, they got the firmware update with no warning, similar to the way iTunes users suddenly found new U2 albums in their libraries without indicating they wanted the songs. In that case, Apple broke with tradition and delivered the media automatically, much to the dismay of some recipients who complained that the album ate up their internet data and that they didn’t like the band’s music.

How Hackers Hide Their Malware: Advanced Obfuscation

Criminals know about sandboxes, and some of the latest evasion tricks specifically target sandboxes. They include trying to fingerprint sandbox systems, delayed or timed execution, and even detection of human interactions. If the malware can detect a sandbox using these techniques, it doesn't run to avoid analysis. Furthermore, underground malware sellers have already created protectors that can detect some sandboxes. However, some advanced detection solutions take this into account, too. Rather than just using off-the-shelf virtualization environments, some solutions might use full system code emulation and create sandbox environments where they can see every instruction a malicious program sends to the physical CPU or memory

Enterprises Are Leading The Internet of Things Innovation

According to Kranz, the adoption of IoT has been broad. A few years ago, VCs were conservative in terms of investments in IoT. Today, Cisco has 14,000 IoT customers across multiple industries. An example is smart and connected cities and their use of IoT. The VC community is starting to invest more in IoT. “According to my own observations and research houses such as Ovum or McKinsey, IoT has been mostly adopted in manufacturing, logistics, transportation but also in retail, healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, and even sports and entertainment,” said Kranz. Kranz spoke about the tech industry and the cycle of reinvention measured in 307 years. Traditional business models, with vertically integrated business models, are ripe for disruption based on the rate of innovation.

Artificial intelligence cyber attacks are coming – but what does that mean?

AI-enabled attackers will also be much faster to react when they encounter resistance, or when cybersecurity experts fix weaknesses that had previously allowed entry by unauthorized users. The AI may be able to exploit another vulnerability, or start scanning for new ways into the system – without waiting for human instructions. This could mean that human responders and defenders find themselves unable to keep up with the speed of incoming attacks. It may result in a programming and technological arms race, with defenders developing AI assistants to identify and protect against attacks – or perhaps even AI’s with retaliatory attack capabilities. Operating autonomously could lead AI systems to attack a system it shouldn’t, or cause unexpected damage.

Interest in cyberinsurance grows as cybercrime targets small businesses

Cybersecurity insurance is not yet a household name. It’s not required by law, nor is it as commonplace as other types of insurance like fire, flood and general liability coverage. But, experts said, it may rival those others in importance in today’s virtual landscape, where everything from employee and customer information to financial records are stored online. Small and medium-size businesses are hit by nearly two-thirds of all cyberattacks — about 4,000 a day, according to IBM. “A lot of these hackers are smart; they’re not going after the big guys. They’re not going after Target and Sony,” said Keith Moore, CEO of CoverHound, a San Francisco insurance broker that started selling cybersecurity coverage last year.

Quote for the day:

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Daily Tech Digest - August 29, 2017

Get ready for new storage technologies and media

Intel says its elegant, narrow rack-oriented design will ultimately allow for 1 pertabyte of storage in a 1U rack. (A petabyte is a thousand terabytes (TBs), which is a thousand gigabytes.) That would be enough to hold 70 years of uninterrupted entertainment, or 300,000 movies, the technology supplier says. For comparison, to obtain a petabyte of storage using 10TB capacity HDDs, one would need a 100-bay 4U server, according to Techgage, which wrote about Intel’s announcement earlier this month. ... Experts say massive levels of data density savings will be required in the future because our insatiable demand for data is going to overrun existing storage tools available. Indeed, storage density improvements might become as important for tech development in our data-intensive future as battery chemistry advancements are thought to be now

India and Pakistan hit by spy malware - cybersecurity firm

To install the malware, Symantec found, the attackers used decoy documents related to security issues in South Asia. The documents included reports from Reuters, Zee News, and the Hindu, and were related to military issues, Kashmir, and an Indian secessionist movement. The malware allows spies to upload and download files, carry out processes, log keystrokes, identify the target’s location, steal personal data, and take screenshots, Symantec said, adding that the malware was also being used to target Android devices. In response to frequent cyber-security incidents, India in February established a center to help companies and individuals detect and remove malware. The center is operated by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

8 Hidden Android Nougat Features You Still Have Time To Try

To run two webpages in split-screen, open Chrome and ensure you’ve got at least two tabs open. Long-press your Android overview button (it’s the one shaped like a square, right next to the home button) to launch split-screen mode as you normally would. Now tap the overflow menu button in Chrome, and select “Move to other window” (see screenshot above). The tab you have up will move over to the other side of the split as a second instance of Chrome. When you’re done, exit split-screen mode by dragging the divider to one side. The tab will go back into your single Chrome instance. You can also close the tab and open a different app in split-screen mode.

You don't lack time to innovate. You lack allocation and purpose.

One of the factors that dictates what people do as consultants is the availability of charge codes. Everyone knows that lawyers, for example, typically bill their time in 15 minute increments. They need not only to bill their time in these time segments, but they also need a "charge code" - some mechanism to associate the time they just spent to a client, a business development activity or some overhead charge. As consultants, most of us are no different. Regardless of how you ultimately bill the client (time and materials, fixed fee, gain-sharing or other mechanisms) almost every consultant and consulting firm I'm aware of tracks consulting time. I'm sure the same is true in many other industries where people are accountable for a time sheet at the end of a week or month.

Open Source at the Heart of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud Development Efforts

Helm is an open source Microsoft tool added with the acquisition of Deis in April. It's a package manager for Kubernetes to keep track of resources, according to Michelle Noorali, a senior software engineer for Microsoft Azure and the core maintainer of the Kubernetes Helm project. Noorali explained that a package in Helm is called a "Chart," which consists of metadata, Kubernetes resource definitions, configurations and documentation. It's a tool to ease developers into Kubernetes, which is "still really hard" to master, she said. Microsoft also has an experimental open source project to streamline Kubernetes development on the Azure Container Service called "Draft." It will detect the language used in the source tree and containerize an app, according to Gabe Monroy

Weave your cybersecurity tactics into a cohesive strategy

To effectively address SSH key management issues in an agency, IT managers must determine who has access to the most critical infrastructure. It’s important to get control of which SSH key-based access may have root access in the environment and, more importantly, how deep the transitive trust of this access extends. The question to be answered here is, “If I breach one root key, how deeply can I penetrate into the environment?” It’s also important to grasp which SSH key-based trusts are related to service accounts and which are for interactive use. Each key-based trust, regardless of its usage, should be assigned back to an individual owner in the environment to establish accountability. Where SSH user key-based trusts are in use, it is critical to ensure the clear separation of duties.

4 ways to simplify data management

Most petabyte-scale enterprises have significant storage sprawl, with over half managing ten or more different storage systems according to a 2016 survey. As the business ages, storage sprawls out even further and soon IT ends up managing a substantial investment in infrastructure. This infrastructure is valuable, but the challenge is that over time, the difficulty of moving data means much of it is on the wrong resource for current business needs. By virtualizing data with software, enterprises can create a global namespace that makes different storage resources simultaneously available to applications. Once the control path is separated from the data path through virtualization, control can span storage silos. This makes it possible to easily move data without interrupting applications.

Dangerous Android app lets would-be hackers create ransomware

The latest TDK, like those before it, can be found on hacking forums and even in social media advertisements in China. All the user has to do is download the APK and install it and they're ready to build ransomware. The process itself is simple: Just specify a ransom message, an unlock key, the ransomware's app icon, mathematical operations to randomize the code, and an animation to show on the infected machine. After the no-code ransomware builder finishes specifying those few simple options they're prompted to subscribe to the app, which they can do with a one-time payment to the developer. Once paid for, the app purchaser is free to create as many custom ransomware variants as desired. The only thing the app leaves to the ransomware builder is distribution: All it does is provide the APK file.

Managing cyber security as business risk

Majority of organisations in private and public sector currently view cyber security as an IT problem not business risk. Department heads focus on the efficiency for instance, IT departments solely focus on network and database infrastructure and upper level management focuses on corporate performance while neglecting the growing security needs within the organisation. Also, the public entities hold a wealth of government and citizen information to ensure service delivery meanwhile ignoring the prevalent threats this data is exposed to. The above raises the question, who should be concerned? Most of the security issues faced within organisations may not necessarily be as a result of poor systems – organisations have established a number strong and well protected systems

Interpersonal Incompetence Costs Organizations Time & Money

Thirty years of experience and research has taught me that there is no relationship between organizational title and interpersonal competence. It has also taught me that the costs of silence are both calculable and catastrophic. Consider our study in health care where we found that 90 percent of nurses don’t speak up to a physician even when they know a patient’s safety is at risk. We’ve also studied workplace safety. We found that 93 percent of people say their organization is at risk of an accident waiting to happen because people are either unwilling or unable to speak up. In our recent study, we wanted to see if we could further quantify the cost of this silence. Our goal was to calculate a per-conversation price tag to show just how much it costs when an employee decides to stay silent—rather than voice a major concern.

Quote for the day:

"Peace isn't merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice." -- Harrison Ford

Daily Tech Digest - August 28, 2017

The far-reaching benefits of SD-WAN improve network edge to inner layers

SD-WAN's original mission was to combine private-network VPN tunnels, like MPLS, and tunnels over the internet to build a VPN that could cover sites too small and numerous to be served by MPLS VPNs alone. Because of this combined virtual-wires mission, SD-WAN must sit at the network edge. An SD-WAN product usually has several network-side connections and one connection to the user's on-premises network. An SD-WAN device on the customer's premises takes on several popular forms: The original combines internet and MPLS VPN; another uses multiple internet service provider connections or internet pathways. One of the benefits of SD-WAN is to tie all the pathways together to create a tunnel network that links all of the sites on an organization's network.

12 Bad Habits That Slow IT to a Crawl

Every additional committee member slows down decisions; more than five members and progress slows to a crawl as the possibility of consensus disappears entirely. It’s worse if committee members consider themselves not IT leaders but representatives of a constituency that otherwise might not get its fair share. This sort of committee will argue forever instead of solving shared problems. Then there’s the meeting schedule. It’s the metronome that sets the pace for every project the committee governs. If a committee meets monthly, then anything waiting for a decision waits a month. How many projects do you have under way that could thrive with a bottleneck like that? How to solve this? Make culture the new governance. Think of it as the lane markers on the road, relegating steering committees to the role of guardrails — when all else fails they’re there to keep IT from plummeting into the chasm, but only when all else fails.

Five pitfalls to avoid in your hybrid cloud strategy

"Most of our clients have accepted that hybrid is their end state," said Gartner analyst Mindy Cancila. "But what I find is that very few of them have clarity around what that means that they need to do. And so, while most organizations are recognizing that they're going to adopt some type of public cloud services, their data centers are not likely to go away overnight." ... And rather than determining the true purpose of the cloud in their company, "a lot of organizations look at hybrid cloud and say 'Okay, this is what everyone's doing, so this is what I'm going to do,'" said Forrester's Nelson. For the best chance at hybrid cloud success, companies should "have direction, have priorities, have the core values of what you're trying to achieve with cloud very clearly articulated," Nelson said, "and revisit those plans over time."

How to get started with Akka.Net

When working in Akka.Net, you use actors and messages to model your problem. In Akka.Net, an actor is an object with some specific behavior. While actors do have internal state, they don’t have any shared mutable state. .... Actors are identified by addresses. They derive from the ActorBase class and in turn they can create child actors. Actors communicate with each other by passing messages asynchronously. Essentially, an actor receives a message and then reacts to it either by processing it or by passing another message to another actor to get the job done. Note that the messages in Akka.Net are processed sequentially, one at a time, in the order in which they arrive. Since actors can be running locally or on a remote server, a common message exchange format is needed. Akka.Net messages are immutable. They can be instances of a string, an integer, or even a custom class.

4 steps to prepare employees for robotic process automation

Unquestionably, the quest for cost reduction is a driver behind automation adoption. And with good reason. The ROI on a typical investment is more than 500 percent. Yet, many don’t understand from the outset the impact automation can have on speed-to-market and revenue cycle improvements and how it can lead to new opportunities for employees to perform higher-value work. Train and reskill employees to become process assessment experts and help them acquire skills related to managing virtual workforces. Case in point: a premier insurance company recently deployed RPA and was immediately able to bind more policies faster and more accurately simply because it could process broker requests for quotes by eliminating tedious work that underwriters had been performing.

Counterpoint: The Data Warehouse is Still Alive

Still data warehouses meet the information needs of people and continue to provide value. Many people use them, depend on them, and don’t want them to be replaced with a data lake. Data lakes serve analytics and big data needs well. They offer a rich source of data for data scientists and self-service data consumers. But not all data and information workers want to become self-service consumers. Many – perhaps the majority – continue to need well-integrated, systematically cleansed, easy to access relational data that includes a large body of time-variant history. These people are best served with a data warehouse. The data warehouse needs to be modernized. Migrating to the cloud resolves many data warehousing challenges. Scalability and elasticity are well-known cloud benefits. Cloud data warehousing also brings benefits of managed infrastructure, cost savings, rapid deployment, and fast processing.

IT powerhouses try to come from behind in enterprise IoT

The strategy, then, is to enter into as many partnerships as possible. So what’s happening is an “interleaving” of OT and IT, leading to products like Predix being able to run on a Cisco edge router, or in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. “It’s a much more promiscuous partnering strategy being deployed,” Renaud said. “A lot of these legacy OT vendors are beginning to partner with these IT vendors.” Importantly, these partnerships are rarely exclusive – which helps ensure interoperability between a company’s existing infrastructure and whatever new IoT platforms it wants to embrace. Open source, as well, is a major contributor to this diversity, and Hung urged businesses to embrace the model. “Make sure that whatever solution you’re looking at is an open solution … that has a strong developer ecosystem around it, so you’re not relying on any single vendor,” he said.

Security leaders need better visibility of risk before the board asks

While many CEOs are beginning to understand the effects that cyberattacks can have on reputation and the bottom line, many are still struggling with a lack of visibility of the risk. They often look to the security leaders within their organization for answers. One statistic from our annual SailPoint Market Pulse Survey would likely shock many executives: ... This lack of visibility is concerning. In our last conversation, we talked about the ever-growing complexity of today’s IT environments. New exposure points are emerging every day, due to the proliferation of applications, user types and unstructured data to trends such as Shadow IT and BYOD. And still, very few organizations have visibility into who their users are — employees, contractors and business partners — and what those users have access to (and more importantly, if that access is appropriate).

Meet Fitbit Ionic: A Little Smartwatch A Lot Of Fitness Tracker

With Fitbit's new Ionic fitness tracker, health and fitness still take center stage, but Ionic is more of an all-around wearable than any Fitbit that came before. Ionic represents the first fruits of the company’s Pebble, Coin, and Vector shopping spree: You can now install third-party apps, make payments, and you can store hundreds of songs for offline listening. The biggest change for Fitbit is the new open system, as the company has leveraged its Pebble acquisition to create a platform for third-party apps. Only a handful of apps will be available at launch, but Fitbit will soon be opening up an software development kit so developers can tap into Ionic’s sensors to build apps and watch faces just like they on watchOS and Android Wear.

IT heroes: Use customer service to build business relationships

The not-so-subtle message is that decreeing relationship change simply does not work. Of course, senior leaders must set broad objectives, but goals alone do not create results. Making pronouncements is easy, but actually driving deep cooperation across departments is more difficult. The need to change is part of a broader shift inside IT, striving to say "yes" in response to user requests rather than the traditional "default to no" mentality. During a recent conference, I spoke with several IT managers -- these are not CIOs - who are using customer service as the model for defining relationships between business stakeholders and IT. FinancialForce invited me to their Community Live 2017 event in Las Vegas to record these conversations as part of the CXOTalk series of conversations with innovators.

Quote for the day:

"I'd rather live with a good question than a bad answer." -- Aryeh Frimer

Daily Tech Digest - August 27, 2017

Applying Enterprise Architecture Rightly

This article takes reference of TOGAF for the discussion. While practicing TOGAF, it’s always implied that TOGAF is a suggestive approach and NOT a prescriptive approach. Xoriant has recently forayed into TOGAF with the help of newly formed TOGAF Certified Architects and is committed to provide solutions to the clients on the proven success stories. Many a times, while interacting with business houses, requirements always start with a single line or sometimes, even a clause, e.g., – We need ERP. This is where a business canvas is provisioned and plans are made to evaluate the opportunity and provide information on that. Considering entire lifecycle of a business opportunity, it’s very important to put the right starting step so that Service Provider does not incur losses.

Issues necessitate Change - Evolution of Enterprise Architecture

The drive for continuous improvement and Information Technology alignment demanded further improvements in the way we thought about architecture – moving ever into the task of understanding an organizations business issues. Other issues that drove changes, such as the following – no chronology implied. Corporate espionage, whether stealing secrets of an organization or stealing information about customers, where taking advantage of corporation vulnerabilities drove the need to look at those vulnerabilities holistically – that is looking at people, processes, and technology. Architects and builders changed to look beyond just IT to address this area.

Where Enterprise Architecture and Project Management Intersect

Enterprise Architecture is not about writing or specifying software code or systems - it is about architecting optimized business processes and systems based on management's strategies for the organization. While software development certainly has its place in organizations, that is an IT function best left to IT and more IT-specific solution, data, and information architects. Since EA is evolving away from IT-centricity and IT project teams, it doesn't make much sense to make them members of IT project teams. However, it may make sense for IT project teams to utilize EAs as subject matter experts - who are advisors and give guidance to specific projects, but are not members of the specific teams OR responsible for any of their scope, timeline, or deliverables.

OpenJDK may tackle Java security gaps with secretive group

The vulnerability group and Oracle’s internal security teams would work together, and it may occasionally need to work with external security organizations. The group would be unusual in several respects, and thus requires an exemption from OpenJDK bylaws. Due to the sensitive nature of its work, membership in the group would be more selective, there would be a strict communication policy, and members or their employers would need to sign both a nondisclosure and a license agreement, said Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle. “These requirements do, strictly speaking, violate the OpenJDK bylaws,” Reinhold said. “The governing board has discussed this, however, and I expect that the board will approve the creation of this group with these exceptional requirements.”

First Robocop to Join Dubai Police Force

That’s right, the time for the Robocop to leave the sci-fi land and enter reality… or sort of. A couple of years ago, Dubai’s police promised that for 2017 they would have enlisted their first robot police officer, and they have delivered. Built by the Spanish robotics company PAL Robotics, the police officer, known as REEM, was introduce to the public during the Gulf Information Security and Expo Conference. .. Although this is fascinating news, it’s still reality and reality is never as fun as fiction so this Robocop is a little duller. It’s not a cyborg half human, half robot, it’s just a robot with batteries. He cannot chase criminals like said before it has wheels, not legs, and it’s unarmed. However, even if REEM doesn’t have the cool design and features that we are used to seeing on the big screen, it means a tremendous achievement for science.

IoT: Penetrating the Possibilities of a Data Driven Economy

With manufacturing units now being able to communicate with each other through the deployment of IoT system solutions, analysis of facility performance metrics can be performed in real time. Management executives, if they want, can also resolve the performance monitoring to shop floor levels, which helps provide revealing manufacturing insights. Serving as an example is the manufacturing giant, Caterpillar. The company has deployed the SAP Leonardo system, an IIoT technology, across all its operation facilities. The system furnishes real time information about manufacturing data, energy utilization data, machine performances, and data regarding the production consumables. Combining altogether, the company executives can have a 360-degree view of the manufacturing processes which leads to better tactical decision making.

Why are the stats on women in tech actually getting worse?

Girls look up to their role models, we have a number of women role models in entrepreneurship and other fields but there’s a significant lack of women role models in technology. Only 23.5% of computer science degrees were awarded to women last year in one of the biggest universities in the States. Some seniors found that they knew of few female computer scientists working in the professional world. This can be a reason why girls aren’t interested in this field as much. This can be changed as well, female representation should not be lacking in any field, especially, the ever growing area of technology. The seniors at Stanford have come up with an organization which dedicates itself in telling stories of women who work in programming, the SHE++ aspire women to take up arms in the technology field and to connect with women in this field as well.

Microsoft is making a blockchain that’s fit for business

Note that Coco is a framework, not a ledger; in fact it uses other ledgers. Ethereum is working already, and Intel along with J P Morgan Chase are porting their ledgers to Coco – plus other blockchain ledgers will also integrate with it. You can also choose what algorithm you want to use to achieve consensus. In one test using the Ethereum ledger in Coco, the network delivered 1,500-1,600 transactions per second with latency between 100-200 milliseconds – far faster than Ethereum itself running on the same hardware. Russinovich says Coco will also scale to networks with hundreds of thousands of participants. Because each transaction is only calculated once, time-sensitive or restricted data isn’t a problem either.

What Is Blockchain? A Primer For Finance Professionals

Now imagine that every time you send the monthly living allowance, you laid down a “block” with the transaction information carved into it. Both you and your child can see the block, confirming that the money was sent and received. ... Together, they create a record of all transactions with your future college graduate. When you get old and infirm, you can point to the chain, show your kid how much money you paid for college, and demand that they invest a similar amount in a high-quality nursing home. This is, more or less, how blockchain works. Each block is a record of a monetary transaction. The chain is a shared accounting ledger that is visible to all parties across multiple networks, or “nodes.” Every new transaction is verified by all nodes and, if valid, added to all copies of the ledger—in other words, a new “block” is added to the “chain.”

5 essentials for building the perfect Internet of Things beast

An IoT platform has more elements, and therefore is more complex, than a typical technology platform many are used to, they observe. These new platforms need to reach out to all the devices, sensors and applications and their underlying technology as well. "Look at the whole technology environment, not just the applications," the McKinsey authors advise. "Use fungible/off-the-shelf technology for the things that are less critical." Remember, too, that IoT is a different beast for every industry, or for every company for that matter. For a sportswear company, it may mean sensor-loaded sneakers. For an manufacturer, it means embedding sensors into production-floor tools. For an insurance company, it means planting telematics sensors in policyholders' cars.

Quote for the day:

"Sometimes life takes an unexpected wrong turn in the right direction." -- Unknown

Daily Tech Digest - August 26, 2017

Disaster Recovery Vs. Security Recovery Plans: Why You Need Separate Strategies

A security recovery plan is designed to stop, learn, and then correct the incident. "A disaster recovery plan may follow similar steps, but nomenclature would not likely use 'detection' to describe a fire or flood event, nor would there be much in the way of analytics," says Peter Fortunato, a manager in the risk and business advisory practice at New England-based accounting firm Baker Newman Noyes."Further, not many disasters require the collection of evidence." Another risk in merging plans is the possibility of gaining unwanted public attention. "For instance, invoking a disaster recovery plan often requires large-scale notifications going out to key stakeholders," Merino says.

The Future of Public Cloud Storage for Big Data

Just as happened with Moore’s law when silicon chips met transistors, public cloud and big data are creating exponential effects. A recent research predicts that public cloud prices for big data processing and storage will decrease by half every few years while processing power will double. Public cloud skeptics predict that costs of big data storage in the public cloud will be the same or increase slightly in 10 years. however, this not true as the costs are expected to decrease significantly. On the other hand, the costs of upgrading big data software will increase. in a few years, Hadoop data lake will need to be upgraded. Right now, data scientists are preferring multiple versions of Spark, indicating the beginning of on-premise headaches. This can only get worse as Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft pursue a serverless strategy.

5 Industries AI Will Disrupt in the Next 10 Years

It's difficult to talk about AI without evaluating its place in the ecosystem. Loosely speaking, it starts with the Internet of Things, in which objects are connected to the internet and used to gather data. Once enough data has been gathered, it passes the arbitrary threshold and becomes "Big Data", which AI is used to interpret. When there are so many data points that no human could ever process them all, artificial intelligence becomes the only real alternative. But AI doesn't always know what it's looking for, which is where machine learning comes in. Loosely speaking, that's the process of using AI to analyze data in such a way that it 'teaches' itself to interpret it. AI disruption, then, is largely going to come in the form of new ways of processing and interpreting data that have never before been available. Here are just five of the industries that AI is set to disrupt.

3 Amazing Ways AI is Going to Wipe Out Cyber Crime!

Ultimately it comes down to the Machine Learning experts, who are the main players behind "educating" the machines. Digital signature, authentication, hiding the IP, masking identity, encryption, firewall, etc have already been implemented by various firms... but what new strategies can machine learning discover? Deep machine learning can apply various algorithms to identify the malicious activities taking place on the network. It can be determined by finding unusual patterns interacting with the system infrastructure. You might have seen Google asking you to verify if you are not a robot. You click on some of the images and then it lets you browse. When you browse Google for long hours on end, this is the common activity that occurs.

Security professionals name top causes of breaches

While this finding underlines the importance of user education and training, the respondents said human error is exacerbated by understaffed security teams and a flood of alerts and false positives. This highlights the negative impact of companies struggling to recruit cyber security teams in the face of a worldwide shortage of people with information security skills and the need for greater staff support. This shortage of cyber defenders with the right skills is further underlined by the fact 43% of respondents said technology detected the attack, but the security team took no action, while another 41% said a combination of technology and human error was to blame. Respondents also blamed a lack of information resources to understand and mitigate attacks, with 42% saying they are left to figure them out themselves.

Leveraging Advanced Analytics to Power Digital Transformation

Recent conversations with Walker Stemple of Intel’s @intelAI organization got me thinking about where and how organizations can leverage “advanced analytics” to power their business models. Now “advanced analytics” is a broad definition, but I have included the following analytics in that definition: Regression, Clustering, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing. And while these “classifications” seem to change on a regular basis (sometimes due to us getting smarter; sometimes due to non-value-add marketing hype), it is critical that tomorrow’s business leaders understand where and how to apply these advanced analytics to power their business models.

Ukraine Central Bank Detects Massive Attack Preparation

The National Bank of Ukraine - the country's central bank - declined to share a copy of the letter with Information Security Media Group, but confirmed that it had alerted banks to a new, potentially major attack. "In order to prevent cyber attacks, the National Bank of Ukraine consistently cooperates with banking sector participants, the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSCIPU), as well as relevant units of the Security Service of Ukraine and the National Police of Ukraine," a spokesman for the National Bank of Ukraine tells ISMG. "On August 11, the NBU promptly informed banks about new malicious code, its characteristics, indicators of compromise and the need to take preventive measures to prevent the networks from being attacked by malicious codes."

Looking beyond the hype of robotic process automation

RPA is particularly appealing for companies that are juggling with millions or even billions of transactions a day. With such an overwhelming amount to deal with, they often struggle to effectively manage important tasks like addressing customer requests, processing files, moving information between different systems, allocating work and making decisions. But RPA promises to help some organizations alleviate the challenge and operate more efficiently by automating, and thus accelerating, transaction processing. They can then provide greater customer service, which inspires continued loyalty and has a direct, positive impact on a business’ bottom line. ... The promise of RPA is creating massive hype in the market, which is being leveraged by RPA vendors to position their products as the “silver bullet” for any company looking to streamline and optimize operations.

What Is Data Mining? How Analytics Uncovers Insights

Data mining comes with its share of risks and challenges. As with any technology that involves the use of potentially sensitive or personally identifiable information, security and privacy are among the biggest concerns. At a fundamental level, the data being mined needs to be complete, accurate, and reliable; after all, you’re using it to make significant business decisions and often to interact with the public, regulators, investors, and business partners. Modern forms of data also require new kinds of technologies, such as for bringing together data sets from a variety of distributed computing environments (aka big data integration) and for more complex data, such as images and video, temporal data, and spatial data.

What is Rust? Safe, fast, and easy software development

Rust started as a Mozilla research project partly meant to reimplement key components of the Firefox browser. A few key reasons drove that decision: Firefox deserved to make better use of modern, multicore processors; and the sheer ubiquity of web browsers means they need to be safe to use. But those benefits are needed by all software, not just browsers, which is why Rust evolved into a language project from a browser project. Rust accomplishes its safety, speed, and ease of use through the following characteristics: Rust satisfies the need for speed. Rust code compiles to native machine code across multiple platforms. Binaries are self-contained, with no runtime, and the generated code is meant to perform as well as comparable code written in C or C++.

Quote for the day:

"No great manager or leader ever fell from heaven, its learned not inherited." -- Tom Northup

Daily Tech Digest - August 25, 2017

How Python makes programming simple

Because Python is easy and fast to write, that saves developer time, although this typically comes at the cost of execution time. The same programs in other languages—like C, C++, and Java—may take longer to put together, but they typically run many times faster than a Python app. But Python can also run fast when it needs to, because many third-party libraries for Python are written in faster languages like C. All Python has to do is plug into such a library, and it can run at or close to the speed of those languages when performance matters. Mastering new things in IT is always tricky, whether it’s containerization, devops, or extracting a little meaning from a lot of data. Python is designed to give you a leg up on getting all those things done, both now and into the future.

The current state of government cybersecurity is 'grim,' report says

When it comes to cybersecurity readiness, US government organizations aren't doing so hot. In a recent report from SecurityScorecard comparing the security practices of 18 industries, government ranked no. 16. "In the midst of investigations into a potential 2016 election hacking, regular major malware events, and an overall increase in the number of sophisticated cyberattacks, the report highlights that the government sector is lagging compared to almost every other industry," the report said. For the report, SecurityScorecard analyzed 552 local, state, and federal organizations to see how their security practices stacked up across 10 key categories. The only two industries that ranked lower were telecom (no. 17) and education (no. 18). For government, that's actually an improvement over last year, the report said, when it ranked dead last.

Indian CIOs to benefit from emerging and maturing technologies: Gartner

“This year’s Hype Cycle demonstrates the keen interest Indian organizations are taking in both emerging and maturing technologies,” said Pankaj Prasad, Principal Research Analyst - Gartner. “The market is witnessing the entry of local vendors in emerging, as well as mature, technology segments, including areas such as IoT robotic process automation offerings and machine-learning-based technologies,” added Prasad. ... Some technologies, such as mobile money, social analytics and robotic process automation offerings, will support new ways of doing business across industries. Technologies such as machine learning, IoT and smart city frameworks are of a transformational nature, which will result in a significant transformation within the industry dynamics and in the creation of a new ecosystem.

Susanne Kaiser on Microservices Journey from a Startup Perspective

Microservices come with complexities like multiple independent services, operational & communication complexity, partitioned data, and the complexity of eventual consistency. This comes with challenges of transformation to microservices, such as the need for different skills & tools, and untangling the core functionality; the team still has to take care of the existing system, and the transformation takes longer than anticipated. Kaiser said the monolith to microservices journey in reality is evolutionary. ... The key concept of modeling microservices is loose coupling between the services and high cohesion within a service. The team also identified bounded contexts for microservices with well defined business functions.

Distributed data centers boost resiliency, but IT hurdles remain

Organizations should create an "assurance construct" to address those questions and show CIOs and CTOs how data traverses the network and how failover works, Traver said. That way, the entire business understands the level of resiliency that its infrastructure delivers. At this point, only major public cloud players, such as Google Cloud Platform, have the resources to establish true cloud-based resiliency with complete consistency across all data centers in the network, Lawrence said. "It's probably not something that enterprises will be able to aspire to -- perhaps not at least for the next decade and a half -- but perhaps when they have enough sites and different colos, it might be possible," he said. Ultimately, the kind of resiliency an organization pursues should depend on its applications.

15 noob mistakes even experienced developers still make

If you’re not writing C or C++, Make is probably not your friend. Make launches another compiler process for each file. Most modern languages are not designed to have a separate process launched for each file. Also resolving dependencies in a language like Java using Make is nearly impossible. I once worked at a large network equipment company and shortened its build process from three hours to like 20 seconds by converting its build to Ant. A shell script is also usually a bad move in the end. I recently wrote a shell build for a lab because I didn’t want everyone to have to download a whole Java tool set to run one little lab. I thought it was a good move, but it was a noob mistake (as always) because the next version of the software it depended on broke everything (as always).

.NET Standard 2.0 Is Finalized for Consistent API Usage

The .NET Standard project for Visual Studio 2017, hosted on a GitHub site belonging to the .NET Foundation, was announced last September. Microsoft said .NET Standard will replace Portable Class Libraries (PCLs) as the de-facto tooling story used by developers for building multi-platform .NET libraries. ".NET Standard solves the code sharing problem for .NET developers across all platforms by bringing all the APIs that you expect and love across the environments that you need: desktop applications, mobile apps & games, and cloud services," Microsoft said in a huge blog post (with nearly 200 comments) explaining the standard in detail. Apparently facing developer confusion about exactly what .NET Standard is for, Microsoft has devoted some guidance to explaining it, even pointing to an analogy written by David Fowler.

Why cybercriminals like AI as much as cyberdefenders do

“AI is a hammer that can be used for good or bad,” said Jim Fox, a partner, principal and cybersecurity and privacy assurance leader at PwC. “And if your adversaries have a hammer, you'd better have one, too.” In the right hands, this mighty hammer can do a lot of good. Artificial intelligence software can monitor all network activity and quickly discern odd patterns that could indicate foul play, even if such patterns haven’t been flagged before. It can learn over time to discern truly suspicious behavior from normal patterns. Last year's Petya malware attack made decisions "at machine speed,” says one cybersecurity expert. “Nobody was guiding that malware. They wrote an intelligent program to do all that.”Adobe StockAt the New York-based investment bank Greenhill & Co., Chief Information Officer John Shaffer sought a better way to deal with zero-day attacks.

What do macOS and Android have in common? Both are booming malware markets

macOS hasn't been doing well on the malware front lately. Q2 2017, Malwarebytes says, was bigger for macOS malware than the entirety of 2016. Add to that the discovery of more new macOS malware families in 2017 than any year on record and you have a clear indicator of the vulnerability of Apple computers. The threats facing macOS are different than Android or Windows, which is somewhat good news. Rather than ransomware and malware, which the report says is the smallest concern for macOS, PUPs and adware dominate. Many popular macOS apps have been found to contain threats—even those on the App Store. Popular websites for downloading software, such as Softonic and Macupdate.com, have also been found to contain malicious installers.

Handset makers may need to reboot data collection rules

“The dangers to privacy in an age of information can originate not only from the state but from non-state actors as well. We commend to the Union Government the need to examine and put into place a robust regime for data protection,” the Supreme Court judges said in their ruling. Even before the court’s verdict on Thursday, the government directed 30 handset makers including Apple, Samsung, Micromax and Xiaomi to share the procedures and processes used by them to ensure the security of mobile phones sold in the country by August 28. Handset makers insist they-’re already protecting user data on the phones they sell. “We have always stood for securing the user data. User data on all our devices are fully secure, in compliance with the necessary laws and regulations,” said a spokesperson from Oppo.

Quote for the day:

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection" -- Mark Twain

Daily Tech Digest - August 23, 2017

Its Time To Think Beyond Cloud Computing

Cloud computing giants haven’t ignored the lag problem. In May, Microsoft announced the testing of its new Azure IoT Edge service, intended to push some cloud computing functions onto developers’ own devices. Barely a month later, Amazon Web Services opened up general access to AWS Greengrass software that similarly extends some cloud-style services to devices running on local networks. Still, these services require customers to operate hardware on their own. Customers who are used to handing that whole business off to a cloud provider may view that as a backwards step. Edge computing’s vision of having “thousands of small, regional and micro-regional data centers that are integrated into the last mile networks” is actually a “natural extension of today’s centralized cloud,” Crawford says.

Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Solving the Impossible

Quantum computing differs from traditional binary computing in that takes advantage of the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time (it’s like your children, where you can both love and hate them at the same time). In classical digital computing, a bit is a single piece of information that can exist in two states – 1 or 0. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or ‘qubits’ instead. ... One important area where quantum computing is expected to have a dramatic impact is in improving the ability for reinforcement learning to process an exponentially-wider range of operating variables in real-time, which is vital in automated cars and smart entities like factories and hospitals. As an example, Google has built a quantum computer which is 100 million times faster than any of today’s machines.

How To Bridge IT's Growing Generation Gap

The challenge for IT leaders is to manage those changes and balance differing priorities and expectations from the three age groups working in IT — millennials, baby boomers and the Generation X cohort stuck between them. It will require deft management skills, a lot of empathy and the ability to drive needed changes to keep organizations competitive in a fast-moving world. ... The push to accommodate millennials begins with the much-discussed need for companies to embrace "digital transformation" or become "digital organizations." IT experts may differ on exactly what that means, but there's widespread agreement about whom it applies to. "When it comes to the new skills required to accelerate digital transformation, a lot of existing staff who are baby boomers and Gen X-ers have legacy skills and need to be reskilled," says Lily Mok, an analyst at Gartner.

The winding road to GDPR compliance

With under a year to go, many businesses have not started preparations, and will need to develop and implement a strategy for compliance. Every organisation that processes the personal data of EU citizens will require a tailored strategy depending on, among other factors, company size, the types and amount of data it processes, and its current security and privacy measures. It is highly recommended that businesses seek legal advice to determine what may be required in their specific situation. However, there are common requirements that will affect all businesses – even the very smallest – that handle personal data. The first step on the road to GDPR compliance is to understand how personal data is stored, processed, shared and used within your organisation.

SDN: Technology to cut costs, speed new services

The past few years have seen the mainstream network vendors jump into SDN with both feet. They still offer feature-rich, turnkey switches with all the support and services mainstream enterprises have come to rely on but with a vendor-provided SDN controller. Many of the mainstream vendors also offer support for third-party controllers. The primary value is in reduction of operational expenses through the automation of configuration and management tasks instead of focusing on hardware costs. In actuality, network hardware accounts for less than 10% of overall data-center spend, while personnel costs can be well over half of a data center’s total cost of ownership. A small reduction in operational costs can pay significant dividends for the business.

The Hyper-Connected Economy: An Interview With Ken Sakai, MD Of Telehouse Europe

For companies that need secure, reliable access to one or more leading public cloud services, Telehouse Cloud Link, a multi-cloud connectivity exchange, delivers a private connection with predictable and scalable bandwidth between their network and cloud services. Telehouse’s collaboration with Microsoft allows enterprises and their IT infrastructure partners to seamlessly provision and manage private connections to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365 using a dedicated and predictable connection. ... Additional cloud service providers are expected to be added to Cloud Link in the near future and this ability to connect to multiple clouds through a single source removes the complexity of traditional network procurement.

Mimecast’s newly discovered email exploit isn’t a vulnerability, it’s a feature

Mimecast says that their newly discovered exploit undermines "the security and non-repudiation of email; even for those that use SMIME or PGP for signing…" That sounds frightening, but the reality is completely different. This isn't an exploit, or vulnerability. It isn't even a bug. What Mimecast describes in their advisory is a feature, and one that isn't even widely supported. Outlook.com and Gmail for example, block external calls to CSS using the LINK attribute. Mimecast makes mention of using EMBED, OBJECT, FRAME, or IFRAME, even SVGs as alternate modes of exploitation. Again, these are all known attack methods, and once more, many of the mainstream email providers block them. In fact, Mimecast themselves admit that Gmail, Outlook.com, and iCloud.com were not affected by their discovery.

Software-based networking brings new automation perks, challenges

Network automation gives IT organizations deploying complex applications the ability to control the rapid provisioning of network resources. It provides the ability to centrally manage the network and reduce operational costs by shifting the challenges of configuration from people to technology. Software-based networks can select appropriate network services based on parameters, such as application type, quality of service and security requirements. ... Network professionals spend significant time and resources adapting the physical and virtual network to changes in applications, compute and storage resources, and device location. Software-based networking tools can automate change management by associating specific network and security policies with applications and devices that can "follow" them as they migrate physically and virtually.

The future will be fuelled by data

Overlaid with a cognitive platform the process would not only be streamlined, it would be far more valuable to all the participants. "There is a lot of data we are generating here: identifying the tenant, landlord, specific lease, specific property and specific segment of that property," says Dobson. Add in the data the banks already hold about tenants and their supply chains, Dobson believes, "There is a profound opportunity to use advanced analytics and predictive modelling to give insights to the tenant, the landlord and the bank. If you expand the scope of the network to other documents or instruments, you are probably scaling exponentially the data that you could observe and the conclusions you might draw." Financial services is just one area that blockchain will impact; supply chains, Internet of Things (IoT), risk management, digital rights management and healthcare are poised for dramatic change using blockchain networks.

Serverless computing may kill Google Cloud Platform

According to Allamaraju, serverless computing is outpacing industry darlings like Kubernetes. His own Expedia “did over 2.3 billion lambda calls per month” back in late 2016, a number that has climbed since then. Nor is Expedia alone in discovering the productivity gains to be found with serverless computing: Coca-Cola, Nordstrom, Reuters, and others have jumped in. Yet it’s been AI and machine learning technologies like Kubernetes that Google has pinned its cloud hopes on. Focused on its Kubernetes-to-GCP and machine learning plays, Google has not built out the array of serverless services that its competitors have. As Mytton notes, “Once your core runtime requirements are met, the differences between the [serverless vendors’] services aren’t particularly important. … What does count is the availability of services to consume from within the cloud provider ecosystem.”

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the art of influencing people to execute your strategic thinking" -- Nabil Khalil Basma

Daily Tech Digest - August 22, 2017

How Google is speeding up the Internet

BBR is not the first effort to speed up TCP. Researchers at North Carolina State University are credited with developing one of the most popular loss-based congestion control algorithms used in TCP today, named binary increase congestion control (BIC) and subsequently, CUBIC. At a high level, these also record measurements to estimate the optimal speed at which to send data when congestion is detected. Another congestion control algorithm that has become popular is named Reno. These all use packet loss to determine congestion, though Jacobson, the Google engineer who developed BBR, says that to his knowledge BBR is the only TCP algorithm that actually estimates the speed of traffic to determine the best way to send it, regardless of whether packets have been lost.

Artificial intelligence will let us outsource tedious tasks to our phones

This week marks the debut of Essential’s first gadget. The Essential Phone is an anomaly: a sleek, premium smartphone not designed by Apple, Samsung or a discount Chinese brand. It has a mirrored ceramic back, titanium edges, a display that covers most the phone’s front and a magnetic connector for a new world of accessories and hardware upgrades that he says will let people hang onto their phones longer. Rubin recognizes that Essential confronts formidable competition, especially from Apple and Samsung. But while he applauds the former’s brand power and the latter’s vertical integration, he said “every saturated market needs a disruption. When there’s a duopoly, that’s the time to do it.”

Doing things right: Cloud and SecOps adoption

The goal of SecOps is to help companies deliver software more efficiently and more securely, while reducing risk for the organization over time. The reality is that due to the new operating model in cloud environments security and operations teams must work together as the security team identifies risks and then works with operations to remediate them. “No matter what resources you do or do not have at hand, including personnel, budget, or tools, SecOps is both critical and achievable,” he believes. But one thing crucial to its implementation is leadership buy-in – the people in charge must realize that security is on equal footing with availability and performance. “If the e-retail boom taught suppliers that they must invest in site availability like they would to ensure their brick-and-mortar has its lights on, they must also invest in security like they would to ensure that the alarms work and doors lock.”

New York University Abu Dhabi researchers develop 'unhackable' computer chip

The chip has a secret key that makes it virtually impossible to access and would only function for authorised users. “Without the secret key, the chips cannot be made functional,” he said. “The functionality of chip - what it does, how it does it - can only be known if the secret key is known.” A patent application has been filed at the US Patent Office. The researchers are creating a web-based platform to make information about the chip available to the public. An extensive research paper by NYUAD’s Design for Excellence team will be presented in November at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in the US. “These are all theoretically proven points and we will present this at a top cyber security conference, but we need to test our claims practically as well," said Mr Sinanoglu.

Calls for UK boards to be better educated on cyber threats

One of the most worrying aspects is the lack of understanding of the serious nature that ignorance brings, said Simmonds. This ignorance has led to a lack of basic cyber hygiene, with companies typically lacking basic security controls and processes, and failing to train employees at all levels from the board down on how to deal with cyber threats. “This has been a consistent theme of Verizon’s annual Data breach investigations report over the past 10 years,” said Laurance Dine, managing principal of investigative response at Verizon. “We’ve seen that the majority of data breaches could so easily have been prevented if basic measures and protocols had been in place. For example, we often see that around two-thirds of breaches are traced back to weak, stolen or lost passwords, which could easily be prevented using two-factor authentication.

How To Choose The Right Enterprise Mobility Management Tool

A key to choosing the best EMM solution is aligning the features and capabilities of the platform to your organization’s requirements. This includes such factors as what types of business apps users typically work with, what security and regulatory compliance requirements the company has, what sort of network and service management features it needs, which mobile operating systems are in use, what level of reporting capabilities is needed, and so on. Selecting the right platform isn’t just a matter of getting the most features, but acquiring the features that best meet the organization's requirements. “Organizational needs relating to mobility differ considerably, as do the infrastructure environments into which mobility solutions will be implemented,” Holtby says.

Are you ready for state-sponsored zombie malware attacks?

Zombie malware combines the most deadly aspects of malware and zombie computers into one horrible mess. Typically malware gets into a compute device via phishing or email attachment which limits the scale of the attack. In contrast, zombie malware autonomously hunts for vulnerable systems across LAN, WiFi and VPN connections. Once zombie malware finds a system to infect, it utilizes the new host to scan for other systems which can be anywhere on the globe. Another key aspect of zombie malware is the lack of a control channel to manage its destructive path (unlike zombie computers used in DDoS attack). Subsequently zombie malware just destroys anything it can connect to. For example, the NotPetya started on Ukraine government systems but then quickly spread around the globe.

How to get Android 8.0 Oreo on your Pixel or Nexus right now

While Google's own Pixel and Nexus devices are almost always first in line for a fresh Android rollout, this year's dessert-themed delight isn't actually quite ready to be served to everyone just yet. Google says it's in the midst of "carrier testing" with the Pixel, Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P Oreo builds and expects to start sending updates out to those devices soon. ... Realistically, the wait for Pixel and Nexus owners to get Oreo as an official over-the-air update likely won't be long. But we tech enthusiasts are a notoriously impatient bunch, and when something new is available, gosh darn it, we must have it. Well, not to fear, my fellow shiny-new-software fanatics: If you own a Pixel, Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P, you can actually get Android 8.0 Oreo on your phone this very minute — with the help of a handy little hack.

The cloud could drive open source out of the enterprise

First of all, open source’s no-cost attribute means less in the cloud. Public cloud providers will charge you for the time you use their cloud to access open source software—or any software. Thus, it doesn’t really matter if you AWS Linux, Red Hat Linux, or closed-source platforms from Microsoft, because they are all “free” yet cost the same in cloud time charges for access. The same is true with the databases; there’s not much different in your monthly cloud bill if you use open source databases versus closed source, or those that are native to a specific cloud such AWS Red Shift. If there is not a dramatic cost advantage, most enterprises won’t care about the platforms that they use in the long run, and that takes away one of open source’s historic strengths.

How to set up an all open-source IT infrastructure from scratch

Not choosing Microsoft Windows is the first obvious decision here. The cost is to high (both in terms of up-front monetary investment and recurring costs associated with securing a closed platform). MacOS is, for the same reason, off the table. What specific platform I chose, at that point, comes down to what my specific needs are within the organization. Chance are I would select a Linux-based platform (either a free Linux distribution – Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, etc. – or a similar system with paid support). Support is the main reason to consider a paid, closed system anyway, so might as well get all the benefits with none of the drawbacks of a system like Windows. Save money, increase security. No brainer. For applications, I’d also standardize around LibreOffice for the office suite and one of the several open-source web browsers (such as Firefox).

Quote for the day:

"Knowledge Management is the art of creating value from intangible assets." -- Karl-Erik Sveiby

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