Daily Tech Digest - November 07, 2018

Accountancy and technology: the changing role of the accountant

Accountancy and technology: the changing role of the accountant
The change is probably less in classic, financial accounting but more on the side of financial analysis and managerial accounting. It will be shifting from getting the numbers out of the system in an error-free way into PowerPoint into really doing something meaningful with these numbers, becoming a business partner and advising the counterparts in the business. So that may be understanding drivers, reviewing trends, and coming to conclusions. Also there’s the interpersonal skills. It’s about not just working with the numbers but working with the people on the business side. ... Like many disruptive changes, it’s starting now and it will take its time to fully come to fruition. There is a learning curve that the industry will have to go through. It will take some time, we will find that some problems will lend themselves better to the algorithms we have today, and the algorithms are getting better all the time.


Event Sourcing to the Cloud at HomeAway

Event sourcing allows services to separate their read and write concern and truly allows services to encapsulate data. Having full encapsulation not only prevents a death star architecture, but reduces integration cost for each microservice. One of the biggest advantages of an event sourcing architecture is data democratization. Having data in the center of the architecture allows services to easily discover and subscribe, which is essential for developer velocity and implementing near real time experiences. Event sourcing also opens the door for pattern based programming. If the pattern and libraries are set in place, the goal should be to have an entry level engineer execute the development lifecycle with very little ramp up time, or training. Event sourcing provides a great audit trail as the entirety of history is persisted, which makes auditing and visualizing what happened very easy. I think this is a very critical aspect as services become more asynchronous, as customers need real time updates or feedback about the state of their transaction.


Cybersecurity, AI skills to dominate IT staff hires in 2019

While large, enterprise firms will focus on cybersecurity and AI, small to midsize firms are more likely to seek new employees with DevOps skills, end-user hardware experience, and proficiency in IT infrastructure. Enterprise staff reported that keeping infrastructure up-to-date and implementing new, innovative solutions -- such as AI, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies are some of the biggest challenges in IT faced today by organizations. Smaller companies, however, are faced with the problem of convincing boards of the importance of implementing IT projects and how to adhere to acceptable security practices and standards. The report includes responses from 1,000 IT professionals. When asked about their own prospects, 26 percent of respondents said they planned to find a new role; eight percent plan to leave the field entirely, six percent hope to transition into IT consultancy, and five percent are on the way to retirement.


Despite Fraud Awareness, Password Reuse Persists for Half of U.S. Consumers


As National Fraud Day approaches (Nov. 11), it remains clear that more consumer education is required when it comes to thwarting scammers and identity thieves. Despite almost half of U.S. consumers (49 percent) believing their security habits make them vulnerable to information fraud or identity theft, 51 percent admit to reusing passwords/PINs across multiple accounts such as email, computer log in, phone passcode and bank accounts. ,,, The good news is, more than nine in 10 (91 percent) Baby Boomers closely monitor their financial account activity such as bank statements, credit reports and credit card statements each week, compared to Millennials (85 percent) and Gen Zs (86 percent). Even so, nearly three in 10 of polled consumers (27 percent) said that they don’t know how to find out if they’ve become a victim; and one in five consumers (20 percent) admit that if they became a victim of fraud, they wouldn’t necessarily know how to report it.


5 best practices for third-party data risk management

Recent events leading to overshared data, breached data, operational failures and other incidents have prompted many businesses to re-evaluate how they approach third-party risk management (TPRM) as many of these situations were attributed to a third party. As such, boards of directors and their C-suite teams understand the critical need to be more focused and informed about their third parties, related risk management activities and key decisions, especially for those third parties deemed critical to the organization. EY recently conducted its sixth annual global financial services third-party risk management survey. In a nutshell, it shows that many companies are continuing to make upgrades to the governance and oversight of this function. Yet, it’s clear that formidable challenges remain. To help businesses stay ahead of the curve, outlined below are five leading practices in third-party risk management from which organizations can benefit


In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?


“Prediction is really the hallmark of intelligence,” Efros said, “and we are constantly predicting and hallucinating things that are not actually visible.” In a sense, synthesizing is simply imagining. The apparent paradox of Farid’s license-plate research—that unreal images can help us read real ones—just reflects how thinking works. In this respect, deepfakes were sparks thrown off by the project of building A.I. ... A world saturated with synthesis, I’d begun to think, would evoke contradictory feelings. During my time at Berkeley, the images and videos I saw had come to seem distant and remote, like objects behind glass. Their clarity and perfection looked artificial (as did their gritty realism, when they had it). But I’d also begun to feel, more acutely than usual, the permeability of my own mind. I thought of a famous study in which people saw doctored photographs of themselves. As children, they appeared to be standing in the basket of a hot-air balloon.


Breach Settlement Has Unusual Penalty

This case is noteworthy for several reasons, including the state attorney choosing to take action against both the covered entity and business associate involved with the breach, but also for the enforcement action against the BA's owner. "The attorney general of New Jersey has an array of penalties and relief to enforce the state's Consumer Fraud Act, including fines and suspension or revocation of authority against a company or individual to do business in the state," says privacy attorney David Holtzman, vice president of security compliance at the consultancy CynergisTek. "While it is not uncommon for a negotiated settlement agreement to include a period of exclusion for a company or its officers, this the first time I am aware of the New Jersey attorney general applying this in relation to an investigation regarding unauthorized disclosure of health information. " There have been a handful of similar actions by state and federal regulators in other cases involving data security, he notes.


How to move beyond REST for microservices communication


From a design and architecture perspective, request synchronicity breaks a fundamental part of good microservice design: autonomy. It's presumed that, when synchronous calls block a microservice, it is no longer an open resource. However, when that presumption is untrue, it can lead to confusion and instability. It's possible to make REST semisynchronous through methods such as HTML polling. The server-push features of HTTP/2 also alleviate issues around binary payloads and can multiplex requests on a single port. Microservices developers who want to keep the HTTP model can settle on HTTP/2, but there are still other options. In asynchronous microservices communication, a message is sent to one microservice, and it moves along until it requires a response. That response may come in the form of an event or a callback. Asynchronous microservices make connections through some form of a service or message bus.


Sending WhatsApp Messages from a Win32 C++ Program

This article is the second part, following the first part. In this part, I will explain how to send images and documents to a group. As mentioned in part 1, there are several service providers and we have chosen one of them (WhatsAppMate) and started a free trial. However, their code samples for using their services are in almost any programming language except for C++. So we wrote our own C++ class for that purpose. Sending documents and files is a bit more complicated and will be explained in this article. WhatsApp is a multi-platform free service for chatting via video or voice and for sending messages to individuals or groups, including files, media, etc. WhatsApp is better than the old SMS because it is free and has more features. During our day to day work, we need to set up all sort of alerts to be sent to a group who share a job or work on a feature and when that's done automatically, it makes life easier to be notified.


Decoupling in Cloud Era: Building Cloud Native Microservices with Spring Cloud Azure


Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. ... A cloud native application is specifically designed for a cloud computing environment as opposed to simply being migrated to the cloud. ... Microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.




Quote for the day:


"A leadership disposition guides you to take the path of most resistance and turn it into the path of least resistance." -- Dov Seidman


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