Daily Tech Digest - August 12, 2020

Can behavioural banking drive financial literacy and inclusion?

In good times, the need to improve financial literacy is widely accepted by banking industry leaders and consumers alike. This important topic is regularly discussed by experts at the World Economic Forum and built into initiatives sponsored by the United Nations. Regarded as an economic good, financial literacy is critical to achieving financial inclusion. What about now, in decidedly less-than-good times? How are banks prepared to promote financial literacy for millennials and especially Gen Z, as they face a world in financial turmoil? ... The right systems helped the bank get up and running just 18 months after its initial launch announcement. Powerful, reliable technology also helped the company create a customer onboarding application that can open a new account within just five minutes. “The technology is extremely important for us,” says Frey. “It has to be fast, agile, and robust. We needed a solid workhorse with a huge amount of flexibility at the configuration level.” In 2020, Discovery will begin looking for ways to incorporate rapidly developing technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning into its solutions. Most important, however, is listening to customers and ensuring that the bank delivers the most pleasant, rewarding experience possible.


With DevOps, security is everybody’s responsibility. OK, so what’s next?

DevSecOps solutions are by nature designed to be preventative. The idea is to remove complexity by baking robust security methodologies into software development from the earliest stages. Get it right from the outset, and reactive firefighting is greatly reduced. Conveniently, this model – “shifting security left” to the coder rather than the expert in a fixed hierarchy – also makes sense when developing on cloud platforms that assume rapid deployment and collaboration. There is no development team, security team, or IT deployment team because they are one and the same person. In theory, that’s how security misconfigurations can be caught before they do harm. However, when it comes to cloud development, “shift left” is more talked about than practised. This situation has crept up on organisations that haven’t realised how programming culture has changed rapidly in the cloud era. “There is a lack of control in this model. With the shift into cloud development and the fact that coders can always get a better answer of Stack Overflow and GitHub, it’s become practically impossible to track the supply chain. It’s a governance problem,” says Guy Eisenkot


Surface Duo: Microsoft's $1,400 dual-screen Android phone coming September 10

Microsoft is counting on users seeing the Duo as filling an untapped niche. But for people used to thinking about carrying no more than two devices -- usually a PC/tablet or phone -- where does the Duo fit? In its first iteration, with a seemingly mediocre 11 MP camera, an older Snapdragon 855 processor and a relatively heavy form factor (about half a pound), the Duo is not going to replace my Pixel 3XL Android phone. And with a total screen size when open of 8.1 inches, the Duo is just too small to replace my PC. Panay and team are touting the Duo as a device that will give people a better way to get things done, to create and to connect. As was the case with the currently postponed, Windows 10X-based Surface Neo device, Microsoft's contention is two separate screens connected via a hinge help people work smarter and faster than they could with a single screen of any size. Officials say they've got research and years of work that backs up this claim. I do think more screen is better for almost everything, but for now, I am having trouble buying the idea that a hinge/division in the middle of two screens is going to make any kind of magic happen in my brain.


The clear Sky strategy

You need to have your eyes to the horizon and your feet on the floor. At all times. And it’s quite a discipline to do that. You see a lot of people who are consumed about managing the now, and then if you look at the last few months, there’s not been a lot of forward thinking. Then you also see other people who, perhaps the longer they are in their roles, spend more and more time thinking about the future horizon. That’s all very alluring and appealing, but they disconnect with the immediacy of what’s important today. You must try to think of both of those things and also encourage everybody else to think of their own role in that way. So, if you’re in broadcast technology today and you’re running that function or department, how do you get your colleagues to look at the future broadcast technologies and at the same time equip people to shoot with their iPhones and get the news out quickly? What you end up with is this networked brain. Everybody in Sky should be thinking about where the company should go, but also “How do I personally make sure I’m doing what is needed?”


Did Intel fail to protect proprietary secrets, or misconfigure servers? Lessons from the leak

Regardless of the circumstances, there are key takeaways from the incident. First and foremost, the unauthorized disclosure of source code and other sensitive intellectual property could potentially be a boon for those seeking to steal corporate secrets. “Intel’s technology is almost ubiquitous, and the leaked device designs and firmware source code can put businesses and individuals at risk,” said Ilia Sotnikov, VP of product management at Netwrix. “Hackers and Intel’s own security research team are probably racing now to identify flaws in the leaked source code that can be exploited. Companies should take steps to identify what technology may be impacted and stay tuned for advisory and hotfix announcements from Intel.” “While we often think of data breaches in the context of customer data lost and potential PII leakage, it is very important that we also consider the value of intellectual property, especially for very innovative organizations and organizations with a large market share,” said Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4. This intellectual property can be very valuable to potential competitors, and even nation states, who often hope to capitalize on the research and development done by others.”


Researchers Trick Facial-Recognition Systems

The model then continuously created and tested fake images of the two individuals by blending the facial features of both subjects. Over hundreds of training loops, the machine-learning model eventually got to a point where it was generating images that looked like a valid passport photo of one of the individuals: even as the facial recognition system identified the photo as the other person. Povolny says the passport-verification system attack scenario — though not the primary focus of the research — is theoretically possible to carry out. Because digital passport photos are now accepted, an attacker can produce a fake image of an accomplice, submit a passport application, and have the image saved in the passport database. So if a live photo of the attacker later gets taken at an airport — at an automated passport-verification kiosk, for instance — the image would be identified as that of the accomplice. "This does not require the attacker to have any access at all to the passport system; simply that the passport-system database contains the photo of the accomplice submitted when they apply for the passport," he says.


The problems AI has today go back centuries

The ties between algorithmic discrimination and colonial racism are perhaps the most obvious: algorithms built to automate procedures and trained on data within a racially unjust society end up replicating those racist outcomes in their results. But much of the scholarship on this type of harm from AI focuses on examples in the US. Examining it in the context of coloniality allows for a global perspective: America isn’t the only place with social inequities. “There are always groups that are identified and subjected,” Isaac says. The phenomenon of ghost work, the invisible data labor required to support AI innovation, neatly extends the historical economic relationship between colonizer and colonized. Many former US and UK colonies—the Philippines, Kenya, and India—have become ghost-working hubs for US and UK companies. The countries’ cheap, English-speaking labor forces, which make them a natural fit for data work, exist because of their colonial histories. AI systems are sometimes tried out on more vulnerable groups before being implemented for “real” users. Cambridge Analytica, for example, beta-tested its algorithms on the 2015 


The State of AI-Driven Digital Transformation

Governments are transforming service delivery through AI as well. In China, a number of AI pilot programmes are rolling out across the court system, including an “AI robot” that can answer legal questions in real time, tools to automate evidence analysis and the automated transcribing of court proceedings that would remove the need for judicial clerks to double as stenographers. These technological developments point to a future in which routine court procedures are mostly handled by machines, so that judges can reserve their attention for more complex and demanding cases. The other major use of AI would be in the areas of security and data privacy. In fact, the Forrester study found that 61 percent of firms in APAC are already enhancing or implementing their data privacy and security-related capabilities using AI. For example, financial services giant AXA IT has been leveraging machine learning and AI to thwart online security threats. They’ve partnered with cybersecurity firm Darktrace whose Enterprise Immune System learns how normal users behave so as to detect dangerous anomalies with the help of AI. Data lie at the heart of AI. The success of AI-driven digital transformation, therefore, relies greatly on the ability to draw insights from big data. 


How to Keep APIs Secure From Bot Attacks

Many APIs do not check authentication status when the request comes from a genuine user. Attackers exploit such flaws in different ways, such as session hijacking and account aggregation, to imitate genuine API calls. Attackers also reverse engineer mobile applications to discover how APIs are invoked. If API keys are embedded into the application, an API breach may occur. API keys should not be used for user authentication. Cybercriminals also perform credential stuffing attacks to takeover user accounts. ... Many APIs lack robust encryption between the API client and server. Attackers exploit vulnerabilities through man-in-the-middle attacks. Attackers intercept unencrypted or poorly protected API transactions to steal sensitive information or alter transaction data. Also, the ubiquitous use of mobile devices, cloud systems and microservice patterns further complicate API security because multiple gateways are now involved in facilitating interoperability among diverse web applications. The encryption of data flowing through all these channels is paramount. ... APIs are vulnerable to business logic abuse. This is exactly why a dedicated bot management solution is required and why applying detection heuristics that are good for both web and mobile apps can generate many errors — false positives and false negatives.


Blazor vs Angular

Blazor is also a framework that enables you to build client web applications that run in the browser, but using C# instead of TypeScript. When you create a new Blazor app it arrives with a few carefully selected packages (the essentials needed to make everything work) and you can install additional packages using NuGet. From here, you build your app as a series of components, using the Razor markup language, with your UI logic written using C#. The browser can't run C# code directly, so just like the Angular AOT approach you'll lean on the C# compiler to compile your C# and Razor code into a series of .dll files. To publish your app, you can use dot net's built-in publish command, which bundles up your application into a number of files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DLLs), which can then be published to any web server that can serve static files. When a user accesses your Blazor WASM application, a Blazor JavaScript file takes over, which downloads the .NET runtime, your application and its dependencies before running your app using WebAssembly. Blazor then takes care of updating the DOM, rendering elements and forwarding events (such as button clicks) to your application code.


AI company pivots to helping people who lost their job find a new source of health insurance

In addition to making health insurance somewhat easier to get, the Affordable Care Act funded navigators who helped individuals choose the right insurance plan. The Trump administration cut funding for the navigators from $63 million in 2016 to $10 million in 2018. During the 2019 open enrollment period for the federal ACA health insurance marketplace, overall enrollment dropped by 306,000 people. "While that may not seem like a lot, the average annual medical expense is around $3,000 per person, and a shortfall of covered patients could represent over $900,000,000 of medical expenses will not be paid by health insurance," Showalter said. When states banned elective medical procedures temporarily during the early months of the pandemic, this cut off an important revenue stream for hospitals and many laid off workers. Some of these layoffs included patient navigators who helped patients enroll in health insurance, particularly Medicaid.  Showalter said that all Jvion customers have had at least a few navigators on staff but not enough to reach every patient in need of assistance.



Quote for the day:

"A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible." -- Polybius

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