Is remote working better for the environment? Not necessarily
When workers’ homes become their offices, commutes may fall out of the carbon
equation, but what’s happening inside those homes must be added in. How much
energy is being used to run the air conditioner or heater? Is that energy coming
from clean sources? In some parts of the country during lockdown, average home
electricity consumption rose more than 20% on weekdays, according to the
International Energy Agency. IEA’s analysis suggests workers who use public
transport or drive less than four miles each way could actually increase their
total emissions by working from home. Looking further ahead, the questions
multiply. Many Shopify employees live near the office and walk, bike or take
public transit. Will remote work mean they move from city apartments to
sprawling suburban homes, which use, on average, three times more energy? Will
they buy cars? Will they be electric or gas-powered SUVs? “You have company
control over what takes place in the office,” Kauk noted. “When you have
everyone working remotely from home, corporate discretion is now employee
discretion.”
Modernizing your applications with containers and microservices
There are many reasons to learn and design with serverless microservices, but
that doesn’t mean they are perfect for every situation – just like microservices
in general. If your workloads are stable or predictable in size, you generally
won’t receive the financial benefits of running in a serverless environment over
the long-term in contrast to unpredictable workloads and serverless platforms
scaling in response. Additionally, one downside of serverless and
functions-as-a-service is magnified when you have stateful microservices that
either require a longer “cold start” time when starting from scratch or
something that requires long-term in-memory state management. One final caveat
for serverless offerings is the implicit caution against vendor lock-in when
using cloud provider-specific serverless offerings, which can lead to deeply
integrated architectural decisions that can be impacted severely should the
offering change capabilities, requirements, or pricing.
The cybersecurity jobs crisis is getting worse
"Cybersecurity is seen as a cost centre to the business -- something you have to
do, but only to a minimal degree, like paying the light bill. We need to shift
the conversation to aligning our security programs with the business," says
Alexander. "Businesses have a tendency to invest in things they see value in. We
need to ensure they see the value in our cybersecurity programs -- including
people, training and technology," she added. People and training are a key issue
here: technology changes fast and the methods cyber criminals use to break into
networks are constantly evolving, so it's important for organisations not only
to hire the right people, but also to invest in training them so they can
continue in their jobs by reacting to the latest threats and dealing with new
forms of technology. But that doesn't start with employers: in order to ensure
there are enough people to fill cybesecurity jobs going forward, education and
training pathways are needed. "At a societal level, we have to do more to
educate school age children about cybersecurity and career opportunities," says
Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst and ESG Fellow.
Turning Microservices Inside-Out
Outbound events are already present as the preferred integration method for most
modern platforms. Most cloud services emit events. Many data sources (such as
Cockroach changefeeds, MongoDB change streams) and even file systems (for
example Ceph notifications) can emit state change events. Custom-built
microservices are not an exception here. Emitting state change or domain events
is the most natural way for modern microservices to fit uniformly among the
event-driven systems they are connected to in order to benefit from the same
tooling and practices. Outbound events are bound to become a top-level
microservices design construct for many reasons. Designing services with
outbound events can help replicate data during an application modernization
process. Outbound events are also the enabler for implementing elegant
inter-service interactions through the Outbox Patterns and complex business
transactions that span multiple services using a non-blocking Saga
implementation.
Kubernetes Expands From Containers To Infrastructure Management
Google engineers and others at vendors like Portworx understood that extensions
were needed to enable Kubernetes to do such jobs as manage compute allocations,
data security and networking, so the CNI (container network interface) and CSI
(container storage interface) were created, leading to “a new avatar for the
second coming of Kubernetes,” he says. “Kubernetes was originally – and still
is, obviously – being used to manage containers,” Thirumale says. “But with
these extensions of CNI, CSI and security extensions, Kubernetes can actually be
used to manage data and storage and manage networking and all of that. If I were
to put a Kubernetes layer in the middleware layer, looking upwards, it’s
managing where the containers land. But looking down, it’s actually now managing
infrastructure. There’s a whole new way of managing infrastructure. The
traditional way was you had to go to the storage admin and say, ‘Give me five
more nodes and give it to me in these terabytes and with this capability and all
of that that,’ then they’d provision your EMC box or a Pure box or NetApp box or
what have you.”
How tech pros perceive the evolving state of risk in the business environment
This year’s study reveals the immense opportunity ahead for tech pros and IT
leadership to align and collaborate on priorities and policies to best position
not only individual organizations but the industry at large to succeed with a
future built for risk preparedness. “Technology professionals today are under
even greater pressure to ensure optimized, secure performance for remote
workforces while facing limited time and resources for personnel training. When
it comes to risk management and mitigation, prioritizing intentional investments
in technology solutions that meet business needs is critical,” said Sudhakar
Ramakrishna, President and CEO, SolarWinds. “More than ever before, tech pros
must partner closely with business leaders to ensure they have the resources and
headcount necessary to proactively address security risks. And more importantly,
tech pros should constantly assess their risk management, mitigation, and
protocols to avoid falling into complacency and being ‘blind’ to risk.”
Is DeepMind’s new reinforcement learning system a step toward general AI?
The combination of reinforcement learning and deep neural networks, known as
deep reinforcement learning, has been at the heart of many advances in AI,
including DeepMind’s famous AlphaGo and AlphaStar models. In both cases, the AI
systems were able to outmatch human world champions at their respective games.
But reinforcement learning systems are also notoriously renowned for their lack
of flexibility. For example, a reinforcement learning model that can play
StarCraft 2 at an expert level won’t be able to play a game with similar
mechanics (e.g., Warcraft 3) at any level of competency. Even slight changes to
the original game will considerably degrade the AI model’s performance. “These
agents are often constrained to play only the games they were trained for –
whilst the exact instantiation of the game may vary (e.g. the layout, initial
conditions, opponents) the goals the agents must satisfy remain the same between
training and testing. Deviation from this can lead to catastrophic failure of
the agent,” DeepMind’s researchers write in a paper that provides the full
details on their open-ended learning.
Zoom Agrees to Settle Security Lawsuit for $85 Million
The lawsuit stems from users' complaints about the company's data privacy and
security practices, including instances in which customers had their video
conferences interrupted by "Zoom bombing," in which attackers gained access to
meeting passwords or bypassed security features and disrupted the proceedings
with profanity and offensive images. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, many
organizations have turned to Zoom and other tech firms for video conferencing
and collaboration services, which led to an increase in hacking attempts. At one
point, the U.S. Justice Department warned that prosecutors could bring federal
charges against those who disrupted meetings through Zoom bombing. In April
2020, an analysis by Citizen Lab, a group based at the University of Toronto
that studies surveillance and its impact on human rights, found that although
Zoom advertised that it used full end-to-end encryption, the company only
deployed the inadequate AES-128 encryption standard within its cloud-based
videoconferencing platform.
The surprising link between creativity and risk
Though the connection between creativity and risk-taking seems intuitive, social
scientists have struggled to show a direct link between the two. That’s because
measuring creativity itself has proven to be devilishly difficult. “Past studies
which aimed to explore the relationship between creativity and risk-taking have
equated creativity to measures such as associational fluency, divergent
thinking, tolerance of ambiguity, creative lifestyle, or intellectual
achievements,” psychologists Vaibhav Tyagi, Yaniv Hanoch, Stephen D. Hall, and
Susan L. Denham of the University of Georgia and Mark Runco of Plymouth
University in the UK wrote in 2017, in Frontiers in Psychology. But, they added,
“each of these measures only provides a narrow insight into some aspects of
creativity.” Adopting a different approach, the researchers looked at creativity
as a multidimensional trait involving self-described personality and creative
achievements, ideation (the process of forming new ideas), association
formation, and problem-solving, among other qualities.
The Ethical Challenges Of AI In Defence
The chief concern of using AI in defence and weaponry is that it might not
perform as desired, leading to catastrophic results. For example, it might miss
its target or launch attacks that are not approved, lead to conflicts. Most
countries test their weapons systems reliability before deploying them in the
field. But AI weapon systems can be non-deterministic, non-linear,
high-dimensional, probabilistic, and continuously learning. For testing a weapon
system with such capabilities, traditional testing and validation techniques are
insufficient. Furthermore, the race between the world’s superpowers to outpace
each other has also made people uneasy as countries might not play by the norms
and consider ethics while designing weapons systems, leading to disastrous
implications on the battlefield. As defence starts leaning towards technology,
it becomes imperative that we evaluate the loopholes of AI-based defence
technologies that bad actors might exploit. For example, adversaries might seek
to misuse AI systems by messing with training data or figuring out ways to gain
illegal access to training data by analysing the specifically tailored test
inputs.
Quote for the day:
"True leaders bring out your personal
best. They ignite your human potential" -- John Paul Warren
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