Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 10, 2014

Security analysis of mobile banking apps reveals significant weaknesses
While banking apps generally use SSL encryption for sensitive communications, Sanchez found that 90 percent of the tested apps also initiated several non-encrypted connections during their operation. This allows attackers who can intercept that traffic -- for example on an insecure wireless network -- to inject arbitrary JavaScript or HTML code into it, for example to display fake login prompts to the app's user or to launch other social engineering attacks. In addition, even when using encryption, 40 percent of the tested apps did not validate the authenticity of digital certificates they received from the server, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks using fake certificates.

Data visualization best practices help users envision business success
"The context of why visualization is so powerful is because as people we're really wired to process images much better than the way we've been working, which is just [with] columns and rows of numbers," said Feinberg, president and founder of DecisionViz, a consultancy in Westfield, N.J., that helps companies develop and implement data visualization strategies and processes. He said visualization tools also open the doors to analytical data to more business users in organizations, which can help improve decision making and instill a more data-driven culture internally.

Simple and fast CSV library in C#
This library allows to save a collection of objects to a CSV file. It also allows loading from CSV files with linq expressions. It is: Simple to add to your application (Single C# file); Simple to use (loading and saving can be done with a single line of code); Fast (the demo creates a million client records in 2 seconds on my laptop); and Small memory footprint (tested with over 10,0000,000 records).

Net Medical Xpress Releases HIPAA-compliant WebRTC-enabled Telemedicine Solution
RTC (real-time communications) Conference Switch is HIPAA-compliant, which means that medical providers can discuss and transmit patient information without fear of compromising HIPAA and HITECH regulations. "Our RTC Switch, which is RSA asymmetrical, includes precise audit controls, public/private key encryption and Net Medical's Safety Pilot permission software," explained CEO Dick Govatski. Safety Pilot is a security protocol that routes calls and shared files through a complex route of encryption, authorizations, permissions and auditing. Doctors and patients can communicate via telemedicine without concerns about malware or unauthorized data access.

Ways To Deal With Botnet
Botnets use multiple attack vectors; no single technology can provide protection against them. For instance, the goal of a DDoS attack is to cripple a server. The goal of a phishing attack is to lure users to a spoofed Website and get them to reveal personal data. The goal of malware can range from collecting personal data on an infected PC to showing ads on it or sending spam from it. A defense-in-depth approach is essential to detect and mitigate the effects of botnets.

Network Monitoring Best Practices: Setting a Network Performance Baseline
In the simplest terms, a network performance baseline is a set of metrics used in network performance monitoring to deﬁne the normal working conditions of an enterprise network infrastructure. Engineers use network performance baselines for comparison to catch changes in traffic that could indicate a problem. Setting a network baseline also provides early indicators that application and network demands are pushing near the available capacity, giving the networking team the opportunity to plan for upgrades.

Curb Appeal: The Tipping Point for Redesign
When you’re working with limited resources and a small team though, you have to look for inspiration across different functions. You might be surprised to find that inspiration and innovation don’t just come from specific job titles. For us, the initial idea and design for our new homepage came from one of our software engineers during a monthly hack day. An unlikely source, yes – but it turned out to be not just a radical shift from our current site — but a shift we all believed might actually work for our members.

Intel's 64-bit Android 4.4 OS for x86 smartphones ready for OEMs
64-bit Android could reach tablets first. Intel said 64-bit Android tablets powered by its Atom processor code-named Bay Trail will become available in the first half of this year. The tablets are expected to sell for as low as $150. The code completion paves the way for device makers to load 64-bit Android and their own user interfaces on devices. A full 64-bit Android is not yet available on smartphones or tablets. Intel also hopes developers will start writing 64-bit applications for Android smartphones running on Atom chips, the spokeswoman said.

Hot data storage technologies for 2014
Some of our predictions are about storage technologies that have only recently emerged from R&D labs, but they bear so much promise that we think they will weigh in immediately. That's the nature of the storage market today: Technologies that used to take years to evolve and gain a following are topping the charts in short order these days. Case in point: solid-state storage's meteoric rise. In fact, the ever-developing flash storage is featured in this year's predictions, with two solid-state techs -- Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and 3D flash -- about to spring into prominence.

Coverity Testing Platform Expands Java Web App Coverage, Revamps C# Analysis Engine
Coverity Development Testing Platform 7.0 broadens Java Web application security coverage, adds new security audit views and reports, and revamps its C# analysis engine in what the company describes as a a major rewrite. The platform combines code analysis, change-aware unit test analysis, and policy management across the three most widely used enterprise programming languages: Java, C/C++, and C#.

Quote for the day:

"How committed are you? There is a remarkable difference between a commitment of 99% and 100%." -- Vic Conant

January 09, 2014

Dealing with the data deluge, and putting the 'information' back into CIO
Dealing with data overload is an appropriate challenge for the CIO. As Gavin Megnauth, Group CIO at Impellam, pointed out: "We are called Chief Information Officers — but taking that title literally, it's worth asking ourselves whether we are spending the appropriate amount of time managing unstructured company information in particular." Megnauth said that while big data is this year's hot topic, with much focus around business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics, an overlooked area is ensuring that unstructured data can be used for business advantage.

Yahoo email encryption standard needs work
Some of Yahoo's HTTPS email servers use RC4 as the preferred cipher with most clients. "RC4 is considered weak, which is why we advise that people either don't use it, or if they feel they must, use it as a last resort," Ristic said. Other servers, like login.yahoo.com, primarily use the AES cipher, but do not have mitigations for known attacks like BEAST and CRIME, the latter targeting a feature called TLS compression that login.yahoo.com still has enabled.

Optimizing the Use of Technology for Business
In 2013 many organizations made progress in balancing technology decisions across business and IT as the lines of business continued to take leading roles in investment and prioritization. Major investments were made in business applications using software as a service, business analytics and mobile computing applications. In some other areas of innovation, particularly big data and social collaboration, deployments are just beginning to happen and a significant amount of projects are in experimental and proof of concept than enterprise use.

Set up a PC as a kiosk using Windows 8.1's Assigned Access
Windows 8.1's new Assigned Access feature allows you to configure a local user account to essentially function in kiosk mode, and it doesn't even require you to edit the registry or dedicate a PC to the task. Once you configure an Assigned Access account, a user signed on to that account only has access to the one Modern app that you specify -- the user cannot run any other application or make any changes to the operating system. Other users can sign on to the computer and have full access to Windows 8.1.

Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace
As Big Data becomes a fixture of office life, companies are turning to tracking devices to gather real-time information on how teams of employees work and interact. Sensors, worn on lanyards or placed on office furniture, record how often staffers get up from their desks, consult other teams and hold meetings. Businesses say the data offer otherwise hard-to-glean insights about how workers do their jobs, and are using the information to make changes large and small, ranging from the timing of coffee breaks to how work groups are composed, to spur collaboration and productivity.

Why Smart Leaders Are Loosening the Reins
Happily, some smart business leaders have begun to figure out that what worked in the industrial age has no place in the ideas economy. Over the course of writing The Talent Mandate, I surveyed more than 100 senior executives about their talent practices. Only 11 percent of them believe that traditional command-and-control structures are still the best way to derive value from employees. What I have learned from these leaders and the scores of others I interviewed is that when it comes to managing talent in today’s vastly changed environment, it makes sense to loosen the reins.

The art of conversation: Using contextual data to deliver on your intent
Some companies believe real-time decisions are only nice-to-have. These companies may script conversations in advance. If so, all their conversations are like the one above. It may occasionally work, but only when they talk to customers that don't tell them anything new. How likely is that with customers continuously adding to high velocity big data? Every interaction in every channel, every tweet and post, every change in physical location can all become relevant to the current conversation.

Network security spending to surge in 2014
Spending on network security, which represented 21 percent of the total security spending pie in 2013, is expected to increase in 2014 as enterprises increasingly look to thwart breaches and attacks. According to a Forrester Research survey of more than 2,000 security pros, 46 percent of companies expect to increase network security spending in 2014. Forrester noted that companies are deploying a Zero Trust security model that requires the verification and security of all resources, limits on access and constant monitoring and logging of traffic.

Exclusive Guide: Energy Essentials for the Modern Data Center
You’re not alone. Traditional infrastructures weren’t designed to power today’s new workloads and, as a result, IT managers have been forced to take a closer look at their data center designs. To help support your efforts, the editors at SearchDataCenter.com have compiled a comprehensive guide that outlines current energy concerns, latest techniques for improving power and cooling and tips to understanding – and reducing – consumption in the data center.

Preparing for Your First MongoDB Deployment: Backup and Security
The intention of a Defense In Depth approach is to layer your environment to ensure there are no exploitable single points of failure that could allow an intruder or untrusted party to access the data stored in a MongoDB database. The most effective way to reduce the risk of exploitation is to run MongoDB in a trusted environment, to limit access, to follow a system of least privileges, to follow a secure development lifecycle, and to follow deployment best practices.

Quote for the day:

"Don't be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful" -- Robert Noyce

January 08, 2014

Machine learning, embedded analytics and big data march ahead in 2014
Will we look back on 2014 as the year that marked a new era in business? According to faculty at the International Institute for Analytics (IIA), advances in big data, along with machine learning and embedded analytics, will drive new products, reinvent old business processes, and quite possibly mean a lot more work for lawyers. The Portland, Ore.-based advisory and research analytics organization released nine official predictions for the new year...

New French surveillance law: From fear to controversy
Even though France's actions haven't been talked about anywhere near as much as the NSA scandal has, the French government says it has begun working on new ways to legitimize these widespread powers of surveillance. A new law just passed by the French Senate defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may survey citizen’s data - including telephone conversations, email correspondence, web browsing activity, and personal location data.

Preparing for PCI-DSS Version 3.0
Among the new requirements of version 3.0 are steps to mitigate payment card risks posed by third parties, such as cloud providers and payment processors. The new version also stresses that businesses and organizations that accept and/or process cards are responsible for ensuring the third parties they rely on for outsourced solutions and services use appropriate security measures, says Leach, the council's chief technology officer. "Many of the breaches have involved the integrity of the third parties," Leach says. "Organizations need to help those types of entities understand their PCI responsibilities."

Seagate Crams 500 GB of Storage into Prototype Tablet
Of course there's plenty of reasons we don't already have hard drives in tablets. The compromise that immediately leaps to mind when you add a spinning hard drive is, of course, battery life. Seagate's solution in this prototype was to hybridize the storage with the addition of 8GB of flash memory. The vast majority of the time, the tablet is just running on flash, and the magnetic drive is powered off. If you want to play a movie, though, the drive will spin up, swap the movie onto the flash memory through a fast 6 gb/s SATA interface, and then spin down again.

Lenovo expects to benefit from CYOD trend
"For the average small business, it's not a productivity loss or big concern to them if they have to reimage one of their 10 PCs every now and then, but for a company which has a 100,000 of them, they absolutely want commonality of the image and we have the internal labs to do that," explained Beck. He added Lenovo's portfolio expansion in recent years into tablets and convertibles has made its proposition even more compelling. At CES, the company further ramped up its product range to include Android desktops.

Information technology budgets are stable or growing
Data suggests 2014 will provide another year of stability and even growth for IT departments, with 32% of respondents indicating they're fully staffed and another 39% indicating they're looking to make new hires. The relative stability and uptick of budgets and headcounts, however, doesn't mean IT leaders have left their penny-pinching ways behind. All the CIOs and IT leaders interviewed for this article, including those whose budgets and staffs increased in 2013, stressed that they continue to look for ways to cut costs without sacrificing service or innovation.

The Keys to Leadership: Your Brain and My Grandmother
If you’re stressed or facing a critical decision, get out of your office! ... Even concentrating on a photograph of nature can help. There’s wisdom in taking time for a regular stroll at lunch. In Your Brain and Business, Pillay cites studies showing that physical movement can have a profound effect on how you think: Getting into a box-like structure and then stepping out of it actually improves your ability to get creative and think “outside the box,” so don’t expect your next big idea to come during the hours you spend in a conference room.

Personalization Is Back: How to Drive Influence by Crunching Numbers
What marketers usually call a response model doesn't simply predict who will buy, per se. Rather, more specifically, it predicts, "Will the customer buy if contacted?" It is predicting the result of one treatment (contact) without any consideration for or prediction about any alternative treatment, such as not contacting or contacting with a different marketing creative. ... Therefore, a response model suffers from a sometimes-crippling, common limitation: The predicted outcome itself doesn't matter so much as whether the marketing treatment should be credited for influencing that outcome.

CIOs Must Balance Cloud Security and Customer Service
"Customer expectations are higher now," said Shawn Kingsberry, CIO of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board. "Everyone's so mobile, and at home they do so many things and have access to so much information, the expectations in the office are even higher when you look at the services that have to be delivered." ... "It's that balance that you have to get," Kingsberry said. "You want to deliver the service, but there are tradeoffs."

Standards in Predictive Analytics: PMML
PMML has particular value for organizations as they move away from a batch scoring mindset to a more real-time scoring approach. When scoring was done in batch it was generally done using the same technology as was used to build the model. With real-time scoring it has become essential to be able to move models from their development environment to a more real-time, interactive scoring environment and PMML has emerged as the primary way to do this.

Quote for the day:

"I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished without taking any chances at all." -- Charles Lindbergh

January 07, 2014

Will we embrace biometrics to replace passwords? FIDO authentication at CES 2014
“Up until now, everyone thought the smartphone was the key to the cloud, but everyone was wrong. The smartphone is a lock and a very smart lock with lots of sensors,” FIDO member Sebastien Taveau told the Washington Post. “Your human body will be your own key, and you will get an extremely customized experience on your device and feel more comfortable doing more on your device than ever before.” While we are terrible when it comes to passwords, many companies are equally terrible when it comes to protecting those passwords.

Continuous integration testing: Challenges and solutions
When the stories from different teams are assembled, there is often a lack of clarity around who is responsible for testing how well they integrate. Processes around integration testing can be a point of confusion for Agile teams. Continuous integration (CI), which is the process of running regression tests with each build, can help, but will not solve all your integration test needs. Agile expert Janet Gregory discusses the challenges with integration testing and explains the practice of continuous integration.

Cybersecurity is for the C-suite, 'not just the IT crowd'
First, the people that sit in the C-suite, the people sitting on the Supreme Court, the people who are generals -- they likely didn't use computers when they were in college. So there's a learning curve. Secondly, these issues have emerged quite rapidly and it's been difficult for businesses and organizations to stay ahead. Just a couple of years ago there was no malware designed to go after mobile devices. Very few people were thinking about how to defend mobile networks because there were very few people using them and very few threats to them. Now there are many, many threats.

The problem with wearables
With all the recent activity with wearables, you'd think consumers are waiting to snap them up and hit the streets wearing one device or another. Some no doubt will do just that, but history tells us that might not happen. Remember the lowly Bluetooth headset that used to be in ears all over the place? These gizmos were early examples of wearable tech that did what they were designed to do, and in many cases did it well. That's why it was common to see them all over the place, inserted in consumers' ears to let them interact with their phone which could remain in the bag or pocket.

10 Companies and Technologies to Watch in 2014
Every year we highlight 10 companies and technologies to watch for the coming year. Our selection is driven primarily by the technologies being distinctive, innovative and relevant to major trends in the industry that we follow. Here is our list, arranged in alphabetic order to avoid suggesting that we have ranked the chosen companies and technologies:

Still More R and Python
Developing thought by some practitioners, though, suggests that Python will soon supplant R and assume the mantel of lingua franca for data science computing. The reasoning is as follows: “While R has traditionally been the programming language of choice for data scientists, it is quickly ceding ground to Python…. there are several reasons for the shift, perhaps the biggest one is that Python is general purpose and comparatively easy to learn whereas R remains a somewhat complex programming environment to master….Python still lacks some of R's richness for data analytics, but it is closing the gap fast.”

Intel's smallest computer to power wearable devices
Edison is Intel's smallest computer and is intended for use in small, flexible electronics that can be worn around the body. The computer has Intel's extremely low-power Quark processor, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity to communicate with other devices. Intel wants to put Edison in wearable products beyond the regular realm of smartwatches, smart glasses and health monitors expected to swamp the International CES trade show being held this week in Las Vegas.

Pragmatic Techniques for Maintaining a Legacy Application
The first step for maintaining a legacy application is to understand it. It is impractical for us to understand every detail of the application, but we need to understand the big picture: ... Analyzing code statically is either inadequate or inaccurate. We developed several tools to spy on the application at runtime to answer these questions. We took care to implement these tools as add-ons: they are not entangled with the application code, so they are not extra code that we have to maintain.

IT Spending in Software and Services in India to Grow
Bahl says, “We expect the Indian economy to start recovering from the tough situation it faced in 2013. It will start picking up (albeit at a slower rate) in 2014 thanks to good monsoons, an uptick in exports due to the weakening of the rupee, and huge infrastructure projects in public transportation, housing, agriculture, and farming that we expect to take off once a new central government is in place. As a result, we’ve marginally increased our 2014 forecast from 7.4 per cent to 8 per cent in local currency.

Cybercrooks Developing Dangerous New File-encrypting Ransomware, Researchers Warn
The new malware is called PowerLocker and its development was most likely inspired by the success of the CryptoLocker ransomware Trojan program that infected more than 250,000 computers since September. Like CryptoLocker, PowerLocker allegedly uses strong encryption that cannot be cracked to recover the files without paying, but it's also more sophisticated and potentially more dangerous because its developers reportedly intend to sell it to other cybercriminals.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." -- Robert Jarvik

January 06, 2014

New types of RAM could revolutionize your PC
The chips would enable the same instant-on capability that's common on tablets, but at much higher performance, said Tom Coughlin, founder of Coughlin Associates. "We're seeing the development of new solid-state storage technologies that are starting to play a role," he said. "MRAM is one that we're seeing playing a role providing a non-volatile memory technology, and there's some talk about resistive RAM doing some things."

Dashboards: Convenient But Not Informative
Another drawback with dashboards is inherent in their designs and the processes used to support them. In most cases, data is gathered by a data analyst or someone from the IT organization who generates a report, or a series of reports, that’s then entered into the dashboard for a team of managers or executives to view. The information that’s presented is typically one-dimensional, where the users of the dashboard aren’t able to manipulate the data themselves or probe more deeply into the data. They can only view the information that’s presented and make their own best judgments against it.

Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014

Last year, Opensource.com covered some popular open source project management tools (ProjectLibre, ]project-open[, and OpenProject.) We found these articles to be valuable to our readers, so here we take a look forward at what we think 2014 holds for these open source project management tools. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but each tool listed here has been deliberately selected based on a rich feature set.

What's driving big data and predictive analytics in 2014?
It's not that they fail to see the benefits: 85% of organisations surveyed said that predictive analytics had a positive impact on their business, and 77% believe that it helps them gain the upper hand over competitors. The main stumbling block was skills, with three quarters of respondents finding that new data science skills are needed within the organisation to take advantage of the technology. TechRadar Pro talks to SAP's VP of Marketing and Analytics James Fisher on what's driving predictive analytics and big data in 2014.

How GPS Can Keep Track of Earthquakes and Flooding
The meteorological side of the project relies on the fact that ground-based GPS stations are in frequent communication with orbiting satellites above. The amount of time it takes a signal from the satellite to reach the ground can be used to calculate moisture levels in the troposphere. This moisture data, combined with data from barometers and thermometers, can improve the accuracy of predictions about rainfall and flash floods.

Making Wearable Devices Gets Easier with Freescale's Warp Development Kit
The kit is targeted at the do-it-yourself community and device makers looking to prototype and develop products, Freescale said. "Companies can use this platform as a basis for their own wearable product and invest their resources into innovation and differentiation instead," said Robert Thompson, director of consumer business development for microcontrollers at Freescale. The Warp -- which stands for "wearable reference platform" -- is like a miniature version of the Raspberry Pi, an uncased Linux-based computer the size of a credit card.

Worldwide Enterprise Software Spending To Grow in 2014
“Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts. Investment will also be aligned to B2B analytics, particularly in the SCM space, where annual spending is expected to grow 10.6 per cent in 2014,” said Richard Gordon, managing vice president at Gartner. “The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post sales processes.” The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets.

“Sexy” Data Science is a Team Sport
Expectations hit data scientists from all sides. “One of the biggest errors executives make,” Dyché said, “is to bring in data scientists too early, before they understand where the gaps are. You can’t model data you can’t find. You can’t discover 'unknowns' until you understand the 'knowns.' And you can’t expect someone to recommend new business actions to people who don’t want to change.” That’s more than data science. That’s organizational politics or even social work. Most people in other jobs just make the best of it. But at current, “sexy” prices, dysfunction is expensive.

Developing leaders: It’s your job
If you are an organizational leader and this is how you think about developing others, you might want to rethink your stance. Put simply, it’s your job. It should be one of the most important things you do, and for the best leaders (meaning those leaders who understand the importance of people to their organization), it is a pleasure to assist and watch others grow and develop. There are lots of reasons to spend time developing leaders in your organization. Some of the most important include:

Need an enterprise data strategy? Cultivate people untainted by data science
The assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management urged chief financial officers (CFOs) to start cultivating talent in their own backyards -- especially if their companies hope to reap business benefits from data. Why? Because your own people are the ones best equipped to know a data breakthrough when they see it. Correlation does not imply causation. As Cavallo put it, Argentina's rise in inflation isn't brought on by solar flares, which both happen every 10 years.

Quote for the day:

"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it." -- Peter Drucker

January 05, 2014

MDM and SOA: Be Warned!
At the heart is the adaptation of the existing process organization required for use as part of the MDM. The standards and parameters associated with the master data must be integrated into the company's operating and recurring work cycles. On the one hand, this affects the operating core processes and their activities, which users perform as part of their line function or roles. On the other hand, MDM-specific administrative processes and data governance must be implemented to ensure operational capability and continuous improvements in how master data are used.

An AI Chip to Help Computers Understand Images
The prototype is much less powerful than systems like Google’s cat detector, but it shows how new forms of hardware could make it possible to use the power of deep learning more widely. “There’s a need for this,” says Culurciello. “You probably have a collection of several thousand images that you never look at again, and we don’t have a good technology to analyze all this content.”

Barracuda Brings Award Winning Firewall To Amazon Web Services Cloud
The Barracuda NG Firewall had recently earned a five-star rating in SC Magazine’s 2013 Application and Web Security Group. SC Magazine had reviewed six enterprise-class solutions as part of this group test. SC Magazine had commended the Barracuda Firewall for offering customers a strong feature set, indicating that “the tool sports an extensive feature set, including most of the functionality one would expect in an application firewall and a few that raise this product above most others.”

Cloud Services: 5 Key Questions Before You Buy
If you have been charged with buying cloud resources, do your due diligence. Demand case studies, testimonials, white papers, and use cases that explain the offerings and demonstrate their value and savings. And remember, just because a resource is in the cloud doesn't mean it will be inexpensive to implement and maintain. As part of your process, be sure to include various lines of business. Many organizations rely on IT to ask and answer all the key questions. That's a bad idea. You need input from all your stakeholders.

6 Reasons Leaders Make Bad Decisions
Leaders that are focused on their own hidden agendas lose sight of the bigger picture, quickly get disconnected from their employees and fail to build a team that lasts. They make bad decisions on complicated issues with the intention of advancing their own agendas and career ambitions first. To help you identify those leaders that are not ready for their leadership roles and are prone to fall into the trap of making bad decisions, be on the look-out for the following six behavioral patterns:

Samsung Announces 'New Era Of Smart Home'
To start, the service will cover three main areas, which Samsung identifies as Device Control, Home View, and Smart Customer Service. Device Control, as you might guess, allows users to control home devices using a mobile device remotely. The feature also allows for voice commands so if, for example, you're going to bed, you could tell your smart TV "good night," and it would know to turn off and tell the lights to dim gradually. Home View will give users a peek inside their own home with "in-built appliance cameras," while Smart Customer Service will notify you "when it's time to service appliances or replace consumables."

Predictions for 2014 – the year of everything
People generally make predictions about the future around this time of year (almost as if they are asking Santa Claus to make it so!). To avoid being left out, this post provides my thoughts on some of the things to watch for in 2014. First, let’s be fair: I’ve already read other people’s predictions, and I have no scientific evidence or quantitative measures to prove that my crystal ball is close to being accurate. Without doubt my own biases have crept into my thinking, and I have a Canadian perspective.

Nanomaterials Could Enable Large, Flexible Touch Screens
3M will begin selling flexible transparent conductive films made of silver nanowires for use in touch screens. These nanomaterials could enable wider adoption of large touch screens for interactive signs, displays, and personal computers. And the flexible films may come to be used in future foldable, curvy personal electronics, too. ... The films are mostly empty space, so they’re transparent. But the nanowires and the ink are formulated so that these films are still highly conductive.

When Log Data Meets BI
"Logs will give you those symptoms," said Sarathy. "The big challenge for CIOs has typically been that they've had to search for those issues. And often times you have to know what you're searching for." In essence, the log data tells the CIO what's going on, which in turn enables a more proactive response. "If, for example, your Web server that serves a million customers the week before Christmas is overloaded, you could fix the issue before it impacts any one of those millions of customers."

Design Patterns: Magic or Myth?
Of couse, there’s a sound basis for this idea. It’s normal for designers in any discipline to later reuse positive experiences, adapting designs to meet new goals as appropriate. The software design patterns community tends to cite Christopher Alexander’s ideas about patterns in architecture as their touchstone,1 but we can see similar use of this concept in the design of motor vehicles, clothing, public transportation systems, libraries, and so on. Some uses involve static forms, but others are processes, rather like software.

Quote for the day:

"Any experience can be transformed into something of value." -- Vash Young

January 04, 2014

Agile development practices: Three predictions for 2014
It's no secret that Agile development practices have taken the software industry by storm.Application lifecycle management, or ALM, vendors continue to come out with products and tools that help development teams embrace collaboration and continuously improve. Looking to 2014, I predict Agile will mature in three primary ways: More "custom" Agile processes; Growth of large-scale Agile; and Continued growth of DevOps

Human Technology Interfaces - What The Future Has In Store
Gadgets like Brain Link are already in the market, which coupled with related applications on smartphones gives beneficial gaming experience like attention training, meditation, neuro-social gaming, research and knowledge about brain. Most of us would have watched the movies 'Surrogates' wherein humans would stay indoors while their surrogates would go out to work and 'Minority Report' where the police and justice department would get alerts the moment some one think of committing a crime.

This Credit Card Startup Has A Way To Thwart Target-Style Hacking
“The root cause of fraud is the exposure of this information,” says William Gomez Jr., the co-founder and CEO. “The Epic One card does not hold any details of any credit cards. Neither does the Epic One application that runs on your smartphone. None of these devices hold any of your credit card information. The Epic One card grants you temporary access to your cloud wallet that is stored within Epic One’s back-end systems.”

Five Data Mining Techniques That Help Create Business Value
When developing your big data strategy it is important to have a clear understanding of what data mining is and how it can help you. The term data mining first appeared in the 1990s while before that, statisticians used the terms “Data Fishing” or “Data Dredging” to refer to analysing data without an a-priori hypothesis. The most important objective of any data mining process is to find useful information that is easily understood in large data sets. There are a few important classes of tasks that are involved with data mining:

17 exploits the NSA uses to hack PCs, routers and servers for surveillance
Some of the exploits are deployed remotely and others are physically installed. Those hands-on operations may occur while the product is being shipped; it could be snagged during shipping so an obscure group like an FBI black bag team can do the NSA’s domestic dirty work. There are too many exploits listed in the leak to cover in one post, but I thought you might like to know about some that target servers, routers and PCs.

Software requirements: Why the term 'nonfunctional requirements' misleads
You don't just need a bunch of usability. Usability is not nonfunctional. Usability is only relevant with respect to functionality. Moreover, usability requirements frequently differ from one function/use to another, and the differences are defined in terms of relevant characteristics, not some sizing unit as the single-entry-per-type approach implies. Consequently, when gathering data to discover requirements, inquiries about various functions each need also to address applicable nonfunctional characteristics, of which there may be many.

What to expect of Internet of Things in 2014
“Right now, if you think about it, the Internet of Things in your household will probably require you to go and re-purchase many devices that you have today, and I’m not sure how many of us can take that hit in one calendar year,” Robert Stroud, a member of ISACA’s Strategic Advisory council and vice president of innovation and strategy at CA Technologies, says. “I actually think it might apply more in commercial ventures first.”

Durandal: Quick Start
With RequireJS as its base and a thin layer of conventions, Durandal can provide amazing productivity while helping you to maintain SOLID coding practices. Pair that with out-of-the-box support for rich UI composition, modal dialogs, eventing/messaging, widgets, transitions, routing and more....and there's no doubt you'll be able to build whatever apps you can imagine. While Durandal has only been publicly available for about a year now, the community has grown at a breakneck pace.

3 Key Risk Management Trends for 2014
In a recent interaction with a leading banking and financial services organization, MetricStream (my employer) discussed how risk and compliance scores were being used to drive vendor negotiations when renewals arose. At another institution, risk and governance metrics directly impact the performance-linked financial incentives taken home by the management circle. This shift toward leveraging risk metrics as it pertains to performance metrics and business critical processes has elevated risk intelligence from a nice piece to a "must have."

Enterprise Architecture: Getting Organized For The New Year
“The architecture describes primarily the current system/enterprise,” Grigoriu writes. “It may also describe the target system/enterprise in order to visualise its end state. The architecture is employed in the process of enterprise transformation to ensure that projects are aligned in an enterprise-wide portfolio covering all enterprise entities, the business and technology issues and their dependencies.” What a concept – knowing how changing a system will affect other parts of the system before it happens. In this regard, EA is the antithesis of spaghetti – whether it’s spaghetti code, spaghetti cabling, or something else.

Quote for the day:

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little past them … into the impossible." -- Arthur C. Clarke

January 03, 2014

GRC professionals' salaries increase as demand for their skills rises
As factors such as mobility and the cloud create new data security risks, GRC professionals should continue to expect their skill sets to be highly sought after, said Derek Gascon, executive director of the Compliance, Governance & Oversight Council. "Their skills are going to be unique, at least for a while," Gascon said. "All of the data that is being distributed through those mechanisms has to be managed somehow, and the governance people understand what kinds of policies are going to be necessary."

A year of living with Windows Phone: What I've learned so far
With Windows Phone my go-to-device, that aging iPhone is still part of my kit bag, only now it's relegated to iPod status. It turns out that the real tether that holds you in the iOS ecosystem is iTunes, and the myriad albums you've bought and ripped over a decade. Microsoft still hasn't delivered a workable tool for copying music from PC to phone - and while Spotify, Xbox Music and Nokia MixRadio meet my streaming needs, they're not really music library management tools.

The search for data scientists may not always mean IT
"We are focused 100 percent on data and infrastructure," Hoskins says. Hoskins agrees that big data is every bit the big deal that is being made of it. No hype here, he claims. "We are in the age of data now," Hoskins says, "and data is what really matters. I don't think it can be overstated the significance that this has for business and for all of us." More specifically, predictive analytics is what organizations are scrambling to master: turning mountains of data into identifiable patterns of behavior.

What Is Object Storage?
Object Storage is a technology where data is stored in self-contained entities called objects. Think of an object as a file. But unlike traditional file systems, this storage method is not dependent on a hierarchical layout of directories and sub-directories. Objects are given unique ID numbers which are managed in a ‘flat’ index reducing significantly the amount of metadata (data about data) needed to store and retrieve a file. Storage systems that have an object storage foundation can deliver a series of capabilities that should be of interest to data centers that need to store large amounts of files or objects.

How Big Data is changing the security analytics landscape
"The goal of Big Data analytics for security is to obtain actionable intelligence in real time," said Alvaro Cardenas, lead author of the report in the CSA press release. "Although Big Data analytics holds significant promise, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome to realize its true potential. We have only just begun, but are anxious to move forward in helping the industry understand its potential with new research directions in Big Data security."

What’s So Innovative about Innovation?
Are we as innovative as our competitors? What are we doing about being innovative? How do we get some of that innovation stuff? This author even jumped on the bandwagon by recently writing a column about successful CIOs that indicated how important the need for innovation was. However, after writing the piece a little handwringing ensued over what innovation really means, or perhaps should mean, to CIOs in the insurance industry.

NSA looks to crack all encryption with quantum computer, report says
The U.S. National Security Agency is attempting to build a new breed of supercomputer that theoretically could make short work of cracking most keys used for encrypted communications. The project to build "a cryptographically useful quantum computer" is part of an $80 million research project called "Penetrating Hard Targets" that is taking place at a campus in College Park, Maryland, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper quoted documents it said were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A CIO's journey to IT transformation begins with 10 steps
With so much new stuff coming our way, we simply do not have the time to keep our focus on the old stuff. For the first time in the history of the world, we are the persons and teams who can help the organization own the future. ... The organization needs us to be effective in leading change, delivering value and moving into the future (because the future is all about technology). A friend recently asked me what I meant by "transformational leaders."

Fifth Third Bank Pilots Analytics-Driven Deposit Pricing
Pricing is often more art than science, he points out. "The art of it is, you can look at what your competitors are offering," he says. "You might put that information in spreadsheets so you can sort and trend it, but it's still largely art and there's not a lot of science behind it." As it brings more science in, Fifth Third will analyze millions of records per month, looking at demand curves, interest rates, and deposit flows within households in reaction to product changes, aiming to find that ideal price point based on the volume of deposits it wants to gather and the maximum amount of interest expense it's willing to incur.

Top 6 Wi-Fi Trends to Expect in 2014!
The new 802.11ac standard is the call of the season. It represents a basic change in innovation of 802.11 standard protocols that boost gigabit speeds during wireless networking. This protocol increases performance of all the 802.11 ac devices by delivering more than one gigabit every second. ... Wi-Fi specific location analytics play a big role for the organization to improve business intelligence, determine security policy as well as improved customer Wi-Fi experience. You must expect Wi-Fi to offer more than just internet accessibility. The users will definitely look for more site- specific applications.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak - and to sit down and listen" -- Winston Churchill

January 02, 2014

Google's Eric Schmidt reveals his biggest mistake
While Google is often ahead of the game, Schmidt admitted that during his time as CEO, the company missed a trick when social media began to change the face of the Internet. "At Google, the biggest mistake I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon,” Schmidt said. "Not a mistake we're going to make again. I guess in our defense we were busy working on many other things, but we should have been in that area and I take responsibility for that."

Add semantic analysis to ward off big data/bad analytics syndrome
So feeding data into a model for analysis doesn't erase the potential for bias and misinterpretation. That's because models themselves are biased -- they are all just a representation of reality, he said. And people can engage in "over fitting" or placing too much significance on the results from a sample; or they mistake correlation for causation; or they have a false sense of confidence in "the big data approach" -- namely that having so much data and so many variables cancels other factors out.

Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture
The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative — until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas. Creative big companies like Amazon and Google tend to be run by their innovators. Larry Page will unilaterally fund a good idea that looks like a bad idea and dismiss the reasons why it can’t be done. In this way, he creates a Can-Do Culture. Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture. This post attempts to answer that challenge and reverse that tragic trend.

DataWind faces uphill climb in India's smartphone market
The Indian tablet and cell phone manufacturer recently launched three potentially revolutionary smartphones in one of the world's hottest consumer electronics markets. Its PocketSurfer smartphones range from around US$55 to US$105 and are outfitted with 5-inch screens, which generally are not available at those price points in India. The devices come with Linux and Android platforms. ... After all, the Indian market has exhibited an insatiable appetite for smartphones, growing at a sizzling 250 percent annual growth rate and primarily in the medium-low price range that caters to notoriously price-sensitive Indian consumers.

4 Steps to Removing Leadership Bias
The main theme involved in why there is so much to learn about leadership is how little we really know about ourselves. So much behind how we think, perceive and behave is elusive at best and could be one reason why we are so driven to find and express that rhetorical recipe that nails it. ... To grow as leaders we need to constantly improve ourselves and that requires improving our understanding of self. We need to understand when to act on gut feelings and when not to. If we already know why we respond to such feelings I would suggest pragmatically testing them for bias.

Unencrypted Windows crash reports give 'significant advantage' to hackers, spies
"This information would definitely give an attacker a significant advantage. It would give them a blueprint of the [targeted] network," said Alex Watson, director of threat research at Websense, which on Sunday published preliminary findings of its Windows error-reporting investigation. Watson will present Websense's discovery in more detail at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Feb. 24.

Raspberry Pi: Hands On with Arch Linux and Pidora
Nothing special is required for this, either in terms of knowledge or equipment; you can do it on pretty much any Linux or Windows system. If you don't even want to do this much yourself, you can buy an SD card preloaded with NOOBS from most Raspberry Pi retailers, such as the Pi Shop in Switzerland, where I got mine (I found them to be very friendly, knowlegeable and helpful.) Then just stick the SD card in the Pi, plug in power and it boots to an installer menu. Honestly, I can't imagine how it could be easier.

Healthcare digital signage: Starting small, but growing
Digital signage solutions are built around a central content manager, which serves as the brains of the installation. The content manager schedules what information appears on a display and when. Miller said Hammond primarily uses Scala's enterprise-level content management software. He said most large customers install the content manager as a virtual appliance. A few host the virtual instance in the cloud, tapping providers such as Amazon Web Services, he added.

Business Analytics and Multi-Wavelength Astronomy
This is similar to the task of practitioners in the analytics and enterprise performance management communities. An organization cannot make better decisions and improve its performance by focusing on only one variable, such as cost, time, quality, service-level and so on. These factors are interdependent. So, it is a much more complex problem. Plus there is more volatility today, caused in part by reduced trade barriers from globalization, which has increased uncertainty about the future. Analysts are on a mission to reduce uncertainty.

I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down
There are many times in the life of a project when a little documentation goes a long way. But to get those benefits, developers must take time away from coding to write things down. Here are some examples where I think they will find the juice was worth the squeeze. ... If no one bothers to write this process down, there’s a good chance it will be performed incorrectly or steps will be missed, wasting even more time. Furthermore, there’s no practical way to automate a process without first writing down the steps.

Quote for the day:

"The day people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." -- Colin Powell

January 01, 2014

Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway? In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.

Deadly Downtime: The Worst Network Outages Of 2013
No company is immune, no matter how sophisticated its technology. In 2013, some of the largest and most well-known technology companies in the world experienced downtime because of network failures. Companies such as Google, NASA, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and others all reported outages stemming from some problem in the network. Whether downtime is caused by a faulty piece of hardware, a software bug, a configuration error, or a denial-of-service attack, it causes the same response in customers, employees, users, and the IT professionals responsible for that network: Sheer panic.

Drake Baer: How To Create A Sustainable Culture Of Innovation
At Fast Company, Baer covers the intersection of psychology and work. He interviews the foremost minds in business for a living, including Clay Christensen, Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb. He also has a special interest in companies and bands on the brink of breaking big and the methods by which they do so. In this interview, he talks about why companies struggle with innovation, why leaders become irrelevant when they aren’t thinking forward, which companies are able to create sustainable innovation, sources of creativity and his career advice.

The security industry finds a dream enemy -- government spy agencies
The security industry has the enemy it always dreamed of to help it make the case for encryption adoption, but users looking to secure their data and communications need to be wary of claims made in marketing messages. Securing data in motion is the priority, experts say, and some large Internet firms are already making progress in this area, but encrypting data at rest without losing its usefulness will prove a greater challenge.

Rule Engine with Generic UI
A business rules engine works by separating execution code for business rules from the rest of the business process management system. This allows the end user to change business rules without having to ask a programmer for help. When a change is made, the engine will evaluate the change's effect on other rules in the system and flag the user if there is a conflict. Generic UI engine is a UI components that are common to various kinds of User Interfaces. That means: having generic UI Components that can be accessed using common Interfaces. Generic UI engine can be mapped to custom rule engine.

Enterprise mobility management: Embracing BYOD through secure app and data delivery
Given the paramount importance of security in IT’s mission, the natural instinct may be to try to limit peoples’ choice of devices or otherwise constrain the endpoint environment, even if it means sacrificing the benefits of greater productivity and flexibility. But simply barring the door to consumer device usage and BYOD is neither realistic nor desirable—it is inevitable that IT will face increasing pressure to provide access to any kind of app, anywhere, on any type of device. Simply put, IT has no choice but to enable and support consumer devices and BYOD; the only remaining question is how.

Four SSD best practices for efficient virtual machine storage
When solving the IOPS problem, IT managers have the choice of either server-side flash (basically, cache) or storage-side solid-state drives (SSDs). Either choice can deliver thousands or tens of thousands of IOPS (depending upon quantity) but they are not interchangeable; this is where the issue of latency comes in. Server-side flash has no more latency than other system cache, assuming the data is flash-resident -- meaning the data accessing the flash has to reside on the server as the flash does. If the system has to issue a read command to the hard disk drive (HDD), then there is no benefit to flash.

5 IT Hiring Trends In 2014
In a survey of 860 tech-focused hiring managers and recruiters, 73% reported planning to hire more candidates in the next six months, and 24% percent said their additional hiring will be substantial. That's good news for anyone looking to make a change in 2014. But expect the IT landscape to change, too. Here's a look at five predictions on hot skills, evolving roles, and how social media will change recruiting.

U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service
The Obama administration effectively agrees. “While this country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans, significant areas for improvement remain,” said Tom Power, deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications at the White House. The disagreement comes over how far behind the United States really is in what many people consider as basic a utility as water and electricity — and how much it will affect the nation’s technological competitiveness over the next decade.

How the Financial Services Industry Should Use Big Data to Regain Trust
Analysing the usage of the many products that financial services firms have explains a lot about the behaviour of the customers. Although banks do not do this, or at least they say they do not do it, they have the possibility to understand customers better than customers understand themselves. The payment information explains a lot about customers. For that reason, when payment provider Equens (the largest pan-European payment processor) decided to sell the transaction data lot of negative reactions appeared and Equens had to withdraw their plan.

Quote for the day:

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust