January 24, 2014

Windows malware tries to infect Android devices connected to PCs
The new malware, dubbed Trojan.Droidpak by Symantec, drops a DLL file on the Windows computer and registers a new system service to ensure its persistence across reboots. It then downloads a configuration file from a remote server that contains the location of a malicious APK (Android application package) file called AV-cdk.apk. The Trojan program downloads the malicious APK, as well as the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) command line tool that allows users to execute commands on Android devices connected to a PC.


Management technologies to ensure mobile data security and compliance
There is no shortage of management technologies available to address these situations. The key is choosing the right products and developing the proper policies to enable secure use of consumer technologies in the enterprise without detracting from their many benefits. Organizations often turn to device-focused strategies and legacy technologies, but a new breed of products and a different way of thinking may be required to strike the right balance.


Lack of Stronger Cyber Security May Cost World Economy $3 Trillion
Titled 'Risk and Responsibility in a Hyperconnected World', the report cautioned that there could be increased cyber attacks if there is a failure to strengthen capabilities for deterring such activities.  Major technology trends, including massive analytics, cloud computing and big data, could create between USD 9.6 trillion and USD 21.6 trillion in value for the global economy.


Data Center Infrastructure Management - Where's the Beef?
There's a general lack of acceptance or understanding of what a DCIM tool is supposed to be. Is it asset management, capacity planning, resource management, environmental controls, automation, or all of the above and more? When the customer hears too many voices, they tend to ignore all of them, at least I do. To combat this issue, DCIM vendors will have to get better at highlighting and demonstrating value in a clear and simple way. I know this seems obvious, but I would argue that the majority of Data Center operators aren't listening yet, likely because they haven't "heard" the right message.


Living in Interesting Times—A View from the New Zealand Privacy Office
Leaving space to deal with the unexpected isn’t easy when even the “known knowns” —or should that be “known unknowns”? —occupy us full time. These include the government’s intention to reform the 20-year-old Privacy Act. The exact shape of the changes is still tba, but we’re hoping for announcements reasonably soon. Proposed changes by the Law Commission, if accepted, would include putting a few more items in our enforcement toolbox, to enable us to deal better with modern information practices and to speed up our current investigations processes. Fingers crossed.


5 Big Business Intelligence Trends For 2014
What's in store for business intelligence in 2014? In some respects, 2014 will echo themes heard in 2013, but the message is getting louder when it comes to visual data discovery, cloud, and mobile. Big data also will continue to garner attention, but people will take a pragmatic approach to adoption. Simplicity, meanwhile, will experience a second coming.


Why I did it: Former hacker Mitchell Frost explains his motivation
"In 2006, I was young and, even at that age, I could see there was a lot of corruption and media propaganda going on in newspapers and on television. At that time, I had a rather large and complicated botnet. With the botnet, I was able to use the compromised computers for almost anything; key strokes, DDOS, servers, passwords, pranks. I had several botnets over the years from a few to thousands and didn't do a whole lot of DDOS on servers because I had no need to."


Cool or creepy? The ethics of big data is on the table
Ethics aren't an easy conversation to have in a business setting, Davis said. The topic is huge, messy and, yes, personal, and it tends to get tacked on to a pile of pressing obligations. In other words, it's not a topic that's easily dispatched. But in the absence of legislation that keeps pace with technological advancement, Davis believes it's a conversation that should happen -- especially among those practicing big data analytics.


The Neuroscience of Agile Leadership
The more we try to convince people of something, the more they push back. It’s our brains telling us this doesn’t add up. We sense threat when we feel forced in some way. Employees need to own any kind of change initiative for it to be successful. There is a critical role that neuroscience can play in making successful change. In environments where there is less stress, there is more thinking going on, we can focus our brains to find meaning in our work, and we can learn to see change as part of personal and organizational growth. Neuroscience is adding new insight into how the brain reacts to change.


Real-Time Computer Vision on Android using BoofCV
In this article, a step by step tutorial will be given for writing a simple computer vision application on Android devices using BoofCV. At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to process a video feed, compute the image gradient, visualize the gradient, and display the results. For those of you who don't know, BoofCV is an open source computer vision library written in Java, making it a natural fit for Android devices.



Quote for the day:

"The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are." -- Marcus Buckingham

January 23, 2014

PayPal chief on the state of digital payments: Mobile is everything
"Mobile is the territory where we want to lead and be best-in-class at across the board," Marcus said matter-of-factly, stressing a need to put developer needs first in this sector too. Marcus implied that PayPal was able to overcome numerous competitors by making strides to tap into all of these different platforms. Just one example, Marcus asserted that PayPal was the first to be able to integrate itself into Apple Safari and utilize the iPhone's camera to scan barcodes to enable purchase power.


Neural Nets: Now Available In The Cloud
“We present the N2Sky system, which provides a framework for the exchange of neural network specific knowledge, as neural network paradigms and objects, by a virtual organization environment,” they say. That’s neural networks in the cloud, to you and me. Anybody can sign in and start using a neural net in ways that have already been validated. Schikuta and Mann even want to create a search engine for neural nets. Simply type in the problem you want to solve and the engine searches for nets that are already known to have successfully tackled the problem or ones similar to it.


Microsoft says it will let users choose where data is stored, but things aren’t that simple
Microsoft’s top lawyer has said the company will let non-U.S. customers choose to have their data stored outside the U.S. On the face of it, this would be a boon for the privacy of the firm’s foreign customers. But in reality, privacy advocates should dampen their enthusiasm. ... But there are two big things to bear in mind if you’re non-U.S. and hoping Microsoft’s storage choice will let you evade the watchful eyes of the NSA:


New Techniques Detect Anomalies in Big Data
In any case, it's clear that anomalies can play a big role, for the better or worse, in optimizing system availability and performance; when a process, application, or infrastructure component fails or slows down, it's typically presaged by usually multiple types of events happening simultaneously or in quick succession. Anomaly detection deciphers how this series of events and their patterns vary from the norm and enables experts to quickly determine what it means to the business. The power behind anomaly detection is neither a single technology nor a single technique.


The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2014
The CIO job itself continues to undergo a profound transformation that is pushing business-technology leaders inexorably closer to customer demands and customer experiences and customer engagements; to revenue generation, enhancement, and optimization; and to sometimes-revolutionary new business models and operating models, and unheard-of new processes. In that spirit, I’d like to share my list of the Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2014, inspired by conversations with executives at hundreds of companies around the globe.


Five best Linux applications for enterprises
Linux has been a part of the enterprise back end for a long time and is becoming more prevalent in the office-side of businesses, from small businesses to major enterprises. So, what are the best Linux applications for IT managers and business owners to use in the enterprise? These five apps will expand the business's IT infrastructure and functionality while reducing the overall cost of maintaining an efficient, reliable business.


Dell Research: Can it deliver innovation from blank slate?
According to Menon, the timing for Dell's R&D push works well with going private. "From a timing perspective this (forming Dell Research) is perfect," he said. "As we go private there's an opportunity to focus more on longer-term trends." ... CEO Michael Dell introduced Menon and his team at Dell World in December. Dell Research was formed 6 months ago. If all goes well, said Menon, Dell Research will be the glue that brings the company's various units together in a "cross Dell way." Menon doesn't have to replicate IBM's approach, but take what he's learned from his more than 25 years at Big Blue and apply them in a Dell context.


Dimension Data and Application Modernization
In Dimension Data’s case, the firm has historically been positioned as a leading professional services firm linked to Cisco products and services. These new market initiatives are helping to broaden the range and focus of its professional, consulting, managed and support services. In fact, despite the anticipated introduction of continued new Cisco-related services in the coming years, we would not be surprised to see the Cisco-related component of Dimension Data’s service delivery decline from roughly two-thirds of revenue in 2013, to somewhere in the 30-40 percent range by YE2018.


European experts divided on success of cyber security
“Cyber security is a failure at all levels, including compliance, methodology, skills and technology,” said Lacey. While agreeing that regulatory compliance is necessary, he said it tends to encourage organisations to come up with the cheapest response. Lacey said regulation does not encourage innovation and tends to recognise outdated standards and models that give the attacker the advantage. The old “plan, check, do” model is too slow-moving and needs to be replaced with a military-style “observe, orient, decide, act” model that enables the faster response times required, he said.


The Secret to Lean Innovation Is Making Learning a Priority
Lean innovation embraces a philosophy of not letting progress get in the way of perfection. It leverages the Pareto principle that 20% of a product’s features (what’s distilled down into the minimal viable product) will most likely deliver 80% of the benefits sought by customers. As an approach, lean innovation lends itself especially well to corporate cultures, often engineering ones and others strongly focused on process-improvement programs such as Six Sigma. Its straightforward, step-by-step methodology makes it relatively easy to explain and to implement



Quote for the day:

"For a manager to be perceived as a positive manager, they need a four to one positive to negative contact ratio." -- Ken Blanchard

January 22, 2014

GRC programs on the rise with data management complexity tides
"There is so much new data they have to deal with," Gascon said. "Organizations are realizing the amount of information they are generating has to be managed in a way that they can more easily produce it when necessary, and also be able to protect it throughout the lifecycle." But with compliance already broadly deployed, new programs may be on the decline: Twenty-four percent of respondents said their organizations would implement a compliance program in 2014, down from 36% of the respondents in last year's survey.


4 New T-SQL Functions
SQL Server 2012 was released last April, making it the 11th major release of the product. Every new version has delivered new functionality that should excite developers, and this release is no different. With the latest release of SQL Server, Microsoft produced 14 new T-SQL functions. ... These functions will be demonstrated using the "SELECT" statement, so no specific database structure is needed. They can be executed against any database, in a stored procedure or other scripts, just like all other T-SQL statements.


The New Cloud Application Design Paradigm
In traditional application design, you forecast how much infrastructure you need, then purchase that amount as a capital expenditure. While it's difficult to really predict how much resource you'll need to run an application, the amortized cost of the resource is consistent: It's the inexorable depreciation of the infrastructure, which never varies whether the resources are 100 percent loaded or runs without a bit of load.


How Xerox Evolved From Copier Company to Creative Powerhouse
How exactly does Xerox get creative about imagining new education products and services? There are a few crucial steps and ingredients, says Vandebroek. First, Xerox employs ethnographic researchers to go into the “field”--in this case, a classroom--to directly observe how teachers work and how they might work more efficiently. Second, Xerox engages in what Vandebroek calls “dreaming sessions” with its clients.


Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views
Some DBAs are simply unaware of the depth and breadth of the information that is available from the DMvs, or how it might help them troubleshoot common issues. This book investigates all of the DMVs that are most frequently useful to the DBA in investigating query execution, index usage, session and transaction activity, disk IO, and how SQL Server is using or abusing the operating system. Secondly, the DMVs have a reputation of being difficult to use. In the process of exposing as much useful data as possible, sysprocesses has been de-normalized, and many new views and columns have been added.


Amazon Innovates With Its Business Model, Not Drones
The essence of business model innovation (BMI) is not a new concept. Indeed, creating disruptive new business models is at the heart of many entrepreneurial start-ups. However, in most large companies and corporations, business models take a back seat to brands. BMI should command more attention as business models, above products, services or brands, are the basis of competitive advantage in the 21st Century. The implications to this are significant.


Calculating the Median Value within a Partitioned Set Using T-SQL
I’m not sure exactly what got me to thinking about calculating the median in SQL, but it was long ago and I realized almost immediately that this could be quite a challenging assignment. SQL didn’t, at the time, have available any built-in functions for the purpose and I did find quite a few competing solutions out there but no clarity on the performance of the various methods. ... SQL 2012 now offers an analytic function called PERCENTILE_CONT that is capable of calculating the median within a partitioned set when it is passed an argument of 0.5 and the ordering within that set is specified.


Walgreens CFO tug of war between IT legacy systems and tech that could 'take us to glory'
We have other legacy systems that you could argue we need to update and refresh. But the problem with some of them is that they are so massive and so integrated that it is not even an issue of whether or not we can or should afford it; the issue is how do you do it and make sure that when you pull all these things apart and put them back together, it is going to work. But I think it is really forcing IT and finance and accounting to work together -- we're partners -- to really say what is the business case here and what value will it create and what are the milestones along the way?


Siccing MDM on personal mobile devices
The mitigation came in part from the fact that users need a domain account to connect to our corporate wireless access points. We don't advertise the SSID and we have a strong password that enables encryption. But the "security by obscurity" approach only goes so far, and it didn't take long for employees to spread the word about how to connect personally owned devices to the corporate Wi-Fi network.


ActiveJPA – Active Record Pattern for JPA
ActiveJPA is a Java implementation of Martin Fowler’s Active Record pattern over JPA. It wraps around JPA and provides useful abstractions to simplify data access. With ActiveJPA, models themselves act as a DAO and interact with the database without you having to write any additional code for the DAL. Since ActiveJPA uses the JPA spec, all ORM implementations (Hibernate, EclipseLink, OpenJPA, etc.) that implement JPA can be used with ActiveJPA.



Quote for the day:

"Who aims at excellence will be above mediocrity; who aims at mediocrity will be far short of it" -- Burmese saying

January 21, 2014

University lecturer reports bad news about your information governance program
The sad truth is that most information governance initiatives either fail or fall short. But there are some steps that companies can take to help increase the chances of success, according to Richard J. Self, a senior lecturer in informatics and business and information governance at the University of Derby in the U.K. SearchDataManagement caught up with Self in between sessions at the IBM Information on Demand conference. Self explained that achieving success with an information governance program means first getting buy-in from senior executives.


TempleOS: an educational tool for programming experiments
It's simple to understand, manipulate, and work within. In essence, it's an educational tool for programming experiments. Drawing a line onscreen in TempleOS and on the Commodore 64 is about as equally complex for the end user. It's barebones by design -- you have direct access to the hardware, and you can do what you like with it, within the limitations of the hardware. This is a laudable goal, and one solution to the complexity of programming modern computers that programmers, hardware designers, and educators are seeking to solve.


Automated penetration testing in the Microsoft stack with OWASP ZAP
"The OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications.  It is designed to be used by people with a wide range of security experience and as such is ideal for developers and functional testers who are new to penetration testing as well as being a useful addition to an experienced pen testers toolbox."


Author Q&A: Patterns of Information Management
An “Information Centric Organization” drives its business on high quality and timely information that is aligned to its mission and goals. We have entered an era where information is now a key competitive resource, and those organizations focused on what they can do and learn with the information they have at hand are finding far greater success than those who do not have this focus. By making the management of information a strategic priority, and by developing systems and practices that nurture and exploit information to maximum effect, an “Information Centric Organization” can exploit analytics to spot new revenue opportunities, drive product innovation, identify patterns to reduce fraud, and mitigate risk.


The Big Data Edge for Hedge Funds
There are three major trends when it comes to big data. The first remains just information gathering. There’s a ton of information that is generated by everyone and basically everything is now tradable. There’s tradable news; there is information provided by Bloomberg, Reuters, and Dow Jones; and there are news feeds. There’s also the internet that is like a data mine of information -- there’s unlimited numbers of stuff. The number one trend is really to synthesize and gain an edge by having some custom understanding of how the news is incorporated into the market and be the first to synthesize the news from the global universe of news.


Enterprises facing shortage of cybersecurity experts: Cisco
According to the networking solutions major, overall vulnerability and threat levels reached their highest in 2013, ever since it began tracking in May 2000. Its 2014 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveals that 2013 was a "particularly bad year", with cumulative annual threat alert levels increasing by 14% since 2012. Organisations in India are also witnessing a huge growth in cyberattacks and intrusions and the country faces shortage of about 4 lakh trained cybersecurity professionals.


Appetite for disruption: Can Simple and the web reinvent banking?
The advent of Simple's ideology came from the idea that large banks have a revenue model that relies on customer confusion about hidden fees and money management. They decided to do away with fees and provide a solid customer service team to help make things as clear as possible for customers. Co-founder and CFO, Shamir Karkal, said the mission of Simple is, "to provide a banking experience to customers that helps them spend smarter and save more." So, how can Simple hope to compete in a land of giants?


Data Management Maturity Model points way to best practices
The DMM is being developed by the Enterprise Data Management Council, a group founded by financial services firms, to provide a way for organizations to assess where their data management programs stand on a five-level scale. The EDM council released an initial version of the model to its members in June 2012; updates have been made this year, and the group expects to release the DMM publicly in 2014 along with a self-assessment spreadsheet.


Pre-fabrication: A New Way of Architecting Data Centers
With business success relying heavily on an organization’s ability to connect with customers and provide services, data center downtime can not only be detrimental to an organization’s reputation, but can strain customer relationships and incur costs upwards of tens of thousands or millions of dollars. To avoid these problems, data center and facility managers should consider a recent innovation helping to mitigate these difficulties: pre-fabricated architecture. In contrast to traditional construction where components are installed separately onsite, pre-fabricated infrastructure is a pre-engineered, factory-integrated and pre-tested system of power, cooling and IT modules mounted on a skid or in an enclosure.


Risk and responsibility in a hyperconnected world: Implications for enterprises
There are multiple scenarios for how the cybersecurity environment could evolve over the next five to seven years. However, if attackers continue to get better more quickly than defenders, this could result in a world where a “cyberbacklash” decelerates digitization. In this scenario, a relatively small number of destructive attacks reduces trust in the economy, causing governments to impose new regulations and institutions to slow down the pace of technology innovation.



Quote for the day:

“You have to dig a well before you can draw water from it.” -- Richie Norton

January 20, 2014

SDN essentials: Why network orchestration and virtualization?
SDN orchestration tools have emerged from startup Anuta Networks and Alcatel-Lucent's Nuage Networks. These tools target cloud providers that need to automate the creation of network services for their customers, although each company attacks the problem in a different way. Anuta's solution focuses on working with the network infrastructure many providers already have in place, while Nuage introduces a distributed software router and overlay network to create multi-tenant friendly network containers.


The PoSh DBA - Reading and Filtering Errors
Both the SQL Server Error Log and the Event Viewer are designed to be used via their respective graphic user interface. This is fine for one or two servers, but painfully slow for the average DBA who has to read and filter information in many servers. Even when you’re focusing down on a problem with a single busy server, the added weight of the graphical tool in terms of resources can slow troubleshooting down considerably. It is very important in the day-to-day life of a DBA to have a mechanism to read and filter error messages quickly and unintrusively; a technique for "mining errors".


E-book: IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity
The world of identity and access management (IAM) is one of constant change, shrinking deadlines, minuscule budgets, overtaxed staff and unmerciful regulations. Unfortunately, the historical approach to IAM involves piecing together “half solutions,” in hope that tomorrow’s solutions will address real-world needs. The e-book “IAM for the Real World: Simplifying Complexity” evaluates what IAM for the real world would, should and can look like. It delves into the most pressing IAM issues faced by virtually every organization and offers actionable, affordable and sustainable approaches to the IAM challenges you face.


The smartest cars may need 5G, Ericsson says
Connected to a 5G network, cars could warn drivers of an impending collision or even be guided through traffic automatically with no driver behind the wheel, Ewaldsson said. Demonstrations at CES showed off both of those types of capabilities. But making those kinds of services work would require guaranteed performance all the way from the cloud that runs the service to the car, and back again. "The networks that we have today have nowhere near that quality-of-service guarantee," Ewaldsson said.


Which mobile cloud approach is right for your company?
Most companies are still trying to find the appropriate mobile cloud computing strategy to make sure their employees are more productive and their data (and their customers' data) is secure. Doing so could mean that remote workers have a combination of mobile apps, remote access to other systems and secure email, for example. Business leaders and IT managers need to think about their enterprise architecture and how to make their employees more productive in the mobile era.


The 24 most exciting new gadgets coming soon
CES has come and gone: we now have a long list of new and notable products coming in 2014. What follows are the ones we're most looking forward to. Let's start by stating the obvious: in 2014, we're going to see a lot of "sequel" products building on the success -- or attempting to fix the shortfalls -- of their predecessors. We've broken out some of the more notable ones on the pages that follow. This story was originally published on January 1, 2014, and has been updated extensively with additional products announced at CES 2014.


Build big data adaptability through rapid experimentation
Adaptable organizations experiment rapidly with their offerings (products, services, and relationships) and build strong discovery capabilities. There's no better way to accelerate discovery than to embrace big data in your strategy -- the key is to attack this with purpose and vigor. To dramatically increase adaptability, you must build an organization that experiments in a big data fashion: with high volume, velocity, and variety.


What Executives Should Know About Open Data
Not all data that’s valuable is internal and proprietary. New initiatives by governments as diverse as those of the United States, Mexico, and Singapore are opening the spigots of readily usable public data. Corporate information too is becoming more “liquid,” moving across the economy as companies begin sharing data with their business partners and, sometimes, consumers. Also surging is the richness of the information from data aggregators, which are assembling, rendering anonymous, and selling (to interested third parties) a wide range of data flows.


Rapid Diffusion of New Technologies Stumps IT Managers
IT managers allowing these technologies to enter the workplace must also take into consideration wireless security. Currently, emerging technologies use either their own WiFi capability to connect to a network or Bluetooth to tether themselves to a tablet or smartphone to access the Internet via a 3G/4G network. There are several issues to consider; the first is using public, unsecured networks. As these devices become more widely deployed they will be a target for the cybercriminal community just like today’s mobile devices.


Considering Going Remote? Here’s What Managers Need to Know
Telecommuting comes with challenges. From a manager’s perspective, there can be security concerns about sensitive company data on a remote device. Remote employees can burn out more easily as they work longer than they would have if they were in the office, research shows. Working from home can also be isolating and lonely. “The worst part about being remote is the feeling of being disconnected. We always wonder if we’re doing OK, if we’re remembered, if we’re sufficiently connected to the home office,” said Scott Hanselman, a programmer at Microsoft who works remotely.



Quote for the day:

"Successful people make the right decisions early and manage those decisions daily." -- John Maxwell

January 19, 2014

The models of data stewardship: how to run a data governance program
In this video interview from the fall 2009 TDWI World Conference, Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, and Nevala, a senior consultant at Baseline, give tips on how to manage data governance programs and detail what they've defined as the five models of data stewardship. In addition, they discuss the benefits that BI teams can get from data governance programs, the need to measure the success of governance initiatives and the importance of giving data stewards the authority and accountability that's required to succeed in that role.


The 5 Keys to Effective Vulnerability Assessment
The bad news here is that too many organizations are not taking care of the basics that they need to in order to secure their systems. The good news: there are many straightforward steps these organizations can take to dramatically improve the security of their systems. One of these steps is having an effective vulnerability risk management program. In fact, a vulnerability assessment to scan for and remedy security flaws and weak configurations within your infrastructure is one of the most effective things you can do to increase the security of your enterprise.


A Simple Model for Information Governance, Part 1 of 3
While both AIIM and ARMA cover the information portion of the topic well, they seem to struggle with bridging the discussion into “Governance.” Others, in the Governance, Risk Management and Compliance arena, make clear the linkage between “Governance” and risk management and compliance, but generally with little reference to “Information.” See OCEG’s “GRC Capability Model ‘Red Book’ 2.0.” (The current version, 2.1, doesn’t address this as well).


SQL Server Change Tracking: A Near Bullet-Proof ETL Solution (Part 1)
This multi-part series will concentrate primarily on the Extract portion of the data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process using SQL Server Change Tracking (CT). The second part will concentrate more on design architecture with CT, and the last part also touch on the Translate and Load portions as well as a near-real world example using the AdventureWorks2012 database. This segment will introduce the concept of CT as well as provide a substantive demo (i.e., something better than a hello world example) of CT’s functionality.


Australian IT project failures spark new ICT governance standard
"The standard was prepared due to continuing failures of major IT projects to deliver expected value. The aim was to bring home the need for action from boards and senior business executives who are responsible for the overall governance of the organisation," said Standards Australia chief executive, Dr Bronwyn Evans. "If organisations want to obtain maximum value from their investment, governance of IT projects should not be left to the IT department alone."


Cloud computing faces a clear and present danger
The “war on terror” is a political reality for both Australia and the US, and business leaders clearly need to more broadly consider the risks involved in working with cloud service providers. Cloud services and offshoring style outsourcing arrangements can be a contractual minefield. They are made more complex when the provider is a multinational that operates infrastructure located in multiple legal jurisdictions. Contractual and legal complexities can clearly be simplified when services and infrastructure are located entirely in Australia, and provided by an Australian company.


Assessing Vulnerability, Strategy, and Cost
The pervasive use of virtualization, the consumerization of IT, and the adoption of Cloud solutions to support IT service delivery are drivers of "new infrastructure" innovation that require public sector technology managers to better identify and mitigate associated security risks. By leveraging a holistic approach to vulnerability, strategy and cost, IT managers can formulate sound plans and operative decisions relative to security and its management. This session will explore these considerations for new infrastructure, workforce mobility, and end-point application security.


Creating a SQL Server DBA's Library
DBAs - like any other information worker - creates, collects, shares and interacts with all different types of information to help him/her do their job. Some of these pieces of information may be needed repeatedly, some of the knowledge gathered over time may be better saved in a secure location. Some of the applications used should perhaps be available for everyone else in the team. This is the concept of a "DBA Library": it's not the library in traditional terms where you have books and journals stacked on your desk; rather it's a centralized and integrated repository of knowledge, information and applications for the DBA.


Obama unveils NSA reforms: 'Keep calm and carry on spying'
A senior White House official speaking to sister-site CBS News' Mark Knoller said the President wants to dance the delicate line between preserving the NSA's surveillance capabilities while addressing "privacy and civil liberties concerns." But Obama remained on the defensive, reiterating previous claims that the NSA was "not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails." Obama's comments will likely not appease everyone, considering the conflicting desires of the technology and telecoms industry, intelligence agencies, foreign diplomats and privacy advocates.


Minding the API Hierarchy of Needs with RAML and APIkit
The trend for the approach used in designing and building public APIs is towards a RESTful approach, and away from the SOAP web services approach, as shown by the following graph drawn from the directory of APIs within ProgrammableWeb.com. This trend also extends to the internal and partner APIs within the enterprise. ... Enter the RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML). As described on RAML.org, RAML “is a simple and succinct way of describing practically-RESTful APIs. It encourages reuse, enables discovery and pattern-sharing.”



Quote for the day:

"Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy" -- Jim Hightower

January 18, 2014

Under-pressure CIOs fret about their digital project skills
There's a cultural tension between IT's desire to do things clearly and in a predictable way and the way you need to operate with digital projects, Gartner Fellow and vice president Dave Aron said. "Traditional IT people like certainly and clarity and there's not a lot of that in the digital world," he said. "What's happening now is CIOs have to continue to provide that really professional, solid core infrastructure but they also have to deal with their company's need to succeed in an increasingly digital world."


Fridge sends spam emails as attack hits smart gadgets
About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said. Instead, the malware managed to get itself installed on other smart devices such as kitchen appliances, the home media systems on which people store copied DVDs and web-connected televisions. Many of these gadgets have computer processors onboard and act as a self-contained web server to handle communication and other sophisticated functions.


The Disruptive Potential of Artificial Intelligence Applications
AI is working across many different industries, but I have detailed three examples below of technologies that many people do not realize are already being enabled through artificial intelligence. These cases are also illustrated by examples of technology that you may be very familiar with, but unfamiliar with the data-gathering techniques and artificial intelligence technology behind these systems. This is very important for business leaders across industries to take note of, as the opportunity to differentiate in a mobile and digital world will become increasingly crucial.


REST Services - Security Best Practices
REST is an architectural principle and is not a standard by itself, but recommend the use of standards such as HTTP, URI, XML and JSON and formats such as GIF, MPEG, etc. ... REST services being based on HTTP specifications is prone to all the security vulnerabilities as that of a web application. Thus REST implementation while it is the easier choice due to its inherent advantages, should also be implemented with due considerations to a combination of compensatory security practices


Can we build an artificial superintelligence that won't kill us?
Another reason for a rapid transition from human control to machine control is the one first described by I.J. Good, what we now call recursive self-improvement. An AI with general intelligence would correctly realize that it will be better able to achieve its goals — whatever its goals are — if it does original AI research to improve its own capabilities. That is, self-improvement is a "convergent instrumental value" of almost any "final" values an agent might have, which is part of why self-improvement books and blogs are so popular.


UK Government Takes Control Freak Approach To Tech
“The big spenders are still under control and only work with the big systems integrators,” Chan says. “The small guys can’t get a foothold in big government contracts, and while we still think of multimillion pound contracts and big gesture politics, rather than things that can work in a small way, this will always happen.” Speaking on digital rights, Loz Kaye, leader of the Pirate Party UK, tells Forbes that it would be political suicide to actually legislate for something as unpopular as Cameron’s web filter. But this filter itself is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a deep misunderstanding or mistrust of technology.


New China-developed OS takes aim at Android, Windows
The Linux-based COS, which stands for China Operating System, is just the latest OS to come out from the nation, at a time when Android and Windows are found on most smartphones and PCs in the country. The makers of the software have been vocal in wanting to break the U.S. hold over China's software market. "The operating system has already risen to become a national security matter," said Shanghai Liantong Network Communications Technology in a statement on its website.


Machine to machine communications and the security of things
If someone compromises a physical device, then its contents, software, and settings are also compromised. Before you purchase an IoT solution or devices, you have to ask the question, "What information is available to a tech savvy thief?" Hopefully the answer is "none" but don't expect that to be the answer you get. Expect that any of your devices can be compromised and any data on them can be accessed. Be sure that your device vendor is aware of physical security and that you've covered the bases with him or her.


CIO considerations for digital transformation in 2014
Now is a golden age for pioneering CIOs to work in close collaboration with their C-suite counterparts to innovate corporate business models and processes using disruptive technologies to transform how work gets done. As we move swiftly into 2014, what are the top considerations for CIOs in terms of embarking upon their digital transformation agendas? Does the mission just require the powerful elements of the disruptive trends, and a strategy for leveraging their combination, or will it require more? How does one begin the digital transformation process and where’s the best place to start?


Non-functional Requirements in Architectural Decision Making
In software engineering, a tight relationship exists between nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) and software architectures (SAs). As early as 1994, Rick Kazman and Len Bass asserted that SA is intimately connected to NFR achievement. This idea has pervaded software development over the years and explains why development projects invest a lot into fulfilling NFRs. This general statement becomes more concrete when we consider how the concept of SA has evolved from a simple structural representation to a decision-centric viewpoint.



Quote for the day:

"A business of high principle attracts high-caliber people more easily, thereby gaining a basic competitive and profit edge." -- Marvin Bower

January 17, 2014

Cooling Strategies for Ultra-High Density Racks
The simple answer to this problem would be to provision a data center so that it is capable of providing 20kW of redundant power and cooling to every enclosure. Unfortunately, this is simply not technically feasible or economically practical in almost any case. Making the wrong choices when specifying a data center for high density operation can needlessly increase the lifetime cost of the physical infrastructure by many times. The purpose of this paper is to outline practical and effective strategies for deployment of high density enclosures and blade servers.


Google unveils 'smart contact lens' to measure glucose levels
It uses a "tiny" wireless chip and a "miniaturised" glucose sensor embedded between two layers of lens material. The firm said it is also working on integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed certain thresholds. But it added that "a lot more work" needed to be done to get the technology ready for everyday use. "It's still early days for this technology, but we've completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype," the firm said in a blogpost.


How Natural Language Processing Makes Our Lives Easier and Improves Your Business
Talking to computers still requires programming languages but the ultimate goal of NLP is “to do away with computer programming languages altogether. Instead of specialized languages such as Java or Ruby or C, there would only be “human.”” The better a computer is capable of understanding natural language, the more applications there will be, but already NLP offers a lot of possibilities to help grow your business, save money and stay ahead of your peers.


The Year Ahead According to Rackspace
There’s a tacit agreement that many traditional security solutions just aren’t cutting it in our ever changing world of technology innovation. The NSA revelations and general scaremongering does not drive the market away from outsourcing, or from US companies, it drives them into wanting to do more on security, demanding more for their providers. 2014 will see continued investment in new security technologies especially around encryption. This will undoubtedly result in better security in the cloud and address some of those lingering doubts around the security of cloud-based platforms and systems.


Predictive Analytics Can Boost Enterprise Performance
"Using historical measures to gauge business and process performance is a thing of the past," said Samantha Searle, research analyst at Gartner. "To prevail in challenging market conditions, businesses need predictive metrics — also known as "leading indicators" — rather than just historical metrics (aka "lagging indicators")." Predictive risk metrics are particularly important for mitigating and even preventing the impact of disruptive events on profitability.


What makes innovation go wrong
Stephen Di Biase says innovation is "in our DNA. We evolved to get here." Di Biase, a longtime R&D executive, is now president of Premier Insights LLC, which provides consulting services about innovation to science-and-technology-based companies. He is on the advisory board of Clean Energy Trust, and he convenes a Chicago-area network of chief technology officers from companies that range from family-held firms to Fortune 500 companies. He spoke with Blue Sky Innovation about leadership, innovation in larger companies and thoughts for managers to consider when looking for new solutions.


IT mobility trend continues in 2014
It's pretty easy to conceptualize any software component as a resource, an element that does something for us. The problem with that very general approach is that it can lead to over-specifying. If you want to expose the functions of a programmable light switch, it's tempting to have verbs like On and Off and maybe status verbs like ReadState. These are nice, but they force an API into being not only functionally specific, but also limited in terms of what technologies can be used to implement it.


Web steps closer to baking-in support for NFC payments and data swapping
When implemented the spec would allow web pages and apps to read and write to NFC tags; to send and receive messages between NFC-enabled devices and provide a way to initiate a wireless connection via wifi or Bluetooth. The API would enable a range of capabilities for web sites and apps such as tapping two devices together to initiate a two player game; tapping devices to share data such as coupons or contacts; and tapping a device to read a message from an NFC tag.


Better software testing and improved quality starts with the culture
A testing expert who really knows his stuff adds enormous value to the project for the customer—and for the whole team by making their job easier rather than harder. Sadly, too many companies still view testing as more of a necessary evil than an opportunity. That's an attitude that Jim Holmes, Director of Engineering for Test Studio at Telerik, is doing everything he can to change.


Spy agencies around the world use radio signals to tap data from targeted systems
The technology, which has to be physically installed in most cases, has been available since at least 2008. It "relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers," according to the Times report. Data captured by the devices are sent to small briefcase-sized relay stations often set up miles away from the target system. The software has apparently allowed the NSA to do an end-run around whatever cybersecurity controls are installed on the compromised systems.



Quote for the day:

"Success is determined by those whom prove the impossible, possible." -- James W. Pence

January 16, 2014

How to make an HTML5 developer smile: A Google Web Designer wish list
Of course, exactly what Google Web Designer will be when it is released is still a mystery. At it's core, Google is a company that is interested in advertising dollars, and every project they promote has padding the bottom lineas the primary, if not sometimes obfuscated, directive. Despite what the development community might be wishing for in a new web design studio from Mountain View, Google Web Designer may be nothing more than a cross-platform plugin that simply makes it easier to drop DoubleClick ads into Android and iPhone applications


The 26 UX Axioms
The set of UX axioms has gone through an evolution over the last year as we iterated through the concepts, refined and combined ideas. We started with 150 concepts and ideas that were combined and synthesized into an initial set of 50 axioms presented to IxDA Grand Rapids in Nov 2012. Over the course of 2013, Erik presented the UX Axioms several times and further synthesized the set down to 21 Axioms. We recently added a few more axioms to the set we felt were missing. The current set stands at 26 UX axioms.


When did Passion for Your Work Become Passé?
Is it out of style to be vocal about your passion for your work, your profession or your firm? Perhaps. At least when it comes to articulating how excited you are to be doing what you are doing, it’s better to show than tell. And while the use of the term may generate a bit of a cringe factor for a variety of reasons, including the suspicion that someone is making it up, showcasing your passion for your work never goes out of style!


Reaping The Benefits Of Diversity For Modern Business Innovation
Diversity is critical for organization’s ability to innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and most admired leaders will tell you the same thing. Diversity is essential to growth and prosperity of any company: diversity of perspectives, experiences, cultures, genders, and age. Why? Because diversity breeds innovation. And innovation breeds business success. Don’t believe me? Take a look:


Google stages coup against Windows 8 with Chrome OS-like update for 'Metro'
Google has made no secret of its push to subvert devices running rivals' operating systems and turn them into pseudo Chromebooks by shifting features from Chrome OS to Chrome the browser. A year ago, for example, Google started baking parts of QuickOffice, a popular iOS and Android app substitute for Microsoft Office, into both Chrome OS and the Chrome browser. Analysts have viewed the strategy as part and parcel of Google's desire to insert itself and its core services -- search, mapping, email and others -- onto as many systems, both PCs and mobile devices, as possible to optimize traffic and associated ad revenue.


Our CIO Is Leaving — Now What?
Confronting CIO succession in this competitive environment is rarely easy. Approaching the problem strategically and systematically helps identify priorities, issues to be mitigated and options that may not have been readily apparent at the outset. Furthermore, such an approach maximizes the chances that the widest pool of appropriate candidates will be considered and that once a candidate is chosen, he or she will be able to meet and surpass the expectations of the CEO and the board.


Data visualization tools may be glamorous, but focus on business value
Data visualizations are about more than just how pretty the information looks, according to Cindi Howson, founder of BI Scorecard. At their best, visualizations help users retain information and make better-informed decisions. Graphic displays can be understood much more quickly than simple data dumps, and well-designed visualizations do this even better, enabling collaborative data discovery.


Massive denial-of-service attacks pick up steam, new nefarious techniques
Today, Prolexic issued its quarterly global DDoS attack report, noting that even Android-based mobile devices are being spotted as instruments to launch DDoS attacks. In the report, Prolexic says its response team “uncovered evidence of the use of mobile applications launching DDoS attacks against enterprise clients, including one of the world’s largest financial firms.” Prolexic says signatures matching AnDOSid, a DDoS attack tool for Android devices, were observed in DDoS attack campaigns.


18 great uses for an old Android device
As we move multiple generations into mobile technology, more and more of us are building up collections of old, dated devices. And more often than not, those devices do little more than take up space and gather dust. Here's a little secret, though: Your abandoned Android gadgets are actually virtual gold mines. You just have to find the right way to tap into their potential and give them new life. So grab the nearest DustBuster and get ready: Here are 18 ways to make your old phone or tablet useful again.


Discover and Diagnose Java Concurrency Problems Using Contemplate's ThreadSafe
Contemplate's ThreadSafe Solo is a commercial static analysis plugin for Eclipse, designed specifically to discover and help diagnose difficult concurrency bugs lurking within Java programs. By being focussed on concurrency bugs, ThreadSafe can find bugs that other static analysis tools, both commercial and freely available, often miss or are not designed to look for. As far as we have been able to determine, none of the defects in the examples below are caught by any other Java static analysis tool.



Quote for the day:

"Education is more than a luxury; it is a responsibility that society owes to itself." -- Robin Cook

January 15, 2014

Continuous security monitoring: What enterprises can learn from CDM
With the CDM program, DHS is focusing on getting agencies to implement a six-step CSM process: installing and updating network scanning sensors, automating the search for known system flaws, collecting the scanning results, triaging and analyzing the results, initiating mitigation of the biggest or worst flaws, and reporting progress. The objective is to enable civilian agencies to fully diagnose their networks within 72 hours of sensor deployment.


Computer science: The learning machines
With triumphs in hand for image and speech recognition, there is now increasing interest in applying deep learning to natural-language understanding — comprehending human discourse well enough to rephrase or answer questions, for example — and to translation from one language to another. Again, these are currently done using hand-coded rules and statistical analysis of known text. The state-of-the-art of such techniques can be seen in software such as Google Translate, which can produce results that are comprehensible (if sometimes comical) but nowhere near as good as a smooth human translation.


Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield
CaaS will enable every app to become as smart as Siri in its own niche. CaaS powered apps will be able to think and interact with consumers like intelligent virtual assistants — they will be “cognitive apps.” You will be able to converse with cognitive apps, ask them questions, give them commands — and they will be able to help you complete tasks and manage your work more efficiently. For example your calendar will become a cognitive app — it will be able to intelligently interact with you to help you manage your time and scheduling like a personal assistant would — but the actual artificial intelligence that powers it will come from a third-party cloud based cognitive platform.


Geraldine Hamilton: Body parts on a chip
It's relatively easy to imagine a new medicine, a better cure for some disease. The hard part, though, is testing it, and that can delay promising new cures for years. In this well-explained talk, Geraldine Hamilton shows how her lab creates organs and body parts on a chip, simple structures with all the pieces essential to testing new medications -- even custom cures for one specific person. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less)


Why you should care about Net neutrality (FAQ)
The basis for the Net neutrality regulation that the FCC implemented is predicated on a centuries-old legal concept known as "common carriage." This concept of "common carriage" has been used not just to regulate telecommunications but other industries as well. It was developed to ensure that the public retained access to fundamental services that use public rights of way. In the case of the Internet, it means that the infrastructure used to deliver Web pages, video, and audio-streaming services, and all kinds of other Internet content, should be open to anyone accessing or delivering that content.


The future of shopping: When psychology and emotion meet analytics
Welcome to the future of retail, which is quickly moving beyond somewhat silly questions about whether tablets will run on Android, iOS, or Windows, and becoming much more focused on actual applications and sales. The best part about the retail sector is that it combines four fun areas: Business, technology, and human behavior and psychology. Here's a brief tour of technologies that range in maturity from those that are implemented today to ones that'll take awhile to be adopted.


Financial malware focuses on hiding malicious traffic, localization
The battle between security professionals and cybercriminals has become a cat-and-mouse game in recent years, Baylor said, as Microsoft and other botnet trackers have had success taking down malware by targeting the command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure used to relay instructions to infected machines. Microsoft led a major operation against the Citadel malware in June 2013, and reportedly took down up to 88% of the Citadel botnets, though it has since rebounded.


Of Internet-connected Crock-pots, cars, smartwatches
The Crock-pot uses Belkin's WeMo technology to connect the slow cooker's IP address to the Internet through a home Wi-Fi router. The company also showed a Wi-Fi-ready Mr. Coffee automatic coffee maker. ... Users can control both devices over the Internet, to turn on the coffee or heat up Irish stew from pretty much anywhere in the world, just as can already be done with a Nest thermostat and other devices. The Wi-Fi capability allows an office manager to turn on the morning coffee pot in the break room before arriving or a catering firm to fire up the cooker at a remote location.


Fifth of enterprise BYOD projects doomed to fail by 2016, claims Gartner
“Whether via a formal BYOD programme, or just via devices coming in the back door and being configured to access corporate systems, the use of consumer technologies in the work environment presents a threat to IT control of endpoint computing resources,” said Dulaney. “Given the control that IT has exercised over personal computers by developing and deploying images to company-managed PCs, many IT organisations will implement strong controls for mobile devices.”


R, the Integration Language?
Integration with R now appears to be a sine qua non strategy for analytics tool vendors. I’m currently investigating KNIME, an open source “user-friendly graphical workbench for the cradle-to-grave analysis process: data access, data transformation, initial investigation, powerful predictive analytics, visualisation and reporting.” KNIME is architected as a visual workflow metaphor and has much the look of a data integration tool, with drag-and-drop node folders such as IO, Database, Data Manipulation, Mining, Reporting, Statistics, etc. An R node is easily added.



Quote for the day:

"Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." -- Warren G. Bennis