Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 23, 2014

Paper cuts: the NHS prepares to go digital
“This is about moving away from paper health and social care records towards an electronic system that will capture critical records and will allow patients and healthcare professionals to have access to their records.” Jones explained how a variety of projects were enabling staff to work more efficiently, including by allowing doctors to digitally request test results. He described implementation as “going well”, thanks in part to a procurement programme supported by a Department of Health (DoH) scheme. “We’ve been successful in securing a commitment from the Treasury through the Southern Acute Programme for funding a fully integrated EHR system,” said Jones, who added the trust is on target to become paperless within four years.

Google Eyes 34 Cities for Next Step in Gigabit Fiber Expansion
Google has chosen 34 cities across the U.S. as the next sites for possible expansion of its gigabit-speed Fiber Internet service. The cities encompass nine metro areas and include Salt Lake City; San Antonio; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; clusters of cities around Silicon Valley, including Mountain View where Google has its headquarters; Atlanta; Portland, Oregon; Phoenix; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

Why Obama's 'Voluntary' Cybersecurity Plan May Prove Mandatory
The framework lists four different buckets - or "tiers" - for judging a cybersecurity plan, from "partial" to the most sophisticated "adaptive." The plan allows a stakeholder to assess its plan's effectiveness and set goals for which tier it wants to reach, while also encouraging progression toward higher buckets. NIST referred to the report as "version 1.0," indicating that it plans to issue future iterations, and the agency presented a "roadmap" of key areas where the framework could be revised.

The great hiccup
The problems began with the discovery of a flaw in Bitcoin’s code at the start of February. Bitcoin is, in effect, a giant shared transaction ledger, recording who owns each individual unit of the currency at any one time. Everyone must use the same copy of the ledger—known as the “blockchain”—to prevent the same coins from being spent twice. The flaw, known as “transaction malleability”, muddles up the ledger so that successful Bitcoin payments do not appear to have been made. This could make it possible for hackers to trick badly-coded software—such as the proprietary Bitcoin wallets used by some exchanges—into sending money repeatedly.

How Data Creates Customer Value: Q&A with Anthony Bosco
Adding that little something special is a way to differentiate—it creates stickiness. I’m not enamored of gimmicks or techie stuff, but I see technology as a lever in the innovation and betterment toolbox. Technology can do three things. It can drive internal efficiency, which may be where it got its start years ago. It can optimize our own supply chain which enhances our value proposition in the marketplace. And we can use it to work with customers in this betterment spirit, to augment their value proposition in the marketplace. The third of these is most important.

Google Maps Gets Massive Update: Five Features to Know About
Like it or not, Google Maps is about to look radically different. Over the next couple weeks, Google is rolling out a new version of its Web-based Maps that’s been redesigned and rethought in just about every way possible. Google announced these changes at a conference last May, and rolled out the change to 20% of Maps users in preview mode. Now, the rest of the world’s Maps users are getting the new look. Try not to be shocked by the new design. The white bar on the left is gone—all you see at first is a map that consumes the entire browser window, with a simple white search box in the top left corner.

Is a restricted Internet our 21st century Prohibition? It’s starting in Britain
For all the positives offered by this free and open system, there is one critical problem with this kind of freedom, and that is the inability to control completely what type of content is distributed across the internet. For every 10 communities trying to make a positive impact on the world via the web, there is a manifesto filled of hate and bile. For everyone sharing pictures of their family holiday there is minority sharing the most disturbing and vile images that you can imagine. And between these polar opposites, there are many, many shades of grey.

How to Evolve Your Approach to Analytics in an Increasingly Social World
Social media analytics has previously focused on the content of posts – e.g., text of a Tweet – to measure consumer sentiment. However, to get actionable insight, companies need to take analysis further. Though it’s not the only step, investigative analytics can be a great first step for more complex analysis at massive scale. It allows non-data scientist users to “play” with social media data by asking iterative questions in near real time, regardless of data volume. Maybe marketing is monitoring Facebook and, thanks to a new query, they’ve decided to serve up a location-based coupon.

Data privacy, machine learning and the destruction of mysterious humanity
Our brains evolved to assess trade-offs best in the face of immediate, physical needs and threats. Should I run from that predator? Absolutely. Unfortunately, we still have these same brains. That’s why the camel crickets in my crawl space make me flip out, but giving my kids’ data to Disney World feels perfectly acceptable. Second, most of us feel that giving our data over to a private corporation, like Disney or Facebook or Google, has limited scope. They can only touch us in certain places (e.g., their parks, their websites). And what’s the worst those parks and websites are going to do? Market crap to us.

Embedded Analytics and Statistics for Big Data
Embedded analytics and statistics for big data have emerged as an important topic across industries. As the volumes of data have increased, software engineers are called to support data analysis and applying some kind of statistics to them. This article provides an overview of tools and libraries for embedded data analytics and statistics, both stand-alone software packages and programming languages with statistical capabilities.

Quote for the day:

“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” -- Mark Twain

February 22, 2014

Everything old is bad and antiquated and not everything new is shiny and good.
The world's leading companies have come to realize that only when their customers are successful, will they be successful. In pursuit of their market leadership not only they need to spend time to look inside their business to know how things are getting done but also look outward to get deep understanding of their customers. Process has indeed come a long way from it humble routes amidst the early industrial revolution and Adam Smiths ‘Wealth of Nations’.

5 ways to encourage Business Transformation in Enterprise Architecture
We try and consistently fail to change the attitudes of our peers - opposing mindsets are now a common feature when implementing business transformation. It has long been the mission of EA practitioners to get the right people motivated in adopting a fully functional EA strategy. We've delved into the perspectives of the Enterprise Architecture industry and uncovered precisely this fact: EA practitioners just don't get the support of the CIO or executive management. Getting the 'buy-in' from stakeholders has become the main hindrance when asserting implementation

Hacking the Data Science
A quick thought that comes to mind when thinking about the image that shows data science as three overlapping circles. One is Business, one is statistical modeler and one is technology. Where further common area shared between Technology, Business and statistician is written as data science. This is a great representation of where data science lies. But it sometimes confuses the viewer as well. From the look of it, one could guess that overlapping region comprises of the professionals who possess all the 3 talents and it’s about people.

6 Out of 10 Android Apps a Security Concern
Webroot found that Android poses a greater security risk than iOS. Webroot identified a 384 percent increase in total threats to Android devices over 2012, and found more than 40 percent of the Android apps analyzed were classified as either malicious, suspicious, or unwanted. By contrast, more than 90 percent of the million-plus iOS apps that Webroot assessed were tagged as "benign," with seven percent marked as "trustworthy," and only a meager one percent identified as "moderate" risks. The lower instance of suspicious or malicious apps is a function of the vetting process developers must go through before apps are made available in the Apple App Store.

Why Your Car Won’t Get Remote Software Updates Anytime Soon
Software is rapidly taking over not only the entertainment console in cars, but also basic functions such as steering, braking, and acceleration, as more cars come with features such as adaptive cruise control and automated parallel parking. This can make it easier to diagnose and fix problems, but it also increases the risk for software bugs or even malicious attacks that might cause serious injury. ... to potentially improving safety by delivering fixes faster, remote updates could save automakers money.

The Kanban Survivability Agenda
The survivability agenda’s values of understanding, agreement and respect demand commitment, both initially and ongoing. These leadership disciplines are key to the impactful adoption of the Kanban Method - they’re protective of the pursuit of organizational learning that takes place inside the boundaries of the change initiative and they’re catalytic at its outward interfaces. Ostensibly about fitness – fitness relative to the competitive environment and fitness for purpose – the survivability agenda is really cultural.

How to Design Test Cases Using State Transition Testing Technique?
State transition testing is a form of Dynamic Testing Techniquethat comes in use when the system explained as a finite number of states and the evolutions between the states is ruled by the rules of the system. Another use of this technique when features of a system are characterized as states that converts to other state, this transition is explained by the method of the software

3 misconceptions about BDD
BDD has been often misunderstood among developers, QAs and even BAs. We often hear of teams saying that their project is using BDD, but when we check it out, it turns out to be using only a BDD tool for test automation - and not the BDD concepts itself. So in the end, we hear people arguing about the tools, and not about the ideas that inspired the creation of those tools. The output of that is a bunch of complaints that we see in blogs all over the internet - people that start to reject the whole idea behind BDD, only because they have tried to use a tool without first changing their attitude towards software development.

Continuous Integration: Scaling to 74,000 Builds Per Day With Travis CI & RabbitMQ
Travis CI relies heavily on third-party infrastructure. This allows us to focus on shipping new features and platform improvements that make our users happy. Working with 3rd party infrastructure also has challenges. For example, we’ve been using a hosted RabbitMQ setup for more than two years now. RabbitMQ has some unique properties for handling overly ambitious message producers in the system. When one or more processes on one virtual host produce more messages than the system can handle, RabbitMQ can block or limit other producers and consumers. Much to our frustration, this affected us a few times.

Adopting a Professional Compass for Information Architecture
With an IA compass in place, expressing the value that information architecture delivers to a business becomes clearer. The IA compass that I’ll describe is absent of theoretical and technical rhetoric and focuses on a greater good. This greater good is one that is most likely to resonate with our business and marketing colleagues. While it is important that they acquire a general understand of information architecture, they are more interested in how information architecture fits into their business model and delivers value.

Quote for the day:

"Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic." -- Jean Sibelius

February 21, 2014

Cyberattacks fallout could cost the global economy $3 trillion by 2020
That is the report's main finding—the global economy has yet to mount an adequate defense against the rise of cyberattacks. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum conducted a survey last year of 200 enterprises, tech vendors, and public sector agencies. The two other findings of the report are that executives in enterprise tech have a consensus on the seven best practices for cyberresiliency, and that cybersecurity is a CEO-level issue.

Who Can You Trust?
Contrary to common belief, integrity isn’t a stable trait: Someone who has been fair and honest in the past won’t necessarily be fair and honest in the future. To understand why, we need to abandon the notion that people wrestle with “good” and “evil” impulses. Except in cases of serious psychopathology, the mind doesn’t work that way. Rather, it focuses on two types of gains: short-term and long-term. And it’s the trade-off between them that typically dictates integrity at any given moment.

Google's Project Tango Sees All
Project Tango phones include a vision processing system, a depth sensor, and a motion tracking camera, along with the gyroscopes and orientation sensors found in other smartphones. They can be thought of as something like a mobile version of Microsoft's Kinect system. ... Given Project Tango phones, developers could create apps that, for example, tracked player movements accurately enough to determine whether a virtual laser blast from one player hit another player or an obstacle.

Microsoft's Free Security Tools - Summary
The series highlights free security tools that Microsoft provides to help make IT professionals' and developers' lives easier. A good tool can save a lot of work and time for those people responsible for developing and managing software. In the series we discuss many of the benefits each tool can provide and include step by step guidance on how to use each. Below is a summary of the tools covered in the series and a brief overview of each.

How Philips Altered The Future of Light
Listening to Philips executives map out the future can lead to a realization: Older digital technologies--the Internet, for instance, or smartphones--accentuate the impact of newer digital technologies, such as the LED. This is most apparent in a product like Hue. Internet connectivity makes the product controllable by smartphone, but also endows it with a vast capacity for improvements. "You could buy it now and it will keep getting better," observes Yianni, "because the evolution is now more in the software and in the app."

Privacy Threats You Need to Know About
A good understanding of the privacy threats is an important factor for preventing privacy violations. In order to provide such an understanding, this article discusses ten important privacy threats, namely government surveillance, data profiling, hacking of bank institutions, hacking of software companies, hacking of government health care websites, fake online complaints, using Facebook for background checking, hacking of delivery drones, hacking of cloud computing servers, and hacking of Google Glass.

Alternatives to RESTful API for accessing object storage
There are downsides or tradeoffs with this approach as well. First and foremost, there is greater latency, leading to longer response times. Anytime one interface must be converted to another, there will be more latency. In addition, the NAS experience is not identical. This is because the software conversion function is an interface convenience, not a replica of a NAS system with all of its features. The iSCSI response times also tend to be slower than native iSCSI storage (latency again) and are not accessible any other way than as iSCSI blocks.

Oral-B has a connected toothbrush. You don’t need it.
Oral-B says that the brush has a Bluetooth radio and will send your brushing data to you via an iOS or Android app, but it will also accept programming so you (or your dentist) can tell the brush where you want to spend the most time. The app also will show you news and weather or whatever while you are brushing, making those two minutes fly by. This would be so much cooler if the brush played the information while you brushed — the way my daughter’s musical toothbrushes play Selena Gomez songs.

Istanbul-based Finansbank manages risk and security using HP ArcSight, Server Automation
BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand at the recent HP Discover2013 Conference in Barcelona how Finansbank extended its GRC prowess -- while smoothing operational integrity and automating speed to deployment -- using several HP solutions. Learn how from a chat with Ugur Yayvak, Senior Designer of Infrastructure at Finansbank in Istanbul. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

From Imperative Programming to Fork/Join to Parallel Streams in Java 8
It is considered the largest language change since the advent of Java 20 years ago. To find detailed practical examples of how you can benefit from these features refer to the book Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams and Functional-style programming written by the authors of this article and Alan Mycroft. These features enable programmers to write more concise code, and additionally they let programmers benefit from multi-core architecture. In fact, writing programs that execute gracefully in parallel is currently the preserve of Java specialists.

Quote for the day:

"Everyone needs to be valued. Everyone has the potential to give something back." -- Princess Diana

February 20, 2014

Debunking four myths about Android, Google, and open-source
The Guardian published a story, which they have since taken down, spreading FUD about Google, Android, Linux, open source, and licensing. The paper later published another article trying to get the Android facts right, but, well, they still don't. ... When all the MADA provisions are taken together, Edelman argues, they tie Google's apps into a near seamless whole.

How SDN and NFV simplify network service chain provisioning
SDN or NFV service chaining also makes the process of network upgrade simpler. Communications service providers, for example, have networks that are geographically distributed, so upgrading equipment requires travel. In addition, a single error can bring down the entire network and cause outages on interconnecting providers' networks. But with SDN and NFV, providers can create new chains that increase the efficiency and the capacity of their networks without radically changing hardware.

Gartner Says Master Data Management Is Critical to CRM Optimization
"Over the last several years, CRM software sales have outstripped overall IT spending," said Bill O'Kane, research director at Gartner. "CRM leaders must understand the benefits of the MDM discipline to CRM and make it part of their CRM strategy. MDM is critical to enabling CRM leaders to create the 360-degree view of the customer required for an optimized customer experience." Mr. O'Kane said that organizations are moving to a more integrated CRM approach that focuses on the customer experience through improved customer engagement, across marketing, sales, customer service, e-commerce and all other customer-facing channels.

The Women Behind The Data
The buzz being made by Big Data has clearly made way for women wanting to get started in a data-driven field. Opportunities in Big Data are attracting women specializing in IT, data science, data management, software development and anything else data related. This could be because Big Data is a fairly new industry which has currently been met with great success. All the hype surrounding Big Data has made careers within this sector more appealing, especially for women looking to exercise their mathematical and analytical skills.

Pulling the Reins on Data Breach Costs
"That leaves you with two options," says David Mortman, chief security architect and distinguished engineer, Dell. "You can work to reduce your chances of a breach. Second, because breaches do happen, you can protect yourself from additional litigation due to a breach, says Mortman. And this is where state law comes into play: they ultimately determine what constitutes due care, and typically when an organization is breached and is following due care they are not as exposed to successful lawsuits.

Fashion house Paul Smith steers a hybrid path to IT excellence
"Agility and continuous innovation are also key measures and I would like to be in a position to be proactive," he says. The role of IT has changed over the past decade, says Bingham, and has become a way of delivering business strategy. "IT used to be a necessary evil. While everyone needed IT, it was a tactical service for Paul Smith’s business. Now I think there is a seismic shift and IT is regarded as a strategic service to grow the business," he says. "IT is now a crucial element of the business and a strategic supporter and enabler."

Cisco fixes flaws in several products
The vulnerability addressed in Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Director stems from a default account with root privileges that gets created during installation. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by accessing the server command-line interface (CLI) remotely using the default account credentials," which would provide the attacker with full administrative rights to the system, Cisco said in an advisory. The vulnerability was addressed in Cisco UCS Director Release Hotfix 4.0.0.3.

Cloud storage appliances: Backup and recovery made simple
OK, now that we're left with just the adults in the joint, let me put this in very simple terms that I am sure any stressed out, overworked CIO or CTO can understand: Your storage is very expensive. Like many organizations, you are probably always on the verge of having to buy another frame, another chassis, and trays of drives because you've got VM and filer sprawl. And the guy or gal who has the authority to sign the purchase orders to get you those new frames, chassis, network infrastructure, et cetera, likes to say no a lot.

10 mistakes to avoid in your disaster recovery planning process
Don't make your disaster recovery planning process even harder than it is by trying to do too much or cutting corners. Careful planning is your best bet for a successful recovery. At the start of the new year, many IT folks (and perhaps a few business managers) resolve to take steps to prevent avoidable interruption events and to cope with interruptions that simply can't be avoided. In short, they decide to get serious about data protection and disaster recovery planning for business IT operations.

SQL Server Security Checklist
There are many security related settings in the Microsoft SQL Server and you should also consider setting up processes to ensure that the security is maintained in the future. The security related tasks can be divided into four main categories: physical security, operating system level security, SQL Server configuration and user management. You should protect your server physically, have a secure OS and then you can start thinking about your SQL Server.

Quote for the day:

"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." -- Peter Drucker

February 19, 2014

Marginally Useful
Smith believes that cryptocurrencies will have wide application across business and culture, including both banking and online advertising. For banks, Bitcoin is “just a new source of money,” he suggests. “Banks are very hungry to advance their value through technology.” It’s easy to imagine, say, HSBCoin, or BarclaysBucks, giving investors who want choice in the currencies they use the services of a trusted financial brand.

Breaking Bad Leadership Habits
Despite being armed with greater access to knowledge and training than ever before, executives still need to be able to integrate that knowledge into their behaviour back at work. To do so, they must go through three major steps. First, one must identify a need for improvement. When we feel satisfied with our performance in a particular area, we don’t devote time and energy to improving it. The first step is hence to move from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence.

Preparing for the Future of AI, Where Robots Can Learn and Ask Humans For Help!
In a world full of self-driving cars, flying drones, and other robots, daily interactions with artificial intelligence will have a profound effect on how we live our lives. Elemental video scientist Boonsri Dickinson visited Carnegie Mellon robotics pioneer Maneula Veloso to talk about the science behind her robotic creations and the many years she has spent bringing autonomous robots to life. For video see this link and embedded below:

Why Big Data In The Enterprise Is Mostly Lip Service
For every Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Google, I would wager that thousands of midsized and large organizations are doing nothing with big data beyond giving it lip service. That is, the fact that a CXO has heard of big data is hardly to the same thing as her company actually doing anything with the massive amounts of unstructured data flying at us faster than ever. This begs two simple yet critical questions: Why the lack of adoption? And how can organizations overcome the obstacles currently impeding them?

In praise of the humble smart plug: Are outlets the gateway for the internet of things?
There are two other considerations here: measuring energy consumption and determining location. Most smart outlets from big names like Lowes and Belkin as well as smaller startups like PlugAway or Parce now have some kind of energy measurement feature, which might be useful in figuring out if your TV is a high-cost plugged-in device for which you should cut off access to power when it’s not on. Some, like Parce, offer algorithms that will turn it off for you.

Intel stresses in-memory computing with 15-core server chip
Applications tied to in-memory computing such as databases will get a boost with new throughput features and memory capacity of 1.5TB per socket. The Xeon E7 v2 chips, code-named Ivytown, will run at clock speeds between 1.4GHz and 3.8GHz, and draw between 40 watts and 150 watts of power. Intel is shipping 20 new chips in that family with between two and 15 cores. The new E7 chips are two times faster than their predecessors released last year, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, during a webcast.

Where Lean Startups and Design Thinking Meet
Many lean startup practitioners have a tendency to treat everything as “pivotable.” This can be dangerous because it turns lean startup into a mechanistic trial and error exercise. The lack of intent makes it easy to get lost. To avoid this fate, it’s helpful to anchor lean techniques around an observed human need, which is supplied by design thinking. You never want to lose sight of the need you’re designing for as you undertake the lean startup.

Mobile devices are uprooting your CRM business processes
Mobile is disrupting today's business processes, which should prompt all of us to rethink how we work: Are there more efficient and effective ways to work that incorporate mobile? How do mobile devices and applications enable us to gather the most accurate and up-to-date knowledge and to use it? Let's consider some ways in which mobility has sparked needed change in our existing tasks.

Digital Independence: NSA Scandal Boosts German Tech Industry
Critics have begun warning of the "Balkanization of the Internet" and doubt whether merely storing data on local servers will protect it from American intelligence. ... As a result, companies like Deutsche Telekom have demanded that data be processed within Europe to the degree possible. But the idea, known as "Schengen Routing," has been received with skepticism by European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes. "It is not realistic to contain data within Europe. You cannot put up border controls. That would destroy the openness of the Internet," she told SPIEGEL.

SQL Server SEQUENCE Basics
SQL Server now has the ANSI/ISO Standard CREATE SEQUENCE statement. Hooray! The bad news is that most programmers will not be aware of the significance of the underlying math. A SEQUENCE is not an IDENTITY. That propriety feature in T-SQL is a table property inherited from the old Sybase/UNIX days. It counts the number of insertion attempts, not even successes, on one particular machine. This goes back to how files were managed on UNIX systems in the 1970s. In those systems, you needed record numbers to locate the data, so T-SQL exposed this count as IDENTITY.

Quote for the day:

"Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging." -- Deepak Chopra

February 18, 2014

Why a great networking engineer is like an application whisperer
The hard-to-swallow truth is that applications have always run the show when it comes to networks. This reality can be extra difficult to accept in organizations where the systems team is fronted by a less senior and often frazzled sys admin who -- if not wearing a red fire helmet and rubber boots -- at least always carries the faint scent of smoke and ash. Nonetheless, it is a truth we must come to terms with.

Getting your features out
Now we are at a point where we actually branch. Feature Branches evolve around the idea that each functional implementation is done in its own branch. The branches are pushed to the central repository, so each feature branch is available for each developer. Once the implementation is done, the developer starts a pull-request, and the changes are discussed in the team and merged to the master.

SDN in action: Pertino service lets users turn up a network without buying hardware
Pertino’s SDN is made up of two parts: A control plane that houses all of the information about the users, security credentials and network topology; and a data plane running on top of cloud-based virtual machines that can scale horizontally and are fault tolerant. This architecture allows for massively large scaling, segmentation among users’ networks and insulation from downtime from service providers Pertino works with, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and others.

3 Leadership Tips for a Particular Kind of Entrepreneur: the Successor
The challenges of taking over a business from a father (or any powerful executive) are not insignificant. The transition at one client of mine was so unsuccessful that the father had to return from retirement to salvage the business from the son's ineptitude. I've seen companies succeed under a second generation's leadership, and I've watched others fall into bankruptcy only a few years after the change occurred.

Diebold's Mattes believes company can succeed by re-igniting its innovation
In a move to drive home the need to re-ignite innovation, Mattes and his management team brought 140 key employees from operations in 17 countries to Canton in late January. They spent three days at Kent State University at Stark studying new products and hearing about the need to work more with customers. "Diebold is not short of great people," Mattes said, while being interviewed during a break in the meeting. The company is filled with employees who have brilliant ideas, he said.

Data Profiling – Four Steps to Knowing Your Big Data
“Know thy data” is one of the fundamental principles of sound data science.1 Another name for this is data profiling. The article “Big Data – Naughty or Nice?” listed six foundational concepts of data science.2 Along with #2 “Know thy data,” the article listed five other data science “commandments” ... We expand on data profiling here by elucidating the following four steps toward knowing your data: data preview and selection; data cleansing and preparation; feature selection; and data typing for normalization and transformation.

SDN security issues: How secure is the SDN stack?
The SDN controller is a prime target for hackers because it is both a central point of influence in a network and a potential central point of failure. "If somebody is not paying attention to [the controller], it becomes an extraordinarily high-profit target for an attacker, who could very easily compromise [it], modify some of your code base and rescript control of your traffic in such a way that it's ex-filtrating data or stashing data somewhere where an attacker can sniff it," said Dave Shackleford, security consultant with Voodoo Security and lead faculty member at IANS.

PseudoCQRS, a Framework for Developing MVC Applications
With CQRS, the state of the customer object is held in memory, and the things that you persist to the data store are the actual events that occurred in the system that affected that customer. As you have a record of all those events, if you shut the application down and then start it up again, you can just run through all the events to restore the state of the Customer object, and the rest of the system. PseudoCQRS was created because we wanted to apply the CQRS pattern to an existing application - one that already has all the state information stored on a database

Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?
The day of reckoning still looms -- it's just been pushed out as the major Internet players have developed ingenious ways to stretch those available numbers. But these conservation efforts can only work for so long. ARIN currently has "approximately 24 million IPv4 addresses in the available pool for the region," according to President and CEO John Curran. They're available to ISPs large and small, but Curran predicts they will all likely be handed out by "sometime in 2014."

A Chromebook offers Defensive Computing when traveling
Even using a Chromebook normally, with a Google account, still provides safety because Chrome OS encrypts all your files. There is no way another person using the same Chromebook can see anything of yours (assuming you don't give out your Google password). If you are going to lose a computing device, you want it to be a Chromebook. Your files are protected even if someone removes the solid state hard drive. And, unlike other operating systems, the encryption is stress free. That is, a Chromebook user does not have to enable anything, run anything or even remember anything, to have their files encrypted.

Quote for the day:

"Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well. " -- Kenneth Hildebrand

February 17, 2014

App delivery techniques: Virtualization and Web-based apps
Browsers are also delivering more native-like capabilities within their interfaces. In the iOS version of Safari, for example, you can make interface elements disappear as you scroll through the page content. But Web-based apps still pose many hurdles for IT. For instance, whenever application-state data -- the data stored in memory during a session -- must be updated, a screen refresh is required. If the user's connection is less than optimal, this refresh can affect performance.

Collect Your SQL Server Auditing and Troubleshooting Information Automatically
The idea is that since we do not know how often the default trace files are changing for each server, and since the files have a maximum size of 20Mb each (but they may be much smaller), it is actually more efficient to import them and merge them than to write custom logic to check which file was imported and which has not. (The performance overhead of importing 20Mb trace files and using the MERGE script is minimal. I performed a test by populating 1 million rows in each table by using Redgate’s Data Generator and even in such case the import was fast.)

Update: Third of Internet Explorer users at risk from attacks
The extension of the vulnerability to IE9 followed confirmation earlier yesterday that active attacks are compromising the newer IE10 and hijacking PCs running the browser. "Microsoft is aware of limited, targeted attacks against Internet Explorer 10. Our initial investigation has revealed that Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer 10 are affected," a Microsoft spokesperson said via email today. With both IE9 and IE10 vulnerable, it means that about a third of all those using Internet Explorer are at risk.

Report: EU to push to reduce US role in Internet governance
The European policy paper seems to reject a U.N. takeover of Internet governance functions, by rejecting calls for a new international legal regime. The paper calls for a multistakeholder process that ICANN trumpets as its current model. An ICANN spokesman didn't have an immediate comment on the proposal. "The Internet should remain a single, open, free, unfragmented network of networks, subject to the same laws and norms that apply in other areas of our day-to-day lives," the E.U. document said, according to the Journal.

An Introduction to UX Design
UX is considered a discipline these days, which incorporates many aspects and will always include good UI design. The problem that many have wrapping their heads around UX is that there is a lot of conflicting information online and even many designers will give you a different definition than their peer might. It’s a little ‘fractured’ as a discipline because of this and simply because at its heart, UX incorporates a lot of ideas, research and theory, as well as practical application in the real world.

Linux Deepin is a fringe Linux distribution that could steal your heart
With a new desktop (DDE – Deepin Desktop Environment), Linux Deepin takes nods from nearly every desktop environment available and rolls it into one, elegant solution. Part Windows 7, part Ubuntu Unity, part KDE, part GNOME 3 (which DDE gets its base), this desktop brings to mind exactly what Microsoft should have done for Windows 8. You take a deeply embedded desktop metaphor and give it a modern twist, a flush app store, and make it scream on nearly any hardware. That’s what Linux Deepin did.

Is it Really Possible to Achieve a Single Version of Truth?
The road to SVOT is paved with very good intentions. SVOT has provided the major justification over the past 20 years for building enterprise data warehouses, and billions of dollars have been spent on relational databases, ETL tools and BI technologies. Millions of resource hours have been expended in construction and maintenance of these platforms, yet no organization is able to achieve SVOT on a sustained basis. Why? Because new data sources, either sanctioned or rogue, are continually being introduced, and existing data is subject to decay of quality over time.

Understanding atomic and composite patterns for big data solutions
Atomic patterns help identify the how the data is consumed, processed, stored, and accessed for recurring problems in a big data context. They can also help identify the required components. Accessing, storing, and processing a variety of data from different data sources requires different approaches. Each pattern addresses specific requirements — visualization, historical data analysis, social media data, and unstructured data storage, for example. Atomic patterns can work together to form a composite pattern. There is no layering or sequence to these atomic patterns.

Exploring the complexity of modern cyber attacks
Justifying ROI for information security can be a challenge. Information security is, in fact, a business problem, not an IT problem. The information security team should develop an information security strategy aligned with the company’s business imperatives and the various IT programs designed to support those business imperatives. A well-executed information security program should also deploy a security architecture that enables business focused outcomes (i.e. enabling the company to research and develop new products, to expand in existing markets or enter new ones, or to attract new customers) in secure ways.

Taking the first step towards better enterprise information management
Banks are under increasing pressure to meet regulatory demands and manage their business challenges. This could potentially create another wave of siloed data projects, if not carefully ‘governed’. While addressing tactical urgencies are important, there must be a strategic focus on having a coherent strategy for banks to leverage ‘data’ for growing, saving costs and staying compliant. The intent of this article is to convey the importance of having a good framework and the right guidelines to help banks make the right choices to be effective and efficient.

Quote for the day:

"I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be." -- Warren Bennis

February 16, 2014

NIST Framework Released to Widespread Praise, But What Happens Next?
The framework was widely praised at a high-profile release event in Washington, preceded by a statement from President Obama. The framework "is a great example of how the private sector and government can, and should, work together to meet this shared challenge," Obama said, adding that much more work needs to be done on cybersecurity, particularly the need for Congress to pass legislation that provides greater legal protection to spur greater cybersecurity information sharing.

The Case Against Wearables, Or Why We Won't All Look Like The Borg This Year
The problem: The hype is years ahead of the market. Big and unresolved questions remain about pricing (too high), battery life (too short), utility (too limited), looks (too ugly) and privacy (too scary). “We’re a ways away from the Borgification of the consumer,” says Bill Briggs, chief technology officer of Deloitte Consulting, which is predicting that 10 million wearable devices will be sold this year in a market valued at about $3 billion. (Compare that with 1 billion smartphones sold in 2013.) “We’re going to need to see new categories emerge and existing categories evolve.”

World’s Deadliest DDoS Attack Against A Company Which Was Fighting It
The new attack used the NTP reflection technique, involving the sending requests with spoofed source IP addresses to NTP servers with the intention of forcing those servers to return large responses to the spoofed addresses instead of those of the real senders. ... CloudFlare wrote in the blogpost that this had two effects: the actual source of the attack is hidden and is very hard to trace, and, if many Internet servers are used, an attack can consist of an overwhelming number of packets hitting a victim from all over the world.

New Data Center Design Drives Efficiency Gains for Dupont Fabros
“We recognize that in this industry, things change and evolve,” said Scott Davis, Senior Vice President of Operations for DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT). “We sat down with the design group and looked at the trends (n data center design). We took all those trends and came up with goals. The end result is (a data center that’s ) cheaper to build, requires lower maintenance, and has an industry leading PUE. We never save at the cost of reliability or resiliency.” The company expects annualized Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) UE to be below 1.14 at 75 percent capacity, and below 1.13 at 100 percent utilization.

Innovation is Inspiration: Lead in your Surroundings
Think “Smaller.” Not every innovation will produce a world of change today. A happy life, a well-done project, or a successful business is just the sum of their parts. Break down any problem into workable smaller parts. Take some simple action to quantify or identify just one part of a problem or activity, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, and innovate a small change to that portion. You will see–it will move the process forward.

DataKind: Data Science for the Common Good
DataKind’s goal is to connect expert data scientists with social change organizations who are seeking to better manage, visualize and understand their data. Porway was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community. Scott Laningham, IBM Digital Journalist, spoke with him at the IBM Information on Demand 2013 conference in Las Vegas.

Modern Enterprise Performance Analysis Antipatterns
The specific examples that led to the distillates below are drawn from the Java ecosystem, but similar remarks apply to many other types of enterprise system. Each basic cause corresponds to some common cognitive bias. For example, Boredom andResume Padding both stem from a desire to escape the existing tech that a developer uses in his or her day job, and their aspirational desire for a better tomorrow. The antipatterns are presented below, in a style and format that should be reminiscent of the Gang of Four, as well, of course, as the antipattern format pioneered by Brown et al.

Secure Networks: How To Develop An Information Security Policy
While security methods provide protection for access and infrastructure, these methods should be the result of a carefully defined security policy. An effective security policy integrates well-known protection methods into a network in a way that meets both security standards and the goals of the entity being secured. An information security policy builds the foundation for a secure network, but it must be seen as valuable to an entity.

Australian standard published for IT governance
“The standard has been prepared to set out how significant IT projects can benefit through the use of appropriate governance frameworks and principles,” said Bronwyn Evans, Chief Executive Officer, Standards Australia, in a statement (PDF). “As the world we live in continues to change rapidly, organisations need to consider how they can deliver effectively today, while investing in technology for the future.” Evans said guiding successful projects, driving change within organisations, and achieving desired business outcomes, requires clear engagement between governing bodies and their senior executive.

Ramp Up Your IT Governance Model for IoT
Effective IT governance help converting the enterprise goals to IT goals and selection of appropriate enablers like policies, frameworks, organization structure, services, infrastructure etc. It will also help in selecting the rights processes that help in achieving the IT goals thereby helping achieving the enterprise goals and meeting governance objectives of meeting stakeholders needs and expectations.

Quote for the day:

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

February 15, 2014

SD Elements--A Solution To The Web App Security Conundrum
It’s an interesting approach – instead of using either a pre-configured software security requirement list, or an after-the-fact automated scanning tool, SD Elements works alongside and at the same time as the development process, it’s also a dynamic tool, taking into account new found vulnerabilities and approaches to security. It’s also compatible with existing scanning products so sits nicely in the web app security lifecycle process.

Study Shows Those Responsible for Security Face Mounting Pressures
"When we speak to CIOs, CISOs, IT Managers/Directors, we almost always hear that their Board of Directors has asked them what they are doing to protect the companys valuable information. When the Board asks questions, there is more pressure. However, security has been a board-level issue for some time," Cole explained. Today, the difference is in the type of questions being asked by the board. It used to be a matter of answering the question, 'what are we doing to prevent data loss?"

US seeks information on industry ability to hold bulk phone data
The RFI has been posted to the Federal Business Opportunities site that lists federal government procurement opportunities. The government is looking for information on whether commercially available services can, among other things, provide secure storage and high availability to U.S. telephone metadata records for a sufficient period of time, and ensure that there are no unauthorized queries of the database and no data is provided to the government without proper authorization.

10 Scientific Insights That Could Make You A Better Designe
As designers, we can take advantage of findings from fields like behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, and become more mindful about exactly how we’re influencing people through our designs. Insights from these fields can help us better understand why people behave the way they do, design more effective products and services that positively influence behavior, and make more informed predictions about how our designs will ultimately impact people when we let them loose in the real world.

Intel wants to be the 'operating system' for big data
Fedder declined to share how many customers Intel has for its Hadoop distribution. A lot of the work for it began as a lab project in China. To date, most customers are in China although there are users in Europe and the U.S. as well, he said. Those looking to pinpoint Intel's intentions for Hadoop should know one thing, according to Fedder. "Where we differ from other players is we're not trying to build an end-to-end solution," he said. Instead, Intel wants to be the "operating system" for big data, letting third-party vendors and customers themselves create the application layer on top, he added.

Can You Keep a Secret, App?
That’s where Secret comes in. Like a more established app called Whisper, Secret is free and lets users post an image along with several lines of text. Yet while Whisper posts can be seen, searched for, and commented on by all users, Secret shows you posts from your contacts who are also using the app, and, under certain conditions, secrets from friends of those contacts and beyond. If your contacts tap a heart icon to indicate they love one of your secrets, it’s sent on to their contacts, and continuous “loving” spreads secrets throughout the app’s user group. While this means you will see secrets from beyond your initial group of contacts, you can only comment on secrets posted by your friends and friends of friends.

'The Moon' worm infects Linksys routers
The worm, which has been dubbed TheMoon because it contains the logo of Lunar Industries, a fictitious company from the 2009 movie "The Moon," begins by requesting a /HNAP1/ URL from devices behind the scanned IP addresses. HNAP -- the Home Network Administration Protocol -- was developed by Cisco and allows identification, configuration and management of networking devices. The worm sends the HNAP request in order to identify the router's model and firmware version. If it determines that a device is vulnerable, it sends another request to a particular CGI script that allows the execution of local commands on the device.

The Problems measuring Innovation
There are several difficulties when measuring innovation. The first is in the definition of innovation. After all, innovation is a relatively generic umbrella term that contains a lot of different activities and outcomes. Incremental product innovation is more definable and predictable than disruptive business model innovation, more familiar and probably easier to measure. Given the range of activities, processes, definitions and outcomes, talking about measuring innovation is a bit difficult, especially when the range of outcomes is so broad.

Big Data Analytics: Descriptive Vs. Predictive Vs. Prescriptive
With data in hand, you can begin doing analytics. But where do you begin? And which type of analytics is most appropriate for your big data environment? In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Wu explained how descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics differ, and how they provide value to organizations. "Once you have enough data, you start to see patterns," he said. "You can build a model of how these data work. Once you build a model, you can predict."

No More Technical Debt - Invest in Quality
But if you neglect the Technical Debt of the project, that might backfire at one point: If you need to change code with a lot of Technical Debt, the changes might be prohibitively expensive and therefore not feasible. Developers usually know and fear these kinds of situations - working with code that has a lot of Technical Debt is not just little fun - it is also very risky because bugs might sneak in and estimates might be easily proven wrong. So while software quality might be very important for the success of a software project, the Technical Debt metaphor is just not enough.

Quote for the day:

"Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." -- Erica Jong

February 14, 2014

Erasing SSDs: Security is an issue
The bright spot was encrypted SSDs, effectively deleting the encryption key makes the stored data useless. The one concern forwarded by the researchers is that there is no way to verify that the memory locations storing the encryption key data were sufficiently sanitized. The research team did not come out and say it, but reading between the lines has one believing there is no reliable way to sanitize SSDs other than physically destroying the device.

How to Optimize Your Enterprise Storage Solution
For enterprises that want their own internal data storage, it is best to start with network attached storage (NAS). A NAS filer is basically an extra server that connects to a network and rapidly adds extra storage to that network. However, at a certain point, too many NAS filers can overwork the local area network (LAN), affecting performance. When a NAS starts becoming too slow, creating a storage area network (SAN) is the next best step. A SAN is a collection of connected computers that are used solely for storing data.

Dozens of rogue self-signed SSL certificates used to impersonate high-profile sites
Such attacks involve intercepting the connections between targeted users and SSL-enabled services and re-encrypting the traffic with fake or forged certificates. Unless victims manually check the certificate details, which is not easy to do in mobile apps, they would have no idea that they're not communicating directly with the intended site. In order to pull-off man-in-the-middle attacks, hackers need to gain a position that would allow them to intercept traffic.

Cyberthreats: Know thy enemy in 2014
Defending a large network has never been harder. Expensive perimeter protection systems, complex host-based malware detection and even whitelisting systems have crumbled as attackers perfect an almost unbeatable pair of attacks: spear phishing and watering holes. Both attacks apply an age-old strategy: If a defense is too complex to beat head-on, bypass it. At the same time, social engineering, the Internet of Thingsand the combination of traditional Web applications, embedded applications and networked devices often with "versions" of Microsoft or Linux operating systems, present untold security challenges.

The Rise and Fall of Western Innovation
The main cause of this decline, according to Phelps, is corporatism—the inevitable tendency of businesses, workers, and other interests to band together to protect what they have. In modern economies, he says, corporations, unions, and other interests turn government into an agency for forestalling change and preserving the status quo. This problem has been worse in Europe than in the U.S., which is why productivity and per capita incomes in Europe have persistently lagged.

Workday: Linking technology design and user experience
We can hardly overstate the importance of software that users can easily adapt over time to changing business needs. Historically, it was difficult for users to change software rules and functionality in response to conditions such as a merger or new regulations. The software was inflexible, so these changes often required programmers to code customizations so the software could meet specific business requirements. A recent Gartner report explains the negative long-term impact of these customizations:

Mid-Level Leaders: Key Stakeholders, Agents of Change or Both?
It has come to my attention that a heightened focus on mid-level, or emerging, leaders has taken the industry by storm. However, I’m not just talking about the leadership development industry. This focus is being seen across many industries, pharmaceuticals and energy, in particular. Upon further reflection, it became clear why this is the case: both industries are facing major change initiatives, and mid-level leaders have been proven to be the most effective at managing change and ambiguity in the workplace.

Measuring the effectiveness of your security awareness program
Granted, measuring security effectiveness is not as straightforward as measuring a manufacturing process. There are many variables that are simply outside of one's direct control. In fact, a recent ISACA report conceded, "...security is contextual and not an isolated discipline; it depends on the organization and its operations. Furthermore, effective security must take into account the dynamically changing risk environment within which most organizations are expected to survive and thrive." All the more reason that improvements be addressed wherever possible!

Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations
There is no debate that the end result of these changes will be good for MegaRetail, but Claes already has hundreds of projects in various states of progress and the question remains whether there are enough people to staff these additional projects? There was no understanding or acceptance in the meeting that the IT department teams are already busy. In addition, the Marketing Director somewhat heavy handedly reminded Claes that business drives the company forward and IT is to be a supporting function and not a roadblock.

CEO Need-to-Know: Enterprise Cloud needs the SDDC
The vast majority of global enterprises today have in one way or another raised the prospect of a move to the Cloud. Yet fewer than 29 percent expect to be running the majority of their IT operations in the Cloud within the next 5 years[1]. Fact is that everyone’s talking about the Cloud, but few have defined it, much less created a strategy around it . Why? Because you can’t very well migrate well if you don’t know what to pack. Yet the promise of the Cloud is very real; the opportunities that a Cloud model presents can be significant for the enterprise that gets it right.

Quote for the day:

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison