Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 20, 2014

A Retrospective on User Interface Development Technology
It seems so simple and so obvious, but a lot of work—and a lot of changes—have shaped how we interact with our devices since the dawn of the computer age. In this brief survey of UI history, we look back to when desktop computers became ubiquitous (early 1990s) and give a short retrospective on UI development technology all the way up to the modern era. To set the ground for novel, state-of-the-art UI API, we were eager to find out how the API for building UIs evolved and what it looks like today.

Measuring Architecture Sustainability
The measures for architecture sustainability we’ve described so far primarily refer to requirements, architecture design, and source code. Additional indirect measures for architecture sustainability include documentation quality and development process maturity. Another important factor is the development organization, after which a software architecture is often modeled. Organizational changes could compromise architecture sustainability if, for example, teams working on specific modules are restructured. However, these indirect and organizational measures for architecture sustainability are out of this article’s scope.

Ex-Microsoft employee arrested, accused of stealing Windows RT, product activation secrets
Email from Kibkalo's own Hotmail account was discovered in the blogger's inbox. Further digging, presumably on Microsoft instant chat service, found messages between Kibkalo and the blogger. "The sample code in Kibkalo's accounts was the same sample code that the Microsoft source received from the blogger, prompting Microsoft's investigation," Ramirez told the court. ... when he allegedly admitted that he "leaked confidential and proprietary Microsoft information, products and product-related information to the blogger," the charge sheet stated.

ERP contradictions in 2014: Smaller projects, more delays
The report states that "organizational issues" were the primary contributor to time overruns, with more than half of respondents spending between 0-25 percent of their budget on change management. While this explanation makes sense, it does not fully explain why less costly projects in 2013 took longer to run, and delivered lower benefit, than those in prior years. The research attributes lower project budgets to smaller companies implementing ERP:

Threat Landscape in the Middle East and Southwest Asia – Part 5: Socio-economic Factors and Regional Malware Infection Rates
This research revealed that there were correlations between 34 socio-economic factors and regional malware infection rates, among the 80 factors studied. A full list of these factors and the sources of data for each are available in the study. Figure 1 contains some samples of the factors and their correlation with regional malware infection rates (Computers Cleaned per Mille or CCM). Most of the factors identified were negatively correlated with CCM; as the indicator value rises, CCM will decrease. For example, as gross income per capita increases, CCM decreases. It is important to keep in mind that correlation does not mean causation.

Digital reality: When IT meets the business
"Enterprise IT departments face increasing pressure to emulate the success of consumer mobile applications as businesses become convinced this is the way to offer technology that is attractive to consumers, and business users demand mobile access to corporate IT and data via consumer devices, and expect these to be quickly developed and delivered." But given the wider social and commercial acceptance of mobile web, she says there is a growing feeling that this could be the right time to start offering apps as a way to help the business and reinvigorate the IT function.

Advanced Technologies Park: An ecosystem of tech innovation in southern Israel
For the Advanced Technologies Park (ATP) at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, located in the Israeli city of Beer-Sheva, the ultimate vision is as high as the desert sun. Inaugurated in September 2013, the park is the brainchild of former BGU president Prof. Avishay Braverman. "My dream that Ben-Gurion University will do for Beer-Sheva what Stanford University did for Silicon Valley begins," said Braverman in a message pre-recorded for the inauguration (PDF). Also present at the ceremony were Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, current BGU president Rivka Carmi, and several Israeli government ministers.

Surfacing elephants and new ideas
When loud leaders and quiet leaders learn to moderate their natural tendencies while remaining true to who they are, modeling and setting expectations that others will do the same, the organization can enjoy a collective wisdom that was kept dormant. Can you imagine what might happen when that occurs? I can, and it’s a compelling vision of fully functional companies that actually listen and hear what’s being said. Creativity is no longer an issue. Collaboration rides on the coattails of this imagined company ripe with rich, deep listening and all voices being heard — with bottom-line results.

Leveraging Big Data Analytics to Reduce Healthcare Costs
The healthcare sector deals with large volumes of electronic data related to patient services. This article describes two novel applications that leverage big data to detect fraud, abuse, waste, and errors in health insurance claims, thus reducing recurrent losses and facilitating enhanced patient care. The results indicate that claim anomalies detected using these applications help private health insurance funds recover hidden cost overruns that aren't detectable using transaction processing systems. This article is part of a special issue on leveraging big data and business analytics.

Protecting your MSP practice against security risks
Besides the cost, MSPs and customers both suffer loss of customer confidence and uncertainty around what was compromised following a data breach. In healthcare in particular, the HIPAA omnibus final rule summary, which was released in September 2013, specifies enforcement of breach notification requirements that began in January 2014. "People in healthcare are going to be held accountable and they're going to get hit in the pocket. When you have these kinds of laws in place, it's our responsibility to help them understand the risk if you don't do it," Gomes said.

Quote for the day:

"Your big opportunity may be right where you are now." -- Napoleon Hill

March 19, 2014

Scrum Master Allocation: The Case for a Dedicated Scrum Master
Why cut back on scrum masters? Managers have limited headcount, and are looking for ways to stretch their budgets. Scrum masters are often not actually writing code. The functions of the scrum master are seen as supplementary, non-essential, and therefore fungible. Many organizations spread scrum masters across two, three, or even more teams. Teams are able to function without a full time scrum master, once they understand the basic agile process. The question is, what are those teams missing out on, that they could have had with a full time scrum master available to them?

Crafting cloud security controls amid a changing sphere of influence
End-to-end cloud protection is not linear in nature or execution; rather, it is globular, with overlapping segments of controls due to the elasticity of globalized business models, disruptive computing technology and a dynamic threat landscape. Regardless of the possible threat vector, tiered protection ideally will stop an attack, or at the minimum, alert an organization's security team of an incident. There is an acute need for such measures as the cloud continues to stretch the boundaries of enterprise networks, making them practically nonexistent in their traditional form.

Facebook holds back on end-to-end encryption
"If you use end-to-end encryption on email, you realize how hard it can be," Sullivan said during a talk with the press at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. End-to-end encryption can be hard for people to use and understand because it typically requires a manual process of exchanging public keys between the sender and receiver whenever they send an email or any other type of message. If Facebook users want that type of security, there are some third-party apps they can use to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook's services, Sullivan said.

NoSQL and Log Data Jump to Forefront
Although application and operating system log files still exist, the growth of the Internet of Things is starting to emerge. Everything from heart monitors for running, to brake sensors in cars to refrigerators will provide information on what a device is doing and/or doing for you. Much of this sensor information is similar to those UNIX log files from my past life. Using multi-structured formats that often don’t fit well in a relational data store, the information from sensors in machinery, GPS mapping tools and even Fitbits comes in some interesting and constantly changing formats.

BI Best Practice: Delete Most of Your Reports
The CEO was actually close to being right. By the time we were finished, we were able to delete 700 reports from the repository. The executive team went down to about 50 reports in total. This process also taught me that most companies follow a very specific pattern. The business will face a strong challenge. Executives will panic and strongly react to the challenge in front of them. They will request reports to grapple with it from many different angles. It will take about six to 12 weeks to wrap their minds around it, address it, and either resolve it, or get it under relative control.

Real Excel power users know these 11 tricks
There are two kinds of Microsoft Excel users in the world: Those who make neat little tables, and those who amaze their colleagues with sophisticated charts, data analysis, and seemingly magical formula and macro tricks. You, obviously, are one of the latter—or are you? Check our list of 11 essential Excel skills to prove it—or discreetly pick up any you might have missed.

Japan holds first broad cybersecurity drill, frets over Olympics risks
Officials have acknowledged that even though Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has passed a strict official-secrets law, the government cannot adequately protect itself from malicious internet hackers. This is a worry for America as the two allies review their decades-old defense pact to respond to new threats, including state-backed hackers. The government has also vowed to safeguard Japan's cutting-edge technology from industrial espionage. Last week, Toshiba Corp sued SK Hynix Inc, saying a former employee passed key chip technology to the South Korean rival.

SQL Server 2014: NoSQL Speeds with Relational Capabilities
Currently queries, both ad hoc and stored procedure based, are only compiled to an intermediate language. From there they are interpreted rather than JIT-compiled into machine code. This allows for a large amount of flexibility, but at the cost of performance. In the past this was acceptable, as loads increased so did the CPU’s ability to handle serial workloads. But now that is no longer an option, Microsoft has decided to build a new execution engine that relies on fully compiled machine code.

Strong CIO/CMO alliance paves way for data-driven marketing strategy
Inevitably, however, integration is needed, because, first of all, the role of marketing is to convert to a sale, so [that data] is going to be moving over to a website or to our agent system at some point. But there are a myriad of other issues marketers run into -- data security, vendor management, availability management. So there's a tendency to either have the marketing department build something themselves or to have an external provider do it, and then it goes through a cycle where it reaches some kind of road block and they need to bring it into IT. That's the methodology we need to change so that marketing includes us at the beginning and we can provide better IT service.

The Bias Against Innovation
Creative thinkers, confronted with bias, are a challenge for companies, who want to innovate. Regardless of proven creativity, innovators do badly, if not given the right environment. Creatives, who broke new ground in Bill Bernbach’s innovative advertising agency, couldn’t replicate the successes at other agencies. Steve Jobs got fired by his own company Apple, and only got hired back after the company had been driven to near bankruptcy. For the most obvious example, there is Gallilei, who was publicly made to renounce his differencing ideas after having been thrown into prison.

Quote for the day:

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” -- Harvey S. Firestone

March 18, 2014

Your next corporate computer might be a Chromebook
What's still missing? Skype or Lync for creating conference calls, that's what. Yes, I know about Google's Hangouts but I really like Skype. I also like Lync. At some point, I expect the two to merge into a single service, because they're both Microsoft properties now. Seriously, Chrome OS needs something other than Hangouts for making calls and conference calls. There are a few Hangout-related apps but I still want Skype. I use Skype on other devices and I really need it on my Chromebook. Lync access would also work for a lot of businesses because they've standardized on it for internal chat and audio conferencing as well.

How Stephen Wolfram plans to reinvent data science & make wearables useful (interview)
It’s a little bit generalized relative to that in the following ways. When data comes in, we have some really good technology for finding what’s interesting in the data. You can generate endless charts and graphs and tables, and things about the data. We have good ways of figuring out what is likely to be the thing where you say, “Oh, that’s an interesting feature of my data,” both because you know a lot about the world and because we have good algorithms for just dealing with the actual raw data. First step is automatic data analysis.

HIDAche - An Exercise in Hardware/Software Integration
The goal of this article is to provide information, by means of a fairly simple example, about how we can make a USB device that communicates with the computer and how we can create cool applications that utilize that communication. As this article is not meant to be an in-depth look at USB I will only cover the basics. ... So to create HIDAche we first need to know what functionality we will need from a hardware perspective. Pretty simple. We need to know the packet format for a HID mouse and keyboard so we can imitate them, USB communication to get that information to the computer, and a way to store our prank settings.

Quantum rewrites the rules of computing
Classic computers use bits -- ones and zeroes -- for processing instructions, and they work based on a series of instructions. Ask the computer a question, and it will move through the calculation in a linear, orderly way. A quantum computer combines computing with quantum mechanics, one of the most mysterious and complex branches of physics. The field was created to explain physical phenomena, like the odd actions of subatomic particles, that classical physics fails to do. One of the rules of quantum mechanics is that a quantum system can be in more than one state at once. But that concept goes against what's known of the world. Something can be green or red but it cannot be green and red at the same time.

Holland says yes to the network-agnostic SIM card

With a carrier agnostic-SIM, a carmaker could attach your car to whatever carrier to you happen to have relationship with and change your connection whenever you switched carriers. Or it could run a managed service with multiple carriers, connecting to whomever’s network had the best capacity or coverage wherever you happened to be driving, said van der Berg, who is now with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Big data: Why IT departments mustn't be a drag on analytics
"Some banks have tried to do analytics on enterprise data warehouses. The tons of analytics we do, if we dared do that, you might actually stall because of the computation power that you're pulling. So we're very careful about doing that," Grogan said. "When I say we maintain our own analytics infrastructure, I mean exactly that. We maintain a pure, cerebral infrastructure that is only used for analytics and analytical processes." But that processing independence doesn't preclude Grogan for being a strong advocate of spreading access to analytics via a secure, governed, self-service portal where staff can research economic and portfolio data.

How to Use Social Media to Improve Your IT Recruiting Strategy
To attract the top quality talent, businesses must engage candidates through venues like social media to sell them on the merits of the company and its mission, Berkowitz says. And one way to do that is by developing an effective social media hiring strategy. "The goal should be to both make potential applicants aware that you have jobs available and to also show what it's like to work for your company -- showcasing the company's personality and culture," Berkowitz says, but that involves more than just posting an endless stream of want ads.

Cyberspying Targets Energy Secrets
“You finally wake up one day and you’re sitting in a world where this is a serious threat to the industry as a whole.” Attacks can go unnoticed for years, or are never reported. As a result, estimates of stolen intellectual property vary “so widely as to be meaningless,” according to a 2011 report on foreign cyberspying by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, which cited calculations of between $2 billion and $400 billion a year. Companies say they worry most about state-sponsored attacks, which tend to be “incredibly well organized, incredibly sophisticated,” according to BP’s Deasy. Some of the hackers are looking for proprietary data about oil fields, painstakingly gathered using costly seismic surveys, which underpins a business worth $3 trillion a year.

6 Business Opportunities Banks Can Tap In Using Analytics
Thirty percent of banking customers transact with more than one bank with 2.4% of churn expected among primary bank customers within one year, according to a study by IBM. Private sector banks fare slightly better in customer penetration due to a larger portfolio of account offerings and their ability to leverage process capabilities to unlock higher revenue opportunities. The study shows that 87% of customers have only one account with their primary bank and only 58% of their investments lie with them. This provides potential business opportunities for other banks to take advantage of the remaining 42% of customer investments with the help of analytics backed personalization.

Ambitious IT pros seek COO role
With technology now the cornerstone of most companies' operations, there is a growing cross-industry push to connect the oversight of IT with operations. In some cases, like at Learning Ally, the answer is a blended CIO/COO position. At other companies, the CIO is now reporting to the COO or to a hands-on CEO instead of the CFO, which had been the prevalent organizational structure in recent years due to the focus on cost cutting. ... "It used to be that IT was a support function, making sure people had phones and computers. Now IT is in charge of everything from e-commerce applications to mobility. Since those things are the business ... it makes sense to have more overlapping roles."

Quote for the day:

"The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done. " -- Arnold Palmer

March 17, 2014

New Programming Language Jeeves Allows Building Of Privacy Controls Into Apps
Jeeves makes it easier for a programmer to enforce privacy policies by making the runtime responsible for producing the appropriate outputs. The programmer implements information flow policies separately from the other functionality, and the runtime system becomes responsible for enforcing the policies. To allow for policy-agnostic programming, Jeeves asks the programmer to provide multiple views of sensitive values: a high-confidentiality value corresponding to the secret view and a low-confidentiality value corresponding to the public view.

The business transformation big bang battle zone
What is even harder about overcoming the transformation process that we need to undertake here is finding the borders between these silo-separated business departments themselves. We could call them vestigial business boundaries if you wish. These sometimes quite intangible divisions have little worth and not very much meaning. But what is most important of all is that we recognise these partitions as separations that were put in place before digitisation, automation and internetworked web-based connectivity.

Australia endorses US withdrawal from internet control
Turnbull said in a blog post that he had been discussing the move with the US Department of Commerce, and said that there were clear conditions that the transition must be to a multi-stakeholder model that does not replace the US government with another government or multi-government organisation like the ITU or the UN. Turnbull said the Australian government supports this approach. "The internet is the most remarkable invention of our times and while it had its origins in research contracts with the US government its growth, its dynamism, its resilience have all been the result of collaborative efforts by the wide internet community not government regulation or fiat," he said.

Gates sees software replacing people; Greenspan calls for more H-1Bs
"We cannot manage our very complex, highly sophisticated capital structure with what's coming out of our high schools," said Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The impact of automation on the labor market, whether it's for drivers, waiters or nurses, is progressing, said Gates. "It's the low income jobs that are really being eliminated by globalization," said Gates in a separate interview at The Atlantic. "Now the quality of automation, software artificial intelligence, is improving fast enough that you can start to worry about middle class jobs. But mostly it has not been information work or middle class jobs," he said.

Do you have “half dead” processes haunting your company?
The lifeblood of processes are the actors of it – whether it’s somebody who processes payroll or the guy who writes the computer code for a robot in a car factory. It’s your people who have the potential to truly bring your processes to life. So are your processes zombies, executing brainless tasks, or are they living and making this a place better to live and work for all of us? Don’t worry; I won’t be going into any new age stuff or founding a new BPM religion. But here are a few thoughts on how to evaluate how alive your processes are. To see whether the processes are alive, we need to break them apart into their main components and see how they’re doing.

Design Patterns for Data Persistence: Unit-of-Work Pattern And Repository Pattern
Microsoft really likes the Unit-of-Work Pattern, so most every sample you see coming out of their shops will include this pattern. The general theory is you have a reference to a stateful link to your data store — a Data Context — that will queue up your queries and then execute all the steps at once within a transaction. They’ll either all succeed or they’ll all fail. For example you’re placing an order in an Order Entry system. You may insert or update the Customer record, insert an Order header, insert one or more Order detail lines, perhaps update the product’s available count.

Key Questions to Ask during Master Data Consolidation
Typical master data consolidation starts with combining the operational master records from all the data silos where they exist. The key aspect being, creation of master data indexes to support single view; knowing and asking right questions during this phase can save lot of time and rework. In an earlier post on this blog, I examined the ways in which we can identify the right sources of Master Data. Once these data sources are identified, next step is to select the right data elements from them, which confront to the definition of master data.

Object-orientation in C — Part 3
For non-trivial class hierarchies the method proposed in Part2 is probably not optimal. The main reason is that there is only one C struct which is used by base and subclasses. Consequently, the hierarchical tree is only implicitlycontained in the data structures and therefor, in this last part of the series, we introduce a more explicit technique that closely resembles “C++ in C”. Let us start with main() just to show where we’re heading for. The UML diagram of the code can be found in Part2 except that we have changed ‘id’ to ‘label’.

Making The Most of Cultural Differences in Transformation Projects
There is one thing, though, that many transformation efforts I’ve been associated with tend to overlook: cultural differences. It might be ok – just possibly – to ignore this subject if you are working for a single-country organisation such as a government or public sector body or a small business. But in the main, transformation programmes have an international dimension, sometimes to a significant degree. Getting culture right is critical. And people from other cultures and countries are just so…strange. This can be infuriating – see this recent piece on the HBR blog – but it can also be a great boost to your change initiative and its operational success – as explained in a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report.

How will Cisco-Sourcefire security combo affect Cisco product roadmap?
In this interview at the 2014 RSA Conference, Roesch discusses the challenges of bringing the two companies' perimeter firewall, next-generation firewall and IPS technologies together, as well as his hopes for a centralized management product. He also explains the ways in which Sourcefire's unique technology might be applied to Cisco's broad base of existing network security customers. Finally Roesch discusses Cisco's new OpenAppID open source Snort plugin for application control, and what's ahead for Snort and Cisco's open source security product portfolio.

Quote for the day:

"Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories" -- Polybius

March 16, 2014

What the C-Suite Needs to Prepare for in the Era of BYO Technology
The convergence of this next era of computing – we call it Open Platform 3.0™ – is creating a Balkanization of the traditional IT department. IT is no longer the control center for technology resources. As we’ve been witnessing over the past few years and as industry pundits have been prognosticating, IT is changing to become more of a service-based command central than a control center from which IT decisions are made. These changes are happening within enterprises everywhere.

Why shouldn't I test private methods?
If you’re trying to test private methods, you’re doing something wrong. You can’t get to TDD nirvana from here, you’re gonna have to go back. It all started with an innocuous little class with an innocuous little method. It did one little job, had a nice little unit test to verify it did its thing correctly. All was right with the world. Then, I had to add an extra little piece of logic. I wrote a test for it, changed the class until the test passed. Happy place. Then I started refactoring. I realised my little method, with its handful of test cases was getting quite complicated, so I used the extract method refactoring and boom! I have a private method.

10 Programming Languages You Should Learn in 2014
Coding skills are in high demand, with programming jobs paying significantly more than the average position. Even beyond the tech world, an understanding of at least one programming language makes an impressive addition to any resumé. The in-vogue languages vary by employment sector. Financial and enterprise systems need to perform complicated functions and remain highly organized, requiring languages like Java and C#. Media- and design-related webpages and software will require dynamic, versatile and functional languages with minimal code, such as Ruby, PHP, JavaScript and Objective-C.

IT Governance - Implementation Obstacles
A recent empirical study by Lee uncovered factors such as ‘lack of IT principles and policies’, ‘lack of clear IT Governance processes’, ‘lack of communication’, and ‘inadequate stakeholder involvement’, as inhibitors of IT Governance implementation success. A good understanding on the barriers or obstacles that hinder the success of IT Governance implementation is important as once understood, their effect is understood and pre-emptive actions can be taken to address them. Implementing IT Governance is a long and continuous journey, where obstacles and challenges are aplenty.

The Impact of Information Governance Trends on E-Discovery Practices in 2014
While information governance (IG) may be a gigantic, broad category, GCs and CIOs were hit with a startling realization: For their organizations to significantly reduce e-discovery costs they must proactively manage electronic information at an enterprise level. This starts with information governance. In this interview, David speaks about his recent emphasis on information governance and its effects on the field of e-discovery.

NIST Guide Aims to Ease Access Control
The flexibility of the ABAC model allows the greatest breadth of subjects to access the greatest breadth of objects without specifying individual relationships between each subject and each object, according to the NIST guidance. "Access decisions can change between requests by simply changing attribute values, without the need to change the subject/object relationships defining underlying rule sets," says NIST Computer Scientist Vincent Hu, who co-wrote the guidance. "This provides a more dynamic access control management capability and limits long-term maintenance requirements of object protections."

Seven benefits of cloud from an enterprise architect point of view
Additional breakthroughs in horizontal and vertical markets as well as the birth of new ecosystems and development platforms provide the construct behind a continuum of opportunity for businesses to benefit from cloud providers’ enhancements to technology offerings. To truly appreciate and take advantage of the impact and benefits of cloud computing, I believe that you must also understand that cloud is primarily an extension of IT and your business. Even though this may be a tall order, I will take this opportunity to introduce you to the benefits of cloud from an enterprise architect perspective and show how it relates to your business.

The PaaS shakeup and what it means for OpenStack
The new OpenStack Havana release sends strong signals to the industry that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors may suddenly have “irrelevant” stamped on their backs. No matter how elaborate or venerable your existing business may be, proving your value inside the rapidly expanding OpenStack ecosystem is no easy task. This time it is the established PaaS vendors like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift who are feeling the heat. A fun guessing game is naming the established players who are next in the stack to get crushed.

Climbing the ladder from EITA to EA
While the entire team should work on this, only a few will succeed. Good news: That’s all you need. However, it’s important that everyone makes the attempt to climb the ladder. As a manager, I have no magic “test” to determine, for certain, which member of the team will make the transition and which won’t. I once thought I did, but reality proved me wrong. So everyone makes the attempt. Those who remain EITA’s can continue in that role for the EA team, or they can transfer to a different group where their technical skills are valuable and needed. So, how is this done? How does an individual EITA climb the ladder?

Collaboration in the Cloud: The Continuity Advantage
Cloud-based collaboration services come with redundancy built into all levels of service delivery from network connectivity and power to all the hardware within the cloud facility and the application itself. Providers rely on redundant facilities so if one facility suffers a site-wide outage, delivery can be handed off to another facility to minimize downtime. The most stable cloud-based collaboration solutions employ multiple layers of physical and logical security to protect data integrity. Ultimately, the aim is to ensure that not only do users have consistent and reliable access to the tools they need to do business but the information they exchange is secure.

Quote for the day:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." -- Mark Twain

March 15, 2014

Dubai Aims To Be City of Gold Standard in Tech
What is interesting is that a lot of companies see the Expo as a catalyst for growth and innovation, particularly in the tech sector. In truth, it’s a massive challenge. The UAE as a whole ranks low in terms of innovation and investment. According to a World Bank report it comes in at 39, below Costa Rica and Romania. As world tech cities go, it doesn’t fare any better. Dubai didn’t feature in a World Economic Forum report this month and it doesn’t feature in various lists of the World’s top areas for tech startups.

How Target detected hack but failed to act
A team of security professionals was set up in Bangalore to monitor Target's network servers and alert security operators in Minneapolis of any detected malware. And this process worked as expected during the November hack. After detecting the hack, the people in Bangalore alerted the people in Minneapolis. But that's where the ball got dropped, according to Bloomberg. The hack continued on its merry way. Why was the hack successful despite all the warning signs? Bloomberg's sources pointed to a few reasons.

Exchange CEOs say they are on high alert over cyber security
More than half of the world's exchanges were hit by cyber attacks in 2012, according to a paper released last year by the World Federation of Exchanges Office and the research department of the International Organization of Securities Commissions. "We are worried a lot and we are far more worried now than we were just a couple of years ago," Magnus Bocker, chief executive of Singapore Exchange Ltd, said during a panel discussion at the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida on Wednesday.

CA Technologies Partners with the Wharton School's Mack Institute for Innovation Management
"Software is disrupting many industries and fundamentally redefining business models. CA Technologies has been one of the leaders in the enterprise software space for nearly 40 years, and its solutions are at the center of the world's largest and most complex enterprises. With this rich industry heritage and focus on continued innovation, CA Technologies brings a very valuable perspective to the Mack Institute," said Mack Institute Co-director Nicolaj Siggelkow.

Long Live Television: Digital Video Ad Convergence Keeps TV Relevant
Now, TV as an ad platform has started to absorb many of the characteristics of the digital ad world (i.e. rich viewing data, enhanced measurement techniques, etc.)…our participants agreed that this presents TV companies, which already have large audiences, valuable content and tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue, with the opportunity to be pivotal players in the future of video advertising. The Nielson report went on to form this general conclusion about Digital Video Ad Convergence: For this convergence to take place, the advertising industry will need to embrace video as a platform agnostic medium. Then video, not the delivery channels, becomes the medium.

IT Age Discrimination: You're Not The Dinosaur
In my last column, I wrote that if you've had a rich, accomplished career and you've kept your skill set sharp, there's more work to be had and done. One snarky reader replied: "Yeah, move to India." Really? So you're saying on one hand that you're expert, skilled and motivated? But on the other hand, you're saying there's nowhere else in the U.S. for you to contribute value and get paid for it? Perhaps you're not looking beyond the big, idiotic IT employers. It's time to take a look at small and midsize companies, those that are growing quickly and whose business practices aren't steeped in generations of dysfunction and shortsightedness.

Embarcadero buys CA's Erwin data modeling tools
The acquisition puts Embarcadero in the lead of the data modeling market, according to Al Hilwa, program director for application development software research the IT analyst firm IDC. The data and systems modeling market will grow in the next few years, as organizations work to implement and manage big-data-styled collection and analysis systems, Hilwa said. To meet customer expectations, tool vendors must integrate modeling with other aspects of system building and maintenance, such as project planning or investment management.

A World-Class London Needs Free, Fast Broadband
Surely, making London a single free zone providing secure, reliable and comprehensive WiFi and other modes of internet access is vital if London is to continue attracting talented people to live and work here? Some power-brokers have long talked a good game on this front. Mayor of London candidate Brian Paddick in 2008 said he would cut Transport for London’s advertising budget to invest in free city-wide WiFi for all. "London is a 21st century city and as Mayor I would want to see 21st century technology accessible to all," said Paddick.

Banks Pushed Toward Cloud Computing by Cost Pressures
"Financial services is experiencing a fundamental shift in enterprise IT while it suffers from a credit crisis hangover," says Tony Bishop, the chief strategy officer at 451 Research, who built one of the first internal clouds in financial services at Wachovia several years ago. A secondary reason for switching to the cloud is that the broader economy is shifting towards all things digitally delivered and consumed, over a variety of devices. "This is remaking how enterprise IT must support customers, employees, and partners," Bishop says.

OpenJDK and HashMap …. Safely Teaching an Old Dog New (Off-Heap!) Tricks
Achieving high performance when using "synchronized" requires low contention rates. This is very common, so in many cases, it is not as bad as it sounds. However once you introduce any contention (multiple threads trying to operate on the same collection at the same time) performance will be impacted. In the worst case, with high lock contention, you might end up having multiple threads exhibiting poorer performance than a single thread's performance (operating with no locking or contention of any kind).

Quote for the day:

"Leadership development is a lifetime journey, not a quick trip." -- John Maxwell

March 14, 2014

Social engineering attacks: Is security focused on the wrong problem?
Anyone -- even pros -- can become a victim of a social-engineering attack. "It's nearly impossible to detect you've been socially engineered," said Daniel Cohen, head of knowledge delivery and business development for RSA's FraudAction group, who says malicious social engineering is one of the biggest problems for security. "As long as there's a conscious interface between man and machine, social engineering will always exist." Money is the main reason malicious social engineering is so pervasive. In October 2013, RSA identified more than 62,000 phishing attacks, which raised the bar in terms of number of attacks carried out within a single month.

Defense Department Adopts NIST Security Standards
The change in policy reflects a "move away from unique DOD standards, to a more broad use of the NIST standards and other government standards," Takai told InformationWeek in an interview last December in advance of the instruction letter's formal release. The change was prompted in part because, she said, "we were concerned we're driving up our costs by virtue of having companies have to fit our standards as well as to other national standards."

Why Leaders Are Poor Communicators
It’s often said that employees don’t leave a job; they leave their manager. A manager doesn’t have to be malevolent. It’s a tough slog when you don’t know what your boss wants or if there’s simply no connection to leadership or a common purpose. Further, communications builds trust – and erodes it quickly when missing or bungled. To that point, in a study captured in the article, “How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders,” most of the improvements listed by Harvard Business Review contributors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman involve shifts in how managers communicated with others.

NSA Disputes Report On Program To Automate Infection Of 'Millions' Of Machines
The agency said it does not "use its technical capabilities to impersonate U.S. company websites" and it only targets users under proper legal authority. "Reports of indiscriminate computer exploitation operations are simply false," according to the NSA. "NSA’s authorities require that its foreign intelligence operations support valid national security requirements, protect the legitimate privacy interests of all persons, and be as tailored as feasible." Meanwhile, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today said he had called President Obama to voice his concerns about media reports on government surveillance.

5 Ways CIOs Can Rationalize Application Portfolios
"There's a striking difference from 2011: IT is considered much more, particularly by the business side, as something that helps them innovate and inform themselves," says Ron Tolido, senior vice president, Application Services, at consulting, technology and outsourcing services provider Capgemini. Tolido is also the author of Capgemini's recently released Application Landscape Report 2014, a follow-up to a 2011 report on the same subject. "In 2011, IT was much more looked at for cost reduction," Tolido adds. "Now it's seen as a strategic enabler. It puts a lot of the CIOs that we've been surveying under a lot of additional pressure."

The new security perimeter: Human Sensors
So how long have you been a responsible cyber citizen? Where did you learn to become one? We all learned how to drive a car and hopefully we are responsible drivers, at least there is training and a test for drivers of automobiles. What about being a responsible cyber citizen? There is no official curriculum in our schools for it? Can you actually cause your country and yourself significant monetary losses or worse, just by not being aware of the dangers that lurk on the internet? The point is, over time malware has become quite sophisticated, what started as a prank in the 1980s is now a multi-billion dollar cyber-crime industry.

Enterprise social media: New battleground for CIO influence
First, social media is part of the ongoing digital transformation taking place in almost all industries. Although social media remains centralized among a few people in a single team, the role of social will eventually expand beyond marketing and customer service to encompass aspects of core operations. Business is about communication so it makes sense that the importance of social media, which means communication, will grow over time. Smart CIOs will embrace this future today rather than waiting.

Mobility bandwagon: Developing enterprise mobile applications
The second fundamental concern an organization must address is security testing. If IT security teams are going to expose the application, its data and the back-end services to the Internet, they have to know that it's packaged for the potential onslaught of malicious actors and curious users. With every interface a potential source of attacks, development teams need to ensure that they understand the risks these applications can add and the vulnerabilities that exist.

Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code
Some employers have learned to look for this combination of talents. Dan Melton, deputy chief technology officer at Granicus, a San Francisco-based startup that puts government data in the cloud, has hired two students with humanities backgrounds from App Academy. He said he looks for those students because they’re able to work better with other programmers and clients and understand the larger meaning of the work. “We already have a lot of software whiz kids,” Melton said. “We like to hire people who are interested in public affairs and civic engagement.”

Huawei chip partnership looks toward Ethernet hitting 400 gigabits
At the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference in San Francisco, Huawei and Xilinx showed off a router line card that they say could handle 400Gbps Ethernet. The part is only a prototype and Huawei doesn't plan to sell a pre-standard product, but the demonstration shows the two vendors are already gearing up for the next version of Ethernet, said Chuck Adams, distinguished standards strategist at Huawei's U.S. R&D center.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing is so potent as the silent influence of a good example" -- James Kent

March 13, 2014

Lambda Architecture: Design Simpler, Resilient, Maintainable and Scalable Big Data Solutions
Lambda Architecture proposes a simpler, elegant paradigm that is designed to tame complexity while being able to store and effectively process large amounts of data. The Lambda Architecture was originally presented by Nathan Marz, who is well known in the big data community for his work on the Storm project. In this article, we will present the motivation behind the Lambda Architecture, review its structure, and end with a working sample. For further details on the Lambda Architecture, readers are advised to refer to Nathan Marz’s upcoming book Big Data.

Want secure software? Listen to Marge Simpson
When it comes to sourcing our security software, the great analyst Marge Simpson was right: "We can't afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy" — whether that philosophy is about being designed by Apple in California, or many eyes, or freedom, or whatever hand-waving feelpinions people might proffer. No, we don't need a philosophy so much as need need science — or, more accurately, engineering.

IT partnership investment: Measuring ROI of the vendor-partner relationship
PartnerPath predicts that someday the tables will turn completely, and it will be the solution providers -- rather than the vendors -- that set the requirements to qualify vendors as gold- or platinum-level partners, for example. On the topic of profitability, Lowe said it involves more than just front-end margins. In fact, he described it as a complicated formula. The equation: Opportunity divided by investment equals profitability return. Opportunity breaks down into three buckets: market demand, financial reward and program support. Investment also breaks down into three buckets: enablement, relationship and ease of doing business.

Will Microsoft's new activist board member force it to clean up its Windows act?
The new board member is G. Mason Morfit, president of ValueAct Capital, and he essentially pushed his way into Microsoft's board room. ValueAct, an investment firm with over $14 billion in assets, had been accumulating Microsoft stock, and had gathered 0.8 percent. That's a lot more sizable number than it seems, given that it is held by a single company -- especially an activist one like ValueAct.

Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?
"The premise of breach detection is things will get through all your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible," says Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs, which has begun testing what it calls BDS products that can identify evidence of stealthy cyberattacks, track down what corporate computers and networks were hit and quickly mitigate against any malware dropped in that attack which would be used to spy and exfiltrate sensitive data. BDS products, however they do it -- through sandboxing, an endpoint agent or other approach -- should be able to at least catch the breach within 48 hours, he says.

Entrepreneurs’ tips for managing employees with different worldviews
The Young Entrepreneur Council is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.Read previous SmartBlogs posts by YEC.

Q&A with Microsoft's channel chief Phil Sorgen
If we take cloud, one of the biggest transformations going on right now, of the successful cloud companies growing the fastest what they sell looks different from what it did previously as they are doing more managed services and more IP related services and they are getting into repeatable methodologies and repeatable IP. They are finding they can expand their footprint geographically more readily than in the past so customer acquisition in the cloud can be faster.

NSA: Our zero days put you at risk, but we do what we like with them
While the NSA is known to build and use exploits for zero day flaws in its foreign intelligence missions, little is known about what rules, if any, it follows for disclosing flaws to vendors so that organisations in the US and allied countries can mitigate the risk of attacks that are being used in the wild. NSA chief nominee US Navy vice admiral Michael S Rogers on Tuesday gave a vague outline of rules the spy agency has for handling such flaws, which includes an internal "adjudication process" for determining whether to let the vendor of an affected product know about it; or just keep it under wraps for spying.

Sustaining Kanban in the Enterprise
The key here not to use pre-cooked solutions (e.g. use a standard visualization board and standard policies). These canned solutions will probably help in the (very) short term - the team starts with “something” - but it will very quickly fail the team by not mapping to the team’s reality and challenges. The biggest problem with pre-cooked solutions is that they let the team members believe that they do not need to think, as someone else (in an totally different context) has already done the thinking for them.

Cisco on mission to outfit all office rooms with video conferencing systems
Cisco isn't the only company focusing on this. Microsoft is also making a strong push with its Lync unified communications server, which can be deployed on customer premises and, with a subset of the functionality, accessed via the Office 365 public cloud suite. Other competing providers of UC and video conferencing systems in particular include IBM, Avaya, Siemens' Unify, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel and ShoreTel. Of course, Cisco has been a big player in video conferencing for years, catering to the low-end of the market with its WebEx line of products and to the high-end with its whole-room Tandberg systems.

Quote for the day:

“Nothing gives so much direction to a person's life as a sound set of principles.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

March 12, 2014

AI researcher says amoral robots pose a danger to humanity
Robots are only now beginning to act autonomously. A DARPA robotics challenge late last year showed just how much human control robots -- especially, humanoid robots -- still need. The same is true with weaponized autonomous robots, which the U.S. military has said need human controllers for big, and potentially lethal, decisions. But what happens in 10 or 20 years when robots have advanced exponentially and are working in homes as human aides and care givers? What happens when robots are fully at work in the military or law enforcement, or have control of a nation's missile defense system?

UK to help lead world fight against cyber crime
“To get access to those skills we have to look at how we can engage with industry through programmes which allow people to work with law enforcement on a part-time voluntary basis,” he said. Looking to the future, Archibald said the NCCU is investing a “considerable amount of money” in developing law enforcement officers from officers on the beat all the way up to the high-end skills. Finally, he admitted that in the past, engagement with industry had tended to be on the terms of law enforcement, which had made decisions on things like media coverage with little regard to reputational damage to the businesses involved.

Do-it-yourself corporate cloud with ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition
The Enterprise Edition is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure. Designed from the ground up to be fully deployed on premises, it enables integration into existing user management tools, governance processes, and security, monitoring, and back-up tools. ... As you would expect, ownCloud Enterprise Edition is based on ownCloud Community Edition. With more than 1.3 million users, the Community Edition is one of the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software programs.

Aruba Announces 5 Software Tools for Optimizing Wi-Fi Networks
Several of the software improvements -- all free to existing customers -- are designed to help IT managers optimize their oversight of Wi-Fi networks, which can lower help desk complaints and improve worker efficiency. One of the new tools, Auto Sign-On, is focused on helping end users. Instead of signing in to each enterprise application, such as SalesForce.com, with a lengthy password that's hard to input on a small smartphone keyboard, the tool uses a worker's Wi-Fi login to automatically authenticate an employee with single sign-on.

25 years of the World Wide Web
The Web has changed the way we work, share our lives with family and friends and even play games. This one innovation has brought an astonishing level of change in a short amount of time. Today, the Web is marking its 25th anniversary. On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, introduced the idea of the World Wide Web in a proposal for an information system. Here, technology leaders, including Vint Cerf, and executives from Intel and AOL, reflect on how the Web has affected the world we live in.

Twitter's Biz Stone is a humble 'Hallucinogenic optimist'
Biz Stone is way too humble. What’s the point in hitting the jackpot when you are too self conscious to use the money in a way that you weren’t able? Time to grow up and grow into your money. You are forty years old. You can live well and do well too. Money is more than philanthropy it is also a means of actively creating the future. Techno-optimists must also become techno-activists — to make sure we get the right future. It won’t come about by itself. We could easily end up in some nightmarish version of a tech-enabled North Korea.

Internet of things cannot be about products alone, warn experts
While they agree that the government funding is a huge opportunity for the UK technology industry, they believe that ongoing success is dependent on companies ensuring they can keep both personal and commercial data safe, and building security and privacy into products from the start. “The benefits that these intelligent, connected devices bring to our lives are almost too numerous to count. However, when we gift these things with intelligence and senses, we also fundamentally change their very nature,” said Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at Lookout.

eBook: The practical approach to Windows Phone 8 development.
The Windows Phone 8 operating system is closely tied to the hardware of Windows Phones, enabling the development of high-performance apps that provide excellent user experiences. With Windows Phone 8 Development Succinctly by Matteo Pagani, you’ll go from creating a “Hello World” app to managing network data usage, enabling users to talk to your application through speech APIs, and earning money through in-app purchases. Dozens of additional features are covered in the book, including launchers, choosers, and geolocation services, so you’ll have a place to start no matter what you want your app to do.

GPS tech built to find missing aircraft not always used
Aviation authorities around the world are starting to implement plans to supplement radar with GPS technologies, but that won't happen everywhere for another 10 years or so, he said. Eventually, all position data will come from the plane. "We're not there yet," Graham said. The major aircraft tracking technologies include Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), said Ric Peri, vice president of government and industry affairs at the Aircraft Electronics Association. Rather than relying on a radar ping, ADS-B uses a GPS signal and an aircraft's navigation system to determine the position of a flight and then broadcast that information, he said.

Is Office 365 worth spending 3x more than on Google Apps?
Microsoft's messaging products (Exchange, Outlook) are ubiquitous. Microsoft and Google both know how to operate secure, cloud-scale operations. Office Web Apps and Google Docs are feature-equivalent. The advantage Microsoft has is the enormous, and universal capabilities of full, installed Office. The curious thing is that although you probably don't really need it, and by extension don't need to pay for it, it's sufficiently cheap that you might as well operate on the old maxim that it's easier just to pay for it, and forget about thinking about it.

Quote for the day:

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success." -- Henry David Thoreau

March 11, 2014

User Experience Design Guidelines for Tablets running Android
While the mobile devices we have today and incredibly powerful compared to computers of just a few years back, they don’t compare to the memory and processor power your desktop computer has. Because your users are mobile and using your application as they move about, you need to keep your application fast and responsive. Your users could be on a bus or train in a moving environment and need to be able to reliably use the UI (can they press a small button when the screen is moving around?). Additionally you need to account for the possibility of drops in network coverage.

Embracing SOA and the cloud: Hybrid integration paradigms offer choices
"It was a multi-enterprise business integration play," said Stamas. "We don't look at it as application integration, but business integration. We are connecting the applications and systems of business partners and service providers. We wanted to embrace SOA and the cloud. SOA provides the abstraction for the applications. The cloud providers provide the abstractions for the hardware and scalability." This hybrid approach allowed them to focus on managing the business process rather than the technology.

Intel's fastest connector lights up data transfers
The cables are smaller, more durable and have a range of up to 300 meters, compared to copper, which can cover only a limited distance, Paniccia said. Ethernet is slower per lane and signals could degrade on cables that are longer than tens of meters, Paniccia said. "It really drives the ability for bandwidth and distance separation," Paniccia said. "We believe the transition's happening to move to fiber." Pricing for the cables was not provided by Corning, which said it would start making cables for end customers in the third quarter.

This Is Why It Feels Like Apple Stopped Innovating Three Years Ago
"If not, chances are your customer will recall the negatives of the feature far more than the positives." Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if the touchscreen only worked 79% of the time? Very few people would have ever bought an iPhone. The reason it feels like Apple has stopped innovating to so many people is that the last time it tried to do what it does best - perfect a technology that allows humans to interact with computers - it failed. And that was two and a half years ago. The last time it succeed was 2006 - eight years ago.

The secrets to executive presence
Why is dress so important? Well, the clothes still don’t make the wo/man, but often they do help you feel like you’re ready for that big step. And it’s that feeling — of confidence and readiness — that communicates most powerfully about your ability in the moments after the person across the meeting table notices your new outfit. What’s with that “feeling”? Isn’t that a bit squishy? People know “boardroom presence” when they see it, but how can you develop it if you’ve never been in the boardroom hot seat? It seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, doesn’t it?

Is privacy undermining trade in digital services?
“Any protectionist measure is a bad thing, particularly in the cloud industry which is essentially global. There’s no harm in selling to customers in the EU on the basis it will keep data within the EU if it’s what they want; but for data protection law it should be kept secure no matter where in world.” A similar warning comes from Thomas Boué ... He says there are proposals going around Brussels with elements of digital protectionism, and cites a European Parliament report calling for the suspension of the Safe Harbour mechanism with the US and to keep European data within Europe.

Design Patterns in ASP.NET
Design patterns are the most powerful tool for software developer. It is important to understand design patterns rather than memorizing its classes, methods and properties. It is also important to learn how to apply pattern to specific problem to get the desired result. This will be required continuous practice of using and applying design patterns in day to day software development. First, identify the software design problem, then see how to address these problems using design patterns and find out the best suited design problem to solve the problem.

Snowden at SXSW: We need better encryption to save us from the surveillance state
Building better end-to-end encryption is the proposed solution to save us from the surveillance state; encryption that happens “automatically and seamlessly” so that average users can use it. If we can make it so that encryption is so easy that even non-techies can use it, then mass surveillance will be ineffective. Then the NSA “cannot spy on innocent people” simply “because they can.” Encryption will make it “too expensive to spy on everyone.” Granted, if the NSA targets you, then they will just hack into your devices, but "hacking doesn't scale."

Enterprise considerations for cloud firewall management and automation
While host-based cloud firewall management seems to be maturing, most enterprises still struggle with developing and maintaining network-based firewall rule sets in the cloud. Some of those difficulties are due to the lack of granularity and capability in many cloud providers' own firewalls, but other challenges often arise from building an automation strategy that can easily keep up with wire-speed firewalls and their complex rule sets in IaaS environments.

Big Data Makes CFOs More Effective
"In our discussions with CFOs over the past decade, the significance of technology and analytical tools in transforming the finance function and broader enterprise has continuously risen," said Bill Fuessler ... "Data has always sat in the center of a CFO's job responsibilities, and CFOs now recognize how insights from big data are helping their company become more competitive. CFOs are being asked to anticipate the future and discover new areas of revenue growth—we anticipate this will spur a new strategic alliance between the CFO and CMO as they partner to drive the corporate growth agenda."

Quote for the day:

"What is not started today is never finished tomorrow." -- Johann Wolfgang von