July 27, 2015

Nonstop Cyber Attacks Drive Israel to Build Hack-Proof Defense

“If I ranked the existential threats, cyber would come right behind nuclear weapons,’ said Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service and chairman of Cytegic, a company that has developed a digital dashboard and tools to help keep companies protected. Israel and the U.S. face some of the most serious cyber assailants in the world, said Daniel Garrie, executive managing partner of cyber-consulting firm Law & Forensics in New York. That forces them to be ‘‘light years ahead’’ in prevention. While attempted hack attacks on Israel reached 2 million a day during last year’s fighting in Gaza, the country has yet to report destructive events such as the theft of data from about 22 million people at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.


The government push to regulate driverless cars has finally begun

The bill, called the SPY Car Act, would require certain commitments from car manufacturers who want to build driverless or connected cars. For example, under the legislation the Federal Trade Commission would force automakers to use "reasonable measures" to protect the increasingly complex software that helps our cars run smoothly. Together with highway authorities, the FTC would also develop a window sticker that rates a new car's vulnerability to digital attack, in the same way consumers use fuel economy stickers to evaluate a car's potential gas mileage. Hackers who figure out how to take control of a car's brakes, engine or other systems not only pose a danger to those inside the affected vehicle but also to others around it.


Worried About a Cyber-Apocalypse? AIG Wants to Sell You a Policy

“We are listening to our customers, who tell us they are looking for larger limits -- some as high as $1 billion in coverage for cyber property damage and business interruption for larger corporate properties and facilities,” said Dan Riordan, chief executive officer of Zurich Global Corporate in North America. He wouldn’t say how much coverage Zurich might provide. Since the first cyberpolicy was written in the late 1990s, insurers have been unwilling to provide coverage for all losses. Most firms are reluctant to offer policies for property damage resulting from hacking because there’s almost no data available to determine costs, according Tracy Dolin, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s.


5 steps to becoming an enterprise architecture ninja

Enterprise architects have often logged years of IT and business experience, and have outstanding abilities to think both structurally and strategically. But when you ask them to rate what they're doing on a maturity scale -- say 1-5 -- plenty of very competent professionals look at their shoes and mumble 1 or even 0. Despite being tasked with making sure company systems have a solid foundation (and don't topple under their own complexity), managing product integration, digital transformation, and IT roadmaps, they don't often take the time to benchmark their own skills and contributions. If you're an enterprise architect, listen up. Charting your own personal roadmap is key to explaining the impact of your role, and winning respect and influence.


6 Smart Jewellery For The Perfect Fusion Of Fashion And Tech

While the Nike+ FuelBand, Fitbit Flex and Jawbone UP demonstrated potential in wearable computing with their tracking capabilities and accompanying mobile apps, the devices themselves looked more at home in the gym than in ones everyday life. Nowadays, a new breed of wearables, more female-targeted line of devices are starting to emerge, offering features that extend beyond health and fitness, as well as the look of “real” jewellery made with metals and stones instead of bulky plastic bands. The “Smart jewellery” range includes a wide range of devices: From those that keep one aware of important calls and texts to those that are meant to serve as protection for women in peril.


Your body, the battery: Powering gadgets from human “biofuel”

When it comes to energy-rich bodily fluids, blood is hard to beat. Plasma, the liquid component of blood, is constantly suffused with dissolved glucose, our cells’ primary source of energy. Most EFCs that have been developed to date target this molecule. The first EFC that could draw power directly from an organism's bloodstream was created in 2010. Its French developers implanted the inch-long device into the abdomen of a live rat, where it operated successfully for 11 days—apparently without much discomfort on the part of the host. During this time, it continually generated around two microwatts of power, which is more than enough to power a pacemaker in theory.


Outsourcing: How Cyber Resilient Are You?

In an effort to improve upon the results of the SEC and DFS reports, issuances from the FFIEC and FINRA provide third-party cyber guidance with a focus on resilience (i.e., the ability to withstand and recover from a cyber attack). Consistent with the regulators’ overall approach to cybersecurity, the guidance suggests an approach that is more advisory than enforcement-oriented and is principles-based rather than prescriptive. A prescriptive approach would make less sense at this stage, as cyber risks are evolving rapidly and financial institutions each have idiosyncratic exposures based on the particularities of the institution.


Interview: When Technology and Design Collide, then Collude

The two are intrinsically interlinked. Both provide inspiration for the other. There is an element of truth that sometimes limitations of technology can prevent designers from thinking big, but technology often comes up with inspiration and new ideas and approaches that design has never thought about. The theory is about incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation. It suggests that incremental innovation is climbing to the top of the existing hill that you're standing on. It's limited by the size of that hill. That's often what a lot of UX designers focus on. They run usability testing, trying to tweak and improve a particular product and service. But they lose sight of the fact that there might be other bigger mountains out there to climb.


How to find agility in the cloud

"We needed to move from where deployment was a post-application function to a Dev Ops culture," Juneja says. "We needed to bring in some talent that could address the leadership gap we had in cloud and in Dev Ops. The benefit of stabilizing and thinking about next-gen concurrently is we were able to do a lot of analysis of our existing stack, our existing team functions — idenfity the things we would do and not do in the new environment. This is where we identified the gaps in our skills and leadership. We brought in a vice president for cloud that had done cloud transformation for a healthcare company. We built a center of excellence for Dev Ops and brought in a leader from a major transactions company."


When DevOps isn't enough, try NoOps

For NoOps to work, it needs an IT platform that developers don’t need to worry about in terms of resource constraints – and that’s where the cloud comes in. Once the hardware is out of the hands of the organisation, the operations side of the equation becomes someone else’s problem. The cloud provider has the job of provisioning, monitoring and maintaining the hardware and – provided a suitable service level agreement (SLA) has been settled – the physical aspects of the platform become relatively immaterial. ... All too often, even in cascade projects, developers fall into the trap of believing their operational environment will perform the same as their development one, forgetting that much of what they do is self-contained in their own workstation or hived away from the vagaries of the main network.



Quote for the day:

"Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means." -- Max McKeown

July 24, 2015

Top Big Data Challenges, Revisited

There's also a shortage of people who can get the most out of all this new data. Harvard business review called Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century (it certainly sounds sexier than "actuary," which is perhaps the closest 20th century equivalent!). Data Scientists have deep analytic and statistical skills combined with knowledge of the business. They are in high demand and they command high salaries. What's new is that technology is helping to remove some of the the bottlenecks. For example there are now easier to use, more automated predictive analytics tools that can be deployed by, say, marketing staff looking to optimize campaigns.


Stakeholder Engagement: The Elephant in the Room

A process of any description is, in many ways, a means to an end—it helps us achieve a goal, output or outcome. Yet different stakeholders will want to achieve different things from that process—and sometimes these needs and wants might conflict. Uncovering these areas of disagreement early, discussing them and working to gain consensus is extremely beneficial. This builds engagement from the very beginning, makes it much more likely that we’ll foresee issues, and makes it much more likely that the process will deliver the benefits and outcomes that we are aiming for.


How IIT Bombay is popularizing robotics in India through its flagship initiative, e-Yantra

e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative (eLSI) provides guidance in setting up Robotics labs at colleges and trains a team of 4 teachers from each college. The eLSI does this through a three pronged approach. The first component of the e-Yantra Lab Setup initiative trains teachers through a two-day workshop on basic concepts in Embedded systems and Micro-controller programming, conducted at a coordinating college termed Nodal Center (NC), in different regions of the country. At the end of the workshop teacher team from each participating college is given a robotic kit to participate in an extended training program called Task Based Training (TBT).


Cars May Soon Understand More of What You Say

Ortiz says that such technology is now in the vehicle production pipeline, which means it may appear within a few years. It will primarily allow for more natural control of dashboard features and retrieval of information such as directions. “In the navigation domain, we’re developing methods to describe points of interest more abstractly,” he says. “I don’t always know the exact address of where I want to go. I want to be able to say ‘I want to go to a restaurant in the marina near the ballpark.’ “ Nuance came to dominate the market for voice-recognition technology over the past decade after acquiring various other companies in that space.


Cloud inventory management for CIOs: Build guardrails, not roadblocks

Organizations of all kinds are encountering workers using cloud apps without IT's knowledge. The usage stems from both individual workers seeking out cloud apps to help them perform a particular task, as well as entire departments lighting up enterprise apps in the cloud, said Forrester Research analyst Lauren Nelson. It's easy to do in both cases and often creates efficiencies in business processes for the workers and departments involved. Unfortunately, many CIOs are left out of the loop, and as a result, they quickly lose track of what apps are performing which functions, Nelson said. "You think you've identified what's being used, but then you find there are people using apps that didn't go through your process."


CIOs say AppleCare for Enterprise is lacking

Some of the services CIOs want from AppleCare for Enterprise, such as setup, training and technical support, are available as part of Apple's Joint Venture program, but it's managed by Apple retail stores and all eligible products must be purchased through Apple directly. Appley says Shorenstein pays $500 per year for this service and it covers up to five individuals, each of whom can receive support for multiple Apple devices. "It helps us get to the front of the line at the Genius Bar," he says. Businesses that pay for membership in the Joint Venture program also get up to 6 hours of in-store training each year and receive in-store assistance with device setup, including supervised data transfer from other devices.


The 12 disruptive tech trends you need to know

People pay plenty of money for consulting giants to help them figure out which technology trends are fads and which will stick. You could go that route, or get the same thing from the McKinsey Global Institute’s in-house think-tank for the cost of a new book. No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, was written by McKinsey directors Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, and offers insight into which developments will have the greatest impact on the business world in coming decades. Below, we’re recapping their list of the “Disruptive Dozen”—the technologies the group believes have the greatest potential to remake today’s business landscape.


Combining Knowledge- and Data-driven Methods for De-identification of Clinical Narratives

A recent promise and the potential of wider availability of data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to support clinical research are often hindered by personal health information that is present in EHRs, raising a number of ethical and legal issues. De-identification of such data is therefore one of the main pre-requisites for using EHRs in clinical research. As a result, there is a growing interest for automated de-identification methods to ultimately aid accessibility to data by removing Protected Health Information (PHI) from clinical records. De-identification of unstructured data in particular is challenging, as PHI can appear virtually anywhere in a clinical narrative or letter.


Worried About a Cyber-Apocalypse? AIG Wants to Sell You a Policy

Zurich Insurance Group AG and Munich Re say they are considering offering infrastructure-damage policies similar to AIG’s. None of the companies has signed a contract. “We are listening to our customers, who tell us they are looking for larger limits -- some as high as $1 billion in coverage for cyber property damage and business interruption for larger corporate properties and facilities,” said Dan Riordan, chief executive officer of Zurich Global Corporate in North America. He wouldn’t say how much coverage Zurich might provide. Since the first cyberpolicy was written in the late 1990s, insurers have been unwilling to provide coverage for all losses.


The Hierarchy of Needs

Related to software quality this means for one thing that robustness, safety and understandability will become relevant only if the software is runnable on the customer’s device and performs the tasks it is intended for. Further it means that an increase in functionality may not result in a higher quality experience on the customer’s side if his or her functional needs are saturated but higher needs are not. For a potential customer functionality is central. For a customer who uses the software already the functionality is more of a given fact. He or she will often expect other and higher quality attributes instead in a new release.




Quote for the day:

"The problems we have today, cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them." -- Albert Einstein

July 23, 2015

The Art of Empathetic Observation

Many technical people immediately presume that we can’t learn from ordinary people who are not experts in the technologies related to our business. One of the participants in my session this week quoted Henry Ford who once said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Yes, it’s true that most people can’t imagine something they have never before seen or experienced. ... So if we can’t ask consumers what they want from us, how do we gain the understanding we need to create breakthrough innovations? The art of empathetic observation is a means to observe and listen to customers as they – Make their own purchase decisions; – Use our products or services


Delivering Application-Centric Network and Security Services

Automation creates a standardized repeatable process that helps accelerate delivery, reducing the time needed to perform the task. At the same time automation also improves the consistency and reliability of the final configuration by elimination of manual errors. Finally automation reduces operational costs by eliminating many manual tasks, and improves development productivity by delivering application environments to engineers faster. vRealize Automation, used in conjunction with NSX, automates an application’s network connectivity, security, performance, and availability.


Germany's startup policy blasted

"Ironically, regarding startups, the Digital Agenda remains vague," Dirks said. The telecoms exec advocated cutting the bureaucratic red-tape that can hinder smaller firms, especially in their first four years of existence. He also said that new legislation around venture capital law is urgently needed to spur investment in young companies. German venture capital-backed tech firms attracted about $1.28bn in funding in 2014, according to CB Insights, a dramatic increase over the $578m raised the previous year, but it still pales in comparison to $21.8bn that flowed to California startups in 2014. In addition to more startup support, Bitkom said that education and training is another key area that the German government should focus on.


Empathic Design: Is Empathy the UX Holy Grail?

Empathic design is the process of developing an understanding of users, not just their overt needs, but of their constraints, practices, problem-solving approaches, contexts, and the interrelations between people as a whole. The aim of researching users in such a way is to help designers identify their users' underlying needs (i.e. those that are not instantly apparent or accessible through questioning alone). Once we have established these needs we can develop new problem-solving approaches that accommodate the users' constraints and exploit (in a nice way) their capabilities. The ultimate aim is to improve the user's or consumer's experience by tailoring the product to their explicit, implicit, and latent needs.


Stop hiring data scientists until you’re ready for data science

In the words of the data scientist I spoke with last week: “Anyone can hire a data scientist. Not every HR department or organization is ready for data science. Generating reports are not analytics — even if they’re prettier or faster reports. Dashboards are not analytics — even if they’re really pretty dashboards. More than anyone, HR should understand the devastating impact of changing job description on someone that’s been hired.” Ironically, that data scientist hire is perhaps one of the most brilliant and strategic hires that HR department has ever made — perhaps ever. But only if they let her do what she was hired to do. HR data scientists can help move HR from being tactical to strategic, using an analytics approach to highlight never seen before patterns, make decisions based on data, and the like.


Why enterprises aren't getting the full value they expect from cloud services

Negative perceptions of vendors have left decision-makers hesitant to adopt as-a-service platforms, as nearly half of the surveyed respondents feel their service providers are unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue models. Another reason for slow adoption may be a lack of consensus within organizations about the benefits and value as-a-service offerings can provide. When asked how important adoption was, 53% of operations leaders saw it as business-critical, while only 29% of middle managers agreed when asked the same question. With these concerns in mind, it’s no wonder that enterprises are being extremely methodical when it comes to cloud migration.


IBM’s Machine Learning Tech Takes on Solar Power’s Flakiness

The project used up a big chunk of the petabyte of storage dedicated to it, tapping into the DoE’s high-performance computing facilities for processing power. Data sources include sensor networks, local weather stations, cloud motion tracked by sky cameras and satellites, and historical records going back several decades. Variables are plugged into multiple forecasting models, with the system continuously tracking how they work under varying conditions. “We can actually see which one of those models or forecasting systems has performed better than others,” said Hamann, adding that the technology’s applications aren’t confined to solar.


A Case for Diversity in Our Workspaces

We can stop assuming that the same space will work for everyone all the time. We can provide lighting options. Allow pets in the workplace. Find appropriate ways of taking time out to make ourselves the creative space we need for problem solving. Create options that don’t make people feel uncomfortable: it is easier to say “I’m just going to make a coffee” than it is to say “I just need to move around a bit to re-establish where my body is in space”; it is easier to stroke the office dog than to say “I just need to re-calibrate my sense of touch so I can feel the keys on the keyboard when I code”; it’s easier to allow headphones at least some of the time than to expect everyone to be able to tune out the background hum of the open-plan workspace and pair programming teams.


End-User Computing: A Challenge for Data Governance Leadership

Data governance is not in the same position as IT with respect to EUC, and does not have to accept IT’s views on EUC. However, EUC is often not a priority for data governance. As noted earlier, many data governance units focus their efforts on dealing with IT and operations, and there is no natural constituency that represents EUC that data governance can deal with. Equally, EUC is often somewhat mysterious to data governance staff. There is not a lot written about it in the literature. Other, more familiar topics such as data quality and data definitions are likely to be areas in which data governance focuses its activities.


Cyber-hijacking: Hackers may try to take the wheel from drivers remotely

Among the most vivid examples came this week, when security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek demonstrated that they could hijack a vehicle over the Internet. By hacking into a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, the researchers were able to turn the steering wheel, briefly disable the brakes and shut down the engine. They also found readily accessible Internet links to thousands of Jeeps, Dodges and Chryslers that feature a proprietary wireless entertainment and navigation system called Uconnect. Valasek and Miller said they could, by merely typing the right series of commands, hack into these vehicles almost anywhere they might be driving.



Quote for the day:

"Now is the time. Needs are great, but your possibilities are greater." -- Bill Blackman

July 22, 2015

Java 9's New HTTP/2 and REPL

All of this means that support for HTTP/2 is a core piece of Java functionality for the next decade. It also allows us to revisit our old assumptions, rewrite the APIs and provide a "second bite of the apple". HTTP/2 will be a major API for every developer for years to come. The new API makes a clean break with the past, by abandoning any attempt to maintain protocol independence. Instead, the API focuses solely on HTTP, but with the additional understanding that HTTP/2 is not fundamentally changing semantics. Therefore, the API can be independent of HTTP version, whilst still providing support for the new framing and connection handling parts of the protocol.


4 ways to manage an overwhelming number of IT initiatives

While it may be tempting to simply stop entertaining new initiatives, this course of action is fraught with risk. Many IT services can now be provisioned with little more than a credit card, and any gaps can be filled by armies of willing consultants. Hanging out a metaphorical "No room at the inn" sign may cause constituents to go elsewhere. Furthermore, technology is changing very rapidly, and a new initiative may invalidate one or more existing initiatives. A new cloud service being requested by operations could eliminate a costly application upgrade or reporting tool, just as a new request by marketing could finally gain support for a less exciting, but dependent, infrastructure upgrade.


What Is A Creative Data Scientist Worth?

For some time, pockets of IT innovators have been creating industrial art which appeals to the head as well as the heart. People like the late Steve Jobs and Apple AAPL -0.12% design chief Jonathan Ive - true IT artists. I remember laying eyes on their ‘iLamp’ G4 iMac back in 2002. It was so original and ridiculously gorgeous. For the first time in my life, I forgot about MB, GB, or Ghz. I just wanted an iMac. And now, some data science outputs are being considered fine art in their own right. As well as creating competitive advantage, spawning new products, identifying fraud patterns, and changing business processes in ways that, until now, could only live in the imagination, these beautiful, hypnotic images are adding a new dimension; bringing data analytics to life.


What’s behind Linux’s new Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

The CNCF is advancing the discussion to consider how containers should be managed, not just how they’re created. That’s a good thing for the industry, and for end users. Big enterprise buyers aren’t going to really use containers until there are are mature platforms for managing them. ... Because the CNCF is attempting to create a reference architecture for running applications and containers, and Google’s Kubernetes will likely play a big role in that. AWS and Microsoft already have a reference architecture for running containers and they’re not looking to support competitor Google’s.


Unpacking technical jargon in machine learning

Machine learning is a child of statistics, computer science, and mathematical optimization. Along the way, it took inspiration from information theory, neural science, theoretical physics, and many other fields. Machine learning papers are often full of impenetrable mathematics and technical jargon. To make matters worse, sometimes the same methods were invented multiple times in different fields, under different names. The result is a new language that is unfamiliar even to experts in one of the originating fields. As a field, machine learning is relatively young. Large-scale applications of machine learning only started to appear in the last two decades. This aided the development of data science as a profession.


Next-generation endpoint protection not as easy as it sounds

The value of endpoint protection platforms is that they can identify specific attacks and speed the response to them once they are detected. They do this by gathering information about communications that go on among endpoints and other devices on the network, as well as changes made to the endpoint itself that may indicate compromise. The database of this endpoint telemetry then becomes a forensic tool for investigating attacks, mapping how they unfolded, discovering what devices need remediation and perhaps predicting what threat might arise next.


The Importance Of Design Thinking For Big Data Startups

Rather than thinking about competing products, think about competing processes. If you are selling into the marketing department, what is their current process for accomplishing the task you are serving? Your goal should be to make that process faster and more efficient. Additional features are great but if a potential client can do X faster with their current process, your offering of Y & Z doesn’t matter. You may win early but it will be difficult to last. Slack has done a remarkable job of accomplishing this. They are in a super competitive space of workplace collaboration. They did not win because of features; they won because of ease and simplicity.


Information security governance maturing, says Gartner

"The primary reasons for establishing this reporting line outside of IT are to improve separation between execution and oversight, to increase the corporate profile of the information security function and to break the mindset among employees and stakeholders that security is an IT problem," said Scholtz. According to Gartner, organisations increasingly recognise that security must be managed as a business risk issue, and not just as an operational IT issue. There is also an increasing understanding that cyber security challenges go beyond the traditional realm of IT into areas such as operational technology and the internet of things (IoT).


Hadoop for HPC—It Just Makes Sense

An increasing number of companies that already use High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running a Lustre file system for simulations sees the value of their existing data and future data. They are interested in what that data might reveal running Hadoop analytics on it. But building out a Hadoop cluster with massive amounts of local storage and replicating their data on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a considerably extensive and expensive undertaking, especially when the data already resides in a POSIX compliant Lustre file system. Today, these companies can adopt analytics written for Hadoop and run them on their HPC clusters.


7 Habits of Highly Effective Monitoring Infrastructures

Monolithic monitoring tools, on the other hand, often assume that you’ll never need to export the data they collect for you. The classic example is Nagios, which is, as you probably know, a tool designed to collect availability data at around 1-minute resolution. Because Nagios views itself as a monolithic monitoring tool, a plethora of single-purpose tools have sprung into being, for no other purpose than to take data from Nagios and place it in X, where X is some other monitoring tool from which it is usually even more difficult to extract the monitoring data. What you end up with is the now infamous anti-pattern of overly complex, difficult to repurpose, impossible to scale, single-purpose monitoring systems. Each tool we add to this chain locks us in further to the rest of the tool chain, by making it more difficult to replace any single piece.



Quote for the day:

"Corporate governance is not a matter or right or wrong 'it is more nuanced than that." -- Advocate Johan Myburgh

July 21, 2015

HTC on why 2016 is a 'critical' year for virtual reality

That's been a common reaction for anyone who has tried the Vive, the virtual reality setup built by partners HTC and Valve, according to Gattis, who shared the anecdote in an interview on Thursday. HTC will be counting on that wow factor as it pushes an entirely new product from its core business of making smartphones. It isn't alone. While HTC and Valve, best known for its Steam online gaming platform, have promised to launch the Vive later this year, Facebook's Oculus and Sony are expected to launch their own virtual reality headsets in 2016. Next year is shaping up to be when the public will get its first real look at this technology. "The industry needs a successful first year," Gattis said. "Next year is critical."


Google Fights Export Controls For 'Intrusion Software'

"It would be a disastrous outcome if an export regulation intended to make people more secure resulted in billions of users across the globe becoming persistently less secure," Martin and Willis write. In a letter sent to the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), Google argues that the proposed rules are too broad and vague, requiring potential export licenses for email, code review systems, instant messages, and perhaps even in-person conversation, despite assurances to the contrary. The rules, suggest Martin and Willis, could require an export license to report a bug and could limit the ability of companies to share information about intrusion software.


New PCI DSS guidance: increased compliance and cost implications

The PCI DSS’s additional guidance (released in June 2015) on maintaining business-as-usual compliance will help organisations assess and document how they maintain PCI DSS compliance on an ongoing basis. ... The DESV is intended to “provide greater assurance that PCI DSS controls are maintained effectively and on a continuous basis through validation of business-as-usual (BAU) processes, and increased validation and scoping consideration,” according to the FAQ sectionon the PCI SSC website. The PCI SSC stresses that the DESV can be used to complement any entity’s PCI DSS compliance efforts, and encourages the adoption of DESV as best practice – even for organisations that are not designated entities.


Intel's IoT future could come out of this accelerator

In an IoT future, software and hardware develop will meld into a single product - the chip that will give online life to refrigerators, washing machines, smart wearables, and the million other little things that will constantly upload, download, and analyze data to the nth degree. To succeed in that game, companies need the help of startups that can develop services, user interfaces, data analytics, and engineering to make interconnectivity work. In an increasingly interconnected world, tech firms have come to realize that they cannot do it all by themselves - and that by partnering with others, they can increase their own value a great deal more than they could by trying to keep everything in house.


Unifying Information Management – Why it Matters

Not surprising that the major obstacles continue to be the proliferation of silos of data sets, the lack of ability to show ROI and the buy-in/funding from executive management. Today’s data environment is getting more and more complex. We have evangelists for big data, discovery platforms, agile labs and cloud services achieving great success in providing capability for quick insights, realisation to value and fail fast discovery processes. However, these are often delivered as point solutions that result in further data silos. This adds even more complexity to the data environment/landscape. ... In its most basic form, every new initiative needs to be assessed as to its data asset impact.


Business cases emerge from growing pains of Hadoop 1.0

Chris Brown, big data lead at high-performance computing consultancy OCF, believes one of the issues is that the technology is simply not suitable for most organisations unless they are processing vast amounts of data – at least 1TB. “The lighthouse accounts for this are Amazon, Yahoo and Walmart, which are huge corporations – but we just don’t have that many in the UK apart from a few telcos, retailers or financial services organisations,” he says.  “So, for the small and medium-sized companies that are in the majority here, it’s huge overkill and is just too big an exercise for them to take on.” Another issue is generating a return on investment (ROI) – a situation exacerbated by the skills shortage Gartner cites, as it inevitably makes expertise expensive to buy in.


5 Questions to Ask Before Labeling a Business with the ‘S-Word’

We tend to call everything ‘sustainability,’ for the lack of a better term to describe the wide cross-section of business activities we deem ‘good.’ That does not make each fairly virtuous act sustainable. It doesn’t. Most of the mislabeled ‘good’ just compares favorably to a more deplorable, drummed-up alternative; it might be more bearable or better for the environment, but advantageous comparisons do not equate to sustainability. Consumers fall so hard for the romantic concept that at times the term is little more than nebulous and trite. More simply, few business activities deserve the ultimate acknowledgement that many readily, and without rigor, deploy.


Making the Case for Remote Power Supply Monitoring

A proactive approach to IT maintenance based on predictive analytics winds up saving IT organizations money, Edward Wirth, director of business development, marketing and sales for Power Service Concepts, a provider of battery environment support services, said. Wirth is speaking on the subject at the upcoming Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September. Wirth said remote monitoring also addresses a number of tactical issues. Gaining access to data centers has become increasingly problematic for third-party specialists. Background checks are now routinely required, and the time slots being made available to those third-party specialists are usually now on the weekends or after normal business hours.


MVC, Angular JS CRUD using WEB API 2 with Stored Procedure

In Internet there are lots of examples related to WEB API using Entity Framework. But in community forum I saw many questions was been asked by members for a simple example using WEB API Entity Framework with Stored Procedure. I search a lot to find a simple Article which explains a simple way to perform CRUD operation using Stored Procedure with MVC and Web API. But I couldn’t able to find any article which explains all this .I plan to make a simple web application using MVC 5 ,Angular JS ,WEB API to perform CRUD(Create/Read/Update and Delete) using Entity Framework with Stored procedure.


CEO Nadella talks Microsoft's mobile ambitions, Windows 10 strategy, HoloLens and more

We will do everything we have to do to make sure we're making progress on phones. We have them. Even today Terry (Myerson, the head of Windows and Devices) reinforced, again, yes, we will have premium Lumias coming this year. If there are a lot of OEMs, we'll have one strategy. If there are no OEMs, we'll have one strategy. We are committed to having the phones in these three segments. And I think the operational details will become clear to people as they see it. I want people to evaluate us on the phones that we produce, but not the inside baseball -- what are we doing to produce -- because that should not be relevant to our broad consumers. It may be relevant to people like you who are critiquing us. That's okay. But what matters to me is what customers care.



Quote for the day:

"Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would." -- Nelson Mandela

July 18, 2015

Services and disservices – 5A: Social example (Introduction)

The Duluth Model – the supposed ‘standard model’ for this context (the contextual equivalent of TOGAF, one might say?) – holds to that perception of DV as a ‘male-only’ evil, asserting that “women and children are vulnerable to violence because of their unequal social, economic, and political status in society” and that “we do not see men’s violence against women as stemming from individual pathology, but rather from a socially reinforced sense of entitlement”. It is explicit in its assertions as to who needs help, and where the cause exclusively resides: ... It also insists that “men are perpetrators who are violent because they have been socialized in a patriarchy that condones male violence, and that women are victims who are violent only in self-defense”.


How The Grid uses AI to revolutionize web design

The Cassowary Constraint Solver is a toolkit that essentially allows web designers to design a webpage with more flexibility. Soon after, Tocchini met Brian Axe who, coincidentally, worked with Badros at Google in the past. The pair founded The Grid, an AI platform that builds and designs websites for users in as little as a few minutes. Badros ended up as an investor in the company. He said that the goal is to make responsive design accessible to everyone, regardless of technical prowess. "They are removing a key technical challenge for the majority of publishers who want to communicate effectively across a wide range of devices without the burden of bad technology," Badros said.


These 9 Cloud Computing Skills Could Give You The Next Career Jump

At the end of last year, there were over 3.9 million jobs in the cloud computing field in America alone—and over 18 million around the world. And professionals with cloud computing experience took home a median salary of over $90,000. It’s a great field to get into — but what skills do you need for a job in cloud computing? Any expertise in these 9 areas will help set you apart from the rest of the application pile. ... While some jobs only require one of these languages, you’ll increase your employability by being familiar with more than one. Yes, familiarize yourself with the many interactive coding lessons available online. Pick one of the languages and start learning!


Robot With Bacteria Brain Stalks Food, Is Your Worst Nightmare

Here's what you have to know: 90% of you, isn't you. You're only 10% human cells. The rest of you is made up of microbes that aren't you, but they are a part of your normal physiology. For instance, you have trillions of microbes in your digestive system that break down your food. While that sounds gross, it is a good relationship. They break down the food and we ingest most of it in the form of nutrients. They take a handling fee in the form of some of the food and live on. Here's the thing: We're starting to realize that not all of those microbes mind their own business. Some of them actually change our personality, control our actions, and might even be the cause of mental disorders.


Hipaa’s Use as Code of Silence Often Misinterprets the Law

Intended to keep personal health information private, the law does not prohibit health care providers from sharing information with family, friends or caregivers unless the patient specifically objects. Even if she is not present or is incapacitated, providers may use “professional judgment” to disclose pertinent information to a relative or friend if it’s “in the best interests of the individual.” Hipaa applies only to health care providers, health insurers, clearinghouses that manage and store health data, and their business associates. Yet when I last wrote about this topic, a California reader commented that she’d heard a minister explain that the names of ailing parishioners could no longer appear in the church bulletin because of Hipaa.


Object storage: why, when, where… and but.

A horizontal platform serving many (secondary) storage needs is what I have been talking about for years now, and I’m glad it is finally happening. API-based Object Storage was the first building block, but now it seems it is going to be integrated in more sophisticated products capable to do what was previously possible with external appliances or software. And this means less complexity and ease of use which, again, will drive more adoption in smaller environments (not only hyper-scale!). This new scenario is not ideal for many of the “traditional” object storage startups around, some of them are very specialized and their file/block protocols are not as good as the core part, while data services are non existent!


Seagate Intros Data Management Services for Hybrid Cloud

Seagate unveiled its Backup and Recovery Private Cloud, a multi-tenant instance of data protection software that IT organizations or cloud service providers can deploy themselves to provide up to two petabytes of storage, and Data Management Services, a service through which Seagate analyzes data usage to advise customers on what tier of storage particular data should reside to store it most cost effectively. Finally, earlier this week, Seagate revealed that it has extended an existing storage alliance with HP and IBM involving its ClustorStor appliances into the realm of high-performance computing.


8 Ways the Internet Of Things (IOT) will change the way you live

The way technology is changing it looks like you no need to worry about anything, your every device will worry about you and will take care of you. The era of Humans control devices is over now, It changed to Devices control humans . Before going further on this article, let us first see why Big companies creating business over IOT, so many Internet of things projects going on in market. Companies are forced to adopt new protocol since Internet of things became popular. ... Your vehicles now are automated, you come near to your vehicle in parking slot, it automatically take reverse and will come just infront of you. They analyse the traffic data collected over the period of time, will change the route by considering google maps data, history and will decide which route to take today.


Using Data to Save Lives  


The program recognizes organizations and individuals implementing analytics in innovative ways to improve the health of their patients and the financial performance of their organizations. The Analytics All-Stars program showcases those who are providing pioneering leadership, spurring innovation and driving improvement across their organizations. ... What's especially frustrating, Showalter says, is that he's always treating patients after their disease has put them in dire straits. In addition, even after the health system treats heart attack victims and educates them on better lifestyle choices and available treatments, 1 percent of all patients leaving the University of Mississippi Medical Center will have a heart attack within a year of discharge.


Introducing Programming Without Coding Technology (PWCT) to C Programmers

It's all about applying the principles of programming on the process of typing code itself. Yes, we are doing it the wrong way for many years, but how can we notice that and prove it at the theoretical and practical side. This article will provide the concept behind visual programming to C programmers, why you shouldn't write C code directly again, why the code must be generated for you, why you should have visual representation for your programs, why you should interact with the visual representation and become able to use visual programming to create your new code without typing that code directly. We are programmers, what are we doing everyday? We are writing code? Sure but, it's not our goal to write code, it's just the method that we use to achieve our goals.



Quote for the day:

"A bad system will beat a good person every time" -- W. Edwards Deming

July 16, 2015

Disaster Preparedness Strategies for Recovery Assurance and Peace of Mind

Obviously, the well-being of your employees in a disaster situation is more important than anything else, and establishing safety protocols and procedures should be your first priority. From there, identify key operational personnel – those people without whom your business can’t operate – and provide them with the ability to work remotely or from a secondary location when a disaster strikes. Determine the steps that will be required to get those employees online and communicating with each other in the event of an outage, and make sure they have quick and easy access to the business-critical data, systems, servers and other infrastructure they need to keep the business running.


Windows 10 -- download full version, before release date

One obvious change that signals this is not a typical beta build is that the Windows Version watermark in the bottom right corner of the screen is now gone. Another point to make is that this build has been released to both the fast and slow rings at the same time.  It's two weeks until launch, and the RTM build...will be shipped to OEMs to use as the basis for them to install on new hardware. ... Up until now every new build has been a full install of Windows overtop of the existing one [but now] it will likely shift to a Windows Update style where just components are updated rather than the entire OS. MORE


Network Services Framework goes live across public sector

Hurrell said that CCS had built on the lessons learnt from both previous frameworks and the extensive consultation process. “We’ve done lots of market engagement and spent a lot of time with suppliers and customers. We got suppliers into working groups to tell us how they would like to sell to government. Some of what they proposed we accomplished, some we didn’t. We tried to arbitrate between what users and suppliers wanted,” she said. “We really made an effort to listen to that feedback – including listening to customers across the public sector so we hope that means they will want to use it because we’ve given them what they asked for.”


Engineering Reverse Innovations

Casting off preconceived solutions before you set down to define problems will help your company avoid the first trap—and spot opportunities outside its existing product portfolio. Consider the problem of irrigating farms in emerging markets. Farmers will argue for the expansion of the power grid so that they can use electricity to run water pumps and irrigate fields. However, farmers need water, not electricity, and the real requirement is getting water to crops—not power to pumps. If they isolate the problem, engineers may find that creating ponds near fields or using solar-powered pumps is more cost-effective and environmentally appropriate than expanding the power grid. When defining problems, executives must keep their eyes and ears open for behavior that may signal needs that customers haven’t articulated.


6 ways to give millennials the mentorship programs they want

Traditionally, mentorship programs have been set up by HR, and younger employees were matched with managers or executives, ... But millennials are disrupting that mentorship model. They want better, faster and more effective mentor programs — or they're ditching HR and doing it on their own. Companies should think of ways to refresh their current programs and engage millennials. ... It can be hard for busy executives to find time for mentoring, but it's important for companies that want to retain millennials to have a few key business leaders involved in mentorships. "Programs don't work unless someone in HR or a senior executive is going to accept the role of champion and is willing to make sure the company invests in the program," Dessau says.


Value sensitive design helps CIOs tackle social, ethical tech issues

There are some researchers who believe you can code a computer to be more ethical than a human -- that a human relies on emotional responses and, under stress, we can make wrong decisions. There are others who argue back that's what it means to be human -- that you make decisions based on your humanness and not necessarily through some cold rationality. I fall into the camp sort of in between [the two], but I lean more toward not coding ethics because we cannot know all external circumstances in the time that we code some device. For example, a killer robot: We cannot possibly code in every single set of conditions that a killer robot might face. And so, unless you can guarantee certainty of outcomes, I am not a fan of coding in ethical decisions.


Chasing Metadata to Improve Decision Quality

Metadata is really about providing the color behind the data that we deal with. It brings context in to life. Metadata augments our engagement with the data by connecting meaning with purpose and goes on to create a new kind of data in the process – the kind that adds the context. Metadata truly embodies the soul of the data, one might add, so that it can come to life and be useful. But as much as metadata defines what data is and how to get the most use out of it, such context also underscores what isn’t in the scope of the data in question. Context, in this manner, provides an invisible boundary – a framework, if you will, to help narrate a story better through the data on hand. Context when coupled with content, even when incomplete, provides the foundation for understanding.


SanDisk Launches Connect Wireless Stick Drive

Flash storage solutions specialist SanDisk has expanded its mobile storage portfolio with a wireless mobile flash drive, the Connect Wireless Stick, up to 128 GB of storage and a compact design. The Connect Wireless Stick works with smartphones, tablets and computers, and allows users to wirelessly access media or transfer large files, save and share photos and videos, or stream HD videos and music to and from mobile devices, up to three at a time. The drive is also capable of supporting a single stream for up to 4.5 hours on a single charge, and with its USB connector, users can also connect directly to a computer to save and transfer files. The SanDisk Connect app enables management of content between devices, all through password-protected WiFi connectivity.


Data Breaches Boost Funding for Cybersecurity Startups

One reason is that cybersecurity startups were often acquired prior to an initial public offering, says Scott Weiss, an Andreessen Horowitz partner. Mr. Weiss sold his own security startup, IronPort Systems Inc., to Cisco Systems Inc. for $830 million in 2007. Well-received offerings from companies including Palo Alto Networks Inc. in 2012 and FireEye Inc. in 2013 have altered that view. Partners at Andreessen Horowitz say they likely wouldn't have invested in a company like Keybase even two years ago. Over the past 13 months, the firm also made an unusually large $142 million bet on Tanium Inc., which tries to make it easier for companies to find vulnerable and infected machines on their networks.


Rise of the Data Visualization Competency Center

Successful data visualization requires using the right kind of graphicacy to correctly interpret and analyze the data, as well as employing the right combination of design principles to curate a meaningful story. However, guarding that visualization process isn’t one I consider to be a question of governance. Ultimately, we need to be able to construct a way to insulate the business from the risk of self-service data visualization with the essence of governed data visualization, but without restricting or otherwise limiting the inherently creative process that drives individual data visualization activities.



Quote for the day:

“Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.” -- Jaachynma N.E. Agu

July 15, 2015

Flash Storage Prices Keep Falling: What it Means For the Future

The combination of increased capacity and lower prices have turned SSD into an even more competitive alternative to hard disk drives. When one of the main selling points of HDD is its larger capacity, it’s easy to see why hard disk drives may fall in overall use. At the moment, most hard disk drives are stuck at around 10 TB in capacity. SSD has yet to reach that same level, but it is quickly catching up. Experts are predicting that solid-state drives will eventually match HDD, or at least come close to matching it, sometime in 2015. SSD will likely overtake HDD capacity in 2016, with some experts even estimating that 30 TB solid-state drives will be produced as soon as 2017. At the same time, the price of flash storage will continue to fall.


Google Proposes Open Source Beacons

Google is calling its beacon protocol Eddystone, a name that comes from a lighthouse in England. It's available on GitHub, under the Apache 2.0 license. The software supports Android, iOS, and many BLE devices. It is compliant with the Bluetooth Core Specification. In contrast to iBeacon, it also supports multiple types of data (frame types). So while an iBeacon is limited to broadcasting an identification code, an Eddystone beacon could transmit an identification code, or a URL, or telemetry data about voltage or device temperature. Google is also releasing two APIs: The Nearby API for Android and iOS, which allows developers to create publish and subscribe methods to share messages and connections between nearby devices, and the Proximity Beacon API, to manage data associated with a BLE beacon through a REST interface.


6 things Evernote does that Microsoft OneNote can't

So it’s not surprising that once people pick Evernote or Microsoft OneNote as their repository of choice for digital scraps, doodlings and scanned documents, they usually stick with that choice. Once you have committed to one of these two popular products, it’s not easy to toggle between them or switch entirely. About a year ago, I chose Evernote over OneNote, and I started amassing my own digital archive. At the time, Evernote's Mac software was far superior to OneNote's Mac app. However, Microsoft has continually upgraded OneNote for Mac and iOS, and today it's a legitimate Evernote rival; if I were facing the Mac Evernote versus Mac OneNote decision today, it would be a different situation.


Self-Charging Phones Are on the Way, Finally

One way the consumer electronics industry is trying to fix this is by aligning with wireless charging technologies like Qi and Rezence. So far, though, only a handful of smartphones from companies like LG, Samsung, and, HTC use the Qi standard, while Rezence-supporting handsets are set to come out later this year. With such wireless charging still far from the mainstream (and still requiring your phone to be on a charging mat or base that itself plugs into a wall), a few companies, including Nikola Labs, are trying to figure out other ways to make you less dependent on outlets so you can keep using your phone for battery-intensive things like looking at websites, navigating trips, and streaming videos.


Asking the right questions: unlocking the value buried in all that data

There are a lot of untold stories in our data said Dave Schubmehl, research director for content analytics, recovery and cognitive systems research with International Data Corp. (IDC), who presented the results of research of 2,000 global knowledge workers about what they do to unlock value in their data. He said the state of information access hasn’t dramatically changed over the last decade, despite the big data hype. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to find the information hidden in your company, whether it’s in a content management system or your email servers. If you acquired a company, it may be in another system you don’t know is there,” said Schubmehl.


So About That Whole Tech-Eating-Jobs Thing

All of which would be a good thing–as most jobs are crap jobs–except that our society is not built for a world in which more and more people are unemployed. Not unless we implement something like a basic income. …That’s the argument, at any rate. It’s one I’ve made repeatedly in this space over the last few years. (Echoing many others, to be clear.) But intellectual honesty compels me to admit: the available evidence does not currently support it at all. If the USA is the canary in our global coal mine–which seems likely, given its high technology and liberal labor laws–then the workers of the world have little to worry about any time soon. “Robots Seem to Be Improving Productivity,


How To Survive Digital Transformation

MIT researchers say the invention of the steam engine began the most transformative social development in the last 3000 years. Fast-forward to today’s paradigm shift – the convergence of technologies fueled by innovation accelerators like renewable energy, robotics, cognitive computing, and the Internet of Things. Is your organization prepared to thrive? That’s the question that was discussed in a recent episode of Game Changers radio: The Next Paradigm Shift and Your Digital DNA, hosted by Bonnie D. Graham, and featuring Futurist Thornton May, Frank Diana of TCS Consulting and me, Timo Elliott, SAP Innovation Evangelist.


14 Security Fails That Cost Executives Their Jobs

When you look at the list of companies that have been hacked in some way, it becomes apparent that even the most technically sophisticated organizations can be breached given a sufficiently well-funded, determined attacker. Speaking on 60 Minutes in 2014, FBI Director James Comey put it this way: "There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese." And Chinese hackers are not the only hackers in the world. Given the vulnerability of IT systems, the first act of an incoming CEO, CIO, or CTO should be to write a resignation letter, apologizing for the "unforeseen" data breach that everyone feared was coming. Ideally, the letter's presence will serve as a reminder to prioritize security concerns.


20 Features of Office 365 That May Surprise You

Office 365 for Business offers the same features (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc) that you maybe familiar with, plus additional tools to help you collaborate and be more productive. What does that mean? In short, Office isn’t now constrained to well, your office! From PC, Tablet to Phone you can access, edit, collaborate and save your files across devices and when on the go. But there’s more…..here are 20 features of Office 365 that may surprise you.....


Check Your Normative Defaults

Once you start thinking about normative defaults in your digital experiences, it’s hard to stop seeing them everywhere. Software is considered more science than art, but highly subjective decisions go into building it. ... Not all defaults are problematic. We want software that makes reasonable assumptions, informed by demographics, user research, and past behavior where obtainable. Maybe one distinction to draw is that the defaults should be less about our core identity (assuming one is male, or an English-speaker), and more about our presumed mindset when using the web service. You may not be sure who a user is, but you may be able to infer why they are there.



Quote for the day:

“The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.” -- Jay Samit

July 14, 2015

CIOs must embrace consumer cloud tools or risk losing control

Finding the right data and information is still a complex and convoluted proposition for many employees, so they look to external tools for help, according to Vanessa Thompson, research director of enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies, IDC.Thompson says IDC's latest research indicates that inefficient access to data from remote locations is undermining productivity, and she says it's getting worse. For example, Thompson still hears from executives who email their work as attachments to personal accounts because they can't easily share work files or take them home from work. It's not always a bad thing for employees to use multiple collaboration platforms at work, but disparate sets of tools can negatively affect workflow and productivity, and threaten a company's information assets.


An Overview of NFV Elements


The main appeal of using NFV to deploy network elements and virtual network functions (VNFs) is that services can be launched more quickly, by installing software on a standard hardware platform. This is akin to the way software applications could be developed and launched for the PC platform when it first emerged. Another advantage is lower capital expenditures, because standardized hardware platforms tend to drive down costs. The NFV model also adds flexibility, allowing service providers to launch, improve, and incrementally optimize services using software updates rather than wholesale hardware replacement. It will also create an “ecosystem” of third-party software vendors eager to supply improvement.


Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Awful, Flawed Advice

Passions are magical, but businesses are grounded in realities. Do you remember when Dorothy and the gang peered behind the curtain to find out that the Wizard of Oz wasn’t an all-powerful being, but rather, kind of a loser? Or when you found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real? Or when you figured out that your parents weren’t superheroes, just people with flaws? It sucked, right? Our hobbies are about escapism. There is a bit of magic and fantasy in them. When you make that your business, you are privy to the nuts and bolts. That tempers the magic.


A Biodegradable Computer Chip That Performs Surprisingly Well

In conventional chip manufacturing, electronic components like transistors are made on the surface of a rigid wafer made of a semiconducting material such as silicon. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, led by Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, made the electronic components in a similar way but then used a rubber stamp to lift them from the wafer and transfer them to a new surface made of nanocellulose. This reduced the amount of semiconducting material used by a factor of up to 5,000, without sacrificing performance. In two recent demonstrations, Ma and his colleagues showed they can use nanocellulose as the support layer for radio frequency circuits that perform comparably to those commonly used in smartphones and tablets. They also showed that these chips can be broken down by a common fungus.


Hacked in the U.S.A.: China’s Not-So-Hidden Infiltration Op

“China is building the Facebook of human intelligence capabilities,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. “This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals.” The most serious breach of records occurred at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where records for every person given a government background check for the past 15 years may have been compromised. The head of the government personnel office, Katherine Archuleta, resigned Friday as lawmakers demanded to know what went wrong. The campaign began in early 2013 with the travel records, said Laura Galante, manager of threat intelligence for FireEye Inc., a private security company that has been investigating the cyber-attacks.


How cloud governance proves essential in the Bimodal IT era

To a great extent, the advent of social media has also resulted in direct customer feedback on the sentiment from the external customer that businesses need to react to. That is actually changing the timelines. It is requiring IT to be delivered at the pace of business. And the very definition of IT is undergoing a change, where we need to have the right paradigm, the right technology, and the right solution for the right business function and therefore the right application.Since the choices have increased with the new style of IT, the manner in which you pair them up, the solutions with the problems, also has significantly changed. With more choices, come more such pairs on which solution is right for which problem. That's really what has caused the change that we're going through.


Hacking Team's malware uses UEFI rootkit to survive OS reinstalls

UEFI is a replacement for the traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and is meant to standardize modern computer firmware through a reference specification. But there are multiple companies that develop UEFI firmware, and there can be significant differences between the implementations used by PC manufactures. Hacking Team developed a method for infecting the UEFI firmware developed by Insyde Software, a Taiwanese company that counts Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba among its customers, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro. “However, the code can very likely work on AMI BIOS as well,” the Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post. .


How to Beat the Bots

Technology is redefining work and commerce, and if we’re smart it can also redefine education for employment and advancement so everyone can monetize, or improve, any skill and connect with any employer in need of it. “Up to 540 million people could benefit from online talent platforms by 2025,” McKinsey said. It is not that hard. We need to be making much better use of the federal government’s labor market data and that of websites like Monster.com, HireArt.com and LinkedIn, and even consider creating skill equivalents of the Obamacare health exchanges. Online talent platforms — that can link everyone’s C.V. with every job opening, with the skills needed for that job, with the online and campus-based schools offering those skills with data showing which schools do it best — create more employment, more relevant skills and the right education for them.


Changing the World by Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators

According to O'Reilly, no matter the size of the company, as long as organizations have the right core values and mission, they can be having fun and creating value. In his career he has found that many of the most interesting movements actually start, not with entrepreneurs wanting to make money, but with people who just want to make something cool and are having fun doing it. Although the fun stage of companies doesn't always last forever -- when companies get to a certain size the logic of the machine takes over -- the commitment and values driven mentality does. "I think the Google of 10 or 15 years ago was having a lot more fun than the Google of today, even though Larry and Sergey really are deeply committed and values driven," says O'Reilly.


Integrating Raft into JGroups

Raft favors consistency over availability: in terms of the Cap theorem, jgroups-raft is a C-P system, meaning that if it can’t get a majority of nodes agreeing, it won’t be available but it will maintain its consistency. If for example we have a cluster of 5 nodes, 3 is the majority, so it will be possible to read/write on the system even with 2 nodes failures. With more than 2 failures it’s impossible to get a majority so the system won’t be available (though it’s possible to have some read-only features in this case). In summary, at a very high level Raft consists of a leader election, (which requires a majority), as well as nodes being coordinated by the leader, each having one persistent log detailing what they are doing. An excellent graphic explanation of how Raft algorithm works in detail is available here.



Quote for the day:

"By the time they fully evolve, machine learning will have become culturally invisible " McKinsey on Machine Learning

July 13, 2015

An Algorithmic Sense of Humor? Not Yet.

Radev and co say the results provide some insight into the nature of funny captions. “We found that the methods that consistently select funnier captions are negative sentiment, human-centeredness, and lexical centrality,” they say. That’s a curious study that is hard to evaluate. The researchers acknowledge that there is no surprise in finding that negative sentiment correlates with funniness; human-centeredness is also an expected property of humor. The significance of lexical centrality is less clear. And therein lies the problem with this kind of research. It’s easy to imagine that one goal from this kind of work would be to create a machine capable of automatically choosing the best caption from thousands entered into the New Yorker competition each week.


Your Data Center – White or not White-Box Switches

They want the ability to automate and drive operations cost down and transform to cloud economics. They want to scale their architecture in an open multi-vendor environment that can be managed at velocity in a simplified agile manner without any compromise on security or compliance. They want to be able to provision and apply policies across the entire infrastructure without the cumbersome or possible errors that may jeopardize security and business uptime. And as they run physical and virtual workloads, they want an infrastructure that is transparent and enable these workloads to reside anywhere without restrictions on movements. Does whitebox switch model help these customers in that journey? Cisco’s Frank D’Agostino sat down with Forrester Andre Kindness to discuss this topic.


How CIOs can create the voice of IT

"Smart CIOs are aware that just like the cell phone space, their world has become commoditized," says Kristen Lamoreaux, president of Lamoreaux Search LLC, an information technology-focused placement firm. "Every one of their business leaders has options. They no longer have to go to IT for computer services -- they can go to Amazon and order what they want in three clicks. Therefore, IT needs to demonstrate its value … and CIOs are recognizing they need to step up their game in terms of communications." ... "As I start building out the elastic nature of IT, I need someone to help communicate and change the conversation I have with business and put things in business-enablement terms—not technical terms," Bhagat explains.


'Platform revolution' signals the end of industry boundaries

One key implication of the platform revolution is that industry boundaries blur as platforms take over and customers' demands and behaviors continue to evolve. In the platform era, a drug store chain becomes a healthcare provider, as is the case with Walgreens; a phone manufacturer becomes a bank. And most of these platforms seek to deliver "an outcome" for customers rather than a product. Increasingly, customers come to a company for a result -- "I want to improve my health, I want more leisure time, I want more convenience in how I manage my home," Daugherty said, outlining this shift in customer demand. The "outcome economy" doesn't just apply to consumers; the shift is broad and affects the B2B world as well, including Accenture, he said.



Computers Still Beat Mobile for Online Shopping

Reasons for the hesitation to shop on mobile devices could be related to the potential for errors, the study said. "While Amazon offers customers one-click purchasing, thus avoiding the tedium and potential error involved with entering credit card and address information, even this is not a perfect solution for first-time buyers, and is often not available on most other retailer sites," the study's authors wrote. "Until that changes, the computer may remain the device of choice for e-commerce, meaning retailers ought to continue optimizing the large-screen online retail experience for consumers."


IoT analytics brings new levels of innovation to new product development

In order to develop and market new products most effectively, you need to create a "single point of truth," or a body of data and insights that is comprehensive, accurate and timely.  These data and insights will provide all disciplines within the company involved in designing, manufacturing and marketing a new product the information they need to make critical decisions – product features, pricing, distribution and related functions. ... Streetline is a good example of how a company is using what some are calling IoT analytics to build out new products. The company recently launched Streetline IoT Gateway, part of the company’s mission to create smart cities and smart campuses.


How Digital NEST could lift a struggling rural community 

Digital NEST works on two primary levels — the first is providing access to tech, and also providing access to a diverse community. It's modeled after companies like Google and Apple, so there's plenty of food, the furniture is moveable, and it's just a cool place for kids to set up shop. The second level is education. Digital NEST offers short courses they call Institutes that cover everything from how to write a resume, to graphic design, coding, and videography. Basically, any tech skills that could lead to a job, Martinez said. It's impossible to explain the mission of Digital NEST without getting into the much larger, flawed ecosystems of both the tech industry and the plight of a community like Watsonville.



The Mobile Arms Race: Why Privacy Is the Next Battleground

It’s unclear how much privacy — or the perception of it — will matter in the mobile race toward “big data.” The concept of big data involves piecing together information from multiple areas to create new insights. This approach requires the consumer to share more in order to receive more personalized and relevant features. ... Data and the features that can be built around customer information have become the current battleground in the mobile wars because tools like machine learning represent the last frontier in a mature market. “We’ve reached a period of incremental innovation, and Google and Apple are looking for the next big leap,” says Saikat Chaudhuri, an adjunct management professor


How techies can volunteer their skills to help nonprofits

Finding others who want to use their tech skills for good is a great place to start. One possibility is Catchafire, a platform that matches talented people with causes they are passionate about. Basically, you pick a topic you care about, like "black male achievement," "maternal health," or "animals," and then pick what you're good at. It could be "data analysis, "digital marketing," "engineering," "web development," or a range of other fields in technology. Catchafire helps you find a project to work on from there. It may be remote or in person, one-day long or several months long. It shows you how much money you're helping save by donating your technical skills, and you get to practice those skills in the process.


The Most Common Reasons Why Software Projects Fail

Project failure can be defined as one or a combination of cost overruns, late deliveries, poor quality, and/or developing a product that does not get used. Regardless of their involvement during the planning stages, more often than not, software developers bear the brunt of the responsibility for such situations; after all, they’re the ones who built the application. However, closer examinations of the projects do not always show evidence of incompetence. ... Being clear on these definitions ensures projects get off on the right foot with realistic targets and an understanding of the project’s constraints. Not doing so can send a project on a death march from the start due to one of more of the following factors.



Quote for the day:

“The only way to follow your path is to take the lead.” -- Joe Peterson