Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 09, 2015

Time to get mapping - how a blind government can develop sight

Indeed, it’s possible today to build an entire organisation using chains of these standardised, cheap, modular capabilities. And - as was the case with the arrival of other forms of shared infrastructure such as electricity, railways, canals, roads, or radio bandwidth - the ability to consume standard stuff using shared plumbing always changes the economic balance in favour of operating models that standardise and consume, instead of building their own special versions. This can be illustrated by considering that most people would find it time-consuming, expensive and uncomfortable to knit their own underwear. Government should view building its own stuff in the same way - why would it want to do that, without a good reason?

Big Data’s Relationship with Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

A BIDW is a data analysis system that collects the transactional information and typically provides summaries on selected key fields of the transactions being watched. These summaries can be used to better understand the overall health and trends in the transactions being monitored. The BIDW data is a copy of production and is not in real time, so long-running queries can be initiated without concerns about impacting the live customer actions. Data may be loaded daily or weekly, depending on the data source. The data is kept at several levels to serve the different customers of the BIDW; summary data and dashboards are the most common outputs of a BIDW, but if needed, you can drill into the transactions.

Visio Series: Simple Network Diagrams

There are many free and paid for tools for scanning a network available, and most of them can output the results to a text or XML file. Devices communicate on a network because they are software assigned a unique identifier (Internet Protocol address) to each connection. The connected port is usually on a hardware component that is hardware assigned (Media Access Protocol address). A laptop, for example, could be connected via an Ethernet cable, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to a network. Each method will have a different IP address and MAC address, but they are all on the same device. The data available in each scanning tool output varies tremendously, but they will all have an IP address and MAC address. Here are three free tools showing examples of their interfaces.

Microsoft and model clauses – where the cloud stands after Safe Harbor

The government argues that as Microsoft is a US company, it is covered by US legislation and regulation that reaches across borders into operations based in other countries. Microsoft says that the data is covered by European data privacy and protection laws – and specifically the Irish interpretation and enforcement of those. The ramifications of the US government’s interpretation being upheld would of course set a precedent that US law enforcement agencies can demand access to data stored on servers or within US-headquartered companies anywhere around the globe. Following the loss of Safe Harbor, and in light of the post-NSA scandal paranoia around the world, the impact of such a precedent could have major ramifications for US cloud computing firms trying to do business around the globe.

New FortiGate Connector for Cisco ACI Delivers App-Centric Security Automation

There are several other customer stories featuring ACI-Fortinet solution, but I’d run out of time and space to list them all. For your easy reference visit http://www.fortinet.com/videos/index.html for more customer videos. Let’s look in detail at the key capabilities of Fortinet-Cisco ACI solution and the benefits it brings to Data Center customers. Fortinet’s FortiGate firewall solution integrated into Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) delivers application-centric security automation in modern data centers. The solution provides automated and predefined policy-based security provisioning for next-generation firewall services. It enables location independent security services insertion anywhere in the network fabric through a single-pane-of-glass management.

Six CIO tips for business innovation with data

First, the business runs a number of information-led initiatives to boost customer engagement. “We are, essentially, a retailer and we want to have long-term, valuable relationships with our clients,” he says. The second way First Utility uses data is for optimisation. “Information helps us to understand what processes work, which processes are causing us problems and how we can use our experience around those processes to make the business better,” says Wilkins. The third way the firm uses information is strategically, says Wilkins. “Now we’ve built a platform, we want to know our technology is working and where the business can use systems and services to develop and grow,” he adds. “It’s all about making the most of data to find new opportunities and to market to new sets of customers.”

Why have most merchants missed the EMV deadline?

Mark Horwedel, CEO of the Merchant Advisory Group, agrees. He said the large majority of the burden – especially the financial burden – of this transition falls on the merchants. “This is the most complicated and most costly point-of-sale (POS) project that’s ever been foisted on merchants. They’re making us pay for 75% of the conversion,” he said, adding that in Europe, networks lowered their interchange fees or offered to share some of the cost of installing new equipment. Besides that, he said, U.S. merchants pay transaction fees that are seven to eight times those paid in Europe. “Credit cards are a bank product,” he said, “and on their face they are unsafe, but the industry has made a one-sided effort to shift the expenses (of making it more secure) to the merchants.”

5 Signs Security's Finally Being Taken Seriously

Developed by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and sponsored by Forbes, the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), and Palo Alto Networks, the Governance of Cybersecurity: 2015 Report examines cybersecurity risk governance practices and attitudes of executives at these top companies from four surveys over the course of seven years. Unlike a lot of security studies out there lately, this one shows a lot of promise. In spite of breach statistics today—or perhaps because of them—this study shows that enterprises are finally taking security seriously. "This report shows that, for the first time, directors and officers understand they have a fiduciary duty to protect the digital assets of their companies and are paying more than cursory attention to cyber risks; it is a welcome change that will help protect shareholders and customers,” says Jody Westby

5 Disruptive Technology Advancements Which Will Change Business as Usual

Historically, there have been a variety of disruptive technologies that have changed the business world. The personal computer essentially displaced the typewriter, forever changing the way we communicate and work. Email also changed communication, largely displacing traditional letter-writing and causing problems with the greeting card industry. Additionally, smartphones have displaced numerous technologies with all of their available apps, including calculators, GPS devices, and MP3 players. Technology is continuing to advance, and more innovative solutions are hitting the market. If current businesses don’t adapt, they could be at risk of becoming the next technology to be phased out. By identifying some of the disruptive technologies that are on the horizon, businesses can create a plan to adapt for the future.

Surface Book, Surface 4 Pro, XPS 12 or iPad Pro?

It's actually a great problem to have. And it's one that I suspect others will grapple with in the coming months as the 2-in-1 computing category becomes viable for a wider audience. My own decision may actually be more difficult though, for a few reasons that don't apply to others. First, my computing needs are actually relatively meager and I try to keep up with all of the major platforms. So I actually rotate through using a Chromebook Pixel, MacBook 12 and HP laptop running Windows 10. As a full time writer, my most used app is really a browser. I can write directly into a content management system through the web. Other daily activities include email, social networking, music and video consumption, light gameplay, general web browsing and online reading.

Quote for the day:

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success." -- M.Forbes

October 08, 2015

Big data makes a difference at Penn Medicine

"We're working in two week sprints, where the clinicians adjust their pathways, and we adjust the algorithms to their needs," Draugelis notes. The team builds a prototype of a new pathway for a particular condition about once every six months. Currently, it is focusing on finding a better way to predict which patients have congestive heart failure and which are likely to be readmitted after discharge from the hospital. In addition, the team is working on acute conditions such as maternal deterioration after delivery and severe sepsis. "We're creating machine learning predictive models based on thousands of variables," Draugelis says. "We look at them in real time, but we train them up over millions of patient records."

Peer Feedback Loops: Why Metrics and Meetings Are Not Enough

We know that we cannot learn without metrics and meetings. But we can certainly measure and talk without learning. If learning is our goal, we need more than performance data and task alignment. Henry Ford's complaint about the whole person attached to the pair of hands he actually asks for, may remind us that knowledge work is more than brains. Like it or not, there is a whole person attached too. A person with specific behaviors, awareness levels, emotions and needs that highly influence the success of any systemic improvement. An expanded version of the Johari-window model may help to better explain why we need personal feedback to encourage this kind of improvement.

Strata + Hadoop World: A quiet mind is a creative mind

Not only did commentators and broadcasters have access to data such as the distance between a breakaway group of riders and the rest of the pack, but fans could access rider statistics through a beta site. The old-world sport meets new-world technology was powered by Dimension Data, an IT services company. "Each of these devices on the bikes talks to other bikes, as well as sensors in the team cars," Jim McHugh, vice president of marketing at Cisco, said during his Strata + Hadoop World talk. That data gets relayed to a race helicopter, and then to a media truck at the end of the stage, and then to a Dimension Data truck. "Inside that truck, an analytics platform is doing the analysis and computation, which are passed on to broadcasters and commentators and digital platforms," he said.

Phil Zimmermann speaks out on encryption, privacy, and avoiding a surveillance state

When we shop online, it's encryption that makes sure that your credit card details aren't being snooped on. When you log into your bank account, it's encryption that means you can be sure it's really your bank's website you are visiting, not a glossy fake. Encrypted databases keep your medical records safe from prying eyes, while encrypted email protects your business proposals, declarations of love, or nude selfies. PGP is now owned by Symantec, and for the last dozen years Zimmermann has been working on encrypted voice communications protocols, and most recently the creation of a company called Silent Circle. One of the voice encryption standards used by Silent Circle is called ZRTP and as the company's website puts it bluntly: 'The Z in ZRTP stands for Zimmermann."

NASA Wants To Know What Happens To Our Bodies And Brains After A Year In Space

The study is the first to measure inter-cranial pressure during a mission, and hopes to figure out why astronauts’ vision changes in zero-gravity, and hopefully come up with a fix. "If we want to stay in space longer than six months to explore," says Michael Stenger, co-principal investigator of the Fluid Shifts investigation, "we have to determine what causes these vision changes so that we can begin developing countermeasures to prevent them." It’s also good for inter-cranial pressure sufferers back on Earth. Normally, measurements are done using a lumbar puncture or by drilling a hole in the skull. The astronauts are interested in neither, so they have come up with a number of non-invasive tests that could be useful back down here.

DjVu: a Short Technical Introduction

An interesting aspect of IW44 wavelet codec is that it is optimized to allow on-the-fly decompression/rendering of the area visible in the display window (and not more) as the user zooms and pans around. This allows to keep the images in compressed form in the RAM of the client machine, and allows to display very large images without excessive memory requirements. Scanned color and grayscale documents in DjVu are typically 30 to 100KB per page at 300dpi, which is 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG, and about 2-3 times smaller than MRC/T.44 or TIFF/FX. Digitally produced documents with mostly text are typically 1 to 3 times smaller than PDF or gzipped PostScript originals at 300dpi, but can be considerably smaller if the documents contain many pictures.

Chatham House warns of growing risk of ‘serious cyber attack’ on nuclear facilities

The nuclear sector is less likely to disclose cyber security incidents because of “national security sensitivities … leading nuclear industry personnel to believe that cyber attacks are less of a threat than is actually the case.” Moreover, as a late adopter of digital technologies the “nuclear industry as a whole is currently struggling to adapt” and there is a “lack of executive-level awareness of the risks involved”. Among the report’s specific findings is the fact that many nuclear facilities now have VPNs and undocumented Internet connections, meaning they are not air-gapped as many facility operators believe, and that even where there are air gaps, “this safeguard can be breached with nothing more than a flash drive”.

Gartner: ‘Widening gulf’ between digital front-runners and everybody else

The survey showed that digital doers don’t think or act like digital planners. Companies that are already doing digital initiatives, for example, don’t make a distinction between digital business strategy and plain old business strategy. Planners, on the other hand, see the two as separate. Digital investments by the doer group are for “piloting and deploying,” while the planner group “is into investigation and experimentation.” Makes sense. Here’s where the gap is more than just semantic: Digital business front-runners overwhelming list “adopting new technology” as their highest priority, followed by “creating a highly collaborative environment” and “supporting customer-driven technology change.”

Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model

Actors make perfect DDD Aggregates because they are atomic processing units that form the ideal transactional boundary. So that's a big perk for using Actor model with DDD, at least from a tactical approach. Another essential point is that Actor model being message-driven means that actors fit naturally into an event-driven architecture. With event-driven, actors can easily support Event Sourcing, where the Events Messages produced by an actor are used to produce their persistent state. However, you can't really query an Event Journal very practically unless you project the events into a query model. So, when you use Event Sourcing it means that you need to use CQRS so you can query data that was produced as the result of sending actors Command Messages.

10 Reasons Why Your Strategy Isn’t Working

The surface conclusion would assume the organizations cited are simply failing to adequately mobilize their people to deliver results. Be very careful with that assumption. There’s a whole litany of reasons for poor execution, of which several can be traced back to the decisions and choices made during strategy design. As an advisor to executive teams leading organizations of all sizes, I am frequently exposed to frustrations, obstacles and traps executive teams face when it comes to getting strategy right. And now (September and October) is the time to get it right – well in advance of 2016. To help you prepare for your best results ever, I’ve put together a list outlining 10 questions you can use to get beneath underperformance and identify the gaps in your strategy approach.

Quote for the day:

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." -- G. K. Chesterton

October 07, 2015

Data Science Falls Into Many Roles

What is quite interesting is the break down of tasks that they spend their time on per: extract-transform-load operations, data cleaning, basic exploratory analysis, and machine learning and statistics. The fine details are in their report, but most spend 1-4 hours a week on data cleaning and also on exploratory analysis. I was surprised that this third year of the survey there were no longitudinal information of change over the past two years. There are new and more in depth questions this time particularly in the skills, but I would have assumed some general trends on salary. How hard is it to find work in data science? About 35% say it is easy, and 29% say it is an average difficulty, although per their salary chart these map quite closely to their average pay range.

The Myths and Realities of Digital Disruption - An Executive's Guide

Over the last few years the concept of digital disruption has received as much or more attention than any other business topic. Given the massive changes we have seen in the media, advertising, retail, taxi services and other sectors, speculation that similar shifts will spread across the wider economy is only natural. But are these disruptions imminent? Why have some industries been so much more disrupted than others? How, and to what extent, will each of our major industrial sectors really change? Where will Silicon Valley (or its many global imitators) find the next generation of mega successes? This report provides a business executive’s guide to these issues.

Big Data Analytics – The game changer in the world of sports

On-field technologies or sensors present in the gaming equipment also help in the gathering of valuable data are changing the scenario of today’s sporting world. Now you can collect millions of data from the swinging of a tennis racquet to the spin of a baseball. You can learn about the tactics applied by your opponents and analyse with the help of Big Data to predict how they are going to play the next match. Or even improve your own team’s performance by checking out if the players are working as a team or is there any gap in the flow of play. Coaching will also be influenced a lot by Big Data analytics. We have already seen some clubs like Chelsea and Portland Trail Blazers are using coaching apps to make players understand the tactics easier. With Big Data analytics one can understand exactly what happened in each game and predict closely what tactics is going to be beneficial in the next match.

The road to hybrid cloud architecture is paved with mistakes

One error organizations used to make when implementing hybrid cloud architecture, said David Linthicum, author of numerous books on IT, started with OpenStack. IT organizations use the open source cloud software platform to build a private cloud, which offers advantages similar to public cloud but uses in-house architecture. It's a perfectly reasonable endeavor, except many organizations didn't fully understand what they're getting into. "It was too much of an engineering challenge for them to take on, and they ended up going over budget or just abandoning it quickly,"Linthicum said. The problem for many was that they believed the hype on private cloud as a bulletproof and easy-to-implement alternative to public cloud, Linthicum said, citing 2013 as the banner year for vendor bunk.

Business Technology Starts to Get Personal

Remarkably, mass-produced goods increasingly personalize into something unique because of a lot of snooping on you. Few consumers turn personalizing features off, adjust use or boycott the products. In a conflict of personalization and privacy, personalization has triumphed. Mr. Immelt foresaw much the same kind of thing happening with machines. “We can now track every jet engine separately throughout its life,” he said, giving each one the machine equivalent of a Facebook page, which states where it is and how it is “feeling,” making maintenance more efficient. Changing the behavior of devices will enable companies, he said, “to make sure you don’t allow any space between the customer and you.”

Stephen King's practical advice for tech writers

The lay audience has no special or expert knowledge. They connect with the human interest aspect of articles. They usually need background information; they expect more definition and description; and they may want attractive graphics or visuals. The managerial audience may or may not have more knowledge than the lay audience about the subject, but they need knowledge so they can make a decision about the issue. Any background information, facts, or statistics needed to make a decision should be highlighted. The experts may be the most demanding audience in terms of knowledge, presentation, and graphics or visuals. ... For the "expert" audience, ... style and vocabulary may be specialized or technical, source citations are reliable and up-to-date, and documentation is accurate.

Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi: What you need to know

Windows 10 on the Pi should be able to run any Universal Windows app. Existing Windows Store apps for Windows 8 machines should also be able to be converted into Universal Windows apps, without "much effort", according to Microsoft. While the Windows Store has faced criticism for the poor selection of apps on offer - there are still a wide variety of apps that could be ported - although the performance on the Pi's smartphone-oriented hardware may vary. However, Microsoft is primarily pushing Windows 10 IoT Core - which can run on hardware with or without screens - as an OS that makes it easier to create IoT devices. This aim of lowering the barrier to building appliances is complemented by the Pi's low price and ability to control a range of hardware via its general-purpose input output (GPIO) pins.

Data centre security – Do you understand your risk?

Let’s assume for a moment that you still manage all or some of your data in-house. By implication that means that somewhere in the building you have a room full of servers that need to be maintained and protected. And as a manager you’ll be aware of the physical risks that threaten the integrity of your data. These include not only flood, fire and incursions by malicious third parties but also the havoc that can be created by unauthorized members of staff entering the secure area and, accidentally or deliberately, tampering with the equipment. Naturally enough you do your level best to protect your hardware and software from all these threats. So now let’s say that you’ve made an important decision to outsource your storage and IT functionality to an external data centre.

14 ways to improve corporate wellness programs with wearables

Wellness and fitness program managers should "take extraordinary steps" to protect sensitive information collected via wellness programs, Huffman said. He also suggested that companies work closely with HR managers to assure staff that their wellness program teams don't have access to sensitive data, such as employee health insurance claims. Eric Dreiband, a partner with law firm Jones Day, stressed the importance of maintaining a secure "firewall" between data collected by wearable technology and personnel records. The goal is to keep staff health and fitness data away from supervisors or other decision makers, so that it cannot inadvertently affect employee pay or promotions.

Average Cost of Cyber-crime in the U.S. Rises to $15 Million

The Cost of Cyber Crime Study also examined global costs, which are not as high on average as those in the U.S. For the 2015 study, the global average annualized cost of cyber-crime is $7.7 million for a 1.9 percent year-over-year increase. The global study methodology examined 252 companies across seven countries, with 1,928 attacks used to measure the total cost. Specifically in the U.S., the study looked at 58 companies, with 638 cyber-attacks used to measure the total cost. "We were surprised by the consistent increase in the cost of cyber-crime over just one year in all countries," Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, told eWEEK. "We believe this is due to the increased sophistication and stealth of cyber-attacks."

Quote for the day:

"Successful people make the most of the best and the best of the worst." -- Steve Keating

October 06, 2015

EU Court Of Justice Throws The Internet For A Loop In Ending Safe Harbor

In short, though, this is yet more damage directly done by the NSA and the US's ridiculous attitude towards mass surveillance, without any concern at all to the economic costs that such mass surveillance creates for US companies. As the EFF notes in its response to the news, the US brought this on itself with its idiotic mass surveillance efforts. This end result is a mess that could lead to greater fragmentation of the internet, which won't do anything to better protect people's privacy (and, actually, might make it more exposed). The only logical way forward is to move away from mass surveillance and towards a more comprehensive view of privacy that takes into account the public's rights -- including the right to free expression.

Cloud Computing: A data-centric business model

The most central aspect of any business is data because data is the fuel for all business processes. The custodian of this data is the business owner. The technical aspects of cloud computing are only tools for the provisioning, manipulating and storing of data. Decisions on all aspects of any cloud computing deployment must therefore be purposely driven by business process owners. The IT Team acts as the trusted technology advisor to and the technology execution arm of the business process owners. On the flip side, the business process owner must act as the trusted business advisor to and business execution arm of the IT Team. This defines why collaboration is essential in the delivery of a cloud computing solution. It also explains why the object of this collaboration must be business data.

The Modern Data Center: Challenges and Innovations

End-user and customers’ expectation levels have never been higher, and the demand for data shows no sign of slowing down. Data center managers must manage all of these elements while also remaining efficient and keeping costs under control. So where does the data center go from here? ... At the heart of the data center evolution is IT’s rapid rate of change. If you examine enterprise data centers, then you might observe the ways that cloud computing and hyperscale innovations are displacing traditional enterprise systems, with new paradigms pioneered by innovators like Amazon and Google. With new options being developed, enterprises now have to chart strategies for cloud computing, including public, private or hybrid cloud.

Cybersecurity through enterprise risk management

This shows a massive value gap between protecting against cybersecurity risks and the value lost in a cybersecurity breach. This also indicates that decision makers either don’t believe that the risk actually exists or they just don’t know how to control the risk. I believe that most decision makers would spend the money for protection if they believed it would control the risk. While this is a very immature space, some incredible technologies are now coming together that are capable of delivering a protection fabric instead of a bunch of security point products. In a majority of the key breaches that have happened, the affected organizations had substantial investments in security technology. Buying the right tools doesn’t necessarily protect you from a catastrophic security event.

Cyber security G&T – Investing yourself in engagement and education

People have to care, people have to retain, people have to recall and when they recall make (and keep making) a consciously secure choice – a choice that often feels awkward and frequently takes a little more effort than the insecure alternative … until it becomes a habit. I’m arguably stating the bleeding obvious there, unless you’re solely thinking about ‘lusers’: folk at the faraway coalface who just get told about good passwords, clearing desks, care they should take with links in mails and what has to happen when they inevitably lose their pass, smartphone or laptop. What about staff involved in change sign-off, procurement and strategic planning? Each of those have (or should have) a chunky security element, but how are those conversations and relationships at the moment?

Cloud services go mainstream in healthcare

Cloud brokering is happening elsewhere in healthcare, where CIOs are exercising the additional due diligence in embracing hosted software in the face of stringent regulations. Creative Solutions in Healthcare is running 100 percent of its infrastructure in a VMware public cloud, says Shawn Wiora, CIO and CISO of the Fort Worth, Texas, nursing home provider, which has 5,000 patients. ... For other healthcare CIOs, the business agility of cloud outweighs the risk of regulatory noncompliance. Partners in Health CIO Dave Mayo in 2013 began using Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to ensure that the nonprofit organization's 17,000 clinicians, which provide healthcare services in such impoverished countries as Rwanda, Haiti and Mexico, could reliably exchange information, including X-rays and other digital images. “Email is our supply chain,” Mayo says.

'Going virtual' may double your security costs

Why do cyberattacks involving virtualized environments cost twice as much? Kaspersky explained that the main reason is virtualized infrastructure gets used more often for mission-critical operations and for storing sensitive data. An attack on virtualized infrastructure, according to the survey, more frequently results in the loss of important data and the ability to operate essential services, and also in damage to the company's reputation. Next come the complexities and risks of virtualized environments. 56% of respondents feel fully prepared to tackle the complicated risks; Kaspersky argued that figure is inflated, calling it a "misguided impression." Just over half of firms surveyed (52%) believe that they understand those risks.

Technology CEOs Focus on Growth for the Future

Uncertainty. Disruption. Innovation. Standing at the forefront of change, companies in the technology space are often the first to feel the impact of a shifting global economy - positive or negative. As part of KPMG’s 2015 Global CEO Outlook report, 102 technology c-suite executives were surveyed. They told us that despite the constantly evolving global business environment, they are feeling more confident in their growth prospects within the sector than they did last year. Indeed, growth has become an imperative for global technology CEOs and developing new growth strategies is the top strategic priority over the next 3 years. Eighty-four percent of technology CEOs have stated they have an aggressive growth strategy; so what are technology CEOs doing to make sure they are on pace for growth?

Rating Agency Threatens to Downgrade Banks Over Security Shortcomings

By any measure, S&P's warning to the financial services industry about the threats they face from online attackers is belated. Indeed, it comes three years after financial services firms began suffering significant disruptions to their websites from a wave of DDoS attacks, nearly two years after the Target breach that resulted in the compromise of 40 million payment card accounts and related fraud , and one year after JPMorgan Chase suffered a breach that compromised information on 83 million households and small businesses. Financial services security expert Avivah Litan, an analyst for the consultancy Gartner, says it's no surprise that S&P is behind the curve on cybersecurity.

Your future in a world dominated by machines

"We need to get over the fact that the internet is no longer dominated by us," he told the LinuxCon Europe event in Dublin. Today a sizeable number of these algorithms are devoted to packaging us up as products, so our identities can be sold in online ad auctions that take place in the blink of an eye each time we load a web page. "These algorithms get together and they trade your identity, they trade your history, they trade and bid against each other for the right to show you information," he said, adding the trade generates multi-billion dollar revenues for purveyors such as Google and Facebook.

Quote for the day:

"There can be no courage unless you're scared." -- Eddie Rickenbacker

October 05, 2015

The reality of android soldiers and why laws for robots are doomed to failure

"Every decade, within 20 years we are going to have sentient robots and there is always somebody saying it, but if you look at the people on the ground working [on AI] they don't say this. They get on with the work. AI is mostly a practical subject developing things that you don't even know are AI — in your phone, in your car, that's the way we work." And even if, at some point in the far future, AI matures to the point at which a computer system can abide by the rules of war, the fundamental moral questions will still apply. Sharkey said, "You've still got the problems of accountability and people will have to decide is this morally what we want to have, a machine making that decision to kill a human."

What ‘digital’ really means

It’s tempting to look for simple definitions, but to be meaningful and sustainable, we believe that digital should be seen less as a thing and more a way of doing things. To help make this definition more concrete, we’ve broken it down into three attributes: creating value at the new frontiers of the business world, creating value in the processes that execute a vision of customer experiences, and building foundational capabilities that support the entire structure. Being digital requires being open to reexamining your entire way of doing business and understanding where the new frontiers of value are. For some companies, capturing new frontiers may be about developing entirely new businesses in adjacent categories; for others, it may be about identifying and going after new value pools in existing sectors.

How to identify and thwart insider threats

Though least privilege, zero trust approaches can limit damage from insiders, these are not fool proof. There are cases where data requires additional protections. An entitled employee for example might have full and unrestrained access to his work product in order to do his job. Likewise, an imposter can retrieve data in a very stealthy manner, avoiding the use of readily detected system scans and brute force dictionary attacks on login screens. Organizations should consider detection methods from the User Behavior Analytics space to deal with insiders, says Tierney. These methods apply behavioral baselines to identify attacks based on employee actions that deviate from normal, established behavior patterns.

Have it Your Way! You Pick the Cloud Model

Ask yourself how important performance and availability are to your company? Is 100 percent availability essential to your company’s survival? Do you have a highly available architecture? Is robust performance critical to your operational success? With by-the-instance cloud you will create both scale and availability by distributing content across multiple instances and geographies. Alternatively, resource pool-based clouds are ideal for environments with large transactional systems that have an underlying HA infrastructure and scale, at a granular level, to fine-tune your compute, network, or storage independent of one another. By-the-instance clouds tend to be less expensive on the front end since they do not include HA redundancy in the infrastructure.

Fifteen Trends Safeguarding Government

Every employee at every level of government is charged with protecting our information from for - eign and domestic hackers, who might use that information to harm or demoralize American sys - tems. Furthermore, this protection only becomes more important each day as more people, places, and things are connected to the Internet. As American government becomes increasingly connected, a question looms: How will our inter - ests and information be safeguarded as cyber - threats mount and evolve? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to cyberse - curity. Instead, government will have to adopt mul - tiple tactics that work in concert and evolve with new threat environments. In this guide, we explore the tools and strategies that public servants are using to safeguard our information systems.

Psychology Of Color To Improve Site Conversion

It’s important to understand that the psychology of color plays a big role in persuasion. Keep in mind that persuasion is different from coercion, manipulation, or simply being pushy. Instead, it’s about bringing the change in attitude necessary to encourage customers to take action. In this case, the action would be a conversion or purchase. Of course, an essential aspect of the psychology of color is value. If devoid of value, your products or services won’t sell regardless of the color scheme. For the psychology of color to work in your website’s favor, the content, design, loading speed, call for action, and other landing page factors must work in tandem.

Is The CIO The Next VP Of Electricity?

So, are CIOs on their way out? The answer depends on the scope of the CIO role. The new role is responsible for the full digital strategy of the organization. Companies that feel they have a weakness in their digital strategy tend to hire a CDO (Chief Digital Officer). When the CDO comes in to define a digital strategy, they spend a lot of time thinking about the customer needs and the full customer journey to find ways to enhance the company’s offering and better engage with customers across all devices. They think beyond the standard website and internal software to more creative ways to improve the customer experience. CIOs should embrace the CDO role. They should be open to reinventing their roles, positioning themselves as versatile experts capable of leveraging technology to empower the entire organization.

IoT: Can It Bridge The Digital Divide To Fulfill Its Promise?

Internet access and digital skills are key to unlocking the potential of the IoT, which can help with those challenges. Applications such as telecommuting, virtual meetings, app-based public transport, smart cars, smart logistics, smart buildings, and smart appliances can help curb emissions and provide more sustainable urban growth. "As of 2014, 60 percent of the global population did not have access to internet, and 56 percent out of this 60 percent belonged to emerging countries," according to the Frost & Sullivan website. "Given the benefits that developed economies derive from proliferation of internet, bridging this digital divide is a pressing global challenge necessitating enhanced public-private collaboration."

Finding your digital sweet spot

Of course, not all industries face the same opportunities or the same threats. Hotels and airlines, for instance, are greatly exposed to the disruptive potential of digital, with our research showing that over the next five years their share of sales via digital channels will rise to 50 percent in mature markets. This will clearly disadvantage digital laggards. Large grocery chains, on the other hand, could be less affected. Their share of sales via digital channels is expected to rise to just 10 percent. With an expense base dominated by the cost of goods sold, the potential for digital to radically transform their economics is somewhat constrained. To capture the value available, organizations will need to assess the value at stake, invest proportionally to that value, and align their business and operating models accordingly.

The Art of Dealing With Disaster

Unless you’ve not been involved in planning and implementing one, the complexity of a disaster recovery system may come as a surprise. I cannot provide a complete picture in a single blog post, but I can at least explain why such systems are complex. First of all there’s the expense. While it is technically feasible to completely replicate a data center somewhere a good distance away, so that computer systems are proof against a geographically widespread disaster, its also very expensive. Large businesses do that and some may still do, but nowadays the preferred and less expensive option is to use the cloud – Disaster Recovery as a Service, as it is called. There are several advantages, including the fact that you can choose a cloud disaster recovery site that is thousands of miles from your data center.

Quote for the day:

"The first task of a leader is to keep hope alive." -- Joe Batten

October 04, 2015

How Is Knowing the Business Important to Data Science?

Many Data Scientists forget the essential step of learning about the business from the business's perspective. Since the business is the customer of the Data Scientist, this can be easily boiled down to “What does the customer truly want to accomplish?” This simple but straightforward question may seem frivolous to an inexperienced Data Scientist, but getting at what the business objectives are for any Data Science project will create a necessary roadmap for moving forward. The fact of the matter is that most businesses have many competing objectives and constraints that have to be properly balanced in order to be successful on a day-to-day basis. As the Data Scientist, one of your primary aims in ensuring a successful Data Science project is uncovering important, possibly derailing factors that can impact outcomes.

The Best Android Wear Watch

Choosing the right Android Wear smartwatch remains a very personal decision. Given that the functionality of Android Wear is mostly consistent across devices you don’t necessarily lose any core experience from one watch to the other. If one simply looks gorgeous to you, chances are you’ll be happier with it in the long run. Below are detailed all the smartwatches running Android Wear available to buy right now. ... While a lot of the Android Wear watches are dust proof and can survive submerged in about 1M of water, the ZenWatch is little more susceptible to dust and cannot be submerged. ASUS’s time in the Android market has been slightly overshadowed by other, more established mobile-phone manufacturers, such as Samsung,

A CIO's guide to enterprise cloud migration

A poorly planned and implemented migration, however, can put a serious dent in the cloud business case. With that in mind, CIOs need to address a number of questions to ensure a smooth migration: Which enterprise cloud migration strategy is right for your organization, if any?; Which applications are suitable for the cloud and which aren't?; Do you have the appropriate tools to aid in migration efforts and cut back on expensive manual tasks?; and What types of computing workloads will work best in which specific types of clouds? In this CIO Essential Guide, we'll address these questions by exploring the intricacies of cloud migration and suggesting best practices for getting the job done.

Data Integrity - A Sequence of Words Lost in the World of Big Data

Data Integrity should, in my opinion, be enforced at the source to the greatest extent possible, to avoid unnecessary work at the end. I hate to bring it up in this day of Hadoop, but Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) still have their place in the world of data management. As stated earlier, there is no question about it, Big Data that satisfies the definition of at least the three V's listed above, requires a new approaches, e.g., Hadoop. However, if your data is not that big, consider more traditional means of managing your data to still obtain cutting edge advantages, like predictive analysis. Analysis of good data is worth a ton of analysis on bad data. Even in a Big Data environment, there are principles that, when enforced, will ensure the quality of the data, and enhance its value.

The workforce of the future will live in the cloud

The design of the workplace needs to put employees first, ensuring they have the necessary tools to work efficiently. According to a study by Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Business Consulting, the older generations of employeesadapt to the workplace, but millennials expect the workplace to be adapted to their preferences. By utilising cloud technologies, offices can adopt an open concept where employees may not necessarily be assigned to a fixed workstation, especially in organizations where employees have to travel between multiple offices frequently. The practice of ‘hot desking’, a concept where employees sit at any free desk or work from remote locations, has gained traction in a number of multi-national corporations today.

The Blockchain Might Be The Next Disruptive Technology

But to go ahead, the blockchain technology needs to fix a few issues. Starting with the network capacity. As we saw earlier, a block is added to the ledger every 10 minutes. Due to the limited size of a block (1MB), the network is restricted to processing 7 transactions per second (tps). This is way far from what VISA can handle, with up to 56,000 tps. A debate around the block size appeared a few weeks ago and a fork happened in the blockchain: A few miners started increasing block size to 8MB. And this sized is scheduled to double every two years. To solve this debate, if the Bitcoin XT reaches 75 percent of the network, the network will entirely switch to the new block size.

Brain Networking

By applying control theory equations to the wiring diagrams generated from brain scans, the researchers showed that the geographical and functional differences between regions of the brain are linked. While the analysis cannot say whether the frontal cortex’s location or its role evolved first, it suggests that part of the frontal cortex’s ability to control executive function depends on its distance from other parts of the brain network. “This study heralds a new wave of network science, grounded in rigorous control theory,” said co-author Grafton, director of UCSB’s Brain Imaging Center. “When applied to state-of-the-art brain imaging data we begin to see some of the design tradeoffs inherent in the architecture of brain connections.”

Modeling Enterprise Risk Management and Security with the ArchiMate® Language

The importance of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and security rises with the progress of globalization and growth of the Internet. An increasing number of organizations interact with consumers and trading partners around the world, and are therefore exposed to an increasing variety of risks. In this context, organizations need to understand the variables that affect their operations, so describing, classifying, managing, and mitigating risk factors is very important. Enterprise Architects must help organizations manage risk through architectures that help avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept adverse risks. Risk and security models help organizations develop guidance and take action to embrace opportunity and manage risk.

How Enterprise Cloud and Virtual Networking are Changing the Telco Market

As far as telcos are concerned, SDN is an enabling technology, not a revenue-generating product in itself. It is a new way to architect their networks that enables them to manage infrastructure and deliver services in new ways. “What’s more interesting is NFV and virtualization of services,” Chander said. NFV is a blueprint for defining those services, things like VPN, WAN, intrusion detection, firewall, and so on. It is virtualizing functions that used to be performed by physical boxes. They become software defined, but they are actual revenue-generating services. AT&T and Japan’s NTT Communications are examples of service providers that use SDN technologies in the most advanced ways.

Enterprise Architecture: Just Breathe and Find the Time to Plan

Just breathe. Besides being one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs, that is my advice when you are feeling the pressures of this brave new digital world. Just breathe – and start planning. That old adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” has never rung so true. With the category in its report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Architecture Management Suites, Q3, 2015, we believe that Forrester is confirming that using EA to plan and manage business and IT transformation is essential for digital success. Today, IT is being called upon to move mountains and move them quickly. So just when it seems there is no time to sit down and plan ahead, that is the time when it is most important to keep calm.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is a process of influencing the probability of achieving a desired change through human relationships." -- P Semark

October 03, 2015

18 cardinal rules of systems administration

It's not just knowing how to set up and maintain your servers and understanding how system commands work that makes you a good system administrator -- or even knowing how to fix things when something breaks down, how to monitor performance, how to manage backups, or how to craft superbly clever scripts. It's knowing these things andholding yourself to a set of cardinal rules that help to keep your systems running smoothly and your users happy. Many of these rules you've probably heard numerous times. Some you’ve probably learned the hard way (when you got seriously burned). These are practices that have proven themselves valuable through decades of systems administration and helped a lot of us keep our cool when the going got hot.

Data Never Sleeps 3.0

The amount of data that can be produced in a single minute is mind-numbing and shows no sign of slowing down. Our third infographic installment reveals astonishing leaps in digital consumption. Since 2013, the global internet population grew nearly 20% – from 2.4 billion to 3.2 billion people. Connectedness paves the way for innovation, and we see that happening every year with new technologies and services. Vine, for example, didn’t even exist when we released our first infographic. Today, over 1 million Vines are watched every minute, and top Viners earn tens of thousands of dollars per month in sponsorships – for making six-second videos. Welcome to 2015.

Infographic: Will Big Data Get Fans Off the Couch and Into the Stadium?

For decades, television networks have tried to create an at-home experience that’s on par with the stadium experience — and they’ve succeeded emphatically. In a 1998 ESPN poll, 54% of sports fans reported that they would rather be at the game than watch it at home; however, when that same poll was readministered in 2011 found that only 29% preferred being at the game. While this varies by sport to some degree, the conclusion is clear: people would rather watch a game in the comfort of their own climate-controlled homes, with easy access to the fridge and a clean bathroom, than experience the atmosphere of the stadium in person. Plus, sports fans today want the ability to watch multiple games at once;

Microsoft tries to clear the air on Windows 10 privacy furor

Given the long awareness of privacy in Redmond, then, the virulent attacks against Windows 10 this summer came as an unwelcome surprise. Critics have accused Windows 10 of spying on customers and collecting data for nefarious purposes, and those criticisms, despite a lack of supporting evidence, have persisted. The trouble for Microsoft is that its only communication on Windows 10 privacy features so far has been its privacy policy, a long document written by lawyers and designed to cover a broad range of legal situations across hundreds of jurisdictions worldwide. Today, the company published a series of detailed technical articles designed to explain how its actual practices align with its privacy policies across the board. The explanation starts with two clear principles:

Dear Data Scientists: It's Not All About You

Watching data scientists interact with regular business users reminds me of my own evolution from a “computer geek” into a “software engineer” (which was much cooler and definitely paid more). The tipping point though was when my background as a computer geek no longer qualified me to lord my knowledge over those less enlightened then myself. It was not that my experience became less valid, it simply became less relevant. Technology has progressed far enough that making it easier to use and accessible to everyone no longer sacrifices cost or performance. In the case of e-mail servers, it’s actually now cheaper to outsource the whole thing in the cloud than to run your own. That started to make my experience seem really expensive, and in some cases, unnecessary.

What Will Alphabet Be When It Grows Up?

You could interpret the reorganization in purely financial terms—as a practical move meant to give Wall Street greater clarity about the profits of core Google and the investments being sunk into more speculative ventures such as X, which has developed a self-driving car and high-altitude balloons that deliver Internet access. Page acknowledged the validity of this view in his announcement of Alphabet, noting that the shake-up would make his company “cleaner and more accountable.” Beyond the financial outlook, though, a more interesting question arises: will Alphabet be able to demonstrate a productive new path for industrial innovation?

Professionalism, Certification and Fallacies Around Best Practice

The absence of methodology in any activity is a sure sign of people who quite literally ‘do not know what they are doing’ (or why they are doing what they are doing) – either as individuals or as a group. The absence of methodology is the active signifier of a dearth or deficit of Know-How in any type of enterprise or at any level in an organisation. I’ll explain why I hold this view in a moment, but first I just want to observe a notable exception: there are places at the forefronts of science and technology, including management and social sciences, where literally nobody knows what they are doing – where everything is an experiment or doing something for the first time by anyone anywhere.

Mobile device management has become alphabet soup

BYOD isn't the only acronym in the game, especially since employees are pushing back. According to a recent survey conducted by Bitglass, 57 percent of employees – and 38 percent of IT professionals – do not participate in their company's BYOD program ... being able to wipe an employee's phone doesn't always keep your company's data safe. Not only can a good hacker prevent wiping a phone by putting it into airplane mode, but your employee might not even report the device is missing. A 2014 survey conducted by ZixCorp found that while 59 percent of employees would immediately report a lost device to an employer if the employer had the capability to wipe the phone, 12 percent would wait a few days, 3 percent would wait a week and 5 percent would wait over a week.

Inside EMC's 10-year IT infrastructure transformation

"EMC as a company has undergone several transformations over the course of its life as a technology company, and we certainly expect that continuous transformation is within our DNA," he said. Peirce said his team has an obligation and responsibility to the rest of the company to be an IT service provider to allow the company to enter a competitive state, and be poised to innovate and capitalise on opportunities faster than competitors. In fact, this year marks exactly 10 years since the company started overhauling its own infrastructure, which was rolled out in three stages: infrastructure first, followed by the operating model, and most recently the company's data and applications.

Q&A with Tom Roden and Ben Williams on Improving Retrospectives

For most teams that adopted agile practices, reflecting and looking for improvements every two to four weeks was a revolutionary shift. For many this has now become standard practice, so there is an argument for keeping that same regular cadence, no matter whether you drop the review and planning processes that sandwiched it in Scrum. It can provide a regular heartbeat that many team members enjoy and punctuates the continuous flow of work. There is no need to keep retrospectives to a fixed cadence though. The closer to the occurrence you review the events, the fresher they are in the mind. So why wait up to two weeks to deal with them. Continuous improvement can mean just that, inspect and adapt on the fly by holding retrospectives based on the trigger of specific types of events.

Quote for the day:

"When people can see which direction the leaders are going in it becomes easier to motivate them." --Lakshmi Mittal

October 01, 2015

On Monoliths and Microservices

The term software architecture traditionally implies the architecture of a single program. In vertical or microservice style architecture, the definitions like “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project” is hardly relevant anymore. What part is hard to change in microservice style architecture? The answer is not the inner components of an application anymore. The difficult things to change are some of the decisions that have been made about the microservices, for example, the ways they are integrated into the system, or the communication protocols between the involved applications and etc. Thus, we at otto.de are drawing a difference between a micro-architecture of an application and the macro-architecture of the system. The micro-architecture is all about the internals of a vertical or a microservice, and is left completely in the hands of its respective team.

What Does the VolksWagon Hack Mean for IoT Security?

We are now in a time in when technology companies must provide "digital confidence." This is necessary and should be mandatory to keep customer trust. From a technology and historical point of view, consider this the beginning of a digital Cambrian explosion. In the Cambrian explosion 524 million years ago, conditions changed virtually overnight. Almost all known animal species emerged and before this, almost three billion years had passed with just a few algae and bacteria on earth. Such a comparable explosion has begun now in the digital world. ... The fact is that digital automation is now a driving force behind many aspects of life, including the cyber-attack landscape. A modern upper class car carries million lines of code in its system,

Why passion is a requirement for today's CIO

Technology, of course, is the most significant contributing factor in these concerns. With no legacy infrastructure, new entrants can disrupt old businesses at a fraction of the cost of established players. Competitors who lead in digital technology can snatch away market share, and in most industries, products are becoming more software driven. With the CEO thinking more about IT than ever, the role of the CIO is changing. ... "Passion is a reason for being," says McCabe. "It is what drives your curiosity and makes you a better and more focused leader. When you care about something, you want others to share the vision, and you strive to bring as many people as possible along with you on that journey."

This Car Knows Your Next Misstep Before You Make It

“Imagine you are driving on a highway,” says Saxena Ashutosh, the director of a project called Robo Brain at Cornell University and Stanford who oversaw the driving project. “You look to the right for a second, because you are going to make a right turn, and as you are starting to make a right turn, some other driver has pulled into the space that you thought was empty.” A car could then either issue an alert or even prevent you from pulling into the lane. The system was trained using cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms, and it could predict, with just over 90 percent accuracy, when a driver was about to change lanes in the next few seconds. A lane change was usually signaled by a glance over the shoulder along with telltale head movements and changes in steering, braking, and acceleration.

Implementing a Recurrent Neural Network with Python, Numpy and Theano

solving the Language Modeling problem also has a cool side effect. Because we can predict the probability of a word given the preceding words, we are able to generate new text. It’s a generative model. Given an existing sequence of words we sample a next word from the predicted probabilities, and repeat the process until we have a full sentence. Andrej Karparthy has a great post that demonstrates what language models are capable of. His models are trained on single characters as opposed to full words, and can generate anything from Shakespeare to Linux Code. Note that in the above equation the probability of each word is conditioned on all previous words. In practice, many models have a hard time representing such long-term dependencies due to computational or memory constraints.

Fighting Developer Fatigue with JNBridge

A better approach would be to keep as much of the .NET-based technology as possible, and start by nibbling around the margins, creating framework code in Python, and calling the more substantial .NET-based logic where needed. Later, more Python skills can be acquired and more Python code can be added, as necessary, and functionality can be migrated out of the .NET libraries if that’s what’s desired. This “go slow” approach can mitigate developer fatigue and allow you to avoid prematurely committing to new technologies that may turn out to be insufficiently robust for production use, or may soon be supplanted by even newer technologies. Note the approach described here can be used to continue using both legacy .NET and Java binaries with emerging languages.

Why Windows 10 is the most secure Windows ever

“Clearly, Microsoft thought a lot about the kind of attacks taking place against enterprise customers and is moving security forward by leaps and bounds,” said Ian Trump, a security lead at LogicNow. Device Guard relies on Windows 10’s virtualization-based security to allow only trusted applications to run on devices. Credential Guard protects corporate identities by isolating them in a hardware-based virtual environment. Microsoft isolates critical Windows services in the virtual machine to block attackers from tampering with the kernel and other sensitive processes. The new features rely on the same hypervisor technology already used by Hyper-V.

How to mitigate vendor risk in a cybersecurity environment

Performing a thorough “vendor due diligence” is critical not only when selecting a vendor, but also on an ongoing basis. This is true for third parties that host your data as well as those that have regular access to your data, including computer support vendors. You are paying for services, so you should demand security that meets or exceeds your own security standards. Prior to beginning your due diligence, you may want to identify all vendors that have access to your personally identifiable data and what data is visible to each vendor. You may then vet vendors with a full review process or other steps, including paying them a visit and asking for a full tour of their facilities and a complete explanation of their operational and security policies. This research will complement any written documentation you may already have in hand.

Navigating The Slippery Slope Of Public Security Disclosure

When considering a public message, consider our most secure US public figure, the President. We know that the President is the most guarded and protected person on the planet. What the Secret Service won’t tell us is how they accomplish this -- and that is by design. Grand visible gestures are a small fraction of the actual security measures in place, yet they serve as a visible and impressive deterrent to foul play. Strong public statements on security without specific details are good. “We employ a myriad of applications, systems and processes to ensure the protection of your personal data” is one such statement. When making your statements, avoid “naming names.” An executive I know recently made a very public announcement about hiring an “ethical hacker” as a member of his security team.

Where's the Money In Data (Part III)

Data monetization opportunities are determined by defining a problem to be solved in terms of focus and state. If the focus of the problem to be solved is external and the state is existing, then the defined monetization opportunity is developing new products, services or channels for customers. This means that you are using your customer intelligence data and applying it to their problems. And while the ultimate business goal is to increase customer loyalty and grow revenue, the data is being used to solve the needs of the customer, not the needs of the business. When using data to solve customer problems, the customer defines the value of the product or solution by variables within the scope of their intended use. This value assessment can be a moving target for businesses to identify and can make the related monetization efforts difficult.

Quote for the day:

"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud." -- Coco Chanel

September 30, 2015

How Big Data Is Changing the Way You Fly

To illustrate how data is playing a growing role in todays flight booking engines I've broken down play by play how each individual piece of data collected about you can be used, analysed and overlaid with other data sets to paint a picture of who you are, what motivates and drives you to purchase a specific product. Every day – trillions of calculations are being number crunched to transform this goldmine of data opportunity into real, tangible high revenue opportunities for the airlines and their frequent flyer programs. When armed with key insights , a holistic overview of yours, and other customers’ detailed profiled information can be applied to direct booking channels which are designed to customize pricing for your personal situation at that very given moment.

Open Sesame: Parse .NET SDK

As of today Parse Push for our .NET SDK works on WinRT, Silverlight, .NET 4.5, Windows Phone, Xamarin iOS and Android, and Unity iOS and Android. As you may have noticed, Push works differently on each platform – even between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. First, registering for push notifications is a different experience for each platform. On Windows and Windows Phone, you have to store the channel URI to listen to the push. With Android, you have to request a GCM registration ID. On iOS, you have to register for remote notification. But everything boils down to one problem: How can you uniquely identify this device so that the Push Server can send a targeted push to this device? In the Parse SDK, we simplify this problem by saving a ParseInstallationobject that contains special fields which enable push notifications for that device.

Women in “a position of power” in IT industry, says BBC panel

“The most important strength women can bring to the workplace is just being a woman in the workplace. I don’t want to be treated differently as a woman, but we do need to raise awareness about diversity,” said Whitney. ... He explained that he aims to introduce a diversity strategy in the next three months at the BBC, which will use recruitment targets to ensure women and under-represented groups are on shortlists for jobs, with the hope that those looking for staff will cast the net wider to find skilled workers. “We’re not talking about positive discrimination here, but we’re saying you haven’t looked hard enough if all the people you’ve brought to that interview are the same,” said Ogungbesan.

A new kind of school tackles the software engineering talent shortage

"There is a great need for software engineers worldwide, and in the US particularly," said Julien Barbier, co-founder and CEO of the Holberton School in a statement. "Holberton School uses a proven system that more closely replicates real-world employment. In this project-based and peer learning system there are no formal teachers and no formal courses. Instead, everything is project-centered." Specifically, Barbier, formerly a senior director at Docker, continued, "Students have to solve increasingly difficult programming challenges, with minimal initial directions about how to solve them. As a consequence, students naturally look for the theory and tools they need, understand them, use them, work together, and help each other. And, by the way, they love it -- I know because I am a graduate of the same system."

Newly found TrueCrypt flaw allows full system compromise

It's impossible to tell if the new flaws discovered by Forshaw were introduced intentionally or not, but they do show that despite professional code audits, serious bugs can remain undiscovered. The first phase of the TrueCrypt audit project, performed by security engineers from iSEC Partners, a subsidiary of information assurance company NCC Group, covered the driver code, but "Windows drivers are complex beasts" and it's easy to miss local elevation of privilege flaws, Forshaw said on Twitter. The Google researcher hasn't disclosed details about the two bugs yet, saying that he usually waits seven days after a patch is released to open his bug reports. Since TrueCrypt is no longer actively maintained, the bugs won't be fixed directly in the program's code.

MapR Drafts JSON To Work With Hadoop

Data can be worked on in real-time as it is coming off the Web. Users will be working with the data in its native format. "You are not depending on IT to set up the schema," Norris said. "This adds to the capability of how data is stored." The community version of MapR-DB with JSON will enable users to test and develop their own apps on the platform, Norris said. "When it becomes part of the business backbone, the company will be glad to pay for the enterprise features," he said. That version will have the governance and security features needed for corporate IT use. The addition of JSON support to MapR's product line is yet another step of adding utility to Hadoop's capability. Last month, MapR announced it was integrating its Hadoop Distribution 5.0 service with Amazon Web Services.

7 Questions Every Data Scientist Should Be Answering for Business

To be candid, many Data Scientist operate in fear wondering what they should be doing as it relates to the business. In my judgment the below questions address both parties with the common goal of a win-win for the organization – helping Data Scientist support their organization as they should and business professionals becoming more informed with each analysis. ... It is important to remember that Data Science techniques are tools that we can use to help make better decisions, with an organization and are not an end in themselves. It is paramount that, when tasked with creating a predictive model, we fully understand the business problem that this model is being constructed to address and ensure that it does address it.

Managing shadow IT risk to the business

First, get an idea of what is really going on across your organization. Simple hardware and software asset mapping tools show what is attached and being run against your IT platform. There will probably be a few surprises there. For example, a department that didn't authorize spending on an enterprise-scale storage area network might have its own network attached storage box running, purchased outside its IT budget. Expect software compliance issues as well: That NAS box probably runs a copy of MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server, even though the organization's standard for database management is Oracle.

Why CIOs should worry about the Internet of Things

“The impact of the IoT on storage infrastructure is another factor contributing to the increasing demand for more storage capacity, and one that will have to be addressed as this data becomes more prevalent,” according to a Gartner report on the IoT and the datacenter. “The focus today must be on storage capacity, as well as whether or not the business can harvest and use IoT data in a cost-effective manner,” the report continues. ... Most CIOs will deal with the first phase of the Internet of Things by investing in and deploying a platform. Any number of them exist, but the one getting the most buzz right now seems to be Google’s Brillo product, along with the AllJoyn platform from Qualcomm and the platform created by the Industrial Internet Consortium.

A Glimpse of Latest Mobile App Development Trends

Whether it is about shopping, ordering your favourite food, saving money, hiring a cab or any other routine activity online, which devicedo you pick up at an instant to carry all such activities? Your Smartphone, right! Well, it is same with every one of us. Our cellular device has emerged as a real friend in need and is playing a crucial role in simplifying our daily tasks, changing your outlook towards information. It is not at all wrong to say that technology of mobile is growing at the speed of light and the apps have become an integral part of the digital ecosystem. In fact, these apps are progressing to make ubiquitous presence. However, staying up-to-date with the latest trends of mobile app development has become order rather than merely an option.

Quote for the day:

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple." -- Freeman Dyson

September 29, 2015

Don't toss data center best practices when managing cloud services

First, you need rules that lay out who can do what with what information, which providers and in which world regions and time zones. Losing control of that is one of the biggest stumbling blocks organizations come across, Cancila said. "You want to be able to position your organization to use cloud services effectively, but you have to retain some level of control so that you meet the requirements of the business," she said. Of course, organizations already use authentication mechanisms like Microsoft Active Directory so users and computers can access systems. If they're using Azure, they can manage users directly in the cloud by having them log in to the cloud version, Azure AD, a separate directory of users that lives in the cloud.

Data Center Trends – Colocation & Sustainability; Can They Coexist?

Efficiency is a great place to start and there are still thousands of colocation centers that have PUE values of over 2.0 (depending on regional climate issues a good PUE should be 1.2 – 1.45). This means on average colocation facilities are burning 30% plus more energy than they should be to support their hosted IT equipment. This inefficiency is bad enough, but when you combine it with the dirty energy mix that most of these 3685 data centers run on the story only gets worse. Consider that a data center running at a PUE of 2.0 on natural gas produces less carbon output than a 1.4 PUE data center running on coal generated energy. Combining a high PUE with a dirty energy supply just exacerbates the situation.

Introducing Azure Data Lake – Microsoft’s expanded vision for making big data easy

Azure Data Lake makes HDInsight, our Apache Hadoop-based service a key part of the Azure Data Lake. As one of the fastest growing services in Azure, HDInsight gives you the breadth of the Hadoop ecosystem in a managed service that’s monitored and supported by Microsoft. Furthering our commitment to productivity, we’ve also updated our Visual Studio Tools for authoring, advanced debugging, and tuning for Hive queries and Storm topologies running in HDInsight. Today, we are announcing the general availability of HDInsight on Linux. We work closely with Hortonworks and Canonical to provide the HDP™ distribution on the Ubuntu Operating System that powers the Linux version of HDInsight in the Data Lake.

Boosting performance of open big data platforms

The first performance and scalability challenge then is how to keep up with the latest open software progressions, adopting them and getting them to work together. This challenge is where the IBM Open Platform for Apache Hadoop can help. It provides a collection of the latest versions of Hadoop ecosystem components that have been tested, tuned and packaged for easy consumption. This collection also paves the way to exploit even more advanced big data and analytics software tools offered with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights. The next performance and scalability challenge exists below the open software at the physical infrastructure—the full scale-out architecture that represents the compute, networking and storage sprawl.

Are datasets truly anonymized? Two well-suited researchers are going to find out

Here's the kicker: Smith and Shmatikov are moving forward with this research with a grant from Google, the company that helped to put deep learning on the computing map with its research in the first place. In other circles, Google is also known as the company that has played a not-so-small role in making online privacy, or lack thereof, a growing concern. Google bestowed the grant -- the amount of which was not reported -- under its Faculty Research Awards program, which gives one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support research in a range of subjects that might benefit from collaboration with Google, according to Penn State.

Juniper unites the enterprise

Called Unite, the architecture is embodied in the company’s Junos operating system software and encompasses a handful of new and existing Juniper products. They include the EX9200 switch, the Junos Space Network Director management system, and third party products integrated through Juniper’s Open Converged Framework. Unite is intended to enable enterprises to build private clouds and then interconnect them to public cloud infrastructures in a hybrid environment for application access and delivery. At the heart of it is Junos Fusion Enterprise, Junos software designed to provide a single point of network configuration and management for the enterprise network. Junos Fusion Enterprise allows customers to collapse multiple network layers into a single enterprise cloud, Juniper says.

CIO interview: Monique Shivanandan, Aviva

“In IT we’re changing the ways of working from waterfall to agile,” says Shivanandan. Adopting agile has been the first step in turning the ship, and now approximately 70% of Aviva’s IT work is performed in an agile manner. Not all of this is taking place in the digital garage – the transformation is taking place across the entire business. But switching from traditional methods of working, where there is pressure to get it right first time, to an agile approach, where staff are encouraged to“fail fast and learn”, requires time and effort. Agile coaches are being used across the business to train employees in methodologies, standup meetings and ways of working.

How to craft an effective social media policy

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to prevent employees from using social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest – while at work. Some businesses are fine with that, even encouraging employees to promote the company and its products or services on social media. At the same time, however, they don’t want productivity to slip, or to have workers portray the company negatively on popular social media channels. So what steps can organizations realistically take to limit or control social media use while at work, without seeming like Big Brother or forbidding its use? Following are five expert tips, along with a sidebar on the legal ramifications of using social media for work or at the office.

Faster Payments—It Won’t Be All Wine and Roses

To understand why this might be the case, you have to remember that under the current system there are (generally) two stages to a transaction: first you have the assignment of rights and responsibilities (X promises to pay Y $5; this obligation is recorded as a debit in X’s account and a credit in Y’s), then you have the settlement ($5 is actually transferred from X’s account to Y’s). With ACH (the system used to transfer money between bank accounts used by almost all U.S. banks), and the systems that run on it, settlement generally takes at least a couple of days, which means that if fraudulent activity is detected before the actual transfer happens, the transfer of funds can be stopped, and Y never will not get his ill-gotten payment. This would not be possible in a real time system because the transfer of money would occur nearly instantly.

Is BYOK the key to secure cloud computing?

Service-managed keys can give you the assurances of per tenant and per subscription keys, with segregation of duties and auditing, without the headache of managing keys. “But with BYOK, we're requesting customers get involved in significant way,” Plastina says. “That means setting up vaults, managing vaults; in some cases, that requires HSM-backed keys so they’re purchasing an HSM on premise, they have to run their own quorums for administrator’s smart cards and PINs, they have to save smartcards in the right place. It definitely raises the burden on them.”

Quote for the day:

"Organizations are most vulnerable when they are at the peak of their success." -- R.T. Lenz