Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 05, 2016

Top tablets with keyboards

The rising popularity of tablets has some people ditching their laptops and desktops for a more portable experience, but the benefits of a full keyboard can still come in handy. The models on this list blur the line between tablet and laptop, usually coining them as "hybrids." The double-life of a hybrid appeases business professionals, students and those who want more PC capabilities in a portable and -- sometimes -- more affordable package. Here are our top recommendations for tablets with complementary keyboard options.

Is your car secure? Maybe not, but enterprise users can still learn something

Ironically - given their brilliant automotive innovations - one example of good security for phones is Google. Sullivan noted how Google aggressively patches the Nexus line. With Chrome OS and the Chrome browser, the Internet giant puts automakers to shame as well. Google updates its software in the background and patches constantly, but the end-user barely notices. Your typical Ford or Buick has nowhere near that level of sophistication for security. Another lesson is related to openness. Mónica noted how the automakers do not report on vulnerabilities as thoroughly and tend to hide behind a curtain, which creates a vicious cycle -- ethical hackers do not get any credit if they find a problem so they lose all incentive to help.

Democratizing Data Takes More Than Just Tech Upgrades

IT teams can’t ignore the cry for data democratization – the broad availability of all the metrics needed to make decisions and measure performance. But the response will not be easy. There are technological challenges involved, of course, but the political hurdles are just as difficult to jump. On both fronts, IT has to lead the way. Technology questions to ask on the way to data democracy Before tackling the thornier political questions that can impede data democracy, IT leaders need to evaluate the technological impediments. ... All of these technology challenges need to be addressed to make data democracy a reality inside the enterprise, but solving them is not enough to destroy the siloes. Many of the walls that separate information were put there by people, and people will need to agree – enthusiastically – to bring them down.

Corporate boards seek more IT expertise, but CIO presence still small

Even if more boards want to add CIOs, they face challenges doing so. Observers say many CIOs lack the experience and expertise to sit on boards -- in particular, boards at the large companies that are the ones currently seeking them out. "They're looking for a business person who has experience with large-scale transformation and has a commercial orientation and governance experience," Banerji said. "They're looking for people who have gone through and faced similar challenges and opportunities and the same scope, scale and complexity as to what they're facing in their current organization. "The challenge is that many operating CIOs do not have meaningful experience interacting with boards," he added, "even if it's just within their own company."

10 cutting-edge tools that take endpoint security to a new level

The best products combine both hunting and gathering approaches and also look at what happens across your network, tie into various security event feeds produced by both internal systems and external malware collectors, work both online and offline across a wide variety of endpoint operating systems and versions, and examine your endpoints in near real-time. The good news is that as these EDR tools become more capable, the sensor or agent that is placed on the endpoint has remained small in size and low in terms of consumed system CPU resources. What is also impressive is that three of the products – ForeScout, Outlier Security and Promisec – are agentless.

3 ways the Internet of Things could help fight climate change

Given the growing number of synergies the IoT creates between different industries, we could see for the first time a simultaneous reduction of industries' environmental footprint, thanks to energy savings and smarter solutions. Even more important is the fact that all those industries have the incentive to increase the adoption of IoT solutions, if they want to keep growing and stay competitive in the global arena. Therefore, the Internet of Things may well be considered a powerful ally in the fight against climate change, precisely at a time when global leaders advocate for more accessible, scalable and economically viable ways to protect our planet. While the disruptive potential of these technologies is quite straightforward, and given the tremendous economic consequences of climate change, the development of the IoT will be also positive

Why Wearables Will Replace Your Smartphone

With the rise of virtual assistants and bots, we'll increasingly talk to our smartphones through wearables instead of poking at their screens. Notifications and updates will be spoken to us through our wireless earbuds. Haptics will nudge and inform us with increasingly sophisticated vibrations. The electronics now used in smartglasses will vanish inside ordinary looking glasses and sunglasses, and we'll use them to take photos and videos with a tap or swipe to see high-resolution mixed- and augmented-reality images. Doppler Labs' Here One earbuds are a great example of the future of all wearables: They're so good they make a smartphone component obsolete. Mixed- and augmented-reality smartglasses will eventually do something similar.

How to use scrum for app development QA testing

Quality assurance (QA) is one area that could benefit from the scrum process. QA often gets short-changed during app development, especially when there are major time to market pressures on applications to get placed into production quickly — for example, the federal government's healthcare database. When QA is done incompletely, or not at all, apps don't end up performing the way they were supposed to perform. ... A pullback of an app from production can be embarrassing —and it can even be more embarrassing if it impacts customers. This is exactly what scrum at the beginning of the development process was designed to prevent—and also an excellent reason for application development managers to consider extending the reach of scrum beyond just app design and prototyping, and into the frequently neglected areas of app QA and checkout.

When intelligent algorithms start spoofing each other, regulation becomes a science

Amicangioli said the probability going forward that there could be unintended AI outcomes is high. From a regulatory perspective, the net behaviour as analysed, could be deemed to be bad, but the author could be deemed to be completely blameless. Much was made of the fact that market regulators were eons behind the complexity that precipitated the 2010 flash crash. So what can regulators do to evolve in a ML markets environment? "I don't believe the government or regulators could ever just hire teams of scientists and compete. These hypothetical problems I have outlined may be around the corner; I don't think they exist today; I could be wrong.

Android is imploding, and there's nothing that can be done to stop it

This is a classic case of too many hardware makers and not enough customers. And while Sony ceasing production in Brazil is down to a number of factors - although the word is that sales in that region didn't pan out as expected - Dell's exit and LG firing executives are both purely down to sales. And it's not because Dell and LG didn't make good hardware. The Dell Venue 8 7000 is probably the best Android business slate available (even if the name is a mouthful). But the tablet market is contracting rapidly, as consumers turn away from pure tablets in favor of 2-in-1 devices. The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed how few tablets were on show at CES this year, and how Google really downplayed tablet features in its new Android

Quote for the day:

"Distilling truth from overwhelming amounts of information is the essence of leadership." -- Carly Fiorina

July 03, 2016

Four Ways CFOs Can Add Value to IT Strategy

When it comes to technology purchasing decisions, a CFO should ask how a solution mitigates risk to the business. For example, a company may be running on infrastructure that is end of life and no longer supported by the vendor. The CFO, along with the CIO, needs to assess whether deferring investments to upgrade is an acceptable risk. One would want to make sure that mission critical applications are not running on platforms such as Microsoft Server 2003, which has stopped support some time ago. When selecting a disaster recovery and business continuity solution, a CFO should be a major part of the evaluation. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is an important component of these solutions, especially since the cost of downtime in a catastrophic situation is quantifiable

AI experts weigh in on Microsoft CEO's 10 new rules for artificial intelligence

Why would we want the second kind? Because if ever they do NOT work (and no AI is perfect), we can *understand* why and fix the problem. Especially for mission-critical systems, we must choose transparency. We must to be able to introspect our AI, so that if something unexpected happens, we can debug and fix it. Transparency means control. The UK principles of robotics also have a transparency rule. Nadella also says, that empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be valuable in the human-AI world. I agree. A study from the University of Michigan shows that college kids are 40% less empathetic than their counterparts 20 to 30 years ago. We have a responsibility to think about our whether our technology will deteriorate or improve our empathy.

How government bodies can unlock the power of digital

Working in what can be a fragmented environment with legacy infrastructure adds to that challenge. So how can central and local government organisations make the move faster to effective digital citizen engagement, while at the same time providing a more cost-effective and ultimately better service? Given the pervasiveness of smartphones and the use of messaging channels in today’s society, mobile devices are vital for effective citizen engagement, using the right channel aligned to people’s preferences. Today’s citizens can be reached on a range of interactive channels including SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype and Twitter, as well as voice. And because one or more of these channels are supported by every mobile device, government groups can connect with people in a quicker and more inclusive way by utilising the right technology to manage multiple channels under one framework.

The big data explosion sets us profound challenges - how can we keep up?

the use of data raises important ethical questions about privacy. The 1998 Data Protection Act now seems distinctly archaic in the face of such abrupt technological advances, and there is understandably a balance that must be struck between public benefit and individual privacy in relation to the use of big data. While personal data remains a small proportion of big data, the public’s justifiable suspicions and concerns must be addressed in policy, with safeguards for their security set in statute. I was personally quite shocked when given a demonstration of readily available popular software which was able to link voter details with their Twitter and Facebook profiles. With most people unaware of the risks, it is far too easy to know far too much about very intimate details of people’s lives.

IoT: Changing the Foundation of Your IT Strategy

Harley Davidson is an example of a company that has employed IoT to increase both sales and overall efficiency. Every piece of equipment in its York, PA plant is now connected to the internet. Its software allows for both reactive and predictive analytics so that if a machine begins to overheat, the system can make real-time adjustments to compensate. At the same time, cost efficiencies are constantly updating, allowing for increases in the speed of production and delivery. Some experts are estimating that between 2013 and 2020, this growing business trend will result in a 25 percent decrease in connectivity costs. Businesses that operate with IoT-focused philosophies can expect to not only lower operating costs and increase productivity but also to expand their markets and develop new products. This is the powerful crossroads of personal sensor tech, business integration of IoT, and the updated systems to support them.

Build your Android applications in Visual Studio using Gradle

Gradle provides flexibility as well as the ability to define common standards for Android builds. Gradle allows Android developers to use a simple, declarative DSL to configure Gradle builds supporting a wide variety of Android devices and App stores. With a simple, declarative Domain specific language (DSL), Gradle developers can easily describe and manipulate the build logic (e.g. manifest entries – minSDKVersion, targetSDKVersion etc.), use the built-in dependency management via Maven or Ivy and essentially have access to a single, authoritative build that powers both the Android Studio IDE and builds from the command-line but this ability to use Gradle in Visual Studio has been missing until recently.

Google Opens Faster Big Data Pipe Between US and Japan

"Ten terabits per second is a lot of capacity, but it's consistent with Google's current bandwidth consumption," Blum told TechNewsWorld. Because tech companies need to transport so much data around the world, it makes sense for them to invest in the infrastructure, and cable still has advantages over other technologies when crossing the seas. "Major Web services companies -- like Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- are investing in transoceanic cables, as well as domestic fiber capacity, because their internal data transport needs are on the same scale as major telecoms companies," Blum pointed out. "In fact, the distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant. When you send a message via Gmail or respond to a Facebook post from the other side of the world, it's transported primarily on internal networks," he said.

The rise of the revenue-generating CIO

CIOs can craft new businesses within their existing organization that contribute to their company's earnings. In fact, the proliferation of data is the primary driver behind the revenue-generating CIO. Today's CIOs can use data to create better products, new products and services, more targeted marketing programs and a better customer experience, according to Ashley Stirrup, CMO of Talend. ... "As data has become more malleable, more prevalent and more accessible, there is now an opportunity to use it in products that can help drive growth for a company and it's a great idea to move in this direction," said Christian Carollo, co-founder and CTO of Dropoff. "It's about creating efficiencies and directionality for those people in the company tasked with moving the ops and sales forward."

The Age of Artificial Intelligence in Fintech

The fintech sector is starting to use artificial intelligence in several ways. Most recently, the California-based robo-advisor, Wealthfront, has added artificial intelligence capabilities to track account activity on its own product and other integrated services such as Venmo, to analyze and understand how account holders are spending, investing and making their financial decisions, in an effort to provide more customized advice to their customers. Sentient Technologies, which has offices in both California and Hong Kong, is using artificial intelligence to continually analyze data and improve investment strategies. The company has several other AI initiatives in addition to its own equity fund. AI is even being used for banking customer service. RBS has developed Luvo, a technology which assists it service agents in finding answers to customer queries.

From technology first to business first: It's time for the IoT to get strategic

By deploying processing capacity at the source, data can be executed at the edge, in context with other local data if required, and the actionable insight shared with the central resource. This model is cost effective; it leverages existing infrastructure and investment and, most notably, provides a platform for incremental expansion of IoT. And this is key; while IoT standards are still to be defined, a strategy that includes interoperability with other IoT platforms will ensure an organisation can evolve and leverage one infrastructure to deliver a set of applications at a scale and pace that suits the business. As organisations increasingly look to extend their use of IoT, it is becoming essential to recognise the underlying business opportunity.

Quote for the day:

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

July 02, 2016

How the internet of things is revolutionizing retail

Not only will IoT technology allow for better visibility, such as identifying within a 10-minute timeframe when goods will be delivered, it can also aid in loss prevention and be used to measure the impact of environmental factors, such as heat, on goods moving through the supply chain, he explains. Damages to goods can be recorded with the exact time and location of the damage, providing an audit trail to identify the responsible party, he says. Automating and optimizing the supply chain is one of the key uses of IoT among retailers, adds Nayyar. “Everyone knows in advance not to run out of chocolate before Valentine’s Day or beer around the Super Bowl, but the real question is how to handle an unexpected surge in demand due to an unscheduled event,” she says.

OnePlus 3 review: The best smartphone in its price range

Looks matter, and the OnePlus 3's design is a big advance. But there's more to the aluminium unibody than just looks. It's a tough material that's reasonably grippy, although downside is that it lacks individuality -- it most resembles the HTC 10 at first glance. The OnePlus 3 fits a 5.5-inch screen into a chassis that's 152.7mm tall and 74.7mm wide. There's almost no bezel at all on the screen's long edges. The handset is just 7.35mm thick and weighs 158g. These are pared-down dimensions, and it's no wonder that the camera lens protrudes a couple of millimetres from the back of the chassis as a result. The high build quality carries over into the side buttons: the power button is on the right edge and the volume rocker on the left, and both are firm and responsive. Above the volume rocker is a welcome feature carried over from the OnePlus 2 -- the Alert Slider.

What is disruptive innovation?

The theory goes that a smaller company with fewer resources can unseat an established, successful business by targeting segments of the market that have been neglected by the incumbent, typically because it is focusing on more profitable areas. As the larger business concentrates on improving products and services for its most demanding customers, the small company is gaining a foothold at the bottom end of the market, or tapping a new market the incumbent had failed to notice. This type of start-up usually enters the market with new or innovative technologies that it uses to deliver products or services better suited to the incumbent’s overlooked customers – at a lower price. Then it moves steadily upmarket until it is delivering the performance that the established business’s mainstream customers expect, while keeping intact the advantages that drove its early success.

3 Steps to Profit With Shared Data Experiences

The cloud is more than just a server; it offers the promise of a deep connection of shared data points centered on individuals and generated by multiple devices, services and platforms. By implementing deep data integration, businesses can see what these users purchased at the grocery store, what movie they saw over the weekend and how willing they were to be interrupted during certain activities. This information requires more than a cursory collection of data points from within a specific application; it demands data sharing between software and devices. Apple is leading the way. Many users don’t realize how immersive iCloud can be, but when it's working correctly, its users can sync bookmarks, notes, to-do lists and even files across their Apple devices. Set a reminder on an iPhone, and it can pop up on your iPad.

When Globalization Goes Digital

Economists and policymakers alike are guilty of glossing over these distributional consequences. Countries that engage in free trade will find new channels for growth in the long run, the thinking goes, and workers who lose their jobs in one industry will find employment in another. In the real world, however, this process is messy and protracted. Workers in a shrinking industry may need entirely new skills to find jobs in other sectors, and they may have to pack up their families and pull up deep roots to pursue these opportunities. It has taken a popular backlash against free trade for policymakers and the media to acknowledge the extent of this disruption.

What CISOs Need to Tell The Board About Cyber Risk

A quantitative approach to measuring and reporting cybersecurity risks can empower the board and top management to make well-informed cyber risk decisions. By relying on cyber risk data in financial terms, boards can ensure that they are properly informed and understand cyber risks, and thus ensure that the organization is making cost-effective decisions regarding its handling of cyber risks. In other words, board directors, armed with quantified cyber risk data, can make a strong statement about their oversight of this critical domain. While this concept is relatively new in the cyber area, financial institutions and insurers have relied on risk quantification for decades. Using “Value at Risk” (VaR) to measure cyber risks is a concept whose time has come. In 2015, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a special report entitled “Partnering for Cyber Resilience — Towards the Quantification of Cyber Threats.

Dangerous keyboard app has more than 50 million downloads

"In particular, it was found to be opening up a net connection, and sending some data it was collecting from the phone to a server somewhere else," he said. "The data was the device, manufacturer, model number, the Android version, the owner's email address, all of the Wifi addresses that it could see, the cell network it was on, the GPS coordinates of where the phone was, information about any of the Bluetooth devices it could see, and information about any web proxies it could see." Once the data is collected, it could also be used to create a very deep personal profile of users, shared with third parties, and vulnerable to state-sponsored hackers and criminals. None of this is information that a keyboard app needs to have, he added.

Security researcher gets threats over Amazon review

Getting your internet-connected socket taken over by an intruder isn’t exactly a cybersecurity nightmare — at worst, you might end up with a hacker treating you to a strobe light party as they switch all your lights on and off. There’s also a slight possibility that repeatedly cutting the power to one of your devices might damage it. But this isn’t the end of the world; it’s just a sort of dumb security flaw. This makes the manufacturer’s outsized reaction all the more unusual. Garrett sent me a few of the emails he received from the company. “Just now my boss has blamed me, and he said if I do not remove this bad review, he will quit me. Please help me,” the representative wrote. “Could you please change your bad review into good?” Garrett responded that he would update the review if the manufacturer fixed the flaw. The AuYou representative insisted she would be fired if the review was not updated.

Approaching Lock-In from a Consultant’s Perspective: An Interview with Nicki Watt

At the end of the day, not all cloud providers are created equal! If you only opt for supporting the lowest common denominator, sometimes you can miss out on many other value add features offered by cloud providers. So completely trying to eliminate custom configurations and options is not necessarily feasible. That said, my approach to minimise coupling is more geared around designing solutions and approaches which try to take advantage of a set of modular, API driven tools and offerings, rather than a single one size fits all type solution. I feel that this approach, coupled with sticking to principles such as always separating your config data from code, and looking to automate everything, gives you a fighting chance of being able to swap out different parts of your solution as required, and adapting to changes in the ever evolving cloud space.

How To Contract For Outsourcing Agile

After all, ASD requires a leap of faith — specifications are not clearly defined and there is a pricing model that motivates the developer to charge as many hours as possible. There are variations of the T&M model that can help control costs, such as capped T&M on an iteration or project basis, a ‘holdback’ for each iteration that accrues but is not paid to the developer until the entire project is complete, and a pool or bucket of development hours paid on a fixed basis that the client can spend as it desires. The T&M model is more palatable due to its more client-friendly termination rights. However, there is a huge risk here: once the project is sufficiently far along, the client’s desire to complete the project outweighs the flexibility to easily exit the project. This could create a situation for the developer to gouge the client towards the end of an agile software development project unless there is a cap on fees.

Quote for the day:

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings." -- Salvador Dali

July 01, 2016

Think different: Cognitive computing systems will bring data-led change

Over the years, as business models have changed and the number of data sources multiplied, organizations tweaked their old programs to fit, patching the logic and creating what Hurwitz called "monster systems." Cognitive computing systems, which use hardware or software to approximate human cognitive functions, will change all that, Hurwitz said. The business applications of the future will be based on fast-moving, ever-changing data from an ever-growing number of sources. Gone will be step-by-step instructions based on the past. Cognitive computing learns from patterns and anomalies, makes guesses about what could happen -- and it doesn't assume there is one correct answer. As more data is ingested and analyzed, the system changes, too.

Cloud Adopters Balancing Cost Savings, Security

Among the reasons for outsourcing security operations is the difficulty of recruiting cloud security experts along with a shortage of technical resources needed to run an in-house security operations center, the company argues. A hefty 79 percent of respondents responsible for cloud security said they welcome outside help in running cloud security operations. Their biggest challenges included managing security content, identifying and blunting "multi-vector" attacks and the high cost of cloud security, the survey found. The Forrester survey also found that IT administrators are turning to outside help for capabilities like threat intelligence analysis (83 percent) as they seek to develop real-time threat detection capabilities. Also cited were assistance for securing public clouds (80 percent), overall security operations (77 percent), network security along with data privacy and regulatory compliance (both 76 percent).

The Inventor of the Merkle Tree Wants DAOs to Rule the World

Because DAOs are designed to operate without a leader, the software on which they are based relies on a series of smart contracts that form their method of governance. Though Buterin’s article, entitled "An Introduction to Futarchy", touches on several alternative forms of governance that might one day power a DAO, at its core is the concept of Futarchy, invented in 2000 by Robin Hanson, a George Mason University researcher and chief scientist of Consensus Point, a markets research firm. Buterin reasoned that Futarchy’s form of governance could eventually lead to a new kind of leadership where governance was controlled by increasingly accurate probabilities derived from what are called prediction markets, designed to determine the likelihood that an event will occur and be free from reliance on any single leader.

Despite Mobile App Demand, Enterprise Spending Lags, Research Indicates

In this week's report, Gartner said the percentage of enterprise application development budgets devoted to mobile has actually decreased from last year, although 42 percent of organizations said they'll increase spending on mobile development by an average of 31 percent this year. Overall, mobile accounts for only about 10 percent of total organizational development budgets, Gartner said. These confounding, non-intuitive statistics echo the findings from many earlier studies. Earlier this year, for example, Red Hat Inc. published survey results gauging the state of mobile maturity in 2015. "Over the last two years, almost half of the organizations surveyed (52 percent) had developed fewer than 10 custom mobile apps, with 45 percent creating more than 10," the Red Hat survey said.

Time-Travel Queries: SELECT witty_subtitle FROM THE FUTURE

The CockroachDB implementation of this feature requires that the timestamp be a literal string in a valid time format. We do not support generic expressions or even placeholder values here (sadly1). However, we are able to support schema changes between the present and the “as of” time. For example, if a column is deleted in the present but exists at some time in the past, a time-travel query requesting data from before the column was deleted will successfully return it. This data is kept in the MVCC layer and garbage collected (GC) at some configurable rate (default is 24 hours and configurable by table). Time travel is supported at any time within the GC threshold.

Microsoft to add Enterprise Advantage to MPSA licensing in early 2017

Microsoft is characterizing the addition of Enterprise Advantage for MPSA as "the next step in the development of modern licensing," in the words of Mark Nowlan, Director of Marketing for Microsoft's Worldwide Licensing Programs. MPSA is Microsoft's licensing/purchasing agreement that is meant to enable users to consolidate various licensing contracts into "a single, nonexpiring agreement for all organizations." MPSA was designed to replace software-centric licensing and purchasing agreements with something simpler that would appeal to customers using a mix of Microsoft software and services. With MPSA, Microsoft's goal is to streamline its multiple licensing/purchase agreements down to a single agreement and two options to buy (transactional/buy as you need or organizational-wide),

Prepping for the Big Cloud Conversation

The chief talking point in favor of the cloud should center on competitive advantage. Present the cloud as a strategic decision, and show how it can align with the organization’s goals. Makes the case why this constitutes a new and better way to deliver business services. Focus on process improvements in terms of increased speed and flexibility. And, yes, point out the reduced operating costs--but set expectations and make it clear that the returns on a new cloud infrastructure won’t be realized overnight. In fact, it may take several years before the average company reaches the breaking point and then starts to realize major savings. For the CFO--and perhaps the CIO--that may sound like a bridge too far. So give management a full picture and identify the real costs of migration;

Cybersecurity: Stop the attacker's offense, don’t do defense

Having full visibility into your IT environment and being able to spot compromised machines is critical for stopping the attacker’s offense. To know their environment better than the attackers, organizations must constantly perform reconnaissance in their environment and collect information and analyze it in real time. With this knowledge, an enterprise can control the situation instead of allowing the hacker to dictate what happens. You want to be able to see all the elements at work in the hacking campaign and cut the attacker’s access to your network at once. Remediating security threats one by one won’t do anything to protect a company. If anything, this method tips hackers off that they’ve been discovered and provides them with time to rework their plan and figure out how to evade your defenses.

Supply Chain Security Must Mimic Enterprise Security

Supply chain security isn’t a one-way street, either, Cheng reminds us. “Be sure that your vendor takes security vulnerabilities seriously. This means that they can demonstrate a rigorous security program that ensures people, engineering, and processes deliver confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your information.” If vendors don’t hold supply chain security best practices to an acceptable standard, supply chain decision makers have the option to walk away and find a vendor who will. Consumers and customers who are affected by supply chain decisions don’t have that luxury. “In general, every time IoT security is compromised, so too is the security of consumers,” says Lucas. “These types of security concerns range from data ownership and privacy to hackers gaining control of our electrical grid. All these risks compromise the integrity of the supply chain and ultimately the quality of products, which can have a huge impact on consumer health and safety.”

Hands-on: NFC-enabled ATMs make it easy to withdraw cash with a smartphone

Using an ATM with Android Pay is almost identical to using the machine with your bank card. But rather than digging through an overstuffed wallet for a piece of plastic, you simply connect your phone to the machine over NFC. After that, it’s the same familiar process: Enter your PIN, grab your cash, and go. NFC payments also add an extra measure of security. First off, the process is quicker—you won’t have to dawdle as you wait for the machine to spit out you card. Second, the card is protected by Android Pay and Apple Pay’s existing security measures, meaning you’ll have to scan your fingerprint or use a pin number or pattern unlock before you can use it. This, in conjunction with your PIN number, makes taking out cash a two-factor authentication process that’s more secure than using plastic.

Quote for the day:

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." -- Bernard M. Baruch

June 30, 2016

MoneyLion brings traditional banking ever closer to obsolescence

Tim Hong, one of the key behavioral architects of the platform, wants MoneyLion to dream big. Many of the tedious financial tasks we all dread can be streamlined with readily available technology. How can we prevent fraud? Facial recognition of course. Need a verification photo for a loan application? Just take a selfie. “One of the problems we saw in consumer finance was that marketplace lenders were spending lots of money to acquire customers for one transaction,” said Choubey. MoneyLion uses rewards to incentivize users to stick with the platform. The idea of rewards is not new in banking, nearly every credit card offers benefits or cash back. A large variety of data enables MoneyLion to offer a wide breadth of rewards for building good financial habits. Reward redemptions on the platform have been growing at 39% month over month.

5 secrets for writing the perfect data scientist resume

For better or worse, big data has become a “mine is bigger than yours” contest. Employers are anxious to see candidates with experience in large data sets—this is not entirely unwarranted, as handling truly “big data” presents unique new challenges that are not present when handling smaller data. Continuing with the above example, a hiring manager may not have a good understanding of the technical challenges you’re facing when doing the analysis. Consider saying something like this: “Reduced model error by 20% and reduced training time by 50% by using a warm-start regularized regression in scikit-learn streaming over 2TB of data.”

10 Hot Smartphones To Consider Now

Google meanwhile has promised to deliver developer versions of its Project Ara modular phone this fall, with general availability planned for next year. Project Ara has been scaled back a bit -- the CPU, display, and RAM won't be removable -- but it still has potential to change the dynamics of the smartphone market. Other handset makers like LG are already experimenting with limited modularity. If Project Ara succeeds, smartphones may become a bit more open and more conducive to third-party participation from peripheral makers. But Google has to demonstrate that Project Ara phones won't just be bigger and more expensive than smartphone designs that don't contemplate expansion or modification. While we wait, here are nine great smartphones you can pick up today, and one to look forward to in a few months.

Migrating Azure IaaS SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster to Premium Storage

Microsoft recommends the use of Premium Storage for optimal performance of SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. If you are running a SQL Server AlwaysOn environment on Standard storage, you might plan to migrate your environment to Premium Storage. This Step-by-Step guide will describe how to migrate to Premium Storage an existing SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster built on Azure VM (IaaS), reducing the down time to its minimum. This blog article will cover infrastructures deployed with Classic deployment model. Microsoft recommends that most new deployments use the Resource Manager model.

Faster Payments says 'open access' model ready for take-off

Faster Payments’ commitment to opening up access to its services via its new aggregator model will provide these PSPs with lower cost solutions and more choice. This will boost innovation and competition, enabling PSPs and Fintechs to offer greater payments choices to consumers and businesses, improving their payment experience and driving economic growth in the country. Things are moving fast and the rising number of aggregators accredited is evidence that there is a demand from PSPs for real-time payment for their customers. The latest organisations to be awarded the certificate of technical accreditation ‘trust mark’ are ACI Worldwide, Bottomline and Compass Plus. They join FIS and PayPort by VocaLink to bring the number of accredited providers to five, with a further three organisations currently in the testing phase required to obtain accreditation.

Brexit: Cloud community mulls over implications for data protection regulation reform

“Brexit is obviously a challenging time and could provide an opportunity for the UK to get data protection legislation that is practical, commercial and pragmatic,” he said. “There are some areas [of GDPR] that don’t work and will be difficult to implement in practice, but we could revisit those to make them a bit more practical and commercial. “The challenge will be to see if Brussels consider it to provide an adequate level of protection. That’s the key thing, because – if it doesn’t – it all falls apart,” he added. Speaking to Computer Weekly, Andy Lawrence, vice-president of datacentre technologies and eco-efficient IT at market watcher 451 Research, said – once the UK gets the process of extricating itself from the EU underway – there may be an influx of legal experts on hand who can help with this.

Public cloud adoption causing some big vendors to stumble

As with any new technology, security is always a worry. In Moyse's experience, the number one concern with cloud revolves around data security, privacy and sovereignty. Data protection is one of the most important aspects of any business, and any weakness can affect the bottom line. "People are paranoid and justifiably so, in some instances, but … it's just like any other change when you are leveraging the Internet," Linthicum says. The concept of moving your business to an unfamiliar environment can make any organization have second thoughts. But "once they've done it once, they're a lot quicker and more receptive to a second or third [cloud service] because … they've felt the benefit[s] and they've overcome that challenge," Moyse says.

Fintech spawns regtech to automate compliance with regulations

Regtech is “the use of new technologies to solve regulatory and compliance requirements more effectively and efficiently,” as the Institute for International Finance (IIF), a research-oriented trade association in Washington, put it in a March report. “I would define it as technological advancement that assists those focused on compliance and regulatory-related activities in their professions,” Kari Larsen, counsel at Reed Smith LLP in New York, and formerly in the Enforcement Division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Bloomberg BNA. “So making it easier, swifter, more complete, more efficient to monitor compliance and regulatory obligations.” “For many years post-crisis, the only growing area of personnel, of hiring, in banks was in compliance,” Andres Portilla

CIOs combat messaging overload with mobile 'micro apps'

The lack of user-friendly enterprise software gives Sapho a shot at slipping into IT departments at a time when more CIOs are adopting a mobile first mentality to software development. In its 2015 CIO survey, Gartner found that 48 percent of employee-facing applications are being designed with mobile as the primary or secondary consumption mechanism. Sapho's user interface and push notifications will play well with millennial managers who have grown up using consumer-focused web apps from Google and Facebook, says Gartner’s Baker. It's a digital native generation raised on push notifications that interrupt their workflows, if only for a few brief moments. "It fits seamlessly into a behavior that is already well established. And that gives [Sapho] an advantage to go to market.”

Why antivirus programs have become the problem, not the solution

This vulnerability is particularly bad—exploiting the vulnerability requires no user interaction. The vulnerability exists in a default configuration, and code execution occurs at the highest privilege level, if not the kernel itself. According to Ormandy, open source libraries used in the products such as libmspack and unrarsrc had not been updated "in at least 7 years." This problem is not, itself, an aberration, and is not limited to Symantec. Security software necessarily requires high access privileges to operate effectively, though when it is itself insecure or otherwise malfunctioning, it becomes a much higher liability due to the extent to which it has control over the system. These software issues, combined with logistical and political problems in the antivirus industry itself, are making users less secure.

Quote for the day:

"Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information." -- Abbie Hoffman

June 29, 2016

The devil is in the details: The importance of tight processes to strong information security

Policies do not have to be long. In fact, the more succinct the better, so long as they cover the required details. In my experience, they should be quite granular -- single policies that cover a variety of topics are hard to maintain and follow. Policies are usually augmented by procedures. A procedure defines the specific steps you will follow in the implementation of the related policy, and by their nature should be very detailed. If a procedure is well written, someone familiar with your organization but not a particular function should be able to follow the procedure and complete the function.

How to install MongoDB community edition on Ubuntu Linux

MongoDB is a NoSQL database that avoids the traditional structure of relational databases in favor of document-oriented JSON-like objects. What this translates to is the integration between application and data is faster and easier. If that's not enough, consider this: MongoDB is one the databases preferred by big data and large enterprise companies, including Adobe, Craigslist, eBay, FIFA, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. There are different versions of MongoDB; the version I'll focus on is the community edition. You can easily install MongoDB on Ubuntu from the standard repositories, but that version tends to be out of date. Because of that, I'll show how to install the version from the official MongoDB repositories.

Windows 10's Biggest Controversies

Since the release of Windows 10 last summer, users of Windows 7 or Windows 8 whose computers have Windows Update set to automatically update the OS have gotten pop-up notices telling them to upgrade to Windows 10, and the large installation files for it (which can be about 6GB) have downloaded in the background onto their system’s main drive, usually without the user directly consenting to this. Initially, Microsoft did provide the option to delay the upgrade, and hacks were figured out by users to put off the upgrading and stop the installation files from being downloaded. But Microsoft has become more aggressive in thwarting efforts to block the download by pushing through strongly worded notices that give just two options: “Upgrade now” or “Upgrade tonight.”

Indian Startups Need Lessons from Their Israeli Counterparts

Solving a problem lies at the core of the Israeli tech startups. Outbrain, one of the world’s most successful content recommendation engine, is one such example which highlights the problem solving nature of these active startups. In the words of Ori Lahav and Yaron Galai, founders of Outbrain, the company has solved a complex problem for two business communities. For newspapers facing tough competition from online channels, it helped them develop a significant and sustainable new revenue source in their hard times while for marketers, it provided them with an opportunity to tell their brand story on the internet in a more effective way. By addressing this problem, Outbrain jumped ahead of the curve by coming up with a new business model that solved problems for all parties involved.

BlueData Introduces First Big-Data-as-a-Service Offering

“One of the challenges for organizations thinking about deploying big data workloads in a public cloud is that their data may already be on-premises, and moving it all to the cloud can be challenging, time-consuming and expensive,” says Jason Schroedl, VP of marketing at BlueData. With the latest EPIC release, end users can run big data applications such as Hadoop and Spark on any infrastructure, whether on-prem, public cloud or hybrid deployment. Initially, the offering will be a direct availability program running on AWS, but over time the company plans to make the platform available on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and other public cloud services. The user interface and experience remains constant whether customers are using BlueData on-prem or in the cloud, giving the same security and control in terms of how many resources are given to different groups for individual use cases.

Ransomware and Cyber Extortion Are on the Rise – What Can Be Done?

Hardly a day goes by anymore without ransomware or cyber extortion making the news. A seeming turning point in the severity of this crime was the mid-February 2016, cyber extortion of a large Los Angeles hospital chain where a reported ransom of $3 million was originally demanded. Although the ransom ultimately paid was 40 bitcoins (about $17,000, a far cry from $3 million), its payment nevertheless represents a substantial and noteworthy increase from the hundred dollar ransoms that were previously commonplace. Among those taking note are insurers providing cyber coverage, who often will include ransomware coverage in their policies. Since this manner of cybercrime is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, insurers and their insureds are best served by proactively managing, and thereby perhaps eliminating, the harm that may result from a ransomware attack.

A career in Unix: The best and the worst

Of all the work I've done over the years, the one that I miss the most was one in which what I did every day seriously mattered. I was a Unix admin and managed a network of servers and workstations. My users were highly intelligent, dedicated analysts who helped to ensure that intelligent decisions were being made on a national level. At some other positions, I provided an environment that supported development of products that made a difference to many thousands of individuals (e.g., emergency communications), but was so remote from the end product that I never got a sense that I was contributing to something of great value.

'Socially-cooperative' cars are part of the future of driverless vehicles, says CMU professor

The basic idea is that if you program a robot to do some tasks, it may not behave in a way that human beings would normally behave when other human beings are around. You can imagine situations where robots are in a lab and they really don't care, they just get a job done. But things are different out of a lab, when you're in a driving situation. Think about when our car enters a highway from an entrance ramp. We negotiate with nearby cars; if we're close to another car, if it's ahead, we let it go. If we're ahead, it lets us go. If we're close to it, we negotiate with visual cues, and also with speed cues. We speed up in order to indicate that we don't want to yield to the other car. Or, vice versa—they speed up in order to get in front of us.

Decentralizing IoT networks through blockchain

A decentralized approach to IoT networking would solve many of the questions above. Adopting a standardized peer-to-peer communication model to process the hundreds of billions of transactions between devices will significantly reduce the costs associated with installing and maintaining large centralized data centers and will distribute computation and storage needs across the billions of devices that form IoT networks. This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse. However, establishing peer-to-peer communications will present its own set of challenges, chief among them the issue of security. And as we all know, IoT security is much more than just about protecting sensitive data. The proposed solution will have to maintain privacy and security in huge IoT networks and offer some form of validation and consensus for transactions to prevent spoofing and theft.

Cybersecurity: Is AI Ready for Primetime In Cyber Defense?

Machine learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence, a field of computer science that started in 1958 when Marvin Minsky founded the Artificial Intelligence lab. Everyone, including DARPA, was pouring money into it. Their goal was to build a fully artificial intelligence capable of passing the Turing test in fifteen years. However, their plans were overly ambitious, for two reasons. They underestimated the technical difficulty and simply didn’t have enough compute power. When it became clear they weren’t going to meet their goal, funding suddenly dried up and the lab closed. AI became a dirty word. However, AI research continued and went in and out of favor for years. In the 1980s, the Japanese became enamored with AI and started applying it to everything from rice cookers to automated subway trains. But until recently nobody called it AI.

Quote for the day:

"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." -- Max de Pree

June 28, 2016

A Letter to the Manager: Release the Power of Your Agile Teams

In knowledge work, like software development, there is an almost infinite amount of new stuff to learn and therefore an infinite potential to get more productive. Just using some of this potential will get you far. A team getting together every week or two in a safe space to discuss what works or not will find the most productive ways to work together. A product developed through exploring different possible solutions, will more likely be the one that's even better than you thought in the beginning. One way you can start is to make sure there is slack in the process. By slack we mean time that is not dedicated to specific work and what the time is used for can be decided by either the team or a team-member when the slack time occurs.

Microsoft-backed Langauge Server Protocol strives for language, tools interoperability

"We developed the protocol based on many learnings and contributions from teams across Microsoft and partners," Microsoft said in a statement. "Visual Studio Code is the first Microsoft product to take advantage of this protocol but in the future other Microsoft products may adopt it as well, including Visual Studio and Xamarin." ... Driving the protocol has been a shift to micro-services and developers writing business logic in any language, Jewell said. Previously, companies such as Microsoft or Red Hat were wedded to a particular language and provided proprietary tooling. "They protected that stack and made it proprietary and guarded it with zealotry that was very intense. All that has changed."

Little Bits of Security – Micro-Segmentation in Clouds

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could create a hardened shell around each one of my applications or services within my datacenter? Opening access to the applications through firewalls and segmented networks that would make your security even more robust? If my outer datacenter security walls were breached, hackers would uncover a set of additional security walls—one for each service/application in your IT infrastructure. The best way to envision this is to think about a bank that has safety deposit boxes in the safe. Even if you broke into the safe there is nothing to take—just a set of secure boxes that also need to be cracked. One of the benefits of this approach is when someone hacks into your datacenter, they only get access to at most one application.

Microsoft’s open source .NET Core and ASP.NET Core hit 1.0

While the 1.0 release of .NET Core is definitely the most important launch today, Microsoft also made a number of other announcements at the Red Hat Summit. The company, for example, is working with Red Hat and CodeEnvy to bring to other tool and language providers the protocol that allows its free Visual Studio Code editor to support more than 100 programming languages already. “This means that any developer can have a consistent, productive editing experience for their favorite programming language on any tool — even if that tool isn’t Visual Studio Code,” Microsoft’s corporate VP for its Data Group Joseph Sirosh explains in today’s announcement. The company is also showcasing a few more of its open-source technologies today, though the demo that will likely draw the most attention is SQL Server 2016 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Artificial Intelligence Has a ‘Sea of Dudes’ Problem

That's not so surprising, given how few women there are in the field, said Fei-Fei Li, who runs the computer vision lab at Stanford University. Among the Stanford AI lab's 15 researchers, Li is the only woman. She's also one of only five women professors of computer science at the university. "If you were a computer and read all the AI articles and extracted out the names that are quoted, I guarantee you that women rarely show up," Li said. "For every woman who has been quoted about AI technology, there are a hundred more times men were quoted." Much has been made of the tech industry's lack of women engineers and executives. But there's a unique problem with homogeneity in AI. To teach computers about the world, researchers have to gather massive data sets of almost everything.

What the JIT!? Anatomy of the OpenJDK HotSpot VM

OpenJDK HotSpot VM converts bytecode into machine executable code by “mixed-mode” execution. With “mixed-mode”, the first step is interpretation, which converts bytecode into assembly code using a description table. This pre-defined table, also known as the “template table”, has assembly code for each bytecode instruction. Interpretation begins at JVM startup, and is the slowest form of bytecode execution. Java bytecode is platform independent, but interpretation and compilation into machine executable code are definitely dependent on the platform. In-order to get faster, efficient (and adaptive to the underlying platform) machine code generation, the runtime kicks off just-in-time compilation, i.e. JIT compilation. JIT compilation is an adaptive optimization for methods that are proven to be performance critical.

Y Combinator wants to build a tech city, too

More to the point, perhaps, is that a true city is more like an organic entity, growing on its own when conditions are right, than a planned, organized, intentional creation. To date, most attempts to plan and create new cities have turned out to be sterile failures instead of vibrant communities. Cities aren’t companies, where you can hire and fire your way into making sure everyone is on board with the plan. They’re messy, disorganized, contentious places where multiple ideas and goals and cultures ebb and flow according to the needs and desires of the cities’ citizens and would-be citizens. Trying to carefully orchestrate all of that spontaneous confusion and complex energy isn’t just impossible, it’s not a very good idea. Careful command and control in the service of over-arching principles or goals tends to founder on the shoals of residents’ own goals and ambitions. And that’s how most people like it.

Yahoo Wants to Sell Its ‘Chicken Coop’ Data Center Designs

Yahoo plans to structure the potential transaction in a way that will allow it to continue using innovations in the portfolio, including its data center designs, by licensing them from the future buyer. The Yahoo Computing Coop has been a key part of the company’s data center strategy in the US, and it plans to continue using it and iterating on it in the future. “We’ll continue to have access to the Chicken Coop design through our license-back and will look for opportunities to continue to leverage that incredibly efficient design going forward,” the spokesperson said. “Equally, we see value in sharing our data center cooling technology patents as part of the portfolio that we’re divesting, so architectural design and construction firms can leverage that patented technology.”

Fed Agencies Look to Encourage Use of Ethical Hacking In Healthcare

Given the need to improve cybersecurity, Savage revealed to the group that ONC is studying the issue of how the agency can accelerate the rate at which ethical hacking occurs in healthcare. “We are all in this together, and we have to figure it out,” Savage added. “I have no idea at the end of the day if we facilitate more ethical hacking in healthcare whether it will be happening at hospitals or in some lab where the data’s not live. I don’t really have an answer for that today. That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re thinking about.” Dale Nordenberg, MD, a member of the Health IT Standards Committee and CEO of Novasano Health and Science, said that it was exciting to hear that ethical hacking is being considered in healthcare.

McAfee Labs reveals new mobile apps collusion threats

Mobile app collusion requires at least one app with permission to access the restricted information or service, one app without that permission but with access outside the device, and the capability to communicate with each other. Either app could be collaborating on purpose or unintentionally due to accidental data leakage or inclusion of a malicious library or software development kit. ... “Improved detection drives greater efforts at deception,” said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Intel Security’s McAfee Labs group. “It should not come as a surprise that adversaries have responded to mobile security efforts with new threats that attempt to hide in plain sight. Our goal is to make it increasingly harder for malicious apps to gain a foothold on our personal devices, developing smarter tools and techniques to detect colluding mobile apps.”

Quote for the day:

"People often seek and find complexity where there is none" -- Gordon Tredgold

June 27, 2016

BYOD can pose privacy risks to employees

Another worrying feature of MDM platforms is the ability to do a remote wipe. The software can wipe managed apps, or individual apps, or it can wipe the entire phone. "It's something that organizations might want, but it puts personal data at risk," Hafid said. One reason that a company might want to do a full wipe is if employees download company documents to non-managed applications. But it could result in employees losing personal photos and personal messages. "Say you leave the organization and your employer wants to makes sure that there's no corporate data you take with you," he said. "They may wipe the device without notifying you." In addition, many MDM solutions allow companies to restrict smartphone features such as iCloud backups.

Board presentations on IT risk: Don't make these five mistakes

IT leaders fail in their board presentations when they try to use presentations to advance management decisions, such as setting budgets, making investment trade-off decisions, and soliciting guidance on strategic projects. These types of management decisions are the C-suite's job, not the board's. Rather, the board's role is to fulfill its fiduciary duty to ensure risk is managed. This is primarily accomplished by evaluating leadership's effectiveness and ensuring the organization has the right management team in place. IT leaders who come to their board presentation asking the board to make management decisions about information security are likely to fail. Instead, the best IT leaders ensure that every aspect of their presentation is designed to build their credibility as a leader.

How You Can Improve Customer Experience With Fast Data Analytics

In today’s constantly connected world, customers expect more than ever before from the companies they do business with. With the emergence of big data, businesses have been able to better meet and exceed customer expectations thanks to analytics and data science. However, the role of data in your business’ success doesn’t end with big data – now you can take your data mining and analytics to the next level to improve customer service and your business’ overall customer experience faster than you ever thought possible. Fast data is basically the next step for analysis and application of large data sets (big data). With fast data, big data analytics can be applied to smaller data sets in real time to solve a number of problems for businesses across multiple industries.

Brexit: Uncertainty around funding and skills likely to affect UK tech startups

Christoph Gerlinger, CEO of German Startups Group, said the Brexit was good news for the German startup scene. “We expect a significant decrease in new incorporations in London in favour of Berlin, as well as an influx of successful London startups,” he said. Techspace, a flexible co-working space for tech startups, has expanded to Berlin – a decision which was taken ahead of the referendum. However, its CEO David Galsworthy added that there is “no doubt London will also continue to be a central hub”. Computer Weekly previously reported that Australia has called on UK technology startups to set up shop on its shores, with the promise of government support, a highly skilled workforce and a stepping stone to Asia.

From not working to neural networking

Deep learning comes in many flavours. The most widely used variety is “supervised learning”, a technique that can be used to train a system with the aid of a labelled set of examples. For e-mail spam filtering, for example, it is possible to assemble an enormous database of example messages, each of which is labelled “spam” or “not spam”. A deep-learning system can be trained using this database, repeatedly working through the examples and adjusting the weights inside the neural network to improve its accuracy in assessing spamminess. The great merit of this approach is that there is no need for a human expert to draw up a list of rules, or for a programmer to implement them in code; the system learns directly from the labelled data.

Talking with your hands: How Microsoft researchers are moving beyond keyboard and mouse

“How do we interact with things in the real world? Well, we pick them up, we touch them with our fingers, we manipulate them,” said Shotton, a principal researcher in computer vision at Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, research lab. “We should be able to do exactly the same thing with virtual objects. We should be able to reach out and touch them.” This kind of technology is still evolving. But the computer scientists and engineers who are working on these projects say they believe they are on the cusp of making hand and gesture recognition tools practical enough for mainstream use, much like many people now use speech recognition to dictate texts or computer vision to recognize faces in photos.

10 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Manufacturing

Manufacturers often are challenged with making product and service quality to the workflow level a core part of their companies. Often quality is isolated. Machine learning is revolutionizing product and service quality by determining which internal processes, workflows, and factors contribute most and least to quality objectives being met. Using machine learning manufacturers will be able to attain much greater manufacturing intelligence by predicting how their quality and sourcing decisions contribute to greater Six Sigma performance within the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) framework. ... Manufacturers are turning to more complex, customized products to use more of their production capacity, and machine learning help to optimize the best possible selection of machines, trained staffs, and suppliers.

Step-by-step guide to a blockchain implementation

IT's involvement with blockchain implementations -- and therefore the level of urgency associated with putting this technology into operation -- will to some degree depend on the vertical industry the company is in, with financial services being the most urgent. But as evidenced by Caraher's enthusiasm for blockchain's application to legal services, interest in the technology is widespread. Vendors active around blockchain -- both broad IT vendors such as Microsoft and IBM, as well as niche blockchain suppliers -- say they're fielding calls from virtually all industries. In addition to financial services and legal industries, others include: insurance, utilities, public sector, advertising, healthcare, auditing, supply chain, manufacturing and real estate.

Automotive Grade Linux wants to help open source your next car

The average consumer doesn't know much about Linux and probably nothing about AGL. Truth be told, that doesn't matter. That same average consumer is already using Linux in devices at home and work; smartphones, embedded devices, clouds, chromebooks, etc. And when they purchase a car running AGL, it won't matter that it's Linux; it will only matter that it meets (and exceeds) their needs. AGL will do just that. Linux has already proved how well it can function in embedded systems and smartphones, so there is no reason to think it will not rise far and above what both Google and Apple are doing with their in-car solutions — solutions that cannot fully function without being connected to an external mobile device.

Banking IT community faces uncertain Brexit future

Emmanuel Lumineau, the CEO of Financial Conduct Authority regulated startup BrickVest, a real estate investment platform, said the company might have to move some of its business and people to other EU member states. “Without doubt, the UK is now a less attractive option for fintech investment platforms that want to operate across Europe,” said Lumineau. “Platforms such as Brickvest are typically regulated by the FCA, whose framework allows us, and companies such as ours, to target investors across Europe. “Brexit now means firms will eventually need to find a new regulator on the continent to continue doing business across Europe. Cities such as Paris, Berlin or Frankfurt can offer this. Consequently, BrickVest may have to shift some of our business and team abroad.”

Quote for the day:

"The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority." -- @kenblanchard

June 26, 2016

2 Ways Big Data and Little Data Are the Perfect Couple

Big Data is so in vogue, that it’s at risk of becoming the next “synergy”. Ah yes, all those wonderful hip words used by executives trying to show just how young and hip they are. While executives wear ball-caps to cover up their bald spot, Big Data is bandied around the Board Room. But what’s the point of Big Data if it doesn’t actually drive decision-making in an effective direction? Or, worse yet, it’s used instead of the tried and true set of smaller data metrics that have driven sales teams and marketing departments for generations? At the risk of showing my bald spot, I think it’s time we look at Big Data for what it is; a fantastic tool that is more than welcome inside the successful company’s toolbox, but not at the expense of smaller data.

Smart contracts: Welcome to a world of automated digital commerce

Blockchain ledger technology opens the door not only to decentralized transactions, but also to smart (that is, automated and computable) transactions and smart (computable and self-executing) contracts that can take advantage of smart transactions. A smart contract is a digitally signed, computable agreement between two or more parties. A virtual third party—a software agent—can execute and enforce at least some of the terms of such agreements. ... Over the long term, the blockchain concept is about creating new entities and processes that can be automated in whole or in part. New blockchain-inspired systems—public, private, or both—will be essential to the growth of the Internet of Things. They will be fundamental to machine-to-machine transactions at scale.

How Open Data Is Changing Chicago

The action of posting data sets makes everything much more transparent and easier to access. In the past, some of this data might have been public in the sense that you could have requested it from us, but now it’s something that you can get on demand. By making data publicly available, I think you change the type of discourse that you have because you’re being proactively transparent, not reactively transparent. Your trust model changes. For example, if somebody came up to you and told you some facts about themselves, about their life, without you even having to ask that question, you would be hard-pressed to call that person reclusive. Same thing here. Proactively publishing information makes it harder to say that the government is being reclusive—and that helps increase trust.

Docker Momentum Mesmerizes and Threatens

“It’s everything you need to go from simple, containerized development to a whole live system that can receive anything from anywhere, anytime that can span multiple service providers and survive hardware failures,” said Hykes, looking trim and peppy in the uniform of the DevOps crowd — jeans and T-shirt. Despite the growing success of Docker — the company is now understood to have a multi-billion dollar valuation because of its expanding use by DevOps teams — there is some anxiety among its technology partners that Docker will wield its growing power to rule the container management space. Even though many of Docker’s tools are open source, its management platform is a proprietary software product that the company is now monetizing with large services contracts.

Don't clear out your cubicle for a robot just yet

“The cognitive era will create new jobs, such as robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators,” the analysts wrote. “But the transformation of existing jobs resulting from re-engineering a process to use cognitive support -- such as turning low-value data entry work to higher-level analyst or customer-oriented roles -- will be even more dramatic.” The analysts pointed out, for example, that IBM’s Watson cognitive platform can reduce the amount of time that data analysts spend crunching numbers. That means those data scientists should have more time to focus on higher-value tasks, such as interpreting results. Eliminating mundane tasks and giving people more interesting work, should improve both morale and worker retention, according to Forrester.

World’s Fastest Supercomputer Now Has Chinese Chip Technology

"It’s not based on an existing architecture. They built it themselves," said Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and creator of the measurement method used by TOP500. "This is a system that has Chinese processors." The new machine shows China’s determination to build its domestic chip industry and replace its dependence on imports that cost as much as oil. The world’s most populous country may also try to lessen its reliance on U.S. companies for defense technology and security infrastructure. Supercomputers aren’t major consumers of chips. But being at the heart of the world’s most powerful machines helps processor makers persuade the broader market to consider their technology.

Are Tech Skills Required to Effectively Lead IT Governance?

“Some IT specialists mistakenly think business leaders cannot govern IT, since they lack technology skills.” The article emphasizes that the reality is that no technology knowledge is actually required. “Understanding the capability IT brings or planning new, improved business capability enabled by smarter, more effective use of IT does not require specific knowledge of how to design, build, or operate IT systems.” 4 To further prove their point, the two authors of the article compared this concept to an automobile: If someone wants to operate a taxi service, they need to understand the capabilities and requirements for the vehicles used to operate the service, NOT how to design and manufacture cars. Therefore, effectively leading IT governance does not require IT skills.

How to know if your organization is ready for data governance software

Understanding the specific scenarios where data governance will provide business benefits to your organization dictates functionality requirements, which then help determine which tool category -- or categories -- you should be looking into. You'll then need to either prioritize your requirements or consider acquiring multiple tools. While most vendors strive to provide a full spectrum of data governance support, or partner with others to achieve that, there's currently no one tool that will meet all data governance requirements. Many companies look for tools that support administration of a data governance program and provide workflow and glossary functionality; they then integrate that software with existing data modeling environments.

Chasing Enterprise Architecture Perfection

The balancing of keeping the lights on and innovation is where Enterprise Architecture is supposed to add direction and most often does. Where most IT organizations seem to focus though is on the lower level stacks. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for those levels including integration strategy, master data, and infrastructure management; but what if instead, the attention was centered on the business process? If IT could better align with the business needs and objectives, and everyone came to sit at the same table wouldn’t the end solution be a much more effective design? I’ve seen a few companies do this very well, so I realize I’m not presenting a new idea; just trying to emphasize the thoughts for companies who aren’t yet thinking in this manner.

Change As Core Competency: Transforming The Role Of The Enterprise Architect

The mantle of change agent has graced the shoulders of many an enterprise architect over the years, but it rarely fits well. Today we’re finally realizing why. Pushing an organization to move from a problematic status quo to some other more desirable state has never led to organizations that are better able to deal with change overall. Instead, for such organizations, change is a temporary and difficult chore, best finished quickly so that people can go about their business. Instead of being an agent of change, the EA must become an architect of change. Change is all around us, pervasive and ubiquitous. Organizations need to get better at dealing with it, and ideally, leverage both internal and external disruption for competitive advantage.

Quote for the day:

"When someone says you can't, look at where they are sitting. Perhaps they meant they can't." -- Tim Fargo