Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 08, 2016

Can the evolving CIO role break a glass ceiling for women?

Clearly the numbers are not about ability. They are more likely a reflection of bias, both in advertising and recruiting for senior roles. That’s a tough one to crack but conditions are changing. So what can be done? Inspiring the young is one step. Heneghan believes more needs to be done to promote technology career paths to school pupils and much of this is down to destroying stereotypes by using those female role models as inspiration. Meeting the demands of the evolving CIO role is another step. Businesses can cultivate female talent based on key strengths, promoting a diverse culture and a strategy built on technology business cases rather than nuts and bolts IT management.

Home Computers Connected to the Internet Aren't Private, Court Rules

The judge argued that the FBI did not even need the original warrant to use the NIT against visitors to PlayPen. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, warned that the ruling is far outside any current legal notion of privacy. The group expects, however, that law enforcement will begin to use the ruling unless it is overturned. "The Justice Department has a practice of carving out novel legal interpretations and then advancing them in court," Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney for EFF told eWEEK. "I would not be surprised if they did try to rely on the idea that they don't need a warrant for this type of hacking." Few people will have sympathy for the defendant, a man who allegedly visited PlayPen and downloaded images from the site, but the precedents in the case could affect everyone, the EFF stated.

Enterprise Business Intelligence vs. Self-Service: It’s Not a Fight

This is the holy-grail question of BI. Enterprise BI tools have historically delivered on the governance front; however, had limited self-service capabilities. On the other hand, data discovery tools have launched a liberalizing platform for users to connect, prepare, and analyze data all on their own but with little governance capabilities. Instead, they rely on storytelling, social media features, and annotations for report creators to share their analyses with background knowledge on how they arrived to their interpretations of the data. While both tools differ in terms of level of governance, it is important to consider their core purpose. Discovery tools are meant for users to conduct data mashups and independently find or create insights while enterprise BI is used for information delivery and monitoring.

12 Ways To Cultivate A Data-Savvy Workforce

"Every employee needs [to understand] what it means to be part of a digital, datacentric organization," said Susan Peters, senior vice president of Human Resources at GE, in an interview. "Whether you're on the shop floor of a manufacturing plant, in a research lab, or at the corporate headquarters, everyone is responsible for a company's shift to becoming data-savvy." Of course, not all companies have GE's vast resources. The company spends $1 billion a year worldwide on employee learning and development alone. Even without such resources, here are 12 things your company can do to effectively attract, build, and retain a data-savvy workforce. Once you've reviewed our tips, tell us what you think in the comments section below. Is your corporate culture ready for a data-driven workforce?

4 ways to make agile and waterfall work together

Whether it’s a consulting engagement or an internal software project, IT departments like the flexibility and productivity of an agile project. But in selling the project to upper management and the finance organization, waterfall concepts will nearly always be introduced as requirements. If you think hard about it, agile and waterfall are nearly contradictory philosophies. So how do you get them to work together? In too many software projects, particularly those involving consultants, it’s a pretty uncomfortable marriage. Unlike the song, opposites do not attract. ... Even though it is common to discover many details after that first phase, these new items are not the project implementer’s problem: they are the consuming or client organization’s problem. They should not be accepted as binding requirements without a change order. Unfortunately, I’ve seen projects that were still in discovery after deployment.

Writing Maintainable Configuration Code

A lot of work has been done to write maintainable code and achieve high design quality in traditional software engineering. Similar to production code, configuration code may also become unmaintainable if the changes to configuration code are made without diligence and care. ... Configuration smells are the characteristics of a configuration program or script that violate the recommended best practices and potentially affect the program's quality in a negative way. In traditional software engineering practices, bad smells are classified as implementation (or code) smells and design smells based on the granularity of the abstraction where the smell arises and affects. Similarly, configuration smells can also be classified as implementation configuration smells, design configuration smells, documentation configuration smells, and so on.

Database architects help scientists deal with data floods

The North American Space Agency (NASA) built a SciDB database that helped it manage and process a mass influx of Doppler radar as part of its study on the intensity and frequency of storms in the US. Since the technology for gathering this data is constantly evolving, the data feeds come in a variety of file formats and levels of detail. Some of the information is measured by the degree, while other sources compare changes in tenths of a degree. Meanwhile, the representation of the data is equally diverse, with grey scale and raw signal data jostling alongside derived data values like precipitation rates and wind speed. Without SciDB, NASA’s scientists would miss the bigger pictures evolving as they’d be too busy writing code that could map the various representations together, says Brown.

The Enterprise Is In An Arm's Race With Cybercriminals

“Attackers use the deep web for anonymized communications that they encrypt over web protocols and for trade in rootkits that they use for nuisance attacks to serve as smoke screens that cover real attacks,” says Professor James Hendler, Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Cyber hoodlums orchestrate the real attacks using threats such as the latest exploits, APT approaches, and zero-days, which they keep close to their chest while enterprises still have no defense against them. “The current state-of-the-art happens off the deep web because attackers are not willing to share that information. Ransomware for example is extremely sophisticated and these criminals go to great lengths to obscure its source,” says Hendler.

More People Work From Home Now Than Ever Before

The number of people working from home increased from 19% in 2003 (the first year the ATUS was conducted) to 24% in 2015. Concurrent with the findings of the previous surveys on longer hours, the ATUS reveals that the average time employed persons spent working at home on days they worked increased by 40 minutes from 2.6 hours to 3.2 hours. Breaking this down by gender, men who were employed full time reported working from home 3.24 hours on an average day while women working full time said they clocked in 3.44 hours on the average day. Those who earned a bachelor’s degree are more likely to work from home. The ATUS found that compared to less educated workers, full time workers who are college graduates were the least likely to work at their workplace on days they worked (74%), and they were the most likely to do some or all of their work from home (39%).

What EA learned about building successful mobile app infrastructure

Some of the best practices include learning from failure, focusing on user experience, creating a plan and leveraging a platform. This allowed the company to go from a few unused applications to a mobile application factory that made it easy to update apps and deploy new ones. Bendrot said it is surprising how often planning the infrastructure does not get considered in implementing a mobile strategy. EA realized it would be much better to leverage a mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) to allow developers to focus on writing new features. It ultimately adopted the FeedHenry MBaaS platform that was recently acquired by Red Hat. In addition, EA needed a strategy for provisioning new apps. They settled on a mobile application management (MAM) platform from Apperian for managing an enterprise store.

Quote for the day:

"High expectations are the key to everything." -- Sam Walton

July 07, 2016

What is a smart contract and what's it good for?

Like traditional legal contracts that are standardized -- think LegalZoom -- many smart contracts will be standardized. "A very large portion of contracts are not going to be the kind where two parties will end up negotiating the entire contract from scratch," Buterin said. Standardized contracts are expected to be available as templates that users can choose among. Panel members described the wide applicability of smart contracts. Speaking from the perspective of a technology vendor operating within the blockchain ecosystem, Mark Smith, co-founder and CEO at Symbiont, a blockchain software vendor, said: "There are so many possibilities. You really need to put your blinders on and decide: What am I going to be good at? We've decided to be good at financial instruments."

Product Development Mechanisms

The first mechanism is tenets, which are basic principles that we all agree just make sense and should guide our actions. Tenets can be used within multiple contexts for a program. For example, we may have some tenets that help guide what work we do such as the product management decisions we make about whether to undertake an initiative or feature. Other tenets may be used to guide how we deliver software, such as constraints or guiding principles for the development process. The second mechanism is exit criteria, which specify conditions that must be met before moving on to the next activity in a value stream. Exit criteria serve as checklists to keep the team honest about ensuring activities have been performed with sufficient rigor so as to avoid re-work or other undesirable phenomena later in the value stream.

Blockchain Revolution review – Satoshi Nakamoto’s world-changing innovation

Overall, the shift the Tapscotts envisage – from hierarchies to networks, and towards a new era of “distributed capitalism” – sounds appealing. But each of the four examples mentioned above, like the numerous others in the book, raises the same two questions. Is this blockchain revolution likely? And is it actually desirable? In answer to the first question, the Tapscotts acknowledge barriers to adoption, particularly in the chapter on “showstoppers”. As regards the second, they allude to the possibly dystopian consequences as well as the utopian: at one point they suggest that blockchain technology could, if we get it wrong, allow institutions to entrench their wealth, provide a platform for a new kind of surveillance society, and even, together with related technological advances, get out of control and turn against humans.

Cognitive Computing Is Marketing’s Shiny New Object

What’s so disruptive about cognitive technology? To answer that question, let’s go to the source. Clayton Christensen – famous Harvard professor and author – is credited with the original theory of disruptive innovation. Forbes paraphrased Christensen’s work, saying that “disruption displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient and worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative.” Disruptive innovation destroys inefficiencies in order to create new, more efficient opportunities. Applying this to cognitive – where you transfer the embodiment of human touch points to a system – you can see numerous opportunities to both destroy and create – whether that’s happening at the person, process or product level. We’re going to see new business models created through cognitive systems, new processes that make transactions more efficient and products that alter how we think and interact with technology.

Banks, Financial Services Firms and Insurers Open Innovation Labs in Singapore

During the past years, banks and financial institutions have opened innovation labs in Southeast Asia and most particularly in Singapore to explore emerging technologies. Citi was among the first banks to do so, launching in January 2011, the Citi Innovation Lab in Singapore. Said to be the first lab of its kind to be established in the country, the Citi Innovation Lab in Singapore aims at leveraging cutting-edge technologies to engage Citi’s institutional clients and deliver innovation products. Citi Innovation Lab recently won an award for its Citi Working Capital Analytics solution at the 2016 FinTech Innovation Awards in London. Another front-runner is MasterCard, which launched in early-2012 a MasterCard Lab in Singapore focusing on researching and developing new payment solutions including emerging payments, chip, contactless, mobile and e-commerce.

DAO Attack Fallout Sees Public Blockchains Questioned by Australian Bank

From an operational standpoint, Groves insists that private blockchains will prove to be more “sensible” than public blockchains. “For a lot of what banks need to do, private blockchains are the most sensible and realistic option, and more than that it’s actually a technology that’s been around for quite a long time,” Groves stated. He was pointing to the work of computer scientist Leslie Lamport, a pioneer in the field of distributed systems and computing, decades ago in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Indeed, a lot of private banks, including the major ones from around the world have banded together as a part of the R3-led banking blockchain consortium, R3CEV. Under a common roof, banks, financial firms and investment houses are exploring blockchain solutions for the industry, together.

At W3C Event, Industry Seeks to Weave Blockchains into New Web

It all comes back to identity, said Doug Schepers, a W3C technologist and team contact that organized the workshop. "The reason people are so interested in it is because usernames and password and the existing way identity is done is so flawed and hard to deal with," he said. The idea is that transacting with a public/private key pair over a blockchain is more convenient and secure than today’s username/password identity schemes. Standardizing these identity iterations could move forward at a quicker pace because Microsoft is a powerful member of the browser-focused W3C already. Plus, the vendor has secured a number of partners for its blockchain identity program, and several representatives from Samsung’s mobile browser work spoke with Microsoft at the workshop about joining the identity initiative.

5 Cybersecurity Tips That Can Save Your Small Business

Just like Fortune 100 companies and other large enterprises, small businesses face a constant threat of cyber-attacks and data breaches from hackers all around the world. According to a 2014-2018 forecast report by the IDC research group, 71 percent of all security breaches target small business. The misconception that cyber attackers only go after large organizations to net bigger monetary gains or to steal more sensitive data—such as intellectual property or competitive trade secrets—is simply untrue. Cyber-attacks don't cost very much, so compromising any organization or individual typically results in profit. Moreover, cyber attackers usually go after computing systems they know well, so often times it’s more about compromising a particular technology rather than targeting a specific person or entity.

Facebook OpenCellular: A Baby Antenna Brings Internet to the Boonies

Subramanian sees OpenCellular as something that would allow just about anyone to set up a wireless network, even in rather rural areas. Measuring 19.5- by 8.5- by 4.5-inches, it’s something you could easily carry as you angle to install it on a tree or a telephone pole. “You could wear it like a backpack as you climb the pole,” he says. “Anyone who can climb a tree can put it up.” Yes, the device still requires power and some sort of “backhaul” connection to the Internet—a wireline cable or the like. But Subramanian and team are working to keep power requirements to a minimum, and separately, Facebook is fashioning antennas that could provide wireless backhaul, streaming Internet signals from cities out into distant rural areas. But part of the attraction of OpenCellular is that it can work even when a backhaul connection goes down.

Is the State of Analytics REALLY That Bad?

Seventy-five percent of CompTIA's survey respondents said their businesses would be stronger if they could use all of their data. Conceptually, that makes sense. Practically speaking, it may not. After all, not all data is valuable. A lot of it is just noise so "all" is a slippery slope. Do the survey respondents think they need access to all their company's data or do they actually need it?. Tim Herbert, SVP of Research & Market Intelligence at CompTIA said in an interview that companies can do a much better job with what they have. "Doing more with what you have in some cases is not as interesting as adopting the newest big data tools. The other part is taking advantage of new opportunities. Even small businesses can tap into certain data streams without a lot of heavy investment," he said. In short, "more data" is probably a more realistic desire than "all data."

Quote for the day:

"Great effort springs naturally from a great attitude." -- Pat Riley

July 06, 2016

10 Tools to Help Remote Web Developers Collaborate With Their Team

Since you can’t do face-to-face client meetings, present projects in person, or sit at the same desk as your programming buddy, it’s easy to feel like being a remote web developer has major disadvantages. I’ve found that to be nowhere near the truth. Remote developers are happier, work harder and naturally learn to take advantage of collaborative tools that are more efficient than working side-by-side. ... Remote work is challenging because we’re programmed to need the company of others and communicate face to face. There’s a learning curve when moving from an office to a remote team, but the tools you’ll use are ideal when used with a remote first attitude.

Firmware exploit can defeat new Windows security features on Lenovo ThinkPads

The exploit, dubbed ThinkPwn, was published earlier this week by a researcher named Dmytro Oleksiuk, who did not share it with Lenovo in advance. This makes it a zero-day exploit -- an exploit for which there is no patch available at the time of its disclosure. ThinkPwn targets a privilege escalation flaw in a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) driver, allowing an attacker to remove the flash write protection and to execute rogue code in the SMM (System Management Mode), a privileged operating mode of the CPU. ... The exploit can also defeat the Credential Guard feature of Windows 10 that uses virtualization-based security to prevent the theft of enterprise domain credentials, and do "other evil things."

What is the Best Strategy for Dealing with Ransomware?

To combat the threat from ransomware, companies need to take proactive, preventative steps to reduce risk and to increase their defense of the latest threats. The basic principles of security in IT networks are: training, establishing robust security processes, and making use of new layers of protection to reduce the risk of your network being compromised. To reduce the threat of ransomware, companies should use protection against exploits and ensure that their security solutions include behavioral detection methods. These are all things that an IT service provider should have built into the cybersecurity strategy of their services. Effective disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans must also be in place in case the worse does happen, however.

People Can’t Tell What Apps Use Encryption, And Don’t Really Care, Study Finds

The researchers found that almost 7 percent of the more than 1,500 people they surveyed wrongly believed to be using a secure and encrypted app while, in fact, they were not. Moreover, as the researchers put it, the data they collected suggests that both geeks and non-geeks voluntarily “behave insecurely” when it comes to using messaging apps. “In general, participants were mostly happy with the level of security and privacy their messengers provided, even if they did not know the real security properties,” Google researchers Alexander De Luca, Martin Ortlieb, Iulia Ion, Ben Laurie, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Sauvik Das, concluded in a paper presented at last week’s Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.

This All-Star Team Plans to Jumpstart 100 Cybersecurity Companies in 3 Years

Hack/secure will operate as follows: Whenever one of the group’s members finds a cybersecurity firm worth investing in on AngelList, hack/secure will contribute up to $250,000 in additional funding. The goal? Nothing short of “protecting the free world,” as Lynch likes to say, through technological innovation and unabashed venture capitalism. “We’re under siege and I think people are distracted,” Lynch says. “Everything runs on software—planes, trains, automobiles, the stock market, utilities—when someone really wants to fuck up the free world, that’s how they’re going to do it.” “We’re not only going to stop that from happening, but innovate and fund companies that can proactively eradicate those threats,” he adds.

Two-factor authentication (2FA): why you should care

Security works in layers. Think of a medieval castle – these castles never relied on just one thing to protect them. They were built in naturally defensible locations, and had strong doors, drawbridges, high towers, heavy stone walls, and more. Even if one of these protective factors failed during an attack, the castle had many other features in place to keep up its defense. The same idea applies when it comes to keeping your information safe on websites and applications you use every day. Cybercriminals are always thinking of new ways to try to obtain sensitive information, so in defense we make sure we have more sophisticated measures in place to stop them. 2FA is an additional layer of security on top of more common methods you already know, like a username and password. The more layers of defense in place, the harder a bad guy has to work to get at your information.

How Big Data Is Changing Disruptive Innovation

Because any new entrant is hard pressed to deliver superior value to a mature market, where products have been refined over decades. But although the low-end approach was pretty common, it wasn’t what was holding incumbent firms captive. It was their own cost structures and their focus on driving marginal profit increases that kept those companies headed down the wrong paths. As long making the right decision on a short-term basis (trying to drive more value out of outdated infrastructure) is the wrong decision on a long-term basis (failing to adopt new technology platforms), CEOs are destined to struggle. Unfortunately, the focus on the low-end approach of disruption is actually clouding our ability to spot the things that are: cheaper, more accessible, and built on an advantaged cost structure.

The Current State of Integration Platform as a Service

RESTful APIS are changing the integration landscape. Having these APIs, not only for SaaS apps, but all apps, makes it easy for everyone to connect and build innovative stuff on top of them. Because of this, MuleSoft has been investing a lot in this area to make it easy for developers to design, find and consume RESTful APIs. We joined the RAML workgroup to help make it easier to document RESTful APIs, and have seen tremendous uptake of the RAML specification. The 1.0 version, recently released, makes it easy to do things that before were extremely difficult. Ever try to write JSON or XML schema by hand? No thanks. Check out RAML data types and you’ll see what I mean. We’re trying to make it very easy for customers to get started defining and cataloging APIs so they can be reused.

Wealth Managers ‘Dangerously Behind’ in Digital Tech Adoption

The research found that wealth management is one of the least tech-literate sectors of financial services; a trend that comes into conflict with HNWIs’ growing enthusiasm in adopting new technologies. 85% of HNWIs are using three or more digital services in their day-to-day lives, and yet, only 25% of wealth managers are offering digital channels beyond email. Over half of HNWIs surveyed believe it is important for their financial advisor or wealth manager to have a strong digital offering – a proportion that rises to almost two-thirds among HNWIs under 45. 47% of HNWIs who do not currently use robo-advice services would consider using them in the future. Meanwhile, two-thirds of wealth relationship managers said they do not consider robo-advisors a threat to their business and repeatedly insist their clients do not want digital functionality.

Connected Insurance: Internet of Things changes Insurance Industry

To begin with, the kind of self- connecting ecosystem that IoT will create in the insurance industry will bring positive effects on all the processes involved, such as better consumer involvement, process optimization as well as preventive care in case of mishaps. With the sensors and ever- efficient gadgets making their way into the field of insurance, insurers will be able to connect the dots as well as mitigate risks much before they reach a threshold level. Internet of Things also makes sure that there is better product development, underwriting, sales, deliveries, distribution as well as claims and services being offered to the insurers exactly as claimed by the insurance companies. In simple words, we can say that the Internet of Things technology will make the concept of insurance and risk management simple and quick for all customers

Quote for the day:

"If your workers are micromanaged, you are killing the intrinsic motivation that you have spent time fostering." -- Rachel Mendelowitz

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