Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - November 21, 2016

Oracle acquires DNS provider Dyn, subject of a massive DDoS attack in October

Oracle plans to add Dyn’s DNS solution to its bigger cloud computing platform, which already sells/provides a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products and competes against companies like Amazon’s AWS. Oracle and Dyn didn’t disclose the price of the deal but we are trying to find out. Dan Primack reports that it’s north of $600 million. We’ve also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn’s recent breach, and whether the wheels were set in motion for this deal before or after the Mirai botnet attack in October, but our guess is that it was likely before. “We decline further comment,” is the response so far from a spokesperson to all our questions.

Getting a Competitive Edge from Comprehensive Data Analysis

It gets back to that idea of a common lexicon. If you think about evolution, you don't want a Madagascar or a Tasmania, where groups get cut off and then they develop their own truth, or a different truth, or they interpret data in a different way -- where they create their own definition of revenue, or they create their own definition of customer. If you think about it as orbits, you have to have a balance. Maybe you only need to touch certain people in the outer orbit once a month, but you have to touch them once a month to make sure they're connected. The thing about orbits and keeping people in the proper orbits is that if you don't, then one of two things happens, based on gravity. They either spin out of orbit or they come crashing in.

Cyber-security synchronisation key to mitigate business risk

Cyber security is not just a technology issue; it's a business risk that requires an enterprise-wide response. The cyber security is also a strategic risk for financial sector as it could create damage to organisation brand and reputation resulting in loss of share value and market confidence. It can also impact the financial and intellectual property resulting in loss of competitive edge and can cause system inoperability caused by a breach resulting in inability to execute trades and access to information. Hence the involvement of the company's board is required which should set the tone for enhancing security and determine whether the full board or a committee should have oversight responsibility.

Vendors push the 'private instance on a public cloud' proposition

A case in point is Alfresco, which today announced that its content management solution is now available on AWS. But rather than the usual multi-tenant public cloud offering, Alfresco is offering itself up as a single-tenant, managed services sitting within an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The pitch here is that the offering offers a kind of best of both worlds: a robust content-centric platform allowing users to collaborate on business-critical content, all with the network isolation and security of a dedicated AWS VPC and without the dedicated internal resources for ongoing Alfresco and AWS management. The offering, which is now available on an early-access basis, comes in a few flavors: either fully managed by Alfresco or available for customers to design, deploy and maintain under their own steam and leveraging the experience

IoT Security vs. IT Security: What’s the difference?

While CISOs are adept in dealing with IT security and employing the sophisticated tools to secure the perimeters of the enterprise, as well as the inroads to mission-critical enterprise systems, the nature of IoT devices and the scale of the IoT landscape presents even the most prepared IT organization with a multitude of unique threats, exposures and operational challenges. Before letting loose the IoT genie, a CISO will want to fully understand the risks and concerns associated with IoT solutions in advance of signing off on a deployment strategy. For this reason, it is imperative that development teams and business sponsors driving the development and adoption of IoT apps take pre-emptive measures to secure access to all IoT devices and related data.

Stay Safe from Cyber Crime - Top Ten Tips InfoGraphic

Given I am regularly asked to explain cyber attacks and then advise on how to protect against them, particularly to home users of late, I thought I would try my hand at creating a simple InfoGraphic to help. It was a challenge to create due to the limitation to the amount of space for text, which means you can't cover everything and you can't go into much detail. However concise messaging is kind of the point of infographics, especially when using them as awareness tools. This InfoGraphic is squarely aimed at the average "home user", it highlights what the bad guys are after, their most popular and most successful attack methods, and then provides 10 tips to help avoid and detect home user cyber attacks, simples.

Google Wifi wireless router: The smart person's guide

The Wifi units include software called Network Assist that makes sure you always have the strongest signal possible by constantly selecting the clearest wireless channel. When using multiple "points," Network Assist will seamlessly transition your device to the closest Wi-Fi point to ensure the best connection possible. The devices were also designed to meet the demanding needs of modern usage—that translates to streaming. Google's goal was to create a wireless router that could stream, download, and share from multiple devices simultaneously, without your network speed taking a hit. Another standout feature is the Google WiFi app. With this app, you can easily share your Wi-Fi password, see what devices are online, prioritize devices for increased performance, and pause your signal to specific devices (think parental control).

The changing face of cybersecurity – A look back at 2016 and a look forward to 2017

Cybersecurity has come a long way over the past five years. Controls have been invented to monitor a user’s every move without violating their privacy and the chief information security officer (CISO) is now a fixture in many modern organisations. With the last quarter of 2016 upon us and 2017 looming large, I've thought about look at what companies need to do as 2016 draws to a close, and what may be in store during 2017. Stay on top of vulnerabilities: Microsoft states that 41.8 per cent of vulnerabilities are given a highly severe rating these days. This is a three-year high! Ensure you’re prioritising and managing your vulnerabilities accordingly. Wean your people off of Flash: According to Microsoft, 90 per cent of malicious web pages contained Flash.

Hedge in the cloud: funds outsourcing computing power step into unknown

"If you're storing someone else's data, you'd think there'd be hacks on that but that's not something we've seen," Garry Liburn, detective inspector for the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit, said at an event in Mayfair last month. Under the FCA's new guidelines, which only took effect in July, firms should tell the regulator if they experience a breach. The watchdog declined to comment on whether any had reported incidents. "I am sure there have been hacks of the cloud ... no one is reporting them," said Viktor Ula, managing partner at investment consultant PivotalPath. "If a cloud reported a hack, it would halt their growth. The risk that everyone believes exists out there would then be perceived to be even higher and folks would probably revert to having systems internally."

Are regulations the answer to better Internet of Things security?

There’s a relatively easy way to get the industry to move faster on improving IoT security: enforcing or updating federal and industry regulations and standards to help safeguard the IoT revolution (and, in fact, compel companies to better protect their web infrastructure overall). No one likes red tape, and regulation for the sake of regulation is silly, but the fact is there are two main drivers that the corporate C-suites is waiting for devoting more budget to IoT and mobile security: headline-grabbing attacks and regulatory obligations. Regulations, whether or not anyone likes it, can be a very effective hammer for greater good. From improved health monitoring to safer highways to smart homes, IoT has already begun to touch the lives of millions of Americans and will become truly transformational in the years to come.

Quote for the day:

"The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us." -- Voltaire

Daily Tech Digest - November 20, 2016

What is the future of SMS and USSD in Africa?

“USSD can become a container for many things,” Muhanga says. “For example, you can run a website on USSD only. Your whole system can be accessible anywhere in the world. And it is very secure.” With USSD users do not store any data on their handsets. This is quite secure in terms of mobile banking transactions that rely on the technology. “You can get sensitive messages like in health or financials that you do not want to store in your phone,” Muhanga explains. Even in the face of OTT services, SMS is not dead. According to the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA), more mobile phone subscribers use text messaging. In its quarterly report for the year 2015 to 2016 ending June this year, there was almost double the number of SMS’s used.

What is Big Data Analytics and Why is it Important in Fintech?

Data sets grow very fast because they are gathered using many information-sensing mobile devices, cameras, software logs, aerial, wireless sensor networks, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers and microphones. Since the 1980s and the boom of the internet, the amount of data that is being generated and kept on a global level is inconceivable, and it keeps growing. The global technological per-capita capacity to keep information doubles every 40 months. Since 2012, 2.5 Exabyte of data is generated every day. A question for big enterprises is deciding who should be the owner of big data initiatives that affect the whole organization. Relational database management systems and some data visualization software have difficulty in dealing with Big data.

Everything you need to Know about Scaling MySQL

Although both sharding and replatforming enhance the performance of MySQL, they are complex processes that consume a lot of time in addition to being costly. Even then, the good news is that they are not the only options. It is not surprising that MySQL technology that dates back to more than two decades ago is struggling to stay abreast with the latest developments in the digital world today. While MySQL databases will do for those companies that do not foresee much growth, companies that are keen on growth need to consider scaling their MySQL databases even though achieving scale is no mean feat. It is possible to encounter problems when scaling MySQL despite having all the financial resources. For instance, Google has built its own database which is a huge undertaking as opposed to if the company had explored modern solutions.

Cyber security experts warn firms about dark side of social media use as hackers hunt data

"Cyber criminals know that the easiest way to penetrate a system is to go after the user, not the computer, so they target vulnerable users with 'spear phishing' emails that are crafted to look like they come from someone known and trusted. The messages might also appear to come from banks or businesses, and can include full names, usernames, and other personal details," he said. "It's an old-fashioned confidence trick," said Harris, "but cyber attackers are deploying it with more sophistication. "For example, imagine I send you a fraudulent email. You might work in the finance department and I send you an email that looks like it comes from your boss requesting you to make a payment urgently into a certain bank account.

Five strategies to unlock smart city potential

Smart city technologies hold the promise of improving the sustainability and liveability of our urban centres, and according to one industry executive, there are five ingredients needed to unlock their potential. “The smart cities movement is a global one. There are no boundaries in the smart cities movement, and that in particular provides a lot of challenges and opportunities,” said Adam Beck, executive director at the Smart Cities Council Australia and New Zealand. ... “Technology isn’t a barrier anymore, and I don’t think funding and finance is a barrier. The barrier now is probably the level of creativity we apply in trying to access that finance and funding,” Beck said. Beck outlined five strategies which he said “establishes the conditions in which we can accelerate the smart cities marketplace.”

Forget wearables. In the future, your clothes will connect to the internet

What Avery Dennison is trying to do is bring these experiences outside the store and expand their possibilities. Sidahmed says the company has no exact roadmap for hitting 10 billion connected items, but the project is underway. “The first collaboration is here with Rochambeau,” she says. “Now the conversation is starting.” The endeavor has obstacles to overcome, however. For one thing, RFID tags aren’t something you can just throw in the laundry and expect to keep working. Washable versions do exist, but Sidahmed admits they’re too expensive at the moment to be widely used. For now, they have to be removable so you can launder the garment, though Sidahmed says companies are working on the problem.

Big data can’t bring objectivity to a subjective world

What’s more, the implications of this weakness extend far beyond the social sciences. There are some, for instance, who think that big data will “revolutionize” advertising and marketing, allowing these two interlinked fields to reach their “ultimate goal: targeting personalized ads to the right person at the right time.” According to figures in the advertising industry “[t]here is a spectacular change occurring,” as masses of data enable firms to profile people and know who they are, down to the smallest preference. Yet even if big data might enable advertisers to collect more info on any given customer, this won’t remove the need for such info to be interpreted by models, concepts and theories on what people want and why they want it. And because these things are still necessary

Internet of Things Messaging, Part 1: Introducing MQTT

MQTT implementations are excellent choices for endpoint devices such as Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, smart phones OSes, and pretty much any platform that can benefit from simple and low overhead messaging. The MQTT protocol is, as of writing, at version 3.1.1 and has become an OASIS standard although there are still many implementations in the market that support version 3.1.0 . The latest specification has major improvements over the previous spec and also mandates that MQTT “brokers” should now be called MQTT “servers”. IANA has reserved TCP/IP port 1883 for use by MQTT brokers, er … servers, along with port 8883 for MQTT over SSL (note that using SSL introduces an additional communications performance overhead). Many MQTT server implementations also support WebSockets.

Physicians Say Blockchain Healthcare Ideas in Need of Exam

“The attention is on these big issues because everyone loves the sexiness of solving a big problem,” said Mathew Rose, a practicing junior doctor in Ireland and co-founder at Saavha. “But if you think throughout history, anything that was an immense problem, it was easier to solve the little problems inside that big problem.” Look at the development of medicine, for example. Part of the reason medical science has advanced so far is because every medical researcher works on a part of the problem, Rose said. In cancer research, some doctors focus on practices for removing tumors, while others focus on inhibiting blood supply, while still others investigate what role proteins play. In Saavha’s implementation, a hash of the appointment data is stored on the blockchain so it can be proven that the data wasn’t changed retrospectively.

Why Top Executives Do Not Get Innovation – and What to Do About It

There simply is no room in this equation for CEOs to put their necks on the line and support investments in innovation efforts that won’t produce near-term results, or may even have a negative impact on the bottom line for some period of time. Thus we find ourselves in a world where companies put too much focus on incremental innovation. In an ideal world, boards would demand that investments in innovation are made on a widely accepted norm of 80% incremental and 20% radical to assure the long-term health of the organization. But few organizations have metrics for measuring innovation, and boards don’t pay executives based on innovation objectives. Dynamic values such as entrepreneurship, creativity, and risk-taking are not measured, let alone valued at bonus time. This lead to an over emphasis on incremental innovation.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders lead. They don't divide; they don't create a climate that is poisonous." -- @JebBush

Daily Tech Digest - November 19, 2016

Key trends in machine learning and AI

If your company isn’t using machine learning to detect anomalies, recommend products or predict churn, you will start doing it soon. Because of the rapid generation of new data, availability of massive amounts of compute power and ease of use of new ML platforms, we expect to see more and more applications that generate real-time predictions and continuously get better over time. Of the 100 early-stage startups we have met in the last six months, 90+ percent of them are already planning to use ML to deliver a better experience for their customers. ... Several high-profile experiments with ML and AI came into the spotlight in the last year. Examples include Microsoft Tay, Google DeepMind AlphaGo, Facebook M and the increasing number of chatbots of all kinds. The rise of natural user interfaces (voice, chat and vision) provide very interesting options and opportunities for us as human beings to interact with virtual assistants.

Rise of the drones: from policing the streets to painting your house

Little surprise, then, that some of the world’s biggest tech companies are testing their drones elsewhere. Last month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a conference in Seattle: “We’re getting really good cooperation from the British equivalent of the FAA, the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority]. It’s incredible. It’s really cool.” Amazon is developing and testing its Prime Air delivery drones in the fields around Cambridge. Despite the UK’s enthusiasm for Amazon, and similarly permissive test flights elsewhere in Europe, Canada and Australia, “no single country stands out as being aeons ahead of everyone else,” says Holland Michel. “Though they may vary on the details, all countries are grappling with the same concerns. The deciding factor will be how flexible and responsive their regulations are.”

Why Human Baby Brains Are Smarter Than AI

“The amazing thing about babies is they can see something once or hear a new word for the first time and they already have a good idea of what that new word could mean and how they could use that new word,” says Gopnik. “So these kind of Bayesian approaches have been good in explaining why children are so good at learning even when they don’t even have much data.” Babies use the probabilistic model to create a variety of hypotheses by combining probabilities and possibilities to draw conclusions. ... Older learners develop biased perspectives as they learn more about the world and strengthen certain neural connections, which hamper their ability to form out-of-the-box hypotheses and abstract theories based on little information. This is where babies and children under the age of five thrive.

Blockchain - It has the potential to transform our lives

There are so many possible applications of blockchain. You can literally transact anything. It could be used for welfare distribution, or for secure voting, land title transfer, music, movies, you name it. One good example that we are looking into is in vaccine distribution. There is a certain percentage of vaccines that get lost on their way to distribution, for numerous reasons. Where blockchain can be helpful is simple supply chain management. We could use blockchain to create an immutable record which is translated along the Bitcoin blockchain. Even if your merchandise got lost, you would know where you lost it. And while we are in the process of fixing a huge problem that impacts millions of people – especially children – around the world, we are also solving a problem that any company throughout the world grapples with on a daily basis.

APIs Blurring The Competitive Advantage Between Banking and Fintech

Fintech startups are interested in APIs from banks and vice versa. What’s more, consumers are embracing this unity on a greater and greater scale. As a result, it’s no longer a matter of whether fintech startups or banks will win a fight against each other. Instead, it’s a matter of which companies will use the right combination of APIs to create something that consumers really want. Some argue that sharing of APIs may cause an unbundling of the legacy banking industry supply chain, allowing aggregators to select products and services to be reassembled in new ways. While that potential exists, others, like Ron Shevlin, believe traditional financial services firms hold the cards because of their existing customer relationships. He believes that the opportunity for platformification™ is powerful.

14 Signs Your Smartphone or Tablet Has Been Hacked

Today's smartphones are powerful computers that allow us to perform tasks that only a generation ago would have been considered science fiction. The devices also often contain a tremendous amount of confidential information, including the contents of our text and email communications, as well as access to various accounts via pre-logged-in apps. It is imperative, therefore, to keep the devices safe from hackers, and to take immediate corrective action if one's phone is breached. But how can you tell if your smartphone has been compromised? Below are some symptoms to look out for. Please keep in mind, however, that none of the clues that I discuss in this article exists in a vacuum, or is, on its own, in any way absolute. There are reasons other than a breach that may cause devices to act abnormally.

Illuminating the dark world of Shadow IT

Most of the time, employees using Shadow IT applications don’t think they are doing any harm and that the apps themselves couldn’t possibly interfere with officially sanctioned IT products or company policies. But all too often Shadow IT apps don’t measure up to corporate standards for data protection and encryption. They can also consume a large amount of bandwidth which in turn can slow the network. In addition, Shadow IT can cause issues when it comes to compliance with data protection laws and sharing data directives. If that wasn't bad enough, the presence of Shadow IT apps on a corporate network dramatically increases the risk of security breaches and data loss that can hurt the company from a financial and reputational perspective.

How Data Virtualization Promotes Governance, Risk and Compliance

Data virtualization enables unified data governance by creating a Virtual Data Services Layer across internal and external data sources, while leaving the source data where it is. A strong data management function sponsored centrally by the chief data office builds guiderails of standards, access control, certified provisioning points, and strong data governance. However, access to data is decentralized in a self-service model for business users, reporting and regulatory interface teams. This approach minimizes replication saving millions of dollars, but more importantly reduces the time and complexity to reach the objective of enhanced GRC. Industry leaders in every field are adopting data virtualization in the context of GRC to tackle the challenges of internal risk management, regulatory reporting, and enhanced agility in the face of changing business needs.

Panel discusses ransomware disease sweeping Asia-Pacific

Sadly, Australia has turned into a huge target for ransomware; as Mr. Dillon pointed out, in terms of reported incidents, “Australia is currently ranked third and last time it was fifth, so it’s in a worsening position.” Lack of education is a cause, but it’s not the only one: “From an enterprise perspective, there is a skills shortage in Australia,” he said, adding, “I know a professional services organization that has just spent 18 months trying to fill a security application position.” And that leads to successful attacks, explained Ms. Boo, referencing one small business owner she talked to. “What happened is that he got exploited by ransomware. He did whatever people always asked him to do, always made sure he had a backup on his data. So what happened was he thought what he had was safe so when he got attacked, he refused to pay the ransom.

Getting started with Machine Learning

How could the computer learn to identify if a recorded voice is from a male or female? Well, if we want the computer to help us, in this case then we need to speak its language: numbers. In the machine learning world this means extracting features from the data. If you followed the Kaggle link above you can see that they already have extracted lots of features from the speech signal. Some feature examples are: mean frequency, median frequency, standard deviation of frequency, interquartile range, mean of fundamental frequency, etc. In other words, instead of having a time series showing the voice pressure signal, they extracted characteristics of this signal that may help us identify if the voice belongs to a male or female- this is called feature engineering. Feature engineering is a critical part of most machine learning processes.

Quote for the day:

"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie." -- Russian Proverb

Daily Tech Digest - November 18, 2016

How To Integrate Disruptive Technologies With IT Outsourcing Contracts

Business and IT leaders may want a trusted partner to manage their entire technology environment. By expanding the scope of an existing deal, the customer can retain integrated performance standards and service levels for the entire environment and maintain streamlined governance processes. It also may be a way to minimize any transition or termination costs. However, the integration of disruptive technologies into an existing sourcing arrangement can present a number of new challenges, says Linda Rhodes, partner in the Washington, D.C. office of law firm Mayer Brown. “The contractual rights and protections available to the client in important areas — such as control rights, approval rights, audit rights, intellectual property ownership rights and post-termination rights—are likely to be different in many respects,” Rhodes says.

Is ice cream the real reason IoT was invented?

“Smile, there is nothing ice cream can’t solve.” Despite going to great efforts T-shirt sayings rarely catch the real mood of our times but this one is something special. For one it is true and two, it seems to dovetail neatly as a great example of why one of the biggest technology trends of the past couple of years actually exists. The internet of things (IoT) has had a lot of hype, some of it justifiable and some of it misdirected. It is still climbing the slope of expectation on Gartner’s Hype Cycle and while numerous analyst reports throw around big-number forecasts about future IoT device market penetration, the reality is that in most sectors it still needs a viable use case. But things are changing, certainly in the industrial space. At Dell EMC World in Austin, Texas last month, one booth was dedicated to showing how collaboration through IoT can work to make ice cream manufacture more efficient.

Building Security Resiliency Into Critical Infrastructure

Developing greater resilience in our critical infrastructure systems requires addressing several interrelated factors. On a broad scale, we must identify, assess and address risks while creating continuity practices to ensure essential services are still available when disruptions occur. The best way to contribute to this resilience, from a cybersecurity standpoint, is to build a more resilient cyber threat prevention strategy. One that can adapt to the changing threat landscape to stay a step ahead of attackers’ plans. Such a strategy must begin with the most common entry point for attackers – the endpoint. Other than the recently disclosed nuclear plant breach, for which we have no details, all of the above examples have one thing in common – the attack began at the endpoints. Take the case of attacks on the power grid.

Is critical infrastructure the next DDoS target?

“The DDoS attack is most effective against targets that are inherently dependent on internet communications and the ICS/SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) environment is just not engineered to operate with that sort of dependency,” he said. According to Gabe Gumbs, vice president of product strategy at Spirion, “the IoT should be strictly defined as consumer-connected devices. Much of critical infrastructure is connected, but it is not consumer-grade technology. Organizations that own things like SCADA systems are invested in securing them, in stark contrast to the consumer end of the spectrum.” And Robert M. Lee, CEO of Dragos, said while there are still ICS assets on the internet – “too many, to be honest” – a lot of them are not.

How To Fix The Internet Of Things Security Mess

For their part, consumers must first recognise that they are partly to blame for the lack of security in the IoT industry. With customers being focused on ease of installation and use rather than security, there’s no incentive for manufacturers to make more secure devices, and they’ll go out of their way to avoid disenchanting users. While it is the duty of manufacturers to create frictionless security into their devices, customers must come to accept that increasingly connected lives will warrant a change of culture at the consumer level. This effectively means that consumers must understand that connecting vulnerable devices to the internet will not only harm the owner, but all internet users in general. Therefore they should hold companies to account for insecure devices and be mindful of the security of the devices they purchase.

Without tech industry guidance, U.S. may resort to weakening encryption

A Trump administration has a “greater likelihood” than the Obama administration of supporting legislation that will force tech companies to break into their customers' encrypted data when ordered by a judge, Rosenthal said. “You have a commander-in-chief, who said at least on the campaign trail he’s more favorable towards a backdoor regime,” Rosenthal said. Earlier this year, one such bill was proposed that met with staunch opposition from privacy advocates. However, in the aftermath of another terrorist attack, Congress might choose to push aside those concerns and pass legislation drafted without the advice of Silicon Valley, he said. Rosenthal said U.S. law enforcement needs surveillance tools to learn about terrorist plots, and that’s where the tech industry can help.

Teach Users Smart Security Habits and They Become Partners in Cybersecurity

The University of Wisconsin–Madison developed audience-specific education training as part of its five-year Cybersecurity Strategy plan in 2015. One of the plan’s top strategic objectives was to “Build a community of experts and improve institutional user competence through security education, training and awareness.” The plan calls for IT security staff to develop group-specific education for professors, researchers, business staff and IT professionals. To address the need for ongoing education about phishing attempts in particular, the plan also calls for quarterly phishing campaigns. Most important, the university measures campaign results to ensure that the ultimate goal — reducing the number of users who respond to phishing attempts — is being achieved.

IBM sets up test range to practice fighting nightmare cyber battles safely

Staff running the simulations can tune them on the fly to make the situation more or less complicated to suit the group carrying out the exercise. “We don’t want them to fail but we want them to be challenged,” says Caleb Barlow, IBM Security’s vice president of portfolio marketing. Scenarios can be spiced up with interjections – unexpected new developments that complicate matters. For example, word might come in that a nosey reporter has gotten wind of details about the attack or that the CEO is angry about how the response is going and creating more problems than they are solving. The range includes a TV interview studio where an actor plays a reporter who grills participants about the breach that has affected the fake business set up for the simulation.

Top Reasons For Network Downtime

New research paints a somewhat bleak picture of network performance. Outages are frequent. Hours typically pass before an issue is reported and resolved. Protective measures are manual and error prone. The source of the data is a survey of 315 network pros at midsize and large enterprises. The survey was sponsored by Veriflow, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup that aims to minimize the risk of network vulnerabilities and outages. Veriflow’s software is designed to catch network problems before they happen by predicting possible network-wide behavior and continually verifying that a network model adheres to an enterprise’s security and resilience policies. The survey results are interesting

Nothing good is free: How Linux and open source companies make money

Many open source projects were originally created because the developers themselves needed a solution for their own use, and then chose to release the code as open source. This can happen when an individual or a company doesn't really want to be in the software business but want to provide value to others for free. Sometimes, they hope that by releasing their project to open source, they can multiply their development resources for free, without having to hire more coders. Other open source projects begin in educational or nonprofit organizations, or as a result of a hobby project. No matter what, a piece of software comes into being with an open code base, but without the need for a business plan guaranteeing an income stream. For this model, there is no promise of ROI needed before investing in the software.

Quote for the day:

"The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country." -- Robert F. Kennedy

Daily Tech Digest - November 17, 2016

Learning To Trust Cloud Security

As you begin your journey, enlist the help of public cloud and software-as-a-service providers. Learn how they think and operate. Check the "us vs. them" attitude at the door and be realistic about your own capabilities. Their reputations rely on their ability to execute, and to do it securely. There's a reason the National Security Agency, for example, turned to Amazon Web Services to build the NSA cloud — instead of attempting it on its own. It's OK to learn as you go. Many organizations have approached the move to the cloud as they would any major IT transition. They analyzed it and tried to glean as much as they could about the cloud and how it's provisioned, managed, and secured. That's not all bad, but the traditional vetting and risk processes slowed them down.

Your future job (part 1) – Cloud Architect

So how do you become a cloud architect? Many of these roles are now filled by people who changed in line with technology and had a background in infrastructure architecture. Some come from a developer background and go involved as part of the delivery of automation services. A good place to start is an understanding of infrastructure design. It is also a core requirement to both know, and keep up with the relevant product portfolios. Along with technical prowess, there are a set of equally important soft skills. Being able to relate business objectives (application uptime and performance for example) with the underlying technology. Then being able to explain to non-technical colleagues or customers how the two interact. Being the bridge between management and developer, and being comfortable in both arenas is essential.

Tech skills earning the highest cash premiums -- no certification required

How do you know if your employer is a victim? Say, for instance, your company doesn’t normally have trouble retaining tech talent and suddenly the best people start walking out the door. Most likely your company wasn’t able to match competing salary offers. Then, to make matters worse, it's soon discovered that the competing offers were actually realistic average local market salaries for these positions -- your employer was actually underpaying people what they were worth from the start. It’s called "salary compression": when market driven pay for talent is growing at a faster rate than the annual salary increases employers are able to offer their workers. Compression is a widespread systemic reality that tends to be much worse in the tech workforce because of the rapid evolution of technology, skills, and jobs.

What the history of open source teaches us about strategic advantage

Collaboration with regards to fixing each other's software challenges had been taking place since the 1960s, but it wasn't until the 1990s before the open movement began benefitting a widespread number of organizations. What movements are slow-cooking within your own organization? If they are slow moving, don't give up on them; instead, remain patient. ... Open is a here-to-stay movement. But what will the next movement be? The most successful organizations will embrace the next movement by taking human nature into account: spending patterns, technology trends, and psychological dynamics. The winning strategy is to go with the flow, listen, be alert, and remain balanced. It's common sense to do so. It's practical.

Social Engineering

Smokers are one of my favorite targets while Social Engineering. Often these employees are frustrated and looking for a quick break from the stress of the day. Sometimes just having a lighter in your pocket or an extra cigarette is all you need to strike up a conversation. Other times it’s just relating to their frustration and using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to create a bond while having a smoke. By mirroring the target’s body language, breathing rate, voice and vocabulary, I can begin to build a connection on a subconscious level. This will often throw my target off and they will allow me to walk into the building behind them without a badge. There are ways to improve your protection from these attacks though.

Why Business Departments Choose Their Own Tech

CIOs should view this as a natural evolution of the ongoing digital transformation—one in which the lines between tech and business get increasingly blurry, and close collaboration proves critical. "As digital innovation accelerates, the winners will create new customer experiences, make faster and better decisions through smarter collaboration, and create new digital business models and revenue streams securely," said Mark Rogers, CEO at Logicalis. "CIOs and IT leaders can play a leading role in enabling that innovation, drawing on skills from insightful partners to help shape their businesses and lead their sectors through the application of digital technologies." The findings cover a broad range of other tech topics—such as the internet of things (IoT), app development, big data, the cloud and cyber-security—and we've included some of those here.

The Right Cyber Coverage Can Protect a Business from Financial Ruin

An essential point to remember when seeking to address cyber risk is to take a proactive stance regarding cyber security. This includes implementing training, education and regular testing for employees as well as developing a cyber risk strategy that includes an examination of IT infrastructure to identify potential exposures, key cyber stakeholders, types of data held and the value of that data. Tackling cyber risk is an ongoing process that requires engagement at all levels of an enterprise. A knowledgeable broker can use analytics and cyber exposure expertise to determine how much cyber coverage limit is needed, how that limit should be allocated based on the unique needs of the business and how to avoid off the shelf policies that typically are limited in scope and coverage.

Frankfurt’s fledgling fintechs show a city racing to catch up

German fintechs could benefit from more technology “sandboxes” for testing software in a safe environment with banking regulators’ cooperation, said Bussmann, who introduced Blockchain digital ledger software at UBS. He’s also credited with modernizing the bank’s information technology system before departing earlier this year. Europe’s biggest banks are increasingly tapping into startups to aid the development of digital services and products to retain clients and stave off competitors. Technology that’s changing how customers can get loans and pay bills is reducing the need for costly branches, adding to pressures on Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, which are grappling with the squeeze from record-low interest rates in the region’s most-competitive market.

Microsoft Doubles Down On Linux Love, Joins Foundation

"Microsoft is hitting all the right notes in terms of aligning its developer business with an ecosystem much broader than Windows," he said in an email. "Joining the Linux Foundation is a natural progression of this strategy and one that might still generate a double take if it wasn’t for all the actions the company has already taken in terms of supporting Linux in Azure and with SQL Server." With the release of the pubic beta for SQL Server on Linux, anyone will be able to take the relational database software for a spin on a Linux machine, though they shouldn't expect the full set of features available on Windows to make their way over to Linux just yet. Microsoft has planned to make SQL Server on Linux available in the middle of next year, and Wednesday's launch is an important step along that path.

Using vfsStream to Test File Uploads with Laravel

Testing of uploading files can be tricky, but with the right tools and the knowledge of a few tricks, the process can be more efficient and a lot less difficult. If you haven’t been exposed to vfsStream in the past, it allows interaction with a file that is stored in memory vs. one that is physically on the machine. This is nice since you don't have to delete files that are used for testing, which is more of a problem when a test fails and the teardown or other code doesn't run to remove the files used in testing. Additionally, it's faster since it is dealing with memory rather than the physical hard drive. Simply put, it's cleaner and faster. This post will go over creating an endpoint (route) to upload a CSV file of users and testing that users in the CSV are displayed in the JSON response, as well as adding validation to ensure CSV files are the types of files being dealt with.

Quote for the day:

"The smarter you get, the less you speak" -- Unknown

Daily Tech Digest - November 16, 2016

As Watson Matures, IBM Plans More AI Hardware & Software

IBM is also planning hardware and software for inferencing, which requires lighter processing on the edge or end device. The inferencing engine takes results from a trained model, adds additional data or input, and provides improvised results. Drones, robots, and autonomous cars use inferencing engines for navigation, image recognition, or data analysis. Inferencing chips are also used in data centers to boost deep learning models. Google has created its own chip called TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), and other companies like KnuEdge, Wave Computing, and GraphCore are creating inferencing chips. IBM is working on a different model for its inferencing hardware and software, Gupta said. He did not provide any further details.

How to Develop Business Acumen in the IT Workforce

“Developing strong business acumen in IT is a prerequisite to effectively shift IT focus from optimizing IT operational efficiency to driving business effectiveness, value creation and growth,” said Lily Mok, research vice president at Gartner. “At the heart of an effective IT communication strategy is the ability to clearly link the vision, strategy and action plans of IT to the business to drive desired behaviors in the workforce that contribute to improved IT performance and business outcomes.” In the digital business world, it is essential that CIOs and IT leaders be able to show the role of IT within the business strategy. Business acumen enables CIOs to combine technology know-how with a broad understanding of the market and industry, and design solutions that create new business value and growth.

Machine learning: The deplorable state of deployment

Modern production machine learning systems do often contain common inference and preprocessing techniques that PMML can represent, but they also contain data transformation and feature engineering steps that are particular to the problem at hand, and modeling approaches that have not yet been canonized in the PMML standard. Thus we commonly see PMML-based deployment strategies that are decorated with Python scripts or other kludges that cover those functional gaps but detract from the raison d’être of the intermediate representation: a single description of the computation that ops needs to manage in production. Because of its restriction to a canned set of functionality, PMML is a failed standard.

IT automation: Where it's working, where it's not

With the growth of mobile devices and the many applications that now support them, IT departments everywhere have witnessed an uptick in requests for new applications at a time when staffing has remained relatively flat. This has prompted the adoption of IT automation that can promote a more rapid development and deployment of new applications. It has also prompted leaders to take a look at other areas of IT that can benefit from automation. At the same time, moving to IT process automation can be difficult. It requires the rewriting of policies and procedures, vetting these rewrites for governance compliance, reworking workflows in the data center to accommodate the automation, and of course, retraining and/or redirecting IT personnel to work with the automation in their daily routines.

CIOs may finally get a seat at the grown-ups' table

“CIOs are tired of hearing about the cost of IT and how to shave it further. By being able to discuss value, they can get a strategic seat at the table,” says Apptio’s Gupta. “They can take it to the level of a services construct, with cost metrics behind that. Security is a great example: The board asks why are you spending so much on security. With TBM, you can have a model of cost and value of security. That means you can talk to business executives at a higher level. And the transparency of the standard TBM model builds a foundation of trust.” Thus, when a CIO comes to the board the discussion isn’t about “why are we spending so much on storage?” but “we can use these existing systems more effectively for these business needs if we invest more here and less there, or replace some with different technologies or cloud services.

Spire Technologies is reengineering HR with its robots

"It takes some time for the ecosystem to realise the importance of disruptive technology, but now the world is waking up to the reality of AI. AI will disrupt and change the way HR functions and all the current cutting-edge technology in prevalence is going to disappear. This technology is going to grow and since we are one of the few early entrants we will get our fair share of growth," says Sanan.

Growing at a fast clip, Spire is poised to take advantage of a world which is slowly, but steadily accepting the impact and understanding the efficiencies of an AI-based platform. While the US, being the frontrunner in the tech world, is the primary market for Spire, many businesses in India are also keen to take advantage of disruptive technologies like Spire TalentSHIP.

The Long Decline Of Online Freedom

“Freedom on the Net,” Freedom House’s annual study on internet freedom around the world, sheds light on the fact that in many parts of the world, access to the free and open internet is simply not a reality. While this is due to a number of factors, for many people government-mobilized access restrictions and shutdowns present a significant barrier to the tremendous benefits of the internet. The Internet Society is a proud sponsor of this year’s report. As an organization that supports the global development of an open internet free of undue regulation and censorship, it considers the findings of “Freedom on the Net” troubling. In particular, we believe the disruptions in internet access identified by Freedom House have harmful social, free speech, political and even economic consequences.

Microsoft partners with OpenAI to advance AI research with Azure

In addition to the partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft also announced the its Azure Bot Service preview that allows developers to build bots on the "Microsoft Bot Framework and easily deploy and manage them in a serverless environment on Azure." These bots run on Azure Functions—available now—to help them scale and more efficiently use resources. However, Microsoft hasn't always had the best luck with bots. Back in April, a chatbot from Microsoft called Tay was manipulated by users into spewing racist and sexist messages before being taken offline. While interesting, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI was preceded by the launch of the Partnership on AI in September, when Microsoft joined Facebook, IBM, Google, and Amazon to promote best practices in AI development.

Google adds new services to its cloud machine-learning products

Google fired its latest salvo on Tuesday, announcing a set of enhancements to its suite of cloud machine-learning capabilities. The first was a new Jobs API aimed at helping match job applicants with the right openings. In addition, the company is slashing the prices on its Cloud Vision API and launching an enhanced version of its translation API. On top of that, Google is offering GPUs in its cloud both through the company's managed services and its infrastructure-as-a-service product. Companies that want to roll out their own machine learning systems and algorithms can now take advantage of the new hardware. These moves are important steps for the company as it continues to compete with Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and other vendors.

Hindered by legacy IT systems, Texas CIO forges a way ahead

"What makes it legacy is when it can no longer perform its purpose and deliver value to the business at any cost. That's when it becomes a hindrance to move your business forward," said David Mayer, vice president of product management-software at Insight. He pointed to legacy-related issues with corporate networks as case in point. Many companies have networks initially built to handle data moving only through internal systems; now those companies expect their networks to handle significant amounts of data moving both internally and externally. "There are a lot of networks designed for 'Old World' interchanges and not for interchanges out in the cloud," Mayer said, adding that legacy networks create bottlenecks that slow down business.

Quote for the day:

"Success is what happens after you have survived all your mistakes." -- Anora Lee

Daily Tech Digest - November 15, 2016

Transparent machine learning: How to create 'clear-box' AI

OptimizingMind's brain-based algorithm is meant to let developers "peer inside of their networks, understand what they are doing, and easily edit them without retraining from the beginning," said Achler. It allows for "one-shot" learning, through which a neural network can be taught on the spot. For example: Siri could be told the definition for a word, which would then be stored. Today, neutral networks can't do that—they need to be trained to incorporate new things, learning using thousands of examples. So what does "clear-box" mean? According to Achler, it provides a way to view decision-making in real-time. "It can access weights, features and nodes, providing flexibility to read them as well as change them. Ultimately this enables understanding of how the neural network is arriving to a decision," he said.

DOS Technique Lets A Single Laptop Take Down An Enterprise Firewall

According to experts from the Security Operations Center of the Danish telecom operator TDC, it would take from 40,000 to 50,000 ICMP Type 3 Code 3 packets a second to overload a firewall. This is not a large number of packets and the bandwidth required to generate them is 15Mbps to 18Mbps, which means that BlackNurse attacks can be launched from a single laptop. "The impact we see on different firewalls is typically high CPU loads," the TDC Security Operations Center (SOC) said in a technical report. "When an attack is ongoing, users from the LAN side will no longer be able to send/receive traffic to/from the Internet. All firewalls we have seen recover when the attack stops."

Major Linux security hole gapes open

The root of this root problem is in the /scripts/local-top/cryptroot file. Once you've gone past the maximum number of trials for transient hardware faults, 30 on x86 architectures, you gain root-level access. This is an example of how open source fails. Just like the OpenSSL Heartbleed security hole, once you look at the code, the problem leaps out at you. But, if you don't look, it just hides there in plain sight. Open-source security only works if you actually read the code. What's even more annoying, this only works if you've encrypted your system partition. Yes, by doing the smart thing of using encryption, you've actually opened the door to this attack. Fun! You can't use this to break into users' encrypted partitions. Of course, you can still wreck them.

Google taps into your life to personalize its streaming music

"This is smart, using an established Google strength in machine learning to help buttress a potentially important product, Google Play Music," he said. "Actually, predicting what people will like is important and difficult. Everybody, from Amazon to Netflix to all the content-creators in the universe, works hard on this problem. I think Google's new machine learning approach will slightly improve their suggestions..." For Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, machine learning is going to be the "next big thing" because it enables service providers to be predictive. "I think [Google is] slightly ahead of the curve in that they're factoring in time of day, location, etc.," he said. "It would be interesting to see where they go next, like who is in the room with you. Will the music change depending on whether your kids are home?"

Should the Manager be in the Ideation Meeting?

Hand over the meeting to an external facilitator. It is hard for the manager to change from their normal management persona into a creative cheerleader. It is much easier for a facilitator to get people to think and act differently. Bring in someone from an entirely different function or business and tell them the outcomes you want e.g. we want to find three new ways to cut waiting times and improve customer service. Then let them run the meeting and you take a back seat. ... Leave the room. I facilitated a brainstorm meeting for a marine engineering company. We started by discussing some of the key challenges and the broad types of solution we needed. The Managing Director then left the room. He was a very intelligent, forceful and dynamic character.

Q&A with Jason Bock: Testing Tips, Advice and Insights

Finding a bug or a painful interaction with an API when you're running tests locally on a developer's machine takes less time to resolve than it would if it was discovered in production. That's even quicker than having the QA team finding these issues (assuming a project has QA involved). ... For teams that haven't written tests before, they sometimes don't treat test code like application code. Their tests end up being hundreds and hundreds of lines of code with no clear focus. As a result, those tests are hard to maintain, take a while to finish, and can be frustrating the developer team. They may even abandon their unit tests. Therefore, my advice for teams not familiar with writing unit tests is treat them with the same love and discipline they take with their application code.

Microsoft has found a way to bring human language intelligence to our dumb computers

The Microsoft Concept Graph is a massive graph of more than 5.4 million concepts derived from machine-learning algorithms and billions of web pages and anonymized search queries. The idea is a major component of ongoing efforts to computationally simulate human thinking. If a computer can understand the concept behind a word, it can then understand the context surrounding the use of the word. So a computer can stop taking everything we say literally and instead start understanding and anticipating what we actually mean. One of the practical concepts the researchers mentioned was keyword advertising. It would be helpful for all concerned if the keyword advertising you see when you are web browsing were more pertinent and a lot less ham-fisted.

C3 IoT: Is Tom Siebel's Startup An Emerging Powerhouse?

C3 came to the industrial internet by way of instrumenting and analyzing data from gas and electric utilities. Pacific Gas & Electric is one of its customers, along with the New Orleans giant Entergy. The young C3 Energy struck pay dirt in Europe, where it signed up Enel (National Entity for Electricity) in Rome, running utilities in Italy and Spain, as well as Engie in Courbevoie, France. With those two customers, it installed "the largest set of IoT production applications on earth," Siebel said. "More than 80% of European smart meters are under management by the C3 IoT platform," said market research firm Harbor Research, which issued a report on C3 and the IoT market in July.

Responding to a Data Breach Starts at the Top

The first thing every leader should remember is that a data breach can happen to anyone. As globalization continues, breaches are becoming an even greater problem. Target, LivingSocial, Facebook, and other prominent companies have been the victims of clever cybercrime. It’s easy to think that a data breach is the kind of thing that happens to other companies—until it happens to you. No security system is completely un-hackable, and every company needs to have a breach response plan in addition to solid cybersecurity. Members of the team should know how to spot signs of an attack—and take that information to leadership immediately. Good leadership during a crisis like a data breach is key to preserving morale and helping the company move past the incident.

Thousands of low-priced Android phones are reportedly sending user data to China

A newly-discovered piece of software running in an unknown number of Android phones is reportedly sending a variety of private user information directly to Chinese servers every 72 hours. The software, created by a Chinese firm named Shanghai Adups Technology Company, is said to be in hundreds of millions of devices - it's not clear how many of those devices are in the US, or how many users are affected. The news comes from a report Tuesday morning in the New York Times - a security firm named Kryptowire identified the malicious software, and said it does more than just archive/collect your text messages (though it also does that). Apparently the software collects "the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information and other data," and then sends that data to a Chinese server.

Quote for the day:

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" -- Abraham Lincoln

Daily Tech Digest - November 14, 2016

Machine Intelligence in Ad Tech

Advertising is a field that is ripe with unstructured and high-dimensional data. Advertising edicts, bylines, articles, reports, jingles, ad copy, ad creatives, social sentiments, user generated data, brand guidelines, audio and video content are all forms of unstructured data. From a dimensionality perspective, the number of products and categories in the advertising space and feature of each product and the utility it provides contributes to dimensionality explosion. Added to this, the demographic, behavior, geography, consumption habits, social bias, cultural make and content consumption channels of an individual consumer explodes the dimension of data beyond comprehension.

Work With Parallel Database Streams Using Custom Thread Pools

By default, parallel streams are executed on the common ForkJoinPool where they potentially might compete with other tasks. In this post we will learn how we can execute parallell database streams on our own custom ForkJoinPool, allowing a much better control of our execution environment. Speedment is an open-source Stream ORM Java Toolkit and Runtime Java tool that wraps an existing database and its tables into Java 8 streams. We can use an existing database and run the Speedment tool and it will generate POJO classes that correspond to the tables we have selected using the tool. One distinct feature with Speedment is that it supports parallel database streams and that it can use different parallel strategies to further optimize performance.

How to avoid becoming a part of a DDoS attack?

The scale of this attack, and the fact that it used devices we’re normally not taking care of, makes it a real wake-up call for IT administrators, but also for various IoT device users in general. Think not only about the flaws in your patch management strategy at work, but more about the complete lack of patch management strategies that exist at the homes of most, if not all your coworkers, friends, and family. Do they run vulnerability scans regularly? Manage and deploy patches to all nodes under their control? ... While defending against a DDoS may be beyond the capabilities and capacities of many of us, we can at least ensure that we are not contributing to the problem, so here’s a list of things all of us can do to help.

What Trump’s Win Means for Cybersecurity

Security and foreign policy analysts warned that it would only embolden the Russian hackers who injected chaos into the presidential campaign and the Democratic party. Election day itself got a taste of alt-right hacking, as an anonymous poster on 4Chan appeared to target a Clinton get-out-the-vote phone bank—but inadvertently hamstrung both Democrat and Republican calling efforts. Edward Snowden and other privacy activists warned that the surveillance powers expanded under Obama could be abused by Trump and called for Americans to use encryption tools to protect themselves. And WIRED offered a primer on how Trump will reshape national security policy, including his likely support for the Syrian regime of dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

Clearing the fog: a vision of security for hybrid clouds

Perhaps the biggest issue that IT teams face is that using hybrid clouds can put data and business applications beyond their traditional IT security controls, which don’t typically touch the cloud – especially public cloud environments. At the same time, the number of cyber threats and breaches are increasing. Once an environment is breached, attacks are able to spread laterally within the cloud infrastructure and even extend externally outwards from the cloud to on-premise networks. ... It all adds up to an enlarged, complex and blurred attack surface for organizations, so they need a comprehensive solution to bridge security gaps and extend protections, visibility and control from data centers to the cloud in a way that works with the cloud’s elasticity and automation.

What E-Commerce Business Owners Need to Know About Artificial Intelligence

"Companies integrating deep learning into their eCommerce site will drastically improve user's search capabilities," says the AI expert Akash Bhatia, cofounder and CEO of Infinite Analytics. "For example, a woman could take a picture of a dress that she likes, upload the photo into the search bar of an eCommerce site and, using AI, the site would immediately analyze the image, understand the patterns, fit, style, color, brand, and other attributes to identify the dress. Voila! That consumer is able to convert right away." Other experts agree with Bhatia. Ryan BeMiller, inbound marketing expert focused on the ecommerce sector, writes, "Photos alone cannot be expected to provide a full understanding of the product. The array of products on display should have distinct and clear product descriptions.

The Current State of Machine Intelligence 3.0

The danger here, unlike the mobile app explosion (where we lacked expectations for what these widgets could actually do), is that we assume anything with a conversation interface will converse with us at near-human level. Most do not. This is going to lead to disillusionment over the course of the next year but it will clean itself up fairly quickly thereafter. When our fund looks at this emerging field, we divide each technology into two components: the conversational interface itself and the “agent” behind the scenes that’s learning from data and transacting on a user’s behalf. While you certainly can’t drop the ball on the interface, we spend almost all our time thinking about that behind-the-scenes agent and whether it is actually solving a meaningful problem.

What Is the Future of Data Warehousing?

While the concept of BI is not necessarily new, traditional BI tactics are no longer enough to keep up and ensure success in the future. Today, traditional BI must be combined with agile BI (the use of agile software development to accelerate traditional BI for faster results and more adaptability) and big data to deliver the fastest and most useful insights so that businesses may convert, serve, and retain more customers. Essentially, for a business to survive, BI must continuously evolve and adapt to improve agility and keep up with data trends in this new customer-driven age of enterprise. This new model for BI is also driving the future of data warehousing, as we will see moving forward.

An Artificial Intelligence Definition for Beginners

“Artificial intelligence is a computerized system that exhibits behavior that is commonly thought of as requiring intelligence.” Or more technically speaking, AI is a “system capable of rationally solving complex problems or taking appropriate actions to achieve its goals in whatever real world circumstances it encounters.” In a way, artificial intelligence is about understanding – then recreating – the human mind. And AI is not just about designing computers that mimic how we think, learn and process information, but also how we perceive and feel about the world around us. Understanding the world of AI only begins with a simple artificial intelligence definition. There’s a whole universe of terminology we need to explore in order to understand the domain before we can invest in it.

Key KPIs Across Agile Methodologies

The accelerated timeframes of Agile sprints dictate that KPIs guide processes towards remaining on course with project goals and objectives. KPIs guide Agile teams in essential software features and primary functionalities. Sprint planning meetings must include key indicators of performance goals and achievements which tie into business needs. KPIs standardize code development and simultaneous automated testing to ensure that shippable releases remain in compliance with planned objectives. To better adhere to KPIs, cross-functional Agile teams, in which developers, QA, and IT contribute to all three disciplines, provide expertise that best ensures quality functionality from each perspective.

Quote for the day:

"Your mind is your prison when you focus on your fear." -- Tim Fargo