Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - December 21, 2016

Why every CIO needs to be a hands-on leader to succeed

If you looked at the job descriptions and expectations for CIOs of the past, almost all of them required the incumbent to be a master builder. A person had to know how build and manage data centers, buy hardware – large and small, and be a virtuoso of disaster and business continuity plans. Today, the cost savings, let alone the flexibility, of utilizing cloud resources for almost everything is just too hard to ignore. While vexing to consider for veteran CIOs, the epic of building physical empires within IT has passed. But this change represents a tremendous opportunity for even the most strategic IT leader to get into the trenches in a meaningful way. By going through data centers, CIOs can be on the frontlines of shutting them down.

10 Cybersecurity challenges from IoT, DDoS, autos and more

We recently saw some of the largest DDoS attacks on record, in some instances topping 1 terabit per second. That’s absolutely massive and it shows no sign of slowing. Through 2015, the largest attacks on record were in the 65 gigabit per second range. Going into 2017, we can expect to see DDoS attacks grow in size, further fueling the need for solutions tailored to protect against and mitigate these colossal attacks. Math, machine learning and artificial intelligence will be baked more into security solutions. Security solutions will learn from the past, and essentially predict attack vectors and behavior based on that historical data. This means security solutions will be able to more accurately and intelligently identify and predict attacks by using event data and marrying it to real-world attacks.

NICE Robotic Automation Improves Interaction Experience

NICE, a longtime contact center systems vendor, has offered real-time process automation since 2001, and it recently launched a new product in this market. It now has three products in this space – desktop analytics, desktop automation and its latest, robotic process automation. NICE Desktop Analytics captures information about what agents, or other designated users, do on their desktop, including systems they access, information they look up, data they enter, information they give callers, and systems they update after finishing calls. The analytics enables organizations to track the four basic components of a call – identifying the caller, identifying the caller’s issue, providing a response and completing any required after call work. The analytics component thus can identify best practices for interaction handling and agent performance, and recommend changes to processes or coaching and training.

Tech companies like Privacy Shield but worry about legal challenges

While U.S. companies are embracing Privacy Shield, many European businesses are "still concerned that Privacy Shield will not hold up under court scrutiny, and they will find themselves in the same scenario as they were in October 2015, when the Safe Harbor agreement was struck down," said Deema Frei, ... Some European companies see Privacy Shield certification as a "tick box" compliance exercise, she added. With some doubts about its long-term viability, companies should also consider other data transfer agreements, such as EU model clauses or binding corporate rules, she recommended. However, if companies can get certainty about Privacy Shield's future, and if it won't be "attacked in the long term by data privacy activists trying to discredit it and challenge its validity, I believe it will work in the long run," Frei added.

Never Fear, Vulnerability Disclosure is Here

There is no excuse for organizations letting fear of working with hackers prevent them from doing so for defense. There is no excuse for lacking a vulnerability disclosure policy, in any organization, private or public sector. The only barrier is building capabilities to handle what can be daunting in terms of facing the world of hackers. Big companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have had to deal with this issue for a very long time, and have worked out systems that work for them. But what about smaller organizations? What about other industries outside of the tech sector? What about IoT? And what about governments, who must walk the line between getting the help they need from the hacker community without accidentally giving free license to nation-states to hack them with an overly permissive policy?

Contactless Payments: Addressing the Security Issues

In a contactless environment, on mobile devices in particular, biometrics authentication can replace the need to use PIN entry as an additional authentication layer, King says in this interview conducted at Information Security Media Group's recent Fraud & Breach Prevention Summit in London. "The challenge there is, 'How do you ensure the security and the authenticity of the biometrics?'" he says. "Biometrics have been around for a while, in terms of authentication. ... They are static information. My fingerprints don't change. Now, if I lose my PIN, I can go into the bank and say, 'Can I have a new PIN?' If I lose my fingerprint, if that is compromised, then there's not much I can do." As contactless mobile payments become more commonplace in Europe and elsewhere, card networks and issuers are rethinking how they secure payments, turning to biometrics and, in some cases, transaction and behavioral analytics, he adds.

Google releases Project Wycheproof: Security tests to check cryptographic libraries for known attacks

Project Wycheproof includes over 80 test cases, and Google says they have already uncovered more than 40 security bugs. The list of bugs is available here, though Google notes not all are currently listed as some are still being fixed by vendors. The same goes for some of the tests — they will be released once the affected cryptographic libraries have been patched. The tests encompass the most popular crypto algorithms, including AES-EAX, AES-GCM, DH DHIES, DSA, ECDH, ECDSA, ECIES, and RSA. The tests detect whether a library is vulnerable to many attacks, including invalid curve attacks, biased nonces in digital signature schemes, and all of Bleichenbacher’s attacks. In short, Project Wycheproof allows developers and users to check libraries against a large number of known attacks without having to “sift through hundreds of academic papers or become cryptographers themselves.”

Mobile banking trojans adopt ransomware features

Cybercriminals are adding file-encrypting features to traditional mobile banking trojans, creating hybrid threats that can steal sensitive information and lock user files at the same time. One such trojan is called Faketoken and its primary functionality is to generate fake login screens for more than 2,000 financial applications in order to steal login credentials. The malicious app also displays phishing pages to steal credit card information, and it can read and send text messages. ... File encryption is not as popular as screen blocking techniques in mobile ransomware because many of the files stored on mobile devices are backed up to cloud services and can be easily restored, according to Unuchek. That doesn't seem to stop developers from experimenting with such techniques, though. Researchers from security company Comodo have recently analyzed another mobile banking trojan called Tordow 2.0 that has the ability to encrypt files.

Raspberry Pi in 2017: New boards, new OSes and more

Expect to see the Raspberry Pi powering far more appliances in 2017, following the release of the Compute Module 3 (CM3). Due to be launched "very early next year", the CM3 will pack the same quad-core Broadcom BCM2837 processor and 1GB memory used on the Pi 3 onto a slimmer and smaller board. The compact design of the Compute Module, which comes with 4GB eMMC Flash storage, makes it better suited to being built into electronic products. The CM3 marks a significant leap forward in processing power, since the previous Compute Module was based on the first-generation, single-core Raspberry Pi, which is up to ten times slower than the third-generation board. When released, it will also be the first Compute Module to run Windows 10 IoT Core, a cut-down version of Windows 10 designed to support Internet of Things appliances.

Automating the Database: A Win-Win for DBAs and DevOps

In most cases, the DBA invests a lot of time and effort in manually reviewing code from the developers and preparing the deployment script. At times, this goes beyond fine-tuning and actually involves rewriting entire code segments, simply because the DBA has a better understanding and overview of the database. Similarly, when database problems arise during deployment or production, DBAs may be called upon to resolve them by fixing unfamiliar code without access to the original developers. No matter the number of development teams and their potentially overlapping needs, the DBA is tasked with protecting the integrity of the data and ensuring availability. In order to perform this behind-the-scenes “traffic duty”, the DBA must balance the requirements of the various development teams with daily database maintenance routines and administrative responsibilities.

Quote for the day:

"Don't judge me by my past. I don't live there anymore." -- Petteri Tarkkonen

Daily Tech Digest - December 20, 2016

Privacy groups complain to FTC over Google’s 'deceptive' policy change

“Google is a serial offender, and the action that the FTC has taken to date has done nothing to slow Google’s intrusive violations of its users’ privacy,” according to the groups. Google could not be immediately reached for comment. Describing the June move as highly deceptive, the groups said the announcement “intentionally misled users,” who had no way to figure from the wording that Google was in fact asking users for permission to link their personal information to data reflecting their behavior on as many as 80 percent of the Internet’s leading websites. The groups have asked the FTC to investigate the changes to Google’s data collection policies as a result of the June policy shift, stop the combination of data from DoubleClick without proper user consent

IP Reputation and Mitigation API

Knowing that your network is under attack or may come under attack by certain hosts doesn’t do a lot of good if your network can’t use that information. When a host or connection is known to be a bad actor, your network must mitigate the situation. This is where Mitigation Cybersecurity comes into play. The basic concept is that there is some intelligence gathering application or service (either internal or external) is providing information about current threats. Cybersecurity intelligence can then be used in a variety of places to help protect your hosts. This information should be used wherever it can to protect your network. Ideally, the mitigation of attacks and threats should be layered from your Internet routers and firewalls right down to the hosts with each providing protection using their greatest strengths.

Privacy in the digital age: honouring the customer

Using customer data in the right way but also to the benefit of the organisation is achievable. Personalising offers or customising promotions is not an abuse if a company is transparent about how it will use a person’s data. It shouldn’t be moving in the shadows. The ICO highlights the necessity of transparency in complying with both the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and, even more so, the impending GDPR. The most common way to provide this information to a customer is via a privacy notice. Under the current law of the DPA, an organisation must detail who they are, what they are going to do with a person’s information and who the information will be shared with. These are the basic foundations on which all privacy notices should be built. Post-GDPR, however, these basic moral principles, like the more stringent financial consequences, will be expanded and enhanced.

Digital marketing's biggest wins and losses in 2016

“The biggest advancement [in digital marketing is] the shift to and adoption of video and particularly live streaming,” Jake Schneider , Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation at The Marketing Arm told Marketing Dive. “Brands and marketers can no longer rely on static content to make an impact with audiences,” he said. “Live streaming provides an authentic and immersive experience that resonates with audiences, giving brands an opportunity to connect in a more intimate way.” ... “[The biggest surprise was] the perfect storm — i.e. the summer season, the power of brand nostalgia, etc. — that helped propel Pokémon Go to the top of mind and home screen of consumers and brands,” said Fishman Zember. “...it was a powerful moment for augmented reality and a chance for consumers to engage with technology, even if they didn't know they were, that has incredible potential to add new layers, dimensions to their everyday realities and very real world.”

Shedding Light on Dark Data: How to Get Started

We have at our disposal all manner of unstructured data for which text analytics are uniquely suited to organize and understand, including images and video—without any enrichment or visual content analysis. ... Dark data can be Big Data. And very Big Dark Data can prove daunting (that’s partly why it stays dark in the first place). But dark data can also be quite small we’ve found. And just as Big Data isn’t necessarily valuable just because it’s big, dark data certainly isn’t valuable just because it’s dark. Lastly, technology can’t make garbage data valuable and the complexities involved in analyzing some forms of dark data often require taking a sample or deciding exactly which parts of the data might prove most interesting to analyze. There are tons of ways to start putting dark data to work for your organization. Here are recent examples of how clients are using OdinText currently to shed light on their dark data.

A DevOps Approach To Digital Transformation Success

In this digital age, it has been estimated that 6 of the top 20 companies in every industry will face serious disruption. Now more than ever, organisations are measured by the speed at which they deliver new products and services. A failure to digitally transform the enterprise could be catastrophic. ... DevOps addresses the missing element that many Agile projects suffer at the execution stage, (when code is released into production) - by including operational teams early enough in the development cycle - thereby avoiding deployment bottlenecks. • Digital Transformation needs to be underpinned by a solid platform to deliver and support new applications, services and technologies. DevOps provides this, allowing organisations to release updates frequently, glean customer feedback, improve and iterate.

Why Technology Won't Displace Human Artists

It's possible to teach a machine Van Gogh's painting technique, but only if it already exists. An algorithm can write chorales like Bach because it can "study" Bach. Even when the work produced by AI is less specifically derivative than it is today -- say, when the algorithms learn to combine various techniques they learn in an intelligent manner -- they will never rise above previous work because the way they work is based on experience. They are constrained by Hume's piece of wisdom. The one way in which we're radically different from machines is in our ability to step into the unknown, to do things that have never been done before with paint, form, sound and the written word. Most of the rewards to creative professionals today accrue to that ability, not to skill or the extensive knowledge of predecessors' work.

Virtual reality is actually here

Virtual reality is an excellent tool when the task is dangerous or the equipment involved is expensive. The U.S. Army is piloting a fully immersive VR system to augment soldier training. The Army asserts that VR makes training more efficient and effective; the military scenario can be changed dynamically to provide different challenges. The actions of each participant can be tracked for later analysis. Moreover, after the initial scenario is developed, the system requires very little time to restart. Practicing the demolition of a building, for example, used to require days to rebuild the target structure before the next training exercise could occur. With VR, the scenario is just restarted, saving time and money and reinforcing trainees’ performance as they repeat the exercise.

Cyber Insurance Now Critical as Data Breaches Wreak Havoc

Nonetheless, insuring against data breaches and other attacks presents its own set of challenges and complications. In particular, the constantly changing range of perpetrators, targets and exposure values, a lack of historical actuarial data and the interconnected nature of cyberspace, combine to make it difficult for insurers to assess the likely severity of future cyberattacks. While most traditional commercial general liability policies do not cover cyber risks, standalone cyber insurance policies typically address a number of risks associated with data breaches or attacks. Chief among these is liability insurance to help companies cover costs, such as legal fees and court judgments, that may be incurred following the theft of enterprises data and the unintentional transmission of a computer virus that causes financial harm to a third party.

5 Data Governance Pitfalls to Avoid

Data Governance can be looked upon as building standard practices, processes and frameworks to facilitate the collection, identification, storage and usage of business information that an organization holds. The concept revolves around a simple objective – to make the right data available at the right time, to the right people, and in the right format. Data governance program is an important step to establish control over information flow by putting up rules, policies, and procedures to safeguard the access and usage of data. Lots of organizations have tried to implement enterprise data governance practices, but only a handful have succeeded in reaping the rewards. What’s the reason behind all these failures? In this article, we will take a look at the crucial mistakes that you must stay away from while implementing a data governance program for your organization.

Quote for the day:

"The hard part isn't making the decision. It's living with it." -- Jonas Cantrell

Daily Tech Digest - December 19, 2016

Aiming for resilience

For years we've been aiming at making our data centers more secure and rugged -- striving for high availability, reliability, and redundancy. Resiliency moves the goal of the truly secure data center one step further. Resilience -- the ability of a substance or system to spring back into shape -- is a measure of our ability to survive a serious threat and, in the case of EMP, to continue functioning in the face of a severe threat to just about every piece of equipment that we use. Setting up a data center to survive an EMP attack is not a simple thing, but some companies (e.g., see reference to Iron Mountian below) have done it. Pushing for needed upgrades to the grid is another matter. Making some assessment of your vulnerability -- business and personal -- is nearly unavoidable.

5 enterprise technologies that will shake things up in 2017

Prepare for the same thing to happen with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)—with tablets and smartphones as the vehicle. According to IDC, 25% of enterprise IT organizations will be testing augmented reality business applications for use on smartphones by the end of 2017. “This may sound relatively aggressive, but the conversations I’m having with the industry and some surveys that we’ve run talking to IT decision makers show that there’s a really strong interest around augmented reality,” said Tom Mainelli, program vice president of the devices & AR/VR group at IDC, during a recent webinar, IDC Futurescape: Worldwide Wearables and AR/VR 2017 Predictions. The end game is head-worn AR hardware, such as the Microsoft HoloLens, he said.

Facial recognition to kick in for 2017

Facial and eye tracking will be used to augment childrens’ school tests, says Hong Kong-based F.S. Artificial Intelligence Ltd., an organization I met with at a TechCrunch Disrupt startup fair earlier this month. The organization has developed a way to use an off-the-shelf tablet device with a standard camera to capture feelings expressed by the kids as they answer questions. Gaze tracking evaluates the emotion of the individual while capturing the test responses and lets teachers analyze how receptive the kids are to the questionnaire. The company says it helps with mental health alerts and the effectiveness of the test design. For example, it can see if the kids get distracted because the questions are too easy. I had a chance to try the technology at the show. They used arithmetic on me, and I reckon the results pretty accurately reflected how I felt: I registered surprise when I saw the first (slightly difficult) question and happiness when I got the second (easy) question correct.

World will need to secure 111 billion lines of new software code in 2017

When an app has been fully coded, there's a rush to get it out the door. That's hardly the best time to start thinking about security. At that point, it may be too late. "The best thing (for software developers) to do is accept that security is just as critical to building software as safety is to building airplanes, and make a conscious decision to build security into your software development process" stated Frank Zinghini, founder and CEO at Applied Visions, Inc. (AVI), a software development company focused on cyber security, business applications, and command and control systems to government and commercial customers worldwide. "Worry about software security before you even start writing code, incorporate vulnerability scanning tools into your continuous integration system, and integrate security testing with your quality assurance process" added Zinghini.

This Free New Software Protects Your PC Against Ransomware

By default, the program suspends any activity it deems suspicious—even if it’s a legitimate encryption program that has some behavior in common with ransomware. It’s then up to the user to either enable the program, or allow RansomwareFree to permanently quarantine the malware. Using this approach, Eilat says that with RansomwareFree enabled about four files can end up encrypted before the security program detects the problem and stops it; however, he says, for most ransomware strains “RansomFree manages to stop the ransomware even before any file is encrypted.” ... It alerts you that the program placed some specially constructed files on your system that help RansomwareFree do its job. Eilat wouldn’t go into too much detail about what these files do. He would say they were there to be the “victims” of potential ransomware infections and to slow the malware down.

Human-less stores are now possible — and it might be the end of retail

The first, from Amazon, was a fully self-checkout store, where items are logged as they are placed into a cart. It uses a network of cameras and motion sensors to guess when something is purchased. The flaw? There are no people to clean up the mess when the software guesses wrong. It's like the world's largest vending machine. The second move was revealed a few days ago in Osaka, Japan, courtesy of Panasonic and the Lawson convenience chain. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, which attended the Osaka unveiling, the reduced-associate stores are powered by an unspecified kind of electronic tag. The article didn't say whether they were RFID tags or not, but that is a likely candidate. It's item-level tagging, which is more accurate — and more expensive — than Amazon's camera approach.

Microsoft opens dataset for teaching computers to talk

Right now, the dataset is free to download for people who plan to use it in a non-commercial manner. Microsoft is sharing it in the same way it shares other open data sets that are used for training artificial intelligence programs. One of those is ImageNet, a database of tagged pictures that’s used for training image recognition algorithms. Microsoft used that database in developing the image recognition technology that now underpins products like Microsoft's Computer Vision API. People who want to read more about MS MARCO can download a research paper written by the team at Microsoft that built it. The team is also putting together a challenge that will evaluate models trained using the MS MARCO data. Evaluation scripts for that challenge are still under development.

It’s Time For Organizations To Automate Security

Security automation makes more efficient use of scarce resources, freeing them up for more proactive tasks. Existing threat defenses are already doing this, automatically and continuously watching for known attacks and blocking them before they get inside. Building on this, advanced threat defenses dynamically watch for anomalous behavior and act quickly to contain unknown threats from inflicting serious harm. Security information and event management (SIEM) software takes this a step further, applying new threat intelligence to historical events to see if any systems were previously affected, and applying appropriate countermeasures. The scale of these actions is beyond the capacity of even the largest, most experienced security team to complete manually in a reasonable timeframe.

Banks Turn to Mind Reading to Source Top Tech Graduates

“There’s definitely a challenge in the sector that’s born out of historical reputation and some of the legacy impact from the global financial crisis,” said Paul Aldrich, head of financial services technology at search firm Odgers Berndtson. It’s not just new tech firms that are looking to poach talent. New banking startups are also competing for young programmers. “We tend to find it easier to attract and retain people than the bigger banks,” said Tom Blomfield, a 31-year technologist who secured a license from the Bank of England for Monzo Bank Ltd. earlier this year. “People want to work on really hard problems from scratch with other talented people, rather than be small fish in a big pond, maintaining software that’s been there for 30 years.” Monzo also publishes its technical plans on the internet, which leads to developers seeking to join the firm, according to Blomfield.

MPLS routing undergoes change, as SD-WAN gains traction

The advent of SD-WAN means a recalibration of how enterprises deploy MPLS routing, which has been the most widely used WAN technology. It provides reliable performance, with QoS guarantees specifying throughput, delay and jitter. ... Internet access is much less expensive and can be put in place more quickly. Price per megabit can range between one-tenth to one-hundredth the cost of MPLS routing, but internet links do not offer throughput and QoS guarantees. To that end, enterprise traffic moving across the internet shares the same links as movie downloads, streaming video and vacation-picture uploads. Despite the lack of guarantees, SD-WAN customers have found that combining multiple internet or LTE connections alongside an MPLS link can achieve higher throughput and yield adequate QoS at a much lower cost than simply increasing MPLS capacity.

Quote for the day:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to us as it is: Infinite." -- William Blake

Daily Tech Digest - December 18, 2016

Information Is Now The Core Of Your Business

In many industries, the information collected by business is now more valuable than the products being sold – indeed, it’s the foundation for most of the free consumer internet. Traditional industries are now realizing that the data stored in their systems, once suitably augmented or anonymized, can be sold directly. See this article on the Digitalist magazine, The Hidden Treasure Inside Your Business, for more information about the four main information business models. Traditional IT systems were about efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity. These new context-based experiences and more sophisticated products use information to generate growth, innovation, and market differentiation. But these changes lead to a difficult cultural challenge inside the organization.

Swift and Objective-C Runtime Programming

In a highly dynamic language like Objective-C, the programmer has incredible power. You can open up core system libraries and place your own code inside of them. You can hook into the very fabric of method invocation itself, creating objects with an infinite number of methods, or create methods that wink in and out of existence over the lifecycle of an object. It is a staggering, dizzying level of power. But with great power comes great responsibility. The more power you have, the less power is left for the compiler. And so the Objective-C compiler has blinders on. Your code *looks* like a simple for-loop through an array. But how do we know you have not replaced NSArray with some object that has an infinite number of methods? How do we know the array is not procedurally generated and has an infinite number of elements?

Bangladesh Bank Heist Probe Finds 'Negligent' Insiders

Former Bangladesh central bank governor Mohammed Farashuddin told Reuters that the government-appointed panel investigating the heist blamed, in part, the five low-level and mid-level officials. "They were negligent, careless and indirect accomplices," he told Reuters, adding that attackers had exploited vulnerabilities in the bank's information security defenses. "The committee came to the conclusion that the heist was essentially committed by external elements." A Bangladesh Bank spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the commission's findings or with whom they've been shared. In the February heist, hackers attempted to steal $951 million from Bangladesh Bank's Federal Reserve Bank of New York account and move it into five accounts held at Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation in the Philippines via the SWIFT interbank messaging network.

60 Keyboard Shortcuts That Will Make You More Productive

Every day your work probably requires you to navigate lots of different operating systems, browsers, and software. That's why I've previously shared some brilliant hacks to make your life simpler--especially if you use Gmail, Excel, Word, Twitter, and Google search. Think about it. All that time you take hunting around through pulldown menus with your mouse adds up. Where the heck is that thing you're always looking for? Is under File, Edit, View, or somewhere else? This way of doing things is for the donkeys. Don't be a donkey! Wouldn't it be great if there were a "cheat sheet" that compiled the most essential keyboard shortcuts? Lucky for you, someone has done just that. Essay Writing Service Pro has created an infographic that compiles 60 essential keyboard shortcuts every office worker needs to know.

Predictive Marketing: The Next Must-Have Technology for CMOs

The real value lies in finding a predictive platform with open architecture — one that integrates with your applications for things like CRM, marketing automation, or business intelligence (BI) and uses them to make accurate and actionable predictions. Reliable first-party data on wins and losses is especially important for the success of predictive models. To understand which leads will convert to customers in the future, predictive tools have to pull data from a system of record like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Insightly, Marketo or HubSpot and identify the characteristics and behavior of prospects that closed. An open architecture also means you don’t have to disrupt current workflows adding more complexity to daily activity. Your marketing team can see predictive insights like lead or account scores and compare them to campaign conversions, right in the tools they are accustomed to using.

Three Ways To Ensure Your Data Tells The Right Story

Good visualization tools can help you create and choose graphs and images that will help clarify the data rather than confuse it. But, as I said above, be careful not to equate more visualizations with better storytelling. Too many companies give their audience the data all wrapped up in beautiful graphs — without any context. The goal of visualizations should always be to provide context and clarity to the story being told. Companies are moving fast to fill the knowledge and skills gap left by the lack of qualified data scientists by creating DIY data reporting and visualization tools. These tools are important and help everyone within a team be able to access their data and probe it for associations and insights. But the downside of these tools is that companies see them as a replacement for the data scientist, who is in actuality the data storyteller.

Time for change

In progressive organisations, Lötter states, more visionary CIOs have embraced a cloud strategy to maximise the value for their organisations. "In these organisations, we've seen enterprise architects educated on cloud, delivery options, integration and security. They work with business to understand requirements and help introduce cloud in a structured manner. Maturity levels of enterprise architectures vary significantly across South African business, and we believe when applying enterprise architecture in the full sense, it means translating business strategy into an operating model supported by process, people and technology architectures. When enterprise architecture is applied in this way, cloud is seen as an enabler and not penalised by a narrow IT-focused enterprise architecture to gain control over the IT landscape and budget."

Artificial intelligence finds its way into business through sales

“With AI, customer interactions become fine-tuned and ultimately smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data,” she said. It’s about using the power of that platform to be a better salesperson, and giving them more time to spend working with customers and closing sales. “For a salesperson to predict where to spend their time or take next best action — they need the right data at the right time. They have to take data from every data source and they have to have a cognitive platform in place to evaluate that data to make decisions,” she explained. We are also seeing intelligence being applied to customer service with the increasing use of bots to handle initial contact with customers. The idea is to have the bot deal with simple tasks, handing off more complex interactions and requests to human operators to handle.

Buyers Beware: Data Visualization is Not Data Analytics

For an analysis tool to be truly useful to an organization it must be updated constantly to account for changes. But this can easily lead to bottlenecks forming in businesses when updates are left to be done by a single factor or department such as IT. Visualization tools that don’t have preparation capabilities will pull their data from decentralized sources that can easily fall out of sync with a number of collaborators accessing them. Then you get a big mess of different data with unreliable dashboards and reports because it becomes extremely hard to keep on top of who has the latest numbers. The more users you have accessing the data sources and changing or updating it, the more errors you get, and the harder it becomes to use the system.

Polymorphism of MVC-esque Web Architecture: Real Time Reactive Fulfillment

At the heart of MVC architectural approach is observable event-driven fulfilments of synchronization between the user’s views and their related real or virtual world that the views reflect upon. The views are expected to, with or without additional commands from the user, react to the changing world. This ideal has been reflected in many MVC realizations from the original desktop GUI to modern augmented and virtual reality. As discussed in the WMVC classification article, this fundamental idea had been largely absent in web applications over the first two decades of the web age. During this time, web applications are dominated by sWMVC-based approach. It has been somewhat revitalized in WUI application development community in recent years. This new movement has been driven by a number of recent technological offerings and standardized protocols.

Quote for the day:

"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought." -- Henri-Louis Bergson

Daily Tech Digest - December 17, 2016

Bitcoin Is Being Monitored by An Increasingly Wary US Government

This ability to financially disrupt, disable and dismantle nefarious networks, is crucial to U.S. national security, Treasury officials say. It has proven effective for more than a decade and is often strongly preferable to deploying troops. “We have made it very difficult for members of the Islamic State to raise or move money around the world these days,” Zarate says. “Even Iran had a hard time finding safe havens.” In fact, years of financial pressure from the U.S. and its allies helped force Iran to negotiate with the White House and sign a landmark nuclear deal last year. The biggest concern the U.S. has about virtual currencies, Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they’ll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them.

10 Steps to Train a Chatbot and its Machine Learning Models to Maximize Performance

The Watson services rely on a variety of machine learning algorithms, most of which fall in the supervised machine learning category, which learn the specifics of the problem from sample labeled data and help make predictions on unlabeled data. Training a supervised machine learning system involves providing it with representative inputs and corresponding outputs and the system will learn by example. These pairs of representative inputs/outputs constitute the “groundtruth” from which the system learns. ... Training NLC would require providing a groundtruth which includes representative utterances (input) and the corresponding intents (output). NLC would then learn which utterances map to which intents. Note that it not only will be able to extract intent from utterances it has seen but it can also extract intent from any utterance based on similarity of such an utterance to what is available in the training data.

Talent Development for the Digital World

From a skills perspective, innovation and learning ability are becoming key requirements. Innovation is not limited to products anymore: It cuts across processes, organization design, reviews, performance management, and rewards. Hence this has become a requirement across all functions within the organization. While the debate on whether innovation is a trait or a skill that can be developed is still raging, the need for it is only burgeoning. In a tongue-in-cheek manner, we can certainly say that learning new skills is necessary to a company’s success. How organizations can create a platform that propels employees to learn and adapt is becoming a key success factor in reskilling the existing workforce and preparing them for the digital future.

How to Use Thought Experiments to De-Risk Your Startup

Sometimes you miss signs that things aren't working. Maybe engineers keep going to Google or Twitter instead of accepting your job offers, or maybe very few customers agree to see your demo after an initial discovery call. When you're scrambling day-to-day, you might think, "if 5% of people want to see a demo, then I should call at least 40 people daily." Months later, you realize that the low demo rate was a sign that your product didn't fit the market's needs. It's helpful to step back and ask yourself if the things that you're struggling with today are a sign that you need to optimize or double down on your processes, or if they're a sign of something more significant, like working on the wrong product or targeting the wrong job candidates.

Artificial intelligence creeps into daily life

A self-driving car, for example, can easily navigate around Google's home base in Mountain View, California, but may have more problems around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where driving behaviors are less predictable. Alahi said robotics needs to understand the unwritten social behaviors used in daily life, which can vary from one culture to another. A robot, for example, might cut through a group of people in a train station to find the most efficient path, unknowingly violating social rules on personal space. "There are situations where technology is not yet capable of understanding human behavior," said Alahi, who is part of a research project using a robot, with the aim of understanding pedestrian behavior. These kinds of robots may be technological marvels, but they also raise fears that they could get out of control, concerns heightened by movies like "Terminator."

Worm on the sensor: What happens when IoT data is bad?

The harsher the surrounding conditions and the more isolated the device, the worse the bad-data problem is likely to be. In addition to agriculture, industries like oil and gas and energy distribution face this. But it’s not just far-flung sensors that have problems. Even in a hospital, a blood oxygen sensor clamped on a patient’s finger can start giving bad data if it gets bumped into the wrong position. On top of that, some IoT devices malfunction on their own and start spewing out bad data, or stop reporting at all. In many other cases, human error is the culprit: The wrong settings mess up what the device generates. ... John Deere equips its giant farm tools with sensors that detect whether the machines are working right. The company’s ExactEmerge planter, which rolls behind a tractor planting seeds across a field, has three sensors per row of crops to detect how many seeds are being planted and at what rate.

Africa 2017: Smartphone penetration, Open Data and less online freedom

The demand for cheap smartphones is boosting penetration rates and is affecting the data bundle business for the majority of telecom companies. Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecom company has seen its profit shoot up through mobile internet services. The company said during its half year result ending September 2016 that: “Mobile data revenue, which accounts for 13.7% of the firm’s service revenue, grew at 46.3% to Sh13.4 billion (US$134 million), driven by growth in active mobile data customers to 14.9 million, increased bundle users and smartphone penetration.” According to research firm Ovum, the smartphone penetration rate will grow at 52.9% year- on-year. Currently there are 293.8 million smartphone users across the continent. Ovum predicts that there will be 929.9 million smartphones by the year 2021.

Self-Driven Car Simulator Using a Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm Training

Artificial Intelligence impacts human life in many ways nowadays. An example is in the auto industry; many companies are trying to make their cars smarter. The cars can self-drive, avoid obstacles, find destinations … without controls from human. This paper is about a car simulation program in which the car itself will move without any controls from outside. The approach uses a Neural Network and a Genetic Algorithm to train the car by making the car learn after each time it fails to finish the track. ... Every computer has different speeds so we need a mechanism to normalize that to make the game run at the same speed in any computer. We have 2 main methods: update and render. Usually, the game runs at 60 fps so the update method will be called 60 times per second and the render method will be called as fast as the computer’s speed.

Getting Started With JMeter: A Basic Tutorial

Performance testing and load testing are the practices of ensuring that websites and apps perform under heavy loads, from different geolocations, and for different user scenarios. If you followed the Pokemon Go craze or heard about Macy’s crashing during the last Black Friday, you know the importance of performance testing and how crucial it is for businesses. Poor performance, whether website crashes or slow page loading, equals an immediate and long-term loss of revenue, as it creates a bad reputation and immediate churn. ... Open-source and JAVA-based, JMeter simulates browser behavior (though it’s not a browser!) by sending requests to web or application servers for different loads. JMeter can also parse the responses. On your local machine, you can scale up to approximately 100 virtual users, but you can go up to more than 1,000,000 VUs with CA BlazeMeter, which is kind of a JMeter in the cloud.

Why Artificial Intelligence Will Be Analog

In essence, analog is similar to the human brain. Consider the human body in comparison to a fitness monitor, like a FitBit. These devices are both analog and digital. The analog sensors are what collects the data about the number of steps your take, your heart rate, etc. That data is then converted using an analog-to-digital converter, so that the readings can be more easily processed using the algorithms in the microprocessor of the device, putting the raw data into a form that we can use. Over time, the device “learns” your patterns, so it can make recommendations as to the number of steps you should take, how much sleep you need, etc. This is a form of artificial intelligence, and the same concepts apply to other AI devices as well. Essentially, as science historian George Dyson points out, the brain itself is an analog computer. Our senses take in information in analog format, whether a sight, sound, smell, etc., which is then processed by the neural pathways of the brain.

Quote for the day:

"Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it." -- Unknown

Daily Tech Digest - December 16, 2016

How Startups Can Use Big Data To Their Advantage

Not using big data is no longer an option; it is a necessity. Taking into account the amount of data that is generated every year and the key information they are missing out on could prove to be disastrous for the future success of the company. Today, the world is all about making well informed decisions and delivering customers with the most efficient and robust service. These can only be achieved by carefully studying the market trends, deriving key insights and building business strategies upon them. Small businesses can use big data solutions as they have become much more affordable in recent years. Additionally, they are simple to implement and use and are many times automated. These surely eliminates the biggest fears of startups thinking of using big data. It also gives them all the reasons to use it as long as they know how to best use it for their business.

The next wave of IT: Where do we go from here?

The tightly coupled, procedural, synchronous computing models we've been using for decades don't just stop working, where they do still work, they become inefficient. They're also associated with a new set of endpoints, not just the familiar PCs and smartphones, but also wearable devices, wall screens, and a whole host of IoT hardware, from devices like Amazon's Echo to Apple's Watch, and to the screens in your car. One aspect of this shift is that it no longer matters where an application is running. Thanks to virtualised userlands via containers the same code can run on a phone, on a PC, on a cloud server - and now it can also run in the network, thanks to container support in the latest core routers and switches. We've virtualized not just compute and storage, virtualized networks are at the heart of our modern clouds. User interfaces can take advantage of flexible web technologies, bringing responsive design across all our platforms.

GitHub Is Building a Coder’s Paradise. It’s Not Coming Cheap

In GitHub’s cultural hierarchy, the coder is at the top. The company has strived to create the best product possible for software developers and watch them to flock to it. In addition to offering its base service for free, GitHub sells more advanced programming tools to companies big and small. But it found that some chief information officers want a human touch and began to consider building out a sales team. The issue took on a new sense of urgency in 2014 with the formation of a rival startup with a similar name. GitLab Inc. went after large businesses from the start, offering them a cheaper alternative to GitHub. “The big differentiator for GitLab is that it was designed for the enterprise, and GitHub was not,” says GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. “One of the values is frugality, and this is something very close to our heart.

Ten Myths of Cloud Computing

The cloud can be cheaper, but the reality is that when you look at total costs, you could very well end up paying more. Chances are you are paying more because you are getting more. Being in the cloud allows a greater degree of agility and scalability; it provides access to security, storage, applications, and other benefits supplied by your cloud provider. It is possible that moving to the cloud will save you money, but it should not be your organization’s primary goal. The decision should be driven by benefits available through cloud computing – benefits that are not free. You might save money if, for instance, you have variable workloads and variable demands. A cloud service provider (CSP) can enable you to switch servers off during times of low demand, and to spin up more virtual machines at high-demand times, charging you only for the computing power you use.

Thanks to mobile computing and the cloud, we’re all starting to work from home more

What’s surprising, however, is that the biggest increase won’t be coming from trendy new alternative workspaces or other nontraditional worksites. Instead, it’s working at home. Toiling in your PJs (or whatever attire you choose to wear at home) is expected to jump from 11 percent of the total work week to 16 percent in two years. ... Not surprisingly, when people were asked in a separate question about the benefits of working at home, the top reason they cited was — you guessed it — work-time flexibility. Clearly, the move to mobile computing devices, more cloud-based applications and internal IT support for enabling work from remote locations has had a large impact on employee’s expectations about how, when and where they can work. And, well, there’s no place like home.

The Shift to Cloud Security Spend Continues

According to the IDC report, the business segments that will have made the largest investments in security this year include banking at roughly $8.6 billion. Banking is one of the four industries that will constitute nearly 40% of global security spending in the next five years, followed by discrete manufacturing, government, and process manufacturing. The industries that will grow the most rapidly in the next five years, each growing more than 9% annually, include: healthcare, telecommunications, utilities, state and local government, and securities and investment services. ... I think another aspect of the spend is the result of a little fighting the battles of today with the strategies of yesterday when it comes to cloud security. Too many organizations are investing in legacy toolsets that have been “cloudwashed” as cloud security alternatives.

How DevOps is changing business and moving companies towards a cloud-first strategy

The shift in moving to a DevOps-oriented view of systems development and management requires that teams align according to the products they are working on rather than by technical or functional discipline. Historically, software design and production environments are owned by two disparate teams; so removing the separation between Development and Operations gives developers the responsibility for the operational system and gives operations teams the ability to influence and work within the development lifecycle. DevOps is not just a realignment of teams; it is also a cultural shift. To be successful, businesses have to be able to take advantage of this shift. Change is hard and is something that people generally struggle with. The key is to find tangible ways to help teams connect with the value of the transformation on a business, technical and personal level.

Lessons learned from the 7 major cyber security incidents of 2016

Cyber incidents dominated headlines this year, from Russia’s hacking of Democrat emails to internet cameras and DVRs launching DDoS attacks, leaving the impression among many that nothing should be entrusted to the internet. These incidents reveal technical flaws that can be addressed and failure to employ best practices that might have prevented some of them from happening. The most important lesson is that cybersecurity is a perpetual battle in which neither side gets the upper hand for long and that requires constant incident post-mortems to discover the next measures to keep data and communications safe. Here is a look at seven such incidents and what lessons they afford.

Conduct a power cycling test to stay ahead of hardware failures

If an unexpected system crash or power disruption causes an unplanned system reboot, the system's internal firmware may see these problems and refuse to complete the boot process. For example, if the server's south bridge chip fails and USB or onboard disk controller functions don't initialize or respond, the boot process will stop, even though the enterprise may not use the server's USB ports and accesses storage across a network instead. Now, IT must attempt to recover from an unexpected disruption and address defective systems at the same time. To avoid this, conduct a periodic and proactive power cycling test to force a system restart in low-level hardware. Instead of scrambling during unplanned outages or downtime, use planned restarts to ensure data protection and migrate VMs or storage instances off target devices in an organized manner.

Quantifying Cyber Risks

“Cyber is absolutely a top risk in the organization. In fact, we’ve actually begun disclosing it as such in our public filings, alongside our business and operations risks,” said Eric Dobkin, the director of insurance and risk management at Merck. “It’s gotten attention from all levels.” Similarly, Laura Winn, the director of risk management and treasury at Time, said the media giant’s board considers attacks on the company’s computer systems a “top-three risk.” Prompted by the board, the company’s risk management department is working to quantify the company’s exposure to cyber attacks so that it can transfer some of the risks to insurers, she added. Culling the media company’s cyber-risk-management information together in a meaningfully predictive way is a tough task, however. That’s because “our organization is siloed,” she said.

Quote for the day:

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” -- Les Brown

Daily Tech Digest - December 15, 2016

Malvertising campaign targets routers and every device connected to router

If the attackers already know that IP, or if it is not one in the targeted ranges, then the victim is served a legitimate ad while the attackers go after the next victim. Otherwise, an infected fake ad is displayed which contains code that redirects the victim to the DNSChanger EK. After the IP address is again checked, then the researchers said the exploit kit “loads multiple functions and an AES key concealed with steganography in a small image.” Those functions include fingerprinting so that the victim’s browser reports back on what router is being used and pushing out instructions to attack the router. Currently, this malvertising campaign is using 166 router fingerprints. If an exploit is not known, the attack tries default credentials; otherwise, known exploits are used to change DNS entries and make administration ports remotely accessible.

Cyber Market Hampered by Insurability Challenges

Extreme scenarios – also known as “Cybergeddon” – cannot be covered well by existing insurance policies, the report emphasized. “Additionally, there might be indirect effects of cyber losses that cannot be measured and thus are not covered (e.g. reputational losses and their impact on stock prices).” Policy complexity is another problematic aspect of coverage limits, GA continued. “Given the large number of exclusions and the dynamic nature of cyber risk, there is uncertainty about what the cyber policy actually covers. Worse yet, the policies in the market have no agreed-upon terminology, which makes the offerings very difficult to compare,” the report explained. “While the cyber insurance market is currently in its early stages, as market development continues, the risk pools will become larger and more data will be available,” it said,

91% Of Cyberattacks Start With A Phishing Email

Higbee adds that Locky's phishing campaign has been effective for the following reasons: It is presented in a business context; it’s personalized to the recipient; there are no noticeable errors in grammar or spelling; and finally, it mimics many organizations’ existing invoice processes. When PhishMe analyzed the Locky data in vertical industries it found that the response rates in the insurance industry were more than one in three (34.7%), while other high response rates occurred in the retail industry at 31.7%; energy, 27.8%; and healthcare at 24.9%. "We don’t really know why insurance was the leading vertical," Higbee says. "It could be that there’s not enough training or insurance workers tend to interact with many external people so the chance for them to receive a phishing email increases."

Where Video Analytics Falls Into Your Big Data Strategy: 5 Use Cases

One area that is receiving a great deal of attention is video analytics. As the name suggests, this field involves analyzing the data taken from recorded videos, usually from specially made cameras with that ability. Vendors specializing in intelligent video analytics have quickly popped up, offering their services as a way to capture this valuable data. But you may be wondering how video analytics actually fits into the big data picture for your organization. As with many new technologies, sometimes it can be difficult to grasp where it would work best. Luckily, major strides have been made in video analytics in the past few years, giving organizations good examples of how best to use it. Consider the following use cases when planning out your big data strategy.

How AI-powered cyberattacks will make fighting hackers even harder

The machine learning algorithms don't even need to be very advanced; relatively simple sequence-to-sequence machine learning could be installed on an infected device in order to monitor emails and conversations of a compromised victim. After a period of monitoring, the AI could tailor phishing messages to mimic the message style of the victim to particular contacts in their address book, in order to convince them to click on a malicious link. "If I were emailing someone outside the company, I'd probably be polite and formal, but if I was emailing a close colleague, I'd be more jokey as I email them all the time. Maybe I'd sign off my emails to them in a certain way. That would all be easily replicated by machine learning and it's not hard to envision an email mimicking my style with a malicious attachment," Palmer explains.

Are 4K optical discs really better than 4K streaming video?

On optical, it’s no contest. The HDR on the Philips player creates a color quality that makes you feel like you are in the scene. The blacks look distinctly black (not washed out or slightly gray), the tiny white flecks of the plant noticeably more pronounced. On streaming, even after making sure my movie from Vudu was playing in 4K (using the Epson, you can see the on-screen resolution), the clarity was not quite the same, and I started really missing the flat, glorious color of HDR. Vudu should support HDR, but it played in normal 4Kon my Roku 4. Similarly, on the NVIDIA Shield TV, 4K support is hit or miss. You can't play 4K movies from Google Play yet, even though they are available. But here’s where things get a little interesting. Watching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 4K on every player imaginable, you can still see the web during those CGI-rendered scenes flying around tall buildings.

Psychology explains why so many leaders pass the buck—and who is really to blame

While passing the buck can be an effective means of self-protection, it can be bad news for the people who will be affected by the decision. Our findings suggest that there is no guarantee that these decisions will end up in the hands of a more capable decision maker. In one experiment, we presented participants with a choice that they could either make themselves or delegate to a coworker who did or did not have expertise into the decision. Although people were more likely to delegate to an expert than non-expert overall, when stuck with a choice between unappealing options, people delegated to anyone else who could assume responsibility and blame for the outcome—even if that person did not have any relevant expertise into the decision. What people do seem to care about when considering potential surrogates is whether they have the authority to assume responsibility for the consequences of the decision.

9 Places to Learn How to Code in 15 Minutes or Less a Day

Coding has so many incredibly useful, important applications in many facets of business and marketing. Take, for example, the entrepreneur who has funding to hire just two programmers for her startup. How is she to evaluate the expertise and experience of those programmers without some basic understanding of what it is they do? Or consider the small local business owner who's finally hired his first marketing firm. They've set him up with a great content management system (CMS), but it would be so much more cost and time efficient for him to make some of the smaller website changes he finds himself needing from time to time if he could just do it himself. Heck, my entire pay-per-click (PPC) software company sprung from a piece of software I built for myself to automate some of the repetitive tasks I had to do in PPC advertising consulting.

IoT Botnets the Fault of Manufacturers, 69 Percent of Consumers Report

Manufacturers’ software development lifecycles should take the security of the devices more seriously, and a number of simple steps could prevent future attacks, including requiring a change to default passwords and enabling Over The Air (OTA) software updates to patch vulnerabilities. Without manufacturer action to secure these devices, IoT botnet attacks will only continue to grow, as we saw recently when hackers attempted to infect 900,000 internet routers in Germany with malware. Had they successfully harnessed a botnet that large, the DDoS attack they would be capable of generating an unprecedentedly massive DDoS attack. But manufacturers aren’t the only ones consumers feel should be responsible for preventing misuse of their devices by hackers.

Consider these Linux I/O scheduler options for storage performance

Many IT pros believe the noop scheduler offers the best possible performance when you use a smart underlying storage channel. With this scheduler, the Linux kernel directly transfers write and read requests to the storage channel, which reorders them. In most cases where a hypervisor, SSDs or SAN filer is used, noop offers the best possible performance. However, this might not always be the case -- particularly with heavily write-oriented loads -- and it may help the underlying storage channel to use the deadline scheduler. The deadline I/O scheduler optimizes write requests by reordering them in the most efficient way, which eases the performance load on the underlying hypervisor layer. If your server is writing a lot, the deadline scheduler is worth a try.

Quote for the day:

"Fear and urgency are a normal part of every day work for many users." -- Aaron Higbee

Daily Tech Digest - December 14, 2016

Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Cloud - Exploring the use Cases

Despite some of the challenges and associated costs of the private cloud model, many bigger firms are compelled to choose private due to the security risks of public. The potential damage to a company’s brand and the loss of customer trust after a public cloud breach can exponentially surpass the costs of the private cloud. ... Implementing a private cloud securely can prove difficult unless you utilize the help of a third-party service. This is where a qualified IT consultancy such as TechBlocks can provide critical guidance on the best practices for implementation, and perhaps discuss the case for a hybrid public-private approach. ... The hybrid cloud is increasingly the path for organizations that desire a customizable approach with reduced maintenance costs and time. Pursuing a hybrid approach is often the path IT will take to convince upper management that the cloud is safe and a good option for critical data.

The mainframe is hindering application delivery

“Organisations face both business and technical challenges on the mainframe, preventing them from innovating and transforming into a digital business. To avoid issues with the mainframe, organisations are working around it, re-platforming, or modernising. However, each of these tactics creates new issues. The good news is that those companies embracing DevOps deliver faster and at a higher quality, all while fostering collaboration,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley Compuware, which commissioned the study, has been aggressively leading the transformation of the mainframe into a fully Agile and DevOps-enabled platform where development, testing and operations processes can occur at the same rapid pace as they do on distributed and cloud platforms.

10 Clear Principles for the 96% that Need Culture Change

“Although it’s important to engage employees at every level early on, all successful change management initiatives start at the top, with a committed and well-aligned group of executives strongly supported by the CEO.” It is imperative for the top team to be on the same page regarding both why the change is necessary and “the particulars for implementing it.” The top leader or any member of the top team will dramatically undermine change efforts if they are directly or indirectly sending messages that are in conflict with the change effort. They must act in a different way that’s consistent with the change effort and visible to all. ... “Mid-level and frontline people can make or break a change initiative. The path of rolling out change is immeasurably smoother if these people are tapped early for input on issues that will affect their jobs.”

Advocate Congress establish a permanent joint committee on information technology

This joint committee was formed in response to both a dramatic threat and an incredible opportunity. The threat was the potential of nuclear war. The opportunity was the potential to use nuclear science to generate electricity to power cities as well as naval vessels, as well as opportunities to use nuclear science in medicine and industry. It was clear to congress at the time that success in response to the threat and success in gaining national benefit from nuclear energy would require a different way of doing things. So, the response was the United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946. For over 30 years the Joint Committee this act set up provided bi-partisan solutions broadly supported and widely credited with bringing unity of effort to many multiple complex activities.

DevOps capabilities vary widely by industry vertical

DevOps maturity varies according to the business sphere that companies occupy, and some are constrained by the characteristics of their markets -- from heavy regulation in the financial services and life sciences industries to stifling technical debt in the retail and media and entertainment sectors. Other markets, such as healthcare and transportation, face unique cultural challenges to bringing a DevOps mindset to the software development process. ... The philosophy of increased IT automation and collaboration between development and operations -- which, in some industries, are no longer separate groups at all -- is here to stay. "Consumers, empowered by rich software interactions with access to internet resources, have never had more power or choices," wrote Forrester Research analysts in their report "The State of DevOps Industry Adoption for 2016 -- Where's the Heat?"

Nine Questions to Ask to Determine IoT Device Safety

While IoT brings forth many benefits to consumers—from convenience to energy efficiency, to monitoring babies and locating lost pets—it also brings risk. ... These IoT devices were used them to take out the Dyn DNS Server this September. As a consumer, you might think… “why should I care if my device is involved in a DDoS attack? As long as it works, I don’t mind.” Well, some 20,000 residents in Finland found out the hard way why it matters, when their building’s IoT connected thermostats stopped functioning because the devices were enslaved to a botnet conducting a DDoS attack (By the way, it’s cold in Finland in November). Whether you are a consumer considering a connected device as a gift for the holidays, or a reporter about to review the next wave of IoT devices launching at CES, we have put together a list of questions you should ask before diving in:

Why soft skills outweigh hard skills for IT-business collaboration

The skills needed in IT change so frequently that businesses are more interested in finding qualified candidates with strong soft skills -- workers who can grow and adapt in a quickly changing landscape, says Palm. Qualified workers can always take a course or complete training in areas where they need more knowledge, but it's not as easy to teach someone how to be collaborative or to communicate effectively. Palm says she's seen an increase in applicants that fit this "t-shaped personality," which means "an individual has a broad set of skills, but only a few areas where the skillset goes deep." T-shaped workers are the type of employees who are "agile and able to rapidly adapt to new changes," she says. They constantly adjust to new and uncharted territory, learn new skills as needed and stay up to date on emerging trends.

Don't Like Russian Cyberspies? Tips To Stop State-Sponsored Hackers

“Customers are looking for a magical button to stop all these threats,” he said. Businesses will then buy the tools and assume they’re safe, when in reality they aren’t properly being used. For example, many businesses often fail to install security patches with their IT products -- including the antivirus software -- exposing them to hacks that otherwise could have been prevented. They may also ignore the warnings that pop up from security software, believing them to be a false positive. Or they’ll even forget to turn the software on. However, in other cases, the businesses had limited expertise on staff to deal with the cyberthreats the security tools encountered. “If you buy the tools without hiring the right people, you are not going to solve your nation-state hacking problem,” Firstbrook said.

Blockchain – The Next Big Thing for Middleware

Fascinating new technologies are emerging these days. Everybody talks about cloud, containers, big data and machine learning. Another disrupting technology is blockchain. You might have heard about blockchain as the underlying infrastructure of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg. This article explains the use cases and technical concepts behind blockchain, gives an overview about available services, and points out why middleware is a key success factor in this space. ... Welcome to the world of blockchain where smart contracts process such a scenario automatically and in a secure way. Governments in conjunction with global non-profit airline associations like International Air Transport Association (IATA), which “support aviation with global standards for airline safety, security, efficiency and sustainability,” could enforce airlines to compensate customers automatically as it is defined by law.

Google Tries To Advance IoT Security With Android Things

Android Things comes after the world got some more glimpses into how insecure many products can be. IoT devices were used to take down popular websites on the East Coast (and elsewhere) in October. Then in November, critical vulnerabilities were discovered in popular IoT cameras--a problem that repeated itself when backdoors were found in Sony's internet-connected cameras in early December. The IoT market had a bad couple of months. These issues have led to calls to improve the security of IoT devices. The problem is that many companies drag their feet in responding to problems, lack the infrastructure to push updates to devices that have already been sold, or simply don't care about the security of their products. Making sure these devices are safe for their owners and for the internet at large just isn't a priority for the manufacturers churning them out.

Quote for the day:

"Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed." -- Robert A. Heinlein