Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - January 17, 2017

Turn Your Organization into an Idea Factory: Part I

If there is a perception that the employee suggestion box is a black hole and a waste of time, employees will quickly stop submitting new ideas. I say perception because sometimes ideas are being looked at and evaluated, but communication and transparency around this process is missing or takes too long. The interesting thing about feedback is that it does not need to be positive. It just has to exist. ... Even when a suggestion is turned down, the feedback is seen as positive if there is a proper explanation provided. Another important element of trust is the participation of leadership within the program. There is considerably more success with programs when leaders are active in commenting and responding to ideas, and reinforcing the usage of the program and celebrating success in communications.

Self-Service Business Intelligence is Big, but is it for Everyone?

While business users represent one pocket of parties interested in Self-Service Business Intelligence, another important user segment is the IT department itself. A survey of IT pros from real-time IT management vendor ManageEngine – which this past summer unveiled a self-service solution to help enterprise IT staff gain insights from the data generated by its network monitoring, applications monitoring, and customer support tools – shows that these experts want Self-Service Analytics tools as much as their business counterparts. Forty-two percent of respondents want to create reports on their own, a win for Self-Service Analytics over traditional reporting – and on-demand, with ad hoc reporting being key for more than one-third so that they can get answers to specific questions and analyze specific data.

McKinsey sees blockchain technology reaching full potential in 5 years

The McKinsey report’s time estimate for full blockchain adoption is about half that of similar estimates. The World Economic Forum released a report in October 2015 about the tipping point of disruptive technologies, and included predictions about blockchain in it. Governments, the report claimes, would reach their tipping point for using blockchain technology by 2023, and people would reach their tipping point for using “bitcoin and the blockchain” in 2027. ... However, over the next one to two years startups and standards for the space will rise, as well as “niche applications that will define new markets that do not exist today.” In another three to five years, they predict that the majority of large players will use blockchain technology. Global business consulting firm Accenture has a similar timeline, with a two year shorter timeframe.

Machine Learning – An idea whose time has come

The increasing availability of Big Data from ever-expanding sources, including IoT sensors, digitized documents and images, has made machine learning more relevant than ever before. The data is constantly being used to ‘train’ machines and enable them to make accurate predictions and recommendations. As data continues to proliferate, the ability of our computers to process and analyze that data will also increase. Not only that, computers will also increasingly learn from that data. ... The adoption of Machine Learning in organizations is bound to face some challenges. For instance, computation of data, sourcing talent in large numbers, and creating the requisite infrastructure are going to be major tasks that will need attention and resources. Besides, uncertainty, ethical issues, outcome metrics, logistics, budgeting computational resources, training and testing of data sets all pose challenges.

Data Science of Variable Selection: A Review

One of the biggest problems in predictive modeling is the conflation between classic hypothesis testing with careful model specification vis-a-vis pure data mining. The classically trained can get quite dogmatic about the need for "rigor" in model design and development. The fact is that when confronted with massive numbers of candidate predictors and multiple possible targets or dependent variables, the classic framework neither works, holds nor provides useful guidance – how does anyone develop a finite set of hypotheses with millions of predictors? Numerous recent papers delineate this dilemma from Chattopadhyay and Lipson's brilliant paper Data Smashing: Uncovering Lurking Order in Data who state, "The key bottleneck is that most data comparison algorithms today rely on a human expert to specify what ‘features’ of the data are relevant for comparison.

Online Or Offline, Ransomware Will Find You

Professional ransomware authors typically use online Command & Control centers for their campaigns as they provide multiple benefits, including the ability to track affiliate campaigns, use unique keys created for victims, and alter campaign specifics on the fly. The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" method has served them well for the longest time, but everything has to change eventually, and even malware makers have to adapt with the times. The reason for this shift in attack strategy is that not all computers are online, which represents a blip in the ability of bad actors to make as much money as humanly possible. If ransomware can't “phone home” when it's time to begin infecting the target, then no encryption can take place and their efforts are wasted. To get around this, it's becoming more common to see offline features built into more traditional packages.

Automate systems and server documentation tasks to boost IT efficiency

You don't need an outside tool, but writing and modifying scripts takes time and effort that can be better spent on other IT projects. Scripts are usually best for smaller organizations with limited IT deployments. When an IT environment includes too many diverse systems to document with a single or even a suite of related scripts, or you must include non-Windows systems in the server documentation process, invest in a third-party tool such as ManageEngine's Device Information tool or CENTREL Solutions' Network Documentation tool. These tools are designed for inventory/configuration discovery, recording and reporting. Implement an outside tool to provide better reporting and free IT staff from time-consuming script maintenance.

Data Theft Trends to Watch in 2017

Mishandling of data by (trusted) third parties will be a prime source of data leaks again in 2017, as it was in 2016. Third party breaches are among the most vexing because business partners and contractors – or even customers – often have access to our most sensitive IT assets and data, but are the hardest to police. We’ve noted the trend of third party breaches before. But expect it to get stronger in 2017 rather than weaker. The reason? More reliance on hybrid products and services that mingle on premises devices and clients with a wide range of cloud based services. Longer and more complex supply chains compound risk. Consider the recent news about wholesale transmission of mobile phone users’ text data and contacts by firmware from the Chinese firm ADUPS to company servers in China.

Five Google Assistant integrations we want to see

Smart conversations need smart partners. The Google Assistant can improve in the near-term very quickly with a larger team of buddies that specialize in different tasks. For example, currently I can ask Google for the score of the latest Golden State Warriors game or when they play next. Down the line, perhaps I’d be able to invoke an agent from ESPN or another sports provider who would be able to answer more detailed questions about a player’s performance, read out relevant news stories, or even participate in a trivia game. When developers get on board, the actions could look very much like this, according to Google: These type of interactions at a deeper level shouldn’t all be handled by Google’s algorithms. News providers and third-party apps and services can offer a larger bank of specialized knowledge for their areas of expertise.

Digital Transformation Forces Businesses To Rethink Cybersecurity

"The big change that's accelerating this trend is that shift to modern architectures," Downey adds. "Sixty-nine percent of executives were saying this digital transformation is creating fundamental changes to their security strategies." Bill Berutti, president of Security and Compliance at BMC, says that cybersecurity is now a critical initiative across the board. Companies, governments and society as a whole are facing increased cybersecurity threats including phishing, ransomware and known vulnerabilities. "Businesses need to tear down security and operations walls — or keep getting hacked," he said in a statement Wednesday. Allison Cramer says many BMC customers are responding by bringing together security professionals, operations professionals and developers into teams focused on particular mission-critical assets.

Quote for the day:

"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it." -- William James

Daily Tech Digest - January 16, 2017

Windows 10 Build 15007 boosts Edge browser

For PCs, the 15007 build's revised Edge application makes it easier to bring data like favorites, browsing history, and saved passwords from another browser when switching to Edge, said Dona Sparker, software engineer in Microsoft's Windows and Devices Group. The revised Edge can also share tabs with compatible Windows apps. XAML scrollbar improvements for Universal Windows Platform, for both the PC and mobile versions of the OS, ensure the scrollbar's availability when needed while taking up less space. The panning indicator now appears when the user mouses over a scrolling region, and the full scrollbar appears when a user wants to directly interact with it. This improvement will be visible in apps using the Windows 10 Creators SDK.

Expect trouble as Shadow Brokers retire, give away hacking tools

“The economics of the dark markets is mainly based on un-exclusive, common, and low priced tools for lower end cyber criminals that look for low hanging fruit. The more sophisticated hackers prefer to roll their own toolset and thrive on their own research to make exclusive and untraceable exploits. They are patient, as to the point they can stay for years in hiding, timing their actions well before making their ‘coup de grace',” he said. “But it is not improbable that the freebie left by Shadow Brokers will be picked up and used by the lower end of opportunistic cyber criminals in campaigns to extort victims for easy money,” he added. More than half of the windows tools are already known and detected by most anti-malware tools, so it is only a matter of time before security analysts close the gap and provide protection against all the threats in the toolset.

Tech's assault on (obliteration of?) consumer privacy

Some of the societal benefits and consumer privacy risks of these new technologies are similar to ones we already know about, Ramirez said. Geolocation data, for example, can help ease horrendous traffic jams on morning commutes, but it should not be collected or used without a person's consent. Risks from unauthorized geolocation information include stalking; exposure of political, health and religious affiliations; and burglary. But there are new challenges, Ramirez said, among them the number of actors "collecting, compiling, interpreting and using data in a world that operates on big data, IoT and AI." The expanding list ranges from consumer-facing companies, device manufacturers and publisher websites to behind-the-scenes software vendors that connect IoT products to the internet to advertisers and analytics providers. "This vast array of entities makes it difficult to provide consumers with informed choices," she said.

Op-Ed: Blockchain - Innocent Until Proven Guilty

This system of multi-member consensus clearing ensures that each member, on an automated basis, applies the same diagnostic approach to the verification of information against the same record, irrespective of the internal processes of each member. Accordingly, each member of the chain is always cognisant of the acquiesced process adopted in determining whether a block should be added to a chain. This system affords transparency to transactions processed through a Blockchain, bearing in mind that due to the flexibility of Blockchain, the system can be restricted depending on the particular needs and purpose of the Blockchain network. The built-in transparency feature of the Blockchain network arguably negates the need for the regulator to administer and enforce further transparency requirements. The regulator should rather focus on the members of the Blockchain network and not the technology itself.

Ericsson CTO on 5G Standards, the WiFi Angle, and Connected Cars

There is going to be a more distinct separation between the services and the cloud. You asked about car makers and the 5G Automotive Association. We launched that association based upon the idea of a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). An automotive maker would rather think: OK, why go to one service provider? Why not create our own platform and then buy the network piece from all of them? They might want to buy service from three or four networks. Why not have the best coverage and pay per bit? We are going to see more model development over the next few years. If we look at 5G now, I see three phases of the business: First, there is basic connectivity. That is coming now. We are building base stations. Second, we will see transformation of core networks triggered by this access. I believe in 2019 and 2020 we will see a big focus on making a high-performance core. Now we have a radio with almost no latency.

AI Technology Takes Center Stage At Retail Convention

At the National Retail Federation event in New York technology vendors are be showcasing some of the most cutting edge technologies for retailers, including chatbots, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and more. Are retailers ready? It depends. There's really a range of experiences across companies. Analytics can offer retailers value across many aspects of their businesses, from supply chain optimization to workforce management to understanding consumer behavior. Yet many retailers are still struggling to get their siloed data integrated. It's one thing to offer a retail app to your customers if you've been a brick-and-mortar retailer. It is a more daunting challenge to integrate customer data from mobile apps, the web, physical stores, catalogs, social media, and any other channels to create a comprehensive picture of consumer behavior that can inform your own business decisions.

Here’s What’s Next for CenturyLink’s Data Center Business

There are some big differences between the two big data center deals that came at the tail end of 2016, however. The assets Equinix cherry-picked in its deal with Verizon will be integrated into an already massive global portfolio, while CenturyLink’s colocation business will become the foundation of a whole new company’s business. The name of the company has not been announced. What we do know is that it is a joint venture between Medina’s tech-focused private equity firm Medina Capital and the 30-year-old European buyout investor BC Partners. Its plan is to use the technologies of four of Medina’s previously acquired cybersecurity companies to provide a range of infrastructure products with emphasis on security, all running on top of the data center platform acquired from CenturyLink.

Coding school graduates: Are they worth hiring?

Coding bootcamps are an attractive educational option for certain populations, according to Kevin Kinser, department head of education policy studies at Penn State University. "They are one of the examples of new ways of thinking about providing access to education that is focused on providing marketable job skills," Kinser said. However, bootcamps are not accredited institutes of higher education. Therefore, a problem—such as a student not believing that the program lived up to its promises—would likely lead to a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, unlike at an institute of higher education, which has multiple layers of oversight. "You have to be assured based on your own understanding of the industry that what you're getting is going to have a return on investment," Kinser said. Longevity is an important factor to consider: If a coding school is not reputable, it's likely that they will not be around for long, Kinser said.

When Real-Time Threat Detection Is Essential

While organizations always want to find threats as quickly as possible, that ideal is far from being met. On average, dwell times last months and give cyber criminals all the time they need to peruse a network and extract valuable information that can impact a company, its customers and its employees. There are times when an organization will be especially vulnerable if they don’t have real-time detection capabilities, and in preparation for these events it’s a good idea to reevaluate tools and strategies. Mike Paquette, director of products, security market at Elastic, identifies some of the most common events that can leave an organization vulnerable, and offers advice to successfully navigating them.

IBM’s Watson Joins the War on Cybercrime

Network defenders are facing a constantly increasing number of alerts and anomalies every day. They have a huge workload screening and prioritizing these threats. Watson is trained to automate the typical duties of security analysts. Relying on machine learning and natural language processing, Watson for Cyber Security decides if a certain anomaly is a malicious threat or not. The system will use its vast amount of data to decide whether a specific security offense is related to a known malware or cybercrime campaign. Moreover, it will determine the potential vulnerabilities as well as the scope of the threat. Watson will also serve up a background about a user’s previous activities. For example, in the case of repeatedly failed log-in attempts, the system can make guesses about whether the event is simply related to an absentminded user or if it's a break-in attempt.

Quote for the day:

"Analyze your mistakes. You've already paid the tuition, you might as well get the lesson." -- Tim Fargo

Daily Tech Digest - January 15, 2017

New Study Paints a Frightening Picture of the Cyber Security Landscape

“The perfect storm is brewing that will pummel our nation’s public and private critical infrastructures with wave upon wave of devastating cyber attacks,” the report notes. “The Mirai malware offers malicious cyber actors an asymmetric quantum leap in capability; not because of sophistication or any innovative DDoS code, rather it offers a powerful development platform that can be optimized and customized according to the desired outcome of a layered attack by an unsophisticated adversary.” Script kiddies and cyber criminal gangs are already drastically expanding their control over vulnerable Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which can be contracted in DDoS-for-Hire services by a virtually unlimited number of actors for use in an infinite variation of layered attack methods, the study says.

Big data and the challenges in the car industry

Beside big data why are we interested in autonomous driving? Well $500 billion could be saved in traffic accidents and the cost to society. And $507 billion could be saved in productivity gains. Think about if you could get that 90 mins back each day? Better traffic patterns and logistics lead to big savings. The overall auto model is changing. We don’t just want driving anymore, we want fleet, no need to own the car. And then there’s the possibilities for the media and the content that can be delivered into the vehicle. But with a 10 x increase in data from a vehicle by 2025, how do we manage that data, what can we do with it? Something has to change. ... We can speed up the innovation in automotive space, and that’s good for everybody. An autonomous vehicle is much safer than a speeding young teen driver, or an elderly person with slow reflexes. 5G will be crucial to get the speed of data up and back. A data centers to use deep learning to constantly update fleets.

9 Bizarre and Surprising Insights from Data Science

We’ve entered the golden age of predictive discoveries. A frenzy of number crunching churns out a bonanza of colorful, valuable, and sometimes surprising insights Predictive analytics' aim isn’t limited to assessing human hunches by testing relationships that seem to make sense. It goes further, exploring a boundless playing field of possible truths beyond the realms of intuition. And so it drops onto your desk connections that seem to defy logic. As strange, mystifying, or unexpected as they may seem, these discoveries help predict. Welcome to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! of data science—the Freakonomics of big data. Below are nine colorful discoveries, each pertaining to a single predictor variable—from the likes of Walmart, Uber, Harvard, Shell, Microsoft, and Wikipedia.

Nokia's vision for digital health

Nokia has already struck up a partnership with the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University Hospital to develop remote monitoring products for neurology outpatients, saying the deal reflects "the company's intent to enter the regulated healthcare space". Is the company intending to focus more on the enterprise healthcare vertical as well as the consumer market? Nokia's digital health business aims to "bridge consumer device experience into healthcare patient solutions", Hutchings said. "One of the shared visions between Nokia and Withings is that there is no definite split or frontier between the consumer world and healthcare." ... "We'll see more and more from this common project [of Nokia and Withings] that involve what look like consumer products, but which really integrate and embed into healthcare and remote patient monitoring environments. We'll be seeing more and more of these pilots, and in the future, large-scale deployments of such solutions."

A Framework for FinTech

Today, after sustained stakeholder engagement, we are proud to publish a whitepaper, A Framework for FinTech, that takes our work one step further to provide that perspective. This whitepaper expresses the forward-leaning posture of this Administration to innovation and entrepreneurship, generally, and fintech in particular. This document sets forth Administration policy objectives that reflect widely-shared values and practical expectations for the financial services sector and the U.S. government entities that interact with the sector. It then provides ten overarching principles that constitute a framework policymakers and regulators can use to think about, engage with, and assess the fintech ecosystem in order to meet these policy objectives.

The Undeniable Power of Data Mining, Visualization and Infographics for Business

One of the most common misconceptions about data visualization is that you need to create amazing works of interactive art, like the cool map from Metrocosm here. Data visualization, massive graphic design budgets, and an in-depth knowledge of coding do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. According to most data experts, data visualization can be any map, chart, graph, etc. that you can make into a simple JPEG image, a video, or even a 3D model like the one above. The only criteria is that the visualization communicates data. It’s also important to point out that data visualizations are usually only visual representations of one data set; a pie chart to show different portions of a specific group, or a line chart showing growth of social media followers. An infographic, on the other hand, is a collection of multiple data sets designed to depict an overall trend, topic, or idea.

Why IoT needs AI

AI typically works in tandem with the Internet of Things (IOT) which includes devices like wearables and connected home gadgets. Simple put, IoT collects the information but AI is the engine that will power analytics and decision-making from that information. IoT connects disparate devices such as wearables and can scale to connect a nearly unlimited number of devices, continuously streaming data. AI processes, makes inferences about this data and ultimately enables recommendations in real-time. Let’s make some examples from the insurance industry A couple of years ago, when I was at Humana around 2012, one of the projects we worked on was understanding seniors (65+) living in their homes to better reduce the incidence of falls and predict the likely use of emergency services in real-time so we can act beforehand, improve their health status and save costs.

Q&A on The Antifragility Edge: Antifragility in Practice

Generally, embracing reality involves entrepreneurs who experiment with options to confront disorder. They are always exploring and seeking opportunities to enable them to thrive; when they encounter disorder and sufficiently and reasonably struggle (that is, experience sufficient and reasonable degrees of stress), they consider their options and experiment, making small and reversible errors that cause acute stress, distributed over time, with ample recovery time, to enable them to learn and grow. ... Antifragility is beyond agility. Agility and antifragility are distinct paradigms, each with a unique mindset, worldview, values, principles, practices, and techniques. The essence of antifragility is a delicate dance --- at the antifragility edge --- between embracing reality and ensuring aliveness, where disorder or stress is at the intersection.

Digital will disrupt insurance the way it disrupted the travel industry

The current model of insurance is B2B2C. Insurance companies sell through the agencies. Some life insurers sell through the bancassurance model. So it is a B2B2C model. Now with digital disruption, they will have to deal directly with the customers. This means they will need to be more customer-centric. Digitization will shake this model and make it D2C (Direct to Consumer). This is very different from other industries that are digitalizing because they have only one dimension to deal with. They only have to interact more digitally with their customers. ... So as an industry we need to get better in explaining our products. In principle, insurance is a very simple product. We need to explain that our product is relevant and reliable and we need to be transparent about it. If people can buy shoes online, why wouldn’t they buy insurance online?

Agile & Architecture

Two things change: first, filling the Solution Backlog — while still the responsibility of the Product Owner — becomes a consent-based collaboration between Product Owner and Enterprise Architecture (collaborating create&review roles, see below). And also: Enterprise Architecture can add items to the Architecture Backlog. Now, as in the Enterprise Chess approach for more classical projects, Enterprise Architecture’s role is checks & balances from the organisation-as-a-whole perspective. Hence, the Product Owner (in classic Prince2 terms, the Project Executive) is in charge of his project. But if there is no consent, then an escalation occurs to the level above the Product Owner, if need be up to the board of the organisation (after all: enterprise architecture’s checks & balances are from the perspective of the organisation-as-a-whole, for which the board is responsible).

Quote for the day:

"I believe it is important for people to create a healthy mental environment in which to accomplish daily tasks." -- Darren L. Johnson

Daily Tech Digest - January 14, 2017

Are these the gadgets most likely to change our lives in 2017?

The self-driving car has made significant progress in the last couple of years. That’s not surprising given that it has the potential to solve congestion, accident prevention and reducing carbon emissions. The pioneers come from the new economy: Google, Uber and Tesla all have partially or fully independent vehicles. However, most of the major car makers have plans to introduce autonomous vehicles by the early 2020s, and were showing off both concepts and future self-driving models at CES. Collaborations with leading technology companies - chip makers NVIDIA and Intel, Samsung and Apple, for instance – were high on the agenda, as was the need for reassurance on the safety of driverless cars. In this context, providing the computing ‘horsepower’ and depth of information needed so a car can assess its environment and make decisions were a major focus for exhibitors in Las Vegas.

WhatsApp’s Small Security Flaw Is the Price of Convenience

According to a new report by the Guardian, WhatsApp has a flaw that could, in theory, allow the company to read messages that users assume are safe from prying eyes. Tobias Boelter, a security researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the newspaper that WhatsApp can force a device to generate a new encryption key when a user is offline. Then, if someone is sending a message to that device while it’s offline, the sender will be made to re-encrypt the messages and resend them. Those messages could, says Boelter, be read by WhatsApp. And, presumably, by anyone who demanded the company turn them over, too. WhatsApp knows this is the case, and it is unapologetic about it. It has a compelling argument: convenience.

An Interview with Dr. David Bray and Michael Krigsman on Ethics and AI.

The ethical aspects of AI center on development, use, and application. AI offers its maker advanced capabilities that can be applied to fields as diverse as robotics, medicine, autonomous vehicles, weapons, and much more. As with any technology, the developer’s goals and objectives dictate how AI technology is used and in what fields it is applied. Given the power of AI to mimic human decisions and intelligence, the question of application is crucial to consider. For example, imagine AI technologies in the hands of a government planning to identify and target specific populations or groups for attack or discrimination. Most people would say this is an unethical use of AI. What about companies using AI to target consumers with levels of personalization unattainable today. At what point do we cross the line between appropriate and inappropriate use?

Your selfies might be leaving you vulnerable to hackers

According to research from a team at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII), cyber thieves can lift your fingerprints from a photo in order to access your biometrically protected data (like the info secured on your iPhone by the Touch ID system). But while it's technically possible, biometrics experts say there's no need to panic. The NII team's report focuses on the personal security threats posed for social media users who share lots of publicly accessible pictures. Using a set of photos taken by a camera placed about three meters away from a subject, the team was able to recreate the fingerprints accurately. The Japan Times reports that NII researcher Isao Echizen told Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese language newspaper, that peace signs could be exploited without much effort. “Just by casually making a peace sign in front of a camera, fingerprints can become widely available,” he told the paper.

Twitter CMO finally explains the purpose of Twitter

As Berland and her colleagues set out to clarify just what Twitter is and why it exists, they landed on the most obvious definition of all. "Twitter is the place to see what's happening," she said. "We've been asking the same question from you for years and years. We've been searching and searching, and the answer was staring in front of us all along." That central question — "what's happening?" — appears right in Twitter's main compose field. "The first thing we did is we actually took ourselves out of the social networking category in the app stores and we put ourselves where we belong, which is news," Berland said. "As we were telling the story about us being in the center of what's happening in the world, reflecting on what's happening in the world, there was in fact a lot happening in the world right here on Twitter," she said.

You should read this super-interesting AMA with AI researcher Joanna Bryson

There are two things that humans do that are opposites: anthropomorphizing and dehumanizing. I’m very worried about the fact that we can treat people like they are not people, but cute robots like they are people…We are used to applying ethics to stuff that we identify with, but people are getting WAY good at exploiting this and making us identify with things we don’t really have anything in common with at all. Even if we assumed we had a robot that was otherwise exactly like a human (I doubt we could build this, but let’s pretend like Asimov did), since we built it, we could make sure that it’s “mind” was backed up constantly by wifi, so it wouldn’t be a unique copy. We could ensure it didn’t suffer when it was put down socially. We have complete authorship. So my line isn’t “torture robots!” My line is “we are obliged to build robots we are not obliged to.”

“OK Facebook”—Why stop at assistants? Facebook has grander ambitions for modern AI

On the road to this human-like intelligence, Facebook will use machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), to understand all the content users feed into the company’s infrastructure. Facebook wants to use AI to teach its platform to understand the meaning of posts, stories, comments, images, and videos. Then with ML, Facebook stores that information as metadata to improve ad targeting and increase the relevance of user newsfeed content. The metadata also acts as raw material for creating an advanced conversational agent. These efforts are not some far-off goal: AI is the next platform for Facebook right now. The company is quietly approaching this initiative with the same urgency as its previous Web-to-mobile pivot.

One Startup’s Vision to Reinvent the Web for Better Privacy

Blockstack’s vision is made possible by an identity system built to be independent of any one company, including the startup itself. It uses the digital ledger, or blockchain, underpinning the digital currency Bitcoin to track usernames and associated encryption keys that allow a person to control his or her data and identity. A collective of thousands of computers around the globe maintains the blockchain, and no one entity controls it. Blockstack’s system uses the blockchain to record domain names, too, meaning there’s no need for an equivalent to ICANN, the body that oversees Web domains today. Software built on top of the name and ID systems gives people control over the data they let online services use. Microsoft is already collaborating with Blockstack to explore uses for its platform.

Developing Transactional Microservices Using Aggregates, Event Sourcing and CQRS

On the surface, using events to maintain consistency between aggregates seems quite straightforward. When a service creates or updates an aggregate in the database it simply publishes an event. But there is a problem: updating the database and publishing an event must be done atomically. Otherwise, if, for example, a service crashed after updating the database but before publishing an event then the system would remain in an inconsistent state. The traditional solution is a distributed transaction involving the database and the message broker. But, for the reasons described earlier in part 1, 2PC is not a viable option. ... A message consumer that subscribes to message broker eventually updates the database. This approach guarantees that the database is updated and the event is published. The drawback is that it implements a much more complex consistency model.

Is this the year IoT standards will finally make sense?

There’s too much at stake in a potentially huge market for major companies to give up the chance to dominate home IoT, Greengart said. “I’m highly skeptical that 'co-opetition' in this regard will prevail over competition. And given than nobody knows what layer of the stack is going to be the most valuable one, everyone is fighting for their own,” he said. The common thread that will make smart homes work may turn out to be a system from one vendor, like Apple’s HomeKit, Greengart said. Apple is as well-positioned as any company to make that happen. But even though many manufacturers at last week’s CES show introduced products that use HomeKit, they didn’t play up that capability much, he said. Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based AI platform that made a splash at CES, at least provides a single user interface, though Greengart said it’s not really a full IoT platform like HomeKit -- yet.

Quote for the day:

"It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another." -- Nelson Mandela

Daily Tech Digest - January 13, 2017

Silicon Valley reckons it can give AI a conscience

“There’s an urgency to ensure that AI benefits society and minimizes harm,” said Hoffman, who is now a Partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. “AI decision-making can influence many aspects of our world – education, transportation, health care, criminal justice, and the economy – yet data and code behind those decisions can be largely invisible.” The idea of developing a series of standards to define ethics and morals is something which has needed to be addressed, and has been raised at industry conferences. Back in October at IP Expo, Nick Bostrom who leads Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, noted there needed to be a set of rules to define the development of AI. It was all very doom and gloom, but Bostrom asked a very basic question; how we control computers when their own intelligence supersedes our own? For this, developers will have to essentially develop consciousness and a moral code into the algorithm; is this possible?

Carnival Ocean Medallion: 5 takeaways from one of 2017's premier IoT projects

Carnival, with headquarters in both Miami, Florida, and London, England, is calling the 1.8 ounce device the Ocean Medallion. It is a quarter-sized metal disc that can be carried in a passenger's pocket, pinned to clothing, or worn on the wrist or neck. It will be loaded with the user's personal identifying information and act as a payment method, logging all of their purchases and preferences. It will also note what they opt to do while on board, and what they opt against, as well as which invitations they accept, and which they ignore in order to personalize future invitations and offers. The medallion will allow for keyless entry into a passenger's cruise cabin, and serve as a personal tracking device with wayfinding so that passengers can locate friends and family members around the massive cruise ship.

Why businesses must make cyber security skills a priority in 2017

Given the long latency period before many security failures are discovered, it’s entirely possible the first fines under the new regulatory regime will be for breaches that are happening now. Businesses can therefore hardly afford to wait for the new generation of code breakers to complete their training. Added to that, no single college, nor even the whole the whole Cyber Security Challenge initiative, can really hope to address the scale of the skills shortage. To look just at one aspect of the GDPR, again, the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ recent study suggests businesses worldwide need to hire at least 75,000 data protection officers (DPOs) required by the regulations in the next two years. The 500-strong cohort of pupils that makes its way to the college in 2018 is a welcome contribution to the fight. It can only go so far, however, particularly after GCHQ and other government agencies have taken the cream of the crop.

The Best Techniques to Avoid Phishing Scams

Due to improper readiness and awareness about the phishing attacks, many companies fall prey to phishing attacks. However, the question is how can we prevent phishing attacks and scams? There are several human and technological factors that companies should consider to avoid falling victim to phishing attacks ... Banks and e-commerce companies generally send personalize emails to their customers, while phishers do not. Phishers often include some sensational messages, (e.g., “Urgent – your account details may have been stolen”) to get an immediate reaction from the recipient. Due to security reasons, reputable organizations avoid asking personal information from their customers in an email. Even if such the email seems legitimate, don’t respond. Contact the company by phone or by visiting their website. Pick up the phone and speak to a real person, or type the URL in yourself by hand rather than clicking a link in a suspicious email.

Blockchain: Time To Get Your Feet Wet

Blockchain’s inherent benefits include no middlemen. By having currencies such as Bitcoin, where there is no Central Bank (middleman), payments can be moved instantly just like a domestic currency. An excellent pilot would be between two central banks. Here, you can discover the real benefits of blockchain at an increasing volume across two currency sets seamlessly linked and with currency owners embedded. The EBA has announced a consultantion to provide real time settlement for instant euro payments We are seeing a number of POCs now underway between banks and corporates, who own subsidiaries in other countries, utilising blockchain in multi-currency movements. A pilot involving multiple and bi-lateral netting, for example, could demonstrate blockchain’s security and efficiency.

Day To Day Data: How To Build Knowledge From Daily Life

One of the newest and most revolutionary factors when it comes to turning personal experience into data is the Internet of Things (IoT) – but most know this sector through big name products like Fitbits and Nest thermostats. At its core, IoT technologies are the little data collectors that live inside everyday objects, tapping into our surroundings and actions to improve our daily lives. In many cases, they’re also feeding that information back to companies, cities, or other institutions that are learning from our data. There are numerous IoT devices for the health and fitness sector and they tap into everything from steps taken and calories burned to variations in glucose level throughout the day. These tools are helping us live healthier lives and normalizing activities like step counting that used to automatically signal that someone was trying to lose weight.

Davos: Technology poses new risks to jobs, economies and society

“AI is going to focus now as much on white-collar as on blue-collar jobs. You are looking at machine learning algorithms being deployed in financial services, in healthcare and in other places. The machines are getting increasingly powerful.” Although, historically, technology has increased labour productivity and created new and better jobs, as machines become more intelligent, there is significant uncertainty over future job creation. The US manufacturing industry is producing as much as it ever did, but with fewer workers. According to economists, 80% of the decline in the share of income going to the workforce between 1990 and 2007 resulted from improved technology. This trend is expected to spread to the service sector, as rapid advances in robotics, sensors and machine learning enable employers to replace hired labour.

From Berkeley Labs to democratising AI with APIs

With the latest 2.0 version Spark, Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi is hoping to bring Artificial Intelligence to the masses. “People have been working on it [Machine Learning] for 20, 30, 40 years, but it's really breaking through now. We're seeing it everywhere,” he says. “The same algorithms that existed in the 70s or 60s now become powerful because you have a lot of data.” ... “Most and the time and effort of building machine learning systems goes to configuring them, collecting these massive amounts of data that these algorithms need, doing feature engineering, extracting the features that you need, tuning that, and then running it through machine learning, then doing the verification, using tools to make sure that you’re managing all these resources that you have.”

5 apps to keep your Android device running smoothly

The Android world has changed a lot since 2012, but that was the last time we wrote about the best Android cleaning apps. Five years is an eternity in the tech world: Some of the apps we originally covered have been abandoned, while others have given way to better products. ... One of the biggest problems for smartphones—both Android and iOS—is background services chewing through battery capacity and device performance. The more apps you install and leave running in the background the worse your device will perform. We've all experienced it, and while Android is getting better at freezing apps that aren't performing necessary functions, problems still exist. Greenify wants to solve that problem by putting apps into hibernation mode when your device isn't in use. It won't just put your apps to sleep, though: Greenify gives you a full list of what's running and what may be causing issues and then gives you the choice to add it to its hibernation list.

NIST Issues Draft Update to the Cybersecurity Framework

“We wrote this update to refine and enhance the original document and to make it easier to use,” said Matt Barrett, NIST’s program manager for the Cybersecurity Framework. “This update is fully compatible with the original framework, and the framework remains voluntary and flexible to adaptation.” NIST further notes that, “in the renamed and revised ‘Identity Management and Access Control’ category, the draft clarifies and expands the definitions of the terms ‘authentication’ and ‘authorization.’ [NIST}also added and defined the related concept of “identity proofing.” In the draft update, NIST also includes the concept of using metrics — measuring the business impact of using the framework of standards. “In the update we introduce the notion of cybersecurity measurement to get the conversation started,” Barrett said.

Quote for the day:

"Unselfish thinking makes you part of something greater than yourself" -- John Maxwell

Daily Tech Digest - January 12, 2017

The DDoS Threat for Enterprises: Why Managed Security Matters

Many prominent voices in the cybersecurity arena warn that DDoS attacks, already on the rise, are likely to proliferate as botnets spread. After the source code for Mirai was released earlier this fall, other attackers modified and began deploying it for themselves. Moreover, numerous botnets are available for rent on the Darknet. In addition, easy access to such DDoS “recipes” virtually assures new exploits sprouting across the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, seeded as it is with marginally-secured gadgets meant to simplify life. Ironically, many of the most vulnerable devices, such as Internet cameras, are marketed to make our homes and offices safer. Unfortunately, enterprises are top targets for DDoS attackers. At the same time, enterprise IT is increasingly budget-strapped, working at capacity maintaining basic operations.

3 reasons why 2017 will see massive cloud migration

When all outsourced hosting is taken into account—which includes SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS—many analysts estimate that 20 to 30 percent of workloads are currently on the cloud. But a better metric is to look at what enterprise applications have migrated to an IaaS or a PaaS platform, which is how most enterprises measure their presence in the cloud. Although SaaS is certainly an option for replacing on-premises applications, its usage tends to be for new, often off-the-shelf software, not existing software as in the case of IaaS and PaaS. Using that IaaS- and PaaS-only scenario, Global 2000 enterprises have migrated about 5 to 7 percent of their on-premises applications. That’s up from my estimate of 1 percent in 2013, a figure that aligns well with the revenue growth of the major public cloud providers.

Follow These Best Practices to Secure Your IoT Deployments

Unlike even the most widely distributed conventional networks, IoT networks present adopters with the unique challenge of managing ecosystems containing millions or even billions of devices. “Scale is the biggest challenge we’ll face in securing the IoT, and it’s going to require the security community to think differently,” Blackmer says. “This means more identity- and policy-based security, virtualization and the adaptability that brings, and using the network itself to detect and remediate malicious traffic and attacks.” Perhaps the trickiest thing about remotely managing high-scale IoT environments is planning how each device gets online and how IT teams will be able to quickly and accurately identify all of the networked devices. “Remote management is only useful if you have appropriately brought the device online in a highly scalable and secure way, with the appropriate identities associated with it,” Grieco says.

IBM bets on the blockchain to keep your medical data safe

The research initiative is a two-year agreement between the FDA and IBM which aims to create and promote a "secure, efficient and scalable exchange of health data using blockchain technology." As our healthcare systems rely more and more on electronic records, the idea of transformative, smart healthcare systems has caught the eyes of tech vendors and research teams alike. Using software to create more efficient records systems, using Big Data and sequencing to improve our understanding of genetics and the use of smart devices to monitor the conditions of patients automatically are just some of the ways technology is impacting our health, but with innovation lies risk. Data breaches are a daily occurrence in today's world. If is a matter of when, not if, enterprise players become the victim of a successful cyberattack, and it is almost expected that, eventually, your data will in some form end up for sale online.

Microservices and containers present a new deployment model in 2017

One problem with microservices in traditional cloud deployments is the latency associated with accessing them. Every microservice is an inquiry-response combination, and if the microservice is accessed frequently in the course of doing work, the delays that accumulate can seriously impact user response time and productivity. This is an even greater problem if the microservices are brokered through an API management tool since the tool introduces an extra hop between the microservice user and the microservice. Another problem that can hurt microservice adoption is resource waste. Microservices are typically small, far smaller than traditional application components. When deployed on virtual machines (VMs), the operating system and middleware needed to run those microservices can make up over 90% of the machine image, and even then the machine images themselves are often much smaller than usual.

Death to the hybrid WAN

Hybrid WANs combine a mix of data services to interconnect geographically dispersed locations. A network that combines MPLS and carrier Ethernet services is a hybrid WAN, so too is a WAN that combines 4G and MPLS. When you have some sites connected via MPLS and others via IP VPNs, this too was a hybrid WAN. When you have sites connected to an MPLS backbone with a secondary Internet connection, you also have a hybrid WAN. SD-WANs speak about the overlay; hybrid WANs speak about the underlay. The two are not exclusionary. You can build a hybrid WAN without an SD-WAN, and you could build an SD-WAN that’s a hybrid WAN. ... You might be wondering, then, as to the difference between a hybrid WAN and a WAN. I would say, in fact, that practically there is no difference.

How IoT and machine learning can make our roads safer

Controlling traffic and keeping roads clear can help immensely in reducing accidents and incidents that occur because of poor road and weather conditions. Driving safety, in particular, is dependent on being able to monitor road surfaces and identify road hazards. IoT road sensors can provide real-time data from roads to help divert the flow of traffic away from areas of hazard. French IoT startup HIKOB is exploring the possibilities in several French cities. “Road sensors are going to be one of the most crucial developments that will take place in the world of transportation with the introduction of the Internet of Things technology,” says Ludovic Broquereau, VP of marketing and business development at HIKOB. “Road sensors can be easily embedded under the roads so that they can effectively measure the changes in temperature, traffic volume and humidity, among other weather and traffic constraints.”

12 New Year's resolutions for your data

Now you have data coming out of your ears and spilling all over the place. Your mainframe is a delicate flower on which nothing can be installed without a six-month study. The rest of your data is all on the SAN. That works out because you have a “great relationship with the EMC/Dell federation” (where you basically pay them whatever they want and they give you the “EMC treatment”). However, the SAN does you no good for finding actual information due to the effects of VM and application sprawl on your data organization. Now the millennials want to deploy MongoDB because it’s “webscale." The Hadoop vendor is knocking and wants to build a data lake, which is supposed to magically produce insights by using cheaper storage ... and produce yet another storage technology to worry about.

Ransom is the main motivation behind cyber attacks

“One thing is clear: Money is the top motivator in the threat landscape today,” said Carl Herberger, Vice President of Security Solutions at Radware. “Attackers employ an ever-increasing number of tactics to steal valuable information, from ransom attacks that can lock up a company’s data, to DDoS attacks that act as a smoke screen for information theft, to direct brute force or injection attacks that grant direct access to internal data. ... Cyber ransom is the fastest-growing motive and technique in cyber-attacks, as most phishing attempts now deliver ransomware. Today, threat actors focus their ransom attacks to target phones, laptops, company computers, and other devices that are a daily necessity. In the future, they may target lifesaving healthcare devices like defibrillators.

8 Big Tech Battles That Will Be Fought In 2017

As consumers and businesses continue to adopt smart devices at a growing rate, and in light of IoT malware that caused major Internet disruptions this past fall, there will likely be a battle between regulators and industry groups on the one hand, and consumers and some manufacturers on the other. Consumers want cheap devices, and there are firms that specialize in offering cheap technology; the government, industry groups, and cybersecurity professionals, on the other hand, want IoT devices to be made with some minimal security capabilities in order to prevent their being easily compromised and commandeered for DDoS attacks. But, adding features such as security improvements costs money, something that consumers do not like to spend on features about which they do not care.

Quote for the day:

"Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology" -- John Tudor

Daily Tech Digest - January 11, 2017

The Bright Side of Smart-Home Silly Season

The Internet of Things is one of the gadget industry's brightest hopes in a world that's saturated with smartphones. Sensors are cheap, and digital giants such as Amazon and Google are aggressively pushing their voice-command technology. The resulting hype, however, spawns inventions that should only exist in the corny worlds of science fiction. At this point, the IoT market isn't well-quantified. Intel says there were 15 billion connected IoT devices in the world in 2015 -- a number the chipmaker predicts will increase to 200 billion by 2020. Gartner, the tech consultancy, counted fewer than 5 billion devices in 2015 and predicted fewer than 21 billion by 2020. There's a good reason for the gap: No one can predict which objects consumers and businesses will want to connect to the internet.

IBM Watson, FDA to explore blockchain for secure patient data exchange

Transactions are recorded as blocks of data to be added to the chain; each block contains a unique cryptographic hash that is used to track that block as well as others in the associated chain. Data within the blocks cannot be modified and the chains are secure by design. Electronic medical records (EMRs) carry a mass of data, including demographics, treatment and genomic information, and act as repositories for biomedical research. But because data in EMRs is the most highly sensitive, there has been little progress in sharing information for research and clinical use, such as aiding in physician decision making. ... "Transformative healthcare solutions are possible when healthcare researchers and providers have access to a 360-degree view of patient data. Today, patients have little access to their health data and cannot easily share with researchers or providers," IBM said.

Rethink on bank cybersecurity rules might only follow major bank breach, says expert

In an interview with Out-Law.com, professor Richard Benham, chairman of the National Cyber Management Centre, expanded on earlier comments he provided to the BBC. He reiterated his view that there will be a run on a bank in 2017 as a result of customers losing confidence in the security of their funds following a cyber attack, and said more formal regulation of cybersecurity is needed in UK banking. Benham said that, despite the existence of Bank of England guidance, the banking industry is currently "effectively unregulated on cybersecurity". There is a lack of "mandated standards", he said, and that these should be put in place. "At the moment there is a tendency to leave banks to manage their own security," Benham said.

Top obstacles and benefits of security framework adoption

“Cybersecurity frameworks are a good way for IT security professionals to create a solid baseline for measuring security effectiveness and to meet compliance requirements, but it can be a challenge to do this without the tools, talent and support from executive leadership,” said Cris Thomas, strategist, Tenable Network Security. “Having the proper tools and intuitive reporting features in place not only improves overall cybersecurity, but also can help organizations eliminate some of the staffing and budget problems by automating the implementation and integration of their security frameworks.” Despite reported obstacles, respondents who have adopted security frameworks see clear benefits, including compliance with contractual obligations (47 percent), achieving measurable security improvements (43 percent) ...

Will you be safe with an always-connected Internet of Things?

Products that can be controlled remotely via mobile devices are rapidly expanding, and include applications such as controlling heating systems, monitoring CCTV systems, door locking, and the control of home lighting and appliances. These smart devices improve our quality of life and give us additional control and security in our homes, but the benefits also come with potential threats from unseen attackers on the web. Another key reason for heightened security fears is due to the number of modern vehicles becoming increasingly connected. As we move towards more intelligent autonomous vehicles, cars are essentially becoming cloud-connected IoT devices with the associated risks of malicious attacks, potentially endangering the lives of drivers and passengers.

Three States Join Others To Expand PI Definition To Include Usernames Or Email Addresses

Under European and many other international data privacy laws, PI includes any information that identifies an individual or from which an individual can be identified when aggregated with other information. This will include usernames and email addresses where the individual's actual name is included within the username or email address. Under the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force in May 2018, if a US organization targets European consumers for goods or services, it will be subject to the GDPR when it processes the PI of such European consumers—whether or not the organization is based in the European Union. The requirements under the GDPR include providing information to the individuals about how their PI will be used, disclosed, and transferred, as well as requirements to obtain consent for the processing and transfer of such data to the US.

Researchers: Brace for a Major Cloud Provider Compromise

Even as data is moving to the cloud, many countries are focusing inward rather than on open-border and free-trade strategies. This includes recent advances in tax-policy, where previous approaches to multi-national corporate governance have come under the microscope of the world’s treasurers. Further initiatives are expanding in the internet realms, with new operating system initiatives being pursued to remove dependency upon foreign software, and foreign hosted SaaS offerings being excluded from other countries such as the Russian LinkedIn Ban. Additionally, multiple governments are enhancing their surveillance initiatives, such as the Russian government’s requirement to hold all cryptography keys to decrypt internet traffic. “We believe this will continue resulting in an increasingly balkanized and separated internet,” Shelmire said.

Security fatigue—or how I learned to overcome laziness and use a password manager

You’re not alone. Security fatigue is a bug the majority of us have. A NIST study recently reported that most people don’t do the right thing when it comes to cybersecurity because they are too lazy, too hurried, or not convinced that they are a target for cybercrime. The study summed up a problem we all know is true. Comb through the stories about security fatigue, and you’ll find many figures citing the prevalence of the problem—91 percent of people in the NIST study report using passwords across sites, for example. And even as surrounded by security-conscious folks as I am, I’ve yet to meet one person who claimed they never, ever succumb to the disease. ... It was time for me to quit saying “Use a unique password for every site!” and not doing it. I needed to overcome laziness (and hypocrisy) and start using a password manager. Boy, has it been hard!

Time to get smarter about public Wi-Fi and personal data

91% of Wi-Fi users do not believe public Wi-Fi is secure, yet 89% of Wi-Fi users choose to use it anyway. This shows that, while more Wi-Fi users are aware of the risks, an increasing number of users connect anyway. Wi-Fi needs to have the security and performance to sustain the many different activities and applications employees are engaging in and with daily. 83% of Wi-Fi users are accessing their email, whether it’s for work or personal reasons and 43% are accessing work/ job specific information. 42% of Wi-Fi users are shopping and 18% are logging into banking applications on public Wi-Fi. These two activities specifically expose more personal information to potential intruders. No matter what application users are accessing, personal and business critical data is exposed to potential threats.

Measuring the Performance of Enterprise Architecture

How much business value does the enterprise architecture function generate? This KPI can be decomposed in many ways: How much value do we generate because we have the necessary business insight through well integrated systems and clean, properly governed data? What is the value of speed, due to our solutions being built with agility in mind? What is the value of a clean, well-managed technology portfolio? What is the value of critical business capabilities relying on high quality technology components? How much is the worth of solutions that are simple, intuitive, and a pleasure for our users? What is the value of technology based innovation? Well, we haven’t figured out the way to measure the business value of enterprise architecture yet, but one thing is for sure, if we wish to get there, it has to be a joint business-IT undertaking. I would love to hear from you if you have good ideas or solutions.

Quote for the day:

"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." -- George Bernard Shaw

Daily Tech Digest - January 10, 2017

U.S. intelligence agencies envision the world in 2035

The trends are global. Mega cities are sinking, about half of the world's aquifers are being bled dry, and in 20 years, half of the world's population will experience water shortages and in some places severe shortages, said Rod Schoonover, director of environment and natural resources, National Intelligence Council, at a webcast panel about the report. Capabilities and basic science will also exist for individuals to develop their own, do-it-yourself weapons of mass destruction, said Suzanne Fry, director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council. These terrorists will operate with the goal of "bringing armageddon to everybody," she said.

8 Retail Technology Predictions For 2017

Shoppers opened their pocketbooks wide over the holidays in 2016, pushing retail growth estimates (the Wall Street Journal reported the fastest growth rate since 2005) and consumer confidence to new heights — with ecommerce a particular bright spot with over $110 billion in sales, according to Forrester Research. Technology contributed mightily to that retail success, at every stage and angle of the shopping journey, both in brick-and-mortar stores and online — from browsing, point-of-sale and shipping to checkout, supply chain, payments and much more. That won’t change in 2017, as top retailers have already long-planned their technology priorities for the coming year. Here, experts weigh in on some of their top technology prediction

Chaos Engineering

Over time, we realized that these activities share underlying themes that are subtler than simply “break things in production.” We also noticed that organizations such as Amazon,4 Google,4Microsoft,5 and Facebook6 were applying similar techniques to test their systems’ resilience. We believe that these activities form part of a discipline that's emerging in our industry; we call this discipline chaos engineering. specifically, chaos engineering involves experimenting on a distributed system to build con dence in its capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. These conditions could be anything from a hardware failure, to an unexpected surge in client requests, to a malformed value in a runtime con guration parameter. Our experience has led us to determine principles of chaos engineering, which we elaborate on here.

Microservices or death: Diffusing the monolith time bomb

A change leader should first recognize that not everyone in their company is willing to accept change. Like it or not, there will always be two groups of developers in your organization: Those who embrace and drive change, and those who resist it at every turn. Competent and well-intentioned as this latter group may be, changing their attitude to follow the new microservices model is a cultural shift that must happen—and sooner rather than later. Often, this shift involves long, painful meetings, and sometimes even letting people go. Even Amazon, the poster child of service-oriented architecture, required a top-down directive from Jeff Bezos before turning the corner. The best way to overcome this is “leading by example” by having those early adopters roll out a few microservices and show that they are indeed easier to operate and develop than monoliths.

Convergence of mobile, payments and security in 2017

Most enterprises have focused on data breach protection measures with varying degrees of success, sometimes accepting calculated risks as attacks tended to primarily yield payment card information. However, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting PII with the intent to steal and monetize identities. With connected applications and devices – such as connected home, car, medical devices and more – there is a dawning realization that a security breach can cause physical harm to the individual person. Here too a data-centric approach to protecting sensitive data at the data level mitigates risk and neutralizes the effects of a cyberattack. At the same time, there is increasing focus on just how much data privacy consumers are knowingly and unknowingly giving up with today’s technologies.

The Need for Better Cybersecurity Prioritization Metrics

Clearly, a lot of time has been spent by various organizations to come up with 10,000’s of controls. However, anyone who has tried to implement cybersecurity across an organization has likely experienced that there are too many topics to cover and there are no good sources to explain what the top areas to focus on should be. In fact, many players in the cybersecurity industry’s “marketing machine” spend considerable effort to sell customers on one kind of product or another without really helping them with overall prioritizing. Customers can only do a few things. “I only have time to do the top 10 – but what are those?!” In order to figure out what those top 10 are for a customer’s organization, we as the defender ecosystem need generally accepted structure and metrics.

Bots may send your liability risk soaring

Consider a typical fintech company, a bank. It uses a bot to cover the most commonly asked retirement fund questions, but someone programmed the wrong answer into the system. Let’s assume that the error causes a customer to miss a key deadline, which causes that customer to have an opportunity-loss of a lot of money. If this matter goes to litigation and a jury or judge is deciding an appropriate resolution, will they view this differently than if an associate gave that wrong answer? Let’s say that the human associate is a 22-year-old with just one week on the job. A jury might decide that her error was deserving of some leeway. The same jury might take a completely different view if the error resulted from code that was written, reviewed and approved at multiple levels — including two people in the Legal department — over several months.

Microsoft's Dropped A Huge Windows 10 Preview Build 15002

Windows 10's Creators Update is due early this year, and Microsoft served up what you might call a hearty appetizer Monday morning: its massive Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002, with so many improvements that we’ve broken out the back-end ones, which include pauseable updates, app throttling and even a new Green Screen of Death, into a separate article. Build 15002 is being released for the PC only, as part of the Fast Ring of Insider builds. Be aware of a few bugs: Miracast connections won’t work, and the Netflix app probably won’t render video (instead, use Edge). Why this matters: Microsoft didn’t specifically mention the Creators’ Update in the context of the new build, but this truckload of features has certainly been added with that update in mind. All of this will probably arrive on non-Insider PCs later this spring.

Adding Purpose to Scrum with Holacracy

Scrum is typically implemented in hierarchical organisations and often only applies to organising the work at the level of one or more teams. Above and around the Scrum teams everyone still works in a hierarchical style and the team is therefore limited in authority and autonomy. As Agile coaches we implement Scrum and give teams a great tool to organise their work, only to find that they are still limited by the hierarchical systems around them. Holacracy helps us govern our organisations and completely replaces the hierarchical systems. It helps us coming up with clear purposes and lets us evolve our organisation around that. Holacracy also has tools for getting work done, but in my experience Scrum is more suited for day-to-day cooperation within teams. Scrum offers concrete tools for visualisation, communication, setting goals, prioritising work, etc.

90 Percent of IT Pros Worry About Password Reuse

Ninety percent of enterprise IT professionals are concerned that employee reuse of personal credentials for work purposes could compromise enterprise security, according to the results of a recent Gemalto survey of 1,150 IT professionals worldwide. At the same time, 68 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable allowing employees to use their social media credentials on company resources. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they're facing increasing pressure to implement the same types of authentication methods typically seen in consumer services, such as fingerprint scanning and iris recognition, and 63 percent said they believe security methods designed for consumers provide sufficient protection for enterprises. In fact, 52 percent of respondents expect consumer and enterprise security methods to merge entirely within the next three years.

Quote for the day:

"If you command wisely, you'll be obeyed cheerfully." -- Thomas Fuller