Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - February 18, 2017

The Rise of AI Makes Emotional Intelligence More Important

Those that want to stay relevant in their professions will need to focus on skills and capabilities that artificial intelligence has trouble replicating — understanding, motivating, and interacting with human beings. A smart machine might be able to diagnose an illness and even recommend treatment better than a doctor. It takes a person, however, to sit with a patient, understand their life situation (finances, family, quality of life, etc.), and help determine what treatment plan is optimal. Similarly, a smart machine may be able to diagnose complex business problems and recommend actions to improve an organization. A human being, however, is still best suited to jobs like spurring the leadership team to action, avoiding political hot buttons, and identifying savvy individuals to lead change.

Support Grows For Robo-Advice

Accenture's report Financial Providers Transforming Distribution Models For The Evolving Consumer says that seven in 10 consumers around the world would welcome robo-advisory services – computer-generated advice and services that are independent of a human advisor – for their banking, insurance and retirement planning. Yet, a large number of consumers still want human interaction for their more complex needs, leaving firms challenged with blending a physical presence with an advanced digital user-experience, as they look to integrate robot and human services. ... The survey also found that consumers are willing to switch to non-traditional providers for financial services. Nearly one-third would switch to Google, Amazon or Facebook for banking, insurance and financial advisory services.

Protecting your digital enterprise—it’s not just up to IT

So, how do organizations protect their digital enterprise and ensure that they are compliant? It will be essential to provide your IT team with the resources it needs to manage data effectively, including where it goes and who can access it. At the session, my team members and I discussed how HPE’s ControlPoint and Structured Data Manager are ideal tools to help businesses achieve this level of data hygiene. But achieving compliance isn’t just up to the IT team. It requires an organization-wide commitment. “What’s really important is to create a pervasive information governance culture throughout the organization,” said Duncan. “GDPR is not a security problem. It’s not even an IT problem; it’s a business problem.”

Tapping the Entrepreneurial Spirit for Successful Digital Transformation

The likeliest place to find these change agents is right in the trenches, in the lines of business. These are the individuals who are intimately involved with and exposed to daily operations, who are uniquely positioned to see opportunities for problem-solving. Taking a fresh perspective on the mundane tasks that are performed every day can inspire creative solutions using custom apps. Here’s a real-life example of an individual who put this experience and perspective to good use. Never one to do things conventionally, Pete Tucci was a pro baseball player with Major League Baseball. When a career-ending hand injury cut his dream short, he founded the Tucci Lumber Bats Company, producing custom baseball bats. The fact that he had no woodworking experience didn’t deter him; he was determined to figure out how to make world-class bats. In short, Tucci was a change agent.

From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core

For all the fundamental change that digital reinvention demands, it’s worth emphasizing that it doesn’t call for a “throw it all out” approach. An engine-parts company, for example, will still likely make engine parts after a digital reinvention, but may do so in a way that’s much more agile and analytically driven, or the company may open up new lines of business by leveraging existing assets. Apple, with its move from computer manufacturer to music and lifestyle brand through its iPhone and iTunes ecosystem, reinvented itself—even as it continued to build computers. John Deere created a whole series of online services for farmers even as it continued to sell tractors and farm equipment. There are many elements to a transformation, from end-to-end journey redesign and embedding analytics into processes to open tech platforms.

3 Big Blockchain Ideas MIT is Working on Right Now

Work on the multifaceted world of blockchain tech now sits easily alongside transparent robots that eat real-world fish, solar nebula research, and other imaginative, futuristic projects in progress at the university. Part of MIT's Media Lab, DCI now has a team of 22 people and at least seven ongoing research projects, and it nurtures three startups that use cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology in a variety of ways. To date, the initiative has funded the work of bitcoin protocol developers, and has supported a range of research, going beyond bitcoin to partner with distributed ledger tech startup Ripple and developing enterprise data projects. DCI research director Neha Narula, who helps drive the initiative, told CoinDesk:

Raking in the Ransoms: How the Russian Ransomware Threat Landscape Ticks

If you think Russian threat actors code a piece of ransomware and directly target users with it, you’re wrong. All native ransomware enterprises are much more sophisticated than that. It all begins with a developer who creates the crypto-malware. They are the one responsible for coding the software, adding additional modules, and setting up IT infrastructure to support the ransomware’s distribution. To coordinate this operation, a creator inevitably hires or enlists the help of a manager. The manager is the only person in a Russian ransomware enterprise who gets to communicate with the author. Their job is to internalize the directives of the creator and find partners who can realize the developer’s vision. In other words, a manager is responsible for finding partners who can help expand the ransomware initiative. Kaspersky Lab explains how they do this in a blog post:

Putting digital transformation on the business agenda

Since embarking on this new world of work, Microsoft Japan now regularly measures how successful its work style innovation has been. Employees are rewarded for making calls and arranging meetings more promptly. “A Japanese company, on average, takes about 10 days before they have an official meeting, from asking for the meeting to an actual meeting to happen; in our case, 5.5 days,” says Hirano. “The new work style empowers employees with the flexibility to not only become more productive but also achieve more work-life balance. This has helped significantly in attracting and retaining talent. In fact, we have halved the attrition rate of female staff.

How Fintech Will Change The Way We Bank In The Developing World

The spread of mobile phones has spearheaded this opportunity. The economic benefit of this inclusion is massive at an individual and societal and organisational level. Not only is there opportunity to provide financial services to 80 percent of the global population through their mobile phones, there are also 200 million businesses in emerging economies without access to financial services including savings and credit. By bringing down the barriers of entry of the banking institutions, entrepreneurs now have the opportunity to enjoy the economic benefits previously available exclusively to established institutions. Blockchain solutions have provided a digital platform which enhances transparency. Furthermore, for governments, a cash run economic ecosystem means that transactions are not captured into the system and tax revenue is lost.

How Machine Learning Transforms Digital Experience, One Industry at a Time

Every customer’s journey is different. Someone looking for wedding items, DIY repairs or Halloween costumes will have different preferences and different stages of the buying journey. ... Machine learning can cultivate this personal experience automatically, quickly and at scale.

Knowing exactly what they want ... Natural language processing (NLP) will help create an incredibly efficient marketing machine from a simple site search bar. One person’s “Cable knit jumper” is someone else's “chunky sweater,” and NLP continuously learns to identify and connect intent. These super-charged analytics give insight to more than just trending search terms, but can also tell you what overall topics and categories are likely to be the next big thing — and which of your current catalogue already fits nicely into these trends.

Microsoft Aims To Expand Into Healthcare With AI And Cloud Services

This is a slight departure from Microsoft's previous healthcare projects like Microsoft Health that has focused on data-based patient programs. The new initiative will create partnerships between various players in the healthcare industry and Microsoft's AI and Research organization, starting with a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). UPMC's product development experts will work with Microsoft's research and technology expertise to build tech solutions that are customized to the needs they are serving. The synergy between the products designed to solve healthcare issues and the realities of everyday healthcare is a crucial stepping stone in healthcare tech initiatives. More efficient information and workflow tools can improve health care systems and even save lives.

Quote for the day:

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln

Daily Tech Digest - February 17, 2017

Extending COBIT 5 Data Security and Governance Guidance

COBIT 5 encourages each enterprise to adapt the COBIT content to the enterprise’s own priorities and circumstances. However, among the processes COBIT 5 recommends are 3 especially suited for security, and the metrics suggested for each are only a subset of measurements that might be meaningful to the enterprise. First is that a system is in place that considers and effectively addresses enterprise information security requirements. This appears overarching (a good thing), and the measures suggested for it include the number of key security roles that have been clearly defined and the number of security-related incidents. Most enterprises would wish to add other measures to the list in keeping with their own situation.

7 tips to turn threat data into true threat intelligence

Unvetted threat intel is a bit like getting raw data feeds about the stock market. Responding to such data, you may be the next investment millionaire, or you could completely lose your shirt. You need to filter through it to eliminate the useless portions, and carefully weigh the balance. As Malcovery Security said in a blog some months ago, most of what the industry refers to as threat intelligence is really just threat data. It is just a list of data elements, full of noise and false positives. Until the intelligence part is applied to this data feed, it is fairly useless, or even worse, may lead to false conclusions. According to Mark Orlando in his presentation to the RSA Security Conference in 2015, raw threat intel data is highly commoditized, has poor quality control, a short shelf life, and promotes a false sense of awareness.

CTO: Our quest for agility led us to the OpenStack framework

The OpenStack framework has been around for a reasonably long time. Even more important, OpenStack was an early manifestation of an approach purposefully designed to help us deliver agility. In the years since the OpenStack framework became available, others have created alternatives to Open Stack, but they are all built to do similar things: leverage commodity hardware, open standards, virtualization and orchestration tools to deliver fluid, portable and complete services (compute, storage and networking). With fluid, portable and complete IT services, we can flex, scale, move around and revise our services as needed. These are capabilities we need -- no, must have -- if we are to survive and thrive in a technology-driven marketplace.

58 Mind-Blowing Digital Marketing Stats You Need to Know

While there are several forms of traditional marketing including print, radio, and television, statistics show that digital marketing is taking over in terms of popularity and success. In fact, by 2021 it’s projected that marketing leaders will spend 75% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing rather than traditional marketing. ... Social media is changing the face of the marketing culture in several ways. With social media, it’s easier to collect useful data on consumers, build a visible and popular brand, and sell products on various social media platforms. The following statistics will boggle your mind and help you understand the importance of getting your social strategy right this year.

Gain competitive advantage with NoSQL databases

Till yet we learned the reasons that worked as a catalyst for the failure of relational databases. However this is not completely true as relational databases still have a fair share of the market however NoSQL drew the attention of many companies which wanted to deal with big data. Some of the NoSQL advantages are- Make the system agile- NoSQl databases work on a dynamic model that allows storing and maintaining data without defining it beforehand. This makes the faster and responsive than ever before. Easy scaling- Scaling up the relational databases were complex and expensive. Unlike this the NoSQL databases can easily be scaled-up and down as per the workload as these have a dynamic architecture offering much more operational benefits than RDBMS.

Russian Cyberspies Blamed For US Election Hacks Are Now Targetting MACs

The group, which is known in the security industry under different names, including Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, and APT28, has been operating for almost a decade. It is believed to be the sole user and likely developer of a Trojan program called Sofacy or X-Agent. X-Agent variants for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS have been found in the wild in the past, but researchers from Bitdefender have now come across what appears to be the first macOS version of the Trojan. It's not entirely clear how the malware is being distributed because the Bitdefender researchers only obtained the malware sample, not the full attack chain. However, it's possible a macOS malware downloader dubbed Komplex, found in September, might be involved.

How to use Instant Tethering on your Google Pixel or Nexus device

Staying connected on the go is a constant struggle for business professionals and everyday techies alike. However, a new feature from Google called Instant Tethering could offer a more intelligent way to keep your devices online. A recent product forum post by Google product manager Omri Amarilio explained that Instant Tethering uses Bluetooth to allow to Google devices to communicate. The devices, such as tablets and Pixel phones, must be logged into with the same Google account. "When you unlock a tablet such as the Pixel C, it will notice if there is no internet connection available, and will ask your Pixel phone if it has internet and battery life," Amarilio wrote in his post. "If it does, we will give you an option to enable a secure hotspot and pair [automatically], without even taking your phone out of your pocket."

Real-World, Man-Machine Algorithms

There are many machine learning classification problems where using log data is standard, essentially giving you labels for free. For example, ad click prediction models are typically trained on which ads users click on, video recommendation systems make heavy use of which videos you’ve watched in the past, etc. However, even these systems need to move beyond simple click data once they reach large enough scale and sophistication; for instance, because they’re heavily biased towards clicks, it can be difficult to tune the systems to show new ads and new videos to users, and so explore-exploit algorithms become necessary. ... As another example, suppose you're an e-commerce site like eBay or Etsy. You're starting to see a lot of spammy profiles selling Viagra, drugs, and other blacklisted products, so you want to fight the problem with machine learning.

2 powerful new features on their way to Android right now

Android can be full of surprises. Thanks to the deconstructed nature of the operating system, individual pieces of the software receive updates all the time -- in a way that has nothing to do with the big, attention-grabbing OS rollouts. It happens with a large and ever-expanding list of core system apps that now exist in the Play Store and are updated accordingly, but it also happens silently and seamlessly with some behind-the-scenes tools that are easy to overlook. As a result, useful new features can sometimes appear in random areas of your device -- and you might not even realize they're there. Such an update is underway as we speak. Google is in the midst of rolling out a refinement to its Google Play Services app that brings two powerful new options into Android's settings -- options you might never notice but don't want to miss.

Bruce Schneier: It's time for internet-of-things regulation

Schneier argued there is precedence for creating such an agency to address new technologies, from trains and automobiles to radio and nuclear. And he said those agencies tend to be created for two reasons. "New technologies need new expertise," Schneier said. "And new technologies need new controls. And this is something markets can't solve. Markets are, by definition, short-term profit-motivated. That's what they're supposed to do. They don't solve collective action problems." Government, he said, is "the entity that is used to solve problems like this." But Schneier also admitted that a regulatory approach to IoT threats brings a lot of problems, from a general lack of technical expertise in the government to historical problems with regulatory capture.

Quote for the day:

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe" -- Anatole France

Daily Tech Digest - February 16, 2017

Biometrics lead to liberty, security debate

“It’s going to apply to all of us, because there is a global priority of security and that philosophy has been clearly illustrated by President Donald Trump,” Joyner said. The benefits of these systems is the potential to reduce fraud, increase security by accurately assessing and identifying individuals, eliminating the need for passwords and, possibly, a cashless society, he said. “There have already been programs like this in effect, and I think that’s why nobody is questioning it now,” constitutional law professor Joseph Ignagni said. The issue presents an interesting legal question about the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant or probable cause, since seizing biometric data is technically a search that is being recorded or kept without probable cause, Ignagni said.

One in three cybersecurity job openings go begging, survey finds

The experience part is paradoxical, of course, since someone somewhere has to bet their infrastructure on an inexperienced but eager candidate willing to learn. There are some choice certifications that make the difference, led by the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, sought by 27 percent of security managers. The survey report's authors recommend nurturing talent from within, to invest in offering support for training and certifications to current staff members. The advantage is these individuals already understand the business, and who owns what line of business. At least 26 percent of security professionals say they have positions that have been open for more than six months, and another six percent say they have positions they haven't been able to fill.

Demand for qualified cybersecurity professionals continues to outstrip supply

Studies show most corporate job openings result in 60 to 250 applicants. Compounding the problem, ISACA’s State of Cybersecurity 2017 found that 37 per cent of respondents say fewer than 1 in 4 candidates have the qualifications employers need to keep companies secure. “Though the field of cybersecurity is still relatively young, demand continues to skyrocket and will only continue to grow in the coming years,” says Christos Dimitriadis, ISACA board chair and group director of Information Security for INTRALOT. “As enterprises invest more resources to protect data, the challenge they face is finding top-flight security practitioners who have the skills needed to do the job. When positions go unfilled, organisations have a higher exposure to potential cyberattacks. It’s a race against the clock.”

Board Can Play A Key Role In Curbing Cyber Threats

The good news is, there has been an increase in the number of firms whose boards of directors and management that are actively engaged with cybersecurity and adopting best practices in their IT departments. Protiviti’s 2017 Security and Privacy Survey shows that current board engagement levels are at 33 percent, compared to 28 percent in 2015. “While there has been an increase in boards of directors’ and company management’s engagement with information security is a positive sign, it’s imperative that leadership keeps closer tabs on the state of their organizations’ cybersecurity programs,” said Scott Laliberte, a Protiviti managing director and leader of the firm’s global IT security and privacy practice.

Lawmakers Want Self-Driving Cars To Thrive But Still Fear Hacks

The vision of widespread self-driving cars might not be realized without Congressional help. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chair John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., announced plans Tuesday to eventually introduce legislation that promoting the autonomous vehicle industry. Today's federal safety standards involve concepts such as the "placement of driver controls" that "assume a human operator," they wrote in a statement. "While these requirements make sense in today’s conventional vehicles, they could inhibit innovation or create hazards for self-driving vehicles." They also plan to examine the "existing patchwork of laws and regulations and the traditional roles of federal and state regulators.”

Hands on with the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 hybrid

A notebook should take you from workstation to couch to the road, with as few peripherals or headaches as possible. But as notebooks get thinner and lighter, more manufacturers have followed Macbook's footsteps and ditched full-sized HDMI, DisplayPorts and USB ports. Instead, the trend is turning towards USB Type-C connectors that can do it all -- as long as you have the right adapter. I've had to temper my great port-expectations because I know it's not reasonable to expect a full USB or HDMI port on a thin, compact device. But, that doesn't mean I'm ready to say goodbye to every port. While the Macbook is an extreme example -- it features just one USB Type-C port for everything, including charging -- Dell found a comfortable middle ground on the XPS 13 2-in-1.

Google Assistant Will Soon Be Able To Buy Stuff For You On Command

There isn’t much you can do with the feature after it’s set up, but presumably Google will announce support for third-party stores shortly. At the start of the set-up process, you’ll need to accept the terms and conditions for both Google Payments and Google Express, an online marketplace that links to a number of popular stores, such as Walgreens, Costco, and Toys R Us, so at the very least you'll be able to buy things there. However, asking Google Assistant to shop for something on Google Express merely brings up a search results screen. Since the feature is tied to your Google account and not the Pixel phone specifically, it’s likely it will work with all of the devices integrated with Assistant, including Google Home and Android Wear 2.0 watches.

There Are A Lot Of Open Questions When It Comes To Machine-Based Innovation

The trend in machine learning has been strongly in favor of neural networks. If 2016 was the year when Alpha-Go bested world's best Go players, I think 2017 will be the year where we make continued progress towards neural-networks based technologies entering the every-day world. I'm thinking better personal assistants (Amazon's Alexa and Google Home are already great successes), greater progress towards autonomous vehicles, machine learning in health-care, etc. People way smarter than myself have been thinking about this. I really like Andrew Ng's perspective: 'if a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.' A lot of analytics that are done require way more than one second of thought!

10 Management Techniques from Born-Digital Companies

Born-digital enterprises are “a generation of organizations founded after 1995, whose operating models and capabilities are based on exploiting internet-era information and digital technologies as a core competency.” “It’s actually the superior leadership thinking, patterns of thought and competencies they’re employing that are beginning to be the differentiators,” said Mark Raskino, VP and Gartner Fellow at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Barcelona, Spain. But conventional companies are often resistant to the idea that they might be able to replicate some of these ideas in their own enterprise. However, the excuses are starting to fall away as companies move toward digital. Traditional companies previously may have thought, those are startups so they can operate differently or those are small companies, they work in the ephemeral, or they are all U.S.-based companies.

Clear goals, patience required for successful IT automation strategy

"There is a training curve for digital systems that does not elicit better work in the short term; it takes time to get there," Conlee said. An IT automation strategy can be a huge help when it comes to one common issue facing modern digitized companies, Galusha said: process and data complexity. Because these companies are responsible for many systems with numerous internal/external data sources, it is difficult to connect all that information to the company's processes. A robotic process automation strategy can help with consolidating data for analytics purposes, Galusha said, and apply unique business rules to information contained in these numerous data sources. "Your processes, and how you are making decisions, [is] only as good as the information," Galusha said. "If you are doing it manually, it's slow, it's inefficient, and you're probably making errors along the way."

Quote for the day:

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." --Theodore Roosevelt

Daiy Tech Digest - February 15, 2017

Operational - the Forgotten Architectural View

DevOps requires embracing new, often unfamiliar technologies and ideas. Architectural thinking and design can help clarify who the stakeholders are, what concerns they have, and how those concerns are being met. Len Bass and his colleagues recently published a book on DevOps technology and practice for software architects2. Beyond that, little guidance exists for architects dealing with their systems' operational environments. To help fill this gap, I outline here an architectural viewpoint, one that updates and reworks the operational viewpoint Nick Rozanski and I described in Software Systems Architecture

Big Data: Why Should You Be Aware of It

As businesses, of all sizes, push to become more competitive in a rapidly developing global economy, there are a number of influences that are moving front and center. It would be difficult to identify one singular component of business that has had the impact of Big Data over the last several years, and there is a good reason for this. Whether you are running a training company or a marketing agency, Big Data will play an immensely powerful role in the development of effective models of customer engagement, branding, research and development, and more. Big Data represents a massive opportunity for businesses around the world, primarily based on its capacity to transform and disrupt the status quo. If you are a business owner, it is imperative that you are aware of Big Data and how it can benefit your business.

CIOs disrupt IT operating models to align with digital business

For many CIOs operating in the digital era, the need to meet customer demands is paramount. But many CIOs also realize that before their organizations can serve customers they must empower employees with premium tools. Borrowing a page from Apple’s Genius Bar playbook, Salesforce.com CIO Ross Meyercord instituted Tech Force teams in the SaaS software vendor’s break rooms. Employees needing technical help can approach the Tech Force staffers to troubleshoot computer, phone or other issues. They get face-to-face with IT staff, rather than filing impersonal help-desk tickets from their desks. ... Unbounded IT and startup culture extend to healthcare organizations such as St. Luke's Healthcare Systems, which includes 10 hospitals in Kansas City, Mo. In true bimodal fashion, CIO Debe Gash is splitting her IT projects into two categories: run-the-business efforts and transformational activities.

Revolutionary Navigation Standard by Volkswagen and Mobileye

"The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost", said Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye. Professor Shashua adds this: "The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilises crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving." In fact, the agreement is the first of its kind to merge the data of different automobile manufacturers worldwide to create a single ‘high-definition world map'.

Data Center Security Critical for Securing Enterprise Data

These cyber-attacks will continue to increase, both in number and sophistication, as we become more globally connected—and the bad actors intent on carrying out their malicious acts become more connected. Unfortunately, detecting and preventing cyber-attacks is made more difficult because the security strategies of the IT teams and the facilities teams—who are responsible for data security and building/physical security, respectively—often don’t align. This problem becomes much more pronounced on a macro level when your organization uses cloud or colocation hosting services from a third-party data center provider. So how do you maintain the highest levels of data security…and who’s ultimately responsible? The truth is, it’s a shared responsibility.

Google brings global database system 'Spanner' to its Cloud Platform

“When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution,” product manager for Cloud Spanner, Deepti Srivastava, said in a blog post. “Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.” He added: “Over the years, we’ve battle-tested Spanner internally with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centers around the world. At Google, Spanner supports tens of millions of queries per second and runs some of our most critical services.”

Risk Level Categorization in Insurance Policy.

Market Segmentation Is The Key To The Insurance Industry. It is virtually accepted that no risks will be identical. If you are insuring a home within the same locality, it is entirely possible that the risks on one of the homes will be slightly higher than the other homes. You have to understand that insurance is all about pooling risks. If the calculation of these risks is inaccurate then the insurance company will have a heavy price to pay. That is why there are always ways in which the insurance policy is changed. The segmentation is also the key to profits for the insurance company. At the bottom of the pile in terms of cost are the low-cost insurance policies. If you decide to go with budget flood insurance for your area, then it is likely that you will first be assessed to check whether you fall on the lowest level of insurance.

RXJava2 by Example

Reactive programming is a specification for dealing with asynchronous streams of data, providing tools for transforming and combining streams and for managing flow-control, making it easier to reason about your overall program design. But easy it is not, and there is definitely a learning curve. For the mathematicians among us it is reminiscent of the leap from learning standard algebra with its scalar quantities, to linear algebra with its vectors, matrices, and tensors, essentially streams of data that are treated as a unit. Unlike traditional programming that considers objects, the fundamental unit of reactive reasoning is the stream of events. Events can come in the form of objects, data feeds, mouse movements, or even exceptions. The word “exception” expresses the traditional notion of an exceptional handling, as in - this is what is supposed to happen and here are the exceptions.

UK debuts new National Cyber Security Centre to take on cybercrime

The NCSC's launch comes after the UK government recently experienced a number of high-profile security breaches ... and a ransomware attack at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. Earlier this month, the Public Accounts Committee called the government's approach to cybersecurity "inconsistent, dysfunctional and chaotic," ZDNet reported. ... "The NCSC will work together with UK organisations, businesses and individuals to provide authoritative and coherent cyber security advice and cyber incident management," the report stated. "This is underpinned by world-class research and innovation." The NCSC aims to manage cyber incidents as well as help citizens protect their machines before a security breach occurs. The strategy is to "use government as a guinea pig for all the measures we want to see done at national scale," said NCSC technical director Ian Levy in the report.

IBM integrates Watson into its security operations platform

Big Blue announced general availability of Watson for Cyber Security, an offering that has been tested with more than 40 customers over the last year. In that time, Watson has ingested more than 1 million security documents. The aim is to help security analysts go through Watson's knowledge base with natural language. IBM is also integrating its X-Force Command Center network, which tracks security events. IBM is announcing the Watson Cognitive Security Operation Centers at the RSA security conference this week in San Francisco. ... One key takeaway from IBM's move is that the company is hoping to use Watson to patch a shortage of security analysts and knowhow. With its various tools and data, IBM security operations platform aims to cut the time spent on cybersecurity investigations. IBM's cognitive security operations platform is available on premise or as an IBM Cloud offering.

Quote for the day:

“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is.” -- Anita Roddick

Daily Tech Digest - February 13, 2017

Approach an off-premises systems management service with caution

There is one massive problem for many organizations. An off-premises systems management setup requires that the IT organization allow the management service to drill straight through the firewall to access sufficient information about operations to rapidly and effectively identify issues and take remedial action. This collection method goes right through to the heart of the IT platform. A lot of monitoring can occur through simple network management protocol (SNMP) and other data sources that pose little security threat. However, while scavenging log files for individual items of IT equipment, a systems management service could unearth data that has a commercial nature to it. In some cases, IT equipment carries username and password pairs.

Internet of Things: CIOs are getting ready for the next big revolution

"Analytics and machine learning are the most important components for gaining efficiency savings," he says. "IoT affords cross-industry and cross-silo interaction at a data level. CIOs must remember that data is ultimately platform independent and data science is also now available as a service." ... While predictive analytics and machine learning have been important tools in IT for many years, Ridley says the key difference today is the democratisation of the technology, particularly as these tools can be deployed via the cloud. "Easy-to-use products like Databricks and Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio are doing for data scientists what the web did for developers and designers 20 years ago," he says. "These features made creating a data science team easier in my previous role as director of technology at reed.co.uk because the tools that the staff used and the support that they needed were more readily available."

Does AI Make Self-Driving Cars Less Safe?

Using the programmed code, a machine learning system behaves in a given way whenever it is exposed to the automated system. The case is different on the roads. The computer will be required to memorize images that keep changing. It’s hard for engineers to code such information. For instance, it may be difficult to determining when to stop or to proceed. The machine will memorize the features like people crossing and whenever similar objects are seen it will stop. But individuals and features keep changing in different locations. The machine will learn to act on concepts rather than judgment. For instance, if during a test the machine learning system recorded images of people wearing red colored clothes, it will only stop on seeing people with red colors. Hence people with different colors are likely to be run on. Likewise, the fully self-driven vehicle may stop paralyzed at a stop, unable to decide.

The power of mobile apps: Human services from the citizen’s perspective

The benefits of mobile technology are considerable, but for apps to be effective governments must design them from the perspective of the user, rather than grafting them onto established processes in individual departments. ... Apps work best when the number of screen swipes and taps can be kept to a minimum, for example, and it’s essential to build in feedback. Research has shown in particular that people in crisis may not trust technology that removes face-to-face interactions.6 They want the reassurance of seeing their documents delivered into the appropriate hands, so apps that provide receipt notices can help them view the technology as reliable. ... Design considerations such as these are part of the essential process of bringing citizens on board with technological innovation. Forward-thinking governments around the globe are using behavioral science techniques to determine how users engage with new apps in real-life contexts.

The Three Tsunamis of Digital Transformation

Change is hard, and many of us procrastinate, make excuses or lag behind. Today, we simply can't. Digital technologies are no longer "nice-to-have" tools of the business - today they are the business. Digital laggards are already finding their markets disrupted and their abilities to compete overturned. As they desperately try to outrun the Darwinian effect of their slow responses, they are faced with not one but three periods - or ages - of digital transformation to navigate - disruptive transformation, hyper-digital transformation and ubiquitous transformation. Understanding these three ages, and when they will emerge, is critical for business success. Some may argue digital transformation started 70 years ago with ENIAC, the first commercially available computer, while others argue it started with the Internet.

Cylance accuses AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas of fraud and software piracy

When questioned about the Symantec test, Cylance argued it was flawed form the start, as AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas were essentially using pirated software. As such, they were not able to access the cloud-based console or enable all the features in CylancePROTECT. "We have no records or invoices showing that MRG Effitas, AV-Comparatives or any person associated with these companies purchasing CylancePROTECT," said Chad Skipper, VP of industry relations and product testing at Cylance. Skipper also noted a lack of contact between the labs and the fact their product was tested with a default configuration. According to Skipper, testing in a default state will see most of the features in CylancePROTECT turned off.

Blockchain: The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World

"Today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries; middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, and so on to establish trust in our economy," Tapscott continued. "These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling, and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can't monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined… so what if there were not only an Internet of information, but an Internet of value. Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed, all without powerful intermediaries.

How to use Microsoft's Paint 3D: Creating cool 3D scenes has never been so much fun

Though it shares a name, Paint 3D isn’t really like the familiar Microsoft Paint app at all. Paint 3D’s entire purpose is to create fun, cartoony 3D objects and scenes—and share them. A major part of Paint 3D’s appeal is the Remix 3D community, where you and other members can import, edit, then share digital objects and ideas, taking from and providing inspiration to your fellow digital artists. Chances are that you haven’t seen Paint 3D yet—but you will. Microsoft first launched the app in conjunction with the Windows 10 Creators Update and Surface Studio announcements last fall. Since then, the app has remained accessible to Insiders only as a preview, before its more general release later this spring. If you’re running an Insider build, there’s really no reason not to download it from the Store and try it out. We’ll show you how!

Special Report: Preventing Cybersecurity Losses

Preventing cyber risks requires finance chiefs to look far beyond the realm of the techies. “CFOs need to pause and broaden their perspective, examine cyber-related business risk in the areas of physical security and in industrial controls as well,” according to Ingram. That’s especially so, given that the work of hackers can have powerful consequences in the physical world. Indeed, cyber attacks have struck utilities and defense and aerospace contractors, Ingram notes. Another non-tech area of cyber risk is mergers and acquisitions. Citing the threat to the $4.8 billion Verizon offer to acquire Yahoo represented by the massive data breaches that struck Yahoo, attorney Craig A. Newman writes that the breaches “underscore an increasingly complex, specialized, and sophisticated aspect of M&A transactions: cybersecurity due diligence.”

How to become an IoT developer: 6 tips

The Internet of Things (IoT) industry is booming—in 2017, the number of connected devices in use worldwide will reach 8.4 billion, outnumbering people, according to a recent Gartner report. By 2020, more than 20.8 billion IoT devices will be in use, Gartner predicts. As connected homes, cars, and offices become more mainstream, more developers are needed to ensure that devices operate properly and securely. The term "IoT developer" remains broad, said Greg Gorman, director of the IoT Developer Ecosystem at IBM. "There are a lot of discipline areas that are in play, including security, networking, systems engineering, cloud programming, and hardware device programming," Gorman said. "It pays to be multilingual so that you can be flexible and play many different roles in the team."

Quote for the day:

"A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation." -- ‏@UpSearchSQL

Daily Tech Digest - February 12, 2017

Inevitable architecture: Complexity gives way to simplicity and flexibility

In the next 18 to 24 months, CIOs and their partners in the C-suite may find an answer to this question in a flexible architecture model whose demonstrated efficiency and effectiveness in start-up IT environments suggest that its broader adoption in the marketplace may be inevitable. In this cloud-first model—and in the leading practices emerging around it—platforms are virtualized, containerized, and treated like malleable, reusable resources. Systems are loosely coupled and, increasingly, automated to be self-learning and self-healing. Likewise, on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud capabilities can be deployed dynamically to deliver each workload at an optimum price and performance point. Taken together, these elements can make it possible to move broadly from managing instances to managing outcomes.

2017 is the year your startup gets funded

After about 20 meetings, you should have a pretty good feel for whether your round is going to come together quickly (i.e. 2 months) or be a drawn-out slog (3-6 months); most tend to be the latter. That’s normal. Hopefully your meetings are leading to progressively deeper dives on the part of the investors. This means they’re interested, and if they’re interested, the discussion should start to veer toward valuation and terms. Next, you will receive a term sheet (if it’s a priced round) or commitments if you’re raising a convertible note. But even if you don’t have a term sheet after 15-20 meetings, don’t despair. Fundraising is a numbers game — remember our “hit rate” from Step 1? If you’re averaging a 5-10 percent ratio of pitches to commitments, you’re doing OK. This also means you’re getting rejected 90-95 percent of the time. Accept it as the way the game works, and don’t give up prematurely.

Biases in algorithms: The case for and against government regulation

Daniel Saraga, head of science communication at the Swiss National Science Foundation, asks in a recent Phys.org column, Should algorithms be regulated? For instance, think about a driverless car and its ability to recognize obstacles in the road: "The control algorithm has to decide whether it will put the life of its passengers at risk or endanger uninvolved passers-by on the pavement." With algorithms being proprietary "closed source," the answer to who is put in jeopardy—the driver or a passerby—is an unknown and carries the bias of the person/s who designed the algorithm-based control system. "They (algorithms) do not have prejudices and are unemotional," writes Alan Reid, senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University in this Conversation column. "But algorithms can be programmed to be biased or unintentional bias can creep into the system."

Kansas City rolls out online map using traffic, parking data from sensors

The interactive online map is operated by city contractor Xaqt, a Chicago-based company that provides integrated intelligence and collaboration tools for cities. With the map, a user can see the location of streetcars as well as how many vehicles passed streetcars at each hour in the past 24 hours and their real-time speeds. Available street parking is also shown in green, and by clicking on a parking area icon, it is possible to see available spaces at that location. Eventually, the city hopes to expand the use of sensors to other congested corridors. In the future, Alexa will be able to tell a user the location of the nearest free parking space and provide a daily forecast of public activities and meetings, said Bob Bennett, the city’s chief innovation officer, in an interview.

How to Boost Your Career in Big Data and Analytics

The world is increasingly digital, and this means big data is here to stay. In fact, the importance of big data and data analytics is only going to continue growing in the coming years. It is a fantastic career move and it could be just the type of career you have been trying to find. Professionals who are working in this field can expect an impressive salary, with the median salary for data scientists being $116,000. Even those who are at the entry level will find high salaries, with average earnings of $92,000. As more and more companies realize the need for specialists in big data and analytics, the number of these jobs will continue to grow. Close to 80% of the data scientists say there is currently a shortage of professionals working in the field.

Digital Transformation and high-tech Robo-Advisor - do you need one?

Big data and advanced analytics can help broaden the scope of robo-advice dramatically, incorporating financial planning into broader retirement planning, tax planning, vacation savings, higher education planning. Robo-Advisors have typically targeted millennials segment because these young investors want to save & multiple money faster and often don't have enough patience & wealth to warrant the attention and interest of a human advisor. High Net worth Individuals also think, online and automated investment tools can positively affect their wealth manager's advice and decision-making. Overall, robo-advisors provide a good user experience with latest digital technologies such as slick apps and fancy interfaces.These platforms make sure that they fit right in with your daily online browsing, and are great options for novice investors who are just starting out and want to dip their toes in the world of investments

IT unbounded: The business potential of IT transformation

Creating an unbounded IT organization will require that CIOs think beyond their own experiences and domain expertise and begin viewing IT through a different operational and strategic lens. For example, they can take a look at the efficiency and effectiveness of current budgeting, portfolio planning, and vendor selection processes and try to identify procedural, administrative, and other constraints that can be eliminated. Or they can work with business partners, start-ups, academics, IT talent, and vendors to explore nontraditional innovation, collaboration, and investment opportunities. ... Important to development, IT organizations can work to replace bloated, inefficient skillset silos with nimble, multiskill teams that work in tandem with the business to drive rapid development of products from ideation all the way through to deployment.1

The Promise of FinTech – Something New Under the Sun?

FinTech’s true promise springs from its potential to unbundle banking into its core functions of: settling payments, performing maturity transformation, sharing risk and allocating capital. This possibility is being driven by new entrants – payment service providers, aggregators and robo advisors, peer-to-peer lenders, and innovative trading platforms. And it is being influenced by incumbents who are adopting new technologies in an effort to reinforce the economies of scale and scope of their business models. In this process, systemic risks will evolve. Changes to customer loyalties could influence the stability of bank funding. New underwriting models could impact credit quality and even macroeconomic dynamics. New investing and risk management paradigms could affect market functioning. A host of applications and new infrastructure could reduce costs, probably improve capital efficiency and possibly create new critical economic functions.

What software engineers are making around the world right now

Hired’s study explores a range of other data, including how much data scientists and product managers are being paid across 16 major cities and how that salary information has changed over time. Of greater interest to us, however, is another section focused on the impact of bias on salaries and hiring practices. It’s something Hired began following roughly a year ago by collecting voluntary demographic data from candidates and examining how their identity impacts the wages they ask for — and what they receive. Bias is nothing new, of course. In fact, in a survey released Tuesday by the job site Indeed.com, one quarter of U.S. workers in the tech sector said they’ve felt discrimination at work due to their race, gender, age, religion or sexual orientation. Roughly 29 percent of female respondents said they experienced discrimination, compared with 21 percent of men.

Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data with Deep Learning

The increasing accuracy of deep neural networks for solving problems such as speech and image recognition has stoked attention and research devoted to deep learning and AI more generally. But widening popularity has also resulted in confusion. This article introduces neural networks, including brief descriptions of feed-forward neural networks and recurrent neural networks, and describes how to build a recurrent neural network that detects anomalies in time series data. To make our discussion concrete, we’ll show how to build a neural network using Deeplearning4j, a popular open-source deep-learning library for the JVM.

Quote for the day:

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." -- C.S. Lewis

Daily Tech Digest - February 11, 2017

How to be Agile with Distributed Teams

Enterprises are becoming more distributed as technology facilitates global collaboration. People start working from home and projects are distributed over different locations. To orchestrate the work, across locations, agile principles help. Interaction between team members and stakeholders are frequent and based on patterns. The stakeholders, users or customers are close to the development teams. Organizations create roles, events and artifacts according to the scrum framework. But it's not always easy to decide what role to place on what location or how to coordinate events with people in different time zones. Not seeing each other in an office creates challenges in alignment. It's also not necessarily visible how each team (member) is performing.

How to become a developer: 7 tips from the pros

Front end developers, full stack developers, mobile developers, and back end developers are all currently in the top 10 hardest to fill tech jobs, according to data from job search site Indeed.com. And Ruby developers experienced a staggering 656% jump in searches by job seekers on Indeed.com—among the fastest growing searches on the site, according to a recent report. "There is a lot of opportunity and demand for developers," said Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester vice president and principal analyst of application development and delivery. Web development and mobile app development are good areas to start a developer job search, Hammond said. "With mobile app development these days, folks are willing to take a chance if you've got some work to show that you've done in your own time, or apps you can point to in the App Store," Hammond said.

India begins to plan its move into IoT

Companies are beginning to understand how IoT is an enabler that can provide a great return on investment, as Dr Rishi Bhatnagar, President of Aeris Communications and Chair of the IET India IoT Panel, highlights. “Awareness of the business potential of IoT is definitely growing,” he enthuses. “Many projects are moving from the drawing board and labs to the field. There is immense potential to be realised, especially in sectors such as healthcare, heavy machinery automation – known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – and environment management.” Nihal Kashinath, Founder of the IoT Bangalore Network adds: “A lot of industries in India stand to benefit from IoT, in terms of efficiency gains or new products/services being offered.

Surprise! You don’t own the digital devices you paid for

When you buy something you naturally think that -- you know-- you own it. But when it comes to products that contain software you don’t. As bizarre as that sounds, it speaks to a serious issue: Consumers who buy a device that depends to some extent on software – whether it’s a Kindle or a tractor – are subject to the whims of the company that developed and sold the software. That odd and fundamentally unfair state of affairs is why two members of Congress – a Democrat and a Republican – have teamed to reform a key provision of copyright law and give consumers the right to actually own stuff they’ve paid for. “The point is to make sure that people’s rights stay intact in the digital space,” says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is supporting the Your Own Device Act.

Transforming Business through Real-Time Data Analytics

Acknowledging the importance of data analytics, Pankaj Dikshit, ‎Senior Vice President (Technology & Risk) at GST Network said, "The entire GST platform is an open source platform. Our data would be loosely defined but tightly integrated because there are going to be so many entities interacting with us. The data will be stored in chunks and analytics will be very critical for us to pull out the right information and give us the exact data point that we need." Shewani also stressed on the need for enterprises to start capturing interactions and not just transactions. "For instance, a customer may be interacting with a bank at different levels. He may walk into a branch, visit the website or talk to customer care. Each touch point creates an interaction, which is critical in understanding customer behavior. The combination of interaction and transaction will increasingly become important."

Microsoft unveils a bonanza of security capabilities

Windows Hello, Microsoft's biometric-based authentication system, is getting two new enhancements with the forthcoming Windows 10 Creators Update. First, Microsoft is making it possible to use its biometric Windows Hello login system solely with on-premises Active Directory servers, rather than requiring Azure Active Directory. Microsoft is also trying to address the problem of users forgetting to lock their computers by using a new Dynamic Lock feature in Windows Hello. That will connect users' smartphones with their Windows 10 devices, and automatically lock the device when a phone's Bluetooth signal drifts far away. Using it requires customers have the Microsoft Authenticator app installed on their smartphones. Once the app is connected to a PC, it uses the Windows Hello Companion Device Framework to automatically lock the computer when its user walks away.

Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

"The proposal aims to ensure that no later than by the end of 2020, a new Windows Basic Client should be the standard city client," a Munich city council spokesman said. However, it seems as if LiMux and other open-source software could still be used until the Windows client is in place. "In the transitional period, departments and business units can use this newly developed Windows-based client with standard products or can continue using a mixed client architecture of Windows and Linux depending on their individual circumstances," the proposal states. The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favour of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software.

Virtual Panel: Microservices in Practice

Microservices have gone from internal development practices for the select few so-called “Unicorns” to something many developers in a wider range of organisations are embracing, or considering for their next project. Some people believe that in order to deliver on the benefits of DevOps, microservices are a necessary requirement. In the last few years we have seen new technologies and experiences shape microservices, often reinforcing their ties to Service Oriented Architectures at the same time as expanding on their differences. Some believe that technologies and methodologies which can assist with developing and adopting microservices are ineffective without associated changes within the organisations that wish to use them. InfoQ spoke with five panelists to get different perspectives on the current state of the art with microservices, how they are likely to evolve and sharing their experiences, both good and bad, when developing with them.

Change the culture to fix the tragedy that DevOps at scale can be

We all have our experiences and we're going to do what we do. When we hear about Netflix giving production access to junior engineers we feel our hair standing up. It's horrible. It sounds like a recipe for a disaster. And that's of course the biggest problem. The one way to solve it is pain. Pain is extremely instructional. When you have a couple of late nights because of deployments that have gone bad that really helps in transforming the culture. And if you think about it all our guides for DevOps starting with The Phoenix Project to any other book of how to do DevOps (or DevOps at scale) talks about how instructional pain is. There is no other way to make this change. You cannot talk people into changing their behavior.

An Introspection on Custom Rule Engine

A complete domain should not be built using rules rather It is better to see which parts of logic do not necessarily change and which part of system changes. Rules approach can be applied to frequent changing part of the system and thus making the rules footprint inside the system to minimal. The another aspect that influence in building rule based system is the myth that business users or users who live above the technical people in product paradigm can change easily make a change to the system. However, in many cases the fact remains otherwise where a specialized people require to maintain the rule system. Since the rules introduces new language into the enterprise and retaining the knowledge becomes additional responsibility.

Quote for the day:

"Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." -- MLK

Daily Tech Digest - February 10, 2017

Are Companies Doing Enough On The IoT Security Front?

Device manufacturers need to make sure security is incorporated into the design and embedded in the product life cycle, Laliberte says. “Design the product to be easy for the consumer to secure,” he says. “Do not rely on them to perform critical activities needed to secure the device. They will likely not do it.” Ultimately, users of IoT and the product manufacturers “have an obligation to install and create IoT products in ways that maximize usefulness and minimize risk,” Laliberte says. “The use of IoT devices is going to expand rapidly, and without adequate security we have the potential to introduce unknown dangers into our homes, workplaces and communities.” The overwhelming amount of insecure and unsecured IoT devices worldwide practically ensures that we’ll continue to see attacks such as DDoS continue to proliferate worldwide for the foreseeable future, DiDio says.

Solving Data Gravity Pain

Data gravity introduces significant industry challenges. BI has primarily lived on-premises, with only a minuscule 2 percent of BI applications living in the cloud. Even as the industry shifts more and more apps rapidly to the cloud, data warehouses and many other data sources still often reside on-premises for a long time. Thus, we anticipate an increased need for BI apps to query across both realms, on-premises and cloud, as the latter matures. Data gravity is an undeniable market force that we’re seeing in our BI industry mid-life crisis. The mobile- and cloud-first world – one in which a myriad of apps for every conceivable function generate more data in the cloud than on-premises. As more apps are delivered via mobile, cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS), the center of data gravity is already shifting.

Highlights from the Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report

The cyber perimeter of organisations has not been restricted to their physical boundaries for some time, and the continued blurring of the line between work and private lives has further increased the attack surface area of many organisations. The increasing use of BYOD and home-working schemes, with employees carrying their devices everywhere, has continued to expand the security perimeter so that organisations’ physical borders have become a hub within the cyber perimeter. The security perimeter has also been extended beyond organisations’ physical devices to the immaterial and unlimited space represented by the Cloud environment, where Cloud solutions are being increasingly adopted worldwide.

Twitter hopes machine learning can save it from oblivion

Twitter began making more noise about its machine learning investments last summer when it acquired Magic Pony Technology, which had developed image-reading technology. At the time, Twitter also highlighted two past acquisitions in this space: Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. During the call, Dorsey revealed that Twitter had hired Jan Peterson to oversee its “science efforts, all of our deep learning, all of our machine learning and artificial intelligence.” Dorsey pointed to the growth over the last three months in statistics like daily active users, engagement, and tweet impressions that people see. The company has been breaking away from its traditional firehose, real-time format to help users find more interesting tweets that they may have missed.

NACD Publishes Five Cybersecurity Principles Every Board Director Needs to Know

Directors are under tremendous pressure to appear to be doing something to get a handle on cyber risks. In many cases, this is manifested by the questions boards are asking CISOs and other managers. For example, the handbook warned that employees and contract workers, while indispensable assets, can also become easy vectors of attack for external actors, highlighting the need for regular security awareness training, strong controls and a strong organizational culture. According to NACD, only 42 percent of public directors are confident or very confident that their company is properly secured against a cyberattack, versus 29 percent for private companies. Similarly, just 42 percent of public directors are moderately confident, in contrast with 39 percent for private companies.

The Biggest Tech Trends of 2017

As the technology matures further over the course of the year we can expect prices to drop as more competitors enter the market. The technology as it stands currently has a prohibitively high pricing point, and increased competition in the sector should push prices down to a point that we see VR headsets in most households. VR is more than just a consumer phenomenon; there are strong business use cases for the technology as well. We can expect more and more business applications for VR to crop up over the next 12 months. One of the most interesting areas for expansion is retail – as retailers use VR to show how a watch might look on your wrist or how a new coffee table would look in your living room. There are so many possibilites with this technology that have yet to get the industry’s attention and investment that they deserve – this will all change in 2017.

Agility Robotics Introduces Cassie, a Dynamic and Talented Robot Delivery Ostrich

Today, Agility Robotics, a spin-off of Oregon State University, is officially announcing a shiny new bipedal robot named Cassie. Cassie is a dynamic walker, meaning that it walks much more like humans do than most of the carefully plodding bipedal robots we’re used to seeing. This makes it better at handling the kind of diverse and complex terrain that we walk over all the time without even thinking, a talent that’s going to be mandatory for robots that want to tackle the different environments and situations that they’ll need to master to be actually useful around people. In addition to search-and-rescue and disaster relief, Agility Robotics has one particular environment and situation in mind: They want Cassie to be scampering up your steps to deliver packages to your front door.

When Hackers Hack Hackers

While most cybercriminals tend to set their sights on siphoning valuable data from poorly protected enterprises, there's no limit to the kinds of targets they'll seek out. There's no honor among thieves, so it shouldn't be a surprise that with the right kind of motivation, malicious hackers will happily attack other black hat and grey hat hackers. Sometimes the attacks are purely mercenary: rivals know they can hit pay dirt very quickly if they find an easy way to tap into data stores of already vetted stolen identities or financial information. Similarly, certain kinds of cyber skirmishes are initiated to take competitors out. And then there are the attacks that are a little more personal: to show someone up, settle a score, or otherwise make a philosophical stand. Regardless of the motives, these kind of squabbles offer up a satisfying dose of schadenfreude for cybersecurity pros beleaguered by the bad guys.

Attorneys Predict A Demanding Year For IT Outsourcing Customers

Outsourcing customers will want to add flexibility to the IT service deals by seeking new termination rights, the right to switch locations, the right to insource, and other similar protections. However, Masur warned, providers are likely to push back insisting that these issues are customer — not provider — problems to solve. “To some degree these political changes may well accelerate the move to sourcing models offering cost savings not based on offshore labor arbitrage such as cloud services, robotic automation and utility offerings. “While these sourcing strategies may result in the elimination of American jobs,” Masur says, “they cannot be attacked as offshoring jobs to foreign countries.” The net result of the current political environment is hard to pinpoint.

Teaching smart gadgets privacy manners

So how should engineers approach building privacy controls into IoT devices? Use new ISACA privacy resources! I am grateful and proud to have been part of the two ISACA International Privacy Task Force groups, both led by Yves Le Roux, since 2013, and to have been the lead developer authoring the newly released ISACA Privacy Principles and Program Management Guide (PP&PMG), incorporating the recommendations and input of the International Task Force members, as well as a complementary privacy guide targeted for publication in mid-2017. The ISACA PP&PMG outlines the core privacy principles that organizations, as well as individuals, can use to help ensure privacy protections. These privacy principles can be used by engineers to build the important privacy and security controls into IoT devices right from the beginning of the initial design phase, and use them all the way through the entire product development and release lifecycle.

Quote for the day:

"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is." -- Scott Cook