Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - September 07, 2017

WhatsApp turns its attention to business

WhatsApp has been steadily enhancing its business-to-consumer capabilities for some time now. Last week, the firm announced a business verification system, with a green badge indicating WhatsApp has confirmed a phone number belongs to an authenticated business account - similar to Facebook’s own grey badge for business pages. WhatsApp has previously announced plans to allow businesses to contact customers with marketing messages. In its blog post, WhatsApp said it will work with business users as part of a closed pilot program to test additional new services ahead of a wider launch. One of the companies testing the enterprise service, UK-based ecommerce firm Yoox Net-a-Porter, said in a blog post that many of its customers prefer to use WhatsApp rather than email to complete transactions and get product suggestions.

SEC chief says cyber crime risks are substantial, systemic

The SEC has a number of active investigations into companies that have claimed to be in the blockchain and digital currency space but which are really just trying to steal people’s money, Peikin said. “As with any kind of newsworthy event, roaches kind of crawl out of the woodwork and try to scam money off of investors,” he said of the rapidly growingly popularity of ICOs. The SEC has a distributed ledger technology working group made up of about 90 people across the commission to help keep abreast of emerging developments and technologies, Peikin said. From an enforcement perspective, Clayton said there not be any sort of dramatic shift in priorities at the SEC and that the protecting retail investors from harm would be remain the top goal.

6 Data Analytics Success Stories: An Inside Look

Commercial purchases of hardware, software and services intended to support big data and analytics are expected to exceed $210 billion. IDC analyst Dan Vesset notes that big data analytics solutions have become key pillars of enabling digital transformation efforts across industries and business processes worldwide. But there is a dark side to this delirious spending: Most data analytics projects fail to yield measurable value. Legacy systems and business-line bureaucracies have spawned data siloes and perpetuated poor data quality. And CIOs are still struggling to fill the gaps in talent required to manipulate data for insights. The war for talent is fierce and the rise of university analytics programs isn’t producing qualified candidates fast enough.

CISOs, A New Deliverable On Your Platter: Customers' Privacy

While delivering the historic judgment, the judges have explicitly recognized the need for a legislation protecting individual data. “Informational privacy is a facet of the right to privacy. The dangers to privacy in an age of information can originate not only from the state but from non-state actors as well. We commend to the Union Government the need to examine and put into place a robust regime for data protection. The creation of such a regime requires a careful and sensitive balance between individual interests and legitimate concerns of the state,” Justice DY Chandrachud noted in his judgment on behalf of himself and three more judges, including the CJI. Justice Sanjay K Kaul too strongly endorsed it in his judgment.

Users review the top cloud data integration tools

As the world of cloud computing becomes more globalized, IT professionals need multiple levels of security and transparency to manage cloud relationships. Using a cloud data integration solution, an enterprise can configure a number of disparate application programs sharing data in a diverse network, including cloud-based data repositories. This allows enterprise tech professionals to manage, monitor and cleanse data from various web-based and mobile applications more effectively. IT Central Station users have identified agile data transformation, a clear, customizable dashboard and efficient data replication as valuable features when looking for a cloud data integration solution. According to their reviews, the IT Central Station community has ranked Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Dell Boomi AtomSphere, IBM App Connect and SnapLogic as leading cloud data integration solutions in the market.

It's time to rethink the software-defined storage market

The real abstraction benefit the software-defined storage market offers isn't the ability to select hardware for deployment. It's the ease with which you can change hardware when workload demands change. When new technology or an upgrade comes out, or you need more performance or capacity, if you have to do a data migration, that's a nonstarter. Storage products that maximize the benefits of SDS enable the hardware to evolve to the needs of the data. ... This is similar to the first benefit, but you also should be able to use SDS-enabled technology for whatever infrastructure and workload you want. You can consolidate data on fast SSDs, higher-capacity hard drives and even the public cloud, while having the intelligence to automatically allocate the right infrastructure to the right workload, with any of it changing on the fly, nondisruptively.

What is ‘anticipatory IT’? An IT strategy for staving off digital disruption

Tuning the opportunity antenna to the anticipatory channel is not any easy task for IT leaders. CIOs, many of whom are juggling roles that require them to be transformational, functional and strategic, are busy reacting and responding to threats and challenges to their businesses. And when CIOs do spy opportunity, getting the C-suite and board to buy into what they're selling is a tough task. Burrus offered some strategic recommendations to help CIOs get executive buy-in and fend off disruption. To avoid disruption, CIOs must be aware of hard and soft trends. A hard trend is a projection based on measurable, tangible, and fully predictable facts, events, or objects. It’s a future fact that cannot be changed. A soft trend is a projection based on statistics that have the appearance of being tangible, fully predictable facts. Think of it as a future maybe.

Businesses can no longer think of cybersecurity as just a ‘tech problem’

Paine said this turns the focus to the user’s relationship with technology, rather than relying on software to find a “needle in a needle stack”. “The old idea of security was like castles and moats. You build really strong walls and then the bad guys won’t get in and we’ll be able to protect everything inside the castle, and that’s great. It used to work really well,” Paine said. “But over time, attacks increased in volume and it became harder to identify friend from foe. “The bad guys were simply faster than the good guys and the technologies couldn’t keep pace with the bad guys ability to adapt.” Paine said that regardless of scale or sophistication, cyberattacks are always motivated by one of two things: “there’s the commercially motivated attacker or the disruptive, hacktivist style attacker”.

Fixing, upgrading and patching IoT devices can be a real nightmare

Ensuring cybersecurity for computers and mobile phones is a huge, complex business. The ever-widening scope and unbelievable variety of threats makes keeping these devices safe from cyber criminals and malware a full-time challenge for companies, governments and individuals around the world. But at least the vast majority of those devices are easily accessible, safe in the pockets or sitting on the desktops of the very people who want to protect them. The Internet of Things (IoT) devices that need protection, on the other hand, could be almost anywhere: sitting in a remote desert, buried deep in coal mine, built into a giant truck. Or, even implanted inside the human body.

Investing in technology for your business

Investing in technology for the business does not always come cheap but it is something that you need to do in order to ensure you move with the times. You can get a small business loan if you need to raise some funds to invest in tech for your business. This will enable you to invest in all of the technology that you need for your business in one go rather than having to do it gradually. Most businesses these days rely on computers for their day to day running. However, computers can be hacked and cybercrime can cause huge issues for your business. Therefore, if you do use computers, you need to ensure you have proper security and protection in place. You can get business antivirus software for a very reasonable price these days, so make sure you have protection in place.

Quote for the day:

"If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be." -- Maya Angelou

Daily Tech Digest - September 05, 2017

5 Technologies That Are Changing The Future of Driving

The promise is clear. No emissions, no smell, no noise (unless you want it), and potentially far lower overall environmental impact in a machine that can provide you with the same driving power as the “traditional” gas guzzlers. What do the naysayers have to complain about? Well, the mileage for one thing. On long travels your mileage on a single charge between charging stations is still questionable, even when you account for their superb ability to actually charge back the batteries when driving downhill. And when you do get to a charging stations, it may take up to an hour rather than a few minutes to be fully tanked with power and ready to go. ... In Tesla’s case they are known as superchargers and are completely solar powered, free to all Tesla owners, and feeding excess power back to the grid.

Intent-based networking needed to run more complex networks

The closest most vendors come to IBN today are systems that create and distribute policies that tell switches, firewalls and load balancers in the data center how to handle specific types of network traffic. Just building and distributing policies isn’t enough, however. What's lacking in these products are the analytics that provide network engineers with complete information on the state of every device and also help them formulate a policy that accomplishes what they want. Too often, engineers find out after deployment that policies fall short, typically through network monitoring applications. "You're not going to have in intent-based networking [today] everything that you want," said Peyton Maynard-Koran, an engineering director at video game publisher Electronic Arts.

Big data and digital transformation: How one enables the other

Structured data is all of the stuff that fits in traditional spreadsheets and databases--your P&L, your customer list, information about your products and business processes, etc. Unstructured data is all of the new stuff that's often too big to fit into a database--the raw Twitter firehose, Google Trends data, public APIs from governments, and feeds from Internet of Things sensors. When you layer unstructured data on top of structured data, that's where the magic happens. ... But the data team started doing sentiment analysis on Twitter and looking at what people were saying about its products and brands. It also looked at Google Trends to see which products and brands people were searching for the most. Then it correlated that data with its actual sales to see if it was predictive, and it found that it absolutely was.

How do you secure the cloud? New data points a way

Whether it’s a public, private or hybrid cloud environment, web application threats are dominant. What’s different among them is the level of risk you face. “As defenders, at Alert Logic our ability to effectively protect public cloud is higher as well, because we see a better signal-to-noise ratio and chase fewer noisy attacks,” says Misha Govshteyn, co-founder of Alert Logic. “When we see security incidents in public cloud environments, we know we have to pay attention, because they are generally quieter.” The data shows that some platforms are more vulnerable than others. “This increases your attack surface despite your best efforts,” says Govshteyn. As an example he notes that “despite popular belief,” the LAMP stack has been much more vulnerable than the Microsoft-based application stack. He also sees PHP applications as a hotspot.

Blockchain's 4 Biggest Assumptions

The spectrum ranges from those suffering from incumbent biases to those sitting in the trough of disillusionment to others who have spent real time understanding the recent developments but came out negative because of their experiences or beliefs. There are also fervent disagreements between the different blockchain communities that raise key questions. The issues I've been looking for in the midst of all of this are not technical in nature because, in my opinion, those challenges will be solved over time, especially given the massive amount of talent this space has been able to attract and will continue to attract. I have also not focused on external factors such as regulatory risk, though they are huge concerns. I believe that signals shown so far suggest regulators are very savvy and are careful to enact new regulation.

6 things IT executives must do to accelerate IoT adoption

IoT by itself is not innovation, although it may be built with innovative technologies. It’s the problems that it solves and the way it does it that creates innovation. Sustainable innovation doesn’t come from a flash of inspiration. It comes from the hard work of understanding the real underlying problems, hypothesizing possible solutions, building experiments, testing, validating and repeating. Organizations that can do this well become innovative market leaders. The IT organization facilitates IoT innovation by building a “sandbox” for experimentation and proof of concept development. This sandbox comprises of an IoT platform, connected to a non-production IT environment and data. It has tools to create simple software applications, run simulations, analyze data, and collect user feedback. It is designed for easy setup, configuration and connection to a variety of edge devices.

3 Easy Solutions to Optimize Images on the Fly

When pages are slow to load, images are frequently the culprit. According to several studies, the megabyte size of web pages is steadily growing, and images are by far the largest component. It is clear that by optimizing images, most websites will achieve a dramatic performance boost. ... Most photos contain metadata stored by cameras and graphic applications, which is unnecessary for the end user and inflates image size. All the image optimization services we cover in the article strip this metadata along the way. The steps above are time consuming, and require expertise to achieve a perfect result. For a website with only a few images, it might be possible to optimize the images by hand. However, on modern websites with as many as dozens or hundreds of images on one page, automation is needed.

The Future of HR AI-augmented Recruitment and Onboarding

So far, the idea of Artificial Intelligence software replacing HR is a pipe dream. Evaluating and directing people requires a level of intuition that is still far away from technology’s grasp. Neither is it is as free from human bias as vendors want you to believe. AI still bases its decisions on currently available data. If bias has skewed that data in the past, then AI will be working from poisoned assumptions. Do you want to make the workplace more fair and egalitarian? Maybe you (rightly!) think that it makes business sense for your company to have intellectual diversity? The best path is still through changing people’s’ perceptions and attitudes. Handing free reign over to the robot overlords won’t solve it for us.

The role of digital marketing in a millennial's world

To stay relevant, brands have had to adjust and redefine their approach to marketing and must now focus on what it takes to sell to a millennial. With the purchasing platform appearing in a wide range of options, it has become imperative that producers now focus on a seamless customer experience at every touchpoint. Producers that have no barriers to purchase are the ones that maintain repeat sales and loyalty among the millennial audience. While this may seem obvious, many brands have not taken the time to truly understand what their consumer now looks like and how best to market products in the new world of millennials. If brands do this, they will undoubtedly gain the loyalty and support they desire with the modern consumers that they need in order to succeed in the future.

A Bright Outlook for Computing On The Edge

One of the most obvious problems that is fixed by moving datacentres towards the edge is that of latency. Looking towards the near future with the likes of artificial intelligence (AI), there will need to be more powerful analytics solutions located at the points of consumption, because network latency can be costly and even fatal to a wide swath of businesses. Imagine the problems that latency could cause if we get to a point where AI is being used to support medical surgery, or if robotics becomes a critical part of vehicle navigation. Real-time action and response in these scenarios is vital. When talking among peers, it is clear that edge computing and networks won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and that the balance sought will depend on individual use cases and business scenarios.

Quote for the day:

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Daily Tech Digest - September 04, 2017

Should CIOs take employees offline to improve security?

What's today's stressed IT manager to do? Continue to block, patch and hope? That approach is getting harder to justify, given the rate at which new vulnerabilities appear. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are almost certainly existing vulnerabilities that we – excluding certain national security services – don't know about. Does it still make sense for all of an enterprise to be online? The answer boils down to a cost-benefit analysis: What's the benefit of everyone being connected to the outside world?; and What's the potential cost in terms of hacking, loss of commercial secrets and downtime? Until recently the benefit outweighed the cost, but now it's not so clear-cut, because some of the costs are hard to determine.

There is no such thing as a DR test failure

Testing your IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plan can be laborious, tedious and fraught with potential landmines. Case in point, that was my first exposure to DR way back in the ancient times of the early 1990’s. We were a mainframe shop, Big Blue, Amdahl, you know the beasts. Our infrastructure team had been performing annual DR tests for several years. These were the kind of tests where you rented space and equipment in some far-away datacenter for a finite amount of time, something like 36 hours. Within that window, you had fire up the mainframes, tape drives and disks, restore OS, middleware and all the utilities. This year was going to be different, however. This year, they actually wanted to recover an application. At the time, I was the lead contractor assigned to the order management applications.

Neato Robotics Adds More Smarts To Its Vacuum Cleaners

With Version 2.0 of its smartphone app, the company is adding the ability to program them via IFTTT.com (IF This, Then That). The web service can automatically trigger certain online actions depending on events or data gathered from other online sources. That will give owners of a connected Botvac a new way to trigger a cleaning session. Instead of pushing a button on the robot, or in the app, or setting a fixed schedule of days and times to clean, they will be able to use an IFTTT recipe to tell the robot to start cleaning as soon as their smart thermostat detects that the house is empty, for example. IFTTT's online calendar integration could trigger an extra clean the morning after a party or, for those with particularly muddy outdoor interests, the day after their calendar lists a hike in the woods or a moutain bike race, say.

Payment card security standard compliance and cyberattacks

When looking at the PCI controls that companies would be expected to have in place (such as security testing, penetration tests etc), the report found an increased ‘control gap,’ meaning that many of these basics were absent. In 2015, companies failing their interim assessment had an average of 12.4 percent of controls absent; this has increased to 13 percent in 2016. Simonetti continues, “It is no longer the question of ‘if’ data must be protected, but ‘how’ to achieve sustainable data protection. Many organisations still look at PCI DSS controls in isolation and don’t appreciate that they are inter-related – the concept of control lifecycle management is far too often absent. This is often the result of a shortage of skilled in-house professionals – however, in our experience, internal proficiency can be dramatically improved with lifecycle guidance from external experts.”

Five steps to a secure workforce

The first step in securing your employees is to understand what they do, and therefore what they need access to. By governing their privileges, you’ll be limiting their ability to do damage with your data, intentionally or unwittingly, without stopping them from doing their jobs. This begins with understanding who handles what in your organisation, and how. Analyse different employee roles. How many of them are there? Create a list and then assign responsibilities to each role, along with the level of information that they need access to when doing their job. Then, place individual job titles into these roles. This will be the basis for a least-privilege access model that gives employees access to the data they need on a need-to-know basis. After creating a framework for managing access, you must build security policies that use this framework to define employee behaviour and mitigate information security risk.

How to install and enable ModSecurity with NGINX on Ubuntu Server

ModSecurity is toolkit for real time web application monitoring, logging, and access control. This open source Web Application Firewall (WAF) module does an outstanding job of protecting web servers (Apache, NGINX, and IIS) from attacks that target potential vulnerabilities in various web applications. ModSecurity handles tasks like: Real-time application security monitoring and access control; Full HTTP traffic logging; Continuous passive security assessment; and Web application hardening. I want to walk you through the process of installing both ModSecurity and NGINX, so you can ensure your web server is better capable of standing up against certain attacks. The installation process is a bit complicated and handled completely through the command line.

Hacker hijacks police radio broadcast until cops call off car chase of armed robbers

During the car chase, an unknown person posing as a cop came over the police radio multiple times. The unauthorized voice reportedly interrupted so often that the real cops abandoned the chase. According to Triple M, “It's not known exactly what instructions were being given over the illegal broadcasts.” However, Victoria Police spokeswoman Lauren Kells said, “Throughout the incident there were a number of disruptions during the radio transmissions which are being investigated.” The police are now hunting for the person behind the pirate transmissions on emergency services radio; they believe they’ve narrowed down the area of the pirate transmission and asked citizens to come forward if anyone recognizes the radio hijacker’s voice.

Six Ways Agile Can Turn Static

This may be the Holy Grail, but this goal isn’t always possible. Idealistically speaking, agile development has all the right elements but it isn’t suitable for every project. Let’s consider how it works in the best case scenario. Agile development accelerates the delivery of initial business value, and through a process of continuous planning and feedback. As a result of this iterative planning and feedback loop, teams are able to continuously align the delivered software with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process. Measuring and evaluating status is based on accurate visibility into the actual progress of projects through all of its stages with all of the project stakeholders. As a result of following an agile process, at the conclusion of a project the software system addresses business and customer needs better.

IT staffs see changing roles amid cloud UC

The shift to cloud significantly affects the organization and strategies of IT staffs. Surprisingly, companies moving to cloud are seeing increases in IT staffs, rather than decreases, according to Nemertes data. For some companies, this trend is temporary, as organizations add staff to manage the cloud transition while still supporting legacy infrastructure. But, for most companies, the additional staff brought on board -- to manage vendor relationships, deployments and training -- is often reassigned to business-facing roles. Organizations moving to the cloud have seen a reduction of full-time equivalents dedicated to operations and technical support. These reductions were more than offset by increases in staff responsible for vendor relationship management, user awareness and adoption efforts, and business-IT liaison roles, leading to a 6% net increase of total staff.

Transforming from Autonomous to Smart: Reinforcement Learning Basics

Reinforcement Learning is for situations where you don’t have data sets with explicit known outcomes, but you do have a way to telling whether you are getting closer to your goal. ... Actions may affect immediate rewards but actions may also affect subsequent or longer-term rewards, so the full extent of rewards must be considered when evaluating the reinforcement learning effectiveness. Reinforcement learning is used to address two general problems: Prediction: How much reward can be expected for every combination of possible future states; and Control: By moving through all possible combinations of the environment, find a combination of actions that maximizes reward and allows for optimal control.

Quote for the day:

"Many people think great entrepreneurs take risks. Great entrepreneurs mitigate risks." -- Jal Tucher

Daily Tech Digest - September 03, 2017

A Web Of Interoperable Blockchain Platforms

When blockchain technology first reared its head, interoperability was not a subject of much debate; there was only one blockchain and it was all about bitcoin. As time passed, more and more disparate blockchain platforms rose, among them Ethereum, and these various platforms innovated in different directions, creating their own protocols. These protocols make it impossible for the chains to send and receive data from one another for reasons similar to that of why a program designed for Windows OS will not function on Mac OS. ... These protocols are designed to both maximize efficiency between disparate blockchain deployments and allow for a co-existence between them to form, creating a more cohesive ecosystem. There are some great examples of innovation to that end.

Your Digital Transformation Won't Succeed Without Cultural Change

Companies from the pre-digital era therefore need to adjust or shift their organizational culture to keep up in today’s digital world. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte recently released their third annual Digital Business report. The report highlighted five key practices of companies developing into "more mature digital organizations." Each of these five key practices focuses on some aspect of organizational culture, a clear indication of the importance culture plays in a company’s ability to adopt new business methods and practices. The question is why is modifying culture so challenging and what guidance can companies follow to increase the likelihood of a successful cultural change?

Business intelligence data is getting even more user friendly

In the digital era, data is pervasive. For many organizations, the amount of data they collect has become a major problem. Others struggle to identify what data will be most helpful for them to gather. Big data, while revolutionary, has created a glut of information leaving companies trying to figure out how to structure it to generate actionable insights. Business Intelligence is at the core of any kind of long-term business strategy, because it helps make sense of the data. When utilized, data strategy can have a big impact on any operation. When surveyed, 72% of business leaders said that they lacked the tools to effectively manage their data for their existing and future efforts. To meet that need, technology companies are beginning to bring more integrated solutions to market.

3 key advantages for AI in the retail space

We’ve learned how to understand real-time customer queries via NLP and extract value from legacy data using machine learning methodology. The challenge of making use of ongoing customer feedback is bigger, but so are its benefits. This challenge requires joint forces. First, an NLP engine needs to extract sense from a query in natural language. After, machine learning steps in to extract value from this sense. Using classification, intelligent machines assign meaning to data, relying on their background and existing knowledge. In practice, the system classifies certain products, say “books,” by categories, say “popular among women over 65.” For retail, this means more focused recommendation and upselling. Using clustering for new information, in turn, opens totally new horizons.

Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite

In short, when it comes to detecting emotion in other people, the face and body do not speak for themselves. Instead, variation is the norm. Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations. People’s movements in general, however, are tremendously variable. To teach emotional intelligence in a modern fashion, we need to acknowledge this variation and make sure your brain is well-equipped to make sense of it automatically.

Get real on container security: 4 rules DevOps teams should follow

The numbers underscore that paying attention to the packages and components that make up a container image is extremely important, especially if the container is from a public repository. Managing the software supply chain requires that companies regularly test their container images for vulnerabilities and vulnerable dependencies. The first lesson is for developers to use container images from sources that they trust, said Anders Wallgren, chief technology officer at Electric Cloud, a software deployment company. "Use images of well-known provenance. If you are going to use Ubuntu, use the published machine instance." In addition, any container image—whether sourced or homegrown—should be frequently tested for vulnerabilities and unwanted software. Luckily, software testing can be easily automated, and should be.

Open Banking - What Does It Mean For Banks And Fintechs?

Open Banking is a new set of regulations in the UK that were created to give consumers more control over their money. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued new rules that would allow consumers to more easily manage their money, switch accounts to find the best deals for their particular needs, as well as avoid high overdraft charges. These new regulations will go into effect in January 2018. As part of the Open Banking regulations, the CMA set a package of remedies to increase innovation and improve competition in retail banking. This includes a requirement for the nine largest current account providers to make available to authorized third parties – customer consent and secure access to specific current accounts in order to read the transaction data and initiate payments.

Distributed, always-on data management

Data platforms should support applications in context, blending transactional, analytical, search, and graph capabilities. In a financial services context, that might mean taking a credit card transaction, analyzing the customer’s buying patterns and searching for the information to approve the transaction. Data management platforms have to process multiple workloads in a single data platform simultaneously. ... A data platform must provide zero downtime. For example, one DataStax customer kept its recommendation engine running despite a hurricane that took down a whole data center. All of the company’s databases failed except DSE because its architecture was able to retain uptime via data distribution across other data centers.

AI chatbots can provide business value when used wisely

One area where businesses are finding the most value from AI today is in customer service. Chatbot applications are among the most mature areas of AI. But enterprises are finding that, while AI chatbots can provide value, they have to be deployed the right way. For online test preparation company Magoosh Inc., that means giving machines license to recommend responses to simple customer service queries, while still maintaining a team of agents who handle more complicated issues. Magoosh uses a customer service bot from DigitalGenius to handle incoming customer service inquiries. The system scans messages for their content and recommends prewritten responses that can be personalized or sent out as is.

The product design challenges of AR on smartphones

So there’s a very real and difficult problem in getting a user to get their phone out while they are in the best place to use your app. Notifications could come via traditional push messages, or the user might think to use the app by seeing something in the real world that they want more information on, and they already know your app can help with this. Otherwise, your app just needs to work anywhere, either through using unstructured content, or being able to tap into content that is very, very common. This problem is the No. 1 challenge for all the “AR graffiti” type apps that let people drop notes for others to find. It’s almost impossible for users to be aware that there’s content to find. FYI — this is just another version of the same problem that all the “beacon” hardware companies have, getting the shopper to pull out their phone to discover beneficial content.

Quote for the day:

"As long as you are fighting for what is right instead of who is right, you can never lose!" -- @Rory_Vaden

Daily Tech Digest - September 02, 2017

IBM is teaching AI to behave more like the human brain

Statistical AI (ie machine learning) is capable of mimicking the brain's pattern recognition skills but is garbage at applying logic. Symbolic AI, on the other hand, can leverage logic (assuming it's been trained on the rules of that reasoning system), but is generally incapable of applying that skill in real-time. But what if we could combine the best features of the human brain's computational flexibility with AI's massive processing capability? That's exactly what the team from DeepMind recently tried to do. They've constructed a neural network able to apply relational reasoning to its tasks. It works in much the same way as the brain's network of neurons. While neurons use their various connections with each other to recognize patterns, "We are explicitly forcing the network to discover the relationships that exist" between pairs of objects in a given scenario

Bridging the boardroom’s technology gap

Relevant IT know-how can dramatically change board discussions and perspectives. Some boards employ external experts or consultants to meet this need, but outsourcing this function is an approach that can frequently lack accountability, eschew specific business context, disregard the organization’s technology capabilities, or rely on generic recommendations. Boards can address this deficiency through a three-pronged approach: appointing a business-savvy technologist to the board, taking a more offensive technology position, and considering a technology committee. Although current or former CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and other C-level technology leaders could provide valuable input and perspective to boards, Deloitte’s analysis indicates that only 3 percent of all public companies appointed a technologist to newly opened board seats in 2016

Your Future Smart Home Might Need A Bosch X-Spect Scanner

According to Dr. von Bieren, X-Spect smart homes technology is similar to that of the SCiO scanner. Like the SCiO technology, it can only read the ingredients of orange, not a cupcake. So only homogenous food items need apply. According to c|net, the most unique thing about X-Spect scanner is its ability to read the makeup of fabric and stains. Rich Brown of c|net wrote, “Right now the X-Spect can determine up to two component materials in a piece of fabric, and also let you know their relative proportions. We saw a demo on a blended cotton-poly t-shirt, for example. The creators hope to bring X-Spect to the point where it can read three different materials. It’s not there yet, but it can read four different kinds of stains. I saw it read chocolate and lipstick via a prepared demo at the Bosch booth.”

Security chatbot empowers junior analysts, helps fill cybersecurity gap

Endgame’s Alexa integration — which they believe is a first in the security industry —utilizes natural language understanding to let security analysts simply ask their network what’s going on. They can ask anything from a general check-in to specific queries about attack types, and execute commands to keep their system safe. The idea is that junior analysts can sit, ask questions, and take actionable steps without being crippled because of syntax or query language. "We wanted to tackle the problem of learning language," Filar said. "It's a good way to help move up to a senior analyst more quickly." Though, I did wonder how it would be possible to move up to a senior analyst without learning the programming language. "What we try to do," Filar said, "is provide a framework that can grow with the experience of the analyst.

What to expect from the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

This will be the fourth feature update to Windows 10 in a little over two years. And that pace will continue, with new feature updates (essentially full upgrades) due on a predictable twice-yearly cadence going forward. As with previous feature updates, there will be no last-minute surprises in this update. It's been developed in the open, with dozens of preview releases to members of the Windows Insider Program. For those who haven't been paying close attention, though, this article should get you up to speed quickly. When I looked through my notes from the past few months of testing Windows Insider builds, I was struck by how many changes have made their way into this update. And those changes encompass a wide array of user scenarios, including a healthy assortment aimed at IT pros and developers.

The current state of applied data science

Deep learning is slowly becoming part of the class of algorithms data scientists need to know about. Originally used in computer vision and speech recognition, there are starting to be examples and use cases involving data types and problems that data scientists can relate to. Challenges include choosing the right network architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and casting problems and transforming data so they lend themselves to deep learning. In many cases, users prefer and favor models that are explainable. Given that their underlying mechanisms are somewhat understandable, explainable models are also potentially easier to improve. With the recent rise of deep learning, I’m seeing companies use tools that explain how models produce their predictions and tools that can explain where a model comes from by tracing predictions from the learning algorithm

When AI and security automation become foolish and dangerous

Technology provides significant and material financial incentives over its unpredictable and fallible human counterparts. Perhaps most tellingly, automation is a key component of most vendors’ ROI stories, meaning it’s a powerful tool in the “buy our product and we will save you money” toolbox. But should organizations really be sprinting headlong into automation? There is no question that automation delivers significant value to organizations. Repetitive and boring tasks waste valuable time and result in unhappy and unengaged employees. ... Implementing some automated solutions can prove valuable. However, when it comes to network security, fully automating the tasks of a security analyst can be a dangerous and foolish decision for a variety of reasons.

The Foundation for Modernizing Application Architectures

What’s emerging is microservices – replacing monolithic applications with modular applets that are designed to do specific tasks. While the overall functionality may be the same as the monolithic app it replaces, application maintenance overhead is drastically reduced. It also means new technologies can easily be integrated, and emerging technologies like IoT and the Industrial Internet can become part of the ecosystem. The end result? Microservices architectures creates agility. So why isn’t this happening quickly? Business response to demands for new apps, integrations, business models, and emerging technologies is slow and inefficient because existing IT infrastructure, coupled with the legacy (monolithic) application model, are obstacles to the rapid and scalable delivery of digital transformation initiatives including mobile, cloud and IoT.

Fatal AI mistakes could be prevented by having human teachers

Having a human in the loop doesn’t always stop AI going wrong, however. When Evans tried the same approach with the game Road Runner, the AI overseer wasn’t able to block every big mistake the game-playing AI made. More complicated Atari games would require years of human oversight before agents were able to play without making mistakes. Even a system trained with human oversight is never going to be absolutely safe. It’s hard to know how these systems will behave in circumstances that an AI hasn’t been trained to handle, says Evans. And even the best AI could be led astray by a sloppy human trainer. “This is only as good as the human,” says Evans. If we are to trust robots in the home and hospitals, then we will need to have some guarantees about their safety, says David Abel at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

CI tried, but did not eliminate data center specialists

Perry was surprised to see how many organizations more closely evaluate their mix of on-premises and off-premises compute resources and spending. CI works well in environments with small staff sizes. But growing enterprises still need data center specialists, particularly within companies reluctant to move new workloads to the public cloud. ... Enterprises still need data center specialists in virtualization and, out of this rank, will come specialists in container management as enterprises adopt this technology, Perry said. Applications and software specialists are also in demand, particularly in growing areas such as security and DevOps, Perry said. A generalist position merges traditional specialist roles, such as server administrator or virtualization administrator, particularly if they involve management of CI. To successfully oversee CI, they must understand the storage ecosystem, Perry said.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership matters more in times of uncertainty." -- Wayde Goodall

Daily Tech Digest - September 01, 2017

The Four Laws of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is about innovating business models, not just optimizing business processes Organizations are looking to leverage these digital assets to create new “economic moats.” Warren Buffett, the investor extraordinaire, popularized the term “economic moat.” “Economic moat” refers to a business’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over its competitors (through process and technology innovation and patents) in order to protect its long-term profits and market share from competing firms. As highlighted in the McKinsey Quarterly article titled “Competing In A World Of Sectors Without Borders,” organizations are embracing digital transformation to knock down traditional industry boundaries and disrupt conventional business models

How to do open source right: LinkedIn shows the way

If you want to know how to do open source the smart way, pay attention to LinkedIn. It has delivered some of the industry’s most impressive open source software, most recently its Cruise Control load-balancing tool for Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform also developed by LinkedIn that is used to build real-time data pipelines and streaming apps in big data applications. Cruise Control exemplifies the serious open source savvy on LinkedIn’s part, with its extensibility and generality. Although meant for general consumption, Cruise Control didn’t have a real community around it; it had been developed by and for LinkedIn. But LinkedIn built Cruise Control in a way that would translate beyond LinkedIn’s needs. Many such projects make the rookie mistake of solving only their creators’ needs; LinkedIn didn’t make that mistake.

How Does AI And Regulation Play Into Fintech?

“I think the biggest change is that people are going to receive financial help before they even know it,” says WIRED Money 2017 speaker and CEO of online investment management company Nutmeg Nick Hungerford. “It’s a combination of big data and artificial intelligence. We’re going to be able to be more intelligent about people’s spending habits, their health, their lifestyles. [We’re] going to get more effective at predicting what they’re going to need for different scenarios of spending and saving. AI predicts when people are likely to get married, when you are likely to have a baby, etc. So in five years, we should be really good at giving people financial advice before they even realise they need it,” says Hungerford. AI is also being experimented with traditional financial institutions.

Disturbing trends revealed by the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

As more and more enterprise systems have moved to the cloud, more and more malicious attacks on cloud services have followed. According the Microsoft report, there was a "300 percent increase in Microsoft cloud-based user accounts attacked year-over-year." The attacks on cloud services can be traced to all countries of the world, but in the case of Azure specifically, some 35% originated in China, with another 32% coming from the United States. Ransomware, while garnering many headlines in 2017, actually affects enterprises from various parts of the world much differently. For example, ransomware is a major headache for many European countries, while the activity is almost trivial for the United States, China, and Japan. However, that does not mean those counties are not vulnerable—criminal activity changes just as fast as technology changes.

Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work

AI will eliminate some forms of this digital labour—software, for instance, has got better at transcribing audio. Yet AI will also create demand for other types of digital work. The technology may use a lot of computing power and fancy mathematics, but it also relies on data distilled by humans. For autonomous cars to recognise road signs and pedestrians, algorithms must be trained by feeding them lots of video showing both. That footage needs to be manually “tagged”, meaning that road signs and pedestrians have to be marked as such. This labelling already keeps thousands busy. Once an algorithm is put to work, humans must check whether it does a good job and give feedback to improve it. A service offered by CrowdFlower, a micro-task startup, is an example of what is called “human in the loop”.

Acer's Switch 7 could overpower the Surface Pro and MacBook Pro

What's really important, though, is what's inside. Acer has somehow managed to squeeze Intel's 8th-gen Core i7 CPU, along with Nvidia's new GeForce MX150, into the slender chassis. The CPU is quad-core with a 15-watt TDP, and Intel says it's up to 40 percent faster in some tasks. Nvidia's GeForce MX150 was actually announced in late May as a replacement for the elderly GeForce 940MX. Few hard specs are available on it, but we do know it uses GDDR5 and is based on the current Pascal architecture used in the GeForce GTX 10-series of cards. ... The combined advantage of Pascal graphics plus a quad-core CPU vs. the dual-core CPUs with integrated graphics—even Iris Plus—means the odds are very good that this new laptop/tablet will handily outperform both Microsoft's Surface Pro and Apple's MacBook Pro 13.

You Are Doing Analytics Wrong: Here Is Why

"If you're just showing me the same data in a new way, how will that show me what I should be thinking about going forward? Is it challenging me to think about how I can optimize my business model? Are there processes I need to tweak? How much money am I leaving on the table? Are we cannibalizing our own revenue? Those are the kinds of questions you should be able to ask of your data," said Kaila. Some organizations have hired a chief analytics officer or a chief data officer to ensure that data can be used as a strategic asset. That person is responsible for bridging the gap between business and IT, orchestrating resources, and driving value from analytics. "Leaders need to ensure accountability for insights," said Kaila. "If you do that, you'll be able to align the definitions, the processes and ultimately how you operationalize predictive insights."

Cloud computing and the costs: a love-hate relationship

Cloud users underestimate the amount of their wasted spend. While costs often appear low in the public cloud space at first glance, especially when temporarily using capacity, these costs quickly pile up when occupying resources on a permanent basis. Sizing plays another important role. Whether it’s regarding oversizing VMs or commissioning high-performance storage for non-critical data that is accessed infrequently, there are plenty of examples of how to put on “cloud fat”. While respondents estimate that around 30 percent is going down the drain, RightScale has measured actual waste to be between 30 and 45 percent. Despite an increased focus on cost management, only a minority of companies are taking critical actions to put governance in place with a quarter of all respondents citing managing cloud spend as their biggest challenge.

How AI Makes Brand Personalities Come to Life

It’s really interesting because we think about AI and robots replacing the workforce, but if you’re a writer, it’s a great time. If you’re a user-experience designer, this is like a renaissance because UX people have been stuck designing mobile apps and websites since the beginning. But now, we move into this voice and conversational space, which is completely a new frontier. For people who are studying philosophy and ethics, there’s a whole other new kind of movement called ethical engineering. A lot of these big tech companies are going to need to bring in people who truly understand ethics and policy and humanity. I think there are going to be some new jobs that emerge. For creative agencies, it’s an awesome time to innovate your creative product.…

Exclusive interview with Starling Bank’s founder and CEO, Anne Boden

There seems to be a misconception that traditional banks and financial services are more secure than new fintechs. There is that idea of a grandiose building with large Roman columns, and the image itself is very secure and solid. Traditional banks are built on core systems that were coded in the 1980s and ’90s, and a huge fear of overhauling these systems has to do with the fear of losing security. Our stack is built on AWS and there is some hesitation when it comes to cloud computing. Is the cloud safe? Where is it? How do you know that someone can't just retrieve vast quantities of data if there isn't a physical place to guard? But luckily, cloud computing is also highly securitised. There are a lot of companies that work specifically on cloud security such as F5, not to mention that Cisco and Microsoft also provide their own cloud security services.

Quote for the day:

The first step is the most important, if we never start we have no chance to finish. -- Gordon Tredgold

Daily Tech Digest - August 30, 2017

Citi Speaks: State-Backed Cryptocurrency Key to Blockchain Adoption

State-backed cryptocurrencies are key to the adoption of blockchain technology, according to an executive at investment banking group Citi. In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, the bank's recently appointed head of core cash management for Asia-Pacific, Morgan McKenney, positioned its new CitiConnect blockchain project within a larger context – one in which the ultimate success of distributed ledger technology depends on the advent of fiat currencies issued on a blockchain. According to McKenney, every payment method has an environment in which it's best suited, and to fully unlock the project's potential – and any number of blockchain environments – cryptocurrency is the most suitable payment method.

3 steps to create a corporate vision for digital transformation

Enterprises often transform around the notion of "What should our company look like?", Witcher said. Instead, they need to build a vision around tangible value they can create within customers' experiences along the journey. Leading companies are not building business strategies that have a digital component—rather, they are digitizing every aspect of their business strategy, Witcher said. "When the corporate vision is not clear, that impacts the speed of adoption of both senior management and middle management," said Gianni Giacomelli, senior vice president and business leader for digital solutions at Genpact. "People will not act just because technology is ready. There's a big component of corporate urgency that needs to be created from the corporate vision. It's really important."

The NIS Directive: the implications for UK technology businesses

For digital service providers, the UK government has confirmed that the NIS Directive applies, in a light touch manner, to: online marketplaces, online search engines, and cloud computing services. The government has proposed detailed definitions of each type of digital service provider: An online marketplace is defined as “a platform that acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, facilitating the sale of goods and services.” Online marketplaces are only in scope if sales are made on the platform itself, price comparison sites and online retailers are excluded. ... There should be confidence that the security principles are met regardless of whether an organisation or a third party delivers the service,” says the consultation, emphasising the importance of “ensuring that appropriate measures are employed where third-party services are used”.

How safe are your passwords? Real life rules for businesses to live by

While I find forced password changes annoying, waiting until you know there is a password compromise to change passwords is ignorant. For example, you will not be aware when people use their organizational credentials for Pokemon Go accounts, as many do. If that site is compromised and an employee has reused company passwords on it, your organization is now vulnerable. Even if the employee doesn’t use your organization’s email address, your organization is still vulnerable in a targeted attack if the password was reused across accounts. If you do not force periodic password changes, your organization is vulnerable as long as the employee has a valid account at the organization. The solution to exponentially reduce the risk to these attacks is to implement multifactor authentication.

What Can Manchester United Teach Us About Fintech?

Rather than learning to predict things in a kind of hardcoded, supervised manner, deep learning techniques operate more like a human brain, filtering through data and learning the important signals. For example, a person driving down a road that hits a pothole will probably slow down; they don't have to hit 100 of them. In order to try and encode the social science component of why a person might click on a certain advert, or trade a certain stock, deep learning algorithms use layers of nodes, some of which filter lots of data into summaries and then learn to make assumptions from these. "Actually summarising data is an easier problem than making predictions," said Chakravorty. "It's about trying to learn how people trade ... "

4 Lessons Businesses Can Learn From This Smart Lock Malfunction

Problems stemmed from an over-the-air firmware update that affected the locks’ functionality and prevented the devices from connecting to the company’s servers. Many companies, including Apple, often announce the availability of new updates and let users decide when and if to download them for their gadgets. It’s even possible to schedule updates, so they don’t occur when people are trying to use the technology. According to feedback from people affected by this smart lock debacle, they got the firmware update with no warning, similar to the way iTunes users suddenly found new U2 albums in their libraries without indicating they wanted the songs. In that case, Apple broke with tradition and delivered the media automatically, much to the dismay of some recipients who complained that the album ate up their internet data and that they didn’t like the band’s music.

How Hackers Hide Their Malware: Advanced Obfuscation

Criminals know about sandboxes, and some of the latest evasion tricks specifically target sandboxes. They include trying to fingerprint sandbox systems, delayed or timed execution, and even detection of human interactions. If the malware can detect a sandbox using these techniques, it doesn't run to avoid analysis. Furthermore, underground malware sellers have already created protectors that can detect some sandboxes. However, some advanced detection solutions take this into account, too. Rather than just using off-the-shelf virtualization environments, some solutions might use full system code emulation and create sandbox environments where they can see every instruction a malicious program sends to the physical CPU or memory

Enterprises Are Leading The Internet of Things Innovation

According to Kranz, the adoption of IoT has been broad. A few years ago, VCs were conservative in terms of investments in IoT. Today, Cisco has 14,000 IoT customers across multiple industries. An example is smart and connected cities and their use of IoT. The VC community is starting to invest more in IoT. “According to my own observations and research houses such as Ovum or McKinsey, IoT has been mostly adopted in manufacturing, logistics, transportation but also in retail, healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, and even sports and entertainment,” said Kranz. Kranz spoke about the tech industry and the cycle of reinvention measured in 307 years. Traditional business models, with vertically integrated business models, are ripe for disruption based on the rate of innovation.

Artificial intelligence cyber attacks are coming – but what does that mean?

AI-enabled attackers will also be much faster to react when they encounter resistance, or when cybersecurity experts fix weaknesses that had previously allowed entry by unauthorized users. The AI may be able to exploit another vulnerability, or start scanning for new ways into the system – without waiting for human instructions. This could mean that human responders and defenders find themselves unable to keep up with the speed of incoming attacks. It may result in a programming and technological arms race, with defenders developing AI assistants to identify and protect against attacks – or perhaps even AI’s with retaliatory attack capabilities. Operating autonomously could lead AI systems to attack a system it shouldn’t, or cause unexpected damage.

Interest in cyberinsurance grows as cybercrime targets small businesses

Cybersecurity insurance is not yet a household name. It’s not required by law, nor is it as commonplace as other types of insurance like fire, flood and general liability coverage. But, experts said, it may rival those others in importance in today’s virtual landscape, where everything from employee and customer information to financial records are stored online. Small and medium-size businesses are hit by nearly two-thirds of all cyberattacks — about 4,000 a day, according to IBM. “A lot of these hackers are smart; they’re not going after the big guys. They’re not going after Target and Sony,” said Keith Moore, CEO of CoverHound, a San Francisco insurance broker that started selling cybersecurity coverage last year.

Quote for the day:

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Daily Tech Digest - August 29, 2017

Get ready for new storage technologies and media

Intel says its elegant, narrow rack-oriented design will ultimately allow for 1 pertabyte of storage in a 1U rack. (A petabyte is a thousand terabytes (TBs), which is a thousand gigabytes.) That would be enough to hold 70 years of uninterrupted entertainment, or 300,000 movies, the technology supplier says. For comparison, to obtain a petabyte of storage using 10TB capacity HDDs, one would need a 100-bay 4U server, according to Techgage, which wrote about Intel’s announcement earlier this month. ... Experts say massive levels of data density savings will be required in the future because our insatiable demand for data is going to overrun existing storage tools available. Indeed, storage density improvements might become as important for tech development in our data-intensive future as battery chemistry advancements are thought to be now

India and Pakistan hit by spy malware - cybersecurity firm

To install the malware, Symantec found, the attackers used decoy documents related to security issues in South Asia. The documents included reports from Reuters, Zee News, and the Hindu, and were related to military issues, Kashmir, and an Indian secessionist movement. The malware allows spies to upload and download files, carry out processes, log keystrokes, identify the target’s location, steal personal data, and take screenshots, Symantec said, adding that the malware was also being used to target Android devices. In response to frequent cyber-security incidents, India in February established a center to help companies and individuals detect and remove malware. The center is operated by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

8 Hidden Android Nougat Features You Still Have Time To Try

To run two webpages in split-screen, open Chrome and ensure you’ve got at least two tabs open. Long-press your Android overview button (it’s the one shaped like a square, right next to the home button) to launch split-screen mode as you normally would. Now tap the overflow menu button in Chrome, and select “Move to other window” (see screenshot above). The tab you have up will move over to the other side of the split as a second instance of Chrome. When you’re done, exit split-screen mode by dragging the divider to one side. The tab will go back into your single Chrome instance. You can also close the tab and open a different app in split-screen mode.

You don't lack time to innovate. You lack allocation and purpose.

One of the factors that dictates what people do as consultants is the availability of charge codes. Everyone knows that lawyers, for example, typically bill their time in 15 minute increments. They need not only to bill their time in these time segments, but they also need a "charge code" - some mechanism to associate the time they just spent to a client, a business development activity or some overhead charge. As consultants, most of us are no different. Regardless of how you ultimately bill the client (time and materials, fixed fee, gain-sharing or other mechanisms) almost every consultant and consulting firm I'm aware of tracks consulting time. I'm sure the same is true in many other industries where people are accountable for a time sheet at the end of a week or month.

Open Source at the Heart of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud Development Efforts

Helm is an open source Microsoft tool added with the acquisition of Deis in April. It's a package manager for Kubernetes to keep track of resources, according to Michelle Noorali, a senior software engineer for Microsoft Azure and the core maintainer of the Kubernetes Helm project. Noorali explained that a package in Helm is called a "Chart," which consists of metadata, Kubernetes resource definitions, configurations and documentation. It's a tool to ease developers into Kubernetes, which is "still really hard" to master, she said. Microsoft also has an experimental open source project to streamline Kubernetes development on the Azure Container Service called "Draft." It will detect the language used in the source tree and containerize an app, according to Gabe Monroy

Weave your cybersecurity tactics into a cohesive strategy

To effectively address SSH key management issues in an agency, IT managers must determine who has access to the most critical infrastructure. It’s important to get control of which SSH key-based access may have root access in the environment and, more importantly, how deep the transitive trust of this access extends. The question to be answered here is, “If I breach one root key, how deeply can I penetrate into the environment?” It’s also important to grasp which SSH key-based trusts are related to service accounts and which are for interactive use. Each key-based trust, regardless of its usage, should be assigned back to an individual owner in the environment to establish accountability. Where SSH user key-based trusts are in use, it is critical to ensure the clear separation of duties.

4 ways to simplify data management

Most petabyte-scale enterprises have significant storage sprawl, with over half managing ten or more different storage systems according to a 2016 survey. As the business ages, storage sprawls out even further and soon IT ends up managing a substantial investment in infrastructure. This infrastructure is valuable, but the challenge is that over time, the difficulty of moving data means much of it is on the wrong resource for current business needs. By virtualizing data with software, enterprises can create a global namespace that makes different storage resources simultaneously available to applications. Once the control path is separated from the data path through virtualization, control can span storage silos. This makes it possible to easily move data without interrupting applications.

Dangerous Android app lets would-be hackers create ransomware

The latest TDK, like those before it, can be found on hacking forums and even in social media advertisements in China. All the user has to do is download the APK and install it and they're ready to build ransomware. The process itself is simple: Just specify a ransom message, an unlock key, the ransomware's app icon, mathematical operations to randomize the code, and an animation to show on the infected machine. After the no-code ransomware builder finishes specifying those few simple options they're prompted to subscribe to the app, which they can do with a one-time payment to the developer. Once paid for, the app purchaser is free to create as many custom ransomware variants as desired. The only thing the app leaves to the ransomware builder is distribution: All it does is provide the APK file.

Managing cyber security as business risk

Majority of organisations in private and public sector currently view cyber security as an IT problem not business risk. Department heads focus on the efficiency for instance, IT departments solely focus on network and database infrastructure and upper level management focuses on corporate performance while neglecting the growing security needs within the organisation. Also, the public entities hold a wealth of government and citizen information to ensure service delivery meanwhile ignoring the prevalent threats this data is exposed to. The above raises the question, who should be concerned? Most of the security issues faced within organisations may not necessarily be as a result of poor systems – organisations have established a number strong and well protected systems

Interpersonal Incompetence Costs Organizations Time & Money

Thirty years of experience and research has taught me that there is no relationship between organizational title and interpersonal competence. It has also taught me that the costs of silence are both calculable and catastrophic. Consider our study in health care where we found that 90 percent of nurses don’t speak up to a physician even when they know a patient’s safety is at risk. We’ve also studied workplace safety. We found that 93 percent of people say their organization is at risk of an accident waiting to happen because people are either unwilling or unable to speak up. In our recent study, we wanted to see if we could further quantify the cost of this silence. Our goal was to calculate a per-conversation price tag to show just how much it costs when an employee decides to stay silent—rather than voice a major concern.

Quote for the day:

"Peace isn't merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice." -- Harrison Ford