Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - September 20, 2017

Cybercriminals Are Using Big Name Apps To Target Unwitting Consumers

When the victim runs an app that the malware is able to simulate (a banking app, for example), it overlays this with its own fake window to steal the bank card details of the victim. The Trojan has an identical interface, with the same colour schemes and logos, which creates an instant and completely invisible overlay. So victims of the scam may not even realise that they’ve been infected. The Trojan also steals all incoming SMS messages and sends them to the cybercriminals’ Command-and-Control servers, allowing them to get access to the one-time passcodes sent by some banks to verify online banking transactions, or other messages sent by taxi and ride-sharing services. Faketoken can also monitor the victim’s calls, record them, and transmit the data to the cybercriminals’ servers.

Blockchain technology could be even more disruptive than Amazon was 2 decades ago

The highly-respected JPMorgan Chase CEO was asked last week at a global financial services conference in New York to share his thoughts on bitcoin—which can be as polarizing as President Trump. Some people love the cryptocurrency, some people hate it. bAlthough he likes blockchain technology, which bitcoin is built on top of, he began by saying he would fire any JPMorgan trader who was caught trading bitcoin, which he went on to call “stupid,” “dangerous” and “a fraud.” Dimon, who’s decidedly in the latter camp, didn’t mince his words. “You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air,” he said. With all due respect to Dimon, some might point out that “inventing a currency out of thin air” is how we got Federal Reserve Notes and other forms of paper money in the first place. Even he admits this:

Cloud Adoption Hindered by Legacy Network Architecture

“The survey revealed an incredible level of agreement by decision makers that their network infrastructures must change in order to have a successful cloud strategy and their pace of implementing next generation networking impacts their ability to realize the full benefits of digital transformation,” survey authors stated. Ninety percent of respondents agreed that legacy network infrastructure cannot keep up with the demands of modern network infrastructure. More healthcare organizations are considering and deploying cloud-based solutions for their infrastructure and many are met with networking roadblocks that can’t be resolved without upgrading the network. Adopting a cloud solution requires organizations to migrate data from their legacy solution.

The 5 Most Exciting University AI Projects

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most exciting fields of growing technology. There are incredible advancements in AI happening on a regular basis. Many of the top universities around the world are involving themselves in some very interesting and exciting AI projects. These projects cover a pretty wide range of subjects and objectives, but they all aim to make very interesting and exciting advancements in the field of artificial intelligence. Universities ranging from the University of Washington to Carnegie Mellon to Harvard and Oxford are putting their best and brightest minds towards some very intriguing AI projects. There are a great deal of exciting and interesting artificial intelligence projects happening at universities all over the world, and these are the 5 most exciting projects.

79% of AI leaders expect employees to work comfortably with robots by 2020

The top three barriers to AI adoption in the enterprise are information security concerns, lack of clarity about where to apply AI most effectively, and siloes within the organization, especially between IT and other areas, the report stated. Genpact found that AI leaders take several steps to foster a culture that embraces the technology that laggards do not. For example, 71% of leaders allocate resources and funding toward AI-related technologies, compared to just 9% of laggards. More than half of leaders allow a training and development culture to learn new skills, compared to 15% of laggards. And nearly 60% of leaders report that their middle managers "think out of the box" and encourage innovation, while only 14% of laggards said the same.

Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards

We often ask managers (both in these classes and in consulting engagements) how good their data needs to be. While a fine-grained answer depends on their uses of the data, how much an error costs them, and other company- and department-specific considerations, none has ever thought a score less than the “high nineties” acceptable. Less than 3% in our sample meet this standard. For the vast majority, the problem is severe. ... The cost of these findings is difficult to predict with much precision. Still, most find a good first approximation in the “rule of ten,” which states that “it costs ten times as much to complete a unit of work when the data are flawed in any way as it does when they are perfect.” For instance, suppose you have 100 things to do and each costs a $1 when the data are perfect.

Why Dropbox decided to drop AWS and build its own infrastructure and network

Williams says for Dropbox, building the network was a business decision and it has had a positive impact on the business overall. “I think it could be argued in fact that anyone who has built a decent-sized network like this has had some effect on the business in a positive way that is actually building trust for the user and getting more users to adopt the product or service based on the quality of the service” Williams explained. The new system has certainly had a positive impact on Dropbox’s reputation with enterprise IT too. Back in the day, Dropbox often had a bad rep with IT because of unauthorized usage inside large organizations. Today, the Dropbox Business line of products combined with this in-house infrastructure and network has created a level of trust they didn’t have before.

Three Things about Networks That Every CIO Should Have on their Agenda

Within the next five to ten years, business will be transformed by digital technology, on a much larger scale than seemingly possible at first glance. Everything will be part of a globally-interconnected IT infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT provides a flood of sensory data to big data analytics and allows for real-time (or near real-time) interactivity. Whatever industry, the IT network will become the foundation of every business. For example, car manufacturers are preparing for a future when cars are not simply hardware that takes us from A to B, but interconnected software platforms that provide an individualized user experience to drivers. Forklift manufacturers will provide forklifts as a service with cloud-based management and fault monitoring. The list goes on and on.

Onboarding For The Digital Workplace: Get Employees To Productivity Faster

A key theme we focus on when working with clients is clarifying what business value they will derive from their efforts. One way to do that is to create use cases for different Digital Workplace scenarios. This is so critical that it led us to develop use case catalogs with two recent clients. Each use case highlights a business scenario or process, its business outcomes, steps to achieve it, and the related success story. This has become an important tool for socializing digital working across the organization, and is sometimes even a roadmap for a new team to follow until their own unique use cases become clear. The success of this approach got me thinking that it would be helpful to share a use case example so that anyone who’s looking to better understand the Digital Workplace can see the power behind it.

How the Financial Sector is Preparing for its AI-led Future

Not only is there no going back on AI, there’s a very clear imperative to go fast-forward. In less than a decade, a whole new Generation Z will join the Millennials as the most important customers of banks. These customers, beyond tech-savvy, will be tech-innate, juggling 5 screens at a time, communicating with images, and shunning text and touch interfaces in favor of the instantaneity of voice-based commands. Understanding and serving their needs will require more than the average human ability. It will require man and machine to work together more symbiotically so people can then prepare for roles and jobs that don’t yet exist – like product predictors, customer-trend readers, maybe even managers of digital currency portfolios. The possibilities are only just beginning to emerge.

Quote for the day:

"My failures have been errors in judgment, not of intent." -- Ulysses S. Grant

Daily Tech Digest - September 19, 2017

Can DevOps deliver on digital potential?

If a developer cannot easily see how to get their code into production, or the path that needs to be taken is convoluted, then, for Hill, chances are features are not being released as quickly as they could be. The situation at JLR, which is unique to certain industries such as automotive, is that there is heavy use of embedded devices. “When we are putting software into vehicles, we do not have the luxury of a web developer,” said Hill. Clearly, it is not feasible to spin up a fleet of vehicles to run automated test suites. Instead, he says the team has to rely on virtualisation and software-based infrastructure to enable it to build code that is representative of the operating environment of a production vehicle. People often argue that the cultural change is harder than the technological change, but like JLR’s heavy reliance on embedded systems, some technologies can prove immutable.

Measuring the economic value of data

On the value side of the equation, there is not a well-defined measure for data value. The value of data is really a measure of business value as a result of using or analyzing that data in some way. In addition, there is a correlation between the amount of data kept, how accessible that data is, and its value. For example, having more data makes all of the data more valuable if the use of the data depends on a historical trend. For example, use of machine learning is already changing the value of larger data sets because most machine learning algorithms work better when trained with large amounts of data. The area under the curve represents the amount of data that is created but not stored because its value is perceived to be lower than the cost to keep it.

Future Cyber Security Threats & Challenges: Are You Ready For What's Coming?

The increasing depth and volume of personal and corporate data make it a more rewarding target for cyber crooks and state-sponsored espionage or sabotage. At the same time, greater connectivity provides more potential attack vectors. This makes industry, governments and individuals uneasy and unsure how to prepare. Predicting the exact nature of future threats and how to combat them is difficult, but a new study from The Internet Society (ISOC) offers credible insight. ISOC was founded by internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1992 “to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world.” On September 18, ISOC released its Paths to our Digital Future report, which sheds light on how the development of the internet might continue to service everyone.

Amazon innovation chief: 'We are failing and will continue to fail'

"It was this willingness to fail and trying to get things right eventually finally that led us to this very beneficial way of doing business," Misener said. The key to innovation is experimentation, Misener told the crowd. And to experiment, you have to fail. "The whole idea is this: if you really want to be innovative, you have to experiment. If you know the outcome of what you're going to do, it's not an experiment. It's more like a demonstration." Misener said too many people confuse real experiments with the type of you do in a school science class. "Undoubtedly your teacher knew what the outcome was supposed to be and you probably knew what the outcome was supposed to be," he said. "The reason? You weren't doing an experiment, you were just rehashing an experiment that was done decades, maybe centuries ago.

Hackers compromised free CCleaner software, Avast's Piriform says

Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack because it penetrated an established and trusted supplier in a manner similar to June’s “NotPetya” attack on companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software. “There is nothing a user could have noticed,” Williams said, noting that the optimisation software had a proper digital certificate, which means that other computers automatically trust the program. In a blog post, Piriform confirmed that two programs released in August were compromised. It advised users of CCleaner v5.33.6162 and CCleaner Cloud v1.07.3191 to download new versions. A spokeswoman said that 2.27 million users had downloaded the August version of CCleaner while only 5,000 users had installed the compromised version of CCleaner Cloud.

Progressive web apps in Microsoft Edge: What you need to know

Under the hood of a progressive web app is a new HTML feature, the service worker. Service workers take what would have been server functionality and bring it into your web content—along with adding support for some native platform-like features. It’s that ability to abstract the web server that makes progressive web apps attractive, because the same underlying web code will work on the web for devices that don’t support progressive web apps, increasing your reach and making sure that users on other platforms aren’t left out. Service workers are event-driven scripts that respond to actions from your UI or from other service workers, giving you a simple structure that can support increasingly complex code. They’re not intended to work with your content—they send messages to and from the page, with familiar JavaScript code and libraries handling layout.

Why end-to-end encryption is about more than just privacy

Duric says the information security community should work on raising awareness about the need for privacy among regular people/Internet users. At the moment these efforts are being obstructed by Internet conglomerates, he notes, just as the tobacco industry hindered awareness raising about the dangers of smoking and passive smoking all those years ago. But those who were fighting the good fight persevered, and today everybody knowns about those dangers, and can choose for themselves whether the option is worth the risk. People need to be aware that the great power Internet giants have over us could lead to great abuses, and ask themselves what can go wrong if they choose not to protect their communications. But also, companies that sell security need to find good ways to do it – adapt methods that have worked in the past for other vendors, both for physical and digital security.

Cyber security: Media companies cannot afford to ignore risks

"Ultimately, when a company is faced with losing $10 million a day, or paying a $10 thousand ransom, executives may see a strong business reason to pay.” It’s an IT security issue but needs to be understood company-wide. “But there are also potential legal implications of paying a ransom, including US sanctions laws and anti-money laundering controls that companies should explore with counsel,” Rosen said. “Cyber security hygiene is a growing and an important component to any major business, and I think it’s only going to continue to grow. “Hackers will find new ways to infiltrate networks, and whether it’s the broadcasting and media industries or some other sector, as long as there is a desire for what you have or to manipulate what you’re doing, the threat of cyber-attacks will continue,” Rosen stated.

MPLS or IPsec VPN: which is the best?

If your real-time apps are a big part of everyday life for users in your company, don’t believe the hype and dump your MPLS network without thorough testing. Ask yourself questions like “Will having unreliable call quality hurt our customers’/prospective customers’ impression when they call our company, as they review a bid from our competitor?” Or “Will it slow our employees down if their app is unreliable or slow?” Those little things make for big losses. Put it this way… if your company has sales of only $25 million/year, a mere 1 percent loss in sales (due to lost customers, etc.), equates to a $250,000 loss. Add this to money lost from lost employee payroll efficiency and you can see how the execs will not be happy with dropped calls, glitchy apps, etc. And a $25 million company doesn’t have a big enough WAN to save $250,000+ from ditching their MPLS.

UK education system exacerbates cyber skills gap

Nick Viney, vice-president consumer at McAfee, said this insight into the widespread uninspiring view of careers in cyber security makes it clear that fixing the cyber skills gap will require more than an updated curriculum. “However, teachers are not to blame,” he said. “Our sector needs to attract new talent, but that won’t happen if the industry cannot convey the wide variety of available job opportunities or the fast-paced and challenging nature of careers. “The view of cyber security needs to change at a national level. While updates to the curriculum could help plug the skills gap and inspire a new generation of cyber experts, it won’t come into effect straight away. Instead, we need to foster new education models and accelerate the availability of training opportunities for all.”

Quote for the day:

"In any leadership position, the most important aspect of your job will be getting your team to work together." -- Dale Brown

Daily Tech Digest - September 18, 2017

Benefits of containers seep into software-based networking

Distributed microservices at scale can create a tremendous volume of network traffic between individual containers; a leading concern is the potential increase in east-west traffic in the data center and even between container-based applications within a single server. Key challenges for networking containers include performance, automated provisioning of appropriate network resources, visibility and network management. Network security is another issue. Containers solve some security concerns, like isolation, but may create other unknown vulnerabilities. Some current security technologies will easily support the migration to containers, while others may not. Networking can be built into container software or provided by third-party network software, such as Cumulus Networks, Pluribus Networks, 128 Technology and Big Switch Networks.

What fuelled Python's rise to become the fastest-growing programming language?

The overriding interest among Python developers in data science is reinforced by other data. Among the Python-tagged questions, the fastest growing tag is related to pandas, a data analytics software library for Python. Only introduced in 2011, it now accounts for almost 1% of Stack Overflow question views. However, the second most visited tag by Python visitors is JavaScript, likely reflecting the healthy use of Python by web developers. For finer detail, Stack Overflow broke down which Python-related frameworks and software libraries visitors were most interested in, with strong showings for the data science-related NumPy and matplotlib alongside pandas, and mixed interest in the web frameworks Django and Flask.

Machine Learning For Java Developers

Supervised learning and unsupervised learning are the most popular approaches to machine learning. Both require feeding the machine a massive number of data records to correlate and learn from. Such collected data records are commonly known as a feature vectors. In the case of an individual house, a feature vector might consist of features such as overall house size, number of rooms, and the age of the house. In supervised learning, a machine learning algorithm is trained to correctly respond to questions related to feature vectors. To train an algorithm, the machine is fed a set of feature vectors and an associated label. Labels are typically provided by a human annotator, and represent the right "answer" to a given question. The learning algorithm analyzes feature vectors and their correct labels to find internal structures and relationships between them. Thus, the machine learns to correctly respond to queries.

Q&A on the Book SAFe Distilled

SAFe scales by combining the power of agile with lean product development, and systems thinking. It creates alignment between strategy and execution from the portfolio to agile teams and vice versa. The basic building block for SAFe’s scalability are Agile Release Trains (ARTs). An ART is essentially an agile program, which contains between five to twelve agile teams that are all collaborating together, as one team, via a common mission, vision, and program backlog. If you are building a solution that requires the contributions of hundreds—or even thousands—of people, you simply launch more trains and coordinate them following the same patterns and similar roles used to coordinate multiple Agile teams. Face-to-face planning and integrated system demos helps assure collaboration, alignment, and rapid adaptation.

AI poses no threat to IT careers

“In virtualisation management, where you might be managing tens of thousands of virtual machines, the level of automation is already an order of magnitude higher, and it’s higher again with containerisation,” Hubbard said. “To IT administrators, that’s helpful. So when you ask, ‘Are you threatened by automation?’, they will say no. But the automation is replacing a full time job.” New jobs, however, are emerging, according to companies already implementing AI. In a Capgemini survey of almost 1,000 organisations which are implementing AI, either as a pilot or at scale, 83% of respondents said AI had generated new roles in their organisations. Among those that had deployed AI at scale, 63% said that no job had been axed. Nevertheless, AI technologies are being rolled out in Australia with the capacity to significantly disrupt traditional roles.

How to work with MongoDB in .Net

MongoDB uses the BSON format under the hood to represent the JSON documents at the heart of the data store. BSON or “Binary JSON” is a lightweight and efficient binary-encoded data serialization format that supports fast data traversal and searches. BSON also allows MongoDB to support data types—namely int, long, date, floating point, and decimal128—not represented in JSON. In MongoDB documents are part of collections, in much the same way as a row is part of a table in a relational database. A document is essentially a collection of field and value pairs, which can also be nested. Note that a value in MongoDB can be a document, an array of documents, an array of BSON, or just a BSON type. Let’s look at how we can work with MongoDB using C#.

Digital forensics: The smart person's guide

Digital forensics is the extraction, analysis, and documentation of data from physical media. Why it matters: Digital life is not anonymous. As we use the web, we also scatter fragments of data in our wake. If collected, personal data fragments can present an accurate profile of our behavior and personality. Often this data trail is accompanied by legal implications. Digital forensic experts know how to assemble the picture. Who it affects: Because digital forensics experts are typically used in a legal setting, government organizations, SMBs, and enterprise companies may want to consider preemptively working with an expert to better understand potential vulnerabilities. When it's happening: Digital forensics has been a thriving industry since the mid-1970s.

Chatbots With Machine Learning: Building Neural Conversational Agents

Interacting with a machine via natural language is one of the requirements for general artificial intelligence. This field of AI refers to dialogue systems, spoken dialogue systems, or chatbots. The machine needs to provide you with an informative answer, maintain the context of the dialogue, and be indistinguishable from the human (ideally). In practice, the last requirement is not yet reachable. But luckily, humans are ready to talk with robots if they are helpful — sometimes, they can even be funny and interesting interlocutors. There are two major types of dialogue systems: goal-oriented and general conversation. The former help people to solve everyday problems using natural language, while the latter attempt to talk with people on a wide range of topics.

The Best Video Editing Software

Video editing software ranges from free versions that are pretty bare-bones to feature-packed prosumer versions. Indeed, they vary as much as the reasons why people take up video editing—whether to make home videos, to become YouTube stars, to create VR experiences, and more. Most video editing software for consumers and mainstream users is best used for one or another of these specific functions, but there are a few generalists out there, too. For this roundup we’ll first be looking at the middle ground: Paid consumer video editing programs that cost $80 or less. Whatever your purpose, you should be able to find consumer software for less than $100 that can meet your needs. We’ll soon be updating this roundup with our top picks among free versions and prosumer versions, so stay tuned for more reviews.

Why won't enterprises take IoT security seriously?

"We're experiencing a period that's very exciting, because there is a lot of innovation going on and different parties racing to deploy new applications, devices, and techniques," Domingo Guerra, co-founder and president of Appthority, said in a panel discussion. However, not enough attention is being paid to the potential risks. "We've seen it before where we deploy smart traffic grids or street lights and never think about how to secure it or patch it until it's too late and too costly to address," Guerra said. "The main risk is not enough caution and foresight into how to address this new innovation securely." Many IoT device manufacturers do not include security in the design phase, said David Schwartzberg, senior security engineer at MobileIron. These manufacturers analyze their project from a cost perspective and time to delivery, and security often falls by the wayside.

Quote for the day:

"Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right." -- John Maxwell

Daily Tech Digest - September 17, 2017

Reasoning About Software Quality Attributes

Quality attribute requirements such as those for performance, security, modifiability, reliability, and usability have a significant influence on the software architecture of a system. Architects need to understand their designs in terms of quality attributes. For example, they need to understand whether they will achieve deadlines in real time systems, what kind of modifications are supported by their design and how the system will respond in the event of a failure. There are large and thriving attribute communities that study various quality attributes but they each have their own language and sets of concepts. However, architects tend to think in terms of architectural patterns. What the architect needs is a characterization of architectural patterns in terms of factors that affect the various quality attributes so that a software design can be understood in terms of those quality attributes.

Where Is Social Media Headed in 2018 and Beyond?

There’s a real movement to create social media platforms that cut-through the censorship of big brother, and give users more control. And it’s not all about bypassing government censorship. Even Facebook has found themselves in hot water, facing down claims that Facebook censors conservative news sources in their “Trending” news widget. There’s also the fact that social media giants make billions of dollars by selling ads that rely on the content we freely give them. As publishers and users, we aren’t getting a slice of the pie. As I researched this article, I stumbled across an exciting new concept in social media -- the idea of taking social media to the blockchain. Yes, you read that correctly. The same technology that’s used to power bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could be coming to a social media app near you.

How to Evaluate Software Quality from Source Code

Compute the codebases’s cyclomatic complexity, normalized over the number of methods. This tells you the complexity of the average method, which carries critical significance. More paths through the code means more tests needed to verify the application’s behavior. And this, in turn, increases the likelihood that developers and testers miss verification scenarios, letting untested situations into production. Does that sound like a recipe for defects? It should. Coupling and cohesion represent fairly nuanced code metrics. I’ll offer an easy mnemonic at the risk of oversimplifying just a bit. You can think of cohesion as the degree to which things that should change together occur together. And you can think of coupling as the degree to which two things must change together.

DDoS protection, mitigation and defense: 7 essential tips

“A disaster recovery plan and tested procedures should also be in place in the event a business-impacting DDoS attack does occur, including good public messaging. Diversity of infrastructure both in type and geography can also help mitigate against DDoS as well as appropriate hybridization with public and private cloud," says Day. “Any large enterprise should start with network level protection with multiple WAN entry points and agreements with the large traffic scrubbing providers (such as Akamai or F5) to mitigate and re-route attacks before they get to your edge. No physical DDoS devices can keep up with WAN speed attacks, so they must be first scrubbed in the cloud. Make sure that your operations staff has procedures in place to easily re-route traffic for scrubbing and also fail over network devices that get saturated,” says Scott Carlson, technical fellow at BeyondTrust.

Why Shift-Left Testing is Critical for Enhancing Software Quality?

As the name suggests, testing gets shifted to the left of the development process and deals with the defects on the go rather than waiting till the end of the process. In the Agile environment, this implies that the software gets faster to the market and can be updated on a continuous basis. Shift left testing approach introduces the tester right from the inception of the software development process. This eases the efforts of the developers while developing the software application that needs to meet the desired quality standards. An Agile approach cannot function without the concept of Continuous Testing and development. It operates on the fundamental premise that the software can be released at any time during development, or upgraded in case of commercial demands. The significance of Shift-left in an Agile set-up is indispensable, as it binds testing effectively with development and continues to ensure quality.

Data Science’s Dirty Little Secrets

If expertise on data, platforms and programming isn’t sufficient, what are the specificities of a data scientist? From our point of view, it all begins with the candidate’s understanding the logics of specific markets and industries. Data Science is also a frame of mind — data scientists are continuing scanning their physical and digital environments for problems to be solved. They day job consists of exploring the nature of the problems to be solved, qualifying the data at hand, identifying which methodologies can produce better choices in given contexts, and transforming data into insightful action. They don’t isolate themselves in front of a computer, but as Lee Baker suggests, they serve as detectives of the realities of the company and its clients, as well as mediators between the technical and operational services inside the organization.

Enterprise Architecture Is Not The Answer - It Is Part Of The Answer

As a matter of practicality, for Enterprise Architecture to be successful, there are many things that have to work out before, in parallel with, and after Enterprise Architecture efforts result in an Enterprise Architecture. There are governance things going on, there are development things going on, there are operations things going on. Each of these areas can benefit from some good old Enterprise Architecture thinking and, as well, Enterprise Architecture success needs these areas to be successful! Again, Enterprise Architecture is not THE answer, it is part of something bigger. In most enterprises governance comes in many forms including strategic management, portfolio management, project management, etc. Most of the methods applied in each of these follow some sort of decision-making loop.

Machine learning methods (infographic)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are a hot topic in the enterprise, with company leaders having high hopes for how they can be used to improve and automate business processes. In fact, some 54% of organizations are making substantial investments in AI today, and that number jumps to 63% in three years, according to our 2017 Global Digital IQ Survey. So how will AI solve business problems, like helping you figure out why you’re losing customers or assessing the risk of a credit applicant? It depends on a number of factors, especially the data you are working with and the type of training that will be required. Learn about the most common algorithms and their uses cases below.

Oath for Programmers

What matters is what the layman thinks about this -- and by extension what legislators think about it. In the end, it will be the everyday ordinary civilian who will demand the commitment to professional behavior; and will demand that behavior be monitored and enforced. ... There are two kinds of harm that a software developer can do to their users. The first is the most obvious. The software could fail. It seems perfectly reasonable that we should promise to do our very best to deliver software that does not fail. The second form of harm that programmers routinely do to their users is to harm the _structure_ of software. Users expect software to be easy to change. It is _soft_ ware after all. Users need their software systems to keep pace with the rapid change in society and technology. It seems perfectly reasonable that we should promise to do our very best to keep software soft.

To control AI, we need to understand more about humans

In a future with more pervasive AI, people will be interacting with machines on a regular basis—sometimes without even knowing it. What will happen to our willingness to drive or follow traffic laws when some of the cars are autonomous and speaking to each other but not us? Will we trust a robot to care for our children in school or our aging parents in a nursing home? Social psychologists and roboticists are thinking about these questions, but we need more research of this type, and more that focuses on the features of a system, not just the design of an individual machine or process. This will require expertise from people who think about the design of normative systems. Are we prepared for AIs that start building their own normative systems—their own rules about what is acceptable and unacceptable for a machine to do—in order to coordinate their own interactions?\

Quote for the day:

"To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." -- Pat Riley

Daily Tech Digest - September 16, 2017

Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains

Across Microsoft’s global network of machines, Mr. Burger pointed out, alternative chips are still a relatively modest part of the operation. And Bart Sano, the vice president of engineering who leads hardware and software development for Google’s network, said much the same about the chips deployed at its data centers. Mike Mayberry, who leads Intel Labs, played down the shift toward alternative processors, perhaps because Intel controls more than 90 percent of the data-center market, making it by far the largest seller of traditional chips. He said that if central processors were modified the right way, they could handle new tasks without added help. But this new breed of silicon is spreading rapidly, and Intel is increasingly a company in conflict with itself. It is in some ways denying that the market is changing, but nonetheless shifting its business to keep up with the change.

Monetizing data: A new source of value in payments

Probably the greatest potential of data monetization comes from merging cardholder data with data from the merchant side to gain an end-to-end view on transactions that can unlock additional value. The opportunities include coupling consumers with preferred merchants, channels, and potentially products; geo-referring transactions to identify a customer’s location; and understanding the dynamics of local markets at a sub-postal code level. The payments providers best placed to capture these opportunities are those with a large market share in both issuing and acquiring in specific markets, or those acting on one of the “legs” that are able to develop effective partnerships with players strong on the other “leg”: for instance, a large merchant acquirer partnering with a primary issuing bank.

Man versus machine: not the war that’s been expected

NATO believes it will get to a point where AI can make strategic decisions on vital NATO issues. This move means AI transcends driverless cars, and transitions to decisions in international diplomacy, where an automated decision could potentially trigger a global conflict or war. If these two instances were enhanced through cognitive computing, we would start to see AI evolve to the point where it has enough brain-power to learn from each decision and maybe even understand the impact. Cognitive computing marries AI and machine learning and “learns” from data without interference from humans. It acts as an autonomous entity that senses and perceives the environment, learns and adapts and takes rational actions to ensure it reaches its goal.

We must not let regulation crush innovation

We have seen this recently with the Financial Conduct Authority’s queries into distributed ledger technology (DLT), where, despite controls being in place, discussions have been opened about the suitability of that technology to meet specific regulatory demands. Yet at the same time, regulators are also offering regulatory sandboxes for fintech innovation. So there is a fine balance to be found between understanding the potential for new technologies, and proper governance around them. If regulators do decide to pursue regulation of the regtech sector itself, the process of financial services firms exploring innovative solutions may become more difficult. The financial services industry needs to promote both innovation and governance, in a technically savvy, efficient and controlled way

Meet the elevators of the future: Moving people sideways and data to the cloud

The cabins can go sideways and aren’t limited to one per shaft due to a unique motor technology that makes the elevators more like a looping metro system within the tower. But it isn’t just the hope of a chocolate factory-inspired elevator utopia that sparks ThyssenKrupp’s innovation, ... Data from Max-connected machines — such as door movements, trips, power-ups, car calls and error codes — are collected from around the world and then sent to the cloud to be analyzed by algorithms and machine learning. From there, operational patterns are picked up and the various components’ remaining lifetimes are calculated so technicians can replace parts before a breakdown occurs. Elevators can then be scheduled for maintenance during off-peak hours to minimization disruption and, therefore, increase efficiency.

Why Blockchain May Be Key to IBM's Future

IBM definitely has a lead when it comes to blockchain technology, having been involved in its development almost since the day people first realized that distributed databases might be useful outside the realm of cryptocurriencies. It was also one of the first companies to put the technology into production for it's own purposes, integrating it into its own supply chain. It also might be uniquely positioned to bring blockchain adoption to financial institutions, which have recognized the technology's benefits but have been cautiously slow to adopt it. The company has worked with the financial sector since the days when computer technology was in its infancy and Big Blue was about the only game in town. That means it's built a lot of trust over the years. It also means it has a deep understanding of the needs and concerns of bankers and others in the financial trades.

6 Best UI Design Principles to Develop Mobile Apps

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works," Steve Jobs famously said. This powerful quote points to the significance of a good user interface design along with a rich user experience. In simple words, the design of your mobile app can literally make or break your mobile application. So, to make your mobile app a success, it needs to be gorgeous inside and out. ... Feedback is another important aspect of design, as it validates action of a user. In simple words, to let users know that the particular action was completed, whether, through text, image or sound is important. So, make sure your app provides instant feedback for every interaction. However, make sure feedback happens in a user-friendly and timely manner.

Don’t Be Tricked by Unstructured Data Analytics Technology

Unstructured data involves a variety of formats such as audio data, images, texts, web data, office documents, and device logs. Each data format needs a specific processing technique, such as speech recognition, image comparison, full-text search, and graphic computation. There isn’t a technique to analyze all forms of unstructured data. Similarly, there’s no reason to replace the image comparison technique with the speech recognition technique, or substitute full-text search with graphic computation. A software vendor who specializes in a certain technology will certainly advertise its domain, like facial recognition technology or text mining, instead of just claiming that it is an expert that doesn't offer anything special.

Threat Intelligence Strategies Suffer from Data Overload

“It’s abundantly clear that organizations now understand the benefits provided by threat intelligence, but the overwhelming volume of threat data continues to pose a hurdle to truly effective adoption,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.“Threat intelligence programs are often challenging to implement, but when done right, they are a critical element in an organization’s security program. The significant growth in adoption over the past year is encouraging as it indicates widespread recognition of the value threat intelligence provides.” Other respondents cited difficulty in the integration of threat intelligence platforms with other security technologies and tools (64%), and a lack of alignment between analyst activities and operational security events (52%).

Don't Delay: Replace Symantec TLS/SSL Certs Now

Google alleged Symantec had issued digital certificates without thoroughly verifying requesters. That's crucial, because holding a certificate for a website means an attacker could potentially decrypt web traffic, exposing sensitive data. Symantec had a robust TLS business. Through acquisitions of TLS businesses run by VeriSign, Thawte, Equifax and others, it held about 30 percent of the market. Part of the reason Google became so involved in the debate is that it was one of the victims of lax TLS issuance. Google charged in September 2016 that it found Symantec's Thawte division issued extended validation pre-certificates for www.google.com and google.com, an egregious and potentially dangerous error.

Quote for the day:

"If you don_t find a leader, perhaps it is because you were meant to lead." -- Glenn Beck

Daily Tech Digest - September 15, 2017

Tesla crash shows man and machine must cooperate

This complex failure, which both man and machine contributed to, sounds an important warning about autonomous-drive technology: until the systems are so good they need no human input, the human driver must remain at the center of "semi-autonomous" drive system design. Engineers must assume that if there's a way for people to misuse these systems, they will. Just as important, companies need to understand that if they over-promote a semi-autonomous drive system's capabilities in hopes of pulling ahead in the race to autonomy, they run the risk of making the technology less safe than an unassisted human driver. There's a lesson to be learned here from aviation. As computers and sensors improved in the 1980s, aircraft manufacturers began to automate more and more of the controls simply because they could.

What is Kotlin? The Java alternative explained

Kotlin has relaxed Java’s requirement that functions be class members. In Kotlin, functions may be declared at top level in a file, locally inside other functions, as a member function inside a class or object, and as an extension function. Extension functions provide the C#-like ability to extend a class with new functionality without having to inherit from the class or use any type of design pattern such as Decorator. For Groovy fans, Kotlin implements builders; in fact, Kotlin builders can be type checked. Kotlin supports delegated properties, which can be used to implement lazy properties, observable properties, vetoable properties, and mapped properties. Many asynchronous mechanisms available in other languages can be implemented as libraries using Kotlin coroutines, which are experimental in Kotlin 1.1.

Markets, GPS could be first to go in the event of global cyber conflict

Evil state-sponsored hackers do want to wreak mass havoc on the societies they deem to be the enemy. I would counter that it is probable, not just possible, that cyberattacks will shut down the power grid, erase or paralyze financial data systems (see above) or cause military equipment to malfunction in the near future. ... “It certainly is very odd that so many incidents have taken place in a relatively short period of time,” Finnish computer programmer Harri Hursti told me. Hursti said vulnerabilities in GPS technology would be the logical place to start any investigation into the U.S. Navy mishaps that have plagued the Pacific fleet this year, but pointed out that there was not enough information about the systems used to make an educated guess at what may have happened.

What is BlueBorne? Billions of phones, laptops and TVs at risk of silent Bluetooth hack

"These silent attacks are invisible to traditional security controls and procedures," said YevgenyDibrov, the chief executive of Armis, in a statement. "Companies don't monitor these types of device-to-device connections in their environment, so they can't see these attacks or stop them," he added. Armis said that it first reported the vulnerabilities to Google, Microsoft and Linux in April and patches have now been released as part of vendors' regular scheduled updates. Users are recommended to urgently download all security fixes to stay safe. Ars Technica reported that the time to exploit a device was "no more than 10 seconds" and that it would theoretically work even if a device was already paired with another. A spokesperson for Microsoft claimed it first released patches for BlueBorne in July this year.

Power, Performance, and the Cloud

There are a lot of security vendors today offering cloud-enabled security tools, devices and platforms. What is lacking is a comprehensive security approach that can tie the hybrid nature of networks together into a single, holistic security strategy without compromising performance. Many of the security tools on the market continue to operate in isolation, which diminishes effective cross-platform visibility. Cloud-based tools don’t necessarily work well in more traditional, physical environments. And nearly all of them collapse in terms of performance when deep inspection is required, which is nearly all the time given the increasingly sophisticated nature of threats and the fact that more than half of all network traffic is now encrypted.

10 tips for better search queries in Apache Solr

Apache Solr is an open source search engine at heart, but it is much more than that. It is a NoSQL database with transactional support. It is a document database that offers SQL support and executes it in a distributed manner. Previously, I’ve shown you how to create and load a collection into Solr; you can load that collection now if you hadn’t done it previously. ... The original scoring mechanism that Solr used is called TF-IDF, for “term frequency versus the inverse document frequency.” It returns how frequently a term occurs in your field or document versus how frequently that term occurs overall in your collection. The problem with this algorithm is that having "Game of Thrones" occur 100 times in a 10-page document versus ten times in a 10-page document doesn't make the document 10 times more relevant. It makes it more relevant but not 10 times more relevant.

Digital Transformation Is More Outside The Enterprise Than Inside

When an enterprise starts a digital transformation initiative, the boundaries for that extend far beyond the enterprise. It goes and touches every part of the ecosystem, which we loosely call the customer, whether he is a paying customer, a prospective customer, a next generation customer or an accidental customer. With all the availability of the digital technologies, we have far more ways to engage the so-called customer. The CIO in the years gone by, whether he was a driver, implementer, endorser, his focus was handling IT systems. Today the CIO’s hands are full in keeping the lights on, and still in a cost-sensitive position, he still has to prepare for the future. ... When you start thinking about real digital transformation inside and outside the enterprise, he may not have the bandwidth and that’s where the CDO comes in.

Workplace IoT Puts Companies on Notice for Smarter Security

Given the understandable unease, employers may be tempted to take a knee-jerk approach and ban employees from using their connected devices in the workplace, similar to what they did when people started taking smartphones to work. But organizations should avoid that inclination and instead focus on providing clear instructions for how employees can safely and appropriately use their devices in a way that does not put the organization at risk. Otherwise, current and prospective employees may look for a friendlier workplace to take their devices — and their talents. Putting a sound IoT policy in place — with emphasis on separate network segments for employee-owned devices — is a far better alternative. The policy should address issues such as whether devices will be allowed to connect to the Internet and how to handle devices capable of recording sound or video.

The future is coming. Here's what it might look like

Emergent technologies are poised to radically change how we work and live. They will transform our cities and workplaces, shifting jobs and entrepreneurship in new directions, and spur new ways to manage our lives. All of society will be affected, up to and including how we interact with machines themselves. Sophisticated machines and applications that communicate online will accelerate demand for broadband internet and challenge existing information and telecommunication norms. All of this will require ongoing discussions about security, infrastructure and open-data policy and planning. We now need action. We must move past: “We know it’s coming and have to do something” to “Here is how we can implement and collaborate to make it happen.”

Is TDD a Form of OCD?

The current fanatical TDD experience leads to a primary focus on unit tests (...) I don't think that's healthy. Test-first units leads to an overly complex web of intermediary objects and indirection (...) It's given birth to some truly horrendous monstrosities of architecture. A dense jungle of service objects, command patterns, and worse. It is easy to see that most organizations are shifting away from TDD as a testing paradigm and towards Behavioural Driven Development (BDD). Atlassian’s Heather Krebsbach writes unequivocally in 2016: This test-first approach became increasingly popular and was coined as test driven development (TDD), but businesses quickly realized it didn’t give them the visibility and coverage they needed for the most important business cases in their systems. So, a variant of TDD was born called behavior driven development (BDD),

Quote for the day:

"The useless men are those who never change with the years." -- J.M. Barrie,

Daily Tech Digest - September 14, 2017

Delivering Genuine Emails in an Ocean of Spam

Deliverability is the industry term for an email’s ability to reach a given in-box. If an organization sends high-quality emails that maintain a sizeable forensic distance between themselves and the hordes of spam, more of them will pass the filtering inspections and end up in the customer’s in-box. If more emails end up in more customers’ in-boxes, then more are opened and clicked on (engaged with, in marketing speak). But this isn’t just a desirable outcome for marketing-oriented emails. If you need to deliver an alert or a confirmation email to users, it’s imperative that it lands in their in-box. For example, suppose you’re trying to send information on medications that are vital to your customers’ health. Huge amounts of spam continually try to sell various dubious medicines to the public, and automated spam filters have become sensitive to them.

AbsurdIT: the old data centre computing model is broken

Companies that dispensed with older approaches and embraced client/server and new technologies more generally aren’t any better off as the spaghetti cranked out by generations of systems from various vendors has led to issues of space, heat, complexity and high energy consumption. Little wonder that there is a thriving boutique business in designing and refurbishing data centres. Some even repurpose spaces from cowsheds, aeroplane factories and caves to churches, military bunkers and salt mines. Attempts to cool facilities have led to a boom in firms selling liquid cooling, fans, heat sinks, air- and glycol-cooled chillers and other devices. And here’s the rub: cooling sucks up about as much electricity as the machines they are taking the heat off. We all know why we have this absurdity (or absurdIT, if you will). Change is tough and, in the case of the data centre, often requires comprehensive auditing

Unwanted By Oracle, Java EE Gets Adopted By Eclipse

Oracle cited Eclipse’s experience in Java EE and related technologies as why it is transferring Java EE to Eclipse. “This will help us transition Java EE rapidly, create community-friendly processes for evolving the platform, and leverage complementary projects such as MicroProfile,” said Oracle softwareevangelist David Delabassee. (MicroProfile arose as a Red Hat- and IBM-driven effort to fit Java EE with microservices capabilities last year after part of the Java community feared that Oracle was neglecting the platform. MicroProfile has since moved over to Eclipse.) "Moving Java EE to open governance and collaboration is going to be a process, not an event,” said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. "Our early discussions with Oracle, IBM, and Red Hat have shown that there is a lot of support for this among their leadership teams.”

7 Tips to Fight Gmail Phishing Attacks

"We have definitely seen a rise in sophistication of phishing attacks over the past few years and a shift toward 'quality' over 'quantity,'" says Amy Baker, vice president of marketing at Wombat Security. Broad-based attacks are still happening, but spearphishing and BEC are on the rise. "Cybercriminals are increasingly using social media channels to mine for data and lay the groundwork for high-value attacks," Baker continues. "In these situations, we see multi-faceted approaches that incorporate social engineering techniques outside of email that ultimately make an email communication more believable." Hackers want to take advantage of users' familiarity with Gmail, and other products from high-visibility organizations like Amazon and Facebook.

Why Redis beats Memcached for caching

You’ll almost always want to use Redis because of its data structures. With Redis as a cache, you gain a lot of power (such as the ability to fine-tune cache contents and durability) and greater efficiency overall. Once you use the data structures, the efficiency boost becomes tremendous for specific application scenarios. Redis’ superiority is evident in almost every aspect of cache management. Caches employ a mechanism called data eviction to make room for new data by deleting old data from memory. Memcached’s data eviction mechanism employs a Least Recently Used algorithm and somewhat arbitrarily evicts data that’s similar in size to the new data. Redis, by contrast, allows for fine-grained control over eviction, letting you choose from six different eviction policies. Redis also employs more sophisticated approaches to memory management and eviction candidate selection.

UK companies are still struggling to comply with latest data protection regulations

Companies in the UK mostly store in the public cloud product information (47 percent), information about clients (40 percent), and information about employees (39 percent), and avoid storing off-premise what they perceive to be more sensitive data, such as research into new products ... “The risk of being GDPR non-compliant means not only negative publicity and damage to the companies’ reputation as it has been until now, but also penalties that can total up to 4% of a company’s global annual revenue,” Bitdefender’s Senior eThreat Analyst Bogdan Botezatu says. “With 2017 having already set new records in terms of magnitude of cyberattacks, boards should be aware that it’s only a matter of time until their organization will be breached since most still lack efficient security shields.”

House passes bill paving the way for driverless cars

The “Self Drive Act” was unanimously approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July, before Congress left for August recess, and passed the full House on a voice vote. “Self-driving cars hold the promise of making America’s roads safer, creating new economic opportunities, and helping seniors and those with disabilities live more independently," Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) said in a joint statement. “This bipartisan bill paves the way for advanced collision avoidance systems and self-driving cars nationwide, and ensures that America stays a global leader in innovation.” The bill would pre-empt states from implementing certain laws governing the new technology. It would also allow car manufacturers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving cars a year that don’t meet normal safety standards.

Beware: Your Latest Cybersecurity Threat Could Be the One You Just Hired

Many employees are now familiar with the phenomenon. Spear phishing is specific kind of phishing attack where the phishers pose as trustworthy individuals. The attackers use email spoofing to mask unfamiliar email addresses with those of a coworker or manager to get an employee to divulge important information, make a money transfer, or open an attachment with a piece of malware. This type of scam is becoming increasingly prevalent. It is estimated that over 400 businesses are targeted by business email compromise (BEC) scams every day, with small- and medium-sized businesses the most targeted. Estimates from the FBI place the value of money lost to BEC scams over the past three years at $3 billion, with more than 22,000 businesses falling victim worldwide.

What You Need To Know About Law Firm Cybersecurity

As entities, law firm systems contain highly-sensitive financial data, corporate strategies, trade secrets, business transaction information and plenty of both PIIA and PHI. Unfortunately, many firms lack a complete, effective, privacy and security program. According to an ALM Legal Intelligence study, 22% of law firms did not have an organized plan in place to prepare for or respond to a data breach. Only 50% of law firms included in the study have cyber security teams in place to handle and implement the types of complex programs and initiatives necessary to deal with a data breach. And, unsurprisingly, hackers have noticed these vulnerabilities. In February of 2016, Russian cybercriminal, under the name of “Oleras,” targeted law firms; in March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the nation’s biggest firms have been hacked

Break down silos to manage your cyber risks

A lot of has changed very quickly in the cybersecurity realm in recent years. Where previously it was largely a support function, today cybersecurity is front and centre for any organisation that relies on technology. “Increasingly, it is the very fabric of the digital business itself,” said Mr Gerry Chng, partner and cybersecurity leader at professional services firm EY. “As a result, you need to have the whole business come together and it is really the board and the management that need to be overall responsible and accountable for cybersecurity and bring the right resources into it,” Mr Chng added. Experts say while it is tempting to assume that cybersecurity is a big organisation issue that does not affect smaller companies as significantly, this would be the wrong mindset.

Quote for the day:

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker

Daily Tech Digest - September 13, 2017

Strategic thinking in the age of digital transformation

“Most board members are 60-plus, which means that many don’t have first-hand experience of technology,” Clayton explains. “On the other hand, those IT and digital specialists who do are young, in their late-20s or 30s, and may not have enough experience to be an effective NED.” She adds: “We need to find a balance and it’s tricky to get this right. You only have to look at British Airways and its IT crisis to see how essential it is that boards do have the right expertise and knowledge base. ” It’s an issue that affects all organisations with a big customer base and data, not just corporate boards. Clayton adds: “Charities are also highly vulnerable to IT issues. Imagine if Oxfam’s donor list were hacked?” And the problem will get worse as technology speeds up.

Nearly 400 million PCs at risk from new attack method that could hide any malware

"Bashware does not leverage any logic or implementation flaws in WSL's design. In fact, WSL seems to be well-designed. What allows Bashware to operate the way it does is the lack of awareness by various security vendors, due to the fact that this technology is relatively new and expands the known borders of the Windows operating system," Check Point researchers said. Hackers using Bashware also don't require to write malware programs for Linux to run them via WSL on Windows. Instead, Bashware installs a program called Wine, which in turn launches and hides known Windows malware. In order for hackers to use Bashware, they need to already be in possession of the victim's PC admin privileges.

DNSSEC key signing key rollover: Are you ready?

DNSSEC works as a hierarchy with different bodies responsible for each layer and signing the key of the entities in the layer below. The key signing key is a cryptographic public-private key pair, and the root zone KSK secures the topmost layer of the hierarchy, the starting point for DNSSEC validation. There is nothing wrong with the key—it hasn’t been stolen or tampered with—but it is good security practice to periodically rotate the signing key so that even if it falls into the wrong hands, everyone is already using the newer, stronger key. There is no reason to wait for something bad to happen—for the key to be cracked, for example—before updating to a newer, stronger, key. “Updating the DNSSEC KSK is a crucial security step, similar to updating a PKI Root Certificate,” the United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) wrote in a recent advisory.

How to Upgrade Judges with Machine Learning

Kleinberg suggests that algorithms could be deployed to help judges without major disruption to the way they currently work in the form of a warning system that flags decisions highly likely to be wrong. Analysis of judges’ performance suggested they have a tendency to occasionally release people who are very likely to fail to show in court, or to commit crime while awaiting trial. An algorithm could catch many of those cases, says Kleinberg. Richard Berk, a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the study as “very good work,” and an example of a recent acceleration of interest in applying machine learning to improve criminal justice decisions. The idea has been explored for 20 years, but machine learning has become more powerful, and data to train it more available.

The best laptops of 2017: Ultrabooks, budget PCs, 2-in-1s, and more

Choosing the best laptop is about to get a lot harder. Fall is coming—and so are a slew of new laptops. In fact, if you’re hunting for a new ultraportable, we recommend holding off on any purchases for the time being. Intel recently announced four 8th-generation Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors that could result in a dramatic leap in performance in thin-and-light convertibles, 2-in-1s, hybrids, and traditional laptops. Reveals of notebooks with these chips have begun, with likely more to follow. If you must buy now, though, we’ve got you covered with our current top laptop picks. And if you’re instead in the market for a gaming laptop or even a budget laptop, you’re in luck: Recent reviews include the Gigabyte Aero 15, Asus ROG Zephyrus GX501, and the Acer Aspire E 15.

In the boardroom: mobility in a connected world

I certainly think it is a critical part of virtually every boardroom conversation out there – to have an effective understanding of how that individual company or identity is going to participate in the realm of IoT. Certainly this next era is IoT. Depending on whose numbers you want to believe, there is somewhere between 20 and 50 billion devices that will be hanging off the internet by 2020. Whether we like it or not, it’s coming to us and our devices more directly, through any kind of product manufacturer or government agency, or any other business models. First and foremost we’ve got to provide our customers and end-consumers with an experience that will differentiate us, where utilising our assets will lead to increased demand and loyalty.

Rapid7 CEO: Rethink IT & Security Organizational Structures

Companies are under constant pressure to innovate in today’s fast-paced business environment. That might mean creating a better product, improving efficiency, or creating a better customer experience. Unfortunately, the security function tends to be separate from the innovation process or, worse, after the innovation has created a new vulnerability. That problem will persist unless companies rethink their organizational structures around IT and security. That’s the message that Rapid7 CEO Corey Thomas is delivering in his keynote today at the company’s United 2017 event in Boston. He believes that IT and security teams can work together effectively to innovate, create a better user experience, and adopt new technology without increasing the vulnerability surface.

British Army enhances data-driven decision making to staunch churn

“The model has proven instrumental in helping staff officers identify the conditions that could lead to the early exit of valuable personnel, allowing them to take pre-emptive action to encourage the soldier to stay.” Since initial deployment, adoption of its platform has, the supplier said, expanded to 700 users in the army today. “While primarily used by planners and policy makers, SAS also sees significant use by logistics, education and investment teams as well as for sentiment analysis of the workforce,” it said. The army is using SAS Visual Analytics and now using SAS Operations Research to help it optimise processes and personnel deployment. It has also recently approved a proof of concept for SAS Text Analytics, which it hopes will allow it to use open source data and more efficiently process freedom of information requests and paperwork.

The Time Is Now for Digital Transformation

You do not want to look back and discover you should have started earlier. You may be creating a crisis which you have not yet discovered. A great quote from Stanford economist Paul Romer is, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Unfortunately, a crisis may be the only way you can convince your organization to rapidly embrace digital transformation. Digital transformation is a change in business and a change in mind set. Think of it as a business turnaround. It doesn't matter whether you are a non-profit, government, business, or any other type of organization. Digital transformation will require imagination. How you did business in the past will not be the best way to do business in the future. The traditional IT organization with projects that may last months or years is inadequate for digital transformation success.

BlueBorne is Bluetooth's Stagefright moment

BlueBorne takes advantage of the fact that Bluetooth-enabled devices are always listening for other devices they can connect to. While devices typically have to be manually paired to form that initial wireless connection, once paired those devices reconnect automatically whenever they are near each other. BlueBorne exploits the vulnerabilities in a way that it can establish the Bluetooth connection with devices nearby without having to go through the pairing process. Unless someone happens to be looking at the list of Bluetooth devices, it’s unlikely these connections will ever be discovered. “BlueBorne is different from past Bluetooth-based exploits, which relied on weaknesses in the protocol that no longer exist, or authentication-based issues related to idiotic PIN codes,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and co-founder of Armis. “It [BlueBorne] requires nothing from the user.”

Quote for the day:

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley