Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - January 07, 2018

Big Data Driven Smart Transportation: the Underlying Story of IoT Transformed Mobility

For public transportation, big data analytics have transformed both the plan and operations phases on planning and demand modeling, predictive maintenance, and event response. New big data tech-savvy has brought more personalized services to public transportation users, such as offering ancillary services to providing recommendations about additional destinations to visit as part of an upgrade to the passenger’s journey, etc. The big data driven smart public transportation influences both automated and human decision-making, which has clearly played a big part in re-energizing public transport network, and has offered plenty of opportunities to improve the public transportation experience with improved reliability and safety. For drivers, real-time traffic sensor data collection, analysis, visualization and optimization of dynamic transportation systems has reduced transportation time and emissions greatly.

Functional programming finally goes mainstream

The customer-facing software development world is outgrowing stateful, object-oriented (OO) development. The bar for great, intuitive customer experience has been raised by ambient, conversation-driven user interfaces, like through Amazon Alexa. Functional programming allows enterprises to take better advantage of compute power to deliver those experiences at scale; better flexibility for delivering the right output; and a more efficient way of delivering customer value. FP also reduces regression defects in code, simplifies code creation and maintenance and allows for greater code reuse. Just as object-oriented programming (OOP) emerged as the solution to the limitations of procedural programming at the dawn of the internet boom in the mid-'90s, FP is emerging as the solution to the limitations of OOP today. The shift is already underway -- 53 percent of global developers reported that at least some teams in their companies are practicing functional programming and are planning to expand their usage.

Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer

Alex Beath, a Toronto-based physicist and pension fund analyst, is skeptical about Bitcoin but sees one useful purpose for the crypto-currency: It may detect when someone creates a working quantum computer. “The second someone creates a viable quantum computer, the NP-complete math problems at the heart of Bitcoin mining tech become instantly solvable,” Beath notes. “In other words, one answer to the question ‘what’s the first thing you’d do with a quantum computer?’ is ‘mine all of the remaining Bitcoin instantly.’ Until that happens, nobody has a quantum computer.” Beath’s off-the-cuff observation, which he made in response to a Fortune query about the security of bitcoin, is amusing. But it also underscores a serious problem: Namely, a new era of computing is fast-approaching and when it arrives, the system that gave rise to many crypto-currency fortunes will collapse.

AI Weekly: If we create artificial intelligence, will we know it?

When people talk about creating an artificial intelligence, the conversation is often focused on human or superhuman AI — systems that would equal or surpass us in intelligence. But what if we create an artificial intelligence that’s deserving of respect, but don’t recognize it as such? That’s a question I’ve had bouncing around in my head for the past several months. Over the course of human history, we’ve proven very poor as a species at successfully evaluating the intelligence of other beings, whether they’re human or non-human. Consider crows, who learn from their dead, recognize individuals, use tools, and even bring gifts to those they like — are they … intelligent? Furthermore, if we were to create an AI that produced those characteristics, does it require the same sort of considerations that a crow does, with regards to its treatment at the hands of humanity? We likely won’t have to reckon with a human-level AI for many years, but these questions could prove more pressing.

5 machine learning mistakes – and how to avoid them

Machine learning gives organizations the potential to make more accurate data-driven decisions and to solve problems that have stumped traditional analytical approaches. However, machine learning is not magic. It presents many of the same challenges as other analytics methods. In this article, we introduce some of the common machine learning mistakes that organizations must avoid to successfully incorporate this technique into their analytics strategy. The shortage of deep analytics talent continues to be a glaring challenge, and the need for employees who can manage and consume analytical content is even greater. Recruiting and keeping these in-demand technical experts has become a significant focus for many organizations. Data scientists, the most skilled analytics professionals, need a unique blend of computer science, mathematics and domain expertise. Experienced data scientists command high price tags and demand engaging projects.

Security fears have held companies back from adopting cloud services

Companies have been slow to move from running applications and storing data on their own private servers to doing them on public clouds such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, a new study by McKinsey found. Only 40% of the companies studied had more than 10% of their workloads on public clouds. Concerns about cybersecurity were holding many companies back, although attitudes are changing, McKinsey, a consulting company, found in the study, which surveyed 90 companies across multiple industries. "Despite the benefits of public-cloud platforms, persistent concerns about cybersecurity for the public cloud have deterred companies from accelerating the migration of their workloads to the cloud," McKinsey said in its report. "Executives cited security as one of the top barriers to cloud migration, along with the complexity of managing change and the difficulty of making a compelling business case for cloud adoption."

How I fell for the blockchain gold rush

I found myself obsessed, constantly monitoring Twitter, waking in the night to check coin tracking apps. Pundits were hailing verge as a game-changer, the next bitcoin. Unbelievers pointed to previous missed deadlines and called it “vaporware”, a nonexistent con, the biggest scam in crypto history. In this unprecedented hype, there was clearly unprecedented money to be made. And more than one way to make it. Three things hold sway over these unregulated crypto markets: coin innovations, bitcoin whales manipulating prices with huge pump and dumps, and social media. The merest hint of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on a coin’s Twitter or Reddit threads can tank its price quickly, and as the final days of 2017 slipped by with Wraith Protocol still unreleased, the FUDers went to town on verge. A crypto tipster named Marquis Trill tweeted his 4.6 million followers on Christmas Day to “sell XVG!”, claiming he had proof from a Reddit whistleblower that the Wraith Protocol project was falling apart.

Top 10 Retail Banking Trends and Predictions for 2018

The fact that the list of trends identified by the financial services industry has remained relatively consistent could be a symptom of a greater problem. The banking industry is moving much too slow, and legacy firms are failing to differentiate themselves. According to Forrester, “In a market where one-third of all customers say ‘all banks are basically the same,’ it would make sense for executives and their teams to obsess over how to differentiate. Unfortunately, 2018 will look more like a digital arms race between warring incumbents than a year in which firms find new ways to specialize and create value for customers.” Regarding changes in emphasis for this year’s trends, removing friction from the customer journey increased in importance from last year, with 61% of organizations placing this trend in the top three, compared to 54% last year. The trend around the use and application of data also increased in importance from last year, with 57% of those surveyed placing this in the top 3 for 2018, compared to 53% in predictions for 2017.

Google Cloud Preemptible GPUs: Dirt cheap machine learning with a serious catch

The words “artificial intelligence” often conjure up a sense of fear and apprehension. Fear for the unknown possibilities of AI, fear for the AI-fueled dystopian images brought about by movies like The Terminator, and most practically, fear for the possibility that AI will someday take our jobs. This fear is neither new nor totally unfounded. As with any disruptive technological invention, faster, more efficient machines are bound to replace human workers. However, those who fear AI will take their jobs can rest a little easier knowing they will at least have the potential to find a new job. A new report by Gartner states that although AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs, it will create 2.3 million jobs. Peter Sondergaard, head researcher at Gartner, predicted AI will augment workers’ abilities and could be a “net job creator” starting in 2020. I believe, like all other disruptive technologies of the past, AI will bring about many opportunities for new jobs.

Brazilian Government Plans to Process Petitions and Write Laws on Ethereum

The key to employing a Blockchain system in processing petitions and electoral votes is to encrypt votes onto the immutable Blockchain network as transactions, to ensure that the specific piece of data remains unalterable and invulnerable to manipulation. Essentially, processing petition signatures on the Ethereum network would require smart contracts, and the system would operate similarly as other decentralized applications that exist on the network. The electoral system of Brazil would act as a decentralized application of its own with an independent digital token, that is used to process every vote on the Blockchain. Henrique Costa, a Universidade de Brasilia law professor, told QZ that the lack of an immutable platform to collect signatures of votes had been a real issue for the government in the past. Within the Brazilian electoral system, any popular petition with the signatures of one percent of the country’s populations is required to be heard in Congress.

Quote for the day:

"Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside." -- Andy Stanley

Daily Tech Digest - January 06, 2018

Artificial Intelligence Is On The Verge Of Heralding A Cultural Revolution

Self-driving cars and chess-playing computers might be the first things that come to your mind when you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but as a concept, AI's not exactly new. Go back to the ancient Greeks, and you'll discover Talos, a mythological giant automaton warrior made of bronze. In fact, that's not the only example from Greek mythology of what we'd consider an AI - Hephaestus, the God of Technology, was also said to have created automated servants some human-like, and others wheeled tripods. Then there's the mud-creature Golem from Jewish lore. Coming back to relatively recent times, you could even consider Frankenstein's monster to be a kind of intelligent automaton. Nearly every culture has stories about man-made creatures that could think and act on their own but given that we're a species that's always tried to play God, it seems only natural. Of course, it wasn't till the advent of computers that Artificial Intelligence moved from the realm of fiction and folklore to reality.

The CIO’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence

CIOs are in the perfect position to educate their company’s CEO and board about recent developments in AI and illustrate how AI might influence their business and competitive landscape. By following this approach, CIOs can potentially flip the traditional engagement model between IT and the business, influencing business strategy at the outset, rather than simply developing implementation projects that follow up on the executive team’s decisions. ... Recent breakthroughs in machine learning, big data, computer vision and speech recognition are increasing the commercial potential of AI. But AI requires new skills and a new way of thinking about problems. CIOs must ensure that IT owns the strategy and governance of AI solutions. Although pilot AI experiments can start with a small investment, for full production rollout, the biggest area of investment is building and retaining the necessary talent.

The Most Important Skill In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The reason why AI is being prevalently used now than before is twofold: 1) the science and the advancement behind algorithm development; 2) with the abundance of data generated makes it a perfect time to use this model. One of the key principles of algorithm design for AI is that there must be enough 'training' data on which to 'train' the model before it is able to make meaningful predictions. This number can range from 10,000 data points and above. The abundance of data did not exist in the same capacity as it does now, and with the prevalence of high-speed computing, this is a perfect time utilize this model. Now, that we understand what AI is and why it is being used now, let's examine what AI can and cannot do. AI is able to replicate and automate decisions based on certain parameters that are fed into the program, but no matter what AI cannot be creative.

What Crypto Didn't Give Us in 2017

Without a shadow of a doubt, this past year has been huge for cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology. Whatever the future may hold for Satoshi's brainchild and all that it has given birth to, 2017 will forever hold a singular position on the timeline of events in the crypto world. But as a new year approaches, the urge to get caught up in all that has happened over the past 12 months could prevent us from considering what 2017 did not bring – and why. Admittedly, it is hard not to be mesmerized by the numbers: the more than 1,300 cryptocurrencies, the $700-plus billion market cap they have produced or the eye-popping ICO raises of Tezos, Filecoin, Bancor and others – oh yes, and the gut-wrenching ride of bitcoin’s price as it climbed over $20 000 – and fell back down. And yet, it is worthwhile taking a step back and considering what is still missing and what exactly this might mean for the year that is almost upon us.

Open Banking starts next week. Meet the man making it happen

The joint UK and EU directive, which forces the nine biggest UK banks to give customers control over their data, comes into force on 13 January, 2018, bringing the prospect of disruptive change to the stagnant banking market. Possibilities include everything from big banks going bust to the invasion of the Banks of Amazon and Google. Entrepreneurs, however, remain wary. Open Banking hasn't been backed by a public awareness campaign, so consumers are at best ignorant, at worst fearful and confused. The limited initial scope only includes current account data, with credit cards and other payment accounts added slowly over the next two years. Last month, five banks, including HSBC and Barclays, announced they would miss the deadline to release their data. Will Open Banking break the big banks' stranglehold on the banking market? Or – as some suspect – end up being suffocated by the incumbents?

Who is responsible for self-driving car accidents?

If a fully self-driving vehicle being operated by an AI system was involved in an accident, who would be liable? Commissioned by the government to explore this question, Professor Koji Nakayama from the Meiji University Graduate School of Law, an expert on the Civil Procedure Code, organised a mock trial for an accident involving a self-driving car in January last year. The Road Traffic Law states that a driver must reliably operate the steering wheel, brakes and other equipment to drive at a speed and in a manner that does not put other people in danger. However, the law was not designed to apply to AI systems. In the mock trial, the hypothetical accident occurred when a bicycle suddenly pulled out in front of a self-driving car, which led the car to quickly change lanes. To avoid a collision with the car, a vehicle behind it swerved to the left and hit a utility pole, killing the driver.

Windows Meltdown-Spectre patches: If you haven't got them, blame your antivirus

Microsoft has warned users that its patches for the dangerous Meltdown CPU bug won't reach them if their third-party antivirus hasn't been updated to support this week's Windows security update. By now Windows users should have received the patches Microsoft released yesterday to plug the widespread Meltdown bug and its companion Spectre, which expose most computers and phones to speculative execution side-channel attacks that affect chips from Intel, AMD, and Arm. Microsoft released software updates for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Windows, and SQL Server, but customers will also need to apply firmware updates from their respective hardware vendors too. Surface and Surface Book users can expect an automatic firmware update from Microsoft but those with other hardware will need to check with their vendors.

Artificial intelligence: McKinsey talks workforce, training, and AI ethics

The potential for these technologies that we call artificial intelligence is huge. They affect potentially every sector, potentially every function. One reason for that is a lot of the potential applications of AI are extensions of the work that people had already started in data and analytics. And so, we've been looking at nearly 500 different use cases of artificial intelligence across every sector, across every function. Sometimes what we say is, these traditional analytic methods, whether it's regression or what have you, gets you this much impact. But, when you could add the multidimensionality of additional data or these additional deep learning techniques, you could increase, for instance, forecast accuracy or increased OEE or decreased waste, a number of these things, which these use cases allow us to do. You could think of AI as just being another turbocharged tool for your analytical toolkit.

How The Blockchain Is Redefining Trust

Blockchains could help reduce the gap of the entire lifecycle of a trade from days to minutes, even to zero. According to a report by Santander InnoVentures, the Spanish bank’s fintech investment fund, by 2022 ledger technologies could save banks $15–20 billion a year by reducing regulatory, settlement and cross-border costs. Digital Asset Holdings wants to be the distributed database handling these speedy transactions. And the who’s who of the world’s biggest financial names, including Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Blythe Masters’s old employer, JP Morgan, have ploughed more than $60 million of investment into DAH. Speed and efficiency are not the only qualities that make distributed ledgers attractive to banks. ‘Regulators will like that blockchain-based transactions can achieve greater transparency and traceability– an “immutable audit trail”,’ Masters says.

How Lean Problem Solving Increases Agile Team Productivity

Today tech companies are facing the challenges of the current digital age: increasing user expectations, technology disruptions and fierce competition. Managers and IT workers tend to proactively push technology solutions in order to solve problems without being sure of the effects and they often fall short…or sometimes options are never evaluated. They lack a proper and rigorous approach to formulating problems, diagnosing the root causes, performing relevant corrective actions, evaluating the effects, and at the end create a better understanding of the work improves day-to-day job practices of people. In this article, we will meet Marek, the CTO of a French mobile development company and Kevin a developer. Through patient observation of a developer’s work and how the software pieces were flowing or being stopped, Marek revealed a waste in the validation & deployment process, which seriously impacts developers’ productivity.

Quote for the day:

"To make a decision, all you need is authority. To make a good decision, you also need knowledge, experience, and insight." -- Denise Moreland

Daily Tech Digest - January 05, 2018

Banks of Future Will Face Digitally-Empowered Customers

One of the biggest impacts of using Internet-based distribution networks to access your consumer base is that it will reduce the number of intermediaries that need to participate in a transaction. This is not to say that middlemen will entirely disappear, but in a world where any two entities can communicate P2P on public internet rails, the concept of correspondent banking will be transformed. We already see the power of such networks in places like Kenya, where it took a branchless banking service called M-Pesa only three years to become the most successful mobile banking service in the developing world. They did this simply by connecting millions of consumers with their bank through SMS. Another impact will be a reduction in the friction inherent in switching banks. Think about how easy it is for a cab driver to switch his or her entire personal business from Uber to Lyft on a daily basis.

Should financial experts fear the rise of artificial intelligence?

Natural language processing, a sub-field of AI is a good example of augmented intelligence. NLP is the development of systems capable of reading and understanding the languages that humans speak. At the heart of this technology is the effort of interpreting a large amount of ‘unstructured data’ (i.e. data that cannot be read by machines yet, such as PDF files, images and audio material). This level of automation is already having significant practical implications. ... 5,000 FinTech start-ups were identified by a 2016 report by Ernst & Young, and the vast majority of them have a mission statement to innovate the banking and financial services sector in some way. Notably, AI is able to vastly improve upon client servicing, trading, post-trade operations such as reconciliations, transaction reporting, tax operation and enterprise risk management, just to name a few.

The Internet of (Secure) Things Checklist

As the AT&T IoT Cybersecurity Alliance highlighted in a recent white paper, Mirai was a prime example of the type of risk posed by unsecured IoT devices. The obvious threat is exposure of personal data to an attacker who compromises a device. However, according to the report, if the connected devices within your organization are used as part of a widespread attack, your organization could suffer reputational damage or, worse, your organization could be victimized by a compromised IoT device from a business partner. Just like any type of cyberattack, the implications of an IoT attack are far-reaching. This is why it is important for security professionals to approach IoT security just as they would network, endpoint, and cloud security. A comprehensive cyber hygiene strategy is a necessary component of securing your organization and preventing cyber attacks.

Witness a crime? In the UK, you can report it to Alexa

While benefits may include more convenient crime reporting and saving public resources, privacy concerns abound, as noted by our sister site ZDNet. If sent out or received through the Echo, crime reports both in and out of the police department would be stored on Amazon servers. This could especially be an issue when it comes to reporting crimes anonymously, ZDNet noted, and will be an issue the police force has to address. This isn't the first time Alexa has been implicated in law enforcement. In January 2017, police investigating a murder in Bentonville, AR, filed a search warrant asking Amazon to provide "electronic data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed words, text records and other data" from the Echo. Amazon refused to provide the information from its servers, but the case highlighted the privacy issues associated with always-on devices, Joel Reidenberg, founding academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University, told TechRepublic at the time.

The shifting sands of finance and technology

With new technologies in place, finance teams will see their role begin to overlap and connect more with their commercial and IT colleagues, with deeper business insights that give people the capacity to become more forward-looking and predictive. Others will be called on to work more closely with computing professionals to develop and implement complex technology systems. It’s time to recognize that just implementing AI or trying out data analytics is no longer enough without the integration and the wholesale processes change to back up the initiatives. The only way the finance organization will realize the full-range and long-term benefits of these technologies is by rethinking finance processes and how the entire ecosystem works together. From our experience at EY, and working with our clients on their own innovations, I truly believe that the finance, IT and other teams can and should all learn from one another.

8 Chrome extensions that supercharge Google Drive

Want to show your sales video to clients without having to hook up your laptop to a projector or large display? Tibor Vukovic's DriveCast extension lets you cast media files you have stored in your Google Drive to a Google Chromecast device plugged into the projector, display or TV. No need to download the file first; just “cast” it from your Google Drive. (DriveCast casts the media file formats that Chromecast officially supports, like JPG, MP3, and MP4.) Once DriveCast is installed and your computer is linked to your Chromecast device, click the DriveCast icon on the Chrome toolbar. It will open a new tab that lists alphabetically the folders in your Google Drive. Click to open the folder where the media file you want to cast is stored in; find the file and click it. In the small panel that opens below the URL address box, be sure to select “DriveCast” as the casting source (not “tab” or “desktop”).

Four misconceptions around compensating controls

Compensating controls are not a shortcut to compliance or a free pass on compliance. Instead companies are finding that most compensating controls are actually more expensive in the long run. Worse still, they can often prove harder to implement than actually addressing the original vulnerability in the first place. Although they can be legally used for almost every requirement of the PCI DSS, brands should calculate the cost to implement the compliant solution before automatically jumping to compensating controls and also consider future potential costs. If companies are not compliant and a hack occurs, they can face compensation and remediation costs, legal fees, federal audits and of course lost revenue. For example, Target’s profits dropped $440 million in the fiscal fourth quarter following the news of the security breach.

Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD

What are the Meltdown and Spectre exploits?

Meltdown and Spectre are not exactly the same, but they are related and use a similar exploit mechanism to gain access to computer data. Nearly all modern chip architectures from the major suppliers (Intel, AMD, ARM) are affected, and this includes nearly all modern computer systems from data center to PC to smartphones. The problem affects nearly all operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android, as well as virtualized environments such as VMware and Citrix. But it doesn’t affect lower-level or real-time operating systems (like QNX) that don’t use this particular feature, nor in lower-level controller chips used for the Internet of Things (IoT). Basically, the exploit involves reading memory locations that are supposed to be protected and reserved for use by the computer kernel. It exploits an architectural technique known as “speculative execution” which is a key feature of things such as look-ahead instructions and data, which significantly improves computer performance.

In the World of Cryptocurrencies, Something’s Gotta Give in 2018

So you thought Bitcoin was anonymous? Hope you weren’t buying anything naughty with it, because—surprise—it really isn’t. But privacy is still of major interest to the cryptocurrency community, which is why you should expect to hear more in the coming year about a cryptographic protocol called a zero-knowledge proof. The mind-bending math of zero-knowledge proofs makes it possible to prove something (say, that you are older than 18) without revealing anything else (like your precise age). A currency called Zcash already uses this to make truly anonymous transactions possible. JPMorgan Chase has even adopted it for its “enterprise blockchain” system. And thanks to its latest software update, Ethereum’s developers can now implement zero-knowledge capability too. It would not be surprising if the next year were to yield applications of zero-knowledge proofs that we haven’t yet imagined.

IT departments have no idea how much they spend on AWS and Azure

Unless an IT department closely scrutinises its cloud usage, it can end up paying far more than it needs to. Public cloud servcies generally offer tools to help IT admins keep track of which cloud instances are being used and how much storage, network, memory and central processing unit (CPU) workloads consume. But it is often hard for an individual user to find these metrics given the way cloud services tend to be procurerd. According to Densify, many businesses have multiple AWS or other public cloud accounts, that roll up into a master corporate account. This means the people who pay the cloud bills rarely understand the reasoning behind the expense, Densify said. Internal users who then take chunks of cloud service from the main account are only aware of the demands their own cloud instances require. Their applications may need different usage patterns in terms of storage, CPU and memory, compared to other parts of the business.

Quote for the day:

"Your job gives you authority. Your behavior gives you respect." -- Irwin Federman

Daily Tech Digest - January 04, 2018

Nissan's plan for safer autonomous driving? Connect the car to a human brain

Instead of removing the human element completely, the driver's brain activity is measured and sent to the car using a headband, the announcement said. The car can then predict human actions such as braking or accelerating and begin the action more quickly, potentially leading to safer, less stressful driving. The Brain-to-Vehicle (B2V) technology shows a different approach to autonomous driving by allowing the human to maintain some control. By staying physically in the driver's seat, some consumers may feel more comfortable with it compared to self-driving vehicle technology. "When most people think about autonomous driving, they have a very impersonal vision of the future, where humans relinquish control to the machines," Nissan executive vice president Daniele Schillaci said in the announcement. "Yet B2V technology does the opposite, by using signals from their own brain to make the drive even more exciting and enjoyable."

Connected Humans, Connected Things: AI and Human Intelligence in 2018

“What is real is the value of data,” Fitze said, “and that data is poised to explode in 2018 with billions of new endpoints lighting up, driven largely by the Internet of Things. Machine learning, deep learning, intelligence is richer when we have more data to derive patterns. Making life simpler and better through data makes sense, with smarter products – and that is the underlying value of layering in AI in IoT applications.” The trend towards automation and data collection and analysis is where Fitze sees “many, many use cases coming up. Where IoT gets even more interesting is when we finally reach the pivotal moment of IPV6, enabling over 600 billion IP addresses by each square millimeter around the world, as well as the speed of the manifestation of 5G/LTE networks which support voice recognition and more. When billions of people can use their voice to command billions of things, we’ll find ourselves in an entirely new world experience.”

Major Linux redesign in the works to deal with Intel security flaw

Intel's blunder was to allow user programs to be able to gather hints about how the kernel address space is laid out. As discovered by Austria's university researchers this summer, "Modern operating system kernels employ address space layout randomization (ASLR) to prevent control-flow hijacking attacks and code-injection attacks. While kernel security relies fundamentally on preventing access to address information, recent attacks have shown that the hardware directly leaks this information." ASLR is vital to today's operating systems' defense against malware. The Intel vulnerability isn't so much a new hole as it is a way of making all those many existing attack methods against ASLR-defended operating systems much stronger. The researchers' solution was KAISER, a system for Linux kernel address isolation. In November, these patches were proposed for the Linux kernel. Realizing just how dangerous these attacks could be, the Linux kernel developers quickly started revising these patches.

8 Biggest Tech Trends to Watch at CES 2018

At CES 2018, you'll see the Vobot Halo, a stylish smart light clock with Alexa, as well as the Blink Video Doorbell, a $99 device that's coming next year. In fact, Amazon has agreed to acquire Blink to accelerate its smart home domination. Security will be a huge theme at CES that extends to all-in-one security systems that hope to build on the success of products like SimpliSafe. The upcoming Angee has a 360-degree camera, voice recognition and motion sensors, and we'll see a separate home security gateway that supports HomeKit, Alexa and Google Assistant. ... So what makes micro LEDs so special? They have LEDs smaller than 100 micrometers — slimmer than the width of a human hair. According to Patently Apple, each of the red, green and blue subpixels in micro LEDs produces its own light, offering high contrast ratios and deep blacks. In addition, ZDNet says the displays will consume less power and won't suffer from burn-in as OLED panels do. In other words, Samsung could give OLED TVs a serious run for their money.

Competition Bureau weighs in on fintech: urgent action required

The Canadian Competition Bureau has released its final market study report into technology-led innovation in Canada's financial-services sector. The study is a valuable addition to a growing body of analysis and evidence that we need to do more to ensure that Canada is not left behind, as fintech has the potential to make an increasingly important impact on the availability and delivery of financial services to Canadians. In its study, the Bureau notes that since the 2007-08 global financial crisis, a new wave of financial-services firms has emerged, leveraging the latest technologies. In a number of jurisdictions, these firms are helping to reshape their domestic financial-services sectors and, in some cases, the leading firms are becoming national champions with global reach. The bureau notes that Canada lags behind its peers in fintech adoption; a number of reasons for slow adoption are suggested, including regulatory and non-regulatory barriers.

Implementing DevOps: Mind the Details

Many successful organizations roll out DevOps gradually to let different stakeholders see and appreciate the practice's value. This, in the long run, "accelerates the adoption of DevOps practices within the organization," Thethi explained. Looking for a quick start, many enterprises opt to create a DevOps team by simply rebranding their existing ops staff. "Don’t do that, as it keeps the silos running," warned James Wickett, an author of DevOps courses on Lynda.comand head of research at Signal Sciences, a cloud security platform provider. "Instead, rally the team around the aspirational goals of DevOps to deliver software faster through continuous delivery, automation and instrumentation," he suggested. ... "Since DevOps is mostly about processes and a way of working and collaborating, one of the major blockers can be from team members who do not understand or refuse to work with this new methodology," cautioned Sylvain Kalache

What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation

The world is more connected than ever, but the nature of its connections has changed in a fundamental way. The amount of cross-border data flows has grown 45 times larger since just 2005. It is projected to increase by an additional nine times over the next five years as flows of information, searches, communication, video, transactions, and intracompany traffic continue to surge. In addition to transmitting valuable streams of information and ideas in their own right, data flows enable the movement of goods, services, finance, and people. Virtually every type of cross-border transaction now has a digital component. Approximately 12% of the global goods trade is conducted via international e-commerce, with much of it driven by platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, and Rakuten. Beyond e-commerce, digital platforms for both traditional employment and freelance assignments are beginning to create a more global labor market.

Bad AI Comes From Bad Data

Data completeness is the degree to which we have a total picture of donors, volunteers, activists, and other key constituent groups. This is a combination of self-reported information in addition to appended demographic data. Over time, the goal is to have a broader understanding of constituents interests, engagements, and preferences. Together, data quality and completeness are about 90% of the data health challenge. And yet, many of the claims of data struggle are design related. The plethora of custom fields in a system that can’t be normalized or made meaningful. The skeletons in the data closet from decisions made in the past about how data collection and management have been handled poorly. Fixing data design issues will take more time and toil, but addressing data quality and completeness can be started without delay. The sooner that data health is prioritized, valued, and championed then the greater chances for benefits to the organization.

Bringing AI into the enterprise

Sometimes, you see a decision being made and, from an organizational point of view, everyone agrees that this decision is really strongly data driven. But it's not strongly data driven. It's data driven based upon the historical information that two or three people are using. It looks like they're looking at data and then making a decision, but, in fact, what they're doing is, they're looking at data and they're remembering one of 2,000 past examples in their heads and coming out with a decision. ... There are sets of tasks in almost any organization that nobody likes to have anything to do with. In the legal profession, there are tasks around things like discovery where you actually need to be able to look through a corpus of documents, but you need to have also some idea of the semantic relationships between words. This is totally learnable using existing technologies.

Technology in 2018 will reach new heights

The financial industry has embraced chatbots in a big way. Capital One, MasterCard, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander are just a handful of institutions using them, so too has the legal sector. Clerksroom is using Billy Bot, a junior robot clerk, to automate many of its administrative processes. As a result, it has saved its clerks around 200 hours per month and been able to focus on higher value activities for enabling growth. What’s clear is that organisations are quickly seeing the value in AI, and we will see investment rocket in 2018 and beyond. .... When Chancellor Philip Hammond delivered his annual Autumn budget in November last year, he said: “A new tech business is funded every hour and I want that to be every half hour. So, today we invest over £500 million in a range of initiatives from artificial intelligence to 5G and full-fibre broadband.”

Quote for the day:

"At the heart of great leadership is a curious mind, heart, and spirit." -- Chip Conley

Daily Tech Digest - January 03, 2018

Don't believe the hype: There are no good uses for blockchain

“Smart” contracts are contracts written as software, rather than written as legal text. Because you can encode them directly on the blockchain, they can involve the transfer of value based directly on the cryptographic consent of the parties involved — in other words, they are “self-executing.” In theory, contracts written in software are cheaper to interpret. Because their operation is literally mathematical and automatic, there are no two ways to interpret them, which means there’s no need for expensive legal battles. Yet real-world examples show the ways this is problematic. The most prominent and largest smart contract to date, an investment vehicle called the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), enabled its members to invest directly using their private cryptographic keys to vote on what to invest in. No lawyers, no management fees, no opaque boardrooms, the DAO “removes the ability of directors and fund managers to misdirect and waste investor funds.”

IoT botnet DDoS attacks predicted after exploit code published

“With the advent of botnet-based DDoS attack services that will be effective against most companies, anyone can target an organisation for just a few bitcoins,” Harshil Parikh, director of security at software-as-a-service platform firm Medallia, told the Isaca CSX Europe 2017 conference in London in November 2017. The exploit code for Huawei vulnerability CVE-2017–17215, which is now available free of charge on text storage site Pastebin, has already been used in the Satori and Brickerbot IoT botnets. These botnets have been described as next-gen Mirai botnets, and in December 2017, the Satori botnet in particular caught researchers’ attention because of its worm-like ability to propagate quickly. According to security researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab, the Satori botnet propagates by using two exploits to connect with devices on ports 37215 and 52869.

Forever 21 Found Malware and Encryption Disabled on its PoS Devices

Following an investigation with payment technology and security firms, Forever 21 said in an update posted late last week that encryption technology on some point-of-sale (PoS) devices was not always on, and that it had found signs of unauthorized network access and malware installed on PoS devices to search for payment card data. The malware searched for track data from payment cards as they were processed through the PoS system. In most cases this data was limited to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code. Occasionally, the cardholder name was also found. Encryption had been disabled and malware installed on some devices at varying times in US stores from April 3, 2017 through November 18, 2017. Some locations only experienced a breach for a few days or weeks; others were hit for most or all of the timeframe. In most cases, only one or a few of PoS devices were affected at each outlet.

Generative AI: The new power tool for creative pros

Generative AI: The new power tools for creative pros

AI can abstract visual patterns from artwork and then apply those patterns in the fanciful rerendering of photographic images with the hallmark features of that artwork. These algorithms can also transform any rough doodle into an impressive drawing that seems to have been created by expert human artists depicting real-world models. They can take hand-drawn sketches of human facesand algorithmically transform them into photorealistic images. They can instruct a computer to render any image so it appears as if it were composed by a specific human artist in a specific style. ... AI can autocorrect photos by generating and superimposing onto the original any visual elements that were missing, obscure, or misleading. It can also transform any low-resolution original image into a natural-looking high-resolution version. It can generate natural-looking but synthetic human faces by blending existing portraits or abstracting features from any specific portrait.

Is Your Test Automation Team a Team of Superheroes?

The Test Automation Environment Expert has to be familiar with all concerns regarding test programs such as test data management, problem reporting and resolution, test development and design and should have technical skills which include knowledge of programming languages, database technologies, and operating systems. Also known as the test lead, the Test Automation Environment Expert verifies requirement quality, test design, test script and test data development, test environment configuration, test script configuration management and test execution. The test lead has to stay on top of all current developments in the testing industry, the latest testing tools, and test approaches and ensure proper knowledge transfer of the same. He/she is also responsible for conducting test design and test procedure walkthroughs and inspections, implementing test process improvements, test the traceability matrix

GPS tracking vulnerabilities leave millions of products at risk

According to the research, the vulnerable services were exposing location information, device model and type information, IMEI numbers, phone numbers (where such information is used for the device in question), custom assigned names, audio recordings, and images. For example: In addition to the verified data exposures, on gps958.com it is possible to access location history, send commands to the device (the same commands that would be sent via SMS), and activate or deactivate geo fencing alarms. No authentication needed. When it comes to images and audio recordings, the exposures happened via open directories on the affected service's website. Stykas and Gruhn first discovered a debugging interface, which allowed them to enter API queries in a web-form (similar to what Temple did in 2015). Once they knew what the API expected, they could query the API even on websites that did not expose the API in a publicly view able directory.

Banking Disruption by PSD2 Takes User Experience Design to the Forefront

Open Banking will cause the rapid growth of financial services, taking the user experience to the next level. Many procedures will become simple and automated. With access to the banking APIs, FinTechs can provide users with opportunities to improve their financial lives. For banks and FinTech companies, this means only one thing. It is necessary to revise the existing user flow and redesign the actual service to eliminate friction, making it valuable for customers. Currently, banks have an infrastructure and a customer base, but they are burdened by a product-centered thinking legacy. Most banking solutions are outdated, and interfaces are not intuitive. Unlike the banks, FinTech companies create modern, client-centered solutions, but they do not have enough resources to bring them to market and acquire customers.

The Three Big Trends in 2018 That Will Matter When Doing Business in Europe

Major European data privacy, security and sovereignty regulations will be enacted in 2018 that will affect every company doing business there and beyond. The EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules, which go into effect in May of 2018, make up-front corporate investment for compliance unavoidable. GDPR's goal is to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals in the EU while also addressing the export of personal data outside the region, with huge fines imposed for companies that breach its provisions. While any company handling consumer data will be impacted, the effect on some industries will be particularly acute, such as medtech and biotech. For example, gathering patient information in one country and storing it in another will require new oversight, with possible implications for any firm performing clinical trials in Europe.

The Cybersecurity 'Upside Down'

Understanding and establishing true visibility for code and application security is a must for today's enterprises. Most companies are developing technology and using many different infrastructure providers and third-party components, and they're accelerating development practices due to competition and new methodologies such as DevOps. If organizations are not integrating security into the entire development lifecycle, they are exposed. Practices of manual pen testing twice per year, and/or siloed testing within development provide no visibility and painful remediation in an Upside Down event. Make sure to ask questions. Knowing how organizations in your supply chain are developing and protecting your products gives you a line of sight into issues and areas of potential risk.

No, The Death Of Net Neutrality Will Not Be Subtle

Of course most of the folks that really understand net neutrality have acknowledged that the harms initially may be muted. ISPs will initially want to be on their best behavior in the new year as they wait for the inevitable lawsuits against the FCC (for ignoring the public and ignoring rampant comment fraud) to shake out, wary of providing the ongoing proceedings with any ammunition. And, as we've noted, ISPs are well aware that even then the rules could simply be recrafted at a later date, which is why they're pushing for a fake net neutrality law that makes federal apathy on the subject the law of the land. But should ISPs win in the courts or on the Hill, the end result of what they're trying to accomplish will be anything but subtle. Anybody believing otherwise doesn't understand the full scope of what ISPs lobbyists are (so far successfully) up to here.

Quote for the day:

"You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." -- Ken Kesey

Daily Tech Digest - January 02, 2018

How Companies Can Respond to Consumers’ Demands for Better Data Protection

Board participation elevates cyber risk beyond the day-to-day concerns of the IT function to become a part of the company’s overall strategic planning. It’s a level of importance commensurate with the level of risk associated with a major breach. Companies can further prioritize cybersecurity by making sure the C-suite is involved in a review of the company’s information security strategy and budget. This includes gaining a clear understanding of what’s at stake in the event that certain systems or data are compromised — and ensuring plans are in place to mitigate the most pressing risks. The good news is the GSISS found companies are starting to elevate the role of chief information security officer (CISO) beyond IT: Respondents report it is more common for a company’s CISO to report directly to the CEO (40 percent) or the board of directors (27 percent) than to the CIO.

Ransomware to hit cloud computing in 2018, predicts MIT

MIT predicts that more cyber attacks targeting electrical grids, transportation systems and other types of national critical infrastructure are likely in 2018. Cyber-physical attacks are expected to be designed to either cause immediate disruption or to threaten to shut down vital systems to extort money from operators. MIT also predicts that 2018 will see researchers and attackers uncovering cyber vulnerabilities in older planes, trains, ships and other modes of transport. Another trend expected to continue and expand in 2018 is the hijacking of computing power to mine cryptocurrencies by solving complex mathematical problems. According to security firm Malwarebytes, it blocked 11 million connections to cryptocurrency mining sites in a single day in 2017. MIT warns that cyber attackers hijacking computers for cryptocurrency mining could have a devastating effect if they target computing resources at hospitals, airports and other similar locations.

Topping Your Wish List for 2018: A Simpler Way to Manage Hybrid IT

A multi-cloud management solution lets IT dramatically simplify operations through visibility and automation. The SaaS-based tool gives IT managers an aggregate view of their entire hybrid IT environment — from a variety of public clouds to traditional on premises IT and from containers to VMs. Shadow IT activities that were previously unaccounted for are now easily and quickly tracked, letting IT better understand and meet the needs of their developers. Automation and proactive management deliver a low-ops lifecycle management experience, giving IT more time to pursue new, innovative tasks that can help grow the business. In its new command and control role, IT is no longer reacting to constant needs. Instead, IT can build quota-based project workspaces for individuals or groups; IT can also streamline DevOps requests and the approval process.

Six Cyber Threats to Really Worry About in 2018

This year will see the emergence of an AI-driven arms race. Security firms and researchers have been using machine-learning models, neural networks, and other AI technologies for a while to better anticipate attacks, and to spot ones already under way. It’s highly likely that hackers are adopting the same technology to strike back. “AI unfortunately gives attackers the tools to get a much greater return on their investment,” explains Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee. An example is spear phishing, which uses carefully targeted digital messages to trick people into installing malware or sharing sensitive data. Machine-learning models can now match humans at the art of crafting convincing fake messages, and they can churn out far more of them without tiring. Hackers will take advantage of this to drive more phishing attacks. They’re also likely to use AI to help design malware that’s even better at fooling “sandboxes,” or security programs that try to spot rogue code before it is deployed in companies' systems.

Why data science is a secret weapon for tech consultants

It's better for experts to partner with data scientists who already know what they're doing. The collective goal of this partnership is to curate the company's data into information, knowledge, and wisdom that expands and supports the experts' base of knowledge. For instance, hypotheses can be tested and vetted using the company's operational data and then developed into an expert system. This becomes a private repository of information that can only be accessed by the experts. ... The first pitfall is a very important one: Don't practice data science without the help of data scientists. The time spent struggling with the nuances of the database or the analytic engine is not time well spent. It's easy to spend days or weeks troubleshooting an inefficient query or a complicated database join when that work is better suited for the data professionals. Also, you must ensure your information doesn't lose its power by making it so obscure that nobody outside the expert group understands what it means.

Reducing the environmental impact of global IoT

As we enter the next phase of IoT evolution, businesses are now able to utilise the entire spectrum to improve the efficiency of their data processing and reduce the need for high-power resources. The emergence of fog computing is enabling companies to extend cloud computing to the edge of a network, to store data without relying on cloud-based centres and facilitate communication outside of the internet’s infrastructure. By sitting closely to the edge, which today in many cases would be a physical object such as a sensor, owners are able to gather more selective yet valuable data nearer to its source, reducing the data capacity needed for information to travel before it is processed. This improved decision-making can now be widely leveraged to ensure the most relevant intelligence is communicated to data centres, resulting in less unnecessary, energy-consuming data and more available resources for big data IoT.

What Do We Do With All This Money?

With $4 billion in capital raised in ICOs, and very little utility value to show for it, it's tempting to call token offerings a bubble. However, the more likely truth is that the same forces that gave rise to today's paradigm-shifting technologies (see: Carlota Perez's definitive book) are at play in the world of crypto. And that while we may be entering bubble territory, the key difference between tulips and crypto is how speculative capital was deployed – the former into manufacturing an asset and the latter into technology development. Still, money is no guarantee of success, which is why I've been spending a lot of time thinking about capital deployment into crypto, a topic deserving of more attention because it will be a major proof point for the ecosystem's long-term trajectory. It is also an area of competitive advantage for crypto projects in the next five years.

Authentication vs identification: Understanding the technology behind face ID

Most current facial recognition options are incapable of determining if the subject of the verification is actually there in person, leaving them susceptible to spoofing by a photo, video, mask or an inanimate representation like a 3D fake head. Why? They lack the ability to detect a critical aspect of true authentication during login: liveness, or the detection of unique human traits that can include movements, skin texture and eye reflections. For context, Apple’s Face ID matches images and can determine three-dimensionality (depth analysis), but it lacks robust liveness detection that can determine whether or not the correct user is actually present in the flesh at the time of login. The multitude of spoof videos already on YouTube clearly show its current limits. Apple’s proprietary technology will undoubtedly improve over time. However, the speed at which it develops will be impeded by their decision to use a specialised – and costly – hardware-based approach.

Cloud culture calls for flexible networks

The reasons behind the need for next-generation networks are manifold. Businesses are looking to cut their IT spend and improve operating costs while delivering services more quickly and maintaining superior-quality services. In an attempt to do that, enterprises are looking for systems that are agile and easy to deploy. Cloud-based applications and infrastructure platforms are the right match to meet high-level business objectives. Enterprises are adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce and that has made the internet an essential component of the enterprise backbone. Archana Kesavan, senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes, says that when the internet becomes the backbone of enterprise communication, organisations need to think proactively about their next-generation WAN having network monitoring tightly integrated within it.

Can IoT help make the enterprise more secure?

Here’s how EIoT works: By adding sensors and connectivity to refrigeration units, automobiles, or assembly lines, vendors create “digital twins” — virtual representations of a physical object complete with key attributes and metrics. MicroStrategy applies this concept to people, creating a “digital badge” called Usher to enable the digital “twinning” of employees, partners and customers. “The device projects the badge holder’s identity to the system,” Lang says, and “can stream data about the person’s context and actions in real time” to power security and other analyses. Lang says MicroStrategy already uses Usher internally, and it is testing it with customers around the world. The concept makes sense, but I have to admit I find it a little bit creepy. Even in a workplace environment, I’m not sure I like the idea of a digital mini-me being tracked by my employer.

Quote for the day:

"Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional." -- Roger Crawford

Daily Tech Digest - January 01, 2018

Data-driven policing strategies bring new look to public safety

First, there's the enhanced decision-making that can happen when you have more information coming in from multiple sources from Next Gen 911 enabling new data sources -- for example, a crash notification from a vehicle. Today, you get a phone call 15 minutes after an accident happens. With telematics integration, you get a notification from the vehicle that says not only has there been an accident, but what is the location, did the vehicle roll over, how many people are in the vehicle. It's just a tremendous amount of information available to the call-taker and first responder that can result in lives saved. Also, there is the ability for analytics to power new insights and improvements in how they handle responses. There's the ability to gain insights from the incident and how it was handled; being able to reconstruct and analyze and identify opportunities for improvement is going to be enhanced when you have this growth in information coming into the center.

Putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work

While everything has the potential to be improved by AI, two notable areas are marketing, which for a long time has been the leading adopter of AI techniques, and the automotive industry, where there is a realization that self-driving vehicles are coming and will change the industry. Other industries are earlier in their AI journeys but are already seeing an impact. For example, EY has helped develop a chatbot for a national blood bank, helping to reach younger donors through a user experience combining AI technologies, social media and human curation. EY has also assisted a global bank to use Natural Language Processing technology to automate voice and text analytics for its complaints and compliance processes. ... The biggest risk is non-adoption. Every challenge in the world, and in business in particular, is an opportunity for AI. Adopting AI will require patience and a willingness to learn, and will be complex and lengthy, so firms need to start now. Many early projects will have a low return on investment (ROI) and a limited impact

What is agile methodology? Modern software development explained

Because software was developed based on the technical architecture, lower level artifacts were developed first and dependent artifacts afterward. Tasks was assigned by skill, and it was common for database engineers to construct the tables and other database artifacts first, followed by the application developers coding the functionality and business logic, and then finally the user interface was overlaid. It took months before anyone saw the application working and by then, the stakeholders were getting antsy and often smarter about what they really wanted. No wonder changes were so expensive! Not everything that you put in front of users worked as expected. Sometimes, users wouldn’t use a feature at all, so that feature was a wasted investment. Other times, a capability was widely successful but required reengineering to support the scalability and performance required. In the waterfall world, you only learned these things after the software was deployed, after all that effort and expense.

We Need Computers with Empathy

Using computer vision, speech analysis, and deep learning, we classify facial and vocal expressions of emotion. Quite a few open challenges remain—how do you train such multi-modal systems? And how do you collect data for less frequent emotions, like pride or inspiration? Nonetheless, the field is progressing so fast that I expect the technologies that surround us to become emotion-aware in the next five years. They will read and respond to human cognitive and emotional states, just the way humans do. Emotion AI will be ingrained in the technologies we use every day, running in the background, making our tech interactions more personalized, relevant, authentic, and interactive. It’s hard to remember now what it was like before we had touch interfaces and speech recognition. Eventually we’ll feel the same way about our emotion-aware devices.

Blockchain-Based CVs Could Change Employment Forever

APPII’s platform allows candidates to create Intelligent Profiles – recording details of professional achievement or educational certification on the distributed ledger, where it can be verified and then permanently recorded. It then allows organizations such as businesses or educational institutions to verify the “assertions” that candidates make during applications. By recording on a candidate’s profile that an assertion has been verified, there is no need for it to be checked again in the future. It also uses facial recognition technology to verify the identity of candidates, by asking them to take a picture using the mobile app and comparing it to a photograph on official identification documents such as passports. McKay says “In high-risk industries, it’s imperative for employers to undertake due diligence – in financial services if you’re providing your money to someone to invest, you don’t want that person to have got their job by falsifying their CV. It’s the same if you go to see a doctor or nurse.”

Here are strategies to achieve 6 common business resolutions for 2018

It's no secret that the tech world can be a high-pressure, stressful place especially if you're the one in charge. According to Business Insider, well-known tech leaders all have their ways of dealing with stress. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett advise reserving time for hobbies and taking that time, no matter what. Apple's CEO Tim Cook encourages leaders to maintain a focus on positive thinking, no matter how many cynics and negative thinkers surround them, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg turns the phone off at night. ... Career-ending events like 2017's Equifax security breach, and the shortage of cybersecurity experts in the job market might be keeping you up at night. Communicate your concerns to upper management and the board if you feel you have security exposures and you lack the skills or resources to address them. This is the time to ask for extra budget money if you have to bring in security experts or consultants to fill skills gaps, or to purchase security software or monitoring solutions.

Will Google kill Chrome OS and Android in 2018?

According to this set of predictions, Fuchsia will replace Android Wear, Android and Chrome OS, but run existing apps designed for those platforms. In other words, future Android phones would ship with Fuchsia instead of Android, and Chromebooks would ship with Fuchsia instead of Chrome OS. That would spell the end of Chrome OS and Android as we know them and usher in a single-platform utopia for apps that run across all devices. The fabulous-Fuchsia faction assumes the new OS will solve whatever problems they’re currently having with either Chrome OS or Android. Fuchsia is expected to end Android fragmentation, solve the problem of slow and uneven Android updates, enable developers to build single apps that run natively on both iOS and Android and boost the performance of Chromebooks.

Entering the Next Era of Human Machine Partnerships

Over the next few years, AI will change the way we spend our time acting on data, not just curating it. Businesses will harness AI to do data-driven “thinking tasks” for them, significantly reducing the time they spend scoping, debating, scenario planning and testing every new innovation. It will mercifully release bottlenecks and liberate people to make more decisions and move faster, in the knowledge that great new ideas won’t get stuck in the mire. Some theorists claim AI will replace jobs, but these new technologies may also create new ones, unleashing new opportunities for humans. For example, we’ll see a new type of IT professional focused on AI training and fine-tuning. These practitioners will be responsible for setting the parameters for what should and shouldn’t be classified good business outcomes, determining the rules for engagement, framing what constitutes ‘reward’ and so on.

AI Will Soon Be So Good At Hacking, We’ll Only Be Able To Stop Them With Other AI

We may soon see machine learning algorithms repurposed towards hiding a piece of malware on a network, using its pattern analysis to ensure that the malicious code’s actions blend in with the daily traffic. Say a company manages to get a bit of spyware into a major rival’s network. It can then stay dormant, while the AI analyses data over time to learn crucial details – how does the firewall work, what time of the day are cyber security teams active, etc. The AI can then use this data to find a weak point in the security system, and even create cover for the spyware to siphon and transfer out data on new technology being researched, or major projects being negotiated, or even which employees are unhappy and looking to quit. And that’s just in corporate espionage. There’s no telling how much havoc an AI-powered malware can wreak on regular consumer systems across the Web.

Entity Services is an Antipattern

In a microservice based architecture, it is important to keep the different services separated. Entity services is a common pattern now applied to microservices, but entity services is an anti-patternthat works against separation, Michael Nygard claims in one of a short series of blog posts on how to work with microservices. Nygard, among other things author of Release It!, notes that entity services is a solution to a problem that is commonly rediscovered, and refers both to a microservices architecture e-book from Microsoft and a tutorial from Spring for two of many new examples of usage of this pattern. For Nygard, an antipattern is a pattern that makes things worse. In arguing that entity services really is an anti-pattern, he uses a large legacy monolithic application as an example. In this application there are multiple instances of the process with all features local and in-process

Quote for the day:

"Success doesn’t come to you just by wanting it—it comes to you by getting in agreement with what It takes to ACHIEVE it." -- @MattManero