Daily Tech Digest - May 04, 2018

7 Ways To Embrace Shadow IT & Win

Direction on how to deal with shadow IT tools is best obtained by asking users to discuss the value the technology is delivering to them and the specific problems it's helping to solve. "It's similar to what our IT teams do when evaluating new technologies, except that the new technology is already part of some business workflow," says Sean Cordero, head of cloud strategy at Netskope, a cloud security platform provider. "If it turns out your team can’t deliver the capabilities needed, then it’s likely a good time to dig further into the use cases and identify solutions that can meet the business' needs." A top shadow IT example is surreptitious use of public cloud services. Employees often share files, offer multiple users document access or simply back up important files to services such as Dropbox or Google Docs. "While these platforms are ubiquitous and easy to use, they can put sensitive data at risk," Green warns. He notes that enterprise-focused cloud platforms offer more robust security and utilization controls, including options to encrypt files so they can be accessed only by intended parties.

We're going to kill off passwords and here's how, says Microsoft

"Nobody likes passwords. They are inconvenient, insecure, and expensive. In fact, we dislike them so much that we've been busy at work trying to create a world without them -- a world without passwords," said Karanbir Singh, principal program manager for enterprise and security at Microsoft, in a blog post. Singh said the goal was to make it possible for end users to never deal with a password in their day-to-day lives, and to provide instead user credentials that cannot be cracked, breached, or phished. For Microsoft, multi-factor authentication and biometrics is seen as a good replacement for passwords -- using a physical key, and/or your face or fingerprint to log into your device instead of a string of letters and numbers. Singh said that Microsoft's Windows Hello biometric log-in is now being used by over 47 million users and that more than 5,000 businesses have deployed Windows Hello for Business, which is used on over one million commercial devices. Another technology in the mix is the Microsoft Authenticator app, which allows you to access your Microsoft account using your mobile phone.

How mobile money is spreading

Both the “Chinese” and the “Kenyan” models have crossed borders. Most developing countries have a mobile-payment service, but Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where the share of adults with a mobile account exceeds 10%. Tencent has an e-payment licence in Malaysia where it plans to launch WeChat Pay—its first foray outside China and Hong Kong. Alipay has taken a higher-profile approach, enlisting merchants in Europe and America to accept it as a means of payment for the benefit of Chinese residents and tourists. And in Asia itself, Ant Financial has been investing in local mobile-payment services in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and, most recently, Pakistan. ... It is hardly surprising that many in this industry, rooted in charitable development work, feel ambivalent about vast commercial enterprises entering the payment business. The suspicions are not confined to Pakistan, and are likely to become more acute as American and Chinese tech giants slug it out for market share in poor countries. As a still largely nascent market of enormous potential, Pakistan also illustrates many of the other tensions affecting the payment business.

No Computing Device Too Small For Cryptojacking

It is unclear how many IoT devices an attacker would need to infect with mining software in order to profit from cryptomining, Merces says. A lot would depend on the type of device infected and the cryptocurrency being mined. "[But] a big botnet with a few thousands of devices seems to be attractive to some criminals, even though some of them disagree." Not all of the cryptocurrency malware that Trend Micro observed is for mining. Several of the tools are also designed to steal cryptocurrency from bitcoin wallets and from wallets for other digital currencies like Monero. But a lot of the activity and discussions in underground forums appear centered on illegal digital currency mining. And it is not just computers that are under threat but just about any internet-connected device, Trend Micro says. "The underground is flooded with so many offerings of cryptocurrency malware that it must be hard for the criminals themselves to determine which is best," Merces says in a Trend Micro report on the topic this week.

Google releases open source framework for building “enclaved” apps for cloud

The SDK, available in version 0.2 for C++ developers, abstracts out multiple hardware and software back-ends for applications so they can be easily recompiled for any of them without a source code change. There's also a Docker image provided via Google Container Registry that includes all the dependencies needed to run the container on any environment that supports TEE. "Asylo applications do not need to be aware of the intricacies of specific TEE implementations," wrote Google Cloud Senior Product Manager Nelly Porter and other members of the Google Cloud team in a blog post published today. "[Y]ou can port your apps across different enclave backends with no code changes. Your apps can run on your laptop, a workstation under your desk, a virtual machine in an on-premises server, or an instance in the cloud." The current Asylo implementation provides enclaves through the use of a software back-end. "We are exploring future backends based on AMD Secure Encryption Virtualization (SEV) technology, Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), and other industry-leading hardware technologies 

New Research Finds C-Suite ‘Infosec Averse’

When asked which part of their organizations’ demographics were more infosec-averse, 41 percent laid blame at their fellow C-suite counterparts. In fact, management as a whole, from C-level executives down to junior department heads, were cited as the most likely to flaunt security risks and leave data vulnerable. Day-to-day knowledge workers, who are often charged with being most likely to cause security problems, were cited by only 25 percent of respondents. Security C-suiters demonstrated a varied but sophisticated view of the risks posed by inefficient security. When asked what was their greatest concern regarding security, 26 percent cited the possibility of fines or other sanctions. In contrast, 42 percent of infosec executives instead cited a potential loss of stakeholder and customer trust as the most concerning potential repercussion. In third place was a loss of employee trust, noted by 16 percent of respondents. This number varied by age, with older infosec executives being more likely to cite stakeholder and customer trust as a greater concern, while youngers executives were more concerned about fines.

Strategies to master continuous testing

If your enterprise delivers new software code several times a day, iteratively and agilely updating applications, you're not alone. A growing number of businesses focus on uninterrupted, continuous software delivery and deployment. This process sounds great, until you realize that continuous delivery (CD) can also mean constant bugs and hiccups. Continuous testing is the only way to avoid delivery failures. If you can test at the same speed that developers build code, your chances of catching bugs greatly increase. This Software Development Training Center entry covers strategies to implement, improve and assess continuous testing. Learn about continuous testing in DevOps, how to test with Jenkins and where continuous integration (CI) and continuous development fit in.

Crypto flaw in Oracle Access Manager can let attackers pass through

“The Oracle Access Manager is the component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware that handles authentication for all sorts of web applications,” SEC Consult researcher Wolfgang Ettlinger explained. “In typical scenarios, the web server that provides access to the application is equipped with an authentication component (the Oracle WebGate). When a user requests a protected resource from the web server, it redirects her to an authentication endpoint of the OAM. The OAM then authenticates the user (e.g. with username and password) and redirects her back to the web application. Since all the authentication is handled by a central application, a user only has to authenticate once to access any application protected by the OAM (Single Sign-On).” But the vulnerability can be exploited to decrypt and encrypt messages used to communicate between the OAM and web servers. The researchers have managed to construct a valid session token and encrypt it, then pass it off as valid to the web server. This allowed them to access protected resources as a user already known to the OAM.

Rise of the decentralized and distributed mesh computer

Companies have been embracing cloud computing for nearly a decade, but it’s currently being disrupted by the IoT phenomenon. Analysts are predicting that there will be 75 billion internet-connected devices by 2025. The cloud was not designed for massive sensor data uploads, nor was it designed for low-latency, real-time communications. This is the catalyst for all IoT platform vendors racing to release edge computing gateways and appliances to bring more connectivity and computing capabilities to edge networks rather than routing everything through “the cloud.” ... With over 75 billion internet-connected devices expected by 2025, there’s going to be a ton of idle/wasted CPU resources and an insatiable demand for machine learning computes! We are moving into an era of decentralized and distributed computing where everything computes (together) as if they are peer-to-peer nodes on a global mesh computer. Decentralized web and decentralized apps will run on this new decentralized and distributed mesh computer. 

Is Payments Industry Ready for New Encryption Protocols?

Dr. N. Rajendran, chief technology officer at National Payments Corp. of India, which is migrating to the new TLS protocol, notes: "The challenge for most organizations is to migrate their legacy systems to a new protocol; the entire process is ... investment intensive." But Tim Sloane, vice president of payments innovation at Mercator Advisory Group, points out: "It would be a sad commentary if acquirers are almost a year behind Salesforce.Com and others in upgrading to the more secure TLS 1.1 or higher. If acquirers or merchants haven't already deployed, or at minimum haven't got a plan to deploy, TLS1.1 or higher, then they have been asleep at the security switch and don't deserve to receive PCI compliance." Adds Julie Conroy, research director at Aite Group: "While we've known about this deadline since 2015, there are always laggards around various aspects of PCI compliance, and this is no exception. The problem of merchants running behind on security has been compounded as so many micro-merchants have come into existence over the past few years. Most of them believe they're too small to be on hackers' radar; ..."

Microsoft Wants to Secure IoT and ICS Devices With New TCPS Project

Microsoft engineers have started working on a new project codenamed TCPS —short for Trusted Cyber Physical Systems— that is intended to provide a hardened system for securing Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) devices. Microsoft formally announced TCPS at the Hannover Messe 2018, a trade show for industrial technology that took place last week. ... Normally, good IoT and ICS systems utilize various security features to protect data in transit (data moving between devices — e.g., use of HTTPS encryption) and data at rest (data stored on a device — e.g., cryptographic file signatures). According to Microsoft, the purpose of its new TCPS project is to add support for the last missing piece in IoT and ICS systems design —protection for data in execution— by utilizing TEEs, similar to how they're used on desktops and laptops. Microsoft cited the recent attacks with the Trisis/Triton malware as the reason it started working on TCPS.

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Quote for the day:

"An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things." -- @BryantMcGill

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Daily Tech Digest - May 03, 2018

The Art and Science of Action-Driven Visual Analytics

In the world of big data, a visualization is merely a vehicle – a vehicle for us to create patterns, familiarity, and salience with data so that we can attract users’ attention and tap into their iconic memories, but to convince them to take actions, we must think deeper and tap into their short-term and long-term memories: Who is my audience? Why should they care? Will I make their jobs easier and help them create more impact? With this framework in mind, let’s look at the two data visualization examples below and see which one is more effective? For illustration purpose, let’s assume that the user for this data visualization is a project manager at an IT Consulting Agency. Her performance is measured by the number of projects she does and how quickly she delivers solutions to her customers. To achieve high impact, she constantly looks for areas that hinder her effort or projects that drag down her performance. ... The magic of action-driven visual analysis is never about the beauty of the chart, but rather the thought process that goes behind it: identify what is important for your audience, and then use visualization tools to surface what they care about.

A Simple DNS Configuration Change Can Reduce Your Risk

Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting malware or phishing sites. Whenever a Quad9 user clicks on a website link or types in an address into a web browser, Quad9 will check the site against IBM X-Force threat intelligence that includes 800+ terabytes of threat intelligence data including 40B+ analyzed web pages and images and 17 million spam and phishing attacks monitored daily. Advanced analysis is performed on IP addresses to assign a risk score based on text, visual object recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), structure and linkages to other sites, and the presence of suspicious files to identify malicious IPs. This data feed combined with multiple other threat intelligence providers allows Quad9 to block a large portion of the threats that present risk to end users and businesses alike. It’s worth noting that Quad9 doesn’t just use IBM’s threat intelligence – there are 18 other combined feeds that make up their threat blocking, which is fairly unique and gives a cross-section of blocking abilities from some of the world’s best threat management organizations.

Do spreadsheets have a role in project management?

Whatever business you are in, it’s likely that somewhere in your organization there is a person or team responsible for project management.  If they are handling multiple projects, juggling the grouping of projects, overseeing work flows and allocating tasks, their job becomes more about resource planning. That means they need a firm grip on who is doing what, where, and when – and must determine whether all resources are being used in the smartest way.  They can use a variety of tools to help organize the resources at their disposal, which may be people, equipment, machinery, or office space. Some people schedule resources using Excel spreadsheets and an assortment of other unsophisticated tools, including calendars, whiteboards, and notepads. Whether these choices are made because of economy, or lack of knowledge of a better alternative, their failure to use specialist resource planning software is probably costing them time, money and the respect of team players and senior management.

Business Architecture At Raytheon: A Conversation With J. Bryan Lail

If someone truly means Enterprise Architecture as the roles, processes, value streams, business capabilities and ecosystems for your manufacturing, supply chain, finance, human resources, or everything your company does, then absolutely Business Architecture is part of that. It’s about translating from the vision and strategy level in Architecture through an understanding of the business needs and gaps before then architecting, or guiding, specific solutions, where solutions include process, roles, systems, information flow, and the technology. In that context, we’ve been building Business Architecture into the TOGAF ecosystem with a set of guides on how to apply Business Architecture as a very strategic tool and methodology. This enables the architect to flow from strategy around the ADM wheel to drive to the right solutions. The case study we presented uses those same Business Architecture methods, following step-by-step, including examples in Raytheon for Sales and Operations Planning. We walk through business modeling at the Vision Phase, then through value-stream analysis and business capability mapping in the Business Architecture phase.

Data Analytics and The Death of The Modern Banking Industry

It is a future where individual consumers sit at the center of their personal worlds and access the services that fit best into their lives thanks to the data about themselves that they choose to share with brands that they trust. Moreover, we are talking about trust on a personal, emotionally-engaged level. Not just the trust we have with a utility-style process that will work the exact same way the next time we need it. Although banks hold huge quantities of transactional data on millions of customers, they already face serious challenges to maintain the quality of that data and the way the data is used on behalf of the consumer. As customers turn to new payment methods, banks progressively lose the granular detail they used to have about their customers’ spending. Instead, they see a stream of transactions where anyone but the banks ‘owns’ the relationship: ApplePay, PayPal transfers, a direct debit to a Nutmeg or Betterment account, or storing value on a Starbucks mobile app … with rewards associated with many of these relationships. As such, a consumer can leave a bank in every way that matters without closing their account.

Optimism and Trust on the CEO’s Mind

The public mistrust of companies is also part of a longtime trend, one of declining respect for all institutions, not just corporations. According to Edelman, the mistrust of media is even greater than the mistrust of business. In the 28 geographies that Edelman surveyed, the overall trust for institutions accrued most to NGOs, then to business, then to government, and finally to media. In 21 of these geographies, business is more trusted than government. In that context, when it comes to dealing with social issues and fostering overall economic growth, people around the world increasingly expect business to step up to the responsibility. Other institutions have lost their license to lead; they aren’t seen as capable of making the right things happen. Two possible reasons for this shift in attitude come to mind. First, the private sector is now seen as an effective actor when business leaders choose to participate in solving the pernicious problems of our time: cybercrime, terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, income inequality and its political impact, and environmental damage.

Microsoft Releases .NET Framework 4.7.2

Microsoft's new .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 offerings may be generating the most buzz among .NET developers these days, but for many use cases the traditional .NET Framework is still the best choice, just released in version 4.7.2. The new .NET Framework 4.7.2 is the next major update following the October 2017 release of v4.7.1, which added support for .NET Standard 2.0, defining APIs that all conformant .NET implementations must provide to ensure consistent API usage across development projects, replacing the previous Portable Class Libraries (PCL) as the means to create libraries for all scenarios. While .NET Core offers cross-platform functionality and more, the 16-year-old .NET Framework is still an optimal choice for targeting Windows desktop projects such as WinForms, WPF and ASP.NET WebForms apps. Both .NET Core and .NET Framework are used for creating server-side apps ... Microsoft also provided guidance about when and when not to consider porting existing .NET Framework projects to .NET Core.

A proper DevOps feedback loop includes business leaders

It's a step up from waterfall, where processes add significant time to project completion in the name of stability. But DevOps itself is already wrong for the modern world: Streamlined processes between development and operations are only useful if the outcome supports the business. DevOps does not solve the problem of IT effectiveness, wherein IT must not just work quickly, but also must stay attuned to business requirements and project goals. DevOps is better christened BizDevOps, as everything that happens must be driven by the business. Development teams can act too selectively: Instead of focusing on an issue identified by operations as critical, they spend time on technically interesting and intellectually challenging tasks that are less pressing. The standard help desk feedback loop system, wherein operations and users raise issues in production, is wrong for DevOps. A DevOps feedback loop enforces priorities and project goals so that the freedom and fast pace in development doesn't lead it astray.

RPA is poised for a big business break-out

"It was scary for a lot of people," Thompson said. He ultimately reassigned those workers to engage with the company's clients and perform other higher value tasks. "Our business leaders are coming along for the journey," Thompson said. "They didn’t think these things were even possible and we’re now showing them the art of the possible." CIOs aren't looking to shed staff so much as free workers up for other work. To that end, bots are a big part of the plans for Walmart, which employs 2.3 million people. Walmart CIO Clay Johnson, who spoke on the panel along with Thompson, said the retail giant has deployed about 500 bots to automate anything from answering employee questions to retrieving useful information from audit documents. "A lot of those came from people who are tired of the work," Johnson said. Freeing up staff is part of Johnson's process automation plan to make Walmart's massive workforce more efficient. More broadly, Johnson's IT strategy entails delivering IT services as a series of products rather than traditional IT project management freighted with set deadlines and rigorous processes.

TigerGraph: The parallel graph database explained

We don’t describe TigerGraph as an in-memory database, because having data in memory is a preference but not a requirement. Users can set parameters that specify how much of the available memory may be used for holding the graph. If the full graph does not fit in memory, then the excess is stored on disk. Best performance is achieved when the full graph fits in memory, of course.  Data values are stored in encoded formats that effectively compress the data. The compression factor varies with the graph structure and data, but typical compression factors are between 2x and 10x. Compression has two advantages: First, a larger amount of graph data can fit in memory and in cache. Such compression reduces not only the memory footprint, but also CPU cache misses, speeding up overall query performance. Second, for users with very large graphs, hardware costs are reduced. For example, if the compression factor is 4x, then an organization may be able to fit all its data in one machine instead of four. Decompression/decoding is very fast and transparent to end users, so the benefits of compression outweigh the small time delay for compression/decompression. In general, decompression is needed only for displaying the data.

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Quote for the day:

"Wherever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience." -- Thomas Haliburton

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Daily Tech Digest - May 02, 2018

Next Port of Call — Digitization of Automotive Retail

As per the Cox Automotive's survey, for every retail sale, customers visit the auto dealer only two to three times (at maximum), including to sign the contract and to take the custody of the vehicle. However, the consumers are also taking the unbeaten path - like - initiating the buying process online by “building a vehicle” to their specifications and then searching inventory in a specific geography. The buyer evaluates their current vehicle’s trade-in value based on its model, option content, age, and condition. The financial institution (either traditional bank or newer online lenders) reviews, selects and approves financing and the consumer’s choice of purchase or lease in real time. Then the purchase process shifts from digital to more traditional retail, when the consumer arrives at the dealership to test drive the vehicle and sign the necessary paperwork to take ownership. Some dealers, taking advantage of their close proximity to the customer, further emulate the new online purchasing model by delivering the vehicle directly to the customer’s home at no charge.

Resolving who actually owns security in agile development

As we know, the developers’ main focus is getting a working product out the door as fast as possible, while the security folks want to reduce the chances that the product will contain vulnerabilities. Ideally, the developers would be able to code without any interruption or inference from the security folks. However, since developers are only human, there will always be flaws in the code that they write themselves, as well as issues in the code that they take from third-parties like open source repositories from sources like GitHub. We know that it is cheaper in terms of time and money to catch and fix vulnerabilities early in the process rather than later, especially when your developers have built more features on top of imperfect code. Moreover, we see a bottleneck occurring when security issues are left unaddressed until a short while before release (when stress levels are particularly high).

Shifting a Corporate Culture at Scale — and with Speed

Speed was very important in decision making. The culture of the prior organization was to extensively “discuss and deliberate.” As an example, the first meeting I was at had 25 people. My first call had 100 people. People were coming into meetings who were not necessarily contributing but who were transcribing and communicating to others; they weren’t the people who were supposed to take the action. One of the first meetings I had on July 14 was a review of the business. I had a stack of paper on one side, a stack of paper on the other side. I said, “I’m going to make a policy decision: no more paper.” And of course, I got a call that evening, saying, “Hey, I don’t know if you are aware of the fact you work for Xerox.” And I said, “Oops.” I said no more paper because the idea is to quickly convert people from the previous approach. People are showing up, and they’re basically reading off the presentation. So we changed that. But organizational structure is the clearest way to inform you as to how successful you will be.

State of Cybersecurity 2018: Enterprises Can Do Better

It seems that over the past 12 months, security has slipped down the boardroom agenda. According to the survey results, only 20% of organizations have their security function reporting to the CEO or main board. This represents an even lower figure than the 24% from last year (although the question in the previous year was phrased slightly differently). Also, 57% of the practitioners surveyed believed that their main board was adequately supporting security initiatives, a 10% decrease from the 67% figure from the previous year. On the bright side, 64% of enterprises were expecting to increase their cybersecurity budget this year, which also means that in 36% of enterprises, the expectation is to make do with the same or less money on their security efforts. That is an improvement over last year (where only 50% of respondents expected a security budget increase) but still shows a degree of complacency or risk-optimism in a sizable number of organizations.

Rip and replace your RDBMS? No – build cloud apps instead.

“Customer success” is not just a nice way to give a new name to services. It is very much a mindset and a model that says you have to really understand what your customer is trying to achieve." That advice also means architecture planning, tying DataStax into an array of tools and vendors, from the storage layer to the security layer to the middleware layer: “How we interact and engage with our partners is all very important.” So is this a revenue play for DataStax, or is it about solidifying the customer relationship and making sure the projects deliver? Bosworth says it’s very much the latter. Without opening the entire financial kimono, he offered this: "We don’t share a lot of financial information. One thing I can tell you is our gross margins run north of 75 percent – that’s our blended gross margin as a company. That’s really how you can figure out if a company is a services company or a software company. Certainly anything upwards of 70 percent puts you in the software category. … kind of time-to-impact if you will."

University of San Francisco GE Digital Transformation Case Study

“Improving the productivity of existing assets by even a single percentage point can generate significant benefits in the oil and gas sector (and in other sectors). “The average recovery rate of an oil well is 35%, meaning 65% of a well’s potential draw is left in the earth because available technology makes it too expensive,” explains Haynes-Gaspar. “If we can help raise that 35% to 36%, the world’s output will increase by 80 billion barrels — the equivalent of three years of global supply. The economic implications are huge.” GE bet big on the Industrial Internet. The company put sensors on all of their products including gas turbines, jet engines, and other machines; connecting them to the cloud; and analyzing the resulting flow of data. The goal: identify ways to improve machine productivity and reliability. And it didn’t take long for GE engineers to realize that they could find interesting and unique patterns in the data.

Car hackers find remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in Volkswagen and Audi vehicles

The researchers noted, “Based on our experience, it seems that cars which have been produced before are not automatically updated when being serviced at a dealer, thus are still vulnerable to the described attack.” I encourage you to read their research paper, which delves into their attack strategy and technical system details, but it does not fully disclose the details of the remotely exploitable vulnerability because that, they believe, would be “irresponsible.” The researchers said they want to protect future cars but ask, “What about the cars of today or cars that were shipped last week? They often don’t have the required capabilities (such as over-the-air updates) but will be on our roads for the next fifteen years. We believe they currently pose the real threat to their owners, having drive-by-wire technology in cars that are internet-connected without any way to reliably update the entire fleet at once.” The hacked car models were from 2015, so if you have an Audi or Volkswagen, then contact to your dealer and ask about a software update.

Collaboration with utilities seen as first step in growth of smart cities

Berst said cities can invest in becoming a smart city in small ways. From installing smart street lights to putting in solar rooftops and other distributed renewable energy sources, to providing residents with electric car charging stations, cities can not only provide a more environmentally friendly atmosphere, but also save money. Installing smart street lights, such as through the Urbanova initiative for example, can save a city millions in electricity costs. “Smart street lights have a pay-off of three years or less. It’s one of the lesser expensive on-ramps that can lead to a deeper collaboration,” Berst said. “While those trucks are there installing the LED street lights, why not have them snap in a communications network into that existing infrastructure while they are up there? Now, not only do you have smart street lights, but an entire communications network as well.”

A Quick Guide to Implementing ATDD

Collaboration is one of the core values of the Agile methodology. Once, as I was working on a large project, I noticed a lack of collaboration between developers, testers, and business-minded individuals; a lack of clarity in requirements; frequent requirements scope-creep; a lack of visibility in regards to the testing completed; and defects being identified late in the project lifecycle. Most importantly to me, though, was that no one had any idea about our automation framework, so all of the automation tests were written after the features were developed and ready for testing. ... As a result, I found Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) as one of the approaches used to mitigate many of these issues. It is often used synonymously with Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Story Test Driven Development (SDD) and Specification By Example (SBE). The main distinction of ATDD, as opposed to other agile approaches, is its focus on making developers, testers, business people, product owners and other stakeholders collaborate as one unit and create a clear understanding of what needs to be implemented.

At Interop: Everyone Into the AI Pool

"Now is the time to proactively look for problems where you can apply this. Yes, I think it's that important," he said, adding that you could toss a dart at a company org chart and find an area that could benefit from AI. Helping to identify the problems to be solved, and the type of improvement -- be it a new product or service, or a process improvement -- that should result is where business leaders need to work with technologists and data scientists to match the goals with technology capabilities. Putting AI and machine learning into action is where David Karandish, founder and CEO of Ai Software, took over. There's been plenty of discussion about how to use intelligent assistants or agents in the corporate world, taking a step beyond the bots that have popped up on websites in recent years. Karandish introduced the audience to his company's "Jane", a chat-based assistant that answers questions for employees and customers when integrated with a client company's internal systems. It's in use at several client companies besides his own.

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Quote for the day:

"Knowledge is like underwear. It is useful to have it, but not necessary to show it off." -- Bill Murray

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Daily Tech Digest - May 01, 2018

Over a million vulnerable fiber routers can be easily hacked

Over a million fiber routers can be remotely accessed, thanks to an authentication bypass bug that's easily exploited by modifying the URL in the browser's address bar. The bug lets anyone bypass the router's login page and access pages within -- simply by adding "?images/" to the end of the web address on any of the router's configuration pages, giving an attacker near complete access to the router. Because the ping and traceroute commands on the device's diagnostic page are running at "root" level, other commands can be remotely run on the device, too. The findings, published Monday, say the bug is found in routers used for fiber connections. These routers are central in bringing high-speed fiber internet to people's homes. At the time of writing, about 1.06 million routers marked were listed on Shodan, the search engine for unprotected devices and databases. Half the vulnerable routers are located on the Telmex network in Mexico, and the rest are found on in Kazakhstan and Vietnam.

Native-Like Animations for Page Transitions on the Web

If you’re unfamiliar with Nuxt and how to work with it to create Vue.js applications, there’s another article I wrote on the subject here. If you’re familiar with React and Next.js, Nuxt.js is the Vue equivalent. It offers server-side rendering, code splitting, and most importantly, hooks for page transitions. Even though the page transition hooks it offers are excellent, that’s not how we’re going to accomplish the bulk of our animations in this tutorial. In order to understand how the transitions we’re working with today do work, you’ll also need to have basic knowledge around the <transition /> component and the difference between CSS animations and transitions. I’ve covered both in more detail here. You’ll also need basic knowledge of the <transition-group />component and this Snipcart post is a great resource to learn more about it. Even though you’ll understand everything in more detail if you read these articles, I’ll give you the basic gist of what’s going on as we encounter things throughout the post.

GDPR: It’s A Marathon, Not A Sprint

The reality is that many companies will not be fully GDPR compliant by the required date. But it’s important to remember that GDPR is not an exhaustive list of what is and isn’t allowed; it’s a principle-based, legal framework to drive change, as opposed to a tick-box exercise. Those companies who purely view it as such will not be building the best platform to succeed in the future – and may even trip up along the way. With less than a month to go, we’ve pulled together some key learnings to help your business remain calm under pressure and show how keeping the right attitude and culture is crucial for true compliance. The main element to a positive GDPR journey is to remember that the regulation has been designed to better facilitate business across the digital market in Europe. Key to this is building trust with citizens and customers by clearly demonstrating that their rights are respected and their data is managed responsibly. It shouldn’t be looked at as another regulation as it essentially builds on data privacy and security principles which organisations should already be abiding by. 

Slack Releases Open Source SDL Tool

GoSDL is, he says, a fairly simple PHP application that allows any team member to begin the process of interacting with security. "The beginning of the process of a new feature is one where they can check whether they want direct security involvement," Feldman says. If so, the feature is flagged "high risk," not because of any actual risk but to make it high priority for security team action. If the security involvement box isn't checked, it doesn't mean that security steps aside, but their involvement begins with a series of questions about the impact on existing products and features. Once the security team is involved it begins to put together risk assessments (high, medium, or low) for each component of the feature. The product engineer or manager is responsible for a component survey with additional checklists of potential issues. All of the checklists and communications to this point are created in the PHP application running on the Slack platform. Once the lists reach the point of requiring action, the application generates a Jira ticket that creates the action item checklist.

Tapping AI to Counter Rising Ransomware Threat in Big Data Era

Most hacks have their signature DNA. More than money, hackers are also driven by their ego to beat the system, so to speak. Cyber forensics typically reveals this signature. Automating the process will drastically reduce the time to sniff for these threats. The DNA is hard-coded into their system, which makes it almost impossible for hackers to change their signature mid-stream. This is, and has always, been their vulnerability. A good analogy would be the police and criminals. Unless investigators develop a predictive model to anticipate a crime before it happens, they will always be playing behind. The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit was established precisely to find patterns on serial offenders in the hopes of identifying them through their signature, and finally pinning them down. Going back to Zero Day Live, the platform can be fully integrated into the IT or business enterprise with hardly any termination in the operations. Combing through large data, the tool is able to assess vulnerabilities and craft an extensive threat analysis.

10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn Angular

There is no doubt that AngularJS – the self-proclaimed “superheroic JavaScript framework” – is gaining traction. I’ll refer to it frequently as just “Angular” in this post. I’ve had the privilege of working on an enterprise web application with a large team (almost 10 developers, soon growing to over 20) using Angular for over half of a year now. What’s even more interesting is that we started with a more traditional MVC/SPA approach using pure JavaScript and KnockoutJS before we switched over to using the power-packed combination of TypeScript and Angular. It’s important to note that we added comprehensive testing using Jasmine but overall the team agrees the combination of technologies has increased our quality and efficiency: we are seeing far fewer bugs and delivering features far more quickly. If you are familiar with Angular, this post may give you some ideas to think about that you hadn’t encountered before. If you know Angular and are trying to justify its adoption at your company or on your project, this post can provide you with some background information that may help.

The right way to manage devops configurations in the cloud

An emerging best practice is to write your configurations with new code, change configurations with existing code, and couple those configurations directly to the code tree when sending it up the devops chain.  That way, the other tools and/or people can see the configuration bound to that particular code tree and database configuration without having to look for it in a configuration repository. This goes well beyond application configurations: Security configurations, governance configurations, compliance configurations, database configurations, and testing scripts also need to be coupled to the application code tree. You should do this as a best practice, so your workloads are logically and physically bounded so they are very easy to keep track of. You should do this no matter how few workloads you need to track or how simple your devops tool chain is. Trust me: Your workloads will grow and your tool chain will get more complex quickly. And if you don’t manage configurations the right way upfront, you’ll pay a very heavy price later in either inefficiencies and erros or in retrfittng your applications’ configurations to what they should have been all along.

Digital is a long-term objective, CEOs warned

The survey highlighted the importance of culture change, but only 37% of those surveyed believed that deep cultural change was needed in their company by 2020. Raskino said: “Digital business is colossal, changing fundamentally certain kinds of products and service. This does not happen overnight. It is a long haul. “If you remember the shift from WAP banking to app banking – this took eight years, and it was a relatively superficial change. But a deeper change to the product and services of your business can take 10 or more year – some will even take 15 years. The risk for business leaders is that some people believe you can do it in three years.” The challenge for business leaders is that investment in new business models and digital products changes the investor proposition, said Raskino. “Investor confidence is expressed through board governance. Often no one on the board of directors will have a tech background, so the group behaviour is not to be risk aggressive.” This risk-averse governance can hamper a CEO’s ability to drive a long-term fundamental shift in the business towards digital products and services, he said.

For a more secure world, cities must share information on cyber-attacks: experts

One solution to improve cyber-security resilience is for city officials to talk more openly about attacks they have endured, said Paul Argyle, who advises the mayor of Greater Manchester in Britain. “We need to accept it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong if you’ve been attacked. We need to start sharing all that information,” he said. Manchester is striving to be recognized as a global digital ‘smart city’, and recently hosted a series of digital summits to push its reputation as Britain’s leading interconnected region. Encouraging tech start-ups, investing in digital research and introducing smart ticketing on public transport so that passengers can use one ticket to ride a bus, tram or bike are some of the measures being taken, Argyle told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Hospitals in the city were last year affected by the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack that infected computers and crippled hospitals, banks and companies across the globe. Britain and the U.S. held North Korea responsible.

Security pros need to move beyond broken two-factor authentication

One of the simplest and most effective ways in which attackers can circumvent basic 2FA is via real-time phishing. With a real-time phishing attack, it is relatively easy for an attacker to coerce the user into giving up their username, password, and one-time-passcode, by asking them to log into a phishing website. The phishing website will look and feel and imitate the log-on experience of a “real” application. This is all with the intent of gaining unauthorized access to an organizations systems and data. Recently, FireEye released a real-time phishing tool - ReelPhish which they claim to have used successfully during their red team engagements. In fact, the FireEye article calls out that IBM Security Intelligence first reported on the use of real-time phishing in 2010. The research from the report concluded that 30% of attacks against websites that are using 2FA were being bypassed.

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Quote for the day:

"Speak in such a way that others love to listen to u. Listen in such a way that others love to speak to u." -- Nicky Gumbel

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Daily Tech Digest - April 30, 2018

10 reasons to love the secret Surface Phone

Microsoft phones failed. Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Windows 10 Mobile — all too little, too late.But I think Microsoft could succeed with its next device.Rumor has it that Microsoft is working on a two-screen clamshell mobile device code-named Andromeda that may be branded the “Surface Phone.” (The more likely branding may be “Surface Pad,” or something like that, to de-emphasize the phone function.) I believe the rumors are true and predict this device could even be teased at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle May 7. From Microsoft’s perspective, creating a new mobile device is an existential necessity. Apple is threatening Microsoft’s enterprise business with a steady infiltration by iPhone and iPad. These client devices invite all kinds of non-Microsoft solutions into the enterprise. Something must be done. Microsoft would likely fail in a fair fight against Apple with conventional phones or tablets. So Microsoft needs to offer a very appealing, business-friendly device that breaks all the rules. Going further, I think the Surface Phone is just what the mobile market needs — just what you need — and for the following 10 reasons

No internet: The unbearable anxiety of losing your connection

So, that was Tuesday. Remember, I work from home. Getting my job done was a major challenge with minimal internet. While I could take my laptop to one of the many coffee shops Oregon has to offer, some work required being hooked up to my dual large-screen monitors and giant tank of directly-attached media asset storage. Watching TV at night was a crapshoot. Sometimes it would work. Other times, not so much. Now, you have to understand, I have a relatively large offline video collection, much of it digitized on one of my NAS boxes. So, even if the internet was fully down, my wife and I could watch movies or TV shows. But did we? No, if Netflix or Hulu or HBO Now or CBS All Access or Prime Video or Showtime or -- heaven forbid! -- YouTube was offline, it was a Category Five level of distress. Being intermittently disconnected from the internet created a level of separation anxiety that, in some ways, eclipsed constructive problem-solving. We didn't have to watch Netflix. We could have just as easily watched something on our own media tank.

Juniper battles Cisco, VMware with Contrail cloud tools

Contrail Enterprise Multicloud simplifies networking through its Contrail Command console. Companies, for example, can use the software's graphical user interface to request workload-to-workload connectivity without knowing the underlying components, like ports, switches, routers and subnets. AppFormix reduces complexity further by providing intelligence on the different cloud infrastructures and the overlay services running across them. The information is useful for planning and diagnostics. Casemore expects Juniper to eventually create a single Contrail-based software console that unifies data center, cloud and branch networks. "They're looking at extending this over the WAN," he said. Piling as much networking as possible into a single management console is also Cisco's strategy. So, to differentiate itself, Juniper is positioning its product as more open than Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). ACI requires the use of at least some Cisco switches. Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, on the other hand, supports Juniper, Arista and Cisco hardware.

7 Reasons Why Open-Source Elassandra (Cassandra + Elasticsearch) Is Worth a Look

For organizations that rely on the Cassandra NoSQL database but require more efficient search capabilities, Elassandra offers a compelling open-source solution. Elassandra combines the powers of Elasticsearch and Cassandra by utilizing Elasticsearch as a Cassandra secondary index. While companies may use both Elasticsearch and Cassandra on their own (and unite them by developing their own custom integration or synchronization code), Elassandra negates the challenges of implementing these measures and managing that software separately. By closely integrating Elasticsearch with Cassandra, Elassandra provides search latencies that approach real-time responsiveness. Better yet, it achieves this while also delivering access to all the advantages of Elasticsearch’s established ecosystem of REST APIs, plugins, and other solutions. Through these tools — such as the powerful Kibana UI that allows users to search, analyze, and visualize data quickly and easily — database ops can be carried out with much more efficiency than is possible using Cassandra and Elasticsearch independently.

Why intent-based networking is important to the Internet of Things

To date, the driving forces behind the change have been things like moving apps to the cloud, the erosion of the enterprise perimeter, and an increase in mobility. But none of these will have the impact that IoT will have on the enterprise network. IoT adds orders of magnitude more devices, many of which are not owned by the IT department. Also, many IoT devices have no inherent security capabilities and often have old operating systems and embedded passwords, making them easy to breach and creating backdoors into other critical systems. IBN can solve many of those challenges. One could argue that organizations could continue to run a data center without IBN, as companies could throw more people and money at that part of the network. It would be difficult, but it might be doable. However, IoT deployments at scale are likely to fail without IBN, and one could argue that the concept of an IBN was designed with something like IoT in mind where unpredictability and randomness are the norms. The more variables in the network equation, the harder the problem is to solve — and that's happening to the network right now.

 'Cyber blindspot' threatens energy companies spending too little

Companies are aware of the need protect raw data, but they’re often less sophisticated about the need to protect recently computerized systems for operational assets, according to Stegall. “When you get to a discussion on locking down the operations issues, they kind of look like deer caught in the headlight,” he said. Based on analysis developed over 15 years, energy companies that earn $1 billion in revenue a year generally spend about $1 million for cybersecurity, Precision found. In comparison, companies within the financial industrial with $1 billion in revenue could spend as much as $3 million. according to the data. Financial services and retailers have been in the limelight for data breaches. Walker, who works directly with energy executives, said he’s found it surprising how many believe the Defense Department or Homeland Security is defending them. They can’t, Walker said, because the government lacks the capability, expertise and, importantly, the legal standing to defend civilian assets before they’re attacked.

The 14 Soft Skills Every IT Pro Needs

Hiring managers and recruiters bemoan a soft skills gap in IT, and recent data backs up the sentiment. A LinkedIn report conducted with consulting firm Capgemini found that more employers say their organization lacks soft skills (nearly 60 percent) than hard digital skills (51 percent).  Some firms, such as Vodafone and Citi, find soft skills important enough that they’re using surveys and AI in their interview process to assess communication skills, according to this year’s Global Recruiting Trends report from LinkedIn. ... If you’re a candidate with any or all of these skills, they’re useful talking points in your next interview. If not, you may find some areas worth brushing up. And if you’re doing the hiring, these are the skills your peers value most on their teams. ... “At a certain level, irrespective of whatever role you might have, you’re in sales,” says Jay Jamison, vice president of strategy and product management at Quick Base. “Selling people on your ideas or vision for the future — or whether you’re carrying a quota and need to close out a month. Communication skills, self-awareness and the capacity to sell and influence are the top three soft skills I’m looking for.”

To improve network throughput, scrap the ones-and-zeros system

Improvements proposed, in addition to the aforementioned abandonment of binary, is to match dodgy signals that are harder to decode to customers close by who don’t need particularly clean signals, then create good signals, which are easier to decode, for the distant customers. By doing that, you optimize the pipe for everyone. Throughput improves, too, as capacity goes up — everyone needs less time to communicate. Van der Linden says one does this by making changes to the actual signal levels. “Normally you would go for four or eight equidistant levels. But if you position the levels with unequal intermediate spaces, you open up larger gaps between pairs of levels that are closer together. The bit encoded within the large distance is easier to decode and thus can handle a worse signal quality,” he says. He says that his “smarter” fiber optimization ideas, which produce better data rates, are based on technology already used in wireless, cable, and DSL. Other proposals he makes in his thesis include more colors in the same fiber — that makes more data streams — and three different clock rates.

BDD Tool Cucumber is 10 Years Old

The difference in productivity between a programmer who has to wait 1-5 seconds for test feedback and 30+ seconds is significant. At 1-5 seconds you can attain (and stay) in state of flow where you're hyper productive, for hours. That just doesn't happen if you're interrupted all the time. We've become so accustomed to slow feedback that we've invented and adopted practices to work around them rather than fixing them. The test pyramid is one such workaround. Conventional wisdom tells us that full-stack tests that go through the UI are slow and brittle. Therefore, we'll have fewer of the slow, flaky tests, and more of the fast, consistent ones. A much better way to address this is to make slow tests fast and make flaky tests stable. What's not to like about confidence *and* speed? Nat Pryce and Josh Chisholm have independently explored ways to make full stack tests run sub-second by removing all I/O and running everything in-process. This used to be something we only knew how to do with domain level tests.

Ericsson and HPE accelerate digital transformation 

It is more bespoke than we would like. It’s not as easy as just sending one standard shipping container to each country. Each country has its own dynamic, its own specific users. The other item worth mentioning is that each country needs its own data center environment. We can’t share them across countries, even if the countries are right next to each other, because there are laws that dictate this separation in the telecommunications world. So there are unique attributes for each country. We work with Ericsson very closely to make sure that we remove as many itemized things as we can. Obviously, we have the technology platform standardized. And then we work out what’s additionally required in each country. Some countries require more of something and some countries require less. We make sure it’s all done ahead of time. Then it comes down to efficient and timely shipping, and working with local partners for installation.

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Quote for the day:

"I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers." -- Madeleine L'Engle

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Daily Tech Digest - April 29, 2018

Institutional Innovation: How blockchain could transform student ROI

Colleges and universities are recognizing that degrees are much like currency. They are sheets of paper that serve as an exchange with employers to signal the graduate has the types of skills that are necessary for the job. The better the degree, the more value a student may have in the workforce. By moving degrees into a form of digital record where the student can own it as a type of currency, rather than the institution holding it, they can put that currency into a massive decentralized network, much like bitcoin. This would allow employers to see students' records more easily. Feng Hou, CIO of Central New Mexico Community College, explained that his institution's decision to look into blockchain technology came from an initiative to convert college-owned technology into student-owned technology — with one of those areas being digital credentials and transcripts. Central New Mexico Community College, working with a vendor called “Learning Machine,” developed an open-source platform where digital diplomas could be recorded and shared in major professional networks.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Warns Of AI's Dark Side

AI tools might change the nature and number of jobs, or be used to manipulate people, Brin says—a line that may prompt readers to think of concerns around political manipulation on Facebook. Safety worries range from “fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars,” Brin writes. All that might sound like a lot for Google and the tech industry to contemplate while also working at full speed to squeeze profits from new AI technology. Even some Google employees aren’t sure the company is on the right track—thousands signed a letter protesting the company’s contract with the Pentagon to apply machine learning to video from drones. Brin doesn’t mention that challenge, and wraps up his discussion of AI’s downsides on a soothing note. His letter points to the company’s membership in industry group Partnership on AI, and Alphabet’s research in areas such as how to make learning software that doesn’t cheat), and AI software whose decisions are more easily understood by humans.

3 Innovative Ways Blockchain Will Build Trust In The Food Industry

Just look to Chipotle. After a major E. coli breakout in late 2015, the company’s profits dropped 44% compared with the same quarter the previous year. It has since given out millions of coupons to lure customers back with free food, but the company still hasn’t fully restored customer trust. There is a way to increase trust in the food industry. Blockchain solutions are already up and running in other industries like pharma and gold production—and they are ready to be applied to the food space. Every year, one in 10 people around the world become ill due to foodborne diseases, and approximately 420,000 of them die. Part of the reason we still see statistics like this is because it takes far too long to isolate product recall or contamination issues in the supply chain. Right now, IBM and Walmart are working on a solution for this. They’re improving Walmart’s food tracking abilities in China. Under the company’s current system, the pair estimated that it took days—even weeks—for Walmart to track a package of mangos from the farm to the store.

Your next coworker soon may be an avatar humanoid robot

Avatar robots are still experimental, but if the market for collaborative robots is any indication, there could be significant demand. Also known as cobots, collaborative robots are covered with soft materials and can work alongside people in assembly and other jobs. The market for cobots is expected to grow to $12 billion by 2025, according to Barclays Equity Research. Remote operation of robots for work outside the factory, however, is already well established. Intuitive Surgical, for instance, has sold over 4,200 of its da Vinci surgical robots, which reproduce a surgeon's hand motions through small incisions in a patient's body during operations such as hysterectomies; benefits may include shorter recoveries. Many workers around the world may be concerned about losing their jobs to automation, but the risk varies from country to country. A recent OECD study estimates that 33 percent of jobs in Slovakia are "highly automatable", but only 6 percent in Norway, though the authors caution that "the actual risk of automation is subject to significant variation."

Why A Per-App Approach to Application Services Matters

The problem is that most of these application services are delivered in a shared infrastructure model. Each application gets its own “virtual representation” but it physically resides on a shared piece of software or hardware. This can cause real problems – and is in part a source of the friction that remains between IT and app dev. It’s this shared nature of systems that brought us change windows and review boards and Saturday night deploys (with pizza, to keep us placated) – the processes that slow down development and make deployment a frustrating experience for all involved.  We’re no longer deploying monolithic monster apps. Even if we haven’t gone manic microservices and decomposed apps into hundreds of little services, we still have more apps that are on more frequent deployment schedules. Apps that are developed in week-long sprints rather than year-long projects, and need to push updates faster and more frequently. That, ultimately, is more of the reason (public) cloud has been so successful. Because it’s my app and my infrastructure and I don’t have to wait for Bob or Alice or John before I push an update.

Three Ways Machine Learning Is Improving The Hiring Process

Technology’s advance into all industries and jobs tends to send ripples of worry with each evolution. It started with computers and continues with artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, big data and automation. There are conflicting views on how new technology will impact the future of jobs. But it's becoming clear that humans will need to work with technology to be successful -- especially as it relates to the hiring process. There’s a great example of this explained by Luke Beseda and Cat Surane, talent partners for Lightspeed Ventures. On a recent Talk Talent To Me podcast episode, they spoke with the talent team at Hired, where I work, about why it's critical to understand why a candidate is pursuing a given job. They concluded that machines can’t properly manage the qualitative aspect of hiring. For example, machines can’t tell if a candidate is seeking higher compensation or leveraging a job offer to negotiate new terms with their current employer. Humans can. However, machines are better at making processes more efficient.

Data and digital infrastructure key to genomic sequencing success, say MPs

Giving evidence to the committee, professor Sian Ellard of the South West NHS Genomic Medicine Centre said it was unrealistic to expect “all of the planned infrastructure to be in place” for the launch of the genomic medicine service.  “Significant digital infrastructure is needed to support routine genomic medicine, and it is welcome that some centres and hospitals already have solutions in place. However, the wider programme to improve NHS infrastructure is running to a later timeframe than the planned genomic medicine service,” the committee’s report said. “The digital infrastructure in place should be one consideration involved in decisions on providing whole genome sequencing in place of conventional alternative diagnostic tests, to avoid attempting to roll out a Genomic Medicine Service at a speed that cannot be delivered.” Committee chair, Norman Lamb, said that the new service “could dramatically improve the health outcomes of UK citizens, but that the committee is concerned its potential is threatened by delays to digital projects.

How Intel's 8th-gen CPUs will affect budget gaming laptops

Intel’s 8th-gen “Coffee Lake” mobile CPUs arrived en masse this month, packing more cores and higher performance than ever before. What does that mean for budget gaming laptops? If you’ve been waiting for the prices of gaming laptops to plunge now that next-gen processors are here, prepare to be a little disappointed. Prices of older laptops generally don’t drop too much when the next big thing shows up. The reasons vary, but in general, PC vendors typically manage inventories fairly tightly to avoid being left with a lot full of Oldsmobiles when the new models come in. That’s not always the case though, and sometimes you’ll find some nice deals if you know where—and when—to look. Discounts on older hardware isn’t the only way Intel’s 8th-gen CPUs will affect budget gaming laptops though. Beyond straightforward discounts, it’s also worth keeping in mind that with the 8th-generation of Intel processors, you’re essentially getting yesteryear’s Core i7 performance in today’s Core i5 chips—and at Core i5 prices too.

How to Increase Backup and Recovery? – Rubrik Briefing Note

Most data protection solutions today comprises two distinct components; the backup software and the backup hardware. The software moves data from production storage to backup storage. It also manages critical factors like ensuring the online backup of applications, as well as locating protected data when necessary, and rapid data recoveries. Data protection hardware typically focuses on cost-effectively storing data for an extended time frame. Ironically, other than the move from tape to disk, most data protection hardware solutions have not invested in making sure that the recovery process is fast. While some backup software vendors have come out with backup appliances, these solutions are typically just pre-installed versions of their software on a set piece of hardware. There is seldom any optimization for leveraging those aspects of that hardware. IT needs a new approach; one that more seamlessly integrates backup hardware and software into a single solution where the software takes full advantage of the hardware and creates an environment specific to data protection.

What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?

Imagine you are a woman in search of romance in this new world. You say, “Date,” and your Soulband glows; the personal AI assistant embedded on the band begins to work. The night before, your empathetic AI scoured the cloud for three possible dates. Now your Soulband projects a hi-def hologram of each one. It recommends No. 2, a poetry-loving master plumber with a smoky gaze. Yes, you say, and the AI goes off to meet the man’s avatar to decide on a restaurant and time for your real-life meeting. Perhaps your AI will also mention what kind of flowers you like, for future reference. After years of experience, you’ve found that your AI is actually better at choosing men than you. It predicted you’d be happier if you divorced your husband, which turned out to be true. Once you made the decision to leave him, your AI negotiated with your soon-to-be ex-husband’s AI, wrote the divorce settlement, then “toured” a dozen apartments on the cloud before finding the right one for you to begin your single life.

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Quote for the day:

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

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