Daily Tech Digest - April 17, 2020

Work from home, phase 2: What comes next for security?

From a security perspective, forward-thinking CISOs are now on to phase 2 focused on situational awareness and risk assessment. This is directly related to the fact that a lot of LAN traffic has been rerouted to WANs and internet connections. The goal? Scope out the new realities of usage patterns and the attack surface. To gain this level of visibility, organizations are deploying endpoint security agents to assess device posture and system-level activities. Think Tanium agents and EDR software from vendors like Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, and Cybereason. Security pros also recognize that employee home networks may be populated with insecure IoT devices, out-of-date family PCs, etc., so I’ve heard of instances where security teams are doing home network scans as well. Finally, there is an increased focus on network traffic monitoring travelling back-and-forth on VPNs or directly out to SaaS providers and the public cloud.  Leading organizations are also ramping up monitoring of cyber-adversaries and threat intelligence, looking for targeted attacks, COVID-19 tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), IoCs, etc. 

.NET for Apache Spark brings enterprise coders and big data pros to the same table

Microsoft has worked hard to make the Spark.NET barrier-to-entry quite low. Case in point: The .NET for Apache Spark Web site provides a big white "Get Started" button that guides developers through the process of installing the framework, creating a sample wordcount application and running it. It takes the developer through the installation of all required dependencies, configuration steps, installation of .NET for Apache Spark itself, and the creation and execution of the sample application. The entire guided procedure is designed to take 10 minutes, and assumes little more than a clean machine as the starting environment. In large part it succeeds (with the caveat that I had to research and manually set the SPARK_LOCAL_IP environment variable to localhost to get the sample to run on my Windows machine), and I have to say it's quite a rush to get it working. ... You can deploy your .NET assembly to your Spark cluster and run it on a batch basis from the command line if you wish. But, for C# developers, Microsoft has also enabled the very common scenario of working interactively in a Jupyter notebook. That support includes a Jupyter notebook kernel that leverages the C# REPL (read-eval-print loop) technology which, is highly innovative in and of itself. Microsoft provides an F# kernel as well.

CI/CD Pipeline: Demystifying The Complexities

CD can help you discover and address bugs early in the delivery process before they grow into larger problems later. Your team can easily perform additional types of code tests because the entire process has been automated. With the discipline of more testing more frequently, teams can iterate faster with immediate feedback on the impact of changes. This enables teams to drive quality code with a high assurance of stability and security. Developers will know through immediate feedback whether the new code works and whether any breaking changes or bugs were introduced. Mistakes caught early on in the development process are the easiest to fix. CD helps your team deliver updates to customers quickly and frequently. When CI/CD is implemented, the velocity of the entire team, including the release of features and bug fixes, is increased. Enterprises can respond faster to market changes, security challenges, customer needs, and cost pressures. For example, if a new security feature is required, your team can implement CI/CD with automated testing to introduce the fix quickly and reliably to production systems with high confidence.

Run .Net Core on the Raspberry Pi

The .NET Core Framework also runs on ARM systems. It can be installed on the Raspberry Pi. I’ve successfully installed the .NET CORE framework on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. Unfortunately it isn’t supported on the Raspberry Pi Zero; ARM7 is the minimum ARM version supported. The Pi Zero uses an ARM6 processor. Provided you have a supported system you can install the framework in a moderate amount of time. The instructions I use here assume that the Pi is accessed over SSH. To begin you must find the URL to the version of the framework that works on your device. ... The current version of the .NET Core framework is 3.1. The 3.1 downloads can be found here. For running and compiling applications the installation to use is for the .NET Core SDK. (I’ll visit the ASP.NET Core framework in the future). For the ARM processors there is a 32-bit and 64-bit download. If you are running Raspbian use the 32-bit version even if the target is the 64-bit Raspberry Pi; Raspbian is a 32-bit operating system. Since there is no 64-bit version yet the 32-bit .NET Core SDK installation is necessary. Clicking on the link will take you to a page where it will automatically download.

Remote working, now and forevermore?

Companies that realize the benefits of remote work during the current crisis will be more likely to continue it long term, said Zapier’s Foster. These organizations are more likely to have a good remote working strategy in place already, he said, as well as the right tools and processes to make the transition easier.  “In terms of [the Covid-19 crisis] accelerating the movement, I’m fairly optimistic, but I think it will go one of two ways,” he said. “Companies with good communication systems in place that are already used to using things like chat, documents, and videoconferencing systems will see the benefits right away and will perhaps do more remote working in the future.”  The opposite is also true, said Foster. “Companies who don’t have effective systems in place are winging it in a lot of areas right now. They’re going to have a hard time with this sudden transition. They are being thrust into an environment where they have no structure.” In these cases, he said, the “wrong type of management, misaligned culture, and lack of essential tools” could contribute to negative remote work experiences.

Is Edge Computing a Thing?

The term “edge computing” implies a generic capability that is different from cloud computing. While there are often requirements such as data volume reduction, latency or security/compliance concerns that dictate an on-prem component of an application, other than these, does edge computing have unique requirements? It does: Real-time analysis of streaming data demands that we kick the REST + database habit. But there is nothing that is unique to the physical edge. This is great news because it means that “edge applications” can run on cloud infrastructure, or on prem. “Edge computing” is definitely a thing, but it’s about processing streaming data from the edge, as opposed to running the application at the physical edge. ... Real-world relationships between data sources are fluid, and based on computed relationships such as bad braking behavior, the application should respond differently. Finally, effects of changes are immediate, local and contextual (the inspector is notified to stop the truck). The dynamic nature of relationships suggests a graph database – and indeed a graph of related “things” is what is needed.

JSON Is Case Sensitive but You Don't Have to Be

You must have learned capitalization rules in your grammar school, but the real-world search is not so sensitive to capitalization. Charles de Gaulle uses lower case for the middle "de," Tony La Russa uses upper case for "La," and there may be etymological reasons for it, but it's unlikely for your customer service agent to remember.  Databases have a variety of sensitivities. SQL, by default, is case insensitive to identifiers and keywords, but case sensitive to data. JSON is case sensitive to both field names and data. So is N1QL. JSON can have the following. N1QL will select-join-project each field and value as a distinct field and value. ... In this article, we'll discuss dealing with data case sensitivity. Your field references are still case sensitive. If you use the wrong case for the field name, N1QL assumes this is a missing field and assigns MISSING value to that field.

Check Point sounds alarm over double extortion ransomware threat

“Double extortion is a clear and growing ransomware attack trend,” said Check Point threat intelligence manager Lotem Finkelsteen. “We saw a lot of this during Q1 2020. With this tactic, threat actors corner their victims even further by dripping sensitive information into the darkest places in the web to add weight to their ransom demands. “We are especially worried about hospitals having to face this threat. With their focus on coronavirus patients, addressing a double extortion ransomware attack would be very difficult. We are issuing a caution to hospitals and large organisations, urging them to back up their data and educate their staff about the risks of malware-spiked emails.” The first known case of such an attack was in November 2019 on the systems of Allied Universal, a US-based supplier of security and janitorial services to large enterprises, and involved Maze ransomware.

COVID-19 Pandemic Puts Privacy at Crossroads

It's possible to develop a contacts tracing system that protects the personal data of those infected with the virus and those who have been around them, says Vanessa Teague, a Melbourne-based cryptologist and CEO of Thinking Cybersecurity. Proximity-based location technology, such as Bluetooth, can ensure that precise location data isn't revealed while enabling an effective warning tool by knowing where people have been in close contact, Teague says. Also, it would be possible to do that so that a government couldn't identify people, either, she says. But maximizing privacy could also deprive government of a means to reach out to people and deliver important messages if someone has been exposed, she says. There's also a question of whether such a system should be mandated by a government or voluntary. "You could imagine some kind of a hybrid system, for example, where you might volunteer to notify an epidemiologist or the Department of Health if you found that you had been exposed," Teague says.

Government investigates perceptions about data sharing of health and social care

According to the National Data Guardian for health and adult social care, Fiona Caldicott, planning for this had started “long before the outbreak of the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic, so it’s not a reaction to it”. “However, we are already thinking about how the knowledge and attitudes of our public participants may have been affected,” she said in an article published on 14 April 2020. Caldicott then went on to explain that the NHS and social care services hold a lot of information about individuals that can be used for a number of purposes, including identify patterns and develop new ways to predict, diagnose or treat illness. However, she noted these organisations don’t always have the expertise to do so and that collaboration can be enabled by sharing data, citing he government’s efforts to encourage data-driven research and innovation. “Organisations which hold health and care data already assess public benefit or interest when deciding whether to allow it to be used to develop new medicines and technologies,” she said.

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Quote for the day:

"Problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there's always a better way." -- Gerald M. Weinberg

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Daily Tech Digest - April 16, 2020

How is the role of the CTO evolving?

Besides looking for the next technologies for a company to use, a CTO that succeeds in the modern landscape must have money management skills. Possessing them is particularly important when leading a startup due to the typical financial constraints associated with a newer company. However, keeping a careful watch on tech-related spending is a crucial part of a CTO’s role, regardless of the age of the company. Gartner predicted that worldwide IT spending will grow by 3.7% in 2020. Nevertheless, the potential to invest in new technology doesn’t exist if the company has a perpetually maxed-out or mismanaged budget. Whether being wise about expenditures means investigating new cloud providers to find more reasonable rates, or switching to a yearly billed plan for a team file storing tool to save money compared to the monthly subscription, CTOs should remain alert for practical ways to slash spending. Staying involved in keeping costs down gives the chief technology officer more freedom to invest in new technologies at the right time.

Fueling your company’s urge to surge

Most companies we look at that don’t surge are obsessed with their competitors. They compare pricing, products, marketing initiatives, and, if they can, costs and operating models. They seek to stay one step ahead (or at least not more than a step or two behind) their competitors. They are completely focused on market share. But companies that surge don’t think like that. They don’t look at their competitors, at least not quite so obsessively. They look at their customers, or potential future customers, and focus on how they can provide better value for the customer — profitably. ... Many established companies are risk averse. They adopt risk management processes, report quarterly to shareholders, and are careful not to disturb their market positioning in the eyes of investors. Having the courage to bet the company on a new product or service that fundamentally transforms a business and enables it to grow multiple times larger is rare. Even if the courage can be found, the bet is hard to pull off given the questions that boards and lenders will ask. However, we have found that companies in ASEAN markets can often make bet-the-company decisions quickly because family control means that a close-knit group drives the key decisions.

4 innovations we owe to open source

Open source (and its kissing cousin, free software) guarantees three legal rights: "Free-of-charge use of the software, access to and modification of the source code, and [the ability] to pass on the source code and a binary copy." In turn, the license specifies the obligations the downstream recipient of the software must perform if she modifies the software and then distributes it. ... Today we're running into trouble because that "specificity" Riehle highlights is becoming, well, too specific, with developers blocking certain classes of organizations from using their software. In our fractious and fraught world, this is understandable. Unfortunately, it's not open source, given that non-discrimination is a cardinal virtue of open source licensing. Even so, this debate is far from over, which proves to be one of the great things about open source: Community. We don't always get along, but we're usually willing to talk about it. If legal innovation is the "brain" of open source, community is the "heart." While collaborative development didn't start with open source, open source has done more to codify the practice than anyone or anything else.

What Is an API Gateway?

As with any addition to your stack, API Gateways introduce another piece to manage. They need to be hosted, scaled, and managed just like the rest of your software. Since all requests and responses must pass through the gateway, they add an additional point of failure and increase the latency of each call by adding a few extra "hops" across the network. Due to their centralized location, it becomes easy to gradually increase the complexity inside the gateway until it becomes a "black box" of code. This makes maintaining the code harder. ... Gateways let clients access services, but what happens when services need to talk to one another? That's where service mesh comes in. A service mesh is a layer focused on service to service communication. You'll see gateway communication described as North-South(from clients to the gateway) and service mesh communication described as East-West(between services). Traditionally it made sense to use a service mesh and API gateway together. The gateway would be the entry point for your client's requests, and then the service mesh would allow your services to rely on one another before passing responses back through the gateway.

Defending aviation from cyber attack

In developing their cyber security strategy, aviation businesses need to understand their supply chain and ensure their own cyber security is robust and reliable. They need to know who has access to which systems, and make sure that vendors have the right practices and procedures in place to deal with the cyber threat. There are several steps the industry can take to secure infrastructure, mitigate risk and ensure resilience in the face of the growing cyber threat.  To support businesses in this endeavour, the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK recently launched the ASSURE framework. Developed in collaboration with the Council for Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST), the ASSURE scheme is designed to enable the aviation industry, including airlines, airports and air navigation service providers, to manage cyber security risk without compromising aviation security or resilience. Everything must be done to limit the threat and make it as difficult as possible for attackers to breach the organisation’s security systems. Achieving this cannot be done without IT teams and OT teams working together on cyber security.

HSBC survey indicates less than ten percent of Hong Kong residents are cyber smart

The survey shows that higher scoring respondents tend to be more affluent, and show greater engagement with a variety of digital activities. Despite their higher degree of risk exposure, they also exhibit better awareness and increased caution on cyber risks. As a whole, respondents showed a high degree of concerns about data privacy, although half of them are willing to connect through smart devices for better convenience. With regard to the use of financial services, 72 per cent of respondents felt uncomfortable in linking their bank account with a third party app. When it comes to cross-generational analysis, Gen Z received the highest scores in knowledge and attitude, but the lowest in behavior. For Gen X, support is needed to help them build tech-related knowledge, such as how to handle privacy settings, two-factor authentication (2FA) and biometric authentication (BA). Among Gen Y respondents, slightly more of them pay attention to suspicious activity alerts, but they have to address some knowledge and behavioral gaps.

Smart and edge data centers for e-governance services

A smart data center can make an e-governance system agile and responsive, while fostering a learning environment and combining best practices, predictive analytics and IT automation. It taps into the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to achieve positive operational outcomes, optimize cooling and overall data center performance, maximize customer experience, and lower risk and IT costs. While identifying the root cause of issues and their impact on business in minutes, a smart data center can lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 20% and decrease IT response time by up to 30%, besides providing fast, accurate, contextual, actionable insights on a proactive basis. Moreover, as smart cities unleash the full power of Big Data, IoT, Cloud and streaming services, there is a need for real-time collection and analysis of data on utilities, traffic, security and infrastructure to enable city officials to respond to problems faster than ever before. Hence, there is no room for latency in e-governance services. End users and devices demand anywhere, anytime access to applications and services, and this creates the need for setting up edge data centers for efficient delivery of e-governance services.

Comparing 4 ML Classification Techniques

In machine learning and artificial intelligence, an important type of problem is called classification. This article describes and compares four of the most commonly used classification techniques: logistic regression, perceptron, support vector machine (SVM), and single hidden layer neural networks. The goal of a classification problem is to predict the value of a variable that can take on discrete values. In binary classification the goal is to predict a variable that can be one of just two possible values, for example predicting the gender of a person (male or female). In multi-class classification the goal is to predict a variable that can be three or more possible values, for example, predicting a person's state of residence (Alabama, Alaska, . . . Wyoming). Note that a regression problem is one where the goal is to predict a numeric value, for example the annual income of a person. There are dozens of ML classification techniques, and most of these techniques have several variations. One way to mentally organize ML classification techniques is to place each into one of three categories: math equation classification techniques, distance and probability classification techniques, and tree classification techniques. This article explains four of the most common math equation classification techniques: A future PureAI article will explain compare common distance and probability techniques

Analytics should strive for better than 95% accuracy

"Instinctively, we feel that greater accuracy is better and all else should be subjected to this overriding goal," said Patrick Bangert, CEO of Algorithmic Technologies. "This is not so. While there are a few tasks for which a change in the second decimal place in accuracy might actually matter, for most tasks this improvement will be irrelevant--especially given that this improvement usually comes at a heavy cost."  I get that, but I must confess that I wasn't getting it very well a few years ago, when I was in charge of a financial institution's credit card operation and one of our board members was denied credit at the checkout in a home improvement store because an analytics system issued a false positive and denied him credit. Data science, IT, and business leaders responsible for analytics face the same quandary: To what degree of accuracy must the algorithm operating on the data perform for an analytics program to be declared "ready" for production? The answer depends on the nature of the problem that you're trying to solve. If you're formulating a vaccine, you want to achieve results that exceed 95%. If you're predicting a general trend, the low 90s or even the 80s might suffice.

10 Ways AI Can Improve Digital Transformation's Success Rate

AI is revolutionizing how organizations digitally transform their security strategies as threats to customers' identities, and personal data continue to proliferate. It's rare to hear any digital transformation strategy prioritize security. BMC's ADE framework is an exception as it recognizes how integral securing customers' identities is a core part of delivering positive customer experience. Organizations are turning to the Zero Trust Security (ZTS) framework to secure every network, cloud, and on-premise platform, operating system, and application across their supply chain and production networks. Chase Cunningham of Forrester, Principal Analyst, is the leading authority on Zero Trust Security, and his recent video, Zero Trust In Action, is worth watching to learn more about how manufacturers can secure their IT infrastructures. You can find his blog here. There are several fascinating companies to watch in this area, including MobileIron, which has created a mobile-centric, zero-trust enterprise security framework manufacturers are relying on today.

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Quote for the day:

“Five years down the line, all of our devices will have an emotion chip. We won’t remember when we couldn't just frown at a device” -- Rana El Kaliouby

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Daily Tech Digest - April 15, 2020

Weekly health check of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services

Outages for ISPs globally were down 9.13% during the week of March 30 from the week before, whereas U.S. outages were down 16.7%, dropping from 120 to 100. Worldwide the outages were also down, from 252 to 229. Public cloud outages rose worldwide from 22 to 25, and in the U.S. there was one outage, up from zero the previous week. Outages for collaboration apps rose dramatically, increasing more than 260% globally and more than 500% in the U.S. over the week before. The actual numbers were an increase from eight to 29 worldwide, and up from 4 to 25 in the U.S. ... During the week April 6-Apri 12, service outages for ISPs, cloud providers, and conferencing services dropped overall. They went from 298 down to 177 globally (40%, a six-week low), and in the U.S. dropped from 129 to 72 (44%). Globally, ISP outages were down from 229 to 141 (38%), and in the U.S. were down from 100 to 56 (44%). Cloud provider outages were also down overall from 25 to 19 (24%), ThousandEyes says, but jumped up from one to six (500%) in the U.S., which saw the highest rate of increase in seven weeks. Even so, the U.S. total was relatively low. “Again, cloud providers are doing quite well,” ThousandEyes says.

A Smattering of Thoughts About Applying Site Reliability Engineering principles

Google has a lot more detail on the principles of “on-call” rotation work compared to project-oriented work. Life of An On-Call Engineer. Of particular relevance is mention of capping the time that Site Reliability Engineers spend on purely operational work to 50% to ensure the other time is spent building solutions to impact the automation and service reliability in a proactive, rather than reactive manner. In addition, the challenges of operational reactive work and getting in the zone on solving project work with code can limit the ability to address the toil of continual fixes. Google's SRE Handbook also addresses this in mentioning that you should definitely not mix operational work and project work on the same person at the same time. Instead whoever is on call for that reactive work should focus fully on that, and not try to do project work at the same time. Trying to do both results in frustration and fragmentation in their effort. This is refreshing, as I known I've felt the pressure of needing to deliver a project, yet feeling that pressure of reactive work with operational issues taking precedence.

Coronavirus: Zoom user credentials for sale on dark web

Analysis of the database found that alongside personal accounts belonging to consumers, there were also corporate accounts registered to banks, consultancies, schools and colleges, hospitals, and software companies, among many others. IntSights said that whilst some of these accounts only included an email and password, others included Zoom meeting IDs, names and host keys. “The more specific and targeted the databases, the more it's going to cost you. A database of random usernames and passwords is probably going to go pretty cheap because it's harder to utilise,” Maor told Computer Weekly. “But if somebody says they have a database of Zoom users in the UK the price is going to get much higher because it's much more specific and much easier to use.” Whilst it is not uncommon at all for usernames and passwords to be shared or sold, Maor said that some of the discussions that followed had been intriguing, with the sale spawning a number of different posts and threads discussing different approaches to targeting Zoom users, many of them focused on credential stuffing attacks.

Remote work will be forever changed post-COVID-19

The problem with these two competing visions is that they assume we'll return to an extreme version of a pre-COVID-19 scenario, either doubling down on traditional remote working arrangements, or spending even more time traveling and sitting in offices, working the way we always did before the virus. I believe that the key lessons many of us will take from this period of enforced remote work are less about location, and more about time and work management. One thing I noticed and confirmed with several colleagues early in my COVID-19 experience was that productive video conferences were mentally more exhausting than an equivalent in-person meeting. A two-hour workshop over videoconference had the same mental drain as an all-day affair in an in-person meeting, especially for the presenters and facilitators. The medium seems to force more intense interactions, and more planning to successfully orchestrate. Collaborating in the same physical space was the pre-COVID-19 norm since it was easy.

Comparing Three Approaches to Multi-Cloud Security Management

IaC is a second approach to multi-cloud management. This approach arose in response to utility computing and second-generation web frameworks, which gave rise to widespread scaling problems for small businesses. Administrators took a pragmatic approach: they modeled their multi-cloud infrastructures with code, and were therefore able to write management tools that operated in a similar way to standard software. IaC sits in between the other approaches on this list, and represents a compromise solution. It gives more fine-grained control over cloud management and security processes than a CMP, especially when used in conjunction with SaaS security vendors whose software can apply a consistent security layer to a software model of your cloud infrastructure. This is important because SaaS is growing rapidly in popularity, with 86% of organizations expected to have SaaS meeting the vast majority of their software needs within two years.  On the other hand, IaC requires a greater level of knowledge and vigilance than either CMP—or cloud-native approaches.

DevOps implementation is often unsuccessful. Here's why

The primary feature of DevOps is, to a certain extent, the automation of the software development process. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) principles are the cornerstones of this concept, and as you likely know, are very reliant on tools. Tools are awesome, they really are. They can bring unprecedented speed to the software delivery process, managing the code repository, testing, maintenance, and storage elements with relatively seamless ease. And if you’re managing a team of developers in a DevOps process, these tools and ​the people who use them are a vital piece of the puzzle​ in shipping quality software. However, while robots might take all our jobs and imprison us someday, they are definitely not there yet. Heavy reliance on tools and automation leaves a window wide open for errors. Scans and tests may not pick up everything, code may go unchecked, and that presents enormous quality (not to mention, security) issues down the track. An attacker only needs one back door to exploit to steal data, and forgoing the human element in quality and security control can have disastrous consequences.

Videoconferencing quick fixes need a rethink when the pandemic abates

A tier down from its immersive telepresence big brother is the multipurpose conference room. Inside offices, companies have designated multipurpose rooms, equipped more minimally with videoconferencing equipment. Instead of spending big bucks on devoting an entire room, with all of the bells and whistles, to an immersive telepresence system, why not outfit a conference room with enough cameras, screens and microphones to offer a good virtual meeting experience, while still leaving the room to be used for general meetings? These multipurpose rooms generally cost a few thousand dollars to outfit with a camera, a microphone array and maybe some integrated digital whiteboards, and a PC or iPad as a control mechanism, Kerravala says. It's a lot more affordable, but a multipurpose conference room still is bandwidth intensive. And it's likely to be tapping bandwidth on the shared network – instead of having its own pipe, as an immersive room would – and that needs to be taken into consideration in network capacity planning.

Information Age roundtable: Harnessing the power of data in the utilities sector

When it comes to data usage across the company, a major aspect to be considered is the trust that is placed in employees. For Graeme Wright, chief digital officer, manufacturing, utilities and services at Fujitsu UK, “data is only trusted with certain people. “Sometimes, it goes across organisational boundaries, because of the third-party suppliers that people are using, and I don’t know if people have really been really incentivised to exploit the value of that data.” Wright went on to explain that the field force “need a different method of interacting to make sure that the data flows freely from them into the actual centre so we can actually analyse it and understand what’s going on”. Steven Steer, head of data at Ofgem, also weighed in on this issue: “This is really central to the energy sector’s agenda over the last year or so. The Energy Data Task Force, an independent task force, published its findings in June, and one of the main findings was the presumption that data is open to all, not just within your own organisation. 

How Does Low-Code Fit Into the Cloud-Native World?

At first glance, low-code and cloud-native don’t seem to have much to do with each other — but many of the low-code vendors are still making the connection. After all, microservices are chunks of software code, right? So why hand-code them if you could take a low-code approach to craft your microservices? Not so fast. Microservices generally focus on back-end functionality that simply doesn’t lend itself to the visual modeling context that low-code provides. Furthermore, today’s low-code tools tend to center on front-end application creation (often for mobile apps), as well as business process workflow design and automation. Bespoke microservices are unlikely to be on this list of low-code sweet spots. It's clear from the definition of microservices above that they are code-centric and thus might not lend themselves to low-code development. However, how organizations assemble microservices into applications is a different story. Some low-code vendors would have you believe that you can think of microservices as LEGO blocks that you can assemble into applications. Superficially, this LEGO metaphor is on the right track – but the devil is in the details.

Graph Knowledge Base for Stateful Cloud-Native Applications

As a rule, stateless applications do not persist any client application state between requests or events. “Statelessness” decouples cloud-native services from client applications to achieve desired isolation. The tenets of microservice and serverless architecture expressly prohibit retention of session-state or global-context. However, while the state doesn’t reside in the container, it still has to live somewhere. After all, a stateless function takes state as inputs. Application state didn’t go away, it moved. The trade-off is that state, and with it any global-context, must be re-loaded with every execution. The practical consequence of statelessness is a spike in network usage, which results in chatty, bandwidth and I/O intensive, inter-process communications. This comes at a price – in terms of both increased Cloud service expenditures, as well as latency and performance impacts on Client applications. Distributed computing had already weakened the bonds of data-gravity as a long-standing design principle, forcing applications to integrate with an ever-increasing number of external data sources. Cloud-native architecture flips-the-script completely - data ships to functions.

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Quote for the day:

"Leaders must be good listeners. It's rule number one, and it's the most powerful thing they can do to build trusted relationships." -- Lee Ellis

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Daily Tech Digest - April 14, 2020

Microsoft and Google delay online authentication change

Companies are gradually replacing this method with more modern protocols. Microsoft and Google are both shifting to OAuth 2.0, which uses tokens to authenticate applications with online services, and gives them an expiry date. That way, an application stays authorised for a predefined period, minimising the need to exchange credentials. This also makes it easier to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA). Microsoft announced that it would switch off Basic Authentication in its Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Office 365 back in July 2018. It planned to turn off support for the feature entirely on 13 October 2021. At the same time, it also advised developers to begin moving away from this API, instead using Microsoft Graph, which is its newer API for accessing back-end cloud services such as Exchange Online. It also expanded those plans in September 2019, announcing that it would turn off Basic Authentication in Exchange Online for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP and Remote PowerShell.

How to achieve agile DevOps: a disruptive necessity for transformation

Organisations have accept that the transition to agile DevOps is going to be disruptive, but entirely necessary for effective and sustainable transformation. According to Erica Langhi, EMEA senior solutions architect at Red Hat, “the best way to mitigate this disruption is through transparency and openness — businesses need to make the benefits of this transition clear to their teams. After that, they should encourage their developers and operations teams to look at how other parts of the business are working.” After this, leaders will need to look at the company’s culture “and start making the tweaks necessary to promote collaboration and communication between teams; this isn’t optional, as nine out of ten organisations that try to make the change to DevOps without changing their culture and structure will fail,” she advised. Overall, to create a maximally agile DevOps, organisation’s “should also invest in a few other technologies and cultural changes. DevOps in fact brings together people, processes, and technology for better efficiency. ...” Langhi continued.

Defining the Database Requirements of Dynamic JAMstack Applications

To understand why multi-region distribution is desirable, let’s revisit why static websites on CDNs are incredibly fast. A CDN is fast to deliver your content because it contains copies of your content at different locations. When content is requested from the CDN from a specific location, it will attempt to deliver that content from the closest location to the requestor. In order to get an idea of how much that matters, take a glance at the Zeit CDN status page which shows you the difference in latency between your current location and other locations. By deploying our applications to a CDN, our pages automatically load from the closest location to the user, which results in low loading latencies. And low latencies result in a great user experience. In order to keep this user experience, the dynamic data that will be loaded from our APIs has to exhibit low latencies as well, and the best way to achieve this is to use a distributed database.

Talking Digital Future: Blockchain Technology

Indeed, the United Nations World Food Program, for example, is serving an incredibly large number of people. And we want the highest amount of good resources to go to those people — so they are. The U.N. did a first round of experimentation on blockchain so it could track the flow of aid from source to destination, and it was very successful. Now, it’s in the second or third round of expanding it. I think I like this technology because it directly and positively impacts human beings. This is probably one of my favorite cases at the moment. Another one is the real estate registries. Very often these are paper-based. I think about New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina came a few years ago. The city was flooded, and it was a complete disaster. It was a terrible tragedy. When the water subsided and the city was getting back on its feet, lots of houses were destroyed and the city had to find the titles for the homes. Well, they were destroyed because they were in boxes and the papers were in the basement of a building that was flooded. So, they had a lot of difficulty for a very long time identifying which properties belonged to who, and then how they could sell the properties.

Edge computing vs. cloud computing: What's the difference?

Real-time performance is one of the main reasons for using an edge computing architecture, but not the only one. Edge computing can also help prevent overloading network backbones by processing more data locally and sending to the cloud only data that needs to go to the cloud. There could also be security, privacy, and data sovereignty advantages to keeping more data close to the source rather than shipping it to a centralized location. There are plenty of challenges ahead for edge computing, however. A recent Gartner report, How to Overcome Four Major Challenges in Edge Computing, suggests “through 2022, 50 percent of edge computing solutions that worked as proofs of concept (POCs) will fail to scale for production use.” Those who pursue the promise of edge computing need to be prepared to tackle all the usual issues associated with technologies that still need to prove themselves – best practices for edge system management, governance, integration, and so on have yet to be defined.

Enterprises regard the cloud as critical for innovation, but struggle with security

Only a little over half (58%) said their organization has clear guidelines and policies in place for developers building applications and operating in the public cloud. And of those, 25% said these policies are not enforced, while 17% confirmed their organization lacks clear guidelines entirely. “Enterprises believe they must choose between innovation and security—a false choice we see manifested in the results of this report, as well as in conversations with our customers and prospects,” said Brian Johnson, CEO at DivvyCloud. “Only 35% of respondents do not believe security impedes developers’ self-service access to best-in-class cloud services to drive innovation—meaning 65% believe they must choose between giving developers self-service access to tools that fuel innovation and remaining secure. “The truth is, security issues in the cloud can be avoided. By employing the necessary people, processes, and systems at the same time as cloud adoption, enterprises can reap the benefits of the cloud while ensuring continuous security and compliance.”

Developers: Getting ahead is about more than programming languages

From a career perspective, IT professionals will often reach a point where they have to choose between becoming a technical specialist or moving down the management path. But even for those on the management path it is incredibly important that they stay up to date with what is new in tech as it becomes all too easy to fall out of step, he said. Gill says another trend within the IT industry is for companies to become more customer-focused in how they develop their products and services. In light of this, ambitious IT professionals must develop an understanding of the clients' needs as well as the intricacies of the code. "They should discuss requirements directly with them where possible or else with their points of contact within their own organisation, such as sales or business development. Having direct feedback and input from clients means the IT professionals will have a far greater chance of delivering something that will meet their needs," says Gill. Malcolm Lowe, head of IT at Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), is another tech chief who believes focusing on the needs of the user is the key to career-development success. He advises other IT professionals to couch everything they do in business outcomes and user needs – because, at the end of the day, that's what you're providing.

How to build a DevSecOps strategy

Almost every DevOps guide talks about implementing the practice at a cultural level, and the same is true with DevSecOps. Developers tend to be incredibly creative and talented people who take a lot of pride in what they do. Get out of their way and allow them to grow. Think of it as future-proofing your security design through a more holistic approach. That’s precisely why the first step on this list is training and educating team members. When given a chance, they will work to further their skills and experience. They will also take everything they learn and incorporate it into the code and content they’re creating. It’s all about giving them the tools they need to succeed, which will only further improve the end product. ... Most likely, there are projects and segments already in place, and your teams created existing code with a different method. Don’t look at this as a negative or obstacle. It provides an excellent opportunity to revisit the foundations of a system to implement the protective armour we’re discussing.

As cybersecurity concerns grow, so does need for security professionals

For people who already work in IT but choose to refocus their energies in the area of cybersecurity, the switch can be lucrative. Job-market analytics company Burning Glass Technologies has been tracking the cybersecurity job market since 2013. In its June 2019 report, it states that the number of cybersecurity job postings has grown 94% since 2013, compared to only 30% for IT positions overall. This growth is three times faster than the overall IT market. Burning Glass’s research shows that cybersecurity jobs account for 13% of all IT jobs. On average, however, cybersecurity jobs take 20% longer to fill than other IT jobs and pay 16% more. This works out to an average of $12,700 more per year. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for an information security analyst is $98,350. Analysts plan and carry out security measures to protect an organization’s computer networks and systems. “Their responsibilities continually expand as the number of cyberattacks increases,” Li says.

What Is A Data Passport: Building Trust, Data Privacy And Security In The Cloud

Data passport technology is based on classic mainframe technology, which today, can include full encryption of your data, to ensure that every piece of data is encrypted. When each piece of data is encrypted, even if it is stolen, it can’t be used.  Data passports allow you to extend the encryption technology that used to be only available on a physical mainframe to cloud computing. Each piece of data in the cloud has a passport assigned to it, and with the passport, you can verify if the data is misused, if the passport is still valid, etc. These data passports also give companies the ability to protect data and revoke access to it at any time, across a multi-cloud environment. Because the data carries its passport — and its encryption — with it, it will help enterprises secure their data wherever it travels. And that's the most significant development that makes data passports so unique and important: the protection and enforcement of data privacy and security are available on and off any given platform as it travels with the data.

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Quote for the day:

"Leaders must know where they are going if they expect others to willingly join them on the journey." -- Kouzes & Posner

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Daily Tech Digest - April 13, 2020

Banks should be cautious with use of AI in cybersecurity

Financial institutions must be prepared however for cybercriminals’ methods countering new defences with continuing evolving means of their own. Instead of executing cyberattacks with the intention of stealing money or making fraudulent payments, cyber criminals may target the machine learning processes, embedding fraudulent mechanics into the way the AI engines work. “One of the big concerns, especially at the regulatory level for the future, is ultimately the underlying data integrity,” Holt says. “So, if the attackers don’t do big enormous payouts immediately but attempt to alter the underlying data, how would that be spotted?” Therein lies the danger for financial services companies which are overly optimistic about the potentials for AI in cybersecurity. Dries Watteyne, head of SWIFT’s cyber fusion centre, urges caution in this area. “When talking about the potential of machine learning, I think we shouldn’t forget everything we achieved to date without it.”

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

As discussed previously, WSL2 is a change in architecture from WSL 1. Where WSL 1 required a translation layer between the Linux system calls and the Windows NT kernel, WSL 2 ships with a lightweight VM running a full Linux kernel. This VM runs directly on the Windows Hypervisor layer. This kernel includes full system call compatibility and allows for running apps like Docker and FUSE natively on Linux. With this new implementation, the Linux kernel has full access to the Windows file system. This new release brings large improvements to performance especially for interactions that require accessing the file system. According to Craig Loewan, Program Manager at Microsoft, this could be between a 3 to 6 times performance improvement depending on how file intensive the application is. He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. With this upcoming new version of Windows 10, currently known as version 2004, Microsoft has indicated that the installation and updating process of WSL2 will be streamlined.

Zoom vs. Microsoft Teams: Video chat apps for working from home, compared

Teams has a similar feel to Slack -- you can talk to team members privately or in specific channels, and you can call attention to the whole group or just an individual with the mention feature.  You can video chat with up to 250 people at once with Teams, or present live to up to 10,000 people. Share meeting agendas prior to a conference, invite external guests to join a meeting, and access past meeting recordings and notes. Meetings can be scheduled in the Teams app or through Outlook. ... The Zoom video conference app works for Android, iOS, PC and Mac. The app offers a basic free plan that hosts up to 100 participants. There are also options for small and medium business teams ($15-$20 a month per host) and large enterprises for $20 a month per host with a 50-host minimum. You can adjust meeting times, and select multiple hosts. Up to 1,000 users can participate in a single Zoom video call, and 49 videos can appear on the screen at once. The app has HD video and audio capabilities, collaboration tools like simultaneous screen-sharing and co-annotation, and the ability to record meetings and generate transcripts.

Creating a Text-to-speech engine with Google Tesseract and Arm NN on Raspberry Pi

The network’s architecture can be divided into three significant steps. The first one takes the input image and then extracts features using several convolutional layers. These layers partition the input image horizontally. For each partition, these layers determine the set of image column features. The sequence of column features is used in the second step by the recurrent layers. The recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are typically composed of long short-term memory (LTSM) layers. LTSM revolutionized many AI applications, including speech recognition, image captioning, and time-series analysis. OCR models use RNNs to create the so-called character-probability matrix. This matrix specifies the confidence that the given character is found in the specific partition of the input image. Thus, the last step uses this matrix to decode the text from the image. Usually, people use the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) algorithm. The CTC aims at converting the matrix into the word or sequence of words that makes sense.

Collaboration answers the call

Senior Reporter Matthew Finnegan, who covers collaboration for Computerworld, addresses the question in the back of everyone's mind: "Remote working, now and forevermore?" Surveys show that the majority of people prefer to work from home — and in organizations that have had mature work-from-home policies for a while, many employees have settled into their new reality as if it's no big deal. The office won't go away overnight. But as long as productivity endures, and as collaboration tools inevitably improve, why not allow people to work wherever they like? Matthew and IDG TechTalk's Juliet Beauchamp discuss these and other possibilities on a special episode of Today in Tech. One thing's for sure: Videoconferencing is proving itself the lifeblood of remote work. But can networks handle it? By all accounts, the public internet and even cloud services have held up remarkably well. Yet as analyst Zeus Kerravala observes in "Videoconferencing quick fixes need a rethink when the pandemic is over," written by Network World contributor Sharon Gaudin, those who return to the office and want to continue Zooming or Webexing could face obstacles.

Why Industries Should Prepare For Mass Blockchain Adoption

First and foremost, the token market is likely to be significantly reduced this year, and only the most highly demanded and well-developed projects will remain as the digital assets traded on exchanges that are increasingly being forced to comply with legal requirements. Another change this year will be a gradual transition to turnkey solutions. The idea of blockchain turnkey solutions was first presented by Bitwings, an official blockchain-based solution of the leading Spanish mobile operator Wings Mobile. Its goal was to create the most secure standards for e-devices without compromising the operating system and its performance. To integrate turnkey solutions, companies need to conduct internal research: analysis of the current market and existing problems, and the potential of the blockchain in different sectors. It’s also worth studying the existing centralized and decentralized solutions and deciding how to integrate the solution into production processes without disrupting their performance. The latter is the most important point; it is one that all executive officers should pay attention to. They must consider the most efficient options for integrating blockchain into their working processes.

DDR5 memory promises a significant speed boost

"What's important about DDR5 is the high level of integration it provides," says Jim Handy, principal analyst with Objective Analysis, an analyst firm specializing in the memory market. "The people who defined this spec took advantage of the fact that Moore's Law not only reduces DRAM's price per bit, but it also makes it cheaper to add increasing amounts of powerful logic to the chip. They have artfully used this to improve the CPU-DRAM bandwidth, to move the Memory Wall a little farther out." The Same Bank Refresh is a good example, Handy says. "For DRAM's entire history a chip couldn't provide data while it was being refreshed. Now Same Bank Refresh allows data to be accessed in banks that aren't undergoing refresh. This does a lot to improve data communication." So when will this start to show up? Last year an Intel roadmap was leaked to the hobbyist press that showed Intel was planning to move to DDR5 and PCI Express 5 (completely skipping PCIe v4) in 2021. Micron has begun sampling DDR5, Hynix said it plans to begin volume production at the end of this year, and Samsung plans to start DDR5 production next year.

Don’t Leave “Ethical Tech” Out of Your Digital Transformation Plan

Few organizations and their leaders develop an overall approach to the ethical impacts of technology use—at least not at the start of a digital transformation. In a recent study, just 35 percent of respondents said their organization’s leaders spend enough time thinking about and communicating the impact of digital initiatives on society. But in order to be truly savvy in the age of advanced, connected, and autonomous technologies, leaders must think beyond designing and implementing technologically driven capabilities. They should consider how to do so responsibly from the start. At Deloitte, we see a relationship between a company’s digital and technological progress—in other words, its tech savviness—and its focus on various ethical issues related to technology. Our research found that 57 percent of respondents from organizations considered to be “digitally maturing” say their organization’s leaders spend adequate time thinking about and communicating digital initiatives’ societal impact, compared with only 16 percent of respondents from companies in the early stages of their digital transformation.

Duplication, fragmentation hamper interoperability efforts, impact patient safety

Duplicate records might also contain incomplete or outdated information and can affect the quality of care by forcing clinicians to make care decisions without important information such as recent lab results, allergies and current medications. Back in 2019, Verato and AdVault partnered on a cloud-based patient matching platform which aims to expand secure identity matching so care teams have seamless access to medical records. Patient matching specialist Verato, which has also partnered with healthcare IT security specialist Imprivata, is of the belief that alignment of disparate patient record platforms will help eliminate duplicate records, establish more accurate care histories and improve patient safety. In a 2016 Ponemon Institute survey, 86% of respondents said they witnessed a medical error as a direct result of misidentification, and indicated that 35% of all denied claims are due to misidentification, which can cost hospitals up to $1.2 million a year. "Many systems still do not communicate and store data in disjointed architectures and an upsurge of identifiers continues to be created," Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, said in a statement.

COBOL, COVID-19, and Coping with Legacy Tech Debt

With a history that stretches back three generations, COBOL was developed for a different breed of compute, Edenfield says. “These were massive machines that did certain things like number crunching,” he says. “It wasn’t fancy.” COBOL was designed to move across multiple machines and frankly to be readable, Edenfield says. “People could learn it quickly and it was easier than an assembly language where you are programming in very cryptic commands.” As new compute demands emerged, programming languages evolved, Edenfield says. Agile development and other modern processes can be more efficient and fundamentally different from how COBOL and other early programming languages were handled. Despite such advances, it is a challenge to escape those legacy roots. “Because COBOL was so prevalent, they can’t get out of it,” he says. “There’s so much of it. It’s running all the backroom, payment processing for all your major financial institutions; all your big companies have it.” It was common for organizations to constantly build up COBOL-based systems for decades, Edenfield says, with the programmers retiring or moving on. “Pretty soon, the people who wrote the systems aren’t there anymore,” he says.

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Quote for the day:

"Many people go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after." -- Henry David Thoreau

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Daily Tech Digest - April 12, 2020

AI (Artificial Intelligence) Projects: Where To Start?

You don’t want to spend time and money on a project and then realize there are legal or compliance restrictions. This could easily mean having to abandon the effort. “First, customer data should not be used without permission,” said Debu Chatterjee, who is the senior director of platform AI engineering at ServiceNow. “Secondly, bias from data should be mitigated. Any model which is a black box and cannot be tested through APIs for bias should be avoided. The risk of bias is present in nearly any AI model, even in an algorithmic decision, regardless of whether the algorithm was learned from data or written by humans.” In the early phases of an AI project, there should be lots of brainstorming. This should also involve a cross-section of people in the organization, which will help with buy-in. The goal is to identify a business problem to be solved. “For many companies, the problem is that they start with a need for technology, and not with an actual business need,” said Colin Priest, who is the VP of AI Strategy at DataRobot. “It reminds me of this famous quote from Steve Jobs, ‘You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.’”

How to Reduce Remote Work Security Risks

Employees should remain cautious of downloading random applications or software to avoid malware, viruses, or insecure protocols. If they’re unsure, they should check with IT support or their Security team. Also, remind remote workers to be careful when sharing confidential data. They should use company-issued apps for file sharing, storage of confidential documents, and communication. Let them know this is for their own safety, too, that the company has protective measures around these apps and can monitor for suspicious behavior. Consistently communicate with your employees. Ultimately, keeping everyone informed on how to secure their home technologies and practice security in their everyday lives trumps technologies. Maintain communication in a variety of communication channels, to keep them up-to-date on the latest security threats and how to reduce their risk to their personal, and company information. Make sure your security and IT experts are household names, available for questions and sharing red flags.

Automated Machine Learning Is The Future Of Data Science

The objective of autoML is to abbreviate the pattern of trial and error and experimentation. It burns through an enormous number of models and the hyperparameters used to design those models to decide the best model available for the data introduced. This is a dull and tedious activity for any human data scientist, regardless of whether the individual in question is exceptionally talented. AutoML platforms can play out this dreary task all the more rapidly and thoroughly to arrive at a solution faster and effectively.A definitive estimation of the autoML tools isn’t to supplant data scientists however to offload their routine work and streamline their procedure to free them and their teams to concentrate their energy and consideration on different parts of the procedure that require a more significant level of reasoning and creativity. As their needs change, it is significant for data scientists to comprehend the full life cycle so they can move their energy to higher-value tasks and sharpen their abilities to additionally hoist their value to their companies.

How Hyperscale Storage Is Becoming More Accessible

It is a scale-out solution that enables you to scale compute and storage independently. And it's through software-defined storage. So you can pick any client, any server, any network, we can run on a quanta server, HP Dell, we can run with Intel CPU, on AMD, or even on arm. There are two main components that I want to touch on. The first one is the NVMe over TCP. This is basically a standard that we invented together with Facebook, Dell, Intel, and a few others. Today, the standard is already fully ratified. What we have here is a super optimized TCP stack userspace that combined together with the NVMe stack, and gives us the ability to support in a very large data center, thousands of connection thousands of containers in millimeter or virtual environment. The second very important layer is the global FTL. FTL is a flash translation layer. That's the layer you can find in every SSD. It's a very high level during the translation between the logical a transaction A to the storage system to the physical transaction to the flesh, what we have done in lightweights.

COVID-19 is accelerating CI/CD adoption

As it turns out, the stakes are much higher given the now pervasive work-from-home arrangements most organizations now embrace. Talking with Rose in a phone interview, he stressed that even after years of DevOps discussion, “You still have a lot of companies that are doing most of their software testing on-prem and behind the firewall. The big installed base remains Jenkins in a proprietary data center.” This wasn’t ideal but it was workable when developers and operations professionals worked in an office environment, within the firewall. In a remote-only situation, getting access to the application development workflow is “tricky,” he stresses, because, in part, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to VPN in. And so companies are moving much faster than planned from private data centers to public clouds, in an effort to move workloads to a place where modern CI/CD can happen. “All the timelines have shrunk,” Rose says. Over the last two years companies have realized they need to move faster, but perhaps still struggled to start moving. “Now every company is trying to get apps to be cloud-enabled or cloud-native,” he stresses.

Zoom Promises Geo-Fencing, Encryption Overhaul for Meetings

In response to Citizen Lab's report, Zoom immediately promised to implement geo-fencing to ensure that no keys get routed via China, except for China-based users. Yuan attributed the routing of keys via China to a development error as the company attempted to rapidly scale up to meet a surge of demand, starting in China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began, leading the company to allow much greater, free access to its tool, in part, to support medical professionals. (Free versions typically otherwise have a 40-minute time limit for meetings.) "In February, Zoom rapidly added capacity to our Chinese region to handle a massive increase in demand," Yuan says. "In our haste, we mistakenly added our two Chinese data centers to a lengthy whitelist of backup bridges, potentially enabling non-Chinese clients to - under extremely limited circumstances - connect to them (namely when the primary non-Chinese servers were unavailable). This configuration change was made in February." He says Zoom fixed this problem immediately after learning of it via Citizen Lab. "We have also been working on improving our encryption and will be working with experts to ensure we are following best practices," Yuan says.

DevOps proponent lays it on the line: stop the madness and start automating

The final three steps is where many development teams tend to stumble, Davis says. "The most blissful thing about writing code or doing a complex admin task and so forth is when you get everything in your head, and you can see how everything fits together, and the world disappears, and you know exactly how your org works, and anybody could ask for any change and you can fix things. Developers live for that blissful feeling -- to know everything and fix anything." The catch is, a particular project ends, distractions distract, new projects begin, and time passes, Davis continues. "That disappears out of your working memory right? There may be a day, or a week, or a month delay before you know that you broke something. By the time three weeks has elapsed, you forgot that you even built that thing. And if you remember that you built it, you forget how you built it, you forget exactly why you built it. You can make another change of course, but then it might take you another three weeks until you can get that back to your users." Multiply this by hundreds or even thousands of change requests within a large organization, and it's easy to see how things can go awry. DevOps brings order and flow to this potential madness, and Davis boils it down to a three-step process: development, innovation delivery, and operations.

New machine learning method could supercharge battery development for electric vehicles

"Computers are far better than us at figuring out when to explore—try new and different approaches—and when to exploit, or zero in, on the most promising ones." The team used this power to their advantage in two key ways. First, they used it to reduce the time per cycling experiment. In a previous study, the researchers found that instead of charging and recharging every battery until it failed—the usual way of testing a battery's lifetime -they could predict how long a battery would last after only its first 100 charging cycles. This is because the machine learning system, after being trained on a few batteries cycled to failure, could find patterns in the early data that presaged how long a battery would last. Second, machine learning reduced the number of methods they had to test. Instead of testing every possible charging method equally, or relying on intuition, the computer learned from its experiences to quickly find the best protocols to test. By testing fewer methods for fewer cycles, the study's authors quickly found an optimal ultra-fast-charging protocol for their battery.

How Big Data and IoT Are Connected

Sensors upon sensors will crop up in all sorts of technologies if they aren’t already. Gigabytes and terabytes of information will whizz between devices at a frightening speed and big data technologies will work even harder to store, process and take value from the collected yet often unstructured sensory information. End-points from numerous locations will knowingly unlock an almost unlimited amount of data, what happens to that data will be considered by those who work in the IoT and big data industries. The result of this interaction will create two likely winners. Firstly, the businesses that can profit from the information provided, and the end-user who has better information to act on. Ultimately, businesses that are seeking to implement IoT into their products are also seeking greater profits, more productivity, higher efficiency and reduced costs. The development of big data technologies works in favor of IoT companies, with both seeking to strategize the ways in which we see and utilize data sets. As for the customer or end-user, they will (if they aren’t already) benefit from the provision of greater useful information, as well as improved customer service and experiences.

Smart Home Versus Connected Home: The Latter Is Happening Today

In a related twist, customers will, with no surprise, first call their ISPs whenever there is any connectivity problem. In order to provide service, that means a larger call staff. However, what if the problem is a specific device? Even more complex, what if it’s a specific application being run on the phone? An ISP which can quickly identify the root cause of the issue can either fix its own issues or point the customer towards the appropriate firm to provide service. Doing that efficiently will save enormous amounts of money. Identifying technical issues is a clear use case for AI. The question that needs to be answered is how close to the devices can an AI system run. On the ISP’s services, there’s a distance that can obscure some issues. It would be much better to run AI on an individual home’s modem or, even better, a router. The question becomes the footprint. Even runtime AI has not been known for highly efficient resource usage, and many companies have been working to address that for many IoT applications. One such company addressing the issue for the connected home is Veego. They claim to have AI inference that runs on home routers and modems in order to identify performance issues.

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Quote for the day:

"As a leader, you set the tone for your entire team. If you have a positive attitude, your team will achieve much more." -- Colin Powell

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