Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - September 22, 2017

6 Mistakes that will kill your Agile transformation even before it begins

Scrum, DevOps, SAFe, Kanban, Continuous Delivery. With so many different buzz words floating around the Agile sphere, it can be easy for companies to get excited and bite off more than they can chew. Every organization is different in its readiness to adopt Agile and needs to carefully consider many factors when deciding how to start the journey. Smaller organizations or teams such as start-ups or IT departmenst of larger companies may be able to immediately start practicing Scrum. On the other hand, larger organizations that have traditionally worked in a waterfall fashion or are in heavily regulated industries, may find it difficult to make the big changes that accompany a framework such as Scrum. As a result they may get discouraged or quit altogether if they run into problems, early on.

Q&A on the Book "Humans vs Computers"

Modern software delivery is a constant struggle to abstract, simplify and model some part of the real world into a useful automated process. However, lack of domain knowledge, time pressure and imperfect information often lead us to oversimplify the real-world, so edge cases fall through the cracks. For example, complex distributed systems built around microservices often require some kind of production monitoring that tries to process transactions end-to-end with test data, and remove those test cases at the end of a successful check. It's difficult to imagine how something like that can cause serious damage, until you know that someone called Jeff Sample ended up stranded in Buenos Aires when the airline operating the connecting flight deleted his ticket without any trace.

EU’s new data privacy law creates headaches for U.S. banks

“A European data subject can make requests on what data the bank has on it, and can make changes and request deletion of the data,” said Roth, who is a former chief privacy officer at American Express. “These require business practices that banks don’t have in the U.S.” Companies with multiple legacy systems will face one of the toughest challenges, Dingle said. “The first problem you will have when you deal with GDPR is that you have to somehow be able to reconcile how the data flows between all these different databases, even though they were made in different times, they may have different formats [and] the data might be called something different,” she said. “That’s why a lot of these beautiful ideas of GDPR are very difficult in reality for people to execute on.”

Training soft skills into AI technology

While it was once thought that computers would never be able to demonstrate true emotional intelligence, examples are starting to blur those lines. In one study, computers were able to detect criminals with a high degree of accuracy just by looking at their facial features and movements. This means they’re getting good at reading people, a key social attribute that aligns with some degree of EQ. Closer examination shows that while the computers may be able to read people, that doesn’t necessarily mean they can understand people. They were able to pick out the criminals by analyzing incredible amounts of data about facial features. The decisions the computers made were based not on insight, but on algorithms. There are plenty of similar examples in which a machine can demonstrate the appearance of empathy when they’re actually just running the numbers.

Digital Disruption Demands Demystification

There are several broad themes to this year’s hype cycle, with a particular focus on disruption and disruptive opportunities. In the context of disruption, some of these are still at the innovation trigger stage–being used by some brave souls willing to take a change and deal with challenges of new technologies (or applications of technology). Broadly, Gartner sees AI and human-centered design in this stage. Further along the curve is customer experience and intimacy. Some grouping are moving toward the trough of disillusionment, as the hype grows without being replaced by enough tangible examples and paths to success. Finally the core areas of the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social, and information) are rapidly moving toward the plateau of productivity. Exploring the details will help you have appropriate expectations as you embark on your change initiatives.

What Is Edge Computing And How It's Changing The Network

Edge computing is a “mesh network of micro data centers that process or store critical data locally and push all received data to a central data center or cloud storage repository, in a footprint of less than 100 square feet,” according to research firm IDC. It is typically referred to in IoT use cases, where edge devices would collect data – sometimes massive amounts of it – and send it all to a data center or cloud for processing. Edge computing triages the data locally so some of it is processed locally, reducing the backhaul traffic to the central repository. Typically, this is done by the IoT devices transferring the data to a local device that includes compute, storage and network connectivity in a small form factor.

Three ways the Internet of Things and the GDPR will impact Third Party Risk

With the IoT, the impact could potentially be even more threatening. Instead of “just” stealing data, an IoT hack could potentially take over the functionality of the device being hacked. For example, a IoT-hacked car could be driven off the road, or the systems and controls of a home could be manipulated. Another issue is the potential loopholes in firewalls – giving access to networks – that a poorly-designed IoT device could provide ... The GDPR explicitly introduces a general mandatory notification regime. When there is a personal data breach, a supervisory authority needs to be notified within 72 hours once an organization becomes aware of a breach, and impacted individuals must also be notified if a certain threshold is met.

The Top 10 Adages in Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment involves automatically testing incremental software changes and frequently deploying them to production environments. With it, developers' changes can reach customers in days or even hours. Such ultrafast changes have fundamentally shifted much of the software engineering landscape, with a wide-ranging impact on organizations' culture, skills, and practices. To study this fundamental shift, researchers facilitated a one-day Continuous Deployment Summit on the Facebook campus in July 2015. The summit aimed to share best practices and challenges in transitioning to continuous deployment. It was attended by one representative each from Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, LexisNexis, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Red Hat, and SAS.

Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 Released Today

"Introducing a module system into a language and platform like Java SE, 20 years after its creation, when a large portion of the world's systems are running on it, is a very serious change," said George Saab, ... Once developers get used to it, modularity has the potential to make their lives easier by allowing them to, as Oracle puts it, "reliably assemble and maintain sophisticated applications." The module system reduces the size and complexity of both Java applications and the core Java runtime itself. It also makes the JDK more flexible, allowing developers to bundle just those parts of the JDK that are needed to run an application when deploying to the cloud. "This version of Java SE will provide millions of developers [with] the updated tools they need to continue building next-generation applications with ease, performance and agility," Saab said today in a statement.

Five changes to the way people will use banks in the future

While banks in the past have taken something of a one-size-fits-all approach, expect services to become much more tailored to your individual needs in the future. Behind this development will be data - or, rather, the more intelligent use of data - by banks. From the way we spend our money to the things we actually buy and the devices we use to log in to our account, banks can use data to build unique profiles of their customers. There are also external data points that can be used, from social media profiles for example. Of course, no bank should be using any of this data without the customer’s explicit consent, but the potential for highly personalised banking services should be a strong draw for many people. For instance, who wouldn’t appreciate discount offers on items you buy regularly sent directly to - and redeemable through - their smartphone?

Quote for the day:

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." -- Oscar Wilde

Daily Tech Digest - September 21, 2017

Manage access control using Redis Bitfields

Access control based on action is a flexible, granular approach to securing your resources. Each user is given a list of things they can do and when the user attempts to perform any action, you check the user’s capabilities against what is required of that action. Sounds simple enough, right? This can be a tricky thing to code and it has to be as fast as possible because whatever latency, transit, or computation time this step requires is overhead that cuts into the processing you need to do with the rest of your app (likely stuff you care more about than capabilities and privileges). First, let’s look at a highly efficient way of storing capabilities and later we’ll explore some more advanced functionality. The heart of this approach is to use binary data, which might seem strange. Redis, unlike many databases, can manipulate and store binary data directly.

What Is A Fileless Attack? How Hackers Invade Systems Without Installing Software

Fileless malware leverages the applications already installed on a user's computer, applications that are known to be safe. For example, exploit kits can target browser vulnerabilities to make the browser run malicious code, or take advantage of Microsoft Word macros, or use Microsoft's Powershell utility. "Software vulnerabilities in the software already installed are necessary to carry out a fileless attack, so the most important step in prevention is patch and update not only the operating system, but software applications," says Jon Heimerl, manager of the threat intelligence communications team at NTT Security. "Browser plugins are the most overlooked applications in the patch management process and the most targeted in fileless infections."

Google tightens grip on Android hardware with HTC deal

Google never entirely quit the hardware business. Since selling Moto, it has continued to release smartphones and tablets under its own brand, but these were designed and manufactured by other companies, including LG and HTC. Now Google is taking greater control of that design process, paying US$1.1 billion to HTC to acquire the team behind its Pixel devices. It will also receive a non-exclusive license to some HTC intellectual property, the companies said Thursday. The number of HTC employees affected by the deal is around 2,000, according to Reuters. The deal won't give Google any manufacturing capabilities: It will still have to outsource that work to others. And it won't knock HTC out of the smartphone market altogether: It still has a team working on the successor to its U11 flagship, launched earlier this year

DDoS protection, mitigation and defense: 7 essential tips

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

The Dangers of the Hackable Car

As vehicles fill up with more digital controls and internet-connected devices, they’re becoming more vulnerable to cybercriminals, who can hack into those systems just like they can attack computers. Almost any digitally connected device in a car could become an entry point to the vehicle’s central communications network, opening a door for hackers to potentially take control by, for instance, disabling the engine or brakes. There have been only a handful of successful hacks on vehicles so far, carried out mostly to demonstrate potential weaknesses—such as shutting down moving a car and taking control of another’s steering. But security experts paint a grim picture of what might lie ahead. They see a growing threat from malicious hackers who access cars remotely and keep their doors locked until a ransom is paid.

Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” Azure confidential computing uses a trusted execution environment (TEE) to ensure there is no way to view data from the outside, such as via a bug in the OS or a hacker who has gained admin privileges.

CIO interview: John Mountain, Starling Bank

Starling even offers software development kits to third parties to make it easier for them to develop services for its customers. “For the most commonly used languages, we do half the work for them,” he says. “This is what companies like Apple do. They say ‘there is an API [application programming interface] but we want to go a bit richer than that’ and do some of the coding themselves.” In fact, Mountain wants anything that is not core to the business, whether it be accounting software or a customer money management service, to be supplied while Starling’s internal team focuses on core competencies. “We visualise our platform as a series of concentric circles, where we ask ourselves how fundamental to the business a certain piece of software is,” he says. “Everything judged to be at the core of the operation we write ourselves.

Assemble tools to address IT compliance standards up the stack

Security and compliance work hand in hand. The threat landscape is more complex due to distributed applications being broken down into components, an increased variety of end points and dispersed data centers. "An increase in the volume and complexity of cybersecurity breaches and the potential damage that those events have on both business operations and brand reputation [are] driving greater demand for IT and security and risk management solutions," said Angela Gelnaw, security products and solutions analyst at IDC. Consequently, businesses take an expensive, multi-tiered approach to secure information. IDC expects enterprise security spending will increase from $73.7 billion in 2016 to $101.6 billion in 2020. The compound annual growth rate of 8.3% is more than twice the rate of overall IT spending that IDC predicts during the five-year forecast period.

What's Holding Blockchain Back From Large-Scale Adoption?

For those of us who believe wholeheartedly in the future of this technology, it’s up to us to figure out how we can best explain what’s actually happening and why it’s important. For example, I recently spoke at the 100x Blockchain Online Summit, and it was enthralling to dive into such deep use cases and talk through specific problems that blockchain can solve, one of which was counterfeiting in big pharma. But to an everyday consumer, or even someone with a strong tech background, the terminology alone creates some roadblocks. The biggest reason education is the first obstacle is that you have to consider who really needs to buy into using blockchain technology in order for it to scale. It’s not just theorists and coders. It’s CEOs, heads of marketing and business development, even investors who are going to decide to foot the bill—or invest in the Ethereum platform, period.

How to choose a database for your mobile apps

To require an Internet connection for mobile applications is to live in the past. If apps rely on a connection, odds are high that the experience will be sluggish and unpredictable. To avoid reliance on the network, providers of databases and cloud services have added synchronization and offline capabilities to their mobile offerings. Solutions like Couchbase’s Couchbase Mobile, Microsoft’s Azure Mobile Services, Amazon’s Cognito, and Google’s Firebase offer the all-important sync that enables apps to work both online and offline. With so many offerings available, how does a mobile developer select the right technology for the right application? The following six key criteria are most important when evaluating mobile solutions: platform support, security, modeling flexibility, conflict resolution, sync optimization, and topology support.

Quote for the day:

"A treasured memory is the lasting gift of time well spent." -- Tim Fargo

Daily Tech Digest - September 20, 2017

Cybercriminals Are Using Big Name Apps To Target Unwitting Consumers

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

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

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

Cloud Adoption Hindered by Legacy Network Architecture

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

The 5 Most Exciting University AI Projects

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

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

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

Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards

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

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

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

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

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

Onboarding For The Digital Workplace: Get Employees To Productivity Faster

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

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

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

Quote for the day:

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

Daily Tech Digest - September 19, 2017

Can DevOps deliver on digital potential?

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

Measuring the economic value of data

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

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

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

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

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

Hackers compromised free CCleaner software, Avast's Piriform says

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

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

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

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

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

Cyber security: Media companies cannot afford to ignore risks

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

MPLS or IPsec VPN: which is the best?

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

UK education system exacerbates cyber skills gap

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

Quote for the day:

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

Daily Tech Digest - September 18, 2017

Benefits of containers seep into software-based networking

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

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

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

Machine Learning For Java Developers

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

Q&A on the Book SAFe Distilled

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

AI poses no threat to IT careers

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

How to work with MongoDB in .Net

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

Digital forensics: The smart person's guide

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

Chatbots With Machine Learning: Building Neural Conversational Agents

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

The Best Video Editing Software

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

Why won't enterprises take IoT security seriously?

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

Quote for the day:

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

Daily Tech Digest - September 17, 2017

Reasoning About Software Quality Attributes

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

Where Is Social Media Headed in 2018 and Beyond?

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

How to Evaluate Software Quality from Source Code

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

DDoS protection, mitigation and defense: 7 essential tips

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

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

Data Science’s Dirty Little Secrets

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

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

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

Machine learning methods (infographic)

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

Oath for Programmers

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

To control AI, we need to understand more about humans

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

Quote for the day:

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

Daily Tech Digest - September 16, 2017

Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains

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

Monetizing data: A new source of value in payments

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

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

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

We must not let regulation crush innovation

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

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

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

Why Blockchain May Be Key to IBM's Future

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

6 Best UI Design Principles to Develop Mobile Apps

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

Don’t Be Tricked by Unstructured Data Analytics Technology

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

Threat Intelligence Strategies Suffer from Data Overload

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

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

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

Quote for the day:

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

Daily Tech Digest - September 15, 2017

Tesla crash shows man and machine must cooperate

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

What is Kotlin? The Java alternative explained

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

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

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

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

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

Power, Performance, and the Cloud

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

10 tips for better search queries in Apache Solr

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

Digital Transformation Is More Outside The Enterprise Than Inside

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

Workplace IoT Puts Companies on Notice for Smarter Security

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

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

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

Is TDD a Form of OCD?

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

Quote for the day:

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