July 02, 2013

10 open source projects that are leading innovation
There are thousands upon thousands of open source projects that bring about innovation. Some do so on a small scale, while others are thinking massive and global. Of the hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there, Jack Wallen comes up with a list of 10 that are leading innovation in the world of technology.


McAfee Study Reveals Abuse of Mobile App Permissions
“Most consumers don’t understand or even worry about the app permissions they agree to,” said Luis Blando, vice president of mobile product development at McAfee. “Because of that, cybercriminals are increasingly abusing app permissions as an efficient way to deliver mobile malware. Through these agreements mobile consumers are unwittingly putting their personal information into the hands of criminals disguised as ad networks, and opening up endless doors for scammers.”


How data could help solve international crime
"To understand the world, you need to make sense of the world, you need stories," explained Villa. "When you can do stories with data, you're much stronger. This is what we try to do and help society by these means." ... Villa noted violence against women is rampant in many countries, but there is a huge gap in the data because victims usually don't report these cases most of the time.


Enterprise APIs now populate path to shared services
The value of these patterns is found in the "very loose coupling between the client and the infrastructure side," Hammond continues. "That allows somebody like Netflix to build a Silverlight client for one device and an HTML client for another device, depending on the capabilities that are available on the client, and have these pieces independently move from the evolution of the infrastructure on the back end.


How to Define Your Professional Value
Part of the process of moving up or moving on involves a hefty amount of self-marketing, and it’s at this point where we attempt to share who we are and what we bring to the table that we often fall short. Whether it’s our online profiles or the summary section on our resumes too often, we resort to weasel word and jargon filled sentences that self-describe us as some kind of superficial super-beings with command over everything in the management and leadership universe.


Big data: Two truths and five myths
“All the time I come across people who tell me why they cannot do things. I don’t know about you but my job is to do things, not can’t do things. In reality, people hide behind the complexity,” Harris said. “If you use the communities, you can meet people who are doing the same stuff. It’s just about finding out how people are overcoming problems and what people are using the technology for,” he said.


Welcome to the Machine-Learning Algorithms
In the world of cloud computing, one such tedious task is troubleshooting. When a failure occurs, getting to the bottom of what happened can be a seriously challenging proposition. Enter, the machine-learning algorithms. A company called SumoLogic puts these algorithms to work – in conjunction with savvy humans, of course – to solve some of the bigger problems that face this new world of highly complex server farms. How does it all work? Check out this episode of InsideAnalysis to find out!


Data Breach--Plan a Counter Strike
“The bottom line is that unfortunately, no organisation is immune to a data breach in this day and age,” said Wade Baker, principal author of the DBIR series. “Today, we have the tools to combat cybercrime, but it’s really all about selecting the right ones and using them in the right way.” ... If you are a target of espionage, don’t underestimate the tenacity of your adversary. Nor should you underestimate the intelligence and tools at your disposal.


Encryption practices vary widely in the cloud, survey finds
Thirty-seven percent of respondents said their own organizations take steps to encrypt data as it’s transferred to and from the cloud service over the network. Thirty-one percent said they encrypted the data before transfer to the cloud. Eleven percent said the cloud provider encrypted their data in storage, while 11% of organizations handled the encryption process themselves in the cloud environment.


Two malware programs help each other stay on computers
Once Vobfus infects a computer, it downloads from a remote command-and-control server a program called Beebone, which is another kind of downloader that installs other malicious programs on a computer. The two work together, downloading variants of the other that are not immediately detected by antivirus products, Choi wrote. "This cyclical relationship between Beebone and Vobfus downloading each other is the reason why Vobfus may seem so resilient to antivirus products," Choi wrote.



Quote for the day:

"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience had brought it home." -- John Stuart Mill

July 01, 2013

NSA collected 1 trillion metadata records, harvested 1 billion mobile calls daily
The SSO document claimed that it allows “75% of the traffic to pass through the filter” before adding, “After the EvilOlive deployment, traffic has literally doubled.” Then on the last day of 2012, an SSO official boasted about yet another secret NSA program, codenamed ShellTrumpet having “just processed its One Trillionth metadata record.” …


Couchbase Takes On Oracle, MongoDB And Cassandra
"If you were developing an application from around 1995 to 2002, you had no choice but to develop it with Oracle, DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server," Wiederhold told InformationWeek. "Now they're having a difficult time scaling and they're not getting the performance they need with relational databases. They want a horizontally scalable application tier and a horizontally scalable database tier because their mobile and Web applications are very data-centric, and they're connected to the Internet and potentially billions of users."


Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive
Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can't come to Harvard Business School.


CIO concerns over IT complexity are smothering the cloud, claims NTT
“Each business has its own complexities but their CIOs need clouds which can take that complexity and hide it behind the dashboard. CIOs expect transparency in their systems and for the control to be taken by the provider. For their part, cloud providers need to demonstrate they can virtualise and industrialise a huge variety of IT platforms and services, and deliver them all with total security.”


Developers Are Lifting The Cloud, Not The Other Way Around
So all the machines and the pipes are getting abstracted and the developer, arguably, is driving that change. The smartphone is a server. As again illustrated by Joyent with Project Manta, the big storage and network machines are now becoming part of the operating system. Compute and storage are coming together and in-memory databases make for split-second analytics.


Cassandra Mythology
Like the prophetess of Troy it was named for, Apache Cassandra has seen some myths accrue around it. Like most myths, these were once at least partly true, but have become outdated as Cassandra evolved and improved. In this article, I'll discuss five common areas of concern and clarify the confusion.


What’s in a ‘G’? Why terms like 5G and LTE-Advanced are important
Anyone who claims to have a 5G network, device or technology is quite simply full of crap. There have only been a few offenders on this front so far — mainly Broadcom and Samsung appropriating the term for marketing purposes — but that hasn’t stopped 5G from eking out into news stories from reputable media organizations. What starts out as a trickle could easily become a downpour.


Singapore creates operations hub to beef up cyberdefense
"We are beefing up our cyberdefence because that's the next leap forward that we see," Ng said. He added the issue of cyberattacks was a major point made at the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore by the U.S. Defense Secretary last month. The Singapore Armed Force's back-end functions such as logistics and engineering, and its front-end capabilities in sensing and responding to threats all depend on computer networks, Ng pointed out.


Big data confusion leads corporate IT to put the brakes on BI spending
Most large organisations have BI platforms in place, he said: “They might feel the need to upgrade, but ‘big data confusion’ reigns. Users do not know what it means for them.” That might change when more concrete use cases for big data analytics emerge, he said, but for now, “people are sitting on their wallets” with respect to BI software. BI spending is also continuing to move outside IT, he confirmed.


Save network bandwidth by using Out-of-Band Initial Replication method in Hyper-V Replica
Hyper-V Replica supports an option where you can transport the initial copy of your VM to the Replica site using an external storage medium - like a USB drive. This method of seeding the Replica site is known is Out-of-Band Initial Replication (OOB IR) and is the focus of this blog post. OOB IR is especially helpful if you have a large amounts of data to be replicated and the datacenters are not connected using a very high speed network.



Quote for the day:

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." -- Lao Tzu

June 30, 2013

Adding Flexibility to your REST Implementation with Yoga
Yoga cleanly integrates with Spring MVC REST, Jersey, and RESTEasy. ... Yoga provides a @Core annotation that can be applied to your serialized domain model (or DTO) to identify fields that will always be returned on a Yoga request. ... If you need more fine-grained control over the structure of your document responses, Yoga will integrate with your existing REST application, and allow you to add selectors to your web requests.


Offsite HIPAA Data Centers Are Key to Health Organization Disaster Recovery
Dooling recommends that offsite data centers should not be located within the same geographic region as the healthcare facility. A catastrophic event like a tornado or fire could easily wipe out a hospital and data center all at once if located at the same facility. She also recommends that healthcare providers ensure the data center is not located in a flood zone or in a region that experiences natural disasters on a regular basis.


BI and the Need for Speed
The good news is that organizations like the CPG example can take advantage of more effective BI development approaches that have emerged out of the chaos; those that resonate well in 2013 and strategies that offer swifter deployments and quantifiable results without wasting excess time, energy and resources. The following are some of the more innovative, sensible guidelines that prove a business case while providing a much better bang for the buck:


Next-Gen Storage, Converged Infrastructure on the Horizon?
Welcome to another episode of Engineers Unplugged. This week’s topic is Next-Gen Storage, handled admirably by Cisco’s J Metz (@drjmetz) and Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett). What will the topology of the future look like? What is the tech evolution that will drive adoption? From token ring to SDN, they’ve got it covered. Watch and see:


Google Glass in the Workplace: Cool Benefits and Surprising Dangers
Regardless of whether it benefits or challenges your company, Google Glass, like all new technologies, will test us. Companies will have to define what Google Glass means for their business and their employees. They will have to establish some decorum when it comes to wearable tech. ... Another topic of focus will be confidentiality and trade secrets.


PayPal Galactic Initiative to Tackle Payments in Space
"We will still need a way to pay for life’s necessities, back here and out there, though exactly how we’ll do that isn’t currently clear. This is why, today we are announcing our intention to make PayPal the leading resource to address the challenges that these new and exciting times present. We are the only company currently poised to deliver payments outside of our planet."


Three Myths of the Mind That Sabotage Even the Most Motivated Achievers
Our attitude toward work and the way we think and feel about certain concepts have direct results in the workplace.For one, they can affect our results. Fortunately, these thoughts can be challenged and put aside, producing better performance. The means of change is to put aside three myths.


Who’s Your Daddy
We sit at the feet of successful leaders like children being cared for by parents. Our childishness speaks to lack of power, fear of failure, and the false hope that someone will take care of us ... Peter Block, author of, “Stewardship,” believes partnership is a healthier way to look at our relationship with leaders.


SDDC Automation and Orchestration
The orchestration and automation layer of the Software Defined Data Center is where the benefits of the SDDC are translated into working applications for end users and business constituents. Every cloud management platform relies upon either a script or one of these automation frameworks to provision and configure the actual end user services and applications.


Dark Architecture: Upgrading Infrastructure With Agile Principles
Rather than speaking on component terms (e.g., swap the reporting database backend from MySQL for Cassandra), think in flow terms (e.g., rendering a graph of wildcard queries for customer X is taking 40 seconds to render, while all other graph types for this customer render perfectly quickly). This exercise will force you to hone scope to exactly where the pain is so you can focus on delivering the solution to this pain first and save others for later.


Quote for the day:

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." -- Thomas A. Edison

June 29, 2013

If PRISM doesn’t freak you out about cloud computing, maybe it should, says privacy expert
“So effectively it’s a law aimed at the rest of the world. Now Americans can still get caught up in this law in a number of ways and that has been the focus of the American civil liberties groups campaigning against it but from the perspective of everybody else in the world, it is somewhat alarming that there is one law for Americans, and one law for everybody else.”


In-Memory Technology Speeds Up Data Analytics
The in-memory shift expands the possibilities for a database involved in real-time decision making, Lindquist says. Previously, getting a database to perform at the now-required level would call for a significant amount of tuning—configuring memory and carving out a data cache in RAM to improve performance. A cache hit is quicker than going back to disk for data, but a cache typically represents a small portion of the data stored in a database.


DR as a Service to address the Business Objectives
The Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provided jointly by HCL Infosystems and Sanovi, will also be equipped to create an entire failover site infrastructure for customers. The service will also help address critical IT DR issues including those of interoperability owing to heterogeneous operating environments. Other features include continuous monitoring; automating manual DR processes, comprehensive reporting capabilities and flip of switch fail over and fall back options.


Why the internet of things has to be not too smart and not too dumb, but just right
“Just limiting the intelligence of the device isn’t going to solve the interaction problem,” Healey said at the annual Research@Intel event. Limit connected electronics to just “yes” or “no” questions and you’ll find yourself reintroducing yourself to them every single day. “The nightmare we’re going to face …. is something akin to what Bill Murray faced in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’” Healey added.


A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate
“In the short run, we don’t find really any adverse or superpositive effect on the employment of Americans,” said William R. Kerr, a Harvard business professor who conducted the study on the work force of 300 American companies. “People take an extremely one-sided view of this stuff and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.”


M2M and the Internet of Things: A guide
The 'things' in the IoT, or the 'machines' in M2M, are physical entities whose identity, state (or the state of whose surroundings) is capable of being relayed to an internet-connected IT infrastructure. Almost anything to which you can attach a sensor — a cow in a field, a container on a cargo vessel, the air-conditioning unit in your office, a lamppost in the street — can become a node in the Internet of Things.


Cisco fixes serious vulnerabilities in email, Web and content security appliances
Releases 7.1 and prior, 7.3, 7.5 and 7.6 of the software in the Cisco Email Security Appliance are affected by three vulnerabilities, one that allows remote attackers to inject and execute commands with elevated privileges through the Web interface and two that could be used to crash the management graphical user interface (GUI) or the IronPort Spam Quarantine service and cause other critical processes to become unresponsive.


How to Close the IT Talent Gap
A skills analysis of your IT team is one of the pivotal tools in your management toolbox. ... "It's crucial to do this type of analysis for workforce planning and career development because it helps employees understand what skills the business is going to need to achieve its goals," says Rachel Russell, director of marketing at TEKsystems. This, in turn, allows leadership teams to better plan for the future needs, but more than that, when done correctly, it builds employee engagement and helps retain staff longer


Set Aside 5% of Your Time For Your "Slow-Cooked" Ideas
The secret behind many of the greatest dishes is patience and pacing. When you cook something slowly, at lower heat for a longer time, the flavors and textures can yield culinary masterpieces. The process of our own creations isn’t much different. Typically we’re searching for an answer with a deadline in mind. We’re generating an idea on a timeline in response to a creative brief, we’re trying to launch a new product or feature by a certain date to meet business goals and/or customer expectations.


Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 14 on the Road: Japan
"Japan has been able to maintain relatively low malware infection rates for many years. I often get asked by the customers and governments I talk to, what Japan’s secret is. I wrote an article on this in the past called, Japan - Lessons from Some of the Least Malware Infected Countries in the World – Part 5, which includes additional context from security professionals that live and work in Japan."



Quote for the day:

"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders." -- Tom Peters

June 26, 2013

Tips to lower data storage costs: Don't always fall for the new stuff
There's also a disproportionate amount of high-performance, tier-one disk-based storage in most organizations, he noted. Following the "Tape Sucks, Move On" bumper stickers passed out at industry events years ago, administrators got rid of tape. Now the slogan seems to be "Disk Sucks, Move On" to flash. But flash isn't widely deployed yet, so many organizations still buy tier-one disk storage for every new application. "This is not sustainable," Toigo warned.


10 Windows 8 tips, tricks and hacks
There are plenty of ways to tweak, hack and make Windows 8 do things you wouldn't think were possible. In this article you'll see how to cobble together your own quick-and-dirty Start menu as well as customize the hidden Power User menu. I'll show you how to use so-called "God Mode," hack the lock screen and Start screen, master File Explorer and much more.


Five Lessons Every Startup Founder Should Learn
Often it takes a real scare to change behavior; some people quit smoking after the heart attack, but others do not. You still see people on the street pulling oxygen tanks behind them and lighting up a cigarette. If you are doing something that involves making people change habits, be prepared for a slow uptake, even though potential customers will admit they need a change.


Phoning Firefox: Browser now makes Web calls
WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) is an open-source API (application programming interface) that Web applications can call for in-browser audio and video communications. WebRTC traces its roots to Google, which acquired the VP8 video codec in 2010 from a company called On2, open-sourced the technology and pushed for its adoption as a standard by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). Mozilla engineers have been also working on the project to implement WebRTC in Firefox.


Useful jQuery code snippets
jQuery is definitely a great tool when it comes to front-end web development. Here are a bunch of super useful jQuery snippets from my personal favorites shared by Jean-Baptiste Jung. Automatically Loading content on scroll, Facebook like image pre-loader, Image resizing, Parsing Json are some of the cool snippets and you have more.


FlexPod architecture: Top five things you should know
FlexPod architecture consists of NetApp storage, Cisco connectivity and either a Microsoft or VMware hypervisor that have all been certified to work with one another. That means FlexPod should go a long way toward helping to reduce the vendor blame game, while also improving system reliability. Even so, there are a few important things to know before investing in a FlexPod architecture.


Hadoop-as-a-Service Market is Growing at 54.9%
The report says Hadoop market type is segmented into four types namely Hadoop performance monitoring software, Hadoop management software, Hadoop application software and Hadoop packaged software. In addition to market sizes and forecasts, the report also provides detailed analysis of the market trends and factors influencing market growth, offering in-depth geographic analysis of the Hadoop market in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa.


The TAO of Facebook Data Management
While Facebook has not released as open source any of the TAO code yet, the architectural details the company has provided could influence the development of new types of data stores and other software, in much the same way that company-published white papers on Amazon Dynamo and Google BigTable paved the way for a new generation of NoSQL databases.


Cisco UCS vs. IBM Flex System: Complexity and Cost Comparison
Off all the ways Principled Technologies shows how UCS is a superior solution, I wanted to touch on just one: highly available and scalable management. A UCS management domain consists of a pair of Fabric Interconnects and supports up to 160 blade and/or rack servers. In contrast, IBM is limited to 54 blade servers plus a non-redundant Flex System Manager node.


The impact of cloud and social media on risk management strategies
In part one of this three-part video shot at the Marcus Evans Enterprise Risk Management Conference in Chicago earlier this year, SearchCompliance Editor Ben Cole sits down with five risk-management professionals to discuss how the cloud and social media are influencing businesses' approaches to enterprise risk management strategies.



Quote for the day:

"Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality." -- Les Brown