Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 10, 2014

Open-source PaaS Cloud Foundry Foundation opens its doors
Indeed Cloud Foundry is already being used in a variety of commercial deployments including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion, and Canopy Cloud Fabric among others. As a community project, its founders believe that its acceptance and advancement will start speeding up even more. What programmers will find most interesting is that The Cloud Foundry Foundation is implementing a new approach to open-source development called Dojo. With Dojo, developers will be trained on Cloud Foundry and given a "fast track" for commit rights. In most open-source projects, earning commit rights usually takes at least a year in a major project.

6 Pieces of Software Development Advice You Should Ignore
Building quality software is tough. And at times, misguided insights make it much tougher. When creating quality code and building great software, it is important to carefully plan your project and communicate well during each step of development. Though good advice is not scarce, bad advice runs rampant amongst those lacking expertise. With this in mind, I reached out to some fellow developers and innovators in the tech space to hear about their software development experience and asked them to share the worst advice they've ever received. Below are some of my favorite insights from those conversations, and my own "worst" advice

Healthcare Security In 2015: 9 Hotspots
Attackers also are becoming more sophisticated, experts warn. Cybercriminals are seeking more information than ever about their victims to sell, Websense researchers cautioned. "These fuller, richer, personal identity dossiers of individual users, consisting of multiple credit cards, regional and geographic data, personal information and behavior, will be increasingly traded in the same manner that stolen credit cards are today." Because this information often resides within health systems' databases or networks, hospitals are natural targets and require extraordinary defenses. With so much cyberdanger to battle, it seems obvious the healthcare industry will face additional crises in 2015. None of the underlying security issues are new, but all are crucial to address.

The 6 Things Everyone Needs to Know About the Big Data Economy
Big data is moving on. We’re moving past the stage where it’s something only trailblazers and early adopters are on board with, towards a time when if you aren’t analyzing data to help you make better business decisions, you’re in danger of being left behind. A survey this year found that 73% of businesses questioned either already had data analytics strategies in place, or are planning to implement them in the next two years. It is becoming apparent that just about any organization of any shape or size can find a data strategy to suit them. So here are 6 key facts about the big data economy you can’t afford not to know;

Korean E-commerce Leader Coupang Raises $300M Led By BlackRock
“Our view is that this is still the very early stages of e-commerce. We all know what is going on with Amazon and Alibaba, but the mass of commerce is still occurring offline. We have an opportunity because of [South Korea’s] density and mobile infrastructure to do things that e-commerce companies will do in other countries eventually,” says Kim, who founded Coupang in 2011. "We are addressing two fundamental friction points: with offline commerce, you can get a lot of information by holding a product in your hand, which we can’t provide digitally, but we are getting closer and closer to providing almost as rich an experience as an offline store. ...” he adds.

FIDO Alliance releases 1.0 specifications for passwordless authentication
Andras Cser, vice president and principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., believes the specifications will help drive significant interest in FIDO, especially in light of the number of high-profile corporate data breaches tied to stolen credentials. "I think FIDO 1.0 is the first step in the direction of creating a uniform and application-independent authentication and strong authentication ecosystem," Cser said. "It provides a great abstraction layer to hide all the complexities of two factor authentication. For those data breaches where authentication was the weakest link, FIDO will definitely play a role in prevention."

Where your tech focus should be in 2015
2014 is almost over, and what a year it has been for tech. But time waits for no one and soon it will be 2015, and if you want to hit the ground running then you'll need to know where your focus should be. Here are the 10 areas that the IEEE Computer Society believe are going to be big in 2015. Some will bring profits through savings and opening up new markets, while others will bring challenges that need to be faced.

Digital governments meet in London to commit to best practices
“Ensuring that our people and businesses have world-class digital skills so they can compete in the economy of the future is a key part of our long-term economic plan to back business, create jobs and secure a brighter future for Britain,” Digital economy minister Ed Vaizey said. “We have already put coding into the school curriculum, and our roll-out of superfast broadband, backed by over £1bn government investment in our digital infrastructure, has now passed more than 1.5 million homes and businesses and is reaching 40,000 more each week.”

Intel's IoT vision encompasses more than chips
"It really is an end to end play," said Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager of the Intel Software and Services Group. A key part of Intel's strategy for IoT is its gateway reference designs, which can collect data from sensors and other IoT devices at the edge of a network and process and translate that data. The gateways can even turn machines that have never been networked into connected devices, translating older proprietary protocols into usable streams of data on IP (Internet Protocol) networks.

Using C# and Wix# to Build Windows Installer Packages
The objective of Wix# is not to replace XML syntax with a different syntax. The alternative syntax would only address one of many practical limitations of the MSI+WiX combination. With Wix# I wanted to bring the deployment development back to the main stream programming. I wanted to move it closer to the developers. I wanted the very same developers who creates software to be able to create very quickly and comfortably deployment solutions as well. DSL would mean that developers need to learn yet another syntax and also to suffer from absence of the code assistance tools (e.g. Intellisense).

Quote for the day:

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” -- Samuel Johnson

December 09, 2014

Top 5 Tips for This Year's Tech Santa
Perhaps, between this month’s tinselly advertisements, you’ve heard that this is the Season of Giving. While many people consider the name nothing more than an invitation to pass poinsettia’s between friends, some understand that it also means giving of your time and talents. For example, as a Macworldreader there’s every chance that you have technical knowledge to spare—some of which would be deeply appreciated by those family and friends you visit over the holidays. Might I suggest, in the spirit of sharing, that you lend a hand in the following five ways?

HP Will Release a “Revolutionary” New Operating System in 2015
A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016, says Bresniker. However, he wants researchers and programmers to get familiar with how it will work well before then. His team aims to complete an operating system designed for The Machine, called Linux++, in June 2015. Software that emulates the hardware design of The Machine and other tools will be released so that programmers can test their code against the new operating system. Linux++ is intended to ultimately be replaced by an operating system designed from scratch for The Machine, which HP calls Carbon. Programmers’ experiments with Linux++ will help people understand the project and aid HP’s progress, says Bresniker.

Knicker elastic and hybrid cloud, do we need to talk about it?
On a roundtable for MeetTheBoss TV this month, several of the attendees suggested the term hybrid cloud was practically obsolete. They told us that the only cloud technology they consider effective for their organisations is hybrid and there’s no point talking about three separate clouds. Alan Nance VP Technology Transformation Phillips IT said: “I think the whole conversation about hybrid and non-hybrid is not very useful because the things that you are building are always going to be combinations. I think the word hybrid is sort of made up almost by people who were not born in the cloud. For me hybrid is almost not a discussion point … it’s like oxygen, I don’t need to debate it, I know I need it.”

New data center OS allows single-source command for Linux servers
Mesosphere DCOS's core innovation is the ability to deploy and manage application workloads across multiple machines without requiring more than a few terse command-line statements. Hadoop or a Ruby on Rails app can be deployed automatically across nodes and scaled up or down to meet demand and ensure that nodes don't go underutilized. Unlike the CoreOS model, DCOS doesn't consist of a Linux distribution built along custom lines to run containers. Rather, DCOS manages existing Linux installations, which might be more immediately appealing to architects of existing data centers.

Cyberattacks Are Just Going To Get Worse From Here
"Long-term players will become stealthier information gatherers, while newcomers will look for ways to steal money and disrupt their adversaries." McAfee said small nations and terror groups will become even more active and will "attack by launching crippling distributed denial of service attacks or using malware that wipes the master boot record to destroy their enemies' networks." At the same time, cybercriminals will use better methods to remain hidden on a victim's network, to carry out long-term theft of data without being detected, the researchers said. "In this way, criminals are beginning to look and act more like sophisticated nation-state cyberespionage actors, who watch and wait to gather intelligence," the report said.

NSA spy program targets mobile networks
The operations closely monitored the GSM Association, maintained a list of 1,201 email targets, or "selectors" used to intercept internal company communications, and gathered information about network security flaws. The NSA documents show that as of May 2012 the agency had collected technical information on about 70 percent of the estimated 985 mobile phone networks worldwide. Other than mentions of operators in Libya, China, and Iran, names of the targeted companies are not disclosed in the documents supplied by Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor now living in Russia.

Continuous Delivery for Databases: Microservices, Team Structures, and Conway's Law
In some respects, the microservices style looks somewhat like SOA and there is arguably an amount of 'Emperor's New Clothes' about the term 'microservices'. However, where microservices departs radically from SOA is in theownership model for the services: with microservices, only a single team (or perhaps even a single developer) will develop and change the code for a given service. The team is encouraged to take a deep ownership of the services they develop, with this ownership extending to deployment and operation of the services. The choice of technologies to use for building and operating the services is often left up to the team (within certain agreed common cross-team parameters, such as log aggregation, monitoring, and error diagnosis).

Flexible working could save the UK economy billions
A huge chunk of those savings, £7.1bn, would come as a result of reduced commuting costs and the half a billion hours that would be regained, instead of being spent travelling. The research also found that there was a strong appetite for flexible working with 96% of those that have the option to so so taking it up and 83% reporting that they would take advantage of their allowances if they were made available. "Over recent years many organisations have become firm advocates of the benefits of flexible working and this study verifies the impact such a culture can bring to the wider UK economy," said Jacqueline de Rojas, area vice president, Northern Europe at Citrix.

Addressing the most critical cloud security threats
Most enterprises are already using some kind of cloud-based service, so it's important to understand that despite the advantages, there are also cloud security threats that need to be addressed when moving there. The basic principle an enterprise needs to remember is that it cannot rely on the cloud service provider (CSP) to take care of every problem. Instead, companies have to communicate with the CSP and solve the issues together. ... When moving to the cloud, enterprises need to address the threats of cloud computing to enhance the security of the entire environment.

Banks are opening up IT to third parties, as hackathon demonstrates
Banks are so hamstrung by the need to maintain legacy systems that the time and money required to create innovative IT products and services to meet customer demand is limited. NAB ran the event on 6-7 December 2014 in partnership with Amazon and Intel. Known as NAB iDAY, the event brought together team members, contractors and partners to compete to build products that benefit customers by using the bank's application programming interface (API).

Quote for the day:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." -- Mark Twain

December 08, 2014

Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science”
The first problem is that current Machine Learning (ML) methods still require considerable human expertise in devising appropriate features and models. The second problem is that the output of current methods, while accurate, is often hard to understand, which makes it hard to trust. The “automatic statistician” project from Cambridge aims to address both problems, by using Bayesian model selection strategies to automatically choose good models / features, and to interpret the resulting fit in easy-to-understand ways, in terms of human readable, automatically generated reports.

Researchers quantify the 'S' in HTTPS
The paper, The Cost of the "S" in HTTPS (PDF), was presented at ACM CoNEXT in Sydney, and suggests that while the use of HTTPS is increasing due to mounting security concerns, it could result in more latency online, greater battery drain for some connected devices, and the loss of in-network value-added services. The paper asserts that HTTPS "does not come for free", with the researchers saying that HTTPS "may introduce overhead in terms of infrastructure costs, communication latency, data usage, and energy consumption". The encryption offered by an HTTPS address may protect information from "man-in-the-middle" attacks, but that same functionality can hamper the application of "middlebox" network appliances, such as firewalls.

Cisco is missing the transition to software-defined networks
It is perhaps unsurprising that more and more buyers are starting to inspect alternative suppliers. Gartner research director Andrew Lerner says tyre-kicking is an apt metaphor for software-defined networks in the mainstream. He says people are interested but, at a session in the US in June 2014, analysts found many were waiting for increased marketing around the concept from the legacy network owners, especially Cisco. The real movement will come when networking specialists controlling budgets start getting questions from elsewhere in their organisation on why their demands cannot be supported, says Gartner.

Free Windows? Not a chance
Turner's dismissal of Windows as a "loss leader," however, won't preclude specific moves, especially on the consumer side that could include free upgrades to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1, or as a longer shot, from Windows 7, as well. But he implied that Microsoft will continue to charge OEMs for Windows licenses in most cases, its effort to crush Chromebooks with a underwritten-by-search OS notwithstanding. More information on how Microsoft plans to reap revenue from Windows will be forthcoming soon. "The business model stuff will be out in probably the early part of 2015," Turner said.

Fedora 21: Worth the wait
Anaconda will do all the right things, but they might be undone or overridden by the UEFI firmware. In the worst case, if your system still insists on booting Windows after Fedora (or any other UEFI-compatible Linux distribution) is installed, you can use Boot-Select again to get a list of bootable objects, and you should be able to select the Linux installation there. All right, let's get to the really interesting stuff. I am going to show a simple screenshot of each of the versions that I have installed and a few comments about what it was like installing and running that version, or perhaps something interesting or unexpected that I came across while installing it.

Detecting the Insider Threat – how to find the needle in a haystack?
The problem of detecting the insider threat before it actually happens is as difficult and complex to solve as the prediction of human behavior itself. What is the next action of a person? Which action will be inside the scope of assigned work for that person? Which action will indicate the preparation for an attack by that person? Recent technological advances have shown significant improvements in predicting what was previously considered unpredictable – human behavior. Despite some initial setbacks, systems such as Google Now, Siri, or Cortana aim to predict users’ needs before they even know them.

European firms satisfied with IT infrastructure outsourcing but priorities are changing
“The infrastructure services supplier landscape includes many different types of supplier, including global, regional and local traditional service providers, Indian outsourcers and emerging suppliers. This is increasing competition and forcing suppliers to bring new offerings and delivery models to the market,” the Forrester report stated. “Faced with this customer demand for better, faster and more cost-effective infrastructure services, and increased competition from emerging and India-centric suppliers, Europe's leading providers are forced to bring new offerings and delivery models to the market,” said Forrester analyst Wolfgang Benkel.

Social customer service next up in call centers
The interest in social media has sparked action between both contact center and unified communications (UC) vendors. In October, for example, UC provider 8x8 announced plans to incorporate Conversocial's cloud-based social media engagement technology. The combined product would enable contact center managers to have greater insight and control over their social media strategies. Many other vendors, including Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys, already natively support social media through their multi-channel contact center platforms.

Less is more for Australian startups
Australia's startup ecosystem has come a long way over the past two decades, but there remains a big difference between the local market and the homeland of the ecosystem that it is working to emulate: Silicon Valley. The domestic startup sector is seeing more and more entrants vying to pony up money to help early stage businesses get off the ground, but when it comes to more substantial later-stage funding, the dollars tend to dry up. However, the economic foundations underlying California's technology sector -- and the United States' tech industry in general -- run far and deep, with numerous wells from which to draw rich seams of funding.

Best Defense Against a Cyber-Attack Is to Know Your Adversary
Chapman, who is director of cyber operations at EdgeWave Security, believes that if enterprises looked at security the way the military does and used military-grade practices, few network breaches would succeed. Chapman gets his military slant because he was in charge of part of the U.S. Navy's cyber-war operations. This is why he thinks the North Korea theory about the attack on Sony Pictures isn't accurate. He said that nothing about the attack makes sense if you try to blame that country. Instead, he thinks the attack was either someone making use of readily available attack scripts found on the Internet or it was an inside job.

Quote for the day:

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong." -- Peter T. Mcintyre

December 07, 2014

Service Architecture – The Importance of Standardized Modeling – Part I
Having the Technical Contract and the Descriptive Contract as two separate standardized definitions allows a more effective design of the Service Registry [REF-2], allowing the alignment of the Service & Capability Profiles [REF-2] and underlying meta-data structures to each one of them, as per "Metadata Centralization" design pattern [REF-1]. It will also enhance the use of an Enterprise Repository of Service-related meta-data and documentation, on which the explicit categorization would ease its overall structure definition and governance. Each of these parts will be explained below.

Todd Montgomery on the Reality of IoT, Protocols, Nuklei
we have things like Raspberry Pis, where the amount of compute power that we have, the amount of storage and the amount of RAM is non-trivial, I mean it’s much more then even back in early 90’s that you had or even early 2000’s. So these really aren't as constrained as they used to be, so the game is different, but we still have these devices that are running on limited power supplies, so things like how the radio is used, how the CPU is used, how much RAM is used, these actually have much more of an effect on battery life than other things. And that’s something that you can't just throw away, a device is only good as long as it’s operating, if it can only operate for half an hour a day, that’s kind of annoying.

Developing Microservices for PaaS with Spring and Cloud Foundry
Microservices - small, loosely coupled applications that follow the Unix philosophy of ""doing one thing well"" - represent the application development side of enabling rapid, iterative development, horizontal scale, polyglot clients, and continuous delivery. They also enable us to scale application development and eliminate long term commitments to a single technology stack. While microservices are simple, they are certainly not easy. It's recently been said that "microservices are not a free lunch." Interestingly enough, if you look at the concerns typically expressed about microservices, you'll find that they are exactly the challenges that a PaaS is intended to address.

Managing Firewalls Shouldn't Push Risks to the Extreme
IT security and operations teams are not adrenaline junkies tempting fate. Without solid network performance, operations staff can’t deliver required application service levels to users and customers. And without a comprehensive security solution—which includes multiple security technologies working collaboratively—security teams have little chance of combating the Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) that increasingly use Advanced Evasion Techniques (AETs). Given today’s budget limitations and resource constraints, some IT managers think they have no choice but to maintain performance at the expense of security by turning off key firewall security features such as Deep Packet Inspection and Application Control.

Faster than a speeding bullet: Geolocation data and account misuse
By tracking the geographic location for account logins, it is possible to discover anomalies by calculating the distance between two logins from the same account. If the speed required to travel that distance within the allotted time is unlikely or impossible, this can indicate account misuse. This use of geolocation data can augment other monitoring techniques to detect malicious behavior on a network. This paper explores how such calculations can be made, identifies parts of the process requiring special consideration, and highlights what can be revealed when using geolocation data to monitor account use.

Lies, Damn Lies And The Myth Of Following The Data
We are told to follow the data and the truth will be revealed, but data tells many tales and it depends on the data and how you interpret it. It makes me wonder if anything is definitive if you can present two similar sets of data and draw wildly different conclusions, depending on your emphasis. That’s because data is a tool in the hands of humans and we can interpret it as we choose. And to be clear, this isn’t because we choose to be deliberately deceptive either, although that’s probably true sometimes. It’s because being human, we can bring unintended biases to the data. It’s a huge conundrum in the age of big data. How do you find definitive answers when you can look at different data points on the same topic and come to different interpretations?

Introducing the Agnostic Composition Controller Pattern
Speaking of practical aspects of the presented separation, it is important to mention that it is actually based on the common threefold notion of basic SOA: client-requestor, service-worker, and service registry. Everything is simple in basic SOA. The client could be anything, capable to comprehend and comply with the service-worker contract, the worker doesn't have to be REST or SOAP WS, and the service registry (and its taxonomy) is not compulsory at all. Frustratingly, the large majority of SOA practitioners openly neglect service registry as "redundant and hardly useful." That might be true for simple service activities in basic SOA.

The Fatal Flaw of Finalizers and Phantoms
Objects with finalize() methods require more work for the garbage collector to track, and the execution requirements of the finalize method require that the garbage collector keep all memory associated with it around until execution has successfully completed. This means a collector is typically required to revisit the object, likely in a whole separate pass. Consequently finalizers on objects with large instance counts and short lifespans are likely to introduce major performance problems.

Security in 2015: The Internet Becomes the Corporate Network Perimeter
The entire concept of the corporate perimeter is changing. We used to think of the perimeter as simply being the actual physical or logical perimeter of the corporate network. A few years ago it became more common to think of the endpoint device as part of this perimeter. Today, smart CISO's recognize that the internet itself is truly the perimeter of their network. So the internet is where we must look for the solution to this rapidly evolving security problem. Businesses today are looking for a comprehensive layer of protection through the cloud itself - enabling users to be protected wherever, and however, they are connecting to web services and applications.

Showdown coming on Ethernet standard for faster Wi-Fi
Most likely you'll have a choice of 2.5Gbps (bits per second) and 5Gbps, and there's no debate there. Some vendors have already announced components and designs for such products, but there's no guarantee that systems built with parts from the two camps will work together. Enterprises want to be able to mix and match gear from any vendor they like, so the official IEEE group for Ethernet standards voted last month to form a task group to set a standard. Now, the two rival camps will have to work out which technologies go into the standard and which don't. This isn't the first time that competing teams of companies have pushed different approaches before a common specification is set, but that kind of rivalry sometimes leaves potential buyers waiting.

Quote for the day:

"Most execs think customers come first & employees second. This is a real concern." -- Nicholas S. Barnett

December 06, 2014

Low-hanging Cloud
After all, basing your foundational design decisions on the easiest use case is a recipe for failure. Chances are, that a bridge designed to get cyclists across needs to be completely redone when the more difficult twenty ton lorries have to be serviced. A bridge designed for heavy lorries, on the other hand, will probably carry the cyclists with ease. In enterprise architecture, this is true as well. Design and develop the easy stuff (such as the business process’s ‘happy flow’) first, and you will probably end up in serious trouble when the difficult work flows — such as all the exceptions (which as a rule are always there) — need to be supported as well.

Creating a Highly Available Windows 2012 R2 RD Gateway Environment
There are two ways RD Gateway can be load balanced, and we will walk through the configuration for both of these scenarios: Scenario 1: You have two load balanced RD Gateway servers, two on-premises MFA servers, and each RD Gateway uses its own local NPS (the typical configuration). and Scenario 2: You have two load balanced RD Gateway servers, two on-premises MFA servers, and both RD Gateway servers use a central NPS. (Companies might use a centralized NPS if they already have one in place in their network, and want to keep all things related to NPS in this centralized location.)

Eliminating Downtime: Six Key Considerations for Your Hosting Architecture
The good news is that eliminating downtime completely is possible. It starts with the physical infrastructure, but the software element is critical as well. By making the right hosting architecture choices up front, companies can ensure that their site will always be available with no interruptions to the end user experience. Even during scheduled maintenance the system will be up and running and available to customers. Eliminating downtime comes from properly architecting your system.

Making a Hash of Passwords
A decade ago, we were using the MD5 hashing algorithm. These days, MD5 is obsolete, so we use the SHA-2 algorithm instead, but the result is the same. When I wrote about this recently I called hashing a “tried-and-true technique” for developing authentication systems. I figured that by now, everyone would be doing it. That’s why I was surprised, even shocked, that today’s developers are asking how to encrypt passwords for storage. They are still trying to save the user’s password in their databases, so they can decrypt them and compare the actual password value entered by the user to the stored password, instead of comparing hash values.

Big data brings new power to open-source intelligence
Two overlapping developments in particular have greatly influenced the growth of open-source intelligence. First, the explosion of social media has given us instant access to a wealth of user-generated content. From Facebook to Twitter to Google+, we are now only ever a few keystrokes away from a potentially global audience. And as these tools increase global connectivity, people seem increasingly willing to project their thoughts, opinions and observations into cyberspace. The process of information generation has produced what has been described as “new digital commons of enormous size and wealth”.

Neural Network Rates Images for Happiness Levels
Sentiment analysis is revolutionizing the study of communication with a numerous companies now offering it as a service. The idea is to study the patterns of words in messages such as tweets and blogs to determine to what extent they are positive or negative. That allows companies, organizations, and political parties to automatically track opinions about their brands. But while this technology has been evolving, little research has focused on the sentiment in pictures. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Can Xu at the University of California, San Diego, and a group of researchers from Yahoo Labs in Sunnyvale. These folks have developed a way to automatically assess the sentiment associated with a picture and say that it outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques.

Review: Designing APIs for the Web
As a distributed systems developer and architect, I find the diversity of voices and ideas in the expanding world of APIs enriching, daunting, and, at times, disconcerting. Something I have noticed is that the definition of the elusive “good” web API is highly influenced by one’s exposure to a plethora of successful and failed concepts evolving over the past 40 years. With the relatively recent rise of the “API Economy” fueling unprecedented exploration of opportunities, I am always looking for better ways to articulate the principles of API design.

Culture Can Make or Break Strategy
The word “culture” alludes to a softer side of the human personality where you have all the emotions that come into the picture. In reality, it is one of the most important drivers of success in implementing change and ensuring sustainable success. In his book, “The Culture Cycle”, Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus James L. Heskett argues that the impact of organisational culture on profit can be measured and quantified. He states that enabling purposeful organisational cultures can improve corporate performance by between 20 and 30 percent compared to culturally unremarkable competitors.

KPMG says businesses do not take IT risks seriously enough
Jon Dowie, said: "Technology is no longer a function in a business which operates largely in insolation. It is at the heart of everything a company does and, when it goes wrong, it affects an organisation’s bottom line, its relationship with customers and its wider reputation." The study found 7.3% of reported events resulted from human error. KPMG said this shows that basic investments in training are being ignored – at the employers’ expense. Dowie said: "With ever greater complexity in IT systems – not to mention the challenge of implementing IT transformational change – companies are running to stand still in managing their IT risks.

Automated Testing Of Web Pages Using Selenium-Web Driver
The WebDriver was introduced in Selenium 2.0 version it provides a simpler programming interface with well-designed object-oriented API. It directly calls to browser using browser’s native support for automation and features they support depend on browser you are using. If your browser and tests will all run on same machine and your tests only use WebDriver API, then you do not need to run Selenium-Server.

Quote for the day:

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." -- Arthur Schopenhauer