Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

January 24, 2015

Security principles of bitcoin
Bitcoin is dramatically different. A bitcoin transaction authorizes only a specific value to a specific recipient and cannot be forged or modified. It does not reveal any private information, such as the identities of the parties, and cannot be used to authorize additional payments. Therefore, a bitcoin payment network does not need to be encrypted or protected from eavesdropping. In fact, you can broadcast bitcoin transactions over an open public channel, such as unsecured WiFi or Bluetooth, with no loss of security.

Publisher/Subscriber pattern with Event/Delegate and EventAggregator
Publisher/Subscriber pattern is one of the variation of the Observer designer pattern introduced by GOF in software devlopment. In Publisher/Subscriber pattern publisher(entiry responsible for publishing message) publish message and there are one or more Subscriber(entity who subsribe(i.e. intested in message) to perticular message type) who capture published message. Below image desribe the senario of publisher and subscriber pattern where Publisher publisher two type of message (MessageA and MessageB) and Subscribers of the message receive the message in which they subscribed

Shout Offers A New Take On Location-Based Social Networking
“We’re not anonymous – and we don’t want to be – because I think that ultimately hurts the value of the content that can be shared over the course of an app’s lifecycle,” he says. While he believes that the trend toward anonymous social networking, popularized by apps like Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper, is more than a flash-in-the-pan, he also thinks it dictates the kind of community that results. “I definitely think it encourages a certain kind of information, and you have to make the decision: is that the kind of information you want to be shared and you want your users to share?” he says.

Gartner: APAC Public Cloud Spending to Reach $7.4 Billion in 2015
Gartner says many countries in the mature Asia Pacific including Japan region have solid reliable telecommunications infrastructure and relatively advanced technology usage profiles. Despite challenges in the global economy, Gartner expects consistent and stable growth to continue through to 2018. Increased intra-region integration in APJ across services and industries will drive public cloud usage as countries in this region break down borders through trade bloc agreements such as the ASEAN Economic Integration 2015 and the Trans Pacific Partnerships, which will drive more mobility, big data sharing and analytics and public cloud infrastructure and applications to support these initiatives.

Can I trust my data in the cloud?
IBM Cloud gathered some of the top #cloudminds in the industry for an informative discussion about hybrid cloud. In this video, they discuss trust and security in cloud computing. We'd like to thank our fantastic panelists: Sarah Cooper, VP Business Development, M2Mi; Andi Gutmans, CEO & Co-founder, Zend; Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO & Founder, Cloudsoft Corporation; Mark Wyllie, CEO, Flagship Solutions; Mike Dorosh, Program Manager, Cloud Technical Partnerships, IBM.

How to avoid "Hybrid Enterprise" tension headaches
For hybrid enterprises, the promise of savings mount from a less expensive physical footprint as well as more flexibility to get data and apps where they need to be and quicker—especially when you have the right application performance platform in place. If not, you'll be chasing blind spots in your application delivery chain that come from only using point solutions from the past—that is, one tool for each segment from a vendor that specializes in one thing and no integration with the overall complete picture.

Conference calls a waste of time?
By 1915, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. network spanned the continent with a single copper circuit 6,800 miles (11,000 kilometers) long that could carry exactly one call at a time. There were already 8.6 million phones served by AT&T, but hearing someone’s voice from the other side of the continent was astounding, like being able to go to the moon, said Anthea Hartig, executive director of the California Historical Society. It was a fitting event leading up to the exposition, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and the latest technological and cultural achievements of the day.

Google’s Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance
The fact that such a large percentage of Google’s employees wish they could separate from work but aren’t able to is troubling, but also speaks to the potential for this kind of research. The existence of this group suggests that it is not enough to wish yourself into being a Segmentor. But by identifying where employees fall on this spectrum, we hope that Google can design environments that make it easier for employees to disconnect. ... Googlers reported blissful, stressless evenings. Similarly, nudging Segmentors to ignore off-hour emails and use all their vacation days might improve well-being over time. The long-term nature of these questions suggests that the real value of gDNA will take years to realize.

How we really use our camera phones
The slight male dominance in video recording is also interesting, as it could point to a perception problem for video that may have to do with the way it’s currently being presented in capturing and editing apps. Or maybe it’s just long-ingrained collective gender stereotypes. Just think back to your family parties back in the 1990s or even the ’80s, long before everyone recorded everything with smart phones. That cousin dramatically crawling on the floor with a camcorder in one hand to get the best shot? Likely a guy. And just for the record: Male Android users take the least amount of photos, with an average of just 90 photos per month.

Actionless Frameworks
Simply put, actionless frameworks are extremely prepared for future changes and can make your application behave better/look better by a new configuration. If you are using it to edit records, then if in the future you create a better editor, you can simply replace the editor registration and the new (and I imagine better) editor will be used in all places. There is no need to search all the calls to the old editor to replace it by the new one. If you are using it to convert data and now you have a faster algorithm, simply register the faster algorithm and benefit from better performance.

Quote for the day:

"Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work." -- Warren G. Bennis

January 23, 2015

FrontRange CEO bets against a cloud-only IT future
FrontRange CEO Jon Temple speaks with an accent that’s hard to locate. He’s actually a California-based Brit who has travelled around quite a bit. His company is a similarly confusing combination, with roots in South Africa and having once been best known for GoldMine, the sales contact management software that it still quietly sells. For some time now though its focus has been on the service desk, another melting pot sector that’s going through change. A person could be forgiven for getting confused…

Getting Ready for Windows 10 With Responsive Design
A flexible grid based layout should be familiar to anyone who has spent any time working with Windows 8 apps, but if you’re not certain head to this MSDN article and brush up on the “Dynamic layout” section. There are very few circumstances where your column and row definitions should not be Auto or Star sizing. In fact I’d go so far as to say if you need to set a fixed value, consider using auto and then having your child element at fixed width so the column/row will collapse if your child element needs to.

Which areas of IT infrastructure will evolve and emerge in 2015?
Every part of the IT stack is in transition - from end user devices to networks, application design, virtual server software, physical server design, storage systems, and even storage media. Some of these transitions are well underway and will accelerate in 2015, while others are just starting to emerge... Cost matters and the least expensive SSDs are likely to be ten times more expensive than the least expensive SATA disks up until the end of the decade.

Beyond the IoT Buzz Is A New Horizon of Embedded Intelligence
The big issue, however, is that most enterprises have yet to articulate or establish a wide-scale Enterprise Information Management or “EIM” strategy or look at how newly connected people, devices, information and places (the new “inter-nets”) will transform their business landscape and relationships. But this doesn’t mean that businesses have to get all their devices online and monitor them before passing go. A good approach is to “think globally (with EIM) but act locally.” To look at what data and content sources are most critical to your top information flows.

Big Data and mobile analytics: Ready to rule 2015
The revolution, then, lies in the data analysis process. Visual analytics solutions already exist on the web with companies such as CrazyEgg and Inspectlet, but since mobile traffic now outperforms web traffic and is expected to continue in that trajectory, the future of analytics is in visual mobile analytics. Traditional mobile analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, emphasize the “what” in their data: key metrics such as number of users, OS used, geographic breakdown, etc., but place no focus on the “why,” which provides the reason behind the metrics.

Sony SmartBand Talk review: Much more than just an activity tracker
Calls sounded excellent on the SmartBand Talk on both my end and the callers end. I thought the calling functionality was just going to be a gimmick, however with the high quality performance it was nice to hold calls while keeping both hands free to do other things. I always seem to forget to switch to sleep mode on my activity trackers, but the SmartBand Talk tracks sleep automatically. It seemed to be fairly accurate when switching into and out of the sleep mode, but if you spend a lot of time watching TV without moving then it may pick up that you were sleeping. The smart alarm feature is a nice way to wake up during a light sleep period. If the vibration alone doesn't work, you can also select to have an audible alarm go off at the same time.

Cloud computing: A critical component of precision medicine
“The issue isn’t just collecting human genomes, but having rich enough data about patient behavior and the phenotypic data from EMRs, so we can integrate health data to form a rich picture about a patient,” said David Shaywitz, the Chief Medical Officer of Bay Area genomics cloud computing startup DNANexus. This was actually a prevailing theme at last week’s JP Morgan conference. “The sequence part is the tool, the commodity – but it’s everything else you’ll do with it that’s the secret sauce,” Regeneron chief scientific officer George Yancopoulos said at the time.

3-D Transistors Made with Molecular Self-Assembly
The IBM group used a new approach known as “directed self-assembly,” using a class of materials called block copolymers (polymer chains are made up of two kinds of monomers, or blocks). It is possible to make these materials self-assemble into complex patterns, such as a densely packed row for stripes. This is done by tailoring the polymers’ length, size, and other characteristics, such as how two blocks attract and repel one another. Patterns made in this way can be much denser than what is possible using lithography. That means the approach can be used to create the smallest, most densely packed, and uniform parts of an integrated circuit: for example, the channels of silicon transistors, or the fins in 3-D transistors.

Why is India the hottest investment destination in Asia?
The Indian economic elephant, meanwhile is lumbering along and seemingly picking up pace. Riding high on investor confidence in the market due to a series of economic reforms by the new Indian government, the IMF and World Bank have projected 5.6% growth rate for India this year. Though this figure may not look substantial if looked at in isolation, it is still significant when compared to other developing countries. India is witnessing a vibrant and lively market. Arvind Singhal, Chairman of Technopak Advisors is ecstatic about Indian retail. According to him the merchandise retail market which is about US$ 525 billion in the current year is poised to cross US$1 trillion by 2020. These are big numbers indeed.

Learn or Lose: Agile Coaching and Organizational Survival
The shift needed in organizations that have barely started to embrace learning can only be created by individuals at all levels, and not confined to particular teams or functional silos. Anyone who can’t or won’t learn ― executives, middle-managers, salespeople, bean-counters, front-line workers, consultants and coaches alike ― will find they are part of the problem, and will feel increasingly insecure, and many well fight back. Agile coaching and approaches can help (a lot), but they are not an end in themselves, and must be pursued humanely and incrementally. Organizational transformation can be likened to rebuilding aeroplanes in the air, and traps abound for young players. And when it comes to this kind of change, we are all young players!

Quote for the day:

"Technology is the new leadership--another word for fear & hope. Or more precisely, leaders' latest influence tool and invisibility blanket." -- @gpetriglieri

January 22, 2015

BlueData's on a mission to democratize big data
BlueData is the only solution built from the ground up and focused on big data applications. The BlueData vision is to allow our customers to take our software, install it on hardware in their own data center, and within a few hours have their own private big data cloud platform akin to Amazon EMR up and running. This would allow data scientists to individually stand up their own virtual clusters and then run their jobs directly. Other approaches on the market are mere band-aids. Our solution helps companies focus on analyzing the data without the burden of complex infrastructure or the challenge and risk of moving their data.

An outlandish Top 10 of cybersecurity events in 2014
“Threat landscape” is a common phrase used in cybersecurity. It governs whether companies choose to buy new hardware or to spend money protecting existing infrastructure. Dependence is direct: If your trains get derailed all the time, buying new locomotives isn’t a solution. ... Our Threatpost site follows all the meaningful news regarding IT security. We decided to pick the top 10 events of the past year by a single criterion: the popularity of the corresponding articles. The results were interesting. There was no politics (no Snowden, no NSA) and few topics of strategic nature. The problems that stand out are those that have to be considered when assessing the threat landscape right now.

The Business of Managing IT: The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum
Quoting industry luminary Marc Andreessen, Betz says “software is eating the world.” Similarly, Betz says, IT management is actually beginning to eat management, too. Although this might seem laughable, we have become increasingly dependent on computing systems in our everyday lives. With that dependence comes significant concerns about the complexity of those systems and the potential they carry for chaotic behaviors. Therefore, he says, as technology becomes pervasive, how IT is managed will increasingly dictate how businesses are managed. “If IT is increasing in its proportion of all product management, and all markets are increasingly dependent on managing IT, then understanding pure IT management becomes critically important not just for IT but for all business management,” Betz says.

Are Your Business Applications Unnecessarily Complex?
The good news is that real-world HTAP applications are now available, with many more to come in 2015. In a recent article, Information Week’s Doug Henschen called out the transaction/analytical convergence as one of the top five trends in enterprise applications this year: As SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner has observed, the separation of transactional and analytical apps is unnatural. The practice became entrenched decades ago only because the technologies available at the time couldn’t handle both at once. Cloud, mobile, and in-memory capabilities are putting these worlds back together. The best current example of HTAP architecture in action is the recently announced SAP Simple Finance application.

Building and deploying large-scale machine learning pipelines
While primitives can serve as building blocks, one still needs tools that enable users to build pipelines. Workflow tools have become more common, and these days, such tools exist for data engineers, data scientists, and even business analysts (Alteryx, RapidMiner, Alpine Data, Dataiku). As I noted in a recent post, we’ll see more data analysis tools that combine an elegant interface with a simple DSL that non-programmers can edit. At some point, DSL’s to encode graphs that represent these pipelines will become common. The latest release of Apache Spark (version 1.2) comes with an API for building machine learning pipelines (if you squint hard enough, it has the makings of a DSL for pipelines).

Big visions for 5G before the FCC
The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, is holding a World Radio Communication Conference in Geneva in November that will help establish international spectrum and technology requirements for 5G for 2020 and beyond. Hoping to get an early start, the FCC has set Feb. 17 as the deadline for making what it calls "reply" comments in addition to the initial comments that were due Jan. 15. The FCC is actively encouraging reply comments from citizens of all types, not just large companies. Comments can be made by going to the FCC website and clicking on item 14-177 and filling in the short comment form. All comments will be made public.

Best practices for an enterprise Android deployment
Enterprise mobility is constantly changing, and the recent rise of trends like BYOD are broadening the idea of what it means to be a mobile-savvy organization. Big businesses no longer have the option to pick and choose how they will engage mobile, and that especially applies to Android. "Mobility is about putting data and computing in the hands of your employees so that they can use the technologies of their choice to better do their work," said Ojas Rege, VP of strategy for MobileIron. "An organization will have to support Android in order to get the maximum benefit from their mobility strategy."

Why CIOs and developers are seldom on the same page - and why that's a good thing
The developers are looking for ways to solve their problems or, if not solve problems and the challenges they need to address, then at least make their life easier. That isn't necessarily something that the CIO looks for." A CIO is probably weighing up the larger picture, along with factors such as security, costs, and maintainability. ... "But the thing is with these frameworks, you don't know what's going to happen in a year from now, whether that framework is going to be there, whether it's going to be maintained and available to do the same stuff they're doing today as efficiently."

Critical Java updates fix 19 vulnerabilities, disable SSL 3.0
The number of attacks that exploit Java vulnerabilities to install malware on computers has been on a steady decline over the past year, but Java exploits remain one of the top attack vectors against Web users, according to a report released Tuesday by Cisco Systems. Another security-related change in the new Java updates is the deactivation of the SSL 3.0 protocol by default in response to the POODLE vulnerabilitydiscovered in October. The flaw allows man-in-the-middle attackers to decrypt sensitive information like authentication cookies from a connection encrypted with SSL 3.0.

Make Agents, Not Frameworks
And to make things worse - when using the suggested approach of runtime generation - the LoggingService cannot be instantiated directly either as the Java compiler does not know about the runtime-generated class. For this reason, frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate use object factories and do not allow for direct instantiation of objects that are considered to be a part of their framework logic. With Spring, creating objects by a factory comes naturally as all of Spring's objects are already managed beans which are to be created by the framework in the first place. Similarly, most Hibernate entities are created as a result of a query and are thus not instantiated explicitly.

Quote for the day:

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." -- Rupert Murdoch

January 21, 2015

Companies Still Not Patching Security Vulnerabilities
Nine out of 10 security chiefs are expressing confidence in their strategies, but, according to available data and survey results, they are doing a poor job of deploying security updates. Some 75 percent of CISOs surveyed from 1700 companies rated their tools as very or extremely effective. However, fewer than 50 percent of respondents use standard tools such as patch and configuration management to help prevent security breaches and ensure that they are running the latest software versions. To that end, 40 percent of respondents admitted they are not patching and 54 percent have had to manage public scrutiny following a security breach.

Not enough women in senior IT roles, research finds
“Our research shows that, while the diversity debate has moved on outside of the office, not enough women are actually seeing this progress at work. If we’re to achieve sustainable and long-lasting change, we can’t just look at women already at the top; we need to focus our efforts on women at every level, creating a strong pipeline of female talent across British businesses. If we fail to do this, there is a very real risk that these women will seek these opportunities elsewhere,” added Pickering. In response to the survey’s findings, O2 has produced a guide to help businesses implement a Women in Leadership programme.

The FCC's possible reclassification of ISPs signals hope for net neutrality
Cloud-connected businesses that rely on an unimpeded internet connection between them and the customer will be able to provide service without ISP interference. Foremost among these is Netflix, who amid its long-standing dispute with Verizon, relented and paid Verizon for prioritization. In a January 2015 blog post, Netflix Vice President of Content Delivery Ken Florance criticized this practice as being "in contrast to an open Internet and all its promise," noting that "Those who can't pay for fast lanes will suffer, entrenching incumbents while undermining the innovative power of the Internet." With a level playing field, new startups face a reduced barrier to entry to the market.

Xerox licenses Thinfilm printed storage tech for smart labels
The Norwegian printed electronics firm Thinfilm has formed a strategic partnership with Xerox around printed storage. Xerox will license Thinfilm’s proprietary technology and make Thinfilm Memory labels, which have some very interesting characteristics. Each label, costing a few pennies, is a plastic tag that’s based on ferroelectric capacitors and allows for power-free archival storage in the 10-15-year range. This isn’t some data center technology though; we’re only talking 10-36 bits. They are however very rewriteable – the data can be rewritten 100,000 times. This means the labels are perfect for continually storing and refreshing the output of sensors.

10 cool network and computing research projects
If you think the latest enterprise and consumer network and computer technologies rolling into your data center and being snuck into your offices by end users are advanced, wait until you see what's cooking in the labs at universities and tech companies. Much of well-funded research is aimed at security, simplifying use of current technology and figuring out how to more easily plow through mounds of big data. Here's at peek at 10 projects.

JSF 2.0 Distributed Multitiered Application
This article aims to present a different approach on handling JSF distributed multitiered applications. Try the suggested steps in order to build robust distributed applications, that serve responses instantly, no matter the complexity of the client request. The components of this article are: Identifying general requirements of Java distributed multitiered applications; Java architectural solutions in order to satisfy requirements : classic solutions vs proposed proof of concept; and JSF2.0 Distributed Multitiered Application Proof of Concept (implementation and advantages)

Getting RID of Risk with Agile
As an Agile coach I come across all of these sort of these challenges on a very regular basis. The reality of modern software development is that these are every day challenges that we have to deal with, and the skill lies in reducing these risks in a timely enough fashion that we can still deliver the most value to a users in a timely, sustainable fashion. How I hear you ask dear reader, how can we possibly achieve that? I don’t have a silver bullet, but what I do have is a system that can help us deal with risk in a more timely manner.

Why 2015 might be the year of the CIO
While struggling to keep the lights on, cloud-based software and services simultaneously commoditized many expensive IT functions, and lowered the price of entry for everything from email to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from months of implementation time and heavy IT involvement to a few minutes and a credit card. An increase in IT spend from nontraditional sources, particularly marketing, further shifted the balance of IT power away from IT leaders, causing many to conclude that the CIO and similar positions were consigned to irrelevance at best, and doomed to be removed from the executive suite at worst.

The unexpected benefits – and subsequent opportunities - of wireless
This growing dependence on wireless is not totally unexpected. As our personal lives become more connected and mobile it is almost inevitable that the businesses we own, manage or work in will follow a similar path. However, our study into SMBs and wireless also revealed something else. It showed that wireless connectivity is enhancing aspects of the business many might consider to be beyond the reach of technology, namely, brand image and employee morale. Two-thirds of the 500 small to mid-size firms we spoke to say that having a wireless network makes their business look vibrant and up-to-date.

How managed print services accelerates business process digitisation
Despite the clear need to better integrate paper and digital workflows, Quocirca's study revealed that overall, only 29% of organisations believe they are effective or very effective at integrating paper and digital workflows. However, there is a stark difference between organisations using and not using MPS. While only 9% of organisations not using MPS rated their ability to integrate paper and digital workflows as effective or very effective, this rose to 51% for those using MPS. Quocirca expects this figure to climb over the next year as more organisations move further along their MPS journey and begin the implementation of document workflow tools and business process optimisation.

Quote for the day:

"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it" -- Albert Einstein

January 20, 2015

The Truth About Malvertising
Malvertisements can appear on any website at any given time, and there is little that the website owner can do to prevent them. That’s because they are planted on Web pages via third-party ad delivery networks. These networks auction website placements to advertisers using a high bid, free market system. There is currently very little oversight in this industry. This system was built for efficiency, so the marketplace has very little regulation to force better security practices. To make matters worse, malvertisers use various techniques to disguise the true purpose of their advertisements, often building entire infrastructures designed to redirect users between URLs.

Drones That Can Suck Up Water Hunt Oil Leaks, Invasive Species
It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.) “If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.” Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.

How To Pitch Hybrid Cloud To Your CFO
“In some instances, organisations can still have data sovereignty and security concerns, even with hybrid cloud solutions. The beauty of using a hybrid cloud solution is that you can choose which data should remain private and which elements you’re happy to store in the public cloud. One solution is to select a co-located data centre, which is close to the cloud provider, but not actually in the cloud. That way, organisations can get all the benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of storing data in a co-located data centre.”

How the Cloud is Reshaping Small Business Productivity
Taking a look at small businesses and the cloud, the Emergent Research study revealed 78 percent of small businesses (companies with less than 50 employees) will be fully adapted to the cloud by 2020 - up from 37 percent in 2014. Though today’s small businesses are reporting using cloud-based applications chiefly for email, online banking and social media, the expansion of the small business community’s utilization of diverse cloud applications, tools and platforms is anticipated to greatly increase. As this trend grows, Emergent Research forecasts that cloud computing will completely change how small businesses operate by 2020 — as the small business landscape fully adapts to cloud computing.

We Still Don’t Know the Difference Between Change and Transformation
Transformation is another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn’t focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives, which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It’s much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk. And even if successful change management leads to the execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.

Cisco builds switch ports to feed faster Wi-Fi
But with speed comes a series of challenges: To enjoy more than a gigabit out on the wireless edge of the LAN, network engineers need to have a switch port with greater than Gigabit Ethernet for each access point. They can do it with 10-Gigabit Ethernet, but that protocol requires Category 6a cable to cover a common 100-meter network link. Most enterprises are outfitted with older cable types, and it can be expensive to pull new wires through a building. That's the idea behind 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps Ethernet, which is under development in an official IEEE task group that only recently began meeting. But vendors aren't waiting for a standard to be set for these so-called multigigabit speeds.

Gap between perception and reality of cyberthreats widened in 2015
The spam writers are also carefully tracking their response rates and continuously adjusting the text of the spam emails. "In one campaign we saw 95 different iterations of their spam messages," he said. And the spam messages are being increasingly customized to target individual recipients, helping them bypass spam filters. There was also a 250 percent increase in malvertising last year, Brvenik added. The criminals use a variety of tactics, including spending actual money to buy their own advertising. "They buy short-term ads on high-exposure websites, and then they're gone," he said.

Rule of law on internet cracks down on cybercrime: Cisco
"Some of those countries where you don't have a strong rule of law, you find there's more organised crime. This is an indication that there's a link between organised crime and their activities, and governments of those countries. We're getting better, but we're not there yet, because some countries aren't as lawful as other countries," he said. The report also revealed that it's up to security teams within organisations to constantly improve their approach to defend against sophisticated attacks. In fact, while 90 percent of the companies surveyed said they were confident about their security policies, 54 percent admitted that they have faced public scrutiny following a security breach.

The business case for reputation risk management
The case for effective reputation risk management in this Age of Hyper-Transparency can be made in two ways – accentuating the positive and exposing the negative. There is growing quantitative and qualitative evidence that smart reputation risk management can add value to the bottom line – through liability avoidance, cleaner and leaner processes and improved products and services. Indeed, properly deployed and integrated, effective reputation risk management can be transformational, actually adding value to the financial bottom line. The financial sector has certainly been in the eye of this storm in recent years given the massive impact of questionable, illegal and downright criminal behaviours exhibited in this sector.

5 Advanced Java Debugging Techniques Every Developer Should Know About
BTrace is a helpful tool that lets you run Java-like scripts on top of a live JVM to capture or aggregate any form of variable state without restarting the JVM or deploying new code. This enables you to do pretty powerful things like printing the stack traces of threads, writing to a specific file, or printing the number of items of any queue or connection pool and many more. This is done using BTrace scripting, a Java-like syntax in which you write functions that are injected into the code in locations of your choice through bytecode transformation (a process we’ll touch on below). The best way to try out the tool is to attach its sample scripts into a live application.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems." -- Brian Tracy