Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

July 11, 2015

Researchers Harness the Power of Networked Brains in Monkeys and Rats

The researchers tested the ability of rat brain networks to perform basic computing tasks. For example, by delivering electrical pulse patterns derived from a digital image, they recorded the electrical outputs and measured how well the network of neurons processed that image. In another test, the researchers delivered information about barometric pressure and temperature and the brain network computed the probability of rain. The brain networks were consistently better than a single brain, especially when the task involved more than one computation step.

Bank’s Risk Governance Framework Needs Three Lines Of Defense: BIS

According to the revised guidance, the board should ensure that the risk management, compliance and internal audit functions are properly positioned, staffed and resourced and carry out their responsibilities independently, objectively and effectively. ... The revised guidance emphasizes the chair of the board plays a crucial role in the proper functioning of the board. It suggests the chair encourage and promote critical discussion and ensure that dissenting views can be freely expressed and discussed within the decision-making process. Thus, the third principle envisages the board to structure itself in terms of leadership, size and use of committees so as to effectively carry out its oversight role and other responsibilities.

Microsoft's new Power BI service to be generally available starting July 24

The new version of Power BI doesn't require an Office 365 subscription. Users can access it from either the free Power BI apps that it is building or from inside a browser. Those using the existing Power BI Windows app will see that app replaced by an updated one, though the existing app will still be available to those who need it. ... The idea of the updated Power BI service is to enable business users to benefit from business-intelligence and analytics without requiring analysts or other middlemen to set up or model the service and data, said James Phillips, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Business Intelligence Product group.

What’s the future of analytics within the enterprise architecture?

Today’s CIOs/CTOs face significant challenges. Unless they’re with a start-up, they generally have a legacy mix of IT systems supporting critical business processes, and they’ve added new analytical technologies over time. This overall mix of analytic technologies and systems has gotten so complex and engrained into the organizational fabric, that there’s an inability to change it. That’s an obstacle to becoming more digital and exploiting the latest analytical capabilities. Modernizing the "factory," as I like to call the platform supporting operations, is not as simple as just removing technology and replacing it with the latest and greatest.

CloudBees Enhances Jenkins Platform for Hybrid CI, CD for Enterprise Software

With its just-announced CloudBees Jenkins Platform, the company looks to ensure developer access to enterprise-class features, and to help companies accelerate DevOps adoption. "Customers have expressed a need for a solution that will help their organization adopt continuous delivery and, ultimately, DevOps practices at their own pace," CloudBees vice president of products Harpreet Singh said in a statement. ... The latest CloudBees offering focus on helping developers tackle many of the top to span cloud-based, premise-based, hybrid and mobile environments, to work with multiple coding languages, and to manage entire application lifecycles, from development and testing through delivery.

Probing the Dark Side of Google’s Ad-Targeting System

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute built a tool called AdFisher to probe the targeting of ads served up by Google on third-party websites. ... Google uses its data to target ads, but ad buyers can make some decisions about demographics of interest and can also use their own data sources on people’s online activity to do additional targeting for certain kinds of ads. Nor do the examples breach any specific privacy rules—although Google policy forbids targeting on the basis of “health conditions.” Still, says Anupam Datta, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who helped develop AdFisher, they show the need for tools that uncover how online ad companies differentiate between people.

Disciplined Agile Program Management: External Workflow

The activities associated with these process blades are often very highly related. For example, in some organizations the activities associated with enterprise architecture and reuse management are fulfilled by a single group. In other organizations some product management activities are performed by the portfolio management team and some by the enterprise architecture team. Some organizations may choose to have a separate group for each process blade. And of course the organizational structure will evolve over time as your various teams learn how to work with one another. Every organization is different.

Top 5 factors driving domestic IT outsourcing growth

The first is diversification of buyer needs. As buyers have to support new types of services, certain types of tasks may be better delivered nearshore rather than offshore. Secondly, there may be a desire to leverage the soft skills of onshore talent. Thirdly, domestic sourcing can be a way to overcome the structural challenges associated with offshore delivery, such as high attrition and burn out in graveyard shifts. Fourth, companies may be seeking to manage certain externalities like regulatory requirements of fears about visa availabilities. Finally, there may be client-specific needs that demand domestic solutions—a local bank that wants to keep jobs in the community or a company with no experience offshore looking to start the learning curve.

Why enterprises need containers and Docker

Once Docker is in place, it drastically simplifies and de-risks the deploy process. Developers have more of a chance to work on application knowing that once they deploy to a Docker file, it will run on their server. They can build their app on their laptop, deploy as a Docker file, and type in a command to deploy it to production. On AWS, using ECS with Docker takes away some of the configuration you need to complete with Docker. You can achieve workflows where Jenkins or other configuration integration tools run tests, AWS CloudFormation scales up an environment, all in minutes.

The Right Way to Plan an Innovation Tour

The problem is, all of these good people are often guided to see a distorted reality. Not that more formalized presentations and assessments are necessarily Potemkin villages, but they often miss what’s really going on. It’s just that these actors naturally tend toward self-promotion. ... But an innovation tour can be valuable, as long as you know what to look for and think about. Entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems aren’t simple, easily graspable objects; they are a construct we use to make sense of an exceedingly complex reality.

Quote for the day:

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B." -- James Yorke

July 10, 2015

The underexploited big data sweet spot for healthcare
"They want predictive analytics derived from big data that can help them to better understand consumer behaviors and patterns in their service areas so they can determine which of their services is most likely to be in demand for certain demographic segments," said Elson. This might mean determining if there are certain demographic profiles at high risk for diabetes that might need preventive or treatment care. In other cases, analytics can be employed to assist hospital personnel in keeping add-on revenues within the institution by measuring which doctors regularly make referrals out of network where these add-on revenues are lost — or even preventing costs by identifying patients who should be reached out to for preventive care, which in turn can lessen visits to the ER.

Can Converged Infrastructure Help IT Get Its Mojo Back?
The challenge is that by operating in infrastructure silos, traditional IT organizations typically can’t move with the same speed and agility as their more nimble cloud services counterparts. This lack of speed or responsiveness to real-time business demands has compelled many end users, particularly application developers, to seek alternatives in the cloud. With the swipe of a credit card, there is a virtually unlimited amount of server compute, storage and networking that can be instantaneously dialed up via the likes of AWS, Google, Azure, and Rackspace. As a result, some IT organizations are being outmaneuvered, outflanked and in some instances, are perilously close to being put out of business by cloud service providers.

Storage systems on Agile
Hardware modifications often introduce timing alterations that can expose code bugs that had never been seen before. Hardware changes also take a longer time to instantiate (build into electronics). This can be worked around by using hardware simulators but timing is often not the same as the real hardware and it can take 10X to 100X more real-time to execute simple operations. Nonetheless, new hardware typically takes weeks to months to debug and this can be especially hard if the software is changing as well. Similar to hardware concerns, OS or host storage protocol changes (say from NFSv3 to NFSv4) would take a lot more testing/debugging to get right. So it helps if the hardware doesn’t change, the OS doesn’t change and the host IO protocol doesn’t change when your using Agile to develop storage software.

Global Cooperation and Cybersecurity: A Q&A with Bruce McConnell
The three elements of risk are threats, vulnerability and consequences. A lot of what needs to be done is to reduce vulnerability. Part of what EWI is working on is promoting the availability of more secure information and communications in technology so that buyers and users can start with an infrastructure that is actually defensible as opposed to the infrastructure we have today which is very difficult to defend. We figure that, yes, there are threats, and yes, there are potential consequences, but one of the places that we need more work in particular is reducing vulnerabilities.

Mobile payments come of age
As CIOs and IT executives, it is clearly time to embrace these technologies whether they are embedded in payments-related applications or others more relevant to your enterprise and/or industry. Most of these technologies have reached critical mass, and some are even mainstream at this point. The more we as an IT community understand the capabilities and constraints of these mobile payments technologies, the more effectively we can integrate them and the more useful, reliable, trustworthy and convenient mobile device technology-enabled payments will become.

What Chicago’s New ‘Cloud Tax’ May Mean for Service Providers
The tax issue is going to increasingly come on the radar as governments look to recover the dwindling tax revenue from brick-and-mortar businesses, he said. Shih also noted a particular implementation problem in defining what qualifies. “The impact on infrastructure service providers starts with how regional and local governments are going to pinpointresidency,” he said. “Is the tax applicable when a server is hosted in a given jurisdiction or is it where the customer logs in from? Or is the residency of the consumer the determining factor? Providers hosting retail sites are going to have to be knowledgeable about these issues when helping online retailers set up their web presence.”

IT departments may be losing their bad reputation
A new survey strongly suggests that most business users are generally pleased with their IT departments, with eight out of 10 survey respondents viewing their relationship with IT as either positive or neutral. "Business units tend to view IT as a valuable partner rather than a hindrance," according to CompTIA, an industry group which produced the report. It found that 52% of business managers reported having a "good relationship" with IT. The survey gathered data collected online from 275 business professionals and 375 technology professionals, and included some interviews as well. The survey asked a series of statements to assess the relationship of business managers with IT. A more neutral view included an affirmative response to the statement that IT "plays a critical support role."

Worldwide cybersecurity market continues its upward trend
The worldwide cybersecurity market continues to grow and grow as defined by market sizing estimates that range from $75 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020. ... What explains the continual growth on cybersecurity spending? Cybercrime. According to Lloyd's of London, cybercrime is costing businesses up to $400 billion annually. As cybercrime rises, corporations and governments increase spending to defend and protect their digital networks and assets. ... Cybercrime is also fueling demand for cyber insurance, a market that is growing alongside cybersecurity products and services. Last year, the insurance industry generated about $2.5 billion in premiums on policies to protect companies from losses as a result of cyber-attacks.

Practices for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
DevOps is an attempt to break the barrier between Development and Operations teams. They are both required for the successful delivery of software, but have been traditionally split into separate organizational silos with competing goals. While developers are responsible for delivering new features and responding to change, operations have to keep everything running smoothly and avoiding change is one way to reduce risk. DevOps is focused on automation and measurement as a way to reduce the risk and collect data to improve the delivery process, but it’s a lot more than using a new tool. It’s about people from different backgrounds collaborating to enable fast and reliable software releases.

OpenSSL bug serious – but no Heartbleed, say experts
“While this may not be a remote code execution bug, it is still pretty severe, as it completely removes the protections that people use OpenSSL. Users of affected versions of OpenSSl should upgrade to 1.0.1p or 1.0.2d as soon as possible,” he said. Thomas added that anyone still using OpenSSL versions 1.0.0 and 0.9.8 should note that support for these versions – including security updates – will stop at the end of 2015. Kevin Bocek, vice-president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, warned that bad actors have learned that enterprises are blindly trusting certificate authorities. “This means, that often the easiest, fastest and most effective way to inject malware onto corporate networks is by signing the malware with compromised or stolen digital certificates,” he said.

Quote for the day:

“To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.” -- Jay Samit

July 09, 2015

From cars to cranes, Nordic industry is embracing the industrial internet of things
The system, which connects a cloud backbone to small handheld device attached to welding machines, not only improves efficiency but also reduces faults by detecting whether a welder is following the specifications of a seam. If they are not followed or the system detects any other issues, the welder and his supervisor can be notified. And, instead of chalk, welders use their handheld devices to record the details of the job which are automatically uploaded to the cloud and assigned to their specific seam. Furthermore, the device can be attached to any welding machinery, not just Kemppi’s own.

A New Architecture for the Internet of Things
Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy. How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Red Hat's Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems, described how to revolutionize your architecture and create an integrated, interoperable, reliable system of thousands of devices.

2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report
Web applicati ons, which are pervasive within today’s organizati ons, area target of choice for threat actors for many reasons, not the least of which is their high likelihood of including vulnerabiliti es and serving as a direct conduit to sensiti ve data. It is not surprising, therefore, that web applicati on att acks are among the top cyberthreats concerning security professionals, who remain far from confi dent about their organizati on’s security posture in this area. ... The potenti al of soft ware-defi ned networking to miti gate the onslaught of cyberthreats – for example, by enabling microsegmentati on and allowing integrated countermeasures to be “piped in” to a communicati ons path regardless of their physical locati on – is not lost on today’s IT security professionals.

United's woes show what's hard about networking
A router failure could mean a lot of things other than total shutdown. Often, it means a software glitch or a clumsy engineer's configuration mistake that can spread to other routers or affect their performance. The router may have malfunctioned, but the rest of the network doesn't know it, said Dell'Oro Group analyst Alam Tamboli. United hasn't shared more details of its latest problem. Router software upgrades are a frequent cause of widespread network breakdowns that lead to embarrassing headlines. In fact, updating network software can be such an ordeal that some enterprises keep running the same versions for years, choosing to manage the risk of security holes rather than take on the dangers of an upgrade, Skorupa said.

How one wearable for women is bringing self defense tools into the modern age
Originally, Mustafa's idea for Roar was wearable mace. She realized that existing self defense tools have not been updated in 70 years, when pepper spray was invented. Women don't want to take tasers or mace to bars or other locations, so the idea was that instead of having to take something out of a purse or pocket, women could already have mace on them. She thought it was genius. But then, Mustafa started talking to women and posted a survey on Facebook, asking women what they liked/disliked about existing self defense tools. In a couple of hours, she received hundreds of responses. And there was a pattern. Almost 40% of women owned tools, but most were afraid mace and tasers would be used against them if they were overpowered.

Android tablets, Chromebooks, and convertibles: Which setup makes sense for you?
Despite Google's ongoing efforts, the Web and even Chrome OS itself aren't entirely optimized for touch-centric experiences. Going into a tablet mode on a convertible Chromebook is enjoyable for things like reading content, watching videos, or scrolling through social media streams -- as you can push the keyboard out of your way and focus solely on the screen -- but the experience is far more limited and less natural-feeling than doing the same on an Android device. By and large, native Android apps just provide a superior touch experience to their website counterparts. It's something that's hard to quantify, but they're designed explicitly for that type of interaction and tend to be more pleasant to use.

CIO interview: Andy Haywood, group CIO, N Brown
“Our current digital offerings are very good, but they’re not as fast as some of our competitors. I don’t mean web speed, but the ability to change and adapt. In the digital world, we want to be making changes every hour of every day,” says Haywood. “That’s the difference between winning and losing in the digital space - agility and speed is needed to react to the market and to customers. That’s what the Hybris digital platform will give us. ... “It's about that customer-centricity being brought to bear on the transformation programme. The credit element is just one example where we’re not yet able to provide the flexibility and choice that most other businesses are giving their customers,” says Haywood.

Which in-memory DBMS best fits your company's needs?
Not all in-memory database systems are relational. Aerospike is an open source, in-memory, NoSQL database management system. It's a key-value data store that enables developers to build personalized user experiences and data-driven applications that scale out to process millions of transactions per second with sub-millisecond response times. Aerospike runs on Linux with support offered for many different Linux distributions including pre-built binaries for Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian. Although Aerospike is available as open source, it can also be commercially licensed. The commercial edition of Aerospike adds features such as cross datacenter replication, fast restart and improved security.

Cutting Jobs, Microsoft Turns Page on Nokia Deal
While Microsoft will not stop making smartphones, Mr. Nadella said on Wednesday that it would no longer focus on the growth of that business, instead emphasizing the expansion of the broad “ecosystem” of products, including mobile phones, that run its Windows software. Since he took over, Mr. Nadella has increased the development of apps and services for Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS devices, many of which have been popular with the public. “I am committed to our first-party devices, including phones,” Mr. Nadella said in an email to Microsoft employees. “However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention.”

Business, Design, and Engineering: Developing Collaboration-Culture
Disrupt or be disrupted. Traditional approaches to building great software are quickly falling by the wayside. With myriad of smaller, more nimble competitors rapidly entering the marketplace, how will your business innovate, survive and thrive? This series offers readers tactical approaches to building software that your customers love. Break down existing silos and create an environment for cross-collaborative teams: placing technology, business and user experience design at the core.

Quote for the day:

"Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig." -- Paul Dickson

July 08, 2015

7 Ways To Kill Data Center Efficiency
While it's impossible to approach system utilizations of near 100% or make sure that every device that is powered on is actually serving a purpose, there's plenty of room for improvement. For example, some of the servers identified in the report as comatose are likely to be servers that are set up as hot-standby or disaster recovery systems in case there is a failure. If that's the case, does the system truly need to be in a hot-standby mode or would a cold/warm standby mode be more cost-efficient and provide nearly the same amount of redundancy? Here are seven ways you can identify -- and resolve -- data center inefficiencies. If you have your own theories on why inefficiencies occur or how to resolve or prevent them, tell us in the comments section below.

10 compelling reasons to consider open source for your enterprise storage needs
Enterprise needs are a different beast from those of SMBs. Few areas define this as clearly as storage. Instead of storing a few hundred gigabytes, you're looking at terabytes and maybe even petabytes. Failover, redundancy, security, backups—all essential when it comes to enterprise storage. You might think the only viable solutions for such tasks are proprietary solutions. Fortunately, for businesses and those working within them, that assumption is incorrect. Open source has come a long way and now powers the backbone of enterprise computing—and that includes storage. Don't believe me? Take a look at the following 10 reasons why open source could be the right storage solution for your organization.

Why E-wallets may be the new headache for banks after bad loans
"According to me, banks launching ewallets is a really bad idea because technically when a banks already holds my account it already has a wallet,'' says Amrish Rau, MD and CEO of Citrus Payment, which has applied for a payments bank licence. "They are trying to circumvent the second factor authentication by putting up a wallet. If you think of it calmly what does a wallet do? A wallet holds money, as do bank accounts. But they are enamoured by the world of wallets." Still, banks cannot afford to be complacent. In advanced markets, technological developments are reshaping the way banking is done. In the UK, one bank will have no premises for a customer to walk in and seek drafts, transfers, or even payments. Atom Bank is the first UK bank to provide banking services only through apps.

How Companies Can Improve Recruitment And Engagement With Gamification
While gamification can have a tremendous impact on how you identify and hire people, it can be just as powerful—if not more so—as a tool for keeping them engaged after they’ve been hired. Engagement has become a hot topic today, with Gallup reporting that nearly 70% of U.S. employees overall (and more than 70% of Millennials specifically) are not engaged employees, which the polling company defines as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.” Given that ADP estimates that the cost to a company of just one disengaged employee is more than $2,200 a year, it’s no wonder businesses are looking for ways to encourage employee engagement.

Competitive Disruption and Cybersecurity Beyond the Buzz
The security of products and services is a key element of the overall security of cyber-physical systems, but a number of things are affecting organizations’ ability to put in place a solid digital defense system. These include an expanded attack surface, inefficiencies in the development process, a weak security architecture of the entire system, lack of specialized security skill sets, and insufficient use of third-party support. Securing a cyber-physical system is a challenge, because of its multiple points of vulnerability. These include the products and the services involved, the embedded software and the data residing within, plus the data aggregation platform, the data centers used for analysis, and of course, the communication channels.

New Top-Level Domain Drives Thousands of Sign-ups
“By signing up for a .BANK domain, financial institutions are taking a clear step to ensure customers’ sensitive information receives an added layer of protection from cyber attacks,” FSR explained in a recent news release. “The award and use of a .BANK domain shows that the institution is a verified member of the banking community and upholds the strict standards of the .BANK community. These requirements go significantly further to protect consumer information than most commonly-used domains.” The groups aren’t trying to get ahead of themselves, however. “This is a marathon,” Doug Johnson, ABA’s senior vice president of payments and cybersecurity policy, told American Banker. “It clearly isn’t a sprint.”

CIOs Rethink the IT Department
Technological changes and demographic forces are reshaping government IT departments. After delaying retirement plans during the recession, a large chunk of the public-sector IT workforce is once again poised to ride off into the sunset. ... At the same time, an improving employment market for skilled technology workers makes it tougher for government agencies to hire qualified replacements. With competition for tech talent heating up, agencies struggle to match private-sector salaries, office environments, schedule flexibility and other factors. It's little wonder that state and local CIOs consistently rank hiring and retaining skilled IT staff as a top concern.

Implementing Agile Delivery for Non-Software IT Projects
Needless to say, a majority of strategy, architecture, and consulting projects will come up with strong risks on all these four points, and therefore will almost always require high visibility, early risk mitigation, adaptability to constantly change, and quick demonstration of business value. Using Agile here is both undeniable and indisputable. In fact I would argue that Agile methods suit no other projects better than non-software projects. The next obvious question is, "How do we make this happen”? In my opinion, as soon as organizations stop practicing 'prescriptive Agile.' Even though the very foundation of Agile is to be adaptive and not prescriptive, prescriptive Agile is one of the major oxymorons across the Agile delivery landscape today.

Throw out the trust, and verify everything
Controlling access, and ensuring that users have the least privileges necessary is something we all should already be doing, but I have rarely reviewed an organization that is doing it well. In the recent OPM hack, the perpetrators were using stolen administrative credentials, rendering most other security measures useless. Zero Trust Lite will help prevent this issue, given that, for example, you could prevent an administrative user from network access outside of the LAN zone. You need to go a step further, however, and make sure users have the correct privilege. The challenge here is that you are managing users on a diverse group of systems.

The impossible war on encryption
In response, furious tech companies began to encrypt traffic - that is, scrambling it to make it impossible to be snooped on - as it travelled over the internet between their servers and their customers. Such a use of encryption didn't really present a huge problem for spies and police, because companies still have to decrypt the data when it reaches their own servers. They do this in order to sift through their customers' emails and web browsing habits themselves, if only to hit them with more targeted advertising (which is why when you write an email about getting married you might start to see adverts for wedding venues). In this case, all the police have to do is apply for a warrant and they can get access to the messages they want.

Quote for the day:

“Leaders fail when they begin to fall in love with negative mindsets of other people!” -- Israelmore Ayivor

July 07, 2015

Execs Think Cloud Needs More Than Conventional Security
Despite much wishful thinking to the contrary in the enterprise, security still remains top of the list of barriers that are stalling this move to the cloud, according to the survey. Sixty-six percent of respondents said security concerns are at the top of the barrier-to-adoption list, while 37 percent said they are concerned about the ability to meet compliance requirements when moving services and solutions to the cloud. And though customer data will be moving to the public cloud, that doesn’t mean there isn’t trepidation surrounding this transition, with 50 percent of respondents noting they are “very concerned” about security of data in the public cloud, and another 34 percent “somewhat concerned.”

PCI DSS publishes updates to standards
Key changes include: The addition of a new “Core Module” section that applies to all POI device types and addresses the configuration and maintenance procedures relevant to the security of POI devices.; The addition of testing requirements to reflect that PTS evaluation laboratories will begin validating vendor documentation of vendor policies and procedures for compliance with the device management security requirements. These pertain to device management during manufacture and up until initial key loading or deployment, where other PCI requirements such as PIN security and P2PE provide coverage.

Mobility and Flexibility Working with Cloud
Cloud computing is constantly changing the working environment in enterprises. Integrating new facets to a work environment, the increasing use of technology has unified the office space with dynamic factors such as globalization, collaborations and inception of new possibilities to improve the overall workplace. The employees are constantly adapting to the new work patterns and operation modes. ... Thus, geographical barriers to workplace have being made limited with the advent of the cloud structure. One may work from home with a complete flexibility of timing and association with the business. Virtual office and virtual teams have become an emerging trend in the modern work culture.

Schneider Electric Targets Edge Computing With New Micro Data Center Portfolio
Completely engineered to order, micro data center infrastructure solutions include the physical enclosure, UPS, PDU, cooling, software, environmental monitoring and security all tested, assembled and packaged at a Schneider Electric facility and then shipped together. ... “We are already seeing the emergence of edge applications in retail and industrial applications, and we believe the need for edge computing will only grow as the Internet of Things expands into commercial applications,” said Johnson. Micro data centers are not new, however Schneider has created a standardized, repeatable framework, said David Cappuccio

How Office 365 balances IT control with user satisfaction
Exchange administrators were surprised to discover that the Outlook app was caching Exchange credentials and a month of email messages, contact details, calendar appointments and possibly attachments in the cloud (originally on AWS servers, and although Microsoft promised to shift that to Azure and Office 365 with regional data centres during 2015, it also indicated that the cloud structure was a strategic part of the Outlook architecture they plan to continue). It needs that information to deliver push notifications for new messages, and for features like easy unsubscribe and the “focused inbox” that highlights messages.

Inside Amazon’s Warehouse, Human-Robot Symbiosis
At the center of the warehouse is a storage space containing square shelves packed with countless products from Amazon’s inventory. In previous generations of its fulfillment center, Amazon’s workers would have roamed these shelves searching for the products needed to fulfill each new order. Now the shelves themselves glide quickly across the floor carried atop robots about the size and shape of footstools. In a carefully choreographed dance, these robots either rearrange the shelves in neatly packed rows, or bring them over to human workers, who stack them with new products or retrieve goods for packaging.

Teradata Chief Analytics Officer Bill Franks Talks Analytics and Angry Birds
There are a couple of things. First, there has been tremendous expansion in the breadth and depth of Teradata’s offerings. These reflect the massive changes in demand from the marketplace. I don’t think most people realize how diversified our product and services portfolio is today, especially if they haven’t taken a look at us in a couple of years. We also continue to make a shift toward focusing on solving business problems as opposed to providing technology. Our consulting services have grown immensely over the years as a result and we now routinely work with business people as well as IT.

IPv6 security vulnerability pokes holes in VPN providers' claims
"A common misconception is that the word 'private' in the VPN initialism is related to the end-user's privacy, rather than to the interconnection of private networks," says the authors in the paper's introduction. "In reality, privacy and anonymity are features hard to get, requiring a careful mix of technologies and best practices that directly address a well-defined adversarial/threat model." ... IPv6 leakage seemed to concern the researchers the most. "The vulnerability is driven by the fact that, whereas all VPN clients manipulate the IPv4 routing table, they tend to ignore the IPv6 routing table," explains the researchers. "No rules are added to redirect IPv6 traffic into the tunnel. This can result in all IPv6 traffic bypassing the VPN's virtual interface."

Lessons Learned Adopting Microservices at Gilt, Hailo and nearForm
Microservices as an architecture value availability over consistency. They keep your site, mobile app or service up and running. There will be errors in some percentage of the data. You get to tune that percentage by increasing capacity, but you never get away from it completely. If your business can tolerate errors, then microservices are for you. Obviously, there are systems that need to be 100% accurate. And the best way to achieve this is with large scale (and expensive) monoliths, both in terms of software, and hardware. Financial, medical, and real-time systems are obvious examples. But there are large amounts of software that is pointlessly slow and expensive to build simply because we aren’t paying attention to business realities.

Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity
Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

Quote for the day:

“It is not a question of ‘Will I make a difference?’ Rather, it’s ‘What difference will I make?” -- Kouzes/Posner.