Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 08, 2016

Google and Amazon are slowly killing the gadget as we know it

The real brilliance of the Chromecast lies in what it isn't, rather than what it is. It doesn't have an interface of its own. You just push a button on your phone and have whatever YouTube video you're watching or Spotify album you're listening to appear on your TV screen. A nice side effect: It's relatively simple to take an existing smartphone app and add Chromecast streaming capabilities, and literally tens of thousands of apps have done that integration. You don't have to think about it or learn a new interface; you just click and go. ... This trend isn't going to kill off the smartphone, or the PC, or the tablet. But it means lower-cost gadgetry that lasts a lot longer. We're only seeing the early stages of this shift now, but it has a lot of potential to shake up how we think about and how we buy our devices.

Blockchain's Hype Exceeds Its Grasp - For Now

Blockchain faces challenges beyond basic business practicality. The lack of universal standards and regulatory governance, a shortage of engineers schooled in working with the software, and questions about blockchain's scalability dampen the technology's adoption. For now, Nichol and other experts says blockchain is caughtin a hype cycle where it’s long on promise, short on practical implementations. "There’s a long way to go before any of the solutions that have been in the headlines in the past 18 months will be ready for enterprise deployment," says Martha Bennett, a Forrester Research analyst who advises clients on blockchain. "Anything that requires a large number of industry players to agree on a common set of processes is likely to be even further into the future; and that’s before we bring regulatory aspects into it."

Humans make mistakes: Is cloud automation the answer?

We want to automate for several purposes. One is scalability but the benefit that most immediately becomes apparent is that humans make mistakes. That's just the way things work. Someone goes in and either through negligence or just mistakenly deploys resources into the wrong region. Something like, they want to set up a test lab, which is no big deal, but they want to set it up in Singapore where it won't conflict or affect any of [their] production or DR workloads which are running in the US. The problem is that now you have resources that are unaccounted for, that are running in another region and are checked out by the governance folks. So we have a scanner that goes and looks for new resources in a region and then we can do something about it.

Security researchers' smart home findings may keep you up at night

To learn what happens when IoT devices are assembled into a smart home system, Fernandes, along with Atul Prakash, also of the University of Michigan, and Jaeyeon Jung of Microsoft Research looked at several smart home platforms. "We looked at what systems existed, and what features they offered," writes Fernandes. "We also looked at what devices they could interact with, whether they supported third-party apps, and how many apps were in their app stores." In addition, the researchers took a good look at the security features of the various platforms, asking the question, "In what ways are emerging, programmable, smart homes vulnerable to attacks, and what do these attacks entail?" To answer the question, the researchers decided to focus on one particular smart home system.

How to Hire and Retain An Expert Security Staff

Healthcare organizations may not be able to offer competitive salaries to lure top security talent compared to other industries such as banking, finance and insurance. So when hiring a qualified candidate isn’t a viable option and outsourcing isn’t feasible either, then the next best alternative is to develop and train the individuals currently on staff. Quite frankly, this should be happening already but the training budget is usually the first thing on the cutting block, assuming there is a formal training budget at all. Enhancing the security skills and knowledge of the current staff can fulfill multiple objectives and requirements, including compliance with regulations that mandate security training, as well as providing improvements to the information security program through better execution and security decision-making.

Design Patterns in the Real World: Flyweight

A flyweight is an object that minimizes memory use by sharing as much data as possible with other similar objects; it is a way to use objects in large numbers when a simple repeated representation would use an unacceptable amount of memory. Reading carefully the definition above, one can see the obvious similarities with what we call a "cache" in software engineering. As such, two important aspects should be considered: implementations of this design pattern may lead to garbage collection unfriendly solutions, as retained, shared objects may be ineligible for garbage collection; and not stated explicitly, but it makes sense to define those shared objects as stateless/immutable. This way we can overcome some evident problems like data race conditions and objects with illegal state.

Stress at work is costing employers $300 billion a year - here's why

Research suggests that people may be more stressed today than ever before - and it's costing employers (and employees) big time.According to a new infographic created by Eastern Kentucky University's online Bachelor of Science in Occupational Safety program, companies spend about $300 billion annually for health care and missed work days as a result of workplace stress. Meanwhile, employees are feeling less energetic, more agitated, and getting less sleep due to increased demands at work - causing them to experience physical and psychological symptoms, fight with people close to them, and have more accidents on the job, among other things. Check out the infographic below to see how stress in the workplace is "reshaping" America

Everything is “Lock-in”: Focus on Switching Costs

After spending tens of millions of dollars putting an ERP system in place, few companies are willing to drop it and move to a frisky competitor! CFOs want to squeeze out every ounce of benefit from an asset before paying to replace it. Even the cloud isn’t immune from financial lock-in. While we think of cloud as exclusively a pay-as-you-go model, many providers offer discounts if you make monthly or annual commitments. While this creates cost savings, it also creates a disincentive to leave. A major financial commitment to a vendor means that switching providers is going to be painful. There may be early termination fees, or reimbursement of upfront discounts. Any wholesale change from one vendor to another typically means that large projects get spun up, and teams spend time on migration efforts instead of other value-added opportunities.

6 Proven Project Management Team Communication Strategies

Make sure you don’t leave anyone out when you invite people to meetings or send out reports about recent developments. If you’re not sure whether certain people need to be involved in a meeting or kept in the loop about the latest project activities or updates, err on the side of caution and include them. It’s always better to gain more input from more people than limited input from just a few team members who are regarded as key players. ... It’s natural that the opinions and thoughts of higher-level project participants may be given more weight than those of junior team members. But that’s a mistake. Even if they disagree with people who outrank them, all team members should be able to freely communicate their thoughts, opinions and concerns without fear of ridicule or consequence. Great ideas are great ideas, regardless of who they come from.

Can AI predict potential security breaches? Armorway is betting on it

Using AI in the cybersecurity realm has exploded recently with MIT and IBM Watson both joining the fray of seeking to predict internet crimes before they happen. Using predictive technology for physical crime has also begun to gain traction, with the LAPD's PredPol software gaining national acclaim as a means for predicting crime. However, it has also raised some concerns about the ethical concerns the technology presents. In the post-Snowden age, questions about privacy and surveillance are paramount, and some people may not be comfortable with algorithms predicting who might commit a crime.

Quote for the day:

"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship." -- Louisa May

June 07, 2016

Understanding Aggregation Services for Banking

An aggregation services team at a trusted technology partner can help banks and credit unions assess their technology needs, identify appropriate products and services and connect institutions with domestic and global vendors. An aggregation team can also assist financial institutions with contract negotiation, implementation, project management and other processes, freeing up bank and credit union IT staffers to focus on more customer-oriented projects. Some decisions regarding technology solutions aren’t complicated. For example, if a financial institution needs a piece of hardware or software to fulfill a specific function, and only a handful of products will meet the company’s needs, a buying decision can be straightforward. After reviewing product features and pricing, an internal IT manager can quickly make a decision and place an order.

Here's the huge question facing fintech startups - can they make any money?

The standard reply from the industry is that these businesses are investing in growth and could recalibrate to make a profit if they wanted to. Instead, what they want to do is grow as big as possible first, then squeeze money out of all the customers they've captured. But critics say many of the business models are unsustainable and simply being supported by the financial teat of venture capital money. The likes of TransferWise and Revolut can only afford to offer such cheap services because of a plentiful supply of free and easy cash from investors that subsidises prices, so the argument goes, not because of any real technical innovation. Most fintech startups still run on the traditional infrastructure of mainstream banking. They may not have a big staff and branch network to maintain, but things like transfers and direct debits cost them the same as your Barclays or HSBCs.

Global regulators attuned to blockchain risks

Fragmentation is the risk of different systems and protocols developing that are not able to talk to each other. Should one system become dominant and not able to connect to other blockchains, regulators would be concerned about the potential for monopolistic behaviour that would potentially counter to the interest of the consumer, he said. Global banks are currently working with various blockchain developers, including R3 CEV, Ripple, Digital Asset Holdings and IBM's Hyperledger. "Interoperability is going to be very important in this," Mr Medcraft said from ASIC's Sydney headquarters. "You want to be able to use different suppliers: as long as they can talk to one another, that works. Fragmentation is one of our big concerns. But if you put your customers first, interoperability makes a hell of a lot of sense."

Widespread exploits evade protections enforced by Microsoft EMET

While EMET is often recommended as a defense layer for zero-day exploits -- exploits for previously unknown vulnerabilities -- it also gives companies some leeway when it comes to how fast they patch known flaws. In corporate environments, the deployment of patching does not happen automatically. Patches for the OS or stand-alone programs need to be prioritized, tested and only then pushed to computers, a process that can substantially delay their installation. With widespread exploits now able to evade EMET mitigations, the tool should no longer be relied on to protect old versions of applications like Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Silverlight or Java until a company can update them. Unfortunately, organizations are sometimes forced to keep old versions of browser plug-ins and other applications installed on endpoint computers in order to maintain compatibility with custom-made internal Web applications that haven't been rewritten in years.

6 ways to destroy your project management career

Proper planning may slow things down initially, but it will save substantial amounts of time, energy, and resources, not to mention unnecessary rework later throughout the other project phases. This will also significantly increase the likelihood of meeting stakeholder expectations as well as overall project success in the end. Stakeholders are unlikely to re-hire or refer a PM who demonstrates he or she consistently fails to sufficiently plan. ... With each new project, a PM brings with them experience from all other projects that can either help or hinder the current project. It's important to recognize each new project, company, industry, product, or service, and culture can possibly negate some of those previous experiences. If a PM is unwilling to recognize that this is a possibility, they are in danger of appearing like a know-it-all, and not likely to be well received.

Enterprise Architects “Know Nothing”: A Conversation with Ron Tolido

Tolido says it’s time for enterprise architectures to stop trying to make predictions as to what architectures should look like and instead provide the business a digital platform that will allow for a new style of architecting, one that drives continuous transformation rather than requirements-driven, step-by-step change. To do this, Tolido says Enterprise Architects must enable “the art of the possible” within organizations, providing their clients with a catalog of possibilities—a listing of potential things they could be doing to help companies continually transform themselves. This is a huge shift for most IT departments, Tolido says, which are still stuck in the mindset that the business is different from IT and that business requirements must drive IT initiatives, with architecture sitting somewhere between the two. No longer can architects be content to place architectures somewhere in the middle between the business and IT,

To put rivals at a major disadvantage IBM & Cisco combine with Watson IoT platform

“This powerful IoT technology from Cisco and IBM, combined with Bell’s world leading network technology, enables customers to tap into innovative real-time analytics options to maximize performance across their operations, no matter where they are,” said Stephen Howe, Bell’s chief technology officer. “Many of our largest customers operate remote systems, requiring continuous availability and access to data to monitor critical performance factors and avoid downtime. Deploying the unmatched analytics capabilities of IBM Watson Internet of Things and Cisco networking intelligence with streaming edge analytics will help to further accelerate Bell’s leadership in Canadian IoT.” Businesses including Port of Cartagena and SilverHook Powerboats are turning to Cisco and IBM to help address their most complex IT and IoT challenges.

Massive DDOS Attacks Reach Record Levels

DDoS reflection and amplification techniques continue to be used extensively. These involve abusing misconfigured servers on the Internet that respond to spoofed requests over various UDP-based protocols. Around one-in-four of all DDoS attacks seen during the first three months of 2016 contained UDP (User Datagram Protocol) fragments. This fragmentation can indicate the use of DDoS amplification techniques, which results in large payloads. The four next most common DDoS attack vectors were all protocols that are abused for DDoS reflection: DNS (18 percent), NTP (12 percent), CHARGEN (11 percent) and SSDP (7 percent). Another worrying trend is that an increasing number of attacks now use two or more vectors at the same time. Almost 60 percent of all DDoS attacks observed during the first quarter were multivector attacks: 42 percent used two vectors and 17 percent used three or more.

Internet of Things: Five truths you need to know to succeed

Given a large enough deployment of sensors, the accuracy of the data they collect will drift over time, as the hardware degrades, he said. In harsh environments, for instance oil field sensors measuring temperature in a hot desert environment, this degradation can happen quite rapidly. These compromised sensors can't easily be replaced "because while the sensors themselves are so cheap they're almost free, the cost of the lost production incurred in replacing them most definitely is not". One way to counter the increasing unreliability of sensor data over time is to corroborate each sensor's data with that of its neighbours, said Wilcox, who suggested creating a "virtual sensor from a neural network of adjacent sensor readings".

Machine Learning Is Becoming A Growth Catalyst In The Enterprise

Machine learning is proving to be effective at handling predictive tasks including defining which behaviors have the highest propensity to drive desired outcomes, which companies like Apttus use to drive business decisions like discounting or automated approvals. Enterprises eager to compete and win more customers are the applying machine learning to sales and marketing challenges first.... Machine learning's ability to scale across the broad spectrum of contract management, customer service, finance, legal, sales, quote-to-cash, quality, pricing and production challenges enterprises face is attributable to its ability to continually learn and improve. Every time a miscalculation is made, machine learning algorithms correct the error and begin another iteration of the data analysis. These calculations happen in milliseconds which makes machine learning exceptionally efficient at optimizing decisions and predicting outcomes.

Quote for the day:

"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise." -- Mary Kay Ash

June 06, 2016

Organizations Need Industry Vision for Digital Business Success

"Enterprises can transform by exploiting business moments or by using digital capabilities to enter or create new markets as Airbnb and Uber have done," said Jorge Lopez, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, many enterprises will find it easier to start by creating a vision for digital business for their particular industry. This approach enables the enterprise to tilt the fundamentals of competition in its favor without limiting digital business to narrow sequences of events and committing to a vast building project. Once the enterprise has established its vision, it can more easily tackle business moments or leverage its digital capabilities in new markets." Lopez offers the example of an organization envisioning changes within its industry if the Internet of Things or smart machines were used to full potential.

5 Signs You Misunderstand Big Data

The enhancing technology that seemed to quickly permit you to collect as well as analyze high quantities of data than prior gave birth to the word “big data.” Humans gained the ability of analyzing new types of data – especially unstructured data which played a big role in naming the data as big data. Initially, the only useful data was the perfect fit into rows and columns of a database. Today, the situation is completely different as the analysis of large text blocks including the books and journals, photos, videos audio, health records and much more is possible. This proves that big data isn’t just about the data volume but it balances the variety of data which is accessible now.

It’s time for ‘small data.

The problem is that education policymakers around the world are now reforming their education systems through correlations based on big data from their own national student assessments systems and international education data bases without adequately understanding the details that make a difference in schools. A doctoral thesis in the University of Cambridge, for example, recently concluded that most OECD countries that take part in the PISA survey have made changes in their education policies based primarily on PISA data in order to improve their performance in future PISA tests. But are changes based on big data really well suited for improving teaching and learning in schools and classrooms?

How Risky Is Bleeding Edge Tech?

Most seasoned information security experts know that when a new technology starts taking off like wildfire, chances are pretty good that someone's going to get burned. The curve of innovation for decades has generally traversed a path where engineers think of features, bells and whistles first, security last. As a new crop of exciting technology like smart medical devices, drones and driverless cars jockeys for position in the mainstream, the question is how much risk they'll bring to the table. A panel of experts with the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute recently took a look at some of the hottest tech making its way to the forefront to answer this very question. Here are some of the highlights from the report, 2016 Emerging Technology Domains Risk Survey.

The case for IT Governance

Even the best of breed systems and tools are not designed to govern themselves. Vendors genuinely do their best job, but verification is always needed. Quite simply, IT Governance didn’t happen. In a similar situation, a lot of companies would blame the IT staff or go after the vendor. ... In conclusion, IT Governance does not have to be a mysterious or out of reach function in your organization. Let RSM help you build an IT strategy that includes proper IT Governance and limits the amount of surprises you may encounter as you continue to grow your business! The Rapid Assessment process will help align the people, process and technologies present in your business for the maximum amount of return on your investment. Contact us if we can help you with this or any technology issue you may be facing.

Insights On IT Governance

In today’s business situation with its complexity, required to be responsive, the costs to an organization can be important to stay competitive and meet business initiatives and challenges. An organization might face challenges and business problems like Global competition, product development costs, regulatory compliance, new business opportunity, and lack of skilled staff. While addressing any of these issues, the organization must be sure that the value of the business internally and the value provided to its customers is maintained or improved. This influences the executives to focus on how they can grow, sustain, change, and manage the organization to meet these challenges pertaining to corporate policies, processes, and IT infrastructure and systems that are required.

Knock, Knock. Who’s There? Your Boss

In one of the more surprising results, the authors found that constructive humor from leaders often fell flat, and they speculate that employees view self-enhancing jokes, in particular, as a sign their boss is trying a little too hard to shrug off any pressure and is reluctant to meet a problem head-on. Drilling further down, the study argues that contingent reward leaders, who base much of their management style on incentivizing employees, should generally avoid spending too much time joking around with subordinates because it tends to undermine their authority as managers. For example, these types of leaders got no benefit from using self-defeating humor; the respondents indicated that they felt it eroded the supervisor’s perceived ability to reward or admonish them.

Fed Cyber Security Focuses on Major Threats in a High-Risk World

“If there was a breach that could drain the funds out of a major central bank, that’s a major issue,” said Ted Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington and a former director of Division of International Finance at the Fed Board. “At a minimum, it would be very damaging to the reputation of the bank.” Such a scenario seems increasingly less far-fetched. News broke in March that hackers stole $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the New York Fed, the biggest known cyber-heist in history. The regional Fed has said that the instructions to make the payments were authenticated by the Swift message system, which is widely used by financial institutions.

Ethics should be at the core of cybersecurity

Reflecting on his time in defence, the major general said organised cybercrime is not only global, but also a lucrative industry. Governments and businesses alike need to play catch-up, as Day said many cybercriminals worked out long before most that data is a commodity from which you can make money. "Some of these criminals have very close links to the intelligence and security services of their countries; sometimes we found it difficult to determine if an attack had been prosecuted by a criminal gang or by a nation state," he said "Some of these criminals work for their intelligence or security services by day, and at night to make money on the side, use their learned tradecraft." According to Day, cyber incidents are now reasonably foreseeable, which he said is very important when a business finds itself in court.

Intel's Next Monster 24 Core Chip Is Made For High Performance Computers

Intel's biggest focus for Xeon E7 v4 is in-memory processing, used for applications like databases. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which sell analytics and database software, are placing more emphasis on in-memory processing because it's faster than continuously shuffling data between the CPU, memory, and storage. The chips support DDR4 memory. The Xeon E7-8800 v4 family plays into Intel's other areas of focus -- the Internet of Things, memory, and silicon photonics -- because powerful chips could help advance those technologies. Servers could be toolboxes where data collected from IoT clients could be analyzed, Buddenbaum said. Intel is putting emphasis on FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), but Buddenbaum said E7 v4 chips aren't designed for use with them. FPGAs are a better match for the company's Xeon E5 v4 servers, which have between one to four sockets.

Quote for the day:

"Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds." --

Wilbur Smith

June 05, 2016

The barbell effect of machine learning

One of machine learning’s most lasting areas of impact will be to democratize basic intelligence through the commoditization of an increasingly sophisticated set of semantic and analytic services, most of which will be offered for free, enabling step-function changes in software capabilities. These services today include image recognition, translation and natural language processing and will ultimately include more advanced forms of interpretation and reasoning. Software will become smarter, more anticipatory and more personalized, and we will increasingly be able to access it through whatever interface we prefer – chat, voice, mobile application, web, or others yet to be developed. Beneficiaries will include technology developers and users of all kinds.

Unstructured Data Miners Chase Silver with Deep Learning

There’s a tremendous amount of value hidden in unstructured data, including social media posts, news stories, legal documents, and other free sources of data. But as indico CEO Slater Victoroff explains, it can be very difficult to get useful insights out of these sources, such as performing sentiment analyses. “We found the majority of people are either not doing anything with unstructured data, or not doing nearly enough with it,” Victoroff tells Datanami. “The main barrier to sentiment analysis is not making a better model. It’s getting more data.” Indico claims it has come up with a better way to analyze unstructured data. While much of how the platform works is secret, key breakthroughs involve the combination of silver-standard corpora training data, as well as the use of transfer learning techniques to accelerate the training of its recurrent neural network (RNN) model.

Tech Conferences: Where the Conversation Has Been and Where It Should Go

Security conferences are an important way to educate and engage an audience beyond the security professional and hackers of the world who attend. The most important conversation we can have is that cybersecurity can no longer be an aftermarket consideration. It needs to be built into every new network and infrastructure system. For example, the idea of collective problem solving would call for “crowdsourcing” information from beyond just cybersecurity professionals and would focus on the collective knowledge of individuals with diverse skill sets to identify and address where existing technologies are lacking and vulnerable. These conferences strive to foster community building among different groups of people working on the same problems. They create an open space where ideas can be shared, people can connect, and collaboration can flourish, ultimately leading to better technology and stronger systems.

Machine Learning Is Redefining The Enterprise In 2016

The good news for businesses is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to strategic goals being accomplished. Revenue teams are using machine learning to optimize promotions, compensation and rebates drive the desired behavior across selling channels. Predicting propensity to buy across all channels, making personalized recommendations to customers, forecasting long-term customer loyalty and anticipating potential credit risks of suppliers and buyers are Figure 1 provides an overview of machine learning applications by industry.

Why stop at DevOps? How about AllOps?

We fully embrace this mindset but we think it is too limiting. Why stop at providing seamless integration and automation for just the developers? After all, there are many other teams that surround and interact with IT operations. Why not let them do the same thing—use their tools of choice to interact with the operations environment in a fully integrated and automated manner? For instance, the virtualization admin may want to provision new infrastructure, update existing infrastructure, or see how virtual resources, such as networks, are mapped to the physical infrastructure. Rather than requiring two teams, two tools, and manual processes, shouldn’t the virtualization admin expect a VirtOps environment? Shouldn’t they be able to work in their preferred virtualization tool and still interact with the physical infrastructure in an integrated and automated way?

A Self Motivated Tester in an Agile World

We have to strongly concentrate on the ‘Agile Manifesto’ which says to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. As testers, there is a need to work as members of the team and to engage with others within the team, regardless of titles. The role of a tester is to test. However, if you see a task that is stuck and needs immediate attention, even though it’s part of the developer's job, you should take up the task. The title and role of every individual working should have less impact in any matter. Regular and timely communication is yet another aspect. Use the daily scrum meeting as the best platform to communicate effectively with the entire team. We have to look at incorporating some best practices so that our efforts as an Agile tester are really effective.

EU's market watchdog to take deeper look at blockchain

"It is too early at this stage to form a definite opinion on whether DLT (blockchain) will be able to address these issues in an efficient way," the watchdog said in a statement. "ESMA stresses that firms willing to use DLT (blockchain) should be mindful of the existing regulatory framework." The watchdog also published a discussion paper asking for more views on blockchain's risks and benefits to help it decide whether new rules are needed for securities markets. "ESMA believes that the DLT will need to overcome a number of possible challenges and shortcomings before its benefits can be reaped," the watchdog said. "Some of these challenges are related to the technology itself. Others are mainly related to possible governance, privacy and regulatory issues." Regulators are trying to work out what is really new about blockchain in case it takes off.

Confluent Platform 3.0 Supports Kafka Streams for Real-Time Data Processing

Kafka Streams is a lightweight solution to real-time processing of data which is useful in use cases such as fraud and security monitoring, Internet of Things (IoT) operations and machine monitoring. It provides a new, native streaming development environment for Kafka. Developers will be able to leverage this library for building distributed stream processing applications using Kafka. Kafka covers the messaging and transport of data, Kafka Streams covers the processing of the data. Kafka Streams also supports stateful and stateless processing as well as distributed fault tolerant processing of data. No dedicated cluster, message translation layer, or external dependencies are required to use Kafka Streams. It processes one event at a time instead of as micro-batches of messages. It also allows for late arrival of data and windowing with out-of-order data.

Artificial intelligence is changing SEO faster than you think

Google’s RankBrain is in the camp of the Connectionists. Connectionists believe that all our knowledge is encoded in the connections between neurons in our brain. And RankBrain’s particular strategy is what experts in the field call a back propagation technique, rebranded as “deep learning.” Connectionists claim this strategy is capable of learning anything from raw data, and therefore is also capable of ultimately automating all knowledge discovery. Google apparently believes this, too. On January 26th, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, which was, essentially, a back propagation shop. So when we talk about RankBrain, we now can tell people it is comprised of one particular technique on ANI. Now that we have that out of the way, just how much is this field progressing?

Zimbabwe: IT Governance Integral Part of Corporate Governance

IT governance now constitutes a key component of every company's strategic plan and consequently it has become a standing agenda item at board meetings. There are also other factors that have catapulted focus on IT governance. IT systems and e-commerce, despite their advantages have also brought with them a lot of operational risks which organisations need to mitigate. Cybercrime has become a very big challenge to organisations with computer database hacking, data corruption, manipulation and loss, phasing, identity theft, card fraud, virtual money laundering etc becoming more rampant globally. This has produced disastrous consequences not only to organisations, their customers and stakeholders, but also to global economies and stability. The rise in cybercrime has placed organisations in "panic mode" catalysing them to invest more in risk mitigation measures as part of their IT governance framework.

Quote for the day:

"Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it." -- Richard Bach

June 04, 2016

Building Data Systems: What Do You Need?

Data engineers must be as conscious of the specifics of the physical infrastructure as that of the applications themselves. Though modern frameworks and platforms make the process of writing code faster and more accessible, the scale in terms of data volume, velocity, and variety of modern data processing means that conceptually abstracting away the scheduling and distribution of computation is difficult. Put another way, engineers need to understand the mechanics of how the data will processed, even when using frameworks and platforms. SSD vs. disk, attached storage or not, how much memory, how many cores, etc. are decisions that data engineers have to make in order to design the best solution for the targeted data and workloads. All of this means reducing friction between developer and infrastructure deployment is imperative.

4 Reasons Why Bitcoin Represents A New Asset Class

“It’s governed by a protocol run by a distributed network of computers,” says White. “That’s in stark contrast to fiat currencies, which are dictated by government monetary policy. Bitcoin is really just math, code, run by individuals on their computers all over the world to ensure the credibility of it, and on the opposite end, you have fiat governed by a small group of individuals.” A look at the growth in the supply compared to gold and the U.S. monetary base shows in a glance how differently Bitcoin, which will be capped at 21 million bitcoins and whose release is halved every four years until the maximum number of bitcoins is reached, functions.

Three important security upgrades to Android N

If you're a Chromebook user, you're already accustomed to that little arrow icon popping up to say that updates are ready to install. This is very much like the old Windows update. Although that Windows update caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, and issues with Chrome OS updates rarely appear. The same holds true with Android. This is important because so many users neglect to bother checking for updates. To that end, their devices will go with unpatched security issues for months. With the new update system, those patches will be applied in the background, in a sort of isolated instance of the operating system...running completely isolated from the working instance. During this time, all apps will be optimized (again, in the background). Once all apps are optimized, the operating system will seamlessly transition to the updated version.

Human Error Biggest Risk To Health IT

"Nearly all past successful network penetrations can be traced to one or more human errors that allowed the adversary to gain access to and, in some cases, exploit mission-critical information," Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the memo. "Raising the level of individual human performance in cybersecurity provides tremendous leverage in defending the [DoD's networks]." Medina's agency, which sits at the intersection of the military and healthcare and arenas, presents a target-rich environment for cyber criminals and other groups of digital adversaries. But the health sector in general has become a favorite target of hackers for a rather logical reason.

Myspace, Tumblr megabreaches put spotlight on security knowledge gap

"Board members, business [members] really don't understand the threat," he said at the recent MIT CIO Sloan Symposium -- this despite security now garnering more and more attention from the board and the C-suite. "They really understand that the level of sophistication, the amount of individuals that are involved in cyberattacks and their skill set have increased substantially in the last five to seven years," said Morrison, ... . Defense Intelligence Agency before joining State Street in 2013. One hopeful note: Security ignorance is not bliss for the majority of security professionals. According to the CompTIA survey, the 53% of security staff respondents who reported gaps in their departments' security skills said they wanted to be more informed in the latest cyberthreats, and about 40% feel they need to get better at educating end users, or that they need to know more about modern security technology.

Cities Are Ahead in the IoT Game, but States Need to Catch Up

“Government agencies that adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward the IoT are unlikely to develop the expertise or engender the trust needed to effectively and efficiently deliver services in this new reality and to reassure citizens concerned about how this new technology will affect them…public sector leaders ready to start tapping into the potential of IoT technology can begin by identifying specific, pressing mission challenges, and then analyze how more or better information, real-time analysis, or automated actions might help address them.” CIOs can also work at the enterprise level with agency heads or CIOs to develop standardization, avoiding silos and individual systems. Incompatible systems for IoT and data management will slow down the effectiveness and benefits of IoT for state government. CIOs should not understate the dollar value of IoT on the state budget.

Borderless Cyber Europe 2016 to emphasize the importance of threat intelligence sharing

We in the security industry might like to believe that attackers operate in a dog-eat-dog world. But that’s simply not the case. They are more than willing to exchange information. It just needs to be under the right circumstances. “Digital threats have moved sophisticated attacks techniques down into the realm of organized crime,” observes Peter Allor, a security strategist at IBM. “Whether by purchasing others’ tools or simply by telling one another, computer criminals are constantly sharing information with one another about how threats work and how they can modify a technique to accomplish a specific purpose.” In the process, they are also contributing to the collective threat intelligence knowledgebase, which empowers every bad actor to conduct more sophisticated attacks in the future.

How Six Sigma Promotes a Culture of Innovation

Taken to its extremes, one would have to dispense entirely with the scientific method of inquiry to buy into the critique, at least with respect to some of the stages of the creative process and the R&D role. “It’s an oversimplification to suggest that Six Sigma always has a chilling effect on innovation because of its emphasis on metrics and method and conformation to standards, thereby shutting down the timid who are afraid of the error part of trial-and-error, or those responsible for the cost justification of it,” said Mike DiLeo, president of Management & Strategy Institute, a provider of online, self-paced certification courses in Six Sigma. That the Six Sigma culture, because of its emphasis on planning and measurement, is incompatible with innovation isn’t necessarily the case. It wouldn’t be Six Sigma without an emphasis on metrics, so it’s fair to acknowledge that some businesses,

How Ransomware Affects Hospital Data Security

While hospital ransomware attacks are not a new issue, healthcare is likely becoming a more prominent target because of the sensitive information that organizations in the industry hold. The apparent increase in healthcare ransomware issues though, has not gone unnoticed, and stakeholders are beginning to take steps to ensure that covered entities and business associates of all sizes have the necessary tools to keep data secure. For example, the California Senate Public Safety Committee passed ransomware legislation earlier this year that outlaws the online act and specifies how the crime should be prosecuted. The legislation amends existing law that “establishes various crimes relating to computer services and systems” and defines extortion as “obtaining the property of another, with his or her consent, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear.”

The rise of SDDC and the future of enterprise IT

According to Gartner's Morency, the initial value provided by the SDDC is threefold: more automation, more agility, and more flexibility. With less manual effort, organizations can use their employees more efficiently and greater agility helps operations respond more quickly to business requests. An additional and often-overlooked use case for SDDC is in improving data center resiliency, said Morency. SDDC also helps to "provide the means by which the in-house enterprise IT staff can begin to configure, provision, [and] activate compute and storage resources at a level that's, maybe not the same, but much more competitive, much closer to what the large public cloud providers can offer," Morency added.

Quote for the day:

"We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles." -- James Earl Carter, Jr.