Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 13, 2016

10 key considerations when building a private cloud

A private cloud enables enterprises to secure and control applications and data while providing the ability for development teams to deliver business value faster and in a frictionless manner. But while building a private cloud can transform IT, it can also be an expensive science experiment without careful planning and preparation. ... Private cloud can be a transformative path for an enterprise. But like any transformative change, it requires significant thought, dedication and perseverance. By paying attention to the practices outlined above, enterprises can navigate the transformation to empower the business to become faster at delivering value and viewing IT as an accelerator of this transformation.

The New Cloud, and the Even Newer One on the Way

First, in a reversal from earlier impressions, organizations are starting to realize that data is in fact more secure in the cloud than at home, removing the last great barrier to widespread deployment. And with Big Data and IoT workloads coming down the pike, enterprises are eager to tap into machine learning, containers and advanced mobile technologies, which can be done much quicker and at less cost in the cloud than by building out data center infrastructure. Not everything is suitable for the cloud, however. According to SolarWinds’ Gerardo Dada, there are a number of key criteria when it comes to determining what should and should not leave the data center. Applications with multiple dependencies, such as CRM and ERP, might have trouble in the cloud, while a self-contained company blog would not.

Automated Regression Testing Made Easy with CasperJS

This script will rely on Casper’s evaluate() method. The method allows you to evaluate an expressionwithin the context of the current DOM. This is an important concept to grasp when working with PhantomJS or Casper: evaluate() acts as a bridge between the casperjs environment and page context. Simply put, when you pass a function to evaluate(), it will be executed as if you typed it into the browser’s console. Using evaluate() allows us to enter the DOM, run some JS code, and return values for further processing within the Casper environment. Which is exactly how we are going to get our gallery image sizes so we can compare them and verify the dimensions.

Google makes Gmail safer with new security warnings to fight phishing

The warnings, announced Wednesday, will impact Gmail use on the web or Android. If an email sender cannot be authenticated, Gmail will display a question mark in place of the sender's profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar. Users are authenticated with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), a digital signature on outgoing messages that uses a private domain key to encrypt your domain's outgoing mail headers. If you receive a message with a link to a site known for phishing, malware, or Unwanted Software, you'll see a warning when you click on the link—an extension of the Safe Browsing protection already available on most browsers.

Aligning the organization for its digital future

Almost every company expects digital disruption in some form or another—but how are they actually preparing for it? Perhaps surprisingly, this preparation may need to be more cultural than technological. Tanya Ott spoke with Gerald Kane about companies’ differing levels of digital maturity as they compete in a rapidly changing world. ... It’s very easy to pretend to do it and not do it. It’s very easy to give it lip service and not execute on those things. If you want to be serious about competing in a digital world, you’ve got to look in a mirror first. You gotta recognize where you fall short on these aspects, and then you have to actually do real and meaningful and substantive change.

Why Data Integration is the Future of Marketing

If organizations are unable to identify the best leads or most promising existing customers, communication breaks down and marketing can become unaligned with sales. This results in irrelevant or unused content, and redundant efforts from both teams. This underscores the benefits of integrating data into one tool or dashboard that can analyze all data and surface the most relevant information. ... Organizations also must integrate their marketing technologies to create a cleaner, more manageable tech stack that drives real revenue impact. To maximize productivity and save valuable time, teams need to streamline processes by adopting fewer solutions that do more, and integrate all of those seamlessly so that insights are unearthed and presented in a digestible way for marketing and sales teams.

Introduction to Hyperledger: Why Open Blockchain is critical for business

The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort designed to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing the necessary features that can be captured in a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers. The thought leaders behind the project consider the peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology of blockchain to be the next generation foundation for transactional applications, one that establishes trust, accountability, and transparency while reducing the cost and complexity of business processes. They think of blockchain as an operating system for interactions. … a whole bunch of banks, a whole bunch of technology firms are going to get together and literally change the nature of money and trust on the Internet.

Humanizing change: Developing more effective change management strategies

When you ask employees to change, you are demanding something ambitious—asking them to change their mental model of how the organization should work. This requires engaging in “System 2” thinking, which is where much more thoughtful deliberation occurs, to reshape and even challenge an existing belief system. But when confronted with new information, System 1 automatically creates a picture of what we know, often ignoring information that conflicts with our assumptions, while filling in missing information based on what our mental models interpret to be true, This is why simply making a rational, incentive-based case for change often fails to win over employees. It is likely falling on only partially listening ears.

Linux TCP flaw lets 'anyone' hijack Internet traffic

The problem exists in any operating system running Linux kernel 3.6 or newer. Linux 3.6 was introduced in 2012. The vulnerability allows an attacker from anywhere on the internet to search for connections between a client and a server. Once such a network connection is found, the attacker can invade it, cause connection termination, and perform data injection attacks. How bad is it? The discoverers say the attack is fast and reliable, takes less than a minute, and works about 90 percent of the time. According to University of California at Riverside (UCR) researchers, the Linux TCP/IP security hole can be used by attackers in a variety of ways: hackers can remotely hijack users' internet communications, launch targeted attacks that track users' online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts, or degrade the privacy guarantee of anonymity networks such as Tor.

Calculating True North for IoT Applications

You'll need a few libraries installed on your Raspberry Pi, these will give you access to your GPS and Magnetic Models through code. The compass does not require additional libriaries but it does use i2c-dev.h. ... The first step is to read the GPS coordinates from your device. Using GPSd and libgpsmm.h make it pretty simple to access your GPS data. We're going to make a class to manage this interface and supply us with values streamed from the device. The GPS uses a serial connection and the sentences returned are parsed for you by libgps. We can either use the raw coordinate values returned or they can be broken into components like degrees, minutes and seconds.

Quote for the day:

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” -- Les Brown

August 12, 2016

How smart offices of the future can make companies more intelligent

A smart office will change everything. Think of how, just 10 years ago, a desktop computer was everything. Now, most employees use multiple devices daily, said Jeremy Ashley, group vice president for Oracle Applications User Experience. "The office has just become one part of the entire story. We're looking to see what types of trends are emerging here. One example is a trend that has emerged only because we have these devices. Everywhere I've been around the world, I ask, 'what's the very first thing you do in the morning?' Doesn't matter where it is, they say, 'I pick up my phone and I read my email, my Facebook, and a selection of other things.' This is a brand new behavior. It's never happened before," Ashley said.

New DBMS products open the door for a once dormant market

As new requirements, such as the need to support more unstructured data, emerged from advances like social networking, start-up vendors approached DBMS concepts differently. "The DBMS market had become quite boring, but market changes recently have made it much more interesting," said Donald Feinberg, vice president, analyst at Gartner. Traditional system revenue has flattened out, but sales of new tools -- although small in relation to the total market -- are increasing by double digits. So, buying a DBMS is no longer a simple choice among Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. One reason for the recent attention is the market's size and growth. The database market is expected to increase from $40 billion in 2015 to $50 billion by 2017, according to IDC. A number of factors are fueling the growth and market shake-up.

Busting Bimodal Myths

Bimodal is the practice of managing two separate but coherent styles of work: one focused on situations of greater predictability, the other where exploration is required. Mode 1 is optimized for areas that are more well-understood. It focuses on exploiting what is known. This includes renovating the legacy environment, so it is fit for a digital world. Mode 2 is exploratory, potentially experimenting to solve new problems. Mode 2 is optimized for areas of uncertainty. Mode 2 often works on initiatives that begin with a hypothesis that is tested and adapted during a process involving short iterations. ... “Bimodal capability that marries the renovation of the IT core with the exploratory approach to developing new digital products and services is essential for an enterprise to survive and flourish in the digital era,” said Mr. Mingay.

Want The Government To Do Something About Cybersecurity?

Our IT infrastructures and capabilities are known to produce benefits for our economy, but clearly we are sub optimized in our current approach. Our schools still teach the old way with almost no benefits from new technology. Most students have no more than a working knowledge of computers. And we turn out too few who can master IT. Economically, we have great unrealized potential in using IT to enable job growth and economic benefits while reducing cost of healthcare, cost of living and cost of education. Smart IT can also reduce cost of business and reduce the cost of goods to consumers. In the federal government, IT helps serve citizens but CIOs and CTOs struggle agency by agency to deliver value.

Information security ignorance is not a defense

Government entities, regulators, and the courts are increasingly applying the "reasonableness" test to determine if an organization was responsible for a breach, or other security lapse. First, courts in California applied this standard, followed closely by the FTC. Unfortunately, "reasonableness," as it relates to information security practice, is nowhere defined specifically. Even so, this standard will likely be applied by many courts in the growing number of security-related lawsuits. It is clear that businesses of all sizes must ensure that they have done everything practical to protect their customer assets, and to prevent any harm to those customers due to their neglence. Given the rise in litigation, however, they must also be able to demonstrate in court that their precautions were "reasonable."

Why Outsourced Call Center Roles Are Coming Back Onshore

So-called “enabler technologies” accounted for about half of the reported investments by contact center providers from 2014 to 1015 — with analytics, automation and multichannel tools the biggest areas of spending, according to the Everest Group report. “CRM and communication technologies have become table stakes with most, if not all, providers including them within their portfolio,” Bhargava says. “In order to differentiate themselves in the hyper-competitive call center outsourcing landscape as well as cater to enterprise needs, service providers have invested in enabler technologies.” HGS, for example, launched its DigiCx platform, which incorporates automation and analytics to deliver chat-as-a-service and other self-service capabilities.

Business Intelligence Analytics is the Future of SaaS

Data preparation is quickly becoming a critical capability of experts, who traditionally relied on others to get the data sorted out and ready from them. In order to transform unsorted data into information on demand, people doing customer targeting, risk analysis and marketing operations will need the necessary tools and skills to handle self-service data preparation at scale. As the gap widens between all of the data and the people who know how to analyze it and use it, companies that do not adapt to modern standards will experience big data blunders, such as embarrassing data quality errors and miscalculation of data.

How developers define 'open' and 'closed' technology

"Open" is one of the most nebulous terms in technology, yet it's also a label that oddly carries huge emotional baggage. To be open is to be on the side of truth and righteousness. To be closed or proprietary is, well, on par with drinking unicorn blood. (Hint: only Voldemort does that.) The problem, however, is that there are no hard and fast rules for "open" or "closed," yet we act as if there were. Perhaps the best way to sniff out true "openness" is to look to developers to see what they feel comfortable building upon. With developers as our guide, the stark differences between open and closed become much more subtle and interesting.

Asymmetric Information Is Economists' Little Secret

Why is asymmetric information so crucial to an understanding of financial markets? It’s probably related to the reason people want financial assets in the first place. People want cars and bananas and microwave ovens because those things are immediately useful. But most people who buy and sell financial assets have no intrinsic desire for the asset itself -- they only care about how its value to other people will change in the future. That means that while information is important for many products, when it comes to financial markets, information is the product. Many major economics papers have explored this fact. One example is the famous 1980 paper “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets,” by Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz.

Inside Look at SWIFT-Related Bank Attacks

"We came across a very interesting piece of malware and one of our researchers, during their analysis, recognized that this malware is likely to have been used in the attack against the Bangladesh Bank," McKinty says. "That's where we got engaged with SWIFT. We were able to provide them some insight, with regard to what had happened at the Bangladesh Bank." And from there, the tale of the malware got more interesting, he adds. While attributing any of these attacks to a single entity or group is challenging, McKinty says the code used in the Bangladesh attack is not widely available in the underground. As a result, BAE believes that the code used in the SWIFT-related attacks is a variant of the same code used in the attacks against Sony Pictures and the bank in Vietnam, he says.

Quote for the day:

"No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code." -- Ken Thompson

August 11, 2016

IT leaders: In the wake of Delta Airlines outage, it's time to simplify

Efforts to reduce complexity, like application portfolio rationalizations, are usually placed low on the priority list, since they're expensive and, when executed perfectly, are completely transparent to end users, save for a large bill for the effort. The historical problem with reducing complexity was a high cost, with a low perceived return. ROI calculations usually centered around reduced hardware and support costs from eliminating redundancy and complexity, which rarely covered the high cost of replatforming, rebuilding, or retiring a legacy application. However, incidents like Delta's readily demonstrate the very real costs of IT complexity in lost revenue. A company need not be a complex, time-sensitive operation like an airline to experience this challenge;

The Differences Between Virtual reality, Augmented Reality And Mixed Reality

Virtual reality is hot, and enterprise- and consumer-facing organizations are eager to figure out how they can take advantage of the new medium, whether it be for entertainment, productivity, sales, or a myriad of other potential uses. However, sometimes lost in all this excitement is the difference between virtual reality platforms and whether the required technical underpinnings are in place to deliver a satisfying user experience. It’s important to understand what virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality are in relation to each other, as well as the technical considerations that those hoping to create experiences for these platforms need to keep in mind.

Canadians Moving Fast and Hard into Blockchain Space

Reports this month suggest the Canadian market will work on strengthening its global position of implementing potential use cases for Blockchain technology. Blockchain News reported recently that payments tech firm NetCents revealed a new partnership with The Vanbex Group, owners of Blockchain payments tool Genisys, to help banks in Canada implement the distributed ledger technology. ... NetCents isn’t the only company anticipating disruption to ACH payments by Blockchain technology. The Deloitte Centre for Financial Services released a report in March that pinpointed ACH payments as a target for Blockchain disruption, and that Blockchain-based payments platforms could reach the scale and volume that ACH currently holds (at 23 billion transactions a year) by 2025.

What do CIOs in high-performing companies do differently?

As companies increasingly rely on technology as a competitive differentiator, CIOs need to build and sustain peer relationships with other C-suite leaders. But all relationships are not created equal. A strong CFO-CIO relationship, for example, can mean smarter technology investments that align with strategic growth plans, improve business performance, and administer effective risk governance.4 This isn’t lost on HPC CIOs. When asked which relationships are important for their success, most (93 percent) consider the CFO relationship one of the top strategic relationships. Only 70 percent of other CIO respondents agreed.

Consortium develops prototype blockchain application for banks

The consortium utilised the Linux Foundation open-source Hyperledger Project blockchain fabric, the development of which was supported by IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. The consortium said that the proof of concept shows the potential to streamline the manual processing of import/export documentation and improve security by reducing errors; this could also increase convenience for all parties through mobile interaction and make companies' working capital more predictable. The consortium now plans to conduct further testing on the concept's commercial application with selected partners such as corporates and shippers.

Data theft rises sharply, insiders to blame

IT professionals also claimed that "insider negligence" is the most common, root cause of a data breach -- and is twice as likely to cause the loss of data in comparison to external attackers, malicious employees with an axe to grind, or lax contractor security. In total, 87 percent of respondents said their jobs require them to access and use data including customer information, contact lists, employee records, financial reports, and corporate documents, but only 29 percent of IT respondents said their organizations enforce a least-privilege model to keep access to this kind of information on a 'need to know' basis. To make matters worse, the survey suggests over a third of businesses have no searchable record of file system activity, and only 25 percent of organizations monitor employee, email, and file activity.

Tech 'utopia is creepy,' according to Nicholas Carr

When we saw the resurrection of the internet after the big dot-com bust, there was this sense that the walls of old media and the gatekeepers were coming down and there was golden age of people in control of their own expression and what they read. This was a strong theme back then. There was Wired cover story called “We are the web” that presented this as a whole new world opening up. What we've seensince then has been very different. The old gatekeepers, to the extent they were gatekeepers, have been replaced by companies like Facebook and Google and companies that really now have become the new media companies and are very much controlling the flow of information.

IT asset management: How to be efficient

Having a service management discipline and ITAM together helps organizations make more informed decisions and design better processes. Imagine the value of having a change risk calculator that factors in asset details such as the age of the assets being changed or whether it was due to be returned from a lease expiring in sixty days. Having solid practices or procedures for collecting asset lifecycle data along with a sophisticated inventory ensures the reliability and integrity of the information. Getting started is not simple. True governance practices require that the company’s learning and growth culture with an effective long-range plan will guide the successful implementation of this business initiative.

Here’s Why We Need Fintech Disruption Now More Than Ever

Maybe it’s unfair to expect fintech mount a meaningful challenge to the likes of JPMorgan and Nasdaq in just a few years. The aspect of the financial world that makes it so apt for disruption – its top-heavy concentration – is also what makes it so hard to disrupt. Neither should the engineering challenge be minimized. The technology of finance is probably second only to agriculture (and maybe one “other” profession) in how long humans have spent honing it. Financial startups inevitably bump into realities that explain why banking is so cumbersome to begin with. They tend to to end up focusing on pesky chores like verifying customers’ identities, or trying to establish systems that are actually indeed secure.

Myth busted: Older workers are just as tech-savvy as younger ones, says new survey

"It's dangerous for companies to assume that if you're under 35, you're tech savvy," said Paul Bernard, an executive coach and regular contributor to Next Avenue, a website for 50-plus-year-olds. "In many cases, I've seen that many older people are able to combine tech-savvy with communication skills—almost without exception, it's easier for older workers to pick up more tech skills than younger workers, who are tech savvy, to pick up communication skills." ... "Older job applicants are viewed as too expensive, and thus are often automatically rejected," Matloff said. "Some employers do claim that the older ones are rejected due to not having up-to-date skills, but I have found that that is generally just an excuse, and that most older tech workers do have modern skill sets."

Quote for the day:

"If you make decisions based upon people's reactions or judgments then you make really boring choices." -- Heath Ledger

August 10, 2016

Protecting privacy in genomic databases

The new system, which Berger and Simmons developed together with Cenk Sahinalp, a professor of computer science at Indiana University, implements a technique called “differential privacy,” which has been a major area of cryptographic research in recent years. Differential-privacy techniques add a little bit of noise, or random variation, to the results of database searches, to confound algorithms that would seek to extract private information from the results of several, tailored, sequential searches. The amount of noise required depends on the strength of the privacy guarantee — how low you want to set the likelihood of leaking private information — and the type and volume of data. The more people whose data a SNP database contains, the less noise the system needs to add; essentially, it’s easier to get lost in a crowd.

Researcher hides stealthy malware inside legitimate digitally signed files

If an executable file is signed, information about its signature is stored in its header, inside a field called the attribute certificate table (ACT) that's excluded when calculating the file's hash -- a unique string that serves as a cryptographic representation of its contents. This makes sense because the digital certificate information is not part of the original file at the time when it is signed. It's only added later to certify that the file is configured as intended by its creator and has a certain hash. However, this means that attackers can add data, including another complete file inside the ACT field, without changing the file hash and breaking the signature. Such an addition will modify the overall file size on disk, which includes its header fields, and this file size is checked by Microsoft's Authenticode technology when validating a file signature.

Huawei cyber president warns technology is a breeder of threats

"Of course it's more complicated now than 35 years ago, but the technology of 35 years ago is still a security challenge, and here we are looking forward five and 10 years towards things that have not really been invented. We don't really know they're going to be fully used around the world and yet people are asking 'how do you secure this world?'" His advice is to focus on securing this world -- not the PC of 35 years ago -- because shortly after each new technology is born a threat occurs. Suffolk does not expect this to change. Due to the public nature of many recent data breaches or security hacks, Suffolk believes that many customers now understand intrinsically what goes on with security, noting it has not stopped them from embracing technology.

16 Stunning Statistics that Forecast the Future of the Internet of Things

Everyone’s talking about the Internet of Things, even the “things,” which can now request and deliver customer support, tell if you’re being as productive as you could be at work, let your doctor know if you’re following orders (or not), reduce inefficiencies in energy consumption, improve business processes, predict issues and proactively improve or resolve them based on data received. The Internet of Things (IoT) is just getting started. These forecasts below show why organizations need to get started too (if they haven’t already) on leveraging and responding to the Internet of Things

Part 1: Machine Learning’s Promise for Cybersecurity

Williamson told an industry panel in May that machine learning and data science solutions are “very technique driven.” “Pretty well every provider of analytics solutions will say ‘look at the techniques I’ve got – I’ve got some core vector machines, I invented one of the core vector machine algorithms, it’s a great technique’,” he said. “It’s still a technique. How do you know for your problems that it’s useful? You don’t.” For some however, especially the data scientists in this field like Rehak, machine learning nevertheless holds great promise for making the Internet more secure. Some argue in fact, it’s not just possible that machine learning will improve security; it’s inevitable.

Storage Flexibility Benefits Multitenant Environment

Disruption, as we've heard, is around containers. We're launching a new container-as-a-service platform later this year based on ContainerX. That will allow us to do containers for both Windows or Starnix platforms, regardless of what the developers are looking for. We're targeting developers, DevOps guys, who are looking to do microservices to take their application, old or new, and architect it into the containers. That’s going to be a very disruptive new offering. We've been working on a platform for a while now because we have multiple locations and we can do the geographic dispersion for that. I think it’s going to take a little bit of the VMware market share over time. We're primarily a VMware shop, but I don’t think it’s going to be too much of an impact to us. It's another vertical we're going to be going after. Those are probably the two most important things we see as big disruptive factors for us.

The most critical gap in cybersecurity today: Talent

Despite the growing breadth/depth of security threats in the everyday organization, it is typical to find an unstructured security team that is not providing professional growth or continued education opportunities. Furthermore, the few professionals who are qualified are spread too thin and tend to burn out quickly. This has also had a profound impact on the security industry, which is now seeing 1 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs in 2016 alone, and that number is expected to increase to 6 million global job openings by 2019. While the task of closing this gap seems daunting, it is important for enterprises to shift their focus to their internal teams to cultivate the talent that already exists within their organizations, even if it’s minimal to start.

Where Do We Go with Robotics?

The word “robot” was coined by Karel Capek from the Czech word “robota” meaning “hard work” or “slavery”. On these aspects, robots play a part in relieving human workers from difficult or risky tasks, while being under their supervision. Volkswagen is testing them to relieve their workers from difficult tasks on assembly lines. Companies working with radioactive material use them to control and inspect their facilities. The army is willing to use them to make sure a military field is safe and cleaned from any explosive device. As for many technologies before, citizens are willing to call them progress only when they start benefitting from them. They may even have forgotten about one of the very first concerns that crystallized the word “robot” when it was coined: the diminution of employment in the industry.

Building engaging and secure mobile apps

Users must feel confident installing the app and using it wherever they might want to. However, most public Wi-Fi networks lack security. So it would be a wise choice to disable automatic connectivity to such networks to prevent loss of important data. Data leaks are the concern where users are expected to sync data to the cloud. The vendor’s protection mechanisms cannot be controlled even if the company’s security policies comply with best practices. To tackle this issue, it is recommended to ensure a different password for every app or service. However, most of the security shortcomings are to be tested beforehand, on the development and testing stages of the security lifecycle. And it is hardly possible that marketers will be involved when making decisions of this kind.

No, 900 million Android devices are not at risk from the 'Quadrooter' monster

Verify Apps scans your device for potentially problematic programs both as you download new apps and continually over time. It'll stop you from installing any app that could compromise your device's security and will also warn you if an existing app starts doing anything suspicious. Verify Apps is present on every Android device running version 2.3 or higher -- which, according to Google's latest platform measurements, accounts for a whopping 99.9% of active Android devices. And Google has confirmed the system is already watching out for any "Quadrooter"-related mischief -- none of which, it's worth noting, has actually been observed in the real world.

Quote for the day:

"Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves." -- Tim Berners-Lee

August 09, 2016

Why All The Fuss About Blockchain?

There are so many people discussing blockchain today that the terminology has become incredibly confusing. Some talk about permissioned ledgers versus permissionless; consensusversus distributed ledgers; public versus private blockchains; and so on. It has, in other words, become a madness of markets in which everyone talks about it and few understand it. The only agreement is that this is a shared system, which means that more than one player must be in the game in order for a blockchain development to work. Those players may be internal – you could use blockchain protocol as a shared database of employee identities and authorizations – but most startups are looking externally. There is some method in the madness, however. Five of the leading lights in blockchain developments for banking are Ripple, R3, Digital Asset Holdings, Life.Sreda, and—perhaps surprisingly—Swift.

Dust-Size Sensors Could Heal You From The Inside

Once the sensors are that small, researchers say they could be implanted inside the brain, as well as in muscles or nerves. The sensors would be powered by a piezoelectric crystal, which can convert ultrasound vibrations outside the body into electricity that is used to run the sensor’s onboard transistor. Piezoelectricity is the charge that builds up in certain solid materials, such as bone, DNA and crystals, because of applied mechanical stress. In lab tests, so far, the sensors have been covered in surgical-grade epoxy. However, scientists are working on what they call "biocompatible thin films," which could one day cover the sensors and last as long as a decade inside the body. “The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology,”

Regulators Struggle to Deal with Fintech and Emerging Technologies

The great news, he says, is that the building blocks for transformation are already in place. Camden has an open data platform and an associated business intelligence stack. The systems have been used to help the council change its financial planning processes and move towards outcome-based budgeting based on citizen need. ... “I’ve been brought in to positively disrupt how we deliver public services. As someone that’s fresh to the organisation and sector, I’m able to see things and ask questions that others might miss. I think I have a talent for spotting where services might be more joined up.” Shiraji expects to be at Camden until the end of the year and possibly longer. For now, he is continuing to focus on creating a platform for delivering business change.

The parallel universe of Indian fintech

With the foundation for identification, verification and underlying bank accounts falling into place, policy makers have also taken aim at digital payments. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an open API that banks can implement to allow phone-to-phone payment transfers directly from bank accounts. In theory, this will allow the 1B+ mobile phones and an estimated 500M smart phones (by 2020) to be used for everything from peer to peer transfers, kirana store payments, migrant worker remittances and other common financial use cases. So, in a short span of time, India could potentially go from being a laggard to having cutting edge transaction infrastructure better than what’s available in developed countries. The interesting part is that this is being made available as free, neutral, open APIs that can be incorporated into any service.

Why building microservices may call upon your gardening skills

Losing the ability to grok the entire system is a major challenge to consider when building microservices, Rolnick pointed out. Often, the scale of the complexity that comes with microservices can be overwhelming for some, and preparing for that complexity is essential. "That's where really understanding that scale is going to get away from you, unless you plan for it from the beginning," he said. "The network effect of all these services quickly gets away from people, and they don't realize it until it's too late." As Rolnick said, management was simpler in the days of macroservices when IT depended on a single server, especially in the case of a crash. "Somebody might log in and start it back up -- that was easy."

A new flaw puts nearly a billion phones at risk

The problem is there are still so many hands in the pot when it comes to updating Android. Google updates its software, but device makers have to tailor it for their phones — and sometimes they get their software not from Google, but from chipmakers like Qualcomm. And then sometimes mobile carriers want to do their own testing to make sure they aren’t inadvertently introducing other problems onto their network. All that means the time from when a flaw is identified or disclosed to when it is fixed is longer than it should be, sometimes leaving hundreds of millions of phones vulnerable for weeks or months. “The problem continues to be that Android security updates are really hard because of [their] fragmented ecosystem,” said Check Point mobile security evangelist Jeff Zacuto told Recode.

Guide To Budget Friendly Data Mining

The easiest way to identify a business’s need for ETL processes or automated reporting is to find out who is reading data from a transaction database and then manipulating the data using a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is the same structure as a database table. Both contain rows and columns. If you have end-users manipulating data on their own, you should ask yourself, “Why can’t that process be automated?” Automating business processes provides an immediate return on investment and should always be considered before moving on to more expensive projects, such as data warehousing. Identifying end-users manipulating data via a spreadsheet may sound simple but there is a caveat to this process. Developers like to automate processes; it’s what they do. End-users don’t necessarily like automated processes, especially if they threaten their job.

Are Financial Services Ready For The Cloud?

A year ago, the Cloud Industry Forum survey revealed that 55 percent of organizations were planning to run their IT on a hybrid cloud basis. In the most recent survey, the number had reduced to 37 percent. “The point here is that there’s a plan for the adoption of cloud-only technology. The desire of organizations to move to a cloud-only IT environment is quite apparent,” says Hilton. While financial services run the risk of running into regulatory issues – in particular problems surrounding extraterritoriality – and management may be mired in legacy integration challenges, the position among many UK firms was aspirational, according to Hilton.

Dataiku Offers No-Code Machine Learning

"Dataiku DSS 3.1 introduces new visual machine learning engines that allow users to create incredibly powerful predictive applications within a code-free interface," the company said in a statement this week. "Users of all skill levels can now leverage HPE Vertica machine learning, H2O Sparkling Water, MLlib, Scikit-Learn and XGBoost directly from within the visual analysis section of Dataiku DSS 3.1 to apply powerful machine learning algorithms to their data science projects without having to write a single line of code." Visual capabilities help data jockeys gain new insights into ML models, said Dataiku, which now provides the visualization of trees to better illustrate decision tree, random forest and gradient boosting algorithms, along with the visualization of partial dependency plots for the latter.

There's Never A Shortage Of Security Holes

Three thoughts. One: When you’ve been caught selling an insecure product, is that really the best time to enforce a warranty time limit? Presumably, customers weren’t aware that the Anker product was ludicrously insecure until Bastille reported it. Two: If customers had wanted Bluetooth, they would have purchased that initially. Three: Here’s a wacky thought. How about fixing this product by adding encryption and then offering to send the fixed units to all customers for free, with no limits? That’s how you regain customers’ trust. Anker also said it had received no customer complaints, but it at least didn’t sound as if its internal communications were a giant mess: “We are happy to inform that we haven’t received any reports or complaints concerning this issue, to date.”

Quote for the day:

"Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle." -- Dr. Robert Anthony