Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - June 23, 2017

Where to spend your next security dollar

You probably haven’t thought about NACD for cyber security training. But, the program is the best security management course I have seen, is online and will give your senior executives a great overview of what your organization needs to be doing about security and risk management. The course describes the security management function and is general in scope, not compliance focused. If your executives participate in this training, they (and you) will have an excellent idea of the essential practices your organization needs to follow. The program connects security practices with business issues and language. I don’t have anything against my ISC2 and ISACA training courses, but their roots are in technology and audit. This training’s roots are in business.

Lightworks 14 review: Free video editing software lacks proper Mac decorum

With version 14, developer EditShare has taken great strides to make the Lightworks more consumer-friendly, consolidating the previously modular user interface into a fixed, full-screen workspace. (The flexible “classic” mode is still available from the Project Layout settings.) With the organized, single-window UI comes an easier to use application, but Mac users won’t feel quite at home. For starters, there are no menu options at all, and Lightworks shuns Apple’s traditional contextual menu shortcuts in favor of the Windows right-click approach. Likewise, the file browser has a distinctly Unix look and feel that makes macOS seem like a second-class citizen. Coming from years of experience with native Mac editing software, the transition was a bit jarring to say the least.

Atomistic and Holistic View of an Enterprise

Enterprises are complex adaptive systems where a complex adaptive system is defined as systems that are characterized by complex behaviors that emerge as a result of non-linear interactions in space and time among a large number of component systems at different levels of organization. That is a view of the enterprise arrived at by breaking it down into smaller units of organization may be useful in comprehending each individual part and how they fit into the larger whole, but it will not lead to a holistic understanding of the enterprise itself. To use an analogy, for example, if you get two cars, one from UK and the one from US, and break it apart and understand it in terms of their components, that analysis might answer some questions about the functioning of these cars, but that analysis alone will not tell you why one has the steering wheel on the left side and the other has it on the right side.

Automation And Society: Will Democracy Survive The Internet Of Things?

When the internet first went live, many commentators assumed it would provide a pure form of democracy. Everyone was given the same platform; age, race and gender were no longer relevant and we were all anonymous. But the reality was more chaotic, as we struggled to comprehend the power of a new tool that would revolutionize human life. This strange world was somewhere we could get lost and detach ourselves from everyday existence, but often it was also a quasi-reality that proved overwhelming and dangerous. Yet slowly we have found structure. Society has become inherently more intelligent - we can find the answer to almost anything at the click of a button. Those at the cutting-edge can now gain previously unimaginable insight into human tendencies and interests.

Stay out of the hot seat with turnkey private cloud

When it comes to implementing a multi-cloud strategy, your approach to private cloud can have a dramatic effect on your organization’s results. When compared with a DIY private cloud approach, implementing a turnkey private cloud will dramatically reduce the friction you experience. Less static friction with a turnkey private cloud means that your strategy will be implemented faster, accelerating time-to-value. Less dynamic friction with a turnkey private cloud means that ongoing cost and risk will be reduced, resulting in improved service levels and a better bottom line. Less friction means less heat. Keep yourself out of the hot seat and adopt a turnkey private cloud.

A new release management strategy depends on speed and efficiency

Dark launching is a similar process. Software is gradually and stealthily released to users in order to get their feedback as well as to test performance. Code is wrapped in a feature toggle that controls who gets to see the new feature and when. Facebook and Google rely on dark launches to gradually release and test new features to a small set of users before fully releasing them. This approach lets operations staff determine if users like or dislike the new function. It also allows for an assessment of system performance before moving ahead with a full release. As these different delivery options emerge, companies are looking for ways to train and familiarize their staff as part of a new software deployment strategy.

What it takes to be a security incident responder

The skills needed for a quality incident responder can be categorized into two main groups: personal skills and technical skills. “The greater one’s technical skills, the better the incident responder,” Henley says. Among the desirable skills are a good grasp of basic security principles such as confidentiality, authentication, access control and privacy; security vulnerabilities; physical security issues; protocol design flaws; malicious code; implementation flaws; configuration weaknesses and user errors or indifference. Responders should also know about the Internet of Things (IoT), risk management, network protocols, network applications and services, malicious code, programming skills and intruder techniques. IT security professionals who become leaders or members of response teams sometimes take circuitous routes to these positions.

5 ways businesses can cultivate a data-driven culture

The pressure on organizations to make accurate and timely business decisions has turned data into an important strategic asset for businesses. In today’s dynamic marketplace, the ability for businesses to use data to identify challenges, spot opportunities, and adapt to change with agility is critical to its survival and long-term success. Therefore, it has become an absolute necessity for businesses to establish an objective, data-driven culture that empowers employees with the capabilities and skills they need to analyze data and use the insights extracted from it to facilitate a faster, more accurate decision-making process. Contrary to what many people think, cultivating a data-driven culture is not just a one-time transformation. Instead, it’s more like a journey that requires efforts from employees and direction from both managers and executives.

The fight to defend the Internet of Things

One job of the IoT ecosystem, including technology, products, and service providers, is to protect millions (or even billions) of other people by introducing robust security capabilities into the wide variety of connected devices shipped everyday. A robot or IP camera might require advanced computer vision and data processing power, while a connected light bulb may only need basic connectivity and a simple microcontroller. But they all need to be protected. Security needs to be considered in every aspect of the IoT, whether that’s the device itself, the network, the cloud, the software, or the consumer. Attacks are imminent. A study from AT&T, for instance, revealed a stunning 458 percent increase in vulnerability scans of IoT devices in the course of two years. Hackers usually exploit combinations of vulnerabilities to perform an attack.

It's Time To Upgrade To TLS 1.3 Already

The designers of TLS 1.3 chose to abandon the legacy encryption systems that were causing security problems, keeping only the most robust. That simplicity is perhaps one of the reasons it will be ready in half the time it took to design its predecessor. Connections will still fall back to TLS 1.2 if one end is not TLS 1.3-capable -- but if a MITM attacker attempts to force such a fallback, under TLS 1.3 it will be detected, Valsorda said. Almost 93 percent of the websites in Alexa's top one million supported TLS 1.2 as of January, up from 89 percent six months earlier, according to a survey by Hubert Kario's Security Pitfalls blog. But seven percent of one million means a lot of websites are still running earlier and even less secure protocols. Among the laggards are some sites you would hope to be on top of security: those taking online payments.

Quote for the day:

"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." -- Doug Linder

Daily Tech Digest - June 22, 2017

The future is not the cloud or the fog: it is actually the SEA!

A SEA device is a complete rethink of how your smartphone works. The phone in your pocket today is basically a fully integrated device consisting of many blocks of hardware and software all dedicated for you and your own purposes alone. With the exception of application software (e.g. gaming, music, personal assistants) that run in some part in the cloud, most everything you do on your device relies in some way or another on a local execution. A SEA device will not necessarily work like this. In the device virtualization paradigm, the same principles that allow virtualization across data centers or the abstractions of EPC elements in the cloud are applied to enable the dynamic decomposition of functions in a device into executable tasks.

10 tough security interview questions, and how to answer them

Suggest establishing an internal mentoring and training program, says Paul Boulanger, vice president and chief security consultant at consulting firm SoCal Privacy Consultants. That way the company can offer the staff personal growth through education and certifications, and a career path within the company itself so there’s an expectation from both sides to lay down roots and make a career, he says. “We want to avoid burnout with particular positions, so part of the training [would involve] job rotation,” Boulanger says. “Individuals will both be able to learn new technologies and stay fresh. We see this in the DevOps/agile movement now where developers are expected to be ‘full stack.’ We should encourage this on the security side too. It makes for better employees.”

Intelligence Panel Learns How to Hack Air-Gapped Voting Systems

How can air-gapped systems be hacked? Halderman explained that prior to an election, voting machines must be programmed with the design of the ballot, the races and candidates. Typically, he said, the programming - known as an election management system - is created on internet-connected desktop computers operated by local election officials or private contractors. Eventually, data from the election management system are transferred to voting machines. "Unfortunately," Halderman said, "election management systems are not adequately protected, and they are not always properly isolated from the internet. Attackers who compromise an election management system can spread vote-stealing malware to large numbers of machines." Another common perception is that because of the complexity and highly decentralized nature of the American election system, the results from a presidential election cannot be altered.

How containers will transform Windows 10

Helium, or application siloing, exists in Windows 10 today as part of the Creators Update, and especially Windows 10 S. This technology enables legacy Win32 applications to be ported to the Windows Store, using the Desktop Bridge (formerly code-named Project Centennial) to package apps. Application silos allow legacy Windows apps to install and update like native Modern Windows 10 apps. These converted desktop apps have full access to system resources, but use a virtual file system and virtualized registry entries like those associated with User Account Control (UAC) virtualization. A Helium-based container isn't a security boundary in the way that a Hyper-V virtual machine is. It lives on top of the existing registry and file system. You can think of it as the next generation of UAC but applied at an application level rather than a machine level.

Why and how to migrate cloud VMs back on premises

Before even thinking about a reverse migration, there are a number of nontechnical items that you need to consider. First, what does your contract say regarding early termination or leaving the cloud provider? This is more of a problem with smaller cloud service providers than with Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google, but it's worth checking, irrespective of provider. Also, check your licensing. An administrator can't just migrate a cloud VM back on premises and continue using the VM as if it still existed in the cloud. Prior to the migration, you need to check both the OS and application licensing small print. Be smart; get that confirmation in writing. Most likely, you'll find that different licensing rules apply. If you're trying to migrate a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering back to your data center, you need to have all the PaaS dependencies lined up.

How Will Analytics, AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning Replace Human Interactions?

“Amelia is working in areas such as wealth management, where she interacts with financial advisors: “They’re looking for the right answer the first time in as short a period of time as possible,” and Amelia was able to deliver just that. … The reaction from the executive team when he had demonstrated Amelia’s ability to answer questions “within seconds of that question being asked, the first time, correctly” had been overwhelmingly positive.” With the newer generation chat bots like Amelia, companies present an immersive and personalized interaction tool with customers, often on their web sites, able to access key data in knowledge management and then, using AI, to tee up the “best-fit” answers to questions (a) that are being asked by customers or (b) should have been asked by them.

AMD launches its Epyc server chip to take on Intel in the data center

Epyc will be socket-compatible with the next generation of the product family, and it also has a dedicated security subsystem, where AMD is burning cryptographic functions into the silicon of the memory controllers, effectively encrypting memory, Moorhead noted. This is AMD's third big try in the server market; it has had enough success and failure to say it knows what it takes to be successful. When it came out with the Opteron Dual Core processor in 2005, offering a twofold single-socket performance advantage over Xeon, it grabbed 20 percent of the market within two years. But a few years later, bugs and postponements in the launch of its Barcelona chip architecture allowed Intel to recapture lost ground.

Why Cisco’s new intent-based networking could be a big deal

A key component of an IBNS is that it provides mathematical validation that the expressed intent of the network can be and is implemented within the network, and that it has the ability to take real-time action if the desired state of the network is misaligned with the actual state. An IBNS is, in theory, a software platform that can be agnostic to the hardware that it runs on. The idea of IBNS has been around for a couple of years, Lerner says, but there have been very few platforms that can enable it. A handful of startups, such as Apstra, Veriflow and Forward Networks have some early components of IBNS in various product offerings. Lerner estimates there are less than 15 intent based-networking platforms in production deployments today, but the number could grow to more than 1,000 by 2020.

How to stop wasting money on security shelfware

Shelfware is not inevitable, and it can be reduced or even eliminated by some proactive and surprisingly simple first steps. Infosec professionals believe it comes down to a more controlled acquisition process, sweating the products you already have -- and getting the basics right before acquiring new solutions. “First, leverage the products that have the broadest of capabilities, something that can give breadth of coverage,” says Malik. “This will help get a lay of the land and understand the challenging areas which can then be focussed on more specifically. Don’t try to boil the ocean, but start from critical assets. Finally, the best way is to experiment with the product and network with peers to see how they have deployed capabilities. Security doesn’t need to be a complex offering -- often it boils down to doing the basics well and consistently.”

GitLab's CEO Sid Sijbrandij on Current Development Practices

The open source model fell short in being able to build a business around it. You need significant work on installation, performance, security and dependency upgrades. If everything is open source you can only make money on support. Taking what we learned in 2013, we engineered GitLab to be user friendly to install and maintain so after one year of subscribing organizations quickly figured out that they did not use the support at all. Therefore, building a business model around support wouldn’t have been sustainable. Instead, we decided that there are some features and functions that are more useful to large development teams, like an enterprise organization. By offering extra functionality to customers with larger development teams or even more advanced needs, we continue to show our value through our product offering.

Quote for the day:

"Education ... is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." -- John Dewey

Daily Tech Digest - June 20, 2017

How to make sure your big data solution actually gets used

To gain visibility and automate steps at every stage of the food pick, pack, ship and deliver process, food producers, shippers, warehouses and retailers use handheld devices, barcode scanners, hands-free, voice-based technology and even sensors placed on pallets, packages and refrigeration compartments in trucks. These sensors track temperature, humidity and tampering of the containers for perishables and other goods, and also issue auto alerts to supply chain managers as soon as one of these conditions is violated. Everyone in the food supply chain knows where every shipment is. Along the way, big data is collected in a central data repository where queries and reports are subsequently run to assess how well the supply chain is performing.

Intel Core i9 review: The fastest consumer CPU prepares for Ryzen war

Like most major Intel launches, the Core i9 family represents a new platform, not just a new CPU, which means a new chipset, the X299, and a new socket, the LGA2066, all incompatible with previous CPUs. The new platform also does something no previous one did by unifying two CPU families. Before today, if you wanted the company’s latest Kaby Lake core, you had to buy a motherboard using the LGA1151 socket. And if you wanted to buy, say, a 6-core Skylake CPU such as Intel’s Core i7-6800K, you had to buy an LGA2011 V3-based motherboard. With X299 and LGA2066, you can now pick your poison, because the platform encompasses everything from a 4-core Core i5 Kaby Lake CPU to an 18-core Core i9 Extreme Edition, which is a Skylake CPU.

Enlightened shadow IT policy collaborates with users

Now, the advantages of cloud services are changing shadow IT policy in many enterprises. The flat-out blocking of cloud services is unacceptable in most organizations today because team collaboration apps, for example, are useful to lines of business and work groups that use them to improve productivity. These apps are quick to deploy and eliminate the need for IT's permission or deployment. "Any IT leader who stands in the way of productivity probably isn't going to hold the job too long," Schilling said, adding that cloud services typically represent an opportunity, not a hindrance. Just like on-premises shadow IT efforts, however, Schilling knows that if something goes wrong and business users find themselves in trouble, IT will have to come to the rescue. "Rather than fighting it, we have to offer users governance and guidelines, he said.

The Rising Business Risks of Cyberattacks and How to Stay Safe

According to 2017 Internet Security Threat Report by Symantec, cyber criminals have revealed new levels of ambition and malice. Data breaches are now driven by innovation, sophistication, and organization to produce ominous results. Cybersecurity has become more of concern for businesses. This year, continue to face complex security threats. There is a growth of new malware that can bypass your antivirus and other levels of protection. Ransomware is on the rise. More than 4,000 ransomware attacked have occurred every year over the last one year. Ransomware and phishing work together with statistics from PhishMe showing a rising trend. When it comes to data breaches, the risk for organizations is high. The risks can range from the easily calculable costs of notification and business loss to the less tangible effect on a company’s brand and customer loyalty.

What you need to know about Power BI now

Starting in an Excel-like table view of your raw data, you use the query tools to construct a series of transformation steps, adding columns and changing data types using a formula-like approach. Once you’ve constructed a query, an advanced editor shows the resulting Power Query code, ready for additional editing or adding new steps. Power BI’s visual editing tools also help simplify your data, removing unwanted columns and changing names. Data from other sources can be merged into your query, adding additional information where necessary. Other tools pivot data into aggregate tables or add custom columns based on calculations. Sharing reports is as important as building them, and Power BI gives you several options. Perhaps the most useful is the ability to build and publish web dashboards that show key performance indicators and tie them to appropriate visualizations.

Excel 2016 cheat sheet

Excel has never been the most user-friendly of applications, and it has so many powerful features it can be tough to use. Excel 2016 has taken a good-sized step towards making it easier with a new feature called Tell Me, which puts even buried tools in easy reach. To use it, click the "Tell me what you want to do" text, to the right of the View tab on the Ribbon. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q.) Then type in a task you want to do, such as "Create a pivot table." You'll get a menu showing potential matches for the task. In this instance, the top result is a direct link to the form for creating a PivotTable -- select it and you'll start creating the PivotTable right away, without having to go to the Ribbon's Insert tab first. If you'd like more information about your task, the last two items that appear in the Tell Me menu let you select from related Help topics or search for your phrase using Smart Lookup.

Data should be stored in space, firm says

Data security will be another advantage when it comes to space-held data, the company says. It says “leaky internet and leased lines” are subject to “hijacking, theft, monitoring and sabotage” and that its dedicated telecom backbone network won’t be. In fact its “network-ring” won’t be connected to the internet it says. Better throughput, too, is obtained by “avoiding traditional terrestrial ‘hops,’” it claims. SpaceBelt’s still-to-be-launched data center platform will operate in low-earth orbit (LEO). That’s the area between the Earth’s surface and 1,200 miles up, and it is the same zone that SpaceX and the OneWeb Internet infrastructures will use for their upcoming broadband constellation roll-outs. Cloud Constellation Corp. expects to build eight satellites for testing at the end of 2018, according to an interview chief executive Scott Sobhani gave with SpaceNews Magazine last year.

5 Steps to Prepare for the Inevitable Cyber Security Attack

To determine how much insurance coverage you need, use a calculator, assessment tool, or modeling to assess your overall risk. Paez recommended using an interruption worksheet, similar to what you may see for property insurance. Your insurance can provide templates, employee awareness training, regulatory preparedness, and PCI compliance readiness. Look at cyber attack risks from a business interruption perspective. “There may be organizations that are not in the, what I would term ‘high hazard’ class– business retail, hospitality, financial institutions, healthcare,” Paez explained. “If you’re outside of that realm looking at it from a business interruption standpoint or supply chain perspective, or utility or critical infrastructure, that’s a different conversation altogether in terms of assessing that risk. ...”

Cybersecurity spend: ROI Is the wrong metric

While this article has focused on helping board members and C-suite executives understand how to quantify the value of their cybersecurity investment, the InfoSec team may need to assist in the effort. If management is making the mistake of asking IT to justify its cybersecurity budget in terms of ROI, the InfoSec team needs to educate management as to why the ask is wrong and refocus them on the correct one. Furthermore, when making your argument against focusing on ROI, you need to provide the right data to support your point. Based on my experience, when asked to report on the security readiness of the network, most teams simply provide management with an exhaustive list of every potential threat that could harm the network; the strategy being that, when management sees a list of thousands of potential threats, they’ll agree to any budget out of fear and misunderstanding.

Enterprise network monitoring tools address companies of all sizes

GroundWork offers a manual process for overlaying network infrastructure on geographic maps. Users can upload the image of a floor plan, topology, architectural software diagram or geographic map. Then, they can overlay GroundWork's performance and availability indicators on the image and drill down into those indicators for further analysis. The system's performance visualization features enable users to set dynamic thresholding and spot performance bottlenecks. The system gathers data from the network via SNMP, APIs, intelligent platform management interfaces, and a variety of other protocols and interfaces. Via these APIs, GroundWork has added the ability to monitor hybrid cloud environments. It integrates with cloud providers via a REST API, and it has out-of-the-box support for Amazon Web Services and OpenStack.

Quote for the day:

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Daily Tech Digest - June 19, 2017

A Data-Driven Approach to Identifying Future Leaders

Those with high motivation potential showed resilience and confidence in their capacity to lead; those who scored lower on this dimension were less likely to persevere when faced with new and unknown situations. Those who possessed strong people potential were empathetic and more adept at building relationships than their less people-savvy peers. And leaders with high change potential were able to move out of their comfort zones to experiment and take necessary risks; those who were more averse to change had more difficulty going against the status quo. ... Too many organizations eliminate talented leaders from consideration because the criteria used to determine potential are subjective and inconsistent. If created carefully, a clear, consistent definition of leadership potential can reduce the potential for bias, increase diversity, and save money by ensuring that the organization invests in high-potential employees early in their careers.

What Careers Are Safe From Automation And The Robot Takeover?

Jobs all across the business and finance landscape will be heavily affected in the manner of insurance underwriters: book keepers, accountants, auditors, loan officers, tellers, clerks, and postal service workers will easily be replaced by artificial intelligence. The legal profession is another highly populated sector that will have a difficult time as the need for secretaries, paralegals and court reporters will decline. And if experts are correct in their projections, the very top business leaders might not be immune either. Jack Ma from Alibaba, recently said that CEOs themselves could be on the chopping block, going so far as to predict that "In 30 years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO." Ma paints a bleak picture of what the three transitional decades could look like for those who are “unprepared for the upheaval technology is set to bring.”

Approximately 350 000 current cybersecurity openings in US

In 2017 the U.S. employs nearly 780,000 people in cybersecurity positions, with approximately 350 000 current cybersecurity openings, according to CyberSeek, a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce. The current number of U.S. cybersecurity job openings is up from 209,000 in 2015. At that time, job postings were already up 74 percent over the previous five years, according to a Peninsula Press analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Security starts at the top. Right now, about 65% of large U.S. companies have a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) position, up from 50% in 2016, according to ISACA, an independent, nonprofit, global association.

Cybersecurity in an IoT and mobile world: The key trends

Cybersecurity incidents regularly hit the headlines, the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in mid-May being a particularly high-profile example. It says a lot about the current state of cybersecurity that the escalation of ransomware had been widely predicted, that the crude but effective WannaCry attack could easily have been defended, and that the perpetrators -- despite the attentions of multiple security firms and government agencies -- remain undiscovered (at the time of writing). Talking of predictions, at the start of the year ZDNet's sister site Tech Pro Research examined 345 cybersecurity predictions for 2017 from 49 organisations, assigning them among 39 emergent categories. Here's the ranking of topics that cybersecurity experts were worried about six months ago:

Attack of the Algorithms: Value Chain Disruption in Commodity Trading

The securitization of contracts involves creating standardized products fromlarge-scale, nonstandard contractual agreements between two parties. Examples include agreements regarding the long-term off-take of LNG and structured investment products, including those based on energy consumption patterns. Many traders in less-developed commodity markets have created a business based on the securitization of contracts. Their business model will face growing pressure as commodity markets become increasingly developed and as more short-term markets emerge, offering greater liquidity, price transparency, and ability to hedge risk. That evolution is already evident in a number of markets, including European gas. In addition to the risks for traders, however, there will also be opportunities.

Designing for an unpredictable future

In recent years we have seen a surge of this kind of design thinking in business and a drive in governments to apply design principles to policy. An insurgency of Innovation Labs have sprung up like Sitra in Finland, Mindlabin Denmark, 18F in the US, and Policy Lab in the UK. Experimentation, prototyping, and openness underpin this way of operating which puts users first and brings in agile methods from tech and design communities to innovate in new ways. To encourage this, public institutions and charitable foundations have opened up challenge prizes to stimulate markets and promote design-led innovation. Social impact investment funds and incentives like the industrial strategy challenge fund in the UK now seek to drive innovation further.

11 predictions for the future of programming

When kids in college take a course called “Data Structures,” they get to learn what life was like when their grandparents wrote code and couldn’t depend on the existence of a layer called “the database.” Real programmers had to store, sort, and join tables full of data, without the help of Oracle, MySQL, or MongoDB. Machine learning algorithms are a few short years away from making that jump. Right now programmers and data scientists need to write much of their own code to perform complex analysis. Soon, languages like R and some of the cleverest business intelligence tools will stop being special and start being a regular feature in most software stacks. They’ll go from being four or five special slides in the PowerPoint sales deck to a little rectangle in the architecture drawing that’s taken for granted.

Perpetuating Bias: Why We Should Think Critically About AI in Marketing

“We have a situation where these artificial intelligence systems may be perpetuating historical patterns of bias that we might find socially unacceptable and which we might be trying to move away from.” While many people would assume that artificial intelligence algorithms are objective tools making objective calculations, the fact is these tools are created from and trained on large sets of data (images, text, video, etc.) that currently exist online. This is data that has been created by humans, and thus is data that’s not free from bias. When AI algorithms and content intersect, we need to be careful about the results. The danger with overuse of artificial intelligence in marketing is that our dominant, biased discourses will remain dominant and biased, especially if we assume an AI tool is taking an objective tack.

How to Beat the Odds and Make Your First IoT Project a Success

IoT solutions affect multiple teams within the organization. Partner with these affected teams early in the planning process to get their requirements, gain their support (knowledge, resources, and budget), and leverage their influence to remove barriers during the execution stages. Partner with your organization’s digital transformation or innovation office, if one exists. Equally important, partner with IoT solution vendors throughout the process. At this stage of the market, their solutions are still evolving. Work with your IoT vendor at a deeper level than you would with other vendors. Stay in close contact and leverage their product management and technical support teams throughout the project. Co-design the solution and project with them – tell them what features you like to see, report bugs, and test updated versions of the product.

Understanding the limits of deep learning

By contrast, humans “learn from very few examples, can do very long-term planning, and are capable of forming abstract models of a situation and [manipulating] these models to achieve extreme generalization.” Even simple human behaviors are laborious to teach to a deep learning algorithm. Let’s examine a situation such as avoiding being hit by a car as you walk down the road. If you go the supervised learning route, you’d need huge data sets of car situations with clearly labeled actions to take, such as “stop” or “move.” Then you’d need to train a neural network to learn the mapping between the situation and the appropriate action. If you go the reinforcement learning route, where you give an algorithm a goal and let it independently determine the ideal actions to take, the computer would need to die thousands of times before learning to avoid cars in different situations.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is not a solo sport; if you lead alone, you are not leading." -- D.A. Blankinship

Daily Tech Digest - June 18, 2017

How to Start Incorporating Machine Learning in Enterprises

Most of the economists and social scientists are concerned about the automation that is taking over the manufacturing and commercial processes. If the digitalization and automation continue to grow at the same pace it is currently happening, there is a high probability of machines partly replacing humans in the workforce. We are seeing some examples of the phenomena in our world today, but it is predicted to be far more prominent in the future. However, Dynes says, “Data scientists are providing solutions to intricate and complex problems confronted by various sectors today. They are utilizing useful information from data analysis to understand and fix things. Data science is an input and the output is yielded in the form of automation. Machines automate, but humans provide the necessary input to get the desired output.”

Understand these 5 basic concepts to sound like a machine learning expert

Most people seem a bit intimidated or confused by machine learning. What is it? Where is it going? Can I have some money now please? All valid questions. The truth is, you’ve been training machine learning models for years now, probably without realizing it. Do you use an iPhone or Apple photos? Or how about Facebook? You know how it shows you a group of faces and asks you to identify them? Well, by tagging those photos, you are training a facial recognition model to identify new faces. Congratulations, you can now say you have experience training machine learning models! But before you do, read these machine learning basics so you can accurately answer any follow up question.

Will the rise of AR mean the end for smartphones and TVs?

The problem, naturally, is that a huge chunk of the world's economy hinges on the production of phones, TVs, tablets, and all those other things that Facebook thinks could be replaced with this technology. Even Zuckerberg acknowledges it's a long road ahead. That said, this Camera Effects platform, should it succeed in attracting a bunch of users, could go down as a savvy move. The apps that are built for the Facebook Camera today could wind up as the first versions of the apps you'd use with those glasses. In the short term, Facebook's play for augmented reality is going to look a lot like competing with Snapchat — and in a meaningful way, it is. Facebook needs developer and user love, so it needs to keep offering fun and funny tools to keep people from moving away from using its apps.

A discussion about AI’s conflicts and challenges

“The big breakthrough over the last ten years has been deep learning but I think we’ve done that now,” he argues. “People are of course writing more papers than ever about it. But it’s entering a more mature phase where at least in terms of using deep learning. We can absolutely do it. But in terms of understanding deep learning — the fundamental mathematics of it — that’s another matter.” “But the hunger, the appetite of companies and universities for trained talent is absolutely prodigious at the moment — and I am sure we are going to need to do more,” he adds, on education and expertise. Returning to the question of tech giants dominating AI research he points out that many of these companies are making public toolkits available, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have done, to help drive activity across a wider AI ecosystem.

How Will Analytics, AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning Replace Human Interactions?

Today using Big Data analytics companies and isolate which web pages, IVR logic paths, and customer service agents are starting snowballs and which web pages, IVR logic paths, and customer service agents are successfully resolving them, or melting them; these analytics also spotlight which issues or reasons are not resolved the first time and result in snowballs. Digging into the root causes of both of these areas produces improvements in processes that can help to Eliminate many thorny issues. In addition, analytics and machine learning can help to predict that there might be a snowball, and recommend how to address that customer in that moment in order to prevent a repeat contact from happening. As with the predictive models that I described earlier this forms a much stronger engine – either automated or human provided – that in turns delivers a combination of Best Service is No Serviceand Me2B success.

How to Prepare the Next Generation for Jobs in the AI Economy

Ethics also deserves more attention at every educational level. AI technologies face ethical dilemmas all the time — for example, how to exclude racial, ethnic, and gender prejudices from automated decisions; how a self-driving car balances the lives of its occupants with those of pedestrians, etc. — and we need people and programmers who can make well-thought-out contributions to those decision making processes. We’re not obsessed about teaching coding at the elementary levels. It’s fine to do so, especially if the kids enjoy it, and languages such as Snap! and Scratch are useful. But coding is something kids can pick up later on in their education. However, the notion that you don’t need to worry at all about learning to program is misguided. With the world becoming increasingly digital, computer science is as vital in the arts and sciences as writing and math are.

9 shell tips every developer should know

The shell is your friend. But many developers don’t really know the shell, the Unix or Linux command-line environment available in several operating systems. (Bash is the best known, but there are others.) Some of you, when you transitioned from Windows to Mac, took your (slow) clickety habits with you, not realizing that the power laid in that app called Terminal hidden under Applications somewhere. Some of you have been shelling into “the server” to tweak a setting or two without realizing that you could automate your life away without even cracking a devops tool. Whatever brought you to the shell, chances are you’re not using it to its full advantage. Here are my top nine tricks for doing so

Why are so many customers still afraid of mobile banking?

Overall mobile adoption among Americans remains relatively low — 31 percent for banking and 17 percent for credit cards, according to J.D. Power. It’s not surprising that card apps are used less, because they’re typically limited to providing balances, payment due dates and loyalty points. Online banking adoption, by contrast, is 80 percent. “Eight out of 10 are comfortable doing their banking electronically, and mobile offers them a more convenient alternative to that, and they have the phone to do it, but they’re still not comfortable with it, particularly older customers,” Neuhaus said. Because 80 percent of Americans have smartphones, “there’s a big pool of potential mobile banking users that have not gotten comfortable with it or have not seen the value yet in making that move,” Neuhaus said.

How To Tell If AI Or Machine Learning Is Real

If someone claims an application, a service, or a machine is smart, you’re almost certainly getting snowed. Of course, people will use the word “smart” as a shortcut to mean “more capable logic,” a phrase that won’t sell anything. But if they don’t explain what “smart” means specific to their offering, you know they think you’re dumb. The fact is that most technologies labeled “smart” are not smart, merely savvy. The difference is that smart requires intelligence and cognition, whereas savvy requires only information and the ability to take advantage of it (it’s no accident that “savvy” come from the French word for “to know”). A savvy app or robot is a good thing, but it’s still not smart. We’re simply not there yet. bEven IBM’s vaunted Watson is not smart. It is savvy, it is very fast, and it can learn.

Identifying And Overcoming Cybersecurity Risks

Many SMBs don’t understand the extent to which their data is at risk, and those who do often don’t know where to start in addressing this problem. In 2015, the U.K. government issued a press release suggesting that businesses need to plan for a cyberattacks. The research revealed that as many as 90% of big businesses and 74% of SMBs had experienced an information-security breach. It’s understandable, then, that a large proportion of small-business owners don’t pay the danger much attention, perhaps failing to realize that something as innocent as a social-media post or a USB stick left in the wrong place can be enough to bring down their whole organization. If you’re in this group, you should start reviewing the risks and putting security procedures in place. This guide gives you a starting point, with five steps you can implement right away to improve the safety of your company.

Quote for the day:

"A good leader can't get too far ahead of his followers" -- Franklin D. Roosevelt