Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - August 04, 2017

Edge computing could push the cloud to the fringe

For some Internet of Things devices, like connected video cameras, it also ceases to be practical to send the data to the cloud just because of the pure volume involved. As an example, he points out that there are already a half a billion connected cameras in place today with a billion expected to be deployed worldwide by 2020. As he says, once you get over 1080p quality, it really ceases to make sense to send the video to the cloud for processing, at least initially, especially if you are using the cameras in a sensitive security zone like an airport where you need to make decisions fast if there is an issue. Then there’s latency. Talla echoes Levine’s thinking here, saying machines like self-driving cars and industrial robots need decisions in fractions of seconds, and there just isn’t time to send the data to the cloud and back.

Much Ado About Blockchain

The fact that government authorities have become so active in blockchain experimentation means that we will soon reach a point where corporations will be expected to interact with those authorities using the distributed ledger technology. Whether through basic blockchain-based registration processes or more elaborate data-transfer protocols, corporations need to start thinking about whether or not their existing technologies and ERP systems can support this type of dialogue. From a financial perspective, the C-suite also needs to think about the competition. Ultimately, the goal of blockchain is to reduce administrative costs. Companies that get out ahead, finding ways to practically leverage the blockchain to make their operations more efficient, will have an edge on their competition when it comes to annual operating costs.

Measuring Data Science Business Value

Just as any other department uses operational metrics to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations, data science needs to do the same. Sales teams use funnel metrics to measure how effectively their teams are converting prospects down the funnel to closed-won. Engineering teams use sprint burndown and team velocity to measure how efficiently their teams complete work in a given amount of time. Monitoring leading indicators allow these teams to quickly adjust before a revenue number is missed or a product feature is delayed. For data science teams, it is important to identify critical information like when a data scientist is spending precious hours reproducing something someone else has already done. Or when a business stakeholder has not been looped in to give feedback on a project before it is delivered as “done”.

It's time for the financial sector to embrace an AI-led future

Large commercial banks have several back-office processes that AI’s operating models are transforming. Operations such as reconciliation, consolidation and credit risk management, can be completed with robotic process automation (RPA), which along with machine learning can be fully automated. Banking functions that are central to operations such as the quarterly closing and reporting of earnings can be accomplished in real time with AI, allowing for greater accuracy and quicker adjustments. A case in point is the Machine Learning program called COIN used by JPMorgan Chase & Co, one of the biggest banks in the United States. The AI program takes just a few seconds to review commercial loan agreements as compared to the 360,000 hours each year that a team of lawyers and loan officers would take to complete.

Internet of things and blockchains: help or hindrance?

The technology is still immature and likely to transition quickly, and fierce competition from rival distributed ledger platforms is a threat. Moreover, the computing power needed to achieve consensus of distributed transactions is expensive, and more cost-efficient models need to be found. With the likes of BP and Microsoft opting for ethereum, there also needs to be more standardised regulation and stability of the cryptocurrencies so larger enterprises can comfortably roll out the technology for customer use. Blockchains may be able to provide an additional layer of security and operational efficiency to existing IoT models, but the technology is not necessarily needed in every use case. In fact, there are IoT platforms already in place that implement supply chain traceability, monitor product provenance, and ensure product authenticity.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk's debate over artificial intelligence: will robots go rogue?

“If we’re lucky, they’ll treat us as pets,” says Paul Saffo, a consulting professor at Stanford University, “and if we’re very unlucky, they’ll treat us as food.” But there are academics, including Noam Chomsky, who don’t believe computers will ever be able to attain that level of intelligence. Yes, they might be able to learn to speak Chinese, but will they ever truly understand Chinese, or merely simulate understanding? These questions are all bound up with concepts of intelligence, sentience, self-awareness and consciousness, things that remain stubbornly impervious to scientific analysis. Zuckerberg’s angle on AI, shared by other industry figures such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil, is that super-smart micro-intelligences offer great benefit to mankind and will always remain under our ultimate control.

From barter to blockchain: A history of money

The world is connected through the internet now; it is at everyone’s fingertips. Computers make us more efficient at what we do than we ever were. What used to take us days takes minutes now. We couldn’t make more time, so instead we make more out of the time we have. Computing power is such an integral part of our life that it has become as scarce and valuable as gold was to our ancestors. And when smart people asked the profound question: “Can we make a currency that is backed by computing power?,” the answer was cryptocurrencies and blockchains. If you don’t yet understand how blockchains work, I’ve written the ultimate guide in plain English to help you understand the concept.

How to get started with machine learning

Not surprisingly, software engineering teams are generally not well-equipped to handle these complexities and so can fail pretty seriously. “A good, solid, and comprehensive platform that lets you scale effortlessly is a critical component” to overcoming some of this complexity, Dunning says. “You need to focus maniacally on establishing value for your customers and you can't do that if you don't get a platform that has all the capabilities you need and that will allow you to focus on the data in your life and how that is going to lead to customer-perceived value.” Enter TensorFlow. Open source, a common currency for developers, has taken on a more important role in big data. Even so, Dunning asserts that “open source projects have never really been on the leading edge of production machine learning until quite recently.”

Social Engineering: The Basics

Social engineering has proven to be a very successful way for a criminal to "get inside" your organization. Once a social engineer has a trusted employee's password, he can simply log in and snoop around for sensitive data. With an access card or code in order to physically get inside a facility, the criminal can access data, steal assets or even harm people. Chris Nickerson, founder of Lares, a Colorado-based security consultancy, conducts 'red team testing' for clients using social engineering techniques to see where a company is vulnerable. Nickerson detailed for CSO how easy it is to get inside a building without question. In one penetration test, Nickerson used current events, public information available on social network sites, and a $4 Cisco shirt he purchased at a thrift store to prepare for his illegal entry.

Excel 2016 cheat sheet

If you're working in a workbook you've saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, you'll see a new button on the Ribbon, just to the right of the Share button. It's the Activity button, and it's particularly handy for shared workbooks. Click it and you'll see the history of what's been done to the spreadsheet, notably who has saved it and when. To see a previous version, click the "Open version" link underneath when someone has saved it, and the older version will appear. And there's a very useful difference in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open, Save or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you've connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it.

Here Are 306 Million Passwords You Should Never Use

The 306 million passwords encompass more than 1 billion compromised accounts. The data comes from rich sources, including the Exploit.in and Anti-Public lists. Both of those lists were massive mash-ups of stolen data covering just over 1 billion email addresses. Hunt calls the service Pwned Passwords. Service providers can use the data in their back-end systems with the aim of improving the state of password security. Hunt has made a 6GB file available with the data. For example, if someone is registering a new account, a service provider can compare the chosen password and warn the individual that the password has been compromised before. At that point, the person can be strongly encouraged or forced to choose a more secure password.

Quote for the day:

"Strategy is not really a solo sport even if you're the CEO." -- Max McKeown

Daily Tech Digest - August 03, 2017

Rebooting Cybersecurity

Certainly, compliance frameworks and programs help to establish the minimum standards for security and give a company a checkmark during audits, but frameworks and programs often fail to protect a company from breaches. Having frameworks and programs will not be sufficient if they do not reflect real-world dynamics and fail to provide needed monitoring, detection, responses, or protection. ... Only a fifth of respondents would invest in mitigating financial loss, and just 22 per cent would invest in cybersecurity training. ... Protecting a company requires an end-to-end approach that considers threats across the spectrum of the industry-specific value chain and the company’s ecosystem. Business exposure needs to be identified and minimized, with a focus on protecting priority assets.

Why SSL/TLS attacks are on the rise

As enterprises get better about encrypting network traffic to protect data from potential attacks or exposure, online attackers are also stepping up their Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) game to hide their malicious activities. In the first half of 2017, an average of 60 percent of transactions observed by security company Zscaler have been over SSL/TLS, the company’s researchers said. The growth in SSL/TLS usage includes both legitimate and malicious activities, as criminals rely on valid SSL certificates to distribute their content. Researchers saw an average of 300 hits per day for web exploits that included SSL as part of the infection chain. “Crimeware families are increasingly using SSL/TLS,” said Deepen Desai, senior director of security research at Zscaler.

Five New Threats To Your Mobile Device Security

Today, mobile devices are coming under increasing attack – and no one is immune. Some 20 percent of companies surveyed by Dimensional Research for Check Point Software said their mobile devices have been breached. A quarter of respondents didn’t even know whether they’ve experienced an attack. Nearly all (94 percent) expected the frequency of mobile attacks to increase, and 79 percent acknowledged that it’s becoming more difficult to secure mobile devices. “They’re starting now to become more aware of the possible impact,” says Daniel Padon, mobile threat researcher at Check Point. “Real, state-level malware and the capability of such malware, together with large campaigns affecting millions and millions of devices, such as Gooligan and Hummingbad, are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Nvidia and Remedy use neural networks for eerily good facial animation

As showcased at Siggraph, by using a deep learning neural network—run on Nvidia's costly eight-GPU DGX-1 server, naturally—Remedy was able to feed in videos of actors performing lines, from which the network generated surprisingly sophisticated 3D facial animation. This, according to Remedy and Nvidia, removes the hours of "labour-intensive data conversion and touch-ups" that are typically associated with traditional motion-capture animation. Aside from cost, facial animation, even when motion captured, rarely reaches the same level of fidelity as other animation. That odd, lifeless look seen in even the biggest of blockbuster games often came down to the limits of facial animation. Nvidia and Remedy believe its neural network solution is capable of producing results as good, if not better, than what's produced by traditional techniques.

What’s new in Angular 5: easier progressive web apps

Its features include: An emphasis on making it easier to build progressive web apps, so apps can be cached in the browser; A build optimizer that makes the application smaller by eliminating unnecessary code. and Making Material Design components compatible with server-side rendering. The progressive web apps concept, the product of a joint effort between Google and Mozilla, is about enabling development of browser-based apps that offer a superior, native-like experience. Supporting progressive web apps in Angular today requires a lot of expertise on the developers’ part; version 5 is intended to make usage easier. “We’re shooting to try and make progressive web apps something that everyone would use,” said Brad Green, a Google engineering director.

Digital Crime-Fighting: The Evolving Role of Law Enforcement

As the cybercrime landscape continues to evolve, methods of policing it must change as well. The increasing number of cyber attacks propagated by everyone from nation-state actors to average criminals is blurring lines between cybersecurity and public safety, ultimately causing a shift in the role of government and law enforcement in protecting against these threats. Verizon's 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report notes, "In addition to catching criminals in the act, security vendors, law enforcement agencies and organizations of all sizes are increasingly sharing threat intelligence information to help detect ransomware (and other malicious activities) before they reach systems." Using their own behind-the-scenes collaboration venues, threat actors have also become increasingly well armed and well informed.

Cyber security is now mainstream business

Unfortunately, those caught in the middle of the storm are able to understand it more profoundly than the observers. While there was unprecedented large-scale impact due to the recent ransomware, it was minuscule compared to the computer infrastructure of the world. Which means that the majority of individuals and organisations would continue to remain unaware of the need for steps they should take to build an optimal cyber defence against cyber threats. That is the biggest bane of the cyber security industry and profession. The second observation is that the organisations that were impacted are building and strengthening controls around the risks of the recent ransomware attacks. That is important, but when you build cyber defence, you should consider all the possible risks to your business and build a security programme that works on mitigating these risks comprehensively.

7 unexpected ways collaboration software can boost productivity

Collaboration software can enable organizations to plan for crises and emergencies, said Michelle Vincent, collaboration and training officer for information services at Mercy Ships. The organization uses private hospital ships to provide free surgeries to residents of developing nations. Mercy Ships uses HipChat “to connect our various stakeholders during crisis drills,” Vincent said. “Hopefully, we'll never have a fire or other such emergency on the ship. But we rely on drills to keep us ready, and HipChat is a useful tool to keep us connected in real time for that purpose.” Emergency drills on the ship are performed almost every week, Vincent said, while a crisis management team’s drills involving multiple locations usually take place every quarter.

Amazon Echo hacked to allow continuous remote eavesdropping

The fact that physical access is required makes it unlikely it will happen to your Echo. It also works only on 2015 and 2016 editions of Amazon Echo devices, as they had a rubber base that can be popped off to reveal 18 debug pads. Neither the 2017 Echo model, nor the Amazon Dot, are vulnerable. If a knowledgeable attacker did have access to an older Echo, Barnes noted that rooting it is “trivial.” After rooting the Echo, the researchers wrote a script to continuously grab the raw microphone audio data. Barnes called the physical access requirement a “major limitation.” The how-to is out there now, so maybe that should give you pause before you purchase a second-hand Echo.

Cloud Data Auditing Techniques with a Focus on Privacy and Security

Nowadays, with the help of cryptography, verification of remote (cloud) data is performed by third-party auditors (TPAs).2TPAs are also appropriate for public auditing, offering auditing services with more powerful computational and communication abilities than regular users.3 In public auditing, a TPA is designated to check the correctness of cloud data without retrieving the entire dataset from the CSP. However, most auditing schemes don’t protect user data from TPAs; hence, the integrity and privacy of user data are lost.1 Our research focuses on cryptographic algorithms for cloud data auditing and the integrity and privacy issues that these algorithms face. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature to protect integrity and privacy; they’re generally classified according to data’s various states: static, dynamic, multiowner, multiuser, and so on.

Quote for the day:

"You're not always going to be successful, but if you're afraid to fail, you don't deserve to be successful." -- Charles Barkley

Daily Tech Digest - August 02, 2017

Procurement: looking ahead to a digital future

Technology is lifting the role of procurement, providing services that are critical to maintaining corporate reputation, not to mention legality. With procurement functions frequently stretching across the globe, companies need full visibility all the way to the end of a supply chain to guarantee it is free of issues such as modern-day slavery or bribery and corruption. “Automated procurement systems can help map connections in a supply chain; for a CEO, who is legally responsible for the elimination of poor processes, that puts procurement in a different light,” says Mr Coulcher. Using technology, such as the blockchain, companies can validate supply chains, bringing a level of transparency that has not always been possible. Last autumn, BHP Billiton, the mining company, announced plans to use ethereum blockchain to improve its supply chain processes.

What Is IT Governance? A Formal Way To Align IT & Business Strategy

Organizations today are subject to many regulations governing the protection of confidential information, financial accountability, data retention and disaster recovery, among others. They're also under pressure from shareholders, stakeholders and customers. To ensure they meet internal and external requirements, many organizations implement a formal IT governance program that provides a framework of best practices and controls. Both public- and private-sector organizations need a way to ensure that their IT functions support business strategies and objectives. And a formal IT governance program should be on the radar of any organization in any industry that needs to comply with regulations related to financial and technological accountability.

Design Thinking 101

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

Why ex-employees may be your company's biggest cyberthreat

Ex-employees are increasingly a cybersecurity risk, Maxim noted: In June, Dutch web host Verelox experienced a major outage of all of its services after most of its servers were deleted by an ex-employee, according to the company. And in April, the US-based Allegro Microsystems sued an ex-IT administrator for allegedly installing malware that deleted critical financial data. So why don't companies take away this access immediately? For one, the process can be time consuming: 70% of IT decision makers surveyed said it can take up to an hour to deprovision all of a single former employee's corporate application accounts. For another, IT and HR do not often work together, said Al Sargent, senior director at OneLogin. "This is a problem, because HR has the single source of truth for which employees are at the company and which are not, whereas IT controls access to the applications," he added.

State of Cybercrime 2017: Security events decline, but not the impact

Companies are spending more on IT security, with an average budget increase of 7.5 percent. Ten percent of respondents reported an increase of more than 20 percent. The bulk of that money is being spent on new technologies (40 percent), but companies are paying for knowledge, too, in the form of audits and assessments (34 percent), adding new skills (33 percent), and knowledge sharing (15 percent). Respondents said they were investing in redesigning their cybersecurity strategy (25 percent) and processes (17 percent) as well. Speaking of cybersecurity strategy, an amazing 35 percent of respondents said that a cyber response plan was not part of it. The good news is that 19 percent planned to implement a plan within the next year.

Kubernetes as a service offers orchestration benefits for containers

Canonical makes Ubuntu, a leading free and open source Linux server and desktop OS distribution. The Canonical Kubernetes-as-a-service distribution is a packaged deployment that stitches together additional Canonical open source projects surrounding Kubernetes, such as Juju, an application modeling framework that uses Charm scripts to simplify Kubernetes infrastructure builds; Conjure-up orchestrates these Juju script deployments. This distribution runs on various infrastructure environments, including local workstations, bare-metal servers, AWS, Google Compute Engine, Azure, Joyent and OpenStack. Canonical partnered with Google, Kubernetes' original developer, to maintain its distribution, with the aim to simplify and standardize Kubernetes clusters on just about any conceivable environment.

Black Hat 2017: Insightful, but too much hype

The industry has become far too obsessed on the zero-day problem (i.e. zero-day exploits) and isn't paying enough attention to eliminating all the manual tasks and busy work we do as cybersecurity professionals. Oh, I agree that zero-days are a problem, but these attacks are the exception. We need to get better at bread-and-butter cybersecurity operations with improved processes, automation and orchestration. In other words, people REMAIN the weakest link of the cybersecurity chain. Addressing this problem should be a high priority for all CISOs. ... New security analytics tools are expanding and challenging SIEM platforms. Software-defined tools are pushing out tried-and-try network security controls.

Machine Learning Comes To Your Browser Via Javascript

The most prominent advantages of TensorFire’s approach are its portability and convenience. Modern web browsers run on most every operating system and hardware platform, and even low-end smartphones have generous amounts of GPU power to spare. Much of the work involved in getting useful results from machine learning models is setting up the machine learning pipeline, either to perform the training or to deliver the predictions. It is very useful to boil much of that process down to just opening up a web browser and clicking something, at least for certain classes of jobs. Another advantage claimed by TensorFire’s creators is that it allows the deployment of predictions to be done entirely on the client. This won’t be as much of an advantage where both the trained model and the data are already deployed to the cloud.

Bill Would Beef Up Security for IoT Wares Sold to US Gov't

"This bill deftly uses the power of the federal procurement market, rather than direct regulation, to encourage Internet-aware device makers to employ some basic security measures in their products," Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said in a statement announcing the bill's introduction. Security technologist and author Bruce Schneier, also in a statement, sees the legislation as a way to motivate vendors to make the investments needed to secure their IoT offerings. "The market is not going to provide security on its own, because there is no incentive for buyers or sellers to act in anything but their self-interests," says Schneier, who also is a Harvard Kennedy School of Government fellow and lecturer.

How to use Redis for real-time stream processing

Redis has become a popular choice for such fast data ingest scenarios. A lightweight in-memory database platform, Redis achieves throughput in the millions of operations per second with sub-millisecond latencies, while drawing on minimal resources. It also offers simple implementations, enabled by its multiple data structures and functions. In this article, I will show how Redis Enterprise can solve common challenges associated with the ingestion and processing of large volumes of high velocity data. We’ll walk through three different approaches (including code) to processing a Twitter feed in real time, using Redis Pub/Sub, Redis Lists, and Redis Sorted Sets, respectively. As we’ll see, all three methods have a role to play in fast data ingestion, depending on the use case.

Quote for the day:

"The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done." -- Arnold Palmer

Daily Tech Digest - August 01, 2017

Understanding the critical role of 'first receiver' in IoT data

The role of the first receiver is first and foremost to allow for the effective leveraging of the utility value of the IoT data. At the center of this is the role of governance and data primacy. The first receiver assumes, but does not necessarily dictate, that the owner of the IoT data will be the enterprise that owns (or minimally controls) the IoT subsystems. Noting that a single record generated from a single sensor message can be utilized by a variety of constituents, internal or external, in a variety of different ways, the aim is to securely and cost-effectively provide a mechanism for allowing the right people/organizations to access and use the right data in the right place at the right time. While the first receiver should also have several other functions associated with it, the key is enabling the right architecture for leveraging the underlying data.

The most valuable cloud computing certifications today

As the cloud becomes more critical to IT and the business at large, demand for cloud skills will only grow. But proving you have the right skills and knowledge in a competitive job market can be difficult. If you’re looking for an extra edge in landing a new job or promotion, cloud certification can be a great option. Certifications measure knowledge and skills against industry benchmarks to help you prove to employers that you have the right mix of cloud skills, knowledge, and expertise. If you’re looking for more general, across-the-board knowledge, a vendor-neutral certification can provide a broad overview of key concepts and foundational expertise. If you’re looking to specialize, whether in your current job or because you’re angling to land a new role, consider specializing in one or more vendor-specific certifications, such as AWS or VMware.

Public Company to Convert Bitcoin to Stock in First-of-Its-Kind Fundraise

Since first posting the terms of its convertible bitcoin loan online, DigitalX CEO Leigh Travers told CoinDesk he's been contacted by several "investor relations departments of major blockchain companies" with questions about how they can do the same. It turns out, it's not actually that difficult. But, to understand how the bitcoin loan was executed, it's important to grasp a bit about DigitalX's unusual background. Back in March 2014, DigitalX became Australia’s first listed bitcoin company following the reverse takeover of "dying oil and gas firm" Macro Energy. The cash-rich company acquired DigitalX (then called Digital CC), but gave more shares to the acquiring company than the original shareholders had, resulting in a shift of control.

The Next Big Technology Could Be Nanomaterials

Some researchers think nanomaterials could be useful in mitigating the greenhouse effect and thus slowing or stalling climate change. Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed a honeycomb-shaped structure built from nanoscale molecules that can trap carbon emissions in the atmosphere. To keep gases from leaking out of the device, the researchers capped its outer surface with vapors of a one-nanometer molecule called ethylenediamine. This protective layer was an attempt to mimic the way bees seal parts of their hives with wax. Another application, developed at Rice University, uses sheets of graphene to recycle waste carbon dioxide into ethylene and ethanol. In a lab test, graphene showed the potential to reduce carbon dioxide by up to 90 percent, converting 45 percent of greenhouse gases into clean fuel. Potential healthcare uses include silicon nanowires that can be absorbed by human cells.

Inside Wells Fargo's cybersecurity war room

In the past, banks have primarily run paper or desktop cyberattack simulations that focused on who would call whom in the event of a cybercatastrophe. “It’s now emerged to a cyber range, a cybersimulation that allows those cyberwarriors to respond to real-life infections and malware, strengthen their skills, improve the controls in their environment and get ready for what may come one day from a malicious or nation-state actor,” Baich said. “In a cyber range, you take real action and, since it's a virtual environment, it will not impact production systems.” Most large banks are using cyber ranges. But the technique has yet to reach the midtier and smaller banks. Chris Thompson, senior managing director and head of financial services cybersecurity and resilience at Accenture Security, said many organizations can’t afford it.

Developing The Next Generation Of Transport

First, the vehicles are becoming more complicated with many more interconnected systems that all have to be operated precisely to deliver the performance and response demanded by customers. To deal with this, the detail of the models being used on the HiL test rigs needs to be increased so that they cover all the vehicle systems including the engine, electric motors, cooling, suspension and so on. These complex multi-domain models need to run in real time with the appropriate level of detail to feed the control systems. The second challenge is that to make a vehicle autonomous, it must be able to see and interpret its surroundings and this is typically done through a range of sensors including cameras, radars, LiDARs (light detection and ranging) and ultrasound sensors.

The Power Of Digital Transformation In A Data-Driven World

In a data-driven world, an organization can rethink many of its old assumptions. When Airbnb, for example, broke away from processes and focused on data, it realized the company doesn’t need to own physical assets (hotels). Aspects of a hotel business that made it competitive in a process-driven world get stood on their head in a data-driven world. People who have apartments in great locations are a different option than hotels and provide different value in the customer experience. In rethinking old assumptions about a business, we can get to where value or opportunities emerge in different places than in a process-defined world. Another example of rethinking assumptions in a data-driven world is the human resources processes.

Data is eating the world: How data is reshaping business in the networked economy

The first thing to understand as we transition to a world dominated by data and networks (networks being any collection of people, nodes or data that is linked together) is this will not be a bigger version of mobile. It is fundamentally different. And requires a new sensitivity and instinct for how connected systems work. The recent cyber/data attack on the NHS in the UK (and others) point to a fracture in the old ideas and institutions we have come to rely on. Data has now become the great fault line of business, and almost everything we know and have learnt about digital, technology, and in many cases commerce, must be left behind us. We have heard a lot about digital transformation over the past 10 years, as companies grapple to maintain relevance in a mobile-dominated world.

Culture for a digital age

Executives must be proactive in shaping and measuring culture, approaching it with the same rigor and discipline with which they tackle operational transformations. This includes changing structural and tactical elements in an organization that run counter to the culture change they are trying to achieve. The critical cultural intervention points identified by respondents to our 2016 digital survey—risk aversion, customer focus, and silos—are a valuable road map for leaders seeking to persevere in reshaping their organization’s culture. The remainder of this article discusses each of these challenges in turn, spelling out a focused set of reinforcing practices to jump-start change.

Adopting AI in the Enterprise: Ford Motor Company

The most common AI applications involve direct driver interaction, including advisory systems that monitor acceleration and braking patterns to provide on-board evaluations of a driver’s preferences and intentions for different purposes—characterization of the driver, advice for fuel-efficient driving and safe driving, auto-selecting the optimal suspension and steering modes, simplifying the human-machine interface by estimating the most likely next destination, and preferred settings of the climate control, etc. These systems use traditional AI methods—rule-based, Markov models, clustering; they do not require special hardware. One of their distinctive features is to be intelligent enough to identify the level of acceptance of provided recommendations, and avoid drivers’ annoyance.

Quote for the day:

"What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people." -- Frank Herbert

Daily Tech Digest - July 31, 2017

Without enterprise architecture, the Internet of Things is just... things

The rise of IoT is shifting software and network requirements within organizations moving forward with efforts, the GAO report also states. The report's authors predict more emphasis on "analysis programs that can condense large volumes of IoT data into actionable information," as well as "'smart' programs that can augment or replace a human operator. Aggregated data gathered from IoT devices can undergo sophisticated data analysis techniques, or analytics, to find patterns and to extract information and knowledge, enhancing decision-making." There will be changes in business structures as a result as well. "IoT software developments permitting automation may reduce the need for human operators in certain capacities," particularly software that "relies on augmented intelligence and behavior to substitute for human judgement and actions, respectively. ..."

DevOps Security & the Culture of 'Yes'

The new way brings the teams together, which makes problem resolution part of the process. Iterations are small, and we have tools to get real visibility into what's happening in production. If there is a problem, we can point to the data instead of each other. This focus on communication, collaboration, and the use of production data to drive decisions is the key to making security work in a DevOps world. The principle issue that security teams face when working with other organizations is how to effectively communicate risk, priority, and tradeoffs. Just because we think something is important doesn't mean our developers and ops guys do, too. Moreover, the old approach of enforcing process and exercising veto power over releases is no longer viable. With DevOps, one thing we can be certain of is that the release is going out the door. No more C-S-No. Today, we can't just say "no." We can't even say "no, but..." We need to find ways to say "Yes, here's how we can do it."

When blockchain meets big data, the payoff will be huge

You can expect to see decentralized solutions like Storj, Sia, MaidSafe, and FileCoin start to gain some initial traction in the enterprise storage space. One enterprise pilot phase rollout indicates this decentralized approach could reduce the costs of storing data by 90 percent compared to AWS. As for blockchain-driven AI, you can expect to see a three phase roll-out. First, within the existing enterprise. Then, within the ecosystem. Finally, totally open systems. The entire industry might be termed blockchains for big data. Longer term, we will see an expansion of the concept of big data, as we move from proprietary data silos to blockchain-enabled shared data layers. In the first epoch of big data, power resided with those who owned the data. In the blockchain epoch of big data, power will reside with those who can access the most data and who can gain the most insights most rapidly.

Security Investments Consume SWIFT's Profits

Banks that collectively own SWIFT saw their profits vanish last year as the organization increased its investments in information security, even as the interbank messaging service handled record volumes of money-moving messages. The investment followed the $81 million heist from the central bank of Bangladesh in February last year, accomplished by attackers who issued fraudulent SWIFT money-moving messages from a compromised Bangladesh Bank system. News of the attack sparked a public relations disaster for the Brussels-based cooperative, formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, calling into question the integrity of its messaging service and whether the organization was doing enough to police members' information security practices.

For CISOs Blockchain Will Improve Internet of Things (IoT) Security

Within the realm of IoT, blockchain has huge potential with home automation systems, connected thermostats, autonomous vehicles, etc. Blockchain helps reduce security threats at the edge. The long-term value is with interactive appliances such as refrigerators or washing machines that can intuitively restock, order, pay for and have items shipped without user interaction. Industries like aviation, financial services, healthcare, mining, public sector and supply chain/logistics companies have all begun transforming to support blockchain. For example, aviation and manufacturing are using blockchain to track, move and locate replacement parts across multiple companies and suppliers. The financial services industry is investigating blockchain to ensure transactional integrity, faster clearing and settlement with lowered costs, especially at scale.

Banking Must Move From Mobile-First to AI-First

The number one trend around artificial intelligence is underscored by the fact that bankers believe artificial intelligence (AI) will ‘revolutionize the way banks gather information and interact with customers.’ This is in line with the findings from other industries, where the application of big data and machine learning is expected to provide a better understanding of customer beliefs and intentions, enabling enhanced customer experiences and better competitive positioning. ... “With advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and big data analytics, humans can now design technology that’s capable of learning to think more like people and to constantly align to and help advance their wants and needs. This human-centered technology approach pays off for businesses, as leading companies will transform relationships from provider to partner — simultaneously transforming internally.”

The Role of Machine Learning Technology in the Hotel Sector

Machine learning uses algorithms that iteratively learn from data, allowing technology to glean more actionable insights from the available data. Examples of machine learning outside of the hotel sector include credit scoring and the targeting of marketing advertisements. In hotel revenue technology, machine learning is often used in conjunction with statistical methods to produce cutting-edge forecasting and decision optimisation. High-performance technology can use machine-learning processes to better understand the relationship between price and demand, and generate room rates that adapt and anticipate market fluctuations.In the age of big data, machine learning systems are critical. Any revenue manager working without the support of an analytical revenue management solution will find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of data.

How smart cities like New York City will drive enterprise change

Smart cities are built on citywide fiber networks, which can eventually (as with the case of ZenFi's network) connect 5G wireless antennas on every street corner and every floor of every office building back to the core network. This densification of the wireless networks is the true hero of the smart cities revolution, enabling not only smart-city kiosks, but capacity for high-speed wireless applications on smartphones and tablets, widespread IoT deployments, mobile augmented reality applications, self-driving cars and more. It's also amazing that New York is leading the smart city charge. Because if the concept can make it there, it can make it anywhere. Dark-fiber deployments in New York typically cost far more than in just about any other city because of heavy unionization and the scale of any disruption when streets have to be closed for fiber installation.

Everything You Need To Know About Wireless Mesh Networks

Mesh networks are resilient, self-configuring, and efficient. You don’t need to mess with them after often minimal work required to set them up, and they provide arguably the best and highest throughput you can achieve in your home. These advantages have led to several startups and existing companies introducing mesh systems contending for the home and small business Wi-Fi networking dollar. Mesh networks solve a particular problem: covering a relatively large area, more than about 1,000 square feet on a single floor, or a multi-floor dwelling or office, especially where there’s no ethernet already present to allow easier wired connections of non-mesh Wi-Fi routers and wireless access points. All the current mesh ecosystems also offer simplicity. You might pull out great tufts of hair working with the web-based administration control panels on even the most popular conventional Wi-Fi routers.

How Rust can replace C, with Python's help

Proponents of Rust, the language engineered by Mozilla to give developers both speed and memory safety, are stumping for the language as a long-term replacement for C and C++. But replacing software written in these languages can be a difficult, long-term project. One place where Rust could supplant C in the short term is in the traditionally C libraries used in other languages. Much of the Python ecosystem for statistics and machine learning is written in C, via modules that could be replaced or rewritten incrementally. It isn’t difficult to expose Rust code to Python. A Rust library can expose a C ABI (application binary interface) to Python without too much work. Some Rust crates (as Rust packages are called) already expose Python bindings to make them useful in Python. But there is always opportunity for closer integrations between both languages.

Quote for the day:

"Beware that the detours in your life don't turn into destinations.: -- Tim Fargo