Daily Tech Digest - January 10, 2018

How Founders Kill Their Own Start-Ups

First, micro-managing founders have a hard time scaling up their ventures. A lack of empowerment inevitably creates decision bottlenecks, which hamper speed of execution, a key ingredient of scalability. Such bottlenecks also foster “firefighting”, which is when small issues keep grabbing more attention and resources than they should. Ultimately, high-level, high-impact decisions suffer neglect and progress grinds to a halt. Second, micro-management is a talent drain. Often those who are attracted to start-ups want to build something, to be part of something bigger. Millennials in particular want to have an impact. Micro-managers clip wings and can’t retain top contributors, especially creative ones. ... Third, time spent micro-managing is time spent away from a founder’s most important tasks: Thinking about the big picture, drumming up business and finding resources to make everything run smoothly. A founder’s micro-management, evidenced by high turnover, may even put off potential advisors and investors.

How the Threat Landscape Will Shift This Year

Defending against supply chain attacks will be tough because each software vendor has a different distribution mechanism and signing infrastructure, says Weston. In the past, companies could put software on a "trusted list" if it had a history of being secure. However, he says, businesses have to realize anything can change from good to bad at any time. "Getting your software sources from centralized locations where possible is one of the practical means for protecting against supply chain attacks," Weston adds. Cryptocurrency will be a growing security issue as more people adopt it. Attackers will target machines to cannibalize their resources and focus on cryptocurrencies, which are getting harder to mine in legitimate ways. Wallets will also become popular among hackers.

The 12 biggest issues IT faces today

Most organizations struggle with finding qualified tech staff, says Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA. Training them up on the clock feels equally daunting. “The good news for employers is that the majority of IT pros like what they’re doing,” Thibodeaux says. “Their jobs provide them with a sense of personal accomplishment. Their skills and talents are put to good use. They see opportunities to grow and develop in their careers — and they’re generally satisfied with their compensation and benefits.” While IT staff may enjoy their work, retraining goes a long way in keeping it that way, says Thibodeaux. “IT pros would like more resources for training and development, and more career path guidance and career advancement opportunities,” he says. “They’re also interested in having access to more tools and engaging with more technologies and applications. And they’d welcome the opportunity to work on new technology initiatives.”

Code Refactoring Techniques

Red-green refactor is the Agile engineering pattern which underpins Test Driven Development. Characterized by a “test-first” approach to design and implementation, this lays the foundation for all forms of refactoring. You incorporate refactoring into the test driven development cycle by starting with a failing “red” test, writing the simplest code possible to get the test to pass “green,” and finally work on improving and enhancing your code while keeping the test “green.” This approach is about how one can seamlessly integrate refactoring into your overall development process and work towards keeping code clean. There are two distinct parts to this: writing code that adds a new function to your system, and improving the code that does this function. The important thing is to remember to not do both at the same time during the workflow.

What is DevSecOps? Developing more secure applications

“DevOps has become second nature for agile, high-performing enterprises and a foundation for the success of their online business,” says Pascal Geenens, a security evangelist and researcher at Radware. “Continuous change in technology and consumer demand means there is a continuous cycle of updates to run that will keep a very varied set of functions from page upload times to shopping and search features up to date and running at their best.” “However, application security was mostly an afterthought, and at times perceived as a roadblock to staying ahead of the competition,” says Geenens. “Given the reliance of applications to keep operations running, bypassing security must be considered a high-risk strategy -- a distributed or permanent denial of service attack could easily catch you out. You just need to look at the implications of failing to update the Apache Struts framework as suffered by Equifax. The DevSecOps movement is designed to change this.”

The symphonic enterprise

After a decade of domain-specific transformation, one question remains unanswered: How can disruptive technologies work together to achieve larger strategic and operational goals? We are now seeing some forward-thinking organizations approach change more broadly. They are not returning to “sins of the past” by launching separate, domain-specific initiatives. Instead, they are thinking about exploration, use cases, and deployment more holistically, focusing on how disruptive technologies can complement each other to drive greater value. For example, blockchain can serve as a new foundational protocol for trust throughout the enterprise and beyond. Cognitive technologies make automated response possible across all enterprise domains. Digital reality breaks down geographic barriers between people, and systemic barriers between humans and data. Together, these technologies can fundamentally reshape how work gets done, or set the stage for new products and business models.

Aadhaar sitting duck for cyber criminals, says RBI-backed research

"Aadhaar faces a number of challenges over the short and long-term. The primary challenge is to protect the data from prying and excessive profit seeking excess of the business world. It is wellknown that businesses are increasingly operating in a highly competitive world in which ethical boundaries are rapidly being pulled down. The problem is compounded because they have to satisfy their shareholders in a competitive business environment that rarely looks beyond the quarterly profits and the operational dynamics of stock market listing," it says. However, the paper says, cyber vulnerabilities of Aadhaar are a bigger concern than the possible commercial misuse of data. "In an era when cyber threats are frequent, the major challenge for UIDAI is to protect the data under its control since the biometrics is now an important national asset which has huge ramifications for various government programmes and the banking system," it says.

3 top trends that will drive ERP software development

Organizations are continuing to see the many advantages of developing a roadmap and strategy that leads to digital transformation (i.e. the ability to leverage the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine learning, AI, big data or analytics). This movement will continue to drive their approach through 2018 or organizations will face the consequences of being left behind by competitors. From an ERP perspective, the combined driving force of these innovative technologies will continue to re-shape how enterprises utilize their IT solutions to provide increased efficiency, process and productivity inside their organization – something for many have been left untapped. While the industry has been discussing many of these leading-edge technologies, here are the “big three” technologies which will play a significant role in re-shaping how we think of ERP in 2018.

How network verification differs from monitoring, and what it’s good for

In a network verification system, the intent is explicitly declared – in this case, that the external partner network should be connected to the demilitarized zone but isolated from the rest of the data center. The network verification system can then explore all possible data flows that could occur and determine if some flows will violate the intent, thus spotting the vulnerability well before the attack. Now suppose you are called early Saturday morning to fix this vulnerability by locking down firewall rules. ... Depending on the application and the access-control mistake, such a slip-up might result in an immediate red-alert outage, or it might not show up until Monday morning. Either way, traffic monitoring will see the problem only after it has already affected users. A company with a network verification system could incorporate the proposed change into its network model pre-deployment and predict that the change would violate the connectivity intent, saving you from causing an outage.

Will 2018 be the year of the chatbot? Not without human help

"A chatbot is like a baby—it needs to be nurtured and taught—you can't just set up a chatbot and let it go," Harles said. Developers should avoid getting too attached to a certain technology, and think about the reasoning for a chatbot, Harles said. The bot should set out to solve a problem for the customer, making it a useful, uncomplex tool. "Some organizations think chatbots will automate a process or avoid call center calls—but the truth is chatbots are like the advent of the ATM," Harles said. "Many thought the ATM would replace banks and tellers, but in reality, it simply created a new channel. That is what chatbots will deliver for brands—a new communication channel." But a new communication channel can come with its own issues, including potential abuse of the channel with inappropriate or unrelated questions.

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Quote for the day:

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." -- Henry David Thoreau

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Daily Tech Digest - January 08, 2018

Five Things Every Developer Should Know About Software Architecture

Software architecture has traditionally been associated with big design up front and waterfall-style delivery, where a team would ensure that every last element of the software design was considered before any code was written. In 2001, the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" suggested that we should value "responding to change over following a plan," which when taken at face value has been misinterpreted to mean that we shouldn’t plan. The net result, and I’ve seen this first hand, is that some software development teams have flipped from doing big design up front to doing no design up front. Both extremes are foolish, and there’s a sweet spot somewhere that is relatively easy to discover if you’re willing to consider that up front design is not necessarily about creating a perfect end-state. Instead, think about up front design as being about creating a starting point and setting a direction for the team. This often missed step can add a tremendous amount of value to a team by encouraging them to understand what they are going to build and whether it is going to work.

5 Traits of Truly Innovative Companies

"Disruption happens when small, nimble companies challenge incumbents with technology," said Conrad Burke, vice president of New Ventures at Intellectual Ventures and head of ISF Incubator, an incubator and accelerator within Intellectual Ventures, which creates and licenses intellectual property (IP). "Timing is everything. You have to be able to execute well and quickly because things can change rapidly." On the other hand, speed can kill. Many great ideas haven't taken off as expected simply because the timing was wrong. For example, at the turn of the millennium, mobile marketing was supposed to change the world. Now, 18 years later, marketers are advancing the same idea as if it's novel. The difference is that today we have smartphones that deliver slick experiences, as opposed to flip phones. In addition, the networks to which our phones are connected provide coverage just about everywhere and their significantly greater bandwidth supports many content types, not just text.

Why Microsoft’s Cosmos DB may displace AWS’s cloud databases

The reason for Cosmos DB’s ascendance may stem from declining developer interest in “polyglot persistence.” Coined by Thoughtworks’ Martin Fowler back in 2011, polyglot persistence suggests that “any decent sized enterprise will have a variety of different data storage technologies for different kinds of data.” Rather than forcing data to fit a relational data model, for example, an enterprise will more likely embrace wide-column data for some parts of an application, a graph database for others, and relational for still others. The popularity of databases like MongoDB is a clear sign that, in fact, we do live in an increasingly polyglot world. Microsoft’s genius with Cosmos DB is that developers may want to have their polyglot persistence cake and eat it too—all in one place. As InfoWorld’s Serdar Yegulalp has written, “With Cosmos DB, Microsoft offers multiple consistency models in the same database, so the choice of model can be a function of the workload rather than the product.” That’s huge.

Fundamental skills for a bright future in IT

“Going forward, I believe you’ll see a basic need for talent that understands the fundamentals of algorithms to create AI systems, as well as general design and even some psychology and understanding of human behavior,” Fermin says. “People who are tasked with designing and building, say, chatbots will need to understand how to give those technologies human characteristics and make the interactions indistinguishable from interacting with another human being — how can it show empathy, compassion, creativity, communication,” he says. But how can job seekers emphasize these kinds of “middle ground” skills on their resume? You can’t simply list them as you would harder tech skills; you should take the same approach you would when highlighting your soft skills, says Quizlet’s Glotzbach. “Emphasize how you’ve learned on the job, or how you’ve invested in a post-graduate education through online courses, microcertifications, bootcamps — anything like that,” Glotzbach says.

Why A Cyberattack Could Cause Infrastructure To Fall Like Dominoes

The biggest motive for cyberattacks over the past few years has been financial gain. Hackers shut down a network and demand a ransom before halting an attack or giving the victim access to their network. With profit in mind, companies that, presumably, have the cash to pay ransoms are typically the target. But infrastructure operators can be victims of hackers facing any number of motivations, including money, politics or vandalism. There are strong indications that bigger and more organized actors — in some cases nation-states — have probed U.S. nuclear power plants, a dam in New York and a network that sits at the center of the global banking system.  Fear of retaliation is likely the best explanation for why a major attack hasn’t occurred. Those who have the means are likely just as vulnerable.

Apple confirms all devices affected by Meltdown and Spectre

While all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, Apple said there were no known exploits impacting Apple device users and recommended downloading software only from trusted sources. Apple has released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown, and said the Apple Watch was unaffected. The impact of the mitigations for Meltdown have been estimated as high as a 30% reduction in performance, but Apple claimed that updates it had released so far resulted in “no measurable reduction in the performance” of macOS and iOS. Apple also plans to release mitigations in its Safari browser to help defend against Spectre “in the coming days” and said testing indicated that the Safari mitigations would have little or no measurable performance impact.

France goes after companies for deliberately shortening life of hardware

Printer manufacturers “deliberately shorten the life of printers and cartridges,” a French environmental and consumer protection group claims. That's against the law in France, and government prosecutors have agreed to investigate the claims. If the lawsuit against the printer company, Japan-based Epson, is proven, the firm could be found guilty of breaking a little-known French law that stipulates vendors can’t purposefully lower the lifespan of a product to ramp up replacement rates. A conviction could be significant for tech hardware manufacturing overall. Nabbing Epson would likely affect not only how hardware is built and sold in France, but it also could mean laws get adopted in other European territories —individual nations are involved in the functioning of the EU bloc overall.

5 steps to becoming a global IT leader

An IT leader in a multicultural environment must also be aware of his or her own cultural framework, observes Annalisa Nash Fernandez, a New York-based intercultural strategist who advises international executives on cross-cultural communication. "For an American CIO, that may mean a high degree of individualism and personal accountability, a task-based versus relationship-based approach and a linear view of project timing, which is the lens through which the diverse cultures and business styles of the teams abroad will be understood and processed," she explains. Begin the journey with face-to-face contacts to better know your customers, business partners and team, suggests Keith Collins, executive vice president and CIO of SAS. "Language and cultural differences make conference calls difficult at best," Collins says. "Practicing empathy is critically important in this environment."

China to block SD-WAN and VPN traffic by Jan. 11

Millions of Internet users relied on virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the Chinese censorship system, dubbed the Great Firewall of China. In the past, VPNs have worked intermittently but were invariably blocked, forcing users to jump to another VPN. The new regulations will block VPN access to unregistered services. Crackdowns on accessing the Internet beyond the Great Firewall — the world’s most sophisticated state-censorship operation, employs at least 2 million online censors. But this news highlights how the world’s second largest economy is struggling to balance authoritarianism with its business leadership aspirations. In addition, a strict new cybersecurity law came into effect in June. In July China Telecom, the nation’s biggest Internet service provider, sent a letter to corporate clients that said in future, VPNs would only be allowed to connect to a company’s headquarters abroad.

Four Age-Old Business Problems Machine Learning Will Soon Solve

The hype surrounding machine learning has been accelerating and expanding for years. Supporters talk about the potential of this technology to improve every process and eliminate any issue. In many cases, the levels of optimism and excitement have reached a fevered pitch. Less enthusiastic observers, however, have noted that the promise of machine learning is often described in broad terms and abstract assertions. The combination of technical jargon, hazy use cases, and vague details leaves many wondering how accessible and advantageous machine learning really is. That suspicion is valid, even important. But at the startup level, the machine learning market is innovating and advancing fast. Better still, the technologies in the pipeline are intended neither for the biggest companies nor the most complex processes. Rather, they are being designed to solve age-old business problems that could plague any enterprise.

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Quote for the day:

"A mistake is a crushing weight to a pessimist and a trampoline to an optimist." -- Tim Fargo

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Daily Tech Digest - January 07, 2018

Big Data Driven Smart Transportation: the Underlying Story of IoT Transformed Mobility

For public transportation, big data analytics have transformed both the plan and operations phases on planning and demand modeling, predictive maintenance, and event response. New big data tech-savvy has brought more personalized services to public transportation users, such as offering ancillary services to providing recommendations about additional destinations to visit as part of an upgrade to the passenger’s journey, etc. The big data driven smart public transportation influences both automated and human decision-making, which has clearly played a big part in re-energizing public transport network, and has offered plenty of opportunities to improve the public transportation experience with improved reliability and safety. For drivers, real-time traffic sensor data collection, analysis, visualization and optimization of dynamic transportation systems has reduced transportation time and emissions greatly.

Functional programming finally goes mainstream

The customer-facing software development world is outgrowing stateful, object-oriented (OO) development. The bar for great, intuitive customer experience has been raised by ambient, conversation-driven user interfaces, like through Amazon Alexa. Functional programming allows enterprises to take better advantage of compute power to deliver those experiences at scale; better flexibility for delivering the right output; and a more efficient way of delivering customer value. FP also reduces regression defects in code, simplifies code creation and maintenance and allows for greater code reuse. Just as object-oriented programming (OOP) emerged as the solution to the limitations of procedural programming at the dawn of the internet boom in the mid-'90s, FP is emerging as the solution to the limitations of OOP today. The shift is already underway -- 53 percent of global developers reported that at least some teams in their companies are practicing functional programming and are planning to expand their usage.

Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer

Alex Beath, a Toronto-based physicist and pension fund analyst, is skeptical about Bitcoin but sees one useful purpose for the crypto-currency: It may detect when someone creates a working quantum computer. “The second someone creates a viable quantum computer, the NP-complete math problems at the heart of Bitcoin mining tech become instantly solvable,” Beath notes. “In other words, one answer to the question ‘what’s the first thing you’d do with a quantum computer?’ is ‘mine all of the remaining Bitcoin instantly.’ Until that happens, nobody has a quantum computer.” Beath’s off-the-cuff observation, which he made in response to a Fortune query about the security of bitcoin, is amusing. But it also underscores a serious problem: Namely, a new era of computing is fast-approaching and when it arrives, the system that gave rise to many crypto-currency fortunes will collapse.

AI Weekly: If we create artificial intelligence, will we know it?

When people talk about creating an artificial intelligence, the conversation is often focused on human or superhuman AI — systems that would equal or surpass us in intelligence. But what if we create an artificial intelligence that’s deserving of respect, but don’t recognize it as such? That’s a question I’ve had bouncing around in my head for the past several months. Over the course of human history, we’ve proven very poor as a species at successfully evaluating the intelligence of other beings, whether they’re human or non-human. Consider crows, who learn from their dead, recognize individuals, use tools, and even bring gifts to those they like — are they … intelligent? Furthermore, if we were to create an AI that produced those characteristics, does it require the same sort of considerations that a crow does, with regards to its treatment at the hands of humanity? We likely won’t have to reckon with a human-level AI for many years, but these questions could prove more pressing.

5 machine learning mistakes – and how to avoid them

Machine learning gives organizations the potential to make more accurate data-driven decisions and to solve problems that have stumped traditional analytical approaches. However, machine learning is not magic. It presents many of the same challenges as other analytics methods. In this article, we introduce some of the common machine learning mistakes that organizations must avoid to successfully incorporate this technique into their analytics strategy.  The shortage of deep analytics talent continues to be a glaring challenge, and the need for employees who can manage and consume analytical content is even greater. Recruiting and keeping these in-demand technical experts has become a significant focus for many organizations. Data scientists, the most skilled analytics professionals, need a unique blend of computer science, mathematics and domain expertise. Experienced data scientists command high price tags and demand engaging projects.

Security fears have held companies back from adopting cloud services

Companies have been slow to move from running applications and storing data on their own private servers to doing them on public clouds such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, a new study by McKinsey found. Only 40% of the companies studied had more than 10% of their workloads on public clouds. Concerns about cybersecurity were holding many companies back, although attitudes are changing, McKinsey, a consulting company, found in the study, which surveyed 90 companies across multiple industries. "Despite the benefits of public-cloud platforms, persistent concerns about cybersecurity for the public cloud have deterred companies from accelerating the migration of their workloads to the cloud," McKinsey said in its report. "Executives cited security as one of the top barriers to cloud migration, along with the complexity of managing change and the difficulty of making a compelling business case for cloud adoption."

How I fell for the blockchain gold rush

I found myself obsessed, constantly monitoring Twitter, waking in the night to check coin tracking apps. Pundits were hailing verge as a game-changer, the next bitcoin. Unbelievers pointed to previous missed deadlines and called it “vaporware”, a nonexistent con, the biggest scam in crypto history. In this unprecedented hype, there was clearly unprecedented money to be made. And more than one way to make it. Three things hold sway over these unregulated crypto markets: coin innovations, bitcoin whales manipulating prices with huge pump and dumps, and social media. The merest hint of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on a coin’s Twitter or Reddit threads can tank its price quickly, and as the final days of 2017 slipped by with Wraith Protocol still unreleased, the FUDers went to town on verge. A crypto tipster named Marquis Trill tweeted his 4.6 million followers on Christmas Day to “sell XVG!”, claiming he had proof from a Reddit whistleblower that the Wraith Protocol project was falling apart.

Top 10 Retail Banking Trends and Predictions for 2018

The fact that the list of trends identified by the financial services industry has remained relatively consistent could be a symptom of a greater problem. The banking industry is moving much too slow, and legacy firms are failing to differentiate themselves. According to Forrester, “In a market where one-third of all customers say ‘all banks are basically the same,’ it would make sense for executives and their teams to obsess over how to differentiate. Unfortunately, 2018 will look more like a digital arms race between warring incumbents than a year in which firms find new ways to specialize and create value for customers.” Regarding changes in emphasis for this year’s trends, removing friction from the customer journey increased in importance from last year, with 61% of organizations placing this trend in the top three, compared to 54% last year. The trend around the use and application of data also increased in importance from last year, with 57% of those surveyed placing this in the top 3 for 2018, compared to 53% in predictions for 2017.

Google Cloud Preemptible GPUs: Dirt cheap machine learning with a serious catch

The words “artificial intelligence” often conjure up a sense of fear and apprehension. Fear for the unknown possibilities of AI, fear for the AI-fueled dystopian images brought about by movies like The Terminator, and most practically, fear for the possibility that AI will someday take our jobs. This fear is neither new nor totally unfounded. As with any disruptive technological invention, faster, more efficient machines are bound to replace human workers. However, those who fear AI will take their jobs can rest a little easier knowing they will at least have the potential to find a new job. A new report by Gartner states that although AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs, it will create 2.3 million jobs. Peter Sondergaard, head researcher at Gartner, predicted AI will augment workers’ abilities and could be a “net job creator” starting in 2020. I believe, like all other disruptive technologies of the past, AI will bring about many opportunities for new jobs.

Brazilian Government Plans to Process Petitions and Write Laws on Ethereum

The key to employing a Blockchain system in processing petitions and electoral votes is to encrypt votes onto the immutable Blockchain network as transactions, to ensure that the specific piece of data remains unalterable and invulnerable to manipulation. Essentially, processing petition signatures on the Ethereum network would require smart contracts, and the system would operate similarly as other decentralized applications that exist on the network. The electoral system of Brazil would act as a decentralized application of its own with an independent digital token, that is used to process every vote on the Blockchain. Henrique Costa, a Universidade de Brasilia law professor, told QZ that the lack of an immutable platform to collect signatures of votes had been a real issue for the government in the past. Within the Brazilian electoral system, any popular petition with the signatures of one percent of the country’s populations is required to be heard in Congress.

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Quote for the day:

"Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside." -- Andy Stanley

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Daily Tech Digest - January 06, 2018

Artificial Intelligence Is On The Verge Of Heralding A Cultural Revolution

Self-driving cars and chess-playing computers might be the first things that come to your mind when you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but as a concept, AI's not exactly new. Go back to the ancient Greeks, and you'll discover Talos, a mythological giant automaton warrior made of bronze. In fact, that's not the only example from Greek mythology of what we'd consider an AI - Hephaestus, the God of Technology, was also said to have created automated servants some human-like, and others wheeled tripods. Then there's the mud-creature Golem from Jewish lore. Coming back to relatively recent times, you could even consider Frankenstein's monster to be a kind of intelligent automaton. Nearly every culture has stories about man-made creatures that could think and act on their own but given that we're a species that's always tried to play God, it seems only natural. Of course, it wasn't till the advent of computers that Artificial Intelligence moved from the realm of fiction and folklore to reality.

The CIO’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence

CIOs are in the perfect position to educate their company’s CEO and board about recent developments in AI and illustrate how AI might influence their business and competitive landscape. By following this approach, CIOs can potentially flip the traditional engagement model between IT and the business, influencing business strategy at the outset, rather than simply developing implementation projects that follow up on the executive team’s decisions. ... Recent breakthroughs in machine learning, big data, computer vision and speech recognition are increasing the commercial potential of AI. But AI requires new skills and a new way of thinking about problems. CIOs must ensure that IT owns the strategy and governance of AI solutions. Although pilot AI experiments can start with a small investment, for full production rollout, the biggest area of investment is building and retaining the necessary talent.

The Most Important Skill In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The reason why AI is being prevalently used now than before is twofold: 1) the science and the advancement behind algorithm development; 2) with the abundance of data generated makes it a perfect time to use this model. One of the key principles of algorithm design for AI is that there must be enough 'training' data on which to 'train' the model before it is able to make meaningful predictions. This number can range from 10,000 data points and above. The abundance of data did not exist in the same capacity as it does now, and with the prevalence of high-speed computing, this is a perfect time utilize this model. Now, that we understand what AI is and why it is being used now, let's examine what AI can and cannot do. AI is able to replicate and automate decisions based on certain parameters that are fed into the program, but no matter what AI cannot be creative.

What Crypto Didn't Give Us in 2017

Without a shadow of a doubt, this past year has been huge for cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology. Whatever the future may hold for Satoshi's brainchild and all that it has given birth to, 2017 will forever hold a singular position on the timeline of events in the crypto world. But as a new year approaches, the urge to get caught up in all that has happened over the past 12 months could prevent us from considering what 2017 did not bring – and why. Admittedly, it is hard not to be mesmerized by the numbers: the more than 1,300 cryptocurrencies, the $700-plus billion market cap they have produced or the eye-popping ICO raises of Tezos, Filecoin, Bancor and others – oh yes, and the gut-wrenching ride of bitcoin’s price as it climbed over $20 000 – and fell back down. And yet, it is worthwhile taking a step back and considering what is still missing and what exactly this might mean for the year that is almost upon us.

Open Banking starts next week. Meet the man making it happen

The joint UK and EU directive, which forces the nine biggest UK banks to give customers control over their data, comes into force on 13 January, 2018, bringing the prospect of disruptive change to the stagnant banking market. Possibilities include everything from big banks going bust to the invasion of the Banks of Amazon and Google. Entrepreneurs, however, remain wary. Open Banking hasn't been backed by a public awareness campaign, so consumers are at best ignorant, at worst fearful and confused. The limited initial scope only includes current account data, with credit cards and other payment accounts added slowly over the next two years. Last month, five banks, including HSBC and Barclays, announced they would miss the deadline to release their data. Will Open Banking break the big banks' stranglehold on the banking market? Or – as some suspect – end up being suffocated by the incumbents?

Who is responsible for self-driving car accidents?

If a fully self-driving vehicle being operated by an AI system was involved in an accident, who would be liable? Commissioned by the government to explore this question, Professor Koji Nakayama from the Meiji University Graduate School of Law, an expert on the Civil Procedure Code, organised a mock trial for an accident involving a self-driving car in January last year. The Road Traffic Law states that a driver must reliably operate the steering wheel, brakes and other equipment to drive at a speed and in a manner that does not put other people in danger. However, the law was not designed to apply to AI systems. In the mock trial, the hypothetical accident occurred when a bicycle suddenly pulled out in front of a self-driving car, which led the car to quickly change lanes. To avoid a collision with the car, a vehicle behind it swerved to the left and hit a utility pole, killing the driver.

Windows Meltdown-Spectre patches: If you haven't got them, blame your antivirus

Microsoft has warned users that its patches for the dangerous Meltdown CPU bug won't reach them if their third-party antivirus hasn't been updated to support this week's Windows security update. By now Windows users should have received the patches Microsoft released yesterday to plug the widespread Meltdown bug and its companion Spectre, which expose most computers and phones to speculative execution side-channel attacks that affect chips from Intel, AMD, and Arm. Microsoft released software updates for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Windows, and SQL Server, but customers will also need to apply firmware updates from their respective hardware vendors too. Surface and Surface Book users can expect an automatic firmware update from Microsoft but those with other hardware will need to check with their vendors.

Artificial intelligence: McKinsey talks workforce, training, and AI ethics

The potential for these technologies that we call artificial intelligence is huge. They affect potentially every sector, potentially every function. One reason for that is a lot of the potential applications of AI are extensions of the work that people had already started in data and analytics. And so, we've been looking at nearly 500 different use cases of artificial intelligence across every sector, across every function. Sometimes what we say is, these traditional analytic methods, whether it's regression or what have you, gets you this much impact. But, when you could add the multidimensionality of additional data or these additional deep learning techniques, you could increase, for instance, forecast accuracy or increased OEE or decreased waste, a number of these things, which these use cases allow us to do. You could think of AI as just being another turbocharged tool for your analytical toolkit.

How The Blockchain Is Redefining Trust

Blockchains could help reduce the gap of the entire lifecycle of a trade from days to minutes, even to zero. According to a report by Santander InnoVentures, the Spanish bank’s fintech investment fund, by 2022 ledger technologies could save banks $15–20 billion a year by reducing regulatory, settlement and cross-border costs. Digital Asset Holdings wants to be the distributed database handling these speedy transactions. And the who’s who of the world’s biggest financial names, including Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Blythe Masters’s old employer, JP Morgan, have ploughed more than $60 million of investment into DAH. Speed and efficiency are not the only qualities that make distributed ledgers attractive to banks. ‘Regulators will like that blockchain-based transactions can achieve greater transparency and traceability– an “immutable audit trail”,’ Masters says.

How Lean Problem Solving Increases Agile Team Productivity

Today tech companies are facing the challenges of the current digital age: increasing user expectations, technology disruptions and fierce competition. Managers and IT workers tend to proactively push technology solutions in order to solve problems without being sure of the effects and they often fall short…or sometimes options are never evaluated. They lack a proper and rigorous approach to formulating problems, diagnosing the root causes, performing relevant corrective actions, evaluating the effects, and at the end create a better understanding of the work improves day-to-day job practices of people. In this article, we will meet Marek, the CTO of a French mobile development company and Kevin a developer. Through patient observation of a developer’s work and how the software pieces were flowing or being stopped, Marek revealed a waste in the validation & deployment process, which seriously impacts developers’ productivity.

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Quote for the day:

"To make a decision, all you need is authority. To make a good decision, you also need knowledge, experience, and insight." -- Denise Moreland

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Daily Tech Digest - January 05, 2018

Banks of Future Will Face Digitally-Empowered Customers

One of the biggest impacts of using Internet-based distribution networks to access your consumer base is that it will reduce the number of intermediaries that need to participate in a transaction. This is not to say that middlemen will entirely disappear, but in a world where any two entities can communicate P2P on public internet rails, the concept of correspondent banking will be transformed. We already see the power of such networks in places like Kenya, where it took a branchless banking service called M-Pesa only three years to become the most successful mobile banking service in the developing world. They did this simply by connecting millions of consumers with their bank through SMS. Another impact will be a reduction in the friction inherent in switching banks. Think about how easy it is for a cab driver to switch his or her entire personal business from Uber to Lyft on a daily basis.

Should financial experts fear the rise of artificial intelligence?

Natural language processing, a sub-field of AI is a good example of augmented intelligence. NLP is the development of systems capable of reading and understanding the languages that humans speak. At the heart of this technology is the effort of interpreting a large amount of ‘unstructured data’ (i.e. data that cannot be read by machines yet, such as PDF files, images and audio material). This level of automation is already having significant practical implications. ... 5,000 FinTech start-ups were identified by a 2016 report by Ernst & Young, and the vast majority of them have a mission statement to innovate the banking and financial services sector in some way. Notably, AI is able to vastly improve upon client servicing, trading, post-trade operations such as reconciliations, transaction reporting, tax operation and enterprise risk management, just to name a few.

The Internet of (Secure) Things Checklist

As the AT&T IoT Cybersecurity Alliance highlighted in a recent white paper, Mirai was a prime example of the type of risk posed by unsecured IoT devices. The obvious threat is exposure of personal data to an attacker who compromises a device. However, according to the report, if the connected devices within your organization are used as part of a widespread attack, your organization could suffer reputational damage or, worse, your organization could be victimized by a compromised IoT device from a business partner. Just like any type of cyberattack, the implications of an IoT attack are far-reaching. This is why it is important for security professionals to approach IoT security just as they would network, endpoint, and cloud security. A comprehensive cyber hygiene strategy is a necessary component of securing your organization and preventing cyber attacks.

Witness a crime? In the UK, you can report it to Alexa

While benefits may include more convenient crime reporting and saving public resources, privacy concerns abound, as noted by our sister site ZDNet. If sent out or received through the Echo, crime reports both in and out of the police department would be stored on Amazon servers. This could especially be an issue when it comes to reporting crimes anonymously, ZDNet noted, and will be an issue the police force has to address. This isn't the first time Alexa has been implicated in law enforcement. In January 2017, police investigating a murder in Bentonville, AR, filed a search warrant asking Amazon to provide "electronic data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed words, text records and other data" from the Echo. Amazon refused to provide the information from its servers, but the case highlighted the privacy issues associated with always-on devices, Joel Reidenberg, founding academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University, told TechRepublic at the time.

The shifting sands of finance and technology

With new technologies in place, finance teams will see their role begin to overlap and connect more with their commercial and IT colleagues, with deeper business insights that give people the capacity to become more forward-looking and predictive. Others will be called on to work more closely with computing professionals to develop and implement complex technology systems. It’s time to recognize that just implementing AI or trying out data analytics is no longer enough without the integration and the wholesale processes change to back up the initiatives. The only way the finance organization will realize the full-range and long-term benefits of these technologies is by rethinking finance processes and how the entire ecosystem works together. From our experience at EY, and working with our clients on their own innovations, I truly believe that the finance, IT and other teams can and should all learn from one another.

8 Chrome extensions that supercharge Google Drive

Want to show your sales video to clients without having to hook up your laptop to a projector or large display? Tibor Vukovic's DriveCast extension lets you cast media files you have stored in your Google Drive to a Google Chromecast device plugged into the projector, display or TV. No need to download the file first; just “cast” it from your Google Drive. (DriveCast casts the media file formats that Chromecast officially supports, like JPG, MP3, and MP4.) Once DriveCast is installed and your computer is linked to your Chromecast device, click the DriveCast icon on the Chrome toolbar. It will open a new tab that lists alphabetically the folders in your Google Drive. Click to open the folder where the media file you want to cast is stored in; find the file and click it. In the small panel that opens below the URL address box, be sure to select “DriveCast” as the casting source (not “tab” or “desktop”).

Four misconceptions around compensating controls

Compensating controls are not a shortcut to compliance or a free pass on compliance. Instead companies are finding that most compensating controls are actually more expensive in the long run. Worse still, they can often prove harder to implement than actually addressing the original vulnerability in the first place. Although they can be legally used for almost every requirement of the PCI DSS, brands should calculate the cost to implement the compliant solution before automatically jumping to compensating controls and also consider future potential costs. If companies are not compliant and a hack occurs, they can face compensation and remediation costs, legal fees, federal audits and of course lost revenue. For example, Target’s profits dropped $440 million in the fiscal fourth quarter following the news of the security breach.

Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD

Meltdown and Spectre are not exactly the same, but they are related and use a similar exploit mechanism to gain access to computer data. Nearly all modern chip architectures from the major suppliers (Intel, AMD, ARM) are affected, and this includes nearly all modern computer systems from data center to PC to smartphones. The problem affects nearly all operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android, as well as virtualized environments such as VMware and Citrix. But it doesn’t affect lower-level or real-time operating systems (like QNX) that don’t use this particular feature, nor in lower-level controller chips used for the Internet of Things (IoT). Basically, the exploit involves reading memory locations that are supposed to be protected and reserved for use by the computer kernel. It exploits an architectural technique known as “speculative execution” which is a key feature of things such as look-ahead instructions and data, which significantly improves computer performance.

In the World of Cryptocurrencies, Something’s Gotta Give in 2018

So you thought Bitcoin was anonymous? Hope you weren’t buying anything naughty with it, because—surprise—it really isn’t. But privacy is still of major interest to the cryptocurrency community, which is why you should expect to hear more in the coming year about a cryptographic protocol called a zero-knowledge proof. The mind-bending math of zero-knowledge proofs makes it possible to prove something (say, that you are older than 18) without revealing anything else (like your precise age). A currency called Zcash already uses this to make truly anonymous transactions possible. JPMorgan Chase has even adopted it for its “enterprise blockchain” system. And thanks to its latest software update, Ethereum’s developers can now implement zero-knowledge capability too. It would not be surprising if the next year were to yield applications of zero-knowledge proofs that we haven’t yet imagined.

IT departments have no idea how much they spend on AWS and Azure

Unless an IT department closely scrutinises its cloud usage, it can end up paying far more than it needs to. Public cloud servcies generally offer tools to help IT admins keep track of which cloud instances are being used and how much storage, network, memory and central processing unit (CPU) workloads consume. But it is often hard for an individual user to find these metrics given the way cloud services tend to be procurerd. According to Densify, many businesses have multiple AWS or other public cloud accounts, that roll up into a master corporate account. This means the people who pay the cloud bills rarely understand the reasoning behind the expense, Densify said. Internal users who then take chunks of cloud service from the main account are only aware of the demands their own cloud instances require. Their applications may need different usage patterns in terms of storage, CPU and memory, compared to other parts of the business.

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Quote for the day:

"Your job gives you authority. Your behavior gives you respect." -- Irwin Federman

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