Daily Tech Digest - September 26, 2018

There and Back Again – A Network Engineer’s Tale

The old ways of operating the network are rapidly becoming obsolete. The CLI is excellent for troubleshooting or small changes, but in increasingly complex infrastructure it is not feasible to only use the CLI. Today, the network is programmable. Key functions are automated. Network engineers are network programmers and need new tools and most importantly…APIs. That is where I make the comparison between networking engineers and Frodo Baggins – i.e. wishing that this change had not been thrust upon them “in their time.” I have talked to many engineers and hear their frustration and fears of being left out in that change or that their CCIE is not as valuable as before. However, although the change might be scary, there are a lot of reasons for not worrying too much. The first is that knowledge of key concepts is still immensely valuable and probably even more so than before. When your infrastructure is more complicated, taking the proper approach to designing a change – a network refresh, or defining how you are going to operate it – is more complicated.

Augmented intelligence: The clearest path to focused AI?

The Eye demonstrated great accuracy when detecting objects on the road, but the AI's primary task is to build behavior patterns. Of course, there are several parameters involved, such as where an event happens, under what conditions and whether there are pedestrians on the road. The system checks what's normal under these circumstances to what is currently happening, and if it is beyond a certain threshold, it will send an alert to all cars within that proximity. While access to information about every car on the road sounds like a privacy nightmare, Discoperi has already taken steps to ensure privacy as well as give users full control over their data by storing the data on a blockchain. Privacy might seem more like a problem for augmented intelligence because it involves human input, while artificial intelligence is theoretically fully autonomous. But due to the real shortcomings in AI, many companies have already used humans behind the scenes to complete AI's job where it failed, raising privacy concerns in AI.

Microsoft Adds Features to Teams, Beefs Up Security

Microsoft sees Teams as a critical interface to the entire line of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services. Added to Office 365 commercial licenses 18 months ago, Teams has become the most rapidly adopted business application in Microsoft’s history, company officials revealed at Ignite, where the company said that 329,000 organizations now use Teams. It was at last year’s Ignite conference when Microsoft revealed its plans to integrate the Skype for Business Online voice, video, chat and screen-sharing capabilities into Teams. It was a surprising move since Microsoft had just rolled out Teams six months earlier. The entire set of communications capabilities in Skype for Business Online became available in Teams last month. Over time, Microsoft intends to depreciate Skype for Business; it hasn’t said when, but has signaled organizations to plan migration for existing customers with a call to action for partners to facilitate that planning. New Office 365 subscriptions now only include the Teams client – not Skype for Business – said Ron Markezich

Serverless Platforms Compared for Performance

Serverless providers charge for not just CPU, memory and number of requests, but also for network and storage. Providers differ in how they adjust memory for specific CPU requirements. AWS, for example, gives more CPU cycles (PDF) to instances with higher memory. Google follows a similar strategy, whereas Azure varies in how CPU is allocated with "4-vCPU VMs tending to gain higher CPU shares". Concurrent requests change the average response time of a function. For non-concurrent requests, the resource allocation remains almost same for all providers except for Google, where it varies around 30%. The compute time in AWS increased by 46% for concurrent requests when the same call was invoked 50 times at once. For Google and Azure it was 7% and 3% respectively, whereas it increased by 154% in IBM. Other tests reveal AWS to have the best performance in terms of concurrent execution.

What is XaaS? A way to inject agility into your digital business

XaaS evolved from the cloud services model, Loucks says. Seeking cheaper, more efficient ways to run IT, CIOs began adopting cloud for anything from email to CRM, to ITSM and business intelligence visualization, to compute, storage and even networking, via software-defined networks, says Loucks. XaaS describes on-demand services that achieve scale horizontally across the business. Seventy-one percent of 1,170 IT and line-of-business professionals Deloitte surveyed from large U.S. companies said that XaaS makes up more than half of their enterprise IT. Learning from their vendor partners along the way, savvy CIOs began co-opting XaaS best practices as their own blueprint for building and delivering new IT services to their business peers. "Rather than simply using flexible consumption models to cut costs and increase workforce efficiency, many organizations are adopting XaaS to transform digitally and become more agile," Loucks says in a new Deloitte report, "Accelerating agility with XaaS."

A look at the new Google cloud security tools and features

The first new Google cloud security feature introduced by GCP is known as shielded VMs. This feature allows customers to enable a virtual Trusted Platform Module -- or vTPM, as Google calls it -- that supports integrity validation for boot processes and the kernel of the VM, as well as logging all the integrity checks with the Google Stackdriver logging and monitoring service. There is no additional charge to use shielded VMs, which makes this a great opportunity to improve the resiliency and security of compute workloads in the Google cloud environment. GCP also has a number of powerful new features for container deployments. Containers require access to repositories to install and configure software packages. However, there are many known concerns and issues with trust validation and security for repositories and software distribution, particularly in open source environments. To aid in securing code registries and repositories, GCP now offers the Container Registry, a private registry in which approved Docker images can be stored. 

Edge computing is the place to address a host of IoT security concerns

Placing a gateway between the industrial endpoints and the rest of a company’s computing resources lets businesses implement current security and visibility technology without ripping and replacing expensive and IIoT machinery. The edge model also helps IIoT implementations in an operational sense, by providing a lower-latency management option than would otherwise be possible if those IIoT endpoints were calling back to a cloud or a data center for instructions and to process data. Most of the technical tools used to secure an IoT network in an edge configuration are similar to those in use on IT networks – encryption, network segmentation, and the like. Edge networking creates a space to locate security technologies that limited-capacity endpoints can’t handle on their own. Mike Mackey is CTO and vice president of engineering at Atonomi, makers of a blockchain-based identity and reputation-tracking framework for IIoT security. He said edge computing adds an important layer of trust between a company’s backend and its potentially vulnerable IIoT devices.

First known malicious cryptomining campaign targeting Kodi discovered

As it turns out, some cyber thugs actually decided Kodi would be a good malware distribution platform. Researchers at ESET detected the first publicly known cryptomining campaign launched via the Kodi platform. If you use add-ons to enhance your movie or TV viewing pleasure, then it is possible your Windows- or Linux-based Kodi has been secretly mining Monero for months and months. In fact, it may continue to do so unless you take action. After the XBMC repository for add-ons was shut down, ESET discovered the repository had been part of a cryptomining campaign that went back to December 2017. That repository was added to the Bubbles and Gaia add-on repositories in December 2017 and January 2018. ESET warned, “From these two sources, and through update routines of unsuspecting owners of other third-party add-on repositories and ready-made Kodi builds, the malware spread further across the Kodi ecosystem.”

Businesses that take humans with them on robotics journeys gain the most

While investing in automation and AI technologies can cut costs and increase productivity dramatically, there is more to be gained if organisations focus on up-skilling staff that are freed from the tasks being automated. The research looked at the differences in performance between organisations that exclusively focus productivity gains from technology and those that focus on the technology and the human workforce. It found that a hyper-productive environment can be achieved if organisations enable humans and robots work together. Chris Brauer, director of innovation in the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths University, lead the research. “In the public discussion, there has been an assumption that [humanity and automation] are in conflict in that in pursuing higher levels of performance and productivity in an organisation through technology you would have to sacrifice humanity,” he said. “But this does not follow from anything we have learned.”

How a new generation of security firms is learning to protect blockchain code

Some unsafe code can be detected with automated analysis tools without much human intervention: If a contract allows any user to extract its funds, it’s probably a mistake, says Petar Tsankov, cofounder and chief scientist of ChainSecurity, a Swiss startup spun out from the prestigious technical university ETH Zurich. ChainSecurity has developed a tool called Securify, which can quickly spot and flag potential issues in Solidify code. But other bugs are only visible as flaws within the context of what a contract is actually supposed to do, meaning the first phase of a security audit often involves sitting down with developers to understand exactly what their contracts are hoping to accomplish. “Typically, there’s very informal documentation on what the contract is supposed to do,” says Tsankov. Then typically comes a mix of human analysis and automated tests to determine if it’s possible to get the contract to violate its specifications. Trail of Bits has developed a tool called Echidna that can quickly execute smart contracts with a variety of inputs, looking for ways to get the code to misbehave.

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Quote for the day:

"Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle." -- Christian D. Larson

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Daily Tech Digest - September 25, 2018

Machine Learning in Robotics – 5 Modern Applications

Imitation learning is closely related to observational learning, a behavior exhibited by infants and toddlers. Imitation learning is also an umbrella category for reinforcement learning, or the challenge of getting an agent to act in the world so as to maximize its rewards. Bayesian or probabilistic models are a common feature of this machine learning approach. The question of whether imitation learning could be used for humanoid-like robots was postulated as far back as 1999. Imitation learning has become an integral part of field robotics, in which characteristics of mobility outside a factory setting in domains like domains like construction, agriculture, search and rescue, military, and others, make it challenging to manually program robotic solutions. Examples include inverse optimal control methods, or “programming by demonstration,”which has been applied by CMU and other organizations in the areas of humanoid robotics, legged locomotion, and off-road rough-terrain mobile navigators.

WannaCry and NotPetya inspiring new attacks

Cyber crime is a business, and market forces, such as the rise in cryptocurrency values, will continue to shape where adversaries focus their efforts,” said Raj Samani, McAfee fellow and chief scientists. “Cryptomining malware is simpler, more straightforward, and less risky than traditional cyber crime activities – causing these schemes to skyrocket in popularity over the last few months. In fact, cryptomining malware has quickly emerged as a major player on the threat landscape. “Organisations need to remain vigilant to these threats – particularly in today’s cloud-first landscape, when many companies are seeing a rapid increase in cloud applications and environments to secure,” he said. To keep crypto-criminals at bay, Samani said businesses must find the right combination of people, process and technology to protect their assets, detect cryptomining threats and, when targeted, rapidly correct systems in the cloud and on-premise.

How Enterprises Can Scale their Machine Learning

"To support the explosion of enterprise use cases, teams need to get bigger and, simultaneously, predictive analytics and machine learning tools need to support these teams as well as the larger community of business people, data engineers, software developers, and AI engineers." Forrester predicts that "massive machine learning automation is the future of data science because it will make data science teams exponentially more productive." The report says that the CRISP-DM process is too sequential and too manually iterative to perform the job. Tools to realize this future productivity will incorporate a few other elements as well. They need to integrate with software development and continuous integration tools. That's important for the AppDev teams to be able to use this work in their design, development and application deployment efforts. And second, these tools must keep up with open source innovations, such as deep learning, Forrester said.

How Java EE development has kept up with microservices

In 20 years, Java EE development has gone through several iterations and added many new features. For instance, open source projects, like Hibernate and Spring, were designed to sit on top of Java EE and address initial shortcomings with specifications, particularly in the area of persistence. "Java EE grew to include functionality from these projects to maintain its appeal to developers," said Simon Ritter, deputy CTO of Azul Systems, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that develops runtime platforms for executing Java-based applications. "Likewise, when web services became a popular technology, Java EE was expanded to include this." Enterprise application development teams are still in the early stages of microservices architecture adoption. However, the Java EE specifications did not provide support in time, Ritter said. As a result, the Eclipse Foundation developed the MicroProfile specification outside the Java Community Process.

A CTO guide: Cyber security best practice tips

“You need to make sure you’re on the latest technology and keep systems patched and up-to-date. The WannaCry was a good example of that. With many of the systems that got breached, the threat vector was a vulnerability that should have been patched.” “Organisations that keep their technology on the latest version and on the latest patch go a long way to keeping their systems protected. So, before I even start talking about advanced threat protection and some of the more clever sophisticated stuff, doing the basics right, getting that hygiene right is vitally important.” ... “The second aspect is that most breaches come via credential compromise of some form. It doesn’t come from a zero-day vulnerability on the backend, hacking a server. It comes from credential theft or some other form of brute force password guessing.” “There’s a variety of phishing attacks, and a breach often comes from compromise in the user credentials. Once the user credentials are compromised, then the attacker can traverse internally, laterally across the network and get access to more stuff.”

10 Ethical Issues Of Artificial Intelligence And Robotics

Existing laws have not been developed with AI in mind, however, that does not mean that AI-based product and services are unregulated. As suggested by Brad Smith, Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft, "Governments must balance support for innovation with the need to ensure consumer safety by holding the makers of AI systems responsible for harm caused by unreasonable practices". Policymakers, researchers and professionals should work together to make sure that AI and robotics provide a benefit to humanity. ... Should robots have rights? If we think of a robot as an advanced washing machine, then no. However, if robots were able to have emotions or feelings, then the answer is not that clear. One of the pioneers of AI, Marvin Minsky, believed that there is no fundamental difference between humans and machines, and that artificial general intelligence is not possible without robots having self-concious emotions.

Cities Paying Ransom: What Does It Mean for Taxpayers?

On September 1, Ontario’s Municipal Offices experienced a cyberattack that left their computers inoperable when Malware entered its systems and rendered its servers useless. The municipality was faced with paying a ransom to the attackers or face the consequences of being locked out of its systems. Per the advice of a consultant, the city paid an undisclosed amount of ransom to its attackers. ... Only a couple months earlier, the Town of Wasaga Beach in Ontario, faced the same issue and paid one bitcoin per server. It spent 11 Bitcoins, valued at the time at $144,000, to regain control of 11 servers. The town negotiated with the attackers to reduce the price to $35,000. After paying the ransom, Wasaga Beach assessed the damages to its city at $250,000 for loss of productivity and reputation. This scenario has become commonplace today. Cities, municipalities, and government agencies have all experienced ransom attacks. But ultimately taxpayers are the ones that pay the bill for these cyberattacks.

6 Ways To Set Expectations For Artificial Intelligence For Everyone In The Business

Artificial intelligence, in many ways, is a different animal from technology waves that have crashed through enterprises over the years. that have gone before. For starters, while some nontrivial investments need to be made to put AI in place -- including talent -- hard business results may not be so immediately apparent. Still, anyone who has spent time selling technology to the C-suite or board will recognize some of the challenges seen with AI, and apply some of that learning. With this in mind, Whit Andrews of Gartner has assembled a set of recommendations for selling AI to the business at large, along with an explanation of what's different this time around, and what's not. The challenge, he explains, is many AI approaches may take time to deliver to their full potential. This typically isn't how business units set their budget priorities. The challenge is to teach and encourage business leaders and end-users need to think big, and to think long-term when it comes to AI.

A new ARM-based server processor challenges for the data center

Ampere isn’t exactly starting from scratch. It acquired the X Gene Arm server processor business from MACOM, which in turn acquired that business from Applied Micro, which started out with its ARM server business back in 2011. The initial releases, the X-Gene 1 and X-Gene 2, weren’t terribly impressive; only eight cores running at 2.4 GHz. Work had begun on the X-Gene 3 chip, codename “Skylark,” but was not completed when the company got passed around. Once Ampere picked up the pieces, it ran with what it had. Ampere has given the X-Gene 3 chip, now known as eMAG, quite a boost. It has 32 cores running at 3.3GHz with L2 and L3 cache hierarchy, integrated SATA I/O ports and 42 lanes of PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral bandwidth across eight controllers. The chip also includes twice as many memory channels, eight per socket, which doubled the memory capacity up to 1TB per socket and doubled the bandwidth. Ampere also has a 16-core chip in the works.

Why Was Equifax So Stupid About Passwords?

In this day and age, there is no excuse for developers to be using live data in testing environments. Substituting fake but lookalike data isn't a new concept. Arguably, it dates from the heady "greeking" days of the 1500s, when printers and typesetters began using "lorem ipsum" - nonsensical Latin - as placeholder text. Enter the digital age: Developers need to ensure that when users enter a value into a 16-digit credit card field, for example, their application handles it correctly. But playing with live data in production environments increases the risk that insiders or outsiders who shouldn't be seeing the data might have access to it. That's why numerous development tools offer the ability to obfuscate and mask live data, as well as to generate "good enough" test data that developers can use instead. European IT market researcher Bloor Research notes that such tools are available from a variety of vendors, including CA, Compuware, Dataprof, Dataguise, Delphix, HPE, IBM, Imperva Camouflage, IMS Privacy Analytics, Informatica, Mentis, Net 2000, Protegrity and Solix.

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Quote for the day:

"To work effectively as an agent of change in a pluralistic society, it is necessary to be able to connect with people different from oneself." -- Beverly Daniel Tatum

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Daily Tech Digest - September 24, 2018

10 signs you aren't cut out to be a cybersecurity specialist

Closely related to a cybersecurity world in a constant state of change is the need to continuously learn and implement new and better protection strategies. The balance between the attackers and the cybersecurity specialist is in a constant state of flux, with battles going to the side with the better technical know-how. Is this environment, a cybersecurity specialist must be willing and able to learn and adapt to new ways of approaching security. If you have ever uttered the words, "But that is the way we have always done it," with any measurable sincerity, you may not be cut out for cybersecurity. ... Building on the pressures of chaotic change and continuous learning is the relentless pressure to keep an enterprise safe from intrusion. Cybercriminals and their orchestrated attacks on enterprise information technology infrastructure never rest, never take a day off. There is no respite from the stress of knowing your systems. The systems you are responsible for protecting are under constant attack.

How can telecom, media, and entertainment find the value in blockchain?

For telecom, media, and entertainment companies, the key may be understanding how such a versatile technology can be applied directly to their businesses. There are now clear paths to implementation—and clear reasons to commit funding. To do so effectively can require an understanding of what blockchain really is and where it can add value. Is blockchain really necessary? After all, plenty of already-existing solutions aim to help telecom and M&E companies mitigate losses, streamline intercompany transactions, and open new strategic revenue opportunities. The answer likely lies with the technology’s strength in several areas: Blockchain is cryptographically secure, it automatically records events and transactions into an immutable and shared ledger, it can be built to execute rules, and it is a decentralized and distributed network of peers that all vote to majority validation of any changes. For the telecom industry, blockchain can manage and limit fraud, secure user identities, support next-generation network services, and help deploy IoT connectivity solutions.

Blockchain-Powered Ads To Disrupt Digital Marketing

The first thing that makes blockchain possible is the absence of any kind of central authority governing the policy. If there is no single source dictation value, then this value is consensual. With no authority capable of diminishing the value of a digital asset, its value is as high as we agree it to be. As of now, we are used to perceiving these scarce digital assets as money because it makes the most sense when we speak of a finite valuable entity. However, this concept reaches far beyond money. We are fine with replicated digital media and tend to tolerate even our own digital identities being duplicated across various platforms. Now imagine every single thing you produce or every datum shared being delivered in a manner where ownership is mathematically verified. This reshapes the concepts of ownership and property as we knew it. ... Ads have to guarantee customer satisfaction. They have only one shot on goal with no right to miss. If the ads do hit the spot, everything else about the product marketing has to be on point in order for the product to be effective.

3 Drivers Behind the Increasing Frequency of DDoS Attacks

In an increasingly politically and economically volatile landscape, DDoS attacks have become the new geopolitical tool for nation-states and political activists. Attacks on political websites and critical national infrastructure services are becoming more frequent, largely because of the desire and capabilities of attackers to affect real-world events, such as election processes, while staying undiscovered. ... DDoS attacks carried out by criminal organizations for financial gain also demonstrate cyber reflection, particularly for global financial institutions and other supra-national entities whose power makes them prime targets, whether for state actors, disaffected activists, or cybercriminals. While extortion on the threat of DDoS continues to be a major threat to enterprises across all vertical sectors, cybercriminals also use DDoS as a smokescreen to draw attention away from other nefarious acts, such as data exfiltration and illegal transfers of money.

Is predictive maintenance the 'gateway drug' to the Industrial IoT?

According to Nelson, the drivers of IIoT growth vary by markets: “Oil companies and mining companies are looking at ways to reduce their costs and insulate themselves from commodity price fluctuations, utilities want to incorporate renewables, pharma and food manufacturers are building smarter supply chains and reduce the risk of recalls.” As that growth continues, the IIoT market is entering a new stage, Nelson said. ... While it’s easy to get distracted by shiny new IoT devices, enterprises know that infrastructure is often more important — and that’s even more true in the IIoT. Nelson explained it this way: “A smart thermostat might cut your power by 2 percent, or $150 a year. In comparison, a paper manufacturer that cuts energy by 1 percent could save $15 million. Likewise, increasing production by 1 percent can mean $1 million at a mine or metal processing facility.” Given the potential of the IIoT, I asked Nelson why the rise of IIoT remains overshadowed by consumer IoT? One reason, Nelson said, is the phenomenal success of consumer plays like Uber, Facebook, and the iPhone.

5 key lessons for organizations still struggling with GDPR

The new legislation enhances an individual’s right with regards to their persona data. One of these rights is the right of erasure (right to be forgotten) – i.e. to request that a company erases the data it holds on them. And, since this needs to happen within a reasonably short timeframe, on receipt of a request, it is important that you know where data is stored in your processes, and you have a procedure in place to delete that data so that you can respond quickly and efficiently. A lot of commonly used business software does not support the selective deletion of data, so this will be a good time to have a discussion with your IT people to see if, and how the right of erasure can be supported. To avoid potential fines and reputational damage for non-compliance, you may also need to introduce automated workflows for triggering and confirming the erasure of data from multiple internal and external systems. There are several good products on the market that will support workflow management, and some will even create a webpage for your clients to exercise their rights.

What is a data lake? Flexible big data management explained

A data lake holds a vast amount of raw, unstructured data in its native format, whereas the data warehouse is much more structured into folders, rows, and columns. As a result, a data lake is much more flexible about its data than a data warehouse is. That’s important because of the 80 percent rule: Back in 1998, Merrill Lynch estimated that 80 percent of corporate data is unstructured, and that has remained essentially true. That in turn means data warehouses are severely limited in their potential data analysis scope. Hiskey argues that data lakes are more useful than data warehouses because you can gather and store data now, even if you are not using elements of that data, but can go back weeks, months, or years later and perform analysis on the old data that might have been otherwise discarded. A flexibility-related difference between the data lake and the data warehouse is schema-on-read vs. schema-on-write. A schema is a logical description of the entire database, with the name and description of records of all record types.

For Hackers, Anonymity Was Once Critical. That’s Changing.

A number of Defcon attendees, citing various concerns about privacy, still protect their identities. Many conceal their real names, instead using only pseudonyms or hacker aliases. Some wear fake beards, masks or other colorful disguises. But new pressures, especially for those who attend Defcon, seem to be reshaping the community’s attitudes toward privacy and anonymity. Many longtime hackers, like Ms. Sell and Mr. Wyler, have been drawn into the open by corporate demands, or have traded their anonymity for public roles as high-level cybersecurity experts. Others alluded to the ways in which a widespread professionalization and gamification of the hacking world — as evidenced by so-called bug bounty programs offered by companies like Facebook and Google, which pay for hackers to hunt for and disclose cybersecurity gaps on their many platforms — have legitimized certain elements of the culture.

Better security needed to harness the positive potential of AI

“Enterprises must make the needed investments in well-trained staffs capable of putting AI safeguards in place,” said Rob Clyde, ISACA Board Chair. “As AI evolves—consider the likely proliferation of self-driving vehicles, or AI systems designed to reduce urban traffic—it will become imperative that enterprises can provide assurance that the AI will not take action that puts people in harm’s way.” In addition to today’s common uses for AI, such as virtual personal assistants and fraud detection, there are high hopes that AI and machine learning have the potential to cause major breakthroughs across various industries, including helping to accelerate medical research, improving crop yields and assisting law enforcement with cases. These advancements, though, are unfolding so quickly that it often is challenging for organizations to develop the expertise needed to put safeguards in place to account for security vulnerabilities and ethical implications.

Freelance workers targeted in new malware campaign

Freelancers, casual workers, and international contractors often rely on emails and communication over the Internet not only to retain relationships with employers but also to find and secure new opportunities. As a result, emailed communication and document attachments are commonplace. Unfortunately, it is this standard practice that cybercriminals are now targeting. MalwareHunter Team's campaign email examples do not appear suspicious. They ask the intended victim to check an attached document and then get back to the attacker with a "cost and time frame." However, a keen job hunter in one case on Fiverr opened the document and discovered that the file was malicious. In another example on Freelancer, the cybercriminal sent over "My details.doc," which also contained malware. In the latter example, the intended victim had an antivirus solution installed and so the infection was detected. The security researcher says "dozens of people" have been contacted this way on the platforms.

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Quote for the day:

"You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside." -- Wayne Dyer

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Daily Tech Digest - September 23, 2018

IKEA designs future autonomous cars that work as hotels, stores, and meeting rooms

Once cars can finally drive themselves, we’ll have more time to enjoy the journey and do other, much more interesting stuff instead. At least that’s the concept behind some of the designs below, developed by retail giant IKEA’s “future living lab,” SPACE10, based in Copenhagen. The design studio/research lab came up with designs for autonomous vehicles that would be extensions of our homes, offices, and local institutions. Some of its seven ideas, shown below, are almost practical. Who can’t imagine autonomously driven cafés or pop-up stores? In fact, they already exist in California—in the form of self-driving cars that have groceries stocked in their back seats. Other concepts might need a bit more thought, particularly the ones that SPACE10 envisions delivering resources to underserved communities. It may be difficult, for example, for a self-driving health clinic to bring medical care to truly remote areas.

New Enterprise Decision Making - Dealing with Uncertainty

Decision making is heavily hampered by internal politics, since failure may lead to a loss in the strength of individuals and departments. You need to be aware of these limitations and be prepared to act on them. If the domain that the decision is going to affect is under scrutiny due to recent and relevant failures, then certainty needs are likely to be higher than if the domain had recently risen to resolving a particularly important challenge. On the other hand, if the department has a new leader, it may be more open to experiments and be willing to try out new things. Most of the companies that are shareholder-centric are risk averse and require special attention when dealing with uncertainty. Typically higher in older companies, company Inertia has a lot to do with the type of organization and the type of industry in which the company operates. Traditional industries have typically more inertia, while a startup has low inertia. Inertia is also affected by legislation and regulation.

Atlassian shops size up OpsGenie buy, Jira for incident management

With Jira Ops, the company will integrate OpsGenie and other IT alert management tools, which include PagerDuty and xMatters, with Slack for incident visibility and collaboration, as well as Atlassian Statuspage to issue customer updates directly from Jira tickets. Jira Ops will create incident timelines and automatically spin up separate Slack channels for frontline IT pros and for business stakeholders as companies respond to critical incidents. Competitor VictorOps also claims to do incident response timelines, and savvy customers can create similar connections between incident management tools with scripts. Zipcar has already integrated OpsGenie with Jira's ticketing system via scripting tools. But the company's engineers said they will watch how the product develops over the next year before they invest further. "It will take time before Jira Ops will be better than what people already have," said Andy Rosequist, director of IT operations at the Boston-based car-sharing service

These Robots Run, Dance and Flip. But Are They a Business?

As the rest of the tech industry has focused on robotic cars and other contraptions that can navigate roads and warehouse floors, Boston Dynamics, which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has plugged away at machines that can walk through the woods, into a rock quarry, across your home. “These robots can climb stairs,” said Sangbae Kim, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on similar machines. “They can jump on a table.” But if driverless cars are still years away from everyday use, walking robots are even further. Though these machines are shockingly lifelike, they have limits. They can handle some tasks on their own, like spotting a curb and climbing over it. But when moving across unfamiliar spaces, like the parking lot outside the Boston Dynamics lab, they still need a human guide. In person, they stumble and fall more often than they do on YouTube. Walking through the Boston Dynamics lab, Mr. Raibert, 68, wore bluejeans and a Hawaiian shirt, as he does nearly every day. He wants to build robots that can do what humans and animals can do.

Small, flexible plaster uses ultrasound waves to monitor blood pressure inside your body

The patch is made from a thin sheet of silicone elastomer. A small lattice of electronic "islands" connect to each other, each of which contains electrodes and tiny devices called piezoelectric transducers which produce ultrasound waves as electricity passes through them. These electronics are connected through a web of copper wires which are able to bend and stretch in order to conform to the texture and curves of human skin. The ultrasound waves are able to penetrate the body and record blood pressure readings as deeply as four centimeters below the outer layer of the skin. As blood vessels pulse, the movement of blood is recorded and converted into waveforms. "Each peak, valley, and notch in the waveform, as well as the overall shape of the waveform, represents a specific activity or event in the heart," the academics say. "These signals provide a lot of detailed information to doctors assessing a patient's cardiovascular health."

How Blockchain is Making It Easier for Fintech Companies to Scale Up

The most important foundation of any business is trust. Cryptography-based Blockchain eliminates third-party intermediaries as the trusted keeper. It will decrease the cost of overheads when parties interact with one another online without the requirement of middleman or central authority. Blockchain improves the processing speed of the transactions because it reduces the decision-making time across the board in financial companies with minimal human intervention. It reduces duplication that arises while keeping records, errors, and reconciliations and frauds, leading to quick settlement and payment. In case of an event such as earthquake, flood, or war at a location, the remaining Blockchain participants can accept a transaction. Blockchain helps financial institutions handle the issue of identity theft as users have full control over the transactions. It safeguards the merchant from risks involved in frauds as once performed the transactions cannot be changed and do not contain any important personal detail.

Data Protection Officer: GDPR Updates Profession

First of all, it is necessary to understand that the DPO must have legal knowledge. This conclusion follows directly from Article 39 of the European Regulations, which lists the tasks and missions of the DPOs. To a greater extent, they are, of course, lawyers. In addition, they should be lawyers who have strong management skills and due to technical expertise, that is, managers. Less often, the DPOs are IT experts who have only basic ideas about the law. However, this situation is typical of Western countries. The IT specialists dominate the personal data protection market, not the lawyers. Either way, large corporations, of course, prefer to hire some specialists to provide IT security and others for personal data protection. Small and medium businesses are trying to make a choice in favor of just one employee competent in both areas. Why does it happen? The answer lies on the surface: the GDPR places a wide variety of responsibilities on companies.

Digital agility for insurers: the key to future readiness

Digital agility includes practical development of digital capabilities for use within a nimble digital infrastructure that allows speedy insights and action. ... Insurers must develop InsurTech capabilities at all operational layers – real-time data capture at the customer interface supported by advanced analytics tools – to enable real-time insights and digital execution to allow streamlined operations. Real-time data capture can help insurers build a rich database of customer information and deep insights critical to the development of innovative, timely, and personalized offerings. However, for real-time data to be beneficial, it must be supported at the data layer with advanced analytics tools that can process it and extract actionable insights. Finally, digital execution and automation ensure that the real-time insights are acted upon promptly, as even small delays can have substantial consequences in today’s dynamic and competitive marketplace.

Why AI should assist humans, not replace them

When a customer is interacting with a brand to achieve a positive goal, such as shopping for a picnic or planning an event, it can be more appropriate to use AI such as chatbots for assistance, as the customers are more patient, have more time and may be more open to ideas that are generated as a result of their customer data. Millard said customers do sometimes require a human to be “ in the loop” to help them make a decision and ensure they aren’t overwhelmed by choice. Similarly, with customers in a neutral state, where their goal is often to perform a task they are obligated to do, Millard said, “This is where quick and easy solution comes in”, and some forms of AI may be helpful in speeding up this process. “The problem is when customers hit a problem or a state of anger and frustration,” she added. “Customers in a crisis are hard to automate.”

Ethics, a Psychological Perspective

With emerging technologies like machine learning, developers can now achieve much more than ever before. But this new power has a down side. Only recently, Facebook’s Chief Executive apologised in front of the European Parliament for not taking enough responsibility for fake news, foreign interference in elections and developers misusing people’s information. Google then announced its Pentagon AI project, triggering a dozen resignations from its development teams. When writing code, where does your responsibility start? And where does it end? Are your only options to stay and get on with it or quit? When we talk about ethics - the principles that govern a person's behaviour - it is impossible to not talk about psychology. One major field has contributed the most when it comes to researching this subject: Social Psychology, or the study of human behaviour in social situations. It aims to explain why we behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.

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Quote for the day:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” -- Viktor E. Frankl

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Daily Tech Digest - September 22, 2018

Scientists discover how to 'upload knowledge to your brain'

“It turns out that certain functions of the brain, like speech and memory, are located in very specific regions of the brain, about the size of your pinky.” Dr Matthews believes that brain stimulation could eventually be implemented for tasks like learning to drive, exam preparation and language learning “What our system does is it actually targets those changes to specific regions of the brain as you learn,” he added. “The method itself is actually quite old. In fact, the ancient Egyptians 4000 years ago used electric fish to stimulate and reduce pain. “Even Ben Franklin applied currents to his head, but the rigorous, scientific investigation of these methods started in the early 2000s and we're building on that research to target and personalise a stimulation in the most effective way possible. “Your brain is going to be very different to my brain when we perform a task. What we found is … brain stimulation seems to be particularly effective at actually improving learning.”

DevOps for mobile apps challenges and best practices

There is no such thing as a separate DevOps for mobile apps. DevOps is an approach that works for all applications and components — from front-end mobile apps, to middleware, to backend server components and data stores. Apply the practices and principles of DevOps across all dev and ops teams in the enterprise to enable continuous delivery of all of these components. Mobile apps do have specific needs and challenges that must be addressed. Our 10 best practices of DevOps for mobile apps address these mobile-specific needs. The goal of these best practices is to bring mobile app development, quality assurance, and operational practices in line with standard enterprise applications. Adopting these best practices allows enterprises to adopt DevOps across their mobile development teams, deliver higher-quality mobile apps, and enable continuous improvement and innovation.

Increasing Regulatory Complexity & the Cost of Compliance

Keeping up to date with the sheer volume of regulatory information being published is a perennial challenge. FIs are increasingly relying on technology as a key enabler in this ongoing challenge to stay on top of regulatory requirements. Large US and European banks are spending as much as $20 billion a year on technology to help them comply with the newly evolving regulations in increasingly complex regulatory environments. Compliance costs for FIs amount to substantial parts of total expenses with a negative correlation between the size of the institution and the percentage of total costs. Globally, banks are spending in excess of $270 billion per year on compliance and regulatory obligations, having on average 10–15% of their staff dedicated to compliance. FT estimates that for some banks, it takes up to $4 billion a year to cover demands ranging from checks to prevent money laundering, to requirements to give more data to regulators for stress tests. However, these investments fade in comparison to the cost of misconduct financial institutions are continuously facing.

Smart Cities: From City To Place

There is more to smart than just the physical location digital agenda. Smart is also about insightful ways of working and having a disruptive ‘can do’ mindset across organisations, particularly from local authority decision-makers and influencers. Where this is done at grassroots levels it can be instrumental in changing mindsets.Today, there is a stronger tendency for a more cost conscious, risk averse culture within the public sector that makes change difficult. However, learning from other countries and private sector collaborations can drive progress. Local authorities are often stuck in the mindset of problem solving today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions rather than thinking about what is possible in the future. Initiatives such as innovation clusters can encourage a change of culture, with local startups working together with local authorities to solve social issues. ... Collaboration across agencies, the private sector and communities is the foundation for success. It focuses on the formation of partnerships to drive change in incremental steps.

Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet

There is a unique opportunity to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and the societal changes it triggers – to help address environmental issues and transform how we manage our shared global environment. Left unchecked, however, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could have further unintended negative consequences for our global commons. For example, it could exacerbate existing threats to environmental security by further depleting global fishing stocks, biodiversity and resources. Furthermore, it could create entirely new risks that will need to be considered and managed, particularly in relation to the collection and ownership of environmental data, the extraction of resources and disposal of new materials, and the impact of new advanced and automated machines. Harnessing these opportunities and proactively managing these risks will require a transformation of the current “enabling environment” for global environmental management.

Blockchain is not a silver bullet for fraud prevention

People commit fraud, not the technology, and the art of fraud is getting into and out of the system. Succeed in that and the rest is the system doing its normal job. If an employee or person with authority to act can find a way into the transaction, then it is difficult to monitor. Mr Wall says: “Any information processing system that has bad input provides bad output. The blockchain can only be aware of the inputs, not the reality. The blockchain will track it as valid data, so if you have the authority to input bad data, then the blockchain will validate the bad data. You still have a dependency on the real world, trusted sources of data and authorisation. If you corrupt that then you corrupt the process.” Unlocking the full potential of blockchain technology will need governments to work as a facilitator, by providing an enabling environment to interested players. There is a need to develop uniform standards, assess infrastructure requirements, deal with security concerns, raise stakeholder awareness and build trust within the financial ecosystem as a whole.

Harnessing the Flow of Data:

The key values of the discussed technologies align with the challenges faced by our environment and society, both now and in the coming decades. An internet of things, a mix of autonomous sensors and tools used by people in diverse environments, will broaden our detection of threats and trends. An individual with a smartphone can capture the calving of a glacier into the ocean, a new invasive species or an extreme weather event and communicate it to authorities and the world in seconds. The growing archives of big data will allow us to understand the world in both space and time and deeper trends throughout complex networks. Long-term observation networks, for example, will help us untangle sudden changes from acute events from the chronic impacts of pollution and climate change. The scale and complexity of big data, if managed appropriately, can help us understand systems beyond the reach of an individual’s cognition and could help us understand ecosystems, regions and global-scale events.

Digital CFOs are here: Why the CFO has clear stake in enterprise IT strategy 

The recent digital transformation of finance has not just lead to creation of innovative business models, but has also impacted the roles and responsibilities of today's CFOs. Now, it is not enough if a CFO only caters to the 'financial aspects' of an enterprise, but needs to play a larger role in influencing strategic business decisions.  It is now required for a CFO to develop skills beyond the traditional responsibilities, like business planning and addressing the challenges faced by the organization during crisis. Hence, CFOs of to-day, need to play a more diversified role, with respect to giving inputs from her domain of expertise in the company's strategic decision-making process.

Meanwhile, enterprises across industries are also taking steps towards ensuring that their CFOs develop new skills to be able to support the goals of the organization. This implies that the CFOs are facing a very challenging roadmap ahead of them, wherein they are expected to take the lead in such operations.

Why Robots Will Require Governments and Organisations to Adapt

Governments have to prepare safety nets for those people that will lose their jobs. They have to provide the right regulation to help those people that will undoubtedly lose their job and will have difficulty in finding a new job. They can do so by focusing on re-education programs to re-skill those who lost their job. This will help them find a new job in a changing society. However, governments and organisations should also prepare for the vast number of new jobs that AI and Robotics will create. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2022, 133 million new jobs will be created. These jobs – such as data scientists, machine learning specialist, blockchain engineers, UX designers or software developers – will require considerably more education, being prepared for jobs that might not even exist. This means that governments should prepare today if they want to be ready for the robot-led society of 2025. Those governments that will encourage universities to develop new programs focused on the jobs of tomorrow will stand the best chance to minimise the impact of automation.

Bias in AI is a real problem. Here’s what we should do about it

For-profit companies creating a product for consumers have a financial incentive to avoid bias and create inclusive products; if company X’s latest smartphone doesn’t have accurate speech recognition, for example, then the dissatisfied customer will go to a competitor. ... All the issues that arise from biased AI algorithms are rooted in the tainted training data. If we can avoid introducing biases in how we collect data and the data we introduce to the algorithms, then we have taken a significant step in avoiding these issues. For example, training speech recognition software on a wide variety of equally represented users and accents can help ensure no minorities are excluded. If AI is trained on cheap, easily acquired data, then there is a good chance it won’t be vetted to check for biases. The data might have been acquired from a source which wasn’t fully representative. Instead, we need to make sure we base our AI on quality data that is collected in ways which mitigate introducing bias.

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Quote for the day:

"To be a good leader, you don't have to know what you're doing; you just have to act like you know what you're doing." -- Jordan Carl Curtis

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