Showing posts with label ideation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideation. Show all posts

June 30, 2014

How to protect yourself against privileged user abuse
One way to tackle it is by focusing on Privileged User Monitoring and Access (PUMA), which relies on monitoring human behavior to determine the context of the behavior and people's intent as well as automated tools such as video replay to keep an eye on privileged user activities. Monitoring human behavior is especially important with privileged users because they often have the know-how to cover their tracks, a feat that becomes much harder with video replay and other technologies that can have a deterrent effect by their presence. If privileged users know you're monitoring their activity, they're less likely to behave badly.


As Technology Changes ‘Everything,’ Don’t Forget About People
Technology companies, in particular, will need to change the ways in which they utilize their talent. For many decades, there was one way to access talent — by hiring it. Today, workforces are flexible and may be spread across time zones and continents. Knowledge workers still contribute as employees on company payrolls, of course. But increasingly, they are just as likely to collaborate on a specific project as partners or as subject-matter experts sharing knowledge within cross-functional or cross-industry groups.


The Internet Of Things Will Need Millions Of Developers By 2020
It's standard to size a market by the number of widgets sold, but in the Internet of Things, which numbers sensors and devices in the billions, widget counts don't really matter. In part this is because the real money in IoT is not in the "things," but rather in the Internet-enabled services that stitch them together. More to the point, it's because the size of the IoT market fundamentally depends on the number of developers creating value in it. While today there are just 300,000 developers contributing to the IoT, a new report from VisionMobile projects a whopping 4.5 million developers by 2020, reflecting a 57% compound annual growth rate and a massive market opportunity.


8 ways the password is dying
Google's massive I/O conference was chock full of trends and portents, but one of the most intriguing messages to trickle out of the show was far more subtle than the Android-everywhere blitz: Google is finally making good on its quest to kill the password. Every single major platform Google promotes declared war on the password in some fashion. And Google's far from the only company to come up with interesting authentication alternatives to memorizing long codes of numbers, letters, and special characters. From digitized tattoos to Bluetooth trickery and beyond, here's how big names like Google, Apple, Samsung, and others are trying to kill the password.


10 Breakthrough Innovations That Will Shape The World In 2025
No more food shortages and no more food-insecure people. The innovation? Lighting. "In 2025, genetically modified crops will be grown rapidly and safely indoors, with round-the-clock light, using low energy LEDs that emit specific wavelengths to enhance growth by matching the crop to growth receptors added to the food’s DNA," the report says. "Crops will also be bred to be disease resistant. And, they will be bred for high yield at specified wavelengths."


How Capgemini's UK financial services unit helps clients manage risk using big data analysis
When Capgemini's business information management (BIM) practices unit needed to provide big data capabilities to its insurance company customers, it needed to deliver the right information to businesses much faster from the very bottom up. That means an improved technical design and an architectural way of delivering information through business intelligence (BI) and analytics. The ability to bring together structured and unstructured data—and be able to slice and dice that data in a rapid fashion; not only deploy it, but also execute rapidly for organizations out there—was critical for CapGemini.


OWASP Top 10 Risks: #1: Injection
For a number of years now, OWASP have been publishing a list of the Top 10 Application Security Risks for developers to use to be more responsible with their applications. The words “responsible” and “software developer” are not words you hear together to often. But in the day of online banking accounts, personal profiles and online shopping, software developers should be taking a more responsible approach to their craft. One way to demonstrate responsibility is being very well versed in the common security risks that online applications face. A way to achieve that is through the familiarity of the risks that have been identified in OWASP’s Top 10 list and the information they provide for identifying and recommended countermeasures.


Smartwatches at work: Boon or bane for IT?
Many smartwatches, including the Samsung Gear 2 that went on sale in April, do have a fair amount of native storage capacity. So IT shops will have to be concerned with smartwatches as standalone computing devices, not simply as devices governed by management policies like Android Work in connected smartphones. Given that smartwatches are still evolving, several analysts said they remain unsure how popular or necessary the devices will have to be before they pose demands on IT.


Buying WAN optimization tools: What you need to know
If your data consists of alphanumeric data with repeated characters or spaces, you are virtually guaranteed benefits. On the other hand, if you are sending backup data that has been compressed before transmission (e.g., .zip archive files), WAN optimization compression probably won't help you. In fact, if the WAN optimization device blindly tries to compress everything, you might even see performance suffer. That's because you will incur latency as the WAN device tries to compress -- but doesn't succeed -- in shrinking your payload in any appreciable way.


How to Ideate? Be a Hunter
Hunters use dogs to flush out their quarry. They do this because of a scent hound’s profound sense of smell. You can’t smell a good idea but you can certainly sense it in other ways. If you put the time in you should start to notice a feeling you get when you’ve got a good idea. It’s inconvenience. You can notice it in someone else, but for passion/product fit it's a sensation that should be your own. Inconvenience makes an excellent compass. When you feel it, head in that direction. Ask "why?" Ask that often enough and you'll get a glimpse of the beast you're looking to snare. The idea won't yet be clear but the general outline of the problem should be apparent.



Quote for the day:

"The key to most difficulties does not lie in the dilemmas themselves, but in our relationship to them." -- David Seabury

October 18, 2013

Using NFC, IBM brings dual-factor authentication to mobile
Here's how IBM's approach works, using an app for using your bank as an example: First, you load up the bank's app. It sends a special challenge number to your phone. Next, the app asks you for your password. But here's the catch: after you enter it, you tap your phone against the NFC-enabled card your bank gave you. Third, the phone transfers the challenge number to the card using NFC, the card transforms it through a calculation based on its own key, then sends it back to the phone, which sends it to the bank.

More about Microsoft’s plans to consolidate around ODBC and deprecate OLE DB
Though this is an older post, thought that these facts might be useful to read again. Microsoft's recent announcement that they would focus more on ODBC and deprecate OLE DB has raised a lot of questions. Amina Saify at Microsoft recently posted some questions and answers. Some interesting points were:


Is application virtualization the answer for users of XP?
Suppliers of application virtualization technology, such as AppZero, Citrix, Moka5, Spoon, VMware, and even Microsoft, have long been talking about the day that Windows XP would die and suggesting that their application virtualization products could make the transition easier. To a company, they suggest that Windows XP applications can be easily and smoothly moved over to a new operating environment without requiring changes to the applications themselves.


How the Walking Dead Uses Big Data to Make Life-Or-Death Decisions
The game operates as a type of choose-your-own-adventure story, asking the player to make quick decisions about what to say from the provided dialogue options. One of The Walking Dead’s greatest successes is that every choice is a new dilemma, eschewing “good” and “bad” options in favor of choices that are all a matter of perspective. Early on in the game, you have to choose between saving one character over another, and there’s no right answer.


15 Inspiring Videos for Web Designers
We believe it is absolutely fundamental to dedicate time to listening to the great visionaries of your chosen field who can help you see things from a different, innovative, and enriching viewpoint. These forward thinkers can help you attack projects with a renewed determination and encourage you to step out of your comfort zone - dive in head first to an unfamiliar sector, or experiment with the latest technology or programing language!


The 5 Common Characteristics of Ideas That Spread
Your success as a creative depends not only on coming up with great ideas and making them happen, but also with getting those ideas adopted by your target audience. Whether it’s the buying public, an art dealer, or just your direct supervisor, getting your work off of your hard drive and into the world is perhaps the most important (and scariest) part of creative work.


NuoDB Takes the Wraps Off Blackbirds Database
If version 1.0 was about getting the database off the ground, version 2.0 is about making it fly farther and faster. NuoDB CTO Seth Proctor recently explained the significance of Blackbirds in a telephone interview with Datanami. “We've worked very hard in this release to make it be something that feel like something very familiar, that has increased number of data types, functions, language features, and management capabilities… to really get the type of maturity that people want from a relational database,” he says.


Jokes aside, some IT managers say there's no option other than BlackBerry for security
"As for alternatives to BlackBerry, there aren't any," wrote Sandra Smith, an enterprise IT manager, in an email to Computerworld, although she didn't identify her organization. "Due to the Snowden revelations, we now realize that if you are running Microsoft/Google/Apple, you need to protect yourself from your OS and not use your OS to protect you." IT managers and analysts note that the strength of BlackBerry's security comes from the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) server software that is still used by thousands of government and enterprise customers globally.


Security: The genesis of SDN
The problem with all this rampant implicit trusting now is that "hackers take advantage of it routinely. SDN allows you to do trust consolidation and have a few trusted entities; everything else is untrusted," said Casado. SDN provides more control of the architecture and the distribution model of the control plane, which makes it possible to consolidate trust into fewer elements.


An Innovation Disconnect
So when a senior leader proudly proclaims, “We will achieve high performance through innovation … ” most of us, at least momentarily, suspend our disbelief. We let our enthusiasm for change overpower any cynicism left over from previous efforts to change the world. (“Reengineering,” anyone?) With our platitude filters temporarily disabled, we follow leadership’s directives down a path that is likely to fail.



Quote for the day:

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude." -- M. Angelou