Daily Tech Digest - December 02, 2017

Data or Algorithms – Which is More Important?

Most of you will recognize that this was also the birth of the era of Big Data, because Hadoop for the first time gave us a reasonable way to store, retrieve, and analyze anything. The addition of unstructured and semi-structured data like text, speech, image, and video created the possibilities of AI that we have today. It also let us store volumes of ordinary data like web logs or big transactional files that were previously simply too messy to store. What you may not know, and I heard Doug Cutting himself quote at this last spring’s Strata Conference in San Jose is that the addition of unstructured and semi-structured data are not the most important feature of Hadoop. The most important feature is that it allowed many ordinary computers to function as a single computer. This was the birth of Massive Parallel Processing (MPP). If it hadn’t been for MPP the hardware we have today would never have evolved and today’s data science simply would not and could not exist.

12 Tips For Using Devops To Fuel Digital Transformation

DevOps automates software assembly, leveraging continuous integration, development and deployment, to improve customer experiences, respond faster to business needs, and ensure that innovation is balanced with security and operational needs. You can think of DevOps as agile on steroids. And it is catching on. Fifty percent of 237 organizations surveyed said they are implementing DevOps, according to Forrester Research. "The DevOps momentum is occurring within all industry sectors," analyst Robert Stroud wrote in the research report. "As we are near the end of 2017, the number of inquiries are increasingly focused on how organizations will be successful given the pressure of accelerated delivery of applications and services — without additional headcount."

CTO Perspectives: The roots of OpenStack and the multi-cloud

Every technology shift that has happened, we’ve taken our customer intimacy, our customer focus, and applied it as the shifts happened. Even to this day, it has continued to serve us well. Cloud was the biggest shift. Rackspace jumped in pretty early and it was a big shift for us when we started to build our own cloud and software for the first time. We wrote some software for our ticketing system and our customer management systems. This software was part of the product that was going to deliver the cloud, and eventually became OpenStack. That legacy has served us well, because it’s now the foundation for our public cloud and also all the work that we are doing on OpenStack private cloud. Even during the cloud era, that emphasis and focus on great customer service and great customer outcomes was important – and valuable, because we created something that we call “managed cloud”.

Four ways state and local CIOs can boost cybersecurity

IT operations in state and city government are often run by the various agencies within the government, rather than being centralized under the state’s or city’s CIO. This leads to shadow IT, with a wide range of servers, software, and hardware spread across the state and city, and no standardized way to measure their risk level or even know when systems need to be updated. IT administrators cannot share best practices, causing further inefficiencies. What’s worse than shadow IT? Shadow security — rogue systems with no security features turned on. Fortunately, some states and cities have made significant efforts toward consolidating and federating their IT, and the broader trend is toward consolidation, as NASCIO reported in its survey of state CIOs.

Why cryptocurrencies are causing an international racket

Today one of the biggest challenges faced by cyber extortionists is how they obtain the cash. In the past, they would ask victims to deposit money into bank accounts or transfer funds via the likes of Western Union, all easily traceable. Fast forward to today and we have a myriad of decentralised cryptocurrencies like Moneto, Ethereum, and the most popular Bitcoin, which offer users fast transactions with full anonymity. If you're a cyber extortionist - what's not to love? This major development can be linked to the escalation in ransomware attacks across the world, being easy to use without the need for any middleman to transact. According to a study earlier this year by 2Cambridge University, there are now over 6 million people transacting with Bitcoin, the majority of which is legitimate business.

2017: A year of highs and lows for Linux and open source

Linux users had to suffer release after release, where next to nothing improved on the Ubuntu desktop front. This was a mistake of grand proportions and sent a lot of users scurrying to the likes of Linux Mint or Elementary OS. ... Samsung has opted to resuscitate Linux and convergence, with the help of their Galaxy line of smartphones and DeX. If you're unfamiliar with DeX, it's a dock that enables users to plug in a supported Galaxy device and enjoy a desktop experience, powered by their smartphone. In the midst of 2017 passing, Samsung made the announcement they were developing an app called "Linux on Galaxy," which would allow users to boot their favorite distribution (or multiple distributions) of Linux on their Galaxy S8+/Note8 devices, and take advantage of DeX—so a full-blown Linux desktop, powered by a smartphone.

Hacking the Autonomous Vehicle

"Today chip-tuning is already used to change the management of the engine and find additional horsepower. This is in most cases legal, but liberates the car manufacturer from its guarantee. When self-driving cars are a relevant market, it is a question of time, when programmers will offer software to ensure a higher safety for their owners, programmed preference for the passenger against the pedestrians.” In the same way that there are after-markets for computer chips that override the engine performance settings that come with the automobile out of the factory, will there evolve an after-market for technicians who can “hack” the life-and-death settings that are pre-programmed into an autonomous vehicle? We are already seeing situations where customers are resorting to “hacking” their vehicles. Farmers are hacking their John Deere tractor’s firmware

Is Your Technology Function Ready For A Digital World?

Most large companies are using digital technologies to do things such as launch apps, build e-commerce solutions and harness data to learn more about their customers. But these “quick hit” efforts inevitably fall short of their goals when they must contend with legacy IT systems and data that can’t interface with new digital apps and architectures. Data is scattered across the company, rendering it useless. Outmoded and sluggish IT operating models slow the company down. The companies that take digital to its full potential learn to integrate their front-end digital solutions with their aging legacy stack. They build technology functions that are flexible, fast, collaborative and creative–hardly the adjectives most companies use to describe their IT departments. But unlocking the true potential of technology can be transformative.

Lenses Are Being Reinvented, and Cameras Will Never Be the Same

In imaging lenses, chromatic aberration must be minimized—it otherwise produces the colored fringes around objects viewed through cheap toy telescopes. But in spectrographs, different colors must be brought to focus in different places. She and co can do either. Neither do these lenses suffer from spherical aberration, a common problem with ordinary lenses caused by their three-dimensional spherical shape. Metalenses do not have this problem because they are flat. Indeed, they are similar to the theoretical “ideal lenses” that undergraduate physicists study in optics courses. Of course, physicists have been able to make flat lenses, such as Fresnel lenses, for decades. But they have always been hard to make. The key advance here is that metalenses, because they can be fabricated in the same way as microchips, can be mass-produced with subwavelength surface features.

Introducing Obevo: Get Your Database SDLC Under Control

While existing open source tools could do the job for simpler cases, they could not handle the scale and complexity of some of our existing systems. And we could not just leave these existing systems without a proper SDLC; they are critical systems with active development and releases. Thus, we developed Obevo (available under the Apache 2.0 License), a tool to handle all such use cases. Obevo’s key differentiator is the ability to maintain DB objects per file (similar to how class definitions are typically stored per file) while still handling incremental deployments. In this article, we will describe the DB Deployment problem space and then demonstrate how the object-based project structure helps us elegantly manage hundreds and thousands of schema objects for a variety of object and environment types.

---

Quote for the day:

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” -- Dr. Suess

---

Daily Tech Digest - September 28, 2017

“Holy Grail” Microchip Might Surpass the Power of the Human Brain

Professor Harish Bhaskaran of Oxford, who led the team, said “The development of computers that work more like the human brain has been a holy grail of scientists for decades. Via a network of neurons and synapses the brain can process and store vast amounts of information simultaneously, using only a few tons of Watts of power. Conventional computers can’t come close to this sort of performance.” Daniel C. Wright, a co-author from the Exeter team, added that “Electronic computers are relatively slow, and the faster we make them the more they consume. Conventional computers are also pretty ‘dumb,’ with none of the in-built learning and parallel processing capabilities of the human brain. We tackle both of these issues here — not only by developing not only new brain-like computer architectures, but also by working in the optical domain to leverage the huge speed and power advantages of the upcoming silicon photonics revolution.”

Before you deploy OpenStack, address cost, hybrid cloud issues

Training can become an indirect OpenStack cost. IT and developer staff may not have the requisite skill sets needed to tackle an OpenStack deployment. You may need to find more OpenStack-savvy staff to handle the job, spend the money to train up existing staff as Certified OpenStack Administrators, hire consultants to jump-start the work or some combination of these tactics. Consider the implications of OpenStack support. Organizations can certainly adopt a canned OpenStack distribution and associated support from vendors like Red Hat or Rackspace. As open source software acquired directly, however, there is no official support. If you choose to deploy OpenStack, assemble a suite of support resources to address inevitable questions or to resolve problems. Some resources are free, while other resources will incur added costs.

To combat phishing, you must change your approach

The threat surface is growing, and cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated. They’re utilizing threat tactics that have made it increasingly difficult for organizations to protect themselves at scale. Cyber criminals are putting pressure on businesses by increasing the volume of these kinds of targeted attacks, dramatically outpacing even the world’s largest security teams’ ability to keep up. Visibility is sadly lacking within most of today’s organizations, and it’s unrealistic for security teams to secure something they can’t see. There’s no tool or widget that can totally fix this and make everything safe. But we can get to a point where we have the ability to construct a security program that reduces risk in a demonstrable way. We can establish metrics for where your risk profile is today.

Fintech’s future is in the back end

Fear that their money would ultimately be spent on on-premise, and therefore nonscalable, technology has been another reason investors have shied away from the opportunity. This fear arises from the tendency of institutions to want to keep a new technology “in the institution” because of security concerns. However, technology has matured enough to meet the reasonably strict security requirements banks impose on partners and vendors. Just six years ago, only 64% of global financial firms had adopted a cloud application, according to research from Temenos. But now, security has dramatically improved in cloud applications and banks are willing to adopt the technology at scale. This is evidenced in both cloud solution adoption and also the industry’s growing willingness to embrace an open banking framework.

WannaCry an example of pseudo-ransomware, says McAfee

WannaCry may have been a proof of concept, but the true propose, he said, was to cause disruption, which is consistent with what researchers are learning when going undercover as ransomware victims to ransomware support forums. “When one of our researchers asked why a particular ransom was so low, the ransomware support representative told her that those operating the ransoware had already been paid by someone to create and run the ransomware campaign to disrupt a competitor’s business,” said Samani. “The game has changed. The reality is that any organisation can hire someone to disrupt a competitor’s business operations for less than the price of a cup of coffee.” In the face of this reality, Samani said the security industry and society as a whole has to “draw a line in the sand”

The Digital Intelligence Of The World's Leading Asset Managers 2017

Where once the asset management sector was a digital desert, websites and social media channels abound. Whilst this represents genuine progress, the content and functionality within them leaves a lot to be desired in most cases. Quality search functionality is hard to find, websites resemble glorified CVs and blogs read like technical manuals. As for thought leadership, well there’s little thought and no leadership. Social media, especially Twitter and Linkedin, are swamped with relentless HR tweets and duplicate updates. It’s clear that asset managers are missing an opportunity to create content that resonates with FAIs and can build lasting two-way relationships. Over the following pages we present our findings in detail and take a closer look at the digital successes and failures within the world’s leading asset managers.

Heads in the cloud: banks inch closer to cloud take-up

On the one hand, cloud providers – such as the leader of the pack, Amazon Web Services – are likely to have security processes and technology that are at least as advanced as those of their banking clients, thanks to their technical expertise and economies of scale. On the other hand, providers can pass on a bank’s data or system management to yet another contractor, increasing security risks present in traditional outsourcing. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, coming into force next year, will up the ante on data security. The new rules require, among other things, that bank customers are able to request that their personal data held is deleted. One practical outcome, say lawyers, is that banks will have to clarify to cloud providers exactly how they should handle

Inside the fight for the soul of Infosys

Murthy criticized Sikka's pay and his use of private jets, and claimed that corporate governance standards had eroded during his tenure. Saying he could no longer run the company amid such criticism from a company founder, Sikka resigned as chief executive on Aug. 18 and left the board six days later. Three other directors followed him out the door, including the former chairman, R. Seshasayee. Murthy's criticisms haven't let up since Sikka's resignation. Speaking to shareholders on Aug. 29, he detailed his "concerns as a shareholder" over how the company's board members approved a severance package worth roughly 170 million rupees ($2.65 million) for former Chief Financial Officer Rajiv Bansal, who left the company in October 2015.

Should CISOs join CEOs in the C-suite?

A working partnership between the CIO and the CISO is clearly a successful formula, regardless of who reports to whom. “CISOs should report to the CEO with further exposure and responsibility to the board of directors,” says Alp Hug, founder and COO at Zenedge, a DDoS and malware protection vendor. “The time has come for boardrooms to consider cybersecurity a key requirement of every organization's core infrastructure along with a financial system, HRMS, CRM, etc., necessary to ensure the livelihood and continuity of the business.” If a board of directors says defending their organization against cyber crime and cyber warfare is a top priority, then they’ll demonstrate it by inviting their CISO into the boardroom. “Of course CISOs and equivalents will say they should report to the CEO,” says John Daniels

The ins and outs of NoSQL data modelling

Data modelling is critical to understanding data, its interrelationships, and its rules. A data model is not just documentation, because it can be forward-engineered into a physical database. In short, data modelling solves one of the biggest challenges when adopting NoSQL technology: harnessing the power and flexibility of dynamic schemas without falling in the traps that a lack of design structure can create for teams. It eases the on-boarding of NoSQL databases and legitimises the adoption in the enterprise roadmap, corporate IT architecture, and organisational data governance requirements. More specifically, it allows us to define and marry all the various contexts, ontologies, taxonomies, relationships, graphs, and models into one overarching data model.

---

Quote for the day:

"If you realize you aren't so wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you're wiser today." -- Olin Miller

---

Daily Tech Digest - May 10, 2017

Using OpenStack: Leveraging Managed Service Providers

There are many ways that users can consume OpenStack to help benefit their IT business, whether it’s built on premises or off. However, one option that has come from this maturity, is the option for a “managed” cloud, being delivered by a managed service provider (or MSP). This option allows customers to maintain a private cloud, either on premises or off, but leave the burden of deployment, configuration, and day-to-day management to a hired, experienced team of experts. And while this does cost you a monthly/annual subscription to retain their services, it relieves you from the complexities of having to do this yourself. Many businesses may find that their internal IT teams may be understaffed, unskilled, or simply better off utilizing their resources elsewhere.

Google Fuchsia: A very, very early first look

Google has been a bit mum on actual Fuchsia details, but we do know its purpose. It's designed for "modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation." That's a bit of a mouthful, but it essentially means it's intended to be THE future OS for current Google-powered devices like smartphones and laptops. If you're not crazy about Armadillo it's time to start hoping Google is still experimenting. If not you're going to have to get used to this new, card-based, minimal operating system. Luckily, you may not have to wait long to find out what Google intends: Google I/O 2017 is happening in a week's time and Fuchsia could take center stage. There's no mention of Fuchsia or Armadillo in the I/O schedule, though there are several events centering around Magenta and Flutter.

Using Blockchain to Secure IoT

A decentralized approach to IoT networking would solve many of the questions above. Adopting a standardized peer-to-peer communication model to process the hundreds of billions of transactions between devices will significantly reduce the costs associated with installing and maintaining large centralized data centers and will distribute computation and storage needs across the billions of devices that form IoT networks. This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse. However, establishing peer-to-peer communications will present its own set of challenges, chief among them the issue of security. And as we all know, IoT security is much more than just about protecting sensitive data. The proposed solution will have to maintain privacy and security in huge IoT networks and offer some form of validation and consensus for transactions to prevent spoofing and theft.

PokitDok teams with Intel on healthcare blockchain solution

If you’re wondering why Intel is involved in such a project, Mike Reed, who heads up blockchain technology for the chip maker, says Intel uses these projects as a springboard for its chip business. “Intel has a long history of contributing to open source, and working with Linux and the hyperledger project allows us to work across multiple market segments,” he explained. In addition to the open source software, as you might expect, Intel has also contributed to the broader blockchain ecosystem with a technology they call SGX. “One key piece is Intel SGX, a method [we’ve built into our chips] to improve the scalability, privacy and security of blockchains,” Reed said. He added that PokitDok has taken advantage of this capability.

An untold cost of ransomware: It will change how you operate

Even if the backup looks promising, there is no easy button. The people creating ransomware know that backups can stand between them and their payday. There are a lot of cases where Microsoft Volume Shadow Copies have been destroyed by ransomware. If you leave your backups online so you can have quick recovery, you may find that ransomware can actually delete or corrupt your backups. This is not uncommon; ead the user groups from various backup companies and you’ll see the sad tales of woes. If you are not concerned enough, there are other potential dangers to your backups. They need to be airlocked from systems your users have access to. Before you bring your backups online, make sure the affected computers are off of the network. You need to be absolutely certain that those systems can’t access the backup.

Excel 2016 cheat sheet

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

With Security Awareness Money Talks

Undercutting the incentives for employees to do the right thing for security purposes is the fact that the vast majority of email attachments from a boss will in fact be a legitimate email attachment from the boss. Even with rampant phishing attacks happening today, most attachments are legitimate, in the same way that most people ringing your home doorbell are not homicidal maniacs. Statistical reality aside, employees’ perception is that the odds are dramatically against them opening a contaminated attachment and having damage result and having that damage traced back to the employee’s actions. In short, employees are rushed and they think it’s a decent gamble to open attachments that at least look legit.

Why Cyber Attacks Will Continue until Prevention Becomes a Priority

Cybersecurity is often described as an arms race between security professionals and skilled attackers, as both parties rush to gain the upper hand. While even cutting-edge defenses are inevitably thwarted by determined attackers, cybersecurity professionals are able to quickly react and nullify attacks. But many businesses don't keep tabs on the front lines of cybersecurity development, leaving them several generations behind with regard to best practices and current threats. For example, while multifactor authentication has been recommended for more than a decade, many organizations are only now adopting the technology across their applications and platforms. Making matters worse, many organizations fail to follow best practices for maintaining and protecting their current environments, creating countless avenues of attack for even inexperienced attackers.

Microsoft fixes 55 vulnerabilities, 3 exploited by Russian cyberspies

Fifteen of the vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft's patch bundle for May are rated as critical and they affect Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and the malware protection engine used in most of the company's anti-malware products. System administrators should prioritize the Microsoft Office patches because they address two vulnerabilities that attackers have exploited in targeted attacks over the past two months. Both of these flaws, CVE-2017-0261 and CVE-2017-0262, stem from how Microsoft Office handles Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) image files and can lead to remote code execution on the underlying system. ... Also known as Snake or Uroburos, the Turla group has been active since at least 2007 and has been responsible for some of the most complex cyberespionage attacks to date.

IBM bolsters enterprise app security with behavioral biometrics

"SecuredTouch technology provides a strong, risk-based, user-centric security check that keeps customers engaged, automatically delivering complete security and privacy while remaining completely transparent to the user, eliminating hassle, registration, and education," according to a press release. "The integration allows IBM customers to implement behavioral biometrics directly into their apps without any additional steps." Potential use cases include second factor authentication in financial applications, or adding another layer of enterprise security for corporate apps. The goal is to enhance the user's digital experience and reduce the friction caused by using passwords and tokens. It can also enable more transactions via mobile and reduce false positives, the press release stated.

---

Quote for the day:

"Nothing gives so much direction to a person's life as a sound set of principles." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

Daily Tech Digest - March 05, 2017

CTO: Our quest for agility led us to the OpenStack framework

Once we were confident that we were not about to make a tragic mistake, we plunged in and started the sometimes challenging process of redoing what we had in order to fit our lives into the OpenStack framework. We started with one of the available implementations of OpenStack/Cloud Foundry. (As with Linux, you can go entirely open source or you can choose a supported version from a number of providers). But, as our knowledge and experience of the OpenStack framework grew, we identified some gaps that created issues around segregation of duties (which is critical for SOX, SOC 2 and other compliance standards). We began modifying our way into our own version, which includes some technologies we created to better handle application-level security and data access controls.

Metadata Management and Data Governance: The Essentials of Enterprise Architecture

Bremeau illustrated what a successfully integrated – but simplified – big picture model would look like, using a classic Enterprise Architecture for Data Warehousing. “If there is one thing to learn and master in any Metadata Management and Data Governance solution, it’s known as ‘the big picture.’” “There are a couple of data stores on one side, could be files, and then I have some ETL tools that are bringing everything into the Data Warehouse,” with the BI tools on the other side. “Now this is very simplified because most of the customers that we deal with do a lot of staging areas, before. And they’re not using one ETL but three or four different types of ETLs, and some hand-written SQL scripts, and you have to deal with all that. That’s the reality, if you truly want to know the lineage of what’s going on in the enterprise.”

The worst enterprise architecture anti-pattern of them all

What many have tried is give more power to the IT department, or have stricter controls, more principles and guidelines, reviews, gates, and so forth. All are ways in which the agility of the enterprise suffers, with nothing much to show for it. Because in the end: the immediate business goals almost always outweigh the long term architecture goals. So, these ways never last. What we need is more agility in architecture (especially now that agile change methods have become popular), not less. My answer is that boards of enterprises should not give these IT architecture goals to the IT department, they must explicitly give them to the business units instead. And they must have the strength of conviction to actually hold those business units accountable for the IT goals, in the same way that they hold those units accountable to compliance with external demands, from owner/shareholder to regulator.

Your Data Is Your Strategic Firewall Against Competition

Per VoC research conducted by our firm, today’s personalization is broken. It relies on implicit data, i.e., web browsing behavior, data mined from social media, data modeling, and purchase-based behaviors. These are not providing the necessary depth of information to drive relevant communications and offers. As a result, most attempts at personalization simply do not drive the expected increases in response. Marketers must now make a profound shift and move to human data, which is based on explicit, self-profiled, opt-in preference data. Human data personalization is unique in that it lends itself to segmentation based on self-described personality types, attitudes, and life stages. Human data-based personalization is consistently driving double-digit response rates.

Executive Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Most crucial part of an AI system that brings machines slightly closer to humans is continuous learning. How does a recommendation engine in eCommerce sites works? It uses humongous historical data on browsing and purchase behavior of website visitors, learns patterns in the data for product preferences and makes relevant product recommendations. This learning is not one time, but happens continuously whenever chunk of new data is available. In fact learning is a key component that differentiates current generation of AI systems from earlier generations. This advancement is made possible mainly because of prevalence of machine learning algorithms. For example, recently Google announced that its language translation tool is dramatically improved because of using a versatile machine learning technique called Deep Learning.

FinTech and Blockchain: Financial Services In Transition

From a macroeconomic perspective, there is a significant pressure on banks, especially European banks, because there is limited growth opportunities. If you cannot go because interest rates are low, and the transaction volume is also because in the market of uncertainty, is low. So, there’s a revenue pressure, the pressure even on the cost side is going up significantly. Cost side meaning your cost-income ratio is under pressure compared to US banks. US banks are at 55% of your cost vs. revenue, most European banks are at over 70%. So there is a significant pressure on those banks to be very careful to reduce your operating expenses, which has also an impact on potential investments going forward. So it is constrained and stressed environment, and the new technology is even triggering, from my perspective, even bigger, significant change.

Pain in the bot? Artificial intelligence in banking

Interactions via natural language processing must be quick and simple - in a word, functional. From a bot perspective, one key differentiator is the capacity for banks to allow richer “mini-apps” as part of their messaging experience, in which each message has the potential to become an atomic application. That means functionality must be broken down into manageable chunks supported by services or better said, micro-services, in the integration layers of core systems. Sadly, if you are a banker, these micro-services are unlikely to exist in your organization. ... If we limit the choice of what users can do in a chat, we will need to somehow train the users or offer “menu” choices, much more obvious in a traditional interface, which reduces useability and defeats the purpose of a “conversation” in the first place. Check out this example from BI Intelligence:

IT Service Management In Disruption, Moving Toward Automation

The incoming description of a problem can be analyzed for its underlying patterns. Much time is wasted in IT services as one service desk listener responds to a problem one way and another in a different way.  "Incident management needs better categorization. There's sometimes misinterpretation of what the incident is about and what skill set is needed to resolve it," said Hough. With ServiceNow's existing configuration management database and change management products will be tied into machine learning to get a more accurate incident management process. The information available through them will also make it possible for a machine-learning system to look at pending changes and "assess the risk as changes come through, based on its learnings from what's happened in the past," she said.

Harnessing the value of big data with MDM

At first hand, it appears that MDM and big data are two mutually exclusive systems with a degree of mismatch. Enterprise MDM initiative is all about solving business issues and improving data trustworthiness through the effective and seamless integration of master information with business processes. Its intent is to create a central trusted repository of structured master information accessible by enterprise applications. The big data system deals with large volumes of data coming in unstructured or semi-structured format from heterogeneous sources like social media, field devises, log files and machine generated data. The big data initiative is intended to support specific analytics tasks within a given span of time after that it is taken down. In Figure 1 we see the characteristics of MDM and big data.

How data governance is now a strategic boardroom consideration in a data-driven world

Data is without a doubt a boardroom responsibility in a digital economy. Organizations have to think of their business from a customer and data perspectives if they want to thrive amidst rapid progress of data-enabled technologies and increasingly competitive environments. The recent Microsoft Asia Data Culture Study 2016, which polled 940 business leaders from medium to large-sized companies in 13 markets in Asia, found that 87% of respondents felt a data culture should be driven from top down, and that there should be a formalized role in the leadership team to drive successful adoption of their data strategy. ... A data strategy is needed to define what data is to be used by the organization – and how that will add long term value. As part of an overall data governance framework, this requires an understanding of the value, risk and constraints inherent in all data.

---

Quote for the day:

"If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny." -- Tim Ferriss

---

Daily Tech Digest - February 17, 2017

Extending COBIT 5 Data Security and Governance Guidance

COBIT 5 encourages each enterprise to adapt the COBIT content to the enterprise’s own priorities and circumstances. However, among the processes COBIT 5 recommends are 3 especially suited for security, and the metrics suggested for each are only a subset of measurements that might be meaningful to the enterprise. First is that a system is in place that considers and effectively addresses enterprise information security requirements. This appears overarching (a good thing), and the measures suggested for it include the number of key security roles that have been clearly defined and the number of security-related incidents. Most enterprises would wish to add other measures to the list in keeping with their own situation.

7 tips to turn threat data into true threat intelligence

Unvetted threat intel is a bit like getting raw data feeds about the stock market. Responding to such data, you may be the next investment millionaire, or you could completely lose your shirt. You need to filter through it to eliminate the useless portions, and carefully weigh the balance. As Malcovery Security said in a blog some months ago, most of what the industry refers to as threat intelligence is really just threat data. It is just a list of data elements, full of noise and false positives. Until the intelligence part is applied to this data feed, it is fairly useless, or even worse, may lead to false conclusions. According to Mark Orlando in his presentation to the RSA Security Conference in 2015, raw threat intel data is highly commoditized, has poor quality control, a short shelf life, and promotes a false sense of awareness.

CTO: Our quest for agility led us to the OpenStack framework

The OpenStack framework has been around for a reasonably long time. Even more important, OpenStack was an early manifestation of an approach purposefully designed to help us deliver agility. In the years since the OpenStack framework became available, others have created alternatives to Open Stack, but they are all built to do similar things: leverage commodity hardware, open standards, virtualization and orchestration tools to deliver fluid, portable and complete services (compute, storage and networking). With fluid, portable and complete IT services, we can flex, scale, move around and revise our services as needed. These are capabilities we need -- no, must have -- if we are to survive and thrive in a technology-driven marketplace.

58 Mind-Blowing Digital Marketing Stats You Need to Know

While there are several forms of traditional marketing including print, radio, and television, statistics show that digital marketing is taking over in terms of popularity and success. In fact, by 2021 it’s projected that marketing leaders will spend 75% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing rather than traditional marketing. ... Social media is changing the face of the marketing culture in several ways. With social media, it’s easier to collect useful data on consumers, build a visible and popular brand, and sell products on various social media platforms. The following statistics will boggle your mind and help you understand the importance of getting your social strategy right this year.

Gain competitive advantage with NoSQL databases

Till yet we learned the reasons that worked as a catalyst for the failure of relational databases. However this is not completely true as relational databases still have a fair share of the market however NoSQL drew the attention of many companies which wanted to deal with big data. Some of the NoSQL advantages are- Make the system agile- NoSQl databases work on a dynamic model that allows storing and maintaining data without defining it beforehand. This makes the faster and responsive than ever before. Easy scaling- Scaling up the relational databases were complex and expensive. Unlike this the NoSQL databases can easily be scaled-up and down as per the workload as these have a dynamic architecture offering much more operational benefits than RDBMS.

Russian Cyberspies Blamed For US Election Hacks Are Now Targetting MACs

The group, which is known in the security industry under different names, including Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, and APT28, has been operating for almost a decade. It is believed to be the sole user and likely developer of a Trojan program called Sofacy or X-Agent. X-Agent variants for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS have been found in the wild in the past, but researchers from Bitdefender have now come across what appears to be the first macOS version of the Trojan. It's not entirely clear how the malware is being distributed because the Bitdefender researchers only obtained the malware sample, not the full attack chain. However, it's possible a macOS malware downloader dubbed Komplex, found in September, might be involved.

How to use Instant Tethering on your Google Pixel or Nexus device

Staying connected on the go is a constant struggle for business professionals and everyday techies alike. However, a new feature from Google called Instant Tethering could offer a more intelligent way to keep your devices online. A recent product forum post by Google product manager Omri Amarilio explained that Instant Tethering uses Bluetooth to allow to Google devices to communicate. The devices, such as tablets and Pixel phones, must be logged into with the same Google account.  "When you unlock a tablet such as the Pixel C, it will notice if there is no internet connection available, and will ask your Pixel phone if it has internet and battery life," Amarilio wrote in his post. "If it does, we will give you an option to enable a secure hotspot and pair [automatically], without even taking your phone out of your pocket."

Real-World, Man-Machine Algorithms

There are many machine learning classification problems where using log data is standard, essentially giving you labels for free. For example, ad click prediction models are typically trained on which ads users click on, video recommendation systems make heavy use of which videos you’ve watched in the past, etc. However, even these systems need to move beyond simple click data once they reach large enough scale and sophistication; for instance, because they’re heavily biased towards clicks, it can be difficult to tune the systems to show new ads and new videos to users, and so explore-exploit algorithms become necessary. ... As another example, suppose you're an e-commerce site like eBay or Etsy. You're starting to see a lot of spammy profiles selling Viagra, drugs, and other blacklisted products, so you want to fight the problem with machine learning.

2 powerful new features on their way to Android right now

Android can be full of surprises. Thanks to the deconstructed nature of the operating system, individual pieces of the software receive updates all the time -- in a way that has nothing to do with the big, attention-grabbing OS rollouts. It happens with a large and ever-expanding list of core system apps that now exist in the Play Store and are updated accordingly, but it also happens silently and seamlessly with some behind-the-scenes tools that are easy to overlook. As a result, useful new features can sometimes appear in random areas of your device -- and you might not even realize they're there. Such an update is underway as we speak. Google is in the midst of rolling out a refinement to its Google Play Services app that brings two powerful new options into Android's settings -- options you might never notice but don't want to miss.

Bruce Schneier: It's time for internet-of-things regulation

Schneier argued there is precedence for creating such an agency to address new technologies, from trains and automobiles to radio and nuclear. And he said those agencies tend to be created for two reasons. "New technologies need new expertise," Schneier said. "And new technologies need new controls. And this is something markets can't solve. Markets are, by definition, short-term profit-motivated. That's what they're supposed to do. They don't solve collective action problems." Government, he said, is "the entity that is used to solve problems like this." But Schneier also admitted that a regulatory approach to IoT threats brings a lot of problems, from a general lack of technical expertise in the government to historical problems with regulatory capture.

---

Quote for the day:

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe" -- Anatole France

---

Daily Tech Digest - December 08, 2016

OpenStack enterprise adoption still awaits full embrace

Every one of those critical area points -- image placement, compute distribution and load -- are fundamental things you figure would just work," Berisha said. Ultimately, Berisha decided on a managed services engagement with VMware Integrated OpenStack. Whether it is a vendor distribution or managed OpenStack cloud, the financial benefits of the open source cloud computing software might not always pan out, because the vendor distributions that eliminate the complexity may also diminish the anticipated cost savings. "A lot of these distros are incredibly expensive," Forrester's Nelson said. She pointed to a recent request for proposal for 30,000 VMs that required $4 million for software licensing.

Backdoor Accounts Found In 80 Sony IP Securtity Camera Models

Sony was informed about the issue in October and released firmware updates for all affected camera models on Nov. 28. Users are advised to install these updates as soon as possible, because security cameras have recently been an attractive target for hackers. "We believe that this backdoor was introduced by Sony developers on purpose (maybe as a way to debug the device during development or factory functional testing) and not by an 'unauthorized third party' like in other cases," the SEC Consult researchers said. The affected cameras can be attacked over the local network or over the internet if their Web interfaces are publicly accessible. A search via the Censys.io search engine revealed around 4,000 Sony security cameras connected to the Internet, but these are likely not all of them and it's unclear how many are actually vulnerable.

The world in 2045, according to Pentagon researchers

"Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment," Sanchez said. "Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain." According to Sanchez, Darpa is working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms. Just last week Darpa demonstrated this amazing tech for the first time and gave a paralyzed man back the sense of touch — with brain implants that provided the feeling "as if his own hand were being touched," he reported. The future has more than just brain implants. Many other exciting things could change the buildings and other objects around us, says Stefanie Tompkins, a geologist and director of Darpa's Defense Sciences Office.

CIOs assess how Apple and Google approach enterprise apps

Google has a fairly robust strategy, whereas Apple's approach is designed to meet specific business objectives, according to Wiora. "I think what technology leaders are looking for is a platform that integrates easily and is secure," he says. "Both companies have historically had their challenges and overcome a lot of them." Many IT professionals are receptive to Android and Google, but businesses should be cautious about overreliance on Google partners because the company could eventually follow Microsoft's lead and supplant some third-party services with its own, Wiora says.  Apple's approach to enterprise development works best for large companies that require a more formalized program or have existing relationships with Apple's current partners.

The Digital Shift: Embracing New Technology and Engaging Your Employees

There are three main reasons why some companies find it difficult to leverage more digital technology within their organizations. First, “new and improved” to some people can feel like “change and work” to others. When digital aspects are introduced into a job function that has existed for years without them, the benefits to users aren’t always obvious. For instance, rolling out instant messaging, which is supposed to make collaboration easier, may feel like just another thing to monitor and respond to that didn’t exist before. Some employees are simply set in their ways. Putting tools like document management systems or portals in place to automate or simplify common tasks takes time. Tagging and uploading a document to SharePoint or Dropbox — so everyone in your company has access to it anywhere

While Circle Pivots Away from Bitcoin, Blockchain Doubles Down on the Digital Currency

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire claimed the company’s fiat-denominated payments are growing many times faster than bitcoin payments on their platform. Allaire also claimed Bitcoin has not evolved quickly enough to support common, everyday payments, and he pointed to what he perceives as development gridlock among Bitcoin Core contributors as the main cause of this lack of progress. Although Allaire is frustrated with the Bitcoin Core development community, the reality is that they released their main scalability improvement,Segregated Witness, this past October. While Circle has continued their pivot away from bitcoin, Blockchain is doubling down on the digital currency.

Microsoft to turn millions of PCs and tablets into smart 'home hubs' 

'Home Hub is designed to run on Windows 10 PCs, mainly All-In-Ones and 2-in-1's with touch screens, but can work on any Windows 10 machine.,' it is claimed. As well as giving access to Microsoft's Cortana AI assistant, it will allow families to more easily create share accounts. 'There will also be a 'family account' that is always logged in,' Windows Central says. That account can see everything the 'family' is supposed to see, such as specific apps, calendar appointments, to-do's, and more. The new software will also be able to control smart home devices, including lights, doors, locks and more. It will use Microsoft's Cortana to allow voice control - much like Apple's siri HomeKit integration.  The firm is also expected to work with theird parties to create dedicated home hub devices, with talks already underway with HP and Lenovo.

Bluetooth 5 Is Out: Now Will Home IoT Take Off?

With Bluetooth 5, BLE matches the speed of the older system, and in time, manufacturers are likely to shift to the low-power version, he said. Range has quadrupled in Bluetooth 5, so users shouldn’t have to worry about getting closer to their smart devices in order to control them. Also, things like home security systems – one of the most common starting points for smart-home systems -- will be able to talk to other Bluetooth 5 devices around the house, Parks Associates analyst Tom Kerber said. Another enhancement in the new version will help enterprises use Bluetooth beacons for location. BLE has a mechanism for devices to broadcast information about what they are and what they can do so other gear can coordinate with them. Until now, those messages could only contain 31 bytes of information.

Where does India Stand in the Impact of Digital Technology on Businesses?

According to Sunil Mangalore, Managing Director, CA Technologies India, “India is at the cusp of a major revolution, as we see digital technologies being at the centre of business strategy for leading businesses. ... The need however for Indian CXOs, is to collaborate with a strategic partner and ensure adoption of digital technologies and practices that helps them grow their business revenues while enhancing customer satisfaction and retention.” ... Digital advancement in any field, least of all in businesses, can’t take place without sufficient supply of energy for daily living, for the industries and for the digital technology to function. India has to resolve this issue seriously, if it wants to make an overall transition to a completely digitised business model at par with the completely industrialised countries.

Cyber-insurance: What will you be able to claim for and is it worth it?

At the moment, CLIC can cover costs relating to the management of an incident, the investigation, the remediation, data subject notification, call management, credit checking for data subjects, legal costs, court attendance and regulatory fines. It can cover third-party damages, where these might include specific defacement of a website and intellectual property rights infringement. And would even cover losses due to a threat of extortion, and professional/legal fees related to dealing with the extortion. And the same goes for costs related to data lost by third-party suppliers and costs related to the theft of data on third-party systems. Simultaneously, some companies are attempting to provide a ‘guarantee scheme' of sorts, which promises to pay a specified amount of money should their product fail and a data breach was to occur.

---

Quote for the day:

"Great minds discuss ideas; Average mind discuss events; Small mind discuss people" -- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

May 19, 2016

Lessons from LinkedIn data breach revelations

As mentioned, LinkedIn’s passwords were encrypted, but the company was still using a relatively weak hashing algorithm. It was also not adding random text to passwords to make it more difficult to reverse engineer the hashed or scrambled versions of the passwords. ... Creating unique passwords for every online service means that if one is compromised, none of the others are affected. However, the converse is also true. If passwords are re-used and one service is compromised, it means all others where the same password is valid are also at risk. “While LinkedIn has taken the precaution of invalidating the passwords of the accounts affected, and contacting those members to reset their passwords, the chances are that many will use the same password across multiple online accounts,” said Liviu Itoafa, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

Cloud security: A mismatch for existing security processes and technology

Certainly cybersecurity professionals want to leverage existing security investments and lean on well-established best practices as much as possible. So, what’s the problem? Unfortunately, existing security technologies and processes don’t always work when pointed at cloud-based workloads. In fact, 32 percent of enterprise cybersecurity and IT professionals admit they’ve had to abandon many traditional security policies or technologies because they couldn’t be used effectively for cloud security, while another 42 percent have abandoned some traditional security policies or technologies because they couldn’t be used effectively for cloud security.

IT Governance Integral Part of Corporate Governance

For any modern day business to stay agile, relevant, competitive and profitable, it has to rely and invest in IT as a major component of its business strategy. Automating a company's functions, apart from requiring significant financial investments, also requires the incorporation of powerful internal control mechanisms into computers (hardware), software and networks to manage operational IT risks. In view of the above, IT governance is now considered as a bread and butter issue for businesses to thrive. The emerging trend is that IT governance and corporate governance can no longer be separated. IT governance now constitutes a key component of every company's strategic plan and consequently it has become a standing agenda item at board meetings.

Ransomware attacks force hospitals to stitch up networks

Once ransomware is on the networks, hospitals were forced to resort to finding and using paper copies, fax machines, phones, and any other non-connected devices, while network administrators hastened to get their systems up and running. The result of these activities has made a lasting impact on operations: in some instances doctors even had to reschedule high-risk surgeries.  The lessons to be drawn from these recent incidents is the need for hospitals to develop and implement a strong cyber resiliency plan that incorporates incident response as well recovery operations from such attacks. The threat of ransomware demonstrates the need for hospitals, as well as all organizations, to identify critical information and properly store it on backup systems that are independent of the main network. While we can’t necessarily predict when attacks against us will occur, we can always be prepared to respond to them once they do.

Digital transformation trips: advice from CIOs

Unsurprisingly, lack of investment from the business is a barrier to digital transformation, with 50 per cent of those studied saying this was one of the biggest downsides. When asked what the major barriers are to digital transformation projects, the top answer was the lack of funds available for technology provision. Adding to complexity, corporate culture is often change-averse, according to 43 per cent of CIOs studied. If they are to encourage investment in digital, CIOs must now convince the board of the area's ability to drive business change. A financial sector CIO explains: "Gain board level sponsorship, so the initiative is perceived as a business led change programme, rather than a technology led one."

Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers

TPU gets its name from TensorFlow, the software library for machine intelligence that powers Google Search and other services, such as speech recognition, Gmail, and Photos. The company open sourced TensorFlow in November of last year. The chip is tailored for machine learning. It is better at tolerating “reduced computational precision,” which enables it to use fewer processors per operation. “Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly,” Jouppi wrote.

Make the bed, enterprise OpenStack deployment is moving in

The increased adoption of OpenStack is part of a changing perspective of open source in general, where more enterprises view it as a way to get faster top-level development, rather than relying on the roadmap of one proprietary entity, according to Nelson. "There's been a big shift from a bunch of developers getting in a room and dreaming of the future to something that has become a lot more real, and adopted by commercial vendors and looked at seriously by a lot of large enterprises," she said. The next step in OpenStack adoption is likely companies that are not interested in putting whole development teams in place to put the upstream code into production. Instead, the next round of adoption will likely involve a deployment from a vendor -- companies such as Canonical, Red Hat or Mirantis -- to do it hands-off, so it feels like rolling out Linux.

SEC says cyber security biggest risk to financial system

The SEC, which regulates securities markets, has found some major exchanges, dark pools and clearing houses did not have cyber policies in place that matched the sort of risks they faced, SEC Chair Mary Jo White told the Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in Washington D.C. "What we found, as a general matter so far, is a lot of preparedness, a lot of awareness but also their policies and procedures are not tailored to their particular risks," she said. "As we go out there now, we are pointing that out." White said SEC examiners were very pro-active about doing sweeps of broker-dealers and investment advisers to assess their defenses against a cyber attack. "We can't do enough in this sector," she said.

New Federal HIPAA Guidance Targets Data Security Incidents

The new guidance defines how business associate agreements should specify the terms of how and for what purposes protected health information will be used, and create reporting mechanisms that cover instances in which protected information is disclosed in a way not authorized under contracts. The new rules put the onus on BAs to report incidents to covered entities. ... OCR recommends that business associate agreements contain requirements that BAs and subcontractors report a breach or a security incident even if it did not cause a breach. The information should include BA or subcontractor name and contact information, a description of the incident, date of the incident and date of discovery, types of unsecured PHI involved in the incident, and steps being taken to further investigate the incident and avoid future incidents.

Role of Business Analysis in Agile

Great business analysts are now more aware of the customer and their journey with the software. They’re interested in understanding not only why the business want the product built, but what the problem is that the product is trying to solve and how their customers will use it. The business analyst is also in a fantastic position to influence team dynamics. They’re working closely with the product owner, working closely with the development team, being able to drive consensus on decisions that are being made is a great way to ensure that the whole team feels they have ownership of the product. This also helps establish a shared goal that the whole team can work towards. So you can see, there’s heaps of different paths a business analyst can take to be T-shaped and provide further value to their teams.

---

Quote for the day:

"Diligence is the mother of good fortune." -- Miguel de Cervantes,

---

December 20, 2015

Mobile App Developers are Suffering

First, a user must discover the potential new app. This is by far the most challenging problem that developers face. There are two portals for discovery today: 1. paid promotion, which is dominated by Facebook, and 2. the app stores themselves. The biggest issue is that these two forms of promotion only work for the apps that have already been discovered. Paid promotion is completely unsustainable for most apps given that the cost for an active install increased to $4.14 in the last few months. I can count on my hands the number of business models in the app ecosystem which can support that cost of customer acquisition. This means that app ads are only usable by the very small percentage of the ecosystem that is monetizing well. For the majority, it is a prohibitive channel.

Driving Digital Transformation Using Enterprise Architecture

The speciality here is, change in pattern for “Transformation” when the prefix “Digital” gets associated. It is no longer IT for Business. It is technology-enabled business, literally! The basics of market place of how one get their 4Ps together to generate values is changing and thus newer Business Model. That is where the critical differentiation comes in. This drives in a couple of thoughts: A) Business Gurus need to understand information and technology B) Technical Gurus need to understand business. It is no longer a question of business and IT alignment, it is a question of merger and how the mix looks like! Everyone understands this and understands that change is unavoidable. However, they are also apprehensive of repeating “past failures to transform”.

Google reveals the most popular searches in 2015

Google has released its list of the most searched terms of 2015. Over 3.5 billion searches are made on Google everyday - around 1.2 trillion per year - and the company combs through these to compile a list of the most popular. The list is a good way to measure what happened during the year and includes a mix of news events, films, celebrities, and apps. Here are the top 10 most popular searches on Google in the past year.

In Who Do We Trust? How Privilege Plays Out in Security and Privacy Online

To make matters worse, there are often conflicting reports on how consumers should protect themselves from identity theft, surveillance and other online threats. Without trusted beacons out there, it is often up to individuals to figure out how to protect themselves — or recover — from invasions when they do occur. Threatening the situation even further is the acceleration of cybersecurity misinformation and government manipulation in the wake of the November 13th Paris attacks. As information about the Daesh (aka ISIS)-affiliated perpetrators began to emerge, so did reports on how they planned their attacks.

The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage

There are two breakthroughs that make Hotz’s system possible. The first comes from the rise in computing power since the days of the Grand Challenge. He uses graphics chips that normally power video game consoles to process images pulled in by the car’s camera and speedy Intel chips to run his AI calculations. Where the Grand Challenge teams spent millions on their hardware and sensors, Hotz, using his winnings from hacking contests, spent a total of $50,000—the bulk of which ($30,000) was for the car itself. The second advance is deep learning, an AI technology that has taken off over the past few years. It allows researchers to assign a task to computers and then sit back as the machines in essence teach themselves how to accomplish and finally master the job. In the past

Tech support call scams becoming more aggressive

Another variation of the tech support scam is luring people to the bogus, malicious fake site. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently fined ($1.3 million) and shut down some scammers who had stolen over $17 million from their duped victims by luring them to their sites with pop-up alerts telling the victim that malware was on their PC. The ads provided a contact number and people would be told to call to get rid of the problem. From there they’d be directed to a malicious site and the unsuspecting victim would follow instructions, and then nasty malware, ransomware would be downloaded, and they would be charged thousands of dollars to have it removed. Every business, of every size, and every individual is a potential target. Make sure that everyone in the organization can recognize some of the key red flags of a tech support scammer.

Using MySQL with Entity Framework

Starting with version 6.7, Connector/Net will no longer include the MySQL for Visual Studio integration. That functionality is now available in a separate product called MySQL for Visual Studio available using the MySQL Installer for Windows ... They have created an *open system for others to plug-in ‘providers’ – postgres and sqlite have it – mysql is just laggin… but, good news for those interested, i too was looking for this and found that the MySql Connector/Net 6.0 will have it… You would need a mapping provider for MySQL. That is an extra thing the Entity Framework needs to make the magic happen. This blog talks about other mapping providers besides the one Microsoft is supplying. I haven’t found any mentionings of MySQL.

Peer Feedback Loops: How to Contribute to a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Feedback is an essential part of any lean or agile development. This holds for the technical level as well as for your work management system. This article advocates for complementing the well-known strategies of metrics and meetings with peer feedback. Why peer feedback? Simply speaking, because this kind of feedback encourages continuous improvement on a personal level too. ... the value-add of peer feedback depends heavily on how it is facilitated. That is why, the three articles of the series present a total of nine methods I've tried and tested in various environments. To make these methods as comprehensive as possible they are presented in the context of real-life case studies and complemented by some figures to illustrate what they can look like.

Web Socket Server in C#

A lot of the Web Socket examples out there are for old Web Socket versions and included complicated code (and external libraries) for fall back communication. All modern browsers that anyone cares about (including safari on an iphone) support at least version 13 of the Web Socket protocol so I'd rather not complicate things. This is a bare bones implementation of the web socket protocol in C# with no external libraries involved. You can connect using standard HTML5 JavaScript. This application serves up basic html pages as well as handling WebSocket connections. This may seem confusing but it allows you to send the client the html they need to make a web socket connection and also allows you to share the same port.

When And Why OpenStack Needs A Cloud Management Platform

Different companies stop at different stages of this maturity model, depending on the business needs and the maturity of their IT organization. As the environments in stage 1 and stage 2 grow in size and complexity, companies can reach an operational scale that requires more sophisticated management tools than the ones provided out of the box by server virtualization and IaaS cloud engines. ... OpenStack does a great job in providing the instrumentation for the aforementioned capabilities – think the metering APIs that OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer) offers or the orchestration templates that you can define with OpenStack Orchestration

---

Quote for the day:

"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." -- Jack Welch

---