IT departments should automate operations now

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didn’t want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of “speed.” In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speed—business leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.+ Also on Network World: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted + However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT departments should automate operations now

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didn’t want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of “speed.” In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speed—business leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.+ Also on Network World: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted + However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Mapping with wifi

We think of Wi-Fi as primarily bathing our homes and offices in a comfy, invisible blanket of data and internet access, but just as a blanket can take on the shapes of the bodies it covers, the microwave radiation sent out from a hotspot can be used to generate a three-dimensional image of the surrounding environment and the things and people in it. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have come up with a process that creates a holographic image of a space from the microwave radiation of a Wi-Fi signal bouncing off people and objects. The scientists say their method could be used in automated industrial settings, to track objects moving through a facility, for example. —New Atlas

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IDG Contributor Network: Adding an IoT dimension to the Tour de France

The Tour de France pro cycling race is one of the oldest and most prestigious annual sporting events in the world. Each year about 200 cyclists compete during most of July in a race that crosses some 2,200 miles of varied terrain in France.The first Tour de France was in 1903. Back then it attracted mostly local competitors and spectators. Coverage and prestige of the event expanded with each consecutive era of newspapers, radio, and television. However, we now live in the digital era. Fans don’t want to just watch a sport; they want to engage with it, and they expect more control and interaction.Professional sports are increasingly embracing digital technology to enhance the fan experience. This includes data-enhanced viewing, live streaming, video on demand, second-screen apps, gamification, and social media interaction. This technology is becoming a critical component of sports marketing necessary to attract fans, athletes, sponsors, and broadcasters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 things I like about my new MacBook Pro—and 5 things I don’t

If you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area, toting a MacBook Air laptop is practically a requirement. For several years now, they’ve been standard equipment for tech workers, entrepreneurs and seemingly everyone else in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.Armadas of the silvery machines, often individualized with colorful stickers for tech startups and rock bands, festoon co-working spaces and coffee shops from Santa Cruz to Petaluma. They’re light enough that techies typically carry them from meeting to meeting opened, casually dangling from a corner—it’s a wonder hundreds of them are damaged every day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers trick iris scanner to unlock Samsung Galaxy S8

When it comes to security and the iris recognition technology used in its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, Samsung touted, “The patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate, meaning iris authentication is one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private.”But the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) made a mockery of Samsung’s “virtually impossible to replicate” claims, easily defeating the iris recognition system used in the new Galaxy S8 with nothing more than a camera, a printer and a contact lens.Not only can the iris authentication system be broken to unlock an S8, the same trick could allow an attacker to access the victim’s mobile wallet. Just last week, Samsung Pay tweeted a short iris scan video ad along with, “Every eye is unique. Now you can use yours to make purchases with Samsung Pay.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers trick iris scanner to unlock Samsung Galaxy S8

When it comes to security and the iris recognition technology used in its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, Samsung touted, “The patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate, meaning iris authentication is one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private.”But the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) made a mockery of Samsung’s “virtually impossible to replicate” claims, easily defeating the iris recognition system used in the new Galaxy S8 with nothing more than a camera, a printer and a contact lens.Not only can the iris authentication system be broken to unlock an S8, the same trick could allow an attacker to access the victim’s mobile wallet. Just last week, Samsung Pay tweeted a short iris scan video ad along with, “Every eye is unique. Now you can use yours to make purchases with Samsung Pay.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers easily trick iris scanner to unlock Samsung Galaxy S8

When it comes to security and the iris recognition technology used in its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, Samsung touted, “The patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate, meaning iris authentication is one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private.”But the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) made a mockery of Samsung’s “virtually impossible to replicate” claims, easily defeating the iris recognition system used in the new Galaxy S8 with nothing more than a camera, a printer, and a contact lens.Not only can the iris authentication system be broken to unlock an S8, the same trick could allow an attacker to access the victim’s mobile wallet. Just last week, Samsung Pay tweeted a short iris scan video ad along with, “Every eye is unique. Now you can use yours to make purchases with Samsung Pay.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Capriza touts its mobile-first strategy for the enterprise

Enterprise software, where hopes and dreams go to die. And where new employees are unceremoniously pulled into a new reality—that the tools they use in their day-to-day lives as consumers are a world apart from the tools they’re expected to use in their working lives.But whereas it used to be a case of employees simply putting up and shutting up, increasingly employees are powerful advocates and potential change-makers—and organizations need to be ready to respond to their needs with tools that aren’t so abysmal to use.+ Also on Network World: A mobile-first strategy improves employee productivity, study finds + Of course, the traditional enterprise vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, realize this change is coming and are trying their hardest to deliver more user-friendly interactions. But as Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book, The innovator’s Dilemma, this isn’t such an easy change to effect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: DataStax wants to manage Apache Cassandra anywhere

In the early days of the cloud, a decade or so ago, the conversations were generally parsed in terms of it being a zero-sum game. Either the cloud would win or on-premises would. Either public cloud would crush private cloud or the other way round. And if the public cloud were to win, then it would be a fight to the death between Google, Microsoft and Amazon.But we’ve all gotten a little more nuanced since then, and most people accept that some kind of hybrid offering will likely be the default for the vast majority of organizations into the future. With a few exception, most organizations will take a little bit of this, add it to a little bit of that, and throw in some of that stuff for good measure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon Web Services sets a lure for Java programmers

Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: "It's time for a change. I'm leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services."He gave his title at AWS as "distinguished engineer" in an update to his LinkedIn profile. Of his work there, he would only say that he would be "wandering around."Gosling began work on what would later become Java in the early 1990s, while working at Sun Microsystems, and continued its development until the company's April 2009 acquisition by Oracle. He left a year later, frustrated that his role had been reduced to that of an evangelist for Java, with the engineering decisions concerning it taken elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WannaCry was a Windows 7 phenomenon

The WannaCry ransomware outbreak may have spurred Microsoft into updating its abandoned operating systems to protect against the malware, but it turns out virtually all of the action was around Windows 7, which remains in wide use. A researcher with Kaspersky Labs noted that virtually all of the infections they found involved Windows 7, especially the 64-bit version. That’s hardly surprising, since there haven’t been 32-bit x86 processors on the market in years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Free Googlage for all, jamming out on the Pi, and Deskberry Pi

I confess, I don’t receive the MagPi magazine – which is a shame for a print enthusiast like myself, because it looks like a handsome and skillfully made publication. It’s also a shame because I could have received a new AIY projects kit from Google, which would have let me add voice recognition and AI capabilities to the Raspberry Pi projects that I am definitely going to get started on one of these days.Issue 57 of MagPi comes with the aforementioned add-on board, which is a joint project of Google and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It’s probably the simplest way yet to add voice recognition to Pi projects, though it’s far from the only one, of course. You can use Google’s voice recognition API with your own hardware, you can wire it up to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant – suffice it to say, there are options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RIPE 74

RIPE 74 was held in May in Budapest, and as usual it was a meeting that mixed a diverse set of conversations and topics into a very busy week. Here are my impressions of the meeting drawn from a number of presentations that I found to be of personal interest.

Houston we have a problem!


Of the many undesirable results of the Space Program is the fetishization of the "mission control center", with it's rows of workstations facing a common central screen. Ever since, anybody with any sort of mission now has a similar control center.

It's a pain for us in the cybersecurity community because every organization wants a "security operations center" laid out the same way. The point of he room isn't to create something that's efficient for working, but one that will impress visitors. The things done to impress customers can often make an already difficult job even more difficult.




I point this out because of the "glowing globe" picture from President Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia. It's supposed to celebrate the opening of the "Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology" (http://etidal.org). Zoom the camera out a bit, and you can see it's the mission control center from hell.


Manually counting, I see three sides, each with slightly more than 100 workstations/employees, or more than 300 in total. I don't know if they intend all three sections to focus on the same sets of problems, or if they are split into three different tasks (e.g. broadcast TV vs. Continue reading

SAP has designs on new government business

Steve Ballmer's latest hobby, USAfacts.org, cast a spotlight on the effectiveness of local, state and federal governments when it launched in April. Its easy-to-read dashboards allow ordinary citizens to compare government's performance of its core missions with spending at all levels.In a roundabout way, that's made the former Microsoft CEO something of an evangelist for companies like SAP, which has released a new cloud service to help public sector organizations manage their spending.USAfacts and OpenGov, a young company offering financial reporting, budgeting and publishing tools for the public sector, are stirring interest in ERP tools for government, and that's creating opportunities for SAP to get involved in the sales cycle, according to Darren Koch, SAP's chief product officer for small and medium-size businesses. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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