Starting A Podcast Is Easy. Continuing Is Hard.

Just how hard is it to start a podcast? It isn’t. Starting a podcast, especially for someone with a bit of technical aptitude, is easy. The actual problem is keeping up with the podcast. Podcasting is a major time commitment that busy people struggle to keep.

For many, I think there’s a romantic notion about podcasting. “Hey, I have all these ideas to share, and I’ve got a creative streak. I think I’ll start a podcast. Fans and money will rain from the sky!” The thought of getting your show with some cool intro music, snappy patter with interesting guests, hijinks with your friends, offbeat humor, or maybe deep content hard to find elsewhere is stimulating and exciting. Your own show! How cool will that be?

You will find moments of joy and wonder as a podcaster. But, podcasts produced regularly and worth listening to are a lot of work — a job. If you don’t love it, you’ll find yourself easily distracted. You’ll skip a week. Then another. And the next thing you know, you haven’t put out a show for over a month, and you’re wondering why you should bother picking it back up.

I’ve seen this cycle happen to folks at least ten times over Continue reading

Intelligence agency opens $325,000 advanced, automated fingerprint gathering competition

Researchers at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) are looking to the public to build a next-generation, automated fingerprint recognition system.The idea behind the competition, called the “Nail to Nail (N2N) Fingerprint Challenge” – which offers $325,000 worth of prizes – is to develop a system that allows for more distinguishing data to be collected from fingerprint biometrics but also eliminates the time and cost associated with using human operators, IARPA said. N2N fingerprints capture the entire fingerprint from the edge of one finger nail bed to the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intelligence agency opens $325,000 advanced, automated fingerprint gathering competition

Researchers at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) are looking to the public to build a next-generation, automated fingerprint recognition system.The idea behind the competition, called the “Nail to Nail (N2N) Fingerprint Challenge” – which offers $325,000 worth of prizes – is to develop a system that allows for more distinguishing data to be collected from fingerprint biometrics but also eliminates the time and cost associated with using human operators, IARPA said. N2N fingerprints capture the entire fingerprint from the edge of one finger nail bed to the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Avaya: How we arrived at Chapter 11

Avaya John Sullivan, CFA, VP and Corporate Treasurer, Avaya Inc. I have been asked how a company that reports strong financial results can at the same time file for chapter 11 restructuring. How did we, Avaya – one of the top competitors in business communications – arrive at this juncture? After looking at the multiple options of how to deal with our debt, we decided it was a critical next step in our transformation from a hardware company to a software and services company and the best path forward for our customers, partners and employees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple collaborates with rivals to advance AI research

Apple has joined rivals as it takes a step ahead to advance research and development of artificial intelligence technologies.After months of collaborating, Apple is joining the Partnership on AI, with other founding members including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.The Partnership of AI was founded in September last year to also steer debate on best practices on AI. The group believes AI could help in the areas of health care, transportation, and automation in factories.Apple's most visible AI technology is Siri, a voice assistant that can answer questions. But a larger AI strategy is still a subject of speculation. Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, and Google have well established AI strategies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker 1.13 Experimental features

Docker 1.13 version got released last week. Some of the significant new features include Compose support to deploy Swarm mode services, supporting backward compatibility between Docker client and server versions, Docker system commands to manage Docker host and restructured Docker CLI. In addition to these major features, Docker introduced a bunch of experimental features in … Continue reading Docker 1.13 Experimental features

Compliance focus, too much security expertise hurts awareness programs

Security awareness teams aren't getting the support they need to be successful, according to the SANS Institute. But some unexpected factors can cause programs to fail as well, including a focus on compliance -- and too much security expertise on the team."Most organizations actually have a security awareness program," said Lance Spitzner, director of the Securing the Human Program at the SANS Institute, looking back at what the industry learned in 2016. "Yet we continue to have problems."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Compliance focus, too much security expertise hurts awareness programs

Security awareness teams aren't getting the support they need to be successful, according to the SANS Institute. But some unexpected factors can cause programs to fail as well, including a focus on compliance -- and too much security expertise on the team."Most organizations actually have a security awareness program," said Lance Spitzner, director of the Securing the Human Program at the SANS Institute, looking back at what the industry learned in 2016. "Yet we continue to have problems."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s executive order won’t destroy Privacy Shield, says EU

Fears that U.S. President Trump has destroyed the Privacy Shield Transatlantic data transfer agreement with one of the many executive orders he has signed this week are unfounded, the European Commission said Friday.On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order entitled "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the U.S.," one of several he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20. Such executive orders are used by U.S presidents to manage the operations of the federal government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s executive order won’t destroy Privacy Shield, says EU

Fears that U.S. President Trump has destroyed the Privacy Shield Transatlantic data transfer agreement with one of the many executive orders he has signed this week are unfounded, the European Commission said Friday.On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order entitled "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the U.S.," one of several he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20. Such executive orders are used by U.S presidents to manage the operations of the federal government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 27th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Tired of noisy drones? Use the same dedrone tech used at Davos. It's the future.

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

  • 1+ trillion: messages Twitter handles per day; 695 million: Internet users in China; >350k: Twitter Star Wars bots; $90 million: value of LasVegas.com domain name; 45%: WiFi connection failure rate; 80: threads in Slack Mac OS app; 364: slides in Adrian Cockcroft's microservices deck; 5180%: increases at Etsy in daily visits to pages related to Donald Trump; 465,000: cars sold by Costco last year; 14 Million: one day of DuckDuckGo searches; 58 million: science papers online; ~3x: use of Kubernetes in production settings; 54: r3.2xlarge instances used for Reddit caching; $14 billion: Microsoft’s Azure's annual run rate; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Carlo Rovelli: the basic ingredient is down there in the physical world: physical correlation between distinct variables. The physical world is not a set of self-absorbed entities that do their selfish things. It is a tightly knitted net of relative information, where everybody’s state reflects somebody else’s state. 
    • Charles Stross: Continue reading

Fiber & Wireless – Stronger Together for Community Broadband

Google in June stunned some in the broadband world by acquiring wireless provider Webpass and “momentarily” exiting the fiber stage. Hybrid wired/wireless networks became the Next Big Thing – for a month. But what if hybrid infrastructure is the key that unlocks the doors to the next level of community broadband success?

Craig Settles

Cisco starts patching critical flaw in WebEx browser extension

Cisco Systems has started to patch a critical vulnerability in its WebEx collaboration and conferencing browser extension that could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers.The company released a patched version of the extension -- 1.0.7 -- for Google Chrome on Thursday and is working on similar patches for the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox versions.The vulnerability was found by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy and stemmed from the fact that the WebEx extension exposed functionality to any website that had "cwcsf-nativemsg-iframe-43c85c0d-d633-af5e-c056-32dc7efc570b.html" in its URL or inside an iframe. Some of that WebEx functionality allowed for the execution of arbitrary code on computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco starts patching critical flaw in WebEx browser extension

Cisco Systems has started to patch a critical vulnerability in its WebEx collaboration and conferencing browser extension that could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers.The company released a patched version of the extension -- 1.0.7 -- for Google Chrome on Thursday and is working on similar patches for the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox versions.The vulnerability was found by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy and stemmed from the fact that the WebEx extension exposed functionality to any website that had "cwcsf-nativemsg-iframe-43c85c0d-d633-af5e-c056-32dc7efc570b.html" in its URL or inside an iframe. Some of that WebEx functionality allowed for the execution of arbitrary code on computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here