Ransomware hammers Madison County, Indiana

Madison County, Indiana, population of about 130,000, was the victim of a ransomware attack last week. Government workers without working computers were thrown back in the past to pen and paper, confusion abounds, and county commissioners unanimously voted to pay the ransom.Indiana State Police Capt. Dave Bursten told WTHR, “It's like when I came on in the 80s - we're doing everything with pencil and paper.”“We cannot query old information to bring up prior reports or prior court records,” Madison County Sheriff Scott Mellinger told Fox59. “If we want to bring somebody’s record up for something in the future, let’s say for somebody that has been arrested or somebody who is even in jail then we cannot look up information that would help us at a hearing. On the sheriff’s office side, we cannot book people into jail using the computers. We are using pencil and paper like the old days.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Trump’s unexpected victory a failure for big data? Not really

Most election prediction shops and public polls in recent days foresaw Republican Donald Trump losing the U.S. presidential race to Democrat Hillary Clinton.They got it wrong, bigly. And the failed predictions could cast doubts on some hot technology sectors, including big data and customer relationship management.Not so fast, say some data experts. The problem with the polls and with forecasters like FiveThirtyEight may have more to do with data collection than data crunching, they say.Data analysis worked well in the Moneyball model for the Oakland Athletics, but baseball stats are different than election polling, said CRM analyst Denis Pombriant, founder of Beagle Research Group. Statisticians have been collecting "highly reliable" baseball data for more than a century, while polling data is more squishy, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How To Ask A Question At A Conference

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The last time you went to a conference, did you ask any questions? Were you curious about a technology and wanted to know more? Was there something that you didn’t quite get and needed an explanation? Congratulations. You’re in a quiet group of people that ask questions for knowledge. More and more, we are seeing questions becoming a vehicle for more than just knowledge acquisition. If you want to learn how to ask a proper question at a conference, read on.

1. Have A Question

I know it goes without saying, but if you’re going to raise your hand at a conference to ask a question, you should actually have a question in mind. Some people grab a microphone without thinking through what they’re going to say. This leads to stammering and broken thoughts that usually culminate in a random question mark here or there. This makes it difficult for the speaker to figure out what you’re trying to ask.

If you’re going to raise your hand, jot some notes down first. Bullet points help as does making a note or two. This is especially true if the speaker is answering questions before yours. If they answer part of your Continue reading

On the ‘Web: The Death of Transit

To tie the two situations together, public transport and transit providers lose money for the same reason — people are willing to pay for what they see and enjoy, not for the means required to get to it. Hence toll roads are a hated part of life, regardless of the access they provide to services, while no-one seems to mind paying a much steeper price at the pump in the form of taxes on fuel. Just as public transportation isn’t a compelling “sell” for most people, transit isn’t a compelling “sell.” People want to watch funny cat videos; they don’t much care about how those cat videos are delivered. There are, of course, several other problems interacting with the disappearance of transit into the inner workings of the web browser and app. —CircleID

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Getting Hyper About Converged Storage, And Then Some

There is no question that information technology is always too complex, and that people have been complaining about this for over five decades now. It keeps us employed, so perhaps we should not point this out, and moreover, perhaps we should not be so eager to automate ourselves out of jobs. But if the advance of computing from mainframes to artificial intelligence teach us anything, it is that we always want to make IT simpler to get people out of the way of doing business or research.

The founders of hyperconverged systems maker Nutanix learned its lessons from hyperscalers like …

Getting Hyper About Converged Storage, And Then Some was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM package brings Watson smarts to everything IoT

IBM has released an experimental program developers can use to embed Watson cognitive intelligence features in all manner of IoT systems from robots and drones to sensors and avatars.IBM says the platform, called Project Intu lets Project Intu offers developers easily build cognitive or basically machine learning skills into a wide variety of operating systems – from Raspberry PI to MacOS, Windows to Linux devices. Devices using Intu can “interact more naturally with users, triggering different emotions and behaviors and creating more meaningful and immersive experience for users.  Developers can simplify and integrate Watson services, such as Conversation, speech-to-text, Language and Visual Recognition, with the capabilities of the “device” to, in essence, act out the interaction with the user,” IBM stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM package brings Watson smarts to everything IoT

IBM has released an experimental program developers can use to embed Watson cognitive intelligence features in all manner of IoT systems from robots and drones to sensors and avatars.IBM says the platform, called Project Intu lets Project Intu offers developers easily build cognitive or basically machine learning skills into a wide variety of operating systems – from Raspberry PI to MacOS, Windows to Linux devices. Devices using Intu can “interact more naturally with users, triggering different emotions and behaviors and creating more meaningful and immersive experience for users.  Developers can simplify and integrate Watson services, such as Conversation, speech-to-text, Language and Visual Recognition, with the capabilities of the “device” to, in essence, act out the interaction with the user,” IBM stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Hacking Smart Bulbs

Researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada released a report today, titled “IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction,” detailing alarming ways hackers can rapidly cause city-wide disruptions in the near future as IoT devices surge to billions in the next few years. —CircleID

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Microsoft launches ‘Feature Pack’ for SharePoint 2016

The traditional update to a major product release is a service pack, which is mostly bug fixes and maybe a few new features. But Microsoft is doing something a little different with the release of "Feature Pack 1" for SharePoint 2016. + Also on Network World: Nov 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft released 14 security updates, 6 rated critical + Microsoft released SharePoint Server 2016 in May, along with mobile apps for iOS and Android shortly thereafter. Mobile access was one of the major emphasis points in SharePoint 2016, along with hybrid cloud support and Office 365 support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why employee experience trumps company culture

There's been a lot of talk about engagement in the workplace -- whether or not employees are happy and satisfied, and what that means for their work performance. In a two-year study of the American Workplace, Gallup found that as much as 70 percent of the U.S. workforce is not engaged at work. This isn't a recent trend, either. The report indicates that over the past 15 years, engagement has consistently held under 33 percent.Engagement is often tied to company culture -- the idea being that providing the right perks and environment for your workers will boost engagement. But the stats suggest that the past few years of focusing on company culture hasn't done much to boost engagement. That's why Aye Moah, chief of product at Boomerang, a company focused on productivity software, suggests backing off company culture and focusing on the "employee experience."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Microsoft is going all-in on AI

Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions.The job of the AI and Research Group will be to work on four overarching initiatives: Harnessing AI through agents such as Cortana, the company's digital personal assistant Infusing AI into Skype, Office 365 and every other Microsoft application Making cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech and machine analytics available to external developers Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service” [ Get ready for the bot revolution]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The scary state of the cybersecurity profession

Most discussions about cybersecurity tend to go right to technology, and these days they usually start with the words “next generation” as in next-generation firewalls, IPS, endpoint security, etc. I get it, since innovative technology is sexy, but it’s important to realize that skilled cybersecurity professionals anchor cybersecurity best practices.  We depend on actual people to configure controls, sort through data minutiae to detect problems, and remediate issues in a timely manner.+ Also on Network World: Recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent + Since these folks protect all our digital assets daily, it’s only natural that we’d be curious as to how they are doing. To measure these feelings, ESG teamed up with the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and conducted a survey of 437 global cybersecurity professionals. This project resulted in a recently published research report. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The scary state of the cybersecurity profession

Most discussions about cybersecurity tend to go right to technology, and these days they usually start with the words “next generation” as in next-generation firewalls, IPS, endpoint security, etc. I get it, since innovative technology is sexy, but it’s important to realize that skilled cybersecurity professionals anchor cybersecurity best practices.  We depend on actual people to configure controls, sort through data minutiae to detect problems, and remediate issues in a timely manner.+ Also on Network World: Recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent + Since these folks protect all our digital assets daily, it’s only natural that we’d be curious as to how they are doing. To measure these feelings, ESG teamed up with the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and conducted a survey of 437 global cybersecurity professionals. This project resulted in a recently published research report. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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