IDG Contributor Network: Matching IT priorities with IT realities

Fall is back-to-school time, though for those of us who aren’t going back to school, it’s a really good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets to see what projects can get done by the end of the year. It’s good to take stock to see what’s been accomplished this year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a new budget) approaches.At the beginning of 2016, some CIO priorities for the year included standardization, integration, faster service delivery, more innovation and better IT and business alignment. No problem, right? Right—unless you’re actually working, day to day, to keep networks and apps up and running for users. That makes it a lot harder to achieve those lofty goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Temporary Time Out

Hi folks, the Captain is taking a few weeks off as he has a brand new instance being spun up this week, if you catch my drift… ? You know, the kind of instance that takes 9 months to boot… I expect to be back at the keyboard by the end of October, but don’t be alarmed if you don’t see much in the way of posts, demos, or tweets. It’s all good.

The post Temporary Time Out appeared first on Captain KVM.

Beware: Attribution & Politics

tl;dr - Digital location data can be inherently wrong and it can be spoofed. Blindly assuming that it is accurate can make an ass out of you on twitter and when regulating drones.    

Guest contributor and friend of Errata Security Elizabeth Wharton (@LawyerLiz) is an attorney and host of the technology-focused weekly radio show "Buzz Off with Lawyer Liz" on America's Web Radio (listen live  each Wednesday, 2-3:00pm eastern; find  prior podcasts here or via iTunes - Lawyer Liz) This post is merely her musings and not legal advice.

Filtering through various campaign and debate analysis on social media, a tweet caught my eye. The message itself was not the concern and the underlying image has since been determined to be fake.  Rather, I was stopped by the140 character tweet's absolute certainty that internet user location data is infallible.  The author presented a data map as proof without question, caveat, or other investigation.  Boom, mic drop - attribution!

According to the tweeting pundit, "Russian trollbots" are behind the #TrumpWon hashtag trending on Twitter.
The proof? The twitter post claims that the Trendsmap showed the initial hashtag tweets as originating from accounts located in Russia. Continue reading

Financial sector expands use of blockchain databases

Banks and financial markets are adopting blockchain distributed database software for their payments and lending services at a pace faster than once expected, according to a survey of 400 such businesses globally.Blockchain software is the basis of bitcoin, first developed in 2009, and acts as an automatic public ledger for transactions, primarily financial transactions.The survey, conducted by a research division of IBM, found that 15% of the banks and 14% of financial market institutions intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain-based services in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways to get more out of meetings

The modern workforce is growing resentful of meetings. In fact, a recent survey from Atlassian found that, on average, employees attend 62 meetings per month and at least half of those meetings are considered "time wasted." Of the respondents, 91 percent admitted they daydreamed during meetings, 39 percent owned up to falling asleep during a meeting and 45 percent said they felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings they needed to attend.In fact, a whopping 96 percent said they often miss meetings all together, whether due to workload or overlapping meetings. And when employees do make it to meetings, 73 percent said they often did unrelated work during it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars

You cannot say that Elon Musk doesn’t dream big. Today he outlined what would be his biggest aspiration ever – colonizing Mars.If you watched Musk, who is SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer deliver the details today on his Mars colonizing mission to the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico you may have been struck by the matter-of-fact way he delivered the details of what even he calls a very complex and dangerous mission.“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it," he said. "It would basically be, 'Are you prepared to die?' Then if that's ok, then you are a candidate for going."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars

You cannot say that Elon Musk doesn’t dream big. Today he outlined what would be his biggest aspiration ever – colonizing Mars.If you watched Musk, who is SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer deliver the details today on his Mars colonizing mission to the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico you may have been struck by the matter-of-fact way he delivered the details of what even he calls a very complex and dangerous mission.“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it," he said. "It would basically be, 'Are you prepared to die?' Then if that's ok, then you are a candidate for going."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The power of lazy programming

Whoever said working hard is a virtue never met a programmer. Yes, ditch diggers who work hard generate longer ditches than those who daydream, and farmers who lean into the plough plant more food than those who stare off into the sky. But programming isn’t the same. There is no linear relationship between sweat on the brow and satisfied users.Sometimes it helps if programmers pull all-nighters, but more often than not it’s better for programmers to be smart -- and lazy. Coders who ignore those “work hard, stay humble” inspirational wall signs often produce remarkable results, all because they are trying to avoid having to work too hard. The true geniuses find ways to do the absolute minimum by offloading their chores to the computer. After all, getting the computer to do the work is the real job of computer programmers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HackerOne CEO: ‘We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency’

Marten Mickos, a veteran executive with companies from MySQL to Sun, Nokia and HP, was not particularly excited about his meeting to explore a leadership role with HackerOne, a fledgling security company. Security is hard, it’s unpleasant, it doesn’t work very well. But he perked up fast after learning about HackerOne’s crowdsourced model of finding and fixing security flaws – a model in which HackerOne plays a key matchmaking role between companies and ethical hackers in a rapidly growing marketplace of skills and needs. Those are still conducted through your platform, those private bounty programs?With increasing urbanization in the world, increasing internet access, good STEM education in many countries in the world, there is no practical limit to how many hackers we can find. We get them from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, all the Russian-speaking countries, Western Europe, the U.S.A., Chile, Argentina. It’s fantastic to see them because you suddenly realize that there are all these mostly young people who have a burning desire to make the world safer and, of course, make some money at the same time. They have such great intent and instincts about this. I don’t think we’ll run out of hackers Continue reading

HackerOne CEO: ‘We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency’

Marten Mickos, a veteran executive with companies from MySQL to Sun, Nokia and HP, was not particularly excited about his meeting to explore a leadership role with HackerOne, a fledgling security company. Security is hard, it’s unpleasant, it doesn’t work very well. But he perked up fast after learning about HackerOne’s crowdsourced model of finding and fixing security flaws – a model in which HackerOne plays a key matchmaking role between companies and ethical hackers in a rapidly growing marketplace of skills and needs. After all, Mickos – who joined as CEO in November, 2015 – knows well the power of crowdsourcing, having served as chief executive of open source companies Eucalyptus and MySQL. In this conversation with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Mickos explains how the HackerOne system works and how companies get started. He talks about the company’s bug bounty platform for private and public-facing projects, and discusses how it can be expanded to tackle other big security problems in the future. Mickos also explores what attitude adjustments are required from mainstream companies in order to embrace crowdsourced security. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Plat.One acquisition marks start of $2B IoT investment plan for SAP

SAP has bought IoT software developer Plat.One, marking the start of a plan to invest US$2 billion in the internet of things over the next five years.Some of those billions will be spent on the creation of IoT development labs around the world, SAP said Wednesday. It already has plans for such labs in Berlin, Johannesburg, Munich, Palo Alto, Shanghai and São Leopoldo in Brazil. The company is also rolling out a series of "jump-start" and "accelerator" IoT software packages for particular industries, to help them monitor and control equipment.Another compoent of SAP's IoT plan is to acquire new businesses, the latest of which is Plat.One. This company makes a platform that helps smart devices talk to one another and with a central database, translating between the different protocols they use to communicate. Plat.One says it manages 200,000 devices for 25 enterprise customers, including three telecommunications companies: BT, T-Systems and Telecom Italia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 tips for a successful cloud plan

How do you get started using the cloud?For some organizations, cloud usage has already begun by someone in the company - whether they know it or not. But to have a successful cloud deployment, it’s helpful to have a plan.Consultancy Cloud Technology Partners is one of many companies that help customers adopt public IaaS cloud computing resources. CloudTP says the following 10 tips are key for a successful cloud rollout.1. Alignment workshopsAfter a company has made a decision to use IaaS cloud computing services, it’s helpful to have a level-set meeting with important stakeholders at the company to get everyone on the same page. Typical groups involved in this meeting would be security managers, finance and procurement professionals, infrastructure engineers, operations workers and third-party consultants. Typically a senior IT manager or CIO leads the process. It’s important to have a clear message to this group of why the cloud is being explored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle denied new trial in copyright dispute with Google over Java

A federal court in California has denied Oracle another trial in its long-standing copyright infringement dispute with Google over the use of Java code in the Android operating system.A jury had cleared Google of copyright infringement in May this year, upholding the company’s stand that its use of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces) in its Android mobile operating system was fair use, thus denying Oracle up to US$9 billion in damages that it was seeking.A number of developers and scientists  backed Google saying that APIs, which are the specifications that let programs communicate with each other, were not copyrightable and any bid to change that would stifle innovation. The administration of President Barack Obama had in its opinion sided with Oracle and said that the APIs are copyrightable like other computer code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why I’m Now Using VirtualBox with Vagrant

One of the things I often tell people is, “Use the right tool for the job.” As technologists, we shouldn’t get so locked onto any one technology or product that we can’t see when other technologies or products might solve a particular problem more effectively. It’s for this reason that I recently made VirtualBox—not VMware Fusion—my primary virtualization provider for Vagrant environments.

I know it seems odd for a VMware employee to use/prefer a non-VMware product over a competing VMware product. I’ve been a long-time Fusion user (since 2006 when I was part of the original “friends and family” early release). Since I started working with Vagrant about two years ago, I really tried to stick it out with VMware Fusion as my primary virtualization provider. I had a ton of experience with Fusion, and—honestly—it seemed like the right thing to do. After a couple of years, though, I’ve decided to switch to using VirtualBox as my primary provider for Vagrant.

Why? There’s a few different reasons:

  1. Greater manageability: VirtualBox comes with a really powerful CLI tool, vboxmanage, that lets me do just about anything from the command line. In fact, the VirtualBox documentation refers to Continue reading

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