Financial services firm adopts agile for digital development

Financial services companies have traditionally shrunk from the notion of releasing applications that haven't been thoroughly baked and battled tested. But in today's digital world, companies that agonize over building the perfect app risk losing out to more nimble competitors. That's why many companies are turning to agile software development to push more products out the door and rescue other projects from oblivion. This is certainly true for Principal Financial Group, a provider of insurance, retirement planning and other asset management services for corporate employees. In 2013, the Des Moines, Iowa, (needed?) company was struggling to prioritize and complete software projects. One insurance business unit in hyper-growth mode couldn't get group benefits products to market fast enough. A services unit was slogging through a project that had gone on for too long and had no end in sight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft: Government’s data gag order practices worse than first thought

Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week.In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court last Friday, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.The original complaint -- the first round in a lawsuit Microsoft filed in April against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- had pegged the number of data demands during the past 18 months at 5,624. Of those, 2,576, or 46%, were tagged with secrecy orders that prevented Microsoft from telling customers it had been compelled to give up their information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft: Government’s data gag order practices worse than first thought

Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week.In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court last Friday, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.The original complaint -- the first round in a lawsuit Microsoft filed in April against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- had pegged the number of data demands during the past 18 months at 5,624. Of those, 2,576, or 46%, were tagged with secrecy orders that prevented Microsoft from telling customers it had been compelled to give up their information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Life on a satellite link

When I give presentations on the topic, I often ask my audience what comes first to their mind when I mention the term “packet loss”. Audiences that have gone through engineering school often come back with “noise”, “bit/symbol error”, “checksum” or the like – all things that cause packets to be lost at the receiver. They see packet loss as a physical / link layer issue. -APNIC

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Oracle will give cloud users first dibs on its next big database update

Oracle's namesake database may have been born on-premises, but the next big update to the software will make its debut in the cloud.Oracle Database 12c Release 2, also known as Oracle Database 12.2, is slated for release in the second half of this year. It will first be made available in the cloud, with an on-premises version arriving at some undefined point in the future.“We are committed to giving customers more options to move to the cloud because it helps them reduce costs and become more efficient and agile," Oracle said in a statement sent by email. "Oracle Database 12.2 will be available in the cloud first, but we will also make it accessible to all of our customers.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Armed with a new CEO, Panzura is ready to bring enterprises to the cloud

Panzura is a company that’s been around for eight years but two months ago brought in the first new CEO after founder Randy Chou left the business. LinkedIn Panzura CEO Patrick Harr  The new head honcho is Patrick Harr, an executive who formerly worked at VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise on its Helion Cloud Platform and Nirvanix – the now defunct public cloud storage company. He’s been brought in to scale the company’s growth, he says. And he’s got a clear plan of how to do it: He wants to bring enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Accessing ASA CLI in Firepower Threat Defence

I’ve recently loaded Firepower Threat Defense on an ASA5525 for my home Internet firewall. For those unfamiliar with FTD, it is basically a combination of critical ASA features and all of the Cisco Firepower features in a single image and execution space. So unlike Firepower Services, which runs separately inside the same ASA sheet metal,  FTD takes over the hardware. Once the image installed onto the hardware, the firewall is attached to and managed by a Firepower Management Console.

For those that still want to (or need to) get under the covers to understand the underpinnings or do some troubleshooting of the ASA features, it is still possible to access the familiar CLI. The process first requires an ssh connection to the management IP of the FTD instance, then access expert mode and enter the lina_cli command.

MacBook:~ paulste$ ssh [email protected]
Password:
Last login: Thu Jun 23 18:16:43 2016 from 192.168.1.48

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Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc.
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Cisco Fire Linux OS v6.0.1 (build 37)
Cisco ASA5525-X Threat Defense v6.0.1  Continue reading

GozNym Trojan turns its sight on business accounts at major US banks

A hybrid Trojan program created for financial fraud has started redirecting users of four large U.S. banks to rogue websites in order to hijack their accounts.GozNym is a relatively new threat, first discovered in April, and is based on the Nymaim malware dropper and the Gozi banking Trojan. Like most banking Trojans, GozNym can inject rogue code into banking websites displayed in local browsers in order to steal credentials and other sensitive information.However, in addition to this old technique, the cybercrime gang behind it has also built the necessary infrastructure to host rogue copies of banking websites, and they've started to redirect victims there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GozNym Trojan turns its sight on business accounts at major US banks

A hybrid Trojan program created for financial fraud has started redirecting users of four large U.S. banks to rogue websites in order to hijack their accounts.GozNym is a relatively new threat, first discovered in April, and is based on the Nymaim malware dropper and the Gozi banking Trojan. Like most banking Trojans, GozNym can inject rogue code into banking websites displayed in local browsers in order to steal credentials and other sensitive information.However, in addition to this old technique, the cybercrime gang behind it has also built the necessary infrastructure to host rogue copies of banking websites, and they've started to redirect victims there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Battle lines are drawn: IBM prepares Power9 to take on Intel and ARM

IBM has many goals with its upcoming Power9 chip, and one is to challenge the dominance of Intel's x86 chips in the data center.The company wants chips based on Power architecture to take a double-digit server chip market share by 2020, Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM, said in an interview.It'll be a three-way battle between x86, Power, and ARM, which has a similar goal of a double-digit market share in the next four years. IBM's Power is off to a better start in terms of socket share, Balog said. IBM already is being used in servers, while ARM server processors are largely still being tested.Intel dominates the data center server chip market with a 90-plus percent market share. But IDC has predicted that Intel's share will shrink as ARM-based chips and AMD's x86-based Zen take away some of that lead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

154 million American voters’ records exposed thanks to unsecured database

154 million U.S. voters’ records were exposed due to a misconfigured CouchDB instance, according to MacKeeper security researcher Chris Vickery. “It was configured for public access with no username, password, or other authentication required.”Vickery determined the leaky database was on Google’s Cloud services and traced it back to a client of L2, a company which claims to be the country’s “most trusted source for enhanced voter” data.The database included fields for addresses, age, congressional as well as state senate districts, education, estimated income, ethnic, name, gender, languages, marital status, phone, voting frequency, presence of children, and if the voter was a gun owner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

154 million American voters’ records exposed thanks to unsecured database

154 million U.S. voters’ records were exposed due to a misconfigured CouchDB instance, according to MacKeeper security researcher Chris Vickery. “It was configured for public access with no username, password, or other authentication required.”Vickery determined the leaky database was on Google’s Cloud services and traced it back to a client of L2, a company which claims to be the country’s “most trusted source for enhanced voter” data.The database included fields for addresses, age, congressional as well as state senate districts, education, estimated income, ethnic, name, gender, languages, marital status, phone, voting frequency, presence of children, and if the voter was a gun owner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inside Japan’s Future Exascale ARM Supercomputer

The rumors that supercomputer maker Fujitsu would be dropping the Sparc architecture and moving to ARM cores for its next generation of supercomputers have been going around since last fall, and at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, officials at the server maker and RIKEN, the research and development arm of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) that currently houses the mighty K supercomputer, confirmed that this is indeed true.

The ARM architecture now gets a heavy-hitter system maker with expertise in developing processors to support diverse commercial and technical workloads, and …

Inside Japan’s Future Exascale ARM Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

DockerCon Thoughts – Secure, Sufficient Applications

containerssuspended

I got to spend a couple of days this week at DockerCon and learn a bit more about software containers. I’d always assumed that containers were a slightly different form of virtualization, but thankfully I’ve learned my lesson there. What I did find out about containers gives me a bit of hope about the future of applications and security.

Minimum Viable App

One of the things that made me excited about Docker is that the process isolation idea behind building a container to do one thing has fascinating ramifications for application developers. In the past, we’ve spent out time building servers to do things. We build hardware, boot it with an operating system, and then we install the applications or the components thereof. When we started to virtualize hardware into VMs, the natural progression was to take the hardware resource and turn it into a VM. Thanks to tools that would migrate a physical resource to a virtual one in a single step, most of the first generation VMs were just physical copies of servers. Right down to phantom drivers in the Windows Device Manager.

As we started building infrastructure around the idea of virtualization, we stopped migrating physical boxes Continue reading

Is this the end for Kinect?

The recent E3 show saw Microsoft break with game console tradition. Normally when a console is released, the vendor does not change the specs for its lifespan (traditionally five to seven years). This way, developers will always have one hardware spec to target when creating games. That kind of certainty helps in game development and keeps the amount of patching down compared with PC games.But just three years after the release of the Xbox One, Microsoft gave its console a massive upgrade in the form of the Xbox One S, a console that will be 40 percent smaller than the Xbox One but will have six times the compute power. The Xbox One has around one teraflop of compute power, the S will have six teraflops, which means 4K video and virtual reality, according to Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPC is Great for AI, But What Does Supercomputing Stand to Gain?

As we have written about extensively here at The Next Platform, there is no shortage of use cases in deep learning and machine learning where HPC hardware and software approaches have bled over to power next generation applications in image, speech, video, and other classification and learning tasks.

Since we focus on high performance computing systems here in their many forms, that trend has been exciting to follow, particularly watching GPU computing and matrix math-based workloads find a home outside of the traditional scientific supercomputing center.

This widened attention has been good for HPC as well since it has …

HPC is Great for AI, But What Does Supercomputing Stand to Gain? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Look who’s coming for the CEO role

Digital is the way of the marketplace today. One look at our hyper-connected, data-driven ways of working, and it’s clear that digital is also the way of the future. In the midst of rewiring business models, mindsets and mechanisms for the digital age, it’s important to ask about leadership. Who has the skills and experience to take on the challenging job of digital transformation today and tomorrow? Who from across the senior leadership ranks is best equipped to be CEO? Will it be COOs or CFOs? CMOs or CIOs?Because digital technologies touch all areas of the business, the best candidates for CEO roles will have experience associated with all of the major C-level roles—operational (COO), financial (CFO), marketing, sales, customer engagement (CMO) and information technology (CIO and CTO). Few senior executives could claim substantial experience in all of those areas until the recent emergence of the CDO (Chief Digital Officer) role. CDOs, tasked with leading and delivering digital transformation across all areas of the business, are gaining broad and varied business experience and skills. That diverse experience is one reason that leading candidates for the CEO roles of tomorrow may well be the CDOs (Chief Digital Officers) of today. Continue reading

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