Robot Farmers, Microsoft jobs, Ada Lovelace Day: discover our weekly news about IT & Tech.
Robot Farmers, Microsoft jobs, Ada Lovelace Day: discover our weekly news about IT & Tech.
Robot Farmers
Google‘s parent company, Alphabet, has presented a prototype for a new line of farming robots to help farmers monitor the health of crops and multiply crop yields.
Consequently, project Mineral consists of swarms of “robot buggies” that go up and down the fields inspecting every plant. They do so on upright pillars, coasting on top of the plants much like harbour container cranes do.
Meanwhile Alphabet’s goal is to accumulate large amounts of data about how crops grow to help the agricultural industry tackle the world’s increasing need for food and the sustainability of growing it.
In addition, Microsoft has made a pledge to create 1.5 million tech jobs in the UK over the next 5 years, with and additional 300,000 depending directly on them.
Called Get Go 2021, the campaign targets people currently in
education, those looking into pursuing a career in tech, and those already in
tech and wanting to change careers. The initiative is also meant to help those
whose jobs have been affected by the Covid-19 crisis and bridge the IT talent
gap. It will be based on education and training programs.
The company will also leverage LinkedIn data to anticipate the need for more than 3 million skilled IT workers.
Born in early
19th-century England, Ada Lovelace was a pioneering mathematician and writer
chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” a
steam-powered calculating machine now regarded as the first fully-automatic
mechanical computer.
Although she wrote the first-ever algorithm, Lovelace’s true
genius lied in her ability to envision the computer’s potential beyond mere
arithmetic calculations. She is hence considered to be the first computer
programmer, a “prophet” of the computer age.
This week we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, reflecting on women’s countless contributions to science, technology engineering and math (STEM) — something we should honestly do every day.
Let this day serve as a reminder of how much work is left to do to ensure equal representation of women in tech.
A surprising number of things can happen in a minute. Especially when it comes to cyber threats and their consequences. Quick overview. The state of cybersecurity in 2020
A surprising number of things can happen in a minute, especially when it comes to cyber threats and their consequences. Quick overview. The state of cybersecurity in 2020
Firstly, every 60 seconds, 375 attacks are unleashed upon the global community, costing the world economy $2.9 million. In other words, every single computer with an internet connection is targeted by malicious agents about 1.5 times per minute. A whooping 16,172 records are compromised.[1] Certainly not a promising picture if you are a business leader or oversee a company’s cybersecurity for a living.
As we celebrate cybersecurity awareness month to promote greater security and cyber hygiene, we would do well to keep in mind that every day should be cybersecurity awareness month. Therefore, we can all benefit from a deeper understanding of today’s most common threats and what we can do to protect our business systems from them.
Cybersecurity in 2020: the impact of the pandemic
The already complex world of enterprise security got further intricate with the advent of COVID-19. Also, the sudden shift to remote work has pushed company networks to the limit, opening a myriad of new potential points of entry for attackers to exploit. Additionally, the ensuing fear and confusion have given more leverage to attackers looking to deceive individual employees as a means to gain company-wide access. As they say: you are as strong as your weakest link. And hackers love that.
Social engineering, the act of tricking someone by using their natural tendencies and emotional reactions, has acquired a whole new dimension of sophistication and finesse. Phishing emails disguised as governmental safety announcements, fake HR memos encouraging you to get acquainted with the office’s new cafeteria policy. And that is just the start two per cent of all COVID-related websites created in recent months contain malicious code. A seemingly small number until you realise there are billions of COVID-19 pages out there.[2]
Remote work is here to stay, and so are the advanced techniques that cybercriminals use. In fact, they will only get more refined in the months to come.
A growing variety of cyber threats – Cybersecurity in 2020
In addition to the rising complexity of attacks, the sheer variety of techniques hackers use is a top concern for companies and cybersec professionals who are struggling to catch up with an ever-growing catalogue of threats. New forms of mobile malware alone, for instance, have grown 12% compared to last year. PowerShell-based malware, which leverages the Microsoft task automation and configuration management framework to carry out attacks without leaving any traces, grew by 1,902% over the same time period.[3]
Cloud has become the backbone of the modern enterprise, and hackers are targeting it accordingly. The rise in attacks is being particularly felt in those industries which depend the most on the cloud for productivity. For example, threats aimed at the transportation and logistics sector increased by 1,350% in the first quarter of the year. Education experienced a 1,114% rise in attacks, with governmental organisations, manufacturing and financial services following behind.[4]
Most attacks are opportunistic in nature and involve the “spraying” of cloud accounts with stolen access credentials. The majority of access attempts came from either China, Iran or Russia. [5]
Ransomware-as-a-service
While phishing and trojans are still behind most cyber attacks, ransomware continues to surge and is perhaps the most feared malware of them all. Its capacity to cripple an entire company’s operations in a matter of minutes, together with how difficult it can be to prevent these attacks in the first place, surely keeps many security specialists and IT managers awake at night. Also, threat actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
What started as attacks
by individual hackers or small rogue groups has now evolved into full-fledged
criminal organisations that operate under a ransomware-as-a-service approach.
Some even have “customer service” helplines to guide victims through the
process of paying the ransom.
These hacker groups have greatly benefited from COVID-19, taking advantage of the increase in cloud usage and telework. Half of the world’s organisations were hit by ransomware last year, with most successful ransomware attacks involving public cloud data. Data was successfully encrypted in 73% of attacks.[6]
Additionally, attackers
are finding more and more weaknesses to exploit as remote workers and IT
engineers increasingly use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access internal
resources. The higher use of personal devices has also complicated the problem
of shadow IT, multiplying the potential points of access and making it more
challenging for security professionals to safeguard company networks.
Discover 3 IT lastest news. Windows made with Linux. Linux the new Windows? - AI: behind the screens - The pandemic and S/4HANA implementation
Is Linux the new Windows?
The renowned
open-source champion Eric Raymond has always been a huge Linux believer.
Raymond has long argued that the OS is destined to rule the
desktop market. Now he’s gone a step further by saying that it won’t be long
before Windows 10 becomes a simple emulation layer on top the Linux
kernel.
According to Raymond, Microsoft’s latest investments in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) reveal that the Redmond, Virginia company might be quite aware of this impending shift. The company also has recently unveiled a Linux version of Edge for IT pros to test websites.
But there’s more: the Windows emulation might ultimately disappear altogether, leaving us with a Microsoft shell that is basically all built on Linux.
Despite the media buzz around AI, it can be
difficult for someone who is not immersed in the technology to precisely tell
you how and where it is being applied.
Well, this
week we got a behind-the-screens look at what developers are doing in both the
public and the private sector.
The city of Amsterdam debuted the Algorithm Register, a portal where everyone can learn more about the various AI initiatives being implemented across the city.
Also, Alexa developers unveiled how they get Amazon’s smart home assistant to interpret what users mean rather than what they say. Here’s more.
The pandemic and S/4HANA implementation
S4HANA implementation was ramping up before COVID-19 hit the global business community. Now, as uncertainty piles up, some organisations might consider postponing their migration to SAP’s next-gen ERP until things settle down a bit.
But should
they?
In an interview with TechTarget, S/4 experts recommend taking advantage of the current disruption. The slowdown in activity offers a great opportunity for IT departments to undergo a more thorough examination of their legacy ERP and come up with a better ecosystem that delivers greater business value.
The biggest challenge they face: convincing business leaders their S/4 project should move ahead.
Since 2018, the Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC) competition challenges participants to push the limits of artificial intelligence and come up with realistic cities from scratch.
If you are unfamiliar with Minecraft (I doubt it), the cube-based video game lets players build all sorts of structures with almost absolute freedom. In other words, cubic freedom.
Participants must leverage a combination of various Artificial Intelligence techniques in Minecraft to level terrain, build roads and bridges and erect buildings. It is a very complex task involving everything from path-finding algorithms to machine learning, but it’s starting to come together.
Surely the technology is still years away, but it looks like city planners and designers will soon have a new digital partner for their construction projects.
Your future apartment
building might well be designed by an AI architect. At least parts of it.
Racist Artificial Intelligence strikes again
And speaking of artificial intelligence I, yet another poorly trained algorithm has put yet another Internet giant in serious trouble. This time it was Twitter’s turn.
Have you ever wondered how the platform decides what parts of a
picture to crop in preview mode? It is, of course, an image-cropping algorithm.
Using a combination of tools, Twitter tries to prioritise faces and text,
unless your face is black.
Ironically, the issue was discovered when a PhD student was
trying to tweet about another racially-biased algorithm he had encountered on
Zoom. The videoconferencing service had erased the image of his black colleague
after failing to recognise his face. Twitter decided that wasn’t enough and
erased his colleague from the screen capture too.
Although the company was quick to apologise for not testing the algorithm thoroughly enough, Twitter feeds quickly filled up with people doing experiments to test the flaw. Some even tried posting images of differently coloured dogs.
Time for lessons to be learnt.
Announcements from Microsoft Ignite
Microsoft has
kickstarted its annual Ignite user-focused conference by announcing a series of
additions to its cloud and productivity portfolios.
Teams is getting new security and compliance-related features,
as well as a suite of new tools to help companies better support remote
workers. The latter are mainly data insights to assess the overall wellbeing of
employees, made available to users and managers to help them improve
productivity and reduce burnout.
The company has also teased Virtual Commute, an upcoming Teams functionality aimed at helping workers unwind after a long day of work. Hmm, how about not being on Teams after working hours to start with?
Plans to expand Azure Stack’s hybrid cloud capabilities have also been announced. The platform lets businesses run public cloud-like workloads within on-premise data centres. Users will be now able to run and deploy containerized applications on the setup, while the Azure Stack Hub will incorporate GPU support for broader machine learning capabilities.
Fishing for Data, data storage, data center, AI, cloud gaming and DevOps, discover latest news with Mission Control Center by Mindquest.
Fishing for Data, cloud storage, data center, AI, cloud gaming and DevOps, discover latest news with Mission Control Center by Mindquest.
Data storage & Liquid cooling
Some weeks ago we
learnt how a future where cloud gaming was the norm could see emissions rise by
30%.
Maintaining a data centre and a data storage is a costly endeavour. Especially because of how much power is devoted to cooling the hardware. But Microsoft has a solution.
Earlier this week, the company retrieved a cylinder-shaped data centre it had sunk off the Scotland coast two years ago. Albeit covered by algae and barnacles,; the data centre is in perfect working order and has in fact proven to be more reliable and efficient than traditional server rack environments.
Researchers attribute the positive results to a combination of less human interaction and cooler temperatures; as well as to the nitrogen that was used for ventilation instead of the usual oxygen. Which reduces corrosion.
Although one could wonder how an ocean floor full of servers would affect global water temperatures.
An international coalition of medical experts has introduced the
world’s first standards for clinical trials involving artificial
intelligence.
The standards, which were published on Nature Medicine and The
Lancet, are aimed at tackling the current hype around AI and preventing
interested parties from leveraging the media attention to sell dubious
research.
The move comes at a time when the entire world is laser-focused on Covid vaccine clinical trials. An area in which AI can help speed up things immensely. Applied wrongly, however, the technology could endanger millions of people.
In an interview with
SiliconANGLE, Gene Kim, the DevOps guru behind books like “The Phoenix
Project” stressed how vital DevOps is to the future of the
enterprise.
At a time when ensuring effective data storage, management and
analytics is so pressing, businesses are prioritising developer operations to
make informed business decisions.
Kim argues that DevOps not only helps organisations’ bottom
line; it is the new bottom line.
A focus on empowering developers, Kim says, will undoubtedly reward companies with unprecedented freedom and agility.
A new report from SolarWinds suggests that IT professionals are feeling more confident during the pandemic. Thus, according to the survey, tech experts admit to having been more proactive in bringing new ideas to the table and taking on a bigger role.
Also, experts believe this newfound confidence is the result of IT pros being used to sudden shifts and unexpected situations – a quality that has helped them ride the Covid-19 wave as opposed to being swept by it.
IT has been
pivotal to business resilience during this unprecedented crisis, elevating tech
experts within their organisations and putting them closer to the
decision-making process.
IT professionals: Bye to VS Codespaces and Flash Player
Microsoft has decided to end Visual Studio Codespaces (formerly known as Visual Studio Online). The cloud-based development environment will then be merged with GitHub’s version of the same product.
Microsoft’s move comes after some developers expressed confusion between the two nearly-identical products. Unfortunately for developers, there is currently no way to migrate existing projects from one platform to the other.
The company has also warned businesses to get ready for the end of Adobe Flash Player support. Microsoft and Adobe first announced the phase-out of the popular internet media player in 2017. From January 21, Flash will be disabled in both IE 11 and Microsft Edge browsers.
IT professionals are feeling more confident so that the government-funded think tank Tech Nation reports a 36% increase in tech vacancies between June and August.
The sector is
experiencing a fast recovery compared to other industries, with 90,000 new jobs
being advertised every week across the UK.
The most sought-after skills identified in the report include:
Tiobe Software’s latest Programming Community
index points at a revival of C++.
The
35-year-old language is the fastest growing language in terms of popularity,
while C tops the list of most used languages.
Experts at the company believe the new C++20 standard is responsible for the recent uptick, moreover, the standard includes a new modules feature which replaces the infamous include mechanism function.
Other languages gaining popularity are R and C#, whereas Java has experienced a drop compared to last year.
The next generation of video game consoles is hitting the shelves this holiday season. Discover news about Game Streaming and Emissions...
Game Streaming and Emissions, or Game vs. the environment
The next generation of
video game consoles is hitting the shelves this holiday season. An epic
marketing battle precedes its launch, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X fighting
to get a head start on each other by selling more consoles than the other.
Yet, ironically, this new generation of consoles might be the
last.
Like it happened in other industries, video games are moving
away from local hardware in favour of a distributed computing model. Why spent
money in a pricey box when you could stream higher-quality video games directly
to your TV or phone in real time?
With companies like Google and Microsoft having already released
their proprietary cloud gaming platforms, it’s just a matter of time before
most gaming is done this way. But, as convenient as it sounds, this could have
severe environmental implications.
A new report suggests emissions could rise as much as 30% in a future where game streaming was the norm.
Earlier this year,
Microsoft announced it was building a low-code Dataflex solution for Teams that
would allow users to easily develop custom applications without leaving Teams.
We got more details this week.
Code-named Project Oakdale, the platform will let teams create
quick applications based on shared databases. No need for third-party tools to
build an HTML or JavaScript feature that runs on Teams. Just install Project
Oakdale and use an Access-like table and form creator to get the job done.
Each team will get its dedicated data environment so that team
members can exchange actionable insights and access more relevant information.
The applications will also be able to connect with the rest of Microsoft’s
ecosystem.
Although it has its limitations, Project Oakdale will be included in the Teams subscription — a big step towards democratising low-code development within the enterprise.
Python, Matlab, Julia -- R. Who would win the battle of the best language for economic research? Hint: the winner has a woman's name.
The Best Language for Economic Research
Python, Matlab, Julia — R. Who would win the battle of the best language for Economic research? That’s probably one of the most common online queries in the programming world. There is just something about humans and our obsession with chasing the very best of the best.
In reality, of course, each language has its nuances and areas
in which it shines. Anyone claiming to have a definitive answer on the matter
should come up with some solid arguments to back their verdict.
And that’s exactly what two London School of Economics researchers did. They looked at different languages based on the power of available libraries, the speed and possibilities when handling large datasets, and the speed and ease-of-use for a computationally intensive task.
Hint: the winner has a woman’s name.
Thanks, but no thanks
That’s the polite
version of what UK students were shouting in front of the Department of
Education over a week ago. The cause of their anger was an algorithm.
University admission exams had been cancelled because of the
pandemic. Teachers proposed predicting their student’s scores as a way to
compromise. The education department dismissed the idea on the grounds that
previous research had proved such estimates to be biased. Instead, they decided
to use an algorithm.
Researchers have
discovered what they believe to be the first-ever crypto-mining worm that also
manages to steal AWS credentials.
Crypto-mining worms have been around for a while, stealthily
infiltrating a network and using its computing power to mine cryptocurrency.
This new worm is actually not even that good at it, having only made a mere
$300 in profits.
However, the attackers, who go by the name TeamTNT, have managed to incorporate the credential-stealing feature into their code. The researchers believe the attackers have recycled this functionality from a previous worm that targetted Alibaba’s cloud.
This points to an emerging trend of copy-and-paste, opening the door for future malware to replicate TeamTNT’s code and go onto steal AWS credentials and compromise cloud ecosystems.
Fired for skipping the firewall
A whopping four out of
ten businesses in the UK admit having dismissed employees for breaching the
company’s security protocols. That’s according to a new survey by Centrify, a
privileged access management solutions provider.
Most incidents were related to work-from-home scenarios, as a
large proportion of employees tends to circumvent safety measures in favour of
comfort or portability.
As a result, 65% of companies have made important changes to their cybersecurity policy. Shadow IT was already a huge problem before the workforce transitioned to remote work. Now it’s become even more difficult to ensure that employees don’t use personal devices to access company networks and files.
Well, just keep in mind that you could get fired for it.
If you are one of the 2.5 billion Android device users out there, you now have a new conversation topic. Yes, your phone is an Earthquake Detector soon...
If you are one of the 2.5 billion Android device users out there, you now have a brand new conversation topic. Soon your phone will be part of a worldwide earthquake detection network. Yes, your phone is an Earthquake Detector soon…
While using smartphone sensors to build an okay seismometer app
is nothing new, Google has a better idea: integrating it into the phone’s
operating system directly.
All devices running Android 5.0 and up will get the new feature
through a Google Play Services update, essentially becoming decentralised
tremor-monitoring stations that one day will help detect earthquakes early on
and warn users.
For now, Google plans on collecting data for a while to fine-tune
the system before rolling out proactive alerts. But don’t worry. You can
opt-out of the service via your phone’s settings. Although most people won’t
even know it is there.
Toshiba-bye
Thirty-five years
after debuting its first laptop, the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced it
is abandoning the portable PC market.
The entire PC hardware market, in fact. In 2018, Toshiba had
already sold most of its PC business to Sharp, the same buyer this time
around.
The decision comes as the company announced its first quarterly
losses in 4 years and officially marks the end of an era in laptop
history.
Toshiba laptops reached their heyday in the 1990s, when they came to dominate the global market. They started losing ground in the late 2000s after an industry shift towards more attractive designs and more powerful machines
A good reminder of how important it is to adapt and keep innovating.
