Innovation (technologicallly driven) – Page 18

The year of IT is no more Department

Or, once upon a long, long time ago in a land far, far away, there was IT, the hero department that ruled over all of information processing. Because information processing was a strange and dangerous thing and if you chopped off one security flaw, seven others would be introduced. So, the IT department was well-trained in keeping the architecture-and-infrastructure beast alive, with all its fresh new and old legacy body parts, fed every now and then with a fair maiden project.

Oh how things evolved. Lately (being the past couple of decades), the department was split, incompletely, between Development/Maintenance, and Operations. Things were run with ITIL and CobIT — as In Name Only as PINO was to the Prince, II.

The INO part being audited throughout (see previous post) but without anyone really caring about the outcomes of that. NO not even regulators or so, so devoid of truly understanding that the qualification ‘parasite’ isn’t too far off, even.

And now, there’s a slow but steady breakthrough of bands of liberators. Deperimetrisation, socmed, cloud, Big Data, flex work(place), hackers-contra-cyber (#ditchcyber), … the many-headed Central Scrutiniser is sprayed wth acid from all sides and is slowly shrunk. Softly wailing for mercy, some do but to not much avail. Maybe an embrace of Sloterdijk’s Part III foams may help.

Ah, I’m not positive but can be — at least, life will remain in the body that is infrastructure management (-coordination) and incident management, etc.

First, this:

Then, this:

[Outsourcing basic shopping to the experts at Milan]

17 views

Just a tip: 2017 will be all about Augmented Reality. Maybe not VR, or is that a mere intermediate-phase subset. But AR.

When M$ adds some capabilities to WW10 (the platform, or binary),the ground swell (or is it an undercurrent, undertow?) is sure to grow.

So, Be Prepared, to see innovation in business software after the years of stale(mate) in ‘ERP’; no more database-system-usersystem stacking, but a mountain of data with lean and mean engines at/on the top now extended with AR to doddle around — and maybe … do something useful. All of business IT will dwindle in significance, so much less users as simple one-screwturn assembly line workers (to be (sic) replaced by robots anyway), but something-large-and-vague and payful, agile top users in the cloud atop. Top users only, be best and bright (self-declared), the shiny, überemployees, the stars. Huh. How’d they get there, be experienced enough, not be hindered by any wisdom … ? How they’d get so blinkered, conceited, presumptuous etc.? How’d they not get caught in the emperor’s new clothes?

I’ve been instructed (not) to be more positive, to not apply debit where debit is absolutely due… So, how can we turn today’s silo’d work into creative, innovative, flexible functions of tomorrow [and the day after; best wishes ;-] ..?

Plus:

[Your yacht may be a piece of art, but still…; Zuid-As Amsterdam (it was)]

Oh… Yes but still, now it’s true:

@TheMalia The Year of VR = Current Year + 1

— Ben Loveridge (@benloveridge) December 8, 2016

[Edited to add:

Here we go again with the tech BS.

Virtual Reality.
Augmented Reality.
Mixed Reality.
Merged Reality.

When will we ever learn.#CES2017

— Theo Priestley (@tprstly) January 5, 2017

]

Oops, there it is! (now you don’t, see it)

Suddenly, there it is, almost as if it’s something new … Malware using stego, as if it might still surprise anyone whereas of course there already was this, and this, and this and this.

What next? Even smarter ad blockers ..? Will not work, as the latter are only in use with the smarter part of the bunch. And smarter ad blockers will be installed by even fewer, as the pay-off is less visible (timely enough).

No, what’s next is first an armageddon [Warning: cultural notion; propose to use the more profound Ragnarök] — of which the result hopefully … is that ads will be marginalised. A great many a socmed platform (looking at you, $FB and other (sic) unicorns) may (signifying possibility and hope) go asunder as ads are their value period

Then, hopefully, Yggdrasil will grow again. E.g., with truly egalitarian platforms; truly global (though that aspect may not have been sunk in the great flood) and free, meaning that also, the trolls can be captured and ring-fenced and not destroy some or many or the platforms / -ideas.

How philosophical one can get in dreams/dreaming, how far off today is the better-than-today’s-should-have-been.

Plus:

[All sorts of meta-info (‘nothing to protect here just move on’/ Í can see you but you can’t see me’ et al); Segovia or what was it]

Is quantum computing replacing Turing Machines ..?

About scientists, and quacks.

… stayed as guests in the Ehrenfest home, they were no doubt amused by their host’s pet parrot, which had been trained to say, “But, gentlemen, that is not physics.”

But gentlemen, let’s discuss quantum computing. How can that, and its current state and moreover, its current systemic and systematic (sic the diference) difficulties be explained by taking note of actual ‘computer’ science (theoretical computing), sparse as it is, in the form of the theories surrounding Turing Machines..?
As the latter were proven mathematically (logically) to rule…. All that ever can compute anything, can be represented as a Turing Machine; logically, they’re all (can be made/translated! into) equivalent, computationally.

So, how could one arrive at “Drop all knowledge you had about computing” in the same way as “In this area, gravity no longer exists” …?
I’m really curious.

Plus:

[Yes gravity’s at work here ..! Barça]

Errors of Your / Machine Learning

Any progress on the front of Machine Learning, i.e., the comparison with how/what humans learn from various teaching formats, and how machines are better at rote learning et al, and how does the perfection of machines learning facts, reflect on what is data processing, what is intelligence, and what is wisdom ..? Where the latter is the area in which of course re retreat ever more, but without the foundation of a life long of learning and experience ..?

[Intermission: Anyone out there still holding on to the ‘you only learn from experience, which is making errors and surviving’? What was so many years of school all about; you’re still no further with calculus than 1+1 equals something more than one — the max you can learn from ‘ experience’ … How did you ‘experience’ History, Science ..? Apparently, there’s quite a base of facts to learn, even (or more?? contra The Shallows) in times of Google. Or, you’ll be the doofus that can not (sic) learn to be intelligent nor wise, and will make any and all rookie mistakes in all situations everywhere, over and over again.
Seems like the base of learning, grows steadily — exponentially…]

Notwithstanding the road (path) to wisdom is through experience … which would ever less be available when machines start to take over the simple, the foundations (qua operationality of work-as-labour), and then the next stage, etc. (since none will be experienced enough to succeed pensionados that still have that subsequent level of understanding). Leaving the abstract thinkers ever more loose in the sky. Hey that’s what’s happening with accountancy, if the industry doesn’t move fast. And will happen everywhere.

But back to the main point: Has Watson-class learning (AlphaGo/Deepmind/Brain (sic), … no not Siri you m.r.n) learned us anything about learning, and/or have we changed learning since machines took over parts of rote learning? Have we changed our view on learing, intelligence, wisdom?

To the disappointed, apologies go; nothing here on how machine learning could lead to the unethics of Computer Says No… Too much of a mer à boire qua research — see here.

Plus:

[Steep, to enlightenment; Girona]

Retrofitting IoT Security

Pitch before I did the idea that for a while be with us will Legacy IoT be, here.
But what about stubbing around it? Developing cheap and easy (necessary since/for backwards compatible, by definition) security solutions that can be plugged onto old IoT stuff.
What ya’reckon, are we too far gone with old IoT and economically-having to keep that alive, or is there sufficiently much more recent stuff to attempt such a thing (and ring-fence the real cr.p)..?

I’m not completely sure how one would approach this thing, technically, but cannot imagine that there aren’t solution models around like, potentially, some form of hardened (lean and mean and armour-coated) enterprise IoT bus thing, possibly with security zones, et al., similar to the obvious and hopefully ubiquitous separation of office automation (why isn’t SAP dead yet? This, some time ago. Oh, might be useful to set up separate mandates to ‘run’ factories yes, which was its original purpose, right; what did E-R-P stand for ..?) from Process Automation, and within the latter, Supervisory Control from operational (close-in) control, engineering-wise, but then with subsets for safe/unsafe hardware.
The isolation stubs could then act as gatekeepers between zones, between potentially-safe and the legacy-most-probably-unsafe.

Though I suspect that the ‘zones’ will have to ‘air’gap at many network layers, including towards the physical end of OSI — meaning that higher up, the connection will have wider gaps, not less why is this so often overlooked ..?

On a separate end note: Where are the wares that should have followed the scares, i.e., we have had a couple of years (yes) now of IoT scares; have the vendors truly stepped in or was it just window dressing e.g., dole out some monitoring tools and good luck with it..?

Progress… and:

[See? Engineering is beautiful; Brussels]

Nocial Media

… How did yesterday’s post know about what I type here now ..?

Too easy. Now for something real:
Nocial Media.
Which is about the distribution of socmed interactions.

Because, the best we have so far is stratified data, by country, age group / gender. Which totally misses that, my guess [hence: fact], a great many relations, either current/frequent or distant/loose, are distributed over a different set of classes. Like, a chunk will be global among peers of any sort (or several of such groups), but also the other chunk will be local, traditional, geo- or socially close like (well, F2F peers but they’re an in-between group) family, IRL colleagues, and association co-members.

Now, would any of you have data on such, probably exponential-in-many-directions, distributions ..? I’d love to hear, TIA.

Oh and on a side note; maybe worthwhile to have some sociology expert elucidate on this: What-how is our future when ‘kids these days’ use /Insta…/Snapch… etc. that leave so little trail; how will your future self be able to browse through old youth pics …? [Advertisers will … Be very sure of that…]

Plus:

[What bin you’re in — Zuid-As Amsterdam]

Rejoice, you the Puzzled

Unless you were doing stuff on Nocial Media (see tomorrow — never mind, I’m not one for linear Time), you may have missed or noticed (same) the release of a facsimile of one of the most veritable puzzles of the ages (Western world), in this here thing, which is posted here. Yeah, that’s how hyperlinks work, I kno, I kno.

So, now you the puzzlers AKA crytographers around the globe, may swoop down in even larger numbers than before, to crack the thing. Or, probably, not. And you knew about this whole thing.

Question: (Why | _ ) hasn’t already some Watson-class ~~frigate~~ AI tool (literally certainly not figuratively) been set loose on this ..? Lack of purpose? Of would it be a good ‘Turing test’ of sorts, if we test the capabilitites (learning/analysis time ..!?) of any AI tool, by the time it would take to make mincemeat out of the Manuscript — Duh-tch for tearing apart. Any attempt after the first successful, would need to be instructed not to find the solution out there on the ‘net, obviously (?) …

One may hope, may one not? And:

[Found it! This is what the Manu is about!!]

SecPoll

Finally, a competition where you can win, too, seriously.

Yes you can, I’m serious. And you win something serious…
The deal:
Your top-3 predictions, in comments, about what new ‘cyber’security stuff (#ditchcyber) will happen in 2017.
In return, if you’re the top predictor (NO.), to celebrate you’ve best found ’17’s bubbles of the year you’ll receive a perfect bottle of ’17 bubbles.
The things you describe can be of any sort, related to information security in the widest sense. Something-cloud, something-privacy, something-Docker, something- Layer 7 or 8 firewalls, something-systemic-breachlike, whatever, it’s up to you. However:

Some terms and conditions [subject to updating when needed..! My call and prerogative]:

No editing your predictions after entering them;
Three apiece;
None should not be around per second half of December 2016;
All should be measurable, and measurably the largest over 2017, suggestions for measurement/metrics should be attached.

I’ll be awaiting your wisdom / totally random stuff with:

[Who would’ve predicted the success, and beauty, of this/these, eh? DC]

Dense, but study

All about this here article. Yes I too, started out as picture browser through this. But more careful study unearthed a lot of gold, qua understanding of the issues. Even to the point of pointing out some gaps, here and there — well, the understanding did, not as much the overview — in ‘moral continuums’, that can and should be filled.
And, much work can be done on opeationalising the Obvious breaches of fundamental human rights (as per Universal Declaration) so don’t go babbling about commerce needs a chance.

[And now for a switch of goal but you’ll find the relation …!]

Where the latter is one big part often missing with ‘disruptions’ quod non:
Doing something simply illegal is just that and is not ‘allowed’ because innovation should be allowed to be tested.
Innovation should not be attempted when the new has been determined already to be illegal
How hard can it be? Laws had been put in place to protect the weak against the powerful, specifically at points where the need was obviated. IF some law has no purpose anymore, one should first do away with it, first through political ways and if that wouldn’t work out to be possible, only then, through e.g., courts for obvious unfairness (sic; if your law system is of the common type you’re hosed anyway). When you don’t succeeed in this the only legal ways, too bad that’s how democracy works, if.
If some law still has purpose but there’s negative side effects you’d want to do away with, do away with the side effects not the law; in the two ways as before doofus!

Oh well. Mock disruptors beware; the world does not need nor welcome you.
And:

[Sometimes, Classics are perfect enough; Prague]