Saturday, October 01, 2016

It seems like Yahoo is generating as many articles as there are hacked accounts.  Perhaps this is why?
A Yahoo insider believes the hackers could really have stolen over 1 billion accounts
   To be sure, Yahoo has said that the breach affected at least 500 million users.  But the former Yahoo exec estimated the number of accounts that could have potentially been stolen could be anywhere between 1 billion and 3 billion.


I’m not sure Fortune got this right!  Perhaps I will have my Governance students research it and write a more accurate article. 
10 Things You Need to Do If Your Business Gets Hacked
   Forty-three percent of hack attacks in 2015 were against small businesses, according to Symantec’s 2016 Internet Security Threat Report.  This is a 9% increase compared to 2014.
Here’s what small-business owners are required to do in the event of a data breach:


Yet another heads-up!
The New IRS Email Scam Coming to Your Inbox
   Just recently, a new scam has started involving fake tax bills tied to the Affordable Care Act.  In one sure sign the notices are fake, many are arriving by email—and the IRS doesn’t initiate taxpayer contact by email.
Even so, some of the fakes are paper notices sent by regular mail and taxpayers should watch out.

(Related) For my Architecture students.
How to fight phishing: security for designers


Interesting.  Think it will work?  Me neither.
Europe Cracks Down on Export of Surveillance Technologies
The European Union has published its proposal (PDF) for a revised Regulation on the export of dual use goods.  The primary purpose is to overhaul and simplify the existing controls that were designed to limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); but it also introduces new controls over the export of cyber surveillance and computer intrusion tools.
More explicitly, it aims at preventing "the misuse of digital surveillance and intrusion systems that results in human rights violations" in line with the 2015 Human Rights Action Plan and the EU Guidelines for Freedom of Expression.  New laws are necessary because existing legislation does not provide sufficient control over cyber-surveillance technologies.


Useful resource?  $10 for your Kindle. 
From EPIC:
EPIC proudly announces the 2016 edition of the Privacy Law Sourcebook, the definitive reference guide to US and international privacy law.  The Privacy Law Sourcebook is an edited collection of the primary legal instruments for privacy protection in the modern age, including United States law, International law, and recent developments.  The Sourcebook includes recent US law, such as the FREEDOM Act, and the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the UN Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Modern Age, and regional privacy agreements.  The Privacy Law Sourcebook 2016 is available for purchase from the EPIC Bookstore.  EPIC will make the Privacy Law Sourcebook freely available to NGOs and human rights organizations.


I wonder if my students know the difference?
Why simplicity ensures that bots will kill 99% of apps
The average person uses 3-5 apps per day.
In a really big way, apps have failed us, and the reasons are quite obvious.
First, apps require learning.
Second, app discovery sucks.
Lastly, apps have too many friction points. You have to sign up, sign in, and remember the app for future use.


For my Architecture students.  How much of this is to fight back against Amazon?
FedEx, UPS Gear Up for Holiday Season With More Sorting Hubs, Technology
Holiday hiring is expected to be flat at package-delivery giants FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., but that masks efforts behind the scenes to prepare for the coming wave of e-commerce orders.
FedEx is opening four new hubs and “dozens” of small, satellite facilities to receive, sort and ship an expected surge in packages between Thanksgiving and Christmas, executives said this week.  UPS is expanding a network of temporary sorting hubs and is increasing its use of software to help sort packages faster, a spokeswoman said.


An article for my next Spreadsheet class.


Looks interesting.
How to Use the New Explore Function in Google Slides
Earlier this week Google introduced a new feature to Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets that they are calling "Explore."  The Explore function in Google Slides can help you find a better layout for each slide in your presentation, help you find previous work that you've done about the topic of your presentation, and help you find information from the web about your topic.  In the video embedded below I provide a short overview of the new Explore function in Google Slides.


Another Saturday?  Already?
Hack Education Weekly News
   Via the Data Quality Campaign: “Student Data Privacy Legislation: A Summary of 2016 State Legislation.”
   Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a university competition dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI.  From the press release: “The goal of the inaugural competition is to build a ‘socialbot’ on Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events.  The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a $500,000 prize.  Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes.”  [Attention Architecture students!  Bob]

Friday, September 30, 2016

We’ve been building the hardware for hackers.  
Hackers Infect Army of Cameras, DVRs for Massive Internet Attacks
Attackers used an army of hijacked security cameras and video recorders to launch several massive internet attacks last week, prompting fresh concern about the vulnerability of millions of “smart” devices in homes and businesses connected to the internet.
The assaults raised eyebrows among security experts both for their size and for the machines that made them happen.  The attackers used as many as one million Chinese-made security cameras, digital video recorders and other infected devices to generate webpage requests and data that knocked their targets offline, security experts said.
   “We’re thinking this is the tip of the iceberg,” said Dale Drew, head of security at Level 3 Communications Inc., which runs one of the world’s largest internet backbones, giving it a window into many of the attacks that cross the net.
The proliferation of internet-connected devices from televisions to thermostats provide attackers a bigger arsenal of weapons to infiltrate.  Many are intended to be plugged in and forgotten.  These devices are “designed to be remote controlled over the internet,” said Andy Ellis, security chief at network operator Akamai Technologies Inc., some of whose clients were affected.  “They’re also never going to be updated.”


What kind of backup is stored next to your live files? 
Oof. This notification from the New Jersey Spine Center, sent to patients on September 22, describes a real disaster where not only essential patient files and credit card information were locked up, but their most recent backup was too.  No wonder they paid the ransom.
On July 27, 2016, our computer systems were attacked by a malware ransom virus called “CryptoWall.”  The malware was detected by our virus protection software but unfortunately not until after our electronic patient records were encrypted.  The virus encrypted, thereby rendering unusable, all of our electronic medical record files that contained all of the clinical information on our patients such as procedures, office notes, reports, etc.
   The virus likely utilized a list of stolen passwords and ran an automated program that attempted access until a correct match was found.
Read the full letter here.  Their press release, posted to their site, provides a lot less detail and doesn’t mention paying ransom, but it does add one detail: they regained access to their files on August 1.  They do not mention how much the ransom was.


Sometimes all you need to detect hackers or malware is an indication that something is “different.”
Meet Apache Spot, a new open source project for cybersecurity
Hard on the heels of the discovery of the largest known data breach in history, Cloudera and Intel on Wednesday announced that they've donated a new open source project to the Apache Software Foundation with a focus on using big data analytics and machine learning for cybersecurity.
   Based on Cloudera's big data platform, Spot taps Apache Hadoop for infinite log management and data storage scale along with Apache Spark for machine learning and near real-time anomaly detection.  The software can analyze billions of events in order to detect unknown and insider threats and provide new network visibility.

Essentially, it uses machine learning as a filter to separate bad traffic from benign and to characterize network traffic behavior.  It also uses a process including context enrichment, noise filtering, whitelisting and heuristics to produce a shortlist of most likely security threats.


The insurance industry apparently likes those little “driving habit” recorders they hope you will install in your car, but this goes much farther.
Joe Cadillic sends along this item from TheNewspaper.com:
Speed cameras are banned in Virginia, but that did not stop the insurance industry from deploying them on state highways.  As part of an effort to promote the issuance of speeding tickets, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the for-profit contractor Brekford set up ten radar units that they used to photograph the faces of motorists and identify them through Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records.  The group used the data collected to call for lowering of speed limits.
The National Motorists Association (NMA) noticed one flaw with the IIHS plan — IIHS never asked for permission to set up the cameras.  On Wednesday the group filed a complaint with the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which has jurisdiction over Virginia highways. READ MORE….


Free speech or free self-incrimination? 
Richard Winton reports:
Can police prevent hate crimes by monitoring racist banter on social media?
Researchers will be testing this concept over the next three years in Los Angeles, marking a new frontier in efforts by law enforcement to predict and prevent crimes.
During a three-year experiment, British researchers working with the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. will be monitoring millions of tweets related to the L.A. area in an effort to identify patterns and markers that prejudice-motivated violence is about to occur in real time.
The researchers then will compare the data against records of reported violent acts.
Read more on the Los Angeles Times.
Joe Cadillic sent me the link to this story with a gentle I-tried-to-warn-you-all comment:
Earlier this year, I warned everyone that police will soon be arresting people based on ‘Sentiment Analysis’ of their Tweets: http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2016/08/police-to-arrest-people-based-on.html#!/2016/08/police-to-arrest-people-based-on.html


Injury to a third party?
Wendy Davis reports:
Google can’t shake a privacy lawsuit alleging that it unlawfully scans Gmail messages.
In a ruling issued late last week, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California ruled that people who are suing Google can proceed even without proof of financial injury.
[…]
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by San Francisco resident Daniel Matera, who said he doesn’t have a Gmail account, but is forced to communicate with Gmail users due to the “ubiquity of Gmail.”
Read more on MediaPost.


Somehow, I don’t think Dissent approves.
In what is likely to infuriate those who believe that the Federal Trade Commission has already abused its authority in its relentless enforcement action against a small cancer-detecting laboratory, the FTC has denied LabMD’s application for a stay of their final order  while LabMD appeals to a federal court.
In explaining its denial, the Commission said it looked at four factors:
(1) “the likelihood of the applicant’s success on appeal”; (2) “whether the applicant will suffer irreparable harm if a stay is not granted”; (3) “the degree of injury to other parties if a stay is granted”; and (4) the public interest. It is the applicant’s burden to establish that a stay is warranted. Toys “R” Us, Inc., 126 F.T.C. 695, 698 (1998).
Because the Commission believes it is right, it fails to see LabMD’s chances of success on appeal.  If they didn’t believe they were right, they never would have issued their final decision and order, right?  So the first factor is somewhat ridiculous and boils down to, “We thought we were right, we think we are right, and therefore, LabMD has no real chance of winning an appeal against us.”
On the second factor, that the Commission failed to see “irreparable harm” given the cost of notifications and implementing the comprehensive data security plan is…. shocking.
As to the degree of injury to other parties if the stay is granted, given that the FTC never bothered to contact even a single patient to inquire whether there had been any harm, the following borders on the obscene:
Because LabMD never notified any affected consumers of the breach, we do not know how many consumers may have suffered harm due, for example, to identity or medical identity theft.
But they could have known – and chose not to find out.
Keep in mind that as HHS spokesperson Rachel Seeger wrote to this blogger, HHS not only declined to join FTC in any action against LabMD, but this wasn’t even a reportable breach under HIPAA in 2008.  There was no requirement for LabMD to notify anyone.  So they didn’t and the FTC never did, and now the FTC would require LabMD to notify eight years later but it can’t wait for an appeal to a court?
Without notification, affected consumers and their insurance companies can do little to reduce the risk of harm from identity and medical identity theft or to address harms that may already have occurred.
They are, of course, referring to the “risk of harm” that they decided was substantial, even though there was no evidence of any harm to any person.  Nor did they provide controlled and replicated research demonstrating that simply having data exposed causes substantial injury to consumers.  If we ask people, “How do you feel that your lab test results were exposed and others could have downloaded them?” I hypothesize that many people would say they would be unhappy about that.  But if we ask them, “Do you feel you have been harmed by that exposure?” I suspect that the vast majority would say that they had not been harmed at all, much less substantially harmed.  Would even a few people claim significant harm?  It’s an empirical question, and FTC provided no evidence on that point.
As for the fourth, and “public interest” factor, I think the public’s interest is in getting the FTC’s authority and the notice issues clarified by the courts, and the denial of the stay is just another poor decision in a long chain of poor decisions in this case.
Related:   FTC v. LabMD (FTC’s case files)


Is this in response to the New York push for the Chelsea bomber?  
Feds approve updates to mobile emergency alerts
Federal regulators on Thursday overhauled the system that pushes alerts to smartphones and other mobile devices in an emergency.
Alerts that were once restricted to 90 characters will now be as long as 360 for some types of networks following the Federal Communication’s vote on the new rules.
And officials responding to emergencies will now be able to include links and phone numbers in all types of alerts.  That could allow law enforcement authorities to link to maps, for example, or other photos.
   The commission also told wireless providers to support alerts that were sent in Spanish.  They will also now formally consider whether to require support for other languages as well.
   The item gained a higher profile after authorities in New York City used the alerts system to send a message to smartphones informing the public that it was searching for Ahmad Khan Rahami, a suspect in a bombing in Manhattan and New Jersey earlier this month.


The Cloud covers the globe?
   We’ve recently joined the ranks of Google’s billion-user products. Google Cloud Platform now serves over one billion end-users through its customers’ products and services.
To meet this growing demand, we’ve reached an exciting turning point in our geographic expansion efforts.  Today, we announced the locations of eight new Google Cloud Regions — Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt — and there are more regions to be announced next year.


For both my Governance and Architecture classes.
Firms Spend Big Money on Flaws They Could Fix in Development
Companies are spending millions on bug bounty programs whose goal is to identify vulnerabilities, but it might be more efficient to take a proactive approach and focus on identifying flaws in the development phase.
A survey commissioned by application security company Veracode shows that of 500 U.S. decision makers working in cybersecurity, 83 percent have admitted releasing code before testing it for security holes and bugs.  In contrast, a vast majority of them are confident that their software is secure.


For my Software Architecture students.  What tools will they need?
Ford sees big profits in ride-sharing
Ford Motor Co. thinks new mobility services could yield profit margins more than double what it makes selling cars and trucks, and Executive Chairman Bill Ford on Thursday said that’s because the automaker is becoming more nimble and forward-thinking.
“In time, if we do this right, we will become less capital-intensive,” he said at the World Mobility Leadership Forum, a two-day conference in Romulus focused on the changing role of transportation.  “We’ll have more revenue streams that aren’t dependent upon heavily fixed-costs investment.”


I’m lazy and cheap.  This App might have been designed for me. 
QuickKey + Inexpensive Phone = Time Saved On Grading
QuickKey is a popular iOS and Android app that can help you save a ton of time when grading multiple choice or true/false quizzes.  I first learned about it a few years ago when a colleague of mine was raving about it on Facebook.
Here’s the basics of how it works; create your quiz on the Quick Key website then print and distribute a bubble sheet.  After your students have completed the bubble sheet you simply scan the sheets with your phone and the grading is done for you.  As you can learn in the video embedded below, QuickKey will work on the cheapest of Android phones as well as on more expensive Android phones and on iPhones.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

So don’t be surprised when I get elected!
Well, Chris Vickery and I tried to warn everyone about making these lists public and not securing them better.  Now we see this, by Nicole Rojas:
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday (28 September), FBI Director James Comey revealed hackers have attempted to hack into voter registration sites in more than a dozen states and on several occasions.  Investigators believe Russia is behind the attempted hacks, officials said.
“There have been a variety of scanning activities which is a preamble for potential intrusion activities as well as some attempted intrusions at voter database registrations beyond those we knew about in July and August,” Comey said.
Read more on IBT.
[From the article:
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Tuesday (27 Septmeber) said that 18 states had requested cyber assistance from the DHS regarding voting systems.  [Which ones?  Bob] 


We’ve been telling lawyers this for years.  (Of course, we need to read the email to see if it’s an email we shouldn’t read…)
Clark D. Cunningham writes:
Fear of hackers reading private e-mails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years.  What we don’t expect is our own government to hack our e-mail — but it’s happening.  Federal court cases going on right now are revealing that federal officials can read all your e-mail without your knowledge.  For example, in the case of U.S. v. Ravelo, pending in Newark, New Jersey, the government used a search warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer’s personal cellphone – more than 90,000 items including text messages, e-mails, contact lists, and photos.  When the phone’s owner complained to a judge, the government argued it could look at everything (except for privileged lawyer-client communications) before the court even issued a ruling.  The judge in Ravelo is expected to issue a preliminary ruling on the feds’ arguments sometime in October.  All Americans should be watching carefully to what happens next in these cases – the government may be already watching you without your knowledge.
Read more on Homeland Security Wire.


For my Computer Security students.
New Pluralsight Course: Deconstructing the Hack
   I'm now really happy to be able to share Play by Play: Ethical Hacking - Deconstructing the Hack:
The theme of the course was to take a number of security events that illustrated various attacks I'd covered in the ethical hacking series and talk through some of the mechanics.  Deconstruct them, if you like.  These are real world security events so this is far from hypothetical, it's things that have actually happened.  Here's what we cover:
  1. SQL Injection: TalkTalk
  2. Session Hijacking: Valve
  3. Evading IDS, Firewalls, and Honeypots: Ashley Madison and Sony Pictures
  4. Hacking Web Servers: Drupal
  5. Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS): Nissan


When re-identification is outlawed only outlaws will have re-identified data?  How about we just point out what a crappy job they did in the first place?
Corinne Reichert reports:
Australian Attorney-General George Brandis has said the government will introduce legislation to amend the Privacy Act for the purposes of protecting anonymised datasets that are collected and published by the Commonwealth.
Claiming that the “privacy of citizens is of paramount importance” to the government, Brandis said the amendment, which will be introduced in the coming months during the spring sittings of Parliament, will criminalise the re-identification of de-identified data.
Read more on ZDNet.


Something my Ethical Hacking students will do for free!  (And you don’t even need to ask!!)
HackerOne CEO: 'We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency'
HackerOne helps you find vulnerabilities in your internet-facing systems.  We do it through a unique model where we have a community of researchers and hackers around the world who will hack you on your request and they will send you a report outlining what they found.  You send them money as a thank you if the report was useful. [Or, we could help ourselves…  Bob]  If it wasn’t, you pay nothing.


My Software Architecture students will be looking for Research Projects.  I thought I’d list a few potential areas here.
American Airlines Faces Next IT Hurdle
American Airlines Group Inc., nearly three years after merging with US Airways, faces a major information-technology challenge this weekend (Sept. 30-Oct.1), when it transitions all pilots and planes to one “flight operating system.”

(Related)
The Algorithms That Tell Bosses How Employees Are Feeling
Every day, humans type out more than 200 billion emails, hundreds of millions of tweets, and innumerable texts, chats, and private messages.  No one person could pick through even a tiny sliver of this information and stitch together themes and trends—but computers are starting to be able to.  For more than a decade, researchers have been developing computer programs that can ingest enormous amounts of writing to try and understand the emotions stirred up by an idea or a product.

(Related)
Citigroup Teams Up With Rival Banks to Fight Venmo
Citigroup Inc. is set to join its fellow big banks in building a peer-to-peer payments app in the hope of fending off fintech upstarts like Venmo.


A bit of an update.
Tech Giants Team Up To Tackle The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence
   Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the group consists of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Apple is also in talks to join.
   The group's goal is to create the first industry-led consortium that would also include academic and nonprofit researchers, leading the effort to essentially ensure AI's trustworthiness: driving research toward technologies that are ethical, secure and reliable — that help rather than hurt — while also helping to diffuse fears and misperceptions about it.
"We plan to discuss, we plan to publish, we plan to also potentially sponsor some research projects that dive into specific issues," Banavar says, "but foremost, this is a platform for open discussion across industry."


Perspective.
Cord-Cutting Could Cost Pay TV Industry $1 Billion in a Year, Study Says
   The results, which are based on an online survey of 1,119 U.S. customers, estimates that pay-TV providers could lose about $1,248 per cord-cutter annually.  That’s because the average cord-cutter saves $104 a month—about 56% of their bill—from dropping cable TV.


Something to amuse my students.
Take a look inside Facebook’s massive data center in Sweden
Data centers are generally massive, but can be very beautiful. Google does them pretty well, but as it turns out, Facebook does too.
The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared a few pictures of its Luleå, Sweden-based data center on his account.
The main data hall is so big that engineers move around on scooters.
Old and obsolete hard drives are crunched, forever protecting privacy.
“The biggest challenge working here? Getting to the data center by car when it is -30 degrees C outside!”


Something else to worry about.
Deutsche Bank can only be saved by the German government, strategist says
Only a substantial intervention by the German government can stop the collapse of the country's largest lender, Deutsche Bank, according to Stefan Müller, the CEO of Frankfurt-based boutique research company DGAW.
"Deutsche Bank doesn't realize that something serious needs to happen," he told CNBC via telephone on Thursday morning.  "(CEO John) Cryan clearly showed that he has no idea how to survive."


If not immediately useful at least it gets me thinking.
Practical Ed Tech Handbook - Updated for 2016-17
Last year I published a 30 page document that I called The Practical Ed Tech Handbook.  This week I spent some time revising that document and updating it the 2016-17 school year.  The Practical Ed Tech Handbook isn't just a list of my favorite resources.  I've included ideas for using these resources and in many cases I've included links to video tutorials about my favorite resources.
In The Practical Ed Tech Handbook you will find resources arranged in seven categories; communication with students & parents, web search strategies, digital citizenship, video creation, audio production, backchannels & informal assessment, and digital portfolios.
You can also grab a copy of it here.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

How do I rob thee
Let me count the ways
The 2016 trends in cybercrime that you need to know about
   In a report identifying eight trends in the underworld of cybercrime, Europol warned that cybercrime offences were becoming the norm and overtaking the reporting of "traditional" crimes in some EU countries.
1: Crime-as-a-Service
2: Ransomware
3: The criminal use of data
4: Payment fraud
5: Online child sexual abuse
6: Abuse of the Darknet
7: Social engineering
8: Virtual currencies


Are these types of articles excuses in advance of something they know is coming?   
U.S. Believes Russia Steered Hacked Documents to Websites
U.S. officials are increasingly confident that the hacker Guccifer 2.0 is part of a network of individuals and groups kept at arm’s length by Russia to mask its involvement in cyberintrusions such as the theft of thousands of Democratic Party documents, according to people familiar with the matter.
   Last week, U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper said it “shouldn’t come as a big shock to people” that Russia is behind the hacking operation.  While Russia has tried to interfere in U.S. elections since at least the 1960s by spying and funneling money to particular political groups, “I think it’s more dramatic maybe because now they have the cyber tools,” he said.


Just in time for my IT Governance students to ride to the rescue!  Do the boring, obvious stuff first, then get creative.
Friend or foe? Bank regulator issues new information security exam procedures
   A new Information Security IT Examination Handbook (“Handbook”) was just released by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) – and it will definitely keep many CSOs occupied during the coming months.
   Those favoring practical experience over checklist security will not be happy.  Most information security professionals agree that practical experience and judgment far outweigh checklist security in protecting organizations.  Some would argue that diverting tight resources into procedural or documenting information security controls can actually hamper protection efforts.  And in some aspects this argument make sense.
The new handbook is “heavy” with requirements to document and provide evidence of control procedures used to manage the bank’s (or financial services company’s) information security effort.  This will surely frustrate checklist security opponents.  And for many requirements, specific expectations are provided that the bank would be expected to have to achieve the requirements objectives.


Has anyone ever considered that people lie on social media?
Council bosses in Cumbria can use Facebook to snoop on residents they suspect of committing an offence.
New guidelines have been added to Cumbria County Council’s surveillance rule book on the issue and approved by leaders.
The regulations allow county council staff to glean information from personal social media account pages as an alternative to carrying out direct surveillance.


We’ll have to change our Cryptography class to emphasize Blockchain. 
Bank of America and Microsoft partner to create blockchain applications for trade finance
Today, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Bank of America to develop blockchain technologies for their trade finance transacting.  The companies are developing a proof of concept using Microsoft’s Azure-based Blockchain-as-a-Service.  The hope is that this collaboration will create more automated and cost-effective corporate treasury operations for both Microsoft and Bank of America.


For my Software Architecture students.
Getting Started With IoT
Despite considerable interest in the Internet of Things, many organizations do not yet have an active IoT project.  Our recent research report, “Data Sharing and Analytics Drive Success With IoT,” finds that 60% of the organizations responding to our global survey do not yet have an active IoT project.


Perspective.  What is a market worth?
Wal-Mart in Talks to Invest Up to $1 Billion in Flipkart
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in advanced discussions to invest as much as $1 billion into India’s Flipkart Online Services Pvt, as the two companies battle Amazon.com Inc. in e-commerce, according to a person familiar with the matter.
   Flipkart is the largest online retailer in India, but its lead has been under assault as Amazon steps up investments in the country.  Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said in June he plans to spend another $3 billion in India to gain customers in the fast-growing market.
   India’s online market will expand at an average of 45 percent annually in the next four years and reach $28 billion by 2020, according to estimates from Kotak Institutional Equities.
   But if Amazon and Wal-Mart both stepping up their investments, Alibaba may have to consider doing the same, either with Snapdeal or on its own.

(Related)
Google Searches for New Users in India
Alphabet Inc. ’s Google is expanding its efforts to connect with millions of Indians, using free Wi-Fi and tailor-made products, as it seeks to harness the country’s growing online population.


For all my students, even though we give them Office365.
   Many long-time Office users will be unwilling to transition away from the apps they’re so used to working with.  Whether you’re an Office veteran or a complete newcomer to these types of apps, iWork may deserve another chance.  Let’s take a look at why.


Sometimes humor is where you find it.  In this case, on a Statistics website.
Significant Digits For Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
0.9 percent
Nobody wants to hear about other people’s fantasy football teams, but it is rather delightful to rip them.  Last week 0.9 percent of ESPN fantasy players started Tom Brady, who is still serving a four game suspension because of Deflategate.  Meanwhile, Trevor Siemian of the Denver Broncos did indeed play and was the best QB in Week 3, yet a mere 0.7 percent of players started him.  I will never pass up an opportunity to mock New England fans who think a suspended Brady will still outscore players who actually take the field.  [SportsCenter]


Forget Skynet.  THIS is how robots will take over the world!
Nissan's autonomous chairs politely carry you through queues