Want to learn about the coming Internet of Things? Read about the Victorian Internet

Bob Gourley January 8, 2016

In the late 1990’s Tom Standage released the first edition of a book that would sweep across the tech community because of its incredible analogies to the rise of the Internet hitting the world at that time. The “Victorian Internet“, first released in 1998, was updated and re-released again in 2013. It provided a well written history and meaningful assessment of the rise of the Telegraph, and made very interesting observations about how the remarkable impact of the Telegraph could help us all think through what may happen as the Internet progressed.

I just re-read the Victorian Internet, this time with the Internet of Things in mind, and would most strongly recommend you grab your copy and review it in that context as well. A new wave of technologies is going to sweep over humanity, and with it will come good and evil. And leaders will need to figure out how to sort out the hype from reality in this domain. The many lessons from history captured in this book should help us do that.

The Global Cyber Alliance Appoints Philip Reitinger as its First President and CEO

Bob Gourley January 7, 2016

Editor’s note: We have known and admired the work of Phil Reitinger for decades and believe his strengths make him uniquely qualified to successfully make progress in the important missions of this new global alliance for good. – bg

From: www.globalcyberalliance.org

The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), an international, cross-sector not-for-profit designed to identify, confront, and prevent cybersecurity risks, today announced that its first President and CEO will be Philip Reitinger, whose outstanding career has largely been dedicated to advancing the state of cybersecurity across the world.

GCA is a global cybersecurity partnership founded by the New York County District Attorney’s Office, the City of London Police and the Center for Internet Security.

Prior to accepting the position of President and CEO with GCA, Mr. Reitinger was the President of VisionSpear LLC. Mr. Reitinger has served in both government and industry in senior cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection roles. From2009-2011, he was the Deputy Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security. He has also served as Sony’s Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Trustworthy Infrastructure Strategist at Microsoft Corporation, the first Executive Director of the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, and a Deputy Chief of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the Department of Justice. Mr. Reitinger currently serves as a Senior Associate (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on the New York Governor’s Cyber Security Advisory Board, and on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security’s Advisory Committee. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and a law degree from Yale Law School.

District Attorney Cyrus R Vance, Jr. said: “I would like to congratulate Philip Reitinger on being named the first President and CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance. The goal of GCA is to share and disseminate – in real time – crucial information related to malicious cyber activity across international borders and economic sectors, in order to prevent future crimes from occurring. Bringing extraordinary skills and a wealth of experience, Philip is perfectly suited to lead this new and innovative approach to combat the global threat of cybercrime.”

Commissioner of London Police, Ian Dyson, said “Our cyber world is inherently international, as are the risks it presents. Philip Reitinger’s international focus and experience will be essential as GCA expands its capabilities in London and Europe, in New York, and around the globe.”

Mr. John M. Gilligan, chair of the Center for Internet Security Board of Directors, said: “Philip Reitinger has for many years been an effective and recognized cyber expert and leader on the national and international stages. He is superbly positioned to be the catalyst and to guide the achievement of the GCA’s mission to positively alter the cyber risk landscape.”

Mr. William Pelgrin, Chair of GCA, said: “Mr. Reitinger is one of the true thought leaders in cyber security. Mr. Reitinger is internationally known for his distinguished career in cyber security. His impressive cyber background in both the public and private sectors makes Mr. Reitinger a great choice as its first President and CEO. He is deeply passionate about GCA’s important mission and I am positive that under his leadership GCA will achieve measurable accomplishments to confront the cyber risks that plague us all. I am pleased the Mr. Reitinger embodies GCA’s principles of collaboration and cooperation. His passion for making a positive difference will carry GCA well into the future.”

Mr. Reitinger said: “I am excited to work with the talented and dedicated GCA team and GCA Partners to reduce cybersecurity risk in a significant way. I am very honored to be GCA’s President and CEO and to serve an organization that has an altruistic mission not to make recommendations to reduce cybersecurity risk, but to implement solutions that actually and measurably reduce that risk. I look forward to leveraging our global, cross-sector focus to help create a safer cyber world.”

For more information about GCA, visit www.globalcyberalliance.org or follow GCA on Twitter at @globalcyberalln .

The Attack We Have Long Predicted Just Occurred: Highly destructive cyber attacks drop a power grid

Bob Gourley January 4, 2016

Cyber-Security-Big-Data-Eye An article posted in the Ukrainian news services TSN reported that massive outages suffered in the country were caused by highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine. The site reported that the only way to restore power was to return to manual methods, something that may be hard to do in other nations (including the U.S.).

ARS Technica reporting included information sourced from the highly regarded John Hultquist of iSIGHT Partners. Their reporting (First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation) includes:

“It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT’s cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.”

Researchers from antivirus provider ESET have confirmed that multiple Ukrainian power authorities were infected by “BlackEnergy,” a package discovered in 2007 that was updated two years ago to include a host of new functions, including the ability to render infected computers unbootable. More recently, ESET found, the malware was updated again to add a component dubbed KillDisk, which destroys critical parts of a computer hard drive and also appears to have functions that sabotage industrial control systems. The latest BlackEnergy also includes a backdoored secure shell (SSH) utility that gives attackers permanent access to infected computers.

Opinion: This type of attack has been predicted for years and is the type of scenario that gave rise to scores of planning events and policy initiatives in the U.S., including the Clinton-era President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, which gave rise to new constructs for helping the nation’s privately run infrastructures better think through ways to protect themselves and share information. But still, till today, the threat of a cyber attack against a power grid being able to bring down the grid was one that some felt was very unlikely.

Although intelligence professionals have gone on the record saying that our grids are being probed and that there are indications that some foreign states have placed logic bombs in portions of the grid, those types of warnings are not widely read and seem to be easily forgotten. The fact that a major attack has caused an outage like this should be considered in this context. This type of attack is a real scenario and the threat of it must be mitigated.

What should you do about this? Number one: Stay informed!

Ensure your workforce is tracking the cyber threat by signing up for the OODA Daily Pulse. This will provide strategic warning of threats and info on mitigation strategies.

Truly Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools You Can Use Today

Bob Gourley December 28, 2015

Are you looking for useful artificial intelligence tools? We know you, dear readers, have been tracking the megatrend of artificial intelligence. There are many issues in this trend that should inform your day-to-day decision-making (we examine AI issues as part of our CAMBRIC construct to help put the trend in the context of other major thrusts in the tech world).

Most AI solutions today are fielded by the big players in IT. For example, Apple’s Siri or the capabilities they embedded directly in iOS9, or Google’s many savvy search solutions or Amazon’s very smart recommendations. Amazon’s Echo is also, like Siri, connecting to a very smart cloud capability that takes advantage of AI. AI capabilities are also being programmed into robotic solutions including self driving cars. IBM is also investing heavily in AI, with Watson the most famous result.

We expect to see a new wave of AI solutions that deliver value from smaller start-up companies as well. This is a very crowded space, with plenty of VC funding for entrepreneurs with capabilities in a wide-range of AI disciplines. Most of these firms seem to be on one of two paths: Success, which will mean being acquired by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft or IBM, or failure, which will see them acquired by the same firms for a lower price for their talent. Either way the innovation continues.

We are also on the lookout for hot firms that are not providing capabilities as part of other offerings or don’t seem to be on a path to be acquired by one of the big guys. This part of the market is very likely going to take off, since open source platforms and open cloud API’s and services like Prediction.io are making it so easy for others to create and field AI.

Here is a short list of capabilities we recommend all enterprise technologists track. The list is by no means comprehensive, but is definitely representative of what is available now:

Artificial Intelligence On Your Phone:

Siri: Part of Apple’s iOS, watchOS and tvOS. Intelligent personal assistant.
Cortana: Microsoft’s intelligent personal assistant. Designed for Windows mobile but now on Android and a limited version runs on Apple iOS. Also works on desktops and Xbox One.
Google Now: Available within Google Search mobile app for Android and iOS as well as the Google Chrome web browser on other devices. Delegates requests to web services powered by Google.

Artificial Intelligence From The Cloud:

Really most all of the AI on your phone and desktops is communicating with cloud services, so keep in mind most solutions are a blend that highly leverage cloud capabilities. But we needed a place to talk about Echo and Watson and soon many others, so:

Watson: A technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of data.
Echo: The device you buy is mostly a speaker and microphone with some commodity IT to connect it to the cloud. The real smarts come from Amazon Web Services.

For Personal and Business Use:

x.ai: Let AI coordinate schedules for you. Your own personal scheduler.
CrystalKnows: Using AI to help you know the best way to communicate with others.
RecordedFuture: Leverages natural language processing at massive scale in real time to collect and understand over 700,000 web sources to seek understanding.
Tamr: Unique approaches to Big Data leveraging machine learning.
LegalRobot: Automating legal document review in ways that can serve people and businesses.
Intraspexion: Uses Deep Learning as the core of an early warning system to investigate and prevent potential litigation.
EverLaw: The power of mobile, machine learning and cloud computing delivered as a SaaS.

Artificial Intelligence For Developers:

Vicarious: Building the next generation of AI algorithms.
Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior.
Prediction.io is a service with easy to use, open templates for a variety of advanced AI workloads.
Jade: Java Agent Development Framework. Simplifies multi-agent system development.
Protege: A free, open-source ontology editor and framework for building intelligent systems.
h2o.ai: Build smarter machine learning/AI applications that are fast and scalable.
Seldon: An open, enterprise-grade machine learning platform that adds intelligence to organizations.
SigOpt: Run experiments and make better products with less trial and error.
Scaled Inference: Cloud based models and an inference engine to help in model selection.
OpenCV: Open source computer vision, a library of programming functions aimed mainly at computer vision.

Artificial Intelligence For Healthcare:

Enlitic: Deep learning for healthcare and data driven medicine.
Metamind.io: Automatic image recognition with many use cases, including medicine.
Zebra Medical Vision: Closing the gaps between research and result for patients with data and AI.
Deep Genomics: Machine learning and AI transforming precision medicine, genetic testing, diagnostics and therapies.
Atomwise: Using AI and analytics to predict medicines and discover drugs.
Flatiron.com: AI and Machine Learning delivering insights on treatments.

Artificial Intelligence For Robotics:

Mttr.net: Building flying vehicles powered by intelligent software.
Skycatch: Software for fully autonomous aerial systems.
IdentifiedTech: Industrial mapping drone automation.

Artificial Intelligence For Space:

SpaceKnow: Using AI to track global economic trends from Space.
OrbitalInsight: Space trends for understanding global issues.

Artificial Intelligence For Marketing and Customer Interaction:

DigitalGenius: Computer driven conversation with customers in ways that scale and serve.
Conversica: AI to help you find your next customer, including automated email conversations to qualify leads.

We know this is not a complete list. Please let us know who you think we should include. Contact us here.

For more see:

What should I know about blockchain?

What artificial intelligence tools are really useful

How can I have a career in data science?

How can I select a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)?

How can I stop ransomware?

How can our military use advanced technology smartly?

How can we improve cybersecurity?

Track the most disruptive technologies by diving into our categorized index:

Artificial Intelligence Companies – A fast overview of Artificial Intelligence companies we believe are poised to cause the most positive disruption in the enterprise.

Big Data Companies – Reference to the greatest, most disruptive Big Data companies in the tech ecosystem.

Business Intelligence Companies – We assess these to be the Business Intelligence Companies most impactful for delivering real decision advantage.

Cybersecurity Companies – We apply our deep expertise in cybersecurity to assessing the best across multiple categories including:

Cloud Computing Companies – We include both platform and software as a service providers, capturing only the most innovative and disruptive.

Collaborative Tool Companies – These are the firms that help humans connect to humans to create, manage and lead.

Infrastructure Companies – Critical enterprise foundations for business agility.

IoT Companies – Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things are here. How do you manage them?

Mobile Companies – Help manage, configure, secure and optimize these very powerful capabilities.

Robotics Companies – Including innovations in Robotic Process Automation, Drones, and industrial robotics.

Services Companies – We only track a few, the ones we really know well.

Tech Titans – These are the big players. We track the tech titans closely since their capabilities change continuously.

VC, PE and Finance Companies – Keeping an eye on the investors can give indications of coming developments.

You can also use our topical pages to get up to speed quickly on the current status of the major megatrends. See our pages on Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics, Internet of Things, Cybersecurity and Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

We also provide special pages focused on high interest topics, including Science Fiction, Entertainment, Cyber War, Tech Careers, Training and Education and Tech Tips.

CTOvision Named One Of The Top 50 Must-Read IT Blogs In The US

Bob Gourley December 17, 2015

We are very proud to announce that CTOvision has just been named to BizTech Magazine‘s list of the 50 Must-Read IT Blogs.

In their words:

For the past four years, BizTech has recognized the best and brightest IT blogs in business and we’re proud to present this year’s list of 50 Must-Read IT Blogs.

With the help of our readers during the nominations round and through some good old fashioned sleuthing on the Internet, we believe we’ve pulled together an all-star list of blogs. Some of the names on the list will be familiar, as they’ve appeared on previous Must-Read IT lists, but most are new, fresh and interesting faces.

The blogs selected this year cut across various industries and even IT roles. Some of our blogs are hyperfocused in one industry, such as retail, sports or manufacturing. Others are focused on specific technology topics, such as networking or security. Some of the blogs on our list are perfect for system administrators while others will appeal to IT managers, such as CIOs and chief technology officers. In short, there’s something here for everyone.

Regarding CTOvision in particular they write:

CTO Vision

Offering context to CTOs, CIOs, CISOs and data scientists, this blog discusses the relationship between regulatory compliance and security, big news in the federal technology landscape and the business impact of cloud solutions, big data and other technologies.

MUST-READ POST: This post, which looks ahead to the future of enterprise technology, including artificial intelligence and interactive advertising displays.

Follow: @ctovision | Read the blog: ctovision.com

Thanks friends at BizTechMagazine, we appreciate the kind words. It was an honor to have been nominated by our readers and a greater honor to have been voted into this list.

We take our writing very seriously and seek to inform an audience in need of early warning on tech disruptions, and plan on continuing this throughout 2015. Please take a moment and ensure you are on the correct distributions for our newsletters and alerts. Do that here: CTOvision Newsletters

New Drone Is Both A Submersible and UAV: Think of the use cases of this incredible breakthrough

Bob Gourley December 10, 2015

The video at this link and embedded below shows a drone that can fly and maneuver underwater. A new type of drone that has never existed before. it is a rare vehicle that can operate in multiple environments. Watch as it transitions from water to air and flies and then transitions back. Imagine the missions that can be done by this new robot, both in government and across multiple sectors of the economy.

This is just a first prototype, but it is enough to get us all thinking. We should, unfortunately, also think about what bad actors will do with technologies like this so we can mitigate those threats. The bad guys will still be with us in the future.

But the bottom line here: The positive benefits of this new style of robot are incredibly virtuous and we should all be thinking of ways we can leverage these great new capabilities to the benefit of our enterprises and society.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and NASA Teaming On Advanced Humanoid Robot

Bob Gourley November 19, 2015

NASA has announced that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory( CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions to Mars and beyond.

You need to see this thing to believe it. Check it out in the video at this link and embedded below:

A group led by CSAIL principal investigator Russ Tedrake will develop algorithms for the robot, known as “Valkyrie” or “R5,” as part of NASA’s upcoming Space Robotics Challenge, which aims to create more dexterous autonomous robots that can help or even take the place of humans “extreme space” missions. (NASA’s challenge is divided into a virtual competition using robotic simulations, and a physical competition using the robot.)

This is an incredibly strong, super-hero robot. Very capable, very strong, self contained. Thankfully it is a good robot.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: Great Science Fiction Full of Thought Provoking Visions Of Our Near Future

Bob Gourley October 31, 2015

The-Future-City Ready Player One is great science fiction set in the very near future. It is well done drama that leverages totally realistic visions of what technology is rapidly evolving to. Imagine a world where virtual reality and global connectivity enables universal access to high quality education. Incredible. Awesome. And achievable by us if we put our minds to it. I love visions like this.

The book does not paint our future as a wonderland for all, for most it seems the new VR is the greatest thing in their lives. I’m hoping that is not the future we build, but for this drama it works.

The book does a great job introducing many of the ethical consideration people are already encountering in today’s high tech world were issues of big business, personal privacy, war, peace, healthcare, wealth and poverty are all impacted by our new technologies. It describes situations and a technological environment I believe to be very realistic if you consider the current capabilities of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and mobility.

There are also plenty of lessons for cybersecurity professionals, including an interesting plot element involving an insider threat.

I highly recommend Ready Player One for any technologist. But I wonder, could it be that I like it so much because of the many references to the video games of my youth? Might it be that those from the generations younger than mine might not be so entertained? Please give it a read and let me know what you think.

Want to learn about the coming Internet of Things? Read about the Victorian Internet

The Global Cyber Alliance Appoints Philip Reitinger as its First President and CEO

The Attack We Have Long Predicted Just Occurred: Highly destructive cyber attacks drop a power grid