This week’s edition of Bacon Bytes comes to you direct from my fourth cup of coffee. Don’t judge me, it’s been a long week and I’ve got a lot of writing to get done. And it’s snowing. Anyway, let’s recap some events from this past week.
Just when you thought the state of Georgia couldn’t make things worse, they have now decided to make unauthorized pentests a crime. You might recall that the city of Atlanta fell victim to ransomware recently. So, I guess the lesson here is that in Georgia, updates are hard, and it’s now a crime to show them how bad they are at security. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Panera was leaking customer details for eight months before taking action this past week. That’s right, eight months ago they were notified and took no action. And the action they took this week? They simply required a person to log in with a loyalty number in order to access the leaked data. I haven’t seen anything so inept since Equifax. Which makes sense, since the director of security at Panera eight months ago was a senior director at Equifax until 2013. I’m not saying he’s to blame. He left Equifax four years before that breach. But, yeah, disasters seem to follow him around.
AWS announced a new service this week, Secrets Manager, showing their efforts at improving security for the world. They also launched a firewall manager and a certificate manager. This serves as a reminder how AWS and Azure continue to develop products and services already offered by 3rd party providers. I don’t hear any outcries from companies forced out of business, but I suspect it is a matter of time.
Cloudflare rolled out a public DNS this week, promising to make web browsing safer for everyone. Of course, we all know that the most secure system is one that nobody can access. Cloudflare’s choice of 1.1.1.1 has met that requirement, causing issues for just about every piece of hardware out there. I applaud the effort by Cloudflare, but not the execution, and I still question their motives.
If you ever needed to see what Google knows about you, this is the website for you.
Microsoft announced a new certification on Artifical Intelligence. I’ve completed the Data Science and Big Data certifications, and plan on starting this new one as well. These certification programs should be required learning for all data professionals. The future of data is not how data is stored inside of any one database. The future is in how users are able to extract value from the data they already have. These certification programs break down silos, helping everyone to understand what the other team needs.
Here’s a great post from Netflix on The Art and Science of Image Discovery at Netflix. I never thought much about how Netflix picked the still images for their shows, but it makes sense that they would use some machine learning techniques. Just in case you needed an example of a company that knows how to extract value from their data in order to drive additional revenue ($11.6b USD in 2017, in case you were wondering). The next time you hear data scientist isn’t a real job or AI isn’t worth learning about, show them this article.
See you next week!
