Independent research Jamila Kaya, in cooperation with Cisco-owned Duo Security, helped uncover approximately 500 Chrome extensions that were uploading private data from millions of users.
Kaya used Duo Securityâs CRXcavatorâan automated tool designed specifically to help assess Chrome extensionsâ to âuncover a large scale campaign of copycat Chrome extensions that infected users and exfiltrated data through malvertising while attempting to evade fraud detection on the Google Chrome Web Store.â Initially, Kaya discovered 70 malicious extensions being used by 1.7 million users. Kaya and Duo Security notified Google, who went on to find an additional 430 similar extensions.
âIn the case reported here, the Chrome extension creators had specifically made extensions that obfuscated the underlying advertising functionality from users,â wrote Kaya and Duo Securityâs Jacob Rickerd. âThis was done in order to connect the browser clients to a command and control architecture, exfiltrate private browsing data without the users knowledge, expose the user to risk of exploit through advertising streams, and attempt to evade the Chrome Web Storeâs fraud detection mechanisms.â
Google quickly removed all 500 extensions, and implemented new policies to make it harder for these type of extensions to reappear. As Duo Security recommends, individuals should periodically review the extensions theyâre using and delete any they donât recognize or no longer use.
Popular news aggregator Flipboard has announced a new video aggregation service, according to a company press release.
Flipboard has carved out a market for itself as one of the leading news aggregators. It was originally released exclusively for the iPad in 2010, and was one of the apps that helped showcase the platformâs potential. Over the years, it has grown, acquired rival Zite and continued to evolve.
With the latest announcement, Flipboard is expanding to curated videos on a range of topics and interests in a premium, ad-free format. According to the companyâs post, âFlipboard TV is a curated video service that will be available inside Flipboard, featuring professionally-produced content across a variety of topical areas, including channels devoted to News, Business, Politics, Entertainment, and Technology. For those interested in entertainment, you can enjoy videos from sources such as Variety, US Weekly, and Rolling Stone. If youâre looking for business videos, we have content from Barronâs, Bloomberg Media, The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and more; the Politics channel will deliver videos from The Recount and others; and local news will include KCRA (Sacramento, Calif.), WESH (Orlando, Fla.) and KCCI (Des Moines, Iowa.)â
The service will be available for a three-month free trial, and cost $2.99 per month after that. Initially, the service is launching exclusively on the Samsung Galaxy S20.
âSamsung continues to innovate to make your life and the things you love to do easier and better. Bringing Flipboard TV into the Galaxy experience gives people a new way to unlock high-quality short-form video, from their smartphone,” said Ignacio de Mingo, Samsung Electronics America senior director and head of loyalty platforms. “As Flipboard takes its next leap in content discovery, we’re thrilled that Flipboard TV will be exclusively available on the Galaxy S20 line at launch.”
âDigital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time,â says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. McDermott says there are three things that any c-suite executives will tell you:
We have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty.
Employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war.
Step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses how digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time in an interview on CNBC:
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time
Now Iâm at ServiceNow and I’m so excited about this cloud future and digital transformation. I have been all over the world and met hundreds of customers in the last three months. Digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time. There are basically three things that any c-suite executives will tell you. One, we have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty. Two, employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war. And three, step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
ServiceNow is the platform that essentially is the platform of all platforms. Every environment in the enterprise today is a heterogeneous environment. We are that cross-platform integration engine of the 21st-century economy which is why ServiceNow is growing faster than all of the companies in the cloud.
Youâve Got To Move Everything To a Modern Cloud Architecture
Here’s the root cause of the problem (of executives hesitating on digitization). It took 50 years to build the chaos, the complexity that exists in these enterprises. When you’re talking to these executives they don’t know what to do. That’s because they don’t know how to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they’re not going to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they are not going to did their way out of this mess. These systems of record will stay there for long periods of time.Â
A system of innovation, a system of action, over these systems of record (is what is needed), where you can integrate the data into a new generation workflow in the cloud. Workflow designed experiences can take the mess and move it into a modern cloud architecture so they can execute their mission. The light bulbs go on when they see the solution. Unfortunately, and sadly, the vendors who got them there in the first place are telling them to buy new messes and add it on to the old mess. You have got to leave that old mess alone, put a tourniquet on it, and move everything to a modern cloud architecture, a modern workflow.
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time, Says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott
âWe’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage,â says Equinix CEO Charles Meyers. âThe reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds.â
Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix, discusses their huge under the radar role in facilitating the massive digital transformation in progress with companies worldwide. Meyers was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Thereâs A Very Deep Demand Pool For Data Centers
We continue to see a really strong set of underlying secular demand drivers for the business. We’re seeing real strength in the business globally right now. Broadly, we’ve seen the sector respond very well. We think there’s a very deep demand pool for data centers. I do think that Equinix plays a very unique role in the market and our differentiated position is allowing us to even outperform relative to our peers. Public cloud adoption is a major catalyst for our business. As enterprises are adopting public cloud and looking at hybrid and multi-cloud as their architecture of choice we’re seeing really strong demand.
We may not be a household name but I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re probably impacting the lives of millions of consumers on a day to day basis working with (many big-name companies such as Salesforce and Netflix). We play a very important role in terms of interconnecting our customers sometimes to public cloud providers, sometimes to SAAS providers like Salesforce, sometimes to other members of their supply chain, and sometimes to networks. A really big part of our legacy and history has been interconnecting people to networks. The interconnection story is a really central piece of the Equinix story.
Equinix Is The Best Representation Of The Digital Edge
Equinix is in fact the best representation of the digital edge today. That is the point at which people are interconnecting their private infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure, with networks, and with other members of their supply chain. When you hear about edge, oftentimes that edge is in fact within an Equinix facility and being interconnected over private interconnection facilities that are facilitated by Equinix.
Typically, when inside one of our facilities, we’re unlike some wholesalers which might have one or a very small number of customers, we tend to have a larger number of customers in any individual facility. They are distributed across the site typically in private cages or sometimes in shared caged environments or shared rack environments and they have their equipment. They’re all obviously very secured and something that’s available just for them to access. But they’re all across the facility. You typically wouldn’t be able to see who the customer is because they are very sensitive about that from a security standpoint.
Firms Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage
We’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage. The reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. So we’re seeing strong demand. I think the trade tensions, etc. probably affects some level of sentiment but we have not seen that impact the demand profile for our business.
What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds. They’re using a variety of public clouds to house some of their workloads. So that hybrid multi-cloud environment is really the architecture of choice for enterprise customers of all sorts. Retail is actually an incredibly strong segment for us. That architecture of choice, hybrid and multi-cloud, is a major driver for Equinixâs business.
Business Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage – Equinix CEO Charles Meyers
âMobile is coming to the enterprise, finally,â says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe. âItâs been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way.â
Our customers are very excited about mobile coming to the enterprise. Itâs been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. You can show a young new employee, a millennial, that you are in fact a modern company that helps get them onboard and productive quickly.Â
Also, the Now Mobile app which will allow employees to get their questions answered, problems reported and then dealt with, and get information. All my approvals are now in one place where I can check them. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way. Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally.
We feel very good about our growth. We feel very good about our customer and very good about our prospects. We are just focusing and executing so our customers get those great experiences.
We Feel Very Good About the Relations We Are Building
We now have 766 customers that are a million dollars and greater. We signed 14 customers that are a million dollars and greater in the quarter. Thatâs just symptomatic of the fact that we now work with 75 percent of the global 500. We are increasingly a strategic partner with those customers. Of our top 20 deals, 17 had three or more products. We feel very good about the relationships that we are building with our largest customers, which are the worldâs largest companies and governments.Â
Our relationship with Microsoft is a very good one. We are initially focusing on US federal business where Microsoft has a strong presence as do we. We have a huge federal business and our datacenters have a certain security clearance. Microsoft Azure has the highest security clearance. Rather than us trying to replicate that, we are going to partner with them to take advantage of that Azure capability and jointly call on US federal customers.
We are doing the same with federal customers in Australia and increasingly we will look at other government markets. We have 20 different product integrations with Microsoft and a long history with them. We think there is a lot of shared opportunity together.Â
RPO Is the Best Forward-Looking Indication of Our Business
We do think RPO is a very good indication and probably the best forward-looking indication of our business because it demonstrates what kind of revenue you can expect going forward. Our current RPO grew 35 percent in the quarter. We feel very good about the outlook and future of our business. We raised guidance for the full year, both on revenue and billings. We see a lot of opportunity and we have a lot of strong momentum. We are focused on building those customer relationships that drive that growth.
Mobile Is Finally Coming To the Enterprise, Says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe
âEvery company is going through a massive digital customer transformation,â says SalesforceCEO Marc Benioff. âWhen you see this transformation happening it’s just incredible to watch. I mean this is as big as Y2K was for the tech industry. Every company is going through it. Every one of these major transformations is exactly that, it begins and ends with the customer.â
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, discusses their blowout earnings quarter and how the massive digital customer transformation is driving their growth in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Massive Digital Customer Transformation
Every customer is going through a massive digital customer transformation. When you see this transformation happening it’s just incredible to watch. I mean this is as big as Y2K was for the tech industry. Every company is going through it. Every one of these major transformations is exactly that, it begins and ends with the customer.
The federal government was one of the most exciting things that happened in the quarter. It wasn’t just the USDA. It was also the Department of Education and the Department of Interior. It was many departments actually. They’re going through a huge digital transformation in the U.S. federal government and Salesforce has been able to offer many of those agencies is the rapid successful digital transformation that they need. We even had a 10,000 person event in Washington, D.C. during the quarter. That continues to be a fantastic growth area for us.
We’re number one in CRM which is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. Every company in every industry and every government is recreating themselves with their customer. This is what’s driving our growth. It’s pure and simple.
Mark Benioff added these comments during the earnings call:
Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends With the Customer
Just last month, IDC Worldwide Software Tracker ranked Salesforce the number one CRM for the sixth year in a row. And I’ll tell you that is more important than ever, especially so many of our customers are going through these tremendous digital transformations. We all know every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer. And when I’m with these CEOs all over the world, this is really front and center in their mind. It’s probably as exciting to them and it’s important to them as it was to CIOs, who are buying for Y2K, which is almost 20 years ago. I think the digital transformation remains just a huge growth opportunity for our entire industry.
Still In the Early Days of the Digital Transformation
Well, there are many, many companies in the very early days. In fact, if you talk to one of our largest consulting partners, they’ll tell you less than 20% of their strategic customers have been engaged in the digital transformation, but there’s a lot of room for them in the marketplace.
So, we have an opportunity here again around this digital transformation and one of the beauties of a product like Trailhead and My Trailhead is helping these companies through their transformation and scale them up with modern technology because the modern worker has to have modern skills. And that’s what Trailhead and My Trailhead really provide the customers. So we really are coming out with an amazing innovation at the right time to satisfy the needs of these customers
Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends With the Customer, Says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
“We’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future,” says Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco. “What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills.”
“I lead our DevNet and technical community and certifications team for Cisco,” says Whaley. “This includes everything about helping developers use our APIs. We do a lot of work on the paths that you can take to build the skills to learn about Cisco technology, to learn about software skills, to learn about automation, and then prove and test those skills by earning some certifications.”
Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco, says that the engineer of the future combines infrastructure, software, and automation skills:
How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
I come from a software development background. I’m working with a lot of DevOps, network engineering teams, infrastructure engineering teams, and we’re really looking at how all these skill sets have been evolving over time. What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills. Whether those skill sets are combined in one person or combined within a team of engineers who have specialties, that’s what it really takes to succeed with the scale, the speed, the agility, and the distributed nature of applications that we’re seeing today.
We’ve really seen this come into effect with COVID and the way that companies have had to respond really quickly. Automation came to the forefront as being very important. Companies that had at least a start on those skill sets have been able to respond more quickly. Now we’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future.
New Job Roles Are Emerging
Part of that has a lot to do with new job roles that are coming out of that. These business drivers of speed and agility and scale are driving things like the need for CI/CD pipeline for more than just your software, even for your networks, for your infrastructure. Out of that are these new job roles emerging, things like a Network Automation Engineer or DevSecOps Engineer, bringing security strongly into your DevOps flow.
That’s part of what we’re learning from the DevNet community and what we’re working with the DevNet community on is how people are building the skills to go after those new job roles. There are a lot of opportunities and a lot of fun stuff to learn.
Cisco’s Mandy Whaley Explains How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
Gizmodo is warning of a new scam involving text messages posing as FedEx tracking notifications.
Android and iOS users (including this writer) have received text messages including what purports to be a FedEx tracking number and a link to set delivery preferences. Clicking on the link, however, goes to a fake Amazon listing and survey.
As Gizmodo highlights, this is where the scam takes a turn. âIf you proceed any further, the survey will then ask users for a range of personal information including their credit card information, which for anyone who hadnât already started feeling suspicious, should set off serious alarms.
âApparently, by entering in your address and credit card number and agreeing to pay a shipping fee for your âprize,â you are also signing up for 14-day trial that turns into a $100 recurring subscription for a range of products, which you will continue to get billed for every month until you figure out how to cancel the payment.â
One way to spot the scam is the alphanumeric nature of the supposed tracking numbers. FedEx tracking numbers are almost always exclusively numbers, whereas the fake ones include letters as well. Similarly, FedEx tracking numbers are 12 or 15 digits long, as opposed to the 10-digit fake ones.
Police departments are warning citizens of the scam and encouraging individuals to check any tracking numbers they receive directly on FedExâs website, rather than following a link in a text message.
Microsoft has announced in a blog post that a database containing 250 million service records was left exposed due to a configuration error.
According to security firm Comparitech, a âsecurity research team led by Bob Diachenko uncovered five Elasticsearch servers, each of which contained an apparently identical set of the 250 million records. Diachenko immediately notified Microsoft upon discovering the exposed data, and Microsoft took swift action to secure it.â
Diachenko is a well-known cybersecurity professional Comparitech collaborates with. Diachenko praised Microsoftâs quick response to his findings.
âI immediately reported this to Microsoft and within 24 hours all servers were secured. I applaud the MS support team for responsiveness and quick turnaround on this despite New Yearâs Eve.â
Microsoftâs own investigation continued, leading to the blog post today detailing what went wrong.
âOur investigation has determined that a change made to the databaseâs network security group on December 5, 2019 contained misconfigured security rules that enabled exposure of the data.â
The company said that the vast majority of data had already been cleared of any identifiable personal information, although there was some data meeting specific criteria that may not have been redacted.
âAs part of Microsoftâs standard operating procedures, data stored in the support case analytics database is redacted using automated tools to remove personal information. Our investigation confirmed that the vast majority of records were cleared of personal information in accordance with our standard practices. In some scenarios, the data may have remained unredacted if it met specific conditions.â
Most importantly, the company says it has found no evidence of any malicious use of the exposed database.
“The acquisition today of Fiix is a really exciting one,” says Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret. “It spans the gap that’s traditionally existed between manually entered keystroke data and real-time data that’s coming from the equipment itself. This helps take maintenance and automation really to a whole new level.”
Fiix Inc. is a privately-held, AI-enabled computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) company. Fiix, founded in 2008, is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
“We’re really taking manufacturing to a whole new level,” added Moret. “We’re taking the traditional operational technology and know-how that’s existed on the plant floor for so many years and we’re marrying that with IT technology and bringing those together. It’s really unlocking a whole new level of productivity across all the industries that we serve.”
Fiixâs cloud-native CMMS creates workflows for the scheduling, organizing, and tracking of equipment maintenance. It connects seamlessly to business systems and drives data-driven decisions. The companyâs revenue grew 70% in 2019 with more than 85% recurring revenue.
âWe believe that the future of industrial asset management is performance-based,â said Tessa Myers, vice president, product management, Software & Control, for Rockwell Automation. âWith the addition of the Fiix platform and expertise, our customers will benefit from a 360-degree view of integrated data across automation, production, and maintenance, helping them to monitor and improve the performance of their assets and optimize how maintenance work is done.â
James Novak, Fiix CEO, said, âFrom the beginning, Fiix has been on a mission to connect maintenance and operations teams to the tools, resources, and technology they need to modernize and join the future of maintenance. Joining Rockwell Automation will allow us to help even more companies modernize maintenance and increase asset performance by connecting to industry-leading data, automation, and production systems.â
The company says that the addition of Fiix directly aligns with Rockwell Automationâs software strategy.
Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret also discussed their involvement with COVID treatments and the vaccine:
“We’re involved with virtually all of the manufacturers who are working on the treatments and the tests and the vaccines around the world for the COVID virus. We’re really helping them and helping the world to recover. So we’re involved in the formulation, the packaging, the tracing, and you obviously have to do this at unbelievable scale to be able to meet the need.”
Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level
âWhen people look at what’s happening with Amazon trying to get into their businesses, the need to transform is also front and center for every c-level executive,â says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. âGiven that Adobe’s been through our own transformation and has software they want to hear from us and they want to experience that same benefit that we have been able to see.â
When we talk about helping businesses transform we do every aspect of it. We help them create that experience and help them understand how to attract customers. That last mile of transacting with customers is so critical. Adobe was a company that actually innovated tremendously but we had a two-tier distribution channel. We have two businesses. We have the creative business and we have the enterprise business. If you look at what we’ve been able to accomplish in the long run and the two tailwinds that we have, we continue to be really optimistic about Adobe’s prospects.
When we completely moved to the cloud we recognized that every other company would go through what we did. Namely, how do you engage with your customers digitally? Do you understand how to acquire them and how do they use your software? I think sharing our learnings with other people gives us incredible credibility in the enterprise and we learn from these customers.
Creating a Real-Time Customer Profile is So Critical
In enterprise software, this third generation, which is all about customer experience management, I think it’s the companies who recognize that you have to partner with an entire ecosystem to create this real-time customer profile that’s absolutely so critical. That’s why our partnerships, whether they be with ServiceNow or Microsoft or the other cloud kings is so critical in enabling our customers to completely transform themselves.
What we have been able to do is create this real-time customer profile. People are really within an enterprise saying how do I create native applications? ServiceNow is clearly the leader in IT Service Management. What John (Donahoe) has done is truly special. I think partnering with them to enable IT professionals within an enterprise to use Adobe’s Customer Experience Management with ServiceNowâs IT Service Management, that was a natural.
The Need to Transform is Front and Center for Every C-Level Executive
Design and creativity have never been more important. Everything has a screen. So people are creating content, whether that’s a car, whether that’s a retail experience, whether it’s a basketball stadium. Adobe is the content provider that enables all of these screens to be delivered with incredible content. Given design is more important and given mobile devices are in every single place, that’s a tremendous tailwind.
Secondly, when people look at what’s happening with Amazon trying to get into their businesses, the need to transform is also front and center for every c-level executive. Given that Adobe’s been through our own transformation and has software they want to hear from us and they want to experience that same benefit that we have been able to see.
Iâve talked about how video is explosive. II think what Disney is doing both with their own service as well as with more control of Hulu is really saying people are consuming more and more content digitally. So providing the analytics for that, providing the digital rights management for that, the right ability to audience segment in terms of who you are attracting, a lot of that is what Adobe powers. This is not just for Disney but for frankly all the major media companies in the world.
Adobe Powering Big CPG Companies Through a Digital Transformation
The big CPG companies are going through the following question. They have sometimes hundreds of millions or billions of people using their products and they just don’t necessarily know who they are. Giving them that insight into how they create this incredible customer database, how they understand usage patterns, and how they understand what these people want. If we can provide that insight to companies then all the CPG companies can recognize that this direct relationship will enable them to innovate at a faster pace.
For example, what Unilever is trying to do is really say we have this tremendous distribution network but what they’ve tried to do even with Dollar Shave Club is really say, âHow do we create an incredible customer database?â But the same thing is happening across Colgate or Procter & Gamble. We are partnering very heavily with Unilever as they embark on this digital transformation and understanding customer patterns and customer sentiments across the world.
The Need to Transform is Front and Center for Every C-Level Executive, Says Adobe CEO
Security firm Sophos has once again warned of the dangers of âfleecewareâ on the Google Play Store.
Fleeceware is a term for apps âwhere users could be charged excessive amounts of money for apps if they donât cancel a âsubscriptionâ before the short free trial window closes.â Sophos had previously warned of the dangers of fleeceware but, rather than improving, the problem has only gotten worse.
Following Sophosâ initial report, Google removed the apps that were highlighted, but unscrupulous developers have continued to create and release new fleeceware apps. In fact, âthe total number of installations of these apps, as reported on Googleâs own Play pages, is high: nearly 600 million in total, across fewer than 25 apps; A few of the apps on the store appear to have been installed on 100 million+ devices, which would rival some of the top, legitimate app publishers on Google Play.â
To make matters worse, uninstalling the app does not cancel the subscription. Many publishers of these apps have a complicated process for canceling, designed to extend the âsubscriptionâ as long as possible. Sophos recommends keeping copies of all correspondence with one of these publishers so it can be shared with Google if needed.
600 million downloads spread out over less than 25 apps is a shocking number of malicious downloads and illustrates the need for Google to do a better job of vetting apps. Apple is often criticized for its âwalled gardenâ approach but, in light of Sophosâ report, Appleâs approach doesnât look too bad.
If you are an Android user, thereâs the list of known fleeceware apps, courtesy of Sophos:
âInnovation is the key,â says Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk. âAnything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.â
Darius Adamczyk, CEO and Chairman at Honeywell, discusses how the company is using innovation and technology to drive growth in an interview on Bloomberg:
Honeywell Digital Makes Us a More Contemporary Digital Company
As we always said my number one priority as CEO was to drive organic growth, but we never say we’re going to give up on our margin expansion. We do it through a combination, both commercial levers, which is managing our mix, and always introducing new products, which bring more value to customers. But also not forgetting our roots, which is driving productivity. With the number of ERPs we have and the kind of complexity we have in our supply chain, Honeywell Digital, which is going to make us a much more contemporary digital company, we have plenty of levers for productivity as well.
Honeywell Digital really has three primary elements. First is data governance, which is standard across all our various businesses. We’ve done over 80 acquisitions in the last 15 years so we have a lot of disparity. Then there are common processes, which is we want to run our businesses the same way in a very consistent manner. We have some pockets of excellence, but those have some inconsistency. Finally, all integrated into a common IT platform. Just to give an example, we had well over 1,500 different software applications before we started. We had over 150 ERP systems. It’s just very difficult to run a company efficiently and enable us to really make good data-based decisions. Honeywell digital is really all about enabling that.
Anything We Do In Honeywell, Innovation is Always the Key
Warehouse automation, which we started in 2016 with our Intelligrated acquisition. It’s been just a terrific business growing strong double-digit. We also made another acquisition called Transnorm which added to that technology in Europe in Q4 last year. We were planning on growing it organically, but also we’re looking to enhance our offerings, so we’re looking for inorganic opportunities as well. Innovation is the key. Anything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.
Amazon is a big customer but we have a lot of big customers. I wouldn’t say it’s a predominant customer in that business. Just about everybody is looking into ecommerce because with a lot todayâs retail you really have basically two options. One option is to enhance the in-store experience which a lot of retailers are doing. The other one is to drive ecommerce. We think that this trend is going to continue. Although I would say it’s in the middle innings in the US, it’s just beginning in Europe. We think we have a huge opportunity in Europe, India, and some of the other overseas markets.
We have a very active venture capital fund and we’ve made about six investments in the last six months which is augmenting our technology plays. So although we haven’t made any big acquisitions, other than Transnorm in Q4, we are continuing to invest through our venture fund and we’re deploying capital that way. It’s been a terrific story for us in 3D printing for instance, particularly for our aerospace business. For a lot of the slow-moving parts we’re trying to basically get a new part certified and three printing per day. That’s our objective. Our aerospace businesses have made tremendous progress in achieving that and it’s really helping both for our inventory and on-time delivery for a lot of our aftermarket customers.
Itâs Important For Teachers To Be More Effective in STEM Education
Regarding the workforce, education is the key and particularly STEM education. Honeywell is a big believer in that. Not only do we develop a lot of our young people that we bring into the company but we also spend a lot of money and time on developing teachers. Itâs important for teachers to be more effective in STEM education. It’s something that we’re going to be supporting going forward even on a broader scale because that’s the way to differentiate our company.
We’re always going to be differentiated by technology and we want to bring the brightest and the best. We want to make sure that it’s a competitive issue, not just here in the US, but everywhere we hire people, and we hire people just about everywhere. We have engineers in the US, China, India, everywhere around the globe. I would say lately we’ve actually been very much on the hiring string. When you grow 8% that creates a lot of opportunities to hire a lot of people particularly in the area of technology and engineering and software.
At Honeywell Innovation is Always the Key, Says CEO
Verizon has announced the launch of OneSearch, a brand-new search engine focused on privacy, according to a press release.
Privacy is increasingly becoming a major factor for tech companies, governments and users alike. The European Unionâs Genera Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law went into effect in 2018. As of January 1, 2020, California implemented the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPR), the most comprehensive privacy law in the U.S. The increased regulation, not to mention increasing consumer demand, has created both challenges and opportunities for tech companies.
Verizonâs solution seems to be a search engine, powered by Bing, that caters toward privacy-conscious users. According to Verizonâs press release, âavailable for free today on desktop and mobile web at www.onesearch.com, OneSearch doesn’t track, store, or share personal or search data with advertisers, giving users greater control of their personal information in a search context. Businesses with an interest in security can partner with Verizon Media to integrate OneSearch into their privacy and security products, giving their customers another measure of control.â
The search engine has additional advanced features, such as temporary link sharing. When Advanced Privacy Mode is enabled, any links to search results will expire in one hour.
Users will still see ads when searching, but they will not be customized or based on the person’s search or browsing habits.
âTo allow for a free search engine experience, OneSearch is an ad-supported platform. Ads will be contextual, based on factors like search keywords, not cookies or browsing history. For example, if someone searches for âflights to Paris,â they may see ads for travel booking sites or airlines that travel to Paris.â
OneSearch does use some personal information. For example, a personâs IP address does provide general location information that can be used to provide location-specific results. Personal data is obfuscated and is never shared with search partners.
While it is always nice to see tech giants embrace privacy, itâs hard to see the benefits of OneSearch over DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has a long-standing track record of providing private search. As CNET points out, the move is also interesting coming from Verizon Media, the branch of the telecommunications company âthat runs an extensive ad network with more than 70,000 web publishers and apps as customers. While the search engine aims to attract users by turning on privacy features by default, OneSearch will also let Verizon Media hone its ad-matching powers on a search engine it owns. (Verizon also owns the Yahoo search engine.)â
It will be interesting to see what becomes of OneSearch and if it lives up to its promise of respecting peopleâs privacy. In the meantime, most users will probably be better off using DuckDuckGo.
On the heels of Facebookâs announcement it would ban AI-driven deepfakes, but not traditionally created shallow fakes, Reddit has announced a broader and more nuanced policy that demonstrates far more common sense.
Facebookâs policy has already been criticized for not doing enough to combat deepfakes, where images or videos of a person can be manipulated or even superimposed in an effort to show them saying or doing something they are not. While AI-enabled deepfakes are the most convincing, and almost impossible to detect, traditionally generated shallow fakes can be almost as convincing. Facebookâs failure to address the latter leaves the social media platform open to further manipulation.
Reddit, on the other hand, is focusing more on intent than a legalistic âdo this, donât do thatâ approach. A post on the site laid out their approach:
â Do not impersonate an individual or entity in a misleading or deceptive manner.
âReddit does not allow content that impersonates individuals or entities in a misleading or deceptive manner. This not only includes using a Reddit account to impersonate someone, but also encompasses things such as domains that mimic others, as well as deepfakes or other manipulated content presented to mislead, or falsely attributed to an individual or entity. While we permit satire and parody, we will always take into account the context of any particular content.â
As the above statement indicates, satire and parody are safe. Another part of the post makes that even clearer: âThis doesnât apply to all deepfake or manipulated content– just that which is actually misleading in a malicious way. Because believe you me, we like seeing Nic Cage in unexpected places just as much as you do.â
Redditâs approach, especially compared to Facebook, is a refreshing, common sense approach the other social media platforms would do well to follow.
BizJournal is reporting that CloudFlare, after recently raising $525 million in its IPO, has purchased S2 Systems.
CloudFlare is a web infrastructure and security company and âis one of the worldâs largest networks.â The CloudFlare service âprotects websites from all manner of attacks, while simultaneously optimizing performance.â CloudFlare allows websites to scale with demand and ensures high performance with data centers in 200 cities around the world.
S2 creates browser isolation technology. This is a relatively new approach to browser security âthat allows customers to launch browser code in the cloud rather than users’ devices. This technology is designed to be more secure.â As a result, if there is malicious code, the customerâs computers are insulated from the potential attack.
The purchase is a logical addition to CloudFlareâs suite of security tools, and the company had been looking for some time at adding the capability. According to BizJournal, the company had approached a number of startups, as well as Symantec, to explore different options. S2 was the only one that the right blend of performance and security.
âThey have a similar culture and outlook as us. We have an engineering-driven culture where we like to tackle big hard tasks. I think that resonated with S2. We also are interested in making the Internet more accessible to the other half of the world who does not have it. This is part of our larger vision that we share,â CEO Matthew Prince told BizJournalâs Dawn Kawamoto.
In spite of this acquisition, Prince said the company does not plan to go on a purchasing spree, preferring home-grown solutions.
TMZ is reporting that Ring and its parent company, Amazon, are being sued in federal court in California, claiming they have failed to protect users.
Ring made headlines a couple of weeks ago when a number of cameras where hacked. In one particularly disturbing incident, a camera in an 8 year-old girlâs room was hacked, with the hacker talking to her, claiming to be her best friend. There have been other incidents as well, with a woman woken by a hacker shouting at her and a couple subjected to racist comments about their son.
To make matters worse, VICE tested the Ring devices and found their security was abysmal. There was no way to see if anyone else was logged in to the camera, nor was there a log of who had accessed the device in the past. In other words, once a camera is hacked, there is virtually no way of knowing it has been compromised.
The lawsuitâs plaintiff, John Baker Orange, seems to have a similar story as the other hacking incidents. He claims that âsomeone hacked into his outdoor security cameras and started commenting on his kids who were playing basketball … encouraging them to get closer to the camera.â If the claim is true, it could be the earliest known example of Rings being maliciously hacked, as Orange claims the incident occurred last July.
For a company specializing in security hardware, failure to provide basic security measures is beyond abysmalâit is unforgivable. Itâs a safe bet this wonât be the first lawsuit Ring and Amazon face.
According to StreamElements year-end report, Microsoftâs Mixer streaming service grew some 149 percent in 2019, yet still lagged far behind rival Twitch.
Amazonâs Twitch has long dominated online game streaming, with 1,256,000 average concurrent viewers. Over the last couple of years, Microsoft has tried to challenge Twitch with its Mixer streaming service, even scoring some major exclusivity deals. One of the biggest was when Microsoft poached Twitch star Ninja.
While such deals helped Mixer grow, it still only commands a mere 3 percent of the streaming market, as opposed to the 1 percent it had in 2018. The same is true for Facebook Gaming, another streaming platform for gamers. While Twitch did lose market share, it only lost two points going from 75 to 73 percent, leaving it as the overwhelmingly dominant service. Similarly, the second place streaming service, YouTube Gaming, lost a single point, going from 22 to 21 percent.
In spite of the two leaders losing market share, they both registered growth in viewership. YouTube Gaming saw a 16 percent growth rate over 2018, while Twitch registered a solid 20 percent.
According to StreamElements, the platforms cumulatively accounted for a total of 12,731,686,280 hours of viewership in 2019, up from 10,344,857,722 in 2010. In view of this report, two things are clear: viewers appetite for watching video game streaming is voracious; and Microsoft Mixer, as well as Facebook Gaming, have plenty of room to grow.
According to Reuters, a judge has struck down a NYC rule âlimiting how much time drivers for ride-hailing services can spend cruising streets in busy areas of Manhattan without passengers.â
Uber and Lyft filed separate lawsuits challenging a NYC rule that was designed to ease congestion. With ride-sharing vehicles making up nearly a third of peak traffic, the city was attempting to prevent ride-sharing drivers from cruising the streets while waiting for new passengers.
New York State Supreme Court Judge Lyle Frank issued his ruling in the case Uber brought, although he made it clear his ruling covered Lyftâs case as well, calling NYCâs cruising cap rule âarbitrary and capricious.â
The mayorâs office indicated it may fight the ruling however, with a spokeswoman for the mayor saying: âWe put these rules in place to protect hardworking drivers and New Yorkersâand weâll fight to keep them.â
While it may be tempting to watch the latest Star Wars installment from the comfort of home, the International Business Times (IBT) is warning that doing so could be dangerous.
According to the IBT report, security firm Kaspersky Labs has found some 30 fraudulent websites claiming to stream the new film. In reality, the goal of the sites is to capture unsuspecting users credit card information.
The security firm also found 65 malicious files disguised as downloadable copies of the film. The files are actually malware designed to infect the devices they are downloaded on.
According to a Kaspersky researcher: “It is typical for fraudsters and cybercriminals to try to capitalize on popular topics, and ‘Star Wars’ is a good example of such a theme this month.”
As with most things related to cybersecurity, better safe than sorry when it comes to the new film: watch it in theaters or wait for it to be released on DVD or Disney+.
Twitter announced Friday that it has patched a serious vulnerability in the official Twitter client for Android.
According to the announcement on the company’s blog, the bug âcould allow a bad actor to see nonpublic account information or to control your account (i.e., send Tweets or Direct Messages). Prior to the fix, through a complicated process involving the insertion of malicious code into restricted storage areas of the Twitter app, it may have been possible for a bad actor to access information (e.g., Direct Messages, protected Tweets, location information) from the app.â
The company does not have any evidence the vulnerability was actually exploited, but is choosing to error on the side of caution. Twitter is contactingâvia email or the appâany users who could have been exposed and providing instructions on what they should do.
In the meantime, all Android users should update to the latest version, where the vulnerability has been fixed. iOS users are in the clear, as the bug appears to have only impacted the Android client.
