Friday 20 May 2016

Structure News: Why Google thinks it has a winning hand

STRUCTURE EVENTS Newsletter
 
Where Birds Will Never Interrupt Your Conference Experience
May 20, 2016 / by Tom Krazit
This week, we'll talk about Israel's plans for a Silicon Desert (of sorts), Docker's week at OSCON, and Google's big nerdy concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater.
STRUCTURE NEWS
We’re continuing to add great advisers and speakers for Structure Security this September, with Oren Falkowitz of Area1 Security (pictured) joining the mix. We're particularly interested in discussing the social engineering problem of security with Oren: you can equip your people with the most secure network and best training, and fall peril to the most basic of phishing attacks nonetheless. Tickets will go on sale soon, so if you’re interested in getting a reminder from us when they hit the market, head on over here.

And a brief programming note: I’m taking a week off next week to attend a friend’s wedding in Hawaii, a hardship I’m undertaking out of duty. So there won’t be a newsletter next week, but make sure to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for Structure updates.
INDUSTRY NEWS
HOW ISRAEL IS TURNING PART OF THE NEGEV DESERT INTO A CYBER CITY
Some of the most influential and ground-breaking security companies have roots in Israel, and the nation continues to produce security professionals and technology at an amazing rate. The Washington Post takes a long look at Israeli government efforts to bring its array of security and technology talent together in a new city in the desert that it hopes will improve its already-formidable information security abilities.

RANSOMWARE MAKER TESLACRYPT SHUTS DOWN AFTER RELEASING MASTER KEY

Ransomware is a scary and growing problem that we’ll definitely talk about at Structure Security, but there was a little good news this week: TeslaCrypt released a master key allowing those affected by its ransomware to break out, Techcrunch reports. It’s probably not a huge consolation to those affected by ransomware, but it does show that a fix could be relatively easy in many cases if the perpetrators can be discovered early enough.

IBM’S OPTICAL STORAGE IS 50 TIMES FASTER THAN FLASH

Flash memory has been a boon to mobile computing because of its power consumption and stability, but it’s pretty slow for something named “flash.” Engadget reports that IBM has made a breakthrough with super-fast phase-change memory that increases the amount of data that type of memory can hold, which should help bring down costs over time to compete with flash.

CHINA QUIETLY TARGETS US TECH COMPANIES IN SECURITY REVIEWS

Remember when Congress threw a fit over potential security issues with Huawei routers and Lenovo computers in government applications? China is returning the favor and upping the ante, according to The New York Times, requiring U.S. companies to certify some capabilities of their products, even those destined for consumers.

DOCKER OPENS CODE BEHIND NATIVE LAPTOP APPS

Oscon seemed a little quieter this year than in the past, but Docker’s Solomon Hykes delivered a keynote address in which he addressed the concerns of some developers that Docker was too difficult to use on Macs and other laptops. Given that Docker’s whole reason for being is to making spinning up containers as easy as possible, the company decided to really focus on improving those native apps and has now released portions of that work as open-source code, according to ITNews.

HOW FACEBOOK BLOCKS BAD CODE FROM THE OUTSET

With over 1 billion daily users, Facebook’s apps and sites have the potential to cause all kinds of havoc if bugs or security holes make to production. The Parallax looks inside Facebook’s code review process to see how the company audits code for security problems before an array of hackers -- both good and bad -- have a chance to find holes.
BIG PICTURE
Google is in one of the most interesting positions in technology as the cloud and mobile computing trends mature. It controls one of the world’s two main mobile operating systems, enjoys one of the world’s most prominent web presences, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, and is clearing a path for other companies to rent its computing infrastructure and tech expertise.

Rivals to Google (or Alphabet, whatever) can’t match that combo: Facebook has a huge audience and AI smarts, but just torpedoed developer relations by closing Parse and doesn’t control a mobile platform. Microsoft has AI chops and cloud ambitions but has had mixed results in mobile and on the web. Apple is still selling boatloads of the most popular consumer tech product ever, but still fumbles about the web while its AI research appears to be guarded like a state secret. And Amazon has the cloud and the web customers, but has also had mixed success with mobile and seems behind this particular group when it comes to AI research.

Google I/O, the company’s annual showcase of its worldview, offered several examples this week of why Google continues to show early critics that it was a one-trick pony a thing or two. Everybody mentioned above will continue to play a huge role in technology, to be quite clear, but the potential for overlap between Google’s projects is extremely interesting.

Google announced (or previewed):

-- a custom-built chip for machine learning that it will offer to cloud customers

-- a strategy in which it will approach cloud customers as a backup alternative to AWS, not as a zero-sum competition

-- an expansion of its Firebase developer platform, which received the biggest cheers of anyone gathered at the Shoreline Arena since the last Bridge School benefit

-- and a mission to put its AI research into literally everything Google builds, which could be amazing, terrifying, or both

Ambitious keynote proposals are part and parcel of the tech industry, and it will be very difficult for Google to execute on such a wide variety of projects to define the future of computing. Still, it’s easy to forget how broad a company Google is; even if Google-run projects don’t wind up at the top of the heap, it’s pretty obvious that Google is working on the right problems holding back the evolution of tech.

Image courtesy Flickr user gilipollastv cc 2.0
 
 
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