Structure News: What we learned this week at Structure Security

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where Fog Computing Was All Too Real At Structure Security September 30th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the highlights of Structure Security in San Francisco this week, the ongoing push to consolidate Google's cloud strategy, and why the vanguards of artificial intelligence continue to work closely together despite their differences. BIG PICTURE Information security is one of those jobs that will never be done. There will always be hackers that grow in sophistication each year, there will always be undiscovered bugs that can wreak havoc on consumers and businesses, and there will always be a slick-talking salesperson trying to sell magic security beans that wind up causing more problems than they solve. Over two days of conversations with some of the leading minds in the information security world during our first Structure Security conference, what is clear, however, is that tech companies that put security at the heart of their product development culture will have a better chance of avoiding disaster. It's sort of like wearing your seat belt: someday your car will crash, or someone will crash into you, but wearing your seat belt increases the chances that the most painful outcome of such a crash is the phone call with your insurance company. A few highlights stuck out for me: -- The talk by Nathaniel Gleicher of Ilumio on what tech companies can learn from experts in physical security was even better than I thought it would be after my preview earlier this month. -- Machine learning is the new hotness in security, as Stuart McClure of Cylance and our awesome panel of machine-learning security companies made clear. Jay Leek of Blackstone pointed out that machine learning could even erase the huge shortfall of qualified security professionals. -- Security practices in the internet of things are even scarier than we thought, as discussed by Dale Davis of Level3 and Andy Ellis of Akamai, both of whom worked with security journalist Brian Krebs on handling the largest DDoS attack in history. Scott Montgomery of Intel piled on by emphasizing the patching problem with relatively dumb connected devices. -- And Yahoo's Bob Lord weathered the storm created by the disclosure of the largest breach in history with class and aplomb when he could have easily decided to stay out of the public eye as insiders started to dish about Yahoo's security culture and others questioned its declaration that the breach was caused by a state-sponsored hacker. We'll have much more to say about Structure Security 2016, including the release of videos for each session over the next few weeks. Thanks to all the speakers, moderators, sponsors and attendees who made our two days in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge so interesting and informative. STRUCTURE NEWS IT'S ALMOST TIME FOR STRUCTURE 2016 Now that we've secured the internet, it's time to start getting ready for Structure 2016, our flagship cloud computing conference. Structure 2016 will be held November 8th and 9th at the UCSF Mission Bay conference center, and we've already confirmed a number of great speakers including representatives from the three titans of the public cloud (Matt Wood of Amazon Web Services, Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, and Urs Hlzle of Google), Arlette Hart of the FBI, John Donovan of AT&T, and Jay Parikh of Facebook (pictured). Tickets are on sale here. The early bird price lasts through the end of next week, so make sure you reserve your seat now. INDUSTRY NEWS GOOGLE COMBINES CLOUD, CORPORATE SOFTWARE OFFERINGS UNDER GREENE This week Google did what it probably should have done years ago and put all of its enterprise software products -- Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps (now known as G Suite) and a few other things -- under a single leader in Diane Greene. Bloomberg reports that the move is part of the sharpened focus on chasing enterprise computing dollars that arrived with Greene about a year ago. A MORE RESPONSIVE GOVERNMENT: A CONVERSATION WITH WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF DENIS MCDONOUGH The Obama Administration's senioritis is being channeled into improving the federal government's use of technology, which always seems to be at least five years behind what the private sector is using. David Kauffman of The U.S. Digital Service conducted an exit interview on Medium with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on the progress so far and the challenges that remain. FACEBOOK, AMAZON, GOOGLE, IBM, AND MICROSOFT COME TOGETHER TO CREATE THE PARTNERSHIP ON AI I've always been impressed with the collegiality of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence, who work for companies that otherwise hate each other. The five companies in the headline created the Partnership On AI this week, which will preach collaboration and standards across the competitors, according to Techcrunch. MICROSOFT PUSHES ITS THREE PILLARS AT IGNITE: SECURITY, INTELLIGENCE, AND CLOUD Microsoft held its big Ignite conference in Atlanta this week, and Ars Technica reports that Scott Guthrie, coming soon to Structure 2016, laid out the company's priorities for the next few years. Guess what: they're all part of Microsoft's rebalancing toward cloud services under CEO Satya Nadella, and the company showed off several new products at the show. GOOGLE RUSHES IN WHERE AKAMAI FEARS TO TREAD, SHIELDS KREBS AFTER WORLDS WORST DDOS After Akamai decided it could no longer provide free DDoS mitigation services to journalist Brian Krebs in the face of an enormous botnet attack on his website, Google got him back up and running, The Register reports. It used its Project Shield service, normally provided to dissidents in autocratic regimes, to stem the worst DDoS attack yet seen on the internet, created by hijacked IP cameras. MARK ZUCKERBERG SHARES PICTURES FROM FACEBOOK'S COLD, COLD DATA CENTER For some reason, everybody likes data center porn. The Verge reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a few new photos of the company's Swedish data center this week, which while interesting to our crowd, mostly reinforces the point that pictures of rows of servers are kind of boring. QUOTE OF THE WEEK To make computer systems more secure, a company often has to make its products slower and more difficult to use. It was a trade-off Yahoo's leadership was often unwilling to make." -- Nicole Perloth and Vindu Goel, The New York Times Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.