Huawei - Security Threat For Many Reasons

The Chinese firm Huawei is the world’s largest manufacturer of networking gear such as base stations and antennas that mobile operators use to run wireless networks. Those networks carry data that are used to help control power grids, financial markets, transport systems, and other parts of countries’ vital infrastructure. The fear is that China’s military and intelligence services could insert software or hardware “back doors” into Huawei’s gear.

Read more here...

Passengers are using Self-Driving Cars in California

Self-driving car startup Zoox won permission Friday to start offering rides to passengers in California. Zoox will submit information to the commission on the number of passenger miles traveled in the test cars and any incidents that occur, along with pollution and safety data.

It's a milestone in the race to make autonomous vehicles safe and comfortable enough to be trusted by lawmakers and the public at large.

Read more...

Having Trouble Finding Cloud Talent?

Talent capable of navigating the intricacies of cloud computing is in short supply in  the Washington, D.C., New York, Austin, Boston, Miami, and other areas; ares that are notnot traditionally thought to have a Tier 1 technology aspirations. Training in-house IT staff can take months or even years, at no small investment.

The objective then becomes to hire outside of the company or to use consultants—or both. This means that the consulting firms are also seeking the same people you are, making the demand go up everywhere at the same time.

How to manage? Many believe a combination of building in-house capabilities balanced with outside consultants can fill the gap.

This Read more here...

Quantum Teleportation

From SlashDot... A  team of researchers from Austria, Italy and Sweden has successfully demonstrated teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group explains how they accomplished this feat and how it applies to future quantum communications networks. Scientists and many others are very interested in developing truly quantum communications networks -- it is believed that such networks will be safe from hacking or eavesdropping due to their very nature. But, as the researchers with this new effort point out, there are still some problems standing in the way. One of these is the difficulty in amplifying quantum signals. One way to get around this problem, they note, is to generate photons on-demand as part of a quantum repeater -- this helps to effectively handle the high clock rates. In this new effort, they have done just that, using semiconductor quantum dots. 

UAV Delivers Medicine over 25 miles

The island nation of Vanuatu uses drones to deliver vaccines to a remote island. 

Read more...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-asia-46616004

Too Much of a Good Thing?

In a study titled "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence", the authors use a standardized problem-solving test to measure the contrast between time spent in collaboration mode against the quality and quantity of problem solving results. The group with no interaction predictably had the highest options for solutions, but those solutions were of lower overall quality. The group with high interaction had higher quality solutions, but less variety and a lower likelihood to find the optimal solution. The intermittent collaboration groups found the desirable middle ground to balance out the pros/cons of the no interaction and high interaction groups, leading them to become the most successful problem solvers.

Popular Cloud Container for Services Found to Have Security Flaw

Kubernetes is a very popular cloud container orchestration system, and a major security hole has been discovered. The problem, CVE-2018-1002105, is a privilege escalation flaw (CVSS 9.8 critical security hole). This makes it possible to gain full administrator privileges on any compute node being run in a Kubernetes pod.

Read more here...