April 19, 2022
Kannan Subbiah
FCA | CISA | CGEIT | CCISO | GRC Consulting | Independent Director | Enterprise & Solution Architecture | Former Sr. VP & CTO of MF Utilities | BU Soft Tech | itTrident
The Linux desktop is so easy. It really is. Developers and designers of most distributions have gone out of their way to ensure the desktop operating system is easy to use. During those early years of using Linux, the command line was an absolute necessity. Today? Not so much. In fact, Linux has become so easy and user-friendly, that you could go your entire career on the desktop and never touch the terminal window. That's right, Linux of today is all about the GUI and the GUIs are good. If you can use macOS or Windows, you can use Linux. It doesn't matter how skilled you are with a computer, Linux is a viable option. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the less skill you have with a computer the better off you are with Linux. Why? Linux is far less "breakable" than Windows. You really need to know what you're doing to break a Linux system. One very quick way to start an argument within the Linux community is to say Linux isn't just a kernel. In a similar vein, a very quick way to confuse a new user is to tell them that Linux is only the kernel. ... Yes, Linux uses the Linux kernel. All operating systems have a kernel, but you don't ever hear Windows or macOS users talk about which kernel they use.
There’s a broader redefinition of purpose that’s underway both for organizations and individuals. Today, people don’t have just one single career in a lifetime but five or six—and their goals and purpose vary at each stage. At the same time, organizations can’t address or engage with the broad range of stakeholders they deal with through just one single purpose. In combination, these shifts are ushering in the concept of purpose as a “cluster” of goals and experiences, with different aspects resonating with different stakeholders at different times. The same cluster concept holds true for career paths. It is vital to expand the conversation about the varied, unique options people have to fulfill their goals. Companies must strive to make those options more transparent, more individualized, and more flexible, and less linear. For today’s employees, the point of a career path is not necessarily to climb a ladder with a particular end-state in mind but to gain experience and pursue the individual’s purpose—a purpose that may shift and evolve over time. To that end, it may make sense for organizations to create paths that allow employees to move within and across, and even outside, an organization—not just up—to achieve their goals.
Mewies says bias in automated systems generates significant risks for employers that use them to select people for jobs or promotion, because it may contravene anti-discrimination law. For projects involving systemic or potentially harmful processing of personal data, organisations have to carry out a privacy impact assessment, she says. “You have to satisfy yourself that where you were using algorithms and artificial intelligence in that way, there was going to be no adverse impact on individuals.” But even when not required, undertaking a privacy impact assessment is a good idea, says Mewies, adding: “If there was any follow-up criticism of how a technology had been deployed, you would have some evidence that you had taken steps to ensure transparency and fairness.” ... Antony Heljula, innovation director at Chesterfield-based data science consultancy Peak Indicators, says data models can exclude sensitive attributes such as race, but this is far from foolproof, as Amazon showed a few years ago when it built an AI CV-rating system trained on a decade of applications, to find that it discriminated against women.
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The best CCOs partner with the business to really understand how to place gates and controls that mitigate risk, while still allowing the business to operate at maximum efficiency. One area of the business that is particularly valuable is the IT department, which can help CCOs to maintain and provide systematic proof of both adherence to internal policies and the external laws, guidelines or regulations imposed upon the company. By having a dedicated IT resource, CCOs do not have to wait for the next programme increment (PI), sprint planning or IT resourcing availability. Instead, they can be agile and proactive when it comes to meeting business growth and revenue objectives. Technical resourcing can be utilised for project governance, systems review, data science, AML and operational analytics, as well as support audit / reporting with internal / external stakeholders, investors, regulators, creditors and partners. Ultimately this partnership between IT and CCOs will allow a business to make data-driven decisions that meet compliance as well corporate growth mandates.
An unhappy sysadmin can breed apathy, and an apathetic attitude is especially problematic when sysadmins are responsible for cybersecurity. Even in organizations where cybersecurity and IT are separate,sysadmins affect cybersecurity in some way, whether it’s through patching, performing data backups, or reviewing logs. This problem is industry-wide, and it will take more than just one person to solve it, but I’m in a unique position to talk about it. I’ve held sysadmin roles, and I’m the co-founder and CTO of a threat detection and response company in which I oversee technical operations. One of my top priorities is building solutions that won’t tip over and require significant on-call support. The tendency to paper over a problem with human effort 24/7 is a tragedy in the IT space and should be solved with technology wherever possible. As someone who manages employees that are on-call and is still on-call, I need to be in tune with the mental health of my team members and support them to prevent burnout. I need to advocate for my employees to be compensated generously and appreciate and reward them for a job well done.
Brian Goetz has a funny way of explaining the phenomenon, called Goetz’s Law: “Every declarative language slowly slides towards being a terrible general-purpose language.” Perhaps a more useful explanation comes from Stephen Kell who argues that “the endurance of C is down to its extreme openness to interaction with other systems via foreign memory, FFI, dynamic linking, etc.” In other words, C endures because it takes on more functionality, allowing developers to use it for more tasks. That’s good, but I like Timothy Wolodzko’s explanation even more: “As an industry, we're biased toward general-purpose tools [because it’s] easier to hire devs, they are already widely adopted (because being general purpose), often have better documentation, are better maintained, and can be expected to live longer.” Some of this merely describes the results of network effects, but how general purpose enables those network effects is the more interesting observation. Similarly, one commenter on Bernhardsson’s post suggests, “It's not about general versus specialized” but rather “about what tool has the ability to evolve.