June 14, 2022

Business Architecture - A New Depiction

Crucial to this depiction are components which exist in both the vertical pillars and the horizontal Business Architecture layer as follows: Application Architecture: includes the Business Process component, to associate application components (logical & operational) with the business activity they support. Information Architecture: includes the Information Component from a business perspective separately from any logical or operational representation of that information by data (structured or unstructured).?Infrastructure Architecture: contains the location component. This is to recognize that business infrastructure is linked to an organization / location either by physical installation or network access. Business Architecture consists of these business components – shared with the other domains – and, in addition, more complex views which link the architecture with the business plans. For example, an architecture view for a business capability (as defined through capability-based planning) would show how the components support that capability. The 3 vertical domains can be considered to constitute IT Architecture (for the enterprise).?

Meet Web Push

One goal of the WebKit open source project is to make it easy to deliver a modern browser engine that integrates well with any modern platform. Many web-facing features are implemented entirely within WebKit, and the maintainers of a given WebKit port do not have to do any additional work to add support on their platforms. Occasionally features require relatively deep integration with a platform. That means a WebKit port needs to write a lot of custom code inside WebKit or integrate with platform specific libraries. For example, to support the HTML <audio> and <video> elements, Apple’s port leverages Apple’s Core Media framework, whereas the GTK port uses the GStreamer project. A feature might also require deep enough customization on a per-Application basis that WebKit can’t do the work itself. For example web content might call window.alert(). In a general purpose web browser like Safari, the browser wants to control the presentation of the alert itself. But an e-book reader that displays web content might want to suppress alerts altogether. From WebKit’s perspective, supporting Web Push requires deep per-platform and per-application customization.

Introduction to Infrastructure as Code - Part 1: Introducing IaC

In recent years, development has shifted away from monolithic applications and towards microservices architectures and cloud-native applications. However, modernizing apps introduces complexity, as maintaining the cloud computing architecture requires infrastructure automation tools, efficient provisioning, and scaling of new resources. Too many developers still see infrastructure provisioning and management as an opaque process that Ops teams perform using GUI tools like the Azure Portal. Infrastructure as code (IaC) challenges that notion. The practice of IaC unifies development and operations, creating a close bond between code and infrastructure. Why should we use IaC? When you develop an application, you create code, build and version it, and deploy the artifact through the DevOps pipeline. IaC allows you to create your infrastructure in the cloud using code, enabling you to version and execute that code whenever necessary. This three-article series starts with an introduction to IaC. Then, the following two articles in this series show how to use the Bicep language and Terraform HCL syntax to create templates and automatically provision resources on Azure.

VPN providers flee Indian market ahead of new data rules

The new directive by India's top cybersecurity agency, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In), requires VPN, Virtual Private Server (VPS) and cloud service providers to store customers' names, email addresses, IP addresses, know-your-customer records, and financial transactions for a period of five years. SurfShark announced on Wednesday in a post titled "Surfshark shuts down servers in India in response to data law," that it "proudly operates under a strict "no logs" policy, so such new requirements go against the core ethos of the company." SurfShark is not the first VPN provider to pull its servers from the country following the directive. ExpressVPN also decided to take the same step just last week, and NordVPN has also warned that it will be removing physical servers if the directives are not reversed. ... Like many businesses around the world, Indian companies have increased their reliance on VPNs since the COVID-19 pandemic forced many employees to work from home. VPN adoption grew to allow employees to access sensitive data remotely, even as companies started adopting other secure means to allow remote access such as Zero Trust Network Access and Smart DNS solutions.

5 top deception tools and how they ensnare attackers

To work, deception technologies essentially create decoys, traps that emulate natural systems. These systems work because of the way most attackers operate. For instance, when attackers penetrate the environment, they typically look for ways to build persistence. This typically means dropping a backdoor. In addition to the backdoor, attackers will attempt to move laterally within organizations, naturally trying to use stolen or guessed access credentials. As attackers find data and systems of value, they will deploy additional malware and exfiltrate data, typically using the backdoor(s) they dropped. With traditional anomaly detection and intrusion detection/prevention systems, enterprises try to spot these attacks in progress on their entire networks and systems. Still, the problem is these tools rely on signatures or susceptible machine learning algorithms and throw off a tremendous number of false positives. Deception technologies, however, have a higher threshold to trigger events, but these events tend to be real threat actors conducting real attacks.

MIT built a new reconfigurable AI chip that can reduce electronic waste

The team's optical communication system comprises paired photodetectors and LEDs patterned with tiny pixels. The photodetectors feature an image sensor for receiving data, and LEDs transmit that data to the next layer. Since the components must work like a LEGO-like reconfigurable AI chip, they must be compatible. "The sensory chip at the bottom receives signals from the outside environment and sends the information to the next chip above by light signals. The next chip, which is a processor layer, receives the light information and then processes the pre-programmed function. Such light-based data transfer continues to other chips above, thus performing multi-functional tasks as a whole," the team explained. ... The team fabricated a single chip with a computing core that measured about four square millimeters. The chip is stacked with three image recognition "blocks", each comprising an image sensor, optical communication layer, and artificial synapse array for classifying one of three letters, M, I, or T. They then shone a pixellated image of random letters onto the chip and measured the electrical current that each neural network array produced in response.

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