Project Libra (Facebook Currency)

Project Libra is the codename for Facebook’s plans to release its own cryptocurrency for shopping and sending currency within the Facebook social network and the company’s various apps like Instagram and Messenger. Facebook announced the new form of digital money in June 2019 but did not disclose exactly when Facebook Libra will become available.

Facebook also announced that it has created a new digital wallet called Calibra that serves as a way for users to store and spend their Libra currency. Calibra will function in a fashion similar to the popular existing Venmo app.

Libra will be managed by a Swiss-based consortium known as the Libra Foundation, with founding members including Facebook, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Coinbase and more than 20 other companies.

Expectations are for the Libra digital currency to be available to the public through Facebook apps and services like the Facebook social network, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in mid-2020. At that time, users will be able to download the Calibra wallet app and purchase Libra currency by connecting one or more of their bank accounts to Calibra.

Privacy Concerns Around Facebook Extend to Libra

While Facebook is touting Libra as a convenient tool to help users purchase products and services and send money to other users, many are questioning how Facebook will protect users’ privacy when it comes to Libra.

Critics contend Libra will give Facebook and its partners additional ways to track users online and enable the company to further personalize ads and information based on their users’ shopping behaviors.

Users will be presented with an option to keep their Calibra wallet information separate from their other Facebook profile details and history, but the company’s recent troubles with keeping user data private have many concerned that Libra will create a higher risk when it comes to ensuring the security of sensitive user data.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

Endpoint Detection and Response, or EDR, is a form of technology that provides continuous monitoring and response to advanced cybersecurity threats. EDR is a subset of endpoint security, which handles holistically protecting corporate networks and data when employees access the network remotely via laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices.

With endpoint security in place, each endpoint on the network is secured and protected from vulnerabilities, hacking and other cybersecurity threats. Endpoint security is responsible for ensuring the overall security of endpoint devices and the corporate network, while Endpoint Detection and Response focuses specifically on helping security personnel identify, investigate, and resolve very advanced threats and extensive cyber attacks that are likely to compromise multiple endpoints.

Key Capabilities to Look for in EDR Solutions

As a result, EDR tools and processes are designed to track endpoint diagnostics and provide detailed information that will help security personnel or third-party security services proactively and continually identify, investigate, and effectively diagnose and resolve advanced security threats and broad-scope attacks that can compromise multiple endpoints.

According to this article from eSecurityPlanet, some of the key features to look for in an EDR solution include:

Leading Endpoint Detection and Response Products

Popular Endpoint Detection and Response solutions on the market today include Symantec Endpoint Protection, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints, Carbon Black Cb Response, FireEye Endpoint Security, Guidance Software EnCase Endpoint Security, CrowdStrike Falcon Insight, RSA NetWitness Endpoint, and Cybereason Total Enterprise Protection.

Cosmic Cuttlefish

 

Cosmic Cuttlefish is the Ubuntu codename for version 18.10 of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. Officially released on October 18, 2018, Cosmic Cuttlefish follows the Bionic Beaver (v18.04) release.

Unlike Bionic Beaver, which was a Long-Term Support (LTS) release designed to be supported for five years, Cosmic Cuttlefish will only be supported for nine months. As a result, the Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish release will be supported through July 2019, while Bionic Beaver will continue to be supported until April 2023.

What’s New in Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish?

Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish offers mostly minor improvements and additions for the Linux server OS compared to earlier releases. Updates in Cosmic Cuttlefish include GNOME 3.30 with support for VeraCrypt encryption and the new Yaru theme that delivers a more modern and “flatter” look, Linux Kernel 4.18, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 8.2, Python 3.6.7, GLIBC 2.28, LibreOffice 6.1.2 and Firefox 63.0.

What Exactly Is a Cosmic Cuttlefish?

Cosmic is a term that refers to the universe or cosmos, particularly as something distinct from the planet Earth. The second part of Cosmic Cuttlefish is a squid-like swimming marine mollusk that has eight arms and two long tentacles that the cuttlefish uses for capturing prey.

As of April 2019, the Cosmic Cuttlefish release of Ubuntu Linux has been superseded by the Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo release.

Customer Experience (CX)

 

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to how a customer feels about a brand or company based on their experiences with it. CX managers and departments responsible for creating an optimal Customer Experience Strategy are tasked with ensuring customers have positive experiences with the company, whether through purchasing a product or service, receiving support for their purchase, or being engaged by marketing or advertising initiatives.

Each of these touchpoints, or ways by which consumers can interact with a company, can create negative or positive impressions, and CX strategies involve both differentiating a brand from the competition and maximizing the positive experiences consumers have with the brand, with the overall goal of reducing customer churn and improving overall customer lifetime value (LTV).

Customer Experience: Optimizing Each Point on the Customer Journey

Specifically, customer experience managers and departments analyze each point on the customer journey or customer lifecycle from the perspective of the customer and work to ensure the company is delivering an optimal experience for consumers along the various steps of the process.

The customer journey typically includes most or all of the following steps: discovering the brand via marketing or advertising, researching the brand and comparing it with alternatives through research and reviews, purchasing products or services from the brand, receiving support from customer service, and ideally, purchasing from the company again or remaining on subscription-based revenue models offered by the company.

By successfully optimizing each stage of the customer journey, customer experience departments create a higher likelihood of brand loyalty and positive advocacy for the company and its products or services while also increasing overall revenues and customer LTV.

Specific Strategies and Tactics for Improving Customer Experience

Effective Customer Experience departments will first create a detailed, clear customer-centric vision for the company to follow and then assist various other departments within the company to better align their goals with this vision.

In terms of specific tactics for improving customer experience, many companies have recently focused their attention on improving customer support interaction and more actively engaging customers through various forums to provide better support while also encouraging word-of-mouth or “viral” marketing from satisfied customers.

Other common customer experience tactics include creating opportunities for positive emotional connections with customers both pre- and post-purchase, emphasizing the emotional benefits of the brand and its products, developing and analyzing real-time customer feedback to improve products and support, and creating and fostering social media communities for customers to interact with the brand and other loyal customers.

helium hard disk drive (HDD)

A helium drive is a high capacity hard disk drive (HDD) that is helium-filled. This hard drive technology replaces the air inside the HDD with helium and is hermetically sealed during manufacturing. Helium drive technology is compatible with most industry-standard magnetic recording technologies including perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR), shingled magnetic recording (SMR), microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and bit-patterned media (BPM).

Image Description: Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 14-TB

Helium Improves Efficiency

Compared to air, helium is one-seventh the density. In traditional drives, the air inside typically creates an amount of drag on the platters, requiring more energy to spin. Replacing the air with helium reduces the amount of energy needed to spin the platters. By some estimates, helium HDDs may be up to 20 percent more efficient than air-filled drives. Additionally, helium drives offer higher sequential data transfer rates as a result of the overall increased areal density.

Helium Storage in the Data Center

Newer helium hard disk drives have provided an advantage in the data center, specifically, cloud and exascale data centers, where 14-TB plus capacity drives can maximize data storage capacity per rack while lowering power consumption to meet TCO objectives. Helium drives have lower cooling requirements which reduce overall energy costs.

As helium-filled drive technology advances, so does the storage capacity of the drives. In fact, Western Digital has announced (Sep 2019) a 20-TB helium-filled drive, using nine platters, each with a capacity of about 2.22TB and a 2.5M hour mean time before failure (MTBF) rating and feature SATA or SAS interface.

Helium Drives at Home

Currently, helium-filled drives that focus on the consumer market are limited. Standard drives are 3.5″ drives that use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters in a helium-filled enclosure, in capacities starting at 10-TB. The drives are compatible with specific lines of desktops and entry-level direct-attached storage enclosures.

Helium Drive History

The first helium-filled hard drive (6-TB capacity) drive was made commercially available by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, in November, 2013. Today, several hard drive manufacturers, Including Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba offer helium hard disk drives.

Disco Dingo

Disco Dingo is the Ubuntu codename for version 19.04 of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. Officially released on April 18, 2019, Disco Dingo follows the Cosmic Cuttlefish (v18.10) release. Unlike the predecessor to Cosmic Cuttlefish, Bionic Beaver, which was a Long-Term Support (LTS) release designed to be supported for five years, both Disco Dingo and Cosmic Cuttlefish will only be supported for nine months.

As a result, the Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo release will be supported through January 21, while Bionic Beaver will continue to be supported until April 2023.

What’s New in Ubuntu 19. 04 Disco Dingo?

Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo offers mostly minor improvements and additions for the Linux server OS compared to earlier releases, with a focus in Disco Dingo on improving performance and Ubuntu’s robustness in serving as an enterprise-grade tool for server deployment and infrastructure development.

Updates in Disco Dingo include GNOME 3.32 with speed improvements and enhancements to the new Yaru theme introduced in Ubuntu Cosmic Cuttlefish, the Linux Kernel 5.0 update, Mesa open source graphics library version 19.0, application permission controls, livepatching for kernel updates without having to perform a system reboot, and more.

What Exactly Is a Disco Dingo?

Disco is a term that refers to a style of music or a club or party that plays disco music. Disco clubs were popular in the 1970s but still hold some appeal with smaller audiences today. A dingo is a wild or partially wild dog indigenous to Australia and easily identified by its tan-colored coat.

The Disco Dingo release of Ubuntu Linux is expected to be followed by the Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine release, which is on track to debut in October 2019.

CASB – cloud access security broker

 

A cloud access security broker, or CASB, is a type of software developed to help IT departments monitor cloud access and usage by employees and partners. CASBs are deployed to help ensure the company’s cloud services are used securely and properly.

CASBs burst onto the scene in the last few years and have enjoyed significant growth as the cloud market has taken off as well. An October 2018 Gartner report reveals about one in five large enterprises are currently deploying a cloud access security broker to control or govern one or more of its cloud services.

How CASBs Operate

CASBs are deployed either directly on-premises or in the cloud, and are interjected between the corporation’s cloud services and customers accessing these services through the cloud. Cloud access security brokers enforce security policies for customers and handle security functionality like authentication and authorization, encryption, logging and alerting, malware detection and prevention and more.

Whether set up on premises or in the cloud, CASBs are deployed either as a reverse proxy, a forward proxy, or in an “API mode,” with many “multimode” CASBs on the market today offering the ability to choose between these three modes.

Reverse Proxy vs. Forward Proxy vs. API Mode

In the reverse proxy mode, cloud access security brokers can manage user-owned devices without the need for configuration changes or special certificate installation, whereas forward proxies funnel all traffic from managed endpoints directly through the CASB. User-owned devices may not be under the management of CASB control with the forward proxy mode though.

One drawback with both proxy modes of CASBs is that they present a single point of failure, creating the possibility for all of an enterprise’s cloud services to be compromised by a DDoS attack.

In the third method, the CASB doesn’t operate in the data path to the cloud, which keeps it from being a single point of failure. However, not all cloud services offer API support at this time, which frequently creates the need to deploy one of the proxy modes as well.

Leading Cloud Access Security Broker Vendors

Some of the leading cloud access security broker vendors today include Forcepoint CASB, Microsoft Cloud App Security, Cisco Cloudlock, McAfee MVISION Cloud (formerly McAfee Skyhigh Security Cloud), Bitglass Cloud Security, and Netskope.

iPhone 11

The iPhone 11 is a new smartphone from Apple that the company announced on September 10, 2019, and released for sale on September 20, 2019.

The iPhone 11 arrived as the successor to 2018’s iPhone XR and was introduced along with the $999 iPhone 11 Pro and the $1099 iPhone 11 Pro Max. Pricing for the iPhone 11 itself starts at $699.

New Features in the iPhone 11 Models

While the new iPhone 11 looks very similar to the previous year iPhone XR model, it does feature some notable improvements, including a new dual-lens camera that includes an ultra wide-angle camera with a 120-degree field of view and a Night Mode for capturing more detail in low-light conditions, 4K video support at 60 frames per second (fps), improved water resistance (IP68) and a tougher glass display, spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos and more.

Apple iPhone X (Source: Apple)

iPhone 11 vs. iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max

In terms of differences between the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max versions, the iPhone 11 offers a 6.1-inch LCD screen while the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max feature 5.8-inch (Pro) or 6.5-inch (Pro Max) OLED Super Retina XDR displays, which offer 1,200 nits of brightness and an HDR experience when watching videos.

The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max also add a telephoto lens along with the wide angle and ultra-wide angle lens of the standard iPhone 11 for an extremely impressive triple lens system. Finally, the iPhone 11 Pro models pack a more powerful (longer-lasting) battery and slightly stronger waterproof protection.

Both iPhone 11 editions feature an A13 Bionic 7-nanometer processor pared with a third-generation Neural Engine as well as support for Gigabit-class LTE, Wi-Fi 6, and the new iOS 13 release. The iPhone 11 models are available in six colors: black, white, red (PRODUCT RED), green, yellow and purple.

software-defined servers

A marketing term coined by HP for its ultra-low power Project Moonshot servers developed for specific data center workloads such as cloud computing and big data. The HP Moonshot software-defined servers use 89 percent less power and 80 percent less space than traditional server systems and reduce complexity by 97 percent.

Benefits of Software Defined Servers

Software-defined servers achieve these feats by sharing a variety of components, including cooling and networking and power supplies, as well as management software such as HP’s Integrated Lights-Out software tools. Software-defined servers derive their name from these shared software management tools, which are able to dynamically assign and efficiently manage workloads across the servers in a system.

application server

Also called an appserver, an application server is a program that handles all application operations between users and an organization’s backend business applications or databases.

An application server is typically used for complex transaction-based applications. To support high-end needs, an application server has to have built-in redundancy, monitor for high-availability, high-performance distributed application services and support for complex database access.

See the Server Types page in the quick reference section of Webopedia for a comparison of server types.

(Many thanks go out to Paul White, Product Marketing Manager EMEA, BEA Systems, for providing this updated definition.)