Last week, we described the privacy changes happening within Apple’s iOS 14.5. Now, in this post, we’ll be presenting the advertiser’s perspective of the situation at hand. While advertisers may think the sky is falling, the full-on Chicken Little scenario might not be happening. The changes will make it harder – but not impossible – for advertisers to track users’ habits and target ads to their devices. And as I mention in my latest blog for Avast here, digital ad vendors need to learn new ways to target their campaigns. They have done it before, and hopefully the changes in iOS will be good for everyone, eventually.
This week, Apple announced the availability of iOS version 14.5 for its smartphones and tablets. The release contains an update that is a major change in direction and support for digital privacy. If you are concerned about your privacy, you should take the time to do the update on your various devices. Earlier iOS versions had the beginnings of this anti-tracking feature. If you go to Settings/Privacy/Tracking, you can turn off this tracking or selectively enable it for specific apps. When you install a new app, you will get a popup notification asking you about which tracking features you wish to grant the new app.
In my blog for Avast, I talk about what exactly is included in the new iOS, and why it is important for preserving your privacy.
This week we talk to Priyanka Sharma, who is the General Manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The group has assembled a massive collection of 600 vendor members, ranging from little-known startups to the biggest companies on the Internet. The foundation is the steward of more than 80 open source projects that support Kubernetes, Prometheus, Vitess, Envoy and other technologies that deal with distributed data structures, network policies and cloud orchestration. The foundation helps to put on an annual conference, which has a business value track this year, and has a library of webinars to help spread the word about the revolutionary technology called software containers. She told us during the podcast that “Life isn’t a zero sum game and we have to work together” to help market cloud tech.
Our interest in this portfolio is high — Paul has written most recently about the foundation here for SiliconAngle. We spoke to her about her role at CNCF and the tactics the foundation has found to help mainstream IT adopt cloud and container technologies, getting her members to agree on a single standard, how to sell open source to the prototypical “pointy-haired boss” and what tech marketers can learn from the cloud evolution that they can apply to solve their own business problems. You can listen to the 20 min. interview here.
Volunteers approach the American Red Cross from many different directions. Mike DeSantis came through donating blood. And then doing it again, and again, and again. He wanted to start donating blood while he was in high school, but was born too late in the year, so he had to wait until he turned 18 when he was in college before his first visit. “I gave whole blood then, and found it wasn’t all that hard or that intimidating,” Mike said. “After a few times at the local blood center, a nurse asked me if I had considered apheresis and told me I had nice big veins.” That was the beginning of something that blossomed into a decades-long relationship. By one accounting, he has donated more than 530 units of platelets over 375 visits. He tries to come in every other Friday afternoon. “This is a lot easier to remember than the whole blood schedule,” he said. There is a lot more to his story, and you can read about him on the Red Cross blog here.
Like so many Red Cross volunteers, Kathryn Buril spreads her love around by serving multiple community organizations. The Little Rock Red Cross chapter volunteer is active at Saint Mark Baptist Church and on the board of directors of Volunteers in Public Schools (ViPS). She has held leadership roles at local branches of the National Association of University Women, the American Association of University Women and the local AARP chapter.
Kathryn began her Red Cross service with sheltering and mass care disaster assistance groups in the summer of 2009 when numerous hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast. “People were coming into Little Rock by the hundreds,” she recalled. Kathryn’s first deployment was in Mena, Arkansas, at a tornado disaster relief shelter.
Every mobile phone has a special card called a Subscriber Identity Module. This is the challenge for a type of attack called SIM swapping which is becoming increasingly easier, thanks to leaks that associate email addresses and mobile phone numbers. In my latest post for Avast’s blog, I take a deeper dive into how this type of attack is pulled off, why it’s so popular, and steps that you can take to prevent it in the future.
Once again I have had the honor of being one of the judges in the Enactus collegiate entrepreneurship competition. Back in 2015, the national finals were held here in town, so I got to participate in person. Of course, this year it was completely a virtual affair.
I have been involved in another competition: the Microsoft Imagine Cup. Back in 2012, I flew to Sydney to be one of the judges for their final competition, which I wrote about here. It was a blast, and I got to meet some very smart students from around the world. Not to mention that I got to climb to the top of the Harbor Bridge too.
The Enactus competition now goes on to their own World Cup held later this year. The teams come from colleges both well-known and ones that you have never heard of, and the team sizes vary from just a few students to dozens. This year the US national champion was the team from the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, which has had success in earlier years. They had an interesting project to help eye patients in India obtain inexpensive glasses, and I didn’t give them top marks because due to the pandemic the project only really got in gear last month.
There are two things the judges evaluate: first is a short video that the team puts together, which contains both their pitch and an introduction to the team members. These are professional quality and include the requisite drone fly-by of the campus with a background of dramatic music.
The second element is the written report that reviews the financials and explains how the project or projects meet the four major tenets of the competition:
Entrepreneurial leadership, where the team identifies a need and shows how they can take personal responsibility and manage risk and change
Innovation and improvement
Apply business principles such as a workable plan and model.
Have a measurable and sustainable positive impact, both socially and economically
The Whitewater students’ business plan didn’t match up with their video, which is why I didn’t give them the highest marks. Apparently, I was in the minority.
The two teams that I preferred were from North Central College located in the Chicago suburbs and Southern Adventist University (SAU) near Chattanooga. Also in the final four was the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, which I have actually been to and have known about as one of the major computer science powerhouses.
North Central’s team (which you can see here) ran a web storefront for Guatemala coffee and chocolate sales as one of their projects. What I liked about this project was how they built upon last year’s efforts and what they did to pivot to deal with the pandemic. They had to work hard to replace in-person sales with some innovative alternatives, such as building their own campus-based store and selling their products to farmers’ markets, using Facetime walk-throughs and Zoom demos of how their stuff was sourced and made, making donations to non-profits and creating private labeled products. They were able to significantly boost their sales and not only cover the additional costs of these efforts but also increase their profits. The storefront will ship product across the US or you can come pick things up at the campus store.
SAU’s team had a series of projects, but their centerpiece was another web storefront selling soap made in Zambia. This store only ships to nine locations there. They now employ 360 people and made some US$5,000 in revenues last year. They had other projects such as local STEM instruction for women and creating a marketing toolkit for non-profits as well.
It is great that Enactus was able to continue their competition during a very difficult year, to be sure, and under some very stressful circumstances as universities went to remote learning and other circumstances. And if you have a moment to watch some of the video presentations on the Enactus site link (warning: it is a miserable website, ironically), you too will be inspired and have some hope for the youth of today.
This novel about one night in LA post-quake reminds me of the movie Magnolia where we follow several characters as they try to deal with their lives and another disaster over the course of a single day. One young mother is out on the town with her friends, her young child left at home with a sitter. Another teen girl has been raped by some thugs,. Both are trying to get home and suffer various adventures along the way, eventually joining up in their travels that involve spending the night in Griffith Park. Having lived in LA for several years, I found the situations interesting and captivating, and the characters are strongly drawn and compelling. How the two relate to each other from different backgrounds — the older woman lives in Van Nuys where the other says, “people with money don’t live in Van Nuys” is also a major sub-plot. I highly recommend this book.
Unfortunately, Facebook (and Google) don’t make authentication particularly easy. And to make matters worse, both companies have the habit of changing their menu options to confound even those who have done it previously. My recommendation is to use a web browser, rather than mobile apps, for these activities. This is because you’ll want the additional screen real estate and some of the options are more difficult to find in mobile apps.
Identity and access management (IAM) in enterprise IT is about defining and managing the roles and access privileges of individual network entities (users and devices) to a variety of cloud and on-premises applications. The overarching goal of identity management is to grant access to the enterprise assets that users and devices have rights to in a given context. That includes onboarding users and systems, permission authorizations, and the offboarding of users and devices in a timely manner.
However, part of the problem are the users and their love/hate affair with their passwords. We all have too many passwords, making the temptation to share them across logins – and the resulting security implications – an issue.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68526858/FB_ATT_Prompt.001.5.png)
This week, Apple announced the availability of iOS version 14.5 for its smartphones and tablets. The release contains an update that is a major change in direction and support for digital privacy. If you are concerned about your privacy, you should take the time to do the update on your various devices. Earlier iOS versions had the beginnings of this anti-tracking feature. If you go to Settings/Privacy/Tracking, you can turn off this tracking or selectively enable it for specific apps. When you install a new app, you will get a popup notification asking you about which tracking features you wish to grant the new app.
This week we talk to 
Like so many Red Cross volunteers, Kathryn Buril spreads her love around by serving multiple community organizations. The Little Rock Red Cross chapter volunteer is active at Saint Mark Baptist Church and on the board of directors of Volunteers in Public Schools (ViPS). She has held leadership roles at local branches of the National Association of University Women, the American Association of University Women and the local AARP chapter.
North Central’s team (which you can see here) ran a 
By now you have heard about