Archive for May 28, 2020

Element AI Announces Collaboration with Veritas Consortium led by Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 28, 2020 by itnerd

Element AI, a global developer of artificial intelligence-powered (AI) solutions and software, today announced a new collaborative relationship with the Veritas Consortium led by Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), to assist with developing a framework for driving the responsible adoption of AI in the financial services industry.  The consortium has an overarching mandate to implement the FEAT principles (Fairness, Ethics, Accountability, Transparency) as critical considerations for the deployment of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (AIDA) technologies within financial institutions.

The FEAT principles and the Veritas initiative are part of Singapore’s National AI Strategy, aimed at building a vibrant and responsible environment for AI adoption within the financial sector.  As one of the AI technology providers to the consortium, Element AI’s involvement aims to include a range of research and development activities in support of this mandate. One of the first initiatives being undertaken is in collaboration with United Overseas Bank (UOB), one of the lead consortium members. Together they will develop a set of quantifiable metrics for financial institutions to assess the extent to which data and the algorithms or models used to evaluate credit scoring for unsecured lending meet the principles of Fairness. 

The consortium’s goal is to publish a research report on the project and to open-source the code for the metrics for AI practitioners to review and to eventually use within their own organizations. The report is expected to be published in the second half of 2020.

To learn more about Element AI advisory & enablement, and AI-powered solutions, visit:https://www.elementai.com/.

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Aptum Launches Managed DevOps Service Powered by CloudOps

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 28, 2020 by itnerd

Aptum, a global hybrid cloud and managed services provider, today launched its Managed DevOps Service in partnership with CloudOps, a cloud consulting and professional services company specializing in DevOps. The Managed DevOps Service offers a cloud-based DevOps platform that allows customers to automate their development pipelines and reduce application delivery times. Customers are also provided with hands-on training on DevOps practices and tools so they can succeed. Through this offering, customers gain access to two highly sought-after skillsets – DevOps and Kubernetes – allowing teams to focus on developing applications without having to worry about navigating the complexity of the DevOps ecosystem alone or the operations of their DevOps platform.

The Managed DevOps Service from Aptum is a fully managed stack, running on cloud infrastructure. It can be deployed over Aptum’s managed private cloud, Azure, AWS and GCP. The service is based on a Kubernetes container orchestration system, which automates the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

Aptum’s Managed DevOps Service solves several common DevOps challenges for customers:

  • Speeds up application development times
  • Avoids costs and time involved in hiring and retaining DevOps platform talent
  • Multi-cloud support enables agile and flexible deployments- Supports hyperscale and private clouds, allowing companies to choose the most cost-effective option
  • Customizable deployment of the data and control plane to comply with data sovereignty regulations.

The Managed DevOps Service is available immediately to customers in North America, United Kingdom and Europe. Additional details can be found here: https://aptum.com/services/cloud/managed-devops/.

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Heads Up To macOS Catalina and High Sierra & Mojave Users…. You Can’t Ignore Software Updates Anymore

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 28, 2020 by itnerd

I’m sure that most users when they see a prompt on their macOS computer to apply some sort of software update, they ignore it most of the time. Now to be clear, you likely shouldn’t. But that’s not how the real world works. And it seems that Apple is aware of that which is why they’ve implemented this change in High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina. I noted that this was in the release notes for the 10.15.5 update for Catalina:

Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the  --ignore flag
This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003.

Now this doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it is. If you run High Sierra, Mojave, or Catalina, the Software Update section of System Preferences will display a prominent upgrade button for Catalina and a notification badge on the System Preferences icon in the Dock. If you didn’t want that, you could always run this command (at your own risk of course) in the terminal to stop this from being displayed:

 softwareupdate –ignore “macOS Catalina” 

Now with the updates that Apple has released earlier this week, this command no longer works. And the likely reason for this is that Apple wants to ensure that users update to newer versions of macOS as soon as possible. Which makes sense as Apple would like to ensure that a certain amount of “herd immunity” exists within the macOS community. Though I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are users who have set up their Macs in a way that installing a software update would create some sort of major problem for them. At the moment, I do not see anything that indicates that Apple is forcing software updates on their users. But Apple does have the ability to do that. For example, when a serious root level exploit surfaced a few years ago, Apple forced a fix onto those who didn’t instantly apply said fix when it was released the next day. But I suspect that if they went there, users would revolt.

As a result of this seemingly innocuous tidbit, I am going to read through the release notes in more detail as clearly there’s more here than meets the eye.

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