Walmart Canada and TELUS Health Join Forces To Provide Walmart Associates With Comprehensive Virtual Health And Wellbeing Services

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

Walmart Canada and TELUS Health announced today a new strategic initiative to bring TELUS Health’s full suite of total health and wellbeing solutions to all Walmart associates in Canada. This robust suite of health services will provide Walmart Canada associates and their families with confidential access to hundreds of health professionals from a variety of disciplines to support every step of their healthcare journey.

This enhanced offering will provide associates and their eligible dependents with a single source to access a full suite of services to improve their overall wellness, whether they need counseling on a variety of topics, including mental health, nutrition advice and more, a virtual consultation with a clinician, or want to improve their lifestyle habits through weight loss, more exercise or better eating. Programs include:

  • Virtual Care: associates and their family will have access to primary care from trusted clinicians, 24/7 and on-demand for text and video consultations. Drawing from diverse backgrounds, these healthcare professionals are trained to deliver inclusive care in a variety of languages, including occupational awareness, gender and sexual identity, ethnocultural diversity and faith, allowing associates to be matched with a compatible clinician.
  • Employee Enablement: This next generation platform transforms traditional Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) into a single convenient and collaborative access point so that associates can more easily manage their physical and mental health, wellbeing, and work/life integration. Unique to this platform are dedicated care advocates who develop compassionate and guided care plans that support associates on their path towards improved health, mindfulness, performance and self-esteem. 
  • Wellbeing: associates in Canada will be able to embrace wellbeing and improve their overall health by engaging with like-minded communities and taking part in friendly challenges with colleagues to help build healthier habits, with the resources and goal-setting support they need to sustain newly-gleaned habits.

Associates can access the TELUS Health suite of solutions in French and English 24/7 via a single smartphone app or direct telephone number. associates will also be able to access the services in 220 other languages and dialects through specialized translation services, the first client to do so.

TELUS Health has more than a decade of experience in virtual care services delivering a national, employer-focused suite of programs that make health and wellness more accessible for associates and their families.

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DH2i Launches DxEnterprise (DxE) Container Sidecar

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

DH2i today announced the general availability (GA) launch of DxEnterprise (DxE) version 22 (v22) featuring a new container sidecar to enable application-level high availability (HA) clustering for stateful containers in Kubernetes (K8s). 

Today, Kubernetes is one of the world’s leading open-source systems for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. The DxE v22 sidecar delivers a separate container that can run alongside an application container in a Kubernetes pod. For database architects and developers the DxE sidecar delivers three key deployment benefits: 

  1. Isolation: The primary application can run independently in one container while the DxE sidecar hosts complementary HA clustering services. This independence can help isolate failures.
  2. Quick deployment: It’s easy to deploy a DxE sidecar container — certainly easier to build and maintain a combined primary application/DxE container image.
  3. Scalability: Once you have the DxE sidecar containers in place, it’s easy to scale up to support as many pods as needed.

DxEnterprise support for containers accelerates an enterprise’s digital transformation by speeding the adoption of highly available stateful containers. DxEnterprise provides SQL Server Availability Group (AG) support for SQL Server containers, including for Kubernetes clusters. It enables customers to deploy stateful containers to create new and innovative applications while also improving operations with near-zero RTO to more efficiently deliver better products and services at a lower cost. Additionally, it helps organizations generate new revenue streams by enabling them to build distributed Kubernetes AG clusters across availability zones/regions, resulting in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments which can rapidly adapt to changes in market conditions and consumer preferences.

For those attending this week’s 2022 PASS Data Community Summit, taking place at the Seattle Convention Center, November 15-18, please visit the DH2i Booth 119.

In addition, please join Jeff Estes, Senior Director, Systems Engineering, Software AG Government Solutions for his 2022 PASS Data Community Summit presentation:

Deploying SQL Server AGs in EKS for Secure Federal Government Cloud Services

November 16, 6:45 am – 7:55 am; Room 608-609

The use of containers in the Federal Government is exploding as it looks for better ways to improve the performance, scalability, and portability of their applications in secure cloud environments. Despite the promise of containers, deploying SQL Server AGs in Kubernetes remains a hurdle that organizations struggle to overcome. Join Jeff Estes of Software AG Government Solutions for breakfast to learn how he used DH2i’s DxEnterprise to jump the hurdle and deploy highly available SQL Server Availability Groups (AGs) in EKS certified for FedRAMP. (Reserve your spot here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/deploy-ha-sql-server-ags-in-eks-certified-for-fedramp-tickets-439683534287)

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TSN Available Today on Roku Streaming Players and Roku TV Models

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

Roku, Inc. and Bell Media have announced the launch of TSN on Roku® streaming players and Roku TV models, in a continued partnership with Bell Media. As the #1 TV streaming platform in Canada, Roku continues to expand its content library for Canadians across the country. Canadian Roku users will now have access to live and on demand programming from TSN, Canada’s Sports Leader.

Starting today, Roku users can stream sports content including: the CFL season, culminating with the Grey Cup; IIHF Women’s and Men’s World Championships and the World Juniors; comprehensive coverage of the Toronto Raptors and the NBA; regional NHL broadcasts; FIFA World Cup™; extensive live coverage of the NFL; golf Majors and tennis Grand Slams; plus MLS, F1, NASCAR, UFC, NCAA March Madness, and much more.

To access, users can sign in to TSN on the Roku platform using their existing TSN login credentials, and new users can sign up directly via Roku Pay.

Availability

Roku users can add the TSN apps to their home screen directly from the Channel Store on the Roku platform. For more information about Roku, please visit www.roku.com

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Nuspire Releases Its Q3 Threat Report… And The Threat Landscape Is As Dangerous As Its Ever Been

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

Nuspire is just launched its latest threat report. Here’s the highlights of what the threat landscape looks like at present.

Notable findings from Nuspire’s quarterly report include: 

  • A 236.22% jump in Kryptik variants, which are a type of trojan malware distributed to victims through phishing campaigns. Their goal is to steal information, including cryptocurrency wallets, files and SSH keys. 
  • An increase of 35.39% in botnet activity, mostly attributed to Torpig Mebroot, a banking trojan designed to scrape and collect credit card and payment information from infected devices.  
  • Remote access trojans (RATs) are popular with threat actors, with the report indicating increased activity from RATs like ZeroAccess and Xtreme RAT. 
  • Vulnerabilities, particularly those containing a remote code execution, continue to be a go-to target for cyber criminals. In Q3, VMware Workspace ONE Access and Identity Manager as well as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite saw heightened activity. 

You can read the full threat report here and is very much worth your time to read.

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New Hackers Target Gov Sectors In Nation Attack; Emails Contain Malicious Trojans Disguised as Voicemails

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

Avanan, a Check Point Software Company, discusses how hackers target the government sector in the Western Hemisphere. 

This country, on average, sees 34,000 phishing attacks a year, most of which are financial-based attacks targeting government departments such as the Bureau of Standards, Foreign Affairs, and the Attorney General Office.

In this attack, victims are presented with an email containing a .htm file claiming that there is a voicemail transcription. In hopes that end-users would click on the file, the link contains a trojan that, when opened, would take over the users’ computers. 

The full report can be viewed here.

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The Gong Show That Is Twitter Blue Gets Even Worse With The Blue Checkmark Being Put On Hold…. And There’s More

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 10, 2022 by itnerd

Within 24 hours of Twitter Blue launching, it became a train wreck next to a dumpster fire with high profile brands being impersonated on Twitter. Take this example:

There was other mayhem that you can read about here. Some of it is funny. Some not so much. And for the record, all these fake accounts got suspended pretty quickly.

With stuff like this, it’s no shock that advertisers are pulling their marketing dollars from Twitter. After all it’s clearly not a safe place for their brands to be. Yes this behaviour violates the Twitter terms of service. But that’s not the point. The point is that literally anyone can do this or worse because Twitter Blue requires zero verification as to who you are. That opens the doors for pretty much anything to happen. And not just brand impersonation. How about misinformation by a foreign government? Or how about misinformation about health related matters?

I guess either Elon Musk figured that out finally, or is simply embarrassed because this has blown up in his face in such a spectacular manner. Either way, you will now not be able to sign up for Twitter Blue if your Twitter account was created after November 9th based on this:

One thing that puzzles me about this is that according to the above, Twitter Blue is only available to iOS users. What happened Elon? did you lay off all your Android developers and now you’re stuck because they won’t return your phone calls when you asked them to return to work?

Stopping new accounts from getting the blue check is a temporary solution at best. This doesn’t stop existing Twitter accounts from pulling the same stunt. And it isn’t clear how Elon is going to stop any of this long term. Likely because he has no clue as he’s flying by the seat of his pants making stuff up on the fly out of desperation to make money as quickly as possible.

That makes this post on Mastodon timely:

In any case, if you really want that blue checkmark, and you are a new Twitter user on any platform, Dbrand can help you with that:

I’m predicting that this will get the attention of Elon and he will lose it on Twitter. That will give Dbrand attention and they will make lots of money from the noise that is created by Elon losing his mind. If you want an example of how Dbrand has made a situation like this work for them in the past, this is worth your time to read. Even if that doesn’t happen, this drop by Dbrand will likely make more money than Musk will. Plus the fact that it’s simply out there really puts into perspective how half baked Musk’s Twitter Blue idea is. And take it from me, it won’t get easier for Musk as it becomes increasingly clearer that he’s out of his league when it comes to Twitter.

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Rogers Releases Its Q3 Numbers And The World Did Not End For Them

Posted in Commentary on November 9, 2022 by itnerd

Today is the day that a lot of people were waiting for. Which is Rogers reporting their Q3 numbers so that we can all see how much damage that the July outage caused team red.

Rogers Q3 numbers were released today. Spoiler alert! The July outage didn’t seem to really hurt them. Here’s the highlights:

  • They had revenue of $3.7 billion which came from Rogers wireless and media businesses. Though that would have been much higher if they didn’t have to hand over $150 million to customers due to the July outage.
  • Rogers only added 6,000 new Internet customers. Down from 20,000 at the same time last year, which a 14 percent decrease.

And listening to the investors call early this morning, I’d like to provide a couple of quotes that are relevant:

There were approximately 666,000 mobile phone net adds across the sector this quarter, and Rogers has succeeded in attracting approximately one-third market share. Once again, reflecting strong competitive execution and attention to customer service. Postpaid mobile phone churn was 0.97%, compared to 0.85% one year ago, remaining under 1% and similar to our peers.

While our churn was more elevated early in the quarter, we had returned below 1% by the time the more promotional back to school selling period commenced. ARPU as reported was [56.82] [ph], down 2%, but grew 3% to [59.76] [ph], excluding the impact of the aforementioned credits. With consumers continuing to travel, roaming revenues were strong in Q3 up 130%, compared to the similar pre-pandemic third quarter period of 2019.

So what that suggests to me is that their wireless churn rate likely went up after the outage. But came back down. When it comes to cable, its a bit more murky:

We were largely measured and balanced in our competitive response matching competitive offers where appropriate and otherwise maintaining underlying profitability versus driving loading. On a product basis, we delivered 6,000 retail Internet net customer additions in the third quarter and video net additions remained positive at 7,000. 

While the highly promotional environment, and network outage impacted our third quarter churn and customer net additions in cable, we remain competitive in the market and optimistic as we move into the fourth quarter.

That caught my attention, so I went back to their press release and found this:

The customer relationship net losses, the lower retail Internet net additions, and the lower ARPA this quarter were a result of the July network outage combined with increased competitive promotional activity.

That suggests to me that Rogers lost customers for their cable related businesses which includes Internet, TV, and home phone.

The net result is that Rogers didn’t bleed customers and they came out okay. But based on this press release suggests that not everything is rosy in Rogers land. And they know that. Especially since both Bell and Telus put up some impressive numbers.

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The Twitter Blue Gong Show Continues

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 9, 2022 by itnerd

This Twitter Blue thing is turning out to a farce, as I said earlier today. In case you missed it, this is what I said:

Maybe I am looking at this wrong, but here’s what I see based on those Tweets: 

  • Elon Musk says that he must democratize verification. 
  • Elon Musk creates an unvetted blue check for all, with no ID verification. 
  • Elon Musk creates a verification scheme for government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures that adds “official” label to those accounts.

So what’s the point of the checkmark exactly? It seems me that charging $8 a month for it gives me a blue checkmark that says that I paid Twitter $8 a month. That’s it. There’s zero semblance of clout or status or whatever that Twitter’s current verification system gave to one who got what I called “the blue checkmark of validity.” So why should I fork over $8 a month based on that? That makes no sense. Besides, with this scheme there’s nothing stopping a rogue nation who say, wants to spread misinformation, from giving a bunch of bot accounts Twitter Blue subscriptions to get the check mark and as a bonus their Tweets will show up on more timelines more often because that’s a feature of Twitter Blue. What could go wrong there? 

This is half baked scheme cooked up by Elon Musk. In fact, I would go as far as saying that this is a farce at this point. Maybe someone should tell Musk to take a time out and come back when he has some real ideas that would stop people and advertisers from fleeting the platform. Or alternately, he could sell Twitter to a bunch of people who know how to run a business and simply get out of their way. I’m good with either option at this point.

Well, maybe he took that time out and concluded that this was a stupid idea. I say that because of this Tweet posted by YouTuber MKBHD and responded to by Musk himself:

Then he posted this:

Um… Okay. Sure.

Then there’s this. Remember a couple of paragraphs ago I suggested that threat actors and other scumbags will still pay $8 a month and still be able to post Tweets for all to see. It’s happening. Here’s an example:
https://twitter.com/AGoldmund/status/1590386510003867648

Honestly. At this point Elon has made a mess of this by jumping into making huge changes without doing the necessary research as to whether it made sense or not. He seriously needs to take a week or two without tweeting anything, and sit down with core stakeholders (staff, management, advertisers, big users) and come out with a plan to move forward. Because his habit of “ready, fire, aim” isn’t working for him. And he looks like a major clown as a result.

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Industry Expert Provides The Top 5 Cybersecurity Predictions For 2023

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 9, 2022 by itnerd

I can already see that 2023 is shaping up to be one crazy year on a number of fronts. When it comes to cybersecurity, that’s going to absolutely the case. To that end Christopher Prewitt, CTO, Inversion6 provides his top five cybersecurity predictions:

1. Government regulations are about to balloon.

Even with the new understanding between the U.S. and the EU, there will continue to be changes in international privacy requirements. Meanwhile, new security regulations will surely come from the SEC. We’re also likely to see more executive orders, more Congressional committee meetings and a lot more talking overall from politicians in the coming year.

And yet, for all their growth in number and complexity, most of these regulations will probably lack real teeth. We haven’t seen any real shakeups since the birth of the “accept all cookies” button. This is unlikely to change in 2023.

2. Hacktivism is on the rise.

From a cybersecurity perspective, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is notable as the first war to prompt large-scale cyberattacks from nonmilitary citizens of other nations.

The Ukrainian army has largely outsourced their offensive cyber operations to hackers across the globe, who are now attacking Russian infrastructure as both a hobby and a political statement. I would expect these types of offensive operations across borders to become more mainstream in the coming year. The results could prove very unpredictable.

3. Zero-trust models are about to have a massive impact on security.

As more and more organizations abandon their internally hosted data centers and migrate to the cloud, they will increasingly rely on zero-trust models to improve security and prevent lateral movement.

In the near future, this new reality will fundamentally change how we perform penetration testing and how we secure our networks. Together, a cloud workload and a zero-trust model will essentially eviscerate the network edge and may even remove the need for significant network security for some organizations.

4. Active response will become the default defense posture.

Historically, the industry has evolved from preventive to detective controls. Still, alerts and timely response have done little to slow the threats. As a result, we may well see systems begin to self-assess and respond to attacks in real-time using locked accounts, forced password resets, network contain systems or other methods to prevent data from egressing.

If things get bad enough, we can expect to see these features become default configurations, and we will begin experiencing auto-responses from many of the platforms we use and operate.

5. Governments will be more direct on attribution.

In 2022, we saw multiple public reports of U.S. espionage efforts in China. This falls in line with the U.S. government’s recent trend of outing its own cybersecurity enemies by name.

As China, Iran, North Korea and others continue to develop their defensive capabilities, we’ll likely hear more and more about attribution of attacks. We can also expect to hear more about the U.S.’ cyber operations, whether we like it or not.

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Elon Musk Seems To Hate Diversity As He Terminates Twitter Black Resource Group Among Other Groups

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 9, 2022 by itnerd

Elon Musk run Tesla has a problem with diversity. And there are a number of lawsuits that seem to back that up. Well it seems that Musk is at it again as news has surfaced that Musk has shut down Twitter’s Black Resource Group now that he owns the company:

An outlet spoke with two Black employees, referred to as Cam and Bailey (to protect their identities), about their thoughts on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the social media site.

According to the pair, employees were initially excited about the Tesla founder taking over the company, but that quickly changed.

“From afar, we were thinking—this could mean great improvements from an engineering and product perspective because he’s known in the industry as having skills in that arena. But the closer we got to him, the more we realized that his personal ideologies are so far away from ours,” the pair said in an interview.

Bailey predicted that under Musk, Twitter would be a less inclusive company. Yahoo News reported that Musk had terminated Blackbird, the Employee Resource Group (ERG) for Black employees at Twitter, founded by Shavone Charles. Musk also got rid of the Women’s ERG at Twitter.

Bailey took the elimination of the ERGs as a clear indication of a shift in the company, and it completely changed how minority and female employees view the company.

“I was a Twitter user before I was an employee,” Cam told Essence, adding that work culture has taken a dark turn.

It think that it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s only a matter of time before discrimination lawsuits pop up at Twitter. Because this appears to be a bit of a pattern of behaviour with Musk run companies. And it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk doesn’t see diversity as something that should be valued.

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