From The Editor
“GDS built the UK’s online platform for petitions to parliament, in eight weeks with four staff at a cost of 100,000 pounds, while in contrast it took six months to get the office set up.”
Our June 2016 article Public Service Lessons Learned described two distinct approaches to Australian Public Service culture change, both successful. July 2016 was Public Sector Innovation Month, with the theme Disrupt · Develop · Display , and has brought some further, sometimes conflicting, insights on culture change, with lessons for both Public and Private Sector. Further input from Academia shows that “Innovation actually demands a cross-range of technical and non-technical skills, even more so in an age where the value of tech skills are diminished by the sheer number of people who posses them.”See below, The Innovation Culture Debate.
“The team tested existing bug-finding software and found that just 2 percent of bugs created by LAVA were detected.”
The above quote is from a July 7, 2016 Science Daily article contributed by the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where “researchers have created LAVA (Large-Scale Automated Vulnerability Addition), a cost-effective technique of intentionally adding vulnerabilities to a program’s source code to test the limits of bug-finding tools and ultimately help developers improve them.” See below, Building a better computer bug finder.
Another area of concern is the growing use of open source software and the vulnerabilities in the open source supply chain, A July 12, 2016 Security Ledger blog post warns that
“a survey of 25,000 applications revealing that close to 7% percent of components in use had a known security defect that could lead to successful attacks.” See below, Developers Gorge on Open Source Amid Worries About Quality, Security.
And now it seems that even our wearables can be hacked, A July 11, 2016 Science Daily article from Stevens Institute of Technology reports that “the motions of your hands as you use PIN pads, which is continually and automatically recorded by your device, can be hacked in real time and used to guess your PIN with more than 90 percent accuracy within a few attempts.”See below Did your smart watch and fitness tracker just give away your PIN?
Current Issue
Articles in the current Issue cover:
The Innovation Culture Debate
“Lack of buy-in from the frontline staff is perhaps the costliest way to fail. Yet, these staff are often the best sources of ideas.”
Building a better computer bug finder
“There has never been a performance benchmark at this scale in this area, and now we have one.”
Developers Gorge on Open Source Amid Worries About Quality, Security
“ An analysis of 380,000 open source projects revealed that components are updated an average of 14 times a year, with half of all projects releasing new versions between three and 10 times a year.”
Did your smart watch and fitness tracker just give away your PIN?
“After capturing accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data from the devices and using it to calculate typical distances between and directions of consecutive key entries, Chen’s team developed a backward-inference algorithm to predict four-digit PIN codes.”
QESP Blog
One of the ACOSM16 attendees was the ProGalore Australia CEO, Jitendra Verma, representing the ACS Startups & Small Business (NSW) SIG. Jitendra has kindly offered to host a QESP evening networking event, 6 to 7.30 pm at their Clarence St Office , with a follow-up at their Parramatta Office for members working in or near Parramatta See the QESP Blog page for more details
Events
A further QESP evening networking event is now being planned, see QESP Blog above.
Quotes
Quote of the Day
“The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.” Niklaus Wirth
Quote from Yesteryear
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977
Ted Smillie
QESP Chairman