Why promises about cloud security make me uneasy (TechRepublic)

A security breach in the cloud could be more of a problem than a problem on an internal network.

The debate around cloud rages on multiple fronts in terms of use, cost and security. The reality however is that more and more technology products are moving to the cloud and companies will likely only offer cloud options in the future.

The reason is simple: it is easier to deploy and sell and the recurring revenue from subscription versus software purchase offerings is far too attractive from a profitability perspective for suppliers to ignore.

Cloud is a gigantic concept that serves many applications and functions. It includes SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, storage and back up as well a distributed application architecture. It is difficult to compare Dropbox to Salesforce or AWS to iCloud, they are all cloud but with very different users and functions.

Security in the cloud is an ongoing concern, and depending on which briefing I attend the cloud offers more or less security than traditional system architecture. There appears to be no consensus and much debate on this. We have all heard about breaches of iCloud and how easy it appears to be to break into personal cloud spaces.

Cloud companies will tell you that their products and services are secure and you can use security products to ensure that your data and applications are secure. I am a bit skeptical.

I can maintain and monitor use and access to my user base and interrogate logs of application use however I lack key visibility when in comes to the cloud - into the backend architecture and I do not know the capabilities of the cloud provider and their teams to view or see data within my cloud offering.

This disturbs me because unfortunately what I don't know can hurt me. Fundamentally, I am left with a prevailing perception that cloud has as much or more vulnerability than my internally managed applications and infrastructure providing I have invested in the proper security platforms and monitoring.

I can unplug my network in a worst case scenario and in the cloud world this is much more difficult to achieve if a major breach of data is realized.

I recall the fear mongering words I hear in every security conference from RSA to Blackhat that continue to repeat the catch phrase "it isn't a matter of if but when your network or application gets breached."

If this is true then regardless of what providers say it is still only a matter of time before my cloud application gets breached.

How comfortable am I in being able to manage a cloud breach? Not very, in fact I am less comfortable with a breach in the cloud than I am in my own network.

I lack control of the cloud and am dependent on a third party vendor for disclosure and transparency which I feel in the case of a systemic breach would not be easily available if at all. In addition, the ability to get useful log information from shared devices that isn't dedicated to my business from past experience is impossible.

So regardless of the debate being had I feel very uneasy with security in the cloud no matter how many vendors seek to dispel these fears.

My challenge is I do not yet have a plan to tackle it and I have no power to stop the cloud growing and being adopted without impacting progress within my business.

FED exige mayores reservas a ocho bancos de EU (Mercado de Dinero USA)

La Reserva Federal (FED) impuso nuevas exigencias de capital a ocho grandes bancos estadounidenses, con el objetivo de reducir el riesgo que su eventual quiebra pueda ocasionar al sistema bancario. Solamente uno de esos bancos, JPMorgan Chase, no cumple actualmente con esta nueva reglamentación, que entrará en plena vigencia en enero de 2019, indicaron responsables de la Fed.

Esta decision se toma con el objetivo de reducir el riesgo que su eventual quiebra pueda ocasionar al sistema bancario.

Además de JPMorgan, las instituciones identificadas como sistémicamente importantes para el sector bancario global (GSIB, por sus siglas en inglés) y que están sujetas a la nueva reglamentación son: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup y State Street.

El capital adicional requerido ayudará "a asegurar que las GSIB tengan capital suficiente para mantener sus operaciones durante períodos de estrés y para proteger al sistema financiero de los riesgos de contagio de una quiebra" eventual, advierte el Banco central estadounidense.

Este arsenal de medidas, que se agrega a la reglamentación internacional de Basilea III, se aplicará a los gigantes bancarios cuyos activos consolidados superen los 250 mil millones de dólares y entrará en vigor por etapas a partir de enero de 2016 para estar plenamente operativo el primero de enero de 2019.

Your Google Searches Could Help the FDA Find Drug Side Effects (BusinessWeek)

Millions of people search online for information about symptoms and prescription drugs. Patterns in their searches might reveal previously unknown side effects of medications

The Food and Drug Administration is talking to Google about how the search engine could help the agency identify previously unknown side effects of medications. Agency officials held a conference call on June 9 with a senior Google researcher who co-wrote a 2013 paper about using search query data to identify adverse drug reactions, according to a record of the meeting posted to the FDA website that hasn't been previously reported. Microsoft researchers also say they have been working informally with the agency for several years on detecting drug side effects.

FDA spokesman Chris Kelly called the meeting an introduction and a chance "for the agency to begin a discussion on how we might collaborate with Google on identifying adverse event data, using Google’s technologies and data.” The agency declined to make officials available for interviews, and Kelly wouldn't comment on the FDA's talks with other companies. A Google spokesman had no comment.

The Google scientist on the call was Evgeniy Gabrilovich. His bio on Google’s research page says he’s a senior staff research scientist specializing in data mining. A former employee of Yahoo, Gabrilovich co-wrote a paper two years ago that used Yahoo search data to identify suspected drug reactions. The analysis, based on 176 million Yahoo queries in 2010, demonstrated that search data can help find drug reactions "that have so far eluded discovery by the existing mechanisms," according to the paper. It was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Before drugs are approved by the FDA, the only people who get them are carefully selected patients enrolled in clinical trials—generally a few thousand people at most. After they reach the market, medicines may go to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. Some of them will be taking additional pills or have conditions that the drug affects. Evidence of negative side effects can lead regulators to change a drug’s safety warnings or prescribing practices. In rare cases, safety concerns can cause a a medicine to be pulled from the market entirely, as happened with the painkiller, Vioxx.

The government’s process for tracking so-called adverse events (which involves patients, doctors and pharmaceutical companies submitting forms that describe possible reactions) hasn’t changed much since the late 1990s. The FDA now gets more than a million reports of adverse drug reactions a year. Although the agency has tried to make the data easier to access, critics say the system probably misses many adverse events and can be slow to detect safety problems.

Companies have been trying for years to sift the noise of the internet for meaningful signs of drug reactions. “If you have the right technology to connect the dots, then you can see problems very, very early on,” says Ido Hadari, chief executive of Treato, which scans patient forums and other online postings. He wouldn’t comment on whether Treato is talking with the FDA.

Beyond the discussion with Google, there are signs that the FDA is expanding its search for new sources of information and ways to monitor the safety of drugs on the market. Last month the agency announced a collaboration with PatientsLikeMe, an online patient network. And last year, an FDA researcher co-authored a paper about monitoring drug safety on Twitter.

Microsoft's researchers have been working on the problem for several years and have co-authored a paper with FDA colleagues, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and managing director at Microsoft's research arm.

Horvitz, along with other researchers from Microsoft and Stanford University, published a 2013 paper (PDF) finding that Web search data could have exposed the adverse interaction between the antidepressant Paroxetine (aka Paxil) and cholesterol-lowering drug Pravastatin, which together can cause hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar. People who searched for both of those drugs over a 12-month period were also more likely to search for terms related to high blood sugar, such as diabetes and dry mouth, according to the paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The analysis of millions of searches1 on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing were from 2010, before the interaction was publicly reported the following year.

Google scientist Gabrilovich’s paper analyzed how searches2 for such common symptoms as “cramps,” “weight gain,” or “tired” differed among people who also searched for the name of a medication. While serious symptoms that appeared shortly after treatment started were likely to be known side effects reported to the FDA, the researchers found that search data were more likely to reveal reactions that "appear much later after the beginning of treatment, hence their association to the drug is often overlooked."

The End of Boys and Girls: These Companies Are Going to Change How Your Kids Dress (BusinessWeek)

Frustrated parents are launching apparel startups to upend gender norms

Svaha clothing line

Ever since Jaya Iyer's daughter was a toddler, she had been fascinated by Saturn and its icy rings. When Swaha turned three, she had a space-themed birthday party. But when her mom went to find clothes with space images for Swaha, she couldn't find any. They were all in the boys section. 

So the 41-year-old mother of two, who has a doctorate in fashion merchandising, started her own business called Svaha (which is how her daughter's name is pronounced) to sell clothes that upend gender stereotypes. One shirt features a grinning green stegosaurus, the plates on its back adorned with polka dots. A second comes in a blazing pink hue, with an astronaut planting an American flag on the moon. That one should satisfy her daughter. "She was very upset with me for not ever buying her anything with astronauts on it," Iyer says. "Then she started telling me: 'I want a ninja on my shirt.'"

Svaha is one of several startups that have emerged in recent years with the goal of changing the standards that govern what kids wear. These upstarts aren't looking to replace current kid's apparel entirely. Instead, their founders say they want to provide children with more options. Handsome in Pink says it's all right for boys to wear pink and purple. BuddingSTEM offers science-themed garb for girls. Perhaps the buzziest label is Princess Awesome, which raised more than $200,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign, showing demand for pirate-themed dresses and girl's apparel covered in the symbol for pi. Most of the ventures remain in early stages as online-only entities using crowdfunded or bootstrapped cash to sell small numbers of shirts or dresses. 

Several of the startups share a common origin: They were borne out of parental frustration with major retailers. Simply shopping in the opposite gender's section isn't the answer, these parents say. Cultural norms mean that as kids get older, designating certain items as male or female can confuse and frustrate them. A girl may not want to wear something designated for boys, and vice-versa. 

"Most kids and parents are going to the big retailers and seeing all these messages of what its means to be a boy or a girl," says Sharon Choksi, co-founder of clothing lineGirls Will Be. Choksi's daughter Maya, now 10, never liked sparkles or "feminine" colors, so the Choksis would shop for Maya in the boys' section. As Maya got older, Choksi worried that "boy" and "girl" labels would unnecessarily upset her daughter. 

Choksi, from Austin, started selling girl's shirts in 2013 before expanding into hoodies and shorts. In an effort to encourage girls to move around freely, the fit of Girls Will Be tops fall somewhere between a traditional, fitted girl's shirt and the boxy, looser fit typically marketed to boys. One design reads, “bold, daring, fearless, adventurous, so many things,” while another features a silhouette of a girl doing a flying sidekick. Choksi wants her clothes to fill a gap left open by big companies. "When are the big retailers going to wake up and realize that not all girls are the same and not all boys are the same?" she asks.

In Seattle, Martine Zoer had similar experiences with her sons. She grew tired of her boys, now four and seven, being pushed merchandise featuring designs of dinosaurs and trucks. In 2014, she founded Quirkie Kids, a label devoted to gender-neutral clothes. "There's nothing wrong with pink or girls liking pink," Zoer says. "But if we only offer them that choice, there's something wrong with that."

“There’s nothing hardwired in our brains that says pink is for girls and blue is for boys,” says Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Frank University and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It. It’s purely a cultural phenomenon. By the time children are toddlers, Eliot says, boys start rejecting pink because they realize it may diverge from what's expected. 

These apparel choices can have enduring repercussions by affecting kids' interests and long-term goals. For instance, since most female clothes are more fitted, they often double as restraints, Eliot says, pushing girls away from physical activities. Kids' play habits matter, because they affect development and ultimately, even what career they end up embracing. If a girl is tugged away from liking outer space by societal pressures, she probably won't veer toward an aerospace profession later in life. If a boy is discouraged from playing with dolls and wearing bold clothes, they may not want to get into fashion design one day. "They see it's the boys with the rocket ships and the girls with the pretty flowers," adds Eliot.

At major retail outlets such as Children's Place and Gymboree, there are few, if any, options for the girl who loves dinosaurs or football. Same goes for the boy who loves unicorns and hearts. Much of the merchandise is as stereotyped as can be: a T-Rex playing football in the boys section; a shirt that reads "I ❤ My B.F.F. More Than Shoes" in the girls section. A representative for Children's Place declined to comment on how it decides what designs and colors to sell boys and girls, and representatives for Gymboree did not respond to a request for comment. 

Big retailers are typically focused on quantity, so until enough shoppers demand clothes that don't fall along traditional lines, not much will change, says Patty Leto, senior vice president of childrens' wear at the Doneger Group, a trend intelligence firm. "Pink is always going to sell for girls and blue is always going to sell for boys, no matter what is going on out there with small labels," she says. In the end, it's up to the parents. "The consumer is the ultimate voter here," she says.

Take Lands' End, which in 2014 found itself under attack by angry shoppers when New Jersey mom Lisa Ryder wrote a letter decrying stereotypes in its clothing selection. Flipping through a catalog, Ryder's daughter loved shirts with planets and dinosaurs, though they were clearly marked for boys. When it was suggested to Ryder by a Facebook commenter that she simply purchase a boy's shirt,she responded with vigor. "The problem is that your recent catalog copy and product offerings strongly promote the gender stereotypes that young boys are smart and mighty and young girls are adorable," she wrote. "Simply buying my daughter one of your 'boy shirts' is not the answer because it perpetuates the idea that science is a boy thing that she happens to be participating in." Lands' End decided to release new science-themed shirts for girls.

Quirkie Kids

For the giants of the clothing world, it's an exercise in figuring out what will sell. 

For the budding brands, it's less a race for revenue than a mission to make a difference. "Everybody's really supportive of each other, rather than being competitive," Zoer, the Quirkie Kids founder, says of the community of new brands. "We're all sort of in this together." 

The Chinese Stock Meltdown That Makes the Greece Saga Look Trivial (BusinessWeek)

The bear market by the numbers, below.
By any standard, the selloff in Chinese stocks over the past month has been epic.  Here’s a look at the turmoil by numbers.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has lost 28 percent since its peak on June 12, the worst selloff in two decades. About $3.9 trillion in market valuation has evaporated, more than the total annual output of Germany—the world’s fourth-largest economy—and 16 times Greece’s gross domestic product. The benchmark is still up 82 percent in the past year, the most among the world’s major markets.

As shares tumbled, companies rushed to apply for trading suspension. More than 1,400 companies stopped trading on mainland exchanges, locking sellers out of 50 percent of the market. The China Securities Regulatory Commission also banned major shareholders, corporate executives, and directors from selling stakes in listed companies for six months.

Chinese stocks have become the most volatile among major markets after Greece. A measure of 30-day price swings on the Shanghai benchmark reached 56, the highest since 2008. The volatility is more than five times that of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

Investors who borrow money from brokerages have amplified the boom-and-bust. A fivefold surge in margin debt had helped propel the Shanghai index up more than 150 percent in the 12 months through June 12. On the way down, leveraged investors unwound their holdings to repay the loans, amplifying the crash. While margin debt on the exchanges has declined by 823 billion yuan ($133 billion) since the mid-June peak, to 1.44 trillion yuan, it’s still more than triple the level from a year earlier.

Officials have unveiled market-boosting measures almost every night in the past two weeks. A group of 21 brokerages has pledged to invest at least 120 billion yuan in a stock market fund, taking a page from the playbook used by J.P. Morgan and Guaranty Trust Co. during the 1929 U.S. crash. Regulators have banned major stockholders from selling stakes in listed companies, suspended initial public offerings, and restricted short selling.

While the efforts have helped boost the largest stated-owned companies—oil giant PetroChina has gained 22 percent since June 26—they have so far failed to revive overseas investors’ confidence. Dual-listed Chinese stocks traded 33 percent lower in Hong Kong than on the mainland, the biggest discount since 2009, suggesting investors abroad are more pessimistic than the locals on the valuation of the companies.

Additional losses threaten to drag down further the slowest economic growth since 1990 and stir social discontent. The world’s second-largest equity market now has more than 90 million individual investors, which is higher than the number of Communist Party members.

The Cities That Make Up the Biggest Economy on Earth (BusinessWeek)

"The Asia-Pacific MetroMonitor reaffirms the shift in global economic growth to the East and South"

Asia Pacific cities are driving the global economy.

From the West Coast of the Americas spanning cities including Vancouver, San Francisco and Lima to Auckland, Jakarta and the metropolises of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo, the 100 biggest metropolitan centers across the region make up one fifth of the global economy, or $22 trillion worth in 2014.

Visita CAMACOL una Delegación Latinoamericana de Expertos Financieros

Latin American  Business Finance Experts in CAMACOL Last month a delegation of experts in finance from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, as well as two journalists in this area visited CAMACOL. This group is visiting the United States at the invitation of the State Department. The group was interested in  our activities and we informed them about the work of Camacol and its programs, such as the Hemispheric Congress of Latin Chambers of Commerce, the Miami Media Film Market and other embodiments of CAMACOL. Gladly we attended such prestigious visitors and exchanged ideas and experiences, wishing them every success with their performance in their respective countries and we hope to meet again soon! The Group exchanged questions and answers with our staff. They were: From Argentina: Sr. Matias Carugati, Chief Economist, Management & Fit Consulting Sr. Esteban Rafele, periodista de finanzas, El Cronista, Buenos Aires. From Bolivia: Sr. Andres Marcelo Gutiérrez Villca Economic Policy Advisor, Central Bank of Bolivia From Colombia: Sra. Ana Erika Cuellar Cortés Rural Development Officer, Colombian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Srta. Nidia Marcela Granados Galvis Senior Marketing Analyst, PROEXPORT Srta. Claudia Milena Porras Lozano Director, Money Laundering Prevention and Control, Financial Superintendency of Colombia From Mexico: Sr. Nicolas Camorlinga Cadena Compliance Officer and Founder, Exchange House Camorlinga Sr. Eduardo López Valenzuela Periodista, El Imparcial Newspaper, Ciudad Obregon, Sonora