Daniel

Common Privacy Risks – How to Protect Your Organisation

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Jun 012017

Today I crosslink to my article Common Privacy Risks – How to Protect Your Organisation as originally published to the Privitar blog on 31 May 2017.

“At the board-room level, data privacy can easily be viewed as a binary matter: data encryption techniques should be employed and the company’s data assets become secure. However, for the security teams chartered with securing sensitive assets, the realities are not so simple. There are many threats that cannot be mitigated by encryption alone, which is why advanced statistical anonymisation techniques that achieve privacy whilst preserving data utility and analytical value should be considered. In this post we look at some of the key privacy risks facing organisations today, and how privacy engineering technology can help to mitigate against them.”

Building a 360 degree view of the customer with data is a two-way process

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Oct 262016

Today I crosslink to my article Building a 360 degree view of the customer with data is a two-way process as originally published to Finextra on 18 October 2016.

“The banking sector in the UK has become much more competitive – new challenger banks have increased savings rates to attract customers while new service offerings aimed at underserved markets are also coming to market. The banking sector has seen growth, mergers and splits over the past few years as well, creating new entities that have to attract customers in new and smarter ways.”

Simplifying Market Tick Data Management

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Sep 052016

Today I crosslink to my article Simplifying Market Tick Data Management as originally published to Finextra on 12 August 2016.

“For my first post, I thought I’d look at some of the issues that exist around managing trading data. After all, market trading generates phenomenal amounts of data. The NYSE, for example, saw more than 3.17 billion trades on the 18th of December 2015, with a value of over $110 billion. The NASDAQ has more than 2,000 equities that are being actively traded. As each market trade takes place, banks and financial services institutions have to ingest and track these transactions over time. The volume of trades for each equity can reach up to a few million ticks per single day, and exponentially more for equity options; multiply this across multiple stocks and exchanges, and the volume of data created over time is vast.”

Software development in banking: Where MiFID II can lead to better applications

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Aug 282016

I am pleased to relay that JAX Magazine published my article Software development in banking: Where MiFID II can lead to better applications in the August 2016 issue.

“The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID, was originally developed to regulate financial markets across the European Union, creating a single market for investment services and other activities. Following the launch of MiFID in 2007, a new version has been discussed and is due to be brought into force in January 2018.”

Searchable XML Documents with DataStax Enterprise

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Feb 072016

Recently a customer asked for advice on storing a large number of XML documents in DataStax Enterprise. Though each XML document will be just a few kilobytes in size, there will be many billions of them. Multiple fields inside each XML document must be indexed and searchable in real time.

I have come across this and similar use cases a few times as a Solutions Engineer for DataStax, and indeed we are an excellent database platform for building a large, distributed, searchable document store. So in turn I created the DataStax XML Demo to show one way to store, index, and search XML documents with DataStax Enterprise. Please check out the GitHub repository and write me with your thoughts and questions.

DataStax Summit Europe 2016
To strike a related but tangential note, please come heckle me and my colleagues at DataStax Summit Europe 2016 in April. Open to all, free to register. You have no excuse, and you just might learn something.

What Jew talkin’ ’bout, Willis?

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Nov 092011

The history of the Jews in England is mixed at best. Jewish settlements date at least to the Norman Conquest, but by 1218 papal England required Jews to wear a stupid hat. A deteriorating situation reached its nadir when King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion in 1290.

On the other hand, a beleaguered but tolerant England sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazi grip on the continent. Today with over 300,000 Jews, England hosts the second largest Jewish population in Europe. The roots run deep and love is a two-way street: Jewish immigrants gave the English their iconic fish and chips.

The artifacts of this complicated relationship spanning a thousand years are at times poignant or hilarious, and always interesting. Even the street names are shadows of a storied past: Old Jewry, Jerusalem Passage, Jews Row, and today’s special guests, Jewry Street and Jews Walk.

I plan to visit the remainder and photograph them as well. In the meantime, if you know of another Jewey street, do share.

Jewry Street, City of London
Jews Walk, Lewisham

Patently Absurd

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Aug 152011

Google buys “Android Partner” Motorola for $12.5 billion.

Wild. What do you have to say for yourself, Google CEO Larry Page? “[The acquisition will] enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

To paraphrase: “Screw you, Steve Jobs.”

I hope this swings the pendulum away from corporate patent trolling and towards innovation and competition. Apple is expert at both; Jobs only knows why they have concentrated on the former.

El Che

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Jul 262011

Che Guevara in 1950, photo by Alberto Korda

NYU, my alma mater, had more than her fair share of sham-intellectual douchenozzles whose wildly naïve political views rivaled only their incredibly poor hygiene in offending common decency. These guys walked around with Che Guevara t-shirts — there is a special, sad irony in the pop culture commercialization of an anti-capitalist murderer — and spouted nonsense about anarchy and communism. My buddy Eric poked a bit of fun at the archetype in his 2008 film Lowenstein’s a Terrorist, in which the writer/director himself cameos wearing a Che shirt. (Side note: one scene was filmed in my old apartment on John Street.)

My point is that today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fills me with the warm and fuzzy nectar of nostalgia.

Summers of No Love

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Jul 212011

Without question, the Winklevoss twins, of The Social Network fame, are assholes: two silver spoons, two senses of entitlement, two grown men whingeing over a nine-figure settlement. So with that in mind, it is not surprising to read the Brainstorm Tech interview of Larry Summers, former Harvard president and renowned arrogant bastard. From Fortune, 20 July 2011:

One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.

Amazing.

By the way, am I alone in seeing Mark Zuckerberg as the Shia LaBeouf of tech CEOs? Incomprehensible success meets tremendous lack of likability.

[Update 22-July-2011] Gawker shares the interview video. Cameron and Tyler respond. #WhiteWhine

Baby Boomers Behaving Badly

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Jul 172011

From The Clash of Generations by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 16 July 2011:

Indeed, if there is one sentiment that unites the crises in Europe and America it is a powerful sense of “baby boomers behaving badly” — a powerful sense that the generation that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kids.

Could hardly say it better myself, Mr Friedman.

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