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IT teams are rapidly learning that applying controls to an employee's personally owned device is not easy, according to Gartner. To address the bring-your-own-device phenomenon, security is moving to the application level. Several vendors, including Good Technology, Mocana and Apperian offer application containers or wrappers that enable businesses to extend security controls to the individual mobile app.
Growth In Security Industry Continues, Gartner Finds
Gartner forecasts the security technology and services market to reach $67.2 billion in 2013, up 8.7 percent from 61.8 billion in 2012. The market is expected to grow to more than $86 billion by 2016. The growth is partly due to interest in a new set of emerging security technologies and a return of more capable defenses that address mobile security, authentication weaknesses and threats to data in the cloud.
At the 2013 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit, chief security officers and Gartner analysts described to CRN the new areas gaining interest. From new antimalware technologies designed to identify sophisticated attacks to application containers made to keep threats from gaining access to sensitive business data, a whole new line of technologies are being evaluated and adopted. Here are 10 security areas that are quickly gaining industry interest, as well as the solution providers that are paving the way.
Get ready for the first complete synthetic human brain, moon mining, and much more. Maybe robotic moon bases, chips implanted in our brains, self-driving cars and high-speed rail linking London to Beijing. According to a dazzling number of technology predictions that single out the year 2020, it's going to be to be one heck of a year. Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it has in store.
2020, of course, is just a convenient target date for roughly-10-years-off predictions. "It's not any more particularly interesting, in my opinion, than 2019 or 2021," says Mike Liebhold, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an all-around technology expert with a resume that includes stints with Intel, Apple, and even Netscape.
Liebhold now helps clients take a long view of their businesses so they can make better decisions in the short term. He and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future don't help clients read tea leaves but they do help them read what he calls the signals — those things you can see in the world today that allow you to make reasonable forecasts about what the future holds.
In other words, the year 2020 (and 2019, and 2021) is Liebhold's business. And he forecasts a pretty interesting world a decade from now. So what will the world look like in 2020? With Liebhold riding shotgun, we took a quick spin through 2020 to see what the future might hold.
Japan will build a robotic moon base
JAXA
There’s no technological reason why Japan shouldn't be able to move forward with its ambitious plan tobuild a robotic lunar outpost by 2020 — built by robots, for robots. In fact, there’s really no nation better for the job in terms of technological prowess.
The Institute for the Future’s Mike Liebhold says, “There are private launch vehicles that are probably capable of doing that, and I think the robotics by that point are going to be quite robust.”
PopSci Predicts: Technologically possible, but economics will be the deciding factor.
How to deal with the inevitable headaches of a 17-country train? Offer to pick up the tab. China would pay for and build the infrastructure in exchange for the rights to natural resources such as minerals, timber and oil from the nations that would benefit from being linked in to the trans-Asian/European corridor.
PopSci Predicts: Possible but unlikely.
Cars will drive themselves
Courtesy of Popular Science
It's long been a dream of, well, just about everyone, from Google and DARPA to automakers themselves: utter safety and ease of transport thanks to self-driving cars. There's movement being made, but the first hurdle to clear is a big one: Getting all these heterogenous cars to speak to one another. We don't yet have the wireless infrastructure, globally speaking, to link all our cars with all our traffic tech.
PopSci Predicts: Certainly doable, but not by 2020.
Biofuels will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels
U.S. Navy
The U.S. military has pledged to get half its energy from renewable resources by 2020, and the Navy whole-heartedly believes it can turn to 50 percent biofuels by then. It makes political sense not to rely on volatile regions for energy, and this push could mean both cleaner vehicle fleets and a major bump in the competitiveness of biofuels in the market.
The rebirth of the flying car? Liebhold, of the Institute for the Future, shoots this one down. "No. The air traffic control for something like that is incredible." It's a problem in every way — logistically we can't do it, cost-wise we can't do it, and technologically it's extremely unlikely. Oh well.
PopSci Predicts: The military might have its prototype “flying humvee” by 2020 (DARPA wants it by 2015), but the tech won’t trickle down to the rest of us for quite a while.
We'll control devices via microchips implanted in our brains
Courtesy of Popular Science
The human brain remains biology’s great, unconquered wilderness, and while the idea of meshing the raw power of the human mind with electronic stimulus and responsiveness has long existed in both science fiction and — to some degree — in reality, we likely won’t be controlling our devices with a thought in 2020 as Intel has predicted. While it’s currently possible to implant a chip in the brain and even get one to respond to or stimulate gross neural activity, we simply don’t understand the brain’s nuance well enough to create the kind of interface that would let you channel surf by simply thinking about it.
“Neural communications are both chemical and electrical,” Liebhold says. “And we have no idea about how that works, particularly in the semantics of neural communication. So yeah, somebody might be able to put electronics inside somebody’s cranium, but I personally believe it’s only going to be nominally useful for very, very narrow therapeutic applications.”
PopSci Predicts: We might have chips in the brain by 2020, but they won’t be doing much.
All new screens will be ultra-thin OLEDs
Courtesy of Popular Science
Display tech moves incredibly fast. There will certainly still be some “antique” LCD monitor screens hanging around in 2020, but as far as new stock is concerned, it’s easy to see the entire industry shifting to paper-thin OLED surfaces, many with touch capability.
“So surfaces will become computational," Liebhold says. "walls, mirrors, windows. I think that's legitimate.”
PopSci Predicts: “Give that one a high probability,” Liebhold says. Done.
Commercial space will take us to the moon and asteroids (and we'll be mining them)
SpaceX
A two-parter: commercial trips to the moon (which is becoming a bustling space industry as you read this) and mining extraterrestrial bodies. That last part seems less likely — we haven't yet figured out what long-term space travel would do to the human body, and even robotic missions are likely several decades off.
PopSci Predicts: Commercial space travel is the real deal, but beyond orbital flights things become exponentially more difficult. The moon, asteroids and mining missions are unlikely targets within the 2020 time frame.
A $1,000 computer will have the processing power of the human brain
Zephyris via Wikimedia
Cisco’s chief futurist made this prediction a couple of years ago, and it seems reasonable in some ways. Not intelligence, really, but purely the "ability, the number of cycles," as Liebhold puts it, is on track given Moore's Law.
PopSci Predicts: Likely.
Universal translation will be commonplace in mobile devices
Google
This one's under intense development, both in practical forms like Google Translate and crazier ones from DARPA. Translation will probably happen in the cloud, consulting with massive bodies of language knowledge compiled by companies and governments.
PopSci Predicts: Probable, but with varying degrees of accuracy depending on the language.
Augmented reality is highly visible on smartphone apps, but we want more — we want rich, customizable, relevant and easy to access AR overlaid directly onto whatever we happen to be looking at. That depends on the glasses and GPS, which should be accurate enough to keep up with the real world by 2020, but also on the spatial web, with geolocation data.
PopSci Predicts: We’re already halfway there
We'll create a synthetic brain that functions like the real deal
Once we have a computer with the processing power of a brain, can we build a brain from scratch? Researchers at Switzerland's Blue Brain Project think so. But there's an argument that as we build a brain, we'll learn more and more about it, increasing the rate of difficulty as we proceed.
A barista puts the finishing touches on a rosetta design, a type of latte art.
Credit: Christy Duggan / Counter Culture Coffee
Latte art has become a hallmark of many quality coffee shops around the world. If you order a drink made with espresso and steamed milk, such as a cappuccino or a latte, you may find yourself marveling over the elegant, marbled patterns of earthen browns and shimmering white that top your beverage. But how do baristas create such works of art?
The designs take shape when a barista pours the drink into a cup; steamed milk over a couple shots of espresso. The impressive creations are a blend of the skill of the barista and the physical properties of the mixture of air and liquid: a foam.
"Foams are very complex and interesting fluids," Emilie Dressaire, an engineer who leads the Particles, Interface and Fluids Lab at New York University, told Live Science in an email. This makes it difficult to know exactly what's going with latte art without studying it specifically. [10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee]
One thing is for certain: Milk doesn't turn into foam by itself.
"Simply put, we steam the milk for two reasons," Lorenzo Perkins, owner of Fleet Coffee in Austin, Texas, and a former chairman of the Barista Guild of America, told Live Science.
Properly steamed milk tastes sweeter, and the texture is thick and luxurious. "Making it sweet and creamy is really the goal," Perkins said.
There are two main steps to steaming a pitcher of milk, said Jesse Gordon, an instructor with Counter Culture Coffee in North Carolina. First, the milk is aerated with the hiss of a steam wand, and then swirled in a "whirlpool" to break up large bubbles into "microfoam." When done the right way, "you get that really nice velvety, wet paint texture," Gordon told Live Science.
The steamed milk's hydrophobic molecules (the ones that don't interact with water), such as the proteins and fats in milk, create a latte foam, said Matthew Hartings, who teaches a course about the chemistry of cooking at American University in Washington, D.C. "Proteins have both hydrophobic and hydrophilic [water-loving] parts, so proteins are really good at stabilizing foams," he said.
Manufacturers can make milk alternatives, like almond milk, shelf stable by adding emulsifiers such as xanthan gum, which helps keep fats suspended in the water. "Things that help to stabilize oil and water mixtures also tend to be good at stabilizing water-based foams," Hartings said. So, additives originally intended to keep some products from separating also improve the texture of a coconut milk latte.
Whether it starts with milk or an alternative, the finished foamy product will be a "porous viscoelastic material," said Howard Stone, head of the Complex Fluids Group at Princeton University in New Jersey. [Liquid Beauty: Dreamy Images Reveal Fascinating Physics]
Because it's porous, the milk foam will hold other fluids, like steam-injected air, but also espresso in between the bubbles. "The coffee is like the ink," Stone said. "[Liquid areas] are letting you print black and white."
Viscoelasticity means the foam will bounce back to its original shape when deformed slightly, but will also flow like a liquid if enough force is applied, Dressaire said. And the nature of that flow could be key to the marbling effect that the best latte art is able to achieve.
Rather than combining turbulently with milk already in the cup, newly added milk mixes in sheets, a motion called laminar flow. The stark borders that form between colors in the cup hold up, at least for a little while, because of the foam's elasticity.
"The slow, honey-like flow of the foam — that's the reason why the white and brown foams have a hard time mixing, and makes this pattern last," Dressaire said.
Baristas can control the churning by adjusting the way they pour the milk. "Pace, position and proximity," Perkins said. "How fast is the milk moving into the coffee? Where is the milk entering the coffee? And how close is the steaming pitcher to the coffee?"
Perkins designed a course called "Milk essentials and latte art practices" for the Specialty Coffee Association of America. "Varying those three things is what's going to allow you to create various shades of white and brown; various sizes and shapes of the design; and how you can draw on top of it," he said.
All three of the main types of latte designs begin with pouring steamed milk into one spot in the middle of a cup, Gordon said. From there, the barista can draw a trail of milk through the dot to create a heart; stop and start again to create something that looks like a tulip; or gently rock the pour back and forth, before pulling the milk through waggling lines to make a fern-like pattern.
The drinks can be beautiful, but coffee experts caution against drinking with your eyes. "Latte art doesn't taste like anything," Gordon said. "If you have good latte art, it means you've properly textured your milk, which is one part of the equation. Hopefully, you couple that with coffee that is dialed-in and tasting great."
