AS the Philippines, her home country is prone to disasters and calamities, Filipino techpreneur Charmaine "Ishka" Villacisneros worked to bring the United States 911 emergency response technology to the country three years ago,

NGA 911 changing public safety for the better

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Similarweb Ltd.

A student from the class who is a staff writer for The Point interviewed McPeak about his role in developing TIME’s social media ... online website. And now the websites, you know, people will go on it, but I don’t even walk into my room and go on a ...

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Amazon recently reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2023 (ended Sept. 30), and its stock jumped almost 7% higher on the day of the release. It was a better reaction than most of the company's tech-giant peers received after they released their results. Here are four reasons investors are likely to continue buying Amazon stock.

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The NextWeb

Since its launch, ChatGPT has been revolutionizing a multitude of industries globally. To navigate this disruption, employees must develop skills to work alongside AI and harness its power for the greater good. What’s more, employers must promote a stronger human-tech relationship to their team members to leverage not just their tech skills, but also their human skills. On today’s episode of Startups On Demand, I am joined by , Writer at . We talk about the narrative of ChatGPT replacing humans vs. the reality of AI creating more job opportunities, the problems in the current school system, and how AI tools supplement mentorship for Gen Zs. Ebony-Storm Halladay The Next Web Omri: Can you tell us something about yourself? Ebony: Where to start? I left formal education when I was 18. I never went to university, it didn’t seem right at the time. When I was 19, I took an apprenticeship with a communications consultancy, and I started developing a career there in social media. About a year and a half later, I went freelance, so at 20, I was remote working. Most of my contracts and clients were in social media, then it moved a little bit more to the editorial space, then it moved to copywriting. And right now, basically, I sell words for a living, which is awesome. Omri: What are your thoughts about ChatGPT and how revolutionary it is to the whole industry? Ebony: I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn because I’m working on my social media strategy right now. That’s what I’ve been doing for over the last few months. And one day, a barrage of hashtags about ChatGPT came along, and it seemed like everyone in my community had something to say about it or questions to ask about it, and for me, I think there are two sides to it: a) a person who’s curious about tech, who interviews people in tech and writes tech stories, and b) there’s also this person who’s making a living as a writer. Personally, I think it’s going to be transformative. A huge portion of what I do is going to be done by AI – if not now, very soon. But in the short term, it’s going to give more work for us as writers: editing and figuring out the right thing to input. People are literally going to specialize in that. And then there’s this narrative that’s like “robots are gonna steal our jobs” – sure, maybe bits of them. But that’s also going to create more jobs. We have to move with and not against technology. In the wider context, I think employees should encourage their teams to play with AI. This narrative that “robots are gonna replace humans” is damaging to that human-tech relationship, and we need to show that tools like ChatGPT are something to engage with and not something to fear. The more AI and tech take on these certain aspects of work, the more value that humans will get for their human skills – we’re talking creativity, empathy, and critical thinking. The stuff that makes us human is going to become increasingly valuable. https://youtu.be/syZpm43yh4k?embedable=true Omri: What are your thoughts about editors resisting ChatGPT-human combined content? Does it matter who wrote the article if the results are the same? Ebony: That’s such an interesting case study. It comes back to that quote “there’s no such thing as an original idea.” I thought of two words: authenticity and disclosure. I think people crave authenticity, so I think there’s a moral issue there if this quote was constructed by technology and not by humans, then it feels like it crosses that boundary and it doesn’t feel quite authentic when a robot produced it and a human didn’t sit down and think about it. And I think disclosure is massively important. So there’s a communication piece around this – if we’re going to be using ChatGPT in that way, we have to be having this conversation and we have to be transparent, especially in writing and media. Of course, we might get to a point where it’s assumed that things are a combination of humans and AI, and it might be okay. But right now, it’s so new and fresh. In my business, it’s something I will be very open and transparent about. Omri: There’s been a debate about ChatGPT replacing school and search engines. In the end, the knowledge that creators have is a combination of school-based experiences and internet research, so the end product of humans and AI would look exactly the same. What do you think about that? Ebony: I read something earlier called “Can ChatGPT fill in mentorship gaps for Gen Z workers?” We’re talking about the Gen Z’s who got jobs during the pandemic or only now going into organizations and discovering that a lot of them have a hybrid or remote work setup. Many of them are struggling with corporate or workplace skills, and of course, they are, because they don’t have the context or environmental experience, so we’re already talking about how ChatGPT can bridge that gap. The way they applied it was if a young person had a question about how they would approach a manager for a raise or have a conversation about annual leave, etc. They can ask ChatGPT how you would word that. And it’s not gonna be perfect, it’s gonna lack personalization, but it is gonna provide them an edge and guidance, and it’s supplementary to actual mentorship, and I think that’s what’s important here: it’s supplementary, not a replacement. I don’t think technology truly replaces us – it displaces us, moves us around a little bit, and shakes us up, right? Omri: What do you think about the school system potentially holding back the creativity of people to thrive in the real world? Ebony: That’s a bit tricky because I think schools have an incredible problem right now because the world is moving so quickly that if you set a curriculum, I imagine it’s going to get outdated pretty fast. But I think there are new educators in the scene as well, I think that’s what we also probably need to cover. The way I think about it is that everything I do – my job, and my career – is thanks to the internet. It’s that and the fact that I met incredible mentors in my first job and incredible freelance colleagues throughout my career, that have really supported my development, that has been amazing. I think relationships are some of the most important forces in your education and your career. And ChatGPT is probably going to be to the younger generation what the internet was to me in my career. That’s what created opportunities for me. Also Published Here

 The Next Web's Ebony-Storm Halladay Talks About ChatGPT and the Creator Economy

Google just passed twenty, yet when we think in web age, it makes of it a dinosaur of the web. Search, which has represented main focus for decades and that has represented the most innovative field for years might be now more of a thing of the past. Also, search appears to be more of a burden than a real strength, as we move toward voice search. Indeed, when in May 2018, Sundar Pichai announced , the giant from Mountain View finally showed to the world its capabilities. Its AI capable of conducting conversations with humans, with extreme comfort and fluidity made clear that Google is way more ahead in terms of Natural Language Processing and Understanding capabilities that anyone would have imagined. Google Google Duplex The semantic Google is here to stay For decades users have been used to search as a way to find a list of pages related to a topic or need they had. Even if you tried to ask Google complex questions, it didn’t answer. Thus, a user reverted to insert a simple keyword to find what they were looking for. Yet starting 2012 Google started to build a massive index of meanings of the web, which is called a . Today that knowledge graph serves a good chunk of searches on the internet. Knowledge Graph The main difference from a traditional search engine and a semantic search engine depends on its ability to answer complex questions by moving along two lines. First, by understanding what the user is looking for. For instance, if I’m looking for “Apple” am I looking for the fruit or the company? The semantic engine looks at meaning by reading the context of a search. Therefore, it will substitute the “unperfect query” with a synthetic, yet more suited query. Second, the semantic engine extracts meaning from the pages around the web. In the past, Google attempted to understand a web page, based on the number of references (so-called backlinks) that page received (besides many other factors). While this mechanism is still essential, today Google is finally able to extract meaning directly from web pages through a vocabulary called Schema.org. The meaning extracted from web pages become part of Google’s knowledge graph. That knowledge graph powers up Google search results and it also offers new visualizations that make users experience richer. Those experiences are also way more complete and compelling. Thus, Google for the first time can offer a whole journey on its search results pages. Even though Google is still calibrating this feature (like many others) that opens up a lot of questions for the publishing industry but also for the future of the web. Example of a search powered by Google knowledge graph. When you search for “Larry Page” you see a feature called Knowledge Panel which extracts critical information from Google Knowledge Vault and serves it to users to provide contextual information. Google above the fold is all that matters now New features like and are taking over Google search results. And the experience and user journey can finally happen on Google above the fold. Indeed, if experts in the field of positioning web pages through Google (SEO practitioners) have been focusing for years on how to rank content on Google’s first page, which got 95% of Google traffic. Knowledge Panels Featured Snippets Now it has become critical to understand how to get featured within Google above the fold if you want to keep using it as a viable source of qualified traffic for your business. This shift on the search results pages (SERP) makes it clear that a war is going on. That is the war to get the attention of billions of people across the globe. Yet while search has been the answer for over two decades, it might be now part of the past. The main asset of the past decades becomes the primary weakness of Google The SERP has been and still is Google most valuable asset. That is the place where more than five billion users queries go through and where advertising (don’t forget Google is the largest digital advertiser on Earth) gets sold. However, what has been a strength and cash cow for over two decades might represent Google greatest burden. As of 2017 Google’s revenues still came primarily from advertising, which makes Google ability to experiment quite limited. Even though last year alone that resulted in 2,400+ changes to search. Those changes are incremental, and they can’t be a breakthrough. That’s because Google search results pages are also the most critical assets in terms of monetization. That gives Google limited flexibility to change the way it works drastically. Imagine the scenario in which Google would unleash its AI, that would break the delicate balance between Google and publishers, which — for two decades — have provided quality organic content beside Google paid ads. Google ran more than 200,000 experiments Therefore, while players like can start from first principles when it comes to thinking about voice and how the next wave of search will look like, for Google that might be harder. Amazon Is search coming to an end? Search is going through a radical shift. As Google is becoming more like a portal it also raises questions on the future of search itself. In fact, on September 24th Google announced it would be rolling out . Think of it as Google feed. Where the feed was typical of the experience offered on social media, now the feed is becoming a critical part of Google experience too. In fact, with Google discovery, a user won’t need anymore to insert a keyword in the search box to get started. The user will see a set of stories based on her interest, independently from search. Google Discovery Thus, publishers that for years have structured their content to accommodate Google guidelines might end up empty-handed! Who’s the greatest loser of this epic war among tech giants? As Google and Facebook lock-in, publishers get kicked out! In this epic battle for the control of “the next web” which might turn out to be completely different from the web as we know it today the sacrifice bunt seems to be the publishing industry. As those publishers have learned to use search engines and social networks as main distributors for their content, those have suddenly stopped sending back organic traffic. Both from desktop and mobile the no-click searches, for which the navigation of the user happens within Google’s search page result — have increased substantially. The effect is even stronger on Mobile. This means that Google is sending less traffic to those sites and we can expect this trend to consolidate in the next future. As Slate pointed out in the “ ” traffic from plummeted at a staggering 87 percent. In January 2017 Slate got more than 28 million clicks from Facebook, which became less than 4 million in May 2018. In an attempt to strengthen “meaningful relationships” (which is a way for Facebook to stay alive after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal) publishers are losing most of their organic traffic via Facebook as well. How are publishers responding? The Great Facebook Crash Facebook In this era of walls, publishers too respond with paid walls. Will those publishers that represented the backbone of the information industry for over a century survive to the next wave of the internet? Is search coming to an end? And what will it become? Those all remain open questions! Three tips for publishers to survive the tech giants lock-ins I’d like to end up this article with a few tips for publishers: if you’re on top of mind for your audience, there is no need for or to get to you. They’ll get to you directly. Cut the intermediary between you and your audience via your brand: Facebook Google as a publisher the traditional advertising + subscription model might have worked for over a century now. However, as new technologies approach and disrupt industries logic which got traction in modern times lose appeal. In this scenario, it becomes critical to experiment with new monetization strategies and rehaul your . For instance, new publishing platforms like leverage on the to create a value chain, thus a new business model. As a publisher, you need to keep a wide-open perspective to those innovations if you want to survive the next phase. Experiment with new business models: business model Steemit blockchain tech giants like , and are fighting the war which will probably determine who will be the next world dominator. If for a while the voice search market will probably be quite fragmented. Eventually, it might consolidate in the hands of a few, if not one player. In that perspective, you need to start . You need to be ready now for voice search: Amazon Apple Google structuring your content and rethinking part of your editorial strategy around voice Originally published at fourweekmba.com on October 13, 2018.

Publishers and Tech Companies Fight for Control of The Next Web

— colloquially named TNW — has been sharing, inventing and advancing tech developments since 2006. TNW started to bring insight, meaning — and every now and again, as they the lulz — to the world of technology. I’ve been reading them for years. Back when I was on the other side of startup land, I pitched them stories. TNW provides deep insights, breaking stories, and the willingness to cover (yes, this bird meets machine learning startup was the first republished story of this partnership). The TNW + Hacker Noon partnership is: The Next Web the startup who wants to clear cities of cigarette butts using crows Once per week, TNW will republish a trending Hacker Noon story, and Hacker Noon will republish a trending TNW story. It’s exciting! The TNW stories we curate and publish can be found at hackernoon.com/tnw . The first 12 republished stories of this partnership are the 12 tech stories I recommend reading this week. The First 6 Hacker Noon stories republished on The Next Web: by Google Glass and Segway failed because they forgot about humans David Ryan Polgar by Here’s how to hack 40 websites in 7 minutes Georgios Konstantopoulos by AI weapons will transform war — and they can’t be stopped Daniel Jeffries by Your bank is probably using phishing tactics on you Duncan Riach by Bitcoin needs to prepare for the attack from banks and governments Daniel Jeffries by Why I don’t care about net neutrality, or our country’s future Whitney Meers “We’re excited to be exchanging some of our stories with Hacker Noon — because the more people read all the cool and interesting stories both our publications post, the better,” said TNW Editor-in-Chief Alejandro Tauber. “I believe media is not a zero-sum game, and that readers deserve to see the best, regardless of the platform — and this partnership is a perfect way to serve even more readers with even more great stories.” The First 6 : The Next Web stories published on Hacker Noon “We’ve centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg” says Pirate Bay Founder. Can Google’s AI Make Better AI Than the Googlers? The Finer Things in Tech: Smart Ads While Men Pee in Public Could Machines Train Crows To Pick Up Every Cigarette Butt in Your City? Does Bitcoin Mining Really Consume More Electricities than Entire Countries? Wikipedia Cofounder to Put the Encyclopedia on the Blockchain If you’re looking for more to read — you rule. Here are Hacker Noon’s top 10 ten stories in November , December and January (so far) . This builds on our recent . For our readers, it’s another step towards bringing tech’s best perspectives to Hacker Noon. For our contributing writers, it’s another step toward increasing the reach, resonance and influence of their stories. For me, it’s very exciting to work with another site that I used to be just another reader of. republishing partnership with Quora If you’re interested in related digital publishing partnerships, . And as always, we’re listening for stories . please email us at Partners@AMiPublications.com over email at Stories@AMiPublications.com Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted. Kind Regards, , David Smooke @AMI P.S. read hackernoon.com/tnw

The Next Web + Hacker Noon Partnership

Part One: SOAP-based APIs Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a messaging protocol based on requests and responses using an XML format. Although some legacy systems still use SOAP over SMTP, the transport method typically used for SOAP requests is HTTP. As an API protocol, SOAP is platform- and language-agnostic, allowing for two applications running on completely different systems to communicate with one another. This post is part of a two-part series covering how to create custom API endpoints in Salesforce with APEX. In Part One, we’ll walk through how to create a SOAP-based API endpoint for other applications to use when communicating with your Salesforce org. A Brief Introduction to SOAP Each SOAP message is contained in an “envelope,” which has a header and a body. The header contains application-related information, such as the date when the message was generated or ids related to the message context. The body contains the actual message. Here is an example SOAP message with a format that would be used for authenticating to Salesforce: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:urn="urn:enterprise.soap.sforce.com">
   <soapenv:Header>
      <urn:LoginScopeHeader>
         <urn:organizationId>12345</urn:organizationId>
         <urn:portalId>abcde</urn:portalId>
      </urn:LoginScopeHeader>
   </soapenv:Header>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <urn:login>
         <urn:username>johndoe</urn:username>
         <urn:password>mypassword</urn:password>
      </urn:login>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope> Since each message has the same structure, SOAP is system agnostic. For example, an application running on a Windows 11 machine can send a message to another application running on a Unix-based web server. Though the message can be sent using SMTP or HTTP, SOAP messages should ideally be sent with HTTPS, with either simple or mutual authentication. SOAP is mostly used to create an or to exchange server-to-server information. Therefore, it is very important for the two systems to establish trust. Salesforce provides multiple ways to accomplish authentication. API web service The relationship between SOAP and WSDL Although all SOAP messages have the same structure, the SOAP specification doesn’t define other aspects, such as message format or transport protocol. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) describes the message formats, transport details, and operations of the web service. The WSDL file can be considered a contract between the client and the service. How to Create a SOAP-based API in Salesforce Now that we have covered the fundamentals let’s begin implementing our SOAP API. Set up a Salesforce org First, you need a Salesforce org. Salesforce provides free Developer edition orgs, and signing up for one is straightforward. Go to the and provide your details. You should receive an invite link within a few minutes. sign-up page Creating a global class with Apex To create a SOAP web service in Salesforce, we will need to create a globally defined Apex custom class. In our class, we’ll use the keyword and definition modifier for every method we want to expose. Adding the keyword automatically gives global access to the method it is added to. webservice static webservice In order to create this class in our shiny, new org, we go to , and then find . In the table listing existing classes, we click . Setup Custom Code -> Apex Classes New To learn more about Apex and how to create classes, check out this and the . Trailhead page Apex documentation Below, we have a sample class that exposes a method used to create new Contact records in Salesforce. The method accepts a Contact’s details as parameters and inserts a new Contact record. ContactAPI createContact If successful, it returns the ID of the newly created Contact along with a message. In case of a failure, it returns an error message. Please copy the code and paste it into the newly created empty class. global class ContactAPI {
  webservice static String createContact (String firstName, String lastName, String contactEmail, String salutation) { 
    try {
      Contact newContact = new Contact();
      newContact.Salutation = salutation;
      newContact.FirstName = firstName;
      newContact.LastName = lastName;
      newContact.Email = contactEmail;

      insert newContact;
      return 'Successfully inserted new Contact! Id:' + String.valueOf(newContact.Id);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      return 'Error:' + e.getMessage();
    }
  }
} Next, we click . Save That’s it! Our web service is ready for operations. We have successfully created a SOAP API in Salesforce. Generate the WSDL We now need to generate a WSDL file and provide it to the external application or third-party developers who can then consume it to call our method. createContact Salesforce provides two out-of-the-box WSDL files to integrate client applications with Salesforce: The is optimized for a single Salesforce org. It’s strongly typed, meaning it contains objects and field definitions for this particular org. Whenever there is a change in the metadata (object and/or fields) in the Salesforce org, a new WSDL needs to be generated and provided to the client (to consume again). Enterprise WSDL The is optimized for use with many Salesforce orgs. It’s loosely typed, and it doesn’t change based on an org’s specific configuration. Partner WSDL In order to utilize our web service, we’ll use the WSDL for our Apex class (to actually call our web service), and we’ll use the Enterprise WSDL to authenticate to Salesforce. After creating our class, we see it show up in the list of Apex classes. In the row for ContactAPI, we click on the link to generate a WSDL. ContactAPI WSDL This will open a new tab with our WSDL, which will look similar to this: We save this file to our local machine, naming it . contactAPI-wsdl.xml To generate the Enterprise WSDL for our Salesforce org, we go to the Setup page, and then find . Then, we click on . Integrations -> API Generate Enterprise WSDL Your generated WSDL should look similar to this: We save this file to our local machine, naming it . enterprise_wsdl.xml To generate the WSDL for your Apex Class: Go to the Setup page. Type and select Apex Classes. Find your class. In our case, it’s ContactAPI. Click on the name. On the next screen, you will have the class page where you have the button. Generate WSDL Test and validate To ensure that the web service works, we’ll consume it by calling it from our web application and see if it responds correctly. We’ll also cover how to validate our API with unit testing. Consume the API For the purpose of this demo, we’ll use , which is an open-source tool to test SOAP (and other protocols) web services. With SoapUI installed and running, we create a new SOAP Project, providing a name and selecting our file as the initial WSDL. SoapUI enterprise_wsdl.xml We now have all available Salesforce SoapBindings listed on the left. First, we need to authenticate our web application to Salesforce. We do this by using the call and providing our login credentials. login Use a security token For added security, we also need to add a to our password to authenticate. We can get a security token by going to the page and selecting on the left. Then, press the button with the same name. We will then receive our security token by email. Security Token Settings Reset My Security Token Log in with the token and credentials With our token in hand, we select the SoapBinding in SoapUI. Ensure you have the correct URL depending on your org. If you just signed up for a developer account, the URL should be . If you are testing this in a Sandbox, then the URL should be . Ideally, the generated Enterprise WSDL will already have the correct URL. login https://login.salesforce.com https://test.salesforce.com For demo testing, we can comment out all other parameters except username and password. We press the green button on the top left of the window to send the request. We receive a response that looks like this: Play The critical pieces that we are looking for in the response are and . In order to call our web service, we need to provide the together with other parameters in our call. We copy down this , as we will need this later. sessionId serverUrl sessionId sessionId Call our SOAP API Let’s call our class and create a Contact in Salesforce. To do this, we need to add our ContactAPI WSDL file, , to our project. We right-click on the project folder and select . ContactAPI contactAPI-wsdl.xml Add WSDL After adding the WSDL, it also appears in the left menu like below. Double-click on to see the request. For this example, we can remove everything from the SOAP envelope header except for the with node. Request 1 SessionHeader sessionId After removing the unwanted nodes, we provide the that we copied from our login call earlier. Then, in the section of the envelope, we provide the details of the contact to be created. sessionId Body We press the green button on the top left. Vóila! We have successfully created a Contact in Salesforce and received its . Play Id Check Salesforce org for new contact Let’s look inside our Salesforce org to see if everything was created correctly. We go to our Salesforce org, click the waffle icon on the left and then type in the search bar to find and select . App Launcher Contact Contacts By default, we land on the Contacts page with the list view. Click the down arrow and select either or list view. Recently Viewed Contacts All Contacts My Contacts : If you are in a Developer org, you will see a bunch of dummy Contacts (and other records) that Salesforce creates for you to test the platform. Note We type the name of our newly created contact in the list search box on the right, and we see our new contact! When we click on the Contact name, we end up on the Details page for that Contact. Call our SOAP API with invalid data Lastly, in order to ensure that our API is working properly, let’s send a bad request to see what we get as a response. We’ll simply send another request to our SOAP web service, but this time replace the in the email address with a instead. . , This time, we receive an (as we programmed in the API). error message The entire error message reads like this: Error:Insert failed. First exception on row 0; first error: INVALID_EMAIL_ADDRESS, Email: invalid email address: sheila@gmail,com: [Email] This shows that our SOAP-based API is working as designed. With this foundation, we can build other SOAP-based APIs to create records for different objects. Unit Testing Besides consuming our SOAP-based API, another way to validate it works properly is through testing. Test Driven Development (TDD) is at the core of Salesforce development. To ensure the stability and reliability of the platform, Salesforce requires your custom code to have a minimum of 75% code coverage via unit tests in order to deploy it to a production environment. Let’s create some unit tests for our web service. @isTest
private class TestContactWebService {
  static testMethod void testInsertNewContact() {
    // Create test data for positive test
    String salutation = 'Mr.';
    String firstName = 'Max';
    String lastName = 'Bond';
    String emailAddress = 'm.bond@mi5.gov.uk';
  
    Test.startTest();
    //Call the method with parameters
    String result = ContactAPI.createContact(firstName, lastName, emailAddress, salutation);
    Test.stopTest();

    Contact newContact = [SELECT FirstName FROM Contact WHERE LastName = 'Bond'];
    System.assertEquals(newContact.FirstName, 'Max', 'Assert Error: Please check the ContactAPI class');
  }

  static testMethod void testInsertNewContactFail() {
    // Create test data for failing test
    String salutation = 'Mr.';
    String firstName = 'Max';
    String lastName = 'Bond';
    // The email address has , instead of .
    String badEmailAddress = 'm.bond@mi5,gov,uk';
    
    Test.startTest();
  
    //Call the method with parameters
    String result = ContactAPI.createContact(firstName, lastName, badEmailAddress, salutation);
   Test.stopTest();

   // This should contain the Error substring that we added to the catch block above.
   System.assert(result.contains('Error:'), 'Fail Assert Error: Please check the ContactAPI class');
  }
} In our unit test, we created two scenarios: a “happy path” that verifies valid inputs result in a newly created Contact record, and a “sad path” where we expect the API to return an error on invalid inputs. Salesforce also provides a . Trailhead on unit testing in Apex Conclusion In this post, we only scratched the surface in terms of the capabilities that Salesforce provides when it comes to SOAP. As we saw, the generated Enterprise WSDL makes a long list of SoapBindings available. In addition, we can create our own custom classes and SOAP-based web services. If you have a (legacy) application that uses SOAP to communicate with other systems, you now have the tools to connect that application to your Salesforce org. With enterprise-level security baked into the platform, you can be sure that your connection is safe and your data is protected. In Part Two of our series, we’ll cover REST APIs, demonstrating how to use Apex to create a custom REST API endpoint for our Salesforce org.

Creating Custom API Endpoints in Salesforce with Apex

Nowadays, sharing WIFI passwords with a guest is easy. Just share the QR code from your phone with your guest. He/she can point their camera to the QR image, and voila !!! We are connected. There is a common mistake we make that can lead to dire consequences in extreme conditions. Here in this post, let’s discuss on that and how to avoid this mistake. The process, for those who don’t know it Go to your phone settings, then go to connectivity or WIFI settings. If your phone is not very old, it will show an option like generating QR Code. Here is an example of my old Galaxy Note 9. Most android phones will have the configuration in the same place. See this link to do it on iPhones. https://thenextweb.com/news/how-to-share-your-wi-fi-password-as-a-qr-code-on-ios While sharing the WIFI password, we must keep in mind that Now, if you have printed the QR code and put it on the wall, anyone will also have access to your network from outside. your guest will have the password indefinitely and can reach all your network devices. Your smart switches, fans, computers, everything. Never share your main network So we should never share our main network password as a QR code; rather, enable your guest network in your router and share it. ; even if they have access to your guest network, they cannot access any of your devices. As the guest network cannot access any network devices, you can be tension free Only share guest network In all modern routers, there is a guest network settings. Enable it, and give it a strong password. Here is an example of my Netgear router. Then disable the network device access for the guest network. Connect to the guest network from your phone, take the QR code and print it. In this way, you don’t have to reconnect to the guest from your phone anytime your guest wants to connect to your router. Just show them the printer QR code. Put the print on your wall and turn it back to your main network. That’s it. Happy sharing wifi. Previously published here.

How to Be Careful When Sharing WiFi Password With QR Code

As a software engineer or developer, especially if you are in the beginning of your career, it’s important to build good habits. Good habits speed you and your team up and helps you write maintainable code. Know Your Tools At first thought this might seem obvious. “Duh, obviously I know how to write code in my editor and use in my shell”. My point goes beyond this. What I mean is that you should (master) know your tools to the point where you are utilising features that speed you up. grep really Let’s look at an example! My favourite IDEAs comes from JetBrains. They create IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm and more. These IDEAs has (pretty much) the same features and key bindings. Over the years I’ve dedicated time to learning the most useful shortcuts and this makes refactoring really quick. Rename a class? . Extract code to a method? . Run test in debug mode. . One shortcut One shortcut One shortcut This is a simple example but I think you get my point. I often see engineers, from associate and senior level, using their mouse to click buttons in the UI or copy-paste when renaming a variable. Don’t treat your IDEA as a simple text editor; use it as the powerful tool it is! Not only will you save time but you will also feel awesome ⭐️ Don’t Strive For Perfection In the beginning of my career I wanted all the code in my team’s system to be perfect. I’d spend hours refactoring CSS classes, thinking about variable names and creating nice abstractions. Then one day, it was decided the system was gonna be superseded by another system from a different team 😮 All my perfect code just became useless. Since then I’ve come to understand the value of shipping code that’s maintainable but not perfect. You might even ship code that’s not maintainable if it provides value to the business or customer. The code you write is simply a tool to solve real life problems and if the problem warrants it, you should be OK with shipping non-perfect code. Tech debt is not the end of the world. You get used to living in a broken world, and that’s fine, because your work is not about producing perfect code but to provide value to the business or customer you are working for. Understand What You Are Building Too many times I’ve seen experienced engineers I work with jump on a task with the goal of finishing it as quick as possible. This is a bad habit. On the other hand, for engineers in the beginning of their career this might be exactly what they need — they need to write code, feel productive and most importantly learn. Experienced engineers though should always understand what the task they want to do achieves, both the value it provides as well as how it fits in with the bigger picture. This is how you learn about the domain to eventually become a domain expert that will greatly help you in progressing in your career. Abstract, But Not Too Early Abstractions are great. Everyone loves a good abstraction! But choosing a good abstraction is difficult. Far too many times I’ve seen fellow engineers make abstractions during the design stage, and this is not a good idea. Abstractions hide complexity and we have different tools to hide them. In code we have methods, functions, abstract classes, interfaces etc. Now why should you not abstract too early? Consider this: you’re tasked with building a web site with a specific design. A menu in the top of the page, for example. “Aha!” you say, “Let me save myself and my colleagues time by creating an component we can re-use for the next web site”. TopMenuWebsite The next week the business or client tells you they want the menu on the right instead of in the top. “Oh shoot, I just spent so much time building the component but now it’s worthless”. TopMenuWebsite Yes, this is a simple example, but you get the point. : don’t abstract until you have three examples. This will give you a good understanding of what parts can be abstracted and which parts can not. A good rule of thumb is Don’t Over-Engineer I’m an engineer — I’ve spent years in school learning about compilers, math and low-level languages. That means I must create complex software, right? No! Every heard of the ? KISS principle The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, should be a key goal in , and unnecessary complexity should be avoided. simplicity design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle Many times I’ve encountered code bases where the engineers were trying to achieve greatness solving trivial problems. Or taking on too many problems for a single system. This is a classic trap that we all fall into sometimes. Conclusion These are my five favourite habits of an engineer that’s in the start / mid of their career or just someone who needs a reminder. Building good habits takes time and you learn by making mistakes, so if you ever did any of these don’t feel bad. I’ve done them all countless times but I always try to learn something from it. Follow me on Twitter @prplcode Originally published . here

Habits Every Software Engineer Should Imbibe

When it comes to cyber protection, organizations should pay attention to many digital risks, not least of which is an insider threat. Recent studies have shown that most incidents related to malware, phishing, or insecure browsing are caused by a small group of employees - and those individuals tend to be repeat offenders. The research found that 4% of employees clicked 80% of phishing links. 3% were responsible for 92% of malware events. While 96% of staff never experienced a malware incident. Meanwhile, 12% of users made repeated attempts to visit websites that violate their organization’s browsing policy. Interestingly, offenders responsible for phishing incidents, malware events, or illicit browsing are not necessarily the same people. According to the report, 9% of users exhibited high risk in only one category, and as little as 0.052% of employees fell into the high-risk category for all three activities. Even federal agencies like NASA that should be able to counter the most advanced cyber threats are not immune to insider risks. An by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that, while the agency has implemented an insider threat program that covers classified systems, the vast majority of the agency’s IT systems (including many containing high-value assets or critical infrastructure) are not covered by the program, which puts them at “a higher-than-necessary” risk. audit What is an insider threat? An insider threat is a security risk that originates from within an organization. This could be from employees, former employees, contractors, business partners, or vendors who have legitimate access to the organization’s systems, networks, and data. Nobody is safe from the wide spectrum of malicious insider activities. Security measures such as the four-eyes principles, anomaly detection, role-based access to sensitive data, two-factor authentication, continuous monitoring, and employee vetting can reduce those risks, but not eliminate them. Many organizations trust their employees and tend to ignore internal automated security alerts. Often, employees are tricked by cybercriminals to help them get inside corporate networks. Two types of insider threats 1. Malicious insider There are two main types of insider threats. A malicious insider is someone who misuses their access to the company’s systems to steal data for financial or personal motives. Malicious insiders may work alone or in cooperation with external parties, such as competitors or hacker groups. show that 29% of malicious insiders commit theft for financial gain, while 9% are driven by the desire to commit sabotage. Insider threat statistics 2. Negligent insider The other type is a careless (negligent) insider or innocent user who unknowingly exposes the system to outside threats. Employee negligence is one of the most common types of insider threats. This includes users who usually exhibit secure and compliant behavior, but occasionally make mistakes and don’t realize that until it’s too late. The term “careless insider” also refers to users unresponsive to cybersecurity awareness training who exhibit risky behaviors that pose a danger to their organization. suggests that negligent users were the root cause of 56% of insider threat incidents. Costing on average $484,931 per incident, while malicious insiders were behind 1 in 4 incidents (26%) at an average cost per incident of $648,062. Recent research Over the past two years, the number of insider threat incidents has seen a 44% increase, with costs per incident up more than a third to $15.38 million. What motivates insider attacks? Insider threats can lead to significant reputational damage and financial loss related to data breaches, intellectual property theft, or as mentioned above, sabotage. Furthermore, employees’ desire to earn money could even threaten state security, as was in the case of Israeli technology firm who stole the company’s intellectual property, including source code for the Pegasus spyware, and tried to sell it for $50 million over the Darknet. This incident is a glaring reminder to businesses of why it’s imperative to deprovision employees facing dismissal and protect assets. NSO Group’s former employee In another incident, a received a two-year prison sentence in December 2020 after he accessed the Cisco Systems cloud infrastructure without authorization and deployed malware that deleted over 16,000 user accounts and caused $2.4 million in damage. former Cisco employee Hacker attacks pose the most risk to organizations. But sometimes, they may be a smokescreen to conceal sophisticated insider threats. One such case involved a financial company that fell victim to a web security incident allegedly carried out by a well-known hacktivist group. That financial organization contacted our team at ImmuniWeb to investigate the incident. One of the company’s web portals was defaced with insulting slogans, criticizing the company for globalization. All the website content that the attackers had access to was wiped out. The first internal notification about the incident came from a web administrator working at the company for 15 years. It contained a link to a zone-h defacement mirror saying that hacktivists compromised and backdoored the server, urging server re-installation from scratch. As the attackers were known, he recommended skipping the formal investigation process to reduce the downtime of the server. His management gave a green light to move forward without proper system mirroring for further forensics investigation. Although it was obvious to the company’s IT team who the perpetrator behind the breach was, some inconsistencies discovered during our investigation suggested that the incident was not as simple as it seemed at first sight. Digging further, we found that the real culprit was a web administrator who worked at the company for 15 years and was considered a loyal employee. It was discovered that a few months before the incident the administrator had been approached and offered an attractive price to sell corporate data. Under the pretense of going to a security conference, he crossed the border to a neighboring country and selected a discreet place without video surveillance to connect to public Wi-Fi. He then ran a security scanner on the web application to simulate pre-attack probing. The next day, when everybody else had left the office, he logged into the web application admin interface (without passing via the public WAF gateway) and carried out a “deface”. Then he made a defaced mirror and locally erased all the content of the web root directory and web server logs. As he already had permission from his company to do so, as a trusted employee, he used those permissions to reinstall the virtual machine with the webserver making further forensics almost impossible. The insider threat is a long-standing problem in all companies and organizations. It is exacerbated by the complexity and cost of security controls and remedies: protecting your internal systems from malicious authorized employees is very complicated compared to defense from external attacks. Many enterprise systems do not have security controls that can be integrated to prevent malicious insider activities or innocent human mistakes. One of the available solutions is continuous monitoring of employees’ abnormal activities. Machine Learning and AI technologies can simplify this task. For example, they can notice when someone is accessing too many CRM records at once or downloading datasheets of a colleague. But, it is unlikely that this will prevent companies’ employees from reading confidential data belonging to customers if they are authorized (but not required) to do so. Conclusion Only a few years ago, sophisticated cybercrime-related theft committed by insiders was a new and emerging trend we didn’t observe a lot in the past. But as the scope of digital attacks, their vectors and complexity grow, so too does the insider threat. Based on this, it’s good to remember that corporate cybersecurity is not rocket science and can be managed pretty well using a . common-sense approach

Know Your Enemy: How to Prepare and Respond to Insider Threats

By now, you’re probably familiar with , the latest cutting-edge product developed by the Tendermint team. Blockchain agnostic, Emeris will expand far beyond the Cosmos network and eventually be a one-stop portal for all crypto apps — the interface of the Internet of Blockchains — no matter what blockchain they run on. Launched on August 17 in beta, the first iteration of Emeris provides users with a noncustodial dashboard to navigate the new and exciting world of cross-chain DeFi. Emeris As further upgrades and improvements are rolled out in the coming weeks, Emeris will soon provide a mobile app and a browser extension wallet as well. Way beyond cross-chain token swaps, transfers, and participation in liquidity pools, Emeris will be a gateway to a wide range of applications, from DEXs, lending platforms, and yield farming, to NFT marketplaces, payment applications, data storage, and much, much more. So, why is this latest addition to the Tendermint tech stack so important? What does the ability to manage all your crypto assets from different blockchain ecosystems in one place mean? In short, why does Emeris matter to Cosmos? Unleashing the Potential of Cosmos DeFi With the ever-increasing popularity of DeFi and the wide array of new financial opportunities outside of the existing legacy system, Emeris, integrated with the , will help take Cosmos DeFi to the next level. Because the future of DeFi isn’t constrained by the limitations of one blockchain. Yet, neither should it involve having to navigate a fragmented landscape of multiple dApps and services built on Ethereum alternatives. Gravity DEX protocol Emeris will lift the user experience to new heights, helping to unleash the potential of Cosmos DeFi and taking it to a wider audience. With its intuitive interface, managing crypto assets from different chains is easy. The significant DeFi user base on Ethereum will be able to experience Cosmos DeFi applications following the implementation of a secure trustless bridge on the Cosmos Hub, allowing tokens to flow freely between Cosmos chains and Ethereum. Emeris will open the floodgates to wider adoption for Cosmos DeFi by garnering a greater user base as well as higher liquidity derived from other chains. Enhancing the Utility of the Cosmos Hub In July, the launched on the Cosmos Hub, marking an enormous milestone for Cosmos DeFi with a cross-chain protocol allowing for the swapping and pooling of crypto assets among different Cosmos blockchains. As more Cosmos chains are added and the work on bridges to other ecosystems (including Ethereum, Polkadot, and Celo) is completed, the utility of the Cosmos Hub will increase exponentially. Gravity DEX protocol Emeris is the connector between this highly advanced decentralized exchange protocol and the end-user. It is the portal allowing access to cross-chain DeFi and cross-chain interactions. As more and more users flock to the Cosmos Hub to engage in cross-chain DeFi, its utility will increase as transaction fees are paid in ATOM and the Cosmos Hub takes its place as the providing connections to other blockchain hubs. true port city Facilitating On-Chain Governance and Staking Governance is perhaps one of the least discussed advantages that tokens can provide. Yet, governance is crucial in decentralized blockchain applications and enables strong communities like Cosmos to form, giving token holders rights through its native ATOM token, a vote in the development of the platform, and the features and upgrades that the Cosmos Hub undergoes. Governance is also a core differentiator when building a sovereign blockchain with Cosmos technology rather than creating a decentralized app on a Layer 1 solution like Ethereum and being subject to the rules and constraints of the base protocol. Despite its fundamental role, very few wallets currently support governance. Cosmos is strongly committed to allowing communities to own their projects and collectively decide on their future development. That’s why Emeris will allow for on-chain governance for all supported chains, making it easier to form a meaningful part of your chosen blockchain community. Emeris will also offer the ability to stake on multiple chains using just one interface. This will make earning yield cross-chain more efficient and allow DeFi to scale for the next generation of users. Taking Cosmos Closer to Realizing Its Vision Cross-chain DeFi is just the starting point for Emeris. But, in reality, the Cosmos vision is so much wider and more inclusive. Emeris will be instrumental in helping our community to realize its vision of a multichain future, as the interface of the Internet of Blockchains, in which there will be a new world of apps and services beyond open finance that we’re only just scratching the surface of today. At the core of the Cosmos vision of a sustainable interoperable future for blockchain is continued collaboration among our peers. That’s why Emeris is blockchain agnostic. Cosmos has never believed in cutthroat competition or forcing people to use our technology. Emeris can be integrated with any blockchain — and there will be multiple blockchain ecosystems — collaborating, interconnecting, and enabling the next web. Also published here

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