Daily Tech Digest - March 03, 2023

Irish Authorities Levy GDPR Fine in Centric Health Breach

DPC says that while Centric stated in its initial breach notification that 70,000 data subjects were affected by the breach, it only issued notifications to the 2,500 individuals whose data was irretrievably lost in the incident. Besides the inadequate breach communication to affected individuals, the fine levied against Centric also reflects a variety of other GDPR infringements, including "failure to implement technical and organizational measures appropriate to the level of risk" posed to personal and special category data on Centric's server. "The failure to implement the necessary safeguards in an effective manner at the appropriate time led to the possibility of patients' personal data being erroneously disclosed to unauthorized people," the report says. Centric, in a statement provided to Information Security Media Group, says that at the time of the cyberattack, it immediately informed the DPC and cooperated fully with the investigation. "We want to assure our patients that we take our responsibility to protect their data and ensure the security of our IT systems very seriously," Centric says. 


Gitpod flaw shows cloud-based development environments need security assessments

"Many questions remain unanswered with the adoption of cloud-based development environments: What happens if a cloud IDE workspace is infected with malware? What happens when access controls are insufficient and allow cross-user or even cross-organization access to workspaces? What happens when a rogue developer exfiltrates company intellectual property from a cloud-hosted machine outside the visibility of the organization's data loss prevention or endpoint security software?," the Snyk researchers said in their report, which is part of a larger project to investigate the security of CDEs. ... In fact, CDEs are in many ways a big improvement over traditional IDEs: They can eliminate the configuration drift that happens over time with developer workstations/laptops, they can eliminate the dependency collisions that occur when developers work on different projects, and can limit the window for attacks because CDE workspaces run as containers and can be short-lived.


Responsible AI: The research collaboration behind new open-source tools offered by Microsoft

Through its Responsible AI Toolbox, a collection of tools and functionalities designed to help practitioners maximize the benefits of AI systems while mitigating harms, and other efforts for responsible AI, Microsoft offers an alternative: a principled approach to AI development centered around targeted model improvement. Improving models through targeting methods aims to identify solutions tailored to the causes of specific failures. This is a critical part of a model improvement life cycle that not only includes the identification, diagnosis, and mitigation of failures but also the tracking, comparison, and validation of mitigation options. The approach supports practitioners in better addressing failures without introducing new ones or eroding other aspects of model performance. “With targeted model improvement, we’re trying to encourage a more systematic process for improving machine learning in research and practice,” says Besmira Nushi, a Microsoft Principal Researcher involved with the development of tools for supporting responsible AI.


Now Microsoft has a new AI model - Kosmos-1

The researchers also tested how Kosmos-1 performed in the zero-shot Raven IQ test. The results found a "large performance gap between the current model and the average level of adults", but also found that its accuracy showed potential for MLLMs to "perceive abstract conceptual patterns in a nonverbal context" by aligning perception with language models. The research into "web page question answering" is interesting given Microsoft's plan to use Transformer-based language models to make Bing a better rival to Google search. "Web page question answering aims at finding answers to questions from web pages. It requires the model to comprehend both the semantics and the structure of texts. The structure of the web page (such as tables, lists, and HTML layout) plays a key role in how the information is arranged and displayed. The task can help us evaluate our model's ability to understand the semantics and the structure of web pages," the researchers explain.


How AI can improve quality assurance: seven tips

One of the areas where AI is proving its worth for quality assurance is in the software development sector. AI seems particularly well-suited to regression testing. That approach requires checking to ensure previously tested versions of software keep working as expected following code modifications. Or, AI could help create new test cases. Some AI models can recognise or come up with scenarios without prior exposure to them. If you’re thinking about using AI for testing help, confirm which processes that typically take humans the longest to do or where the errors happen most often. Then, assess whether AI might avoid some of those issues and speed up the steps testers typically go through when verifying all is well with new software. Also, keep in mind that using AI for software testing works best when you have a large data set. That’s why training your AI models thoroughly is so necessary, and not a step to take hastily. 


Edge Computing Eats the Cloud?

Additionally, Sedoshkin says that smartphones are “more compact” than a set of GPUs and peripheral components make more sense in an R&D lab environment. He predicts this trend will continue to intensify. “Many real-world applications require the usage of a smartphone anyway, and these devices are capable of running pre-trained neural networks on edge. Smartphone manufacturers will continue increasing computational power and memory capacity on edge devices. However, R&D labs will use specialized hardware for training and testing AI/ML algorithms, and DIY enthusiasts will use specialized lightweight chipsets," Sedoshkin says. In short, there is little to stop the encroach of edge computing on the cloud’s lofty turf. There isn’t much friction to slow it down, either. “The future of edge computing is an evolving landscape; however, ‘ubiquitous’ is the best word that describes it because it will evolve to be all around us,” Tiwari says. And by ubiquitous, industry watchers say they literally mean everywhere.


4 tips to freshen up your IT resume in 2023

Every IT hiring manager looks for professionals who are passionate about their work. And what better way to show this than by discussing your passion projects? In your resume’s contact information section, add a link to any outside projects you’ve worked on over the years, casual or professional. Remember that these don’t need to be overly complex or high-tech – the point is to show you’re passionate about technology outside of work. Even if your contributions involve small edits or suggestions to other people’s code, include them on your resume. That said, your profiles must be up to date. If you haven’t updated it in years, don’t include it. Keeping your IT resume updated and relevant in 2023 is crucial for job seekers in the competitive technology industry. And while many IT professionals get job offers without an optimized resume, an exceptional resume might just be what stands between you and your top-choice company.


The role of human insight in AI-based cybersecurity

Traditional cybersecurity solutions, like secure email gateways (SEGs), rely on pre-defined rules and patterns to identify potential threats. However, these rules and patterns can become outdated quickly, leading to a high rate of false positives and false negatives. Sophisticated phishing attacks can also evade SEG systems as they impersonate known trusted senders or takeover accounts. By using RLHF, the model can learn from human feedback and continuously adapt to new threats as they emerge. Enterprise security teams spend as much as 33% of their time dealing with phishing scams. Since traditional cybersecurity solutions often rely on manual processes, this leads to delays in detecting and responding to potential threats. By combining AI and RLHF, teams can better identify potential threats, resulting in up to a 90% reduction in the amount of time needed to identify and react to phishing scams, while also significantly reducing the organization’s risk posture.


Biden's Cybersecurity Strategy Calls for Software Liability, Tighter Critical Infrastructure Security

The requirements will be performance based, adaptable to changing requirements, and focus on driving adoption of secure-by-design principles. "While voluntary approaches to critical infrastructure security have produced meaningful improvements, the lack of mandatory requirements has resulted in inadequate and inconsistent outcomes," the strategy document said. Regulation can also level the playing field in sectors where operators are in a competition with others to underspend on security because there really is no incentive to implement better security. The strategy provides critical infrastructure operators that might not have the financial and technical resources to meet the new requirements, with potentially new avenues for securing those resources. Joshua Corman, former CISA chief strategist and current vice president of cyber safety at Claroty, says the Biden administration's choice to make critical infrastructure security a priority is an important one.


Interactive Microservices as an Alternative to Micro Front-Ends for Modularizing the UI Layer

Interactive microservices are based on a new type of web API that Qworum defines, the multi-phase web API. What differentiates these APIs from conventional REST or JSON-RPC web APIs is that endpoint calls may involve more than one request-response pair, also called a phase. ... Unbounded composability — Interactive microservices can call other end-points and even themselves during their execution. The maximum depth of allowed nested calls is unbounded, and each call disposes of a full-page UI regardless of nesting depth. This is unlike micro front-ends which typically cannot be nested beyond 1 or 2 levels at most, because the UI surface area that is allocated to each micro front-end becomes vanishingly smaller with increasing nesting depth. General applicability — Qworum services are more generally applicable for distributed applications than micro front-ends, as the latter are generally tied to a particular web application (ad hoc micro front-ends), front-end framework (React micro front-ends, Angular micro front-ends etc) or organisation.



Quote for the day:

"When building a team, I always search first for people who love to win. If I can't find any of those, I look for people who hate to lose." -- H. Ross Perot

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