Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and blockchain enable the future of payments
CBDC has the potential to transform the future of payments. It can be used to
create programmable money that can be spent only on specific things. For
example, a government could issue a stimulus package that can only be spent on
certain goods and services. This would ensure that the money is spent in the
intended manner and would reduce the risk of fraud. Also, CBDC can improve
financial inclusion. According to the World Bank, around 1.7 billion people do
not have access to basic financial services. CBDC can solve this problem by
providing a digital currency that anyone with a smartphone can use, without the
need for a bank account. When a CBDC holder uses their phone as a medium for
transactions, it becomes crucial to establish a strong link between their
digital identity and the device they are using. This link is essential to ensure
that the right party is involved in the transaction, mitigating the risk of
fraud and promoting trust in the digital financial ecosystem. That said, CBDC
and the digital identity can work together to improve financial inclusion.
A statistical examination of utilization trends in decentralized applications
Decentralized applications (dApp) have proliferated in recent years, but their
long-term viability is a topic of debate. However, for dApps to be
sustainable, and suitable for integration into a larger service networks, they
need to attract users and promise reliable availability. Therefore, assessing
their longevity is crucial. Analyzing the utilization trajectory of a service
is, however, challenging due to several factors, such as demand spikes, noise,
autocorrelation, and non-stationarity. In this study, we employ robust
statistical techniques to identify trends in currently popular dApps. Our
findings demonstrate that a significant proportion of dApps, across a range of
categories, exhibit statistically significant positive overall trends,
indicating that success in decentralized computing can be sustainable and
transcends specific fields. However, there is also a substantial number of
dApps showing negative trends, with a disproportionately high number from the
decentralized finance (DeFi) category.
How SaaS Companies Can Monetize Generative AI
Rather than building these models from scratch, many companies elect to
leverage OpenAI’s APIs to call GPT-4 (or other models), and serve the response
back to customers. To obtain complete visibility into usage costs and margins,
each API call to and from OpenAI tech should be metered to understand the size
of the input and the corresponding backend costs, as well as the output,
processing time and other relevant performance metrics. By metering both the
customer-facing output and the corresponding backend actions, companies can
create a real-time view into business KPIs like margin and costs, as well as
technical KPIs like service performance and overall traffic. After creating
the meters, deploy them to the solution or application where events are
originating to begin tracking real-time usage. Once the metering
infrastructure is deployed, begin visualizing usage and costs in real time as
usage occurs and customers leverage the generative services. Identify power
users and lagging accounts and empower customer-facing teams with contextual
data to provide value at every touchpoint.
“Auth” Demystified: Authentication vs Authorization
There are two technical approaches to modern authorization that are growing
ecosystems around them: policy-as-code and policy-as-data. They are similar in
that both approaches advocate decoupling authorization logic from the
application code. But they also have differences. In policy-as-code systems,
the authorization policy is written in a domain-specific language, and stored
and versioned in its own repository like any other code. OPA is one well-known
example of this approach. It is a CNCF graduated project that is mostly used
in infrastructure authorization use cases, such as k8s admission control. It
provides a great general-purpose decision engine to enforce authorization
logic, and a language called Rego to define that logic as policy. The
policy-as-data approach determines access based on relationships between users
and the underlying application data. Rather than rely on rules in a policy,
these systems use the relationships between subjects (users/groups) and
objects (resources) in the application.
Redefining Software Resilience: The Era of Artificial Immune Systems
Artificial Immune Systems, inspired by the vertebrate immune system, provide
an innovative approach to designing self-healing software. By emulating the
biological immune system’s ability to adapt, learn, and remember, AIS can
empower software systems to detect, diagnose, and fix issues autonomously. AIS
offers a framework that enables the software to learn from each interaction,
adapt to system changes, and remember past faults and their resolutions. AIS
leads to a more robust, resilient system capable of tackling an array of
unpredictable errors and vulnerabilities. The vertebrate immune system
consists of innate immunity and adaptive immunity. Innate immunity protects us
against known pathogens. Innate immunity is always non-specific and general.
Present self-healing software models closely resemble innate immunity.
Adaptive immunity can learn from current threats and apply the knowledge to
handle future situations. At its core, these systems mimic the vertebrate
immune system’s differentiation of self and non-self entities.
Europe’s Business Software Startups Prove Resilient: Why?
So what are the factors underpinning the resilience of Europe’s business
software sector. One key element of the picture is demand from other tech
companies. “Europe’s tech ecosystem is maturing, " says Windsor. “And as the
sector matures, companies need tools. Those tools are being supplied by
business software companies.” And of course, there is demand from companies
outside the tech sector. From banking and financial services to manufacturing,
digital transformation is continuing across the economy as a whole creating
opportunities for new B2B software providers. But how do European companies
take advantage of those opportunities in a market that has been dominated by
North American rivals? This isn’t captured in the data, but Windsor sees a
home market-first approach, widening out to include new countries and
territories as businesses grow. “Anecdotally companies start by selling to
their domestic market, then they look at the continent. After that, they
expand to other regions.” There is, Windsor adds, a preference for the Asia
Pacific. The U.S., on the other hand, remains a difficult market.
Open RAN Testing Expands in the US Amid 5G Slowdown
To be clear, open RAN technology in the US has a number of backers. Dish
Network is perhaps the most vocal, having built an open RAN-based 5G network
across 70% of the US population. Further, other operators have hinted at their
own initial open RAN aspirations, including AT&T and Verizon.
Interestingly, the US government has also emerged as a leading proponent for
open RAN. For example, the US military continues to fund open RAN tests and
deployments. And the Biden administration's NTIA is doling out millions of
dollars in the pursuit of open RAN momentum. Broadly, US officials hope to use
open RAN technologies to encourage the production of 5G equipment domestically
and among US allies, as a lever against China. But open RAN continues to face
struggles. For example, US-based open RAN vendors like Airspan and Parallel
Wireless have hit hurdles recently. And research and consulting firm Dell'Oro
recently reported that open RAN revenue growth slowed to the 10 to 20% range
in the first quarter, after more than doubling in 2022.
Low-Code and AI: Friends or Foes?
Although it appears likely that AI will replace low-code, there are actually
many opportunities for symbiosis between the two concepts. Rather than
eradicate low-code platforms entirely, LLMs will likely become more embedded
within them. We’ve already seen this occur as low-code providers like Mendix
and OutSystems integrated ChatGPT connectors. Microsoft has also embedded
ChatGPT into its Power Platform as well as integrated GPT-driven Copilots into
various developer environments. “Low-code and AI on their own are powerful
tools to increase enterprise efficiency and productivity,” said Dinesh
Varadharajan, the chief product officer at Kissflow. “But there is potential
for the combination of both to unlock game-changing automation for almost
every industry. The power comes from the congruence between low-code/no-code
and AI.” There is also the opportunity to train bespoke LLMs on the inner
workings of specific software development platforms, which could generate
fully-built templates upon natural language prompts.
Cloud cost optimization should begin by measuring the drivers of cloud spend
at a granular level and then providing full visibility to the teams and
organizations that are behind the spend, says Tim Potter, principal,
technology strategy and cloud engineering with Deloitte Consulting.
“Near-real-time dashboards showing cloud resource utilization, routine reports
of cloud consumption, and predictive spend reports will provide application
teams and business units with the data needed to take action to optimize cloud
costs,” he notes. ... Rearchitecting applications is a frequently overlooked
way to achieve the cost and other benefits of transitioning to a cloud model.
“Organizations also need to understand the various discount models and select
one that optimizes costs yet also provides flexibility and predictability into
spending,” says Mindy Cancila, vice president of corporate strategy for Dell
Technologies. Cancila adds that organizations should not only consider current
workload costs, but also how to manage costs for workloads as they scale over
time.
Warning: Attackers Abusing Legitimate Internet Services
Cloud storage platforms, and Google Cloud in particular, are the most
exploited, followed by messaging services - most often Telegram, including via
its API - as well as email services and social media, the researchers found.
Examples of other services being abused by attackers include OneDrive,
Discord, Gmail SMTP, Mastodon profiles, GitHub, bitcoin blockchain data, the
project management tool Notion, malware analysis site VirusTotal, YouTube
comments and even Rotten Tomatoes movie review site profiles. "It is important
to note that ransomware campaigns use legitimate cloud storage tools such as
mega.io or MegaSync for exfiltration purposes as well," although the
crypto-locking malware itself may not be coded to work directly with
legitimate tools, the report says. Criminals' choice of service depends on
desired functionality. Anyone using an info stealer such as Vidar needs a
place to store large amounts of exfiltrated data. The researchers said cloud
services' easy setup for less technically sophisticated users makes them a
natural fit for such use cases.
Quote for the day:
"We're all passionate about something,
the secret is to figure out what it is, then pursue it with all our hearts"
-- Gordon Tredgold
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