Daily Tech Digest - August 28, 2024

Improving healthcare fraud prevention and patient trust with digital ID

Digital trust involves the use of secure and transparent technologies to protect patient data while enhancing communication and engagement. For example, digital consent forms and secure messaging platforms allow patients to communicate with their healthcare providers conveniently while ensuring that their data remains protected. Furthermore, integrating digital trust technology into healthcare systems can streamline administrative processes, reduce paperwork, and minimize the chances of errors, according to a blog post by Five Faces. This not only enhances operational efficiency but also improves the overall patient experience by reducing wait times and simplifying access to medical services. ... These smart cards, embedded with secure microchips, store vital patient information and health insurance details, enabling healthcare providers to access accurate and up-to-date information during consultations. The use of chip-based ID cards reduces the risk of identity theft and fraud, as these cards are difficult to duplicate and require secure authentication methods. This technology ensures that only authorized individuals can access patient information, thereby protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access.


A CEO's Take on AI in the Workforce

Those ignoring the AI transformation and not uptraining their skilled staff are not putting themselves in a position to make use of untapped data that can provide insights into other areas of opportunity for their business. Making minimal-to-no investments in emerging technology merely delays the inevitable and puts companies at a disadvantage at the hands of their competitors. Alternatively, being too aggressive with AI can lead to security vulnerabilities or critical talent loss. While AI integration is critical to accelerating business outputs, doing so without moderators, data safeguards, and regulators to keep organizations in line with data governance and compliance is actually exposing companies to security issues. ... AI should not replace people, but rather presents an opportunity to better utilize them. AI can help solve time-management and efficiency issues across organizations, allowing skilled people to focus on creative and strategic roles or projects that drive better business value. The role of AI should focus on automating time-consuming, repetitive, administrative tasks, thereby leaving individuals to be more calculated and intentional with their time.


The promise of open banking: How data sharing is changing financial services

The benefits of open banking are multifaceted. Customers gain greater control over their financial data, allowing them to securely share it with authorized providers. This empowers them to explore a wider range of customized financial products and services, ultimately promoting financial stability and well-being. Additionally, open banking fosters innovation within the industry, as Fintech companies leverage customer-consented data to develop cutting-edge solutions. The Account Aggregator (AA) framework, regulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), is a cornerstone of open banking in India. AAs act as trusted intermediaries, allowing users to consolidate their financial data from various sources, including banks, mutual funds, and insurance companies, into a single platform. ... APIs empower platforms to aggregate FD offerings from a multitude of banks across India. This provides investors with a comprehensive view of available options, allowing them to compare interest rates, tenures, minimum deposit requirements, and other features within a single platform. This transparency empowers informed decision-making, enabling investors to select the FD that best aligns with their risk appetite and financial goals.


What are the realistic prospects for grid-independent AI data centers in the UK?

Already colo companies looking to develop in the UK are evaluating on-site gas engine power generation and CHP (combined heat and power). To date, UK CHP projects have been hampered by a lack of grid capacity. Microgrid developments are viewed as a solution to this. CHP and microgrids should also make data center developments more appealing for local government planning departments. ... Data center developments have hit front-line politics with Rachel Reeves, the new UK Labour government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) citing data center infrastructure and reform of planning law as critical to growing the country’s economy. Already some projects that were denied planning permission look likely to be reconsidered with reports that “Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner" had “recovered two planning appeals for data centers in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire (already)”. It seems clear that to have any realistic chance of meeting data center capacity demand for AI, cloud and other digital services will require on-site power generation in some form or other. 


Why Every IT Leader Needs a Team of Trusted Advisors

When seeking advisors, look for individuals with the time and willingness to join your kitchen cabinet, Kelley says. "Be mindful of their schedules and obligations, since they are doing you a favor," he notes. Additionally, if you're offering any perks, such as paid meals, travel reimbursement, or direct monetary payments, let them know upfront. Such bonuses are relatively rare, however. "More than likely, you’re talking about individual or small group phone calls or meetings." Above all, be honest and open with your team members. "Let them know what kind of help you need and the time frame you are working under," Kelley says. "If you've heard different or contradictory advice from other sources, bring it up and get their reaction," he recommends. Keep in mind that an advisory team is a two-way relationship. Kelley recommends personalizing each connection with an occasional handwritten note, book, lunch, or ticket to a concert or sporting event. On the other hand, if you decide to ignore their input or advice, you need to explain why, he suggests. Otherwise, they might conclude that being a team participant is a waste of time. Also be sure to help your team members whenever they need advice or support. 


Why CI and CD Need to Go Their Separate Ways

Continuous promotion is a concept designed to bridge the gap between CI and CD, addressing the limitations of traditional CI/CD pipelines when used with modern technologies like Kubernetes and GitOps. The idea is to insert an intermediary step that focuses on promotion of artifacts based on predefined rules and conditions. This approach allows more granular control over the deployment process, ensuring that artifacts are promoted only when they meet specific criteria, such as passing certain tests or receiving necessary approvals. By doing so, continuous promotion decouples the CI and CD processes, allowing each to focus on its core responsibilities without overextension. ... Introducing a systematic step between CI and CD ensures that only qualified artifacts progress through the pipeline, reducing the risk of faulty deployments. This approach allows the implementation of detailed rule sets, which can include criteria such as successful test completions, manual approvals or compliance checks. As a result, continuous promotion provides greater control over the deployment process, enabling teams to automate complex decision-making processes that would otherwise require manual intervention.


CIOs listen up: either plan to manage fast-changing certificates, or fade away

Even when organizations finally decide to set policies and standardize security for new deployments, mitigating the existing deployments is a huge effort, and in the modern stack, there’s no dedicated operations team, he says. That makes it more important for CIOs to take ownership of the problem, Cairns points out. “Especially in larger, more complex and global organizations, the magnitude of trying to push these things through the organization is often underestimated,” he says. “Some of that is having a good handle on the culture and how to address these things in terms of messaging, communications, enforcement of the right policies and practices, and making sure you’ve got the proper stakeholder buy-in at the various points in this process — a lot of governance aspects.” ... Many large organizations will soon need to revoke and reprovision TLS certificates at scale. One in five Fortune 1000 companies use Entrust as their certificate authority, and from November 1, 2024, Chrome will follow Firefox in no longer trusting TLS certificates from Entrust because of a pattern of compliance failures, which the CA argues were, ironically, sometimes caused by enterprise customers asking for more time to deal with revocation. 


Effortless Concurrency: Leveraging the Actor Model in Financial Transaction Systems

In a financial transaction system, the data flow for handling inbound payments involves multiple steps and checks to ensure compliance, security, and accuracy. However, potential failure points exist throughout this process, particularly when external systems impose restrictions or when the system must dynamically decide on the course of action based on real-time data. ... Implementing distributed locks is inherently more complex, often requiring external systems like ZooKeeper, Consul, Hazelcast, or Redis to manage the lock state across multiple nodes. These systems need to be highly available and consistent to prevent the distributed lock mechanism from becoming a single point of failure or a bottleneck. ... In this messaging based model, communication between different parts of the system occurs through messages. This approach enables asynchronous communication, decoupling components and enhancing flexibility and scalability. Messages are managed through queues and message brokers, which ensure orderly transmission and reception of messages. ... Ensuring message durability is crucial in financial transaction systems because it allows the system to replay a message if the processor fails to handle the command due to issues like external payment failures, storage failures, or network problems.


Hundreds of LLM Servers Expose Corporate, Health & Other Online Data

Flowise is a low-code tool for building all kinds of LLM applications. It's backed by Y Combinator, and sports tens of thousands of stars on GitHub. Whether it be a customer support bot or a tool for generating and extracting data for downstream programming and other tasks, the programs that developers build with Flowise tend to access and manage large quantities of data. It's no wonder, then, that the majority of Flowise servers are password-protected. ... Leaky vector databases are even more dangerous than leaky LLM builders, as they can be tampered with in such a way that does not alert the users of AI tools that rely on them. For example, instead of just stealing information from an exposed vector database, a hacker can delete or corrupt its data to manipulate its results. One could also plant malware within a vector database such that when an LLM program queries it, it ends up ingesting the malware. ... To mitigate the risk of exposed AI tooling, Deutsch recommends that organizations restrict access to the AI services they rely on, monitor and log the activity associated with those services, protect sensitive data trafficked by LLM apps, and always apply software updates where possible.


Generative AI vs. Traditional AI

Traditional AI, often referred to as “symbolic AI” or “rule-based AI,” emerged in the mid-20th century. It relies on predefined rules and logical reasoning to solve specific problems. These systems operate within a rigid framework of human-defined guidelines and are adept at tasks like data classification, anomaly detection, and decision-making processes based on historical data. In sharp contrast, generative AI is a more recent development that leverages advanced ML techniques to create new content. This form of AI does not follow predefined rules but learns patterns from vast datasets to generate novel outputs such as text, images, music, and even code. ... Traditional AI relies heavily on rule-based systems and predefined models to perform specific tasks. These systems operate within narrowly defined parameters, focusing on pattern recognition, classification, and regression through supervised learning techniques. Data fed into these models is typically structured and labeled, allowing for precise predictions or decisions based on historical patterns. In contrast, generative AI uses neural networks and advanced ML models to produce human-like content. This approach leverages unsupervised or semi-supervised learning techniques to understand underlying data distributions.



Quote for the day:

"Opportunities don't happen. You create them." -- Chris Grosser

No comments:

Post a Comment