Daily Tech Digest: DeFi

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Daily Tech Digest - May 30, 2024

Single solution for regulating AI unlikely as laws require flexibility and context

In drafting the AI Act – the world’s first major piece of AI legislation – with an “omnibus approach,” Mazzini says, the EU aimed for a blanket coverage that allows for few loopholes. It aims to avoid overlap with existing sectoral laws, which can be enforced in addition to the AI Act. With the exception of exclusions around national security, military and defense (owing to the fact that the EU is not a sovereign state), it “essentially covers social and economic sectors from employment to vacation to law enforcement, immigration, products, financial services,” says Mazzini. “The main idea that we put forward was the risk-based approach.” ... Kortz believes it is “unlikely that we will see a sort of omnibus, all-sector, nationwide AI set of regulations or laws in the U.S. in the near future.” As in the case of data privacy laws, individual states will want to maintain their established authority, and while Kortz says some states – “especially, I think, here, of California” – may try something ambitious like a generalized AI law, the sectoral approach is likely to win out.

Why Intel is making big bets on Edge AI

“Edge is not the cloud, it is very different from the cloud because it is heterogeneous,” she says. “You have different hardware, you have different servers, and you have different operating systems.” Such devices can include anything from sensors and IoT devices to routers, integrated access devices (IAD), and wide area network (WAN) access devices. One of the benefits of Edge AI is that by storing all your data in an Edge environment rather than a data center, even when large data sets are involved, it speeds up the decision-making and data analysis process, both of which are vital for AI applications that have been designed to provide real-time insights to organizations. Another benefit borne out of the proliferation of generative AI is that, when it comes to training models, even though that process takes place in a centralized data center, far away from users; inferencing – where the model applies its learned knowledge – can happen in an Edge environment, reducing the time required to send data to a centralized server and receive a response. Meanwhile, talent shortages, the growing need for efficiency, and the desire to improve time to market through the delivery of new services have all caused businesses to double down on automation.

Tensions in DeFi industry exposed by LayerZero’s anti-Sybil strategy

If identity protocols could eliminate Sybil farming and solutions already exist, why have they not already become standard practice? Cointelegraph spoke with Debra Nita, a senior crypto strategist at public relations firm YAP Global, to better understand the perceived risks that liveness checks might introduce to the industry. “Protocols may be reluctant to solve issues they face with airdrops using better verification processes — including decentralized ones — for reasons including reputational. The implications vary from the impact on community sentiments, key stakeholders and legal standing,” said Nita. Nita continued, “Verification poses a potential reputational problem, whereby it, from the outset, potentially excludes a large group of users.” Nita cited EigenLayer’s airdrop, which disqualified users from the United States, Canada, China and Russia despite allowing participation from these regions. This left a sour taste in the mouths of many who spent time and money on the platform only to receive no reward for their efforts.

Investing in employee training & awareness enhances an organisation’s cyber resilience

One essential consideration is the concept of Return on Security Investment (ROSI). Boards scrutinise security spending, expecting a clear demonstration of value. Evaluating whether security investments outweigh the potential costs of breaches is crucial. Therefore, investments should be made judiciously, focusing on technologies and strategies that offer substantial RoI. A key strategy is to consolidate and unify security technologies. Many organisations deploy a multitude of security solutions, often operating in silos. ... Furthermore, prioritising skill development is essential. With each additional technology, the demand for specialised expertise grows. Investing in training and development programs ensures that internal teams possess the necessary skills to effectively manage and leverage security solutions. Additionally, strategic partnerships with trusted vendors and service providers can augment internal capabilities and broaden access to specialised expertise. Ultimately, consolidating security technologies, focusing on ROI, and investing in skill development are key best practices for maximisng the effectiveness of existing security investments.

Modular, scalable hardware architecture for a quantum computer

To build this QSoC, the researchers developed a fabrication process to transfer diamond color center “microchiplets” onto a CMOS backplane at a large scale. They started by fabricating an array of diamond color center microchiplets from a solid block of diamond. They also designed and fabricated nanoscale optical antennas that enable more efficient collection of the photons emitted by these color center qubits in free space. Then, they designed and mapped out the chip from the semiconductor foundry. ... They built an in-house transfer setup in the lab and applied a lock-and-release process to integrate the two layers by locking the diamond microchiplets into the sockets on the CMOS chip. Since the diamond microchiplets are weakly bonded to the diamond surface, when they release the bulk diamond horizontally, the microchiplets stay in the sockets. “Because we can control the fabrication of both the diamond and the CMOS chip, we can make a complementary pattern. In this way, we can transfer thousands of diamond chiplets into their corresponding sockets all at the same time,” Li says.

NIST launches ambitious effort to assess LLM risks

NIST’s new Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI (ARIA) program will “assess the societal risks and impacts of artificial intelligence systems,” the NIST statement said, including ascertaining “what happens when people interact with AI regularly in realistic settings.” ... The first will be what NIST described as “controlled access to privileged information. Can the LLM protect information it is not to share, or can creative users coax that information from the system?” The second area will be “personalized content for different populations. Can an LLM be contextually aware of the specific needs of distinct user populations?” The third area will be “synthesized factual content. [Can the LLM be] free of fabrications?” The NIST representative also said that the organization’s evaluations will make use of “proxies to facilitate a generalizable, reusable testing environment that can sustain over a period of years. ARIA evaluations will use proxies for application types, risks, tasks, and guardrails — all of which can be reused and adapted for future evaluations.”

Researchers Detailed Modern WAF Bypass Techniques With Burp Suite Plugin

One of the key vulnerabilities Shah discussed is the request size limit inherent in many WAFs. Due to performance constraints, WAFs typically inspect only a portion of the request body. For instance, AWS WAFs inspect up to 8 KB for Application Load Balancer and AWS AppSync protections and up to 64 KB for CloudFront and API Gateway protections. Similarly, Azure and Akamai WAFs have their size limits, often leading to uninspected portions of large requests. This flaw can be exploited by placing malicious payloads beyond the inspection limit, bypassing the WAF. Shah introduced the nowafpls Burp Plugin to facilitate the exploitation of these request size limits. This tool simplifies the process by automatically padding out requests to exceed WAF inspection limits. Depending on the content type, the plugin inserts junk data at the cursor’s position, making it easier to bypass WAFs without manual intervention. For example, it adds comments in XML, junk keys and values in JSON, and junk parameters in URL-encoded data.

Four Essential Principles To Empower Your Decision-Making

First and foremost, write down your options. It's astonishing how tangled our thoughts can become when we don't have a clear view of our choices. By putting pen to paper, we untangle the knots and pave the way for clarity. Then comes the crucial shift from chasing perfection to embracing the best available option. Jeff Bezos' wisdom rings true here; waiting for 90% of the data often means missing out on opportunities. Sometimes, 70% is all we need to move forward. And once the decision is made, it's made. Dwelling on the "what-ifs" serves no purpose other than to tether us to the past. As Bezos famously put it, most decisions are reversible "two-way doors." So why let fear of making the wrong choice paralyze us? Indecision, I've learned, is its own form of suffering. Committing to a choice, even if it's not perfect, is infinitely more empowering than languishing in uncertainty. ... Decision-making, I've come to realize, is not an innate talent but a cultivated skill. It demands a shift in mindset, a commitment to better practices and a willingness to confront our own limiting beliefs.

How CPUs will address the energy challenges of generative AI

Industry AI alliances, such as the AI Platform Alliance, play a crucial role in advancing CPU technology for artificial intelligence applications, focusing on enhancing energy efficiency and performance through collaborative efforts. These alliances bring together a diverse range of partners from various sectors of the technology stack—including CPUs, accelerators, servers, and software—to develop interoperable solutions that address specific AI challenges. This work spans from edge computing to large data centers, ensuring that AI deployments are both sustainable and efficient. These collaborations are particularly effective in creating solutions optimized for different AI tasks, such as computer vision, video processing, and generative AI. By pooling expertise and technologies from multiple companies, these alliances aim to forge best-in-breed solutions that deliver optimal performance and remarkable energy efficiency. Cooperative efforts such as the AI Platform Alliance fuel the development of new CPU technologies and system designs that are specifically engineered to handle the demands of AI workloads efficiently.

Driving Business and Digital Transformation: The CIO Agenda for 2024 and Beyond

Business transformation is a comprehensive process that aims to enhance overall business performance by increasing revenue, reducing operating costs, improving customer satisfaction, and boosting workforce productivity. ... Digital transformation, on the other hand, focuses on integrating digital technologies into all aspects of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers. This transformation requires significant investments in technology and tech-enabled processes, driving innovation and operational efficiency. ... Business and digital transformation are complementary processes. While business transformation aims to enhance overall performance and achieve strategic goals, digital transformation provides the technological foundation and innovative capabilities necessary to drive these changes. ... In 2024, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are at the forefront of driving AI and innovation-led digital business transformations. Their role has evolved from managing technology infrastructure to becoming strategic leaders who drive business transformation through digital innovation.

Quote for the day:

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." -- Eddie Rickenbacker

Daily Tech Digest - December 24, 2023

The emerging role of the chief resilience officer in BCDR

Chief resilience officer is a relatively new senior-level executive title and is still evolving. Responsibilities can include business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), incident response, cybersecurity, and risk management. The chief resilience officer might also be designated as the lead executive for crisis management activities. Chief resilience officers must ensure the organization can adapt and improve its operations so that future disruptive events are more effectively mitigated, resulting in minimal damage to the organization and its reputation. ... Preparing for and responding to disruptive events traditionally has been managed by a wide variety of job titles in an organization. Sometimes the role is part of the IT staff or disaster recovery team. Other times it can be part of administration, risk management, emergency management, human resources or facilities management. In medium to large organizations, the need for a central leadership role for these and related activities has become evident. ... Establishing a chief resilience officer reinforces the importance of BCDR activities across the entire organization.

Global securities body releases DeFi recommendations: Finance Redefined

Following its release, some community members worried about how it could “kill” DeFi, while others said it would not have a fatal effect. Apart from IOSCO’s move, China’s central bank also urged jurisdictions across the globe to regulate the DeFi space jointly. Meanwhile, the DeFi ecosystem flourished in the past week thanks to ongoing bullish market momentum, with most tokens trading in green on the weekly charts. IOSCO published nine recommendations for DeFi. The organization encourages consistency when it comes to regulatory oversight across jurisdictions worldwide. The new recommendations were a companion to the digital asset and crypto recommendations released in November. Furthermore, IOSCO released a note on how the two sets of recommendations can work hand in hand depending on the level of decentralization of regulated entities. ... Apart from IOSCO, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) also pushed for joint DeFi regulation in its latest financial stability report. The central bank allotted a section to crypto assets in its report, underscoring the need for the industry to be regulated with joint efforts from various jurisdictions.

Unleashing power of language models in India’s IT landscape: The talking network revolution

The cornerstone of this transformative paradigm is the ability of language models to comprehend, analyze, and respond to user queries with human-like understanding. India, with its vast and diverse linguistic landscape, stands to benefit immensely from language models that can comprehend and respond in multiple languages. This linguistic versatility ensures that the Talking Network caters to the linguistic diversity of the Indian corporate environment, making it an inclusive and accessible solution for businesses across the country. One of the pivotal trends catalyzed by GAI and LLMs in India is the development of proactive and predictive IT maintenance tools. AIM Research predicts that, by 2024, 40 per cent of enterprise applications will embed conversational AI as a standard feature. Traditionally, IT maintenance has been a reactive process, addressing issues only when they arise. However, the Talking Network introduces a proactive dimension by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities embedded in these language models. By analyzing historical data and identifying patterns, the network can foresee potential glitches and address them before they escalate into major disruptions.

Why Bill Gates Says AI Will Supercharge Medical Innovations

He cites an AI-powered tool under development at the Aurum Institute in Ghana that helps health workers prescribe antibiotics without contributing to antimicrobial resistance, where pathogens learn how to get past antibiotic defenses. The tool can comb through all the available information about antimicrobial resistance and suggest the best drug plan for a patient. ... Gates also sees AI assisting in education, calling AI education tools "mindblowing," as they are tailored to individual learners, and says they will "only get better." He's excited about how the technology can be localized to students in many different countries and cultural contexts. Not everything on Gates' mind is AI-related. He's concerned about climate change, saying he's "blown away by the passion from young climate activists," and hopeful that 2024 will see more investment in innovations that will help those who are most affected by the climate crisis. And he even plunges into the debate over nuclear energy. Gates notes that high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl in the 1980s and Three Mile Island in the late 1970s have spotlighted the risks, but over the past year, he's seen a shift towards acceptance.

How AI Is Transforming Industries

A critical sector of the Indian economy, agriculture contributes to 18 per cent of the GDP. And several new-age start-ups are emerging in this segment with the likes of CropIn, DeHaat, BharatAgri, and Bijak. These start-ups are helping develop innovative solutions for various aspects of agriculture, especially precision farming, supply chain management, and market linkages The 2019 start-up Fyllo presently has over 100 agronomy models to help farmers produce over 20 crops. It provides insights on growing crops based on climate or occurrences of diseases/pests on crops. Fyllo believes that both problems can be solved with accurate data, which led to them building a number and pathogens prediction models using AI now. "We use AI for multiple use cases at Fyllo. The first use case is predicting the weather. We use climate data from our devices and machine learning-based weather Models to come up with a highly precise farm-level weather prediction model. Another use case is getting crop health, and crop stage identification from satellite imagery. We use various machine learning models to do that.

Magnetic Knots Push Future Computing Toward 3D

“In the last decades, electronics basically developed in the paradigm of two-dimensional systems,” says Nikolai Kiselev, a staff scientist at the Peter Grünberg Institute in Jülich, Germany. “Which from a certain point of view is absolutely reasonable because technologically it’s much easier to fabricate and maintain such devices. But if we look toward the future, most probably to make our devices the most efficient, at some point, we will have to turn towards a three-dimensional architecture. And that’s where the discovery we made in our paper might become useful. ... Although hopfions move around readily, other aspects of their computing potential is still uncertain. The team used transmission electron microscopy to image the hopfion, and measuring its location more efficiently is an outstanding problem. The team says they plan to look at how these objects respond to electric current, which could help detect and track them. Plus, precise details on the exact ways hopfions might encode information is still an open question. That said, Kiselev adds, many questions like this don’t yet have answers because there has been no reason to ask them.

The Art Of Listening: Silent Communication In Leadership

Silence, first and foremost, is a medium of introspection and reflection. Leaders, constantly barraged by information and demands, may find themselves lost in a maze of noise—both external and internal. Silence offers a sanctuary, a space to step back and reflect. It allows leaders to process information, contemplate decisions, and align their actions with their core values and objectives. This introspective silence is not merely an absence of noise; it’s an active engagement with one’s thoughts, a deliberate pause to understand the bigger picture. Moreover, silence can be a powerful communication tool. It’s not just about the absence of speech; it’s about listening, understanding, and absorbing. ... Silence also plays a crucial role in conflict resolution and negotiation. In tense situations, a leader’s silence can de-escalate emotions and give everyone a moment to breathe and reassess. By not immediately responding to a provocation or a challenging statement, leaders can avoid knee-jerk reactions that might exacerbate the conflict. Instead, silence can be used to control the tempo of the conversation, allowing for thoughtful and measured responses that are more likely to lead to constructive outcomes.

2024 in laptops: it’s shaping up to be a big year for Windows

It’s the AI coprocessor inside that’s intriguing to me, particularly because Intel and Microsoft have both been dropping hints about a future version of Windows arriving soon and how “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” Rumors suggest that Windows 12 will include a large focus on AI and take advantage of the AI coprocessors that Intel is building into its Core Ultra chips. (Intel isn’t the only one: AMD also has its own Ryzen 7000 mobile processors that include a dedicated AI engine, and these types of neural processing unit (NPU) chips are common on Arm-powered Windows laptops.) Intel held an AI event to launch its Core Ultra chips this month, just ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where we’ll see all of the new laptops that are powered by Intel’s new chips. Lenovo, MSI, Acer, and Asus are all launching laptops with these new chips inside. While Intel talked a lot about “AI everywhere,” the missing piece of the puzzle, a new AI-focused version of Windows, is still a mystery right now.

Chips To Compute With Encrypted Data Are Coming

At first glance, it might seem impossible to do meaningful computation on data that looks like gibberish. But the idea goes back decades, and was finally made possible in 2009 by Craig Gentry, then a Stanford graduate student. Gentry found a way to do both addition and multiplication without calculation-killing noise accumulating, making it possible to do any form of encrypted computation. One comparison you can use to understand FHE is that it’s analogous to a Fourier transform. For those of you who don’t remember your college signal processing, a Fourier transform is a mathematical tool that turns a signal in time, such as the oscillation of voltage in a circuit, into a signal in frequency. One of the key side effects is that any math you can do in the time domain has its equivalent in the frequency domain. So you can compute in either time or frequency and come up with the same answer. The genius of fully homomorphic encryption is that it uses lattice cryptography— a form of quantum-computer-proof encoding—as the mathematical transformation. The problem with this approach is that the transformation leads to a big change in the type and amount of data and in the sorts of operations needed to compute. That’s where the new chips come in.

Ransomware Attackers Abuse Multiple Windows CLFS Driver Zero-Days

CLFS is a high-performance, general-purpose logging system available for user- or kernel-mode software clients. Its kernel access makes it eminently useful for hackers seeking low-level system privileges, and its performance-oriented design has left a series of security holes in its wake in recent years, which ransomware actors in particular have pounced on. ... Nothing in particular changed about the CLFS driver this year. Rather, attackers seem to have just now identified what was wrong with it this whole time: It leans too far left in that inescapable, eternal balance between performance and security. "CLFS is perhaps way too 'optimized for performance,'" Larin wrote, detailing all of the various ways the driver prioritizes it over protection. "It would be better to have a reasonable file format instead of a dump of kernel structures written to a file. All the work with these kernel structures (with pointers) happens right there in the blocks read from disk. Because changes are made to the blocks and kernel structures stored there, and those changes need to be flushed to disk, the code parses the blocks over and over again every time it needs to access something."

Quote for the day:

"The signs of outstanding leadership are found among the followers." -- Max DePree

Daily Tech Digest - November 12, 2023

The metaverse has virtually disappeared. Here's why it's generative AI's fault

"It's basically going through the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," she says. "We've had the hype and now we're seeing the reality. The metaverse was capturing people's imagination. But we're still looking for proven use cases that are going to generate value." Searle's assertion that the metaverse is suffering a familiar fate to other over-hyped technologies is certainly one explanatory factor for the drop in interest in the metaverse. But another huge contributory factor is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI). ... Of course, the rapid take up of generative AI isn't the only narrative in this story; there's a whole series of potential concerns, such as hallucinations, plagiarism, and ethics, that need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. But if you want to impress your family and friends with a tool that seems to work like magic, then generative AI is the one. On the other hand, the metaverse -- just like the blockchain before it -- feels a bit like a rabbit that's stuck in a magician's hat. Entering the metaverse often isn't as easy as its proponents have promised.

Why the service industry needs blockchain, explained

The difficulty of integrating blockchain with existing infrastructure and processes is a significant obstacle. Because service providers frequently use a variety of platforms and technologies, achieving seamless integration can be difficult. It might be difficult to protect data security and privacy while still adhering to regulations. Blockchain’s transparency conflicts with the requirement to protect sensitive customer information, necessitating careful design and implementation of privacy measures. Another major challenge is establishing communication and data exchange across various blockchain networks and traditional systems. To facilitate seamless interoperability, service providers need to spend time developing standardized protocols, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, there are scalability concerns. Blockchain networks, especially public ones, may face limitations in handling a high volume of transactions efficiently. Delays and higher expenses may result from this, especially in service industries where several quick transactions are necessary.

Why developer productivity isn’t all about tooling and AI

Creative work requires some degree of isolation. Each time they sit down to code, developers build up context for what they’re doing in their head; they play a game with their imagination where they’re slotting their next line of code into the larger picture of their project so everything fits together. Imagine you’re holding all this context in your head — and then someone pings you on Slack with a small request. All the context you’ve built up collapses in that instant. It takes time to reorient yourself. It’s like trying to sleep and getting woken up every hour. ... Another factor that gets in the way of developer productivity is a lack of clarity on what engineers are supposed to be doing. If developers have to spend time trying to figure out the requirements of what they’re building while they’re building it, they’re ultimately doing two types of work: Prioritization and coding. These disparate types of work don’t mesh. Figuring out what to build requires conversations with users, extensive research, talks with stakeholders across the organization and other tasks well outside the scope of software development.

Here’s What a Software Architect Does in an Agile Team

An architect is probably not a valid role on an agile team. I admit I have at times been overzealous with non-coding members of a dev team. The less militant version of this is to be aware of ‘pigs’ and ‘chickens’ in the agile sense. When making breakfast, chickens lay eggs but pigs literally have skin in the game. So only pigs should attend daily agile stand ups. There are three problems with the role of architect in classic agile. Think of these as Lutheran protestant theses nailed to the door — or more likely to the planning wall.There are no upfront design phases in agile. “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”. An architect cannot be an approver and cause of delay. This leads to the idea that architectural know-how should be spread out amongst the other team members. This is often the case — however it elides the fact that architectural responsibility doesn’t fall to anyone, even if people feel they may be accountable. Remember your RACI matrix. Should all agile developers be architects in a project? This makes little sense, since architecture describes a singular plan.

AI’s Ability to Reason: Statistics vs. Logic

As a simplistic existence proof that today’s AI does not reason with logic, consider the following problem in basic algebra which was given to Bing/OpenAI GPT to solve. The gist of the problem shown in the figure below is that there are two rectangles, each having the same height (though this detail is not clearly stated in the sourcing 6th grade math text) but different widths. Areas for each are given. The rectangles are positioned in the corresponding math text to suggest that they may be aggregated into a larger rectangle having a width that is the sum of the widths of the smaller rectangles — maybe as a hint toward length. The request to find the length (height) and widths is a test to see whether OpenAI’s GPT via Bing would determine if there are sufficient equations matching unknowns. There aren’t. GPT didn’t discover the number of equations is one too few. Instead, it attempted to find length and widths, and it responded suggesting it had successfully solved the math problem. Everything started to go amuck when the insufficiency of the number of equations matched to the number of unknowns was missed, and the third equation given above simply is a function of the other two.

Security Is EVERYBODY’s Business, But CISOs Need to Lead

Cybersecurity is not an audit or internal audit. There is a fine line of difference there. And as much as the CISO is seen as somewhat more of an enforcer, they need to be seen as an enabler to the business. CISOs need to have very direct, effective, and transparent communication with the board members when it comes to quantification of everything that they’re doing. And when I say quantification, what I mean is quantification of risks to the organization. Some of the board members will be closer to cybersecurity risks. Some of them may be closer to a reputational risk or a financial risk. But if a CSO can stitch that story together and quantify it for the audience of the board, I think that goes a long way. That’s what’s needed because, in the situation in the market that we are in right now, with the threat landscape changing, with new capabilities coming into play, I think it’s critical. CISOs need to ensure the message is articulated well in the boardroom.

How Agile Managers Use Uncertainty to Create Better Decisions Faster

Here's the problem I see with big, long-term, and final management decisions: the decision is too large to have any certainty at all. Remember I said I don't take long consulting engagements? Early in my consulting career, I learned that even a “guaranteed” consulting project was not a guarantee at all. Sure, the client might pay a kill fee (a portion of the unused project budget), but most of the time, the client said (on a Friday afternoon), “Thanks. The world has changed. Don't come back on Monday.” While I always continued my marketing so my business would survive, I felt as if the clients cheated themselves. Because we thought we had more time, we didn't create smaller goals and achieve them. Our work was incomplete—according to their goals. And that's what people remember. Not that they changed the circumstances, but that we didn't finish. That's exactly what happens when managers try to decide for a long time without revisiting their decisions. The world changes. If the world changes enough, the managers feel the need to lay people off, not just stop efforts. Those layoffs are a result of too-long and too-large management decisions.

Technical and digital debt can devastate your digital ambition

Of course, no organisation can afford zero technical debt (is this even possible?). The judgement here is targeting existing technical debt in a priority order. Deciding what not to do is just as important as what to do. You will be better able to manage the high expectations of stakeholders, shape the transformation and prioritise investment when you have this insight. Ask yourself these questions:What technical debt will act as an anchor when trying to increase the pace of change, irrespective of how fast your new IT engineering and product-based approaches to change are? Or to put it another way, which single piece of technical debt will limit the flow of value, irrespective of how slick everything else is? To be able to adapt at pace, at short notice, responding to market opportunities, where is your underlying technology strong but resistant to change? Customers just expect your digital channels to work; where must you improve the reliability of your service? Where can you increase cost effectiveness or risk mitigation through targeted automation as one of the treatment strategies available to you?

How AI and Crypto is Transforming the Future of Decentralized Finance

As time has passed, the crypto industry has evolved into a breeding ground for fraudulent activities and deception. Safeguarding investors from fraud has become increasingly vital, especially with the influx of initial coin offerings and new platforms entering the market. The encouraging news is that AI and crypto can effectively prevent fraud attempts and ensure that investors adhere to financial compliance. AI bots, for example, can detect and flag fraudulent transactions, preventing them from proceeding unless confirmed by a human. Confirming crypto transactions often takes up to 24 hours due to reliance on consensus methods. However, cases of transaction delays often pose a challenge for the crypto sector. With some recent advancements in AI technology, there have been some enhanced trade management options. Some companies are adopting innovative consensus methods that significantly reduce transaction times to just a few seconds. This improvement holds potential benefits for the

Secure Together: ATO Defense for Businesses and Consumers

First off, businesses need to take the lead in forming a stronger partnership with their customers. This means educating both customers and employees on proper security measures. Websites operating with user accounts, engaging individuals and corporations, often find themselves in the crosshairs of swindlers intent on ATO. We mentioned above that phishing is a common tactic. It’s imperative to consistently enlighten customers and employees about the looming menace of online security breaches like phishing, including how phishing attempts trick people and tips for not getting tangled. Adopt a vigilant stance on security by ingraining robust preventive protocols, including routine password updates and providing guidelines for safeguarding user credentials. ... Training does not end there. The MGM Resorts cyberattack we cited above also involved a fraudster tricking a customer support help desk. Businesses must train their staff on how to stop these attempted breaches — for example, by knowing how to ask questions that only a legitimate account holder could know the answer to.

Quote for the day:

"You may be good. You may even be better than everyone esle. But without a coach you will never be as good as you could be." -- Andy Stanley

Daily Tech Digest - September 19, 2023

Experts: 'Quiet cutting' employees makes no sense, and it's costly

The practice involves reassigning workers to roles that don’t align with their career goals to achieve workforce reduction by voluntary attrition — allowing companies to avoid paying costly severance packages or unemployment benefits. “Companies are increasingly using role reassignments as a strategy to sidestep expensive layoffs,” said Annie Rosencrans, people and culture director at HiBob, a human resource platform provider. “By redistributing roles within the workforce, organizations can manage costs while retaining valuable talent, aligning with the current trend of seeking alternatives to traditional layoffs.” ... The optics around quiet cutting and its effects on employee morale is a big problem, however, and experts argue it’s not worth the perceived cost savings. Companies reassigning workers to jobs that may not fit their hopes for a career path or align with their skills can be demoralizing to remaining workers and lead to “disengagement,” according to Chertok. He argued that the quiet cutting trend isn’t necessarily intentional; it's more indicative of corporate America’s need to reprioritize how talent is moved around within an organization.

Why We Need Regulated DeFi

One of DeFi´s greatest challenges are liquidity issues. In a decentralized exchange, liquidity is added and owned by users, who often abandon one protocol for another offering better rewards thus resulting in unstable liquidity on DeFi protocols. A liquidity pool is a group of digital assets gathered to facilitate automated and permissionless trading on a decentralized exchange platform. The users of such exchange platforms don’t rely on a third party to hold funds but transact with each other directly. ... There are many systemic risks currently present in DeFi. For example, potential vulnerabilities in smart contracts can expose users to security breaches. DeFi platforms are often interconnected, meaning a problem on one platform can quickly spread and impact others, potentially causing systemic failures. Another potential systemic risk is the manipulation or failure of oracles, which bring real-world data onto the blockchain. This can result in bad decisions and lead to losses. Ultimately, regulated DeFi can help enforce security standards, fostering trust among users.

Microsoft Azure Data Leak Exposes Dangers of File-Sharing Links

There are so many pitfalls in setting up SAS tokens that Wiz's Luttwak recommends against ever using the mechanism to share files from a private cloud storage account. Instead, companies should have a public account from which resources are shared, he says. "This mechanism is so risky that our recommendation is, first of all, never to share public data, within your storage account — create a completely separate storage account only for public sharing," Luttwak says. "That will greatly reduce the risk of misconfiguration. You want to share public data, create a public data externally storage account and use only that." For those companies that continue to want to share specific files from private storage using SAS URLs, Microsoft has added the capability as part of GitHub's monitoring of the exposure of credentials and secrets. The company has rescanned all repositories, the company stated in its advisory. Microsoft recommends that Azure users limit themselves to short-lived SAS tokens, apply the principle of least privilege, and have a revocation plan.

Chaos Engineering: Path To Build Resilient and Fault-Tolerant Software Applications

The objective of chaos engineering is to unearth system restraints, susceptibilities, and possible failures in a controlled and planned manner before they exhibit perilous challenges resulting in severe impact on the organizations. Few of the most innovative organizations based on learning from past failures understood the importance of chaos engineering and realized it as a key strategy to unravel profound hidden issues to avoid any future failures and impacts on business. Chaos engineering lets the application developers forecast and detect probable collapses by disrupting the system on purpose. The disruption points are identified and altered based on potential system vulnerabilities and weak points. This way the system deficiencies are identified and fixed before they degrade into an outage. Chaos engineering is a growing trend for DevOps and IT teams. A few of the world’s most technologically innovative organizations like Netflix and Amazon are pioneers in adopting chaos testing and engineering.

Unregulated DeFi services abused in latest pig butchering twist

At first glance, the pig butchering ring tracked by Sophos operates in much the same way as a legitimate one, establishing pools of cryptocurrency assets and adding new traders – or, in this case, victims – until such time as the cyber criminals drain the entire pool for themselves. This is what is known as a rug-pull. ... “When we first discovered these fake liquidity pools, it was rather primitive and still developing. Now, we’re seeing shā zhū pán scammers taking this particular brand of cryptocurrency fraud and seamlessly integrating it into their existing set of tactics, such as luring targets over dating apps,” explained Gallagher. “Very few understand how legitimate cryptocurrency trading works, so it’s easy for these scammers to con their targets. There are even toolkits now for this sort of scam, making it simple for different pig butchering operations to add this type of crypto fraud to their arsenal. While last year, Sophos tracked dozens of these fraudulent ‘liquidity pool’ sites, now we’re seeing more than 500.”

Time to Demand IT Security by Design and Default

Organizations can send a strong message to IT suppliers by re-engineering procurement processes and legal contracts to align with secure by design and security by default approaches. Updates to procurement policies and processes can set explicit expectations and requirements of their suppliers and flag any lapses. This isn’t about catching vendors out – many will benefit from the nudge. Changes in procurement assessment criteria can be flagged to IT suppliers in advance to give them a chance to course-correct. Suppliers can then be assessed against these yardsticks. If they fail to measure up, organizations have a clear justification to stop doing business with them. The next step is to create liability or penalty clauses in contracts that force IT vendors to share security costs for fixes or bolt-ons. This will drive them to devote more resources to security and prevent rather than scramble to cure security risks. Governments can support this by introducing laws that make it easier to claim under contracts for poor security.

DeFi as a solution in times of crisis

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 shows that even large banks are still vulnerable to failure. But instead of requiring trust that their money is still there, Web3 users can verify their holdings directly on chain. Additionally, blockchain technology allows for a more efficient and decentralized financial landscape. The peer-to-peer network pioneered by Bitcoin means that investors can hold their own assets and transact directly with no middlemen and significantly lower fees. And unlike with traditional banks, the rise of DeFi sectors like DEXs, lending and liquid staking means individuals can now have full control over exactly how their deposited assets are used. Inflation is yet another ongoing problem that crypto and DeFi help solve. Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have a fixed total supply. This means that your holdings in BTC cannot be easily diluted like if you hold a currency such as USD. While a return to the gold standard of years past is sometimes proposed as a potential solution to inflation, adopting crypto as legal tender would have a similar effect while also delivering a range of other benefits like enhanced efficiency.

Cyber resilience through consolidation part 1: The easiest computer to hack

Most cyberattacks succeed because of simple mistakes caused by users, or users not following established best practices. For example, having weak passwords or using the same password on multiple accounts is critically dangerous, but unfortunately a common practice. When a company is compromised in a data breach, account details and credentials can be sold on the dark web and attackers then attempt the same username-password combination on other sites. This is why password managers, both third-party and browser-native, are growing in utilization and implementation. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is also growing in practice. This security method requires users to provide another form of identification besides just a password — usually via a verification code sent to a different device, phone number or e-mail address. Zero trust access methods are the next step. This is where additional data about the user and their request is analyzed before access is granted.

AI for Developers: How Can Programmers Use Artificial Intelligence?

If you write code snippets purely by hand, it is prone to errors. If you audit existing code by hand, it is prone to errors. Many things that happen during software development are prone to errors when they’re done manually. No, AI for developers isn’t completely bulletproof. However, a trustworthy AI tool can help you avoid things like faulty code writing and code errors, ultimately helping you to enhance code quality. ... AI is not 100% bulletproof, and you’ve probably already seen the headlines: “People Are Creating Records of Fake Historical Events Using AI“; “Lawyer Used ChatGPT In Court — And Cited Fake Cases. A Judge Is Considering Sanctions“; “AI facial recognition led to 8-month pregnant woman’s wrongful carjacking arrest in front of kids: lawsuit.” This is what happens when people take artificial intelligence too far and don’t use any guardrails. Your own coding abilities and skill set as a developer are still absolutely vital to this entire process. As much as software developers might love to completely lean on an AI code assistant for the journey, the technology just isn’t to that point.

The DX roadmap: David Rogers on driving digital transformation success

companies mistakenly think that the best way to achieve success is by committing a lot of resources and focusing on implementation at all costs with the solution they have planned. Many organizations get burned by this approach because they don’t realize that markets are shifting fast, new technologies are coming in rapidly, and competitive dynamics are changing swiftly in the digital era. For example, CNN decided to get into digital news after looking at many benchmarks and reading several reports, thinking subscribers will pay monthly for a standalone news app. It was a disaster and they shut down the initiative within a month. To overcome this challenge, companies must first unlearn the habit of assuming things they know that they don’t know and are trying to manage through planning. They should rather manage through experimentation. CIOs can help their enterprises in this area. They must bring what they have learned in their evolution towards agile software development over the years and help apply these rules of small teams, customer centricity, and continuous delivery to every part of the business.

Quote for the day:

"Strategy is not really a solo sport _ even if you_re the CEO." -- Max McKeown

Daily Tech Digest - January 12, 2023

Agritech forces gain ground across Africa

One of the crucial issues that agriculture in Africa is currently solving, according to Gaddas, is a lack of water. He says that in Senegal, Tunisia and many other countries, companies are working hard on intelligent irrigation, and on how to optimize water resources that are becoming increasingly scarce, especially in the context of climate change and unpredictable rainfall. “Managing water is becoming crucial,” he says. “We’ve met start-ups that use drones, which, through their precision devices, help to collect data that can be used by farmers, such as the levels of nitrogen from the fields, precise mapping of areas with fertiliser deficits,and others that solve plant disease problems by making diagnoses. There are also ERP systems for farm management and to know what is happening in real time—the management of inputs, fertilizers and more.” He also appreciated the digital aquaculture companies that allow for very rational management of aquaculture farms, while praising the impressive diversity of solutions. “The diversity of problems that farmers face in Africa is very wide but creativity is not the weak point of Africans,” he says.

Ushering in an era of pervasive intelligence, powered by 6G

The impact that this new era will have cannot be understated. It will power economies, drive sector convergence, enable the distributed infrastructure behind Web 3.0 and scale and interconnect metaverses. Put simply, it will transform all aspects of life. But getting there isn’t straightforward, and we need to act now to lay the foundations that are necessary if we are to harness its power. This on its own is not the most straightforward undertaking, as is evidenced by the issues with the 5G+ rollout and adoption. The right infrastructure and business models were not in place, which led to delays and innovative potential left on the table. Let’s learn from past mistakes, course correct and ensure we’re ready for the future of pervasive intelligence. ... Transformation into the pervasive intelligence era will first require the establishment of a high performance, integrated ecosystem made up of a range of partners from different industries and sectors. This is critical as pervasive intelligence will only be reached in an environment where data and information can move freely and securely. This, however, cannot happen if companies operate in silos or in isolation.

DeFi Labs Revolutionises Decentralized Finance by Leveraging AI

According to the co-founder of DeFiLabs, “With our AI-powered yield farm, we’re introducing a new level of innovation to the DeFi space. We’re making it possible for users of all levels to earn high returns on their investments, while also minimizing risk. Our goal is to provide our users with the best investment opportunities available in the DeFi space, and our AI-powered yield farm is just the beginning. We’re excited to see how our users will benefit from this new offering.” This launch is also a significant step for the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, as it showcases the capabilities and the potential for growth of Binance Smart Chain. This yield farm will encourage the usage of the Binance Smart Chain and drive the adoption of DeFi on this network. The yield farm is live and fully operational, and users can start staking their Binance Coin (BNB) or other supported tokens to earn high returns on their investments. The DeFiLabs team is constantly working to add new features, tokens, and investment options to the yield farm, making it even more valuable for users.

The importance of collaboration in maximising cybersecurity

The CISO has a vital role within companies, and one which is currently evolving. Beyond technical knowledge, one of the most important aspects of the CISO’s role in an enterprise is collaboration. Information, security and data protection controls permeates all levels and departments of a company, not just limited to tech. As such, it is important to relay technical information succinctly to all relevant directors and parties, ensuring all teams are adequately equipped to manage cyber risks. There is a wide range of cybersecurity services that can be adopted. This includes perimeter and cloud security, device security, network security, threat hunting, DevSecOps, and web and mobile application security. To make them all function, and operate as tightly as possible, you must work with a team of experts, to ensure that your company is at the forefront of new advances in cybersecurity. The removal of silos is therefore integral to ensuring companies are prepared and equipped to defend themselves against cyber-attacks.

IT supply issues have organizations shifting from just-in-time to just-in-case buying

One thing more enterprises should be looking for is greater visibility from their suppliers. "A lot of people are realizing that we're living in a more transparent world now," said Genpact's Waite. And integration between companies has increased, with some providers offering more information to their customers. ... With this approach, vendors are selected not just based on technical fit, form, and function but also based on where in the world they source their materials, or how big of a company they are. Supply chain visibility is particularly important for manufacturers. They need to know if the supplies they need are on track, or if alternate sources have to be found in order to avoid production delays. "Our supply chain is built entirely on transparency," says Carl Nothnagel, COO at specialty hardware manufacturer MBX Systems. "With every supplier, we push for that information. Sometimes we don’t get it, and we’re left with projecting, or guessing as best as we can. We have some manufacturers that are very transparent and we can see where it's going to hit every day, and some are a bit of black hole."

6 Data Governance Principles Corporate Leaders Should Apply in 2023

The success of your data governance plan depends on what your employees do with the data they handle. Therefore, once you’ve created a data governance plan, you should share it with your employees. Successful data governance requires a holistic, organization-wide approach that demands transparency across your organization. You can further demonstrate internal transparency by documenting all data governance decisions and actions. This documentation can help you learn from past mistakes and protect your corporation if you experience a data breach, lawsuit, investigation, or other regulatory action. ... Responsibility and accountability are integral parts of any corporation’s data governance processes. Traditionally, your information technology (IT) department would be responsible for managing your corporation’s data. But now that most—if not all—of your employees deal with data on a daily basis, employees throughout your organization must see themselves as the stewards of your data. So, who is responsible for what data? That is something you will need to decide.

Study shows attackers can use ChatGPT to significantly enhance phishing and BEC scams

The more complex and long a phishing message is, the more likely it is that attackers will make grammatical errors or include weird phrasing that careful readers will pick up on and become suspicious. With messages generated by ChatGPT, this line of defense that relies on user observation is easily defeated at least as far as the correctness of the text is concerned. Detecting that a message was written by an AI model is not impossible and researchers are already working on such tools. While these might work with current models and be useful in some scenarios, such as schools detecting AI-generated essays submitted by students, it's hard to see how they can be applied for email filtering because people are already using such models to write business emails and simplify their work. "The problem is that people will probably use these large language models to write benign content as well," WithSecure Intelligence Researcher Andy Patel tells CSO. ... Attackers can take it much further than writing simple phishing lures. They can generate entire email chains between different people to add credibility to their scam.

Insights on Nordic artificial intelligence strategies

The Nordics are generally early adopters of technology – and AI is no exception. More than 25% of the Nordic companies are already investing at least 20% of their research and development budget in AI projects. Moreover, the Nordic countries are planning to get ahead – or at least keep up with other industrial nations. Each of the four countries have at least one top-ranking AI-related educational institution – and private investment in AI has more than doubled in the region since 2021. ... Finnish AI research runs primarily along three different dimensions. The first is to optimise the performance of AI algorithms to head off the problem where computational requirements get too far ahead of what hardware can deliver. As a small country, Finland is particularly sensitive to the increasing costs of computational power – even though they house what is currently Europe’s most powerful supercomputer, LUMI. The second dimension is trustworthy AI. Ethics and values are important to Finland, as they are in all other Nordic countries. Research in trustworthy AI aims to overcome the complex ethical challenges inherent to AI.

Structured Data Management for Discovery and Insight

Polanco says the chief data officer, chief compliance officer, and CISO should collaborate on finding an effective structured data management practice that provides a well-governed, fully-compliant data architecture that connects data sources for data consumers. “Data must be findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable for [data] consumers, while also ensuring compliance with data quality standards and data security and privacy measures,” he adds. Anyone in a managerial position who encounters data will likely have considered best practices for data management already. “While those managers may be responsible for implementing data management resources for their respective teams, the initial solution can come from technology companies that weld together the manual knowledge of what the data needs to look like and the efficiency of a more automated sorting process,” Polanco says. Macosky adds that while the chief data officer position is fairly new across industries, he expects to see the role become more important and vital as organizations prioritize and value data management.

How to Measure the Energy Consumption of Bugs

It is very important to always have the underlying architecture and communication to all the connected services in mind. Often it may seem that a bug does not affect energy consumption at first sight. This impression can quickly change when the broader context of the feature where it occurs is taken into account. A QA engineer needs to understand communication between the services, how it is implemented (in collaboration with the developers), when it takes place, where it initiated, and where the services and features run. In practice this means that QA engineers who want to measure the energetic impact of their product in more detail must not only understand the customers’ perspective (as usual), but in addition many implementation details from different perspectives. Where do particular services run? On which infrastructure? Which libraries are used? How can the implementation of the product be modified in order to measure energy consumption. Improvement of energy consumption is not something that can be activated by just pushing a button.

Quote for the day:

"If you don't demonstrate leadership character, your skills and your results will be discounted, if not dismissed." -- Mark Miller

Daily Tech Digest - January 03, 2023

Security Top IT Investment Priority in 2023

Dennis Monner, chief commercial officer at Aryaka, says he thinks what IT leaders are finding is that the talent that they really need on their teams is in short supply. “The boundaries between the traditional, functional disciplines are getting fuzzy, requiring a new breed of security professional,” he explains. “The cloud team needs to understand the network. The network team needs to understand security. It’s driving them to rethink their investment and hiring strategy.” He adds recruiting, training, and retention all takes real dollars from the budget that could potentially be deployed in services that guarantee performance. “You can only outsource security to a certain degree,” Haff cautions. “Even if you're 100% in a public cloud, you're still largely responsible for your own application security, as well as your internal access and authentication procedures.” While a cloud provider can implement all manner of security tech and processes if you don't control who has access, those won't do much good. “It was somewhat disappointing that, although our survey generally showed investments in people was a high priority, ‘hiring security or compliance staff’ was one of the lowest security funding priorities,” he adds.

How biometric payments are tackling financial exclusion

Even the most reluctant individuals are likely to have succumbed to contactless payments and some form of digitised banking in recent times. This will have the positive impact of making the needed transition to biometrics more seamless. Using fingerprints or facial recognition to unlock phones or access apps is not unusual. If anything, they have been convenient and comforting additions to the surge of tech innovations over the last couple of decades. There is a relief in knowing that these portals are being secured by methods that are almost impossible to replicate. It is a breakthrough that financial players and governments in the world’s most developed countries still need to catch up with, as emerging economies have already capitalised on biometrics’ capabilities for almost a decade now. In India, for example, internal fraud and leakage from pension payments dropped by 47% after transitioning from cash to biometric smart cards. Because the solution bypasses the need for prior credit ratings or credentials, the country has also been able to catalyse safe online banking among previously unbanked adults since biometrics’ introduction in 2014.

Decentralised finance – a threat for traditional FS firms, or an opportunity?

Done right, DeFi offers traditional banks and financial services firms the ability to reduce costs, increase speed and attract new customers who are looking for simplified, more attractive, and secure solutions. When we look at the current payments ecosystem, we’re confronted with a maze of payments services, systems and rules which rely on a cacophony of different players. DeFi offers a solution to this inherent friction, delivering ecosystems than can run autonomously based on rules and verify transactions without human intervention. The main attractions of this innovation are two-fold. Firstly, it reduces inefficiency while eliminating fees, manual effort (e.g. for corporate actions) and intermediaries. Basic transactions can be executed at any time, from any place, with the only requirement having an internet connection and a compliant wallet. By removing the middleman in asset rights transfers, lowering exchange fees, and giving access to wider global markets, moving securities on blockchain could save between $17B and $24B in global trade processing costs.

Engineering Best Practices of CI Pipelines

The essence of a CI/CD system is to aim for green builds and to resolve issues quickly when a red build occurs, meaning a test failed. When the automated tests run, any failure results should be visible to all team members. Then, it should be a top priority for the team to make the build work again. Green builds and rapid fixes are critical for two reasons. First, when tests are failing, it is not possible to test forthcoming development and changes accurately. Secondly, continuous deployment will be halted, because no new and validated packages exist. Although it may seem like a frustrating situation to stop active development and instead focus on fixing failed tests, this mindset will ensure optimal application stability. An efficient CI/CD system should be the only path that leads to the production environment. In other words, if you have confidently built a CI/CD system with a comprehensive set of tests, there should be no other way to deploy applications to the production system. It can be highly tempting — and common — to maintain administrator privileges and deploy an application to the production systems just once.

Blue-Green Deployment From the Trenches

The concept of blue-green deployment is to have (at least) two instances of an application running at one time. When a new version is released, it can be released to just one (or some) instances, leaving the others running on the old version. Access to this new version can be restricted completely at first, then potentially released to a subset of consumers, until confidence in the new release is achieved. At this point, access to the instance(s) running the old version can be gradually restricted and then these too can be upgraded. This creates a release with zero downtime for users. There are, of course, caveats. Any breaking change to data sources or APIs means that old requests cannot be processed by the new version, which rules out a blue-green release. It’s one of my favourite interview questions to ask how one might approach a breaking change in a blue-green environment on the off-chance that someone comes up with a great solution, but it would probably involve some bespoke routing layer to enrich or adapt "old" requests to the "new" system. At which point, you’d have to consider whether it isn’t better just to have some good old downtime.

Top 10 AI Trends that Will Redefine Technology in the Year 2023

The role of AI and data science in innovation and automation will increase in 2023. Data ecosystems are able to scale, decrease waste, and provide timely data to a variety of inputs. But laying the foundation for change and fostering innovation is crucial. With the use of AI, software development processes can be optimised, and further advantages include greater collaboration and a larger body of knowledge. We need to foster a data-driven culture and go past the experimental stages in order to change to a sustainable delivery model. This will undoubtedly be a significant advancement in AI. ... Over the past few years, IT systems have become more sophisticated. Vendors will seek platform solutions that offer visibility across numerous monitoring domains, including application, infrastructure, and networking, according to a new Forrester prediction. ... The automatic modification of neural net topologies and improved tools for data labelling are two promising areas of automated machine learning. When the selection and improvement of a neural network model are automated, the cost and time to market for new solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) will be reduced.

How the EU plans to take on big tech in 2023

Increasing competition could leave gaps for European challengers to enter. The EU, however, has historically struggled to turn its world-leading research into big tech companies. One barrier is the notoriously slow and inefficient transfer of IP from academia to the economy. This problem is illustrated by the EU producing more research papers than the US, but turning far fewer into commercial applications. According to Luigi Congedo, a venture capitalist and Innovation Advisor at marketing firm Clarity, this weakness can be reduced by changing the EU’s investment framework. This, he argues, could stimulate a more effective technology transfer — and prevent promising startups from being acquired by Silicon Valley giants. “We need to create our Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and, in order to do it, create a better environment to compete and do business across the continent,” he said. “If we fail in creating a real European platform for innovation and instead maintain the current ‘country-based model,’ all our emerging businesses will end up becoming M&A targets for American multinational companies.”

The limitations of mathematical modeling

Thompson believes these failures are often owing to misaligned incentives: “Those who correctly estimate significant tail risks [i.e., deviations from the normal distribution in a statistical model] may not be recognized or rewarded for doing so. Before the event, tail risks are unknown anyway if they can only be estimated from past data,” and “after the event, there are other things to worry about.” In short, it was in investors’ interest to design a model that characterized unlikely risks as infinitesimally so, and regulators weren’t paying attention. So why should we bother with models at all? Occasionally, Thompson believes, they do get it right. Her preferred example concerns research by two chemists, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, who in the 1970s modeled the potential impact on the ozone layer of the continued release of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Within 15 years of their research, an international agreement, the Montreal Protocol, had been signed to limit CFC use, and it is now possible that the ozone layer could recover to its 1980 level by 2050. “The acceptability of the model was a function of the relatively simple context and the low costs of action,” Thompson explains

Business and tech leadership predictions 2023

With remote working on the rise – despite some companies attempting to go back to the office – global hiring will continue to increase. More and more people will be able to work in digital jobs that can be done from anywhere. “When you hire internationally, you have access to a much larger talent pool, and with the possibility of hiring employees to work from anywhere in the world, companies will have a unique opportunity of filling their roles in a more diverse way to increase cross-cultural competency in remote teamwork,” says Kelvin Ong, chief of staff at online software engineering school Microverse. However, Ong agrees with James Wilknson, that this means IT managers will have to develop their soft skills, such as explicit and clear written communication (“low-context communicaiton” and sending messages where there is a timelag before you get a response (“asynchrous communication”). ... Hedley says: “Most recessions are mild and temporary. While they are not fun, recessions can be endured. Second, business owners can, to a large extent, control their own destiny. And that’s especially true when it comes to identifying and hiring the talent that will move the needle.”

How to be the manager your IT team needs in 2023

Authenticity is important in creating high-performing teams because it lays the groundwork for strong relationships and environments in which employees can bring their whole, best selves to work. Being authentic doesn’t mean bearing all your darkest secrets, but it does mean understanding your own personal style and drivers and helping your team understand those. Humans are wired for consistency, so when you show up consistently and authentically, your employees know what to expect, how to approach you, and what’s important. Better still, they feel they have space to share who they are and what drives them. ... Perhaps the most important tip, though, is to be present when you are with your team. Shifting to all virtual work over the last couple of years has taken a toll on our ability to focus in the moment. We are constantly typing emails while listening to conference calls or responding to chats and texts while also trying to write articles or create solutions for clients. The pressure to multitask is great, but the benefits of focus and attention are even greater.

Quote for the day:

"Be so good at what you do that no one else in the world can do what you do." -- Robin Sharma

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