Showing posts with label digital divide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital divide. Show all posts

Daily Tech Digest - May 20, 2026


Quote for the day:

“Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” -- Jim Rohn

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What can you do with quantum computing today?

The InfoWorld article explains that while practical, large scale quantum computing remains years away, current enterprise engagement should center on proactive learning, strategic experimentation, and urgent security preparation. Present day infrastructure utilizes noisy intermediate scale quantum hardware, which requires hybrid models that pair error prone quantum processors with classical computational power. Through cloud based quantum computing platforms provided by IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, pioneering organizations are already piloting specialized optimization, molecular simulation, and risk modeling workflows. For instance, global companies like HSBC and DHL have successfully demonstrated notable performance gains in bond price forecasting and logistics routing. However, fully fault tolerant application scale quantum systems are not expected to mature until the late twenties or thirties. Consequently, forward looking companies must address an existing tech talent gap by developing quantum proficiencies internally. Most critically, enterprises must prepare immediately for the inevitable arrival of Q Day, when advanced quantum computers can easily decrypt modern encryption methods. To actively mitigate this looming cyber threat, organizational leaders are advised to classify long lived sensitive records and rapidly transition their public key infrastructures to post quantum cryptography today, ensuring critical safety against threat actors who are currently harvesting encrypted organizational data for future deciphering.


Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

In this APMdigest article, Venkat Ramakrishnan of NeuBird AI shifts the perspective on alert fatigue from a quality-of-life issue to a direct contributor to systemic downtime. Data from the 2026 State of Production Reliability and AI Adoption Report reveals that 44% of surveyed organizations experienced outages due to ignored or suppressed alerts. Additionally, 78% endured incidents where no alerts fired, forcing engineers to rely on customer complaints to discover system failures. This operational gridlock occurs because 77% of on-call teams receive over ten alerts daily, with fewer than 30% being actionable. Consequently, engineers predictably ignore warnings, inadvertently missing weak, early-stage threat signals amidst legacy tool noise. Since downtime carries an expensive financial penalty—with 61% of companies estimating costs at $50,000 or more per hour—engineering leaders must pivot away from reactive, fragmented incident management models. Modern cloud architectures require moving toward autonomous production operations powered by AI. Instead of focusing on efficiently resolving problems after they occur, the author concludes that organizations must leverage automated intelligence for full incident avoidance, continuously predicting threats and standardizing operational institutional knowledge before a critical failure disrupts business continuity.


7 tips for accelerating cyber incident recovery

The CSO Online article highlights that prompt and coordinated incident recovery is crucial to minimize the cascading financial, operational, and compliance damages caused by inevitable cyberattacks. To accelerate recovery times effectively, the text outlines seven actionable tips from cybersecurity experts. First, organizations must hone their incident response team's internal coordination through strict training and tabletop exercises. Second, prioritizing scoping and containment stops initial system bleeding by isolating breaches and credentials. Third, establishing deep situational awareness determines threat vectors, affected assets, and broader business impacts. Fourth, security leaders should readily enlist external professional support, such as multi-disciplinary forensics and cloud recovery partners, to safely scale operations. Fifth, systems must be securely restored based on business criticality rather than technological convenience, prioritizing revenue-generating platforms first. Sixth, CISOs should remain disciplined and follow structured frameworks like NIST 800-61 alongside a RACI matrix to entirely avoid reckless improvisation. Finally, teams should thoroughly implement lessons learned to fortify infrastructure controls before executing validation penetration tests. Ultimately, a structured approach helps security departments avoid the burnout of extended outages and prevents threat actors from exploiting prolonged dwell times to achieve re-compromise.


Programming in 2026: Should Students Still Learn Code?

In this Security Boulevard article, tech entrepreneur Deepak Gupta addresses the modern dilemma of whether students should still learn to code given that 30% of code at major tech companies is now AI-generated. Gupta emphatically argues that learning to program remains essential, but notes that the traditional definition of a developer has drastically changed. Instead of focusing heavily on writing manual syntax, modern programmers primarily direct, review, and evaluate automated software. Crucially, individuals who cannot read code will remain unable to effectively verify AI outputs, mitigate subtle logic hallucinations, or catch critical security vulnerabilities like hardcoded credentials and broken authentication flows. To align with this technological paradigm shift, computer science curricula must adapt by prioritizing systems thinking, security intuition, rigorous code review at scale, and precise specification design. Aspiring programmers are advised to master fundamentals over passing frameworks, gain comprehensive database and networking literacy, and treat AI as a collaborative teammate rather than a total crutch. Ultimately, AI is not replacing software engineering as a discipline; rather, it is weeding out mechanical coders who rely solely on typing speed while enormously magnifying the value of strategic human judgment and architectural decision-making.


How Risk Management Can Build ROI in Regulated Technology Firms – Part 1

The article by Kannan Subbiah explores how regulated technology firms, such as FinTechs and HealthTechs, can successfully reframe risk management from a defensive cost center into a strategic value driver that yields a high return on investment. With intensifying global regulatory pressures, existential cyber threats, and shifting investor expectations regarding enterprise governance, mature risk frameworks can directly boost overall firm valuations by up to 25 percent. Subbiah outlines five major dimensions where robust risk management generates tangible financial value. First, it minimizes direct financial losses and unexpected operational disruptions through proactive mitigation rather than reactive crisis management. Second, it accelerates innovation and time to market by integrating risk assessments into the earliest design phases, acting as a steering wheel rather than a progress brake. Third, it enhances brand equity, customer trust, and long-term user retention by prioritizing transparent security and operational reliability. Fourth, it unlocks corporate efficiency, yielding potential gains of ten to twenty-five percent by streamlining internal processes and drastically reducing runtime downtime. Finally, it improves strategic decision-making by replacing gut feelings with objective, data-backed scenario planning and advanced resource scoring. Ultimately, the piece emphasizes that mature risk practices protect capital and unlock unique competitive advantages across markets.


Product Thinking for Cloud Native Engineers

The InfoQ presentation titled “Product Thinking for Cloud Native Engineers,” delivered by cloud engineer Stéphane Di Cesare and product manager Cat Morris, outlines how internal technical teams can transition from being perceived as organizational cost centers into critical business value drivers. Specifically targeting DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering domains, the speakers advocate for a fundamental mindset shift that prioritizes user value and product outcomes over raw technical outputs like code volume. By implementing the structured "Double Diamond" framework, cloud-native engineers are encouraged to comprehensively explore and define concrete user pain points before jumping directly into building architectural solutions. The presentation highlights vital product discovery methodologies, including user interviews and shadowing sessions, to build actionable empathy for internal developers. This active engagement helps mitigate the risk of creating counterintuitive tools that engineering peers might ultimately reject. Additionally, the session emphasizes choosing outcome-based product metrics, such as developer cognitive load, flow state, and deployment speed via the DevEx framework, instead of traditional machine utilization metrics. Ultimately, embracing this continuous product lifecycle perspective allows technical professionals to clearly articulate their worth to stakeholders, thereby reducing operational friction, maximizing organizational engineering investments, and securing meaningful career promotions.


The next digital divide: AI owners vs. AI renters

The CIO article outlines an emerging structural shift in enterprise technology, arguing that the next true digital divide will not be between organizations that use artificial intelligence and those that do not, but rather between AI "owners" and AI "renters." AI renters primarily rely on external platforms, APIs, and cloud services to deploy capabilities quickly and minimize up-front infrastructure costs. However, this dependencies limits long-term model visibility, compromises data control, introduces scaling expenses, and hands operational sovereignty over to external providers. Conversely, AI owners build and control their intelligence systems internally, leveraging controlled environments like private or sovereign clouds. By deeply integrating models with internal knowledge bases and implementing specialized governance frameworks, AI owners capture unique proprietary feedback loops that continuously refine competitive advantages. This paradigm shift mirrors historic transitions observed during the maturation of web and cloud infrastructures. Ultimately, technology leaders like CIOs must navigate this landscape not just by selecting tools, but by defining an intentional architecture that balances external consumption with protected internal innovation, ensuring that their systems remain assets they fundamentally command rather than services they merely rent.


Communicating cyber risk in dollars boards understand

In this Help Net Security interview, Nedscaper’s Cybersecurity Architect Nick Nieuwenhuis explains why massive financial investments in cybersecurity have failed to yield true organizational resilience. He argues that most companies analyze risk through a reductionist, techno-centric lens, prioritizing measurable technical controls while ignoring messy, complex socio-technical dynamics like human behavior, organizational constraints, and internal processes. This narrow view fails because cyber risk behaves dynamically rather than linearly. Nieuwenhuis also points out a critical disconnect between security teams and executive boardrooms, which stems from poor risk communication. Instead of using abstract, qualitative heatmaps or dense technical jargon, security professionals must translate cyber risk into grounded, evidence-based narratives and financial metrics that business leaders can easily comprehend. Furthermore, he emphasizes that traditional root-cause analysis is inadequate for modern incidents, which typically arise from multi-factored, cascading systemic breakdowns. To fix this, organizations must shift from strict prevention to comprehensive cyber resilience, accepting that systems will eventually fail under stress. Resilient enterprises must actively invest in human capabilities, use enterprise architecture to improve communication, thoroughly rehearse incident response playbooks, and cultivate a culture of continuous learning and feedback to safely adapt to an ever-evolving digital landscape.


Deepfake wave breaking the digital dam; orgs are busy building defenses

The article focuses on how generative AI evolution is sparking a prolific wave of deepfake identity impersonations, forcing global organizations to transition from reactive fact-checking to proactive trust architectures. According to a Gartner report, 40 percent of government organizations will implement dedicated TrustOps functions by 2028 to safeguard against public-facing disinformation campaigns and internal social engineering breaches targeting biometric authentication. Highlighting this risk, advanced, commercial deepfake platforms like Haotian AI now empower bad actors to alter their facial and vocal identities seamlessly during live video calls on Zoom, WhatsApp, or Microsoft Teams, effectively breaking the baseline truth of digital platforms. To combat this escalating digital regression, identity verification firms are aggressively releasing structural defenses. For instance, iProov launched "Verified Meetings" as a platform plugin to continuously authenticate that participants are real people using authentic, uncompromised hardware cameras. Concurrently, GetReal Security released identity proofing updates within "GetReal Protect," supplying ongoing verification and threat intelligence to secure critical workflows. Because eight out of ten organizations already encounter these synthetic threats, security leaders argue that the burden of authentication must shift permanently from vulnerable end-users to institutional architectures through cryptographic provenance, multi-approver frameworks, and collaborative digital trust councils.


Tokenmaxxing Pressures: The Impact on Modern Developer Ecosystems

The article investigates the rising phenomenon of tokenmaxxing, defined as the corporate practice of treating artificial intelligence token consumption as a primary metric for engineering productivity, and its deeply disruptive impact on modern developer ecosystems. Driven by intense hierarchical pressure from corporate leadership to showcase rapid technology adoption and prove a return on investment, many enterprises have established internal dashboards and competitive leaderboards tracking computational usage. This management approach creates highly perverse incentives, prompting software engineers to actively gamify the system by artificially inflating their token counts. Developers frequently achieve this through brute force context stuffing, unnecessary premium model routing, and redundant autonomous agent loops that merely mimic genuine professional progress. This trend introduces an expensive, modern iteration of the archaic mistake of measuring developer output by lines of code. Within engineering environments, tokenmaxxing severely degrades workflows by causing massive cloud cost overruns, extending code review latencies, and introducing bloated, unverified outputs into repositories. It promotes performative, visible busyness over technical elegance and system reliability. Ultimately, the text argues that organizations must dismantle these flawed vanity metrics and transition toward value driven governance frameworks that prioritize actual task resolution, downstream quality, and efficient human and AI collaboration.

Daily Tech Digest - June 20, 2020

Linux Foundation and Harvard announce Linux and open-source contributor security survey

Here's how it works: The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practices badge shows a project follows security best practices. The badges let others quickly assess which projects are following best practices and are more likely to produce higher-quality secure software. Over 3,000 projects are taking part in the badging project. There are three badge levels: Passing, silver, and gold. Each level requires that the OSS project meet a set of criteria; for silver and gold that includes meeting the previous level.  The "passing" level captures what well-run OSS projects typically already do. A passing score requires the programmers to meet 66 criteria in six categories. For example, the passing level requires that the project publicly state how to report vulnerabilities to the project, that tests are added as functionality is added, and that static analysis is used to analyze software for potential problems. As of June 14, 2020, there were 3,195 participating projects, and 443 had earned a passing badge. The silver and gold level badges are intentionally more demanding. The silver badge is designed to be harder but possible for one-person projects.


The startup making deep learning possible without specialized hardware

It didn’t take long for the AI research community to realize that this massive parallelization also makes GPUs great for deep learning. Like graphics-rendering, deep learning involves simple mathematical calculations performed hundreds of thousands of times. In 2011, in a collaboration with chipmaker Nvidia, Google found that a computer vision model it had trained on 2,000 CPUs to distinguish cats from people could achieve the same performance when trained on only 12 GPUs. GPUs became the de facto chip for model training and inferencing—the computational process that happens when a trained model is used for the tasks it was trained for. But GPUs also aren’t perfect for deep learning. For one thing, they cannot function as a standalone chip. Because they are limited in the types of operations they can perform, they must be attached to CPUs for handling everything else. GPUs also have a limited amount of cache memory, the data storage area nearest a chip’s processors. This means the bulk of the data is stored off-chip and must be retrieved when it is time for processing. The back-and-forth data flow ends up being a bottleneck for computation, capping the speed at which GPUs can run deep-learning algorithms.


Company boards aren't ready for the AI revolution

Beyond governance of Big Data and AI, there’s a second bottleneck and that’s talent. The well-worn phrase is true: every business is a technology company now; soon, though, most will also be AI companies. So when it comes to hiring good data scientists and AI experts, these businesses will have to compete not only with their peers but also tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. Instead of attempting to raid the physics and mathematics departments of their local universities for talent, I therefore recommend that companies look elsewhere for AI experts - on their own payroll. Most businesses have incredible talent in-house. All they have to do is provide their staff with the necessary training and support, which can be done with the help of technology partners, provided these are platform-agnostic so that they can support a wide range of technologies and use cases. Training will have to be delivered on two levels. The first is AI enablement, by training staff to program and handle the technical aspects of AI and machine learning; they need to understand how to use bots, deploy robotic process automation and use machine learning to harness big data.


The digital divide: Not everyone has the same access to technology

As we exit the immediate crisis here, the health crisis, and move into a period of economic recovery, we're certainly going to see tremendous amounts of job loss, transitions in needed skills, and our labor force is going to be dramatically affected around the world by what's happening now. We do have an opportunity to think about re-skilling in a new way. Can we provide certain swaths of the economy with educational resources that will help them participate in the technology economy in ways that were not permissible or possible before? Can we think through an infrastructure build that will enable schools, for example, in rural areas or in parts of the world that haven't traditionally had access to technology, to train their students in these kinds of skills? I think there is an opportunity to think systemically about changes that are needed, that have been needed for a long time, quite frankly, and to use this recovery period as an opportunity to bridge that divide and to ensure that we're providing opportunities for everyone. 


How Decentralization Could Alleviate Data Biases In Artificial Intelligence

A few projects are also exploring the potential for blockchain-based federated learning, so to speak, in improving AI outcomes. Federated learning makes it possible for AI algorithms to amass experience from a wide range of siloed data. Instead of having the data moved to the computation venue, the computation happens at the data location. Federated learning allows data providers to retain control over their data. However, privacy risks lurk whenever federated learning is employed. Blockchain is able to alleviate this risk thanks to its superior traceability and transparency. Also, a smart contract could be used to discourage malicious players by requiring a security deposit, which is only refundable if the algorithm doesn’t violate the network’s privacy standards. Ocean Protocol and GNY are two projects exploring blockchain-based federated learning. Ocean recently launched a product, called Compute-to-Data, which allows data providers and data consumers to securely buy and sell data on the blockchain. The Singapore-based startup already has some enterprise names including Roche Diagnostics, the diagnostic division of multinational healthcare company F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG using its services.


Democratizing artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword

At one end of the spectrum is data, and the ingestion of data into data warehouses and data lakes. AI systems, and in particular ML, run on large volumes of structured and unstructured data — it is the material from which organizations can generate insights, decisions, and outcomes. In its raw form, it is easy to democratize, enabling people to perform basic analyses. Already, a number of technology providers have created data explorers to help users search and visualize openly available data sets. Next along the spectrum come the algorithms into which the data is fed. Here the value and complexity increase, as the data is put to work. At this point, democratization is still relatively easy to achieve, and algorithms are widely accessible; open source code repositories such as GitHub (purchased by Microsoft in 2018) have been growing significantly over the past decade. But understanding algorithms requires a basic grasp of computer science and a mathematics or statistics background. As we continue to move along the spectrum to storage and computing platforms, the complexity increases. During the past five years, the technology platform for AI has moved to the cloud with three major AI/ML providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.


What Will Happen When Robots Store All Our Memories

Mostly, though, Memory Bots became routine and part of the social fabric of the future as controversies faded, laws and regulations were refined to curb abuses and maximize safe usage, and people became intrigued and distracted by the latest new gadget that was going to wow them, then scare them, and then become routine. In the old Shlain Goldberg house in Marin County, you could still find Ken, or the essence and memories of Ken, captured inside an eight-inch-tall black cylindrical tube on the kitchen counter that looked remarkably like an ancient Alexa. (Sadly, Ken, as well as Tiffany, had just missed the advent of longevity tech that allowed their daughter to live thousands of years and counting.) Except that Ken-Alexa had a swivel head that was constantly recording everything, with the positive-negative filter still set right where Ken had left it, in the middle of the dial. Even when Odessa was centuries old but still looked the same as she did when she was 25, she could talk to her dad, and ask him questions, and hear him laugh.


Applying Observability to Ship Faster

We needed to learn to think in monitoring terms, learn more about monitoring tooling, and how best to monitor. Most monitoring systems are set up for platform and operations monitoring. Using these for application monitoring is taking them and engineering somewhere new. Early on, we got some weirdness out of our monitoring. The system was telling us we had issues when we didn’t. It sounds silly now, but reading and re-reading the monitoring system documentation until we really got it helped. Digging deeper into how different types of metrics and monitors were designed to be used allowed us to build a more stable monitoring system. We also found that there were things we wanted to do, that we couldn’t do with out-of-the-box monitoring. Our early application monitoring was noisy and misfired. Too frequently it told us we had problems that we didn’t have. We kept iterating. We ended up building more of the monitoring in code than we expected, but it was well worth the time. We got the bare bones of a monitoring system early, and by using it in the real world, we worked out what we really needed.


What’s Next for Self-Driving Cars?

The machine vision systems in cars today are excellent at recognizing obstacles like other vehicles and pedestrians. Anticipating how they’ll act is another issue entirely. People behave irrationally by running red lights or jaywalking, and that kind of behavior is hard for an AI to react to or expect. These AI systems will get better with more training data, but collecting that data can be complicated. Right now, putting an autonomous car on the road can be dangerous, but they need to be out there to gather data. As a result, the process of getting all the necessary training may be a long one. Autonomous cars may not be ready to disrupt the industry, but implementation is still possible. Public transportation is an ideal application for today’s self-driving vehicles because it’s a more predictable form of driving. By driving pre-defined routes at slower speeds, autonomous public transports can start to gather that all-important training data. Some companies have already started taking advantage of this area. A business called May Mobility has been running self-driving shuttles to train stops since May 2019. 


4 roles responsible for data management and security

Including a section in apps that provides transparency on how it uses data can help ease security concerns. Zoom, which has been in the news due to its increased use amid COVID-19 and security concerns, recently brought in leaders in the security space and a new acquisition to help. Having a strong opt-in strategy is also important. Apple and Google have a good approach with their work on contact tracing. But opting in is not going to give you all – or even enough – of the data. ... The CDO should set strategy for managing all of an organization's data – both from a defensive standpoint (addressing compliance regulations, data privacy, good data hygiene, etc.) and from an offensive one (making data more easily consumable for those who want and need it). Some key agencies do plan to have specialist CDOs. The Department of Defense has been working to recruit candidates for its CDO position. And at the end of March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the official job post for its CDO opening. ... Consumers are grappling with data collection, something they've struggled with for a while. People are trying to become more educated about application data collection and personal data privacy and security.




Quote for the day:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." -- Vernon Law