Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah: framework

Showing posts with label framework. Show all posts

Daily Tech Digest - April 10, 2026

Quote for the day:

"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle." -- Abraham Lincoln

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Duration: 21 mins • Perfect for listening on the go.

How Agile practices ensure quality in GenAI-assisted development

The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into software development promises significant productivity gains, yet it introduces substantial risks to code quality and architectural integrity. To mitigate these dangers, the article emphasizes that traditional Agile practices provide the essential guardrails needed for reliable AI-assisted development. Core methodologies like Test-Driven Development (TDD) serve as the foundation, where writing failing tests before generating AI code ensures the output meets precise executable specifications. Similarly, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) utilize plain-language scenarios to ensure AI solutions align with actual business requirements rather than just producing plausible-looking code. Pair programming further enhances this safety net; studies indicate that code quality actually improves when humans and AI work together in a navigator-executor dynamic. Beyond individual practices, organizations must invest in robust continuous integration (CI) pipelines and updated code review protocols specifically tailored for AI-generated logic. By making TDD non-negotiable and establishing clear AI usage guidelines, teams can harness the speed of GenAI without compromising the stability or long-term health of their software systems. Ultimately, these disciplined Agile approaches transform GenAI from a potential liability into a controlled and highly effective engine for modern software engineering success.

Why—And How—Business Leaders Should Consider Implementing AI-Powered Automation

In the Forbes article "Why—And How—Business Leaders Should Consider Implementing AI-Powered Automation," emphasizes that while AI-driven automation offers immense potential for streamlining complex data and operational efficiency, its success depends on maintaining a strategic balance with human interaction. Rebello argues that over-automation risks alienating customers who still value the personal touch and problem-solving capabilities of human staff. To implement these technologies effectively, leaders should first identify specific areas where automation provides the most significant time-saving benefits without sacrificing the customer experience. The author advises prioritizing one process at a time and maintaining a "human-in-the-loop" approach for nuanced tasks like customer support. Furthermore, Rebello suggests launching small pilot programs to gather feedback and minimize organizational disruption. By adopting the customer's perspective and evaluating whether automation simplifies or complicates the user journey, businesses can leverage AI to handle data-heavy background tasks while preserving the essential human connections that drive long-term loyalty. This measured approach ensures that AI serves as a powerful tool for growth rather than a barrier to authentic engagement, ultimately allowing teams to focus on high-level strategy and creative brainstorming while the technology manages repetitive, data-intensive workflows.

5 questions every aspiring CIO should be prepared to answer

The article emphasizes that aspiring CIOs must master the "elevator pitch" by translating technical initiatives into strategic business value. To impress C-suite executives and board members, IT leaders should be prepared to answer five critical questions that demonstrate their business acumen rather than just technical expertise. First, they must articulate how IT initiatives, like cloud migrations, deliver quantified business value and align with strategic goals. Second, they should showcase how technology serves as a catalyst for growth and revenue, moving beyond simple productivity gains. Third, when addressing technology risks, leaders should focus on operational resilience or the competitive risk of falling behind, rather than just listing security threats. Fourth, discussions regarding emerging technologies like generative AI should highlight competitive differentiation and enhanced customer experiences rather than implementation details. Finally, aspiring CIOs must explain how they are improving organizational agility and effectiveness by fostering decentralized decision-making and treating data as a vital corporate asset. By avoiding technical jargon and focusing on overarching business objectives, future IT leaders can effectively signal their readiness for C-level responsibilities and build the necessary trust with executive leadership to advance their careers.

New framework lets AI agents rewrite their own skills without retraining the underlying model

Researchers have introduced , a groundbreaking framework that enables to develop, refine, and rewrite their own functional skills without needing to retrain the underlying large language model. Unlike traditional methods that rely on static, manually designed prompts or simple task logs, Memento-Skills utilizes an evolving external memory scaffolding. This system functions as an "agent-designing agent" by storing reusable skill artifacts as structured markdown files containing declarative specifications, specialized instructions, and executable code. Through a process called "Read-Write Reflective Learning," the agent actively mutates its memory based on environmental feedback. When a task execution fails, an orchestrator evaluates the failure trace and automatically rewrites the skill’s code or prompts to patch the error. To ensure stability in production, these updates are guarded by an automatic unit-test gate that verifies performance before saving changes. In testing on the GAIA benchmark, the framework improved accuracy by 13.7 percentage points over static baselines, reaching 66.0%. This innovation allows frozen models to build robust "muscle memory," enabling enterprise teams to deploy agents that progressively adapt to complex environments while avoiding the significant time and financial costs typically associated with model fine-tuning or retraining.

The role of intent in securing AI agents

In the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, traditional identity and access management (IAM) frameworks are proving insufficient for securing autonomous AI agents. While identity-first security establishes accountability by identifying ownership and access rights, it fails to evaluate the appropriateness of specific actions as agents adapt and chain tasks in real-time. This article argues that is the critical missing component, as it explicitly scopes an agent’s defined purpose rather than granting indefinite, static privileges. By integrating identity, intent, and runtime context—such as environmental sensitivity and timing—organizations can enforce least-privilege policies that prevent "privilege drift," where agents quietly accumulate unnecessary access. This shift allows security teams to govern at a scalable level by reviewing high-level intent profiles instead of auditing thousands of individual technical calls. Practical implementation involves treating agents as first-class identities, requiring documented intent profiles, and continuously validating behavior against declared objectives. Ultimately, anchoring permissions to an agent’s purpose ensures that access remains dynamic and purpose-bound, providing a robust safeguard against the inherent unpredictability of autonomous systems. Without this intent-aware layer, identity-based controls alone cannot effectively scale AI safety or maintain rigorous accountability in production environments.

Do Ceasefires Slow Cyberattacks? History Suggests Not

The relationship between and is complex, as historical data indicates that a cessation of physical hostilities rarely translates to a "digital stand-down." According to research highlighted by Dark Reading, cyber operations often remain steady or even intensify during truces, serving as an asymmetric pressure valve when traditional combat is paused. While groups like the Iranian-aligned Handala may announce temporary pauses against specific nations, they often continue targeting other adversaries, maintaining that the cyber war operates independently of military agreements. Past conflicts, such as those involving Hamas and Israel or Russia and Ukraine, demonstrate that warring parties frequently use diplomatic pauses to pivot toward secondary targets or gain leverage for future negotiations. In some instances, cyberattacks have even increased during ceasefires as actors seek alternative methods to exert influence without technically violating military terms. A notable exception occurred during the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiations, which saw a genuine lull in malicious activity; however, this remains an outlier. Ultimately, security experts warn that threat actors view diplomatic lulls as technicalities rather than boundaries, meaning organizations must remain vigilant despite peace talks, as the digital battlefield often ignores the boundaries set by physical treaties.

The Roadmap to Mastering Agentic AI Design Patterns

The roadmap for mastering emphasizes moving beyond simple prompt engineering toward architectural strategies that ensure predictable and scalable system behavior. The foundational pattern is ReAct, which integrates reasoning and action in a continuous loop to ground model decisions in observable results. For higher quality, the Reflection pattern introduces a self-correction cycle where agents critique and refine their outputs. To move from information to action, the Tool Use pattern establishes a structured interface for agents to interact with external systems securely. When tasks grow complex, the Planning pattern breaks goals into sequenced subtasks, while Multi-Agent systems distribute specialized roles across several coordinated units. Crucially, developers must treat pattern selection as a rigorous production decision, starting with the simplest viable structure to avoid premature complexity and high latency. Effective deployment requires robust evaluation frameworks, observability for debugging, and human-in-the-loop guardrails to manage safety risks. By systematically applying these architectural templates, creators can build AI agents that are not only capable but also reliable, debuggable, and adaptable to real-world requirements. This strategic approach ensures that agentic behavior remains consistent even as project complexity increases, ultimately leading to more sophisticated and trustworthy autonomous applications.

Upstream network visibility is enterprise security’s new front line

Lumen Technologies' 2026 Defender Threatscape Report, published by its research arm Black Lotus Labs, argues that the front line of enterprise security has shifted from traditional endpoints to upstream network visibility. By leveraging its position as a major internet backbone provider, Lumen gains unique telemetry into nearly 99% of public IPv4 addresses, allowing it to detect malicious patterns before they reach internal networks. The report highlights several alarming trends: the use of generative AI to rapidly iterate malicious infrastructure, a pivot toward targeting unmonitored edge devices like VPN gateways and routers, and the industrialization of proxy networks using compromised residential and SOHO devices to bypass zero-trust controls. Notable threats include the , which achieved record-breaking 30 Tbps DDoS attacks by exploiting residential proxies. The article emphasizes that while most organizations utilize endpoint detection and response, attackers are increasingly operating in blind spots where these tools cannot see. To counter this, Lumen advises defenders to prioritize edge device security, replace static indicator blocking with pattern-based network detection, and treat residential IP traffic as a potential threat signal rather than a trusted source. Ultimately, backbone-level visibility provides the critical context needed to identify and disrupt sophisticated cyberattacks in their preparatory stages.

Artificial intelligence and biology: AI’s potential for launching a novel era for health and medicine

In his article for The Conversation, James Colter explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in addressing the staggering complexity of biological systems, which contain more unique interactions than stars in the known universe. Traditionally, medical science relied on slow, iterative observations, but AI now enables researchers to organize and perceive biological data at scales far beyond human capacity. Colter highlights disruptive models like , which predicts how gene variants drive conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. A central theme is the field's necessary transition from purely statistical, correlation-based models to "causal-aware" AI. By utilizing experimental perturbations—purposeful disruptions to biology—scientists can distinguish direct cause and effect from mere noise or compensatory mechanisms. Despite significant hurdles, including high dimensionality and biological variance, Colter argues that integrating multi-modal datasets with robust experimental validation can overcome current data limitations. Ultimately, this trans-disciplinary synergy between AI and biology is poised to launch a novel era of medicine characterized by accelerated drug discovery and optimized personalized treatments. By moving toward a mechanistic understanding of life, researchers are on the precipice of solving some of humanity's most persistent health challenges, from chronic dysfunction to the fundamental processes of aging and regeneration.

The vibe coding bubble is going to leave a lot of broken apps behind

The "vibe coding" phenomenon represents a shift in software development where AI tools allow non-programmers to build functional applications through simple natural language prompts. However, this trend has created a bubble that threatens the long-term stability of the digital ecosystem. While vibe coding excels at rapid prototyping, it often bypasses the rigorous debugging and architectural planning essential for robust software. Many individuals entering this space are motivated by online clout or quick profits rather than a commitment to software longevity. Consequently, they often abandon their projects once the initial excitement fades. The primary risk lies in technical debt and maintenance; apps built without foundational coding knowledge are difficult to update when APIs change or operating systems evolve. This lack of ongoing support ensures that many "weekend projects" will inevitably fail, leaving users with a trail of broken, non-functional applications. Ultimately, the article argues that while AI democratizes creation, true development requires more than just a "vibe"—it demands a commitment to the tedious, long-term work of maintenance. As the current hype cycle cools, consumers will likely bear the cost of this unsustainable surge in disposable software, highlighting the critical difference between creating a prototype and sustaining a professional product.

Daily Tech Digest - March 24, 2026

Quote for the day:

"No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him." -- W. A. Nance

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Duration: 22 mins • Perfect for listening on the go.

The agent security mess

The article "The Agent Security Mess" by Matt Asay highlights a critical vulnerability in enterprise security: the "" of over-provisioned permissions. Historically, security risks remained dormant because humans typically ignore 96% of their granted access rights. However, the rise of changes this dynamic entirely. Unlike humans, who act as a natural governor on , autonomous agents inherit the full permission surface of the accounts they use. This turns latent permission debt into immediate operational risk, as agents can rapidly execute broad, potentially destructive actions across various systems without the hesitation or distraction characteristic of human users. To address this looming "avalanche," Asay argues for a shift in software architecture. Instead of allowing agents to inherit broad employee accounts, organizations must implement purpose-built identities with aggressively minimal, read-only permissions by default. This involves decoupling the ability to draft actions from the ability to execute them and ensuring every automated action is logged and reversible. Ultimately, AI agents are not creating a new crisis but are exposing a long-ignored authorization problem, forcing the industry to finally prioritize robust identity security and governance.

Faster attacks and ‘recovery denial’ ransomware reshape threat landscape

The CSO Online article, based on , highlights a dramatic shift in the cybersecurity landscape where ransomware attacks are becoming both faster and more strategically focused on "recovery denial." A striking finding is the collapse of the "hand-off" window between initial access and secondary threat group activity, which plummeted from over eight hours in 2022 to a mere 22 seconds in 2025. This acceleration is coupled with a transition in tactics; has overtaken email phishing as a primary infection vector, signaling a move toward real-time, interactive social engineering. Furthermore, attackers are increasingly targeting core infrastructure, such as backup environments, identity systems, and virtualization platforms, to systematically dismantle an organization’s ability to restore operations without paying a ransom. Despite these rapid execution phases, have paradoxically risen to 14 days, as nation-state actors prioritize long-term persistence alongside financially motivated groups seeking immediate impact. These evolving threats necessitate a fundamental rethink of defense strategies, urging organizations to treat their recovery assets as critical control planes that require the same level of protection as the primary network itself to ensure true resilience.

Attackers are handing off access in 22 seconds, Mandiant finds

The Mandiant M-Trends 2026 report, based on over 500,000 hours of incident response data from 2025, highlights a dramatic acceleration in attacker efficiency and a significant shift in tactical focus. For the sixth consecutive year, exploits remained the primary infection vector, yet the most striking finding is the collapse of the "access hand-off" window; the median time between initial compromise and transfer to secondary threat groups plummeted from eight hours in 2022 to a mere 22 seconds in 2025. While overall global median dwell time rose to 14 days—largely due to prolonged espionage operations—adversaries are increasingly bypassing traditional defenses by targeting virtualization infrastructure and backup systems to ensure "recovery deadlock" during extortion. The report also identifies a surge in highly interactive voice phishing, which has overtaken email as the top vector for cloud-related compromises. Furthermore, while AI is being incrementally integrated into reconnaissance and social engineering, Mandiant emphasizes that the majority of breaches still result from fundamental systemic failures. These evolving threats, including persistent backdoors with dwell times exceeding a year, underscore the urgent need for organizations to modernize their log retention policies and prioritize the security of their "Tier-0" identity and virtualization assets.

From fragmentation to focus: Can one security framework simplify compliance?

In "From Fragmentation to Focus," Sam Peters explores the escalating complexities of the modern cybersecurity landscape, driven by geopolitical instability and a rapidly expanding attack surface. As digital transformation progresses, businesses face a "messy" regulatory environment characterized by overlapping requirements like GDPR, NIS 2, and DORA. This fragmentation often leads to duplicated efforts, increased costs, and significant compliance fatigue for organizations of all sizes. To combat these challenges, the article positions as a unifying "gold standard" framework. By adopting this internationally recognized standard, companies can transition from reactive defense to proactive risk management. ISO 27001 offers a flexible, risk-based approach that can be seamlessly mapped to various global regulations, thereby streamlining operations and reducing overhead. The article argues that a consolidated security strategy does more than ensure compliance; it fosters a security-first culture, builds digital trust, and serves as a critical driver for competitive advantage and long-term business resilience. Ultimately, moving toward a single, structured framework allows leaders to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence, transforming security from a burdensome cost center into a strategic asset that supports sustainable growth in an increasingly volatile global market.

Microservices Without Drama: Practical Patterns That Work

The article "Microservices Without Drama: Practical Patterns That Work" offers a pragmatic roadmap for implementing without succumbing to architectural complexity. It emphasizes that while microservices enable independent team movement, they should only be adopted when data boundaries are crisp to avoid the "" trap. A core principle is absolute data ownership, where each service manages its own dataset, accessed via stable, versioned contracts using OpenAPI or AsyncAPI. The author advocates for a balanced communication strategy, favoring synchronous calls for immediate reads and asynchronous events for decoupled integrations. Operational success relies on "boring fundamentals" like standardized Kubernetes deployments, GitOps for configuration, and robust observability through OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. Reliability is further bolstered by defensive patterns, including circuit breakers, retries, and idempotency, ensuring the system remains resilient during failures. Security is addressed through mTLS and strict secrets management, moving beyond fragile IP-based allowlists. Ultimately, the piece argues that microservices provide true freedom only when teams invest in consistent standards and treat interfaces as public infrastructure. By prioritizing data integrity and operational repeatability over architectural trends, organizations can reap the benefits of scalability without the associated drama of unmanaged complexity.

The end of cloud-first: What compute everywhere actually looks like

The article "The End of Cloud-First" explores a fundamental transition toward a "" architecture, where centralized cloud environments are no longer the default destination for every workload. This evolution is driven by the reality that the network is not a neutral substrate; bandwidth and latency constraints, coupled with the explosion of IoT data, have made the traditional cloud-first assumption increasingly untenable. The emerging model operates across three distinct layers: a gateway layer for protocol translation, an edge layer for localized processing near data sources, and a centralized cloud layer reserved for heavy-lifting tasks like model training and global analytics. Modern machine learning advancements now allow for efficient inference on constrained devices, empowering local hardware to filter and classify data autonomously rather than merely forwarding raw telemetry. However, this decentralized approach introduces significant operational complexity. IT leaders must now manage vast fleets of devices with intermittent connectivity and navigate a landscape where partial system failures are a normal steady state. Software updates become logistical challenges rather than simple deployments. Ultimately, the focus is shifting from simple cloud migration to sophisticated orchestration, ensuring that intelligence and compute are placed precisely where they deliver value while balancing performance, cost, and reliability.

We’re fighting over GPUs and memory – but power manufacturing may decide who scales first

In this article, Matt Coffel argues that while the global tech industry remains fixated on GPU shortages and silicon supply chains, the true bottleneck for scaling artificial intelligence lies in electrical manufacturing capacity. As data center power demands are projected to surge from 33 GW to 176 GW by 2035, the availability of critical infrastructure—such as switchgear, transformers, and power distribution units—has become the decisive factor in operational readiness. AI-intensive workloads demand unprecedented power densities and constant uptime, yet the manufacturing sector is currently struggling to keep pace with the rapid acceleration of AI deployment. Traditional lead times of eighteen to twenty-four months clash with the immediate needs of hyperscalers, exacerbated by a shortage of skilled trades and over-customized engineering. To overcome these constraints, Coffel suggests that operators must shift toward standardization, modularization, and prefabricated power systems while engaging manufacturers much earlier in the design process. Ultimately, the ability to scale will not be determined solely by who possesses the most advanced chips, but by who can most efficiently deploy the resilient electrical infrastructure required to keep those processors running at scale.

Spec-Driven Development: The Key to Protecting AI-Generated Data Products

In "Spec-Driven Development: The Key to Protecting AI-Generated Data Products," Guy Adams explores the rising threat of in the era of AI-accelerated data engineering. Semantic drift occurs when data metrics gradually lose their original meaning through successive updates, potentially leading to costly business errors when executives rely on inaccurate interpretations of "headcount" or other key figures. While traditional DataOps focuses on recording what was built, it often fails to document the underlying intent, a gap that AI-assisted development significantly widens. To counter this, Adams advocates for —a software engineering methodology that prioritizes clear, structured specifications before coding begins. By defining a data product’s purpose and constraints upfront, organizations can leverage agentic AI to audit every proposed change against the original requirements. This ensures that new implementations maintain coherence rather than undermining a product’s utility. Although maintaining manual specifications was historically cost-prohibitive, Adams argues that current AI capabilities make automated spec maintenance both feasible and essential. Ultimately, adopting this "left-shifted" documentation approach allows enterprises to build drift-proof data products that remain reliable even as AI agents accelerate the pace of development and modification across complex enterprise systems.

IT Leaders Report Massive M&A Wave While Facing AI Readiness and Security Challenges

According to a recent ShareGate survey published by CIO Influence, IT leaders are navigating an unprecedented surge in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), with 80% of respondents currently involved in or planning such events. This massive wave, fueled by a 43% increase in global deal value during 2025, has positioned M&A as a primary catalyst for IT modernization. However, this acceleration brings significant hurdles, particularly regarding cybersecurity and AI readiness. While 64% of organizations migrate to Microsoft 365 specifically to bolster security, 41% of leaders identify compliance and data protection as top concerns during these transitions. The study also highlights a shift in leadership; IT operations and security teams, rather than business executives, are the primary drivers of AI adoption, such as Microsoft Copilot. Despite 62% of organizations already deploying Copilot, they face substantial blockers including poor data quality, complex governance, and access control issues. Furthermore, 55% of teams select migration tools before fully assessing integration risks, which can jeopardize long-term stability. Ultimately, the report emphasizes that for M&A success, IT must evolve into a strategic partner that integrates robust governance and security into the foundation of every digital migration.

Identity discovery: The Overlooked Lever in Strategic Risk Reduction

The article "Identity Discovery: The Overlooked Lever in Strategic Risk Reduction" emphasizes that comprehensive visibility into every human, machine, and AI identity is the foundational prerequisite for modern cybersecurity. While organizations often prioritize glamorous initiatives like Zero Trust or AI-driven detection, the author argues that these controls are fundamentally incomplete without first establishing a robust identity discovery process. This is particularly critical due to the "," where non-human identities now outnumber humans by nearly 46 to 1, creating a structural shift in the threat landscape. By implementing continuous discovery and mapping access relationships through an identity graph, organizations can uncover hidden escalation paths, lateral movement risks, and "toxic" misconfigurations that traditional dashboards often miss. Furthermore, identity security has evolved into a strategic board-level concern, with 84% of organizations recognizing its importance. Identity discovery empowers CISOs to move beyond technical metrics, providing the strategic clarity needed to quantify risk and demonstrate measurable improvements in posture to stakeholders. Ultimately, illuminating the entire identity plane transforms security from a reactive operational task into a disciplined, proactive risk management strategy that eliminates the blind spots where most modern breaches begin.

Daily Tech Digest - February 19, 2026

Quote for the day:

“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” -- Colin Powell

The new paradigm for raising up secure software engineers

were already struggling to help developers keep up with secure code principles at the speed of DevOps. Now, with reshaping how code gets written and shipped, the challenge is rapidly intensifying. ... What is needed to get thrown out are traditional training methods. Consensus among security leaders is that dev training needs to be bite-sized, hands-on, and mostly embedded in developer tool chains. ... Rather than focus on preparing developers for line-by-line code review, the emphasis moves toward evaluating whether their features and functions behave securely in context of deployment conditions, says ... Developers need to recognize when introduces unsafe assumptions, insecure defaults, or integrations that can scale vulnerabilities across systems. And with more security enforcement built into automated engineering pipelines, developers should ideally also be trained to understand what automated gates catch, and what still requires human judgment. “Security awareness in engineering has shifted to a system-level approach rather than focusing on individual vulnerabilities,” Pinna says. ... The data from guardrails and controls being triggered can be used by the AppSec team to drive creation and delivery of more in-depth, but targeted education. When the same vulnerability or integration pattern pops up again and again, that’s a signal for focused training on a subject.

New agent framework matches human-engineered AI systems — and adds zero inference cost to deploy

In experiments on complex coding and software engineering tasks, substantially outperformed existing self-improving frameworks. Perhaps most notably for enterprise decision-makers, the system autonomously evolved agents that matched or exceeded the performance of frameworks painstakingly designed by human experts. ... Unlike traditional systems where an agent only learns from its direct parent, GEA creates a shared pool of collective experience. This pool contains the evolutionary traces from all members of the parent group, including code modifications, successful solutions to tasks, and tool invocation histories. Every agent in the group gains access to this collective history, allowing them to learn from the breakthroughs and mistakes of their peers. ... The results demonstrated a massive leap in capability without increasing the number of agents used. This collaborative approach also makes the system more robust against failure. In their experiments, the researchers intentionally broke agents by manually injecting bugs into their implementations. GEA was able to repair these critical bugs in an average of 1.4 iterations, while the baseline took 5 iterations. The system effectively leverages the "healthy" members of the group to diagnose and patch the compromised ones. ... The success of GEA stems largely from its ability to consolidate improvements. The researchers tracked specific innovations invented by the agents during the evolutionary process.

GitHub readies agents to automate repository maintenance

In order to help developers and enterprises manage the operational drag of maintaining repositories, GitHub is previewing , a new feature that uses AI to automate most routine tasks associated with repository hygiene. It won’t solve maintenance problems all by itself, though. Developers will still have to describe the automation workflows in natural language that agents can follow, storing the instructions as Markdown files in the repo created either from the terminal via the GitHub CLI or inside an editor such as Visual Studio Code. ... “Mid-sized engineering teams gain immediate productivity benefits because they struggle most with repetitive maintenance work like triage and documentation drift,” said Dion Hinchcliffe ... Patel also warned that beyond precision and signal-to-noise concerns, there is a more prosaic risk teams may underestimate at first: As agentic workflows scale across repositories and run more frequently, the underlying compute and model-inference costs can quietly compound, turning what looks like a productivity boost into a growing operational line item if left unchecked. This can become a boardroom issue for engineering heads and CIOs because they must justify return on investment, especially at a time when they are grappling with what it really means to let software agents operate inside production workflows, Patel added.

One stolen credential is all it takes to compromise everything

dominated incident response activity in 2025. Identity weaknesses played a material role in almost 90% of investigations. Initial access was driven by identity-based techniques in 65% of cases, including phishing, stolen credentials, brute force attempts, and insider activity. ... Rubin said the growing dominance of identity attacks reflects how enterprise environments have changed over the past few years, creating more opportunities for adversaries to quietly slip in through legitimate access pathways. “The increasing role of identity as the main attack vector is a result of a fundamental change in the enterprise environment,” Rubin said. “This dynamic is driven by two key factors.” He said the first driver is the rapid expansion of SaaS adoption, cloud infrastructure, and machine identities, which in many organizations now outnumber human accounts. That shift has created what he described as a “massive, unmanaged shadow estate,” where each integration represents “a new, potentially unmonitored, path into the network.” ... The time window for defenders is shrinking. The fastest 25% of intrusions reached in 72 minutes in 2025. The same metric was 285 minutes in 2024. A separate simulation described an AI-assisted attack that reached exfiltration in 25 minutes. Threat actors also began automating extortion operations. Unit 42 negotiators observed consistent tone and cadence in ransom communications, suggesting partial automation or AI-assisted negotiation messaging.

The emerging enterprise AI stack is missing a trust layer

This is not simply a technology problem. It is an architectural one. Today’s enterprise AI stack is built around compute, data and models, but it is missing its most critical component: a dedicated trust layer. As AI systems move from suggesting answers to taking actions, this gap is becoming the single biggest barrier to scale. ... Our ability to generate AI outputs is scaling exponentially, while our ability to understand, govern and trust those outputs remains manual, retrospective and fragmented across point solutions. ... This layer isn’t a single tool; it’s a . I often think of it as the avionics system in a modern aircraft. It doesn’t make the plane fly faster, but it continuously measures conditions and makes adjustments to keep the flight within safe parameters. Without it, you’re flying blind — especially at scale. ... Agentic systems collapse the distance between recommendation and action. When decisions are automated, there is far less tolerance for opacity or after-the-fact explanations. If an AI-driven action cannot be reconstructed, justified and owned, the risk is no longer theoretical — it is operational. This is why trust is becoming a prerequisite for autonomy. Governance models built for dashboards and quarterly reviews are not sufficient when systems act in real time. CIOs need architectures that assume scrutiny, not exception handling and that treat accountability as a design constraint rather than a policy requirement.

India Is Not a Back Office — It’s a Core Engine of Our Global Innovation

We have a very clear data and AI strategy. We are running multiple proof-of-concept initiatives across the organisation to ensure AI becomes more than just a buzzword. The key question is: how does AI create real value for ? It helps us become more agile and faster, whether in product development, improving internal process efficiency, or enhancing decision-making quality. India plays a crucial role here. We have a large team working on data analytics, intelligent automation, and AI, supporting these initiatives and shaping our agenda. ... It’s not just access to talent, it’s also the mindset. Indian society is highly adaptable. You often face unforeseen situations and must find solutions quickly. That agility and ability to always have a “Plan B” drive innovation, creativity, and speed. ... Data protection is a global priority. Many regions have introduced regulations, India’s , GDPR in the European Union, and similar laws in China. For global organisations, managing how data is transferred and processed across borders is a significant challenge. For example, certain data, like Chinese customer data, may need to remain within that country. Beyond regulatory compliance, cybersecurity threats are constant. Like most organisations, we experience attempted attacks on our networks. We have a robust cybersecurity team working continuously to secure both data and infrastructure.

AI likely to put a major strain on global networks—are enterprises ready?

Retrieval-heavy architecture types such as —an AI framework that boosts large language models by first retrieving relevant, current information from external sources—create significant network traffic because data is moving across regions, object stores, and vector indexes, Kale says. “Agent-like, multi-step workflows further amplify this by triggering an additional set of retrievals and evaluations at each step,” Kale says. “All of these patterns create fast and unpredictable bursts of network traffic that today’s networks were never designed to handle. These trends will not abate, as enterprises transition from piloting AI services to running them continually.” ... In 2026, “we will see significant disruption from accelerated appetite for all things AI,” research firm Forrester noted in a late-year predictions post. “Business demands of AI systems, network connectivity, AI for IT operations, the conversational AI-powered service desk, and more are driving substantial changes that tech leaders must enable within their organizations.” ... “Inference workloads in particular create continuous, high-intensity, globally distributed traffic patterns,” Barrow says. “A single AI feature can trigger millions of additional requests per hour, and those requests are heavier—higher bandwidth, higher concurrency, and GPU-accelerated compute on the other side of the network.”

Quantum Scientists Publish Manifesto Opposing Military Use of Quantum Research

The scientists’ primary goals include: to express a unified rejection of military uses of ; to open debate within the quantum community about ethical implications; to create a forum for researchers concerned about militarization; and to advocate for a public database listing all research projects at public universities funded by military or defense agencies. Quantum technologies rely on the behavior of matter and light at the smallest scales, enabling ultra-secure communication, highly sensitive sensors and powerful computing systems. According to the manifesto, these capabilities are increasingly being folded into defense strategies worldwide. ... The manifesto places these developments in the context of rising defense budgets, particularly in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The scientists write in the manifesto that the research and development sector is not exempt from the broader rearmament trend and that dual-use technologies — those that can serve both civilian and military ends — are increasingly prioritized in policy documents. The scientists acknowledge that are not inherently military tools. However, according to the manifesto, once such systems are developed, their applications may be difficult to control. The scientists argue that closer institutional ties between universities and defense agencies risk undermining academic independence. .

From pilot purgatory to productive failure: Fixing AI's broken learning loop

"Model performance can drift with data changes, user behavior, and policy updates, so a 'set it and forget it' KPI can reward the wrong thing, too late," Manos said. The penalty for CIOs, however, comes from the time lag between the misread KPI signal and the CIO's moves to correct it. Timing is everything, and "by the time a quarterly metric flags a problem, the root cause has already compounded across workflows," Manos said. ... Waiting until the end of a POC to figure out why a concept doesn't scale is clearly too late, but neither is it prudent to abandon a "trial, observation, and refine" cycle entirely, Alex Tyrrell, head of advanced technologies at Wolters Kluwer and CTO at Wolters Kluwer Health, said. Instead, Tyrrell argues for refining the interaction process itself to detect issues earlier in a safe setting, particularly in regulated, high-trust environments like healthcare. He recommends pairing each iteration with both predictive and diagnostic signals, so IT teams can intervene before the error ripples down to the customer level. ... AI pilots fail for the same non-technical reasons that have always plagued technology performance, such as a governance vacuum, organizational unreadiness, low usage rates, or "measurement theater," which is when tech performance can't be tied to a specific business value, explained Baker.

How AI agents and humans can play together in the same sandbox

Unlike traditional automation, which is rigid and rules-based, AI agents are goal-driven. They can plan, adapt, and respond to changing conditions. That makes them especially powerful for modern business processes that are dynamic by nature - processes that span systems, teams, and time zones. Another defining characteristic is endurance. AI agents don't get tired, sick, or distracted. They can operate continuously, scaling up or down as needed, and executing tasks with consistent precision. This doesn't make humans obsolete. ... Trust plays a central role here. Agents must demonstrate that they are reliable and predictable. At the same time, humans must define boundaries - what agents can do autonomously, where approvals are required, and what guardrails must always be respected. There is a fine balance to strike. Constrain agents too tightly, and you eliminate the benefits of autonomy. ... A logical approach enables AI agents to access views of data directly from source systems, in real time, without first having to replicate or move that data. For Agentic AI, this is critical: agents need live data, delivered in the shortest possible time, in order to plan, act, and adapt effectively. By abstracting physical data complexity and unifying access across sources, a logical data layer provides AI agents with fast, trusted, and governed data - exactly what autonomous systems require to operate at scale. A shared data plane provides all consumers - human or machine - with the same source of truth. It also provides context, consistency, and traceability.

Daily Tech Digest - January 09, 2026

Quote for the day:

"Always remember, your focus determines your reality." -- George Lucas

The AI plateau: What smart CIOs will do when the hype cools

During the early stages of GenAI adoption, organizations were captivated by its potential -- often driven by the hype surrounding tools like ChatGPT. However, as the technology matures, enterprises are now grappling with the complexities of scaling AI tools, integrating them into existing workflows and using them to meet measurable business outcomes. ... History has shown that transformative technologies often go through similar cycles of hype, disillusionment and eventual stabilization. ... Early on, many organizations told every department to use AI to boost productivity. That approach created energy, but it also produced long lists of ideas that competed for attention and resources. At the plateau stage, CIOs are becoming more selective. Instead of experimenting with every possible use case, they are selecting a smaller number of use cases that clearly support business goals and can be scaled. The question is no longer whether a team can use AI, but whether it should. ... CIOs should take a two-speed approach that separates fast, short-term AI projects from larger, long-term efforts, Locandro said. Smaller initiatives help teams learn and deliver quick results. Bigger projects require more planning and investment, especially when they span multiple systems. ... A key challenge CIOs face with GenAI is avoiding long, drawn-out planning cycles that try to solve everything at once. As AI technology evolves rapidly, lengthy projects risk producing outdated tools.

Middle East Tech 2026: 5 Non-AI Trends Shaping Regional Business

The Middle Eastern biotechnology market is rapidly maturing into a multi-billion-dollar industrial powerhouse, driven by national healthcare and climate agendas. In 2026, the industry is marking the shift toward manufacturing-scale deployment, as genomics, biofuels, and diagnostics projects move into operational phases. ... Quantum computing has moved past the stage of academic curiosity. In 2026, the Middle East is seeing the first wave of applied industrial pilots, particularly within the energy and material science sectors. ... While commercialization timelines remain long, the strategic value of early entry is high. Foreign suppliers who offer algorithm development or hardware-software integration for these early-stage pilots will find a highly receptive market among national energy champions. ... Geopatriation refers to the relocation of digital workloads and data onto sovereign-controlled clouds and local hardware and stands out as a major structural shift in 2026. Driven by national security concerns and the massive data requirements of AI, Middle Eastern states are reducing their reliance on cross-border digital architectures. This trend has extended beyond data residency to include the localization of critical hardware capabilities. ... the region is moving away from perimeter-based security models toward zero-trust architectures, under which no user, device, or system receives implicit trust. Security priorities now extend beyond office IT systems to cover operational technology

Scaling AI value demands industrial governance

"Capturing AI's value while minimizing risk starts with discipline," Puig said. "CIOs and their organizations need a clear strategy that ties AI initiatives to business outcomes, not just technology experiments. This means defining success criteria upfront, setting guardrails for ethics and compliance, and avoiding the trap of endless pilots with no plan for scale." ... Puig adds that trust is just as important as technology. "Transparency, governance, and training help people understand how AI decisions are made and where human judgment still matters. The goal isn't to chase every shiny use case; it's to create a framework where AI delivers value safely and sustainably." ... Data security and privacy emerge as critical issues, cited by 42% of respondents in the research. While other concerns -- such as response quality and accuracy, implementation costs, talent shortages, and regulatory compliance -- rank lower individually, they collectively represent substantial barriers. When aggregated, issues related to data security, privacy, legal and regulatory compliance, ethics, and bias form a formidable cluster of risk factors -- clearly indicating that trust and governance are top priorities for scaling AI adoption. ... At its core, governance ensures that data is safe for decision-making and autonomous agents. In "Competing in the Age of AI," authors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani explain that AI allows organizations to rethink the traditional firm by powering up an "AI factory" -- a scalable decision-making engine that replaces manual processes with data-driven algorithms.

Information Management Trends in the Year Ahead

The digital workforce will make its presence felt. “Fleets of AI agents trained on proprietary data, governed by corporate policy, and audited like employees will appear in org charts, collaborate on projects, and request access through policy engines,” said Sergio Gago, CTO for Cloudera. “They will be contributing insights alongside their human colleagues.” A potential oversight framework may effectively be called an “HR department for AI.” AI agents are graduating from “copilots that suggest to accountable coworkers inside their digital environments,” agreed Arturo Buzzalino ... “Instead of pulling data into different environments, we’re bringing compute to the data,” said Scott Gnau, head of data platforms at InterSystems. “For a long time, the common approach was to move data to wherever the applications or models were running. AI depends on fast, reliable access to governed data. When teams make this change, they see faster results, better control, and fewer surprises in performance and cost.” ... The year ahead will see efforts to reign in the huge volume of AI projects now proliferating outside the scope of IT departments. “IT leaders are being called in to fix or unify fragmented, business-led AI projects, signaling a clear shift toward CIOs—like myself,” said Shelley Seewald, CIO at Tungsten Automation. The impetus is on IT leaders and managers to be “more involved much earlier in shaping AI strategy and governance.

What is outcome as agentic solution (OaAS)?

The analyst firm, Gartner predicts that a new paradigm it’s named outcome as agentic solution (OaAS) will make some of the biggest waves, by replacing software as a service (SaaS). The new model will see enterprises contract for outcomes, instead of simply buying access to software tools. Instead of SaaS, where the customer is responsible for purchasing a tool and using it to achieve results, with OaAS providers embed AI agents and orchestration so the work is performed for you. This leaves the vendor responsible for automating decisions and delivering outcomes, says Vuk Janosevic, senior director analyst at Gartner. ... The ‘outcome scenario’ has been developing in the market for several years, first through managed services then value-based delivery models. “OaAS simply formalizes it with modern IT buyers, who want results over tools,” notes Thomas Kraus, global head of AI at Onix. OaAS providers are effectively transforming systems of record (SoR) into systems of action (SoA) by introducing orchestration control planes that bind execution directly to outcomes, says Janosevic. ... Goransson, however, advises enterprises carefully evaluate several areas of risk before adopting an agentic service model, Accountability is paramount, he notes, as without clear ownership structures and performance metrics, organizations may struggle to assess whether outcomes are being delivered as intended.

Bridging the Gap Between SRE and Security: A Unified Framework for Modern Reliability

SRE teams optimize for uptime, performance, scalability, automation and operational efficiency. Security teams focus on risk reduction, threat mitigation, compliance, access control and data protection. Both mandates are valid, but without shared KPIs, each team views the other as an obstacle to progress. Security controls — patch cycles, vulnerability scans, IAM restrictions and network changes — can slow deployments and reduce SRE flexibility. In SRE terms, these controls often increase toil, create unpredictable work and disrupt service-level objectives (SLOs). The SRE culture emphasizes continuous improvement and rapid rollback, whereas security relies on strict change approval and minimizing risk surfaces. ... This disconnect impacts organizations in measurable ways. Security incidents often trigger slow, manual escalations because security and operations lack common playbooks, increasing mean time to recovery (MTTR). Risk gets mis-prioritized when SRE sees a vulnerability as non-disruptive while security considers it critical. Fragmented tooling means that SRE leverages observability and automation while security uses scanning and SIEM tools with no shared telemetry, creating incomplete incident context. The result? Regulatory penalties, breaches from failures in patch automation or access governance and a culture of blame where security faults SRE for speed and SRE faults security for friction.

The 2 faces of AI: How emerging models empower and endanger cybersecurity

More recently, the researchers at Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) identified a disturbing new trend: malware that uses LLMs during execution to dynamically alter its own behavior and evade detection. This is not pre-generated code, this is code that adapts mid-execution. ... Anthropic recently disclosed a highly sophisticated cyber espionage operation, attributed to a state-sponsored threat actor, that leveraged its own Claude Codemodel to target roughly 30 organizations globally, including major financial institutions and government agencies. ... If adversaries are operating at AI speed, our defenses must too. The silver lining of this dual-use dynamic is that the most powerful LLMs are also being harnessed by defenders to create fundamentally new security capabilities. ... LLMs have shown extraordinary potential in identifying unknown, unpatched flaws (zero-days). These models significantly outperform conventional static analyzers, particularly in uncovering subtle logic flaws and buffer overflows in novel software. ... LLMs are transforming threat hunting from a manual, keyword-based search to an intelligent, contextual query process that focuses on behavioral anomalies. ... Ultimately, the challenge isn’t to halt AI progress but to guide it responsibly. That means building guardrails into models, improving transparency and developing governance frameworks that keep pace with emerging capabilities. It also requires organizations to rethink security strategies, recognizing that AI is both an opportunity and a risk multiplier.

Hacker Conversations: Katie Paxton-Fear Talks Autism, Morality and Hacking

“Life with autism is like living life without the instruction manual that everyone else has.” It’s confusing and difficult. “Computing provides that manual and makes it easier to make online friends. It provides accessibility without the overpowering emotions and ambiguities that exist in face-to-face real life relationships – so it’s almost helping you with your disability by providing that safe context you wouldn’t normally have.” Paxton-Fear became obsessed with computing at an early age. ... During the second year into her PhD study, a friend from her earlier university days invited her to a bug bounty event held by HackerOne. She went – not to take part in the event (she still didn’t think she was a hacker nor understood anything about hacking), she went to meet up with other friends from the university days. She thought to herself, ‘I’m not going to find anything. I don’t know anything about hacking.’ “But then, while there, I found my first two vulnerabilities.” ... he was driven by curiosity from an early age – but her skill was in disassembly without reassembly: she just needed to know how things work. And while many hackers are driven to computers as a shelter from social difficulties, she exhibits no serious or long lasting social difficulties. For her, the attraction of computers primarily comes from her dislike of ambiguity. She readily acknowledges that she sees life as unambiguously black or white with no shades of gray.

‘A wild future’: How economists are handling AI uncertainty in forecasts

Economists have time-tested models for projecting economic growth. But they’ve seen nothing like AI, which is a wild card complicating traditional economic playbooks. Some facts are clear: AI will make humans more productive and increase economic activity, with spillover effects on spending and employment. But there are many unknowns about AI. Economists can’t isolate AI’s impact on human labor as automation kicks in. Nailing down long-term factory job losses to AI is not possible. ... “We’re seeing an increase in terms of productivity enhancements over the next decade and a half. While it doesn’t capture AI directly… there is all kinds of upside potential to the productivity numbers because of AI. ... “There are basically two ways this can go. You can get more output for the same input. If you used to put in 100 and get 120, maybe now you get 140. That’s an expansion in total factor productivity. Or you can get the same output with fewer inputs. “It’s unclear how much of either will happen across industries or in the labor market. Will companies lean into AI, cut their workforce, and maintain revenue? Or will they keep their workforce, use AI to supplement them, and increase total output per worker? ... If AI and automation remove the human element from labor-intensive manufacturing, that cost advantage erodes. It makes it harder for developing countries to use cheap labor as a stepping stone toward industrialization.

Understanding transformers: What every leader should know about the architecture powering GenAI

Inside a transformer, attention is the mechanism that lets tokens talk to each other. The model compares every token’s query with every other token’s key to calculate a weight which is a measure of how relevant one token is to another. These weights are then used to blend information from all tokens into a new, context-aware representation called a value. In simple terms: attention allows the model to focus dynamically. If the model reads “The cat sat on the mat because it was tired,” attention helps it learn that “it” refers to “the cat,” not “the mat.” ... Transformers are powerful, but they’re also expensive. Training a model like GPT-4 requires thousands of GPUs and trillions of data tokens. Leaders don’t need to know tensor math, but they do need to understand scaling trade-offs. Techniques like quantization (reducing numerical precision), model sharding and caching can cut serving costs by 30–50% with minimal accuracy loss. The key insight: Architecture determines economics. Design choices in model serving directly impact latency, reliability and total cost of ownership. ... The transformer’s most profound breakthrough isn’t just technical — it’s architectural. It proved that intelligence could emerge from design — from systems that are distributed, parallel and context-aware. For engineering leaders, understanding transformers isn’t about learning equations; it’s about recognizing a new principle of system design.

Daily Tech Digest - December 30, 2025

Quote for the day:

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” -- George Eliot

Cybersecurity Trends: What's in Store for Defenders in 2026?

For hackers of all stripes, a ready supply of easily procured, useful tools abounds. Numerous breaches trace to information stealing malware, which grabs credentials from a system, or log. Automated "clouds of logs" make it easy for info stealer subscribers to monetize their attacks. ... Clop, aka Cl0p, again stole data and held it for ransom. How many victims paid a ransom isn't known, although the group's repeated ability to pay for zero-days suggests it's making a tidy profit. Other cybercrime groups appear to have learned from Clop's successes, including The Com cybercrime collective spinoff lately calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters. One repeat target of that group has been third-party software that connects to customer relationship management software platform Salesforce, allowing them to steal OAuth tokens and gain access to Salesforce instances and customer data. ... Beyond the massive potential illicit revenue being earned by these teenagers, what's also notable is the sheer brutality of many of these attacks, such as data breaches involving children's nurseries including Kiddo and disrupting the British economy to the tune of $2.5 billion through a single attack against Jaguar Land Rover that shut down assembly lines and supply chains. ... Well-designed defenses help blunt many an attacker, or at least slow an intrusion. Enforcing least-privileged access to resources and multifactor authentication always helps, as do concrete security practices designed to block CEO fraud, tricking help desk ploys and other forms of forms of social engineering.

4 New Year’s resolutions for devops success

“Develop a growth mindset that AI models are not good or bad, but rather a new nondeterministic paradigm in software that can both create new issues and new opportunities,” says Matthew Makai, VP of developer relations at DigitalOcean. “It’s on devops engineers and teams to adapt to how software is created, deployed, and operated.” ... A good place to start is improving observability across APIs, applications, and automations. “Developers should adopt an AI-first, prevention-first mindset, using observability and AIops to move from reactive fixes to proactive detection and prevention of issues,” says Alok Uniyal, SVP and head of process consulting at Infosys. ... “Integrating accessibility into the devops pipeline should be a top resolution, with accessibility tests running alongside security and unit tests in CI as automated testing and AI coding tools mature,” says Navin Thadani, CEO of Evinced. “As AI accelerates development, failing to fix accessibility issues early will only cause teams to generate inaccessible code faster, making shift-left accessibility essential. Engineers should think hard about keeping accessibility in the loop, so the promise of AI-driven coding doesn’t leave inclusion behind.” ... For engineers ready to step up into leadership roles but concerned about taking on direct reports, consider mentoring others to build skills and confidence. “There is high-potential talent everywhere, so aside from learning technical skills, I would challenge devops engineers to also take the time to mentor a junior engineer in 2026,” says Austin Spires

New framework simplifies the complex landscape of agentic AI

Agent adaptation involves modifying the foundation model that underlies the agentic system. This is done by updating the agent’s internal parameters or policies through methods like fine-tuning or reinforcement learning to better align with specific tasks. Tool adaptation, on the other hand, shifts the focus to the environment surrounding the agent. Instead of retraining the large, expensive foundation model, developers optimize the external tools such as search retrievers, memory modules, or sub-agents. ... If the agent struggles to use generic tools, don't retrain the main model. Instead, train a small, specialized sub-agent (like a searcher or memory manager) to filter and format data exactly how the main agent likes it. This is highly data-efficient and suitable for proprietary enterprise data and applications that are high-volume and cost-sensitive. Use A1 for specialization: If the agent fundamentally fails at technical tasks you must rewire its understanding of the tool's "mechanics." A1 is best for creating specialists in verifiable domains like SQL or Python or your proprietary tools. For example, you can optimize a small model for your specific toolset and then use it as a T1 plugin for a generalist model. Reserve A2 (agent output signaled) as the "nuclear option": Only train a monolithic agent end-to-end if you need it to internalize complex strategy and self-correction. This is resource-intensive and rarely necessary for standard enterprise applications.

Radio signals could give attackers a foothold inside air-gapped devices

For an attack to work, sensitivity needs to be predictable. Multiple copies of the same board model were tested using the same configurations and signal settings. Several sensitivity patterns appeared consistently across samples, meaning an attacker could characterize one device and apply those findings to another of the same model. They also measured stability over 24 hours to assess whether the effect persisted beyond short test windows. Most sensitive frequency regions remained consistent over time, with modest drift in some paths ... Once sensitive paths were identified, the team tested data reception. They used on-off keying, where the transmitter switches a carrier on for a one and off for a zero. This choice matched the observed behavior, which distinguishes between presence and absence of a signal. Under ideal synchronization, several paths achieved bit error rates below 1 percent when estimated received power reached about 10 milliwatts. One path stayed below 2 percent at roughly 1 milliwatt. Bandwidth tests showed that symbol rates up to 100 kilobits per second remained distinguishable, even as transitions blurred at higher rates. In a longer test, the researchers transmitted about 12,000 bits at 1 kilobit per second. At three meters, reception produced no errors. At 20 meters, the bit error rate reached about 6.2 percent. Errors appeared in bursts that standard error correction could address.

Smart Companies Are Taking SaaS In-House with Agentic Development

The uncomfortable truth: when your critical business processes depend on an AI SaaS vendor’s survival, you’ve outsourced your competitive advantage to their cap table. ... But the deeper risk isn’t operational disruption — it’s strategic surrender. When you pipe your proprietary business context through external AI platforms, you’re training their models on your differentiation. You’re converting what should be permanent strategic assets into recurring operational expenses that drag down EBITDA. For companies evaluating AI SaaS alternatives, the real question is no longer whether to build or buy — but what parts of the AI stack must be owned to protect long‑term competitive advantage. ... “Who maintains these apps?” It’s the right question, with a surprising answer: 1. SaaS Maintenance Isn’t Free — Vendors deprecate APIs, change pricing, pivot features. Your team still scrambles to adapt. Plus, the security risk often comes from having an external third party connecting to internal data. 2. Agents Lower Maintenance Costs Dramatically — Updating deprecated libraries? Agents excel at this, especially with typed languages. The biggest hesitancy — knowledge loss when developers leave — evaporates when agents can explain the codebase to anyone. 3. You Control the Update Schedule — With owned infrastructure, you decide when to upgrade dependencies, refactor components, or add features. No vendor forcing breaking changes on their timeline.

6 cyber insurance gotchas security leaders must avoid

Before committing to a specific insurer, Lindsay recommends consulting an attorney with experience in cyber insurance contracts. “A policy is a legal document with complex definitions,” he notes. “An attorney can flag ambiguous terms, hidden carve-outs, or obligations that could create disputes at claim time,” Lindsay says. ... It’s hardly surprising, but important to remember, that the language contained in cybersecurity policies generally favors the insurer, not the insured. “Businesses often misinterpret the language from their perspective and overlook the risks that the very language of the policy creates,” Polsky warns. ... You may believe your policy will cover all cyberattack losses, yet a look at the fine print may revealed that it’s riddled with exclusions and warranties that can’t be realistically met, particularly in areas such as social engineering, ransomware, and business interruption. ... Many enterprises believe they’re fully secure, yet when they file a claim the insurer points to the fine print about security measures you didn’t know were required, Mayo says. “Now you’re stuck with cleanup costs, legal fees, and potential lawsuits — all without support from your insurance provider.” ... The retroactive date clause can be the biggest cyber insurance trap, warns Paul Pioselli, founder and CEO of cybersecurity services firm Solace. ... Perhaps the biggest mistake an insurance seeker can make is failing to understand the difference between first-party coverage and third-party coverage, and therefore failing to acquire a policy that includes both, says Dylan Tate

7 major IT disasters of 2025

In July, US cleaning product vendor Clorox filed a $380 million lawsuit against Cognizant, accusing the IT services provider’s helpdesk staff of handing over network passwords to cybercriminals who called and asked for them. ... Zimmer Biomet, a medical device company, filed a $172 million lawsuit against Deloitte in September, accusing the IT consulting company of failing to deliver promised results in a large-scale SAP S/4HANA deployment. ... In September, a massive fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) government data center in South Korea resulted in the loss of 858TB of government data stored there. ... Multiple Google cloud services, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, and Gemini, were taken down during a massive outage in June. The outage was triggered by an earlier policy change to Google Service Control, a control plan service that provides functionality for managed services, with a null-pointer crash loop breaking APIs across several products. ... In late October, Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region was hit with a significant outage, lasting about three hours during early morning hours. The problem was related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the region, causing increased error rates, latency, and new instance launch failures for multiple AWS services. ... In late July, services in Microsoft’s Azure East US region were disrupted, with customers experiencing allocation failures when trying to create or update virtual machines. The problem? A lack of capacity, with a surge in demand outstripping Microsoft’s computing resources.

Stop Guessing, Start Improving: Using DORA Metrics and Process Behavior Charts

The DORA framework consists of several key metrics. Among them, Change Lead Time (CLT) shows how quickly a team can deliver change. Deployment Frequency (DF) shows what the team actually delivers. While important, DF is often more volatile, influenced by team size, vacations, and the type of work being done. Finally, the instability metrics and reliability SLOs serve as a counterbalance. ... Beyond spotting special causes, PBCs are also useful for detecting shifts, moments when the entire system moves to a new performance level. In the commute example above, these shifts appear as clear drops in the average commute time whenever a real improvement is introduced, such as buying a bike or finding a shorter route. Technically, a shift occurs when several consecutive points fall above or below the previous mean, signaling that the process has fundamentally changed. ... Sustainable improvement is rarely linear. It depends on a series of strategic bets whose effects emerge over time. Some succeed, others fail, and external factors, from tooling changes to team turnover, often introduce temporary setbacks. ... According to DORA research, these metrics have a predictive relationship with broader outcomes such as organizational performance and team well-being. In other words, teams that score higher on DORA metrics are statistically more likely to achieve better business results and report higher satisfaction.

5 Threats That Defined Security in 2025

Salt Typhoon is a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor best known in recent memory for targeting telecom giants — including Verizon, AT&T, Lumen Technologies, and multiple others — discovered last fall, targeting the systems used by police for court-authorized wiretapping. The group, also known as Operator Panda, uses sophisticated techniques to conduct espionage against targets and pre-position itself for longer-term attacks. ... CISA layoffs, indirectly, mark a threat of a different kind. At the beginning of the year, the Trump administration cut all advisory committee members within the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a group run by public and private sector experts to research and make judgments about large issues of the moment. As the CSRB was effectively shuttered, it was working on a report about Salt Typhoon. ... React2Shell describes CVE-2025-55182, a vulnerability disclosed early this month affecting the React Server Components (RSC) open source protocol. Caused by unsafe deserialization, vulnerability was considered easily exploitable and highly dangerous, earning it a maximum CVSS score of 10. Even worse, React is fairly ubiquitous, and at the time of disclosure it was thought that a third of cloud providers were vulnerable. ... In September, a self-replicating malware emerged known as Shai-Hulud. It's an infostealer that infects open source software components; when a user downloads a package infected by the worm, Shai-Hulud infects other packages maintained by the user and publishes poisoned versions, automatically and without much direct attacker input.

How data-led intelligence can help apparel manufacturers and retailers adapt faster to changing consumer behaviour

AI is already helping retail businesses to understand the complex buying patterns of India’s diverse population. To predict demand, big box chains such as Reliance Retail and e-commerce leaders like Flipkart use machine learning algorithms to analyse historical sales, search patterns and even social media conversations. ... With data-led intelligence studying real-time demand signals, manufacturers can adjust their lines much sooner. If data shows a rising preference for electric scooters in certain cities, for instance, factories can scale up output before the trend peaks. And when interest in a product starts dipping, production can be slowed to prevent excess stock. ... One of the strongest outcomes of the AI wave is its ability to bring consumer demand and industrial supply onto the same page. In the past, customer preferences often evolved faster than factories could react, creating gaps between what buyers wanted and what stores stocked. AI has made this far easier to manage. Manufacturers and retailers now share richer data and insights across the supply chain, allowing production teams to plan with far better clarity. This also enhances supply chain transparency, a growing priority for global buyers seeking traceability. ... If data intelligence tools notice a sharp rise in conversations around eco-friendly packaging or sustainable clothing, retailers can adjust their marketing and stock in advance, while manufacturers source greener materials and redesign processes to match the growing interest.