Author: Admin

A Preamble, sort of As we’re writing this – it’s April, 2023 – it is hard to overstate the attention going to, the hopes associated with, and the fears surrounding deep-learning-powered image and text generation. Impacts on society, politics, and human well-being deserve more than a short, dutiful paragraph. We thus defer appropriate treatment of this topic to dedicated publications, and would just like to say one thing: The more you know, the better; the less you’ll be impressed by over-simplifying, context-neglecting statements made by public figures; the easier it will be for you to take your own stance on…

Walking the halls at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando recently, one theme came through clearly: organizations have moved far past the question of whether they should invest in AI and AI agents. The conversation now is about how to operationalize AI safely and at scale. Nearly every leader I spoke with was experimenting with AI agents or planning to introduce them into their enterprise workflows. But when the conversation turned to the data those agents would rely on, I noticed that confidence dropped quickly. That gap between AI ambition and the reality of data readiness is something…

For the past 20 years, there’s basically been one guy in Republican politics who was known as the Iran war guy.For years, even decades, John Bolton has argued for regime change in Iran, and for America to take a proactive military role to make that happen. Bolton served as the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush and, later, as national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term.The partnership with Trump was fleeting, however. He did not leave the administration on good terms and has been a critic of Trump since. He’s even been indicted…

A disgruntled data analyst decides that the best response to losing his contract is to steal the entire company payroll database and demand $2.5 million in Bitcoin – signing his extortion emails from a company called “Loot.” Meanwhile, two people drive up to the entrance of the UK’s nuclear submarine base at Faslane and politely ask if they can have a look around. Tourists? Spies? Something in between? Plus: Female Muslim punk rock group, and a little red book that might save your sanity in a post-truth world. All this and more in episode 460 of the “Smashing Security” podcast…

The UK’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has raised serious concerns over the ability of environmental regulators and government to meet their existing responsibilities while delivering a programme of major reforms. In a newly published report, MPs conclude that the current regulatory system requires “substantial changes” and is failing to effectively support either nature recovery or economic growth. A key focus of the report is the growing problem of illegal waste dumping. The committee warns that the scale of illegal waste sites has outstripped the enforcement powers of the Environment Agency (EA), which is currently limited to pursuing lengthy and costly…

I have a model class in my app which uses SwiftData / CloudKit: @Model final class Project { var name: String = “” var avatarData: Data? var hasAvatar: Bool = false … As you can see there is an optional avatarData property for the user to store an image in Project. I’ve included a hasAvatar bool so that I can tell the difference between the user having not set an avatar vs CloudKit not loading the avatarData. This way works but obviously it’s annoying having to manage two variables. I’ve thought about doing it this way: @Model final class Project…

Data Centre Infrastructure Management, or DCIM, implies a lot. A unified command layer: one system that ties together power, cooling, and compute, understands how they interact, and gives operators a coherent picture before things go wrong. Walk into most enterprise data centres and what you find is something else entirely. In practice, what exists across most facilities is a collection of independently deployed systems: a SCADA or BMS for engineering infrastructure, a separate NMS for network monitoring, an ITSM layer for incident management, and physical access control on its own stack. Each does its job within its own domain. The…

Attention, Google Pixel fans! The “base” Google Pixel 10 just dropped to its best price at Amazon. During the Amazon Spring Sale event, you can grab the 128GB model in Indigo at a whopping 31% off its original price. Full disclosure: this promo actually went live about a week before the March savings event. However, it vanished quickly, and given that just one color option is now $250 off right now, I wouldn’t assume it’ll stick around until the end of the shopping spree. The Google Pixel 10 is now $250 off $250 off (31%) Amazon’s Spring Sale event continues, and…

Researchers have experimentally observed a new kind of particle in transition‑metal dichalcogenide bilayers called doubly charged excitons, or quaternions. A single exciton is an electron bound to a hole, and combining an even number of fermions can create a boson with integer spin. In this system, one electron and three holes (or one hole and three electrons) bind together into a stable, doubly charged bosonic complex. Because bosons can occupy the same quantum state, these quaternions could in principle form a Bose-Einstein condensate, a collective phase in which all particles share a single macroscopic wavefunction. For charged bosons, such a…

Shadow AI is considered the next iteration of Shadow IT,  with the big difference being that while developers might use a self-contained, unauthorized tool in their work, the tool itself does not create risk. Shadow AI is particularly troublesome because an unauthorized model can gain access to databases it shouldn’t have and lack the system and organizational context to make correct decisions. Further, Shadow AI almost always involves someone in the organization taking company intellectual property and pasting it into a public tool, leaving the destination and subsequent processing unknown. Part of the problem, according to Broadcom Head of Product…