Quote for the day:
"Knowledge is being aware of what you can do. Wisdom is knowing when not to do it." -- Anonymous
Consumer rights group: Why a 10-year ban on AI regulation will harm Americans
AI is a tool that can be used for significant good, but it can and already has
been used for fraud and abuse, as well as in ways that can cause real harm, both
intentional and unintentional — as was thoroughly discussed in the House’s own
bipartisan AI Task Force Report. These harms can range from impacting employment
opportunities and workers’ rights to threatening accuracy in medical diagnoses
or criminal sentencing, and many current laws have gaps and loopholes that leave
AI uses in gray areas. Refusing to enact reasonable regulations places AI developers and deployers into a lawless and unaccountable zone, which will
ultimately undermine the trust of the public in their continued development and
use. ... Proponents of the 10-year moratorium have argued that it would prevent
a patchwork of regulations that could hinder the development of these
technologies, and that Congress is the proper body to put rules in place. But
Congress thus far has refused to establish such a framework, and instead it’s
proposing to prevent any protections at any level of government, completely
abdicating its responsibility to address the serious harms we know AI can cause.
It is a gift to the largest technology companies at the expense of users — small
or large — who increasingly rely on their services, as well as the American
public who will be subject to unaccountable and inscrutable systems.
Putting agentic AI to work in Firebase Studio
An AI assistant is like power steering. The programmer, the driver, remains in
control, and the tool magnifies that control. The developer types some code, and
the assistant completes the function, speeding up the process. The next logical
step is to empower the assistant to take action—to run tests, debug code, mock
up a UI, or perform some other task on its own. In Firebase Studio, we get a
seat in a hosted environment that lets us enter prompts that direct the agent to
take meaningful action. ... Obviously, we are a long way off from a
non-programmer frolicking around in Firebase Studio, or any similar AI-powered
development environment, and building complex applications. Google Cloud
Platform, Gemini, and Firebase Studio are best-in-class tools. These kinds of
limits apply to all agentic AI development systems. Still, I would in no wise
want to give up my Gemini assistant when coding. It takes a huge amount of busy
work off my shoulders and brings much more possibility into scope by letting me
focus on the larger picture. I wonder how the path will look, how long it will
take for Firebase Studio and similar tools to mature. It seems clear that
something along these lines, where the AI is framed in a tool that lets it take
action, is part of the future. It may take longer than AI enthusiasts predict.
It may never really, fully come to fruition in the way we envision.Edge AI + Intelligence Hub: A Match in the Making
The shop floor looks nothing like a data lake. There is telemetry data from
machines, historical data, MES data in SQL, some random CSV files, and most of
it lacks context. Companies that realize this—or already have an Industrial
DataOps strategy—move quickly beyond these issues. Companies that don’t end up
creating a solution that works with only telemetry data (for example) and then
find out they need other data. Or worse, when they get something working in the
first factory, they find out factories 2, 3, and 4 have different technology
stacks. ... In comes DataOps (again). Cloud AI and Edge AI have the same
problems with industrial data. They need access to contextualized information
across many systems. The only difference is there is no data lake in the
factory—but that’s OK. DataOps can leave the data in the source systems and
expose it over APIs, allowing edge AI to access the data needed for specific
tasks. But just like IT, what happens if OT doesn’t use DataOps? It’s the same
set of issues. If you try to integrate AI directly with data from your SCADA,
historian, or even UNS/MQTT, you’ll limit the data and context to which the
agent has access. SCADA/Historians only have telemetry data. UNS/MQTT is report
by exception, and AI is request/response based (i.e., it can’t integrate). But
again, I digress. Use DataOps.AI-driven threats prompt IT leaders to rethink hybrid cloud security
Public cloud security risks are also undergoing renewed assessment. While the
public cloud was widely adopted during the post-pandemic shift to digital
operations, it is increasingly seen as a source of risk. According to the
survey, 70 percent of Security and IT leaders now see the public cloud as a
greater risk than any other environment. As a result, an equivalent proportion
are actively considering moving data back from public to private cloud due to
security concerns, and 54 percent are reluctant to use AI solutions in the
public cloud citing apprehensions about intellectual property protection. The
need for improved visibility is emphasised in the findings. Rising
sophistication in cyberattacks has exposed the limitations of existing security
tools—more than half (55 percent) of Security and IT leaders reported lacking
confidence in their current toolsets' ability to detect breaches, mainly due to
insufficient visibility. Accordingly, 64 percent say their primary objective for
the next year is to achieve real-time threat monitoring through comprehensive
real-time visibility into all data in motion. David Land, Vice President, APAC
at Gigamon, commented: "Security teams are struggling to keep pace with the
speed of AI adoption and the growing complexity of and vulnerability of public
cloud environments.
Taming the Hacker Storm: Why Millions in Cybersecurity Spending Isn’t Enough
The key to taming the hacker storm is founded on the core principle of
trust: that the individual or company you are dealing with is who or what
they claim to be and behaves accordingly. Establishing a high-trust
environment can largely hinder hacker success. ... For a pervasive selective
trusted ecosystem, an organization requires something beyond trusted user
IDs. A hacker can compromise a user’s device and steal the trusted user ID,
making identity-based trust inadequate. A trust-verified device assures that
the device is secure and can be trusted. But then again, a hacker stealing a
user’s identity and password can also fake the user’s device. Confirming the
device’s identity—whether it is or it isn’t the same device—hence becomes
necessary. The best way to ensure the device is secure and trustworthy is to
employ the device identity that is designed by its manufacturer and
programmed into its TPM or Secure Enclave chip. ... Trusted actions are
critical in ensuring a secure and pervasive trust environment. Different
actions require different levels of authentication, generating different
levels of trust, which the application vendor or the service provider has
already defined. An action considered high risk would require stronger
authentication, also known as dynamic authentication.
AWS clamping down on cloud capacity swapping; here’s what IT buyers need to know
For enterprises that sourced discounted cloud resources through a broker or
value-added reseller (VAR), the arbitrage window shuts, Brunkard noted.
Enterprises should expect a “modest price bump” on steady‑state workloads
and a “brief scramble” to unwind pooled commitments. ... On the other hand,
companies that buy their own RIs or SPs, or negotiate volume deals through
AWS’s Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), shouldn’t be impacted, he said.
Nothing changes except that pricing is now baselined. To get ahead of the
change, organizations should audit their exposure and ask their managed
service providers (MSPs) what commitments are pooled and when they renew,
Brunkard advised. ... Ultimately, enterprises that have relied on vendor
flexibility to manage overcommitment could face hits to gross margins,
budget overruns, and a spike in “finance-engineering misalignment,” Barrow
said. Those whose vendor models are based on RI and SP reallocation tactics
will see their risk profile “changed overnight,” he said. New commitments
will now essentially be non-cancellable financial obligations, and if cloud
usage dips or pivots, they will be exposed. Many vendors won’t be able to
offer protection as they have in the past.The new C-Suite ally: Generative AI
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While traditional GenAI applications focus on structured datasets, a
significant frontier remains largely untapped — the vast swathes of
unstructured "dark data" sitting in contracts, credit memos, regulatory
reports, and risk assessments. Aashish Mehta, Founder and CEO of nRoad,
emphasizes this critical gap."Most strategic decisions rely on data, but the reality is that a lot of that data sits in unstructured formats," he explained. nRoad’s platform, CONVUS, addresses this by transforming unstructured content into structured, contextual insights. ... Beyond risk management, OpsGPT automates time-intensive compliance tasks, offers multilingual capabilities, and eliminates the need for coding through intuitive design. Importantly, Broadridge has embedded a robust governance framework around all AI initiatives, ensuring security, regulatory compliance, and transparency. Trustworthiness is central to Broadridge’s approach. "We adopt a multi-layered governance framework grounded in data protection, informed consent, model accuracy, and regulatory compliance," Seshagiri explained. ... Despite the enthusiasm, CxOs remain cautious about overreliance on GenAI outputs. Concerns around model bias, data hallucination, and explainability persist. Many leaders are putting guardrails in place: enforcing human-in-the-loop systems, regular model audits, and ethical AI use policies.
Building a Proactive Defence Through Industry Collaboration
Trusted collaboration, whether through Information Sharing and Analysis
Centres (ISACs), government agencies, or private-sector partnerships, is a
highly effective way to enhance the defensive posture of all participating
organisations. For this to work, however, organisations will need to establish
operationally secure real-time communication channels that support the rapid
sharing of threat and defence intelligence. In parallel, the community will
also need to establish processes to enable them to efficiently disseminate
indicators of compromise (IoCs) and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs),
backed up with best practice information and incident reports. These
collective defence communities can also leverage the centralised cyber fusion
centre model that brings together all relevant security functions – threat
intelligence, security automation, threat response, security orchestration and
incident response – in a truly cohesive way. Providing an integrated sharing
platform for exchanging information among multiple security functions, today’s
next-generation cyber fusion centres enable organisations to leverage threat
intelligence, identify threats in real-time, and take advantage of automated
intelligence sharing within and beyond organisational boundaries.
3 Powerful Ways AI is Supercharging Cloud Threat Detection
AI’s strength lies in pattern recognition across vast datasets. By analysing
historical and real-time data, AI can differentiate between benign anomalies
and true threats, improving the signal-to-noise ratio for security teams. This
means fewer false positives and more confidence when an alert does sound. ...
When a security incidents strike, every second counts. Historically,
responding to an incident involves significant human effort – analysts must
comb through alerts, correlate logs, identify the root cause, and manually
contain the threat. This approach is slow, prone to errors, and doesn’t scale
well. It’s not uncommon for incident investigations to stretch hours or days
when done manually. Meanwhile, the damage (data theft, service disruption)
continues to accrue. Human responders also face cognitive overloads during
crises, juggling tasks like notifying stakeholders, documenting events, and
actually fixing the problem. ... It’s important to note that AI isn’t about
eliminating the need for human experts but rather augmenting their
capabilities. By taking over initial investigation steps and mundane tasks, AI
frees up human analysts to focus on strategic decision-making and complex
threats. Security teams can then spend time on thorough analysis of
significant incidents, threat hunting, and improving security posture, instead
of constant firefighting.
