The Zen of IT
By Evan Schuman
The food delivery driver identification dilemma
Ever use one of those mobile food delivery apps — only to realize your delivery person isn't who you expected? There's a lesson here about identity, authentication, and what happens when the best laid tech plan meets human beings.
The AI data-poisoning cat-and-mouse game — this time, IT will win
The IT community is freaking out about AI data poisoning. For some, it’s a sneaky backdoor into enterprise systems as it surreptitiously infects the data LLM systems train on — which then get sucked into enterprise systems.
When a customer gets defrauded, should the enterprise reimburse?
The New York Attorney General’s office sued Citibank for failing to reimburse customers victimized by fraud, raising serious issues all enterprises must figure out. When should a customer be reimbursed for fraud? And at what point do...
Failed unsubscribes could be a clue your data's out of control
One of the oldest and most frustrating rules about email spam is that the unsubscribe link never works — all it does is confirm your email address is active. But what if the unsubscribe failure is caused by something far more...
Will super chips disrupt the 'everything to the cloud' IT mentality?
It's no secret that enterprise IT in recent years has been disappointed in corporate clouds. But in general they've not done anything about it. That could soon change.
Choosing a genAI partner: Trust, but verify
As generative AI fever continues to mesmerize enterprise executives, those same execs are insisting that IT somehow make it happen.
Android’s new biometric spec for 'strong security' is anything but
When Google rolled out its latest biometrics specs for Android devices, its top-level 'strong security' option allowed “a spoof and imposter acceptance rate not higher than 7%.” Most biometrics specialists argue that's much too high;...
Forrester asks a forbidden question: Are vendors lying or do they believe their own hype?
The idea that vendors lie a lot is, as the saying goes, “a tale as old as time.” But to suggest vendors are so persuasive because they actually believe their falsehoods — now, that's intriguing.
Zoom goes for a blatant genAI data grab; enterprises, beware (updated)
Zoom stirred up a kerfuffle this month when it amended its terms of service to make execs comfortable that it wouldn’t use Zoom data to train generative AI models. In reality, it was really doing spin control worthy of the sleaziest...
Has Microsoft cut security corners once too often?
As details about the recent China attack against US government agencies come to light, two details stand out: Microsoft failed to store security keys properly — and the keys were used by attackers even though they'd already expired.
Lawyers and Incident Response can be a dangerous combo
In many ways, lawyers, CIOs and CISOs have the same mission: protect the enterprise from forces that want to do harm. But those two professions often approach the task in such polar opposite ways that they fight each other instead of...
The shadow IT fight — 2023 style
Gaining visibility into anything IT-related is always difficult, but the age-old nemesis, shadow IT, remains a major problem — especially as the enterprise environment has changed.
Generative AI is about to destroy your company. Will you stop it?
If coders lied as often as ChatGPT, they would be fired immediately. Stunningly, some enterprise execs seem to be just fine with that — as long as AI continues to code quickly and for so little money.
Do the productivity gains from generative AI outweigh the security risks?
Using generative AI to code is dangerous for a variety of reasons, but its efficiencies will tempt corporate leaders — especially CIOs and business execs — to use it anyway. A senior AWS executive at Amazon argues the decision doesn’t...
IT’s lovefest with GPT-3 needs to meet reality now
As we’ve seen with other highly-hyped technologies — such as the Web back in ‘95 and blockchain more recently — companies can get ahead of themselves when they jump into investments based on things other than strategic goals.
A compliance fight in Germany could hurt Microsoft customers
A compliance fight between Microsoft and German regulatory authorities has gotten white hot, though it looks as though any penalties might bypass the company and take aim at its customers.
Biometrics are even less accurate than we thought
Biometrics are supposed to be a fundamental pillar of modern authentication. Unfortunately, for a wide range of reasons and in a variety of ways, many biometric implementations are wildly inaccurate.
This would be a good time to test your cloud ROI
As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly fades — and the rush to cloud solutions it hastened now seems less critical to business success — a question arises: Has anyone on your team recently run an ROI analysis to see whether the cloud truly...
Sadly, IT can no longer trust geolocation for much of anything
This goes beyond simply not trusting location data for cybersecurity authentication. Geolocation is now used for a wide range of business reasons — but it shouldn’t be.
Planned ‘fixes’ for credit-card interchange fees will actually make fraud easier
The US Federal Reserve and the US Senate are both looking to lessen restrictions on retailers — ostensibly to rein in card fees. What they actually are doing is inviting more fraud.
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