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AI industry at a crossroads

Lou Covey

The AI industry appears to be reaching a crossroads that will determine its future in the next two years. The only clear outcome is it will not be what it is now, nor what it is predicted to be.

Most doomsayers and cheerleaders largely agree on a single vision: The technology will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. Wealthy investors and captains of industry consider that a good thing and mumble about universal income legislation and Star-Trekkian futures. White-color workers and unions see the future less optimistically. But cooler heads see a precarious future. Those cooler heads include Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Chat GPT, and X.ai’s Grok. Cyber Protection Magazine talked to all three, and they all came up with four likely scenarios that may be brewing even as this article is read.

A security breach or a major AI system collapse.
Technical plateau causing diminishing returns on scalability.
Strict regulatory legislation that stifles innovation and makes development too expensive to pursue.
A significant economic downturn or massive market correction drying up capital investment.

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Malicious actor considering his next act of dysinformation

Defining Dysinformation

Lou Covey

Happy Holidays – our last issue of the year is out, and it’s all about Disinformation or, as we like to put it: Dysinformation.

Dysinformation is a scourge of society, fueled by social media and malicious actors, but you may not have heard the term spelled this way. Dysinformation simply means “damaging information.” It puts misinformation and disinformation in the same bucket, but what is the difference?

Disinformation

Disinformation is intentional. The authors know it is false and distribute it with the desire to defraud, destabilize and delegitimize issues and individuals. It is often defended as, “Hey, I’m just asking questions.” The first recorded instance of disinformation occurs in Genesis. After Eve explains to the serpent why she should not eat forbidden fruit, the serpent replies “Has God really said…?”

Disinformation authors do not need to prove an allegation. They just need to get a small credulous audience to wonder if what they say is true. If the allegation reflects a particular opinion of the audience, they are more likely to accept the allegation as true. Every piece of disinformation may contain an element of truth to establish the author’s qualifications, but the majority is sheer speculation.

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Digital Operational Resilience Act

EU’s DORA: Who will stand up for protection?

Lou Covey

The EU's Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) went live in January. This legislation's goals seem to conflict with the US administration’s willingness to ignore technology security standards. The question is: Who will stand up to protect corporate and consumer data?

DORA is highly targeted at the stability and resilience of the financial services sector. It ensures financial institutions can respond to, withstand, and recover from ICT-related threats and disruptions. It also requires robust strategies and policies to manage ICT risks in financial institutions.
Arnaud Treps, chief information security officer at Odaseva, said, “DORA is very different from previous regulation where you have to change where you operate. DORA is about having proper backups, the capability to restore quickly, and building redundancy.”

Europe takes the lead

But does the US rejecting data privacy regulation mean walling America off from the rest of the world? Meta has threatened to potentially limit

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English riots cause unprecedent damage

How social media moderation works

Lou Covey

There has been a lot of debate regarding the imposition of moderation on social media and whether that constitutes censorship and violations of the right to free speech. That argument is specious at best. Offending content on commercial social media is removed only when it negates profitability.

Most humans moderate their speech. Sometimes we think about impulsively speaking in reaction to something that incites strong emotions. People who do not react have what is called, “self-control”. Some people don’t have that filter (I’m looking at you, Elon) and blurt out offensive, nonfactual, or dishonest responses. Sometimes they aren’t atypical, they are just selfish people without manners (still looking at you Elon). Moderation of your speech is just a civilized attitude.

Profit motive

When it comes to social media, however, especially for-profit social media, the primary factor is profit. That has been the guiding principle of all social media moderation.

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Editorial: Jog on, Meta

Lou Covey

Mark Zuckerberg made two announcements about major changes in Meta in the past two weeks. The first was the revelation that they would be creating hundreds of AI-driven bots to interact with users. The second was the announcement that they would stop moderation of content, “except for dangerous stuff,” according to a video posted by Zuckerberg. With a certain amount of schadenfreude, we note that Meta had to pull the accounts they had already made as users started engaging with them, finding their inherent flaws and raking them over the coals for how piss-poor their execution was.

Both of these announcements validated a decision I had made earlier this year to start divesting myself of Meta platform accounts. I made the request to deactivate all the accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Messenger) a week before both announcements. I would have done it sooner if I had known it would take Meta 30 days from my request to deactivate everything. This morning, however, I received a text from my partners in Cyber Protection Magazine asking if I thought we should deactivate our Facebook account.

Frankly, I had forgotten we had one, basically because we received zero engagement from the platform, despite the amount of content we put up there. That,.too, is a result of Meta de-emphasizing legacy media. Of course, I concurred with the team. Sometime in February, we will disappear from Facebook.

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Security expert collapsed from exhastion

Breach fatigue or too big to fail?

Lou Covey

As we prepare for the annual October holiday season with Cybersecurity Awareness Month there is an important question to ask. Are we as a society at the point of fatigue over every new security breach, or are the companies getting breached just too big to fail?

Security giant Fortinet announced a data breach this week that was remarkable in two ways. One was how small the breach was (less than 500GB) Two was how calm Fortinet seemed to be about. Security gadfly Dr. Chase Cunningham posted a flippant comment about the breach on Linkedin, encouraging his followers to “buy on the breach.” He pointed out that with big public companies, in security or not, generally take a hit on their stock for a day or two after a breach, but the stock rises to new highs as the dust clears. And no one seems to care about the downstream customers whose data might have been stolen.

A 2010 study published in the Journal of Cost Management concluded that a company could be more profitable if it annoyed unhappy customers more than they already were. The success of that strategy increased with the size of the company, according to the study, and when there were fewer competitors for a customer to turn to.

The reasons for the success were simple. If a pissed off customer decided to go a smaller provider, there were always new customers who signed up, simply because they were the biggest. If there were no smaller competitors, the customer never went away. In the process, the offending company rarely has to pay out to make the customer whole. The study pointed our that companies like United Airlines have notoriously bad customer service, but they rarely lose market share because of it.

Kevin Szczepanski, co-chair of Barclay Damon's Data Security, is much more forgiving

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Crossing the Compliance Chasm

Tarique Mustafa

There is a wide gap between regulatory compliance mandates and practical implementation and enforcement that I like to call the “Compliance Chasm”. That chasm is defined by the activity to protect consumers and consideration for the economic and operational impact on business enterprises. Finding that balance requires thought, not the more popular whack-a-mole enterprise strategy that reacts to new compliance mandates.

The frequency and size of regulatory fines are rising for non-compliance. In January 2023, Meta was fined $418 million for GDPR violations by Meta properties’ Facebook and Instagram. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission follows up in May that same year with a $1.3 billion fine for additional violations. And those were just the latest fines imposed on web giants, that also included Google and Amazon.

The targets of those fines might be justified in saying compliance is an impossible task. By 2025 the volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is forecast to reach 181 zettabytes. Nearly 80% of companies estimate that 50%-90% of their data is unstructured text, video, audio, web server logs, or social media activities.

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