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Batten down the hatches and hit the gas: 8 steps to recession-proof your IT budget

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on Batten down the hatches and hit the gas: 8 steps to recession-proof your IT budget

THE ECONOMY BEGINS TO TURN It’s easy to understand why the broader economy is pulling back after over a decade of historic expansion. Early pandemic spending sprees are giving way to late-pandemic pullbacks. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is sending shockwaves around the globe. Between chaotic energy markets, broken supply chains, waves of layoffs, rampant inflation, and spiking interest rates, there’s no shortage of frightening economic headlines. Historically, IT has followed the rest of the business herd as economic indicators have started to trend downward. As everyone else’s...

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Massive Pentagon data leak shines light on insider cybersecurity risks

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog, StringN. No Comments on Massive Pentagon data leak shines light on insider cybersecurity risks

NO LONGER JUST A GAME Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, 21, was arrested last week for allegedly stealing the highly classified military documents and sharing them on a Discord gaming channel. The compromised data includes signals-based intelligence that could impact American information gathering efforts for years to come. In the ever evolving pantheon of major cybersecurity events, this ranks among the most damaging. What is especially troubling about this particular breach is the amount of time it took to be discovered. Military officials were...

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Today’s CIO role is evolving more rapidly than ever. Here’s what’s driving it.

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on Today’s CIO role is evolving more rapidly than ever. Here’s what’s driving it.

EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED If we’re being blunt, CIOs of old were little more than tactically-focused bureaucrats who had to ask others – typically the CEO, CFO, or COO – for budgetary approval. They rarely participated in strategic decision making, as the rest of the leadership group tended to view them in little more than a maintenance role. CIOs of old were largely focused on maximizing uptime, staffing the help desk, and replacing employee laptops every few years. This may have been sufficient when most of an organization’s technology infrastructure was stuck behind a glass wall and...

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Tech leaders pen letter demanding AI pause: are we moving too quickly?

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WHAT THEY’RE ASKING FOR The letter, Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, was published by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization partially backed by Elon Musk. It says, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” The signees are asking all AI research labs to halt, for at least 6 months, the training of any AI tool that is considered more powerful than the current state-of-the-art, GPT-4. They suggest using the pause to build and implement common...

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Twitter source code gets leaked online. Here’s why it matters.

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog, StringN. No Comments on Twitter source code gets leaked online. Here’s why it matters.

THE SECRET SAUCE, NO LONGER SECRET The New York Times reported on March 26th that Twitter had sent a copyright infringement notice to GitHub. The company asked the developer forum to remove a repository containing what it said was leaked source code. GitHub removed the code the same day, and while it was not immediately known when the leak first occurred, the Times reported the code had been exposed for a number of months. The optics are troubling. Any leak of source code is worrisome for any company. For a software or platform company, however, it’s infinitely worse. Source...

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AI chatbots go next-level – and productivity apps are their next target

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on AI chatbots go next-level – and productivity apps are their next target

EVERYTHING CHANGED As we wrote about recently, ChatGPT’s arrival marked a significant inflection point in the tech industry, as it represented the general public’s first direct exposure to a full-on AI-based platform. Up until now, these technologies largely existed in labs. The global release of ChatGPT turned this once-sci-fi-seeming technology into an everyday reality as millions of regular folks logged in and tried it out. ChatGPT’s public debut has understandably spurred a flurry of activity among major tech companies as they jockey for position in this chaotically accelerating...

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As business concerns over AI ethics continue to worsen, new best practices emerge

Written by Carmi Levy on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on As business concerns over AI ethics continue to worsen, new best practices emerge

EARLY AND BUGGY Since ChatGPT was first made available for public consumption in late 2022, it has served as the poster child for the generative AI revolution. It has also become something of a proving ground for millions of AI newbies still trying to figure out how all of this applies to them. But like any new technology, it comes with its own dark side. AI chatbots tend to “hallucinate”. Also known as going rogue, they can just as easily return outright lies the longer we interact with them. These imperfections are largely based on the fact that their training methods...

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STEP Software celebrates 18 years – and looks to the future

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RESET THE CLOCK If we’re being really nitpicky – we’re developers, so we pretty much are – STEP Software’s history actually goes back 20 years, to 2003. That’s when our co-founder, Jim Freeman, developed an RSS reader and registered the overcow.com domain. Why Overcow? Because it was the era of snappy, memorable, unconventional tech products and company names. And Jim wanted to pay homage to legendary Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, who loved speaking about cows almost as much as he did. If Larson saw his other characters as being the bosses of the cows, then Jim thought...

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Ongoing Twitter outages speak volumes about infrastructure’s importance

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog, StringN. No Comments on Ongoing Twitter outages speak volumes about infrastructure’s importance

A GATHERING STORM Whether it’s an API error, or simply a notification that you’ve exceeded your allowed number of followed accounts, it falls well short of a complete outage or a network-wide meltdown. To the typical end-user presented with these errors, Twitter is still largely operational, but it seems to be experiencing a series of annoying glitches here and there. Over time, the annoyance factor adds up. None of this is enough to trigger a mass response from the platform’s 300 million users. Yet. But it is enough to highlight an unwelcome increase in the reports of intermittent...

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TikTok bans are a long overdue wakeup call for mobile security

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog. No Comments on TikTok bans are a long overdue wakeup call for mobile security

A GATHERING STORM The Canadian move echoes similar moves in recent weeks by the U.S. government, the European Union, and at least half of all American states. It falls short of a full-on national ban, however such legislation has been proposed in the U.S. Nevertheless, this marks a serious foreign policy rebuke from Canada to China. The growing global turbulence around TikTok reinforces the disparity between its populist perception as a non-threatening app, and accusations that it represents a major security threat on a personal, organizational, and national...

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