Crucial Tech – Details, episodes & analysis

Last week I attended the most honest tech conference I can remember. The ironic thing was that it wasn’t a tech conference at all. If was the California Press Foundation (CPF) annual conference.

The CPF traces its history back to 1878 when it was formed originally as the California Press Association to represent the journalism industry in the state. It morphed and partnered with different journalism groups over its existence, and today it operates independently as a statewide nonprofit supporting the next generation of journalists. At its core, it works to keep the shrinking industry alive.

Journalism is crucial to the survival of democracies worldwide, and this organization is doing yeoman's work in pushing it into the 21st century.

Every year at this time I start getting pitches from PR folks offering client's predictions for the coming year. Lots of publications put out their annual predictions articles in December with their own, plus a few selected from these pitches.

At Cyber Protection Magazine we do it a bit different. Our predictions don't come out until January so we can give equal review to the stuff that comes in after Christmas. So you're welcome.

But in this podcast with Ian Thornton-Trump, CISO of Inversion6, we start the process early. We not only give out a few predictions but we also talk about what makes a good prediction. Hint: It doesn't start with "In 2026 we will see a continuation of..." Anything that says everything will go on as it is is not a prediction worth reading.

This is a longer than normal podcast, but when Ian and I get wound up, it's hard to stop.

More often than not, when I'm interviewing a corporate leader about the news they are presenting to me, I find a bit of news in their own content that they didn't see, That was the case when I interviewed Mike Wiacek, founder and CTO of Stairwell. The company is in a very competitive market with almost 250 companies dedicated to identifying malware before it can mess up your system, The report was about the rise of malware variants in the world, but their own report showed that, at least this year, the technology niche they are in is actually knocking that number down. He was surprised, but it made for a good discussion.

Generative AI is BIG business. Maybe too big. In the rush to commercialize and cash in on billions of dollars of investment, Big Tech is letting security slip through the cracks again. Adversaries are weaponizing AI to supercharge phishing attacks, destabilize governments and blackmail innocent people. This episode is the first entry in a months-long series of storeis, podcasts, videos and panels on "Defense Against the AI Arts (with Apologies to Harry Potter". Our first subject Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop.

Telesign is part of a growing security niche market dedicated to providing the infrastructure companies need to keep customer data safe. We talked with company CMO Kristi Melani about how the industry needs to educated not just corporations but the users in what is available to them.

This episode is our very first book review. I edited Data for All late last year and had my eyes open to both the massive amount of customer data collected by almost every corporation in the world, and the amount of digital waste produced by the effort. There is also a mini-review of Not with a Bug, but with a Sticker. These are two books that if you read them (and they are both easy reading) will make you sound like an expert in AI and data science in any gathering of people. That may not be a good thing but I enjoy it.

#GenerativeAI was front and center at the RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco. Companies were either promoting it as a means of improving security or warning against it as a security weakness. It was even the keynote on Tuesday by RSA CEO Rohit Ghai, who took a neutral position that leaned positive on its potential.

But as he spoke, for the most part, glowingly about the AI age we are entering there were some questions that arose. So we contacted him through his PR agency and he graciously accepted an interview appointment to answer those questions. Our focus was, primarily, on the ethical use of generative AI and the failure of the tech industry to live up to its own stated ethics. The conversation was frank and illuminating.

You cannot spit without hitting a news story about generative AI (AKA ChatGPT, Bard, etc.). Some of the news is good, some of it bad, and all of it fairly confusing. ⁠Cyber Protection Magazine⁠ has been digging through the detritus and find what really is good or bad about it and today we continue that with an interview with a very smart man: Dr. James Norrie, a full-time professor in the Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship department at York University and founder of the cybersecurity company CyberconIQ. He holds advanced degrees in cybersecurity and intelligence analysis, copyright law, and project management. And he has a very specific take on generative AI.

TikTok has been in the news for quite a while, but at Cyber Protection Magazine, we are pretty sure we aren't getting the whole story, so we are starting a series of articles and podcasts to get to the bottom of the issue, starting with this episode.

We talk to Ian Thornton-Trump -- raconteur, iconoclast, cyberwarrior, and CISO for Cyjax -- and he, as usual, has a lot to say. As you listen you will find that the real problem is not in the app, but in ourselves... and in bad algorithm design.

Also, this is an ad-free episode. If you want to support the work we are doing, go to Cyber Protection Magazine and donate to the cause. The button is on the bottom of the page.

You can't talk in polite company about politics or religion, but everyone can talk about how they hate advertising. And for good reason. I take a break from discussing technology to rant about what tech companies do to get you to buy their stuff, and why you don;t trust them.