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WordPress.org statement threatens possible shutdown for all of 2025

“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.” To put this move into context, the shutdown only directly impacts WordPress.org, whereas most enterprises using Automattic’s WordPress are leveraging WordPress.com, the commercial hosting site. But given the ripple effects across all of WordPress, it is likely that enterprise users would also be impacted. “The WordPress CMS is licensed under the GPL, so it is permanently available for free. However, a lot of WP’s value comes from themes and plugins,” Rosen said. “My understanding is that in some cases, the wordpress.org URL is hardcoded into WordPress, which can make it difficult or impossible to update your themes and plugins if they haven’t been added to the directory. It really depends on the particular website’s configuration.” source

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CIO Leadership Live Middle East with Dr. Nasser Alamri, General Director of Information Technology at Saudi Arabia Institute of Public Administration

Episode 102 CIO Leadership Live Middle East with Dr. Nasser Alamri, General Director of Information Technology at Saudi Arabia Institute of Public Administration 20 Dec 2024 12 mins CIO Leadership Live source

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Microsoft: No support or updates for Windows 11 PCs without minimum hardware requirements

Microsoft also doesn’t elaborate on what it means by Windows 11 “compatibility issues,” so this is a matter of guesswork. However, it’s possible to imagine that new features that assume a TPM is available could cause instability on a machine lacking this facility. It could also affect drivers for older hardware no longer supported in Windows 11, although this would be likely to be an issue over the longer term. Meet the TPM Microsoft’s minimum requirements for Windows 11 cover several hardware components, including having enough RAM and a powerful enough microprocessor. But the most contentious issue is whether a PC contains or supports a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), specifically version 2.0, released in 2014. A TPM is a secure enclave for storing data such as cryptographic keys, certificates, and biometric information fundamental for the security of a PC, including those required for low level PC checks such as Secure Boot, or for the use of Microsoft’s BitLocker in its more secure mode. Having one is somewhere between a good idea and essential, as more and more software systems going forward assume one will be there at the root of trust. For a summary of the arguments in favor of upgrading to a system with TPM 2.0, Hosking’s blog is a good place to start. source

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Sweat the small stuff: Data protection in the age of AI

As concerns about AI security, risk, and compliance continue to escalate, practical solutions remain elusive. While NIST released NIST-AI-600-1, Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile on July 26, 2024, most organizations are just beginning to digest and implement its guidance, with the formation of internal AI Councils as a first step in AI governance. So as AI adoption and risk increases, it’s time to understand why sweating the small and not-so-small stuff matters and where we go from here. Data protection in the AI era Recently, I attended the annual member conference of the ACSC, a non-profit organization focused on improving cybersecurity defense for enterprises, universities, government agencies, and other organizations. From the discussions, it is clear that today, the critical focus for CISOs, CIOs, CDOs, and CTOs centers on protecting proprietary AI models from attack and protecting proprietary data from being ingested by public AI models. While a smaller number of organizations are concerned about the former problem, those in this category realize that they must protect against prompt injection attacks that cause models to drift, hallucinate, or completely fail. In the early days of AI deployment, there was no well-known incident equivalent to the 2013 Target breach that represented how an attack might play out. Most of the evidence is academic at this point in time. However, executives who have deployed their own models have begun to focus on how to protect their integrity, given it will be only a matter of time before a major attack becomes public information, resulting in brand damage and potentially greater harm. source

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In potential reversal, European authorities say AI can indeed use personal data — without consent

“Nowhere does the EDPB seem to look at whether something is actually personal data for the AI model provider. It always presumes that it is, and only looks at whether anonymization has taken place and is sufficient,” Craddock wrote. “If insufficient, the SA would be in a position to consider that the controller has failed to meet its accountability obligations under Article 5(2) GDPR.” And in a comment on LinkedIn that mostly supported the standards group’s efforts, Patrick Rankine, the CIO of UK AI vendor Aiphoria, said that IT leaders should stop complaining and up their AI game. “For AI developers, this means that claims of anonymity should be substantiated with evidence, including the implementation of technical and organizational measures to prevent re-identification,” he wrote, noting that he agrees 100% with this sentiment. “This is not that hard, and tech companies need to stop being so lazy and looking for excuses. They want to do great things building tech, but then can’t be bothered treating the data they need for their great tech respectfully or responsibly.” source

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Zscaler protects data through unified classification engine

00:00 Hi everybody, welcome to DEMO, the show where companies come in and they show us their latest products and services. Today, we have a special episode. Zscaler is going to show us their data protection offering, but they’re not here. Instead, we’re going to go out to San Francisco and meet one of our co-hosts, Brandon Mahne. Brandon, take it away. 00:15Thanks, Keith. I’m here today talking data security with the Zscaler team. Welcome, Moinul, would you like to introduce yourself? 00:23Absolutely, Brandon. First of all, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. My name is Moinul Khan. I’m Senior Vice President and General Manager for Zscaler data security business. 00:34Welcome. We are excited to have you on the show. We’re talking about data security, a hot button item. Why don’t you tell us about Zscaler’s data protection and how it helps keep data secure? 00:47Yeah, absolutely. With distributed data, with the cloud and mobility, enterprise customers are facing a lot of complexities when think about data security, data is everywhere. There are a lot of data flows going on between user to applications, between applications to applications, between API to API. And what we really strive to achieve, when we think about this data security, is how can we deliver a fully integrated, very comprehensive data security solution for all different type of use cases. So if you look at our current solution today, we are protecting structured data and unstructured data. We are protecting it for data in motion, data at rest, and data in use. What that really means is with one single classification engine, you can protect all your exfiltration channels. Your exfiltration channels are web and SaaS-based services, the data that is sitting in public cloud infrastructure. There is sensitive data sitting on the endpoint. A lot of data breaches are happening through corporate exchange and corporate Gmail, and there is a lot of data security concerns when employees are using their BYOD and personal assets. And once again, what we strive for is a fully comprehensive data security platform, one classification engine that is protecting all your exfiltration channels. 02:19Sounds amazing, I’m excited to see it today. You know, as a chief technology officer, I know how I would use this, but who else is going to utilize this software, who is your target? 02:28This is primarily for CISOs. When you think about CISOs, this is for enterprise customers. So small enterprise customer, mid-sized enterprise customers, large enterprise customers, Fortune 500 companies. Everybody needs data security, right? Data breaches are happening everywhere, in all kinds of verticals. 02:55So this is really for the security team, SaaS organization, and as they start to grow, what do you see? Are the problems that you’re trying to solve in a first, second or third? 03:01The data breaches look at how [they are] evolving. It is evolving in many different ways. Just about a couple of years ago, our customers would say, “Do you have a DLP solution, data loss prevention?” people were looking for CASB, cloud access security brokers, for their cloud traffic. Today if you ask me what are some of those hot topics: GenAI security. The users, they’re crazy about these GenAI applications. They want to use ChatGPT, they want to use Gemini. These tools are making these employees super productive. So they want to use it, yep, but the concern for the CISO is, are we leaking our sensitive data? Are we losing our intellectual property? This space is constantly evolving because of the new trend in the market. 04:00I see it every single day and all the conversations that I have is on everybody’s mind. So if it weren’t for Zscaler, what else would people be doing today? A homegrown solution? How do you solve this? 04:13Organizations, they’re trying to do data security for years, but the main problem is the complexities that existed in the market for last 15-20, years, and they’re stuck with compliance. They’re not really solving the data security problem, the number one issue that we see in the market is these enterprise customers. They’re stuck with six, seven different DLP products. When all these different DLP products are running, they’re all disjointed, they’re all stand-alone products, point solutions. So the way to really focus on the data security issue is one single classification engine. You can create policy once and then the same policy should be applicable. Doesn’t matter if the users are working from offices or they’re remote, they’re working from home. Doesn’t matter what devices they’re on. All of that needs to be covered with a fully integrated solution, and that’s exactly what we are delivering to the market. 05:15Outstanding. I’m excited to see it. Take it away. 05:19So Brandon, what I’m going to do is, you know, we are pressed for time. I can’t really show you all the tools, but two tools are really driving a lot of adoption today. The first one is GenAI security. I’m going to show you how we secure GenAI, and then I will also demonstrate DSPM, data security posture management. This is a hot topic. This is all about securing data in public cloud infrastructure. So let’s start with GenAI security. What we really do is, we are a man in the middle proxy. That means all internet traffic, our customers’ internet traffic, they’re egressing through our proxy. We have a very scaled infrastructure. This is all cloud delivered security. We have 160 data centers around the world. We are inspecting 500 billion internet transactions today, so it’s very easy first to provide that visibility. The first thing we do is, you know how many applications your users are using, how they are using it, what kind of data leaks that are happening. So if you as an administrator, when someone logs into our interface, our zero trust exchange interface, right away, they can get that visibility. In this particular test instance, I am demonstrating that a total of 18 applications are being utilized. As you can see on

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Mastering Azure management: A comparative analysis of leading cloud platforms

Automation for efficiency Automation is a core element in managing Azure environments efficiently. Azure services like Azure Automation and Azure DevOps Pipeline help with automation that can carry out repetitive tasks such as resource provisioning, scaling and patching. Automation reduces the need for manual intervention, decreasing the likelihood of human errors and minimizing downtime. On top of the advantages mentioned above, automating also enables continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), allowing teams to push updates or new features while maintaining consistency across environments and reducing time-to-market (TTM). Automation is also crucial for cost optimization. Automating the start and stop of non-production virtual machines during off-hours can significantly reduce cloud expenditure, as VMs are billed by the hour. Further, implementing automation for right-sizing underutilized resources ensures workloads run on appropriate infrastructure without over-allocating resources, which can save budget. For example, setting policies to right-size virtual machines (VMs) and databases based on historical performance data ensures that resources are scaled to match actual workload demands. Incorporating automation into cloud operations enhances resource management, security, and governance. Automated enforcement of compliance policies through tools like Azure Policy ensures that the entire Azure environment adheres to industry regulations and internal governance standards. Comparative analysis of Azure management platforms Azure is one of the most widely adopted cloud platforms. Several organizations have developed solutions to manage the environments effectively in terms of cost optimization, automation, and monitoring, each serving distinct needs for cloud management. Below is the list of top Azure management solution providers who excel at managing and optimizing an environment. 1. Turbo360 Turbo360 is a comprehensive cloud management solution built to enhance Azure operations by offering deep insights into resource usage and providing automation and cost control tools. It allows businesses to monitor, manage, and optimize their cloud environments in real time, focusing on improving operational efficiency. With minimal manual intervention, Turbo360 helps automate key tasks such as scaling, deployment, and compliance checks. This solution can also seamlessly integrate with Azure’s native services. The platform offers a centralized dashboard with visibility into multiple cloud environments, enabling IT teams to track performance, address issues proactively, and ensure resources are used efficiently. Turbo360 aims to make cloud management scalable, secure, and cost-effective for organizations of any size and stage of their cloud adoption journey. source

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Salesforce adds skills to its AI agents and agentic platform to serve more enterprise use cases

However, Salesforce isn’t the only agentic AI provider that is taking the approach of launching basic agents which could be tweaked to suit a variety of use cases. Microsoft’s corporate vice president Bryan Goode, who leads products such as Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365, told CIO.com during the launch of its AI agents that it was releasing 10 pre-built agents that would act as templates for enterprises to help them develop agents for a variety of use cases. Salesforce, and rivals such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, and IBM, are also partnering with other software vendors, such as Workday, DocuSign, and Neuron 7, to create more agents that can be accessed via their marketplaces. source

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