The U.K. government has released its “AI Opportunities Action Plan,” outlining the 50 ways it will build out the AI sector and turn the country into a “world leader.” The strategy involves boosting public computing capacity twentyfold, creating a training data library, and building AI hubs in deindustrialised areas. Innovation is front and centre in this new plan, marking a clear turn from the risk-averse approach of the previous Conservative government, exemplified by its AI Safety Summit and safety pledges. Most recommendations focus on developing AI infrastructure, boosting adoption, growing talent, and attracting investment. “Our plan will make Britain the world leader,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a press release, emphasising the creation of “more jobs and investment in the UK, more money in people’s pockets, and transformed public services.” Plan designed to boost AI use countrywide to ‘win the global race’ There are strong arguments for this shot in the arm for the tech sector. In August 2024, the number of tech startups founded in the U.K. suffered its first “marked decline” since 2022. This metric is seen as an indicator of industry growth — or lack thereof. The U.K. ranks third in the world for AI readiness according to Stanford University research, falling well behind the U.S. and China. Tech giants like Google have also spoken out about the laws in the U.K. that prevent AI models from being trained on copyrighted materials and called for a “pro-innovation regulatory framework” to prevent the country from being left behind. SEE: UK Government Announces £32m of AI Projects On the other hand, evidence suggests that AI safety and regulation still have significant room for improvement. A report from Microsoft found that almost half of U.K. SMEs do not use AI technologies in any capacity, and 72% cited concerns about their potential unreliability as a barrier to its adoption. In October 2023, research from the University of Cambridge ruled that the U.K. needs AI legislation in safety and transparency so companies can confidently put resources into AI development. The government tasked tech entrepreneur and newly-appointed AI Opportunities Adviser Matt Clifford to develop the Action Plan in July, which he discussed with venture capital firms. His 50 recommendations on how to grow AI and boost its adoption will be implemented in the U.K.’s plan. According to the International Monetary Fund, the AI Action Plan could see annual productivity gains of 1.5% and boost the economy by an average of £47 billion annually over a decade. Furthermore, Microsoft research found that adding just five years onto the time it takes to roll out AI in the U.K. could reduce its economic impact in 2035 by more than £150 billion. The Prime Minister said: “The AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers. And in a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by. We must move fast and take action to win the global race.” More must-read AI coverage Clifford’s key recommendations Clifford’s proposals fall under three broad categories: laying the foundations for AI to flourish, boosting AI adoption in public and private sectors, and keeping the U.K. ahead. Thirty of the recommendations relate to the first category, which includes: Establish “AI Growth Zones” in deindustrialized areas: Within these zones, planning requests for data centres will be expedited, and AI infrastructure will have better access to the energy grid, ideally from clean sources like nuclear fusion. This is needed as the construction of new data centres in the U.K. is being held up due to insufficient electricity supply. Three private tech companies have already pledged £14 billion to this end. Increase public compute capacity twentyfold by 2030: Clifford found that this would give the U.K. the processing power it needs to fully embrace AI. As of November 2022, the U.K. had only 1.3% of global computing capacity, while Microsoft ranked the country 11th in the world for cloud infrastructure in May. This initiative will be started by building a new supercomputer, a change of tune since the government scrapped £1.3 billion for building these resources in August. Create a National Data Library: This will involve gathering “five high-impact public datasets” to be made available to private AI researchers, but there is little clarity on how this will be achieved “responsibly, securely, and ethically,” as claimed. Clifford also recommends creating a “copyright-cleared British media asset training data set,” which can be licensed internationally. This is unlikely to be accepted by creative industries, which, just last month, called for greater protection of copyright laws so artists retain control when licensing to AI firms. Be more aggressive with text and data mining: Similarly, Clifford states that “current uncertainty around intellectual property is hindering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI.” He recommends reforming text and data mining practices. While he mentions leaving rights holders with control over the use of their content, the mandate suggests that this is not a priority. The government has launched a consultation on this recommendation. Require regulators to declare how they support AI innovation: Data regulators are far too risk-averse from Clifford’s perspective. He believes they should be making active steps to support the growth of AI, such as granting more licenses and AI resources and reporting them annually. If reporting mandates and deadlines do not provide enough pressure, he suggests employing a new central body with a “higher risk tolerance” to make such decisions. Nurture AI talent: The AI Action Plan contains several recommendations to support AI talent in the U.K., including assessing the skills gap, supporting higher education institutions to teach relevant skills and boost AI graduates, expanding the number of AI education pathways, using the immigration system to attract graduates from international universities, and actively promoting diversity. Indeed, only 28% of Coursera’s Generative AI course enrollments are from women. SEE: Red Hat: AI Is the Most In-Demand Skill in the UK for 2024. Details about the three categories of recommendations Compared

By Theresa Schliep ( January 14, 2025, 8:15 PM EST) — A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday revived a toy company’s copyright infringement case against fashion retailer Aritzia over “kinetic” sculptures that appeared in window displays at its stores, rejecting Aritzia’s arguments that the art pieces can’t be considered “fixed” under copyright law just because they’re manipulable…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Diffbot, a small Silicon Valley company best known for maintaining one of the world’s largest indexes of web knowledge, announced today the release of a new AI model that promises to address one of the biggest challenges in the field: factual accuracy. The new model, a fine-tuned version of Meta’s LLama 3.3, is the first open-source implementation of a system known as graph retrieval-augmented generation, or GraphRAG. Unlike conventional AI models, which rely solely on vast amounts of preloaded training data, Diffbot’s LLM draws on real-time information from the company’s Knowledge Graph, a constantly updated database containing more than a trillion interconnected facts. “We have a thesis: that eventually general-purpose reasoning will get distilled down into about 1 billion parameters,” said Mike Tung, Diffbot’s founder and CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. “You don’t actually want the knowledge in the model. You want the model to be good at just using tools so that it can query knowledge externally.” How it works Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph is a sprawling, automated database that has been crawling the public web since 2016. It categorizes web pages into entities such as people, companies, products and articles, extracting structured information using a combination of computer vision and natural language processing. Every four to five days, the Knowledge Graph is refreshed with millions of new facts, ensuring it remains up-to-date. Diffbot’s AI model leverages this resource by querying the graph in real time to retrieve information, rather than relying on static knowledge encoded in its training data. For example, when asked about a recent news event, the model can search the web for the latest updates, extract relevant facts, and cite the original sources. This process is designed to make the system more accurate and transparent than traditional LLMs. “Imagine asking an AI about the weather,” Tung said. “Instead of generating an answer based on outdated training data, our model queries a live weather service and provides a response grounded in real-time information.” How Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph beats traditional AI at finding facts In benchmark tests, Diffbot’s approach appears to be paying off. The company reports its model achieves an 81% accuracy score on FreshQA, a Google-created benchmark for testing real-time factual knowledge, surpassing both ChatGPT and Gemini. It also scored 70.36% on MMLU-Pro, a more difficult version of a standard test of academic knowledge. Perhaps most significantly, Diffbot is making its model fully open-source, allowing companies to run it on their own hardware and customize it for their needs. This addresses growing concerns about data privacy and vendor lock-in with major AI providers. “You can run it locally on your machine,” Tung noted. “There’s no way you can run Google Gemini without sending your data over to Google and shipping it outside of your premises.” Open-source AI could transform how enterprises handle sensitive data The release comes at a pivotal moment in AI development. Recent months have seen mounting criticism of large language models’ tendency to “hallucinate” or generate false information, even as companies continue to scale up model sizes. Diffbot’s approach suggests an alternative path forward, one focused on grounding AI systems in verifiable facts rather than attempting to encode all human knowledge in neural networks. “Not everyone’s going after just bigger and bigger models,” Tung said. “You can have a model that has more capability than a big model with kind of a non-intuitive approach like ours.” Industry experts note that Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph-based approach could be particularly valuable for enterprise applications where accuracy and auditability are crucial. The company already provides data services to major firms including Cisco, DuckDuckGo and Snapchat. The model is available immediately through an open-source release on GitHub and can be tested through a public demo at diffy.chat. For organizations wanting to deploy it internally, Diffbot says the smaller 8-billion-parameter version can run on a single Nvidia A100 GPU, while the full 70-billion-parameter version requires two H100 GPUs. Looking ahead, Tung believes the future of AI lies not in ever-larger models, but in better ways of organizing and accessing human knowledge: “Facts get stale. A lot of these facts will be moved out into explicit places where you can actually modify the knowledge and where you can have data provenance.” As the AI industry grapples with challenges around factual accuracy and transparency, Diffbot’s release offers a compelling alternative to the dominant bigger-is-better paradigm. Whether it succeeds in shifting the field’s direction remains to be seen, but it has certainly demonstrated that when it comes to AI, size isn’t everything. source

The artificial intelligence evolution is well underway. AI technology is changing how we communicate, do business, manage our energy grid, and even diagnose and treat illnesses. And it is evolving more rapidly than we could have predicted. Both companies that produce the models driving AI and governments that are attempting to regulate this frontier environment have struggled to institute appropriate guardrails.   In part, this is due to how poorly we understand how AI actually functions. Its decision-making is notoriously opaque and difficult to analyze. Thus, regulating its operations in a meaningful way presents a unique challenge: How do we steer a technology away from making potentially harmful decisions when we don’t exactly understand how it makes its decisions in the first place?   This is becoming an increasingly pressing problem as artificial general intelligence  (AGI) and its successor, artificial superintelligence (ASI), loom on the horizon.   AGI is AI equivalent to or surpassing human intelligence. ASI is AI that exceeds human intelligence entirely. Until recently, AGI was believed to be a distant possibility, if it was achievable at all. Now, an increasing number of experts believe that it may only be a matter of years until AGI systems are operational.   Related:AI’s on Duty, But I’m the One Staying Late As we grapple with the unintended consequences of current AI application — understood to be less intelligent than humans because of their typically narrow and limited functions — we must simultaneously attempt to anticipate and obviate the potential dangers of AI that might match or outstrip our capabilities.   AI companies are approaching the issue with varying degrees of seriousness — sometimes leading to internal conflicts. National governments and international bodies are attempting to impose some order on the digital Wild West, with limited success. So, how ready are we for AGI? Are we ready at all?  InformationWeek investigates these questions, with insights from Tracy Jones, associate director of digital consultancy Guidehouse’s data and AI practice, May Habib, CEO and co-founder of generative AI company Writer, and Alexander De Ridder, chief technology officer of AI developer SmythOS.  What Is AGI and How Do We Prepare Ourselves?  The boundaries between narrow AI, which performs a specified set of functions, and true AGI, which is capable of broader cognition in the same way that humans are, remain blurry.   As Miles Brundage, whose recent departure as senior advisor of OpenAI’s AGI Readiness team has spurred further discussion of how to prepare for the phenomenon, says, “AGI is an overloaded phrase.”   Related:How Do Companies Know if They Overspend on AI and Then Recover? “AGI has many definitions, but regardless of what you call it, it is the next generation of enterprise AI,” Habib says. “Current AI technologies function within pre-determined parameters, but AGI can handle much more complex tasks that require a deeper, contextual understanding. In the future, AI will be capable of learning, reasoning, and adapting across any task or work domain, not just those pre-programmed or trained into it.”  AGI will also be capable of creative thinking and action that is independent of its creators. It will be able to operate in multiple realms, completing numerous types of tasks. It is possible that AGI may, in its general effect, be a person. There is some suggestion that personality qualities may be successfully encoded into a hypothetical AGI system, leading it to act in ways that align with certain sorts of people, with particular personality qualities that influence their decision-making.   However, as it is defined, AGI appears to be a distinct possibility in the near future. We simply do not know what it will look like.  “AGI is still technically theoretical. How do you get ready for something that big?” Jones asks. “If you can’t even get ready for the basics — you can’t tie your shoe –how do you control the environment when it’s 1,000 times more complicated?”  Related:Addressing the Security Risks of AI in the Cloud Such a system, which will approach sentience, may thus be capable of human failings due to simple malfunction or misdirection due to hacking events or even intentional disobedience on its own. If any human personality traits are encoded, intentionally or not, they ought to be benign or at least beneficial — a highly subjective and difficult determination to make. AGI needs to be designed with the idea that it can ultimately be trusted with its own intelligence — that it will act with the interests of its designers and users in mind. They must be closely aligned with our own goals and values.  “AI guardrails are and will continue to come down to self-regulation in the enterprise,” Habib says. “While LLMs can be unreliable, we can get nondeterministic systems to do mostly deterministic things when we’re specific with the outcomes we want from our generative AI applications. Innovation and safety are a balancing act. Self-regulation will continue to be key for AI’s journey.”  Disbandment of OpenAI’s AGI Readiness Team  Brundage’s departure from OpenAI in late October following the disbandment of its AGI Readiness team sent shockwaves through the AI community. He joined the company in 2018 as a researcher and led its policy research since 2021, serving as a key watchdog for potential issues created by the company’s rapidly advancing products. The dissolution of his team and his departure followed on the heels of the implosion of its Superalignment team in May, which had served a similar oversight purpose.   Brundage claimed that he would either join a nonprofit focused on monitoring AI concerns or start his own. While both he and OpenAI claimed that the split was amicable, observers have read between the lines, speculating that his concerns had not been taken seriously by the company. The members of the team who stayed with the company have been shuffled to other departments. Other significant figures at the company have also left in the past year.  Though the Substack post in which he extensively described his reasons for leaving and his concerns about AGI was largely diplomatic, Brundage stated that

By Elaine Briseño ( January 13, 2025, 4:41 PM EST) — The TwinSpires horse-race betting platform has sued Michigan’s gaming authority and other officials for their allegedly unlawful efforts to compel the company to license or shut down the gambling app, arguing its activity is allowed under the Interstate Horseracing Act…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

More Australian government agencies failed to meet the required levels of cyber security maturity in 2024 than in 2023, according to an assessment by the Australian Signals Directorate. The ASD reported that only 15% of entities achieved Maturity Level 2 on Australia’s Essential Eight cyber security framework in 2024 — a sharp decline from 25% in 2023. Under Australia’s Protective Security Policy Framework, agencies were required to implement all Essential Eight mitigation strategies to meet at least Maturity Level 2 by July 1, 2022. Some entities were also advised to consider whether their security environment warranted achieving the higher Maturity Level 3. SEE: Private sector tech investment to be led by cybersecurity in Australia in 2025 Despite these requirements, the ASD noted that the 2024 results highlight that achieving Level 2 compliance “remains low” among agencies. 1 Semperis Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Large, Enterprise Features Advanced Attacks Detection, Advanced Automation, Anywhere Recovery, and more 2 ESET PROTECT Advanced Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Any Company Size Any Company Size Features Advanced Threat Defense, Full Disk Encryption , Modern Endpoint Protection, and more 3 ManageEngine Log360 Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Micro (0-49 Employees), Small (50-249 Employees), Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Micro, Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise Features Activity Monitoring, Blacklisting, Dashboard, and more Government agencies going backward on cyber security mitigation Australia’s Essential Eight framework outlines eight mitigation strategies to help entities reduce their vulnerability to security incidents and the impact of incidents if they do occur. These measures include: Patch applications. Patch operating systems. Multi-factor authentication. Restrict administrative privileges. Application control. Restrict Microsoft Office macros. User application hardening. Regular backups. The framework also describes four maturity levels’ characteristics, ranging from 0 to 3. Entities must meet a maturity level across all eight strategies to claim they have reached a higher maturity level. SEE: Australia passes groundbreaking cyber security law Where agencies are performing worst against the Essential Eight The mitigation strategies where the lowest proportion of agencies reached Maturity Level 2 were: Australian government agencies fared best against Maturity Level 2 for the following strategies: Restrict Microsoft Office macros (68%). Regular backups (59%). Patch operating systems (51%). Must-read security coverage A 2023 update may have impacted results The ASD suggested that several upgrades to the Essential Eight model in November 2023 may have contributed to agencies rating their maturity levels lower in 2024. “Changes to the Essential Eight Maturity Model mean entities which had not yet implemented new requirements would record a reduction in maturity level compared to 2023,” the ASD said in the report. For instance, 54% of agencies previously reported they were at Maturity Level 2 for Multi-Factor Authentication. New requirements for phishing-resistant MFA pushed the proportion down to 23%. SEE: Are Australia’s public sector agencies ready for a cyber attack? However, these updates were to “address cyber security threats informed by the evolution of tradecraft used by malicious actors,” which required advice “commensurate with the threat,” the ASD said. Agencies not keeping up with Essential Eight upgrades will essentially be exposed to an increased risk of compromise by malicious actors and suffer greater impact if a compromise does occur. Legacy IT also playing role in cyber security deficiency There were some areas of concern for the ASD, including the volume of incident reports it received. The percentage of entities reporting security incidents to the ASD remained low, with just 32% reporting at least half of the observed incidents on their networks in 2024. The ASD also said the proportion of entities applying effective email encryption decreased from 43% to 35%, according to scans conducted to assess cyber hygiene improvement. However, the use of legacy systems greatly contributed to many agencies’ ability to implement the Essential Eight. In 2024, 71% of entities indicated that using legacy technologies had impacted their ability to implement the Essential Eight — an increase from 52% of entities in 2023. Entities reported the most significant reason for still using legacy IT was: Lack of prioritisation of upgrades (25%). Insufficient dedicated funding (24%). Lack of a viable replacement (16%). Time to decommission systems (16%). In the report, the ASD said the ongoing problem with legacy IT in public sector agencies presented “significant and enduring risks to the cyber security posture of Australian Government entities.” “Legacy IT is more vulnerable to cyber attacks as vendors do not support the development of security updates, or limit security services,” the ASD said. “Malicious actors may be able to compromise legacy IT and use it to gain access to more modern systems in IT environments.” Agencies are doing some things right, says the ASD The ASD said Australian government agency cyber security postures were “well-established in some areas, and required improvement in others.” It singled out the establishment of corporate governance mechanisms to understand security risks and prepare for cyber threats as a positive area. The report found that most had planned for a cyber security incident and were ready to respond: In 2024, 75% of entities had a cyber security strategy, an increase from 735 in 2023. 86% of entities addressed cyber security disruptions in their business continuity and disaster recovery planning, an increase from 83% in 2023. 86% of entities had an incident response plan, an increase from 82% in 2023. ASD calls for public sector to improve security maturity The ASD concluded that agencies should continue to implement the upgraded Essential Eight mitigation strategies across their networks to at least Maturity Level 2, in line with current requirements. It also recommended that Australia’s public sector agencies increase cyber security incident reporting and share cyber threat information with ASD, implement strategies for managing legacy IT now and into the future, and maintain an incident response plan and exercise it at least every 2 years. source

By Ali Sullivan ( January 13, 2025, 4:35 PM EST) — The Federal Communications Commission is defending its decision to hit T-Mobile and Sprint with a combined $92 million in fines for selling users’ sensitive location data, telling the D.C. Circuit that the wireless carriers could have received a jury trial but were not owed one…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Windscribe VPN fast facts Our rating: 4.1 stars out of 5Pricing: Starts at $5.75 (annual plan)Key features: Has a generous free version. ScribeForce team accounts for organizations. Unlimited device connections. Windscribe VPN is a decent option for those seeking a virtual private network with a fully functional free version. Its free plan allows up to 10GBs of data, unlimited device connections, and the same security features as the paid tier. It also has a customizable Build A Plan subscription option, giving customers more account flexibility. However, it may not be the best choice for users who value having a large server network, particularly for streaming or unblocking purposes. Right now, Windscribe supports macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Linux, Mozilla, and Opera. Semperis Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Large, Enterprise Features Advanced Attacks Detection, Advanced Automation, Anywhere Recovery, and more ESET PROTECT Advanced Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Any Company Size Any Company Size Features Advanced Threat Defense, Full Disk Encryption , Modern Endpoint Protection, and more ManageEngine Log360 Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Micro (0-49 Employees), Small (50-249 Employees), Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Micro, Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise Features Activity Monitoring, Blacklisting, Dashboard, and more Windscribe VPN pricing Duration Price Free version (11 locations only) Free 1-year Windscribe Pro account $5.75 per month 1-month Windscribe Pro account $9.00 per month Build A Plan Billed $1.00 per location per month ScribeForce $3.00 per seat, per month, minimum 5 seats For its annual subscription, the $5.75 per month falls in the middle range in terms of pricing compared to other VPNs. Meanwhile, Windscribe’s monthly $9.00 per month plan is one of the more affordable options on the market. While most VPNs make their long-term subscriptions more affordable, I appreciate how Windscribe’s monthly plan is on the lower end of the spectrum. More about Cloud Security Windscribe also offers a Build A Plan tier that allows customers to select servers from different locations. There is a $3 minimum purchase, with each server location costing $1 per month, but the overall option is very customer-friendly. For teams of five or more, ScribeForce is a plan that allows for centralized billing and team management with one subscription. Lastly, Windscribe has a free version that offers several features found in the paid plan. I would recommend users interested in Windscribe try the free version before committing to a paid plan. If you’re set on accessing all of the Pro features, their monthly plan is the way to go, given its lower-than-usual price. Windscribe VPN free version Windscribe VPN has a free version that comes with a lot of the same in-app functionality as their paid plans. The main difference is that the free version only provides access to servers in 10 locations. Windscribe VPN’s free version. Image: Windscribe VPN In particular, Windscribe VPN’s free version offers access to servers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, and Romania. On the flip side, a Windscribe Pro account includes access to all server locations in 69 countries and 134 cities. These users have access to Pro servers that are less crowded and perform better. In addition, a paid subscription includes unlimited data, while the free version only allows up to 10GB monthly data. However, new users can only access 2GB of data without providing an email address. The option to try out the service without providing personal information, such as an email address, is a plus. Like the paid tier, the free Windscribe version allows unlimited device connections. This is impressive, considering that other VPNs don’t offer unlimited device connections — even on their paid plans. The free version also includes an abbreviated version of Windscribe’s R.O.B.E.R.T. domain and IP blocking tool for malware, ads, and tracking protection. The full R.O.B.E.R.T. feature set is included with the Pro plan. Overall, Windscribe’s free version is a solid free VPN with more functionality than expected. If you’re interested in other free VPNs, check out our rundown of the Best Free VPNs for 2024. Is Windscribe VPN safe and reliable? Yes, Windscribe VPN is a safe VPN to use in 2024. It offers all the industry-standard security protocols expected of a VPN: OpenVPN, IKEv2, and WireGuard. It also has AES-256 encryption, split tunneling, and a reliable Windscribe Firewall that acts as a VPN kill switch. It also has a no-logs policy stating that Windscribe doesn’t record connection logs, IP timestamps, session logs, or user activity. To make sure this is actually the case, it’s important to check if a VPN’s no logs policy, or any aspect of its application for that matter, has been independently audited. When I first reviewed Windscribe last year, the VPN provider said that it had been independently audited and was currently undergoing another audit. However, these audit results were neither published nor available for public viewing. In this regard, I had to dock points off of Windscribe since they didn’t have any publicly available audits then. Now that we’re in 2024, I am happy to report that Windscribe has published full details of its independent audits for both its no-logs policy and application. In September 2021, Windscribe’s desktop app was audited by Leviathan Security Group, which aided the VPN provider in addressing all issues that were raised. In 2022, both Windscribe Android and iOS applications were also audited by Leviathan. Finally, Windscribe’s VPN stack called FreshScribe was also recently audited by Packetlabs in June 2024. WindScribe VPN also publishes real-time Transparency Reports that outline the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and law enforcement requests sent to their service. On top of all this, Windscribe VPN has fully open-sourced its applications on GitHub, meaning anyone can view their source code and spot vulnerabilities or weaknesses. To me, this is a meaningful selling

00:00 Hi, everybody. Welcome to Global Tech Tales: What Buyers Want. I’m Keith Shaw here to moderate a discussion with other editors from around the world about technology and leadership topics. Joining me for today’s show. Matt Egan, my co-host, the global content editorial director at Foundry. He is representing the UK and Cathy O’Sullivan, she is the editor in chief of APAC for CIO and CSO coming to us from tomorrow in New Zealand. And you get to joke if you know about your geography. And Valerie Potter, she is the managing editor of features from Computerworld, also in North America/United States, somewhere in a in a bunker, right, right. Val, exactly. All right. Welcome everybody to the show. Hey, you can just wait. Thanks. Okay, so Matt, this episode, we’re on the third episode now, and we’re talking about IT careers in this one, it’s a little bit different from our other episodes, where we were covering a specific technology, such as artificial intelligence or cloud computing was our last one. So why is this the topic that and why do we think that this is still important from the IT leader perspective? Sure.Well, as you know, Keith, we talk to it buyers every day in the world’s top markets across the globe, are hundreds of journalists are talking to IT and business leaders, professionals, operatives, and they’re doing that to understand the real world, lived experience of those who work in it. What matters to it buyers. It’s in the name of the show, right? And so in this series, that’s what we share, a deep understanding of the real views of real it buyers in all the world’s major markets, around key topics and careers is a huge topic for IT leaders how to develop their own careers, maintain their own careers, but also, and I think maybe even principally, how to build, maintain winning teams. And I’ll give you a small piece of evidence for that in our latest CIO pulse survey, which we did late last year, when asked CIOs, said that skills was the most important thing that their organization was the least focused on. In fact, only 20% of CIO respondents strongly agreed that their organization had the right level of focus on skills, on developing their teams, on staffing. So you can see that as we head into 2025 like all aspects of careers, from building those teams to managing our own careers are hugely important to it buyers, all right, and and we usually start to show off with some statistics.So as I was doing research for for this episode, I did find three different surveys from from either different articles on the foundry sites or out there in the world, and I just wanted to just pepper the conversation, or start the conversation with these three statistics. So the first one is that IT organizations are reporting that burnout is having a big impact on companies. A new survey from the Upwork Research Institute said that 71% of full time employees say they are burned out, and 65% said they are struggling with employer demands on productivity. In addition, 81% of global C suite leaders acknowledged that increased demands on workers over the past year the second the second one is that it recruitment firm Harvey Nash has said that CIOs are decidedly pessimistic about it hiring in the new year with only 36% saying that their IT head counts would increase in 2025 which is the lowest sentiment since 2011 and then the third stat that that jumped out at me around this this topic was nearly three fourths of women in it have said that they work longer hours to improve their chances of career advancement due to in part, to gender bias and discrimination. And a Corona survey said 71% of respondents said that they work longer hours in hopes of more quickly advancing their careers, and 70% said men in it were likely to advance their careers or received promotions more quickly than women. So with that framework like, what are your thoughts on the market as we head into 2025 around either looking for a job, retaining a team and Val I know that computer world just recently published its best places to work in it, and a lot of these issues came up when you were discussing the companies out there that are, that are great at a lot of these topics, absolutely.Well, in general, I’d say, I mean, the mood is pretty grim out there, you know, among, you know, sort of anecdotally seasoned IT pros who were laid off over the past couple of years are really having difficulty finding new work, and at the same time, companies are saying they can’t find tech workers with the right skills and experience. So there’s a real disconnect there that’s not so prevalent among the best places, companies, you know, those. These are the, these are the companies where IT pros want to work. So, you know, it’s not quite the same situation for them. But even they are saying there’s, there’s some pessimism out there about the economy and, you know, uncertainty. Be there’s a lot of disruption going on in the world right now, and I think companies just are a little hesitant to go on any kind of big hiring sprees at the moment. So that’s left everybody feeling uncertain.Yeah. Cathy, what are you hearing about from your neck of the woods, in New Zealand and Australia, in that whole area?Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, there’s been an increased focus on costs. So and certainly IT budgets aren’t what they were maybe in the in previous years, certainly around the pandemic times. So with that in mind, people are being asked to do more. They’re certainly being asked to do more with less, and that has an effect both on IT leaders and their teams. And it is interesting, though,