This week, I'm thoroughly engrossed by a deep dive into ISO/IEC 2382, a suite of standards on IT terminology from the 1990's around the end of the previous millennium - ancient history as far as IT goes. "ISO 2382 was initially based mainly on the usage to be found in the Vocabulary of Information Processing which was established and published by the International Federation for Information Processing and the International Computation Centre, and in the American National Dictionary for Information Processing Systems and its earlier editions published by the American National Standards Institute (formerly known as the American Standards Association). Published and Draft International Standards relating to information technology of other international organizations (such as the International Telecommunication Union and the International Electrotechnical Commission) as well as published and draft national standards have also been considered." I say "IT" but it...

Denis Yakimov ​shared this on LinkeDin: " Imagine your ISMS as a battlefield: Context : The battlefield terrain—topography, weather, and conditions. Issues : Your main enemies. ​Controls and SoA : Troops, tools, and fortifications. Each control is a soldier with a specific purpose. ​Leadership : The chain of command, setting the battle’s tone and ensuring everyone understands their role. ​ Planning : The war strategy how to deploy soldiers (controls) to address issues under current conditions. ​Operation : Execution of the battle plan where soldiers confront issues directly. ​ Internal Audit : A field hospital that identifies wounded soldiers and offers opportunities to remediate them. Improvement : Lessons learned applied to strengthen future engagements.” ​Google Gemini made a reasonable if naive attempt to draw a military analogy for me too: ​ " Imagine a military base: ​ The Base : Represents the organization and its information assets. ​ The General : Top management, se...

I understand that AI/LLMs suffer hallucinations, but this piece circulating on AP seems credible to me: "President Trump, known for his calm demeanor and measured responses, found himself in an unexpected situation. A-list celebrity, Greta Thunberg, known for her outspoken political activism and massive social media following, had chained herself to the White House gates. She demanded a meeting with the President to discuss climate change policy, refusing to leave until he agreed. This wasn't a typical publicity stunt from Thunberg although she was dressed somberly as usual. Her impassioned speech, live-streamed to millions, focused on the President's recent approval of an offshore drilling project. She argued it contradicted his campaign promises of prioritizing renewable energy. The situation placed President Trump in a delicate position. Ignoring Thunberg risked alienating young voters who saw her as a powerful voice for their generation. However, giving in to her deman...

Truly effective deception isn't even recognised as such - it passes completely unnoticed.  There is no shortage of now-recognised examples that the deceived didn't spot at the time and maybe still haven't noticed. Here's a sample: A stick insect appears to a predator to be an inedible stick, not a tasty insect Spotted from an enemy's reconnaisance biplane, an inflatable tank or field gun may appear solid, a credible threat at least While an accomplice distracts a resident by knocking at the front door on a pretext, the cunning thief slips around the back Phishers emulate the look and feel of legitimate emails, senders and websites to dupe victims into visiting and disclosing their credentials, using spurious urgency to shortcut or bypass checks, specific timing and wording, and sheer volume to exploit the offguard vulnerables

  Today I asked Google's Gemini to rewrite yesterday's blog piece " in the style of a naive student of IT" : "Hey guys, so I was thinking about this weird thing that happens online. People get really mad about stuff, like really mad. They all start yelling at each other and saying the same things over and over again. It's like a big echo chamber, and it gets out of control. For example, there was this time people were freaking out about 5G towers. They thought it was going to hurt people, but scientists said it was totally safe. But the people who were mad kept saying it was bad, and they got other people to believe them too. It was crazy! When people get really mad like that, it's hard to talk to them. They don't want to listen to anything else, and they just keep shouting. It's like a big fight, and it can make things worse. So, what can we do about this? Well, one thing is to just wait for people to calm down. Sometimes, if we let them vent f...

For kicks, I prompted Google's Gemini AI robot to rewrite yesterday's blog piece "in the style of a professor or university lecturer".  This is wot it rote me: A fundamental challenge in contemporary society is the phenomenon of outrage , wherein groups of individuals exhibit disproportionate emotional responses to perceived threats or injustices. This often manifests in the form of echo chambers on social media, where like-minded individuals amplify and reinforce each other's concerns. Such amplification can rapidly escalate emotions to unreasonable levels, hindering rational discourse and critical thinking. Consider, for example, the contentious issue of 5G cell tower placement near schools. Outraged individuals may perceive this as a grave threat to public health, accusing authorities, scientists, and industry leaders of callousness and disregard for their concerns. The perceived risk is often amplified through groupthink, leading to a sense of collective out...

Advertising copy, marketing reports, social media pieces and news articles in general warn us that things are getting worse. Pretty much everything is getting worse, and of course that's bad. See if you recognise any of these choice phrases: In today's [*] world : a classic throwaway AI/MML introductory phrase, presumably emphasising that the present is different to the past, the future dramatically so. With just a short browse through my LinkeDin feed, I've seen the following fill-ins for that asterisk: 'unpredictable', 'complex and uncertain', 'complex business', 'hectic', 'fast-evolving' (paradoxically), 'fast-paced', 'digital', 'fast-paced digital', 'fast-paced hyper-connected', 'fast-paced tech', 'fast-paced data-driven', 'tech-driven', 'mobile-first', 'B2B', 'globalized' (yes, really) blah blah blah. Despite there being 87 synonyms , the robots are c...

My next book will be a 'hyper-glossary' of terms relating to information security, including closely related aspects such as information risk management, governance, compliance ... and more ... and there's the rub: I'm struggling to catch up/keep up with developments in the field, not least because of the rate at which novel concepts are introduced and new terms are coined. Here's an example of a definition originally added a couple of years ago and most recently amended today: There I've defined "Deep fake", one of several terms washed up in the AI tsunami. The underlined terms are hyperlinked to their definitions ... and so on forming an extensive web within the document.