Certainly the biggest news of the past month has been a continuation of the trend towards regulating the biggest players in the tech industry. The US House of Representatives is considering 5 antitrust bills that would lead to major changes in the way the largest technology companies do business; and the Biden administration has appointed … Read moreRadar trends to watch: July 2021 – O’Reilly
Security continues to be in the news: most notably the Kaseya ransomware attack, which was the first case of a supply chain ransomware attack that we’re aware of. That’s new and very dangerous territory. However, the biggest problem in security remains simple: take care of the basics. Good practices for authentication, backups, and software updates … Read moreRadar trends to watch: August 2021 – O’Reilly
Let’s start with a moment of silence for O’Reilly Author Toby Segaran, who passed away on August 11, 2021. Toby was one of the people who got the Data Science movement started. His book, Programming Collective Intelligence, taught many how to start using their data. Throughout his career, he mentored many, and was particularly influential … Read moreRadar trends to watch: September 2021 – O’Reilly
The unwilling star of this month’s trends is clearly Facebook. Between reports that they knew about the damage that their applications were causing long before that damage hit the news, their continued denials and apologies, and their attempts to block researchers from studying the consequences of their products, they’ve been in the news almost every … Read moreRadar trends to watch: October 2021 – O’Reilly
While October’s news was dominated by Facebook’s (excuse me, Meta’s) continued problems (you’d think they’d get tired of the apology tour), the most interesting news comes from the AI world. I’m fascinated by the use of large language models to analyze the “speech” of whales, and to preserve endangered human languages. It’s also important that … Read moreRadar trends to watch: November 2021 – O’Reilly
The last month had a few surprises. Three items about quantum computing—all of which appeared on the same day. You’d think they were coordinating with each other. And of course, everybody wants to build their own version of the metaverse. There are several takes on having avatar-filled meetings in virtual spaces. Unfortunately, this solves the … Read moreRadar trends to watch: December 2021 – O’Reilly