Posts

The rise of deepfakes and mistrust in the digital age

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In early 2022, a video circulated showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia. Within hours, experts identified it as a deepfake, an artificially generated content designed to fabricate reality. Though quickly debunked, the video briefly caused confusion among Ukrainian citizens that were already under extreme stress. This was not the only incident related to deep fake. As AI technology advances, deepfakes have evolved from being an innovation to genuine threat and in cases, psychological weapons, undermining our ability to distinguish truth from fiction in an already fragmented digital world. What exactly are deepfakes? Deepfakes use deep learning algorithms, a subset of artificial intelligence, to create hyper-realistic fake videos, images, or audio showing real people saying or doing things they never did. The technology behind deepfakes is not inherently malicious. They are the same AI techniques that po...
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When a Cloud Misconfiguration Costs $190 Million: Ethical Lessons from the Capital One Breach

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In July 2019, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee discovered a misconfigured firewall in Capital One's cloud infrastructure. The resulting breach affected over 100 million customers and led to a $190 million settlement . More importantly, it exposed fundamental failures in cloud security that could have been prevented  if engineers adhere to code of ethics framework such as ACM. The Anatomy of a Breach The assumptions around the Capital One breach believe the root cause was a misconfigured firewall setting. However, the technical reality was more complex, and the attack sequence exposed control failures. The attacker, Paige Thompson who is a former AWS employee, used TOR and VPN services (specifically IPredator end nodes) to access Capital One's cloud network between March and July 2019. The initial entry point was Capital One's Web Application Firewall (WAF) , specifically, an open-source ModSecurity WAF running on an AWS EC2 instance . However, unlike ma...
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Welcome to my blog

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Hello! My name is Nathan, and I like to talk about tech-related topics ranging from technical to the hot and latest news in the tech industry. Also, this might be a place where I jot down my upcoming personal project and things that I learn. So, stick around and maybe you'll find something cool. Me (most of the time)
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Exploring Sustainability, Maintainability, and Security in Software

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  " Puhpowee " - an Indigenous word meaning "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight" - perfectly describes the explosive growth in today's software landscape. We are living in a world where AI accelerates product development exponentially and over 50 million new startups emerge yearl y . This creates an unprecedented surge in software creation. But under the rapid growth there is a question: are we building solutions that can stand the test of time, or are we just chasing the trends?   The hidden cost of speed-first development   In the race to release groundbreaking products, many companies prioritize speed and treat maintainability as an afterthought. This oversight comes with a steep price tag - up to 40% of a development team's time gets consumed by managing technical debt and maintaining problematic systems . That's nearly half of a team's potential for innovation locked away in dealing with past shortcuts ...
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