Up Times
Ocean waves are not energy but signs of the pulsing energies from storms and winds and shifting rock and lunar gravity – not unlike our computer-connected world where what we see and what is happening are two different things.
Undersea cables are the most … poetic pieces of the Internet – In 2012 Andrew Blum was interviewed on the radio program Fresh Air to explain the internet (Blum had written a book while admitting to really understanding just a fraction of all that happens to make the internet happen). By design, Blum explains, we see the words on the screen or the spreadsheet or the image – the working mechanisms are invisible.
Andrew Blum: [The undersea cables are] usually about the thickness of a garden hose, and they’re filled with strands of fiber-optic cable. And light goes in one end and comes out the other – goes in one end of the ocean and comes out the other end of the ocean.
Though the capacity numbers have increased in the past fourteen years, the concepts remain, as Blum continues: The most interesting part is that you have many frequencies of light passing through a single strand of fiber [within the garden-hose-like tubes] – frequencies are colors of light. So in a single strand of fiber, you might have a 10-gigabit-per-second wave, a wave of light, that will transmit through pulses 10 gigabits per second of data … but … there’ll be dozens, if not a hundred, other wavelengths of light, other colors of light passing through that same fiber. So you have incredible, incredible capacity through a single strand of fiber, and that’s … what allows them to carry stupendous amounts of data through a single strand of fiber.
So if you make it to the ocean this summer, give a moment to the forces at work out there. We can only see the waves, not the powers behind them. Just like we only see a texted vacation photo, not the ocean-length cables that make it possible.
But invisibility isn’t always this tranquil. The complex infrastructure that carries a photo also hides what’s fighting against such benign uses. In the interview that follows, Michael Murphy describes being shown a security log with a criminal’s attempt to breach a firewall 10,000 times – a relentless (though unsuccessful) assault. And most users would never know it was happening.
And that kind of quiet IT brings us to Bryley’s twelfth MSP 501 award – a recognition built around the question: how do you evaluate an IT operation anyway? The MSP 501 gives an outside appraisal of IT provider soundness. If quiet IT sounds appealing, reach Bryley’s Roy Pacitto at 978.562.6077 x217 or at RPacitto@Bryley.com.
This symbol is a signifier of the reliability of an IT provider and so of your systems, data and support.
The MSP 501 award, an IT symbol of reliability
In a worldwide industry evaluation, Bryley is again shown to be among the top IT providers
Bryley has been given its 12th MSP 501 award. The MSP 501 is an annual IT industry honor that brings attention to those MSPs (managed service providers) with the highest operational efficiency and business models.
The MSP 501 award is based on a sixty-point audit designed to independently verify the fitness and stability of IT providers … [2 min. read; audio available] Continue Reading >
An organization’s foundational problems may lead to losses insurance money can never fix.
“Hackers only have to be right once”
A conversation with Murphy Insurance Agency’s president Michael Murphy
I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Murphy president of Murphy Insurance Agency on cyber liability insurance. I wanted to know things like about pricing and post-breach investigations. He replied by email that while my questions were great that all he’d be able to answer was, “it depends.”
But there was a lot Michael would tell me, like giving a peek into insurance mechanics, looking at the reasons to take a deeper view of security than post-breach financial reimbursement and how to get people to start thinking about their organization’s cyber vulnerabilities … [4 min. read; audio available] Continue Reading >
Poor privacy practices lead at least to decreased cybersecurity health
Thirteen percent of Americans have uploaded their personal health information to chatbots
It’s a sign o’ the times
This highly sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) is routinely sent to profit-seeking companies who do not have the best interests of the senders in mind. The main reason given for revealing such sensitive information is that the chatbots’ answers seem to be free. Of course not too much is really free, and like we showed in last month’s Up Times: ChatGPT states that they use what you enter in order to train.
So just extrapolate this to your business. Is your organization’s data being handled in a similar way? If employees can’t access capable AI tools through secured, company-approved channels, they are going to find their own. So contracts, finances, client records – it’s all one frustrated employee away from leaving your oversight.
And in this vein, clear data-handling policies need to be in place and communicated across the organization.
Bryley can help you get set up to minimize losing important data through reckless chatbot use … [6 min. read] kff.org
All the percentages in the twenties show over 100 days recovering from a breach
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report
And there’s the 65% still trying to recover
IBM’s report quantifies just how long breach damage lingers. Of organizations that fully recovered, 76% said it took more than 100 days — navigating client questions, managing staff anxiety and trying to win new business while the incident was still a live topic. Only 2% recovered in under 50 days.
But then: 65% of organizations in IBM’s report hadn’t fully recovered at the time of the survey.
IBM explains that “full recovery” includes restoring customer confidence and employee trust. An IT team can typically remediate in days. But winning back a client who received a breach notification letter from you? That takes considerably longer … [30 min. read] ibm.com
Ransomware is being AI-automated for greater volume
To pay or not to pay
Governments are considering banning paying criminals in ransomware attacks
But of course there’s no easy answer. Our concern with a ban is what happens when a payment ban is in place but data recovery is not feasible … situations are almost always more nuanced than a ban accounts for, Andy Maus of DriveSavers says.
A criminal breaks into your system, locks it down and sends you a bill. Pay up and maybe get your data back. Refuse and maybe lose everything.
In 2025 the number of confirmed ransomware victims jumped nearly 400 percent.
The people behind the attacks operate like businesses with support staff, service tiers and negotiators. They are organized, patient and powered by AI tools that let them hit multiple targets at the same time for little cost.
Some lawmakers are looking to ban ransom payments for public bodies. For small businesses no rule exists like that, meaning the decision is yours.
One thing: the best time to think through your strategy for how you’ll decide whether to pay or not is before you need to make that decision. If you need help working this out, please call on Bryley at 978.562.6077 or email ITExperts@Bryley.com … [3 min. read] arstechnica.com
It produced the equivalent air pollution of 10,000 drives from NY to LA and back to train an LLM (large language model) the size of Meta’s Llama 3.1 – who will tell us when these LLMs are big enough?
Kinda like out of sight out of mind
The Verge has a breathtaking look at AI datacenter energy consumption
Remember when people made fun of how big computers used to be – that now we had more computing power in our pockets? As you know datacenters are growing beyond a scale I don’t think anyone could foresee five years ago.
Worth a few minutes because of how the article conveys the scale and costs, even though it never tells us (because probably all these municipalities have different deals), but who’s going to foot the bill for this massive energy and water use and dealing with the waste? [15 min. read] theverge.com
Wyman Gordon’s plant in North Grafton and its colossal, hot as hell press is set up as the contrast to the MIT almost-thinking machines
The beginnings of digital
Before Prof. Shannon applied Boolean (AND, OR, NOT) logic to physical switches and Prof. Forrester showed digital computing was practical, it was an analog world
Here’s a rare glimpse back in time through a CBS short film about the computer science work at MIT in 1954. It begins at Wyman Gordon with a brute-strength press and then goes to school, showing Dr Wiener and the FELIX light-sensing and -following automaton. It then introduces Jay Forrester’s room-sized Whirlwind 25,000-computation-per-second computer (a laptop CPU today is more than millions of times more capable). Prof. Forrester arrived at the digital idea (binary aka 1s and 0s) in computing working through a practical, mechanical problem: Whirlwind was built to be a navy flight simulator, but analog computing introduced too much noise and imprecision to be useful. Digital computing has no artifact noise and is precise (think streaming music vs vinyl).
And maybe even more impressively Bell Labs’ Claude Shannon demonstrates his mechanical mouse Theseus that shows by telephone relay switches how machine learning works. The device makes a try, hits a wall, then another and hits a wall and then finds a clear path and proceeds – tripping a switch that records the right way to go. On its next run, those switches guide it directly to the goal.
It’s buried in complexity and scale but this trial-and-error effort is what machine learning looks like at its core: a machine that updates its own state based on outcomes rather than following fixed instructions – the same principle that underlies the AI systems we use now … [25 min. watch] youtube.com
Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.
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