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Cybersecurity Essentials for Distributed Tech Teams: Zero-Trust, Identity Management, and Beyond

Cybersecurity Essentials for Distributed Tech Teams: Zero-Trust, Identity Management, and Beyond

As remote work continues to redefine how tech teams operate, distributed engineering teams face unique cybersecurity challenges. Protecting sensitive code,… Continue reading Cybersecurity Essentials for Distributed Tech Teams: Zero-Trust, Identity Management, and Beyond The post Cybersecurity Essentials for Distributed Tech Teams: Zero-Trust, Identity Management, and Beyond appeared first on ReadWrite .

A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica : A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats —  Moxie Marlinspike—the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger …

Stop Windows 11 from tracking you: Reclaim privacy with this setting

Stop Windows 11 from tracking you: Reclaim privacy with this setting

By default, Windows tracks the current location of your computer. Depending on your hardware configuration, it evaluates location data from various sensors on your device. If your PC has a GPS chip, its location can be accurately pinpointed. In the rare case your PC has a SIM card, Windows can triangulate its location using the signal strengths of surrounding phone towers. Windows can also check the names of Wi-Fi networks and the MAC addresses of nearby access points and compare them to an international database to determine your system’s location. Your PC’s external IP address also provides a rough estimate of where you are. If all these methods fail, the operating system falls back on the default location, which you can define in Windows Settings under Privacy & security > Location > Default location : If Windows can’t determine your current location, it uses the system’s default location. You can freely define this default location in Windows Settings. Joel Lee / Foundry Don’t want Windows and Microsoft to always know your last location? You can turn off location tracking. Then, neither your operating system nor your installed apps will have access to this data. You have two ways to do this. Method #1: Disable all location You can open Windows Settings and navigate to Privacy & security > Location , then toggle “Location services” to Off . Doing this will prevent Windows and Microsoft Store apps from accessing location data. However, regular desktop apps that you download and install from the web (i.e., not via the Microsoft Store) will still be able to determine your location independently without the location services of Windows (e.g., by evaluating nearby available Wi-Fi networks). Method #2: Disable location per app You can leave “Location services” as On in Windows Settings and enable the “Allow apps to access your location” setting. This gives you the option of deciding on an app-by-app basis (which are listed in the setting) which ones can access your location. Only apps that were installed via the Microsoft Store will appear in this list: In Windows location settings, you can choose whether to disable location services altogether or allow select apps access. Joel Lee / Foundry The “Allow desktop apps to access your location” setting controls whether desktop apps are allowed to use Windows location services. Below that, you can see which apps have most recently done so. The “Allow location override” setting is used to configure remote PCs that are connected to a server system using the Remote Desktop feature. If location services are active on both computers, different locations can be used for the server and the client: Joel Lee / Foundry Finally, under the “Recent activity” setting, you can see which apps have recently requested location data. If you set “Allow apps to access your location” to Off , the “Notify when apps request location” setting appears at the bottom of this window, allowing you to set whether Windows should show a notification when an app attempts to access your location despite being prohibited from doing so. For security reasons, it’s recommended that you leave this option enabled. Further reading: All the ways Windows 11 collects data about you

Why Egnyte keeps hiring junior engineers despite the rise of AI coding tools

Why Egnyte keeps hiring junior engineers despite the rise of AI coding tools

Egnyte , the $1.5 billion cloud content governance company, has embedded AI coding tools across its global team of more than 350 developers — but not to reduce headcount. Instead, the company continues to hire junior engineers, using AI to accelerate onboarding, deepen codebase understanding, and shorten the path from junior to senior contributor. The approach challenges a dominant 2025 narrative that automation will replace developers, showing instead how enterprises are using AI to scale engineering capacity while keeping humans firmly in the loop. “To have engineers disappear or us not hiring junior engineers doesn't look like the likely outcome,” Amrit Jassal, Egnyte CTO and co-founder, told VentureBeat. “You've got to have people, you're training and doing all types of succession planning. The junior engineer of today is the senior engineer of tomorrow.” How Egnyte coders are using AI — without ceding control Egnyte — which has more than 22,000 users including NASDAQ, Red Bull, and BuzzFeed — has rolled out Claude Code, Cursor, Augment, and Gemini CLI coding tools across its developer base to support its core business strategies and expand its newer AI offerings like  customer-facing copilots and customizable AI agents. Devs use these tools across a variety of tasks, the simplest of which include data retrieval, code comprehension, smart search, and code lookup. Egnyte’s code base has lots of Java code, which uses numerous libraries, each with different versions, Jassal explained. AI tools are great for peer-to-peer programming , helping new users get a lay of the land, or existing users probe into different code repositories. “We have a pretty big code base, right?” Jassal said. “Let's say you're looking at an iOS application, but you're not well versed; you will fire up Google CLI or an Augment, and ask it to discover the code base.” Some Egnyte devs are moving into automatic pull request summaries, which provide simple overviews of code changes that essentially explain the “what,” “how,” and “why” of proposed modifications. “But obviously, any change that's made, we don't want to hear that AI made the change; it has to be that developer made the change,” Jassal pointed out. “I would not trust AI to commit to the production code base.” Commits still pass through human review and security validation , and anything red-flagged is escalated to senior engineers. Devs are warned of the dangers of settling into autopilot mode or blindly trusting code. A model may not have been exposed to, or given enough samples of, certain coding components and infrastructure in its training. Another growing, and closely monitored, use case for AI is unit testing, where code components are run in isolation to ensure they work as intended. “At the end of the day, it is a productivity improvement tool,” he said. “It is really a continuation, it's like any other tool, it's not some magic.” Beyond core engineering, AI is helping other teams collaborate with programmers. Product management, for instance, is using tools like Vercel to bring “demo-worthy” prototypes, rather than just ideas, to devs, who can then move ahead with mock-ups. Or, if UX teams are looking to change certain elements on a dashboard, AI can quickly spin up a handful of options, like different widgets or buttons. “Then you come to engineering with that, and the engineer immediately knows what you really intend to do with it,” Jassal said. Setting expectations, meeting devs where they are However, day-to-day activities for all Egnyte engineers, including junior developers, extend beyond just coding. Junior developers are given hands-on tasks across the full development lifecycle to accelerate their growth and experience, Jassal said. For instance, they assist with requirement analysis in early software engineering phases, as well as deployment, productization and post-deployment maintenance. In turn, these activities require “Egnyte-specific tacit knowledge and experience” offered by senior engineers. One clear example of work that sits firmly with senior engineers is authoring architecture notes, as these cut across the platform and require a more holistic, system-level view, Jassal said. “Many of the traditional roadblocks are navigated faster these days with AI; for example, understanding the codebase, dissecting requirements, auto-testing,” he said. “This faster track allows our talented junior hires to progress more quickly and provide higher value to the company sooner.” The company expects a much faster learning curve from junior to mid-level engineers, Jassal said.  “It's always the case that people coming straight into the workforce are much more excited about trying new things,” Jassal said. But that has to be colored with reality to temper expectations, he added. On the other hand, some senior engineers may need to be ramped up in their adoption because they’re hesitant or had ho-hum or bad experiences with earlier generation tools. This requires incremental introduction. “The senior people, having been burnt multiple times, bring that perspective,” he said. "So both [types of engineers] play an important role.” Hiring will continue for scale and fresh perspective “In general, I would say it has been really hyped by folks who want to sell you tokens,” Jassal said referring to people who talk about human coders becoming obsolete. " Vibe coding" could be construed in a similar vein: Like others in software development, he prefers the term “AI assisted coding,” wherein programmers have a self-driven loop, generating code, analyzing exceptions, then correcting and scaling. At least in Egnyte’s case, hiring will continue, even if at a slower clip as people become more productive thanks to AI, Jassal said. “We are not just hiring for scale, but to develop the next generation of senior developers and inject fresh perspectives into our development practices,” he said. The takeaway for technical decision-makers is not that AI will eliminate engineering jobs — but that it will reshape how talent is developed. At Egnyte, AI-assisted coding is compressing learning curves and raising expectations, not removing humans from the process. Enterprises that treat AI as a replacement risk hollowing out their future senior talent pipeline; those that treat it as infrastructure can move faster without losing the judgment, creativity, and accountability that only engineers provide.

Long-Running Web Skimming Campaign Steals Credit Cards From Online Checkout Pages

Long-Running Web Skimming Campaign Steals Credit Cards From Online Checkout Pages

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a major web skimming campaign that has been active since January 2022, targeting several major payment networks like American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB Co., Ltd., Mastercard, and UnionPay. "Enterprise organizations that are clients of these payment providers are the most likely to be impacted," Silent Push said in a report published today.