Archive for February 14, 2024

Salesforce rolls out trusted generative AI for Canadian Slack customers

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 14, 2024 by itnerd

Salesforce today announced the rollout of Slack AI, a trusted and intuitive generative AI experience available natively in Slack, where work happens. Customers can easily tap into the collective knowledge shared in Slack through guided experiences for AI-powered search, channel recaps, thread summaries, and soon, a digests feature. These capabilities will enable customers to find answers, distill knowledge, and spark ideas faster.

Why it matters: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to efficiently do their jobs, according to Gartner. This, paired with an increasing number of tools and ways to exchange ideas, adds to workers’ cognitive load and makes it difficult to catch up quickly and feel on top of the work day. AI holds enormous potential to make internal knowledge more contextual, relevant, and easier to find and prioritize.

Innovation in action: Starting today, Slack AI’s search and summarization capabilities can help customers easily find and consume large volumes of information quickly. These features are trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Users initiate them through guided, contextual interactions, ensuring they don’t have to learn brand new skills to enjoy the benefits. And each output is secure, cited, and personalized to the user. With Slack AI, customers can access:

  • AI-powered search that delivers personalized, intelligent responses to any question: Users can ask a question conversationally and get a concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. Users can find what they need faster, whether they want to learn about a new marketing campaign, get up to speed on company policies, glean insights about past decisions from historical context, or define unfamiliar acronyms.
  • Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels: Users can catch up on unread messages, summarize the last seven days, or set a custom date range to summarize. Users can quickly catch up after time away from work, get up to speed on a new project, or jump in quickly to help resolve time-sensitive issues.
  • Thread summaries that catch users up on long conversations: Users can get the gist of a long conversation in one click, and clear sources are included in each summary, allowing users to dive deeper into a highlight. Users can instantly summarize key decisions and next steps from a thread with a lot of back and forth, get up to speed on a customer support ticket, or catch up on a team stand-up to get a bird’s eye view of priorities.

Sales spotlight: Sales teams are under pressure to streamline their operations and maximize team effectiveness. With Slack AI, sales reps can:

  • Easily identify and bring in the right subject matter expert when a customer has a specific question or concern during a deal cycle.
  • Summarize an account channel and get the context they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively.
  • Generate key takeaways from a long discussion about deal progress to help keep the team on track.

Engineering spotlight: The incident management process can be time-consuming and complex. With Slack AI, engineering teams can:

  • Find answers in past incident channels to uncover potential solutions and apply learnings.
  • Get the right information they need so they can quickly get situated and jump in to help find a resolution.
  • Recap an incident channel and use it as a starting point to draft a root-cause analysis faster.

Slack’s trusted and secure AI experience: Trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and Slack is committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically. 

  • Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect.
  • Slack AI’s large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organization’s use. Customer data remains siloed and will not be used to serve other clients, directly or indirectly.
  • Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

The future of native generative AI in Slack: More features that help users summarize and prioritize information are on the horizon. Soon, Slack AI will create digests summarizing key highlights from channels that users want to stay informed on but may not require immediate attention, enabling them to stay up to speed on what they could otherwise miss while focusing on their top priorities. Additionally, Slack is building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, that will provide answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

These new search and summarization features are just the beginning of how Slack will enable people to work smarter and faster. In the future, Slack will be the command center for work and the conversational interface for generative AI.

Slack’s AI-ready platform: In addition to these native AI capabilities, partners are bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps. Available today, upgraded AI-powered apps from Slack’s partner ecosystem allow users to ask PagerDuty Copilot for help resolving incidents, automatically summarize Notion documents in link previews, and more. And coming soon, a brand new AI integration with Perplexity will allow users to subscribe to AI-powered insights and pipe them into Slack.

Pricing and availability:

  • Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans.
  • Slack AI is available now in U.S. and UK English only.
  • Additional Slack plans and language support are coming soon.
  • AI-powered partner apps are available now in the Slack App Directory.

Learn more:

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Appdome Revolutionizes Geo Compliance for Mobile Brands

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 14, 2024 by itnerd

Appdome today unveiled its new Geo Compliance feature set, allowing mobile brands to trust the user’s location and detect location spoofing, fake GPS apps, VPN use, SIM swaps and other methods used to circumvent geo restrictions in mobile applications. Mobile brands already use Appdome to simplify and accelerate delivery of mobile app security, anti-fraud, anti-bot and other defenses in Android & iOS apps. Now, mobile brands can combine Appdome’s new, no-code, no-SDK, Geo Compliance features with any other mobile app defense features on its unified mobile app defense platform. 

Mobile application commerce continues to rise rapidly. The geo-location integrity of the mobile end user and transaction data is critical. In many cases, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) policies, regulations like business licensing, advertising restrictions, consumer safety and privacy all rely on valid geographic data and restrictions in mobile apps. On top of that, mobile brands need a greater array of signals to detect fraud. They also need to ensure malicious users are not faking their mobile location to bypass geo restrictions or obtain access to offer inventory and services outside of an approved geography. Putting the quality of the user experience center stage, these same brands need geo compliance to validate user identities in mobile applications, including in P2P and social-based mobile applications.

Legacy geo compliance, mobile app security, and anti-fraud products are point products, providing narrow detection and defense coverage. Using more than one of these point products in the same mobile app requires complex app-level code changes to overcome compatibility challenges and resolve in-app conflicts from overlapping feature sets. These challenges don’t exist when using Appdome, as all detection and defenses options including the new Geo Compliance features, come fully interoperable with all other 300+ Appdome defenses out-of-the-box. 

With Appdome’s Geo-Compliance Service, mobile brands can detect:

  • Fake Location: Combat the growing threat of location spoofing, using a method to manipulate or falsify of the geographical location transmitted by a mobile device.
  • Fake GPS Apps: Detected Fake GPS Apps, used by mobile end users as a location service provider, when your mobile app is in use. 
  • VPN In Use: Advanced techniques to detect attempts to bypass geographical restrictions using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). 
  • SIM Swaps: Robust SIM swap detection, alerting brands to SIM card or eSIM changes, when other location variables remain unchanged. 
  • Random Locations: Identifies mismatches in location telemetry from on-device settings or components, including manual overrides to on-device location services.
  • Teleportation: Improbable location changes within timeframes.
  • Banned Locations: Detect when an app trying to be used in a country/region where the mobile brand does not allow use.
  • Other Geo-Compliance features: several other geo-compliance features provide data and control to mobile brands with location-based services, offers and promotions.

The new Geo Compliance features can be combined with any of the 300+ mobile app defenses in mobile app security, anti-malware, anti-fraud, MOBILEBot™ Defense, anti-cheat, MiTM attack prevention, code obfuscation, and more in Android and iOS apps. All features are fully automated and built on-demand in the language of the mobile app by the Appdome platform, inside the mobile DevOps and CI/CD pipeline.

For more information on Appdome’s Geo-Compliance feature set, visit https://www.appdome.com/geo-compliance.

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Review: HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 Mouse

Posted in Products with tags on February 14, 2024 by itnerd

When you’re serious about pwning n00bs in whatever game you play, skill only gets you so far. Because if you’re playing with the average mouse, that will be the difference between winning and losing. That’s where a mouse like the HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 comes in. This is a very lightweight gaming mouse that has a maximum polling rate of 8000Hz. Meaning that if you sense that someone is behind you, this mouse will allow you to quickly spin around and pick them off before they can pick you off.

Let’s have a look at the mouse:

From the top, it looks like every other mouse out there. But the tell tale RGB lighting is present, which tips you off that this is a gamer focused mouse. But there’s another thing that will make it clear that this mouse is focused on gaming:

You can add rubber grips to the buttons….

…. and the sides to make sure that your fingers don’t slip at a critical moment. Speaking of buttons, you get four plus the scroll wheel. You can program all of the buttons on this mouse using the HyperX NGENUITY Software (and I should mention that you can customize the RGB light as well using this software), but you can’t reprogram the scroll up/down inputs, and the left- and right-click button functions can only be switched. Not a deal breaker, but some of the competition allow you that level of customization. One big plus is the cable. It’s made out of paracord material and I had no issues with it snagging on anything. Why is that important? It’s important because it’s distracting and that might get you pwned.

I tested this first with Call of Duty Warzone, then with Team Fortress 2. Long story short, this mouse works well. It’s light which means that it won’t tire your hands, and it is very precise. I was able to precisely get headshots in Team Fortress 2 much easier with this mouse versus the mouse that I usually use. All the buttons are very tactile which takes away that moment of “did I click the button” that one might have in an intense gaming session. Finally, the rubber grips are something that you should try, especially if you have sweaty hands as it simply makes gaming better.

The only real downside to this mouse is that left handed people need not look at this mouse. That’s not unusual for mice, but it would be nice to see a gaming mouse that can be used by anyone. Having said that, I’d recommend this mouse if pwnage matters above all else. The HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 is $80 CDN and worth it as far as I am concerned.

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Living Security Unveils Technology Alliance Program 

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 14, 2024 by itnerd

Living Security, the global leader in Human Risk Management (HRM), announces the formation of its Technology Alliance Program (TAP), enabling dozens of the most utilized cybersecurity tools to deliver additional visibility and value through seamless integration and interoperability with the Living Security Unify Human Risk Management platform.

As cyber threats continue to target vulnerable members of the workforce and evolve in sophistication, collaboration among security tools becomes paramount in fortifying defenses. Living Security’s Technology Alliance Program bridges this gap by fostering integrations with a diverse array of industry-leading platforms, including but not limited to Microsoft Azure, Proofpoint, Sailpoint, Okta, Mimecast, Netskope, ZScaler, Crowdstrike, Microsoft Defender, Rapid7, VMWare Carbon Black, Sophos, Abnormal, Cofense, KnowBe4, Proofpoint, and Workday.

The key to effective Human Risk Management lies in understanding human behavior. Through simple API integrations facilitated by the Technology Alliance Program, Living Security can harness valuable behavioral insights from various sources such as email, web, IAM, SIEM, Endpoint, Device, DLP, and HR platforms. This enables organizations to identify human risk, protect employees, and foster positive behavior change.

The integrations facilitated by the Technology Alliance Program encompass various aspects of cybersecurity including:

  • Authentication, Access, and Activity: Analyzing authentication patterns, access attempts, and user activity to enable proactive risk mitigation strategies.
  • Data Security and Privacy: Facilitating proactive risk mitigation strategies by analyzing user behavior and context to safeguard sensitive information and ensure compliance.
  • Endpoint Security: Providing real-time insights into device activity, configurations, and vulnerabilities through seamless integration with endpoint security platforms.
  • Phishing and Email Security: Building a comprehensive Human Risk Index by incorporating phishing and email security data to track key behaviors and mitigate risks effectively.
  • Training: Leveraging training events to determine the effectiveness of security awareness and compliance training programs.

Living Security’s Technology Alliance Program exemplifies the company’s commitment to innovation and collaboration in the cybersecurity landscape. By fostering integrations with a diverse array of industry-leading technologies, Living Security empowers organizations to bolster their cybersecurity posture and mitigate human-related risks effectively.

For more information about Living Security’s Technology Alliance Program and its integrations, visit https://www.livingsecurity.com/technology-alliance-program.

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