Posts by Tom Smith
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Helping Developers, Engineers & Architects Simplify Tech | AI Content Strategist...
Posts by Tom Smith
Changing a mainframe is slow for a reason. One middleware upgrade can touch dozens of applications. And the knowledge of how everything connects often lives in the heads of a few senior engineers, many of whom are close to retirement.
IBM is going a...
Europe and Asia want AI they control. Governments and enterprises are pushing for models and infrastructure that run locally, under local rules. But putting GPUs in-country doesn't answer the harder question: who controls what happens to the data, th...
Setting up an enterprise application is slow work, and much of it gets repeated. Teams work out which settings depend on which, put the steps in the right order, test the result, and then do it all again for the next customer. The knowledge sits i...
Three threads defined this week. Security researchers — now routinely assisted by AI — found critical bugs faster than maintainers could coordinate patches. Agentic AI standards solidified in meaningful ways, with the Agentic AI Foundation adding fou...
The Agentic AI Foundation AAIF launched in December 2025 with three projects: the Model Context Protocol MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md. Less than a year later, it hosts 10.
On October 22, at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose, AAIF added four m...
Most security talk about AI coding agents focuses on the model. Will it run a bad command? Can a poisoned README trick it? New research from HiddenLayer looks somewhere else: the plumbing between the agent and the model.
In a report released today, ...
A financial crime group active since 2012 just showed developers what their everyday agent stack looks like in the wrong hands.
New research from Straiker shows how CyberCartel built a multi-agent attack system called CARLIY0S and aimed it at more ...
PHP shipped emergency patches on October 21 for two critical flaws now known as PHP2Shell. Both are rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0. Both can let an unauthenticated attacker run code on your server.
The fixes are in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. ...
Valerie Crafton has spent more than 20 years on the owner side of hyperscale data center construction. As Chief Revenue Officer at Mod42, she's now asking a question the industry has largely avoided: why are we still building data centers the same w...
A week defined by two big ideas running in parallel: AI agents are breaking the infrastructure underneath them, and the security surface around developer workflows keeps growing. Both threads showed up in force. Here's what mattered.
Anthropic hit ...
In June, at Info-Tech LIVE in Las Vegas, I sat in a media roundtable with Infotech CEO Tom Zehren and founder Joel McLean while they talked about where the research and advisory industry was headed. One observation from the room that morning stuck wi...
A lighter week on the conference calendar, but a solid set of stories — agent infrastructure, open source governance, and two developer conversations worth your time. Here's what mattered.
Coding agents broke Git's scaling math. GitHub is rebuildin...
Ask an IT leader how many AI agents are running in their company and you'll usually get a pause. Ask which of those agents can delete data and the pause gets longer.
That's not negligence. Agents don't arrive through one front door. A team turns on ...
Ericsson Software Technology had a fork problem. Like a lot of large engineering organizations, it kept private copies of open source projects, patched them in-house and carried those patches forward release after release. Then the EU Cyber Resilienc...
A lighter week by volume — but the three security stories that did land are worth understanding carefully. Here's what mattered.
A crafted package name was enough to reach an AI agent's AWS credentials
BeyondTrust's Phantom Labs researcher Sergio ...
Most enterprise AI programs are stuck. Not because the models are bad, but because the underlying infrastructure can't keep up. Costs are climbing, productivity gains are flat, and organizations are locking down access rather than expanding it becaus...
Every developer knows the feeling. A task slips from Monday to Wednesday. Another one that was due Friday lands the following Tuesday. Nobody panics. The team says it'll catch up.
Dr. Atif Ansar says that's exactly how billion-dollar data center pro...
Data center operators have a new answer when communities push back on water use. Switch to a closed-loop system, fill it once, and the facility uses about as much water as a fast-food restaurant.
That answer is true. It's also incomplete.
"I remind...
A week where the same lesson kept showing up in different forms: the credentials your AI coding tools hold are the real attack surface, and most teams still can't answer the basic question of how many there are. Here's what mattered.
Z.ai was packa...
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