Fearless advice, voice cloning, Nethui and 2 weeks of content
Kia ora koutou IT Professionals Te Pou Hangarau Ngaio members and supporters - and welcome to our weekly digital pānui, sent every Friday except when we have public holidays! I hope you all enjoyed your Easter holiday weekends and the 2 x short work weeks we’ve just had. Which also means I have 2 weeks worth of content to share with you today.
Topic of the week around here has been discussing “Fearless Advice” after we received a question from an NMIT student asking, in the context of the ITP Code of Ethics, what fearless advice means. One of our board members Nathan gathered feedback from members via our latest Tech Chat Tuesday and wrote the collective wisdom up in this blog post. The discussion concluded with a strong emphasis on the responsibility of digital technology professionals to share their expertise and provide guidance in all situations. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this – do you agree with this sentiment?
Technology wise the biggest news this week has been OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) announcing they have invented the technology to generate a convincing clone of anyone’s voice using just 15 seconds of recorded audio! But luckily for all of us they have deemed the breakthrough too risky to release. Stories of cloned voices and even cloned video have appeared in the news recently, like the $25M payment made after a deep fake video call between a company CFO and their team member in Hong Kong. This is scary stuff. Deep fakes erode trust in everything, making truth a moving target - so thanks OpenAI for not releasing the capability yet, but we know it exists so it’s a matter of time before this is mainstream.
Nethui 2024
Our exciting news is IT Professionals is partnering with InternetNZ to bring you Nethui in 2024. In years gone by ITP has held it’s own large format conference ITx. Joining up with InternetNZ to bring a digital technology flavour to Nethui is a fantastic outcome, all of the large form conference benefits while engaging with a wider audience on topics of mutual interest - mis and dis information, AI governance and legislation, cyber security to name a few. I love love love Nethui, it’s always been one of my favourite conferences so am thrilled we will be involved this year.
Save the Date - October 3rd and 4th. More to come on this next week.
One question the ITP team are grappling with is whether to hold ITx awards during Nethui, I have spoken to members and heard folks love the idea with a few changes to make this more accessible and community focused. If you have time please fill in our really short survey on the shape these awards could take. Looking forward to your feedback.
Podcasts are back
I’ve been madly recording podcast episodes with amazing people who have such different roles in the digital technology space. This week we have Lynda who works in Testing and Quality Assurance and loves what she does. I really enjoyed hearing Lynda’s story, why she loves testing in particular, the breadth of opportunity it presents her with every day.
For a wee change, and challenge to myself, I uploaded Lynda’s episode into Fireflies.AI and used the transcript it produced to write a summary blog which you can read here. Google Gemini helped me edit the blog post too.
You can listen to our chat and all of our previous episodes on Spotify and Apple podcasts or directly off our website.
Blogs this week
Peter’s editorial this week is - Griffin on Tech: War of words over hacking heats up - but is it news? - talks about state sponsored hacking, the news that NZ parliamentary computers were hacked in 2021 and which nations are the hacking super powers.
Regional Spotlight Manawatū - we have a new segment where folks from around the motu are writing us all a summary of what is happening in their region. Starting with Manawatu, Steve from ManawaTech has given us some insight into the vibrant growing digital technology space in his region, how ITP and ManawaTech are working together and if you are living there, how you can get involved.
Brendan’s Cartoon this week is on the impact removing the Clean Car subsidy has had on EV sales, and the general drop of EV sales also happening globally. If you missed this news you can read about it here, and this article (behind the paywall) speculates NZ will lose access to EV models. The Cliff.
Substantial AI regulation - EU first off the blocks is one of our guest blogs this week. In light of the OpenAI news on voice cloning the timing of regulation in the EU is perfect. This post is all about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, it outlines what is banned, risk assessments and how these principles can be adopted in other jurisdictions (like here in Aotearoa NZ).
Accessibility remains an afterthought – how NZ’s digital health tools risk excluding people with disabilities is another of our fab guest blogs this week. Accessibility is a theme you will be hearing more about from us in coming months, it’s a really important issue and this blog post describes the barriers created in terms of health care discrimination well. The need to bring accessibility considerations into design thinking not tackled as an after thought once your website or application is built.
A close call for the Linux community as major vulnerability detected - Peter has shone a light on the exposure of a rogue actor building a security backdoor or malware into Linux operating systems. Luckily this was discovered in Beta versions of Fedora Rawhide and Debian but it does rock the notion of security in open source to some extent. The blog contains an in depth explanation of what happened including a visualisation.
Fearless Advice - we have our ITP member sourced post on giving Fearless Advice.
Challenges and Triumphs: a journey in Testing and QA - is an overview of my recent podcast recording with Lynda Irving on how much she loves working in testing and quality assurance.
SFIA Framework for Cyber Security skills
The SFIA foundation have built out their Skills Framework for Cyber Security and mapped it against NIST, NICE and others. As with all SFIA mapped roles these are designed to target where an individual needs to focus their professional development to ensure they can reach their capability and development potential. I do like the more rounded workforce focus they have brought to this group of roles - addressing both specialist and general expertise.
You can use this as a resource today, as ever this is useful for writing position descriptions, measuring capability outcomes, mapping targeted progress and ensuring responsibilities and accountabilities are correctly identified within a Cyber Security team. Here is the link.
Events
Our friends at Enspiral Dev Academy have two really interesting courses coming up
- Practical AI for developers, starting on May 13th is a 7 week course on how to apply AI to your role.
Part-time, and developed by industry experts, you'll explore applying AI assistants and tooling to accelerate your coding, build a range of different AI powered apps, and get up to speed with the state of AI, current advancements and what they mean for you.
- Testing Automation Essentials, which is hands on, part-time with flexible learning, and will leave you ready to tackle modern challenges in Test Automation, API Testing and seamless CI/CD integration.
Fireside Chat with Craig Young - next Wednesday the 10th at 4:30pm Craig will be joining me to discuss so many things. The cost of internet in NZ (it’ high), SME’s uptake of digital technology (it’s low), resilience in our networks post natural disasters, supporting our Future Leaders in Technology as they navigate their careers and more.
You can register here to listen to Criag's Fireside Chat live. I hope you have been following along with these interviews, they are just fantastic. You can watch or listen to recent ones with Paula from WeCreate, Kendra from We Love Cyber and Emily the award winning entrepreneur here.
- In the Manawatū the next ITP meetup is on Thursday 11th for breakfast at 7:30am, details here
- In Ōtautahi Christchurch the next event there is on 18th April (Thursday week) and it’s going to be an exciting event exploring the cutting-edge world of Data and Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLMs)! Free for everyone to attend. Register here.
- Dunedin ITP members are getting together on April 23rd for a meal and drinks.
Register here.
Digital Technology news in brief
Tech Talk - Content Authentication
Inspired by the news from OpenAI I thought it worthy expanding on Deepfakes and the need for Content Authentication.
As deepfakes become more sophisticated, the ability to verify the authenticity of online content becomes paramount. Deepfakes, hyper-realistic AI-generated videos or audio recordings, can be used to spread misinformation, damage reputations, and sow discord. They're scary because they appear so real, making it difficult to distinguish between genuine footage and a fabrication.
This is where content authentication steps in. These are techniques that embed hidden markers or digital fingerprints directly into content, like a microscopic watermark on a painting. Techniques like digital watermarking and cryptographic hashing create a unique identifier for the content. Any alteration to the content, such as those used to create deepfakes, will disrupt this identifier, exposing the manipulation.
The BBC have joined the Content Authenticity Initiative and released their content verify product, their detailed explanation is a good read.
Finally
Sad news, Jack Morgan a founding member of the New Zealand Data Processing and Computer Society (now ITP) who was also an honorary fellow - passed away on 24th March. Our condolences to his whānau, colleagues and friends.
Lots going on for all of us as the year ramps up. To those who are facing uncertainty in their roles - and I know there is a great deal of uncertainty out there - take care of yourselves. Noho ora mai, Vic
