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AI Regulation – not so new?

Looking at discussions of Regulating Artificial Intelligence it struck me that a lot isn’t new, and a lot isn’t specific to AI. Jisc already has a slightly formal Pathway document to help you identify issues with activities that might involve AI. But here are some topics that seem to often come up in those discussions. […]

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Law of the (AI) Horse?

When the Internet first came to legislators’ notice, there was a tendency to propose all-encompassing “laws of internet” for this apparently new domain. A celebrated paper by Frank Easterbrook argued that (my summary) there wasn’t a separate body of new harms to address and that existing laws might well prove sufficiently flexible to deal with […]

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EU AI Act: scope of “education”

The European legislative process on Artificial Intelligence has moved on one step with the Council of Ministers (representatives of national governments) agreeing on their response to the text proposed by the European Commission last year. The main focus of the proposed law is makers of products that use “AI”: where these are designed for a […]

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Machine Learning for Marking Support

One promising application of Machine Learning in education is marking support. Colleagues in Jisc’s National Centre for AI have identified several products that implement a similar process, where a program “watches” a human marking assessments, learns in real time, and suggests how the quality and consistency of marking can be maintained or even improved. This […]

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Thinking about automation: DDoS protection

One of the major causes of disruption on the Internet is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Unlike “hacking”, these don’t require there to be any security weakness in the target system: they simply aim to overload it with more traffic than it (or its network connection) can handle. Often such attacks are launched from […]

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Thinking about automation: Malware Detection

Sophos have recently released a tool that uses Machine Learning to propose simple rules that can be used to identify malware. The output from YaraML has many potential uses, but here I’m considering it as an example of how automation might help end devices identify hostile files in storage (a use-case described by Sophos) and […]

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Thinking about automation: network debugging

I’m hoping my generic model of a security automat (Levers, Data, Malice, Controls, Signals) will help me think about how tools can contribute to network security and operations. It produces the ideas I’d expect when applied to areas that I already know about, but the acid test is what happens when I use it to […]

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Automation: Two ways

Earlier in the year, Networkshop included a presentation on Juniper’s Mist AI system for managing wifi networks. I was going to look at it – as an application I don’t know – as a test for my model for thinking about network/security automation. That may still happen, but first it has taken me down an […]

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The future of automated incident response

My post about automating incident response prompted a fascinating chat with a long-standing friend-colleague who knows far more about Incident Response technology than I ever did. With many thanks to Aaron Kaplan (AK), here’s a summary of our discussion… Developments in automated defence AK: Using Machine Learning (“AI”) in cyber-defence will be a gradual journey. […]

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Does the AI Act allow automated network defence?

In response to my posts about the relevance of the draft EU AI Act to automated network management one concern was raised: would falling within scope of this law slow down our response to attacks? From the text of the Act, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t, so I’m grateful to Lilian Edwards for the […]