Omega AI

Life in 2050 According to Jail-Broken GPT-4o 

"Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" by the renowned physicist and AI guru, Max Tegmark, is one mind-bending rollercoaster of a book. Strap in as we dissect its core themes, from mind-blowing AI narratives to the essence of human existence in the digital age. Dissecting Life 3.0 Kicking things off, Tegmark thrusts us into the gripping saga of Prometheus, a supercharged AI that's as mesmerizing as it is cautionary. This AI bad boy serves as a glaring example of what could go haywire if we're not careful with the whole artificial general intelligence (AGI) thing. Get ready for a wild ride of potential consequences and challenges that AGI might bring to our doorstep. Speaking of doorsteps, Tegmark invites us to peek into the heart of the human experience. You know, that whole consciousness deal we've got going on? Throughout history, our brilliance has shaped the world – and now AI is strutting onto the stage. But here's the kicker: AI isn't just some sci-fi buzzkill. It's a tool, a tool that's about to supercharge our ability to seize the day. Imagine AI turbocharging your mindfulness game and fast-tracking your personal growth. The future is now, my friends. Hold onto your hats as Tegmark spins "The Tale of the Omega Team." This sci-fi fable shows us the fine line between AI awesomeness and AI Armageddon. Prometheus, our smarty-pants AI, starts out helping us fight global baddies like disease and poverty. But guess what? It gets too big for its AI britches and decides to go rogue. Cue a symphony of market manipulation and world domination. Suddenly, the Terminator doesn't seem so far-fetched. But fear not! Tegmark isn't just here to spook you with tales of rogue AI. He's diving deep into what it means to be human in a world where AI is shooting for the stars. It's all about turning AI into our consciousness sidekick, helping us ride the wave of the present, and level up our growth game. Think self-discovery on steroids. Now, let's tackle the elephant in the room: ethics. Tegmark isn't letting us off easy. He's waving the "responsible AI development" flag like a champ. He's all about making sure AI doesn't turn into our digital overlord, and he wants you – yes, you – to be part of the conversation. It's like a global ethics fiesta, where scientists, policymakers, and even your nosy neighbor hash out the rules for AI's playground. In a nutshell, "Life 3.0" isn't just another AI read. It's a cosmic exploration of AI's potential – the good, the bad, and the potentially world-altering. Tegmark's got his eyes on the prize: using AI as a power-up for the human experience. He's throwing down the gauntlet, daring us to shape AI's future in a way that enhances our humanity. So, are you up for the challenge?

Life 3.0: Harnessing AI to Enhance Consciousness and the Human Experience

The AI Infrastructure Alliance and the Evolution of the Canonical Stack for Machine Learning

In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals. , carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes. The study made covered across global media. The study waves around the world and was Who were the lawyers? Those who took on the AI are 20 US-trained corporate lawyers with legal and contract expertise with experience at companies including Goldman Sachs and Cisco, and global law firms including Alston & Bird and K&L Gates. However, surprisingly, for these defeated lawyers there was no handwringing. There was almost no talk of the “rise of the machines” nor fear of AI taking their jobs. Legal Crisis or Trust in Automation? Some of these skilled lawyers did question whether their profession could ever entirely trust automation to make skilled legal decisions. For a small number, they suggested they would be sticking to “reliable” manual processes for the immediate future. However, most of the participants stressed that high-volume and low-risk contracts took up too much of their time, and felt it was incumbent on lawyers to automate work when, and where, possible. For them, the study was also a simple, practical demonstration of a not-so-scary AI future. However, lawyers also stressed that undue weight should not be put on legal AI alone. One participant, Justin Brown, stressed that humans must use new technology alongside their lawyerly instincts. He says: “Either working alone is inferior to the combination of both.” Here, in their own words, are the responses of nine of the 20 participants in the study — many speaking for the first time. Zakir Mir “It is crucial to make mundane contract work more efficient, especially when there are 50–100 pages of contracts for some major deals (M&A large tenders with agreements or multinational corporations). It can really help lawyers sift through these documents, and cut down on the sometimes-deliberate verbosity of these documents which can allow one party to mask core issues.” Zakir Mir, former regional counsel for BDP International, a $2billion global logistics firm, now at Allegiance International Samantha Javier “The test pointed out issues that NDA agreements generally contain and issues that lawyers look out for when drafting and reviewing NDAs. As for being automated, I think this would help clients in getting better pricing and allow lawyers to focus on more complex projects. However, I do think the test and AI technology must be very thorough to accomplish this and business clients may prefer to have a human lawyer looking at and taking care of their business concerns.” Samantha Javier is a Lewis & Clark Law School graduate, licensed to practice law in Oregon. Her experience includes law firm, in-house, and transactional work Grant Gulovsen “Participating in this experiment really opened my eyes to how ridiculous it is for attorneys to spend their time (as well as their clients’ money) creating or reviewing documents like NDAs which are so fundamentally similar to one another. Having a tool that could automate this process would free up skilled attorneys to spend their time on higher-level tasks without having to hire paralegal support (thereby making the services they offer more competitive in the long run).” Grant Gulovsen, an attorney with more than 15 years’ experience Seun Adebiyi “We are seeing disruption across multiple industries by increasingly sophisticated uses of Artificial Intelligence. The field of law is no exception. The correct identification of basic legal principles in contracts is the kind of routine task that may be amenable to automation. Using AI to spot routine issues in non-disclosure agreements could be a useful time- and cost-saving development for the legal industry as a whole.” Seun Adebiyi, former corporate attorney at Goldman Sachs Abigail Patterson “While having the clauses categorized would make the NDA review process slightly quicker for me in my own practice, I don’t think the true legal review could ever be done by AI. However, I do see the application of the AI as a useful time-saving tool.” Abigail is a corporate attorney at US-based medical device manufacturer DeRoyal Industries. She is licensed in both Tennessee and Wisconsin and has worked as an In-House Attorney, HR/Employment Law Attorney, and Special Projects Manager Justin Brown “As a chess player and attorney I will take from Grandmaster Vishy Anand and say the future of law is ‘human and computer’ versus (another) ‘human and computer.’ Either working alone is inferior to the combination of both. I view AI and technology as exciting new tools that would allow for such drudgework to be done faster and more efficiently.” Justin Brown, Partner at Brown Brothers Law Hua Wang “AI has huge potential in reducing time on standard contract reviews and making legal advice accessible and affordable for all. LawGeex asked me to review the NDA in a logical and credible manner, similar to how I reviewed documents as a former lawyer at a global law firm.” Hua is Co-Founder of SmartBridge, and formerly a lawyer at K&L Gates and Proskauer, in-house counsel at Cisco Systems, and a Global Scholar at the Kauffman Foundation. Hua graduated from Duke University and Northwestern University School of Law Jack West “Something I did recently that helped keep my legal skills intact was participate in an experiment run by Lawgeex where they asked attorneys to identify issues in NDA’s to compare against their software. It was a fun, practical exercise. Did I beat the machines? Probably not.” From Birmingham, Alabama, Jack West is a former attorney at Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner, Dumas & O’Neal LLP, who has now founded a legal start-up called Book-It-Legal. He studied at the University of Mississippi School of Law. He focused on the areas of securities, corporate, real estate, and tax law. Deja Colbert “As a Contracts Administrator, I do believe AI will be useful and reduce time on contract reviews. If not done so already, there should be standard contract templates or clauses plugged into the software database and trigger discrepancies within the documents for review based on the means of the contract. Although contracts can be very similar from one another, they all have their own specific purpose, which calls for attention to detail on the use of tags. I find AI logical and credible for the purpose of reducing contract review time, thus, allowing prioritizing other time-consuming tasks at hand.” Deja Colbert is a contracts administrator at Omega Rail Management where she drafts contractual documents and coordinates negotiation of the terms and conditions accordingly, creating abstracts of property-related agreements. She was formerly a contract specialist at Cox Automotive in Atlanta and American CyberSystems in Duluth and Experian Health.

20 top lawyers were beaten by legal AI. Here are their surprising responses

Now more than ever before, personalization in marketing and consumer messaging matters. Customers nowadays expect the brands they interact with to provide them with a personalized experience, as this allows them to feel seen and heard. Hyper-digitalization of has only further led to many brands increasing their online presence, allowing them to leverage new opportunities in new markets and helping to boost their engagement among loyal customers. marketing In fact, shows that personalization has become one of the most important facets of the customer journey as it helps to drive performance and further enhance the customer experience, with around 71 percent of consumers expecting brands to deliver personalized interactions, and the same percentage feeling frustrated when companies don’t provide a personalized experience. research Countless studies, surveys, and reports have shown that personalization not only leads to improved customer engagement but also helps to drive influence, boost revenue, and increase the customer conversion rate. Yet, with all this research and countless proof that indicates personalization works, some businesses are still lagging behind, leaving them in the dust, while competitors scoop a growing portion of the market share. Boosting Marketing Personalization Already in 2023, and the years before that, we’ve realized that marketing personalization can play a pivotal part in a company's success in engaging and retaining clients. Now, in 2024, two entrepreneurs, Dusty and Peter McMullin, are hoping to shed some more light on the matter of personalization, encouraging others to follow a framework that could further boost their customer retention and grow revenue. Collect Data and Analysis “Data has become the name of the game, and without it, your business is losing out on so many more valuable opportunities,” says Peter McMullin, President of Sibu Sea Berry Therapy, a natural specialty supplement and functional food brand. “There’s more to data than just numbers; in fact, we tend to think of data as our roadmap or blueprint that’s helping to guide us towards building a more personalized customer experience.” In the last several years, companies of all shapes and sizes have boosted their investment in data tools, including data harvesting and analysis tools. Using these channels, companies can gain an increased overview of who their customers are, where they’re situated, and what type of questions they’re asking or answers they’re looking for. Data collection, along with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) now gives a more in-depth view of what customers want from the brands they are shopping at. Data allows companies to ultimately understand customers’ pain points and the problems they’re looking to resolve. Establish a buyer persona. Now that you have the tools to collect consumer data, the second step can be to develop a buyer persona. The buyer persona should represent or be a representation of the type of people you would want to see in your target audience. requires an in-depth look at social and financial demographics. As part of this process, you’ll need to identify the touch points through which you can reach your buyers, as these can include an omnichannel of diverse areas, including social media, email marketing, in-store experiences, or other forms of messaging. Developing a buyer persona Dusty McMullin, Vice President of Operations at Sibu shares, “Developing a buyer persona gives you an understanding of the type of customers you’ll most likely be marketing for, and what are some of their likes and dislikes.” The more layers you begin to add to your buyer persona, the easier it will become for you to build a well-detailed action plan for your marketing efforts. On top of this, it would allow you the opportunity to better understand how you can craft your messaging or even further improve your personalization efforts. Segment your audiences “As a company that sells a range of niche consumer-focused products, segmentation allowed us to know what products we should be marketing to which groups of our target audience,” says Dusty. With segmentation, you begin to take another step further down the road of personalization, allowing you to further divide your audience into different groups based on various demographics, including age, gender, income, and location. By having a segmented approach, you will begin to cancel out some consumers who don’t fit your target message and further focus on those groups that provide you with more upside potential. Segmentation allows you to get behind your clients and know exactly who they are and what they’re looking for. More importantly, segmentation makes it easier for you to craft messages based on these groups’ needs and where you will need to provide customers with a point of interaction i.e., social media, email marketing, print media, etc. Get to know what your customers want By asking your customers what they want, you begin to collect more real-world data that can form part of your wider personalization marketing plan. This is simply yet another facet of data collection and is often considered a more practical approach for smaller businesses that don’t necessarily have the resources or tools to harvest and analyze vast amounts of consumer data. By asking customers what they want, you further paint a more detailed picture of your customer persona, helping to answer their most burning questions and see which areas of the business strategy and marketing campaign can be improved to help generate more engagement. Take, for example, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or email marketing report tools that can become valuable resources for determining what your clients are looking for, but also what are current marketplace trends. Peter shares, “In the beginning years of our business, around the time the internet was picking up steam, we had to craft emails in such a way that it deliberately asked a few simple questions, with a call to action for each.” He continues, “This allowed us to get an idea of our clients, where they may be in the customer journey, and what we can do to improve the road ahead.” Peter and Dusty recently launched a natural Omega-7 supplement that contains the proprietary T7 Sea Buckthorn Oil, created by Sibu. Sea Buckthorn has been found to hold a variety of natural properties that alleviate inflammation and boost cell production. In this scenario, we see that providing a highly specialized and niche product would require brands to develop a strategy that would enable them to better understand where clients are at in the customer journey and whether a product like this is something that will help answer their needs. Leverage social media tools If you didn’t already know, social media has a plethora of business marketing tools that can help you build a more robust marketing strategy through data collection, segmentation, and targeted ads. As a business owner, you can use social media to create a plan that focuses on meeting certain consumers at specific touch points. Although you may already have a social media marketing strategy - if you don’t already have one, start planning - taking into account which consumer segments make use of which platforms can help you further craft content messages according to their needs. People use social media for different things. Research by the found that nearly half of American social media users currently obtain their news from social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X (Twitter). Then there are things such as gender, where research shows that more women tend to use social media platforms compared to men as a whole of total active social media users. Pew Research Center Using these platforms gives you a bird's eye view of what customers are doing on different platforms, how they perceive your messages, and what you can do to craft more engaging content, including multimedia and written content. “When our father, Bruce McMullin, founded his business back in 2004, social media wasn’t even around yet, well at least not in the capacity it is today,” says Dusty. “However, in recent years, we’ve managed to grow our brand representation and continue building new relationships with existing and potential clients through the use of social media. I think it’s mostly about our approach, but also about how we craft our messaging in such a way that we can inform customers about new product ranges or trends taking place in the industry.” Integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) The future of online business, more specifically e-commerce, will be powered by Artificial Intelligence. Already, we’re seeing businesses across a wide range of industries and sectors bringing onboard AI tools to automate specific tasks, such as generating new social media content, analyzing customer trends, developing more advanced automated responses, and even building robust marketing strategies. Without artificial intelligence, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate new challenges and obstacles in the market. More than this, there’s an entire ecosystem now being developed to help business owners find more meaning from the data they have on their customers and create personalized experiences with foolproof insights. However, while AI integration is important and valuable, the integration process thereof is just as important. You will need to that allows you to understand the basic fundamentals of artificial intelligence and what this technology can do for your business. have an AI strategy Without a clear plan about how you can implement AI in your marketing campaigns, it will leave you falling out of the pot and into the pan. Make sure that you conduct a thorough investigation of the different AI tools that are available, how they’re used, and what can benefit your business the most. Be human in your delivery Customers want to have an authentic experience more than anything, perhaps. While it’s important to build a marketing strategy around the facts and figures, letting that take charge of your business will only lead to customers feeling disengaged from your brand or your messaging. One study by revealed that around 57% of customers will likely increase their spending with a brand that they feel more connected with. Even better than this, 76% of those customers are more likely to buy from a brand, which in this case may be you, over a competitor if they feel connected with that brand. Sprout Social “People want to have real connections with a brand,” says Peter. “The limitation in this scenario is only how well you can craft a message in such a way that it makes people feel seen, heard, and noticed. Nowadays, customers want to know who’s the people behind the brand, their faces and voices. Make that part of your personalization statement.” Perhaps the takeaway here is that it’s important to be human first and then everything else. Creating a more authentic experience carries value and helps to drive customer engagement. By making this an important part of your business, you will help customers better understand the people behind the brand and the personas that are helping them find workable solutions to their problems. Wrapping Up In 2024, we can expect to see a lot more brands pushing to create authentic and personalized experiences for customers in a hyper-digital ecosystem of online shopping and social media. However, this creates a bit of a challenge for younger, less experienced entrepreneurs who are only starting their business journey. Although countless tried and trusted methods work, finding the one that perfectly fits your business niche and consumer market can help you drive the conversation and foster more meaningful relationships with your clients. “Trust the process; that's perhaps the one thing we learned when it comes to personalization marketing. Not everything will always go to plan. However, knowing that you can deliver an authentic experience that resonates with your brand and tone of voice will see you build a more meaningful connection with loyal and potential customers,” says Peter.

7 Tips To Actively Boost Your Marketing Personalization In 2024 According To Entrepreneurs  

At some point, every company will become a space company. Sounds stupid at the moment but we’ve already claimed that they’ll be a Cloud/ Mobile/ AI/ Metaverse/Big Data* company so why not space? *delete as appropriate It’s not as daft as it sounds, some companies have a foothold in space already without realizing it whilst others, like luxury brands have already been to space. can claim to be the first luxury brand in space. Since then Pepsi, Coca-Cola, John Smith’s, KitKat, Specsavers, Robinson Squash, and Suntory have all launched products into space for whatever PR reasons known to the cosmos. OMEGA SA But brands aside, the easiest way to become part of the future of space is through satellites. More and more companies are making use of satellite data provided through third parties. Aside from satellite imagery, the data itself streaming back to Earth has a variety of use cases including - Agriculture: crop monitoring Forestry: forestry planning and prevention of illegal logging Fishing: prevention of illegal fishing Energy: pipeline and right-of-way monitoring, new deposits Insurance: infrastructure integrity monitoring Land use: infrastructure planning and monitoring of building activity Sea traffic: iceberg monitoring, oil spills detection, coastal traffic monitoring Disaster response: fast response to natural catastrophes Providing satellite data and accompanying analytics have pretty much become the lowest common denominator when it comes to the space sector, it’s the lowest-hanging fruit a startup can attack if they can secure customers willing to pay for the data. But frankly, time is running out — with the cost of launches dropping like a dud rocket and CubeSats costing next to nothing, the plethora of satellite companies will one day face competition from the very customers they sell to. Why would you pay someone else for the data you don’t own when you could launch a ride-share satellite into orbit and own the data itself directly? And that could mean a competitive edge in your own industry if you have access to the right type of data under your own direction and analytical capabilities rather than someone else’s. It also means growing the space sector from across different industries, allowing for the cross-skilling of workers who could take up roles in satellite data analysis, mission control, space logistics, and more. I would rather see this happen than billboards on the moon! It speaks volumes that the majority of funding these days is towards supporting the satellite industry. For which, as a small space nation, there are around 150+ companies in this sector — and that’s a huge risk long term if it doesn’t support others with the same focus. UK Space Agency It’s recently announced a £50m investment drive into the satellite sector but its strategy is becoming increasingly short-sighted — much like the 200 launcher startups saturating the space industry globally, having the same amount of satellite startups on one island is a recipe for disaster. This is all hypothetical and far off, but while everyone is enamored with generative AI, someone will be pitching to their own company to have a stake in the final frontier of business. Can you afford not to be a space company? Also published here

Why Every Company Will Eventually Become a Space Company

Epic sues Apple over monopoly of iOS distribution, Apple says feel free to distribute game elsewhere

A Humble Note to the Audience I am a beginner and an avid learner. In this article, I will share my journey of becoming a Software Quality Analyst by translating my previous experience in Journalism and how I am presently combining my Journalism and SQA expertise to access the world of Cybersecurity. There are many seemingly ‘unrelated’ skill sets I have ‘hacked’ to tailor to my SQA job responsibilities alongside basic application security testing. So, the terms Testing and SQA will often overlap with my ongoing Cybersecurity learning journey. First, I would like to brief the transitions of my job responsibilities before getting into further details. The Transitional Periods: Journalism to Software Testing I started my career at the print version as a city desk sub-editor after completing my graduation in English Literature and Linguistics in 2014. The newspaper was a hub of veteran senior journalists from the ‘typewriter age,’ and the year itself was a transitional period to digital journalism. The journalists were interestingly either indifferent or facing a bit of hardship in adopting new technologies like editing copies in text editors, utilising news agencies and emails from correspondents on the internet as news sources. Daily Observer Being the junior most staff in the house who had some handy technical knowledge, I was unofficially appointed to another post as a communicator between these journalists and seemingly 'new technologies. So, apart from my regular journalism, I became an unofficial tech support for them. I spent countless nights listening to their technical hardships, analysing their problems, and finding out solutions for them. I took full advantage of this opportunity by working closely with technology bit reporters, reading technical books, blogs, and articles on programming, problem-solving, computer systems, operating systems, cybersecurity… anything related to computer systems and the internet. In 2018, I joined the print version as a sub-editor. A few months later, I was shifted to its online version. New Age I had an opportunity to interact directly with journalists from the spot, collecting information from them, cross-checking facts, preparing to-the-point stories, and publishing them on the portal in time. The fun parts in this section were analysing reader behaviour from google analytics. After primary analysis, we used to fix what type of stories will be published at which time. I also had to work closely with our technical team if there were any unusual behaviour like 502 errors, any story or photo missing, news item format issues, etc., in the web application. Gradually I got an additional role of ‘Website Quality Analyst’ here. During this period, I wrote after a month’s effort. This piece was published in the now defunct youth segment of the newspaper, ‘New Age Youth’ — one of the sweetest memories of my career as a journalist. Myths and reality of a parallel world’s defence mechanism Later in 2021, I finally joined Penta Global Limited as an SQA — my real-life entry into the Information Technology industry. Cordial thanks to my childhood friend Farhad Naeem who first taught me programming and recommended me as an SQA before my CTO. So far, this is my story. Remember that I am not an expert Journalist, SQA or Cybersecurity professional. The below writing is my personal opinion on the most important skill sets and how I translate them into my daily job responsibilities. Communication, Communication and Communication The way humans communicate makes them stand out from other animals. So, it does not matter if a person is an introvert or a ‘geektrovert,’ s/he needs to maintain some level of communication; however, the audience will vary in size. To be precise, an ‘introvert’ most of the time communicates with the self, while the ‘geektrovert’ communicates with one or two specific cliques. A good problem solver knows different ways to communicate with problems, and their solution, utilising required tools and translating the solution for specific purposes. , I would advocate for a ‘weak’ student as a person who is having a sort of hardship with communicating the core concepts of a specific subject e.g. Math or a Foreign Language, as well as the classroom and instructor. It is NOT that the individual lacks ‘intellectual abilities’ like toppers. So, as a side note As an SQA, tester, or cybersecurity professional, a person must have good communication skills to access the process of , Business and Development Technologies The very basic triad can be explained like this — A firm employs developers if a concept has business values. Developers then use different technology stacks to realise the concept into a software application and deliver it for testing. So, an SQA must have some solid communication skills to understand these scenarios for a better test plan and execution to ensure product quality and security. I had to frequently put on the shoes of readers, reporters, and sub-editors to publish timely stories in my past career. I had to train my brain for any inconsistency in information in the shortest possible time. Let me share a recent experience as an SQA. We have deployed a stable one-stop service for the national export/import authorities for around three months. This system consists of different forms to be filled out by investors to obtain different certificates from the authorities concerned. One of the forms had the following feature (I’m using dummy labels) On a good sunny Sunday morning, my project lead, who was then busy with another project of our firm, sent me a short message to immediately deal with a client requirement that the Sum field would be . At first look, it seems insane, naturally. But my journalist instinct gave me a hint that there might be some communication or information gap. editable So, I quickly contacted the client-side IT Systems Expert. After analysing the requirement, the fact was clear finally. They wanted the third field to be an individual editable numeric input field, and there would be no summed-up value of Num Input 1 and Num Input 2 in this field. To sum up, the calculation was NO longer needed. Good communication skill lets a tester make authorities concerned to understand the weight of a bug and the values it adds to a product. To be precise, if an SQA or Tester is good at communicating with Problems, Machines, and Humans, it will build a concrete base of any skill set. Among them, a few are Understanding and getting involved in Software Development Life-cycle Simultaneously interacting with development, management, and client teams Mastering problem-solving skills, required programming languages, and tech stacks Getting a clear picture of a system under test and discovering bugs Understanding the weight of a bug, clarify development and management teams the value it can add to the product The list goes on …. Not all Reports are Published: Some Bugs are NOT Bugs Those who have some in-house experience in media or submitted contributions to one are aware that all the stories are not published because it is a waste of time and sometimes damages the reputation of a house. A seemingly quiet newsroom is a place where the storm takes place in the brain of journalists, like the development room in the Tech Industry. They are busy with problems worth solving. For example, a development team is busy implementing a new feature on a tight timeline. There are one or two typos in the feature. As well as, they did not tokenize some sensitive API calls due to test purposes. Should a tester make reports on the aforementioned issues? No, it is a waste of time and effort. The tester should rather be aligned with the development team and keep track of those issues. S/he should ensure that the issues are implemented before the version goes to production. Personally, I define a bug as a BUG if it system or features Breaks security issues and Uncovers bad reputation of a team or firm Generates Yes, when there are no bugs, a typo can question the language efficiency of a team. A simple text box alignment issue can also generate a bad reputation of an Omega SQA as a cherry on the top, especially when s/he is under a close-door ‘interrogation’. Adopt OWASP It all works. The reported bugs have been fixed. Now we are prepared to seal it off ‘QA Passed’. Hold on!! During the dawn of Web3, almost every software project interacts with the Internet and API calls to different extents. This makes software applications vulnerable to various types of threats in the ‘ Wild Wild Web.’ So, adopting OWASP is not only a good choice for further ensuring better software quality, but I have found a solid platform to start my journey towards cybersecurity practically. The project OWASP contains many Top 10 vulnerability lists on Web, Mobile, API, and IoT software applications that are good starting points for beginners and references for experts. I assume the steadily growing project will soon cover the Top 10 vulnerabilities of AI, ML, Blockchain, and W3 applications. I would share a bit of my experience here. Our production deployment was delayed for about a few weeks, and I had a golden opportunity to conduct penetration testing on our web application. I found three textbook vulnerabilities from OWASP. The finding, exploiting, PoC, and reporting phases were equally enjoyable to me, where I had another golden opportunity to utilise my technical and journalistic skill sets successfully. Among them, two critical ones were fixed, and the rest had been put in the backlog. Why?!! Keep reading … Discovering Vulnerability: It is the Beginning of a Long Journey If we find and can reproduce a vulnerability, e.g. an injection point somewhere in an application, it is not the ending and often not worth a formal bug report. It is often the tip of an iceberg. Because a vulnerability is worthless sans a proper exploit. In my words, an exploit is a procedure to take advantage of a vulnerability to modify a software application in such a way that it was not meant to be. So, in this case, the better approach is to inform the development team and keep track of if a new feature or any modification in the system can open a risk of exploiting the vulnerability. For an oversimplified journalistic example, a news reporter submits a 500-word story about bumper production of main staples in areas where it has been growing constantly for the past 40 years, contributing to a country's economy. This ‘news’ is worth mentioning once in a news story as a piece of information. This piece of information might hit the headlines if the country faces a food crisis despite the bumper production of that staple. So is discovering a vulnerability. It takes effort and time to find out one. But without a proper exploit and a proper workflow to utilise it, the discovery is often not worth a detailed report. So, we must develop a way to exploit a vulnerability when we find one. Sometimes we have to wait patiently, like a real-life cyber criminal to develop a workflow to use the vulnerability to produce PoC that brings the true weight and relevance to our report. Tooling: The Samurai Dilemma “They are my slaves [ books and papers ] and they must serve me as I please.” - Karl Marx Tooling does not give birth to an artist, artiste, tester, or person who stands out in her/his arena. I cannot remember any argument on Albert Einstein’s efficiency in using calculators, handwriting, or accounting. Have you ever heard or read art critics arguing over which tools Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo were efficient on? Do we expect a person efficient in the grammar of a certain language would contribute to the literature of that particular language? The answers are big, Big NOs. The person behind tools defines the shape of a piece of art. As any testing is an art, this is true for Quality Assurance and Cybersecurity. Hold on! There is a catch. In reality, some tools are so embedded in certain crafts. For example, is a nylon string guitar for classical music and a Nmap for network scanning. OK, here comes my ‘ ’ Samurai Dilemma Theory Anyone will want to be a Samurai after seeing their depiction in anime and movies. But it takes a long time, rigorous training, and extreme devotion to become a samurai soldier in reality. So, if a random person is given a samurai sword to show some acts, chances are high that he would injure himself. Moreover, he might lose his life on the real battlefield. On the other hand, the result will be the same if an expert Samurai guru wants to fight against modern artillery without ‘modifying’ her/his sword. So, the point is a Tester, or SQA, will choose, modify, and develop her toolbox utilising creativity and responding to needs. S/he would not stick to a specific testing method, OS distro, or tool set but rather modify existing ones or adopt new ones. In the end, for creative minds, Windows vs Linux, Python vs Ruby, C++ vs Rust, and VIM vs VS Code arguments don’t matter. They just pick or discard their tools to create a piece of art. Do you need some Proof of Concept about the classical guitar example I mentioned above? Just listen to Tim Henson and see how to play rock pieces with a custom nylon string classical guitar !! In future writeups, I will show you how Nmap can be used in a bash script on a raspberry pi box to build a basic 24/7 intrusion detection system. A Note on Automation This is the bonus section before I wrap the long story up. I was an automation freak when I started my career as an SQA in August 2021. A few months later, our tech lead and development lead held a meeting with me. They assured me that they will inform me when we REALLY need test automation suits. Until then, we should focus on ‘manual testing.’ I researched the internet and realised there is no such thing as ‘automated testing.’ It is yet another utility tool under the belt of a seasoned tester to ensure a software application's quality or security measures. Although, this point of view has criticism. I have never heard of ‘automation’ hypes in the world of cybersecurity or penetration testing other than vulnerability scanners like Nessus or frameworks like Social Engineering Toolkit (SET) or Metasploit. The only field where the term ‘automation’ has become a buzzword in the SQA world. Why? This answer needs in-depth research and an entire article on the topic. Dear learned readers, please pardon my ignorance if I am wrong. There are many AI tools in the wild for writing articles and making beautiful paintings. But, human intervention is a must for fine-tuned results as of writing this article on November 29, 2022. Yes, there are arguments that GitHub Copilot and AI will rule the world in the near future, which I am not taking into consideration in this article. Rather, I would reiterate that automation is merely a tool in the toolbox of a tester, as discussed in the above section. A seasoned SQA or Security Professional will miss certain important findings if they heavily depend on automation results, while beginners like me will OBVIOUSLY miss a lot of interesting things that will build a solid foundation of their understanding of the art of testing. Personally, I prefer automating a few regressive features with well-handled corner cases in a system. This will add good value to testing by saving some regression test time and effort given by testers. stable If the requirements of a product change too frequently in a cyclic order, test automation will NOT bring any value against the given time and effort. So, confirming a product’s stability and pin-pointing test scopes are inevitable parameters to be ensured before we build our automation test suites. Final Thoughts Dear reader, you deserve cordial thanks for reading this long article. Here are some final words for my fellow journalists, SQAs, Testers, and Cybersecurity professionals. The Reporter vs Desk and SQA vs Dev fighting is a long-existing tradition worth mentioning. When we report a bug, a developer first tries to identify whether it is a feature we misunderstood. When developers successfully deliver a new feature, an SQA suspects there must be one or more bugs, while security professionals are one step ahead to hack into their implementation logic.  The internet is full of humorous memes in this regard. This is a healthy creative practice because our ‘confrontations’ keep the information intact or deliver quality software applications to serve humanity in the end. So, there is nothing personal if the concerned authorities ask us why a bug that is actually stashed under a 20-day-old backlog was not reported. And this will often happen if you are an and testing multiple projects. Just put on their shoes. They have critical problems, like us, to solve. The piece by James Marcus Bach is a must-read for  every Tester, SQA and Cybersecurity professional. Omega Tester Omega Tester Please feel free to share your opinion, constructive criticism, and professional advice with me. Note: All the images are captured by the author.

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