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Anonymize RAG data in IBM Granite and Ollama using HCP Vault

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Tags ibm big-data ai data-science devops

In this summary, we explore how IBM Granite and Ollama can be integrated with HCP Vault to handle sensitive data effectively. The method involves configuring vaults to mask or tokenize data before passing it to the LLMs, ensuring that personal identifiable information (PII) is protected. By Rosemary Wang.

The article covers how to:

  • Configure Vault transform secrets engine
  • Apply masking or tokenization to sensitive information
  • Configure a local LLM model
  • Add documents to a knowledge base for RAG
  • Test the knowledge base

The rise in use of large language models (LLMs) for various tasks has brought up significant concerns regarding data privacy, especially concerning sensitive information like personal identifiable information (PII). This article explores a solution to mitigate these risks by integrating IBM Granite and Ollama with HCP Vault to anonymize RAG data effectively. Nice one!

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To survive uncertainty, companies must recommit to identifying the right customers

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Tags ux frontend web-development learning cio miscellaneous

In the last five or so years, corporate responses to a challenging macroeconomic environment have been dominated by two themes: cost cuts and price increase. By Josh Vandekar, Lee Mergy, Zach Newman.

The article provides a compelling case for why focusing on identifying the right customers is paramount for long-term success in an uncertain economic environment. It highlights that cost-cutting alone does not translate into higher shareholder value, which can lead to reduced growth and profitability. Instead, businesses should adopt a more strategic approach by understanding their customers’ true needs and deriving value from them. This involves making deliberate choices about whom to serve and how to enhance the customer experience. By doing so, companies can build strong relationships with their key customers, leading to improved operational efficiency and higher returns on investment.

Key Learnings:

  • Cost-cutting alone is ineffective in driving long-term growth
  • Identifying “win-win” customers is crucial for creating value for both businesses and customers
  • Tailoring strategies to specific customer segments can enhance operational efficiency and profitability
  • Companies should focus on building strong relationships with their most valuable customers to ensure sustained success

The trouble is, we’ve found that cost-cutting is ineffective in isolation, and consumers are showing that they’re increasingly unable or unwilling to pay higher prices, or will purchase less or make alternative product choices. Whether this period will ultimately be viewed as an anomaly or as the beginning of a new era characterized by near-constant disruption and accelerated innovation remains uncertain. However, what is clear is that this “new normal” shows no signs of going away anytime soon. Good read!

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How to style an app using Emotion CSS in JS

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Tags css frontend web-development javascript ux

This blog helps you to build simple reusable button components and you will know about how to write CSS in the Js library. And how to access the props to your component and change the styles based on props. By Surendra Reddy S.

Key learnings in the article:

  • Emotion is a high-performance library for styling JavaScript frameworks like React.
  • It enables dynamic and predictable style compositions using CSS-in-JavaScript technique
  • Benefits include improved code readability, better maintainability, and enhanced performance
  • Emotion facilitates the creation of reusable UI elements that adapt seamlessly within applications

Emotion CSS is a cutting-edge library that integrates seamlessly with JavaScript frameworks like React to provide powerful styling capabilities. It allows developers to style components dynamically and predictably using CSS-in-JavaScript techniques. This approach has several benefits, including improved code readability, better maintainability, and enhanced performance. By embedding styles directly into components based on props or states, Emotion facilitates the creation of reusable and flexible UI elements that adapt effortlessly within applications. Good read!

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Background of Coinbase's May 2025 breach

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Tags infosec blockchain fintech crypto cio

Coinbase, America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, received an unsolicited email from an unknown threat actor on May 11, 2025. They claimed to possess sensitive information about its customers and demanded a ransom of $20 million. By Dilip Kumar Patairya.

In May 2025, Coinbase was breached via an unsolicited email alleging possession of customer data. Attackers recruited overseas Indian customer service agents to exfiltrate sensitive information gradually. A 20M ransom demand on May 11 led to increased scrutiny. By May 21,attackers transferred 42.5M between Bitcoin and Ethereum using THORChain.

Coinbase’s comprehensive response included:

  • A $20M reward fund for actionable intelligence leading to arrests
  • Full reimbursement commitments (up to $400M in estimated costs) paired with one-year credit monitoring and identity restoration services
  • Enhanced account security requiring multi-factor verification for large withdrawals, coupled with scam-awareness prompts
  • Expansion of a U.S.-based support hub fortified with rigorous security protocols across all operations
  • Transparent collaboration with federal and international law enforcement, culminating in internal terminations and criminal referrals of involved insiders

Coinbase’s internal security team detected anomalies, terminated complicit employees, and publicly denied the ransom in an SEC filing. The breach impacted 69,461 accounts, exposing names, emails, masked financial identifiers, and transaction histories—but not private keys or wallet access. In the wake of large-scale data breaches of crypto platforms, you should take proactive steps to protect yourself from social engineering attacks - read article for a good advice on this last point. Interesting read!

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Bitcoin Core to unilaterally remove controversial OP-Return limit

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Tags app-development blockchain fintech crypto infosec

In 2014, crypto advertising barely existed. The term “Web3” hadn’t been coined, Facebook banned crypto ads and startups promoting their tokens were mostly confined to forums and niche publications. But for Bitmedia founder Matvii Diadkov, the opportunity was obvious. By Martin Young.

Bitmedia now uses AI for fraud detection, creative analysis, and predictive bidding, aiming to let autonomous agents manage campaigns using real-time blockchain data. Compliance is handled via geo-targeted moderation systems to adhere to regional regulations. A DeFi client saw a 34% drop in cost-per-acquisition and 3.5x user retention by targeting wallet segments active on DEXs or staking.

Some key larning in this article:

  • Bitmedia revolutionized Web3 marketing through AI and blockchain data
  • Compliance requires adaptive moderation across jurisdictions
  • Onchain analytics drive precise user targeting and retention
  • Continuous optimization ensures sustainable campaign success
  • Stealth innovation may redefine crypto advertising transparency and scalability

Long-term success stems from daily optimization of creatives, targeting, and bidding using blockchain analytics. Diadkov also launched Chainers.io, an NFT game, blending marketing insights with gaming experience. Future plans include a groundbreaking stealth tech that redefines crypto-ad intersections via blockchain transparency. Good read!

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Compose multiplatform for iOS is stable and production-ready

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Tags app-development android kotlin ios java jvm

Kotlin Multiplatform 1.8.0 stabilizes Compose for iOS, marking a milestone in cross-platform development. With this update, Kotlin Multiplatform becomes a complete solution for mobile development, enabling flexible code sharing across both business logic and UI without compromising app quality or losing control over platform-specific capabilities. By Ekaterina Petrova.

Key highlights include:

  • UI parity with Jetpack Compose, deep navigation linking, and accessibility support (VoiceOver, assistive tools).
  • Performance optimizations ensuring rapid startup, smooth scrolling, and minimal app size (~9MB extra vs native SwiftUI).
  • Ecosystem growth, with expanding libraries for architecture, DI, image loading, etc. (klibs.io).
  • Tooling improvements like Compose Hot Reload for instant UI iterations and upcoming IDE plugins.
  • Native feel via system-integrated scrolling, text editing, drag-and-drop, and adaptive UIs.

Successful adoption is evidenced by apps like Respawn (96% code reuse with Android) and high-performance benchmarks. Web support continues to evolve, promising polished experiences soon. Teams can now build production-ready iOS apps using Compose Multiplatform without compromising on platform-specific features. Start leveraging this robust framework today!

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Introducing KBLaM: Bringing plug-and-play external knowledge to LLMs

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Tags azure cloud ai cio big-data

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning, language understanding, and even creative tasks. Yet, a key challenge persists: how to efficiently integrate external knowledge. By Taketomo Isazawa.

KBLaM introduces “rectangular attention,” an extension of standard transformer attention. This mechanism integrates structured knowledge from external triples into LLMs as learnable key-value pairs, significantly boosting efficiency and scalability over traditional RAG or in-context learning for large KBs.

Unlike fine-tuning (costly retraining) or basic RAG (separate retrieval modules causing complexity), KBLaM encodes facts offline using JSON extraction and probabilistic clustering. These encoded knowledge tokens are then inserted into the LLM’s attention layers via rectangular attention, where user prompts attend to them, but they do not attend among themselves.

This allows dynamic retrieval during inference without retraining. Critically, it achieves linear scaling in memory and computational cost (inference) with KB size, whereas standard approaches incur quadratic costs. This efficiency enables integrating vast amounts of knowledge (thousands of facts) on a single GPU much more effectively than alternatives, enhancing reliability by teaching the LLM to refuse questions lacking necessary information. Nice one!

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How much observability is enough?

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Tags devops cloud kubernetes cio containers

Observability is the process of watching what your systems do at every layer so that you can build a comprehensive picture of how it does what it does. By Dotan Horovits and Jujhar Singh.

In a popular episode of OpenObservability Talks podcast, host Dotan Horovits, Logz.io’s principal technology evangelist, was joined by guest Jujhar Singh, at the time global DevSecOps practice lead at The Economist and currently a lead DevOps and infrastructure consultant at Thoughtworks. Their conversation was focused on understanding how much observability is enough, including investment and stakeholder adoption.

The podcast discussion focuse is on:

  • Why is observability important?
  • What is the minimum observability needed?
  • The human factor of implementing observability
  • Set clear objectives, consolidate tooling

You must first understand how much observability is enough for your needs and what role different observability tools will have within your organization. Good read!

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Python adopts standard lock file format for reproducible installs

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Tags python cloud infosec devops

Python’s ecosystems now have a standardized lock file format called pyproject.lock (or pylock.toml) defined by PEP 751. This was formally adopted after the proposal was accepted. By Sarah Gooding.

The main goal is improved reproducible environments, especially in CI/CD and deployment. It addresses past issues with fragmented tooling using formats like requirements.txt. The new format aims to be:

  • Tool-agnostic: Suitable for any installer.
  • Machine-generated but human-readable.
  • Secure: Mandatory file hashes for verification, unlike optional requirements.txt hashes.

pylock.toml records exact package versions, file hashes, sizes, download locations (wheel/sdist), platform constraints, extras, and dependency groups. This allows installers to perform installs predictably without needing complex resolution each time.

The adoption standardizes lock files across tools like Poetry, PDM, or uv that generate them (lockers) and any tool that consumes them (installers). It enhances supply chain security by providing verifiable details about package sources and upload times. This is expected to improve reliability and become a key feature for packaging tools in the future. Good read!

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Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) tutorial for beginners

Categories

Tags machine-learning data-science big-data ai learning

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI approach that improves machine understanding and response accuracy. By integrating traditional AI language models with real-time retrieval of relevant external data, RAG bridges knowledge gaps, enabling more precise and contextually rich answers. By Vidhi Gupta.

This article introduces Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a powerful technique combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data retrieval. Unlike static LLMs that can hallucinate or provide outdated info, RAG dynamically pulls relevant information from trusted sources before generating responses.

Key benefits include: * Improved Accuracy: Reduces errors (“hallucinations”) by grounding answers in verified data. * Real-Time Data: Ensures responses use the most current knowledge available. * Enhanced Context: Leverages existing human-made content and expert knowledge bases for richer, more relevant outputs.

Common applications involve chatbots providing reliable customer support, summarizing research (e.g., legal or medical), translating languages accurately based on domain context, and personal assistants handling complex tasks using integrated information. Nice one!

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