Digital Daze

These pieces are all from Digital Daze – a blog and beautiful printed magazine, produced by Phable.

Supply chain reaction

The disruption of the past two years has brought supply chain transparency into sharp focus. At the micro level, it has meant customers waiting weeks or months for goods to arrive. Add to this the war in Ukraine, and various industry strikes in a number of European countries, and you’ll see how things aren’t going to get any easier in the short term.

At a macro level, it has resulted in a scarcity of materials, problems in trend and financial forecasting, increasing freight prices and port congestion, and a changing of customer attitudes as they seek out other companies or routes to fulfil their requirements.

Even before the pandemic wreaked havoc, supply chains in every business sector were already hellishly complex – winding through different legal jurisdictions, technical systems, time zones and transport methods.

That complexity makes it difficult to analyse and optimise internal processes, but can also create problems with customer relationships. How can you make confident claims about your ethical and environmental standards if you can’t see the whole supply chain in granular detail?

The solutions may lie in a combination of open-source frameworks, machine learning and the blockchain. Datanomix is a tech company that applies predictive machine learning to manufacturing – providing real-time analytics data on physical processes, and allowing for continuous improvement from first component to finished product.

The Open Apparel Registry is an open-source map and database of global fashion manufacturing facilities – allowing major brands to understand exactly who they are partnering with. This enables them to assess risks with everything from sustainability to workers’ rights.

And Provenance is a social enterprise that uses the blockchain to help businesses prove to its customers exactly where their products have come from. This verified evidence can be pushed straight into marketing communications to bolster a brand’s reputation for sustainability.

Global supply chains will remain essential and fragile – new tech solutions can help make them a little more resilient and transparent.

Hackers for hire

Cybersecurity is a constant headache for companies of all sizes. Enterprises of all sizes are vulnerable to hacking – whether by state-sponsored actors, commercially driven criminal organisations, or some kid in a basement with too much time on their hands.

Intrusions can take a variety of guises, with ransomware proving particularly brutal in recent years. The Verizon Business 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report estimates that ransomware attacks have risen more in the last year than in the previous five.

Along with the range of technical precautions and behaviour change that IT teams are already deploying, there’s a human-powered approach: hackers-for-hire. There’s been a boom in tech companies providing ethical (or ‘whitehat’) hacking expertise to help enterprises understand their vulnerabilities.

HackerOne has a client list including Uber, Spotify, Twitter and Goldman Sachs. Their ‘hacker-powered security platform’ puts companies in contact with the world’s leading security experts, penetration testers and cybersecurity researchers. They coordinate bug bounty programmes – where hackers are offered rewards for finding vulnerabilities and flagging them with the company concerned, rather than hawking them on the dark web.

Alongside its technical security solutions (application scanning and surface monitoring), Detectify provides crowdsourced expertise from its global community of ethical hackers. Each time one of their whitehats finds a vulnerability, Detectify builds it into their automated scanner and makes it available to their clients.

Bugcrowd takes a similar approach. Clients define the attack surface they want to check – such as a web application front end, or a mobile or IoT platform. Bugcrowd can then push it out to the research community, or to a limited set of experts. The hackers set to work with their digital pickaxes, and share whatever chinks they find in the company armour.

When malicious hackers are the biggest threat to your business, it helps to have your own code warriors onside. As Bugcrowd founder Casey Ellis puts it: “Cybersecurity isn’t a technology problem — it’s a human one — and to compete against an army of adversaries we need an army of allies.”

Quantum leaping

The future of computing is quantum. Where classical computers convert information into ones and zeroes, quantum computers can process it as either or both. These qubits are capable of running multidimensional quantum algorithms which can tackle super-complex problems..

But while the theory is sound, quantum computing has yet to truly make the leap into real-world applications. One of the challenges is the cost of experimentation – building, adapting and maintaining the hardware to test out new ideas. Amazon Braket is attempting to make this easier, by providing cloud access to different types of quantum computers and circuit simulators to speed up research.

Another big hurdle with quantum computing has been error correction. To minimise errors in calculations, the computers need to be kept in precision-controlled, laboratory conditions – which is impractical in the longer term. Riverlane has partnered with Rigetti to tackle exactly this problem. Riverlane’s Deltaflow.OS aims to be compatible with any quantum hardware.

And Australia’s Silicon Quantum Computing achieved a major breakthrough in June 2022 by creating the world’s first quantum computer circuit – containing all of the components found in a traditional microchip, but at quantum scale. The company had already built the world’s first quantum transistor in 2012, so they’ll following the same path that led to the first classical computers.

Quantum computing is stepping out of the lab, and could be landing in your industry sooner than you think.