Billy Hurley

New York

Reporter at IT Brew

Reporter at Morning Brew

Reporter @ITBrew/@MorningBrew, All-Time Leader of the 6-Like Tweet

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Articles

How LastPass preps for the next audio deepfaker

1 week ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

A classic gift card scam has been getting an AI-powered audio remix. In April 2024, a phisher replicated the voice of LastPass CEO Karim Toubba. The identity management firm detailed in a blog post the experience of an employee who received calls, texts, and a WhatsApp audio deepfake voicemail from the impersonated executive. Toubba and Alex Cox, LastPass’s director of threat intelligence, shared how the company is trying to put the new threat on mute, one year on.
How curious veteran coders keep up (and reinvent themselves) with AI

1 week ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Back in the ’90s, Rob Brown, 48, now director of foundation engineering at employee-experience platform Workleap, wasn’t bagging groceries. He was coding them. The teenage software engineer in training was working part-time for a supermarket in Ontario, Canada, when he created an inventory management system. Brown used a programming language called Turing, a general-purpose language developed in 1982, to bring his “little pet project” to life.
How to prevent software bugs from ruining your weekend

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Decades ago, when Mathew Thomaswas a young programmer for a pager company, he learned a valuable lesson that many veteran coders have likely learned, too:If the weekend is almost here, don’t touch anything.
How semiconductor manufacturers prepare for supply problems

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

A semiconductor is a silicon wafer with deposited metals that form electrical circuits enabling computation in all our devices. They can be the size of a fingernail, but there’s nothing simple about these tiny components powering today’s electronics. Creating one is a difficult, monthslong process requiring etching a polishing of the silicon piece, Guttorm Aase, partner at McKinsey & Company, told us. “You also need hundreds of materials that are part of this process,” Aase said.
Will Microsoft’s new screen-capture block be enough to thwart Microsoft’s Windows Recall feature?

2 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Everything on the video call—PowerPoint slides, passwords, and that new haircut included—is about to get a little more protection. Microsoft announced in a recent “roadmap” update that it will deploy a “prevent screen capture feature” in its Teams communication platform. When a user attempts to take a screenshot, the post says, a proposed mechanism, set for rollout in July, will go Sopranos finale and abruptly turn a meeting window to black.
Why companies have high hopes with low code

3 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

There was a time at Veterans Affairs when processes called for more paper than code, but times, and applications, have changed. The Memorial Benefits Management System (MBMS), a web-based app deployed in 2019, for example, supports families and veterans with burial benefits. The task had once required manual data inputs and paper-intensive records, according to Veterans Affairs’ Jacqui Nissen, an acting director for low code/no code in its digital transformation center.
How to instruct an OpenAI LLM, according to a person who trained it

3 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

You thought training your puppy to not eat your socks was hard. Michelle Pokrass, post-training lead at OpenAI, has the challenge of fine-tuning the reward mechanisms that steer the company’s large language models (LLMs) to the most desirable answers. OpenAI’s latest model GPT-4.1 has features especially geared to help programmers, to ensure they’re getting helpful, usable code, and not half-eaten socks. The AI lab announced on May 14 that GPT-4.1 would be incorporated into paid tiers of ChatGPT.
An OpenAI trainer explains how coders can use the LLM

3 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Billy Hurley

1 hour agoAmazon is known for its amazing customer experience, despite most customers never talking to an Amazon employee. How does this digital experience—with no human interaction—drive so much loyalty? The short answer is confidence. There is very little that goes wrong with an Amazon experience, and if …
A checklist for when a laptop goes missing

3 weeks ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Decades before Rob Hughes became CISO at RSA Security, he led tech-support at a small marketing-services software company—and got an early crash course in incident response. “Someone came in and grabbed a bunch of laptops and just ran out of the building,” Hughes said. These days, employees are likely the ones taking their laptops out of the building, if they even come into the office at all.
Enterprise software companies feeling AI’s ‘big squeeze’

1 month ago | itbrew.com | Billy Hurley

Is it hot in here, or is it just the tightening grip of an emerging technology that might make us all irrelevant? A report from global consulting firm AlixPartners says a “big squeeze” from two sides—new AI entrants and tech giants ready and resourced to buy AI—is threatening the survival of midsize enterprise software companies.