Mary Branscombe

3 weeks ago | cio.com | Mary Branscombe

It can be faster, easier, cheaper, more representative, and more privacy preserving to generate data than to collect it. But done wrong, synthetic data can double down on everything you’re trying to avoid. What’s the way forward to ensure the path of least resistance?

1 month ago | thestack.technology | Mary Branscombe

Built at Netflix, used at Apple, LinkedIn, Meta and Tencent, supported by data processing engines like Spark and Flink and adopted by an increasingly long list of database and data platform vendors from Databricks to Microsoft to Snowflake; the open source Apache Iceberg is a common table format designed for extremely large analytic data sets that lets you mix and match.

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Mary Branscombe

For the last four years, the major browser vendors, web standards creators and other contributors to browser engines have joined together to improve the interoperability of the web, coordinating improvements to inconsistent browser implementations so it’s easier to make websites and apps that work the same way in every browser and on different devices.

Mar 4, 2025 | thestack.technology | Mary Branscombe |Ed Targett

Broadcom warned today that a trio of VMware zero days are being exploited in the wild – and can be used to “escape” from a virtual machine (VM) to the underlying hypervisor itself, with root privileges. Yes, that’s a “yikes.” That's potentially a hacker going from compromising a meagre single VM to your entire VMware private cloud.

Feb 28, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Mary Branscombe

Whether you were building a web site or an application, hosting choices used to be about bandwidth, latency, security and availability (as well as cost), with content delivery networks (CDNs) handling static assets and application delivery networks relying on load balancing for scale. All those things still matter, but there are also many more choices to take into account — from the backend implications of frontend decisions, to where your development environment lives.