Month: July 2024

Image is taken from the presentation of Jonn Lantz, AB Volvo.

Today, we had the Software Center reporting workshop, where we talked about software development and how it will look like in the future. The picture above shows how important the software is in the current truck.

In his keynote, our colleague showed how to design software in the large scale, when the commodity is important, but innovation is what shines out; in the world, where the platforms are important, but do not get the attention that they need.

This kind of approach means that you must be able to grasp both. One must design the software to meet all kinds of features that are relvant today and may be relevant tomorrow. When I see this, I think about ChatGPT, where the platform is the ChatGPT model that allows us to create own GPT-s based on that platform.

This also reminds me about platforms like Ollama or Torch, which allow us to build products fasts and customized to our needs. We can grab models, share them, train them, and (for a small fee) we can even deploy models based on this platform.

So, the blog was out for a while. Turned out that the web server that hosted the website was hacked. You could find it ironic, I find it annoying. Here is why.

First of all, we, as a university, outsource this kind of tech to other actors. It makes no sense to build competence about maintaining web servers locally. Yes, we do have the main website, but we should focus on research, education and outreach. So, we trust the partners that they know what they are doing. Turns out this may not always be the case.

Second, this shows that no one is immune any more. The recent attacks on Primula show that this becomes an increased problem (Inga personuppgifter läckte i hackerattacken (di.se)).

In the work of my team, we try to ensure that these attacks are harder to perform. We create methods and tools that allow to check if the software is secure or not — see this docker container: miroslawstaron/ccsat – Docker Image | Docker Hub. You can use these kind of tools to check if the software that YOU construct is secure, but you can never really be sure about the entire supply chain. Your software may be secure, use MFA and other mechanisms, but if your supplier is vulnerable – not much you can do.

So, with this words of advice – stay safe and keep back-ups!