I said so

Between 2023 and today
I put my neck out seven times.

These are pieces I wrote when the conclusions were not yet obvious. Some came true. Others I have been flagging for three years and nobody has done anything. I am listing both, because publishing only the ones I got right would be picking my own cards.

It happened
September 2023
“Blockchain is overrated: a distributed, encrypted database delivers nearly the same outcomes, and the word itself mainly serves to attract investment.”

ThenThe NFT market evaporated and most corporate blockchain projects were quietly shelved.

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June 2023
“Artists should encrypt their own work to stop AI systems harvesting it. Only then will anyone be forced to ask permission.”

ThenEight months later I took the same argument to Il Sole 24 Ore. Since then copyright against model training has become one of the largest disputes in technology, and protecting content from scraping a requirement the market asks for.

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May 2023
“We will need a way to certify whether a work was made by a person or by a machine.”

ThenTransparency obligations for generated content and provenance standards entered the European regulatory agenda.

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August 2023
“Security is not a technical detail to delegate to the IT department: it is the leadership that has to answer for it.”

ThenNIS2 and DORA turned that recommendation into an obligation, with responsibility falling personally on whoever runs the organisation.

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Still open
June 2023
“There is no sense in requiring multi-factor authentication if account recovery then runs through another mailbox.”

Three years onIt is still the case almost everywhere. A lock on the front door and the back window left open: it remains the most widespread and least discussed weakness in authentication.

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June 2023
“A service should be able to verify whether an address has multi-factor authentication enabled before accepting it.”

Never builtIt remains an open idea, and one to handle carefully: knowing how well protected someone else's account is is itself information open to abuse.

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July 2023
“Digital security should be taught in schools the way we teach children to look both ways before crossing the road.”

Not yetIt is not a subject in any national curriculum, while the age of the first device keeps falling.

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