Author: Malavika Madgula

In the 21st century, our identity isn’t confined to physical documents like drivers’ licenses and passports. It actually exists as a complex web of digital attributes, including personal data and credentials, scattered across more digital institutions and platforms than we can count. Welcome to the new web – Web3 – where how this very identity is saved, stored, secured, and shared plays a crucial role in ensuring privacy and trust, and reducing fraud. This new web is very different from the web of the old and also demands a new approach to identity. Commercial relationships and data structures will be…

For decades together, browsing the web meant combing through static blue links… However, we’ve come a long, long way since “Ask Jeeves” and even traditional search engines like Firefox, Edge, and Chrome, which defined an entire Internet era. What started as a static bunch of web pages has now evolved into something far more dynamic, and now we’re entering a new frontier of the agentic web. However, don’t confuse them for simply being regular browsers with artificial intelligence-powered (AI) plugins — they’re much, much more than that. Imagine our web browsers being able to actually use websites the way we…

The digital revolution in healthcare has reached our bodies, with wearable technology having made significant progress in sensing biochemical and physiological markers for telehealth and remote patient monitoring They’ve revolutionised personalised healthcare by facilitating a shift from traditional, hospital-centred environments to more decentralised, patient-centric models. Wearable sensors are now collecting real-time physiological data, providing deep analysis, and generating actionable insights for personalised therapy and point-of-care precise diagnostics. In fact, wearable tech devices, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, have become pervasive, ensuring continuous monitoring of vital physiological parameters, including sleep patterns, activity levels, heart rate, and even advanced metrics like…

Could you imagine a data centre sharing space with quarries that store cheeses, wine, and apples? You don’t have to imagine anymore, as it’s already happening. The Dolomites in the Italian Alps are to be home to Intacture, Europe’s very first digital data centre being built deep inside the active underground San Romedio mine. Sitting just outside the city of Trento in the province of Trentino, this mine data centre is a 5MW facility that’ll even support colocation services beginning in 2026. Who knew that nature and cutting-edge technology would meet in such an interesting way? Miracle Beneath The Mountain…

In 2018, Singapore declared its plans for nationwide monitoring by deciding to embed facial recognition cameras in lampposts.. Likewise, Malaysia, around the same time, was readying to partner with China’s Yitu Technology to provide a central database-linked artificial intelligence (AI)-powered facial recognition system to its police. The reason? Using body camera footage to identify citizens in real time. These aren’t isolated examples. There’s a new breed of digital eyes that are keeping watch over citizens around the world. While mass surveillance isn’t a new concept, these AI-powered systems have allowed the governments to keep much more efficient tabs on the…

In the 1995 Sandra Bullock movie The Net, a supposedly secure and safe security program is actually a Trojan horse of sorts, allowing hackers “backdoor access” into business mainframes. It might have sounded high-tech at the time, but backdoor attacks are anything but new…. They were originally developed in the 1960s as troubleshooting tools, but transformed into malicious methods of unauthorised access by the 1980s. As the cybersecurity landscape has rapidly evolved since then, they’ve constantly faced this particularly insidious threat: backdoors. Basically, they’re already existing clandestine entry points that allow hackers to gain unauthorised access to systems by bypassing…

Tangible investments and assets increasingly look like a thing of the past… As our world becomes progressively digital, the conversation is getting noisy, with the concept of ownership is also going through a profound transformation. We’re moving beyond mere physical possession of assets and exploring new ways of ownership, trading, and managing them. For many, the terms ‘digital assets’ conjure images of unique digital items and NFT art collections that have intrigued and enthralled the masses. However, two terms that are cutting through the noise and frequently appearing just about everywhere: NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and RWA (Real World Asset) Tokenization.…

Imagine creating artificial intelligence (AI) for your benefit, only for it to be used to create ransomware that could potentially even destroy your own data. It sounds straight out of a Black Mirror episode, but it’s very much the reality. Recently, cybersecurity firm ESET’s researchers discovered the world’s very first AI-powered ransomware, ‘PromptLock.’ Interestingly, it was created using OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b model and leverages Lua scripts to perform reconnaissance on the local filesystem. It not only sweeps through the target files and exfiltrates selected data, but can also encrypt and possibly destroy it. If that didn’t scare you enough, these Lua…

Do you use different versions of the same password for your 300+ social media, app delivery, and shopping accounts? Have you used password managers to generate and store all login credentials? Or have you used the same nightmare combination that your system auto-generated simply because it checks all boxes and has the least chances of getting hacked? No matter which category you fall into, the way we’ve been using passwords has been broken for a long time. However, that’s finally changing with the advent of passkeys, which are here to replace passwords. Widely considered to be more secure than passwords,…

According to BrightEdge Research, nearly 68% of internet activity begins on search engines, with around 90% of those searches taking place on Google…. This arrangement has held so strong for the last few decades that even a seemingly minor change has convinced some people that the system might be crumbling. We’re talking about the new (artificial intelligence) AI tool that appears atop the results when you perform a Google Search. Despite generating iffy results sometimes, these AI-generated overviews succinctly summarise whatever information you’re looking for – so much so that sometimes you don’t even need to go past them to…