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🐘☁️ Our family had trip to the awesome town of Pécs on the long weekend, I booked accommodation via a site well-known in Hungary (szallas.hu). I have used that site before but never created an account; I have been avoiding creating accounts whenever possible, for privacy reasons. When I already booked the accommodation, it turned out that an account would actually be useful, so I created one. I was worried how the account would relate to the booking I made a few days before. I should not have worried. It worked.

I not only saw in my account the booking I made a few days before, I also saw the one I made last year and the year before, etc. I saw ALL my history in the account I just created, reaching back to the covid era. (This was a wow moment similar to the one when I realized that the page google.com/history exists.)

Thinking over the database structure the site may have in the background (i.e. they had to record my e-mail address, had to link it to each of my reservations, etc), this behavior is logical, and I could have expected it. It even made me happy in the given case. Note that I do not mean to bash the given site, and now I assume many sites work similarly.

👉 Looking back, it was mighty stupid of me to believe that not creating an account helps privacy in any way. In this case, it does not. 👉 Going forward, I am going to create an account whenever I can. At least it allows me to set a password, preventing others from creating an account with my e-mail address. My password manager can remember a LOT of unique passwords.

TL;DR: If you enter your e-mail address on a site, your activities can be linked to you, so you have an account, even if you cannot log in. The cloud remembers. ☁️🐘

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-11-01.

Most AI related opinions fall into one of the extremes: either AI enthusiast 🤖🥰 or radical anti-AI 🤖😡. There is truth on both sides, and one can also argue against both:

vs the enthusiast riding the AI hype 🤖🥰:

• 🫤 This is a cool technology that can summarize, create lookalikes or combine existing patterns well, but it is not going to create anything radically new. At best it can create solid, consistent work, but its art is always going to be mediocre as works by combining the past. Don't expect it to find breakthroughs, it does not think 🧠; it is a glorified autocomplete.
• 😶 It is no replacement where you need human touch or empathy. It can behave as if it had feelings, but people will know it does not and will miss the human.
• 👉 While not human, it may forever be vulnerable to e.g. social engineering attacks, as it was built to emulate human behavior.
• 👀 Why put AI everywhere? You may not always want a human looking over your shoulder. The more you consider AI a person, the more you may want privacy from it. Sometimes you don't want a copilot but just want to fly alone.
• 🥸 Consider it an extremely efficient, hard-working employee, whom you did not hire, you cannot motivate, cannot discipline or cannot hold responsible if something goes wrong. While it does what you ask, it may also be secretly pushing some huge megacorporation's agenda.
• ☢️ You can use AI for supplementary tasks, but companies who give up understanding their core business are doomed.

vs the anti-AI Luddite 🤖😡:

• 🎉 You may be skeptical but this technology works! We can accomplish cool things with it we could not even dream of a few years back.
• 🛠️ Yes, there are funny glitches, stupid mistakes and vulnerabilities, but they will be fixed. For those that cannot be fixed (e.g. non-determinism), there will be workarounds.
• 🧠 It may seem to break some of today's processes (e.g. essays at school or peer reviews of scientific papers), but perhaps those processes are wrong. Is it really art if AI can really produce the same quality? Come on, be more creative!
• 🪥 Don't worry about Skynet taking over the world -- because worrying does not help. Even if you turn your back on AI, the toothpaste is already out of the tube, and you cannot make humanity unlearn this technology.
• 🏃 Companies/countries that outright refuse to use AI (or any fancy tech) will fail. Those that consider using it will have more options and will be in a strictly better position and will eventually outcompete the rest. Regulation alone does not solve this; if major countries do not regulate, they will have the advantage.

I use AI, as it is useful and rejecting it does not bring you anywhere. I try to learn how to use it right. Companies riding the AI hype are creating AI systems both good and bad -- as a security guy I will need to secure them. I tend to be open & creative when experimenting, but conservative when it is a live system.

Be open & learn but keep your gunpowder dry!

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-10-23.

Let me share some experience about the agentic AI trainings I completed on Linkedin:

• Hands-on AI: Implementing Agentic Systems
  This one-hour course is very fast. Starts with a high level overview about agents and frameworks, touches on some security aspects, and then jumps into showing actual agentic AI apps using Python and CrewAI.

  The course gives you a glimpse of how the source code looks: most of the application consits of prompts in a yaml format, defining a 'crew' of AI agents, and then very little and generic code invoking CrewAI based on this yaml. The course does not explain how the code works line by line, and you will have trouble following it unless you know what to expect. It also shows cools examples of how all this can fail: in one case when the tool had no access to source data, the AI tool decided to make up some realistic looking source data itself.

  If you want an intro on how an agentic AI ecosystem 'feels', this course can be useful. If you want to learn how to create such an app, then this is not for you.

• Creating Agents with CrewAI
  This course teaches you step by step how to write agentic AI based apps using Python and CrewAI, it takes two and a half hours. It is very hands on, jumps right into doing stuff.

  The course explains how you can install CrewAI and fire up your environment. It uses OpenAI but also gives guidance on how to make other platforms work. (You need to purchase credits to use OpenAI via APIs, but Gemini has a free tier; I could make the latter work with rather little effort.) The course explains concepts behind CrewAI and teaches you what you can customize and how. It builds a couple of applications, walking through each steps of the process. It does the kind of babysitting I was looking for.

I find frameworks like CrewAI rather useful; they allow you to write code fully independent of the AI platform you use (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, etc). It also orchestrates how you call the LLM, helps you glue your prompts together and extract results. Not rocket science, but very a handy tool.

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-10-19.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a great composer, but it is less known that he completely sucked at relational databases.

Mozart was a very active prodigy with many revisions and variations of his works. He kept no catalogue himself, his manuscripts were all over the place, and some were discovered after his death only (when forgeries started appearing too). Many of his works lacked a title or any other way they could be unambiguously identified. Thus, people were confused when referring to Mozart's works, some wondering cluelessly like: 'You know the one that starts like 🎶🎵 [humming]... No, not that one, the one that continues as 🎵🎶 [humming]...' Even counting his works was a challenge. Mozart did not use any unique id; he clearly did not think of people later trying to organize his works into an SQL database. 😄

Then came Mozart-researcher superhero🦸 Ludwig von Köchel, who said: 'Let's number Mozart's works in chronological order!' So hath Köchel spoken, the Köchel catalogue was born, and there was confusion no more. (*)

➡️ Assigning ids is a surprisingly simple and effective solution.

➡️ While you cannot blame Mozart for not using unique ids 300 years before computers, it is just surprising how many times we see in today's world long lists of 'stuff' without any way to navigate, identify items, tell them apart or count them.

➡️ For me as a security guy: it is really tough to secure something you cannot even count... 😫

*: Actually, people kept discovering new works of Mozart, and some were re-dated / re-attributed, so the Köchel catalogue had to be re-numbered a couple of times. Today it sounds like a better idea to say: 'Let's number them in any order and do not change those numbers ever as ids must be immutable'. (see 9th edition of Köchel catalogue)

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-09-28.

Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025, which means: no more security patches. It is a very bad idea to run an OS without security patches (unless you live in a cave; a cave without any Internet). Time to get off Win10!

We had a Win10 machine in our home which did not update to Win11, as it did not meet its hardware requirements. It is a good machine otherwise, and I just did not want to throw it away 🚯 just because M$ stops the support.

I decided to install Linux 🐧 (Debian 'trixie' 13.1). I used to run Linux on my desktop while I was a PhD student, but after I joined the corporate world, I gave in and moved my desktop to Windows (and using Linux on servers only). It felt so good to have the Linux desktop back! 😊

Some key observations:

• 😫 The Debian installer still has the user experience of running a gauntlet. It is now graphical but did not change much. (Why does a 21st century user need to know what a 'locale' is!? If you want better user experience, try Ubuntu; I tried that but turned away as I had to be dodging offers to buy cloud/AI services, and this was exactly what I wanted to get away from at M$. 🤑)
• 😊 All my hardware worked immediately.
• 😊 I installed the necessary software via the package manager and they just worked.
• 😊 The longest/hardest part of the Linux install was shutting down Win10 (which just never wanted to finish).
• 😊 I installed cloud gaming client which could stream AAA games seamlessly. (I did not yet try gaming directly under Linux, but I heard it is also doable.)

It barely matters what OS I use today. I do most of my things in a browser, and that is cross-platform. M$ Office is not something I can realistically get rid of, but it is also available in a browser. The apps I use are usually free and cross platform. When I need a specific OS, I can fire it up on a VM in the cloud and connect to it.

Get off Win10 ASAP, and keep in mind that you are no longer locked into Windows! 😄

Update (2025-09-29): Microsoft decided to make Windows 10 extended security updates truly free in Europe.

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2025-09-20.

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