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AI Agents: What They Are and How They Will Change Work

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond simply answering questions and generating text. A new generation of AI systems—known as AI agents—is emerging with the ability to plan tasks, use tools, make decisions, and complete multi-step workflows with less human intervention. From managing emails and analyzing data to writing software and assisting customers, AI agents could significantly change how people work. What Are AI Agents? An AI agent is a software system that can perceive information, reason about a goal, take actions, and adapt based on the results. Traditional AI tools usually respond to a specific instruction. For example, you might ask an AI chatbot to summarize a document, and it provides a summary. An AI agent can go further. You could give an agent a goal such as: "Research three competitors, compare their pricing, summarize their main features, and prepare a report." The agent may then: 1) Understand the objective. 2) Break the task into smaller steps. 3) Searc...

Fire walling to protect systems and networks

Fire walling to Protect Systems and Networks
* Firewalls are devices (or sometimes software) that sits on the border between two securities domains and monitor/log activity between them, sometimes avoiding the traffic that can pass between them based on certain criteria.
* For example a firewall router may permit HTTP: requests to pass through to a web server inside a company domain while not allowing telnet, ssh, or other traffic to pass through.
* A common architecture is to place a de-militarized zone, DMZ, which arrange of sits "between" the company domain and the outside world, as shown below. Company computers can extend either the DMZ or the outside world, but outside computers can only extend the DMZ. Perhaps most importantly, the DMZ cannot extend any of the other company computers, so even if the DMZ is breached, the attacker cannot get to the balance of the company network. (In some cases the DMZ may have restricted access to company computers, such as a web server on the DMZ that reqires to query a database on one of the other company computers.)
     figure: Domain separation via firewall.
* Firewalls themselves required to be resistant to attacks, and unfortunately have several vulnerabilities:
o Tunneling, which includes encapsulating forbidden traffic inside of packets that 
are allowed?
o Denial of service affects addressed at the firewall itself.
o Spoofing, in which an illegal host sends packets to the firewall with the 
return address of an authorized host.
* In extra to the normal firewalls protecting a company internal network from the outside world, there are also some specialized forms of firewalls that have been recently developed:
o A personal firewall is a software layer that guards an individual computer. It may be a part of the operating system or a unique software package.
o An application proxy firewall understands the protocols of a specific service and acts as a stand-in (and relay) for the particular service. For example, and SMTP proxy firewall would take SMTP requests from the outside world, examine them for security concerns, and forward only the "safe" ones on to the real SMTP server behind the firewall.
o XML firewalls examined XML packets only, and reject ill-formed packets. Similar 
firewalls exist for other specific protocols.
o System call firewalls protects the boundary between user mode and system mode, and delete any system calls that infringe security policies.

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