by Gary Mintchell | Sep 15, 2025 | News, Personal Development
I’ve given this topic a lot of thought. An eclectic reader, I read wisdom literature wherever I can uncover it. I found this teaching from the Christian New Testament. The intersection of technology and ethics (or lack thereof) concerns me. Everyone I’ve met working within manufacturing/industrial technology has presented as reasonably ethical. But some technologists are so competitively pragmatic as to be amoral.
Wisdom from my friend James (the Apostle) who writes words of wisdom.
“You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger;”
And again,
“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
I have read much and thought long about the event and aftermath of the shooting of political influencer Charley Kirk. I had no idea who he was having decided not to follow these political influencers of any ideology. I understand what happens inside me when my emotions are stirred. I prefer a broad and reasoned approach to learning.
Two people whose works I read published blurbs about a side of Kirk not aligned with his public persona. But it’s the public persona that counts. I have learned through study of history and through observation that people who exist by inciting base emotions in followers seldom end well.
But today we have something previous decades, centuries, and indeed millennia didn’t—the ability to spread opinions and videos widely and almost instantaneously.
Cal New port earned a PhD in computer science, has written several best selling books found on my bookcase (Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, Slow Productivity), and is faculty co-founder of the Georgetown University Center for Digital Ethics. He’s been writing on this topic for several years.
His recently released a newsletter addressed many concerns that many have (including me).
Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. At the time of this writing, little is yet known about the shooter’s motives, but there have been enough cases of political violence over the past year that I think I can say what I’m about to with conviction…
This isn’t a one-off. It’s a situation encompassing some time.
Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific.
He’s not pulling his punches here. And what do we learn?
This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms: they are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible, as much as any other force, for the unravelling of civil society that seems to be accelerating.
Since we know the evils of these platforms, why do they remain popular?
They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.
But the reality is…
But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.
What can we do?
After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.
To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.
Enough is enough.
Arnold Newsletter
One of my sources for fitness and nutrition coaching comes from a team Arnold Schwarzenegger has assembled following his term as California’s governor. They publish the Pump Club newsletter and have an app. I use the app to track resistance training and nutrition.
Germane to this topic of social media is the carrier of said media—the smartphone.
They head one of the articles on this newsletter:
Having your smartphone nearby—even if you’re not using it—can reduce your brainpower.
Think that evil little thing is innocuous just lying on your desk?
Researchers examined if our phones drain more than just our attention when they buzz or light up. To test this, they conducted two experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users. Participants were asked to complete tests that required full attention and cognitive capacity—like problem-solving and memory tasks. The twist? Some participants had their phones placed on the desk, some had them in their pocket or bag, and others had them in another room.
I like the newsletter and app partly due to their reliance on real science.
Scientists found that the closer the phone was, the worse the performance. Those with their phones on the desk showed significantly reduced cognitive capacity compared to those whose phones were in another room. Even having the phone turned off and face down was not enough to prevent the drop.
It’s time for all of us, one-by-one, to leave the (un)social media behind. I deleted my Facebook and X (Twitter) apps a few years ago. I visit Facebook one time per day on my computer to wish friends a happy birthday and to see what’s happening in my community. I deleted the LinkedIn app. It’s getting almost as bad. I visit it once a day just to check in briefly—also on my computer.
We can all also be aware of the consequences of what we say—perhaps being a little kinder, more understanding, less vicious in our remarks.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 9, 2025 | Business, News
Cybersecurity company business models intrigue me. People seem to float around continually. I can’t believe there is sufficient market income for all of them to operate as independent companies. There are few evergreen companies in the small-to-midsize market. Inductive Automation has staying power, and I doubt an exit anytime soon. HighByte is another company that has now been around for a while. I’d have thought they would have found an exit by now. Perhaps they’ll take the evergreen path. (See Dave Wharton on Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People Podcast.)
When I see large investments by a major company in the market, I begin to think acquisition coming. This news regards Nozomi Networks acquisition by Mitsubishi Electric. All the executives make the usual comments about nothing changing, but time will tell. When the corporate systems people from the acquiring company invades the acquired company, things do change. (Been there; done that.)
I hope for the best out of this. Cybersecurity remains an important corporate requirement.
In Brief:
- Nozomi Networks, a global leader in OT, IoT and CPS security, defends organizations around the world from cyber threats and operational disruption
- The acquisition accelerates Nozomi’s industrial cybersecurity innovation while maintaining its heterogeneous approach to supporting customers and partners
- Both companies share a vision for the power of data and AI to fuel more effective cyber defenses and improve operational efficiency and resilience
Nozomi Networks and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. announced Sept 9 they have signed a definitive agreement whereby Mitsubishi Electric will acquire Nozomi Networks. Upon close, Nozomi Networks will be a wholly owned subsidiary, operating independently of Mitsubishi Electric. This acquisition accelerates Nozomi’s industrial cybersecurity innovation while maintaining the company’s heterogeneous approach to supporting customers and partners.
Mitsubishi Electric participated in Nozomi’s $100M Series E funding round, announced in March 2024, and the two companies have collaborated on innovation and go-to-market since. This combined history informed the foundation of this transaction.
The acquisition of Nozomi Networks brings Mitsubishi Electric a strong and growing AI-powered, cloud-first cybersecurity software business with an award-winning track record of scalable innovation. Nozomi’s world-class leadership and engineering teams, as well as its history of financial success, will strengthen Mitsubishi Electric’s ability to deliver cutting-edge solutions to customers worldwide.
With more than 100 years of global industrial operational technology (OT and IoT) experience, Mitsubishi Electric will support Nozomi’s continued cybersecurity innovation and strong track record of business growth, as well as enable both companies to accelerate digital transformation for critical infrastructure and industrial organizations worldwide.
The companies share a strong vision around the power of data and context from OT/IoT environments, paired with robust artificial intelligence to deliver more effective cyber defenses and material operational improvements for customers. Both companies also share a deep commitment to customer success, a partner-first business model, and fostering a strong corporate culture that values and supports employees.
Nozomi Networks is committed to serving all its customers and partners by maintaining its brand, leadership, teams, and operations. There will be no disruptions to current operations, roadmaps, or partnerships. Nozomi’s teams, offices, and points of contact remain unchanged, ensuring a seamless experience for all its stakeholders.
Relevant attached quotes:
Quote from Satoshi Takeda, Mitsubishi Electric Senior Vice President, CDO, Chief Information Officer, Board Member at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
“We are excited to welcome Nozomi to the Mitsubishi Electric family. Their cutting-edge OT security technology and rapid development philosophy have earned them a strong reputation. By combining Nozomi’s strengths with Mitsubishi Electric’s extensive expertise and capabilities in OT, I believe we can achieve even more. This acquisition will enable us to co-create valuable new services while supporting Nozomi’s commitment to innovation and customer flexibility. Together, we can help our customers achieve their digital transformation goals while enhancing security, efficiency, and resilience.”
Quote from Edgard Capdevielle, President and CEO of Nozomi Networks
“This marks an exciting new chapter for Nozomi Networks. By becoming part of Mitsubishi Electric, we will combine our strengths to drive the next generation of industrial security and innovation to bring additional value for customers around the world. Nothing will change in our day-to-day engagement with Nozomi customers and partners – they will continue to receive the same support and service, and the same cutting-edge OT and IoT cybersecurity platform they have come to trust. With the combined global reach and resources of both companies, we can supercharge our innovation engine, helping industrial organizations secure and accelerate their own digital transformations.”
Quote from Andrea Carcano, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Nozomi Networks
“By combining Mitsubishi Electric’s century of global industrial expertise with Nozomi Networks’ innovations in data science, AI/ML and industrial cybersecurity, we have a unique opportunity to create a new generation of AI-powered solutions that will strengthen cyber and operations through power new innovations for customers across all OT/IoT use cases and industries around the world. Together, we’ll make the world’s critical infrastructure safer, more resilient, and more efficient.”
The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth calendar quarter of 2025. Upon close, Nozomi will maintain headquarters in San Francisco, California, and research and development in Mendrisio, Switzerland.
EY Strategy and Consulting Co., Ltd. is serving as financial advisor and White & Case LLP is serving as legal advisor to Mitsubishi Electric. Barclays is serving as exclusive financial advisor and Gunderson Dettmer is serving as legal advisor to Nozomi Networks.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 4, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
I am on vacation, yet devoting hours to my avocation–assigning soccer referees to high school games. When disputes happen, I’m always in the middle. I’ve devoted several hours to that this week. Meanwhile, I still check the news.
I have two favorite news sources. One is called Axios; the other Morning Brew. But neither is infallible.
Today’s Morning Brew newsletter included this incendiary headline, Companies Are Benefitting from AI-drive Layoffs.
That is simply not true. Companies are laying off because they overhired during Covid and post-Covid times. Now they need to cut back. The CEOs, clueless though they may be, have called on managers to increase use of AI to do the work of the terminated employees. Studies show that this simply doesn’t happen. Like almost all automation technology, the reality of implementation is harder than marketing and trade journals make it sound.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 2, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
How are you searching on the Web these days?
I still use Ecosia that realistically uses Google. Some, any way. You get many ads, a few links. Over time, though, the value of the links has continued to dwindle. When I want a deep search with follow up and deeper probe, I use Claude.ai.
But Claude does not show ads or links to sources (you can ask, but I usually don’t.)
Wonder what the ramifications are? Me, too. Then this article crossed my rss feed from Crazy, Stupid Tech.
Cloudflare’s CEO wants to save the web from AI’s oligarchs. Here’s why his plan isn’t crazy.
Written by Fred Vogelstein
Vogelstein writes:
Sixteen years ago Matthew Prince and classmate Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School decided there was a better way to help companies handle hacker attacks to their websites. Prince and a friend had already built an open source system to help anyone with a website more easily track spammers. What if the three of them could leverage that into a company that not only tracked all internet threats but stopped them too?
Within months they had a business plan, won a prestigious Harvard Business School competition with it, and had seed funding. They unveiled the company, Cloudflare, a year later at the 2010 Techcrunch Disrupt completion, taking second place. And today, riding the explosion of cloud computing and armed with better technology and marketing, they’ve leapfrogged competitors to become one of the dominant cybersecurity/content delivery networks in the world.
I was immediately interested because I pay Cloudflare to protect my website. So far, it has been an excellent purchase.
Prince wants to talk about the future of the web and journalism with me because he thinks the AI chatbot revolution is killing both of them. And he thinks he can help fix that with something he calls pay-per-crawl, a gambit he and Cloudflare launched on July 1. He cares, he says, because “I love the smell of printer ink and a big wet press. So I kind of have a soft spot for the media industry and how important it is.” This isn’t spin. Two years ago he and his wife bought the Park City Record, his hometown local paper..
It’s a big enough problem that Prince and most publishers now believe a lot of journalism and anything else advertising supported online will die or be subsumed into AI companies in the next few years without intervention. And because 20 percent of websites use Cloudflare for security and traffic management, he can block enough AI chatbots crawlers – with his customers’ permission, of course – to at least force some big AI companies to the negotiating table.
I worked as an editor in trade magazine publishing for about 15 years. By the time I left in 2013, I could see the handwriting on the wall. During my entrepreneurial life, I’ve seen booms and busts. I can usually smell a bust coming. The advertising model of trade journals looked shaky. And digital funds are in short supply. In my 12 years as a blogger meeting many other former magazine writers also out on their own, I’ve met expenses with a little left over. But every year gets tougher.
The problem Prince is trying to solve is perhaps the biggest attack on how the web functions since Tim Berners-Lee created it in 1990. Until the AI revolution took hold two and a half years ago, the economic foundation worked like this: Search engines like Google and Microsoft freely and regularly indexed every site with web crawlers. In return, the search results powered by those indices generated referral traffic to those crawled websites. That has supported hundreds of billions of dollars in ad spending and search engine optimization.
But AI chatbots don’t work that way. Instead of ten blue links to choose from after a search – with advertising displayed at the top and right of results – AI chatbots just supply you with the answer. It’s a much better experience for users. Twenty years ago Google’s founders themselves in interviews with me and elsewhere talked about Google search only being an intermediate step toward creating an answer engine like this.
The problem this creates, however, is that there are no ads when AI chatbots give you the answer. If there are links to sources, users almost never click on them. AI chatbots also drive up publishers’ bandwidth costs because they crawl thousands of times a day. Wikipedia said back in April that these bots had raised their bandwidth costs 50 percent.
To larger entities than mine, this is a double hit. I hope Cloudflare can ignite a movement to bring some sort of sense to this market.
I highly recommend reading the entire interview.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 27, 2025 | Business, Generative AI, News
Voice AI news comes to me only through Deepgram, although my tech podcasters update all the consumer news and failings of Alexa, Siri, and other Voice AI consumer applications. Deepgram actually provides a platform for developers to add the technology into their products.
Two pieces of news of interest. Deepgram has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The multi-year agreement deepens Deepgram’s relationship with AWS and reflects a shared commitment to accelerating the development and adoption of generative voice AI. And second, Deepgram’s voice AI models are now available on Cloudflare Workers AI, making it easier than ever for developers to build real-time, expressive voice applications at scale.
As part of the AWS collaboration, Deepgram will expand co-selling and go-to-market efforts, integrate more deeply with AWS services, and empower enterprises to build scalable, high-accuracy voice applications across a wide range of use cases.
Deepgram’s infrastructure is deeply integrated with AWS, enabling customers to deploy its platform on Amazon EKS for scalable container orchestration, store data securely with Amazon S3, and manage containers using Amazon ECR. Customers can also use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to securely orchestrate interactions between Deepgram’s voice AI APIs and other services, including Amazon Bedrock hosted models and enterprise systems. Whether deployed in a customer-owned VPC or as a fully managed SaaS environment, Deepgram offers the flexibility required to maintain compliance, ensure data control, and operate efficiently at scale. Looking ahead, Deepgram plans to expand availability through AWS services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to further streamline AI model deployment and orchestration.
Deepgram’s speech-to-text API can also be integrated into Amazon Connect, enabling best-in-class STT speed and accuracy for real-time transcription and voice automation within contact center environments. This helps enterprises improve agent productivity, automate call summaries, and enhance customer experiences.
Regarding Cloudflare announcement, Adam Sypniewski, CTO, Deepgram, said, “By hosting our voice models on Cloudflare’s Workers AI, we’re enabling developers to create real-time, expressive voice agents with ultra-low latency. Cloudflare’s global network brings AI compute closer to users everywhere, so customers can now deliver lightning-fast conversational AI experiences without worrying about complex infrastructure.”
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 26, 2025 | News
The thing I find most amazing lies in the first teaser bullet point—only 61% plan an AI adoption. There are many flavors of AI. Many already exist in their plants. Maybe “leaders” questioned are not aware of all that? Or do they just not know how to proceed? Or they don’t have the engineering talent? I’m fascinated by the thoughts.
- 61% of Cybersecurity Professionals Plan AI Adoption as Manufacturing Faces Growing Cyber Risks
- Global State of Smart Manufacturing Report finds cybersecurity is now the top external concern after economic conditions
Rockwell Automation released the cybersecurity findings from its 10th annual “State of Smart Manufacturing Report.” Drawing insights from more than 1,500 manufacturing leaders across 17 of the top manufacturing countries, the report reflects how cybersecurity is becoming a central business issue. One third of respondents have direct information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) cybersecurity responsibilities.
As manufacturers advance smart operations, the integration between IT and OT increases the risk of cyberattacks. The report shows that manufacturers are beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help manage these risks to strengthen protection.
Key global cybersecurity findings include:
- Cyber threats are among the most serious external risks. Cybersecurity (30%) now ranks among the top external risks, second only to inflation and economic growth (34%).
- Security teams accelerate AI adoption. 61% of cybersecurity and IT professionals plan AI and machine learning (ML) adoption for security in the next 12 months, outpacing general manufacturing by 12 percentage points.
- Cybersecurity tops smart manufacturing use cases. 38% of manufacturers plan to use data collected from current sources to drive protection.
- IT/OT security takes center stage. 48% of cybersecurity professionals identified securing converging architecture as a key to positive outcomes over the next five years, compared to just 37% on average.
- Cyber readiness is a growing talent priority. More than half (53%) of respondents from companies of $30 billion or more identified cybersecurity practices and standards as extremely important skill sets, compared to 47% of all respondents.
Workforce development continues to be a major hurdle. A shortage of skilled talent, training challenges and rising labor costs remain significant barriers to competition. As manufacturers recruit the next generation, cybersecurity and analytical skills are also becoming hiring priorities, reinforcing the need to align technical innovation with human development.
