September 17, 2026

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Thursday’s here! Think that dumb question you asked ChatGPT or Claude is safe from human eyes? Think again.

In today’s edition:

🐄 Moo-ving up

🤖 Hasta la vista

⚛️ Quantum questions

—Billy Hurley, Eoin Higgins

IT STRATEGY

Support beam

Chris Rozum

Like a blue-raspberry Warhead or a Mortal Kombat finishing move, tech support in the ’90s was intense.

When it came to fixing that pre-Y2K hardware, sometimes you had to ask the caller to put their phone down and grab their toolbox.

Chris Rozum, now founder and CEO of Insite Managed Solutions, a contact-center operations consultancy, began his IT career at the service desk, guiding customers via phone through problems with their Gateway 2000 desktops (those computers that arrived in cow-print boxes, familiar to many a millennial).

That kind of repair work meant walking customers of varying levels of expertise through at-home repairs. “Think of your grandma. You’re saying, ‘Go find the screwdriver with the star on it, and we’re gonna go take things apart,’” Rozum told IT Brew.

Put it back together.—BH

Sponsored By Hubstaff

Tell me something I don’t know

According to Hubstaff, meetings are up ~6x over the last three years. The average worker toggles between apps and websites nearly 1.2k times per day, spending ~4 hours a week just reorienting. And only ~39% of the average workday is spent in deep focus.

Okay, you probably don’t need data to tell you that most days feel like meetings, context switching, and "work about work.” All part of the job, sure. But here’s another reality check: Engineers need 2–3 hours of uninterrupted focus blocks to make real progress. Most never get them. That’s why teams ship slower.

Every tech leader wants more output, but who’s measuring how teams actually spend their days?

The Technical Leader's Productivity Playbook offers practical strategies to protect workers’ focus time, structure meetings around engineering rhythms, and use real workforce data to spot delivery bottlenecks before they show up in missed sprints.

Read the playbook.

CYBERSECURITY

Arnold fashioned

Animated gif from the Terminator movie, showing a humanoid robot with glowing red eyes holding a plasma rifle in front of a mushroom cloud and blue lasers shooting behind it.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day/TriStar Pictures via Giphy

For cybersecurity pro David Mayer, 1984’s The Terminator is all about good intentions and bad execution—that’s the polite way of describing Skynet, the movie’s AI villain, which starts out as a Department of Defense project before nuking humanity.

After the nuclear apocalypse, Skynet time-travels a Terminator cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother of offscreen character John Connor, who will eventually lead the resistance against the machines. Fortunately, John has also sent back a soldier to protect her: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn).

Mayer, a certified instructor at cybersecurity education group SANS Institute, as well as CIO and managing director of advanced assessment at cybersecurity services company Neuvik, sees similar issues with intentions and execution in today’s agentic systems. Present-day IT pros face the challenge of keeping autonomous systems from traveling outside of their established parameters (and hopefully not their timelines).

Read on if you want to live.—BH

CLOUD

Prep time

IBM

“Aways be prepared” is a helpful motto for scouting, life, and quantum cybersecurity.

Mainstream adoption of quantum computing is still in the future, but there are already indications that attackers are preparing to use the technology to break encryption. For organizations, proactively instituting protections today can avoid sensitive information from being exposed later.

Fall festival. Commercial viability of the technology is seen as a case of when, not if, by industry experts. Threat actors are taking note—and preparing.

Make sure you prepare, too.—EH

Sponsored By F5

You can’t secure what you can’t see. That’s why the F5 AI Security Platform keeps an eye on all the AI usage at your organization. We teamed up with F5 to break down everything their AI Security Platform can do, like improve compliance and data security. Read the full article.

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 90%. That’s roughly the proportion of token use that’s resulting in negative ROI, according to David Hsu, CEO of Retool. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely.”—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a social media post about AI pacing (the New York Times)

Read: Flock data accessed by hackers reveals how the surveillance cameras work. (Wired)

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Written by Billy Hurley and Eoin Higgins

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