Windows Baseline Security

Windows Baseline Security is something new for the Age of AI Agents.

The AI Agent Prevention Society

One of the obstacles to AI agents becoming all powerful is the technology infrastructure that actively seeks to obstruct agents.

This technology has various names, one being WAF, or web application firewall.  

The purpose of a WAF is to stop web applications from common attacks. 

Recall the OWASP Top Ten Risks? Some of the motivation behind these protections are good - for example, guarding against bot-driven DDoS attacks.

There are various vendors and products in this space; such as Imperva WAF, Cloudflare, Akamai Site Defender, AWS WAF, Azure Web Application Firewall and Google Cloud Armor.

These solutions are all effective at detecting and blocking agents, headless browsers, scrapers, credential stuffing bots (where leaked usernames and passwords are used across numerous websites to exploit potential duplication) and automated (even if legitimate) login attempts.

Action taken could range from limiting requests based on IP, presenting CAPTCHA challenges and blocking certain geographies.  However, these actions may prevent legitimate bots from using required services, or performing agentic actions on behalf of legitimate users.

Hushlogins

CloudFlare R2

The CloudFlare R2 Developer's Guide is good reading for developers needing to use this CDN.

Applications include storage for cloud native applications, podcast content as well as storage for batch process output.

Core concepts are Buckets and Objects.

Accelerating "safe AI adoption" is one of the company's current mantras.

Immutable Github Releases

Some software is distributed as immutable Github releases (this is for software supply chain security). One such example is Inno Setup.

Windows SDK

Windows SDK is needed for MSIX packaging. Windows 11 SDK includes Windows Performance Toolkit, Application Verifier for Windows and Debugging Tools for Windows.

Ingress and Egress Fees

Ingress and egress fees refer to the cost of data transfer into and out of the cloud.

• Ingress fees are typically zero - allowing users to upload data to Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage with no additional charge. 
• Egress fees are typically charged when data exits the cloud. These fees can differ significantly between providers and source and destination region.

Hosting on S3 will set you back $0 for 1 GB download per month, and around 1000 downloads of a 50MB file will cost you just under $5 a month.