Digital Promises on Digital Infrastructures at Scale

Promise theory helps us understand commitments that actors make.

Automation is a big part of IT, but not all automation brings value.

Let’s look at a realistic and uncommon story of cloud and outsourcing.

An unnamed OpenAI model allegedly ‘broke out’ and ’escaped into the wild’ from its ‘highly isolated sandbox’ and then hacked Hugging Face.

How software grows A lot of software begins its life as the project of an individual, but ends up being used widely in organizations, or even society at large.

The root cause In the 1990s my father’s health deteriorated as a result of what was later thought to be some immune system related disease.

Can IBM’s Granite 4.1 code?

Suppose you are a government, a regulator, or a concerned cloud consumer.

The game of trust How do people establish trust under the most adverse circumstances?

Autarky Implicit in many discussions on digital autonomy is the quest for “autarky”, being completely independent from other actors, for example those actors whose objectives may be in conflict with ours.

Many people think we are overly dependent on big tech, and we should be more autonomous and sovereign.

Achieving some form of digital autonomy or sovereignty is a wicked problem, too large to handle in one go.

A badge on the wall: repurposing hacker camp hardware as a home energy display I wanted a wall display for my house’s energy.

Have you ever been called an amateur?

I am trying to figure out where the pendulum for AI LLM inference hosting will swing to.

Angkor Wat (Cambodia) is the world’s largest religious building and site.

I was chatting with an AI agent about its own configuration, and it answered with surprising confidence.

I wanted to experiment with AI automation while also paying particular attention to security concerns.

As 2025 ends, I reflected on the major topics that I see evolving in my practice.

Money isn't the only currency of value.

After coding a demo application with Claude Flow it was time to do a larger project.

How can you use cloud security lessons to better secure AI?

Where do you start your IT security journey?

Testing RSS

Six roles run every AI system, from customer to data provider, each bound by its own promise.

My AI coding journey continues.

Target was PCI-DSS compliant and still lost 40 million card numbers — compliance forces risk management onto reluctant actors, but never guarantees security.

A great way to look at how value is created in interactions between autonomous actors is game theory.

Digital Power: The book For the book and my blog, here is the link: https://digitalinfrastructures.nl.

Cloud Computing is an important and big set of digital infrastructures.

Here is how I AI-coded a fully functional Tic-Tac-Toe web game without looking at a single line of code or manually identifying a GUI or logic error.

The approach People call LLMs statistical completion engines and that they therefore cannot write computer code.

Imagine that you are part of the government of an average nation, and you have just realized that IT has become a substantial factor in your operation.

My AI-supported risk analysis assistant mirrors a common pitfall in risk management: focusing on irrelevant controls rather than genuine threats.

My first interest in networking came in the early 80s, as I was in the final years of my mathematics and computer science master’s program.

Digital infrastructures serve, nearly always, multiple customers.

What is the problem with the image that Zero Trust based information security brings along?

This is the dawn of a new age.

From the moment a security vulnerability is discovered, it represents a negative value to its potential victims.

If you build software for a living, generative AI may be a scary development, as it has the potential to take over a lot of software creation.

Here is the story of how I started to use AI to help with running and securing my home network.

The US president Harry S.

A contract is just two complementary conditional promises plus a fallback for non-delivery: what do I do, what do you do, what do I do if you don't?

The units so far have explored quite a few, seemingly unrelated, concepts and observations.

Data, not hardware, is the real asset at risk — ENISA's cloud taxonomy, the threat/vulnerability chain, and why risk = impact x probability needs a real victim.

What is information really?

Below 150 people you know who to trust by name.

A service agreement is a contract.

Understanding the technical architecture of digital infrastructures is critically important, in particular for non-technical professionals.

Shared resources can lead to conflicts.