Author Archives: bredemarket

Marketing and writing services.

Beyond Voice: Adobe Experience Manager and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity

I previously described how technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity protects you from voice deepfakes.

But as Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult notes, C2PA technology provides the “provenance” of other types of assets.

Adobe is implementing C2PA-compliant content credentials in AEM [Adobe Experience Manager]. These can tell you the facts about an asset (in C2PA terms, the “provenance“): whether the image of a product from a particular manufacturer was created by that manufacturer, whether a voice recording of Anil Chakravarthy was created by Anil Chakravarthy, or whether an image of a peaceful meadow was actually generated by artificial intelligence (such as Adobe Firefly).

(AI generated image of Richard Nixon from https://www.youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rkQn-43ixs)

April 2025 Update on Bredemarket’s Proposal Services

This post has two purposes:

  • To brag about myself.
  • To let you know how this braggart can help you with your identity, cybersecurity, and technology proposals.

First, the bragging

Let’s start the bragging by announcing that one of Bredemarket’s consulting clients was recently notified of an award by a federal agency.

I won’t name the client or the agency, other than to clarify that the agency is NOT the U.S. Department of Education, the Agency for International Development, the Voice of America, or similar agencies that have taken a beating over the last 2 1/2 months. So the award is fairly safe.

So what do I have to brag about?

To be honest, not much.

Second, the reality

Yes, I made sure that the proposal was compliant and persuasive, that it addressed all the required points, that it went to the correct person, that it stayed within the mandated page and word limits, and that it was delivered before the due date and time.

But if the client had proposed an inferior solution, questionable implementation plan, or unqualified personnel, there would NOT have been an award regardless of whether the text was in 12-point Times New Roman with the appropriate margins.

Like all Bredemarket projects, I collaborated with the client to submit the proposal, which in the end was a winning proposal.

Third, how did I get here?

I’ve told the story before, but I kind of fell into the proposals world in October 1994 when I began consulting for the Proposals Department at a company called Printrak International. After several acquisitions, the company became part of IDEMIA 23 years later.

During my time at Printrak, Motorola, MorphoTrak, and IDEMIA I spent two separate stints in Proposals, primarily focusing on state and local opportunities with various international opportunities thrown in.

Things changed in 2020 when Bredemarket started offering proposal services. With one exception (a State of California healthcare-related proposal), all my proposal work has been at the federal level.

I’ve worked at various proposal maturity levels, ranging from working via SMA in a mature proposal development process, to cases in which I was the sole proposal expert. But the keys always remain the same: work with the client, do great work, and turn the thing in on time.

Fourth, how will YOU get THERE?

If your organization has the need to submit a technology software proposal, perhaps I can help. I can plug into your existing proposals organization, or if necessary I can BE your proposals organization.

If you’d like to talk about it, schedule a free consultation via my “CPA” page (the “P” stands for Proposal) and check the “Proposal services” check box.

https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

(Wildebeest proposal picture from Imagen 3)

If Your Identity System Only Manages People, It Is Flawed

This is painful, but it has to be done.

I’ve spent 30 years working with the identities of PEOPLE and ensuring that all PEOPLE accessing a system are properly identified.

In other words, leaving a huge GAPING security hole.

Look at what Okta is doing;

“[N]ew Okta Platform capabilities…help businesses secure AI agents and other non-human identities with the same level of visibility, control, governance, and automation as human ones. The Okta Platform will now bring a unified, end-to-end identity security fabric to organizations for managing and securing all types of identities across their ecosystem, from AI agents to API keys to employees.”

I think that “unified” will take the place of “trust” as the identity buzzword. Thankfully.

If you’re only selling biometrics, or maybe biometrics and ID cards, where will your customers go to get the rest of their systems? Or will you just be a commodity supplier to the companies that provide the REAL systems?

(Unified security AI picture from Imagen 3)

When Can Cybersecurity Professionals “Wing It”?

In my career, I’ve experienced all levels of process maturity, ranging from “process for process’ sake” to “winging it.”

  • Many, many years before Marie Kondo popularized the term “spark joy,” one of my former employers shut down the entire office for the afternoon so that we could spend that time cleaning up. Thankfully this was not instituted (institutionalized?) as a weekly occurrence.
  • On the other extreme, some organizations resist process and just wing it. To the point that I literally hide when I use a process.

Now the ability to “wing it” can be used in some circumstances but not in others. Obviously improvisational comedians “wing it” by definition. But Ike (pre-matrix) couldn’t have used the “wing it” approach on D-Day.

What about cybersecurity? Can you “wing it” when you’re attacked?

Jack Freund says no:

The evolving threat landscape demands robust governance architectures and well-defined board duties to ensure resilience against cyberthreats. Effective cybergovernance not only protects an organization’s digital assets but also reinforces trust among stakeholders. 

Governance is a critical component of cybersecurity, if for no other reason than to prove that your organization actually HAS cybersecurity. Ideally an organization will govern its cybersecurity by some type of “maturity model.”

And that’s more than refraining from calling someone a poopy head.

(AI image from Imagen 3)

Anyone Interested in Tax Fraud?

Anyone interested in tax fraud—a true financial identity challenge that is timely right about now?

authID recently shared a link to an Identity Week article on the topic, “Americans express concern about their personal data in tax fraud.” The article addressed findings from Allstate Identity Protection.

“40% of cases where Allstate restored identity protection were reported during the tax season.”

Granted that this is a skewed number, because tax season is 2 1/2 months long, and not all identity fraud during the period has to do with tax filings. But there does appear to be an uptick.

And Allstate isn’t the only organization providing an anti-fraud solution. The aforementioned authID has a solution of its own:

“Our multi-layered biometric authentication technology provides the security needed to protect sensitive financial transactions with one-in-one-billion false-match accuracy and lightning-fast processing speeds. Our innovative PrivacyKey™ technology eliminates biometric data storage risks, helping financial institutions implement robust identity safeguards during high-risk periods like tax season.”

(Hands holding 1040 form AI picture from Imagen 3)

NPEs and Emotions

When I introduced emotions as the seventh question in Bredemarket’s seven questions, I was thinking about how a piece of content could invoke a variety of emotions in a human reader.

Oh, John, your thinking is so limited.

In a piece in Freethink, Kevin Kelly discussed emotions…in non-person entities (NPEs).

“Like anything else, I think in some cases robots with emotions will be really good. It’s good in the sense that emotions are one of the best human interfaces. If you want to interface with us humans, we respond to emotions, and so having an emotional component in robots is a very smart, powerful way to help us work with them.”

More here.

MFB = Multi Factor Biasification?

There’s a paper from Itiel Dror that I need to read. Its title is “Biased and Biasing: The Hidden Bias Cascade and Bias Snowball Effects.”

Here is a portion of the abstract:

“Cognitive bias…impacts each and every aspect of the justice and legal systems, from the initial engagement of police officers attending the crime scene, through the forensic examination, and all the way to the final outcome of the jurors’ verdict and the judges’ sentencing. It impacts not only the subjective elements in the justice and legal systems but also the more objective scientific elements, such as forensic fingerprinting and DNA….[S]uch errors in the final outcome rarely occur because they require that the shortcomings in each element be coordinated and aligned with the other elements. However, in the justice and legal systems, the different elements are not independent; they are coordinated and mutually support and bias each other, creating and enabling hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects.”

Secretly Using WOMBAT for Positive Impact

We create things for maximum impact. But is the impact positive or negative?

Move fast and break things

In 2019, Hemant Taneja wrote the following in a Harvard Business Review article, “The Era of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Is Over”:

“The technologies of tomorrow—genomics, blockchain, drones, AR/VR, 3D printing—will impact lives to an extent that will dwarf that of the technologies of the past ten years.”

Although not mentioned in the sentence above, Taneja subsequently references artificial intelligence—not as a technology, but as an underpinning of the others.

And the overall theme of the piece is a questioning of what all these things DO—and that it may not be good to break things. Destroying society may have an impact, but it’s a negative one. Can anyone think of any recent examples?

Which leads to keeping processes secret. But not all of them.

Bredemarket’s not-so-secret process

If you’ve ever read my CPA page, you may have noticed the phrase “before I write a word.”

Perhaps that’s the point where some people stopped reading the page. After all, Bredemarket provides writing services. Write stuff! Don’t wait.

And I do write stuff, creating a draft 0.5, sleeping on it, and only then creating a draft 1.

But there’s something that I do even before my draft 0.5.

“Before I write a word, I work with you to make sure that I understand your needs. I start by asking seven important questions. This ensures the best possible deliverable.”

In case you’re curious about those seven questions, you can read about them here. These questions certainly aren’t so secret, since I’ve talked about them for a long time. (There used to be six.)

But there’s something I’ve learned not to talk about.

Bredemarket’s secret process

I don’t want to reveal Bredemarket’s secret process, so I’m just going to call it WOMBAT. Not that WOMBAT is unique to Bredemarket; far from it. Many companies use WOMBAT.

And many companies don’t use WOMBAT. In fact, they abhor WOMBAT and call it stifling. (Emotion words. Geddit?)

But I’ve found over the years that if you don’t use WOMBAT, there’s a very good chance that you’ll break things.

And who catches hell? The consultant. “Why did you do what we asked you to do? Now look at the mess you made!”

So out of a sense of fear and self-preservation (geddit?), there are times that I’ve secretly used WOMBAT and not told my clients I’m doing it.

Because it helps my clients make an impact.

A positive one.

(Imagen 3)