Reference
Tech glossary
Plain-English definitions for the terms that show up in Notifire reporting. Updated as the news cycle adds new ones.
Agentic AI
AI systems that can autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step tasks rather than respond to one prompt at a time. The defining capability is tool use — calling APIs, reading files, writing code, and recovering from errors without a human in the loop for each step.
CVE· Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
A unique identifier assigned to a publicly disclosed security vulnerability, in the form CVE-YYYY-NNNNN. The CVE is administered by MITRE and is the canonical reference used by vendors, scanners, and patch advisories.
FIDO2 / WebAuthn
The web standards for phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication. Instead of one-time codes (which can be replayed by phishing sites), FIDO2 uses public-key cryptography bound to the origin — a phishing site requesting authentication gets a cryptographic mismatch and fails.
FSD· Full Self-Driving
Tesla's branding for its assisted-driving system. Despite the name, FSD is not autonomous in the regulatory sense — it requires driver supervision. Tesla's commercial Robotaxi service in 2026 is the first fully driverless deployment.
MCP· Model Context Protocol
A protocol for AI assistants to communicate with external tools and data sources. Originated at Anthropic and increasingly multi-vendor — Claude, OpenAI, and several frameworks support MCP servers as a tool-integration standard.
RAG· Retrieval-Augmented Generation
A pattern where an LLM is given relevant context at query time (usually retrieved from a vector database) rather than relying solely on its training data. RAG is the standard architecture for grounding model output in proprietary data.
Sidecar container
A container that runs alongside an application container in the same Kubernetes pod, sharing its network and lifecycle. Common uses: service mesh proxies (Envoy, Linkerd), log shippers, metrics scrapers. Kubernetes 1.30 graduated sidecar containers to GA with proper lifecycle ordering.
SLO· Service Level Objective
An internal reliability target — for example, "99.9% of API requests return in under 200ms over a rolling 30 days." SLOs sit between SLAs (contractual, customer-facing) and SLIs (raw metrics). The gap between SLO and SLA is the error budget.
SSPL· Server Side Public License
A source-available license created by MongoDB and adopted by Redis, Elastic, and others. SSPL requires anyone offering the software as a service to open-source their entire service stack — a deliberate barrier for cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). The OSI considers SSPL non-open-source.
Vector database
A database that stores high-dimensional embedding vectors and supports nearest-neighbour search. Used for semantic search, RAG, recommendation systems. Examples: pgvector (PostgreSQL extension), Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus.
Zero-day
A vulnerability with no available patch at the time of disclosure (or exploitation). The "zero" refers to the number of days defenders have had to prepare. Zero-day-class disclosures usually trigger emergency patching cycles across the industry.
Missing a term? Email [email protected] — we add entries as they come up in reporting.