Techstrong Gang – April 11, 2024

Happy Thursday, everyone. We've got a lot of AI stuff to go over with you, as well as some news on the security bloggers network, security creators Network, RSA, all of this and more you are watching Techron Gang. Hi everyone, happy Thursday.

It's Alan Shimmel here, uh, CEO and, uh, Textron. And you're watching the Textron Gang. As I mentioned.

Let me tell you what gang members we've got on for today. First of all, as usual, joining us from, uh, high up in the Rocky Mountains. It's our CTO and principal research analyst, Mitchell.

Ashley. Hey, Mitch. Welcome.

Happy Thursday. What a great day. Happy Thursday to you joining a, a Roving gang member joining us from the Raleigh Durham Triangle area.

I think if he's home. Anyway, our AI expert, mark Hinkle. Hey, mark, welcome.

Thanks Alan. And I am home for once. Good, good for you.

I'm glad you made it home. Um, and then joining me here in our Boca Raton Headquarters Studios, our Echo Insights editor and lady about town, Bonnie Schneider. Hi, Bonnie.

Hi, Alan. Great to be here. Thanks to have you here.

So guys, let's just jump into stuff today. ai site, and it's, it's basically a welcome or acknowledging, I think, I don't know if a welcome's the right word, acknowledging, uh, that we are entering the generative AI election era as if our elections didn't have enough aggravation before AI with meddling and social media and fake news and everything else. Now we've got AI to crank it up.

Mark, you're the AI guy. What do you, what do you think It's gonna be a wild ride? Um, you know, in the last three months, it seems like every day there's some kind of new AI model that does text to video.

They're getting better. Um, they're, you know, we are gonna have to have a real critical eye for this election and for the news in general going forward. It's just the barrier to creating realistic deep fakes and videos in Now, you know, voice cloning has gotten really, really good too.

I think it's a matter of security for everyone from phishing schemes to, you know, news misinformation based on generative AI being, you know, so good so fast. Yeah. Yeah.

I see. I already see the AI out there in terms of bots, like bots, anytime, um, someone posts something political on, on social media, it'll be followed by lots of, um, I think bot accounts, because if you look, they have very few followers and they're influencing, or they're disrupting. They're, they're designed to make people argue with each other on social media.

So we're seeing that now, and I think because it is an election year, this is only gonna escalate. And as, as Mark mentioned, those DeepFakes, I mean, they're pretty convincing. Now, some of them, especially if you're not paying attention, you think it is, um, a candidate or someone that's running.

So messaging and AI's influence on messaging is gonna be something to watch. Absolutely. You know, putting the election stuff aside for a second, I still read another article today about a, a pretty widespread problem we're having in high schools and colleges, and that is with deep fakes of like fake nude shots of, of especially of, of women girls, right.

That, uh, using ai, you know, it's, it's the cool thing to kind of make, make AI images fake images of, you know, women's faces or girls in school's faces on, on kind of pornographic bodies or nude bodies doing pornographic things, you know, and, and that's not new. Of course, people have been Photoshopping and playing that game, but AI, of course, takes that to a whole nother level. The, to me, that, and what we're talking about with the election stuff really points to the same issue we've been having now since kind of the rise of social media.

And that is that as a body politic, as a civilization, we can't discern truth from fiction and with AI and bots and, and, and the bots really are there to gain the system, right? Because the way these algorithms work, the more, excuse me, the more likes or comments and particular posts gets, the higher up its visibility, the more it trends. And our system is based on that.

The whole social media kind of algorithm is based on that. And, and, you know, people are gaming it. I, I mean, I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago for not here on Techstrong.

Someone had invited me on their podcast, and when it was published, they asked me to put it on LinkedIn because they have a cadre of followers who will like it and share it and push it to help game the LinkedIn algorithm. And I get it. You want, you want to get your stuff out there, but this is, this is the world we live in, and now you add AI to the mix that's like turbocharging that kind of activity.

And I, Yeah, I think it's taken to another level, right? Yeah. I, I, I can't imagine as, as Mark said right off the bat, it's trouble, it's trouble.

How are we, how how's the average person supposed to get their information and ascertain truth from fiction here? You know, the head headline grabbing stuff, you know, you talk about the deep fakes and people putting images, people's faces on images, et cetera. Those are the things that are, are easy to at least talk about maybe getting more challenging to spot.

What I think is, is interesting is both everyone who's doing creative writing of some type is, is using generative AI as a tool in that process. I mean, 'cause they wanna learn it usually, but also it's an aid in doing that. I, I'm interested in, in how you could take generative AI and both craft multiple prompts for a particular topic or article, but then, and then create your own echo chamber where you could be reposting and having generative AI create, create 25 different ways of reposting the following article.

And you could do that through an API and you can do that through posting on multiple accounts. So we could see a real escalation of the number of kind of fake posts that are happening and some real manipulation taking that, you know, gaming the, the system up. I think another level, I, I absolutely, I, you know, so what, what's the answer here though?

Where, where's the light at the end of the tunnel tunnel? Or are we just all, Well, there's definitely talk, obviously of, of some regulation, but you're right, it is already a problem. And, um, it isn't easy to tell what's true and what isn't.

I think that the, the, because going back to the fact that it's an election year, I think that the, those, those fake accounts and, um, the superficial ones are gonna be, um, watched even further. And who knows? I mean, if it gets to the point where it gets, let's say, where it really causes a, a, a widespread misinformation event that that'll just put more spotlight on it.

But I, I think, I think it, like, it's gonna just go upwards in terms of attention and an escalation. And, um, the bots that I mentioned straight into November, I, I think it's already caused the widespread. I think if you go back to the 2016 presidential election, that was Trump and Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, the, the Russian meddling, right?

Using, and that was before AI per se, but the Russian meddling using fake accounts and, and trying to gain the algorithms that we've seen absolutely had a, a, a impact in that election. And I think also what I forget the name now, of the British firm that was hired by one of the candidates, um, Cambridge Analytic, Cambridge Analytics, that's it, mark. Um, and that was before they had generator AI as a tool.

Imagine, you know, a Cambridge analytics type of operation now, a generate armed with gen AI type of functionality. I, I don't know, do you put a total ban on, on political ads and, and commentary? How, how are people supposed to get their information and how would, how sophisticated did they have to be to separate, you know, truth from fiction here?

I I, I, I'm at a loss. I, you know, I hate to be pessimistic, but I'm at, I, I don't know what to say. Well, I, There is a legislation, I think introduced by Holly and Koons, if I remember right.

Um, protect elections from AI or deceptive ai. I don't know if that'll go anywhere, but even if it does, you know, that's never stopped. The, the ransomware dudes and everybody else doing things That should be guns only, gun only outlaws have guns.

Yeah, exactly. But I think that particular AI law was more to stop sort of robocall with fake voices, You know, this was deep fakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it was prompted by that robocall that Mark, you were gonna say something? Yeah, I think actually you started out, I think you have part of the answer already. And I think that when you, like you're talking about the security bloggers network and the security creators is, I think that we, in the short term, it's gonna be a mess.

In the longer term, I think we start to have more of a relationship with individual news reporters. So I feel like, you know, I see the Creator newsletter economy, some of it's gamed, all of it's always gonna be gamed. But I look at like Matt tbi, who was, you know, a respected journalist and then did the Twitter files, and now he has racket news.

And I feel like in the long term, the transparency is hard for a big corporation and for a smaller person who's staking their career on their integrity, you know, I think more of these citizen journalists are what they called them 20 some years ago, and now we call them creators, but they're sensationalists. But I also think there's a lot of folks out there that are, you know, gonna make their bones on being good journalists and citizen journalists instead of, you know, part of the big media conglomerates that, you know, 80% of our news is paid for right now by big pharma. I mean, that's, that's part of the, the, the whole problem is that the, the model isn't a meritocracy.

You know, w William Morris is turning over in his grave right now going, this Is, well, it's definitely a rise of independent journalists for sure. Um, and that keeps on growing, um, as well. But what's interesting with the ai, another way the AI influences us, is it also kind of keeps us within our own ecosystem.

Like, it, it knows tribe you like tribe tribes, right? Which isn't good because it's, it's, it's better if people are with opposing ideas, get to debate them rather than just be with somebody, Raise with you. But I, I think what we have found is that people want to get their own views amplified.

Yeah. So they tend to stay in a tribe where their own world views are amplified and, And validated. Right.

And other people believe like I do. Yep. And I, I, and you know, I've read articles where this is translating for, like, for some of the first time in the US anyway, to people picking where they wanna live, right?

They, they wanna live in a red state or a blue state, but not just at the state level. They wanna be in a neighborhood. How did that neighborhood vote?

Wow. What's the political, I have no idea what my neighborhood vote. Yeah.

You know, and, and it's, there's been a bunch of articles. 500,000 people have moved outta Florida in the last, I think two years. Many more have moved in, but for the people moved out, one of the big things in addition of cost of living insurance was the, the, the political hate, if you will, uh, among the populace here.

And it, it, again, you've got, if you've got actors who want to play that out and heighten the, the, you know, the, the divide and, and try to sway elections and stuff, this is a great tool for them. And I don't know, I don't know how you could stop them from using it. So anyway, make good choices.

Dig into the information you're looking at. You know, democracy depends on free and fair elections, and, um, I think it's all of our duty to, to, you know, make sure we're, we're not being fooled. And then, by the way, it's not just a US issue.

You're seeing this in every, in every democracy and, and, and, and non democracies worldwide. So anyway, let's hope we figure out a solution to this sooner than later. We're gonna take a break on Textron gang.

We'll be right back. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building. com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and more.

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Hey, everyone, we're back here on Text and Gang, our next subject, again is AI related, and, but it, we're getting away from the politics and the doom and gloom. It's, can organizations afford LLM? So maybe it is doom and gloom.

Um, you know, we've spent a lot of time recently here on the gang and on our tech strong sites talking about, you know, will as, as this whole AI thing unfolds, we're learning not all LLMs are created equal. And some LLMs and some s SLMs will be better for certain jobs. And it's about using the right tool for the job.

And, and in this case, that tool is an LLM, but you know, we, we talk like LLMs are something you could go in the candy store and buy in a baseball card pack with a pack with a little piece of bubble gum. No, there's more to an LLM than that, I think. Um, and can the organizations who are gonna rely on these LLMs actually afford to sort of do the customization work that's really going to, you know, give them the ultimate value there?

So Mark, what do you think? Yeah, I think you have to break it down into a couple different categories. So the, the thing that is the most resource intensive with LLMs is training it on your data and training is, is taking an algorithm and using machine learning to populate that LLM.

Those are the things that like OpenAI is doing that generates those sensational power usage stats. Then when you and I use Google Gemini or chat CPT, it's doing something called inference. And the inference is less CPU intensive.

So what isn't practical for a lot of organizations is the training. So that's when you download what's called a foundational model. Like, uh, um, meta Has Llama or Mistral is another, um, popular vendor of these sort of open access or open source models.

And then those things don't take as much, but it's like everything in technology, the more that we, it's available, the more we consume. It's that way, you know, the amount that we drove our cars versus in the twenties has gone up substantially. The amount that we use our desktop computers and our smartphones continue to use to rise and the amount that we use ai.

So, um, I think the, the takeaway is this is LLMs are easily accessible. The compute that underlies them is what's expensive. So that's the, the Nvidia GPUs that's, um, Brock with a, uh, queue is another vendor there.

There's a ton, ton of up and comers there that are all going to, um, have this problem to solve, is how can they reduce the amount of power they consume while they're producing more and more inference, and in some cases, training Fair Barney? Well, Uh, uh, we were talking about cast ai and they have a new product that's optimizing this, um, which is interesting because when I was looking into it, um, the, the, the, the pitch is, well, it's more cost effective, but there's also a sustainability angle. Because if they're optimizing cost and they're using, um, less energy, they're also freeing up the, um, ability to focus on other products and other things at the same time.

So it's, it's I guess the cast ai, um, point is that it's cost effective, but I was thinking that, um, if if they're optimizing it, then it's gonna be using less energy, and that's, you know, beneficial to sustainability. But that's just maybe in the smaller picture of that product. Well, part of it is they, what CAST has done, to your point, is they've added the AI aspect to running on, uh, Kubernetes, which they already monitor to Kubernetes and cloud environments.

And I guess this is gonna be offered as part of Google, uh, GCP initially, but it's, it's kind of the larger finops of managing costs. Um, I, I'm curious, I, I'm doubtful that they're gonna recommend different, uh, LLMs for the one that you're using. Maybe they will, but that seems to be such a fast changing landscape.

And I wonder too, you know, I'm thinking we want to be flexible and don't get too tied into a single LLM, but Mark, once you've trained, if you've trained data into an LLM, you're not gonna be punting and going somewhere else, are you? No. I mean, you, you may have a foundational model that you actually access data through a Vector database, and that makes it sort of portable, but they're not so much portable.

I think it's more like a dashboard approach. But if we look, and I was an early cloud guy. I mean, Apache Cloud Stack was one of the early and open stack cloud providers, and we've talked about, you know, this arbitrage of cloud forever and ever.

And what happens is that people do not, you know, dynamically switch workloads. It just, they just keep an eye on the cost. There's, there's been tons, you know, NetApp has SPOT IBM has cost optimization tools.

There's a lot of these tools, but they're not, no one has sort of cracked that code in cloud, and there's not a whole lot of difference in AI other than it's a different workload you're monitoring. So, and then you, you, you really have to take this holistically as, you know, we talked a little earlier in the show about, you know, power consumption versus cost now, you know, and then the amount of work, how do we measure work if it's inference versus training? So I think it's, it's a pretty complex thing to crack.

Um, it's good to know what your costs are, but at the end of the day, the, the sort of core services just like storage when Amazon and Google and compute, that's a race to zero. And I mean, it's a commoditization play in the long term, hopefully given once we get past the GP shortage. Yeah.

Um, you know, also, I would be remiss not to say that a Google Cloud next is going on right now out in Vegas. Mike Ard, our chief content officer, is not on the gang today. I was hoping to have a live report from him at Google, Google Cloud, but I don't know if we're gonna pull that off.

But they touted it a bunch of, uh, new AI advances too around this. Do you see us moving to a place where different LLMs are available in a marketplace, if you will. Right?

And, and you could kind sass your LLM, if you will, right? You don't have to buy it, you just rent it. And maybe it has, you know, it's trained a certain way, or it's trained for healthcare, it's trained for finance, it's trained for pharma, or what have you.

And this way the, the amount of investment in time and resources that an organization would need to put in to have, you know, a specialized LLM might be more affordable, might be easier, you know, more fungible. Yeah. That's cast announcement came from, um, Las Vegas, uh, yesterday.

Yep. Sorry, Mitch, go ahead. So Martin's gonna talk, go ahead, Mike.

Yeah, so the thing that they are doing right now, there's two things, is what we're seeing is these models that are called mixture of experts, which nails what Alan is saying. So it has this routing layer that says what expert is the best for this? So if Bonnie has a climate change question, or Alan has a question about, you know, style or whatever, it's gonna route the best expert.

But in the long term, what I think we're gonna see is this gateway. And so, uh, Kong, which is a big, uh, gateway provider for regular data, has just released an open source gateway that's gonna say exactly what you did is depending on your use case. So we may have what I call our general LLM, the Google of L lms, maybe it's Chachi, bt, and then we're gonna have, you know, med GPT and we're gonna have lawyer GPT, and we're gonna have those things.

And you're gonna have these gateways, I believe that'll route your questions to some, you know, maybe not a marketplace, but pre-approved like model. So you may have an internal model for the tech strong gang that has your internal dialogue versus us asking general election questions of Chachi, BT or Gemini or someone like that. Fair enough.

I mean, we, we will have to see how that, you know, makes its way to market. Uh, you know, again, I I we're so early in the gen AI story, so, you know, can organizations of afford LLMs talk to me in two, three years? And I'll, I'll have a much better handle on that.

And, and, and your, you know, opinion. I, I think we're in such a rapidly evolving, changing cycle right now that what's, you know, prohibitively expensive today, is affordable tomorrow. And, and what's affordable today is, is is quite likely commodity tomorrow.

Right? And, and, you know, and what's the, what's open source gonna have, uh, uh, play a role in here, in, in keeping, you know, that whole ecosystem open and, and somewhat affordable? Hopefully.

Um, you know, Alan, I feel like we're living in a, a giant experiment, which is, you know, every piece of software that I use has some kind of an AI element to it. Most of 'em want to charge you nine bucks a month or whatever it is, right? I can't afford to do it on all of them, but most of them, you know, since it's in software, they can tell if you copy it or you click copy button or you do a thumbs up.

So it's kind of got this built in training, almost like we would train, uh, through some ML algorithms to start to learn what are useful uses of Gen ai. Just sticking it on your email client doesn't make it a better email client, right? Sticking in front of a database of documents, well, might be helpful, might not, but we're, we're kinda learn, as you mentioned, we're early, but we're also learning in real time what's useful.

And people that get really smart about how their technology is being used, I think are gonna have a leg up. The great, I, I don't, you know, I, I absolutely agree with you there, Mitchell. It's, I gotta tell you though, first I thought you were gonna tell me that we're all living in some AI matrix or something, right?

Red pill. You Were, you were thinking I was going matrix, I was going red pill, blue Pillers already, you know? But, um, We are batteries, but that's another topic.

Mm-Hmm. Just, Just a little data point to that, to your point, Alan, of like, I remember getting on the internet in the late eighties, and if you had a T three at your office that was super fast, that was 44 megabits per second. Today, 25 years later, I have a gigabit, which is to my home fiber, to the home that's consumer.

Uh, T one back or T three. Back in those days, cost tens upon tens of thousands Of T three was about 40, 40 to $50,000. Yeah.

45 grand. Yeah, it's five. If it was five grand a month, five to 10, depending on where you are.

Yeah. Yeah. Today I have for a hundred dollars a month or less, I have, you know, 20 times the bandwidth that, or, you know, less than, you know, like 1% of the cost.

So that's, I mean, I think, You know how Tech Knowledge works, right? So now all of the apps you use require 10 times the bandwidth to really use them well. Yeah.

And, you know, you wanna watch that video in HDR or just plain old fashioned hd. Yeah. Um, so, you know, there, there, there's that, there's that, and it, and it is, I, I see it in my house as well.

Um, it, it does kind of freak me out. com era company called Inter Reliant. And we were buying, uh, T three and T one lines from WorldCom, if you remember, back in WorldCom.

And then this company outta Houston came to us and said, oh, we, we could arbitrage your, your, uh, bandwidth cost and we can be a better bandwidth provider provider for you. So I went down with the CEO of my company and our VP of, uh, I-C-T-E-O to Houston and this big building with a big E in front of it, and, um, went all the way up to the top floor. And, you know, I remember they gave us a whole pitch on, on Bandwidth media and arbitrage.

And I asked my CEO, 'cause I, I was younger then, I a little more naive. I said, herb, is this real? What do you think?

He said, these guys are either the biggest geniuses in the world, or they're crooks. Well, it was RO and they were crooks. Yeah.

Um, so, you know, who knows what, what, what the future holds when it comes to these things, but it, it, it certainly is there. Anyway, we're gonna take a break here on, uh, Textron Gang. We're back with our third block it.

We're gonna move off AI a little bit to security, so stay tuned. All right. We're back here on Techstrong Gang.

Our last block today is something that's very personal to me. Um, we recently put out a press release and a blog I'm writing should be out by the time. This is, uh, on Textron TV that we have renamed the Security Bloggers Network.

The Security Creators Network. And this year at the RSA conference, instead of doing our usual security bloggers meetup, we're actually gonna do the Security Creators meetup. What does that all mean?

Well, let me give you a little history in the genesis of the security bloggers network and, and Mitch Mitchell. Ashley, by the way, was right at my side when all of this happened so he could verify. What I'm telling you is, is the truth.

Um, I was, Mitchell and I had helped co-found a company called Still Secure Back in the early two thousands, 2000, 2001. And the, uh, uh, VC behind that was our good friend Brad felt Brad was investing in many companies back then as the whole Web two oh thing was really starting to kick in. And, uh, Brad invite introduced me to a fellow named Dick Costolo.

Dick at the time was the founder of a company called Feed Burner out of Chicago. Dick went on to become the CEO of Twitter, but at the time he was the founder, CEO of Feed Burner. And also at that time, the world of the RSS kinda syndication, really simple syndication was like the tower of Ba Babel.

There were multiple standards of RSS, much like SBOs and stuff like that today. And just because you were able to render one version of RSS didn't mean you could read other RSS versions. What FeedBurner did was standardize the RSS feeds.

So no matter whether you were using R rss, one r, SS two Adam, or any of the others, if you used FeedBurner, your, your blog or whatever you were using to syndicate displayed correctly, it was great. What a great concept, what great technology, but how did you make money from it? And so, Dick Costolo had this great idea of if he could bundle like-minded blogs on, you know, similar topics, he could then sell advertising into that syndicated feed.

Excuse me. And so Dick asked, well, Brad Feld put together the, the VC bloggers network. He asked me to put together a security bloggers network.

I still secure was a security company. So I reached out to a couple of my friends and I did that. And as I said, this is about, oh, it's almost 20 years ago now.

And, uh, we, we put it together pretty quickly. We probably had 50 to a hundred security blogs syndicated in there. And, um, this is around, as I say, 2003, 2004.

Um, and then we decide, wow. You know, and the security bloggers world was happening at the time. There were, Martin McKay had the network security blog.

Mike Rothman, security Insight, rich Mogul Securosis, um, uh, Bruce Schneider was, was blogging of course. Probably the biggest one was Brian Krebs, our friend Brian. Well, Brian was still, I think at the Washington Post at the time.

He was, yeah. But, um, anyway, we quickly gathered this community that, that in retrospect was like a who's who of of bloggers. And we decided, you know what, it's time we meet in person.

Let's, let's grab some beers at RSA this year. And we, we put it out there that, you know, everyone who blocks security is invited to this bloggers meetup. And before you know it, companies are reaching out saying, Hey, I heard about this.

We'd like to sponsor it. We'll buy your beer for you. You don't have to ask me twice.

Um, so we had the very first bloggers meet up, I, I guess it was either 2004 or 2005, I don't remember now. There were probably about 35 or 40 of us that got together. And, um, you know, that, that's where it was born.

From there, the Security bloggers network quickly grew to over 400 security blogs. 'cause blogging became very popular. And the security bloggers meetup became an annual mainstay event at RSA, where those core people.

And it grew, I think at the biggest, we probably had 250 people at the party. Those core people. It was the best of event of RSA week.

It was a marketing free zone, no sales zone, chill out, talk to your security friends and, you know, and have some fun, good, good drink, good food, good people. Um, fast forward, and by the way, Dick Costal Law then sold a feed burner to Google for like 80 or $90 million on like zero revenue. Um, crazy story, but true.

About six months later, I get a call from Google and they said, Hey, Dick Costolo gave us your name. You know, we, we own FeedBurner now. We don't know what to do with the security bloggers network.

Would you take it back? I said, sure. You know, I, I, I created it.

I'm happy to. And I took it back. This was probably 2006 or 2007, and at that point, I, I put the security bloggers network feed, which was just a syndicated RSS feed out into the wild.

Anyone could use it, republish it, do whatever. Um, but I always thought it was a tremendous, tremendous, uh, uh, you know, a a a re reservoir of information. What a great resource.

com launches March of 2014. Within a year, I'm thinking, what's the next site we should do? Well, I'm a security guy.

I, I want to do security. And we come up with the notion of Security Boulevard. But what made Security Boulevard special is I took that security bloggers network feed and made it the backbone of Security Boulevard.

So today there's still, I think 300 or 350 blogs in the security bloggers network publishing anywhere from 20 to 40 articles a day on, on Security Boulevard. And it's why we have probably the most content of any site out there when it comes to security. Um, and it, and it's, it's real.

And it has been a long time, and thank you to every single person who's ever been a member of the security Bloggers network. But, you know, times change, times change. First of all, not everyone blogs today, we have people who do podcasts and videos and newsletters and, uh, they create content on TikTok and social media.

They create tech, uh, content for tech vendors like White Papers and eBooks and infographs and any number of things. So calling it the Bloggers Network was kind of old. And speaking of old the last couple years, even during covid, when, when RSA was open, the last two years, we, we had our bloggers network and it was great.

'cause our core people, about 75 to a hundred of them still come down. We love getting together. But we've been doing this for 20 years, and many of us have been in the industry much longer than that.

We wanna bring in fresh blood, we want new people, we want new security content creators to be part of this, to, to take the baton, to take the torch and carry it forward. So, long story short, that was a very long story, and it wasn't very short, but the, the, we've renamed the Security Bloggers Network as the Security Creators Network, still the same great blogs that were there before you could still join. And if you publish any kind of security, you can, uh, security content you can apply to have that added to the Security Boulevard site.

And for RSA this year, as we do every year, the Wednesday night of RSA, this year it's March 8th, we are having the very first Security Creators network meet up, um, May 8th, uh, May 8th, excuse me, not March 8th. Yes. And, uh, it's at the Tonga room, which we're also kind of building on the old Tonga Con, uh, vibe that Jack Daniels and, and some of those folks put together.

And a shout out to Jack. I don't think he'll be at RSA this year. Um, but anyway, you're all invited.

You could look at, at the websites, you could Google it as a Eventbrite page. Love to have you there. We are looking for sponsors, as we always do for the Security Creators Network.

This isn't a moneymaking thing for Techstrong. We, we throw money into, it's just, it is still the same old story. We're covering the beers.

So if, if you're interested in that, reach out to me as well. But that, that's Mitch, did I miss anything? No, I love to hear you recant the story.

And I've heard it many times, you know, which is on, and I love hearing it. What's amazing to me is I think the spirit of what started it was a group of us saying, we need to, we're getting in security. We gotta share this information, right?

We're all kind of battling the same wars and trying to figure out similar stuff. And we can go to RSA and listen to each other's talks. But, you know, we're, we're blogging now, let's put this together.

And it was a pretty altruistic, you know, community-based thing. And I think that community is still, is what's really held it together. Yes, it's great content, it's great people, but it's, it's both collaborating together and sharing that which is what the network is and expanding that to podcasts and videos and, and newsletters and all different kinds of content, um, just makes it a wider audience.

And frankly, I mean, one of the benefits to you and I was, that also helped our, our profile in the industry. Oh, Absolutely. Increasing that.

I mean, mm-Hmm. And people are doing that today. That's one of the inspirations for doing a podcast or, you know, doing these kinds of activities.

So we encourage you to join. We would love to have you, uh, be part of the network. Yep.

Two things I I left out there. I do wanna mention, one of the things that made the Bloggers Network Meetup, uh, pretty cool was we used to do the security bloggers awards. And I always thought they were tongue in cheek, but a lot of people took 'em very seriously.

We wanted to do it again for this year, but we're not gonna have, we didn't have enough runway between getting the, a place, the Tonga room and doing everything. But next year we will be back with a vengeance and we will be doing the Security Creators Network awards. And then lastly, and maybe most importantly, as I said, this isn't a text strong only thing.

So I reached out to my friend Gianna, who is with the, or runs the security marketing professionals or cyber security Marketing Professional society, and they are partnering with us on this and producing it. Gianna and her team will help a lot with it. And don't be fooled because they're the marketing people that this is now becoming a marketing heavy event.

It's not, it's still a no marketing zone, but they have great connections into people creating security content today. And they also have a lot of people kind of coming up in the ranks. And I think they're a great organization for us to partner with to revitalize the, the meetup and, and bring new blood in.

I mean, we, we want to see new people come have some drinks on us. Hey, I think it'd be worth, and I know you can't name everybody, but there's some folks like Jennifer and people like that Who are Yeah. Pe part of, yeah.

People who are instrumental and, you know, my, our good friend Jennifer Gio, media fighter, we quite frankly, Mike Rothman, rich Mogul, and I wrote her coattails for 10 years making this party. Jennifer did the whole thing. Uh, but Mike Rothman, rich Mogul, I think I met, mentioned Martin McKay and Bruce Schneider and, and Brian Krebs.

People like Graham Cluey though, um, Troy Hunter from Microsoft always won a lot of awards. Uh, you know, Andy Ellis, Jack Daniels, I mentioned. Um, just trying to think of Jeremiah Grossman, Robert Hansen, ARS Snake, I just a who's who of security, you know, that we saw Chris Hoff.

Mm-Hmm. The Hoffmeister right. Early on.

Chris was, was huge in that. He was one of the best bloggers out there. Um, so many more.

Alex Hutton, I, I could probably go on forever there. There's actually a Facebook page, uh, security bloggers meetup where you can see pictures. I happen to look at it yesterday to make the event bright.

I've got pictures down there from 2007 to eight. I had so much hair. Um, but anyway, um, do check it out if you're, if you're a cyber professional, if you create content around security, be part of it.

That's my public service announcement for today. Anything else? Well, I think it's really timely that you changed the name.

I blog. When I think of blogs, I do think of the early two thousands. Yeah.

And everybody had a blog. So content creation creator network is great. And I also wanna point out kind of connecting it to our early segment about AI and how we don't know what's true and what's, what's real.

Because we're all just virtual and online. I think it's terrific that you're doing this in person event where the people that you, you read their blog, you don't really know them. And then you get to meet face to face.

Absolutely. What an excellent opportunity. And I will tell you the network that was built through this, I, I don't mean the, the bloggers network, I mean the personal networking that goes on has really fueled, it's fueled tech strong.

It's fueled my career. It's fueled Mitchell's career. And a lot of 'em are really great friends.

And some of 'em we only see once a year at RSA at the meetup and others, you know, we're, we're working with or, or talking to all the time. But it is a big part of not only our network, but just our colleagues and friends that we've had for so many years. Yep.

The labor of love. Alright, I think that's gonna wrap our Textron gang today. I was, I'm sorry I was a little subdued there for a while, but whatever.

Um, I thought you were gonna get emotional there for Them. I, I was holding back. It's a nice Story.

Um, but it is, it's a true story. Anyway, we have a great lineup of Textron TV besides on the gang today. Mark, thanks for joining us.

Hey man. I, I know we're getting, we're about a month, well, a little more than a month out on, on the AI event. You wanna give a quick update?

Yeah, yeah. So we have the Artificially Intelligent Enterprise Conference going on online, May 21st. We're adding folks from Amazon.

We're adding folks from the practitioners that were at large banks. They're talking about how to use generative AI from a firsthand experience. So, uh, if you get a chance, uh, go to, uh, tech Strong events, check us out, sign up.

Um, it should be a good event. 12 hours per half of the world. So you'll get to see, you know, a lot of different things, whether you're a developer, an executive business person, or a DevOps person.

Gen AI for DevOps is one of the topics. And then it will repeat another 12 hours for the other kind of like how the eclipse goes around. Uh, that's all right.

And you can get to the tech strong events, but Mark, what is the URL for the event, isn't it? It's the AI enterprise Online. So Yep.

The AI enterprise online, THE, the AI enterprise online. You could go right there, you know, registration's free. We'd love to have you on there.

We really want to make this the biggest AI event out there. So sign up. We, Mark's done a great job.

If you, you don't follow his artificially Intelligent Enterprise newsletter and stuff, you're missing out on a lot of great AI news. I know. And you knowhow right up for that.

For sure. Yep. Alright.

And happy Thursday everyone. Enjoy the rest of Techstrong tv. We're not live on Friday as usual.

Have a best of, but we'll be back at it on Monday. Thank you. Cloud native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem.

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