Techstrong Gang – August 6, 2024

Hi, everyone. Happy Tuesday. It's Black Hat.

It also might be Black Tuesday. With all heck breaking loose on the markets worldwide. We've got that.

We've got a Gen AI comes to the mainframe, as well as is quantum computing gonna be more sustainable? You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Alan Shiel here for Techron Gang. Uh, you are watching this. I'm out in Vegas for Black Hat, but we've got a lot going on, not only in in Black Hat, but the state of the world.

We're gonna be talking about all these subjects. We've also got some good gen AI coming to the mainframe, uh, segment today. And then our own, uh, Bonnie Schneider has a report on applying quantum computing to sustainability.

And we're also going to immediately following this gang show, we will be live at Tech Field Day, which is always a great, great, uh, event to listen in on. Uh, before we get started though, let me introduce you to our gang members today. Joining me also from Black Hat this week is our, uh, editor John Swartz.

John Hi. Welcome. Las Vegas.

Yeah. Steaming Las Vegas. Yes.

Yes. It's going to be actually already in Las Vegas 'cause he likes to get out there early. I don't know whether it's to roll dice or whatever one does in Las Vegas early.

What happens in Vegas stays there. It's our own C-T-O-C-T-A. Mitch Ashley.

Hey Mitchell. Welcome. Hey, good to be, uh, talking to you from Black Hat.

So is it a dry heat? It, it's, it's just a heat. It's 101 degrees.

When I got off the plane, that's eight 30 last night, so, wow. There you go. All right.

I will, I have one 10 jacket. Um, well anyway, welcome Mitchell. And then joining us live here in our Boca its own headquarters.

As we, before we all head out, to my immediate left is our Echo Insights editor and analyst, Bonnie Schneider. Hey Bonnie, how are you? Hey, doing well, thanks.

Good. And to my far left, he'll be holding the fort down here in Boca this week. It's our Chief Content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike. Hello. Good to see you, Rizza.

Excellent to see you. So guys, look, it's summer camp for the cyber world in Vegas. Um, black hat Def Con BSides Vegas.

Give a shout out to them. It's always my, one of my favorite BSides a lot going on. Of course, you know, the CrowdStrike incident is kind of sucking a lot of oxygen, but there's al there's always a lot going on at Blackhead.

I mean, if you look at the roots of Blackhead, it's, it's different than r It was different than RSA black hat was very much aimed at AppSec. It was very much aimed at exploits and security research. The last several years it has become RSA in the desert.

It's all things security. But John, you had a great writeup on this over on the, uh, security Boulevard. Why don't you kick us off with Alan Black hat preview?

Yeah, sure. Uh, so there's gonna be two obsessions. One of them was already planned.

The other one was of course a surprise. The, the surprise was CrowdStrike, right? Which basically put the spotlight on security, especially among the mainstream media.

So everyone was covering it. It was a national news story. And I think what's gonna happen, and what I, I've talked to about two dozen folks who are attending the show all from security companies, and they all pivoted to, to not the, the downside of the outage, but they see a marketing opportunity obviously.

So in a sense, this show is, has a very heavy marketing influence. And so a lot of them are gonna lead into the CrowdStrike outage and the importance of, uh, security, especially in the AI age. So one of the things that I kept coming across, uh, these executives kept bringing up among themselves and the companies, the customers they work for, is the importance of understanding and company structure and rules and the potential privacy and compliance issues that are arising as a plunge into ai.

And again, CrowdStrike was a human error, but it kind of raises the temperature, so to speak, in Vegas, even more so about the importance of this. And it, again, it will also bring more attention from the mainstream who's covering this because they love cybersecurity breaches. They, they love disaster happening to consumers.

I mean, I'll, I'll admit it. Um, the other thing that will be talked about, and there were a number of panels already planned, was disinformation or misinformation. So this is a year where half the world's population will be able, are eligible to vote, uh, including obviously November 5th.

And one of the things, one of the fears is that AI is gonna turbocharge phishing. Uh, one executive I talked to referred to AI as a weapon of mass deception. So there were a number of, uh, studies market research that show a spike in phishing incidents because of ai.

So those are the two dominant themes, CrowdStrike and disinformation. And I think what they, a lot of these companies are gonna do is use this as an opportunity to sell Exactly right. And to bring attention to themselves and maybe fundraise.

So Mitch, how long have you and I been going to Black Hat? Early Two thousands. 2003.

2003. That's when we started. I could count on one hand actually on three fingers, the amount of years that there isn't a major security breach right before Black Hat or a major security incident right before Black Hat.

That that drives the, the, the world round and round and round. Is this a Conspiracy? Uh, I'm, I'm not a conspiracy theory kind of guy that's, I remember a sick, um, I remember Alan, the, uh, I think one of the first ones you and I went to, you remember the old Apple commercials where Apple's secure and can, you know, as Apple or pc and uh, they had, uh, set a team to break into an Apple, into a Macintosh.

And uh, they got through an Adobe vulnerability and Right. They hack. I Remember that one a few minutes.

Yeah, that was the big, that was the big splash. That was a big One, Mack. But, you know, it, it's just, I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory, but it's just the way of the world, I guess.

'cause on any given week, there's a good breach though. The, you know, this one, CrowdStrike one is a doozy. The other thing is though, and it gets back to what I said in the opening, there was a time where blackout was about research and exploits Bar B Jack making the ATM machine spit dollars out on the stage.

Right? Remember that, Mitch? It's not anymore.

This is RSA, it's a security show for the security industry. You know, there was a time where Defcon attracted all the feds and that was a great place where they, you know, the, the federal security apparatus intermingled with, it's called a gray hat, white hat kind of community. But a lot of that's been replaced, a black hat where for, you know, uh, you know, just bright lights and sizzle and it's a lot of companies vying in a very crowded space for marketing.

And then, and then John, to your point, one of the things I, I used to hate it when I ran Still Secure with Mitchell and our friend Raj. Ava is stepping on the backs of your competitors. Right?

Something like this happens with CrowdStrike, right? And you send out an email that says, this wouldn't have happened if you used company Acme's company. Right.

Or Acme Security and or Trade in your CrowdStrike for acne security. Wabu, ddu. Either you got the goods or you don't have the goods.

Don't you know the grace of God next week? Yeah. Because he could, any one of them.

So That a lot of these companies were sympathetic on that point. Actually, there was only one company that refused to talk about CrowdStrike under any circumstances. And that was Palo Alto Networks.

Good for that. I give them credit. Yeah.

They Weren't the only, everybody else wanted to sell fear, honestly. Yeah, no, that's what they do. They stop on, you know, someone's back until it's their turn.

Right. Because it's, it's the zebra her, and one day the lion's going to get you and Yeah. It's interesting that you, me, sorry, Alan.

It's interesting you mentioned, 'cause I, back in the day, back in the early two thousands, I used to go to black hat, uh, mice to cover cybersecurity at a, the newspaper. And I went with my colleague and it seems so much different now than it was back then. I mean, now it seems more like just an RSA in the desert, as you said.

Yeah. Because it kind of become more of just a marketing concept. Absolutely.

I mean, back then, and Mitch, he can tell you this, you know, it was at Caesar's, there was no exhibit hall. The, the sponsors lined up in the hallway outside the briefing rooms and you had a little stand in the hallway. We always like to get the one near, um, I forgot what they call Venus Pool.

Venus or whatever. Venus. Venus Pool.

That's what it, right. Where it was clothing optional. And you know what, we would bring a pair of binoculars and I'd have people lined up down the hall.

The only thing is before I let you use the binoculars, we had to scan your badge. Um, and different day shortage. Uh, I don't know, I guess everybody really is naked when it comes to cybersecurity.

But it was a different, it was a very different show that very different. Um, well, Let me ask you something about, is the, there is been a change, I think in tenor, and it's not the first time we've seen this in a show, but, um, the keynotes for this thing are led by the head of cisa, the head of security for Europe, and the head of security for the uk. And they're all government led people.

So having governments become the primary leaders and drivers of the cybersecurity community, it seems like there's been a subtle shift now where they are kind of front and center almost every week. They have some sort of announcement about something that they're doing these days. And so has, has the the mojo changed?

Well, the government, as I said earlier, the government was always a big player at Black Hat Defcon. And, and there's another change. John, you were there earlier, you know, Mitch, you know, too, it was Black Hat Defcon.

Right? Right. You went just from Black hat into Defcon.

Mm-Hmm. And you spent the week. It was all Yeah, it was, it was one continuous show.

Right, right. They very much, but in those days, the government, it was, we had a lot of government, a lot of government people wouldn't say they were government people back then. A lot of FBI, if I remember.

Yeah. A lot folks that You knew were from The government. Yeah.

But I mean, to your point, Mike, the gover, the, the governments of the world have gotten actively involved in regulating and dictating cybersecurity policy. Right. We didn't, I, I mean, you know, we had Graham Leach Bliley back in the day.

Um, but we didn't have anything like what we have now around SBOs and software supply chain security and the EU stuff, uh, GDPR and, and Dora and what have you. I, I think it, on the good side, it points to that cybersecurity has arrived. It is truly the priority we always said it was.

And it's on, you know, top of everyone's mind. The bad side is, you know, I'm here. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Um, I have a question about that because when you, we look at what's going on, I haven't been to Black Hat, so I don't know what it was like years past or now, but is it different this year because you have such a conflation of so many events in the days leading up to Black Hat with, um, the stock market with, um, what's happening in the Middle East and what's happening with this upcoming election. It does seem just on the outside that it, there's a lot happening that, that maybe, maybe we will take away a little bit of the focus on CrowdStrike. I'm not sure.

But there, there just seems like a conflation of events going into this year. Yeah. There's always The stock market's probably gonna over Yeah.

Overwhelm in terms of talking points. You know, Bonnie, I think it's also that, um, we talk much more about critical infrastructure now. We, we didn't weren't really conceiving in the early days of Black Hat, you know, how sensitive those things were.

And I think security people have a much greater appreciation now because we so often work with, um, with law enforcement. 'cause oftentimes an attack will turn into something that's gonna be, you know, reported to the law enforcement or at least informing them about it. So that, that partnership is, has come a long ways.

It didn't, it didn't kind of happen overnight. I remember when Richard Clark, remember Richard Clark came here, was like the first security czar, I think it was 2007, something like that, Surrounding No, no, I think it was, it was, it was under w Was it under w So it was a little earlier than that. Yeah.

That was, that was kind of what I remember is the first big government Instance. Yeah. You know, he also was a major figure at RSAs I remember, uh, For years and years.

Years and years. Post nine 11. Right?

Yeah, no, Richard was, uh, friend and, um, mean what a body of work he has as well. Mm-Hmm. Um, yeah, I, it is, I I think, you know, talking about the market and stuff like that, the cybersecurity industry, as I said, it's taken such a top, top of mind place.

There's so much money investing. You know, when I first started going to blackout, I think there were 800 venture backed cyber companies and we used to say, oh, can't can't support more than three, 400 half of these guys are gonna go outta business. I think the last number I saw, I forgot if it was 3,500 or 7,000, some outrageous number of cyber backed of venture backed cyber com or public, uh, cyber companies.

So any news on the financial markets is gonna be big news within the cyber industry. And again, this has become a show or the industry by the industry. So would you say that half the cybersecurity vendors are probably for sale?

I I think half of the venture backed tech vendors in general are probably for sale, if not more. I think it's just, you know, we're seeing analysts come out with stuff every day with this. I mean, when the market goes down and the IPO doesn't become a va a a viable liquidity.

Everybody's for sale. 'cause you got nowhere else to go. The Still begins.

Yep. The sale begins. Yep.

Well, I, so if someone comes and beats you up and says, you know what? You should replace CrowdStrike. You might wanna ask them, are you gonna be here next year?

I think people do ask that. Absolutely. Because you have to.

What your staying power, You can even look at, um, it was reported that Warren Buffet, who's the largest Apple shareholder, um, sold off a good portion of his shares. He's still the largest shareholder. Um, but the speculation is that he's anticipating the market go down and that's when you're gonna buy a comp.

Buy and invest could be interesting. So if you freeing up cash to be able to do that in anticipation, I wonder if, uh, Wiz is wondering whether they should have walked away from the Google offer. I was wondering And 23 billions looking real good right about now, but you don't know how much of that was stock.

Sure. Right. And, and so you're trading one stock for another.

But look, you know, at the end of the day, let me close 'cause we're over time on this section. We could talk about valuations and finance and all of these things. Black Hat is still about security and we're gonna have a lot of great security discussions there.

We will be there all week streaming live along with our friends from rum. Uh, we have a, a party tonight at the Mandalay Bay Pool. If anyone on Black Hat or out in Big is watching this, probably Google it.

You, you need to register an Eventbrite for it. But, um, John, you'll be doing all kinds of interviews and briefings as well. You all Will be right.

I'll be going from one to another to another all day Tuesday, today and Wednesday. I wanna clarify one point. No naked people at the pool tonight.

Oh, No, no. That was at Caesar's Palace. Okay.

This is at the Mandalay Bay Pool. Um, but we do have a pro a tent there, a a, you know, kind of celebrity tent and drink some food and seeing all my friends. So, and, and if nothing else, look, there's two times a year I get to see all my bud from and gals from cyber.

It's r saying it's black hat. And you know, even Hoff is back. I don't know if he is, he's probably not watching this, but he's gonna be a CAA Fuente he is tonight.

His old hangout Disregards like old times. I didn't even know if Casa Fuente is there anymore. But anyway, good luck with you coming a black hat and you see any of our crew do say hello, but we're gonna take a break now.

We're coming back to talk about gen AI coming to the mainframe. All right folks, we're back and we're talking about gen AI in the mainframe. BMC is out previewing some tools that is showing, including an AI agent that helps you convert your code into something else.

And they're gonna have all kinds of AI agents for managing the mainframe. And it seems like it's part of this whole effort to democratize this venerable platform that used to require a lot of skills to manage. Mitch, what's your take on what's going on here?

I think that this is part of a much larger trend, but does the mainframe just become another platform? Well, I think it's, it's, you know, the mainframe is a compute software data environment just like anything else. And it has, its, uh, it has knows, been around a long time, it has its own complexities and new people are coming in to take those jobs for folks that may have retired out of mainframe type of work.

So you have this, one of the biggest factors is training people up on mainframe systems and code. And a lot of that code is, you know, been out there for a while. And so, but no, the people that wrote it are long gone.

You know, I'm retired and, and, uh, you need some way of understanding what's happening. So there's a lot of things about operating, managing, developing, writing code, translating code, understanding what it is. com talking about, uh, John McKinney, uh, from BMC about the new automated mainframe intelligence, uh, devex code is, is pretty interesting.

I think you, what, what's sort of a nostalgic about this, and I'm showing ma nostalgic about this, is the first expert system that I worked on was actually an expert system to diagnose failures on the mainframe. This is in the eighties. So it tells you how far back that goes.

So it's, I think it's exciting for, for, you know, people developing and operating mainframe environments to have the benefits of what gen AI can bring to it. Kudos to from owning up to that Mitchell. Oh, now Yeah.

Come for confessions. On, on, you know, when I'm at Black Hat, you got Here Got Marys and how enjoy black hat. Um, I, so look, I I think this is a testament to the versatility of, of this venerable platform.

How's that for some big words? Huh? Wow.

Some college Words here. I got big ones, but, um, you know, if you look at what, what's been going on with the mainframe in the last 10 years, even, you know, IBM and the rest of the, of the, uh, community including BMC and Broadcom ca and, you know, well ca and them became Broadcom and Rocket. They've done a great job of modernizing the mainframe.

We talk about app modernization on mainframe, but really they've modernized the, the platform. And so it runs Java, it runs Kubernetes, it runs all of these, you know, modern, uh, languages. Why shouldn't we bring Gen AI to it?

Um, you know, I, the, the question I have though is does the gen AI live on the mainframe? In other words, is that AI itself living on the mainframe or are we going out to an AI in the cloud or something that then that then, you know, tells the mainframe what to do or Things? And is it cost effective to run it on the mainframe?

You know? Yeah. The answer is that Is different.

They're Gonna do all the above. They'll have local agents and then they'll call out to some extent, There's no GPUs, right. You're not starting to stick Nvidia chips on this thing.

IBM, oddly enough, has an AI chip for the mainframe that's kind of a co-processor that they created. So they be able to kind of think about that as in a different light. But we'll see.

It's still still Acceler. You know, I, I have to laugh though. So a couple of weeks back I'm, you know, sitting in a bar here locally in Florida and you Meet some, what a surprise.

And you And you and you meet some fellow and you ask him, you know, what do you do? And half the time in Florida, the answer is, I'm retired. Yeah, right.

But the guy laughs he says, well, sort of, I'm on a consulting gig to support this IBM mainframe for the last five years. And he's probably looking to support that for the next five, Five years. And he probably could, But it maybe not because if we democratize this stuff then, you know, it becomes more accessible to and more realistic to use kids now to manage the mainframe.

You know, you'd be surprised at the amount of kids who do manage mainframes. I, I do the Open Mainframe show with the Open Mainframe Project from Linux Foundation. And a huge gist of their efforts are on getting kids in colleges here in the US and especially in India, teaching them cobol, teaching them mainframe and getting them involved.

Because you know what, there's a lot of jobs in the mainframe market and a lot of the mainframe folks are retired and we are looking for fresh blood and, and fresh, you know, workers there. So it, you know, it, it does come to that. I, I don't know, you know, let's not repeat the mistakes we've made with Gen AI thinking it's the be all and end all.

I don't know if gen AI is gonna democratize the mainframe, right? Um, I think you're still going to need mainframe skill sets to do the mainframe AI will make you just the way it makes every dev, it can make every developer tester and everyone else 10 x more effective or efficient. But I don't know if it's gonna take jobs away from mainframe people.

I'm not entirely certain it plays out exactly that way. I think that if you listen to IBM and BMC and even Broadcom, they're all trying to figure out how to turn that mainframe into just another node on a distributed computing environment. And it'd be the mainframe, the cloud, the local on-premise stuff.

And it feels like we're trying to take down all the walls that have existed in these different silos and reduce our need for specialization and all these platforms. And I think one of the benefits of just having that prompt to interface with things is I can play more easily. I can figure out how something works or doesn't work.

I can tell it how to do it, I can do it iteratively. So even if I don't know what I'm doing, I can learn passed away. So that's why I think we might see some actual democratization of all of these platforms.

I think that the word I remember hearing is homogeneous environments. How do you make that, you know, operate so it isn't so starkly different from I do these things these way, this way in the mainframe environment. I do this way in the cloud or Linux or whatever.

It's, we, the two will never be the same. Yeah. In terms of knowledge and skills.

But you know, a lot of the things that we do today in the cloud, you know, came from the mainframe environment. So they're at that far off. Cool.

And then the question becomes, well if I can find more people to, uh, manage the mainframe well more organizations use mainframes. 'cause it's always had this issue of being the million dollar club, you know, I had to have X amount of budget and then I could get all the ROI benefits. But maybe mainframes become more accessible to more organizations.

Well there, there's still a, a hefty price tag to get started in that business. Yeah, yeah. You know, you just don't go down to Best Buy and pick up uh, a z but maybe, maybe they will.

That's part of the democratization process one day. Would you like Water cooling with that? Like, And I like that Sony 85 inch monitor please.

We got a special on chillers in the back. You got a deal. You got a deal.

Uh, besides Jetson ish. But anyway, what's going on with the mainframe? We're gonna take a break here on Text Gang.

And we're coming back from mainframe to quantum sustainable. Do we care? Bonnie Schneider's gonna clue us in.

com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts and more.

com. Home of security bloggers network Quantum computing. Well, it's supposed to be working faster than let's say a supercomputer, but did you know that quantum computing is also helping in efforts towards sustainability?

Recently I spoke with Bill McGinn, who is the CEO of QCI quantum to talk more about his operation, quantum computing and the innovative work that they're doing in the area of being environmentally responsible. Computers in general really have an advantage and you can basically use principles of quantum mechanics to cast your problem into a variety of state system states or iGen State simultaneously. And when you do that, you're allowed to search the space for solutions that are faster than you can do with a classical machine, which tends to have to do the calculations sort of in a, you know, expanded, you know, kind of, uh, factorial, you know, combinatorial approach.

Quantum computers can use super position to simultaneously cast the problem into multiple states at the same time in search for solutions so faster and can eliminate the, the trap of getting caught in a, a local ground state, which is not really the best answer. So our approach is we use photonics where we can use, uh, photons to encode a problem that you want to solve and then run that photonic information through our system in a feedback where we can modulate the energy of the photon modulate its loss. And when you do that in a quantum system, you will naturally fall into what is called the ground state.

And that ground state represents the best answer for the problem that you initially encode into the system. That, that makes sense. Um, can you tell us about some of your, uh, case studies?

Like what, what have you done in terms of solutions for clients? And maybe give us some examples. Sure, sure.

So I mean, like any type of computer technology, you could imagine the using quantum computers for just about anything you can imagine using a computer for. But we're a very small company and based on our architecture, we, we build quantum optimization machines, meaning trying to find the best configuration of a very complex problem. And so our area of focus right now is in energy, transportation and infrastructure.

So examples are we can, uh, optimize the number of sensors you put on an autonomous, uh, vehicle for driving to have collision avoidance and effective low cost. Right? Um, we can also, uh, optimize the placement of wind turbines in an, in a wind farm to maximize the output from each wind turbine, minimizing the interaction between them, which causes inefficiencies in the energy production.

And also adds con considerable services cost for the so-called ya of the Nassal that are, you know, interacting with each other and into energy grid management. We can even look at some financial optimization problems. So the area is quite vast, but our area is really energy, transportation and infrastructure to find, uh, answers to complex problems.

So when it comes to sustainability, it's almost as, as always a double-edged sword because we're talking about quantum computing as a way to compute faster, um, be more energy efficient. But just as when we talk about data centers, one of the issues with quantum computing is, um, the energy that it uses to do the quantum computing and also the cooler environments needed, um, to support it. Now, bill McGinn is, as you heard in the interview, and, and if you go to Techstrong, uh, tv, you'll see an even more extended interview of the, uh, with Bill.

But one of the things he mentioned is that QCI is innovative in what they're doing and they've been able to do quantum computing in more of a lukewarm environment versus cool to reduce energy. And one final note on sustainability, quantum computing is also anticipated to help with discover new ways to mitigate the effects of climate change in terms of climate technology. So, um, it, it's interesting to see how it's being applied and the drawbacks and see if that, that the balances of, if the, uh, positives outweigh the negatives.

My, my take is when we dealing with new technologies like this and, and quantum is still, you know, bleeding edge sustainability and efficiencies generally take a backseat to just getting the damn thing to work, right? Like right now, I, I thought the thing was we're trying to get to a hundred qubits, or is it a hundred or a thousand qubits, whatever it is there, there's a certain amount of qubits that's gonna allow us to really be commercially viable here. And I think it's gonna be, you know, breakneck, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead till you reach that level.

Once you reach that level where we are really commercializing it and not just science experiments, then you'll start looking at improvements and efficiencies that'll help with things like sustainability and, and you know, power consumption. And, 'cause my understanding is for quantum computing, you do have to have like kind of superconductors at, you know, very, very low Kelvins and all of that stuff. So, but look, there's no doubt we will continue to improve that.

That's just the way of the world. The whole thing often leaves me scratching my head because somebody will announce that they are running some type of workload on quantum computing and achieved y and then about six months later if somebody goes, Hey, you know, that traditional computing workload that was on Quantum, we now can run it on a standard thing and it's faster than the quantum thing if we run it on the standard thing. And I feel like we haven't quite established like, well what exactly are the use cases that we're No, yeah.

What's the killer apps Right. That we couldn't do on something else that is eventually gonna get faster Anyway, I think it's breaking encryption key. I Was just gonna say that breaking Rx a encryption, This is true Though.

As a result, you know, the new certificates and stuff coming out now are quantum proof. Mm-Hmm. Allegedly nation states are collecting all the encrypted data they can find on the assumption that they're gonna be able to crack it in five years using Qu.

So are the bad guys. Yeah. Oh wow.

Maybe that's The thing we were talking about power consumption and water for quantum, you know, living in Colorado and Rail is one of the government agencies that has labs up there in Boulder, Colorado is focused on energy and they're giving presentations a lot. I see it quite often on, uh, energy consumption and quantum computing and methods. Uh, they, the, the holy grail is kinda getting to room temperature, quantum, right?

Uh, where you can, uh, you know, you don't have to have, you know, close to absolute zero practically to, to run a quantum computer. So people, you know, it's, it, it, I compare it to is, is quantum computing, uh, a super collider that only a few governments around the world are gonna be on one of those things 'cause they're so expensive and so, you know, technically difficult to run or are they gonna be something that makes it into the mainstream of science and business and things like that. And, and that's what people are trying to push it to beyond what you do in, in the lab.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think there were a lot of use cases for it. I was, yeah, that's interesting what Mitch said because I was in Chattanooga about a year and a half ago, and I visited a, a quantum computing company, quantum networking company, which is near the t Tennessee Valley Authority or this part of it is there.

Um, and it's just this whole idea of like accessibility beyond only a specialized view. And so when I hear about sustainability and, and quantum, it always seems to be like to be a contradiction in terms, but yeah, things are changing. Yeah, I think the room temperature part that, that Mitch meant, and it is key to that because that was, uh, something, um, GCI, um, is doing in their endeavors and also any kind of innovative strategy that's going to help, let's say make renewable energy more efficient or more effective, like using quantum computing to improve the, the ability for solar power panels to, you know, absorb, absorb solar energy, things like that is, is also part of the equation.

But, but I agree that it, it still has a ways to go, but it's interesting to see the different industries that's being impacted and the sustainability angle. I'm waiting on the cloud service providers to show me that quantum API so I can just use my input. Well, Amazon's sort to roll out a quantum service.

I need one for my email inbox. That's what, if it solved that, I'd be happy. I'll tell you, I I had what could anybody wanna take bets?

What comes first? Cold quantum or cold fusion? Mm-Hmm.

Wow. I would say though, to your point about black hat, um, people do need to start replacing those encryption schemes because it takes a while to get No, no. So that, I, I'll tell you, this is the first time I've ever seen people get out ahead of something.

Mm-Hmm. Um, and, and there was, uh, NIST was behind this Mm-Hmm. Working with Mitre and the new algorithms are, yeah, I haven't tested 'em, but they're supposedly quantum proof and they're in place way ahead of, way ahead of, you know, the, the rollout of quantum computing.

So, you know, but we say what, what's gonna be the killer out of quantum? Well, what are you gonna to use it for? Well, once you have it and it gets into people's hands, there'll be, there'll be uses we haven't quite thought of yet.

Both good and bad, unfortunately. 'cause that's just, again, that's the way of the world my 2 cents. So are we gonna be like, you know, this whole quantum thing, you're gonna have like two bits at the same in two different places, right?

So, you know, are we gonna be, we're In two different States, two different states. So, you know, is that gonna lead to like, all kinds of changes? Like, can I be on Zoom in two different places at the same time?

Eventually? Maybe. I'm not gonna answer that one.

Get a digital screen. You, you think about the strangest things you laying up at night, Mike? I, Yeah.

Just in the wall. Think the uncertainty. Principle strikes again.

Heisenberg. The Forest of Life works on mainframes. Tell you this or what?

Change your name to Heisenberg. The Heisenberg Chaos. All right.

So I think that's gonna wrap up our, our, uh, Techron gang today. I wanna mention we have a, uh, special Techron gang report coming up, uh, later today as well on, uh, what's going on with Intel if you haven't been following the news there. And is that just the, the, uh, precursor to what we're seeing going on in the markets worldwide today?

Yesterday? And, uh, it's gonna be great. We, we will be joined by Daniel Newman, uh, CEO Principal Analyst at Futurum.

John will be with us, John Schwartz and Mike Ard and I. But for now, stay tuned. We're gonna go live to Tech Field Day.

If you've never seen a Tech Field Day, they're a lot of fun. Check them out. Um, I'm Alan Schmo.

Mitch John, I'll see you guys in Vegas. Mike Bonnie, thank you. You've just watched Techstrong Gang.