Techstrong Gang – February 24, 2025

Has Microsoft discovered a new state of matter? It's quantum to me. You're watching Text on Gang.

Hey, everyone, happy Monday to you. It's Alan Shimel coming at you with a, a start of a great week of Textron Gang, and he can't get any greater than the lineup we've got for today. We're very excited.

We're gonna be discussing some really media or maybe media, not media at the same time, uh, type of topics. Let me introduce you to our gang members who are gonna do the discussing today. First of all, joining us from out at Sea, though I think he's actually anchored somewhere in the Keys right now.

He is our resident security expert. Hockey. Well, he is not really a hockey fan.

He's married to a hockey fan. Uh, one and only Chris Glass. Hey, Chris.

Good to see you. Good to see Alan, everybody. Yeah.

So I'm for the, uh, where's Waldo exercise of the day. If you, uh, look on Google Maps for half Moon key near Key West, you'll find a little channel in the northwest corner of it, and that's what you see out the back window. Very cool.

Very cool. All right. Joining us from, it looks like he's home, I guess, in Auburn, hoping the, uh, NCA basketball.

I I just got my tickets last night, man. Very cool. Well, well, let's you, you, you haven't been exactly a good look.

No, no, I agree. But that I just steal one second. That was that.

My son's argument of not getting the tickets is that what're making lose, We're kinda like mush in the Bronx. It doesn't really work that way, but he is our AI cloud DevOps, just all around guy. God, Willis.

Hey, John, great to have you on already. And then joining us, I would say she's home in New Mexico as well. She's the c I'm now Yep.

For a short time. But she's the CEO of Deploy hub, open source aficionado. Uh, she's Tracy Reagan.

Hey, Tracy, thanks for coming on. It's good to see you. Hey, Alan, just great, great to be here.

As always. I love this particular team, so this will be a fun day. Good.

I hope so. I think it will be. And then joining us from up in Harrison, New York where it, it's cold.

Uh, he's our Chief Content Officer from the Bronx, Mike Baard. Hey, Mike. I'm well.

How are you, sir? You're you're good. I'm still where it is called.

You're actually by me, so there you go. Yeah. But yeah.

Well, but you know what? It's home and it's good to be home. Uh, all right.

So guys, let's jump right into it. You know, Microsoft made some big news when I first read it. I was like, oh my God, they, they invented a new state of matter.

It's not a liquid, it's not a solid, it's not a guess. Is it, you know, faster than a speeding bullet? Well, you know, is who knows?

And, but it's a, and and, and they're making their own chip with it to, you know, have potentially million cubic kind of quantum computing. I don't know. Is this tabletop fusion?

I, I am not quite sure, but Mike, why don't you kick it? Well, they're calling these things topo conductors, and this first one is eight qubits, but they think they'll be able to get up to millions of qubits eventually. It's not clear how they're gonna manufacture these things.

It's scale yet. But, um, John, I know you've been following this, and I think they still haven't quite put this in. They're promising to describe this in an upcoming issue of nature, I think, in this.

So there's a lot of people who are skeptical going, well, is this real or not real? But John, you've been following quantum computing. What's your take on all this?

Yeah, You know, I think I, I like to say I am, you consider me, uh, like a sports journalist on this subject, right? I don't actually play the field, but I do have opinions and I do keep up on it as, as much as sort of any other interesting subject. And I, I'll go back to a little bit on when my oldest son was going into university, um, about a year before.

This is about probably seven years ago. Um, I, I, there's some think tanks I've been involved with where there are true experts on quantum computing. And, and every year I would go, I would, the first year it was like, it was about a year when my son was a senior.

I was like, is this an area that he should, um, get into? And almost every, all the experts said no. And he said, this is, you know, 15 years, this is seven years ago.

They were saying 15, 20 years out, right? And, and so, but I've kept my sort of eye on this thing. And, and being in a university town, periodically they have a, uh, uh, experts come in.

I wind up catching the thing. So I've been follow. What was interesting is, you know, what, last year Google sort of announced their breakthrough quantum moment, right?

And, and, and how they were gonna sort of change the game. And, and it got ridiculous amount of press, right? And it was over hyped because, you know, the net net, even today, most experts would tell you that, you know, I think when we, when we talk about what a fully fault tolerant universal quantum comput, that means the thing actually works.

You can actually do real work on it without just losing the states and these, what they call qubits. And so most people would say, you know, aggressive people, and even in the Microsoft announcement, they would say 2030 or later, uh, most would say 10 to 20 before we have a sort of a universal quantum machine that actually can do business work, right? Um, and then the interesting thing becomes, I mean, the, the, you know, the, that, that idea of this, uh, what they call topological qubits or these, uh, you know, material science work, that's basically gonna give you more fault tolerant qubit states, right?

The problem with these states is they, they can do a massive amount of potential, uh, compute crunching, but today they're the, the ability to get the proper states if you turn thing off, you know, recover. There's just so many operational issues with these things. Here's the net net, right?

Google talked about this announcement last year. Everybody went nuts. About a week later, people realized we're still 10 years out.

Um, if you compare sort of Google's announcement and Microsoft's announcement, Microsoft is really more theoretical. And even Google with their announcements last year on, on their quantum computing breakthroughs, we're still 10 years out. And they have examples.

The, the report here is really just all theoretical. So the net net is, this is all good. Um, because the, the, the net net is now the, um, private sector is actually investing in taking this serious where most of the sort of quantum compute, serious quantum computers, academia or CERN areas like that.

And then one last thing, unless anybody wants to go any deeper, which I don't really care to, uh, but is that I, IBM's been doing this for 40 years, and they get no press, no big announcement. And in, in the last 10 years, they've been incredibly serious. In fact, if you listen to, as I do, some of these professors that are actually talking about real projects that are happening in research, they'll always point to the IBMQ experience and that stuff.

So it's just ironic that, you know, like we today, you know, now we get this major, Microsoft's gonna change everything. It's, it is sort of a turf war of something that's 10 years out. And, and, you know, and again, I think it's really interesting that I, IBM's been slow and steady wings the race on this topic for 40 years, and certainly 10 years in modern quantum computing to sort of qubit architectures.

Yeah, that's all I got to say about that. Tracy, I'm looking at your take on this, because when I look at this, I'm like, okay, well, that seems interesting, but where does the software for this thing come from? And what am I actually going to maybe program against?

Well, the first thing I thought when I saw it was like, oh, no, it's closer than we thought. We better figure out how to do better algorithms because encryption, because the first thing it will be used for, for it will be for breaking encryption. No doubt.

That's where my head went. But I also thought about a conversation that Alan and I had maybe in the fall that we brought up Quantum. And Alan was like, ah, but it's, it's 10, 15 years out.

The thing about it is, you know, time flies when you're having fun. And maybe we're 10 or 15 years out, and maybe, um, what, uh, Microsoft is introducing is somewhat of a game changer so that we can pursue it in a more aggressive way, because it is, we're fault tolerant. I'm excited about it.

Let's hope it is real. Uh, I know that there's debate if it's a, if, if it's, you know, if it's hype for their 50th anniversary or 50th birthday, or if it's something that they've really delivered. I'm hoping it's the later, because it's time that we stop talking about ai.

I wanna talk about something else. Let's talk about quantum. It's a much more interesting topic, and I wanna learn more about qubits and what they're doing with this topological qubit.

Just to point out, one last thing on there is, it, it is, it is not a game changer at this point, right? It's not, it hasn't even been peer reviewed. The paper hasn't been peer reviewed.

So, um, it's hype, it's promising, it's interesting. It's great that the private sector is investing money in this space more aggressively, you know, meaning I, IBM's been doing forever, but, and now you've got like, you know, Google and Microsoft, but, but at the end of the day, um, it doesn't, it won't deserve the hype that it's gonna get. But if we have hype then and we have more investment, won't we get there faster, right?

So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. I think the Chinese are gonna beat us anyway. So I don't know if that Matters.

Fair point. I think you're probably right. True Patriot, Especially when they call, when you talk about encryption, right?

So, no. Yes. So, so here, here's the thing.

I, I have a couple of thoughts on this. Number one is, I think Mike Ard and I had a conversation when we were in person this week. This ain't the first time Microsoft's made such an announcement, right?

Mi Microsoft claimed this not Topographic Oceans, that's a yes album, but, uh, what, what do they call the material top, top of something they call Topological majority Topuc. Yeah, but topological cubits. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like top of the morning, but top O conductor. Yep.

Well, they, they claim to kind of event this state of matter a few years ago, only to subsequently kinda withdraw the claim. Who knows? You know, I mean, I'm not saying they're lying or they're trying to grab some publicity, but who knows?

Yep. Both things can be true though, right? Like, they're providing research to Tracy's point, and that's a good thing.

They're getting some, you know, good mojo out of what they are and who they are. Well, that's the whole purpose of quantum, right? Two things can be true of Well, Yeah.

That was good. Mike, Jay, I, I, I feel very fusion energy about this, right? You know, will we get there?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, almost certainly, you know, on both, right? You know, exactly when, yeah.

I don't know. Right? And it's, it is one of those things where the probabilities aren't much stronger three years from now than 30 years from now, right?

And as, as, as we're talking about here, there's lots of signs that three years from now or 13 years from now is probably closer than 30 or 33. But for those of us who've been watching this infusion energy for a long time, Okay, I'll believe it when I See it. You know what?

Quite frankly, there were those people who were watching AI for a really long time and kept saying, it'll be there, it'll get there one day. It'll get there. And then all of a sudden that day comes, and no matter how long thing it's gonna get there, it kind of surprises you, oh, I Have a book coming out that next month.

You A book. Exactly. How was your segue?

That was my, that was my, uh, that was my softball to you go. But you know, the other thing is, quite frankly, and maybe it's because I know so many people who are in the security world, the only thing I hear about what, what, what's quantum computing guy? Is it, how's it gonna change the game?

Oh, it's gonna break encryption, it's gonna encryption, Break encryption immediately. But you know what, yes, it may break encryption, though. We now supposedly have quantum proof algorithms we're gonna use, but there's so much more that quantum computing might be able in, in terms of like, you know, climate calculations, nuclear reactions, protein folding, you know, real earth shattering kind of uses that this could shepherd a new era in I, If you don't scare easy, um, I, I wouldn't read this book if you, if you're a paranoid person, but it's, uh, by one of the ex, it's called the Coming Wave by, um, I think it's Mol.

I'm trying to molt just the coming wave. I won't pronounce his last name. Um, he, he does, he does this, he breaks out the, like, what, you know, what AI and quantum can do.

And it, it's, and he, he, he's a, he is a, he was a ex bigshot at, at Google, and, and it's a scary book. I mean, it is a really scary book about like synthetic biology and, and like, yes, his, his main theme of that book, and I, I, I regret reading it, it was so scary. But, um, his main theme is when you start moving AI and, and, and real quantum together, the, the positive and the negative effects are going to be, uh, eerie.

Well, on a positive note, we have a really cool new term exotic quasi particle. I'm on a t-shirt that just says exotic quasi particles. So yes, that's a great idea.

I may do that. I'll send you one if I do It. Okay.

I think, I think Chris, Chris is a Walking example of an exotic quasi particle. Aw, I, well, not to be too optimistic about it, but you know, there was that, uh, uh, men in black closing line, you know, there's always a, a vo on death fleet coming to destroy the world, right? We are living today and have all our lives with all these huge potential negative consequences.

We agonize over 'em a lot. And to date, you know, we have largely avoided them. You know, what we're talking about here contains a whole bunch of new ones, fantastic opportunities folding Oh my God.

But huge risks. Oh yeah. So Chris, to that point, Chris, to that point, the security world talks about Q Day, right?

It's some unknown day when these quantum machines are available and start destroying all these encryption algorithms. Is that a real fear or is that something that you know, is out of the movie? Well, you, the way you rate a bank fault or a safe is by time, right?

You know, how long will it take, you know, the expected adversary to open, not if when, but just when. So anything you're encrypting ever or that has ever been encrypted will at some point be revealed. So when you're looking at securing data, you know, you're saying, how long do I need this too?

So, yeah. As, uh, as computing power cranks up, you know, and I did, you know, again, it's not just quantum, but quantum is one of those obvious things when you just exponentially go up a couple of numbers. Yeah.

Your old stuff is gonna get read. So there you go. All right.

Start the meeting those piles now. Yeah. Or, or start well, in risk management, you know, you have to assume if this is compromised, then what?

So kind of building that into your security thoughts, you know, actually deal with the consequences, you know, put all your controls in place, have an idea of what to do if it's revealed, or if that's what we're talking about here, you know, your encryption being broken, somebody reads data, you know, want them to have, what do you do next? Maybe it's gonna happen. Well, you know, and one last thing, Chris, is a really good point, because I've always tried to explain that not being a total expert in security or in quantum, but I, the, the thing that scared me the most, which was it will get broken.

And so anything that's been out there is compromise at some point. And then, so your point, I've never had that follow on answer, which is you really need to prepare for what to do when it does get caught, because it will get caught data that it's not like you can just re you know, encrypt the data. That data is out there.

It's, you know, like somebody has it, you know, like Hillary's emails, right? Like literally, once the data was out there, it's out there. And, uh, well, it, Yeah.

And, and I think it gets to, you know, it gets to the core philosophy about security. We accept all sorts of risks all the time. Our companies and ourselves will not last forever, right?

You know, let's not over secure things. Let's secure the things that we need to the level that need to be secured and the rest of it. And quite often when you think about what happens if this thing happens, you realize it's not that bad and is way more expensive and impeding to stop it.

So, and maybe it doesn't happen, move on. You know, my advice is don't let it take up space in your head. I, I read that from some crazy guy on Facebook.

You have enough to do already Uhhuh You enough. All right, let's take a break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna come back in just a moment with more stuff You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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All right, we're back in. Well, we did quantum, so we might as well move on to AI because, well, you know, that's just the topic of the day. And it's interesting because Amazon is talking about a next generation Alexa device, which will be a lot more interactive thanks to ai.

It's supposed to be out in the next couple of months or so. And our full disclosure, we used to have Alexa in our house, and, um, I just kind of got bored with it, and so did my wife and just turned it off and forgot about it, and it just kind of went away. And I, frankly, not missing it.

But Tracy, I don't know if you guys have Alexa, if you're still engaged with it, but do we need a more interactive flavor of Alexa to make it interesting again? Well, I think in order for Alexa to remain relevant, we'd have to have a more engaging Alexa. That's for, that's an absolute truth.

Um, we do use Alexa, but you know, Alexa, tell me what the weather's gonna be in Las Vegas. Alexa, you know, play Radio Paradise, mellow mix on stereo. There are some things that I just tell her over and over and over, but I haven't, I haven't ventured beyond that.

And at this point, you know, it's been a year and a half, I believe since we've had an upgrade. I think we've all established a relationship with Alexa that may or may not change. I would hope that we could have a more engaging experience with Alexa considering how far we've gone in ai.

And I keep complaining about AI's great, but it's great for businesses. It's not so great for consumers. So can we now start delivering AI that has benefit to every person's home?

You know, it would be great to be able to say, if you're a parent and you've got a, uh, you know, you'd like to know how well your kid's doing in school. Alexa, can you give me the last grades? My child just got his last test.

Wouldn't that be an interesting experience? But I think what, what we could have the potential of is to reimagine how we interact, even with chat GPT. So if we could just have a conversation instead of typing on our keyboard while we're sitting there cooking dinner, I think that that changes the world for consumers.

So yes, let's, let's keep moving this product forward, and let's get new habits, because it can do more than tell me what the weather is or turn on the stereo. So I have some thoughts here. So, first of all, it can give you your child's grades, depending how old they are.

'cause it's a privacy requirement. But with that being said, I, I, I very much have a love-hate relationship with Alexa, right? I'll, I have Alexis throughout my house, and I'll say something like, Alexa, play music, you know, while I'm in the shower and getting washed up.

And it'll stop playing music. Or it'll say, oh, music is playing on another device. Would you like to play it here?

And I say, yes, play it here. Music's playing on another device. Would you like the Amazon Family music plan?

So you can play on more than one device? No, Alexa, play it here. Well, music's playing on another device.

Well switch to this device. If you don't give it its magic words. It's like, I need a magic key.

And I forget the magic keys all the time, but I don't wanna just bang on Alexa. You know, I have the same problem with Siri. I had the same problem with Google Home.

All of these things, you know, these, these agents that were supposed to miraculously help us so much have been somewhat disappointed. The task we use, I can't get my Alexa to play my Sonos, even though there's an integration. They, they've been somewhat disappointed in limiting.

I do. Um, let me, let me hit this one last point, Josh. I do think that AI can make them better.

I I absolutely do. But chay, the, the problem you outlined to me is not an AI or intelligent agent problem. The problem is that we're still stuck in the 1970s park, spark, whatever, out in Palo Alto lab of how we interface with our computer technology, which is still primarily mouse, windows and keyboards.

What happened to Scotty, you know, in the Star Trek with the whales where he says, hello computer. That's my my point. So the, the main main point is how did Apple and Amazon drop the ball here?

Because I don't know if I've been using, I don't use it for home use, but like, I drive to Atlanta to the airport from Albert, and it's a 90 minute drive, and I just have deep conversations with chat GPT and, and like, I mean, I'm literally like research level Fulfilling then Yeah. Off the chart. Fulfilling.

Yes. Um, again, do you have to know how to talk to it? It's not the end all, be all.

It doesn't, isn't gonna drive my car. Yeah, I'm married 35 years. I'm just figuring that out with bond.

But I mean, like, I tell you what I'm not using in my, sort of the things that really excite me other than like, Alexa home, like, what time is it? You know, what's the weather? What in, uh, Siri, gimme directions, you know?

Um, or, you know, but, but what I'm really doing is I'm spending a lot more time thinking about research or things I'm writing or the books I'm working on. I'm not having those conversations with Siri, right? And, and at the core of all this too is, and it is a very simplistic high level, is those products, Siri and, and Alexa got stuck on NLP and, and, and sort of open AI and this sort new LLM transformer.

They, they adhere to a transformer model and the transformer attentions all you need changed everything. And now go back to how did they miss this? Google wrote this paper.

They, you know, and, and like, they missed the AI assistant window by moonshots, right? So that's the thing that just like, it perplexes me is how they, they had all the ingredients, particularly Google, um, and, and literally are just like, it's comical, you know, having your conversation. I, you know, I have some thoughts on that, why they missed it.

I think that if I was Google, I would be looking at, um, Alexa and trying to figure out how to build ads into it. And I don't think it works that well. I would be really annoyed if I was having a research conversation with chat GPT by the way, I call my best friend now because I'm using it so often to do research.

But I never thought once to go and ask Alexa, Hey Alexa, I need to buy a new car. What's the best hybrid SUV on the market? Never once did I think to do that.

And I don't believe that. And instead, I went to Google and looked at it, and I got a ton of ads. So I, I believe that Google doesn't wanna disrupt their, their revenue model, and I could be completely off.

But, uh, you know, capitalism likes to capitalize on, uh, you know, reinvest things that make a profit, and does Alexa really make a profit? Does this kind of technology make a profit for them? If we're taking out the ads, which I would love that idea, and I think that's gonna happen over time, that It goes back to, and I definitely wanna hear towards Chris, but that goes back to like the, uh, summits next start with why, right?

It's like missing, you know, if you've read that book about how, you know, the, the, the transformations, how these companies just completely missed waves. And I, I think in some ways, you're right, it is about their commercial vehicle, but then the driving mindset of innovation there wasn't focused on, oh, AI assistance are probably gonna be the next big thing. So anyway, I, I just, you know, I, I agree with that absolutely.

Everything you say, I, I'm gonna take the, uh, this approach. So, so bear, bear me out. I love Alexa, right?

It is, as you guys know, I have multiple built in these boats. I use 'em in control, and I've had 'em in homes from day one. I've been playing with 'em.

And you're absolutely right. You know, number one, you know, they totally suck. They're not very good.

They don't not good at the job. And crazy. Totally, right?

Yeah. This is a money losing thing, you know, I don't know if, you know, I supposing Jeff Pea was just somebody in Amazon just decided to keep it going. For the heck, I'm always concerned they gotta cancel it because it's so useless.

However, right? It's like the first generation of HiFi stereos, right? Honestly, to have a voice activated thing, you know, for the casual stuff that set the lighting in my room, 'cause it's evening and I just wanted to change the colors or, but on these boats, both of the pros and cons, it is such a low, but yet barely functional maturity level that if I enunciate clearly, it's very handy to control lights and pumps and, you know, things that I use, you know, navigating the boats when time is really precious, right?

I just, or yeah, I just don't want to get up and hit the damn switch, or I just, you want to, uh, or, you know, things are going on in real time. So there's these wonderful advantages that you can see in this terrible package that, you know, and as I was mentioned a number of times compared to the chat GPT and what we see out there, it's just this stunningly stupid product that you would literally have to speak very clearly at, or it'll, you know, do the wrong thing and blow up. But the fact that it exists and it actually manages to deliver some value at such a primitive level tells me that we have to be close.

And I think the speaking to the world, you know, the, if not Star Trek, maybe at least, uh, the expanse level, you know, is not that far away. The, the next five and 10 years, the commercial drivers will wind up to. So the Amazon and the other providers will give us things.

We can, you know, it's like I saying, John, they're there right now, if you know about it. So in 3, 5, 7 years, it's gotta work its way into all this stuff. I think this thing is gonna be super annoying and it's gonna be in your face all the time going, can I help you with this?

Can I do this? Can I, you know, I see that you're doing this. Uh, do you want me to do this, that, and the other, and all these other things is gonna be helpful.

And this will be the last thing I say on this whole thing, folks. And I'm gonna help you right now. 'cause you all have Alexas that are probably lighting up like crazy as you listen to this.

So Alexa, off Your way down this one. All right, let's take a break. We're gonna come back for our last, uh, block for, for this beautiful Monday.

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Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna have a little chat about cybersecurity and how the cyber attacks are changing. Darktrace has a report out and there's an article on Security Boulevard that you can check out about this that sends it well over half now, of these cyber attacks can be traced back to the so-called cyber criminal as a service platforms. And these are basically automated systems that have been set up to help just about anybody launch a cyber attack these days.

Chris, it, I think people still have it in their heads that cyber criminals are dudes in hoodies and basements and kinda leaning over keyboards, but it feels like the whole thing has got automated to the point now, like I look at these things and I go, my God, these people are using DevOps to attack us. Mm-hmm. That's funny.

There's nothing new in the world, basically, right? You know, I, I had the names just before this segment, I'm blanking on it right now, with the slick Willie. There was that, uh, uh, famous, uh, thief, mid nine, uh, 1950s kind of thing, who was asked by the FBI, why do you always rob banks?

And his answer was, because that's where the money is, where, and the organized crime organizes around crime, you know what the crime is doesn't really matter, right? You reach a level of re repeatability, you know, like any sort of conflict, right? You're having a conflict with the policy structure with the law, and you find gaps, and you can exploit them individually, randomly, like you say, in a hoodie in early computer days, but reaches the point where it's not about the computers anymore, it's about the, the money.

And there are always organized crime organizations, you know, literally the, the mafia, you know, and versions of that and nation state operations and rogue nation state operations and so forth that, that build up around them. So we're at this stage, which anybody involved in the early days of the internet, again, forecast because at some point, this security stuff gets serious, you know, and pretty well, all of us, you know, on this call probably remember those days about 20, 30 years ago, when you're saying to whomever, you know, DOD military people or whatnot, at some point you're gonna be able to turn off the grid remotely. You know, site seems like sci-fi.

That's the world written right now. So we're in the world where you can make a lot of money with cyber crime. So all the traditional organized crime organizations are doing it.

North Korea, for example. So it's mobsters who code is what you're saying? Well, They're even code, right?

There is higher coders. Yeah. Well, uh, so that at the nation state level, that's very true.

And, and it is what it is. But I will also say that not all cybercrime is nation state related. There are, there are huge criminal enterprises and not only enterprises.

What does this report really focuses in on is that there's a criminal, we, we call it the dark web or what have you, an ecosystem. So what happens is, you know, you, you've got the developer class who come up with their, their rat, right? And, and then they make that particular cyber crime as a service available to the ecosystem at the high end of the ecosystem might be the nation state people or the, you know, the big fish who we're going after big bucks and particular things.

But when they're done with it, you know, then the hyenas, the jackals and the vultures come in, who, and they all take their slice out of these, of the carcass, of the cybercrime victim, right? Some are looking for passwords, others are looking for HIPAA data, others are looking for financial information. So one, you know, one particular, uh, SaaS, uh, crime is a, uh, what do they call it here?

Cyber crime is a service, kind of application services, five or six different levels of this criminal, you know, dark web ecosystem. Who then, and they all resell it too, right? I, I got, you know, I, I took the, this, I skimmed the cream off the crop, but if anyone's interested in, you know, four field data on 150,000 people, you could buy this file and have at it, right?

And that data may be your address, phone number and a password or something. Um, so this is, you know, but this is not new either. This has been going on a long time.

The good news is, John, you made reference to Josh and csa. You know what? Both at the government level, you know, we we're in the us so we focus on the US but not only the US Europe, rest of the world, at the government level, as well as at the, the good guys, the white hat level.

We've been fighting this scourge for years. The problem is, if it's not gonna be a priority going forward, and if you look at recent actions about how they're just exposing confidential data as part of this doeg, I I question whether What c is gonna look like. Well, here's why I'm scared to death, right?

Um, well, I mean, it's three, there's three topics I think a lot about, again, not being a cyber person, but thinking a lot about what ai, I mean, the first is everything old is new. Again, that means all these, um, attacks, vectors and things that just are been common that people like Chris and Tracy are experts on, um, now create a whole nother level with ai. Because most of the AI infrastructure is just infrastructure.

So they're building these things, and they're not hardening them. They're being built. We've, I've had this conversation many times on this show, right?

About how new infrastructure's being built by a chief AI officers. That's one level of we I've discussed that. The, the second is the new infrastructure bugs.

And I, I feel that not enough ai, uh, security experts are staying up to speed on what is happening with Jailbreaks and all that. But the thing that keeps me up at night is a, about a year ago I had a conversation with Josh Corman about cyber infrastructure. And he, you know, he will tell you stories about how easy it is to take out a city's water supply and how it may take three to four weeks to fix that water supply, and how many people will die when that happens, and how, and, and if.

And so I started following some, a bunch of newsletters on this. Um, and like, if you've heard of Salt, typhoon and Vault Typhoon, right? These are real scary things.

And here's the nexus of why I'm having trouble sleeping, and I want to hear Chris and Tracy's theory ideas on this is also in these same sources that I've been following in the last three or four weeks. I'm watching government agencies tell me how CSA and, and NIST and the people who are really been the, the stuff that was going on in csa. Now, Jo Josh worked there.

They, I, I think they've been tracking things like sa, typhoon, and vol, these real, um, nation state cyber groups that are literally looking to disrupt our telcos, our water supply, our electricity grids, and the people that were doing the most serious work, according to what I've led. And, and also what Josh has confirmed to me are all getting axed right now. And so probably at the height, and then you take that deep seek moment three weeks ago, and you throw that all together, and we are letting our guard down at 11, I feel, and I'm scared that we're letting our guard down at the worst possible time to let our guard down.

I completely agree with that. I do. We are so letting our guard down.

Um, I mean, maybe we need to remind, um, our government why we need to do this. And you know, that article pointed out that one of the areas of, of, of their favorite attack are edge devices. Okay?

Let's think about our military. Our military in the field, boots on the ground. They all, everything is based on an edge device.

Everything that we do, walkie talk, everything is an edge device in the field. They don't have a local, you know, cloud that they're, they're working from. So I, I really do have a belief that we, we believe, we a community believe that we have solved most of the, the problems with security.

We have SaaS testing, we have das testing, we have PIN testing, but we don't do anything on edge devices to be quite honest. We might do SaaS before we deliver or anything on embedded, but once it's out there and vulnerability hits, it's hard to up update those devices. So maybe we can ask our, our, our new government that, you know, they created Space Force, maybe it's time to create cyberforce that's part of the DOD that can focus on this, because that's where we are most exposed when it comes to our military.

We're talking satellites. We have satellites now that are, uh, that are software driven satellites that they could take over those and make 'em crash into each other and destroy our, our entire GPS system. But I don't know if the, uh, I, I, you know, I know that there are really good people in the DOD that are thinking about this, but I do believe that NIST and CSO cisa where the, where the, where was, who is really focused on it, and maybe we just have to shift where the focus is and make it a, a military issue as opposed to a general cybersecurity issue for enterprises as well as government.

So we have to set their hair on fire somehow in order to make this happen. And there on jailbreaks, okay? I've never thought about playing on any of these tools that I hear, but one came up last night that we, uh, we discovered Steve Taylor, it, I don't know how he found it, but he said, Hey, there's a new geo jailbreak called Indiana Jones, and it will allow you to prompt, you know, LLM, take a chat, GPT, and it will help you prompt it so you can find all the back doors.

Now, I wanted to go find it and start playing on it immediately. And that's terrible. That's a terrible thought that, you know, somebody like myself and security wants to say, oh, I wanna learn to do that.

Let's see if we could get into a back backdoor. So these, these, you know, these cyber, uh, as a service, uh, uh, tools are a real threat, and they're going to cause young people to wanna play on 'em. And it's just gonna create a whole new brand of cyber criminals that we don't even know we we're doing it because it looked like a fun tool to play on, right?

Indiana Joe's, what, what better name for it? So, so curiosity still kills that cat, right? Is that what you're, So, so, you know, let me first endorse the cyberforce.

I think that's actually literally correct. I think the DOD we, you know, a Cyberforce military, uh, focus and, and structure and process would be a great idea. And look, this is a high consequence, high risk, high likelihood time.

You know, there's a lot of moving pieces as you know, as has been said already in the last couple of minutes. Um, I don't think there's a lot of fans of the policies being enacted on our behalf for the nation at the moment. You know, there's a lot of, you know, risky moves at the very least, if not stupid moves, um, you know, increasing all the risk.

Um, but as we're talking about in the green room, right? You know, you know, so Tracy and, and John, you know, we're all boaters, you know, and so are you, Alan, right? And you're out on the water with your boat and the thing happens, motor blows up, you know, you know, we have pon, we all have pontoon boats.

You, so you lose a pontoon, and that's nothing good about that. However, you're out on the water. What are you gonna do?

And having, you know, both lived through the time I have and worked in this, in this, uh, industry to, to the time I have, I've been through a lot of similar eras, right? You know, from the Cold War now, right? You know, this is, like I say, every individual, you know, there, history does not repeat.

It rhymes. This situation rhymes with other stupid times you've been in. There's a lot of stupid stuff going on that has huge risk.

However, right? You know, there will, there will be a morning after, you know, something will be here 30 years from now and 50 years from now, and a lot of these issues will have been solved by definition, because they can't continue to go at this rate. We cannot continue to function with that John Deere point, right?

I've watched from zero the development of what we see called DHS and CSA and, and all these, you know, federal government functions they didn't use to exist. The risks were basically the same. You know, the, the ability to exploit those risks wasn't so high.

Um, and now they're kind of going away, but not entirely. And I, you know, Josh has a meeting experience, you know, huge respect. You know, I'm, you know, I'm the more optimistic of the two of us.

You know, I think things will continue to happen inside the belt way that aren't completely stupid, and there's certain momentum going forward. I, I wanna keep, if you finish, I wanna point out that he is more aligned with what you're saying and actually made me feel better. In fact, one response, very similar to the response, just, just not play him as he's, he's really, he's actually, I'm more pessimistic than he is.

And he sounded more like you. But anyway, well, again, 20 19, 20 20 when I first, you know, took a really hard look at the presidential orders about supply chain across the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and now Trump administrations, they all, with very different ideologies and approaches. They actually form a, a very coherent line because the, you know, different reasons for doing, doing similar things.

But when you turn to people who do this stuff for a living and say, what can we do in supply chain for whether to secure it or punish some other country? Here are your options, right? And that institutional memory and momentum, you know, moves forward even in times of chaos.

Alright? Keeping With that boning metaphor, I am reminded, however, and maybe I'm showing my age here, of the Poseidon Adventure, and the theme song for the Poseidon Adventure was a song called The Morning After The Ship Sink. Yes, That also happens.

Yes. And sometimes the ship does sink. And, and as a result, we learned to build better ships or iceberg detection.

But in any event, guys, we're about outta time. What a great way to kick off our week here on Text Drunk Gang. We've got a full day of text Drunk TV following this, so don't go anywhere if you're watching this as part of the text on TV stream.

Um, we're gonna be doing some interesting things with Textron Gang coming up, and, uh, we'll get back to that. But until then, John, Chris, Tracy, Mike, thanks for joining in. Thank you for watching.

Stay tuned for more. You've just watched Texture on Gang. We're outta here.