Techstrong Gang – March 6, 2025

Hey, everyone. Today's episode is from Russia With Love. You're watching Text on Gang.

I, Hi everyone, it's Alan Shimo. Happy Thursday. Welcome to Text Drug Gang.

Don't for Donya. But, uh, anyway, you know what? We live in a crazy world.

Once again, I wake up and I'm looking, what has Biff done today? So, we're gonna be talking about it. We've got a couple of blocks to talk about of some interesting things going on in the world, and we've got some great folks here to talk to.

It's kind of Cork Textron gang folks today. Let me introduce you to 'em. First of all, giving us the, the, uh, 4 1 1 from, I don't even know what the area code is out there anymore, John, but from Silicon Valley.

Oh, It used to be. It used to be 4 1 5. Now it's, it's six five.

Oh, Okay. The 4 1 1 From the 6, 6 5. Oh, you close?

Yeah, you're close. It's our editor at large, John Schwartz. Hey, John.

How are you, man? I'm good. I'm just kinda reeling from a very long speech last night, but, uh, I didn't watch it.

You know, we Move on It. Yeah. There was a speech last lasting.

I don't know. I, I watched, uh, something else. It was, it was two nights.

It was two nights ago. Going, going from high top Silicon Valley to sea level where he's, I think, well, you, you are actually not a Key West anymore, right? You, you're, you kind of turned into the Gulf a bit Into, in the area in lower, lower keys.

You know, today's island in the, where is Waldo search is raccoon key. So you can Google map that up. It's a couple miles, miles offshore away from the US one.

I've been edging towards the Gulf Edge, the content keys. I'll get to the next couple of days to check those out. Very cool.

Chris Blas, our security expert, cyber expert, going from there, back up high into the mountains. Rocky Man, high, Right? It's our guitar, ma'am.

Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch. How are you?

Very good. Very good. Just, you know, holding things down at the top of the peaks here in Colorado.

All right. Keeping, keeping the sky up. Yep.

Holding, holding the sky. Yep. Very cool.

And then from there too, Harrison, New York, the seat of tech strong content. It's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, what's going on?

Hey, the birds are chirping and there's buds on the trees, and I ain't talking about the kind they sell in Colorado, so, no, no, no. Spring's coming. All good.

And the Yankees keep winning, man. There you go. Yankees looked good again.

Anyway, it's all pre-season, of course, means nothing, but still. Um, let's move into today's news, guys. I, I kind of started teased it off in the beginning.

You know, pigs fly and, uh, we've decided, or the government, or at least our esteemed Secretary of Defense, I'm not gonna say anything more that I'd like to, um, says that we, uh, should supposedly, 'cause now I'm seeing pushback that we should stop offensive cybersecurity, uh, uh, procedures, operations against our warmest ally, the Russian Federation. Very good comrade. Mike, what do you say?

Well, I say that it's hard to tell what's going on here, and not everybody, as I understand and who's involved in this, might necessarily report up to the Department of Defense. So there seems to be some confusion as to who's doing what. And of course, you know, the best defense is a good offense.

So it's hard to say what an offensive thing is versus a defensive thing is these days. But Chris, what's your arena? What's going on here?

Oh, you know, Kim Zetter and other people that I trust have been reporting on it. You know, it's like, you know, you said it well enough. I don't know.

I haven't talked to sources and so forth. The fact that it's so matches our expectations, you know, and what we as a nation are communicating, you know, to this, you know, not ally. You know, our, our main adversary in the world right now is chi, is Russia.

I almost said China, but economic, in a sane world, China would be, uh, our, our real, uh, opposition. Because Russia is a tiny little country with the economy of Italy, right? Uh, that just happens to be bombing one of our allies and are maneuvering around them.

Doesn't make sense. You know, they are the existential threat. So whether into what extent, you know, this order or directive was given or thought to be given by people who are taking actions on, on our behalf, the fact that it, that it's not shocking is what we should be shocked about.

You know, I I'm disappointed in you guys. Yeah. I, I I figured you'd be more savvy and kind of catch on to what's going on here.

What's really happening is this is a Marco Rub, Rubio and Trump secret plan to partner with Canada and Mexico to give Russia a giant head favor to think that we're, were their friends and China too, right? In the meanwhile, we're undermining all that stuff he's ramping up there Is we're playing checkers, and they're playing four D chess. Exactly.

Got the attention. That makes sense. Come that makes sense.

Look, let me, let me, let me just throw some stuff in here. Number one, Russia's economy. I don't know if it equals Italy, Chris, but I, I've heard it's, it's similar to New Jersey and being from New York, you are from Jersey.

You know, that's a, but what Russia has and has had beyond their economic footprint is their military footprint, because they are depending who you believe the first, second or third largest purveyor of nuclear weapons in the world, and they're not shy about threatening to use them. We've heard it numerous times during the three year, four years, whatever, of this Ukrainian war, right? And, and that if not for the nuclear weapons, honestly, who, who, who would give two craps about what goes on in Russia, right?

Let's be honest about it. However, not equal to their military footprint, but their hacking footprint has always, has forever since there's been an internet, been a huge footprint, whether it's a wink, wink from the government, letting groups operate openly within the Soviet Union, and then Russia or Russian asset, Russian government assets themselves, what we used to call the KGB. Now it has some truth speak names, time and time again, time and time again, attacks in this country and in the West have been tracked back to groups based in Russia operating under the, the, the cover of the Russian government.

And for us to ignore that and not, uh, is a terrible dereliction of duty. Pretty much what you'd expect from a guy who never, who shouldn't be the Secretary of Defense to begin with. Well, in a sense too, you, you think back to the 2016 election and Trump benefits again from Russian meddling.

So in a sense, this is part of his reward to them since he no longer has a run for office anymore. And on the flip side, you've got this obsession with China and security and deep seek. I mean, we spent so much time within the government thinking about banning them for probably good use or at least ban limiting the use.

But on the Russia side, as you said, Alan, I mean, there there is great, uh, protagonist antagonist is, is, is, uh, uh, Russia is, and yet we kind of looked, we're looking the other way. And again, I'm not even sure what the hell Heif is doing. I mean, evidently he ordered the US cyber command to halts offensive cyber operations, and this was supposedly went into effect.

Or if the order went in late February, yet there's pushback. I mean, it's, you, you can't get a straight answer from these guys, but I think at the very least, I would, I would argue that again, with Russia, they're just gonna look the other way. They always have.

And they, they continue, they will continue to, especially in these asymmetrical warfare front. I mean, read, read your Leo to Tolstoy, right? You know, this is War and Peace, you know, it's about court posturing and, you know, appearances and whatnot.

And, you know, this is, you know, Alan, you're entirely correct. You know, what happened with the Soviet Union collapsed and the, uh, uh, the Russian mafia and the Russian government merged, right? And what's been going on in cyber operations for, you know, the last decades is that Russian cyber criminals are given free reign to do anything.

Like as long as they use KGB slash FSB tools, right? And should they, you know, compromise something of interest, they give that access to, to the government, right? So it's all the same thing.

And I'm sorry, but if you watch Sopranos, I don't want to, you know, force people to go read classic Russian literature, but it's a lot of posturing. And for us to say, even give the impression that we would let the heat off on them. No, absolutely not.

You know, you wanna threaten to hack our grids and turn it off, do it, you know, we will bring your whole, your, your whole infrastructure down. You have to have that posture. Let me say something about China though, right?

We, we, we don't live in a black and white world where I've got Boris and Natasha over here. The bad guys come, we go get squirrel, right? And then we're, we're, we're the Lone Ranger and Lone Ranger and Tonto here we're the good guys.

And, and that's what the world is. No, there's more. You've got the Chinese, the Chinese are not angels, and they ain't our friends either.

And it's always been a little education for Mr. Secretary of Defense. The United States Defense strategy has always been, we must be able to fight wars on multiple fronts at the same time.

We've gotta be able to deal with enemies, mortal, or not on multiple fronts at the same time, just because you want to take it to China or, or thwart Chinese hacking, which is terrible. And it's been terrible. And I, back in my still secure days, Mitch knows this.

We were, we were right on the front lines of that stuff. That doesn't mean Rush is the good guy. And when Rush is the bad guy, doesn't mean China's the good guy.

There's, there's multiple levels of bad guys in this world. It's a big bad world out there. And for us to, to take the bullets out of our gun, you know, no, the only thing missing is someone to get up on a microphone and say, I've brought us peace in our time.

You know, you know, the only reference a couple of nights ago that, that Trump made about defense was this ridiculous Golden Dome idea, which was basically a ripoff or Reba of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. That was the only thing he referenced. And again, it's just, I mean, it's just like we're in a, in the next segment we're gonna talk about Doge, but just kind of pulling things out of a hat.

And the one thing I want to, I wanna foreshadow before the next segment, is this $500 billion figure that keeps coming up in terms, in terms of part of the scam or the schemes. Um, but again, it's, it's, it's, we have multiple enemies. And the fact that we're, I'm sorry, go ahead.

So let's bring this back to the average cybersecurity and business executive out there, Chris, should I expect, you know, and, and a significant increase in the number of attacks coming outta Russia, aligned cyber syndicates aimed at US assets. 'cause they're gonna be basically going, well, we got a free pass, here we go. I'm trying to be objective about this, you know, because, uh, my, my position opinions, I think are clear.

Um, maybe not, maybe the op opposite, maybe the direction for the Kremlin is, hey, or reward, you know, Trump for his capitulation and go off, you know, let the, let the stats go down a little bit. That might be a little bit too intelligent for the people in charge. Um, but, you know, short of that, short of some direction from the Kremlin to, you know, reward our misbehavior, you know, I would say, yeah, sure, you know, this is a bit, a bit more free reign for all the, all the cyber prime operations out there, that they're likely to be more rewarded.

You know, they're a, uh, you know, so much of the ransomware and so much of cyber crime is, like I say, Alan, this is not about Russia. You know, Russia's actually a, a lovely country. It's just a bit of a train wreck.

Now, this comes from everywhere. But Russia is one of the massive actors, and this does absolutely nothing to slow them down again, unless Putin, you know, wants to wave a, wave a flag at his, at his criminal fleet, you'll to slow down for a minute. All right?

So if you assume that the glass is, uh, half empty rather than half full, I would suggest the key word of the day is incoming. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Don't pay less Down folks.

You know what, let me, let me go, let me politics aside for a second. And craziness aside for a second. This, the article that we're talking about that, that spawned this conversation is an article in Security Boulevard, I think, by Jeff Burt, Jeffrey Bur, and he has a ton of really credible friends of ours in the cyber world who, who are talking out about this.

I'll also point out that at least for now, NSA Cs a, uh, you know, some of the other government agencies who are on the front lines of cyber are not necessarily, from what I understand, part of this DOD edict, though, I can't imagine that the Secretary of Defense is allowed to do anything without the okay. From Fearless leader. And so it probably extends, you know, I, I wouldn't be surprised if it extended in, into the rest of the government, but it doesn't extend to private industry.

So my advice, to your point, Mike, the private industry and my cyber profession, fellow cyber folks out there, stay vigilant. Keep doing your job right? With or without the government or the US government, we still have a mission to, to, to work on here.

And, and the mission remains the same. Keep our infrastructure secure. Keep our businesses secure.

Keep our people secure. I'll leave it at that. Good.

All right, let's take a break on text Drug Gang. We're gonna come back and well, we'll continue the fun. We're gonna talk about, uh, you know, supposedly how AI is being used by Doge.

And you know, that advisory group that really has no official power, uh, to change the government. You're watching Textron Gang Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Alright, well, as John alluded to, we're gonna have a conversation here about, well, what exactly is going on with Doge and their use of AI and the alleged amount of waste that they are finding.

'cause there's a lot of, uh, people who are calling maybe BS and all of this stuff. But, uh, John, you've got a story up on text, drawing AI talking about a group who's kinda asking for some records to maybe hold folks trouble. What's going on?

Well, there's a group called Democracy Forward, which has been filing a lot of legal actions against the Trump administration. They've been very busy. They've done at least two dozen legal actions, including this Freedom of Information Act filing and some other actions.

What they're looking into are, um, they, they, they, they want public record requests from several federal agencies on the use of artificial intelligence to make personnel decisions. In other words, the decisions that, um, let, let's, I'll give you some of the, uh, organization. There's Doge, first and foremost, uh, office of Personnel Management, general services administration, state, uh, defense, treasury departments.

And they're, what they're trying to figure out is, and what they think is happening is that Doge in particular is using AI as part of this email campaign. Remember again, where Musk was trying to force government employees to respond to what they did the last week with five things. And in effect, what the Doge is doing, allegedly, is using some of those responses to figure out who's worthy of staying on in their employment and who they're gonna get rid of.

And, uh, in a sense, the executive, the person who's in in charge of Democracy Forward has said that Doge and the administration are operating in this shroud of secrecy, and they're governing by cast tactics, have led to less efficient government and more disruptions to our safety and security. Um, when Trump was talking during his interminable State of the Union address, he mentioned that the initiative to cut back costs had found hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud. And, um, he, at one point, he, he threw out the number of 500 billion, which I mentioned earlier.

That always seems to be a patent number that they're using for everything. Um, he also referred to Musk as the head of dos, which was kind of interesting. But in any event, allegedly Mocu has talked about using AI for efficiency purposes is being looked into by this organization.

It'd be really interesting to find out what they, what they discover. But again, AI is being used to eliminate jobs, which might be a precursor to, to other industries and, and other agencies doing the same thing in the future. I'm a little dubious of the whole use of AI to begin with.

'cause if I look at what seems to have happened is, um, basically you're cutting everybody who was hired in the last year or two as, and those all seem to be hired under the Biden administration. And then the next thing just seems to be flat out, let's go do global search for the term DEI and anything else like climate. And, you know, we'll just cut those things.

And that's about the extent of their effort. So I wouldn't need AI to go do all that. But Alan, what's your take?

Oh, you think I have a tank? Yes. You in the back of the room raising your hand.

Yeah. Um, Well, you know, John, good article by the way, on ai. Oh, thanks.

On text, on ai, on this. I don't know, there's also a Washington Post article that I i I worked that do's AI use in government doesn't add up. And, and quite frankly, it doesn't.

But let's, let's, let's step back for a second. Does anyone else find the irony in let's keep AI safe and not profit? Mr.

Musk using it for these purposes? Elon, the hypocrite strikes again, right? So in other words, you can't use it for all, you shouldn't use it for all those things, but I will, because after all, I, I have money, and therefore, there are no rules that apply to me.

I mean, this is, this is really the crux of it. He was the guy who went after open AI because it wasn't safe and secure. That's why Exactly on principle.

Uh, that's, that's why on principle, he has to leave before he decided he wanted to try to buy them in, in weird, another weird publicity State. I mean, the whole, the whole thing is, so this whole look, I'm telling you, dude, I wake up every day and I'm looking for Biff up in that big tower in that Vegas kind of hotel saying, what kind of craziness is what, you know, what's right is wrong nights and white satin breathe in the gathering gloom. Um, what, what goes on in this world?

But nevertheless, it, it's just par for the course of how they are just mashing the federal government. And no, it wasn't the most efficient organization in the world, that's for sure. But it's almost by design not to be efficient.

It's almost by design. But I think Aaron, what we're seeing is, is the Trump effect rolling out to other people? Um, a mess has clearly learned the art of projection, right?

Oh, you shouldn't use AI for those things, and then I'm gonna do it myself. This's is one of, you know, a thousand things as well as if I say it, it's true. Whether it as any meeting in reality, kinda, we, we, we expect things to tie back to something that makes sense.

They don't, nine times outta 10, maybe 10 out of 10. It just doesn't. So it, it, you know, I I look at it as yeah, but then the next thing is then we're gonna hear, must complain about how someone's using AI against something he Believes.

Of course. We'll, but, but the bottom line is what are the repercussions here, guys? What are the repercussions here?

I don't think we're gonna know that for Oh, I think we're gonna know real soon. You do. Why?

I think they're, I think they're using it in a lot more ways than we know about. Yeah, I, I get the No, no, but I, I think you are going to see the gears of government grinding to a halt, and then all those people who raise their hand, who say, Yee ha, this is what we voted for Until their house burns down. Um, Watch their house burn down.

Yeah. Anymore from Canada. So, You know, so, so I'm trying to filter out all of this and, you know, and get to the topic because again, you know, the adversarial goal is to make it impossible to talk, right?

This is all, you know, met, you know, cognitive denial of service attacks, right? You know, give, give people so much to talk about that they have no time left to talk about bloody anything else. And in this particular topic, I don't really know, you know, but I, I look at artifacts like, you know, so you have this, this doji, uh, dodgy operation, you know, thrown together in five days and they get 2 million e email responses.

You know, humans aren't even reading through that ever. So there's obviously an auto, a lot of automation filtering going on, you know, is it lms ai? Yeah, probably.

Right? You know, and that's just so obvious on the surface. And they couldn't possibly even do anything without just automating everything.

So you fire a million people without looking at two of them. But Chris, Let me, let me point out, the emperor has no close. Do you really think?

They, they go through this and that's what they're making decisions on. Let me tell you something. They've made their, the decisions on what agencies we're going to get cut, what programs we're going to get cut, were made.

This is, you know what I mean? This is a basack awkward situation. They already know what they want to do and what they're doing, and they just use this stuff to keep you guys busy.

They're doing what they want. They wanted to, to get rid of the Department of Education. They wanted to get rid of the USAID thing.

They're claiming, I don't know how many people are 150 years old in the world now in our country now, 10,000, 50,000, because that's what cobalt the coding defaults to. They, this is all, this is, this is for consumption. So he could stand up and bandy about that $500 billion number, and then all, all the Yeehaw or deplorables, or whatever the hell you want to call 'em, go on Facebook and say, whoa, we cut $500 billion.

And then they find out poor Aunt Mary's Medicare got cut and poor Aunt Mary can't get dialysis anymore. Sorry, aunt Mary, right? This is, this is the world we're living in, guys.

But John, you know, it's kinda, at least I find it kind of weird to watch. It's like, so they make a claim on a savings, then there's this contract that they said they cut, then three days later, the website changes, and that savings wasn't there in the first place. And so these numbers are bandied about, seem to be, You know, That was part of the post article.

The numbers don't End up, that's funny, Mike. I was, I was, I was thinking about that in terms of like the manu, all these manufacturing ideas or these deals that they're throwing out there. So I went back and looked at Foxconn and looked back at the original terms of that, which were like in the tens of billions of dollars.

And it ended up being like a $600 million project. They talked back then about foxcon about 30,000 jobs that ended up less than 1500. And I think the same principle applies to this.

You know, Trump also mentioned in his speech, apple and the $500 billion they're gonna spend, which many of those programs were already underway, by the way, it's never gonna reach that level. It, it at least Musk in his, in, in, in Musk's weird way. You know, he will project the troops once in a while.

And he, you know, he'd laughed at the idea of the SoftBank deal, which, which Trump, Bali, who's, uh, SoftBank during his speech. I used to think all this stuff is, is about flooding the zone, overwhelming us with things that are silly that we fixate on and we never learn as the press. We never learn.

We have to separate, we have to separate the noise from the signal, right? 99, 90 9% is the noise, right? Ev and us chasing down all that noise is distractions, right?

Kinds back yesterday or two years ago or whatever is kind of pointless, right? What are, what are they really after, I think is what, what your point is, Alan, is those decisions have already been made, right? Here's the agencies we want to cut.

This is what we wanna stop doing, and we'll find whether a path to do that. And there'll be a wake of chaos in that process, as well as everything else we pile on to confuse the situation and to track distract everyone for what we're really doing. You know, the one thing, can I mark the tape on this?

I'm, I'm gonna compliment Trump on something I think he does better than anyone I've ever seen. And that is, in a sense, manipulating that too. Well, two things, uh, manipulating the media and giving, forcing them in a weird way, or tricking them in a weird way to follow a certain path, which they do ad nauseum and they fall into this trap that he switches gears and moves to the next topic.

And I think this is what we're going through again with Doge. I, I, I would really, if you add up the numbers of some of the things he mentioned that they had allegedly saved on, would probably less be less than, uh, $500 million at best. And yet he's talking about saving $500 billion.

Well, you have to give the Democrats credit for their pickleball paddle strategy last night. What an So, you know, I, I'm gonna find, I'm gonna find a silver lining in this somewhere, right? You know, so, you know, the A the ai the AI in this topic should be used by us, by tech strong, by a, B, C, because the old cliche we're all talking about here, you know, take two seconds to line.

It takes two hours to refute it. By that time you're lying about something else. One thing AI might be really good at, and maybe media organizations should be specifically deploying it, is not spending the time, you know, everything that comes out have AI filtered out.

So we're not sitting there googling. We don't have people researching to find out what the stupid lie is last, last time. And, and I am, and you know, I am reaching here, right?

We don't have at the national level, you know, our own government is the adversary, right? You know, we don't have any national defenses and we are at the public sector level working against having defenses. Maybe this is something that media organizations should invest into.

Shorten that loop the rest. Yeah, I think, I think you're onto something. You, you put a maybe gonna crawl across the bottom of the screen as he's speaking in real time with, with the AI response or the AI fact checking.

I don't know, something like that. Although Americans don't like to read, so maybe that won't work. But, um, They're not interested in facts.

People are an interested in facts. When you point out something is nonsense, they move to the next thing. Or what about this, what about that?

Take vitamin A for your measles. I I read a frigging article yesterday. You know, we're, we're recommending vitamin A for measles and 'cause vaccinations are a personal decision.

And after all, before we had vaccinations, virtually every child in America had measles. And you know what? Only one out of every 1,250 children who had measles dies.

What's the big deal? Until it's your kid or your nephew, or your niece or someone you love. Then that 1,250 out of one one out of 1,250 becomes real.

That's what this whole thing is. The whole, this whole thing is, let's, I'm done. We're going on text, we're taking a break.

Let, let's come back and talk about, wait, A last Thing, one last thing. Mark Twain had it right. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes out.

There you Go. That's exactly it. You're watching Text on Gang.

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Home of security Bloggers Network. Hey folks, welcome back. We're gonna geek out a little bit because, well, you know, politics is politics and tech is tech, or at least it's supposed to be.

But, you know, things get intermingled. But Mitch, there's this small little conference that was happening in Europe called Mobile World Congress. You know, a few hundred thousand people show up at that thing.

I think it's one of the largest conferences in the world. And one of the things that leapt out at me was this announcement from Red Hat where they had lined up, I think a half a dozen telcos or so to deploy their cloud native platform called Red Hat OpenShift. And it seems to me like we're just starting to move a boatload of code out to the network edge here.

What's going on? Well, yes, you're right. Mobile world of Congress is the, you know, ginormous con of conference of conferences.

It's quite an experience to go. Um, yeah, I, it, it's interesting. Red Hat is making a really strong play.

I mean, they've already been in the telco industry with OpenShift. That's really where OpenShift kind of got a lot of its functionality. And legs came from working with telcos, and now they're extending that kind of up the stack, if you wanna think of it that way.

In one way is, is capturing as more things go to the edge or more things are considered cloud native, whether that means just containerized or if it means, you know, building it with other things like microservice, et cetera. And more things move to the edge. Just like, you know, the ran, the, the, the, the radios have been ized and moved to the network.

More software's going there too, that they're, they're deploying and they wanna simplify or at least offer the telcos a way of not just running OpenShift in the big behemoth data centers or cloud centers, but also running it the edge. 'cause that's, that's where the action is and that's where more software's moving. So yeah, the, the, the companies we would recognize in the US here were like Orange and Fujitsu and, uh, T-Mobile, I believe there were I think four or five others.

Symphony, some others I'm not that familiar with. Um, we're talking about, uh, what moving more applications and supporting, supporting OpenShift is part of their infrastructure. Now that's a migration process, right?

If they're not already doing that at the edge, there'll be some work to this. So this, this is directional, but you know, that Red Hat is really making a strong play, not just on the infrastructure, but also on the development side of things. We're seeing more and more announcements come that are directed at AI and at software development.

I think AI is gonna kickstart this thing in a bigger way because we need to process and analyze more data closer to the point where it's being created and consumed than these round trips to the cloud. And all the network latency that goes with that doesn't really work all that well. So my question therefore is, um, you know, is this gonna wind up in a situation maybe where we have some more software at the edge than we have in the cloud one day Possibly, or at least wider spread for sure.

I mean, they bought Neuro Magic back in November, which was all about deploying ai, right? Not just to the core, but also to the edge. So yeah, it's, it's moving that direction.

Yes. Gentleman in the back room is raising his hand. I think he had a question.

You, yes, you, um, You know, I I, thanks Mitch. Um, I, I think it's important not to lose the cloud native aspect of this, right? Cloud native doesn't necessarily have to live at the Hyperscaler Cloud Center.

It could exist on bare metal at your data center. It could be on the edge, it could be everywhere and anywhere, which is a good plug for an event we're going to plug at the end of this. But, um, what it does do well in greenfields, it's, it's proven to be a pretty big task to transform your existing apps and infrastructure from monolith to, to cloud native, right?

Um, and, and cloud native in all of its glory and flavors, right? So, so you're talking about, uh, not multithreaded, I always mix up thread well distributed, but no, from an architectural point of view, not multithreaded, but it's multithreaded microservices, right? So you talk, when you talk about moving from monolith to microservices, you talk about distributed core edge data center, that's a lot easier to do on a, with a blank piece of paper to start than it is to take something that people is mission critical or people are using already and, and convert it.

And to me that that's a huge piece of this, right? I I, I saw an article last week. They estimate that for new applications, 85% will use microservice architecture, cloud native technologies, but transforming, and there's a lot of applications out there that need to, you know, will be transformed.

That's a much heavier lift, a much, much heavier lift. I think as we get closer to the end of the decade though, we'll hit a tipping point where the amount of cloud native code will have reached a point where it just becomes simpler and easier to containerize the legacy app, including the virtual machine, and run that on Kubernetes alongside the cloud native stuff to have one single set of platforms to manage. But Mitch, you know, is that wishful thinking or what?

I, I don't think at all, Mike, because we think about OpenShift is kind of the infrastructure management of it, if you will. But right on top of that is, you know, even the co container services that you run in OpenShift that's Kubernetes underneath all of that. So I think our definition of cloud native needs to expand.

Yes. I mean, today we kind of think of it as microservices, et cetera. We're also thinking about it as you're containerized and run things on Kubernetes, whether it be legacy systems or things that are partially modernized.

But on the other end spectrum is also agents ai, right? That that is also being deployed. And, and we have data from a survey that's coming out here in the next few days about how much of the workload people are putting of AI in Kubernetes, which makes a lot of sense.

So cloud native really means kind of distributed computing anywhere at the edge at the core and with, uh, with workflow management Kubernetes, or if there's something else someday that takes its place, that's, that's where we're evolving to now think of it more broadly, not just rebuilding it one way with microservices. 'cause it may not be that, it may be a combination of multiple things that it's built in. Alright.

Hey Chris, you know, I don't know if this has been lost on you or not, but I think, you know, if you listen to what we just said and we, uh, extended the attack surface that needs to be defended by a factor 20 and Or contracted it, I don't know. Right? You know, this is the whole cloud argument, right?

You know, if we just, if we just do all our own security ourselves, we're better than outsourcing that to some company that lives and dies by their platform being secure. Um, yeah, it's a very simple view. I mean, these are complex issues and so forth, but even security companies, you know, the time you have to do your own network administration much less, you know, deep dive security, y you know, I've seen it over and over again, right?

We're a security vendor, obviously we do this well, it's like, yeah, maybe, maybe not, right? Yeah. So, and, And those I if it gets anywhere, We're an awesome job on security, man.

Well, you have to, you have to kinda live in a world where, you know, everything is changing all the time. Otherwise you're gonna be catatonic with the, the amount of change that's happening in the, the attack surface getting so broad. And it, you know, to Alan's point he's made about the adoption of ai, the, it's, it's a train nobody's stopping.

And the same thing is true to moving to cloud native to the edge distributed workloads. You know, we think about what it looks like now, it'll look even a much greater, bigger attack service than surface in five years from now. I, yeah, the, the all cloud stuff, you know, mss ps you know, outsourcing your security operations, you know, you know, like everything, it's been, you know, more than 30 years I've been following this along.

And in that one of the best marketing pieces, maybe sums all this up, is IBM they had those blue and blue ads, God, I don't know, not maybe 20 years ago, but it's this great one. It's this, you know, frantic little, little office conference room. And these people are there and the, the big boss comes in and he, and he is like, okay, are are production down?

No, no. Production's fine. You know, is there, you know this down?

I said, no, no, we're fine. Why are we here? You know, it's like we're, we're a shirt company.

Uh, we make shirts, you know, as you know, not a database company, not an I company. Yeah. Even like, even technology security companies make security technology to sell.

That doesn't necessarily mean they are network security, information security implementation companies. So at a certain point, you know, the adversary and security has, along with everything else, been evolving from script kitties to nation states. And, and, and, you know, I've always thought at a certain point, not just the security, but yeah, the, the whole IT infrastructure needs to get out of the most companies.

Agreed. You know, just a quick plug here. Uh, cube Con London Cloud Native Con is, its alter ego name is in London, April 1st to the fourth, we will be there live, live streaming from London and replaying here on text, on tv.

Mitch, I think you'll be there, Mike, you'll be there. I'll be there. We'll, we'll be reporting from there.

And also, I think it's in July, our own tech strong virtual event that we do every year on the state of Cloud Native, cloud native now, which is also our website for Cloud native will be in July. This year's theme is one for the road, right? Meaning we're taking cloud native on the road to the edge, the endpoint and everything else.

Um, it's a bit of a Blues Brothers theme. And, uh, stay tuned for that. So, and that of course is virtual, so be able to watch that on demand or live, and that's in July.

But for now, Mike, Mitch, Chris and John, thanks for joining us today on Gang Thank you out here for listening to our rancid therapy session on, on getting it off our chest of, of, of the world we live in. Who was it? Who said what a revolting uh, development this is.

But anyway, um, stay tuned. We have all text Drunk TV following today's gang. We'll see you tomorrow to end out the week here on this, uh, March week, first week of March.

For now, though, that's it. It's Alan Humma. We're outta here.