Techstrong Gang – June 4, 2024

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Textron Gang. Today we're gonna be talking about, well, a lot of different things, but we're gonna lead off with AI for social good. Turns out there's a lot of use cases for AI that are gonna have some major benefits for society, and then we're gonna shift over to Green data centers, and then finally, cybersecurity in the movies.

Just how real is it? We'll be back in a second. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Textron Gang.

We're gonna start off with a segment on AI for social Good. And what we're really talking about is how we lost sight of the prize. There's just a lot of noise in the system about how we have many, many issues with, uh, ai.

But there's an article on Text Strong AI that points out, Hey, you know what? Teachers are starting to use this stuff to help students who previously couldn't write a lick. And now they're helping get their ideas out there.

And the healthcare sector, who hasn't had a bad healthcare experience. And a lot of it has to do with the paperwork and the documentation. So Techstrong was looking at some of the use cases for healthcare, and then finally, just this, uh, I guess it was two days ago now, but um, at Compex, Nvidia was showing how, um, AI is gonna be used in robots.

And they were basically gonna be used for everything from, Hey, help me clean my house, to, we could stick, uh, AI in a robot and have it go fight a fire. And we don't have to have fire people be put in danger. So, Mitch, let's start with you.

I mean, have, have we become overly obsessed with all the bad things that AI are gonna possibly create, and maybe we're losing sight of what the mission is? Well, we live, live in a world of science fiction and movies, and, you know, we've long talked about AI and robots taking over the world, so it's not a new topic, right? We've lived with this idea, and of course, thought, you know, the Terminator movie, that could never happen.

That's way down the road. Well, now those things kind of spring back up again for us, especially when we have professionals in the community, you know, writing letters, signing letters about the potential dangers. You know, there are people who were kinda throwing out the warning signs that said, yes, that that is the AI mageddon, if you will, is possible, I guess.

Um, but in the meantime, there are tons of, you know, really beneficial use cases. And I think the article does a great job of it. I think medical is a great one.

Now, of course, there's always the AI helping us versus AI doing something on its own autonomously, and that's always sort of that threshold that that has to be crossed or not, and, uh, what you're comfortable with. But I think there's a lot of applications we're already seeing. We're starting to see AI in applications, not AI as the, as the copilot of the app.

Yes, there, there is that, but I think we'll be pretty surprised at some of the applications people will come up with. Tracy, how are you feeling about AI these days? I mean, we've been following this now collectively for five or six months.

Are you positive, negative, and different somewhere? So I'm gonna take us, I'm gonna step it back and say, yeah, I've been, we've been focused on it as an industry for five or six months, and AI's been around for a long time. We've been leveraging it to help us with things for a decades plus, right?

How do you do simulations and emulations and those kinds of things? We've been, it's been there. Um, my daughter showed me an app this weekend that I thought was great, uh, and she said, this is so cool.

It's before ai. And you literally push the record button when there's a beautiful bird singing outside, and it'll tell you, I think it's through Cornell University, it'll tell you what bird that is. And I said, baby girl, that's ai.

No, no, it can't be, it's not generative. I'm like, so I'm gonna start by saying there's all kinds of ai, all kinds of ai, and the folks who are warning us about AI are not warning about AI writ large. They're not saying that machine learning and some of these predictive algorithms are terrible.

They're warning us about some of the generative techniques and that those things that are happening there, where my at though, I still say it has amazing, groundbreaking potential. And I am always pragmatic. It's good to help us here, but here are the challenges with it.

So as long as we're going into it eyes wide open, there's a lot that it can do. I love it. In logistics in particular, you know, if you, if you think about, uh, UPS and the AI that they use to try and figure out the box sizes, FedEx has all of their pre-built boxes sized to how they fit into, that's all ai.

That's all ai. And so it can do an amazing amount of well offloading to your point about educators, it can do a tremendous amount to help us to have a bigger workforce. When we don't have it, we can delegate those jobs that are easily repeatable.

Now, I wanna key in on something that Mitch said there. I saw a posts this morning that I read out loud, and it went something like this. I want AI to do my laundry and my dishes so that I can do my creative writing and my artwork.

I don't want AI to do my creative writing and my artwork so that I can do laundry and dishes. And I think that that really captured the essence of what we're all thinking. We all want to use it to help free us up so we can do awesome and amazing things to be the teacher's assistant to help us with the logistics.

You know, the medical advances are off the chain crazy in terms of being able to, um, proactively identify challenges people have. Just amazing. Well, I think also in the area of sustainability, AI is doing some incredible things.

We talk a lot about the power source of, of AI and the negative side of it. But on the positive side of it, when it comes to sustainability, what we're seeing is AI that's able to calculate carbon emissions for different output. Also, we're using it when it comes to climate change.

We have more extreme weather events, uh, due to climate change. So AI is being used as a way to effectively predict areas that are at greater, greater risk for, uh, damage from extreme weather and what the climate outlook looks like for specific locations. That's all used in AI applications.

So it's doing a lot to, uh, promote the science of the what's happening with climate change and, and create awareness. And also, uh, it's helping to educate people and to let them know more about their risk for climate. It's, there's different programs where you can put in your location and get an accurate look at what's ahead for climate risk.

And of course, when it comes to ESG and carbon emissions reporting, AI is being implemented in that. Yeah. Jensen Wang was talking about during the Computex keynote that kind of alluded to, I don't think he made a hard promise, but he said we might actually be able to predict the weather now that we have these next generation of, uh, Reen GP news that are coming down the pike.

And, um, of course we heard that when IBM bought the weather company. I mean, right. Do you hope that This is gonna happen?

Well, I was actually there when that happens. So I can, I can say firsthand, you know, um, it's meteorologist, there's always that, that in that, um, it's, um, not a hundred percent precise as we know from watching it just on tv, but yes, the, the AI and predictive capabilities are absolutely gonna enhance weather forecasting. Yeah.

They know what just announced yesterday, uh, what was the, I guess, yeah, yesterday was start of hurricane season and they just announced new supercomputers that they're using as well to better forecast and predict the track of her that's happening right now. Yeah, I'm, I'm super excited about that. If I put on my way back machine, I worked with AccuWeather, uh, years ago.

Both my husband and I worked there and have maintained those relationships with folks. And one of the claims to fame are that you became a regional expert. Understanding these micro climates, the things that they have models, there have been predictive models for weather for decades.

Decades. But now to your point, when you throw in the super computers, when you throw in the super pods, when you throw in, being able to amass that much more information and be able to throw the compute at it and ask the ai, ask these different tools, what else? Right.

Before, it's been pre a little bit predictive, but I think we're gonna see beyond climate change. You imagine if you actually knew whether or not you need an umbrella today, that that would be just wonderful. You know, One of the benefits to humanity is if AI actually made a useful auto corrupt or autocorrect, excuse Me, autocorrect.

Yeah, that'd be really helpful with some of my speech to text. I, I use that when I send text messages. Yes.

Yeah, I've got some doozies. I've got some Doozies. Yeah, I've sent some texts I regret.

How long do you think it might take for all this to play out? Because, um, Nvidia is talking about a new class of GPUs in 2026 that could drive a lot of these new use cases. And so figure it's 2027 before the hardware's around and the software guys might be working on it now, but, you know, what's your sense of timelines?

Anybody want to hazard a guess? Now? Now I, I, we're, we're not waiting for this Mitre just, uh, coin just, uh, penned an agreement with Nvidia and we have a super pod.

So we're doing this stuff right now. And I mean, we're, we're, we're active. And because we work with not just, uh, the defense side of the house, we work with, you know, when the COVID stuff is coming out, we, with medical, we work with social justice and look at those patterns and tracking.

It's happening now, like right now. So I don't think it's a, a matter of when it's going to be, how broad scale and how accessible are the outcomes. I think that that's going to be the real question, Mike.

Mm-Hmm. And getting the messaging out, because as we stood instead at the start of the segment, we're mostly talking about the negatives and what we have to watch out for with ai. But the more AI is used for good and the more that messaging gets out there, I think that's also gonna help people maybe are slow to adapt or, or seeing the negative side of it.

I think the other factor in this mic, you know, we had availability of chips for a while. That seems to subsided somewhat, but it's also the cost. And I think as new generations, the chip come, come out, the existing chips, of course become much less expensive.

That's a big driver. 'cause the more we put into this, the more powering, the more kind of compute cycles and views that we're using to do this. So I think the cost curve will follow very aggressively the kind of applications we wanna do and not be an, a hindrance to the kind of AppSec we wanna build.

But I agree with trace's point. It's now you're doing ai, now you already missed the train. You better catch the one that's in the station right now.

Quick. The models are gonna get smaller, right? And we know that it's, it's all been about every, every step of the way for the last eight 18 months has been more parameters, more data, bigger, bigger, bigger.

And what we're seeing is bigger isn't better. Bigger is bigger. Um, they're small language models, uh, niche focused language models.

Those take up less space. They require less compute. They can be delegated, right?

They can be the micro, uh, models. So I think we're going to see, um, a dispersion, right? We're gonna see it, uh, really, uh, differently geo located models, we're not going to see them all massive central big models.

Those will be there. Those are the compute busters right now, by the way. It's the big models that are, are taking a lot of water, taking a lot of electricity.

I think as we kinda look down the road though, I'm trying to figure out, so there are gonna be these robots and they're gonna be trained using LLMs. How many robots am I gonna need? Do I need to like, have one in the house, one in the office, or will one just follow me around?

Or will there be multiple that I gotta stick in the car and drive around everywhere I'm going? I'm kind of trying to get my head around the whole robot thing. How do you guys envision that playing out in your minds?

I think you need one, at least one robot to manage all your copilots that you're gonna have by then. You know, I'm not a fan of, you know, 20 copilots for Sure. No, not At all.

It's, it's a great question. I mean, do you, you have one in the home, right? Uh, maybe you have one per person or something like that.

Who knows what we're gonna be using. But there's also, of course, specialized use cases, like what they talked about, copy X, the, um, was the use case of BMW and Nvidia using robots and manufacturing floor. Now those are gonna be specialty trained.

That was driven by Chachi PT is what they were demonstrating with OpenAI. But still to, to Tracy's point, specific domain specific models, maybe smaller models, things like that will drive a lot of that. So I guess we just have to go back and watch a few episodes of the Jets.

And that's what I was thinking. See how Rosie was doing The, the, we've had, we've had robot helpers for a long time. If you've watched, is it Boston Robotics?

If you've watched these groups, what's available already is mind boggling. And the research and the evolution of human machine teaming, like how well you get along and work with that thing. All of this is not new, but it is net new to the broad audience.

It is net new to the person who has a small business. And they're thinking about this. Um, I saw a recent robot that was bricklayer and it beautifully late and now didn't look like a human.

But robots don't always just emulate like a cyborg, like a human figure. And it was laying bricks, and it knew exactly how much more to put it, knew exactly how later, better later, a more effective and, and cost, uh, cost efficient, uh, wall than having a human. But then the human has to come along still in the loop and be the person evaluating it, I think.

Yeah, we're also kind of getting slowly acclimated even to the concept with Google Home or Amazon Alexa. How many of those do we have? Do we have 'em in every room or do we have them in, uh, at, at the office as well?

I, I know I kind of got over done with it, and I said, this is too much. I only need one. You have, uh, people answering Alexa, answering you every not good thing.

All right, here's, here's my ultimate social good. So imagine that robots are finding these wars for us, right? And they kind of are with drones, but if both sides have an equal amount of capacity for creating these robots, the robots will just continue to destroy each other.

And then what would be the whole point of going to war in the first place? Well, we'll do the whole Star Trek thing. Do you don remember the Star Trek episode where you just, you show up when you, when they, when you get your text or your email that it's, it's time for your demise.

You show up at the booth and it atomizes you. So maybe that's the direction that we go. I, I do remember that episode and I think that, uh, captain Kirk intervened in that whole process.

He did. He did. He Forced him back into real combat instead of through, through autonomous robots or whatever it was being.

Well, maybe what happens in this is that, um, less about the wars and more about what happens with humans. We've talked about people losing job, but it was Elon, I think it was Elon Musk who recently came out and said, we need to start talking about not a minimum wage, but a living high wage for humans. So as we are able to delegate more, think about becoming that altruistic society, I don't know, in Star Trek, if they were all getting paid, if they got a biweekly and had to check their pay stubs, there was a, there's a point where you become focused on humanity as opposed to worrying about the cost of your house and the cost of all of those accoutrements.

What would it look like to have a living real safety net for everybody? Because we're able to have more free time to focus on humanity, to focus on one another, to focus on addressing normal biases that have been around for a long time. Maybe my, this helps us to, to actually pay more attention to each other and less late nights trying to debug things and, and solve other problems Conceptually.

I love that idea. But I also, um, you know, your religious friends might tell you that the idle hands are the devil's playground, right? And if everybody's sitting around and doesn't have enough to do, you know, they'll find negative things to do.

Unfortunately, that is, The capitalists will find things for those people to do. No, I agree with that. Um, but of course, as we're saying at the start of having something that's for good, for good, hopefully that will at least in some ways, counteract it.

All right, folks, we don't know exactly how all this is gonna turn out, but ai, it's a double-edged sword, but there's a lot of good things to think about, and hopefully we can mitigate the bad ones with a little preemptive planning. We'll see what goes on. We'll be back in a minute.

com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building. com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and more. com has the largest collection of original DevOps content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more.

com to learn more. com where the world meets DevOps. Hi everyone, welcome back to the techron gang.

Green Data Centers are on the rise, but what are they? Well, they're data centers that are leaning into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and also really innovative technologies to cool data centers and reuse the heat that's generated from them. Platform sh is definitely leading the way in this technology, and in fact, they're offering a 3% regional discount for their clients that are using these green data centers.

And I recently spoke with Leah Goldfarb, who's the environmental impact officer of platform, sh about this new offering. And she says, the response has been robust Upson, which is our new offering. And it's, it has this, it runs on the same proven infrastructure that platform H has created, but there are some new twists to it.

It's a resource based offering. And what we are offering is 3% discount on the resources on platform. Sh if you pick a data center that runs on low carbon en energy, and the exciting thing we have to announce with that is so far for the clients that have signed up, 80% of them have opted for the greener data center.

So this is really quite new for us. That is really exciting to hear because it seems like this, um, turnaround in interest is, is now really, really reflected in the statistics at 80% that that's an impressive number. Yeah, and I think it's showing that people are getting educated on how emissions are calculated, how carbon audits are done in the cloud, and that the greenhouse gas protocol, which is the international standard, used to calculate emissions in the cloud, uses a location-based strategy.

So the carbon intensity of the underlying electricity grid supporting the data center is very important. Well, Leah also says they're planning more innovations with these green data centers. And, uh, Mike, it's something that we've been talking about a lot that we're seeing so much of it with major players in tech and even smaller ones.

Everybody wants to, um, if they're using data center, they wanna know how green is it, how do we measure it, and what's the success of it? We've talked about this in a couple episodes, but I was recently in Barcelona for a Nutanix conference, and it was just funny to, to see how this all played out. So talking to the European IT folks all over this issue, like, you know, most important thing in the world asked a couple of Americans about, is anybody asking you to track carbons or anything in your data centers?

You know, and I got a lot, a lot of people looking at their shoes going, no. And, uh, other people are like, I'm not even sure how to go about doing that. So I, I feel like we're all over the, the landscape on this, Mitch, but do you think that this is gonna come to be a bigger issue and, and maybe it falls to the DevOps team to manager?

Well, I think, um, globally we're all tracking green. Some of them are tracking this green and some of 'em are tracking that green. So, uh, so when we say go green, keep in mind it may, may have double meanings.

You know, I, it, it is a topic of conversation about how we create more efficient software and how we are more cognizant of, you know, just don't throw more compute or more, more network or more AI at it just for the sake of it. And the, there is the, the fail safe of, I never, I never get fired for over provisioning, right? But I will get fired if something goes down because I didn't have enough capacity.

So I think in a, it, it's DevOps, but I also think it's a lot of platform engineering. I'm thinking about how we, uh, architect and design the services that we're using, the software stack, the cloud services, and it's a combination. So we could create more efficient software, we can create platforms that are better attuned and in using energy.

And you know what? The market drives it here. You know, it, it may be more of a social conscious in, in Europe, but here, if customers demand it, they will do it.

And I think that's gonna be a big factor. We see this in contracts and showing up there and then, you know, clauses or product cost of doing business with customers, then we will respond. I mean, that's how US works, right?

Yeah. Well, I was, you know, it's interesting. One of the other things that Leah had pointed out, and I think it's gonna be coming out soon, their review of 2023 and the, the clients that use the green data centers, what was their overall success with it?

And what they're getting initially is reporting that they, they did save money and they also saw overall sustainability improve. Now that, that's coming from them, we'll take a look at the report, but it, it is interesting that it's a growing trend and especially if it can correlate to re reducing overall carbon emissions for the company, a, a better sustainability state for stakeholders to observe. And, um, just more successful in reducing carbon emissions.

I think it's, it's the demand is only gonna grow from Europe to the us. Tracy, you deal a lot with the federal government. Do you think that at least here in the US it's gonna require some sort of mandate or some sort of compliance requirement from the federal government to everybody to get their green act together?

'cause it seems like here in the us, you know, if it's not a requirement, if it's not a law, we're just gonna ignore it. Well, there's, it doesn't necessarily have to be a law, but there has to be incentive. And to Mitch's point, the incentive is often green.

Now, that's not every company. There are those who truly are like, think about Tom's shoes. Um, now we're not talking about green data centers there, but people who do things all touristically on behalf, right, of the better good.

Um, so will it require there being a law or a rule about it? It will require there to be incentive. Uh, and that incentive might be a stick and it might be a carrot.

Um, I do wanna track back to something that, that Mitch talked about, because you guys know my background. I'm a software architect and an engineer, and I have long bemoaned and I focus with my teams that they understand what performant software is. Because we have gotten lazy as an entire industry because of cloud, we've gotten lazy.

I don't have to worry about my algorithm being as effective or as efficient as possible. 'cause I'll honestly just throw some hardware at it. It's virtual anyways.

It's only a couple of pennies here and there. Um, that has to change. And we're doing that with education, but it has to, we have to double down on it in the same way that we're doubling down on security.

So our developers, our engineers and architects need to understand whether they're DevOps, whether they're platform, whether they're, you know, full bodied on, on all software. They have to be thinking about both those things. How do I be performant at the same time that I am, um, making things cyber secure.

I went to a conference, I was in the UK for Q con, and what was interesting to me were the number of sessions that were about green languages. So software programming, what languages do we pick because they inherently are more efficient. So teach people how to write more efficient code using more efficient languages than maybe what we're using in the past.

So we've got to do that. Um, although are, uh, although there's just a lot of right now education that we could do to minimize how much compute people are using on a daily basis. It's amazing.

Um, you know, Bonnie, have you ever thought about, um, folks who are now using GPT instead of Google, right? They're using that. How much more computer are they using for each search that they're doing to find out something simple?

They want a recipe and they're putting it into perplexity, or they're putting it into chat. GPT. Like there are some inefficient uses where we're kind of baiting the public to get used to ai.

I think there's a lot of efficiencies, a lot of, a lot of not green behaviors that we're, you know, egging on. And sometimes you can't escape it because even now, if you put in something into Google before you even look at any of the sites, an AI answer comes up. Is it?

Um, it's, It's okay. The Google one is probably wrong though. Only if it talks about thicken your, uh, cheese to your pizza with non-toxic glue.

There you go. You know, I think this is a great application of ai. Think about getting people to change habits.

Let's write more efficient code. Let's architect software. Let's don over provision things.

It's hard to get folks to change. You know what they, it's got a lot of momentum behind it. You know, what, what ai, AI thrives on, not really just generative ai, you know, machine learning.

This is lots, tons of data, right? And we have so much data that we capture about the execution of our software and environments. And I think AI could very easily be applied to, okay, well really what are we using?

What's what Mm-Hmm. What are the core components of all that stuff that's provisioned or over-provisioned? How might we tune that down in terms of resource utilization and tune up the performance of it where, you know, it can look at, at, at vast quantities of data across multiple, multiple, multiple customers for a cloud provider or a software SaaS provider, and look for ways to optimize it.

I think that to me probably holds as much hope, maybe even more than getting people to change their habits. Well, as a, a complete agreement, if we can also get the company or the people that own the data to be willing to share that, that data. Maybe I don't want you to look at all my internals.

Uh, I'm a big company. I'm using your cloud services. Your agreement doesn't mean that you can tinker around and, and do other stuff.

Now, there are some really cool new tools that I've been looking at that are doing exactly what you're talking about, Mitch, you can open up for yourself, you can open up your different data corpus areas to it, and it can help you to do those optimizations. And so I think that that's on the horizon. I just dunno how we're gonna scale it.

If people are still holding their cards a little close to their chest. Well, if they anonymized a lot of times, like security companies that are, are in hosted in the cloud, we'll use anonymized data, right? They'll anonymize it first, then do the analysis.

And that can take you quite quite a ways to your point, Tracy, and to get into the specific as of what you're doing and maybe takes the next level of it. But if somebody said, I could save money if I'll open this up and not put my data at risk. If you can prove that to me, I think people would do that.

Yeah, it's always about the green. It's a great, it's great incentivization, my friend. Do you think AI will force this issue?

Because I think, you know, and I think Tracy mentioned small language models earlier, um, but I feel like we tend to just go after, you know, here's my shiny new toy, so now I'm gonna use everything in a large language model, and maybe I should be thinking through the use cases based on what the actual goal is. Mm-Hmm. Because right now we like toys, so we're geeks and we kind of just throw things at things and we pretend that we're not doing that as a fashion statement when we are.

So, you know, do we need to be smarter about how we're gonna use these language models? Mitch, what do you think? Did you say shiny object?

Oh, Yes. Oh yeah. Shiny objects.

Yes. World. Definitely.

Well, you know, we're, we're at the beginning stages of what generative AI can do for us in terms of software development. What we're missing, or the next things kind of to be added are, I want more secure software. I, right now, all that code that it's generating are based on, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands, millions of, uh, contributions out on the net that it's, you know, gobbled up in whatever form, not necessarily the best coding practices of the most secure, right?

Same thing for efficiency, right? We'll, we will improve those models. So, you know, at a, uh, AI generated code probably could write a more efficient or greener, uh, if that's a word, more tur, more greener, uh, software, then maybe a person can, and that's a canned.

Great. Let's figure out how to use those tools. You know, not everything has to be amber.

I'm wanting a nail done here once in a while to make it be more efficient. Yeah, I tend to agree. We are, we're at the beginning and because we're at, at the beginning, because there's so much excitement around it, this is the first time that a technology has really been dispersed to everybody.

It's really been democratized. Like you can go to the bank and the teller will be talking to you about something with generative ai. That wasn't the way it was with Agile or cloud or DevOps or any of the other things.

So that has been a driver for businesses trying to glom on, I need, I need generative ai. What for? Well, I, I, I need it.

It's gonna help me. It's gonna make me more productive. Okay, let's define that.

We're at that point though, of telling businesses pause on going directly to production. Let's experiment. Let's rapidly experiment.

Let's figure out what's a good use case for you. Let's figure out how big or small that language model needs to be. Use somebody else's, pull down open source and do it yourself.

We're right at that point of learning what those different patterns are to Mitch's point to make it effective, to truly make it effective. 'cause those original big language models, uh, they're kind of cool. They're really big, but again, I'm gonna keep coming back to bigger isn't better, and we have to bolt things on top of those language models to really get the best outputs from them.

Okay. Do we have a problem though, with fomo, right? Where you have a fear of missing out, so everybody's kind of doing a proof of concept Sure.

And experimenting with some stuff, or is that just part of the natural learning process? It's, it's both. I think that any new technology has a little bit of FOMO to it.

I think this is the first time that we've seen the CTO and the CIO and the CEO and the entire sales organization, the entire marketing organization involved in it as well. So I think that that is the one differentiator with this. Yeah, there's fomo, but there's also a good reason that organizations, there should be no organization who doesn't have thumb sandbox capability or some rules, somebody becoming AI savvy, because if you're not using it, somebody else who is using it is gonna take your job.

I just, I, I've seen that slogan out there so much. If you're not using it, someone else is using it to take your job. I think that is so true.

Mm-Hmm. Um, and regarding fomo, yes. I admit that's, uh, something I have all the time because just when you think you found the perfect AI tool to solve all your problems, another one comes out.

So, uh, there is a bit of that Or they stop working the way that you wanted them to. I've had that even today. Now take their, I'm sorry.

Right. Go ahead. Do you think the folks have been banging the drum about green it for a long time, have been, to be fair, somewhat walking around in the wilderness screaming then no one's fully listening, right?

Or at least outside of Europe. Do you think that this is their moment? Has it come where people are gonna wake up and go, Hey, you know, this AI stuff really matters and this is kind of the, the cause and effect conversation?

Yes, and I think it has to do a lot what's happening in Europe because there's new regulations, um, in the uk, uh, new regulations regarding greenwashing, uh, being, I'm gonna be talking more about that on Ecotech insights, but new regulations that are affecting global companies that we all know the big tech giants. So there's gonna be a forced awareness of all of this, and a lot of companies are getting ahead of it by promoting what we talked about earlier, the AI for good versus the negative. So it, it is gonna be something that'll come to the forefront.

Right. And, and then I have A question for Bonnie, if it's okay. Mike, go ahead if you have time.

Yeah, just I'd love to get your thoughts on, you know, we, we know the upfront of going new can be pretty high, but how are, how are those who are really focusing on the data center, how are they dealing with some of the rents and the reliability concerns right now? Because our green technology, our storage of energy, it's not always where we need. Is it gonna scale?

Are those still challenges? That's a great question, because we're seeing that even just here in the US for states that are trying to go all renewable and then they're not getting enough sun for solar or, or it's, you know, it's, it's, it's not foolproof yet, but where it can be used, especially with the data centers, is interesting because not only is it relying on renewable energy as the primary source, but it's the technology, as I mentioned, that's offsetting the heat, that's bringing in innovative waste to cool building data centers in naturally cooler climates. So it's a combination of all of those things to where we're not putting all our eggs in the renewable energy basket.

We're doing a lot of different things to make it work. And I think it's Microsoft and maybe Google, but a lot of the cloud service providers say that they're gonna be carbon negative by 2030, and they're gonna start paying off all the carbon they generated by 2050. I'm making up a number there.

Yeah. But I think it, that's, you get the idea. Um, is that feasible?

And then, you know, we'll just go back to business as usual and, you know, ignore all this stuff. I don't think so. I don't think they, people will be able to ignore it because there's always people watching anytime a company makes a claim.

I mentioned the green watching in the UK and the regulations about that. Um, it's not gonna be so easy to say something is environmentally friendly or eco-friendly anymore. Of course, this is starting, as I mentioned, in one part of the, the country in the world, but it is gonna carry through.

So the goals that these major tech companies are setting, uh, I believe it's reachable. I they're already making strides and innovations in those areas. All right.

I am, I am shocked that we have an issue where companies said something five years ago that nobody went back to double check whether or not it's true. But yeah, it happens all the time. So, um, hopefully we will put a pin in 2030 and make sure we look back and say, Hey, did you actually deliver on this promise, sir?

And who knows, maybe they'll be ahead of the game, Maybe hopefully with AI at their, at their side for good. All Right. Well folks, I think we've had moved this conversation as far as it's going right now.

We'll be back to this topic many, many times Yes. With Bonnie. But, um, we're gonna move on to our next segment.

Hi everybody. Welcome back. We have a very special segment here.

One of, uh, a lot of it's kind of sci-fi and different kinds of fans of, uh, movies and always interesting when our work shows up in movies. And of course, you know, cybercrime, uh, cyber security hacking, all those things are popular even and been a theme for a long time. I recently had a chance to, uh, interview someone that many of us known for quite a while, ed Radcliffe, who's an investigative reporter, uh, writer, author.

Uh, she's, uh, created three, a series of three books and a cybercrime series and, uh, it's called Breaking Backbones. And she's actually their approach. She is working on churning that into a streaming video series.

And, uh, we hope that, uh, she's able to do that. So let, let's take a hear a little bit of our conversation we had. I ended up just developing this deep story in my head over time.

I had a few outlines written and, you know, I was busy writing cyber crime and cybersecurity stories starting with Bite Magazine in, I think the first one was 2000, um, 1996. That was after working on a book about Kevin Mitnick in 95. Rest his soul.

Kevin actually is the person I credit with changing my life, getting me out of general assignment journalism and getting me into the cyber reporting field around cyber crime. Mm-hmm. Learning a lot.

My naivete drifted away very quickly because his friends were quite unique. Let's just put it that way. A few of them were a little scary.

Kevin was actually more of a good guy than anybody gives him credit for. Uh, he, I called him the Harbinger, right? If it wasn't for him being such a flashy guy with all of his cyber exploits, we wouldn't have had enough warning that this is coming.

Definitely Check out the risk of that interview. Uh, it'll be available on Textron tv. I love talking to authors because you don't write a book just out of nothing.

You, you have a passion for it, and there's something behind it. And one of the unique things about Deb's books is that says he's the hackers as the heroes, not as the evil, not as the missed robot folks. Premier Mallek, who were you?

Are they good or are they bad? Um, so it's kind of nice to see, you know, the, the white hats doing well in, in a sci-fi, uh, hacking series. Mike, I'm curious.

You, you run the content creation business your whole life, and I'm sure you see this, people writing books, uh, about different topics that we deal with in our technology. Any thoughts on cyber crime? And, you know, it's been a long time since we had Blade, what's the next kind of popular topic gonna be?

I'm always amazed at how fast they are whenever they're trying to hack into something. I mean, it's just instant. Uh, and, and their skills are just phenomenal.

And, and Tracy, I just wonder if you look at this and you're over at Mitre, and does that make your, will your eyes a little bit? Not at all. Not at all.

Um, hackers are fast, some of them. Um, but some of them take a nation state, uh, may take months to accomplish something. There's a long runway.

It's not all as fun as the script kitties, right? That we learned about back in the day, right? War games, Matthew Broderick bere playing with this computer and, and tying into national defense.

It's a lot more complex. But there, there are some that are exceptionally speedy with what they're doing. There are those that need to go slow because of the layers, uh, that they are tapping into and that they're dealing with.

So it's all over the mountain. It's exciting and terrifying in this games. Yeah, speaking of terrifying, at first I was thinking about war games, Tracy.

That was a, that was a good reference. Uh, but I also remember just recently on Netflix, there was a, um, a, a movie at Obama was an executive producer over, I i's on the tip of my tongue, and someone's gonna write and say what it is, but it was basically about cyber attacks on our infrastructure from everything from, um, you know, airlines and roads and, uh, power. Uh, basically everything that can possibly go wrong goes wrong.

And how, uh, how would we react to it if we don't have anything? And everything is attacked cyber. It's cyber crime.

Yeah. And in some countries that may not matter as much, and we're kind of shifting a gear here, but I know somebody was telling me, you know, if that happens in the us, we're paralyzed. If it happens in some other countries, they'd be like, you know, just another day in the, uh, on the grid.

And they'd be like going about their business as usual. So, um, are we kind of maybe too dependent upon all these technologies that we're using right now and we don't have a backup plan? And maybe this is the next movie, right?

Well, think about what happened the last time any major outage happened in the us. Think about that. I remember when there was the, the issue in New York City, maybe this was five, six years ago, and it was the hurricane, I think might be longer than that.

Hurricane came through, flooded, took out the, uh, underwater cables, and all of a sudden, or there was the fire that was in the, uh, east coast that took out regional pieces. Um, think about this. I had this recently happen where I had no cell signal here in my house.

I had no internet. I had, I could, uh, not contact anybody. And for a couple of moments I'm like, exactly, what am I gonna do?

How, how am I going to accomplish what I need to accomplish? Do I hop in a car and drive two and a half hours to the nearest office? Like we do have a dramatic dependency, especially if we work in that realm, if we're it or if we're knowledge workers, we're hyper dependent upon our infrastructure, hyper dependent upon it.

I agree. Not that I fall into conspiracy theories much, but when I do hear about a major cable or major, uh, cell phone network going down for better part of a day or more, yeah, it, it reminds me in the back of my head, we don't come out and say that those were due to hacks. It's possible this is already happening on a fairly large scale.

We just don't talk about it because we don't wanna draw attention to it. There again, I'm not sure if that's really true, but a little bit of conspiracy, her Emmy says that's Happening. So I'm gonna say it's true because there's a reason that CISA is focusing on 16 infrastructure areas right now.

They are exceptionally doubling down because they see the risk. Though I figure if cisa, and I'm a big fan, if cisa have an issues, if they're saying this is what our challenges are, you know, yeah, it's, the movies might be hyping it, but I don't think that they're hyping it so far from normal Arnold Schwartzenegger, not withstanding, right? Not talking about that, but the other pieces of it, being able to break in, being able to poison this, being able to stop service, being able to be abruptive, you know, interrupted.

That's, that's all real. I don't know how crazy that is. I don't think the movies are that far off when it comes to those things.

They're not. I I was in, uh, New York a few years ago, it was before Covid and there was a heat wave followed by Major Blackout, and I had to get from one part of town to the other, and I couldn't wrap my head around walking through traffic. And all the traffic lights weren't working, and the cars were all trying to move.

You don't realize how much you rely on the traffic lights. And, um, the whole city, everybody was out walking to get to where they wanted to go. And then when I finally got to my building, of course, guess what?

No power. So you walk up all those steps. But, um, so sometimes real life and movies, um, I agree, Tracy, they can mirror each other.

I don't dunno, is it me? But I feel like every time there is an outage, my brain immediately goes, uhoh cyber attack versus, you know, thinking. Absolutely.

Absolutely. First of is my first line of thought every time it could be a snowstorm that takes out my local, uh, electricity. And my first thought is not, is it a snowstorm anymore?

My first thought is, if it's not the snowstorm, what is it? So we're being tempered to think that way. Not the worst thing.

Although I don't want us diving underneath our desks, uh, like back in the, uh, the cold era. The Cold War era, where we're all practicing for the nuclear drill. Like, where should we be teaching our children?

What should we be thinking about? How should we be dealing with the possibility that all of that critical infrastructure is not available on, on a particular day? What would you do?

Well, I actually do dive under my desk to check the wifi cable, you know? Well, that's different. That's different smart opinion.

Now When, when Guy Faults shows up on our TV saying, you know, uh, I picked over, you know, we've been, It sounds like Mitch, the, the, the, the author you interviewed could very well be offered movie rights or this story, a series of books because, um, it, there is an interest in this of what, what can go wrong in, in the worst way. I dunno why we are all drawn to that, though. We're Deb's book are fantastic.

And one of the big values is that she's researched it. She, it's not as though she just wrote this on a whim after watching some other movies or was so moved by something. She's been a part of the cybersecurity scene for 25 years.

Uh, and she's a, a major force in that. She's always at RSAC. Um, and her books are fantastic.

And if you were to read them, you'd take a step back and say, huh, there's a little bit of no going on here, Huh, Mitch, do you think all this stuff is good for the cybersecurity professionals out there? Does it kind of raise their mojo a little bit and make 'em maybe walk a little taller? 'cause I can go, Hey, I'm at a dinner party and I'm in cybersecurity, and suddenly people want to talk to me.

Well, at least you can reference that as a, as a movie to explain to your mom and dad what you do. They still won't understand it, but, oh, do you do movies? Oh, I'm doing security.

I'm not in movies. You know, I, I think the biggest benefit of it's science fiction has always portrayed what futures might look like and how many things that come to fruition of that. You know, we had sort of the mini floppy bits, uh, that looked like similar seven something in Star Trek that plugged in for data storage and, you know, cellular phones.

They match all these handheld communications. And today we see a lot of that too. So you tend to be more on the Armageddon dystopian side.

Um, it's nice when you find a movie that is in it's movie that's talking about the future, but that's a little harder to go by. Do you remember in Star Trek, the little lapel thing? You, you hit your little, your little up little Chevron and it could talk into it.

It kind of reminded me of the recent lapel pin. The, and I think it was ta it was very quickly taken off the market. I believe it interacted with chat GPT, but it let you come after it.

It was too hot, it was physically too hot for people to leverage it. So it's on the horizon, my friend. If it's not in your glasses, it's gonna be here, it's gonna be somewhere, right?

They had the ring for a while, right? You could have the Siri ring the Alexa ring or something like that. So it's, it's, it's almost there.

This where this is bringing our robots that we talked about earlier, together with sci-fi together with our own fear, because this is so new and different, kind of a cool time to be alive. But you could be a really awesome conspiracy theorist right now too. If you wanna be just saying, I, I do think it's really great the Docdocumentary side of this.

Like, you can go back and see the Snowden documentary or Stucks neck, stuck Neck. Um, there's so many really good documentaries about what would've happened in the past and kind of pulling it back together. 'cause in hindsight, you could see what led up to how they found it, et cetera.

So I think that's also a helpful way of just educating ourselves of what's happening has happened, and of course, will continue to happen in the future. Tracy, I remember talking to a fellow about all this one time, and he said, if you can imagine it, somebody's trying it. So, you know, is that where we are with cybersecurity?

As everybody's kind of playing with these different things and we have these red teams that go out and try to find ways to disrupt things to help organizations become more resilient. And they're a pretty creative bunch. I, a couple of Them.

Yeah. Let's take it a, let's take it a step further. If the good guys have all of these incredible tools, right, where you, whether it's social engineering and on top of it, all of the threat vectors that are tracked and managed and maintained, the bad guys have access to all of that.

And they're leveraging these tools to come up with cool new ideas. And they're also revisiting, we're seeing a resurgence of old stuff, of old ways to do things because we thought we had that dealt with. But maybe people are not, like some of the phishing attacks that are going on old school phishing attacks, old school password, uh, issues.

So we're seeing newbies with tools who are becoming hackers faster than those script kitties. Remember the, the, the, the joke of the script kitty, is that you had this, you know, middle class family, both parents are working, the kids at home with the computer, he's got the internet. He figures out how to hack in and change his grades and do these other things.

This is much more intentional and much more rapid. Uh, so yeah, I'm, it's happening very quickly and it's happening. It's scaling.

It's scaling, massively scaling. All right, Mitch, are you seeing the same thing? 'cause I think Tracy just said that Cybersecurity's kind of like my dance moves.

They're so old, they're new again. Just don't show us. That's all right.

We'll trust you now. It it, it happens at really, I mean, the speed of light, because so much of this is now all automated, right? It's, it's a, it's about getting up to the masses.

As many people as you can, attack it as possible. There are greater number of chances you'll get a hit, right? And Tracy's right what's old is new.

Again, those old approaches, just like phishing, you know, it still works, right? People click on that stuff, it gets better. It looks real, more real looks accurate, um, until you realize they don't have to spell knowledge or some word in there.

You're like, yeah, this, I don't think this is right. But still, people click on that stuff. So it just happens on a much broader scale that's not, you know, Mitch in, in the basement sending out, you know, logging into this computer and seeing what I can do and kind of working my way through the network.

It's all, it's all done through scripts. Well, AI has made it more sophisticated now too. The reason that phishing is on the rise, the reason there's a taxer on the rise is that it no longer has broken English.

So somebody can create something that's beautifully crafted. They can take examples of leading voices in technology and use that as a sample to create these things. There's also a piece that we don't talk about too much that we might wanna bring up.

And that is social engineering. Social engineering with now with graph databases, and now with AI on top of that, or in, in concert with it, make it that much easier to learn all about Mitch, to learn about what he likes and what he doesn't, likes to predict not just his passwords, but his behaviors. And then to leverage Deepfake to get some information.

I probably get two text messages a day that are completely fake that I have to pause and take a look at because there's a believability to it. So think about all of that is happening en mass right now as well. And Mark, I think one of the best solutions we have is if we got rid of email, and we don't have to worry about all this.

You have phishing texts and things, but you know, email's, the, it's the root of all evils. I know you don't like EAL either. Well, yeah, a lot of people are turning to text versus email, but I also think there's a whole new audience of people for the old is new that don't know about the old, and then I don't, this sounds like a conspiracy to get me to use Slack.

Is that what this is? Yes, Yes, Absolutely. No, no, not at all.

Ha. Well, let me just ask one last question about this related to the energy sector, which seems to me like if I really wanted to disrupt something, I would launch a cyber attack against the grid and then knock out all kinds of stuff that's dependent, as we talked about in the novel. It would be kind of this cyber Armageddon kind of scenario.

I mean, are the energy folks talking about This? Well, you know what they're talking about. I'm gonna have an upcoming segment on it.

Is the cyber biosecurity the new way of, of controlling the attacks, which, um, CISA has brought to the forefront the threats on our water supply, that that's a big threat if somebody were to taint that in some way. So they are talking about it and we're talking about, you know, the energy grid that, as you mentioned, water supply. Um, we early, we mentioned earlier hospitals and imagine ambulances can't get to where they need to go.

So it, it, it is connected, but particularly, and when it comes to energy, yes, it's definitely, um, an issue because, uh, we're now leaning into renewable energy. Does that, that make it less secure or more secure, you know, and that, that's something not investigated too. All right, folks.

I think we need a new Oscar category for cybersecurity and we can give those out every year and we can maybe get votes in the community to vote for that. And instead of a bunch of actors who probably don't know anything, they can Get more viewers. Wait, are you saying that we'll get to join the academy?

Yeah, well, we'll, we're gonna build our own academy. Oh, okay. How about the Security Creators network?

Why not start there? Right there, there we go. Yeah.

I, I like this idea. I think we're gonna do this. So stay tuned.

At the end of this year, there's gonna be a best cybersecurity movie voting mechanism from the creators, the Cybersecurity Creators Network. So by all means, go check that out. Network.

It's on Security Boulevard, by the way. Hey guys, thanks for being on the show, sharing your knowledge and insights. We had a blast.

Thank you all for watching the latest episode. And stay tuned 'cause we got a bunch more coming right after this. 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 to learn more.

com. Home of security bloggers network.