Ep 58: News Roundup (Feb 8) - SpaceX Tonga, Meta Updates, Trouble in Cryptoland, Cyber & Ground Warfare, Net Neutrality

James Thomason: 0:07

It's the Next Wave Podcast, episode 58. I'm James Thomason here with co-hosts Dean Nelson and Brad Kirby. And this week we're covering the latest freshest stories in tech. And man is there a lot to talk about? First though, Dean, I have to say your room is an absolute mess. What is going on?

Dean Nelson: 0:24

That's why we record a podcast and not a vlog. My daughter is moving. So we're packing up and moving lots of stuff down to her place in LA. So it's a mess. But my office is a mess all the time, James, you know, that

James Thomason: 0:37

Minw is too. But it's especially it's especially disrupted today. Especially. It looks like a kerfuffle took place,

Brad Kirby: 0:43

I think mine's worse.

Dean Nelson: 0:50

You know, if we were on Zoom, I would have a perfect house again. So now you see my reality. You know,

James Thomason: 0:56

yeah, there's no, there's no switching your background in our virtual studio here. It is what it is.

Dean Nelson: 1:02

But if you were to describe it, you could see that I've got literally 20 spinning media hard drives, about 25, SSD drives. And every gadget left, I've got three extra monitors and a whole bunch of crap in here. So it's just too much stuff.

James Thomason: 1:18

And the rest of the place looks like it's been robbed. I mean, that's where we're the daughter moving stuff is taking place looks like it's been robbed.

Dean Nelson: 1:24

Lots of boxes, lots of things. But hey, you know, all of a sudden, like things are leaving our house. Because remember, she moved back with it during the pandemic. And now she's moved back down, instead of flying back and forth. So it's good as

James Thomason: 1:34

Exciting you're an empty-nester Again.

Dean Nelson: 1:38

yeah. And I've been traveling a ton man. I tell you what, and I got Spain coming up Monaco, and Miami. And then Seattle.

James Thomason: 1:50

And you were just in Hawaii again. Right? For PTC? Yeah.

Dean Nelson: 1:54

Nice. And that was awesome. And like, we were talking offline here.

Brad Kirby: 2:00

Ah, alright. Alright. Thursday, just like three days.

Dean Nelson: 2:05

Okay, don't bring a gift home. Speaking of which the Canadian gift? So you're flying, you're not driving a truck?

Brad Kirby: 2:16

I am not driving a truck. I don't have my my, my truck driving license and I have no interest in getting trapped in that traffic right now.

James Thomason: 2:25

I gotta say, I didn't have I didn't have Ottawa, Canada's the birthplace of the revolution on my bingo card that was not going to be on the list. I was thinking more like LA New York, you know, typical places. Ottawa, Not so much. But I got to admire like the the digging in of the heels on both sides here. I mean, on one hand, you have a blockade, you have 12 hours of honking a day. And then there's Trudeau who steadfastly refuses to even talk to anyone and like fled the city when people arrived, by the way, like a true act of cowardice rarely seen not since Dick Cheney went down the rabbit hole of 911 Have we seen such a brazen act of cowardice with the head of a nation fleeing the Capitol? That was that was really remarkable. I think that deserves to be immortalized they should erect a statue in Ottawa of Trudeau fleeing.

Brad Kirby: 3:16

Would have been nice if they like you know rated Parliament just like the you know, back last year when?

Dean Nelson: 3:23

No Okay, so this podcast we try to steer clear of everything just basic raised.

James Thomason: 3:33

American politics but Canadian politics are free game, you know, cuz I don't think enough people are aware of what goes on up there.

Dean Nelson: 3:39

Yeah,

Brad Kirby: 3:39

I'm not even aware.

James Thomason: 3:41

See

Dean Nelson: 3:43

You haven't left your house in four months.

Brad Kirby: 3:45

Yeah, true.

James Thomason: 3:47

But you have some truckers in the neighborhood right.

Brad Kirby: 3:50

I can. I've seen them and I've seen the the fans and they're all their their cars are decked out with all sorts of signage and honking horns everywhere. So I've been staying on lockdown. It's been it's been another rough start to 2022 three years in a row now. So

James Thomason: 4:09

I The funny thing about it. Funny, not funny, is they were threatening to call tow trucks and on the truck drivers. And then the tow truck drivers were like, Yeah, we're not gonna do that. Because that's our customers and we make a lot of money there. So we're not gonna go, we're not gonna go do that. And so it's

Dean Nelson: 4:29

how do you get tow trucks to tow 18 wheelers of that quantity? That just doesn't seem like it would logistically work?

James Thomason: 4:37

No, where would you tow them to? Also it's severe pain that the convoy was 46 miles long. Yeah. And even if you tow them away, and it's like a brand truck back there, you have to disengage the air brakes. What's the big the big? Have you seen the tow trucks that the tow Big Rigs are they they could do it and they plug in their own air compressor and they release the braking system? They can do it but it's a huge ordeal

Brad Kirby: 4:59

And you have to work reserves you have to do like hundreds of them just to eliminate the blockade anyways.

Dean Nelson: 5:05

One path, I've saw the bridges there, the three wide and you know, miles deep semis pretty crazy.

James Thomason: 5:14

Yeah, it's absolutely nutty. I'm gonna recommend rolling back restrictions. That seems like the easiest way to move the trucks to me.

Brad Kirby: 5:22

But hey, makes sense to me, too.

James Thomason: 5:25

I'm not Canadian. I have no right to say anything.

Dean Nelson: 5:28

Well, no, James, though, hold on. We, I was on a call yesterday and with a friend in Australia. And so they're opening up borders, I guess that they just did, where they were really locked down before, but they're 93% vaccinated across the entire country. So yeah, it makes sense. Probabilities

James Thomason: 5:49

Canadia... haha Canadia.Canada has an extraordinarily high vaccination rate as well. It's 85% or 86% for a single dose and right at 80. I think for the second dose the fully backs the mark, and half the country almost like 46% has boosters. So that's, that's really, really good. And in I mean, United States is only at I think 76% For the first dose or something.

Dean Nelson: 6:16

Yeah, so that's really good. Yeah, yeah. You think you think about the hardcore in China where it's like zero tolerance, or zero tolerance for anything, right? No cases, but lockdown solid, everything. But man, I those numbers, the probability of actually getting it is going down. This is the whole point when you start to get that much vaccination, right, that must concentrate on a herd herd immunity or whatever that's happening because of Omicron I believe, because there's so many, but also because of the vaccines.

Brad Kirby: 6:51

They told us that if you're healthy enough age not to get we can't I can't get tested even if I had symptoms anymore. Why is that? Because there's not enough tests around. So if I had COVID symptoms, I would not be able to get a test. So the numbers are skewed, as in like a lot of people have it and it's it's it's more of the it's one of the ICU hospitalization rates they're focused on which are actually quite high. So that's a that's kind of the the issue here is our health care system, you know, fragile? Yeah,

Dean Nelson: 7:32

but you know that you know, that you're, you're more extreme when California actually releases something before others. Are masks are supposed to come off the mandate on the 15th of February.

James Thomason: 7:43

Next week, from a recording date. Yeah, that's next week. There you go.

Brad Kirby: 7:48

And that's when we might be able to have five people in the same room together. Yeah,

Dean Nelson: 7:54

to see the light of day

James Thomason: 7:55

Half of California now is completely non-compliant. You know, if you leave if you go west, I'm sorry if you go east of Fremont California Yeah, yeah then forget about it there's no there's no mass were going on there's no no nothing going on. It's it's more or less like regular old America. In the Bay Area though, when I go when I go into the bay area it's still very much a lot of very high would say high compliance with it's so interesting to see that come off. Well, unless you were under a rock you probably saw the gigantic explosion of the volcano and Tonga super impressive big the biggest explosion we ever saw from satellite. Terrifying I happen to be a sailor and I follow a sailing family who lived on their sailboat and built a place in Tonga which was utterly destroyed by the tsunami thankfully, they weren't there at the time but actually all of their animals and everything were on their on their ranch. So we don't really know what's happened they don't know really what's happened. Except that when you look at the satellite photo there used to be houses there and now there's sort of muck there's nothing where it should be. But this is a the good news as I guess that Well, firstly, the The earthquake was so severe that it snap the only fiber optic cable to Tonga, destroying their internet service. So the nation's but darn for telecom since the eruption. But Elon Musk to the rescue once again, Elon Musk and SpaceX have dispatched a team to Fiji and they are building a substation uplink to Starlink to restore at least some limited access to the country. So that's really cool that he could do that. Like maybe these satellites are kind of a good idea.

Dean Nelson: 9:47

Yeah, especially when you have the subsea cables that cost billions of dollars and years to run. Snap. And one little great little one of my saying, One minor giant

James Thomason: 9:58

volcanic eruption yeah

Dean Nelson: 10:00

Yeah, right right. Yeah,

James Thomason: 10:02

I must say you know I own a house I do actually own a house on a volcano which is newly renovated I'm now questioning the wisdom of my this was unwise it was completely unwise. So I Clear Lake and California and part of it. Part of the volcano there is under the LEC so it'd be it could be a massive kind of steam explosion, like we saw in Tonga. And if you saw the satellite photos, the there used to be two islands connected by a landbridge, which was all pretty new, like within the last 10 years had formed in a series of eruptions, but that is gone and his two islands again in the lab big landbridge is just vaporize blown out of existence. So man, amazing, man, that's crazy. In other I guess to start our big tech news, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the fact that it seems that Jeff Bezos, his giant, giga yacht is too big to pass through the port where it is being constructed. And this means in the city of Rotterdam that they may have to dismantle a historic bridge for the super yacht to pass through. And Rotterdam are pretty annoyed by this. Of course, he's gonna pay for it. But that's kind of not the point. And so 1000s of rhododendrons are now planning to line up on either side and pelt the super yacht with rotten eggs as it passes between where the bridge used to be. 120 700 ships is likely to cost more than $500 million

Dean Nelson: 11:37

I think that's that is a big boat. However, Sailor Island has its

James Thomason: 11:46

seven meter overflow over

Brad Kirby: 11:47

Four hundred foot boat. Wow. Which got to be up there with some of the largest because I remember Paul Allen had a 300 foot yacht there was about 150 million and he crushed it in the Cayman Barrier Reef, and I was down there in 2017.

Dean Nelson: 12:08

You know, these the other one the those big yacht battles, as I assume he he's battling the other oligarchs. So there's a guy a Russian oligarch, I think it's a Roman Abramovich Yeah. His super yacht is a 455 foot long.

James Thomason: 12:26

And giraffes, those tiny giraffes they have in Russia. Have you seen? Yeah. Only only the Russian oligarchs have the limited giraffes. Yeah, that is you almost think they were compensating for something you don't want to say that? We used to would have said

Brad Kirby: 12:48

okay. I agree.

James Thomason: 12:49

Bezos looks a lot happier these days. Did you see him over New Year's in the in the Caribbean with his girlfriend? He looks so happy. Really? What is there to be unhappy about? They look, they look great. They look great together. I'm glad he's finding new romance and excitement. Amidst the world's most expensive divorce. I don't think it's phased in one little bit.

Brad Kirby: 13:09

Oh, AWS is doing Amazon Zimmerwald still does, despite, you know, some of the other tech problems in big tech.

Dean Nelson: 13:16

Yeah. Isn't that crazy? They stayed up and everything else crashed. That tells you that tells you something.

Brad Kirby: 13:23

Oh, their ad business is worth crazy amount. But

Dean Nelson: 13:27

like hell AWS is worth. Right. What are they doing? 20 20 billion a quarter or something or? No is 40 billion a year? I think we we talked about last year. Last year is probably anyways. Yeah, it's it's just incredible. The amount of money that that company is rolling in?

James Thomason: 13:45

Well, Facebook isn't having a very good actually. This is the I think the first maybe the only gloating segment of next week podcast because on our predictions episode just a few few short weeks ago. I believe my words were social media is dead because Facebook has rebranded itself and under what circumstances does one of the world's most widely recognized brands a household name, suddenly an out of the blue rebrand itself? Inexplicably, and at the same time, the CEO and founder of the other social media company Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter that is not a good sign. That means that the numbers look horrible. So bad that Jack wants to focus on his own business and so bad the Facebook rebrand and indeed it does look bad, right? So for the first time ever, Facebook acknowledged that it has lost a lot of users. The market cap dropped by 200 billion. So that's that is enough to build several new yachts several several new like 200 Yeah, like like 400 You know? 400 The odds you could build. Oh, there we go. Business. Yeah, yeah, it's my math anyway.

Dean Nelson: 15:05

Yeah. decimal places optional.

James Thomason: 15:08

Yeah. So it, it seems like I'll say it again, you know, the pandemic. Facebook and social media wasn't a fun place during the pandemic, was it not really. And it wasn't even fun before that, and it's certainly less fun now. So the only one out of the group that seems to be thriving is tic tock. And that is sort of like probably plugging our brains directly into the probably Twitch CCP propaganda stream. Twitch, twitch I'm sorry, Twitch is doing pretty well. Actually. Yep. Yeah. Nina, as Nina has needed, the Nelson has has a Twitch channel, correct.

Dean Nelson: 15:46

She does that I share the numbers with you. No,

Brad Kirby: 15:49

not recently. So almost a quarter million one isn't there?

Dean Nelson: 15:52

It blew my mind. Yeah. So she was remember, she got COVID. And then she had streamed in the in lockdown. And she had 3000 People Watson on Christmas Day, but going towards New Year's there are 250 some 1000 people watching her stream. That's over a five hour period. It was just so yeah, you're right. Brad, the platform is just boom. And they were testing these algorithms. Because the the, the base of the program managers and back, were asking different people to participate. And so they wanted a lot of, you know, music producers and performers to actually be in part of this algorithm. And so it was rotating or back and forth on to the homepage, and that and the front page. And so there's kind of five or six slots, and five of the six were music versus gaming. And I think they were just testing and it it shifted. There was just a ton that came in but you know, she was averaging between eight to 9000 people at any given moment that were just in there and chat was going nuts and it's just it was it was incredible to watch. So yeah, Twitch is booming. And in for anybody who's interested go check out Nina and Nelson on Twitch. She writes music live and performs live so yes, I'm a proud Dead Sea actually kicks ass.

James Thomason: 17:08

She does. I think I I flub I said Nina Dean Stern, Nina and Nelson Greif. Okay, meta. So meta, meta, so meta is threatening to shutter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, in the EU in the EU due to the privacy restrictions, specifically those on copying data. And I got, I actually got to take Facebook site on this might a bit because to construct a global service that runs anywhere and everywhere, it's impossible that you're not going to have to copy data around from one place to another. It's just, yeah, it's untenable to think that so this, this restriction probably really, really is a severe problem for them in terms of the infrastructure they would have to build to get around it. But I think this is mostly bluster about you, they're gonna cut off the EU. And all those

Dean Nelson: 18:17

are a million reminds me of a wait right when they went back and Google right search in Australia. Remember that whole thing? I do?

James Thomason: 18:24

I was thinking about that as well. Yeah. It's just too big. They reached an agreement, you know, agreement, mutual agreement where everyone is mutually unhappy. So the mark of a good agreement? Yeah,

Brad Kirby: 18:38

there is a there's a ruling in Belgium right around the the pop ups around GDPR. Like the consents. So it kind of hit all the big tech companies, and it was like 1.2 billion in fines ended up.

Dean Nelson: 18:54

That's part of it. Really? Yeah. Actual fines? I think Well,

Brad Kirby: 18:58

I think I think it's part of their line item.

James Thomason: 19:01

Yeah. There's like a budget line item for fines. Yeah. Why do you support to say that the meta meta meta book has denied this? Right. They said that they did not threaten to leave Europe. I think there was a big blog post on it. Today, like today,

Brad Kirby: 19:19

yeah, I think, well, you know what I'm reading like from Al Jazeera and from Bloomberg that they are threatening, but there's like a, it's kind of up in the air right now. I think it's just a bit of a bluff. But there are like five or six legit, legit news agencies reporting that they're threatening to pull out of Europe. But I did also read that they that was kind of a little bit of a overblown statement.

James Thomason: 19:51

Yeah. Why did just want to say that the meta publicly denied it. So yeah, in a statement in a blog post published,

Brad Kirby: 19:58

I think it was more of a Being unable to offer a number of products, because of the legislation, I think they were saying more like, oh, we won't be able to offer most of our services versus threatening to pull out. So I think they think there's a bit of a journalism hype around that.

Dean Nelson: 20:18

You know, I don't know about you. But I've been hearing this data sovereignty and rules and things for a decade. And I remember at eBay, we had that same kind of threat that there was going to have to be specific sharding of data, landing in country. And then what happened to it is that there was just certain parts of data that now had to be in country, but not the entire set. And the only one that had to do that it was an Uber when they carved it up and put it into China. And that became an island, because there's no way that stuff was going back and forth. So when you think about it, I was talking to a guy in India under Render that was on our show before. And he said that they have now enforced the data sovereignty in India. And he said that remember that 400 megawatts that was, you know, in the entire country? Yeah, he said they right. There's another two to three gigawatts in process right now. And he said, the majority of is because of the new data sovereignty laws. So things are happening, where it used to be Germany, I think it was what was going to do this first. But now it looks like across the EU, but mostly in India, they're really forcing it. So architecturally, James, you said, how, how do you do that without impacting the service itself? Because you won't have all the right data in the right place?

James Thomason: 21:34

Yeah, it's really tricky. And it is worth saying also that, you know, data doesn't have any sovereignty normally attached to it, right. I mean, you know, storing metadata about sovereignty is something else that you have to build and design into the system. In order to, you know, if you, for example, if you were challenged and said, you know, Can you can you prove the data has never left the borders of nation X. How would you, if you have a SQL database, how do you prove that, you know, the, the blocks, maybe blockchain maybe, maybe ledger, you know, maybe ledger, but certainly that's, that's not the way we designed data architectures today. Yeah, I'm not fast. That's not a fast thing to do. And there are there implications to the service if you didn't do that, right. So speaking of crypto, Facebook's crypto project is also officially done and rounding out our news on on Facebook.

Brad Kirby: 22:29

Man, it this makes me very happy.

James Thomason: 22:32

I know, I know, this makes you very good to me. No, this

Brad Kirby: 22:35

is a personal personal thing for me.

Dean Nelson: 22:38

Why is that? Tell me Brett? Ah,

Brad Kirby: 22:42

it just, I can't really say it on here. It's just, it's, it goes back to it goes back to what they did. And in terms of creating that consortium of about 20 organizations and launching it and kind of bringing in some academic institutions and possibly committing some intellectual property theft that Yeah. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make any accusations because

Dean Nelson: 23:19

did that go back to the lyric conversation we were having and way back in the day

Brad Kirby: 23:22

Libra. Yeah. So Libra Libra Libra DM, and they're they're apparently selling it for $200 million. Do whatever they created. Wow. So I don't know. Yeah, tough, but they still have their wallet. That's the thing. They still have the wallet service. So

Dean Nelson: 23:43

which makes a lot of sense. The wallets themselves are gonna be the thing that people latch on to right.

Brad Kirby: 23:48

Yeah, I mean, I still need but it's been killed by regulators around the world. Just because, I mean, it might just be part of their plan anyways. Because, you know, they brought in this consortium, and it wasn't really the Act. The actual Libra cryptocurrency concept was not necessarily the moneymaker for Facebook, it was the wallet and the data, not financial data, right. If you have social data and financial data, then you have pretty much a full picture of an individual. So I was happy to see that 2 billion users aren't going to be using their cryptocurrency

James Thomason: 24:38

so I'll reinforce one last Facebook news is it's been one year now my one year anniversary of leaving Facebook behind me too. So that is that has been great. It was kind of painful the first few weeks of it, especially given the restrictions on socializing with the pandemic. But I'm really a lot happier for it. So I can definitely, I could definitely say to anyone like, for at least for me, it's resulted in a lot more personal time and happiness. So I'm very happy to, I'm not going back. I'm definitely not going to strap a profile prophylaxis to my face and join meta, not happening. I still have to, to delete Twitter. But I still think that there's a big market opportunity for the oncoming backlash, the building of smaller communities that tie together, they're tightly knit. And really that's more like the internet was in its infancy when we used to have bulletin boards and forums and Usenet groups where people who wanted to talk with each other because they had shared interest or mutual connections could find each other. And those were relatively small places. And there were a lot more civils. And they certainly weren't censored. You could say whatever you wanted, to whomever you wanted, and no one was gonna step in and put an exclamation mark on your posts and say, Man, I think that's valid information. Bla bla bla bla bla. No committees. No, no. Commissar has to make sure that you were toeing the party line.

Dean Nelson: 26:19

Okay, James, have you been? Have you been called out on Twitter?

James Thomason: 26:23

Have I been called on Twitter?

Dean Nelson: 26:25

Yeah, like the reason that exclamation point, says, oh, yeah,

James Thomason: 26:29

absolutely. Yeah, I've had Twitter's really bad about so far as we can tell about sort of stealth censorship, where they will simply not give impressions to something that their algorithm doesn't agree with initially. And we've experimented a lot. By using words to replace different, you know, credit, it doesn't appear to be very sophisticated. Like it's not using like a latent semantic analysis or any kind of like, Semantic Processing to know when your subsequent words It seems to be word vectors and dictionary based. So it's not it's not all that great. I'm sure they're working on it to improve its censorship capabilities. But you could definitely see it in the in the data when, when you do get censored. So I'd say that's the number one thing is that's just self censorship, where impressions are not shown, you know, shopping indexes, that kind of thing. I've also had the exclamation point a timer to for completely innocuous reasons. Because it thought, you know, it didn't like the source of a link I was posting or something like that. But that's been a while I haven't had that problem about but a lot of stuff I read has that on it. That says about me, but

Dean Nelson: 27:42

you just you look for that.

James Thomason: 27:45

I looked at Yeah, I looked for that. You know, I looked that as a seal of credibility now. Like, if it's if it's got an exclamation point that I definitely want to read it because someone doesn't want me to read like

Dean Nelson: 27:52

the checkmark. Yeah, I just want the other one. Yeah,

James Thomason: 27:55

it's like the, like, this is The Scarlet Letter post. I'm definitely gonna read it now. Yeah, I wonder what they want to know what they don't want to know. We'll continue with our theme of trouble in crypto land. The Department of Justice seized $3.6 billion in bitcoins after busting an entrepreneur couple in the bid FinEx laundering scheme. So Brad, this was this was a huge hack that took place like back in 2016. Right, where they just they stole them change?

Brad Kirby: 28:23

Yeah, there was like a big yeah, there's a big big hack. And that's what started to remember tether funded BitFenix. And they denied being related party, and then the paradise papers were released. And and that revealed that they had the same wholly own parent, which led to all these fraud charges, and I still think will still be bigger than made off. But so I think 3.6 billion is still tiny compared to what you'll see. But it was interesting to see there was one couple that that was involved with it. And what's funny is that the way that they recovered 3.6 billion of the 4.5 was was the guy had the keys that has seed phrase on his Cloud account. So all they had to do is get access to as as Cloud Drive,

James Thomason: 29:18

puts their seed phrase in the cloud. It's

Brad Kirby: 29:21

like what you're told not to do, and they were active in their community like they were. She was writing for Forbes, and he was a, he was part of like using Aetherium advisor and like an advisor to, you know, a number of other larger projects. So there wasn't they weren't inactive. So they should have known better. But especially the

James Thomason: 29:46

question is, is the DOJ smart enough? Once they sees these coins? Does that mean that they have transferred them to a separate DOJ wallet or are they just trusting the idea that this is the only copy of the encryption keys that are out there? That there's not someone involved they couldn't just immediately get dressed for and he's going to themselves, right.

Brad Kirby: 30:04

They would have David they would have had they learned to do this the hard way from when the Dread Pirate Roberts when they when, when he was taken down part of Silk Road. Yeah. two FBI agents paid off with it. So they really, yeah, well, I mean, if you have the keys, you have the keys, so they would have answered it to a multi SIG wallet. I'm sure they have a process for this now, because it's not the first time. And I think the FBI was involved with this in court and liaising with the DOJ,

Dean Nelson: 30:37

like finding a bag full of money on a raid,

Brad Kirby: 30:39

right. Yeah. Like, I mean, I dealt with the DOJ in 2012. When the FBI that was my first encounter with Bitcoin was when when they raided investment manager in San Francisco and tried to burn the hard drives. And that's how I learned what a Bitcoin wallet was and how to try to recover it found 1000 Bitcoin in 2012. And that was kind of my first understanding of Bitcoin. So their their experience with it, and they do have experts that track this stuff. For sure.

James Thomason: 31:18

Well, on the heels of that news, a $320 million crypto hack just happens this week. Right. So we have another another fi hack. What happened this time bread?

Brad Kirby: 31:28

So this one was this was actually a cross chain hack. So what happened was there was a transfer between Ethereum and Solana Slann is another big, big blockchain and effectively so what happened was there was a security patch that was posted to GitHub, but it wasn't actually updated. So somebody had taken advantage of the vulnerability and stole $320 million. And they they offered them a $10 million bounty effectively if they were to return those 320 million. So Haha, yeah.

James Thomason: 32:14

Yeah, what a bargain.

Brad Kirby: 32:16

Yeah. So you know, that's, that's the second largest defi theft, I guess, if you want to call it in terms of decentralized finance, like earlier this earlier in 2021. Polygon had a $610 million hack. But still small compared to $3.6 billion that was seized this week. But that wasn't all this week. In terms of crypto crypto world.

James Thomason: 32:48

Yeah, there was one more thing was there was a leave of source code released between the Federal Reserve and some research that was going on at MIT. Is that correct? Yeah. So a demonstration of a high speed ledger for a centralized cryptocurrency digital currency open

Brad Kirby: 33:07

and open, it was called open sourcing CBDCs. Open cbdc is on GitHub. I took a look at the code, it's revolutionary. I say that with a lot of

James Thomason: 33:22

Sark, a small amount of sarcasm and honey, a lot of the

Brad Kirby: 33:25

very large amount of sarcasm. It's a, you know it. I just love the research paper because it just talks about how it needs to be one central authority that's running a distributed ledger. And it just just asked me at that point, I thought, you know, the Federal Reserve Banks, maybe you could have the state banks run independently or because they have state banks. Right. So yeah, those are Bank of Boston and St. Louis, like, run them as a federated, you know, network if they wanted. But I don't really see the use case for this in terms of if you're going to centralize it Why do it on a blockchain?

James Thomason: 34:09

Right. All right. I mean, we have that now, basically. That the key feature of banks really is is fraud protection, right? Like they want your houses are insured. If someone steals it, you're covered. If someone hacks in, takes your card, whatever they do to steal your money, they're you're covered. And that really is the killer feature in the digital world.

Brad Kirby: 34:35

Yeah, and you the Treasury are released a big report as well on on stable coins, and the risk of their Congress's meeting today on them again, Biden's presidential Working Group on stable coins as a systemic threat, going back to BitFenix and tether like that's all interrelated, but they only had one way And it was representative from the, from the Department of Treasury. And they're really pushing for them for like a banklink regulation of stable coins. So it's it's gonna be interesting to see where it lands because Congress, like the the House Financial Services Committee has kind of first rates to potentially draft legislation on this. They don't then you could see the SEC and CFTC coming in even the state banking regulators. So it's a bit of a mess. Because they don't want to stifle innovation. But at the same time, it's it's kind of everyone's putting their two cents in right now. And I think Congress hopefully can come up with something. They seem to be fairly well educated compared to the other regulatory bodies right now on stable coins specifically. So I'm hopeful there. And then the last piece, a Canadian guy, another scam. Another scam. So the quadriga CX was the biggest hack. And there's actually a documentary that came out last year called it's called, what's it called? I watched it last week. It's called

James Thomason: 36:27

this is this is the exchange where the guys suddenly died in India. Right. And so when he died

Brad Kirby: 36:32

in India, yeah. And it's called Dead Man's

Dean Nelson: 36:36

suddenly

James Thomason: 36:36

died, suddenly died owing $190 million in crypto, and apparently was the only guy only only person with the keys is that the case? He's a co

Brad Kirby: 36:45

founder said he cut ties with him in 2016. And he's in this documentary saying that as well. But it turns out that he was identified another by by somebody to be involved with a number of different crypto scams over time, by way of unmasking his kind of online identity. So and his name is Michael patron. They're both from Vancouver, Canada here. I should say that one one was. I mean, I don't think anybody believes that he's actually dead. But Oh, really?

James Thomason: 37:25

Yeah. Yeah, it seems quite dubious. This happens. So this developer went on to start like a pretty successful multi billion dollar. Crypto, right. Is this the network Cadabra magic internet money token? Was that the was that the original scam token from 2018.

Brad Kirby: 37:50

Um, the quadriga. Cx was an exchange, right? So they were one of this exchange options in Canada. And they were fairly legitimate, like they had the Canada Post, doing the ID checks, like the same way as like the USPS would do it. And they were kind of aboveboard, it seemed. Except that, you know, just like everything crypto, there was no internal controls, and turned out that one guy had the keys. So I mean, it just, it just goes to show you that a little bit of a little bit of regulation goes a long way around these things, right? Just to be able to keep these basic internal controls if you're if you have $300 million of someone else's assets, like should have dual signature my first business when I was 17. Like it was dual signature checks, you know, like there's no segregation of duties and just as a as a chartered accountant, I just It blows my mind that these things can go on without any oversight.

James Thomason: 38:58

Well, when you see people dumber than you getting rich. Someone was telling me the other day to day, they lost a bunch of money on the ship. He knew I'm like, of course you lost money on shipping. He knew I mean, what are you doing? What are you doing? Well, speaking of money, and money moving around, we have a lot of m&a activity going on. It's it's it's heating up. First. The bad news first. And I personally have said about this one is that NVIDIA is blockbuster arm acquisition apparently is officially dead.

Dean Nelson: 39:33

Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah, huge

James Thomason: 39:35

was huge. And it I mean, I thought I thought that it was a genius acquisition for Nvidia that would position them incredibly strongly in the market. Apparently the regulators agree that it would position them strongly in the market. And so the the deal is Bustan arms owner Softbank is the big winner I guess because they get billion and a quarter dollars. As an unwinding fee as a failure to close the transaction, so that's a pretty stiff penalty. So they get they get to pick up a billion bucks. No means that that arms back on

Dean Nelson: 40:11

the mark would have happened. What would happen if it went through?

James Thomason: 40:15

I would have they would have gotten billions and billions of dollars for selling arm. Yeah, it's

Dean Nelson: 40:21

it's like, but it's almost like a no no lose situation there. When you got a clause like that to say, oh, yeah, it's

James Thomason: 40:28

very it's very, very common ending. Yeah, very, very common.

Brad Kirby: 40:31

They're gonna they're gonna IPO they're gonna IPO next

James Thomason: 40:36

12 months. Yeah, IPO or continue to shop it. But disappointing because I was I was really looking forward to the, to the NVIDIA that could have been. Yeah, because I do think that they're a great company, a very strong company. With Yeah, a lot of real intellectual property. A lot of really smart people at Nvidia have been dominant companies, both of these companies. So yeah, I think, you know, they definitely would have been unstoppable. I guess that's the problem.

Dean Nelson: 41:06

Yeah, there was saying Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel and Amazon are all those that rely on that chip technology. So I guess that's just with with Nvidia's GPUs, and I guess it's just too big.

James Thomason: 41:20

Too good to be true. So I'm a loser on that deal. I've been a huge fan of that acquisition to tell you I've talked several times on this podcast about it. So very disappointing.

Dean Nelson: 41:35

Yeah, $40 billion, just a little vaporized,

James Thomason: 41:40

in a less in a lesser deal. But no less, no less significant is that Citrix is getting acquired, it looks like they're going private. through private equity. And I know disclaimer, I sold a previous company, or rather, I was with a company that sold a Citrix back in the day called NetScaler. lots lots of smart people at Citrix. Interesting to see them going private. I'm not a fan of these go private transactions at all, unless they are run by a super smart people at the helm. Like I mean, Michael Dell, that was a sort of genius level go private transaction was not he was keeping his name on the wall and personally invested billions of dollars to make it happen. So that that's quite a different private transaction. But I'm not assuming. He called you.

Dean Nelson: 42:29

He called me he called me when that yeah, he called me personally, when the when they were doing that deal. Was I was at bay, it was pretty incredible. Because that was a big customer. And he went back and said, I just wanted to spend a few minutes to tell you what this is all about. Like, Michael Dell called me what the heck, wow. Like, Oh, great. And he goes, Look, I just want to understand, you know, before I had, I had kind of one hand on the wheel. Now I can have both hands on the wheel. And I can steer where I want us to go. Like, that's really, really interesting.

James Thomason: 43:02

Yes, He's, um, he's a really interesting man to work for. He recently published a book, which I've not read yet, but, you know, I'll read the book, and I'll send him an email and see if you'll see we'll come on the next week podcast, he doesn't do a lot of that sort of thing. So I highly doubt it. I can't imagine. But you never you never know. I mean, he did buy my company for a lot of money. And

Dean Nelson: 43:26

give me a laptop personally. He gave me about the story.

James Thomason: 43:31

He didn't give me a hard time about carrying my Apple laptop around Dell, even like that.

Brad Kirby: 43:36

That's hear that story.

James Thomason: 43:39

Where's your XPS? It's in the box. Yeah, I just haven't transferred the data over yet. Don't worry.

Dean Nelson: 43:47

Yeah, but when I when I first met Michael Dell, I was I went over to their sales kickoff. You ever seen those things in Vegas? There were 5000 sales reps in a stadium. Right? And, and I was a customer. And so I went up and they asked me to be on stage to start talking about things. And they had this scripted, they wanted things in a certain way and all that. And I just, I couldn't help myself. So Michael's there. He met him before and then we went up on this panel. And, and they asked a question and said, You know what, before I answer that, can I just can I give a shout out to the DFS team, right or a DP, I forgot the name of the group itself. But it was the modular data center team. And I said, I just want everybody to understand one thing about what that group just did. A year ago, I said, if you can go back and make this work, I'm going to scream your names at the top of the mountains. And right now you guys kicked ass. You're an extension of the engineering team, what you actually created as the most efficient data center deployment in the world. That is awesome. Right. And so anyways, it just erupted in the room because I was genuine. It was very cool to have this team that worked so well with us. So after after that thing In Vegas, I get the box at eBay, right? And it's this brand new, like custom laptop from Michael Dell. He said, hey, thanks. And I said, thanks, I have a Mac and also have a gifting policy. So shipped it back. I have my Michael Dell story.

James Thomason: 45:19

I well, he didn't call me when the merger was when we're going private, he certainly didn't call me although, you know, you had to speak to my partner when he was buying the company, like you would do the deal without it. So went out and, and I flew him out with him. And he came personally down to see our products, you know, when we had finished doing what we had signed up to do. And that was really cool. And got us in a couple strategy meetings. But my favorite story about him is that he's still such a heart. He's always been a hardware guy. And someone I worked with quite closely a Dell told me that he was waiting. It was a Dell World or one of these, you know, big sales events, like you're saying he was waiting by Michael to go on stage. And they were wheeling out one of those, you know, mobile racks of equipment, all the blue LEDs? Yeah, Michael leans over and says, Man, I just love those blue LEDs. You know, he's such a hardware guy, he's still he still builds his own computer from time to time, which is how he started. So I would love I haven't I've got his book here. I'm going to read it, it's by the title is play nice, but when and I would say that. That is definitely the culture of Dell, the company and very, very ethical company. Have a we had a rough time here because we went through the go private transaction. And then the merger with the MCM is a very tumultuous time at Dell. But even then, I really had a good experience working there and met met so many intelligent people and I'm still connected with throughout the industry who have you know, scattered to the four winds through all of this. All this shake up, but I'll be interested to read his book and see what he has to say. And then we'll shoot him an email and see if he wants to. Come on the old Next Wave Podcast. I'm just gonna say 90%. No, but you never know. You never know if you don't ask. Right. You never know.

Dean Nelson: 47:10

He probably listened to see, I guess ask him. Come on. Come on.

James Thomason: 47:14

Yeah, I mean, he might he might even listen, we don't we don't know. We don't know.

Dean Nelson: 47:19

Jeff Bezos. Yep.

James Thomason: 47:21

I'm sure Jeff is listening. He has to be right.

Dean Nelson: 47:24

Somewhere I get the right signal on this. Yeah. Yeah,

James Thomason: 47:27

he's you know, it's I'm sure it's high on his priority list. Each episode comes out he's first download. Okay, so good luck to my friends at Citrix. My doors are always open.

Dean Nelson: 47:48

You've seen this movie before? Wait, wait, wait, you start in this movie. I've started

James Thomason: 47:52

in this movie. And it's typical. The formula for these go private transactions is they they acquire a company that has modest growth, a healthy top line is a profitable business and they come in they strip out absolutely everything that is an expense in order to fatten up the earnings per share. And spread that generally, they usually come in to make big promises like oh, well, everything's gonna be the same. We're gonna be great partners together and watch the grill, by the way, half of your fire. That's usually how it goes in the first six months. And then they say, you know, we're really sorry about firing half of you. But that's never gonna happen again. Yeah. And then about four months later, like we're only gonna fire a quarter of your this time. And we should be able to hit the metrics you want. And then every IPO the company makes make a ton of money. So yeah,

Brad Kirby: 48:37

exactly. It's the PS like it's LA, it's evergreen codes, capital Corp and best equity partners which owns which owns a typical rate. So that's exactly

James Thomason: 48:51

yeah, it's like it's like putting, putting a limit on a juicer and in squeezing it down to the pulp. So good luck, everyone. I'll remember you all in therapy.

Brad Kirby: 49:02

I think there was another DECA corn, other crypto deca, corn, another

James Thomason: 49:09

another crypto DECA corn. So, what is this thing? Alchemy is not the name of a company but alchemy.

Brad Kirby: 49:16

It is it is the name of the company. It is a a16z Panthera coin base funded company. They just they raised$200 million back in October and they just did another series C for $200 million. Again, actually went it's actually 250 in October 200. Okay, but when a 10.3. They're a web three development platform effectively. So they have just a bunch of products suites for like creating nodes for Aetherium and it's kind of the tool chain for for web three, so think API's, you know, monitoring tools, prototyping debugging code, they don't crypto.org just don't polygon, you know, they then they have a lot of defy and NFT platforms as well. So they're there. They kind of have their hands and everything.

James Thomason: 50:25

Can we get someone from alchemy on to explain what the hell this is? Because the claims, there are many audacious claims.

Brad Kirby: 50:32

Yeah, yeah, I think it's. Yeah, it seems like a pretty high valuation. But

James Thomason: 50:40

you're saying it's too big for us? It's not too big for us. Okay, well, the

Brad Kirby: 50:43

good thing is that open see, an article came out saying that, I think vice reported first, that EBA, at least 80% of the NF T's are at least fraudulent or fictitious, yay, after the 13 billion valuation, so that came out last week. So I have a feeling they're no longer a DECA corn valuation at this point, because DECA corn, not to speculate on their on their valuation. But that was a similar situation where it was the same the same cast of characters trying to exit from a centralized blockchain play

James Thomason: 51:22

for so it seems like these guys are on if I understand it correctly, these guys are on a collision course with the likes of Coinbase. Right. Coinbase aspires to be kind of the center of the blockchain universe by providing platform services and API's that help you basically write code to the to the blockchain right to, to all the varied, many different coins that are out there. It seems like that's exactly what they're gonna do with Coinbase. Cloud. Is that, is that a fair?

Brad Kirby: 51:50

I think, I think they're kind of in the compute space with it more so. Like, with respect to running change with respect to blockchain infrastructure? There? Yeah. There's a few other companies like this, that but they claim to be locked, but they typically run in the cloud. Like it's typically they have, you know, it's their partner to Google Cloud, or like GCP or AWS.

Dean Nelson: 52:18

But this seems a little different. Right? They're, they're being called to AWS of crypto. Which means

James Thomason: 52:25

I that's going to be that's no point about the Coinbase Coinbase project. That's been called

Dean Nelson: 52:31

though cloud Coinbase. Cloud. Got it. Got it. Okay. Nevermind. Sorry.

James Thomason: 52:37

You know, whenever we talk about this stuff, just because we know well know Brad is the youngest among us. I just feel like old man yells at Bitcoin. Yeah. Get off my lawn. What are your crappy coins?

Dean Nelson: 52:51

You drag that pluck chain back? Rick came for me, sonny? Yeah.

Brad Kirby: 52:57

A big thing, though, right. Like, you know that

James Thomason: 53:00

I know. But that's how I feel it's talking. I bet it's the one Yeah. You know, what it is, is I'm too much of a like whenever I've dug into these implementation of twitch or code hacker I look and see what Sir I'm like, this is nothing. There's nothing here. And I you do that 25 times and then you're then you're disappointed and then you're then you're the old man yelling a Bitcoin. You take your lecture, get back on your side. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's bad. It's bad. Yeah. Well, moving briskly along the cyber warfare. The FBI claimed it as an attained NSOs Pegasus, spyware. We talked about Pegasus previously, on this podcast. Did we not Mr. Brad?

Brad Kirby: 53:45

Several times. Yeah. Yeah. So the FBI confirmed that they were using it. And on top of that, I think there was a second Israeli spy friend that was using the same iPhone flaw that the NSO group was exploiting. On the same week, so they're called quad dream. So yeah, another fun week for Israeli spy firms. Not to, you know, pointing fingers because

James Thomason: 54:20

fingers are always spying on us. But yeah,

Brad Kirby: 54:23

yeah. I think everyone's spying.

James Thomason: 54:27

But that description fits you then maybe own it. Right. Like, that's all

Brad Kirby: 54:31

right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

James Thomason: 54:34

Biden, formed a cybersecurity review board to probe failures. I presume he's not probing failures of his own administration, perhaps previous administrations. That's not a very not a very politician thing to do. But I think he's talking specifically log for J and these other big Yeah, yeah. Massive. Are exploits that have like had pretty severe implications for everyone.

Brad Kirby: 55:05

Yeah. It was interesting that they modeled around the National Transportation Safety Board, but they hired three times as many members. They have 1515 people that they're hiring for that. And that's. So that's how serious it is really.

James Thomason: 55:23

So who's on it? It's not anybody we know.

Dean Nelson: 55:27

I don't release the names. It's residing under the Department of Homeland Security. They said 15 different members. But it's not a once you call it, it's not an independent agency, like the transportation board.

James Thomason: 55:46

So I guess the chair and vice chair Rob Silver's was the undersecretary of policy at DHS, and a lawyer, very experienced with cybersecurity issues will chair the board. And then Heather Adkins, Senior Director of Security Engineering at alphabets, Google has been tapped as the vice chair. So in case in case you were ever doubting that, Google and Amazon and these big companies are like, basically divisions of the US government. There we go.

Dean Nelson: 56:14

Well, it says here that they're bringing people together from the government and the public sector who don't want to be confirmed by the Senate. Or don't need to be confirmed Don't.

James Thomason: 56:23

Don't need to don't

Dean Nelson: 56:26

it's not an independent agency. Yes, yeah.

James Thomason: 56:31

Yeah, it sounds like they're gonna actually try to get something done. That'd be the case, right? Oh, no, they did publish the list. Other members of the 15 person board include Rob Joyce, top cybersecurity official at the national security at the NSA. John Carlin, principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Chris Inglis, National Cyber director to meet to meet you. I'm never gonna have I have to look at his name Dimitri. I'll pair of itch.

Dean Nelson: 57:02

Hey, nicely, probably

James Thomason: 57:03

screwed that up. Dimitri. I apologize. Was this in the Wall Street Journal? Yeah. As co founder of The Washington based policy accelerator and think tank, and Katie, Missouri's security researcher who pioneers bug bounty programs and instead of reporting for computer virus, so interesting. Kimball Walden, counsel, Microsoft and Wendy Whitmore, Senior Vice President of Palo Alto Networks, cyber cyber threat team. So

Dean Nelson: 57:32

sounds pretty good. Yeah. Good. You said I think it sounds like you get something

James Thomason: 57:37

through. Yeah, they're, they're, they're moving fast and getting something done here. So interesting.

Dean Nelson: 57:42

Yeah. They all have a vested interest in actually trying to stop something. Is it?

Brad Kirby: 57:47

Yeah. Hmm.

James Thomason: 57:49

Yeah. Interesting, interesting mix of, of experts. And, of course, a lot of lawyers in the mix as ever.

Dean Nelson: 57:58

Always have lawyers.

James Thomason: 58:00

Well, the next frontier next wave of cyber warfare might be in Ukraine, as it sure appears, everyone's trying to make a really good excuse to get into a war, a proxy war. It's kind of a standard formula, right? If things aren't going well, in your administration started, start a tiny little war, to shore up the economy and distract everyone's attention away from the things that you may not have been doing that you promised you were going to do. Not to be overly political. We all know that the approval rating is low. And things haven't been going well for the administration. But this does seem like page 30 of the industrial complex presidential playbook. So, wagers gentlemen, is there going to be a conflict in Ukraine, or is this all just saber rattling to? To get things done? What do you think, Dean?

Dean Nelson: 59:00

I don't know. This seems pretty hot. I think it could turn into that. I don't think it's saber rattling. What do you think, Brad?

Brad Kirby: 59:08

Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at it's gonna be, you'll see that you'll definitely see the cyber warfare aspect of it. In some way, shape or form. I mean, there's even theories that will impact us.

James Thomason: 59:20

Well, no, not like there's not the cyber yet. What do you think the odds of physical the actual like the border

Brad Kirby: 59:26

is the actual? Yeah, that could happen to

Dean Nelson: 59:31

I mean, there's a lot of maths there. Yeah, that could happen. We hope not. Hopefully not. But yeah.

James Thomason: 59:37

Yeah, it's not it's not good when nuclear powers play footsie with firearms. That's just not no good. can come of that for anyone. Yep. Thumbs up. I love this story. There was a hacker went rogue and decided to hack all of North Korea and deface government websites and all kinds of things as an act of retribution for himself and others being compromised by North Korean hackers. So this is not in well for encase I only assume that this did not go over well internally in the North Korean administration to be publicly debased in such way. But kind of a hilarious story in development, apparently not a state actor, just some guy off the internet.

Dean Nelson: 1:00:30

And he's arrested. Right?

James Thomason: 1:00:32

Does he Reisen Mm hmm.

Dean Nelson: 1:00:34

I was trying to find the story again. But I remember reading that and I thought that he just said he was really pissed off away it was so he just took the law into his own hands and went after North Korea. All right, talking about amassing something he just he was a one man army went down and took down kinjo Young.

James Thomason: 1:00:53

No problem. No problem. I don't know the rest of them, though. I thought he was. I thought we didn't even know who he was. Exactly. But apparently, we're gonna follow up on that to find out find out more about that. Last but not least, federal appeals court upholds California's net neutrality law, this is kind of a big deal, actually. Because net neutrality is one of those things that is so misunderstood, particularly by those in government. And, you know, things are so polarized people rally behind things along party lines, no matter what, and they have no understanding at all, like how things actually work. So I think this is, this is one of those things that I think is a good thing, to level the playing field and make sure that packet packets must flow. from place to place, the spice must flow. We mustn't have special swim lanes for different types of traffic and different compensation structures. And anyone who's at all familiar with the mess, the utter mess and chaos of the cellular space with roaming agreements and all the accounting and back and forth that goes on there. It's just it's quite literally a cluster. In the internet, we knew a little bit better because we had watched all that happen in the telecom space. So the bilateral peering agreements that ensure neutrality between carriers I mean, it's pretty good thing. And since a lot of the internet flows through California, I think this is going to trickle downstream. And so other places no one wants to run afoul of that we have we have too much peering here for it to not have an impact elsewhere so probably a good thing. Yep. Well, folks, that's a wrap. I think, for this particular episode, we lost turns around. He's back Yeah, can you see me here? See you back back down, but say goodbye to everyone.

Brad Kirby: 1:02:51

That's okay. My, my my voice on US politics is probably not all that relevant. Well,

James Thomason: 1:02:56

we're talking. We're talking hackers. That's why Yeah, I

Brad Kirby: 1:03:00

know. I feel like I cut out during the did

James Thomason: 1:03:03

you vanished?

Brad Kirby: 1:03:04

Seems like some people think that they won't invade and some people are confident it'll come in a day. So that's what I'm reading.

James Thomason: 1:03:12

Well, folks, if you enjoy podcasts such as this one where we try to keep you informed as to the latest news in tech, the big machinations that are driving change the trends, the people the movements, the yachts, the Giga yachts, the bridge dismantling the egging of said Giga yachts. Please do give us a like helps us grow our audience. Yeah, to keep going. We are sponsored as ever by Infrastructure Masons who is uniting builders of the digital age. Learn how you can participate by going on the website imasons.org. Be sure to check out Nina Nelson's channel on Twitch and subscribe. We're sponsored also, of course by EDJX, building a new platform to connect all the things business on the web at EDJX.io. That's edjx.io.