This week we have more updates on Apple privacy concerns, Microsoft Azure reveals a Top Secret Government Cloud while emerging threat vectors in the cloud prompt Biden to take action, the Indian Government is trying to establish a surveillance state, US Officials run into a few issues and Elon, who once feared Terminator-like AI, is now building Tesla robots
This week we have more updates on Apple privacy concerns, Microsoft Azure reveals a Top Secret Government Cloud while emerging threat vectors in the cloud prompt Biden to take action, the Indian Government is trying to establish a surveillance state, US Officials run into a few issues and Elon, who once feared Terminator-like AI, is now building Tesla robots
Its The Next Wave Podcast Episode 45. I'm James Thomason here with co-hosts Dean Nelson and Brad Kirby. We're here with the latest news in tech. Once again, and man there's a lot of news this week. Dean, are you still in Hawaii? It's like the third or fourth or sixth or tenth month in Hawaii?
Dean Nelson:I'm on the second workcation, remember? At least that's my excuse. It's a great place to work, and not work and surf and other stuff. So yeah, I did surf for the first time in my life earlier with this week with my daughter.
James Thomason:Really, how was that?
Dean Nelson:I didn't feel as old as I thought it was. So I got up on the second attempt and, and surfed so it was actually really fun. I can I can see the allure. That's really cool. The allure, especially when you're up on the board, and you're riding in front of the wave, and then you see how clear it is in front of you. Like a plane gliding over the surface as you're going in there. It's very visual here. But it was just neat. And then I don't know. I can see why people love to just go out there kind of hang watch the swells and then just zoom up and start surfing. So we're going to try it again.
James Thomason:That's awesome. I love surfing. I dream about surfing quite a bit still. Wow. Though I don't have the opportunity to go as often as I'd like. Stand up paddleboard these days, that's the ultimate old man sport is stand up paddleboarding. You're already standing
Brad Kirby:It's harder than it looks.
James Thomason:Yeah, surfers, for the most part, hate stand up paddleboarders because we just sort of paddle right into the wave and then you know we can we could be on another wave before they're even paddle back out again. So I learned to surf in Santa Cruz when I lived in Santa Cruz and my girlfriend was a pretty strong surfer herself grew up in Santa Monica and her whole family was like champion surfers. So she taught me well. She's not a patient teacher, but she taught me well. Yeah, man, I miss it, which I get to do more.
Brad Kirby:I almost went surfing out in Tofino a few weeks ago when I was there. It's the surfing capital of Canada to feed on I think we're gonna go back every year. So I think next year, I'll try surfing obviously also
James Thomason:known as the ice skating capital of Canada.
Brad Kirby:The ice skating?
James Thomason:Ice skating capital Canada as well. Depending on the time of year.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, probably
Dean Nelson:Sounds like cold surfing. That sounds like really cold surfing.
Brad Kirby:It would be very cold. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:Well, there was one bad mishap in my surfing thing. I lost my iMasons hat somewhere in the ocean. So I can no longer be an iMasons Ambassador. I know. Terrible, terrible. I was gonna take a picture and it just decided to go somewhere else.
James Thomason:So that's for Australian friends in the audience. Have you noticed Australians in a particular area like perfect tend to say? No as Gnar there's like an AR inflection on the other like Gnar
Dean Nelson:Gnar. I love on our
James Thomason:Yeah, I love it. I think it's adorable. My daughter does it all the time now after we watch some YouTube shows of Australians and she's constantly saying it's adorable. Well, after initially warning of the Terminator-like Apocalypse, Elon Musk is now saying he's going to build Terminator-like robots. Okay, well, he didn't say Terminator-like robots. But he did say in case you missed it. The robot "code named Optimus, will stand to five foot eight, weigh 125 pounds and have human-like hands and feet, contain a visual sensor to help it see and ultimately work to help eliminate dangerous and boring tasks. There's something so creepy about saying that it has human-like hands and feet. I don't know. Is this robot gonna touch me? I don't know. It says boring and repetitive tasks I mean...
Dean Nelson:Got it. So thing's going to smack you in the back of the head. Yeah, I don't know. So I just find the story funny. The waffling that Elon Musk has been doing, he's just gone from"AI is going to destroy the world" to now "we're going to build AI bots to do those things." So I'm just wondering where that that actually came from? You know what I mean? What caused that change just so drastically within the last year?
James Thomason:I think the need to keep Tesla stock price up is probably what caused the shift? I mean, yeah, I mean, after promising self driving vehicles after selling everyone on self-driving capabilities. That was a few years ago, right? In 2016, Musk promised full self-driving vehicles by 2018 said at that time, in two years, someone would work to connect you and bring your car to you anywhere that we're not blocked by borders. That didn't happen. So I think credibility is becoming a bit strained at this level. And I mean Tesla stock price is outrageous. Even for the modern like inventor genius that he is, I guess like it's just it's very high.
Dean Nelson:I guess. I'd say he's rather successful. You know, this is what a visionary...
James Thomason:There's no doubt about that.
Dean Nelson:I mean, this is what a visionary does, right? They go out and say these are the wild claims this is what we're gonna do. And then they make everybody think about it, and then they get everybody behind it, and then they drive to actually get it done. So he did make a statement in 2016, that by 2018, we're going to have all these self driving vehicles. But if you think about the Tesla today, there is a summon feature. So there's ability for the car to come to you There is a self driving aspect. It's not level five, nowhere near that. But there's progress towards it. So I guess this human AI, just right off of our last episode with Joshua, this AI but an actual physical manifestation of that right, the Tesla bot? When would it be there? And at what level? What do you think, Brad?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I don't know, I'm, I'm a bit surprised that he wouldn't be considering the cognitive ability giving his work on Neuralink and whatnot. And I guess maybe that's his fear is that if it's truly just a robot that has the dexterity of a human being that can do those tasks, maybe he's not as scared of, of that aspect of it, compared to the cognitive piece where they're learning and you see them being able to have conversation and then be able to code and create new employees. And so maybe this is just his approach to AI Symbiosis, I think, is what he called it recently. And that's really just about robots in the workplace, and then being able to do those tasks that within manufacturing, or whatever it is, they're replacing those those high risk jobs that people are dying from.
James Thomason:We were talking about NVIDIA last week, NVIDIA has a price to sales ratio of 25 today, I think, yeah, 25 point 16. Tesla's at 19. You know, so just on a, on a pure growth like valuation metrics perspective, it's not insane. It's insane, more like when you look at the financials, and like everything that has to come together to make the Tesla's supply chain work, and for them to actually succeed in the market, you know, Nvidia just means to build better computers and edge equipment, right to succeed. Tesla has to like, have all these stations everywhere for charging their vehicles, they have to have this supply chains are rare earth minerals, all this manufacturing, it's like, it's just a huge difference, right? And I'm wondering how they can ever get there. Under current circumstances, how can they ever have it's not through vehicle sales? Obviously, it's got to be through license, your partnership and joint ventures with others.
Dean Nelson:I think, but I think it is, it's all three, if you take the vehicle sales, and you take the subscription stuff. So like, I have to subscribe and pay for stuff on the Tesla, right, but it's so small, and then they done something with the actual electricity. Remember, I get the free charges with the Model X. Right, and it's awesome. But I don't know how they financially can sustain that unless they're doing investments with trading energy trade in the background, which they must be doing. So there's another whole nother segment in that. But the thing about the numbers of vehicles. So I think we just broke a million electric vehicles on the road in the US or something, just I think it was last year. And how many are there going to be? All the indicators are there. So think about every vehicle manufacturer said by 2030, they're going to be having all electric fleets. And then the incentive plans that are going out to say how many Evie chargers are going to go in place? Because to support that that wave? So 10% of that market? Like right now, how much is Tesla covering, as far as electric vehicles on the road must be a pretty good percentage, because they're one of the few that have something out. So can they maintain that or grow that? I think so. So as a stock, something that's going to go up? Again, no advice, but there's demands, somebody's going to make that money. Right?
James Thomason:I think Tesla's share of the automotive market is like 3%, or look it up since we're, since we're sort.
Dean Nelson:Of all autos?
James Thomason:Of all autos. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:Right. But then when you start zeroing in on electric, it's pretty significant, right?
James Thomason:That's a different question.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. And then if you think about what changes over the next eight years, is going to be majority electric, right? Net new cars coming out.
James Thomason:So somebody is going to take that market share much better numbers, 79% of electric vehicles.
Dean Nelson:So they're doing ok.
James Thomason:And 3%-ish? Well, they peaked at 3.66% of all vehicles sold in July of 2020. And they've been hovering around 1.5%. Since then, so pretty, pretty flat. Not much not much growth. I mean, it is COVID for them, so yeah, take it with a grain of salt and all bets are off during COVID. Right? Yeah. People aren't exactly rushing out to buy luxury cars. I don't think. although my friend owns a dealership, he says that people have been buying cars like crazy. So maybe because their cheaper? They're not cheaper. They're insanely expensive. My car is increased in all of our cars increase in value in the last 12 months.
Dean Nelson:Oh, yeah, yeah, I heard that. That's right. People are selling because they want those. So this reminds me of the rental stuff in Hawaii. As we were out here a month ago, right? It was difficult to get hotels, restaurants, rental cars, everything they were all booked up for like months in advance. So now I'm here a month later, and things have shifted a bit I actually was able to get on the right snorkeling tour and go surfing and other stuff where I couldn't get any of that before. And now the cars are catching up. So this is just a supply chain problem. They get Figure out how to get the right things at the right place at the right time, the right people. So Tesla's got the same thing they got to deal with, right? Where they're going to get the same resources to build. And those types of factories. I mean, the newest one's in Austin, is that right? Somewhere in Texas, Texas. So I think I think your concern before is really about the supply chain, are they gonna be able to keep up with that, if you just look at the market growth, and you look at keeping a percentage even just sustain 3% of that market growth, it's going to be the majority of cars out there. And that's a pretty big chunk of money. That's going to be going. But they're going to face competition now with all the other car manufacturers Finally, thank goodness going the electric route.
James Thomason:Yeah, I mean, there's got to be a way they license their tech to everyone else and get out of the car business. I mean, to me, the Tesla like in terms of build quality, the Tesla's an inferior vehicle, in a lot of respects to like, compared to say, a Mercedes or BMW, right like it. But it's drive train, it's Battery Tech, its software, I mean, all of all that tech and plus all the infrastructure with all the charging infrastructure we're talking about, that's a huge gap in the market. For everyone else that wants to enter in this space. I know Ford bought up a bunch of charging stations. I think one other manufacturer is also invested in charging stations, but they're not going to get there this level anytime soon. Yeah. And so it seems like the play is like, everyone get on board with the Tesla drive train and software and just Tesla's the new Microsoft of vehicles. I don't see, I don't see another way like that. The other thing they can Yeah, create a competitive advantage through competing head to head like they've been able to.
Dean Nelson:Make the make traction with you know, a new vehicle. I mean, I bought one, right. And they sold a lot of vehicles. I don't think it's as bad as... I had a Mercedes before I really liked it. This one, there's just different features. It's so quiet, it's fast. It's, I don't know, I'm enjoying it. But you're right. And when it comes down to luxury vehicles, there's going to be cooler cars coming out. For sure that you know, from the other manufacturers just imagine what Audi and Mercedes and what's the McLaren electric gonna look like and that kind of thing. So, but I think they're doing okay, on the car itself. It's a good car. I haven't any issues with it. Right? I enjoy driving it. But I guess I want to who's going to dominate now? Who's going to have the largest percentage of sales within that electric market vehicle?
James Thomason:Yeah. And does the does the presence of competition erode Tesla's margins? And if so, you know, how does the company survive? Yeah, that's Yeah, key for me. But I can't help but think that there's a pivot here to be more like a platform company and less like the dirty business of manufacturing stuff.
Dean Nelson:I agree with you on that one. Take what Uber did. Remember, the autonomous vehicle group, the Advanced Technology Group, and they're doing everything from the, you know, the people, drones, that we're going to be the flying taxis, to the the autonomous vehicles. And these are all really important things. But they ultimately shifted out saying, we'll be the platform for whoever develops that tech, they exit out of that. And they're the platform and that platform plays a big deal. Because now you can say, Well, if you can now turn up all the Tesla's on that platform, that's a software thing playing overnight. Right?
James Thomason:It's just on that platform is create ecosystems, right? They can they create competitive effects, they create componentization. There's a huge industry that they are, I mean, my view, they could disrupt by taking the platform play, take a page out of Microsoft take a page out of the Google Book and platform in print. And, yeah, I'm sure there's many barriers to entry that I don't understand about this market. Because I'm not I'm not a car, dude. But it just seems like technologically speaking. That's, that's the only way I don't see how they can continue to compete. Yeah, spending the way they're spending and running big negative numbers forever. And 19 price to sales ratio, like its features already priced in, you know, your you buy the future today, but you're not gonna make any money out of it.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, that certainly didn't work for Amazon. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. They've lost money for a very long time.
James Thomason:Yeah, well, I love the eye on the world play. And I mean, Amazon, Amazon lost money, but the they lost money very carefully, you know, there, they would bounce between profitability and nonprofit ability, like every other quarter. And that was just a, that was basically random noise. Like they're very efficient at plumbing every single dollar back end of the machine. Yeah, that's pretty true. That's the only company in history that's ever gotten away with that. And everyone else publicly traded was and in fact, they didn't get away with it. I mean, like the middle finger, the market for a decade, and said, this is the way we run the business. So don't really care what you think about the stock. And it's still work. Yeah. And eventually, he was right.
Dean Nelson:So think about it. Think about what they did, though. That was a diversification. Right? They kept they kept trying different things like cloud. They let these new businesses new things pop up. So Uber did very similar things. But I think it comes down to hardware is much different than software is much different than platforms and platforms that are powered by software that enable that hardware. The hardware players are going to get commoditized out of business eventually right consolidate it, somebody else is going to buy it but the hardware is needed but the software is the thing that really pushes it. We all know this from Under the platform play, but if you think about what we're talking about here, optimists, is this just another diversity play for diversification play for Ilan, that he wants to make sure he's playing in that personal assistant robot actual representation of space, as well as vehicles, because his tech will apply to all those.
James Thomason:Right? Well, self self driving is really interesting because, and you know, a lot of others, obviously, for Uber, but I'm disappointed in a way because I knew the entire time that they were collecting data from these vehicles, and feeding it back into their training algorithms to basically to create, when you're driving a Tesla, the Tesla's driving you, it's driving as you're driving it, correcting itself, and all that data ends up back in the mothership. So I'm disappointed that they couldn't create self driving from such a rich corpus of data, because it means it can't be done. That's what it really means, right? Like, you can't, you cannot, with current technology, build self driving cars with the stuff that we have today. And when you look at like self driving systems are not new, right? We've all been on an airport train that drove itself between terminals, on a close track under highly controlled conditions, right, or various subway systems, etc.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, and most high-end luxury cars have had LIDAR sensitivity in terms of the, if you're on cruise control, right, it will automatically stop and go, so to some extent, self driving.
James Thomason:So that's what you're going to need is like the cityscape equivalent of tracks, and the passenger vehicle, maybe on a road and a car that steering itself around, but it's going to look like this, you're going to enter self driving zones, where the infrastructure is smart. At that point, you have the discretion to say, okay, car takeover, that's how it's really gonna work, right? Like the generalized. Yep, the generalized cases to call the generalized case ends up with people crashing in the back of trucks and exploding. What I'm saying is looking at the intelligent infrastructure around it, like the track, and my analogy of the self driving train at the airport, this is never going to work, or it's not going to work with barring a revolutionary new technology, because if it could work, it would already be working. So that's, that's why it's disappointing to me as like, Wow. I mean, he couldn't, they couldn't make it work. It's not good enough. With current tech.
Dean Nelson:I think it's going to be a combo. Think about the edge stuff that we're working on. The whole point is to bring compute out to the edge to enable things like this to happen. And people always confuse that with, okay, fully level five autonomous driving is going to need edge. But the thing is just smart vehicles and those within the guardrails, the way that transportation is going to be done is going to change. But I see that smart vehicles are going to be able to say self drive on all these because they have those right away. So as you said, it's like Fast Track lanes and those kinds of things. So you're gonna have ways in which people can now have their cars to drive them in that manner. But the complication is when you start to get into the unpredictable mode, like you said, non train track type thing. That's been the big challenge. But if you look at what Uber did what Google's done, I mean, Google's had cars driving on California for eight or nine years, right? And that will Google Maps they have they look around,
James Thomason:And much to my chagrin would get run over by a self driving car every time or in Mountain View.
Dean Nelson:True. But how many times have you really been run over? It's all virtual?
James Thomason:Yeah, I've been virtually run over. But my point is very slow. You know, which is good. I mean, you want your experimental self driving cars to be slow. Yeah. So they create congestion, which is annoying. Yeah, was was right.
Dean Nelson:But there's going to be these, like you said, these tracks, there's going to be you jump on this one drives around the city, it's got a route that it takes all the time, fully autonomous. So I think that companies like take Uber, for example, you've got the autonomy, right that they were talking about. But the easiest autonomy problem is still these the people taxis or the people, drones. And I think that's going to happen before fully level five autonomous driving happens. And the reason is that that's one of the simplest autonomy problems. So I'm going to go get in the vehicle, it's fully autonomous, it goes up over and down. The only thing it has to actually worry about is other air traffic. But it's got a specific path. It's like those tracks you're talking about. But it's in the air, there's not a whole bunch of other obstacles are going to hit. And they get rid of Genesee built into those vehicles themselves. So I think they're on the right track there. And ultimately, that's going to be a game changer when it comes down to cities and any the concentration of driving the traffic. So it's going to change the way things are done. It's going to change the landscapes. So I think that autonomy is going to be multiple things.
James Thomason:I'm pretty confident I'm going to die by getting out one of those Star Trek style racing pods. It's got a quadcopter underneath it looks like a motorcycle, but it's a quadcopter that's what Yeah, tell me because as soon as I can buy one of those I will totally and it'll be just like SpongeBob you know, floor it so straight into a tree. Yeah.
Brad Kirby:That brings up concept that I find quite interesting in digital twins. If you look around the world, in Shanghai for example. There's a project where they've created the entire city, every building.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, not so cool.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. And then on top of that, there's a few other projects that are in the works that are really trying to map the entire Earth. Yeah. Now they're starting off in the Amazon Basin this year, but but they're trying to map every single landform, from mountain to building to river, quite a large undertaking in terms of the geospatial space. And I think there's just endless applications there. Yeah. So instead of going up, down, left, right, it's really, yep, everywhere.
Dean Nelson:My point is that it's going to start that way. But if you think a gaming today, they already do this, they replicate. Like,
Brad Kirby:Yhat's how it's being done. They're using Epic's Unreal Engine to do all this. That's how that's what they're doing it in the city. It's so cool. Which is interesting, right?
Dean Nelson:I was watching the making of one of these zombie movies where they had to create, you know, post apocalyptic Las Vegas. So this is James hometown. So the, and they show the way it was rendered and how they did it, they captured all these pieces. And then they were able to take that as the base, that digital twin. And then they created all the destruction and mayhem around it. The Tech is amazing.
James Thomason:I mean, there's many parts of Vegas, you could go to that are already post-apocalyptic. So I'm not sure that the CGI had to be very good. You just you're just heading to North Vegas, get on the wrong street, and you're there.
Dean Nelson:Everybody looks like a zombie zone.
James Thomason:Now that's more of a San Francisco thing. So you just collect you collect in San Francisco take into Vegas, and you're good.
Dean Nelson:How do we get here? Hold on. We were talking about something with Olympus or elliptic no major, major
James Thomason:left turn major left? Yes, Optimus Prime.
Dean Nelson:Alright, enough on Elon, let's go into the next fun thing. When we talking about Microsoft,
James Thomason:let's talk about Microsoft because Microsoft just unwrapped its top secret cloud. And that sounds cooler than it is right? It's pretty cool, I guess. So it's an air gapped Azure Government cloud instance. And it has its authorization to operate under Microsoft's classification status. And I know Microsoft has been aiming for top secret status for some time, they don't quite yet have it yet. They don't have that classification. And so that's a that was a key deliverable of their $10 billion Jedi project, which got scrapped when part of the contract got awarded to Amazon, which I think there's now litigation going on about that. But you think you think? Well, it's like, you know, this is it's like, tossing a chicken into a gator pit. That's what's going on here.
Dean Nelson:There's a visual, let's go back to what you said in there. Because maybe people in the show may not know what this is. So air gap. So when you think about it, the actual implementation of it, there's a gap in between something. So this is when they're talking about a secure network is an air gap between networks. So there's no way that that physically will be interconnected with something else. And so that air gap between things so SCIFs, I forget what that acronym means. SCIF, a secure containment infrastructure facility, I think it is, those SCIFs are all over all over data centers and things and they create physical isolation. But an air gap is different. Because you can have those cages in a data center, they're actually touching the network, even though they're physically isolated from from access, you can get to them, but this air gap for the super secret aspect has got to be completely isolated. And that's hard. Because yeah, it's the most secure data center is one that's not built, the most secure network is one that's not connected to anything. But it's not very practical.
Brad Kirby:Unless you're the Iranian government and your nuclear facilities get air gapped by Stuxnet. Which actually did happen, which it's one of the more unbelievable hacks really out there. In terms of cyber warfare.
James Thomason:I should also explain that we talked about this in the show previously, but Jedi when I said Jedi, that's the joint enterprise defense infrastructure contract, which was 10 billion bucks. And Microsoft had won it. And on a previous show, we noted that they they lost some of it, all of it, half of it. And that was awarded to to Amazon. The whole thing was awarded to Amazon, right?
Dean Nelson:Nope, nope, they basically killed the entire Jedi project. Because remember, remember back when they're saying that, oh, they want to have a single source, single vendor. That's what the government was going for a single award. Right, then the person that actually put that together said, you know, now over the last three to four years that we've been doing this probably makes sense for us to have multiple suppliers. So they're not doing a single award anymore. Yeah. That's what that's what it's a reset. Yeah. But Jetta It was a cool name. definitely got some publicity.$10 billion. Usually does that.
Brad Kirby:Did the exchange hack have anything to do with that I mean, with with solar winds, and just in terms of having one centralized vendor, I seem to recall that the timing was around the same time
James Thomason:I can't see how it would I mean, we know about these things, right? Like we used to joke on Usenet that one day, there would be email viruses. Haha, I sent you an email virus and then Microsoft implemented it. That was a feature. This is a feature. We know all of that, right. So they have to be kind of open eyes about that. I mean, a little hack on Microsoft couldn't possibly scare them after the last 20 years.
Brad Kirby:Well, it wasn't a little hack. It was..
Dean Nelson:That was kind of a big one,
Brad Kirby:Almost every major in fortune 500, their Microsoft Exchange servers. So all of their emails were compromised for four months, including all the big four accounting firms DoD the I think it was the largest hack on Microsoft, in their history. I mean, and it Microsoft takes I know, it's, we can rag on Microsoft that we want. But I remember Bill Gates wrote a memo back in, I think, 2002, where he really said that we have to be investing into the security like it's going to be a massive issue. So obviously, they've taken it seriously, but as a borderline monopoly, in terms of their OS their targets, right. So
James Thomason:You think? I just think,
Dean Nelson:Is that our new theme for the show? Yeah. Okay.
Brad Kirby:Thanks, Captain Obvious.
James Thomason:There you go. Well, speaking of cloud, there are emerging new threat vectors due to increased cloud adoption. And among them, this was a piece that came out of CIO magazine by ETCIO. Is that right?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, that's right.
James Thomason:I pointed this out for I don't know, since cloud came around, like I thought, I thought security was like the Grim Reaper of cloud, right, you get one nasty compromised. That's because running data centers and centralized infrastructure, as I have done, we did get hacked, and bad things ensued, a couple of specific instances come to mind, like, someone got into our core routers and blew away all the configuration and took down entire data centers. And those were bad days, right. So I've always thought that like getting into getting past the layers and layers of security in some way in any of these clouds would be the mother of all breaches, and would be so devastating. That would scare people back to running their own stuff. But it hasn't happened. There hasn't been a breach that's been th t extreme yet that we know of that we know of. Well, is it c ming? Dean, what do you think?
Dean Nelson:Yes. There's just too many holes. And it's gonna, it'll be the forcing function for additional things to to be changed. I believe we remember our, our other guests. for him. His name is CIO. He was talking about security and the vulnerabilities just within
Brad Kirby:Ryan Noon?
Dean Nelson:Ryan Noon, yeah. And if you think of him, and then also at Trilliot, we talked about this on that episode too.
Brad Kirby:With Booth.
Dean Nelson:Where there's just too many attack vectors, an attack vector is a way of gaining unauthorized access via network in order to launch some type of cyber attack. And when you think about network access, well, how many points are there in data centers, there's many, many things. But physically, you can't get to them and as easier as easily as you can edge data centers. And so all of a sudden, you've got all these places where somebody could get in. So think of the solar winds hack, what did they do they checked in source code, right. And that just got proliferated across so many different places, and it opened the holes to all this. So ways in which that can happen, for sure. So we also talked about this with zero trust networks. Because no matter what you have to assume it's going to happen, there's going to be a breach. So you need to limit the blast radius. So still comes down to that, you know, zero trust network means that I've got a all the way down as low as I possibly can, that they can't get any further than that. But if we don't have that kind of architecture or methodology that we're applying towards these edg deployments, it's just massiv holes. Just more and more way for people to get in. That's m opinion. And I'm sticking to it Mr. Thomason said help
James Thomason:Brad named 10 ways you can screw up cloud infrastructure, go!
Dean Nelson:Uh oh, test! Let's go Brad.
Brad Kirby:API vulnerabilities(1) and key access (2); you have storage bucket mis-configurations (3) storage bucket credentials (4),
Dean Nelson:Alright, that's two issues,
Brad Kirby:like in terms of not having sufficient multifactor or authentication (5&6), that's two within that; credential leakage in terms of permissions on the actual reaffirmation of rights that you're doing within an organization (7). All right, you could have a DDoS attack (8).
Dean Nelson:DDOs, alright, he got four
Brad Kirby:You can also have personally protected information that is the leaked and stolen(9), that's actually a big one, f you look at a lot of the data breaches, hey've come from s3 buckets really right? And that's just from someone not getting. That might be a roughly five, you can get an malware injection(10). I know too well, because I've had that.
Dean Nelson:Alright Brad you're impressing me, that's six.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, but you gotta have side channel attacks through VMs, which is something we were concerned about at Brookfield because payments were like, our payment systems were run through VMs that nobody actually had access to. (11) But if you're able to gain access to that through administrative rights, then you could actually use the cloud to steal money. And that's how one of the largest hacks in the world which was Bank of Bangladesh trying to steal billion dollars from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York happened because they had middleware in the cloud that was connected to the swift service Bureau and connected to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And they walked away with$90 million cash. I mean, on top of that, you could, you could say that just even things like any other kind of standard attack on the internet, ports and things. (11) I think another feature as well, is that I've been experiencing as the zero day bugs (12) in terms of updates to the cloud and being able to inject it through and that's across everything that's not cloud specific. Okay.
James Thomason:Well, that's eight on a challenge of 10. So that's good. That sounds pretty good.
Brad Kirby:I'll stop there.
James Thomason:That's pretty good. I mean, it's passing. That's a passing result.
Brad Kirby:You know, I actually read a book, I actually read a book this weekend called This is How the World Ends.
Dean Nelson:He can read to, that's amazing.
Brad Kirby:Well I listened to it. "This is how the world ends." And it's by a New York Times columnist that wrote on InfoSec for about a decade, until she was scared for life because people were threatening to kill her. And it goes through all of these. And these days, when I get hacked, that they are zero day bugs on Microsoft.
Dean Nelson:Like, I can go back and trace them. And it's concerning. Not only is Brad Kirby, you know, crypto Brad. He's actually security Brad now. So, James.
Brad Kirby:And you guys know, all too well, right, like hackers, historically, in terms of ethical hacking, and governments and intelligence agencies, they're not ready to give away their vulnerabilities immediately. They'll also pay for them now, nowadays, right? They'll pay people to give them.
Dean Nelson:Oh bug bounties. Oh, yeah.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:About millions of dollars a year because it saves them billions of dollars a year. They didn't use.
James Thomason:I had a bug bounty backfire. Recently I tried to offer I tried to offer a bounty to someone on an open source project. He's like, I would but I can't because I'm on a student visa and I can't take any money from anyone unless it's through a paid internship. So I'm like, well, when when you when you can take a paid internship, let's talk There you go. But yeah, no, no bounties. Well, Biden has summoned the masters of the universe to solve America's cybersecurity problems headed to Washington are Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Andy Jassey all planning to attend a White House event scheduled for Wow, tomorrow? Thursday afternoon. The barons themselves shall grace the king with their presence.
Dean Nelson:This is
James Thomason:so would love to be a fly on the wall and this meeting?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, very different than previous meetings of tech. Masters of the Universe. I would say I won't go any further than that. But this is exactly the way that things should work, where the US government partners up with tech companies to understand. And James, I know, I know your concerns about that one, about how things are working in cohorts for bad things. But I believe this is this is good, because in the end of it, cyber security's such a massive threat to everything because of what we seen just in the last year, all of these cyber attacks hitting the hospitals, banks, gas lines, everything else. So I think it's really important when you take the looks like the three most valuable companies in the world, as far as trillions of dollars, right?
James Thomason:I think he's got the three right people. I mean, there's no doubt about that. And I think that he should consult with these people about a lot of things. My concerns are more out of like, each of these companies becoming de facto branches of the US government, which some would argue is already the case. So you know, this more maybe more like a Cabinet meeting than then a consultation. Right. So I don't know, none of these guys. I mean, obviously, no comment, no comment, three no comments out of out of them for attending this meeting. So no, I would love to be a fly on the wall, though. And just just be there just Biden should invite me to this meeting. Yeah. Honestly, it's just all I mean, the only guide that will tell them the truth, straight, unvarnished truth.
Dean Nelson:I believe you would, Brad, I'm very, very confident that he would tell the unvarnished truth. As is James Thomason.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. I would support it.
James Thomason:That would be a hell of a meeting I'd pay to attend that meeting. Quite honestly, some people want to pay to go to space, I'll pay to go to that meeting.
Dean Nelson:This reminds me of Hamilton.
James Thomason:But I'd have to be able to talk and I can't just sit there, I have to be able to talk.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, though. That's not going to the meeting that's participating in the meeting James. He just paid more money.
James Thomason:What they could do, they could regulate me, okay, they'll just put me in the corner and give me a buzzer that I can hit when one of the three of them says bullshit. So if any of them says something that's like patently technologically false, or a gross exaggeration of the truth, I get to hit the buzzer. And it has to be one of those like DEFCON buzzers, you know, that's like the new collection from the silo kind of buzzers. Yeah, that disrupts The entire meeting. I can't say anything but I could hit the buzzer.
Brad Kirby:Well, Jamie Dimon was also extended in my I'm not sure if he's necessarily a an authority on infosec or cybersecurity, obviously, he's the CEO of one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.
Dean Nelson:But I have to say, though, Chase is pretty, very forward thinking, you know, in other areas
Brad Kirby:They are.
Dean Nelson:In fact, even Josh was talking about, they deploy Amelia pretty heavily across Chase. Right. Yeah. And I think about their I mean, they just put $4 billion into data centers, they're building data centers. So you think enterprises are one of the only people that are actually building their own. And they put significant money into into cyber cybersecurity as well. So I think there's something there. Because if you can truly lock down the banks, because you have to, reputation is on the line. Right? There's got to be some pretty incredible tech inside of that. Because a company depends on it. That's my perspective.
James Thomason:But can we talk about the giant squid here and the fact that Zuckerberg isn't invited to hell?
Brad Kirby:I love it.
James Thomason:What the hell?
Dean Nelson:Huh? Yeah, Apple's? Not there are no apples there.
James Thomason:You forgot one.
Brad Kirby:I guess Jack Dorsey is not invited either. Right? Yeah.
James Thomason:Well, jack Dorsey in the school of fish that is Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, as a pretty small, pretty small fry.
Dean Nelson:I think about it. Where's Google, that's interesting.
James Thomason:Google's there, Satya. Microsoft, I'm sorry, excuse me.
Dean Nelson:Freudian slip there.
James Thomason:Satya, where? Where the hell is Google? Where the hell is Google this meeting? Yeah. They're actually gonna be there. Are they just not not in this headline or that?
Brad Kirby:They should be there.
James Thomason:So no, Facebook, and no, Google, and Microsoft and well, okay. Clearly, this is a government contractors meeting than anything else.
Brad Kirby:I would say, though, that the reason like Facebook doesn't necessarily pose as much of a national security threat
James Thomason:What?
Brad Kirby:If you put social engineering aside, right? Think about Google, like a newer operating systems that an apple like your iOS, Microsoft, like, much larger attack factor, then then Facebook says the company is run on it and challenge me if you like, James, if you disagree, I'm I'm open to, to hear it.
James Thomason:I think Facebook is the single greatest threat to Western civilization at the moment, other than nuclear annihilation.
Brad Kirby:Sure, I agree with you on that. I just meant in terms of straight up infosec. Right, in terms of protecting software and hardware like Facebook's an app, right? It's not an operating system?
James Thomason:Well, Facebook, Well, Facebook, increasingly your iPhone is a simply a delivery system for Facebook apps. I mean, you've got WhatsApp, you've got Facebook, you've got Messenger, you've got Instagram. I mean, mostly what you're putting on an iPhone these days is Facebook software. So Who's commoditizing? Who? And who's more important than whom, right? Yeah, granted, not in any way diminish the importance of Apple's platform. But yeah, I think Facebook is a huge vector for a lot of things that we don't want, ranging from proliferation of extremism, extremist thought on both sides, all sides of the political spectrum, to actual coordinated attacks on people and state infrastructure and so forth. So human trafficking, there's all kinds of things that the friendly, closer
Brad Kirby:Those aren't all cyber security necessarily, right. That's all I'm saying. I agree with you in terms of the level of risk to society, in many other ways.
James Thomason:And even if I see that, how do you not invite Google though?
Brad Kirby:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They need to be there.
James Thomason:That is that?
Dean Nelson:I mean, yeah, they're one of the largest, if not the largest, right?
James Thomason:Yeah. But again, maybe this is more like a contractor thing. Like, you get a win a government contract to get in this meeting.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, maybe. Or maybe the invite was extended, but not accepted. That can happen to that could happen to you. Right? Like it happens. You never know.
James Thomason:You never know. Never know. They don't tell me about these things.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, they didn't invite you again, because you hit the buzzer. Yeah. You went to DEFCON buzzer that's why. Now if it was electric shock that you could say that. Wait, that's not true. That's not true, then that would be a different thing. They probably invite you then. Okay, maybe not.
James Thomason:That's a famous psychological experiment. You know that right? Where they they did at Stanford, where they, I can't remember if Stanford was the one where they put people in fake prison, but really in prison. Or if it was also the home of the electric shock treatment. I can't remember. I think it's fake prison. That's a famous experiment. Yeah,
Dean Nelson:That was a scary one. Stanford was fake prison. Its people changed.
James Thomason:Who did the shocks. Anyway, people were told to administer electrical shocks to a person in another room through a glass window. And the settings on the dial were like, mild pain, medium pain, severe pain, extreme pain and near death and death. And the instructor kept telling the turn it up and up and up all the way to death and extreme that people would comply. Even when they believed reasonably that they were actually administering electric shocks to the person the other room. They would take instruction to Africa, and the guy would feign death in the other room. And yeah, it was experiment to see if people would, yeah, how compliant people would be in the presence of authority, famous experiment.
Dean Nelson:Easy way to pull out which ones were the psychopaths? Oh, it killed him. Sorry, it was an experiment.
James Thomason:This is more like just obeying authority. Like, will you keep turning up the knob even though everything tells you and the guys they have an actor in the room, right? So when you when you turn it up to severe pain and hit the button, the guy like twitches and screams bloody murder, and it was a great experiment. What do you do, Dean?
Dean Nelson:I would be shocked. I wouldn't shock others. I just feel guilty to guilty. I just can't do that. So, but maybe a fun fun shot to begin with. But crank it up? Nope. I'd say hey, person in the room with me. You go over there. I'll shock you. You tell me how much more I should tell this incentive.
James Thomason:Well, it's actually based on our last podcast where we're talking about Apple's speaking of Apple and their violations into privacy. And their national coalition of 90 plus civil society organizations wrote an open letter to Apple calling for the company to abandon its recently announced plans to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, and other Apple products. The letter said something like "the undersigned organizations committed civil rights, human rights and digital rights around the world are urging Apple to abandon plans and announced on five August 2021, to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, iPod products. And they went on to say that while it's great to protect children and reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, as it's known in the industry, we are concerned they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten privacy and security of people around the world and have disastrous consequences for many children. I wholeheartedly agree with that. Again, they didn't ask me to sign that letter, but I would have. So consider this a rousing endorsement, you can check that letter out by going to the Center for Democracy and Technology that's cdt.org. There's a link right up front to read the letter, if you like and also who signed it and recommend you do that. Meanwhile, big tech is bending to the Indian government's will or so it would seem new rules give the Indian government were empowered managing the perception. their perception with tech companies and video content providers were forced to comply or else gets delisted. The platform's turned off shut off filtered. In India, Twitter had already suspended hundreds of accounts of journalists, media outlets, politicians, opposition parties, among others. During the country's farmers protest, by the way, I don't know if you saw the farmers protests that were going on in Delhi. That was crazy. They were driving tractors all over everything. There were 1000s of 1000s of people in the streets for a long time. Yeah, we were kind of just like busy with COVID here, but that that was happening. On August 6, Twitter locked out Rahul Gandhi, leader of India's main opposition party, after he tweeted a photo of the parents of a nine year old girl who was allegedly raped and murdered in Delhi. When God he refused to delete that image Twitter, like this account is eventually restored after a lengthy grievance process. But this is kind of like par for the course of Twitter now, right? I mean, they just they filter whatever they want, they censor whatever they want. Sometimes they bring it back something most of the time they don't. That's only for people who have the sort of following to get themselves reinstated.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, so this is tough. Again, we talk a lot about this on the show quite a bit. But the moral moral stance on all this. So if you think about Twitter, and Facebook and the banning of our former president write for certain specific actions, and then you think about what's happening inside of India. It's the reverse, right? where there have been a ban, people who are negative, or at least that's what it seems like negative to the government. And then how do you define what is wrong to actually post? And who really is? There's a quote in this article, I thought it was really interesting, you know, thinking did this to POTUS they can do this to anyone and big tech firms are now the new oligarchs, yet they must have known these firms would cede to the to new oligarchs themselves. Interesting. This is so difficult, the fact that the world has access, and anyone can go back and be viral, right and reach so many people. How do you fix that? So and then governments get involved and platforms that enable it all over and then platforms are having to make calls? what is right or wrong? And yeah, it's, it's not cut and dry. It's not It's not 100%. Clear.
James Thomason:Meanwhile, platforms continue to have their effects rate US officials rushed to delete online pics of Afghan allies. I thought this was a really interesting story. Everyone was in a panic to scrub websites, social media accounts, any kind of content that might be viewed as evidence of collaboration by the Taliban. We've all seen the the pictures the video of the pullout in Afghanistan. Terrible, though it did give light to I think the single greatest Biden joke so far this administration in which someone posted a picture of Joe and Hunter Biden with a caption that said, This isn't the first time I've had a hard time pulling out.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. We love to say that, man, he had to go there, didn't he? He had to go there.
James Thomason:Worth its weight in gold, worth it's weight in gold.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, this is pretty serious. I mean, all those people that are fleeing and their faces are out there. software can just go off track and find out who's who. So it just makes a target list. The problem is once the cats out of the bag, it's hard to put them back in. The images are out there. I mean, how do you delete something off the internet? It's propagated everywhere.
James Thomason:Yeah, I haven't. I haven't found that button yet. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. So it's a scary thing.
James Thomason:Yeah. It's all it's all my daughter that I'm like, whatever you put out there, whatever photo you take on your phone, assume that it's going to be published on a billboard. So yeah, yep. And if you don't want to publish on the Billboard, don't take it don't even take that if you don't say anything that you wouldn't put on a billboard. That's the world we live in. Now.
Dean Nelson:Ya think?
Brad Kirby:I just, I just want to bring up one other thing that came up today with respect to going back to Apple and the security there was actually a pretty significant development with respect to the NSO Group and Pegasys and this is net new on iOS 14 and the Bahraini Government actually utilize it to hack 4 activists. And what's new about is it's a brand new zero click attack that wasn't discovered in the previous research. And it was it was brought up by Citizen Lab. So that was actually released today. It's been dubbed the last one, I think was called Glassdoor. So they've effectively Beat Glassdoor, which was the iOS 14 strengthening. But this latest exploits called Forced Entry. So Apple's working frantically to try to catch up by messaging for that with respect to Pegasys' is reach. So that's one other reason for James to get rid of his iPhone.
Dean Nelson:They said it's going to take a month or so to get the iOS 15 patches out or fixes for this too. Scary. That was 50,000 phone numbers. Right. The Pegasys project Yeah, yeah, list. Yeah.
James Thomason:Well, conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact right, the ability to turn your online activities into valuable information that can be harvested by your political enemies, and in this case, well armed and deadly. But speaking of weird tech, we haven't had a good weird news story in a while, but this one's about Havana Syndrome. And if you don't know what that is first identified in Cuba in 2016 people at the embassy in Cuba, the US Embassy came down with a strange syndrome. They had headaches, they had problems with their distant vision and blurry vision. In other words, causing them to squint. They had recurrent episodes of vertigo where the world was spinning on them. Some of them had nosebleeds and ultimately resulted in these cases being documented. And very recently, last week, in fact, in Germany, two more American officials suffered the same type of symptoms. And then today, Kamala Harris's trip to Vietnam was delayed after two US staffers reported Havana syndrome symptoms. So there's a lot of debate about this, the idea that it's some kind of either directed energy weapon or an audio weapon of some kind. What do you think about this, Dean? What is this thing?
Dean Nelson:I actually think there's got to be something to it has been previous attacks on things, Texas over the decades, this one makes sense, because you can't hear it, smell it, see it so that it goes to how do you detect it? There's got to be a way in which you can go back and see if this is happening. So I would assume that each of the at least the embassies or something have got to have some tech that could counter this or at least identify it, but apparently not if it's happening to these different delegates, right.
Brad Kirby:There's some research where they're saying that this could be caused by pulse radio frequencies, right. So in terms of feeding the conspiracy theorists, right, like it, this is it.
Dean Nelson:Pulse radio frequencies. So like a pulse gun? Yeah.
Brad Kirby:Yeah. Not, not like not like just the radio frequencies that we use in everyday I know.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. It's kind of like if you get water going fast enough. It can cut through steel. Right? Yeah.
Brad Kirby:And it can give off like microwave radiation and things like that. Is that your understanding? James?
James Thomason:Yeah. I mean, there's there's a lot of rumors and speculations. Some scientists say that this is scientifically implausible. And I remember that you're going back to the original episode in 2016. Again, you know, everything is so politicized no matter what, these days, it's hard to know, without being an expert yourself in the field. And that's, I mean, maybe one thing we should do is try to dig up someone who knows something about this would make an interesting guest on the podcast. But yeah, I remember like in '61 1961 Frey, the scientists Alan Frey reported pulsed microwave radiation could result in people hearing, clicking and other sounds that didn't exist in their head without any actual sound being produced. So that's, I think, one of the best cases of like, okay, microwave radiation can do something to cause a sensory effect in the human brain. However, there's been a lot of ongoing research to try to reproduce that and none of it has met with any success. So over 50 years ago are still not reproducing this effect, according to the way that it was done, that doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just means that something's different probably in the experimental setup, or either that or it was just completely spurious, which is definitely possible. But to get the kind of power, like the field density, radio frequency is measured and field density. And that's proportional to the amount of energy that's pushed down the wire as well as the effective radiated power from the antenna. And there's some lovely equations you can look at that will show you those relationships and everything from the resistance on the wire to the power demand that so on the implausible side of this, you need a lot of microwave energy to feel it in any way, physically or otherwise. I mean, there's anecdotally some folks have told me in the past that they were hit by military radars and stuff, and they definitely felt it. And you know, these are hazardous devices where humans aren't supposed to be standing in front of them. And but they take a lot of power, like 2000 plus watts, specialized antenna array, I mean, but who knows, like if this is more of a, there's other research on like, auditory phenomenon, like if you, if you're perceiving sounds with certain overlapping frequencies, they can result in feeling nauseous, or, you know, to me, these are all spurious claims until there's some actual science reproducing these effects. Right. But these are the claims anyway, I don't know that this is a weapon. But on the other hand, the coincidence that it keeps happening in US embassies, and to us personnel, that's just those kind of points. This is don't happen. That's not a thing. So this is definitely something. Okay.
Dean Nelson:So let me get some clarity on that There's a long history there. Yeah, there is but this specific thing in Hanoi, Hanoi, if I could say it, right, the two diplomats were actually not at the embassy. They're having at their house. And so they're getting clicking sounds are homes. Oh, yeah. And then from there, they started getting the nausea and other things that were happening, but was over time. So if somebody was doing this, they were directing something for a while. at their house, right. But if they're new, they're a diplomat. So they're doing that that's plausible, but it still comes down to what is that weapon? What are they using? And the second point, we've got to get the Skinwalker guy on here, because this exact phenomenon? Exactly. This is happening at Skinwalker Ranch.
James Thomason:okay, well, we're gonna have to go Shanghai him, or something.
Dean Nelson:I'm gonna go to Utah, just actually get on his black helicopter and fly him over to a microphone. But in Skinwalker Ranch, if you watch the episodes, you see, they are doing science. They're bringing things out and actually doing these measures. And they said, they get to certain parts of the land, and they say, it's like being in front of an open microwave. That amount of energy is coming out. And it affects people, right. They're getting nausea, they get nothing. So there's there's something to this, but I mean, Skinwalker Ranch, it seems to be a natural phenomenon, hopefully, or something there. But if this is a weaponized type thing, it seems plausible.
James Thomason:If we get the Skinwalker guy on, I mean, it can take this podcast on a whole different direction. Who knows where we go from there?
Dean Nelson:Right, exactly where you want it to go. That's where you...
James Thomason:exactly where I want to go. Exactly. Yeah,
Dean Nelson:but I would enjoy that. I think it would be good, right, Brad? Yeah, I
Brad Kirby:Think I'm just ready to buy a Faraday cage at some point in the near future and just...
James Thomason:An underwater living dome.
Brad Kirby:That works too.
Dean Nelson:Must have it. Yeah. Maybe in Hawaii. Aloha. You think?
James Thomason:Man, we're gonna have to drop that we have to drop that as a catchphrase. I started watching the 1980s series Hunter. Oh, yeah. Again on Netflix. Yeah, well, actually, it's on Tubi It's not on Netflix. It's on To be fair, but to be is it's like the most stealthy, video streaming company you've never heard of, but they have all the great shows that you love to be in the 80s to be TUBI. Check it out. Somehow they licensed all this content anyway. They have Hunter. And I'd never realized that hunter had a catchphrase until Yeah, very recently, which is "works for me" and he's always thinking "works for me" in all the episodes and is driving me nuts. So we absolutely can not have a catchphrase Dean Nelson,
Dean Nelson:For making it. No, BAM. Wait.
James Thomason:BAM works for me. Well, folks, if you enjoy shows, such as this one where we keep you abreast of the latest in tech, I always found that interesting way of saying that. keep you abreast of the latest news and information in tech. Please do click like it does help us grow our audience. And of course, we're sponsored by Infrastructure Masons whose uniting builders of the digital age, learn how you can participate by going on the web to imasons.org. That's imasons.org. And by EDJX, we're making a new edge cloud for planet scale so you can create smarter, faster apps, websites and data pipelines on our secure global edge platform. Visit us on the web at edjx.io that's edjx.io. [Ya Think]? [Ya Think?]
Brad Kirby:Ya think?{Ya Think}