EU Challenges Meta Over WhatsApp AI Restrictions – Tech Field Day News Rundown: February 11, 2026

Amazon AI investments again versus stops. AI leaks. States are not okay with ai.

Zscaler dances with Square X Google API ai. Oh my oh, YAWS gets hacked in an eight minutes and we're gonna take a look closer. Look at some of the EU AI moves in this week's episode of the Tech Field Day rundown.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. It is February the 11th, and I am already tired of saying ai, but I wanted to let you all know that it is national Make a Friend Day, but I don't need to do that because you're all my friends, because you all show up every Wednesday to listen to the rundown that I record with my other good friend, Mr.

Alistair Cook. Al, it's good to see you again. It's a to be here on such a beautiful morning.

Yeah, we'll go with that. It's funny because for some people it's a cold, miserable morning that they need a latte, uh, for others that it is so hot outside that we wouldn't even think about drinking coffee. But the good news is, is that all of the stories that we have are both hot and cool for whatever you might need.

And we're gonna start off by talking about everybody's favorite subject, hyperscalers and billions of dollars that they're using to build out for generative ai. Boy, this seems like the never ending story that will probably eventually end with a small popping noise. For now, though we chose the AWS news that we've linked in the show notes article to represent all of those billions of dollars that still seem to be committed to building a home for some future AI application.

We think, we hope, are we getting jaded with these announcements, as you could tell, by my readin from the story? Or are these still vital investments in the future of AWS's clients businesses? Time will tell.

We don't, we really don't At this stage. It is an investment in the future that many of us are very skeptical about. As you can tell, Tom is one of the most skeptical about this, and we've heard these stories so much.

It really is getting kind of dull to hear of another $200 billion being spent as part of maybe 500 billion. That's half a trillion dollars of spend amongst the three big cloud vendors that just in 2026. So we've seen announcements that are about three years worth of commitment to building things.

We've seen announcements that are about huge amounts of power being contracted. Uh, this continues to be a big bet that AI is gonna be transformative and specifically generative AI using the tool sets that we currently have is gonna be transformative for how people operate their businesses over the next few years. And yeah, it does seem like maybe things are getting over hyped that maybe we're getting to the point where we covered last week that there been little bit of pushback on Oracle.

They're having trouble borrowing some of these hundreds of billions of dollars that they need for their build out. So maybe there is some challenges going on here. What we have seen is, um, some actual returns, some actual value being delivered by these AI applications.

And so quietly what's going on is businesses are actually using AI to generate value quite a lot of the time. It's not generative ai quite a lot of the time it's old fashioned machine learning or what we refer to as predictive ai, but there are absolutely some use cases where generative AI is providing some real value. Uh, we've seen some of that being covered very quietly.

It doesn't get nearly as much noise when you actually become profitable or more profitable in your business compared to these hundreds of billions of dollars. So I think, uh, I hope I will have the courage to take a break from bringing any of these massive purchase stories until somebody is spending over a trillion dollars on ai. Um, and I know Tom will keep me honest on that one, but in the meantime, I hope you to bring you some more stories of businesses that are getting value out of these, these large spends, because in the end, nobody's getting value from it.

It is gonna be quite a loud popping sound when, uh, the patient runs out. Versa has added some new capabilities to its universal SASS e platform to be, to detect and protect sensitive data being shared with AI dos. The update improves text analysis and adds OCR to inspect text.

That's actually in images like inside some of those terrible PDF documents that are just scanned images. And it uses ai, the tool uses AI to reduce alert noise and improve threat detection. This features help organizations secure their data and manage new AI related risks without adding separate security tools.

I think as we start to see AI in the core of both protection and operation, that's a good thing for us, Tom, I think it is. And the reason why it's so valuable is because you know those policies that you have in place that say, don't upload company documents to, uh, public AI repository like Claude or, or chat GPD or anything like that. Yeah.

Do you think those are being followed? Because I have proof that even the head of CISA didn't even follow those and uploaded sensitive government information to a public AI repository. So how are you gonna prevent that from happening?

'cause shadow AI is how we got into this mess in the first place when people started playing around with it. Well, that is a combination of two things. I've already talked in the past about companies that are detecting tokenization and invalidating those tokens, but that's very invasive.

If you already have a perimeter security set up like you would if you were using some kind of an SD-WAN appliance, you can do this because part of the sd-wan SS ESSE platform, SE in this particular case is the ability to do security at the edge. And if you think, oh, well, being able to detect data being uploaded is, is that new? No, we used to call that data loss prevention or DLP, and in the old days it was looking for very specific things.

It was looking for social security numbers that were being sent in emails. Uh, it was looking for credit card numbers that were being sent in the clear text of an email or in an attachment. Again, these are very important things and we definitely wanna stop them, but the game has been upped.

com or anywhere that's running some kind of a system that I may not want my data being uploaded to, you're probably thinking to yourself, well, that's probably a good idea, but I would never use one of those things. So is the person running Windows 11? Because you're probably uploading data to Microsoft's copilot and you don't even realize it.

And that's part of the problem is that a lot of times these agents are sending data where we may not expect them to be sent. And we saw that from things like, uh, claw bot, mt bot, open claw, whatever we're calling it this week, uh, where it would actually go out and proactively try to find things that it could be used to do. Uh, there was actually a, uh, great, uh, video that I saw where it was talking about how Molt bought, uh, would go out and it would actually try to, you know, say, Hey, I wanna create an API integration with this, uh, uh, insulin pump company to measure your, your system so that I can, uh, send you a text alert whenever your blood sugar gets too low.

Well, if the system did that all on its own, that means that there had to be communications and calls and things like that. What if it accidentally sent all your patient information into the cloud or pulled it down and uploaded it someplace you didn't want it to go? Yeah, that's not a HIPAA violation 'cause you're not a provider, but you may not want your medical information being uploaded in places that you don't want it to be.

And so by creating these perimeter systems to prevent that data from being uploaded both with your consent or without it, that helps organizations kind of overcome this, this desire to just feed everything to a, an AI system and, and vibe code security breaches, because that's kind of what you're doing. Um, I, I, I honestly believe that more people should be taking a very close look at what data is actually being uploaded to these places and probably screaming horror when they realize they really don't want people to find that out. So props to my friends over at Versa for taking a close look at this.

Uh, I know Kelly Hoja has been a presenter at Tech Field Day many times and he has a very, uh, unique grasp on the SD-WAN and SS e community. And I'm sure that this is something that a lot of companies have been asking for and I'm glad that they're delivering it. We're gonna take a trip over to New York State because they are the latest state to consider forcing a pause on building all of these new data centers.

I dunno if you've heard this or not, but there is a massive build out of said data centers. And the reason for AI that's putting pressure on a range of essential resources, several states are considering restricting planning permission to prevent increases in power prices, in water demands, and conservation of the land from other productive uses. Many of the loudest voices are concerned about the environmental impact of these new data centers.

Now, al the question that I have is, are we gonna see data centers being built elsewhere? I know we've seen some people that have considered building them under the ocean, and Lord knows that every super villain is obsessed with rail, building them in space. You know, we know that building them in space is just plain stupid, but building under the sea seem to work, but nobody's carrying on.

So, you know, we're, we're still gonna see these things on land. Uh, this pushback in, in New York is just the latest of a series. There's been, uh, wider other states have been doing this at state level, including Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, and Oklahoma.

Uh, and then we've also seen this in local communities as well. There've been previous stories that, that I've read of, uh, this being in, in state, uh, hand or in county hands rather than in state hands. Um, but the whole point here is that local communities don't really like the idea that there are gonna be massive data centers soaking up or, um, a lot of the resources that they would otherwise rely on.

Uh, and power and cooling are a couple of the really big ones that, uh, there's some concerns that there aren't enough environmentally sound power sources for these massive buildouts. So yeah, there's, there's some real concerns, uh, and a variety of communities, uh, spread across the entire country about these data centers being built out. The impact of these data centers on local communities, local resources, and the wider environment, the story's gonna continue.

I think we, we'll see more of these stories of people basically saying, not in my backyard, but maybe this is more than just straight up nimbyism. Maybe this is a, uh, stand against what we possibly think might be a bit of a bubble going on with these builds. And nobody really wants a half built and then abandoned data center, uh, right next to their town center.

So yeah, there, this is definitely a speed bump for a lot of the companies that are wanting to build out these data centers and they wanna build them close to where large populations are. And of course, that's where resources tend to be scarce. It's a real chicken egg kind of challenge for them.

It's just gonna increase the cost of your AI if you end up getting value for that ai. Zscaler has acquired the browser security for firm Square X to extend zero trust protections directly into standard web browsers. The deal integrate Square x browser based threat detection into Zscaler zero trust exchange, helping protect users from phishing, malicious extensions and, uh, data leakage from AI tools.

AI is everywhere. Uh, again, all of this without requiring enterprise managed browsers and secure legacy VPNs to tunnel everything through the slow core of your network. Did I say it slow?

The core of your network's not slow. Is it Tom? Well, you'd hope it wouldn't be, but that's not where you wanna be scanning for this stuff anyway.

'cause you want those packets to fly across there as fast as possible. As, and I have been talking to Vivec and the people over at Square X for quite a while. In fact, you probably saw them present last year at Security Field Day.

And the biggest question that always gets raised is, why do you want to create a secure browser? As you're watching this from Safari or Chrome or Firefox, you're probably watching it on a web kit or a chromium browser because that's literally the only two browsers that are left. Um, they're, they're all using the same rendering engines.

All of the applications that we use are browser based using Slack. Guess what? Kids?

That's rum, that's a browser based app. It's just the browser is locked down and it's on your system and it doesn't look like a browser. So why wouldn't you wanna protect that?

It goes back to the story we talked about with the, the Sassy gateway. If you know all of your traffic's going through one place, why don't you just scan at that location? And you, I I love the fact that Square X is like, we're not gonna use those stupid VPNs, by the way, if anybody needs to know, like tunnels are the duct tape of the internet.

Because if you can't make something work, force it through a tunnel and then you can do things to it. And they don't wanna do that. Instead what they do is they have an agent that lives inside of a browser and it enforces security protocols.

And when you think about a corporate laptop, that is absolutely perfect because I'm not gonna let you download other stuff, right? If you're supposed to be using Edge, you're gonna use Edge. If you're supposed to be using Chrome, you're gonna use Chrome.

And I think most people are using Chrome. I don't think anybody's using Edge. But what it allows this now to do is to integrate with the rest of the Zscaler platform, right?

Because that's ZScaler's thing. They are the SSE King, all of these security services. So it's loaded into your browser with Zscaler plugins.

And now you can do content filtering, you can do redirection, you can do, uh, posture assessment, you can do all of that stuff. This was a really good exit from the team over at Square X. Um, you know how it is, like you, you create a product and you think to yourself, man, I would love to see this being used in a platform.

And that's exactly what Zscaler said. If this is the next frontier, everybody uses a browser now, whether they realize it or not. And this is a great way to provide security for that without having to install tons and tons of plugins and agents.

You just use what Square X has already developed and delivered, and that allows you to provide a secure workspace for everybody. So I'm again, big, big, uh, shout out to the team over at Square X and I'm excited to see where this goes with, uh, Zscaler and Zscaler. We'd love to see you at Security Fuel Day, so gimme a call.

We're gonna be talking about our friends over at Google because they have released a new developer knowledge, API, which allows coding assistance to directly access the latest Google documentation. What you may not have to Google for it, the new API provides programmatic access to Google documentation rather than relying on the version that was available when the model was originally trained. Does this mean that we're going to see more APIs to provide assistance to assistance during things so that they have the most current documentation?

Yes. Yes it does. Uh, and it's awesome.

What this is the, the right application of the M CCP standard. The standard for allowing one AI tool to gather data out of some other tool, whether it's another AI or in this case, this is it of documentation. Uh, this is absolutely awesome.

Uh, as background, you're probably aware that large language models take a lot of compute power and a lot of time to build, and they only know about what was in their training data at the time that they were built. So if I'm using a large language model that was built six months ago, that's great for working with enterprise software where there probably hasn't been a new version in the last six months. Uh, so it knows maybe my, my old version of maybe on-premises, uh, installed word.

But cloud services are constantly updating. That's why software companies love delivering things as a software as a service because they can always have the latest, most secure, most up-to-date version running. And that means that there's a newer version that when your large language model was trained, so your coding assistant is not aware of the changes.

Uh, this ability to link your coding assistant to Google's canonical source of truth of what the current state of all of their services and the way you interact with them, this is awesome and we'll see more of this. We'll see this same kind of capabilities turning up for anywhere that we need to have our code integrate with something that updates reasonably frequently. Uh, myself, I do a bit of embedded development, so working with microcontrollers and having access to the, the latest information about both the libraries that work with my microcontrollers, but also having my AI coding assistant directly access the documentation for the specific microcontroller I'm using now, that would be really beneficial to me.

It's, uh, one of the reasons I'm looking at using some sort of, uh, AI coding assistant maybe for some project, but it doesn't just have to be documentation. It can also be around the capabilities of every other microservice within your organization. You could have the segregation where, uh, the, the tool that is being used to develop one microservice doesn't read the source code of all of the other microservices.

It just has access to an interface to the documentation of their interfaces. Um, if you're building, building microservices to talk to another, each microservice should treat the other one like a black box. It shouldn't know what's going on inside.

It should only know what the API is to access. So again, this kind of programmatic access for your AI assistant to know the interfaces, the capabilities that it should interact with is something we'll see more and more of. And it'll significantly help to make these AI coding assistant better, uh, whether they're good now or great.

Now, uh, we've had some interesting reports. We've had some great reports about improvements in, uh, AI coding assistance over the last two years since we've been looking at this code of space. So they're there, they're creating code and hopefully tools like these, uh, MCP service to provide access to UpToDate information are gonna improve the quality of that code over time.

Security researchers at SIG report that attackers are used AI tools to breach a company's ai, uh, AWS environment and gain admin access in under 10 minutes by exploiting exposed credentials and automating reconnaissance and privilege escalation with a large language model. The attackers rapidly moved through the cloud identities and access sensitive services. The incident highlights how AI is accelerating cloud attacks and raising the stakes for credential management and runtime security.

AI is making it much easier to attack you when you are bad at it. Hopefully you aren't exposing credentials to, oh Yeah, hopefully I'm not. Um, and hopefully no one else is either.

Here's the problem, and this is actually, I recorded this in this week's episode of, uh, security Boulevard. If you're not subscribed to, uh, please go do social security boulevard com and just look for the podcast. Um, if there's one thing that a, that humans are really, really bad at, uh, okay, there's a lot of things that humans are really, really bad at.

Um, but one of the things that they think they're actually really good at is math. Um, it turns out, no, no, you are not. Isaac Newton was good at math 'cause he invented math.

Uh, some of it, uh, you average user are really, really crappy at math. And I'll tell you why. Um, you know how, uh, we've always been telling you guys for years and years and years that you need to make your passwords longer and you need to add things like uppercase and lowercase letters.

If you actually go out and look right now, if your password is, uh, six characters long and consists of only numbers, it can be instantly cracked as in a single GPU. If you can find one or rent one from the cloud, uh, we'll instantly crack your password. And, and realistically speaking, just adding lowercase and upcase letters would would link to that to about a month for a single GPU to crack it probably thinking, okay, cool, I've got a month.

No, you don't. You know why? Because I can rent 50 GPUs do the math.

I can crack it in less than a day now because I can parallelize that workload. Now, what if I could rent more than 50? What if I could rent a hundred?

What if I could rent a thousand? You're probably thinking to yourself, well, man, renting a thousand GPUs is super expensive, isn't it? Uh, you know, who has a lot of money hacking groups and nation state backed actors and people who really, really, really wanna get in?

Now, imagine this, some company rents a crap load of GPUs from Microsoft and uses it to hack Amazon, or rents a whole bunch of GPUs from Google tus in Google's case, and uses them to hack Microsoft Azure. Why would they ever want to do that? Well, one thing, you're distributing the workload and all you're doing is you're, you're running a security scan, right?

You're, you're checking the hash value of this password, but realistically, what you're doing is you're parallelizing the workload. Um, if you're my age and AL'S age, you might remember a little project called Seti at home, or maybe even folding at home. Remember when we were leveraging every screensaver on the planet to try to find proteins and alien life?

Um, that's, that's what we're doing here, except we're doing this at a massive scale and we're making it very, very easy to do. And that's the problem. Again, humans are bad at math.

They do not understand that when you double the amount of computing power that's being dedicated to a resource, it's trivially easy to compromise something. 10 minutes. Folks, if anything, if there is even the smallest, uh, like hole in the armor, it's going to find it and it's going to exploit it instantly.

You know how we, if you've ever seen like any kind of discussion of things like Von Neumann machines or you know, the, the, the Nanobot Gray Plague kind of thing, you know that once it hits critical mass, it's the next iteration that causes disaster. So it goes from like a half life to a full life instantly. And that's our problem.

If it took 20 minutes for this to happen before it now takes 10, which means the next time it will probably only take five because these things get better. They learn, they, they in, they grow. And these people who are programming them are probably getting better at prompting them on what to look for, right?

Look for sensitive secrets that are being held in the wrong spot. Analyze GitHub repos, pull all the information, the information out that you can, that means you've just gotta get better at defending all of your stuff. And yeah, I, I know I hate to say it, but you're gonna have to involve some AI tools to fight fire with fire.

Because if the AI tools can catch the easy stuff before you let it get out, then that means that the people who are trying to get into your system are gonna have a harder time if only because they don't get to have the easy wins. So we're gonna have to do a lot better about this. And that includes the providers.

So Amazon specifically all my, all my buddies that still work at Amazon, remember how I've been telling you for years that you needed to make S3 buckets private by default? And you know how you finally did that? And I'm taking full credit for that, by the way, like that, that's on me.

I, I, you should put that my name on there. You need to start doing these things. You need to have automated checks that run against systems before they're put live and make sure that nobody has any of these easy to do things.

And luckily in these cases, because researchers publish all their information, guess what you have, you have a roadmap to figure out what they got into and how they got into it. And you can tell your customers, don't save your password. There.

People are gonna find it. It's the only way we're gonna get through this. And, and I hope that we don't end up with a great plague of bond Neumann machines because that's gonna be terrible.

You know, it's not terrible though a closer look, because we had something we wanted to look, take a look at. And I thought it was kind of interesting because it kind of speaks to the market right now. Uh, we're not gonna do this in the US though.

We're gonna go somewhere that actually has regulations, you know, the eu because they are taking action against our friends over at Meta Over concerns that they are restricting competition by blocking third party AI assistance in WhatsApp. The European Commission says that Meta's recent policy changes may potentially violate EU antitrust rules, and they're considering interim measures to restore access for rival AI developers while their investigation continues. Now, look, people in the us I know you don't know anything about this, but there is a program called WhatsApp that pretty much everybody not in the US uses to communicate with each other, and it's owned by Meta.

And one of the things that Meta wants to do is put AI in everything, because they can use that as a way to justify all this massive spend that they're doing. Uh, but one of the problems is that if meta only wants to put their AI models in WhatsApp and other companies are like, but we wanna do that too. And if meta restricts that, uh, something, something monopoly, something something antitrust, um, you know, again, a foreign concept to most people who live in the us but I wanna get the perspective of someone who doesn't live in the us.

Al do you think that the EU is onto something here by saying, no, if you wanna put AI in these tools, you have to let everybody put AI in these tools? Well, I think the, the key thing that's gone on here is that there has been a change in METAS rules. So, uh, last October 15th of October, meta announced an update to their business solution terms.

So not just the the general meta, but meta business solutions terms. And it effectively means that the only AI assistant available in, uh, WhatsApp is META'S meta ai. And that's as of the 15th of January.

So this, this has been in play for a couple of weeks now, uh, looking at the eu, the European Commission, uh, site, their objection is that, yeah, this, this is a change to what you allowed to block competitors. It's not that they've never been competitors providing AI assistance in, in WhatsApp now actively blocking those competitors. Well, that's very clearly an anti-competitive move, and I think it would be a very different status if there had never been any way to have a different AI assistant inside WhatsApp.

Uh, and yes, for those of you who live in the US or live entirely in an Apple, uh, kind of space where you can use iMessage to message people over the internet, uh, WhatsApp, WhatsApp is that equivalent for people who don't use exclusively iPhones who are using, in particular, I use WhatsApp a lot when I was traveling to the US with my, uh, to the US and to Europe with my Android device, uh, because it was the easiest way to message anybody I knew without having to work out which country I was actually making the call from. Just needed connection. Uh, WhatsApp absolutely is incredibly useful.

Uh, and I'm kind of relieved that it's owned by Meta rather than some shady organization from some shady other company, uh, country. However, this kind of behavior, yeah, it sits along with what would expect from Meta. Uh, they want us and everybody to be using their ai, they want all of our information to be feeding their AI as well.

Because remember, if you're not being, if you're not paying to use the AI while you're paying with your data rather than your wallet, um, Tom, have you used, uh, WhatsApp as you've traveled around the world? I know internally within the Tech Field Day team, we extensively use iMessage. So the utility for WhatsApp is a little lower, but I'm interested to see if you've used it a bit.

I have used it, um, on and off. Uh, my, my preference is not to use it. I prefer to use Signal for most everything because again, it's not owned by a shady one to be billionaire who created a website to rate how hot college students were that he then turned into a global ad empire that is creating filter bubbles that might be ruining society.

But who am I to judge about that? Uh, I, I agree with you. Here's the problem In a nutshell.

You can create a platform that people want to use. We've seen that happen so many times over the years. SAP, Salesforce, um, iMessage, zoom, you name it.

What you can't do is change the rules to lock everybody out because suddenly you wanna harvest all of the data that's being sent in that platform for your own needs. Now, they had a little bit of a problem at the beginning because the biggest selling point for things, not WhatsApp, namely iMessage and Signal, was that little thing called end-to-end encryption. You know, we've had this debate many, many times, end-to-end encryption means that the provider in the middle cannot see any of your messaging information.

It means that they can't do things like an analyzing it for, um, you know, add functionality or, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I like that idea. I don't like the idea of forcing me to use your AI model when I want to ask a question, because when I ask that AI model that question, that means that you get to collect the data on the exchange between those two things.

Yeah. You know, like the rest of the people that Mike, mark Zuckerberg is idolizing with the Sam Altman's of the world that, that are doing that. Oh, hey, by the way, did you see that chat GP is now sending, uh, has ads for the free tier?

Yeah. I wonder where those ads are gonna come from. They're probably gonna come from the things that you asked check GPT about, and that's the value is you remember in the old days with Facebook, the, the breakthrough in advertising was I'll just serve you ads based on things you hit the like button on, right?

Because I can request a whole bunch of information there, but even that's not enough now because people use likes like currency, like this post and I, and you'll get a free this or that you, they're driving using it to drive engagement. So people might actually like that thing. They may just be using it as a, a way to gain free things or follow a post or something like that.

But if I'm specifically asking a platform for a thing that is kind of a a, a direct intention, right? Like we've all seen it. If we start Google searching for cars of a specific kind, suddenly all of our ads turn into those cars.

But if I were to log into a, an AI platform and ask it, you know, which is better, this four cylinder engine or the six cylinder engine, then the system knows, oh, he's probably shopping for a car. Which cars have those engines? I'm gonna serve him ads from those locations.

Again, this is how they're gonna pay for it. The trick is, is that if you wanna not fall on the wrong side of regulation, you have to allow me to use whatever I want and nobody is immune from this. Apple's had this problem for a while.

We've had chat GPT integration for an entire version of iOS. We're reportedly gonna get integrations with Google Gemini very soon, but you cannot lock people out exclusively because that's what everybody wants to do. The, the problem with all of this, if I could stand even higher on my soapbox for just a minute, is not that these tech billionaire bros want to make AI invade our lives.

It's that they want their AI to invade our lives exclusively. Elon wants you to use xai and Grok Zuck wants you to use whatever meta is using Llama or some something. Altman really wants you to use open AI for everything because that is the value that is their competitive advantage that they have the data that nobody else does and they can't get it out anywhere.

But if it's very easy for me to go up to the radio button and say, I wanna switch from using chat GPT to Gemini, then they're locked out and they're trying to make their platforms sticky. And uh, I hate to say it 'cause again, this is a little bit of the political step on the soapbox. It appears that the people in the places where these things are being built don't seem to care.

And so we once again rely on the EU who actually seem to give a damn about regulations and fairness to say, Nope, that's not gonna fly. And they're gonna institute these things. And by the way, the reason why the EU doing it, why, why it feels like it means more is because they don't just find you a few million dollars as a way to say, look, we are gonna slap you on the wrists.

They're finding them a percentage of their annual revenue, they really make it hurt, which means people really don't wanna do that. And one of the things that we're starting to find out is it turns out that EU regulations actually have a lot to do with making things better. If you don't believe me, think about GDPR and look at CCPA, which was instituted in California, which is very much closely related to GDPR.

Our lives are probably better because of that. And yeah, I know clicking on the allow all cookies pop up every time you go to a website feels kind of stupid. But would you rather be clicking on it and not and knowing that there are cookies or would you rather be blissfully ignorant of what's going on?

Gimme blissful ignorance, man. Just protect me without me ever having to think about it. And that's one of the things that, uh, the EU does seem to, to like to do is to provide common sense protection for everybody as a sort of fundamental right.

I like it. Something else I really like is Tick Field day events, and I'll be back in the US for Cloud Field Day 25 on the 11th and 12th of March. Uh, have a great time there.

The delegate panel and the, uh, sponsor panels are both building up beautifully and stay in touch with us. Uh, keep an eye out on the Tick Field Day website as we update who all is gonna be joining us there. Uh, of course then Tom gets to travel.

Although you're not traveling to California in March, are you? Well, no, I am, I'm gonna San Francisco because that's where RSAC is. I I love Moscone and Union Square and apparently in the news as of late the Tenderloin, um, it's, it's okay.

Uh, but we're gonna be there for RSAC, the RSAC conference. It's not RSA conference anymore. Uh, but we have great presentations coming up from Beam Object First Commvault and probably more we're gonna be listing this people on the website as soon as we confirm their participation.

And we're also gonna be listing our delegates, our friends like Sky Fugate and Shala Denise. They're gonna be there and we love to hear what they have to say about the state of security. And I'll probably be hanging out talking to some people.

I might crash one of Alan Kimmel's parties. You never know, just look for me randomly invading a podcast somewhere. Uh, the important thing is, is that I'm going to enjoy the fine March San Francisco weather if there is such a thing.

And then I'm gonna take a couple of weeks off for break and then I'm gonna come back once again to Silicon Valley because we're gonna be talking about networking Field Day. This is gonna be big three days, April 8th, ninth, and 10th. We have some great conversations that are gonna be going on.

com. Just click on the link for Networking Field Day. And by the way, that's Networking Field Day 40 XL Baby.

We hit it. We, we are gonna have to start using Roman numerals. It's gonna be wonderful.

And then we're gonna have to start doing it in Hex because you know, we need to preserve as much space as we can. What you also need to preserve is time on your calendar every Wednesday, because that was when you get to watch the Tech Field Day rundown. We're gonna publish those episodes on YouTube.

We're gonna put them up in your favorite podcast application of choice. And we're also gonna put the show notes up so you can check out the stories that we link to and read those. The rundown is also streamed on Techstrong tv if that is your preferred place to watch it.

And don't forget that Al and I also spend a lot of time on other Techstrong and futurum group properties like Security Boulevard podcast or the Tech Field Day podcast. We're gonna be back next Wednesday to talk about all the IT news of the week that was, and we get to show off our Valentine's Day presence, uh, if they're cool until then for myself, Tom Hollingsworth and Alistair Cook, and as well as all of the people who bring you the Tech Go Day rundown. Thanks for tuning in.

We sincerely appreciate it. And we'll be back next week.