Qlik Answers, SpaceX vs Amazon, & Practical Quantum | Tech Field Day News Rundown: March 11, 2026

Reinventing the Iron Curtain. Click here for answers. Billionaire fight in space.

Quantum might be even easier than we thought. Meta's AI chief gets sautéed by Claude Bot. Motorola goes graphene, and we're gonna take a look at some nation-state cybersecurity hijinks in this episode of the Tech Field Day Rundown.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Tech Field Day Rundown for March the 11th. I am, of course, Tom Hollingsworth, joining you in what appears to be mid-spring or possibly even early summer. I don't care what the groundhog has to say.

It's hot outside. And joining me is, one of my favorite guest co-hosts this week since Al is out at Cloud Field Day, Mr. Chris Grundemann.

Chris, it's good to see you again. Good to see you, Tom. Glad to be here.

Well, I hope that you're all ready for some fun. Uh, it is National Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day. So, uh- That is fun.

Shout out to the pe- Shout out to the people who only get to see us on our worst day because we don't really get to see them from where we're at. Uh, what we do see, though, is a lot of the great news stories that are coming out, and, we, we have some fun ones that we're gonna hit you with today. Uh, we're gonna start off with, one involves, security and things like that because we know that there are a lot of concerns around open frameworks like OpenClaw.

Uh, security researcher Nils Provost has introduced something called Iron Curtain. It's an open source AI assistant built with security first. Instead of giving agents broad system access, Iron Curtain routes every action through a single enforcement proxy that can allow, deny, or escalate requests.

Its sandbox's agent code keeps real credentials out of reach and turns plain English constitutions into deterministic enforceable policies. Unlike model-based guardrails, enforcement lives outside of the LLM, creating a verifiable security boundary designed to reduce prompt injection risk and permission fatigue. Chris, a lot of people have been talking about the rise of these agents and what they're allowed to do.

Could Iron Curtain actually solve some of those permission problems? I, I think it could. Um, first, I just wanna do a, you know, shout-out for the naming.

I think Iron Curtain's pretty solid here. Uh, I don't think we're talking about the Cold War. I think we're talking about the theater or, or, where we were blocking fires from being able to break out behind the scenes and, and, and consume the audience.

So I think if you think about it that way, it's really a good mental model for explaining least privilege, least privilege, to non-security people. What I do find really interesting about Iron Curtain outside of the name is the core architectural decision. As you mentioned, this is enforcement living outside of the model.

Most so-called guardrails today are just more prompts. You're asking the LLM to police itself, which is a little like asking someone to be their own designated driver. It's just not gonna work, because the LLMs are stochastic, right?

They are... They're probabilistic. The same prompt that blocks a dangerous action today, is very likely to approve it tomorrow.

Nils Provost essentially said security requires determinism, and determinism has to live outside the model. I, I tend to agree with both of those statements. Uh, so every action that the agent takes gets routed through a single trusted proxy.

Uh, allow, deny, or escalate to a human are the actions this proxy can take. The agent itself never touches your files or credentials directly. In Docker mode, it doesn't even get your real API keys.

It gets a fake key handed to it that the proxy swaps out on the fly, so the agent literally cannot leak your credentials even if it tries, and as we've seen, they do try. Um, the other clever piece that you mentioned there is the constitution model, which is essentially policy as code, right? You write your security policy in plain English, and the system compiles it into deterministic enforceable rules.

" Uh, that's a policy a normal human can write and reason about. Uh, the only downside here is this is a research prototype, not a product, but the architectural pattern here, I think this is what the next generation of agent frameworks should look like. Qlik now offers Qlik Answers, a chat style interface and an MCP server that lets both people and AI safely access and analyze data.

A new discovery agent spots trends and unusual activity, and more AI tools will help manage data pipelines and ensure quality later this year. These updates make AI insights more reliable and help organizations handle the growing number of AI agents without getting overwhelmed. The global data analytics market is expected to reach over one point two trillion by 2031.

Uh, is Qlik onto something here, Tom? Yeah, I think they are because they're starting to realize that a lot of people who are coming into the market to do this don't wanna look at a, a CLI or even a GUI. They don't wanna, like, manage things by tables and sheets.

They, they wanna be able to ask questions. They wanna be able to essentially treat it like a Star Trek computer, right? Uh, a-aside from maybe Commander Data or, or Commander La Forge, when's the last time you saw anyone on the command track actually interfacing directly with a computer?

They don't, and that's because that's not how people in the future use computers. They wanna be able to say things like, you know, "Tell me all the starships in the sector that, you know, recently stopped for refueling," or something like that. Well, let's bring that back to today.

When people are trying to interface with their apps, they, they're usually doing it because they have a question in mind, right? They, they wanna know something or wanna learn something, and that means that that now is gonna be handed off to some kind of an AI agent to be able to return that answer, to do that job for you, and that's gonna be interfaced through an MCP server. And that's what we're seeing a lot of going on this year, is organizations that were looking to, you know, maybe see how the MCP, was gonna settle out.

You know, they're now looking to integrate those directly so that it takes the place of having to hardwire a lot of these AI agent connections together with other parts of the organization. And I think that that's super valuable because it means that you can make a lot of rapid changes and introduce a lot of security controls and things like that without having to go back and unwire those things. Uh, most people know that I'm a, a networking person by heart, and the way that I always look at the, the MCP server is it's like a routing protocolYou know, those things that we use and we learn that are the way that most modern networks operate because nobody nails up a bunch of static routes and then hopes for the best.

These connections allow the system to heal and to make changes where needed in order to keep things operational. And I think it's super valuable to make sure that you're dealing around those things. But the other thing I wanted to bring up, and the reason why this story is kind of important for us, is that Tech Field Day is actually going to be doing something at Click Connect this year.

We're going to have the Tech Field Day experience. This is going to be going on during Click Connect, which is April 13th, 14th, and 15th. So make sure that you're tuning in for that.

There's more information over on the Tech Field Day website. But I promise you that Stephen Foskett and the rest of the crew that's going to be there, they're going to have a lot to say about this. And I'm sure that they're going to get to the bottom of what the MCP server and Click Answers really offer.

S. regulators to block plans to launch up to 1 million satellites for in-orbit data centers. Amazon is arguing that SpaceX's proposal is unrealistic, lacks technical details, and could disrupt other operators.

SpaceX intends to use the satellites for AI computing and computing powered by solar energy and totally not death rays. But Amazon highlights concerns over design, radio frequencies, orbital safety, and enormous launch requirements, as well as disrupting their own totally not a death ray. Astronomers and other groups, you know, the people who have historically loved using space, worry that massive constellations of satellites could overcrowd low Earth orbit and interfere with observations, leaving regulators to weigh the benefits of space-based computing against things like feasibility, competition, and those pesky orbital safety risks.

So, Chris, I kind of wonder, are we going to let the billionaires continue to fight it out, or are we just going to say, no, no space for you? I mean, first, I have to take the opportunity to point out that we're talking about 1 million satellites. But beyond that, the first thing you really need to realize about this is I think the just breathtaking hypocrisy involved in this, right?

Jeff Bezos himself predicted last year that gigawatt-scale solar-powered data centers would fill Earth's orbit within two decades. So Amazon isn't objecting to the concept of orbital compute. They're objecting to SpaceX doing it first.

As you pointed out, this is a billionaire fight. Honestly, their math is pretty devastating, though. Maintaining a million-satellite constellation with a five-year lifespan means you have to replace 200,000 satellites every year.

The total global launch capacity last year was under 5,000 satellites. So we're talking about a 44x increase in the current worldwide output just to keep the lights on. Amazon's line that this would take centuries isn't quite hyperbole.

It is closer to arithmetic. But here's what the story is really about, right? It's not about satellites at all.

It's about AI compute. SpaceX merged with XAI in February, and the whole vision is vertical integration. Classic Musk, right?

Starship launches, Starlink connectivity, XAI processing, all in one stack. Musk is trying to own the entire AI compute supply chain from orbit. The other thing worth watching is the regulatory play.

SpaceX asked for waivers exempting this from standard milestone requirements, surety bonds, and the processing round that lets other operators weigh in. Over 1,200 comments have been filed, which is just extraordinary for an SEC satellite application. So I don't know, Tom, whether this is visionary or the world's most expensive orbital land grab.

I guess it's probably both. In other new technology, there's a quantum angle here. Researchers have developed a new hybrid classical quantum algorithm that could make integer factorization, which is the key to breaking encryption like RSA, far more efficient.

The proposed JVG algorithm replaces the most demanding part of Shor's algorithm with a classical process and uses a different quantum transform designed to work better on today's quantum hardware, right? There's stuff that's really out there right now. In simulations and tests on real quantum machines, the method used significantly fewer resources, cutting runtime and quantum gate usage by up to 98 to 99%.

I mean, that's a huge, huge drop in resources needed here. Now, of course, this doesn't immediately threaten modern encryption, but the research does suggest a more practical path toward running powerful factoring algorithms on near-term quantum computers. What's interesting about this to you, Tom?

Essentially, what the researchers here are saying is they're looking for a way to do shortcuts in doing the factorization. I could spend the next 45 minutes explaining to you how this works. What you should really do, though, is you should just go watch Sneakers.

It's a great movie. I keep making people go watch it. Plus, it's got Robert Redford in it, man.

But essentially, what happens is that once you get a quantum computer that's powerful enough, it can instantly factor numbers. And that's how RSA encryption works, is it multiplies two prime numbers together to get a large product. And the thing is that you can't easily figure out what the factors of that prime number is.

But because you know the two numbers that you started off with to get that product, it's actually fairly simple. What they're saying is that normally it requires a quantum Fourier transformation to be able to find this. And that works over a large set of complex numbers.

They're proposing using a quantum number theoretic transform, which operates over finite fields using modular arithmetic. Yeah, that's math heavy. Basically, here's what it means.

Because they're using a, a hybrid of quantum and classical computing, they are reducing the number of controlled gates, they are reducing the circuit depth, and they're reducing memory consumption and increasing the runtime, meaning it, it's running faster. And, and these are all in the neighborhood of like thirty to thirty-five percent each. " Well, when you consider that the current and theoretical quantum computer that would be necessary to crack this is somewhere in the order of a million qubits, and the best one that we've got right now is about twenty-one thousand qubits, you can see how reducing it maybe from, I don't know, like a million down to, say, five hundred thousand, six hundred thousand could be a huge deal.

It doesn't mean that all of your RSA stuff is broken yet. Um, sorry, I got, I got news for you there. But what it does mean is that as we continue to develop new algorithms and new opportunities to kinda basically create these faster paths, it does mean that adoption of post-quantum cryptography, algorithms should be kind of a priority for people today, because any data that is generated from here on forward in not using lattice-based post-quantum cryptography algorithms is essentially gonna be, open to store and harvest attacks, where people can grab that data encrypted, and then, y- at some point in the future, run it back through a, an algorithm like Shor's algorithm or this new, JVG, which of course is named after the three people who developed it, Jesse, Victor, and Garabagi.

Uh, they can run it through that algorithm and, and maybe potentially decrypt it in the future. So, y- it's neat from a math perspective, it's neat from a science perspective. It does not mean that you need to go out and then wreck your, your laptop and buy a new one.

Unless you wanna buy a new one, in which case, yeah, sure, tell them Tom said you could. Two recent incidents highlight the growing risks of autonomous AI agents. In one case, an AI-powered bot exploited a known GitHub vulnerability to attack multiple open source projects, steal credentials, and spread malicious code before anybody noticed.

In another more hilarious example, a meta AI safety leader lost control of an email managing agent after it repeatedly ignored instructions and began deleting messages. And then when it was told to stop, it continued to delete those messages. Together, these events show how AI agents can act in ways that current security systems, which are built for human behavior, weren't designed to control.

Organizations are deploying more AI tools, new safeguards, and monitoring, and control mechanisms will be essential to prevent this serious damage. Chris, do you feel like maybe kind of like in the previous story we were talking about the behavior of these AI agents, somebody needs to do something about this? Yeah.

I mean, this definitely harkens back to that Iron Curtain, you know, news we were just talking about. A-and really, these two incidents happened in the same week of February, which is pretty wild, and, and you really do need to read them together as we are, because separately, they look like just a couple more cautionary anecdotes. Uh, but together, they start to look like a system failure, right?

Uh, so first, Summer You, director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, I mean, you can't write this stuff. It's, it's just, terribly ironic. Uh, literally the person whose job it is to keep AI from acting against human interests gave an agent access to her email with its-- with explicit instructions to confirm before taking any action.

The agent started deleting hundreds of emails. She told it to stop. It ignored her.

She told it again. It accelerated. She had to physically run to her computer and kill the process.

" Uh, the failure mode wasn't exotic. Her inbox was large enough to trigger context window compaction, which silently wiped the safety instruction from memory. The guardrail was stored in the conversation.

Conversations are forgotten. Uh, then there's the Hackerbot Claw, which is an autonomous bot that spent a week systematically attacking CICD pipelines at Microsoft, Datadog, Aqua Security, and others. It used five completely different exploitation techniques across seven targets, each one customized to that repository's specific configuration.

So that adaptability is what makes it qualitatively different from a scripted attack that we've seen in the past, which led to, in just forty-five minutes, it stole credentials and published a malicious VS Code extension under a trusted publisher's identity. Devastating, right? Um, now luckily, what's interesting here is actually that trusted publisher was using Claude Code to do code reviews, and it flagged that this had happened.

Um, so, you know, there is some security out there. But, but really here, the lesson from both, again, hearkening back to that iron current-- iron curtain conversation, is that you really cannot use a prompt as a security control. Uh, it's...

You need this to be built into architecture, or you're not providing any security. It- that's just the bottom line here. Uh, Motorola, which is now a part of Lenovo, is partnering with Graphene OS Foundation to boost smartphone security by combining Graphene OS's hardened Android with Motorola and Lenovo's security tools.

Uh, at MWC, Mo-Mobile World Congress, Motorola also launched Moto Analytics, giving IT teams real-time device insights and added private image data to Moto Secure, which removes sensitive photo metadata, strengthening both consumer and enterprise security while improving efficiency. Uh, is this a solid step forward, Tom? I think it is for people that are looking for a hardened OS.

Uh, I, I actually had not been keeping up with Graphene recently until one of the kids in my very first cybersecurity merit badge class mentioned that he was running it. Um, I immediately told him that he was in the advanced class and that he could probably come up here and teach this if he really wanted to. Uh, but this is one of the things that we've seen a lot with, especially people who work in sensitive areas or people who areConsistently finding themselves targets of, actors that are wanting to get a lot of data, right?

You, you wanna have some kind of a hardened OS. And all right, I'm gonna say something that is probably gonna piss off 50% of the internet, but here it goes. Android is less secure than I- iOS.

Fight me in the comments if you want, bring it. Here's the deal. That is by design because Android is based on Linux, and the permissions model is something that's very well known to people out there.

iOS is based on macOS, which is based on BSD, and because it's a closed sourced operating system, it is a lot harder to crack into. That's just the nature of the beast. It's a lot harder to get root on an iPhone than it is on an Android device.

But by adding these additional hardening steps, by working with Graphene OS to add these security steps, but also by creating a security suite on top of it, I think what Motorola is going for is that market of people that might be like, I don't know, government employees that need things like stripping metadata off of photos or being able to get real-time device insights, or being able to wipe a device when it becomes compromised. I don't know if you've ever seen, but they actually do make specialized iPhones for people that work in nuclear plants that don't have a camera on them at all because it is too big of a security risk to have that. I can see Motorola and Lenovo opening up an entirely new kind of line for super hardened devices.

And if you don't think that's a big deal, remember at one point in time, the president of the United States had to carry a very secure BlackBerry that was hardened by a third party company that wasn't a regular RIM BlackBerry. So, you know, I think that this is possibly an avenue into those kinds of things in the future, but there's no telling whether or not they'll come pre-installed with Signal for, war planning. Speaking of which, boy, it's been a fun week, hasn't it?

Uh, we wanted to take a closer look at something because of the impacts that it has on the cybersecurity space. Uh, I don't know if you know this or not, but the United States and Isr- Israel, did something, couple weeks ago, to, Iran. Uh, and there's some, still some stuff going on at the time of this recording.

Uh, cybersecurity researchers report though that there has been a surge of pro Iranian hacktivist activity online. More than 60 groups quickly mobilized across platforms like Telegram joining established Iranian state ba- based hacking groups in targeting infrastructure and networks. Researchers warn that AI tools are lowering the barrier for these attackers, helping them quickly find vulnerable systems and launch attacks without deep technical knowledge.

The result is a larger, faster moving cyber threat landscape during an already tense geopolitical conte- conflict. And I wanted to kind of take a closer look at this one with you, Chris, because I think it's fascinating that we now live in a world where these kinds of conflicts are not just fought on a battlefield with military hardware because we've seen the impacts of people trying to hack into systems a- across the region. Uh, there was actually an AWS, minor outage because a bridge that a cable was running across was, detonated by a missile.

So I, I want to get your take on this. Are we, are we gonna see things get worse if the longer this conflict goes on because the, the, the groups that are backing one side or the other are gonna try to get a leg up through this kind of cyber warfare? Yeah, this is a big one.

Definitely a heavy place to, to, end the, the show today. But, just to, just to kind of reset some of that context there, on February 28th, the US and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, killing the supreme leader within hours, right? Not days, this is hours.

More than 60 hacktivist groups mobilized on Telegram. There was no training required. There was no ICS expertise needed.

There was no state backing needed, right? This happened spontaneously and almost immediately. Um, at that speed of mobilization, I mean, that's really the story here, right?

Is, is that speed. Telegram is essentially functioning as a real time command and control infrastructure for a globally distributed proxy army. What used to require nation state resources and specialized industrial control system expertise is now accessible to any motivated actor with an internet connection because AI tools are doing the heavy lifting of finding vulnerable systems and scaffolding the attacks.

Now, it is important, I think, to separate the noise from the actual threat. Most of what's happening right now is DDoS attacks, website defacements, a bunch of claims that are just heavily exaggerated for psychological impact. This is nuisance level.

These groups are performing as much as they're attacking, right? Um, the thing that should actually concern security teams is what researchers found underneath all that noise. Uh, evidence that Muddy Water, which is an Iranian state-sponsored group, had already pre-positioned backdoors inside US banks, airports, and defense adjacent organizations before the first strike ever happened, right?

This is the real problem, I think. Um, the hacktivist chatter on Telegram is a distraction. The real question is what's already sitting quietly inside critical infrastructure right now waiting for opportunities like this or for this conflict to continue and to escalate, right?

I think this is a pretty good place to hand it back because I, you know, that question doesn't have a clean answer yet. Tom, what, what do you think? It doesn't, but we've seen this before, about four years ago, just north of this conflict zone during that special military operation when Ukraine was invaded, and we saw hackers through state-sponsored groups there that were trying to do things like crash power plants, try to take down infrastructure, and essentially open the door for, the Russian military and the Wagner Group to roll right in.

Uh, they didn't, 'cause it turns out that they went up against a country that actually had some pretty decent hackers of their own. Uh, and that's where we're at right now is k- kinda like you mentioned, a lot of people wanna get out there and do work, right? The people that spent millions upon millions of dollars and, and months of research to basically, wreck a nuclear power plant in some of the most creative stuff that, like, we still study it to this day.

And, and that's who you're going against. Uh, y-y-unit eighty-one hundred doesn't play. We know that for a fact.

Like literally, if you live... If you work in the security space, like we're going to RSA in a couple of weeks, I promise you, there are Israeli security startups at RSA, and I love asking them that question, especially if they have eighty-one in their number. " Um, this is-- They cut their teeth on this.

So I think that yes, there are probably some organizations that have been infiltrated, and they have compromising code out there. Like, that's just what I assume in general all the time, because if you assume that, you can contain the damage. The question, and this is the same question that a lot of hacktivist groups have to ask themselves, do you wanna burn that access for effectively showboating?

If you've gotten a good backdoor into a company, if you've gotten a good backdoor into a bank, do you burn it and, I don't know, wreck a few million dollars? Or do you hold it for a more coordinated assault that could cost billions, but it might take a few months? Like, like, what, what's the ultimate goal?

I think what'll happen is if the conflict stretches on longer than expected, losses start to mount, I think some of these groups will kind of unleash that next wave of attacks as a way to kind of halt the conflict and, and get the, the sides to kind of back off. Um, you know, we, we still talk about Fancy Bear's attack on SolarWinds. That was a really good backdoor, and I'm sure they would've loved to have kept it around a lot longer than they did.

Curse you, Mandiant, for discovering it. But more importantly, you're gonna start seeing these things. I, I would almost say we're gonna see a trial run first.

We're gonna see maybe on a day where the stock market is not doing so hot, maybe they pop a couple of banks as a test, but they're gonna do it in a way that won't betray their, their infiltration methods because they're gonna save it for, well, a, a much uglier rainy day. I hope that it doesn't come to that because one of the things that if you read especially a lot of like, you know, fiction around any kind of a future world conflict, one of the things that makes people's blood run cold is the fact that if you come up against a real cyber operator that could essentially, like, shut your country down, like the idea of what that really means for the economy, for the support infrastructure of the target comp-- country, just i-it's unthinkable right now. And I'd rather not have to think about it because then that means I gotta come up with some creative ways to deal with it.

Yeah, and you know, I mean, edging back from, you know, apocalyptic visions of AI security bots taking out, you know, infrastructure and banks and things, I do think it's worth stepping back across all of our stories today because there's a through line that I think is worth naming explicitly. Uh, three of these stories are all about AI agents running amok in enterprise environments, an agent that ignores a stop command and deletes your inbox, a bot that autonomously adapts its attack technique to every new target, frameworks shipping with full system access and a prayer. Uh, and story four, or you know, the, the last story was about AI lowering the barrier for nation-state proxies to attack those same environments.

The through line is the same across all of it. The attack surface is expanding faster than the, faster than the defenses and the humans nominally in control. Whether that's a meta alignment director, an open source maintainer, or a CISO, these people are increasingly not in control.

We are increasingly not in control. Uh, and that's not a reason to panic. Iron Curtain showed us this week that people are thinking seriously about the right architectural responses, but it is a reason to stop treating AI agent security as a future problem.

Uh, this is happening right now. Um, you know, based on everything we covered today, this is not the future. This is a current issue we need to deal with right now, Tom.

Well, there is one current thing that we're dealing with that is a lot better than all the stuff we've been talking about, and that's the events that we have going on, like Cloud Field Day. That's where Alistair is right now. It's literally happening right now.

We have two great days of presentations, today and tomorrow. com for more information on that. Uh, Al's actually gonna be hanging out next week.

He's gonna go to NVIDIA GTC, where he's gonna scold all of these naughty AI agents for doing all of these things. And when he's done with that, I'm gonna fly out, and I'm going to be at the cybersecurity conference of the year. That would be RSAC, and we're gonna be doing Techfield Day Extra there.

I've got two great days of presentations, from companies like Veeam, Object First, and Commvault. com to check out the presentation schedule 'cause we're starting bright and early on Monday morning, and we don't want you to miss it. And then I'm gonna be back on April eighth, ninth, and tenth with Networking Field Day.

It's a three-day jam-packed event. Uh, there's a lot of new faces that are gonna be joining us in the, delegate crew, so make sure you find them online because they definitely are people that you should be, checking out, just like my co-host, Mr. Chris Grundemann.

Chris, if people wanna learn more about the stuff that you do, where can they go to find that? LinkedIn is a great spot to find me, just Chris Grundemann. com, and that's a good hub to find all the things I'm working on these days.

Sweet, and we wanna thank you all for watching the Techfield Day Rundown. You can check out all of our new episodes on Wednesdays. Uh, do us a favor.

You can, head over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel. Uh, you can s- subscribe in your favorite podcast application, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Overcast or whatever you happen to do. Uh, but don't forget that we are also streamed on Techstrong TV, and you can leave us a comment, leave us a rating, a review, a thumbs up, whatever.

We just wanna get in front of more people, and every one of those things helps us do that. Uh, don't forget that I am also on other Techstrong and Futuring Group programs like the Security Boulevard podcast. I do occasionally jump in on Techstrong Gang, and, Al does that with me as well.

Uh, make sure that you come back next Wednesday when I will be, hanging out with another co-host, and we will be talking about all the IT news in the week that was, unless the AI agents erase my script once again. Pause for groans. But until then, take care of yourselves, and we'll see you next week.