Trump’s New Tariffs Disrupt Tech and Auto Industries | Tech Field Day News Rundown: August 6, 2025

Hackers plant raspberry pie in bank network. Riverbed brings AI observability and acera acquire scale computing. Cisco donates their agency, and Sneer wants faster, smarter AI psycho uses AI for DevSecOps and trumps new tariffs, disrupt industries, and raise tariffs.

All this and more, maybe some snark chasm, all on the tech field. Day rundown. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown, where we, each time we meet, we run down the IT news of the week with a variable degree of snarkiness.

I'm your host Alistair Cook, and I would like to welcome you to Root Beer Float Day. Uh, I'm also welcoming for the first time to the tech field day rundown, my friend Mr. Jeffrey Powers.

How are you doing today, Jeff? Is, is rip your float day in New Zealand or here in the United States? Well, I think it's there in the United States along with national wiggle your toes day and wiggling your toes as important.

If you're flying from here in New Zealand up to the United States, you've gotta keep the blood flow going. Yeah, Absolutely. Blood flow's very important.

com for enterprise build needs. It is also National Social Engineering Day, or as I like to call it, national Kevin Mitnick Day, the Master of Social Engineering Love Kevin Mitnick. We start with, uh, an interesting story.

We're a, uh, cyber robbery group known as UNC 2 8 9 1. That's a catchy name, used a raspberry pie device to a infiltrated bank's ATM network. The device was installed in an unmanned ATM location, and the hackers initially used a cellular connection to initiate their attack.

And it seems that their plan was to gain control of the A TMM network and extract cash. Hmm. Modern day bank robbers are sophisticated, don't need guns or masks, do they?

Jeff? No, they do not need guns or masks. You know, it's really funny because every time that I go to a pump, I go to any type of a TMI insert my anything that I have to insert my card or tap my card and run my hand across it and see if that thing just pulls off.

Uh, if it doesn't have a protection sticker on it, I do not pump the gas. Same thing with ATMs and even cashless registers that are in the store, because you, you might think that they're safe from skimmers, but you have all these report reports that, that scammers are actually getting inside the store, maybe through a disgruntled employee that, you know, getting a couple dollars on the side turns the cheek, whatever. So, and, and I always have to ask people, when was the last time you used the McDonald's kiosk?

And have you ever thought of checking those reader card readers before you even start started the card? Now, this news story is the greatest reminder that even in enterprise it, especially if you're in the financial enterprise, IT area risks come in, uh, from physical vandalism and physical hacking. It's not just enough to secure the software.

You need a full stack physical security, access control and monitoring. All invol involved in this and the threat threat vector, threat vector we have here wasn't a bug, but it's a box the size of a wallet for it. Pros, this is the kind of breach that slips past traditional defenses, and it's time to actually start thinking about planning different types of hardware and software layers to make sure that if a device is planted, your credit card or other personal information is safe.

And to top it off with a good, good security system that can identify maybe, maybe through AI and, and that being physically altered, had that event happening so they can, police can track 'em down a sensor inside the machine that could identify weight or difference, uh, card slide slides in a little bit differently, all of a sudden could create an instant pop-up on those screens saying, Hey, this kiosk has been compromised. And finally, a system that identifies possible risks and ways to record every bit of information. So when a kiosk is compromised, law enforcement have enough data to find the person that did it.

And that can all happen at the server level. And I think that that's where we need to see, uh, you know, news stories like this and how we have to counter them. Riverbed has launched new AI powered tools to improve network monitoring, including the Intelligent Network, observability Essentials Bundle, and the XX 90 appliances.

Uh, these updates help businesses manage growing data and the cyber threats using AI to spot and fix issues faster. Key features include tools for visuali, visualizing network activity, AI driven alerts, and better support for cloud and on-prem setups. The new XX 90 hardware boosts speed and storage for analyzing network traffic.

Riverbed has also introduced a flexible subscription plan and says its observability sales grew 92% in early 2025. Alistair, do you think that's true? 92%.

It's a huge amount of growth, but it depends where you started from. If your observability practice was small and just beginning, your growth can be huge. We know that over time it takes a while to move those needles, but I think it, it's interesting to see Riverbed adding more and more observability, uh, seeing what's happening in real time and getting that feedback loop back to application developers and operations teams is vital.

And we've always seen, uh, Riverbed as, uh, about application delivery management, well observability as an extension of that to seeing far deeper into the applications themselves. So this brings together a couple of things. Uh, I really like that there's a plugin for Grafana, which is a, an enabler for creating custom dashboards and, uh, getting open source, uh, tools for visibility in your environment.

That's, it's really nice to see that they're not locking you into using just their own tooling. Uh, having an AI tool that looks at what's going on. It'd be interesting to see how that AI tool plays out, how actual AI it is and whether it is more of a exception handling and identification, which will be more of a predictive AI that we've seen historically in management tools or whether there's something more in the, the generative ai and I, we really would need to dig into a little deeper into that.

Hopefully we'll see Rubber bed at an upcoming tech Field Day event, showing us some of the depths of this, and particularly showing us some of these amazing, uh, high performance devices with sustained packet capture of over 50 gigabits per second being dumped out to, up to two petabytes of storage in these XX 90, uh, appliances. So there's some really interesting capabilities in these. Aira has acquired scale computing and is retaining the scale computing name for the combined entity.

Uh, aura's Secure Edge networking joins scale computing's virtualization technology, and they plan to be a major disruptor in the edge computing, networking, helping businesses run AI and other applications across many locations. This move aims to simplify operations, improving performance, and uh, serve industries like retail, manufacturing and hospitality. The former, uh, CEO of scale computing, Jeff Reddy will serve as the president and chief marketing officer, and the company explains plans to expand its global reach with smarter and more efficient edge solutions.

Uh, this pairing together and staying under the branding of scale computing looks like a really cool move, doesn't it, Jeff? Uh, well, we'll see what happens on that. Uh, you know, it, I, I think they're just kinda saying, Hey, uh, scale computing's in a move where we're bas they're basically shouting.

We swear edge, edge isn't buzzwords and boxes anymore. And sure if you, if you're an IT manager that has like a hundred thousand fast food locations, this type of marriage might mean smoother or, or orchestration, uh, real time AI at the edge and one less reason to call your SD WAN vendor, but just kind of tell 'em that, you know, the shake machine's still down getting more real. Let's kind of pretend that this is all plug and play magic, which it might, it's still edge.

That means that remote boots means compliance. We've got troubleshooting boxes. Uh, you'll have to troubleshoot in Omaha, Seattle, and Miami from your bed at 2:00 AM in the morning with the only screen on being your laptop screen.

I'm bright, but you know, hey, now comes with an all-in-one interface with prettier dashboards and a bigger sales team. Uh, on the security front, it might solidify them as being the absolute best in cyber security for edge computing in a distributed enterprise, but only time will tell if they can, uh, take that belt home with them. Agency.

A project that helps AI agents work together across different systems is now part of the Linux Foundation, backed by companies like Cisco, Dell, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Red Hat. As more platforms create their own tools, agency agency aims to unify them with open standards for discovering, identifying messaging and monitoring agents so they can easily collaborate like humans do. By donating the full framework to the Linux Foundation Agency ensures that the project stays open, it stays neutral and community driven, helping building trust foundation for agent, uh, based AI systems across the industries.

So Alistair, is this type of system better as an open source cross platform type thing, or did they make a mistake? Well, I think it's definitely one of those situations where we're seeing a plethora of standards turning up in ag agentic ai. So ag agentic AI is where some AI system is not just doing an analysis, but it's completing a task.

And normally it's a small task and, and you build a larger system out of a series of small agents doing very specialized tasks. The agency framework aims to make it easier to use agents that aren't just from a single vendor. So you don't have to commit yourself entirely to just one company's, uh, agent mechanisms.

You can combine agents from different vendors. Interesting that this came out of Cisco, uh, uh, was actually from out shift a, uh, uh, component of, uh, Cisco and, uh, supported by Dell and Google Cloud and Oracle and Red Hat. And so there's, there's a bunch of people behind agency.

It's a related standard to the a to a standard that we've previously seen. So a to a communication between agents, uh, and is sort of sits in parallel to the model context protocol, MCP Sarah that we've seen as well. I think it's a sign that agents, uh, and agentic AI are starting to mature when we get beyond, uh, a vendor who says, you have to come to us and get everything because we are the only ones with a vision.

And we get to the more mature position of we'll have agents that are, are working on our technology, and they'll interact with agents that are working on other vendors technology. I think that element of being able to build a multi-agent software lifecycle across different vendors is really important. And the only way that happens is through standards that aren't entirely owned by a single industry organization.

So putting this framework out into the, uh, Linux Foundation, absolutely, it's a, a good move. Time will tell which of the standards we're actually going to use over time. We've seen this previously that there were, were a whole lot of different ways of doing orchestration of containers, and eventually Kubernetes won out.

We'll see the same thing here. Eventually, the collection of standards or the single standard that unifies will emerge as as a popular acclaim snia, the storage networking Industry Association believes that CPUs could be a bottleneck between storage and GPUs and AI systems. The storage AI initiative places the storage on the same ultraverse network as the GPUs, and it appears that the optimal infrastructure designed for AI infrastructure is still very much a moving target.

Jeff, where should I attach my storage in my AI infrastructure? Well, first of all, Tite, um, and that's a, that's a good question. Where should we, 'cause it looks like SNE has just kind of hit the panic button right there.

Uh, hopefully it's gonna bring together industry leaders rethink how we feed that AI beast. Uh, enterprises are always basically burning through power. They're burning through dollars, and they're burning, burning through IOPS because their infrastructure just wasn't built for that AI pipeline.

So hopefully this project will look at aiming to create vendor neutral standards for AI optimized storage through high throughput, through low latency, through tiered data flow. Um, for IT leaders, it's a future proofing move. If you're not storing data anymore, you're feeding intelligence engines that needs a, basically needs a whole new playbook, and that's where they need to start writing here.

Um, I, I consider it to, like back in the day when we had to compress files to save disk space and transfer rates, but even using, I've even been using AI to knock down some of my storage needs, uh, running programs that find duplicate files on systems and kind of mixing 'em, finding out which one's the better one, uh, uh, finding systems that actually can be reduced. Uh, so there is more storage, but then that means there's more storage to be had and more files to be had, and then we run into the same problem and we run into the same hardware limitations from there. So we will see what happens on this whole thing if it actually does help us in the future.

Psycho has added an AI tool to a security pro platform that helps teams figure out which software issues are the most dangerous so they can fix them first obvious. It also offers other AI tool tools that suggest fixes and track code changes. These tools give better context and reduce false alarms as AI creates more coding mistakes and hackers to use AI to find them.

Having smarter security tools is becoming more important with new rules and sharpened responsibility between developers and security teams. Keeping software safe is now a bigger focus. Do you agree, Alistair?

Well, I think there's an arms race going on between bad actors and, uh, software developers or the infrastructure and DevOps teams, and that's not new. It's just a change in the tooling that's being used. So site code here is doing some analysis of changes that are being made in source code repositories and identifying things like vulnerabilities in those source code repositories.

And more than just identifying that a vulnerability exists, but looking at the criticality of that vulnerability, whether there are other mitigations for the base level of vulnerability built into the code, or particularly the infrastructure around it. Uh, the psycho tools are aiming to make sure that as developers are fixing vulnerabilities, they're fixing the ones that are actually a risk rather than just hitting everything that's got a C number assigned to it. I think that's, that's a really important thing because on where the risk lies is vital to making sure that your safest from compromise.

Uh, this application security posture management platform that is from Psycho is definitely gonna be helpful, particularly if you're working with open source kind of projects as well. But anywhere that there might be a supply chain attack, and we've seen supply chain attacks on people's source code repositories. We saw, uh, we covered in, in the rundown, I think it was last week, around a compromise that was in a plugin for, uh, visual Studio code that was allowing an attack through that Visual Studio Code plugin.

These kinds of elements of, uh, code coming in from external sources needing to be analyzed and needing to be looked at the changes. This is exactly where psycho code is, uh, attacking with these AI agents, and we should see this being really helpful. Um, fu and group surveys found that these kinds of DevSecOps automation tools and cybersecurity automate orchestration are really important things for our customers, and that they really are looking for ways to help reduce the risks around the high speed and open development of applications that they have.

It's time for us to take a little bit of a closer look, and it's a topic that's getting, uh, a lot of mainstream news coverage and is definitely impacting some of the organizations we care about. And it's President Trump's new tariffs on dozens of companies that are shaking global markets and hurting major US companies like Apple, Amazon, and car makers. What's going on is that they're increasing the cost of materials and products that are coming in, and the uncertainties are leading to fairly significant delays in some of those things being shipped.

1 billion in dollars in tariffs just this quarter, and Ford estimates $2 billion for the entire year. That's money that's being paid by American consumers into the government's tax funding. Uh, the tariffs do aim to fix the trade imbalance and the tariffs are being levied against, uh, cut foreign companies that sell more products to the United States than they buy from the states, uh, states.

And the objective is that this makes it more competitive for US based companies to build things. And this takes a while. Uh, there's our problem.

There's a, a big lag time between having this tariffs come in and the jobs and the productivity on shore that the tariffs are supposed to encourage. Uh, right now job growth is slowing because we have that latency between, we have that delay of higher cost for products, but we don't yet have the ramped up production domestically, and it's likely to be some time for that. Uh, experts warn that the economy could suffer as it slows down and more cost are passed on to consumers.

And of course, AI rears its head that some people believe that this, uh, AI tools are gonna be used to eliminate the people cost and lead to, uh, reduction in, in employment. Now, historically, we've seen this panic that every new technology is going to take away jobs, and yet we don't have fewer jobs working in it. We have more jobs caring and feeding those machines over time.

So I think it's interesting to see that there's a, a large list of companies that are, uh, having tariffs levied against them. Here, I I live in New Zealand, we have a 15% tariff is being levied against New Zealand because we send you more wine and, uh, cheese and, uh, dairy products or other, other meat products then we get from the United States. Um, you know, there's, there's this imbalance.

Uh, the president does say that tariffs are vital and that, uh, there's no chance for us survival or success without these, these tariffs. But, uh, I think he's a little uncomfortable with the fact that there is a lag between putting the tariffs in and, uh, and the actual upsurge of US manufacturing and employment. And so this is why we saw a bit of an knee reaction to the news that, uh, the rate of increase of, uh, employment in the United States has gone down.

It's below the, uh, the average of 130,000 jobs a month. Well, 73,000 jobs added in in July, and it wasn't welcome news. Jeff, are you seeing confidence here?

I'm not in the United States. I only see this secondhand. Are you seeing confidence and, um, comfort in, in the United States as a result of these tariffs?

Uh, before I answer that, I'm gonna have to, uh, invoke my 30% tariff that just happened. So, uh, once I get paid for that, then I can reply. Okay, now we're good.

Um, so I, this is, this is just, this is amazing how one person can think that doing something like this is going to help overall when it has been proven time and time again that it does not work. Uh, that going back to that broken wheel and trying to make a new version of that broken wheel is going to do it. And that's, that's what really frustrates me because, uh, we're in the IT area.

We see from everything from consumer products all the way up to enterprise products that things that are just, you know, we can't get to anymore and we have to have those global tech supply chains and enterprise it definitely feeling that ripple effect through the whole thing. Uh, I personally had some work put on hold because they don't know what it's basically gonna mean for technology and tariffs. That means I'm not working, they're not working and nobody's winning off of this situation.

So with companies like Apple expecting to pay that $1 billion in the quarter, it, the cost increases are just accounting lines. They're pressure points, not just counter, uh, accounting lines. They're pressure points across procurement, across infrastructure, rollouts, and end user pricing.

And that means potential delays, as you said, in refresh cycles, uh, higher costs, everything. Uh, the next iPhone is gonna be what, 20 to 30% more. And when Apple tried to move to a different country to relieve themselves on a different taxes, we got dinged for that as well.

And building, let's, let's talk for a second about building infrastructure in the United States to alleviate this whole thing. 'cause you just can't pop up a, you know, an Amazon store in the middle of, you know, Utah or something like that and expect production to happen with within under 12 months. Because building a plant like that is more, more than just breaking ground and building the plant itself permits environmental surveys, uh, government getting in the way to try and figure out where their cuts gonna come in.

And more than that, that's gonna take more than 12 months alone. So if we were to build a plant, 'cause we tried this, Foxconn came, was gonna come to Wisconsin and do all this, and they went through so much red tape. They, they first started in Ohio, they went through red tape, they moved to Wisconsin, and then we ended up not getting Foxconn at all in the United States.

So the, it, it just doesn't make sense. I have, it's set up for failure and that's what really frustrates me. Adding in things like AI stressing infrastructure.

That's the only option is to pay, and that means thinning staff and sending these bumps to the client. And that's what's really, I can see it. I don't understand why other people cannot, but I dec digress.

I think, you know, the, the, uh, the plan is, is a long-term plan. It involves pain at the moment, and I think that pain is, is gonna take some time to pass, hopefully some more of the trade deals, uh, negotiations go through and as we see some reductions in these tariffs over time. But, uh, that really comes down to the strength of those negotiations, the ability of those negotiating change.

Speaking of the real world, we have some things coming up. Uh, Jeff, you're gonna be at Cleveland for an event, uh, in the next couple of weeks? That is correct.

I am going, it's gonna be my first time at Share Cleveland. This is everything that deals with mainframe. IBM just came out with a new AI mainframe, uh, a couple months ago and we're gonna probably see a lot about that.

We're gonna be, uh, that's gonna be of course a hotbed topic is bringing AI into mainframe. Uh, we did a podcast on this a couple weeks ago, uh, talking about share on, uh, tech Field Day. And, uh, we all thought, thought the exact same thing that AI is going to be where it is, IBM's new servers are gonna be where it is and the new direction, uh, that, uh, mainframe is gonna go to keep people going, keep people secure.

And 'cause you know, we have the issues in New Jersey where getting a flight is just as painful as getting a tooth pulled, uh, seven times over. And so how is the new direction going to affect finance, going to affect flight, gonna affect trends, gonna affect buses and all that other stuff? Uh, so it, like I said, it's gonna be my first time, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm gonna expect from there, but we've got a full schedule of, uh, different clients that we're meeting and talking to and it'll be interesting to see where their direction is headed.

And then the next event for us after that is AI Infrastructure Field Day. I'll be heading back to Silicon Valley with my panel of delegates and what we're hearing from, uh, Broadcom and Hammer Space ti and sat, uh, um, potentially a, a bunch of other interesting sponsors. Also gonna talk about how you build an infrastructure to run all of that ai.

Following on from that, later in September, uh, Tom Hollingsworth will be back talking all things security again in Silicon Valley. He'll have Nile and Square X and one password as presenting companies for that event. And you can check out all of our Tick Field Day events on the Tick Field daycom website.

Thanks for watching the Tick Field Day rundown with all of the news that's ready to be run. You can catch new episodes every Wednesday as a YouTube video or on your favorite podcast application. The rundown is streamed on text, on TV as well.

And you can often catch us at other Textron and RUM group events and programs. We'll be back next Wednesday to talk about all the IT news of the week. Uh, and until then for myself and for Jeffrey Powers and all of us here at Tech Field is wishing you and yours a great day.