US Signs Take It Down Act || The Tech Field Day News Rundown: May 21, 2025

Samina snaps up ZT Systems. Arista has their head in the clouds. Microsoft Open Source Linux, Palo Alto gets mobile.

Salesforce converges charter cashes out on Cox Communications. HPE makes Morpheus a little more green. And we're gonna take a closer look at the Take It Down act in this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown.

Hello everyone. It's time for the Tech Field Day rundown. Today is May the 21st, and I hope that you're all being very nice to your wait staff because it is national wait staff day.

In fact, you should probably send a memo around the office to do that because it's also National Memo Day. One thing you don't need a memo for is to check out my awesome co-host this episode, Mr. Alistair Cook.

Al, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tom. It's always a pleasure to be here.

And I think National Juice Slush Day might be one of my favorite days today. Well, it is the best time to go get one of those, but not right this second because we have some great news stories that we wanted to take a look at. There's some acquisitions brewing, there's some acquisitions that are closing, and then there are some legal things that we're gonna get into.

But first, let's talk about one of those acquisitions because a MD acquired ZT Systems last year. You may recall that we covered that on the rundown, and now they're gonna be selling most of what they acquired to Sanmina a MD states that this will help them manufacture more chips on US soil and will also help mitigate the impact of those pesky tariffs that we keep talking about. A MD didn't sell all of ZT systems to Sanmina, but I have a question.

Al, how does this help them save on tariffs? You know, I'm not really sure how this saves on tariffs. The plans to produce chips using the TSMC manufacturing facilities in the US aren't kind of closely linked.

This, as far as I can tell, maybe ZT systems, uh, does manufacturing overseas, and therefore divesting of that is gonna help a MD to be importing less, less systems. Uh, it's important to see that this divestment was planned from the very time that a MD purchased ZTE, uh, ZTE systems. It's important to see that this divestment was planned from the very time that A MDA acquired CT Systems, and it's the manufacturing part that has been sold on to send mia.

The AI design piece is staying inside a MD, and that's what a MD actually wanted. They didn't want to be a manufacturer of systems. They're manufacturer of chips and, and so the design part is staying within a MD and the actual manufacturing is the piece that's being moved on to sunna.

The AI design is absolutely a, a critical part of, uh, a MD's future. We know that huge amounts of infrastructure are being purchased and, uh, this infrastructure adoption is being driven by AI requirements, generative AI applications, and a MD wants a chunk of that, and they want a larger and larger chunk over time, obviously, in order to be more profitable. So having a, a design solution, a design practice around building infrastructure for AI seems like a very good thing for a MD to do.

And sanmina with their part of the Z two systems, the manufacturing part, they're a first partner for a MD. So it's not simply with getting rid of the bits that, that we didn't want outta the business, we're also continuing to deliver some of that value through from the piece we're keeping to the piece we're diversity in. So it's a a bit of a closer relationship then between a MD and Samina with ZT Systems.

I think it's, it's a good move to, for a MD not to be competing with its its own customers in delivering these systems. That's the part that was a little puzzling at the acquisition time, but now it's become clear that it's the AI design piece that a MD wanted, and they had to get the whole business in order to, to actually have that part. Six months later, they're now allowed to divest all that manufacturing side, hadn't stopped competing with partners, of course, now they've got a another partner that's more equal than maybe some of the other partners, but that's how partnership works.

A blockbuster bit of reporting last week when it was rumored that Arista Networks would be acquiring VeloCloud from Broadcom, VeloCloud was formerly the SD WAN business. Uh, that was, uh, startup acquired by VMware back in 2017, about four $50 million solution, then got bundled into the networking and NSX component of the VMware product suite and seemed to do pretty well. I quite like the product when I did some work with the, uh, SD WAN team at VMware.

Of course, brocom buys VMware and everything changes, and Broadcom wants to get back to the core products in VMware and has been progressively divesting of the non-core assets. Reporting's not yet been confirmed by either side and community feedback seems to be pretty positive. Tom, what's going on?

I wish I had a really clear answer because when I first heard about this last week, I, I, uh, uh, I was a little bit shocked to be honest with you, not shocked in the way that, you know, VeloCloud was getting sold off because I think we, we see that that's kind of VMware's, sorry, Broadcoms trajectory for the brand known as VMware. Now, the, anything that's not core to VMware Cloud Foundation is gonna be sent away. Uh, you think about their end user compute that got sold off to KKR, uh, that, you know, that was not really a, a surprise to anyone.

Uh, the fact that nobody wanted to buy carbon black off of them actually was kind of surprising to me. And that's one of the reasons why Carbon Black was kind of brought back in-house. It's not because it was critical to the operation of, uh, VMware Cloud Foundation.

It was more that nobody could afford to buy it. I think this though, has the potential to be a really good deal. If you look at what Aris has been doing for, you know, the last few years they've been making quiet acquisitions.

You know, you may think of awake security or you may think of big switch networks, or honestly, you may think to yourself, I don't even know who those companies are. That's because they don't go out and make splashy deals that are huge dollar values and then struggle to integrate those components. What they do is they buy smaller companies where they can take the assets for those companies and kind of roll 'em into their existing product lines.

And I think that that's what we're gonna see here, provided this deal actually goes through. Because you know how it is, right? Um, where there's smoke, there's fire, but sometimes there's not anything at all.

So we're working off of the assumption that this is actually going to happen if it does. This gives Arista honestly, a play that they've needed for a while, which is sd sd-wan. Uh, if you look at the market, there's been people who've been speculating for the last couple of years that the SD-WAN market is down because they have seen some pull through, right?

Like everybody needed an SD-WAN appliance when the pandemic started, and then the people who were gonna buy it kind of bought it. So where does that leave them now? Well, when you think about the fact that Arista is very active in cloud computing, they are, they're considered to be one of the networking vendors of choice for people in the cloud, whether it's Azure or AWS or a lot of other companies being able to offer SD WAN on the on-prem devices as well as the, in the cloud devices, it's a huge win for cloud providers because they can provide secure data tunnels using SD WAN between those two locations.

It also gives Arista a place to compete against Cisco, because I mean, in that market, Cisco is the king that everybody's coming for, and Arista wants to make sure that they're not gonna miss. VeloCloud has really good technology, and I know if you watched our mobility Field day coverage a couple weeks ago, you probably heard from CTO Ken Duda, who is probably the best proponent in the industry of code quality. And I think that that's one of the things here is he's going to be scrutinizing the code quality of the VeloCloud engineers, which is high by the way.

But that ultimately means that if we're gonna see, uh, VeloCloud SD WAN technology integrated into Arista EOS operating system, it's gonna have to pass muster. And that could take a little bit of time to integrate. So probably what you'll see is they'll, if this, again, if this goes through, they'll start selling VeloCloud appliances on the edge, very similar to what Cisco did with VIT tele.

And then as the code quality requirements get to where they need to be, you'll probably start seeing that integration piece where maybe those hardware devices become end of life, end of support, and the software itself runs in Arista boxes on top of EOS and it just becomes transparent. That typically is the way that Arista handles these things. I think that's a good thing.

Overall, the question is whether or not there's actually anything here, and we're gonna have to wait a few days, weeks to find out, because the, the one thing I'll say about these acquisitions, especially if it's not material to the bottom line of the company, is that we often find out about them after they've already closed. So make sure you stay tuned to the rundown, because I'm sure when it does close, we will definitely be covering it in more depth. You may have heard of the Windows subsystem for Linux.

It's something that enables Windows users to leverage running Linux and Linux commands on their computer. It's a favorite among system administrators, developers, and other power users. Since it was released in 2016, Microsoft finally open sourced the Windows subsystem for Linux.

By the way, that request had been in for nine years. This was first a GitHub issue for WSL entitled, will This Be Open Source? And they finally closed it nine years later.

Is Microsoft now truly an open source company? Al I, I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you. I think I already know the answer, but I also never thought that when a subsystem for Linux would ever be open sourced, what do you think?

Well, I think we both know the answer that, uh, Microsoft is in the business of making money, and if open sourcing part of their, their product, uh, helps 'em along that way, decreases their cost or increases their profitability, they're all over it. And so for Microsoft Open Source is a, um, tactical move rather than the strategic move. It's not like they're a, uh, open source first company.

I do still remember the quote of Bill Gates, um, or actually it was not a quote net. I do still remember the attribution to Bill Bill Gates of a accusation that somebody was a communist because they were going to be giving away software for free. However, Microsoft has embraced quite a bit of open source over time and has also recognized that the operating system, uh, that they have in the Windows operating system doesn't fit the needs for every user and every, every need for every user.

And so the Windows system for Linux has, has been very popular amongst particularly system admin people that I know of and, and developers who, who are working in a mixed environment that is both Linux and Windows environment. So it's definitely been a popular tool to enable you to use a single computer, not have to run a discreet virtual machine that is all isolated from your Windows machine and order on Linux commands, uh, support for a variety of different Linux distributions, uh, to appear under Windows subsystem for Linux has been great and continued development and particularly community driven development. So Windows system for Linux, yes, open sourced.

Great. We've only been waiting nine years for it. Is it a big deal?

Probably not really. Uh, in the end, open sourcing doesn't change the functionality. It does get a little more visibility of what's going on in the product and Windows subsystem.

Linux is just a small part of the massive estate of software that, uh, that, um, Microsoft is ma making good money from. They did shift a little while ago from focusing on making their money by protecting the, the back office and Microsoft office space towards being Azure as the, the crown jewels at Microsoft. So things that are on the desktop is no longer quite the crown jewels that it used to be 15 years ago.

And the cloud things are really where Microsoft is making their big money. That's the place to look for them doing things that'll move the industry too. T-Mobile and Palo Alto Networks have partnered to launch a managed solution that combines T-Mobile's 5G Advanced Network with Palo Alto Network's Prisma, uh, sass E 5G platform.

This offering integrates T-Mobile's clientless authentication system and dedicated virtual network segmentation to deliver advanced security and per and performance by embedding security directly into the network infrastructure. The solution aims to simplify IT management and provide robust protection for a range of devices, including those that cannot support traditional sassis software such as IOT devices and 5G routers. This sounds like implementing 8 0 2 11 x in a much larger scale.

Tom, can Palo Alto help T-Mobile break into the business connectivity market? 1 x, lest you summon the Eldridge horrors that were, well, pretty much anybody who ever tried to implement that, that solution. But you're absolutely right.

Security works best when it is absolutely invisible to anybody who's using it. And that's one of the reasons why T-Mobile has developed this, uh, you know, architecture that allows you to effectively sign on without having any kind of need for like, you know, challenges and, and things like that. What they needed was a way to project that in a wider area, and who better to do it than Palo Alto Networks.

So Palo Alto on their hand gets a provider to start offering this service. And if you think to yourself, well, this just basically sounds like a sassy device or sassy setup at the edge. Bingo, you're right.

But the key there is that it is aimed at businesses and it is aimed at IOT devices because this is a thing that a lot of people are finally starting to realize as we add more and more of these, um, sensors and collectors to our environment, I guess would be the best way to put it, is that the data that they produce, they don't care. It's, it's, it's out there available for use and whatever. Okay, well, we'll just secure it.

Have you ever tried to do that to an IOT device? Have you ever tried to install a certificate on an iot device that isn't centrally managed somewhere? That's why you turn into an Elridge horror is because you don't survive that process well, very well.

That is the value of having a solution that is completely transparent underneath you have T-Mobile offering this solution on top of what Palo Alto is, you know, well known for, is that ability to analyze application traffic, is that ability to provide sass e services so that it doesn't matter whether it's a milling machine or the operator of that milling machine getting on the internet, all of that is protected. So I think that this is valuable for T-Mobile to be seen in the business space, but I also think that it is absolutely critical to get more Palo Alto, uh, technology out to the edge. Finding skilled people to build your agentic AI is a challenge for many businesses.

And a recent survey by Asana suggested that half of IT leaders are regretting implementing AI without providing staff training. Who would've thought Salesforce took another approach? ai, gaining both AI technology and a team of skilled AI developers, Salesforce is betting the farm on Agent force, which is not per the Platypus secret partner.

But I have to ask, is Aqua hiring the best way to get ahead when it comes to ai? Yeah, it seems that it's a dual purchase here. Definitely Convergence AI has technologies that Salesforce wants, but they have a skilled dev team.

And I think I saw a couple of stories this week around just how difficult it is to build that team and that study from Asana suggesting that there was some regret at having tried to build the applications without actually upskilling your team first. I think Acquihire is, is definitely an element of this, this deal as well as the tech technology acquisition. So there is technology that will be used from the, uh, acquisition that to improve the agents that are currently behind Agent Force going beyond the, uh, relatively simple least what's described as relatively simple Einstein models that are used with, uh, with Agent Force at the moment towards, uh, more context rich and aware AI agent for Salesforce.

Uh, this is Salesforce, making sure that they're the one, not the ones whose lunches being eaten by another company that uses AI and agentic AI to do management of interfaces with with customers, yes. Customer relationship management. The question for me is also, is this a valid strategy for anybody else to do acquihire?

Are there enough AI startups with skilled teams going around looking for an exit that can be purchased by larger companies that can't grow their own AI teams? And I think the short answer is no. There's still still a shortage of skills.

There aren't that many startups that you can ac acquire, hire to get a large AI dev team. It's gonna come back to continue to develop the staff that you have and acquire new staff. We're seeing this throughout the industry.

We see rounds of layoffs of, uh, reductions in workforce, and then they're usually followed or aligned with acquisitions of the whole hiring of new staff, uh, in, in different areas. The the rounds of layoffs are usually about organizations making a shift in focus rather than a, uh, reduction in the size of the business. Definitely businesses should be continuing to develop their teams and AI skills seems to be a very important part, both infrastructure and software development side.

So yeah, I don't think there's enough startups to acquihire all over the place to solve your, your shortage of AI skills, developing your, your own staff and acquire hiring staff that you can develop seems to be a, a much more extensible method. A cable giant charter is making a bid to buy one of the other Titans Cox Communications, uh, for almost $22 billion. The deal would create the largest cable TV in broadband provider in the US with 38 million subscribers.

Analysts say the move is designed to combat the intrusion of 5G providers like Verizon and T-Mobile into the end residential broadband market, which has historically been dominated by cable t TV providers in the us. The companies had looked at a merger back in 2013. That plan didn't happen.

Tom, is Charter and Cox getting together a good deal for users? I, I don't know if it's good, but I also don't know that it's bad. And I will say this in complete transparent disclosure, I use Cox Communications as my internet service provider because I don't really have much of another choice right now.

I mean, there's, there's a few options, but, but it's, you know, familiarity kind of breeds contempt in this case. I am curious to see if this is gonna make it through the regulations, because you're effectively creating the largest cable company in, in America. And, and I know that there's already been some discussion with the, the DC lawyers, technically Charter and Cox operate in different sections of the us so there's not any overlap, there's not any reduction of competition, but I don't necessarily know that this makes it any better for consumers either.

Uh, the the thing though, and this is probably where the, where they will use it to get through the regulations is that Cox and Charter are not competing against each other. They're not, uh, you competing against any former cable companies that you might have heard of from years ago. They are competing against the residential service providers.

So I mentioned that one of the reasons why I use Cox Communications is because there aren't really a whole lot of other options. Well, one of the other options around here is at and t, but when you look at the fact that Verizon and T-Mobile are offering small cell service for the house and essentially saying, rather than running cables to your house or fiber to your house, why don't you just use one of our small 5G cells and, you know, we'll put a bandwidth cap on it and do whatever we want and you'll be able to use it and everything will be hunky dory. And oh, hey, by the way, that means that we get to increase our capabilities all over the place, uh, because now we have a small site cell signal kind of in every house.

And I mean, that's one of the things that Cox has actually done as well, is if you run a Cox modem, then you're using Cox wifi and Cox subscribers can hop on your wifi at your house and use it because it's transparent to all users. But I think where we're gonna start hitting, you know, the, the, the ceiling of this is if we get down to a couple of providers, is that valuable for the customer? I mean, yes, owning the last Mile is really expensive, so expensive in fact, that Verizon sold off all their last mile Fios to Frontier several years ago.

They're in the process of buying it all back after some bankruptcies and some debt consolidation and some financial trickery. But we're starting to see that consolidation phase and, and everybody who's ever been in this knows that there's the divestiture phase 'cause they need to re meet regulations or they've loaded it down with debt. And then there's the, you know, pro the period where, you know, revenue's extracted somehow, and then there's the reconsolidation because it's actually better if it's back under our, our building.

So I think that that's where Charter and Cox are right now, is that they realize that they're never gonna compete against each other, but together they have an opportunity to compete at a nationwide, um, stage against the T-Mobile's, the Verizons, the at and t's, or honestly, a lot of the local companies, so like for example, the other provider that's literally just over the street, there is a local electric company that's been running a lot of fiber through the area, which I would switch to in a heartbeat. OECC, please come into my neighborhood. But more importantly, that's the way that they're gonna survive because the value that Charter has been bringing for so long has been the bundling of the internet and the tv.

And we all know that cable TV is effectively dying with all the streaming services that we got and phone and, and all these other services. You run outta subscribers sooner or later. So how do you continue to operate, operationalize that and, and gain new customers?

Well, if you're region bounded, you have to buy companies that have new customers that you haven't reached yet. And I think that's kind of where charter's at and it's obviously worth, well, $22 billion to 'em. But again, you've gotta clear the regulatory hurdles and we don't actually know how that's gonna shake out.

So I expect to be talking about this well into next year. You may recall that our friends over at HPE acquired one of our other friends Morpheus data last year. And the apparent target of that was to be able to integrate HPE GreenLake private cloud management with public cloud management, which is the holy grail for pretty much everything they want to do at Cloud Field Day.

Right before the acquisition, we got a glimpse of the Morpheus private cloud platform based on the KVM hypervisor. Guess what? HPE now offers, HPE Morpheus VM Essentials as a private cloud platform along with HPE Morpheus Enterprise software for multi-cloud management.

Hmm. Where have I heard this before? I have to ask Al, does this open a whole new world for hybrid multi-cloud as a service, which is kind of what the target of what GreenLake is?

Yeah, I think, I think that is very much what the, uh, integration and the rapid integration of Morpheus into the, uh, HPE portfolio does mean. Um, at Cloud Field Day last year when Morpheus presented their not yet released, uh, Linux KVM based, um, private cloud platform, uh, it looked very nice and was really nicely integrated into their console. The Morpheus Management Console is really a cloud management platform console for all of your clouds, be they on premises or, uh, in public cloud or potentially even in a, a co-location center.

So it's good to see that very rapidly integrated into HP's, uh, approach, uh, seeing the development of the Morpheus, uh, virtualization platform in the business essentials. Uh, nice to see, really nice. And I think it's a reflection that Morpheus had built really good technology, that it's very rapidly seems to be replacing the original private cloud offering that, uh, HPE had in GreenLake.

Uh, so definitely interesting that there's two products in here, the one that provides the virtualization platform for your private cloud, which is the business essential side, and then the core Morpheus piece, the piece that really is, is what Morpheus has been about for a long time, which is integrating the management of your hybrid cloud environment across multiple locations and hybrid multi-cloud in particular, if you've been following Cloud Field Day over the last few episodes, hybrid multi-cloud is definitely a focus that I, I see in large enterprises and the need to try and unify that management across the, the very different platforms that we see and the different cloud providers. Um, Morpheus does this and I think that's exactly why they're acquired by HPE and this, this product should be really nice. Uh, hopefully we can, as usual with GreenLake choose which bits we want and choose to only have maybe the, uh, HPE Morpheus Enterprise software, the hybrid multi-cloud management, if that's what we'd like.

And obviously if we're running a an on-premises cloud, maybe we also want the VM essentials, the HB Morpheus, uh, VM Essentials hybrid multi-cloud, I very strongly think is where we are landing as a realistic place for almost every enterprise organization. So really good to see, um, rapid movement of the, the Morpheus product into HBS line up. Of course, HPE, like all large companies, normally moves fairly slowly.

So, uh, this has been under a year from acquisition to ship product. That's gotta be pretty good. It is time for us to take a little bit of a closer look and this time we're gonna take a look at the brand new Take It Down Act.

The US government signs a new act into law that has opponents concerned about the ramification of what it can be used to do. The Take It Down Act was proposed to allow the rapid takedown of non-consensual intimate images, or NCII, uh, from the internet. The law requires social media platforms remove content within 48 hours, uh, and that people could be convicted of violating the law.

Also, there's, uh, the same penalty applies if, uh, other copies of the media are known to be around by the provider. Uh, what's the catch though? Seems like a good thing to, to be getting rid of these non-consensual images, uh, that are often used for blackmail on, on those kinds of elements.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, uh, and another Freedom organization, the law has been written too broadly and it can be applied to a broad range of content, including political speak. It doesn't seem like an intimate image. The law could also be used to pressure companies into weakening encryption and to allow for easier detection of, to allow easier detection of that content.

Uh, the element in there of the weakening of encryption is that this law, as it's written, makes the company that is carrying the content liable for it, irrespective of whether they actually know that there is objectionable in this case, uh, non-consensual intimate imaging, uh, on, on the platform. So the ability to break that encryption and to view whether this is actually NCII that's being carried is gonna be vital for compliance. And of course, the transport people, the people transporting your data, being able to break the encryption is rather a concern.

So is this a Trojan horse? Is this in fact, uh, the NCII, the non-consensual part that everybody agrees we should be, uh, putting measures in place to restrict, limit remove? Uh, is this just a, a cover for bringing in some laws that are gonna allow, uh, stifling of free speech, uh, suppression of, uh, dissenting organizations, particularly media organizations?

Uh, is that a track that maybe has been heard a little bit in the politics in the us I'm not particularly well qualified to comment on how the US politics works, but if this law has not been written well, or if it's been lit written with an agenda that is not the stated agenda, this could be a significant problem for the us. Tom, you are over there in the us what's going on? There's a problem here and, and you've hit on most of the issues that, that people have with this.

'cause there's two things that are problematic here. I wanna tackle the second one first because it's the one that's most important to our audience. This could be the lever with which law enforcement organizations are finally able to force providers to compromise their security mechanisms to ensure that they can get access to, to devices, right?

Because you need to know who created the image, whether it was one that was taken of someone that was shared without their consent, whether it was an AI generated image. But in order to do that, you have to prove possession, right? You have to prove that the the picture was sent to somebody, you have to prove that it was stolen.

You have to prove that this was the device that generated it. Well, let's just say we're, we'll say texting for example. Well, if you're using iMessage or you know, Google RCS, those are encrypted end to end.

So that means that there's no way for you to know that unless you get the device and you have a warrant and you get the codes to get into that device. But getting warrants is messy, right? Like, we need to take this down right now, it has to go down within 48 hours.

So wouldn't it be better Apple if you would just provide us with a key to get into anyone's iMessage that we wanted to, and, and we could, you know, obviously we, we need to make sure that we're not abusing this, so there has to be a reason for it. And, uh, we'll just, we'll get into somebody's text messages and we'll make sure that that really is the, the NCII that they did. And oh man, I hope we don't find any other, you know, crimes that they may have committed along the way.

That would be terrible and we'd be forced to arrest them. And not just for this, but for other things too. And yeah, you don't have a problem with that Apple 'cause you're, you're aiding and abetting criminals if you don't let us do that.

And yet every time that that's happened, it, that power has been abused. There's a reason why companies like Apple say that the way that they have things configured, not even they can get into the system, it is on purpose that they have no access to the device. Because if they don't have access, then no one is tempted to go looking.

And I would say that if the barrier to getting a warrant to search a device is high, it's high on purpose. That's why we can't just stop people and take their devices and say, you have to unlock this for me and show me everything that's on it, because that's an illegal search. When you get a warrant, you have to tell the judge what you are looking for.

You can't just say, I would like a warrant to search this house for anything illegal going on in there. No judge in their right mind would sign that warrant. That's a expedition.

The warrant should say, I am looking for evidence of this particular crime that was committed on this date. So for example, if you're looking for a baseball bat that was used in the commission of an assault, you can't go looking around for guns or golf clubs or chainsaws and you say, well these were obviously used for crimes too. Mm-hmm Warrant says you're looking for this.

So that is one of the reasons why we have such a high bar to clear in the US and what they're effectively saying is, we wanna go in and we wanna be able to just look whatever we want and take whatever we want. 'cause you know, no one has ever been accused of stealing images like this and keeping them for themselves. Not that I would think that any law enforcement agents would do that, but you know, other people might, because once those keys leak that then the, the game is up.

And we saw that 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago when, uh, a lot of those CIA hacking tools were leaked to the greater internet and then they became the foundation for a new wave of malware. So let's go back to that first problem. You know, the one where, uh, the way that the, uh, the law is written, it could be used to stifle political speech.

So lemme give you an example of something, um, I don't know if you've seen this or not, but there have been images that have been shared over the years of, um, we'll just, we'll, we'll take a prototypical example, uh, of females who are clad in revealing swimwear. And, um, there, there's nothing wrong with that. That's absolutely a way to make money to share yourself on the internet.

But what if I put a sticker across it with political speech? Maybe you're supporting a particular candidate, maybe I am putting a sticker over it of you supporting a candidate that you don't actually support. I've generated an image that you did not consensually share with me now, I as the image rights holder because it's my photo, call the provider and say, you need to take that down because I don't support that candidate.

Now I have violated the take it down act by posting an image non consensually. And for the simple fact that all I did was take one of your images and put a banner on it saying you support somebody. You don't.

I could go to jail for up to three years. Do you see how this could be used in a false flag operation to take collections of those pictures, attribute them to other people, and then force them to be sent to jail by manipulation? If you don't see how that could be done, then you believe in the nobility of what this act is being used for.

Yes, we need to be able to take down when someone, uh, has revenge porn of someone and they share it online. And, and that's what this was originally designed to be. It was designed to be a revenge porn restriction act.

The problem is, is that nobody stops at the limits of the law. They're gonna keep pushing the boundaries until they find a spot where they're gonna get away with as much as they can before they get caught. And Al I know that you remarked that, well, you know, this is probably a US thing right now, but I promise you that if it goes into law and it gets used effectively there, there aren't people in the world that won't jump at the opportunity to implement a similar law in their country to affect similar change.

Yeah, I we definitely see law changes in one country, and particularly law changes in the United States, uh, set a precedent for other countries. We have seen definitely, uh, follow-ons of changes in legal stance in the US drive changes in legal stance here in New Zealand as well. Uh, historically we've been very British oriented because we've still have have the, the king on our currency.

Uh, but we definitely see the, the trends that come out of the US driving law changes. And I, I think there's also some interesting elements around if, if iMessage, uh, gets sort of legal backdoored by, uh, law enforcement, then where are people actually gonna communicate? It's gonna more likely cause suffering to people who aren't actually doing anything, uh, illegal.

Uh, the people who are truly outted to take illegal action will very rapidly move to platforms that aren't being, uh, knowingly backdoored by US law enforcement. We may see the rise of tools, more tools like Signal and Telegram were again, end to end encryption, but not necessarily us based a little harder for, uh, US companies to, uh, apply the leverage or the US law enforcement to get access to offshore, uh, resources. Uh, yeah, there's, there's all kinds of, of dangers sitting behind this very noble idea of preventing the spread of revenge porn.

And there's been some suggestions that, uh, this might even be the bad for the victims of that revenge porn, although I didn't quite understand how, um, the, the takedowns were, were bad for the victims or at least worse than the content being up for the victims. Unfortunately, there's no telling how these laws can be interpreted and applied to other things. But what I can tell you is that the intersection of where these policies come into contact with enterprise, it is honestly one of the places that we discuss quite a bit at our Tech Field Day events.

And the next three weeks are extremely busy. So I'm gonna be gone next week because I'm gonna be at Security Field Day where we're talking about problems just like this. com and check those out, um, they can, you know, you can see the lineup of all the people.

We're gonna be talking about AI security, we're gonna be talking about network monitoring. We're even gonna be hearing a report from our forensic Futureum research about what the future of cybersecurity looks like right now. That is May 29th and 30th.

com for more details. Then I'm flying back, but then I get to see you in the US because you've got the next event. I do, I have Cloud Field Day on June 4th and fifth and uh, you may have heard me talk about hybrid multicloud.

Well, we'll definitely be talking about hybrid multi-cloud at Cloud Field Day 23. I have a great lineup of presenting companies as well as delegates flying in from all around the world, people traveling further than I am in order to get to, uh, the uh, San Francisco area that week. Of course then I hand the baton back to you and you head back to the West coast the following week.

Yes, only this time I'm headed down to San Diego because we are gonna be at Tech Field Extra at Cisco live US 2025. So I thought about this, this is my 19th Cisco live in a row. I've gone to everyone since 2006.

Uh, I've been to San Diego. This will be my third time. And I can honestly say even though it's a pain in the neck to get there, I love it to death because it is a great place to be and it's gonna be a great place for you to all check out.

Uh, that's gonna be June 10th and 11th. We're gonna be having presentations from Open Gear, Avi and Cisco. And I know for a fact that they have some exciting stuff that they can't wait to share with you.

I can't tell you what it is yet, but you should definitely tune in. We'll have the schedule coming up very soon. You're not gonna wanna miss it.

You're also not going to wanna miss what we've got coming up after that right now all I can tell you is, is that we'll be back with another edition of Networking Fill Day July 9th and the 10th. So after you get done setting off the fireworks and having all the picnics settle in and get ready for more networking content, there might also be some things that get added to the calendar between now and then. com and click on the link for future events.

Trust me, you're gonna want to do that just like you do when you tune in for the Tech Field Day Rundown every Wednesday. That's right. We're gonna be uploading the rundown to YouTube.

We're gonna be checking out the audio portion of this podcast and your favorite podcast application of choice or head over to Techstrong it and check out the show notes and all the articles that we linked for all of the fun snarkiness that we leave you in, our coverage of the news. Make sure that you check out all the other Techstrong and Rum group, uh, shows and properties and reports while you're there. And I also wanna make sure that I shout out Rum Research people because they're doing amazing work.

We got to hear some great conversations about that at Mobility Field Day a couple weeks ago. We're gonna hear about it at Security Field day next week. So make sure that you are, uh, tuned in for that because you're not gonna wanna miss it.

Al and Steven will be back next week with more great news content and I'll be back the week after that. Uh, hopefully fun things happen between now and then. But until then, for myself, Tom Hollingsworth, for the wonderful Alistair Cook and everybody else who works very hard to bring you the rundown every week.

Thank you very much for tuning in. Go have some strawberries and cream 'cause it's always a dessert day around here, and we will see you next week.