Rise of the Old Guard

Hey, everyone. IBM's building crazy new quantum computers, but they're not blue. You're watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Thursday on Textron Gang. We've got a lot to go over.

I mentioned IBM's new quantum commercial grade quantum computers. They're real shiny and silvery from the pictures, but, uh, we've gotta discuss that. We've got some Cisco news and, and some cyber news on this bed box botnet, interesting stuff.

But first, let me introduce you to our lineup of gang members for today that we're gonna be discussing this with. First of all, sporting a shiny new haircut, looking good out there in, in the valley. He's our, uh, valley editor, John Swartz.

Hey John, how are you? I'm good. Welcome back.

I haven't talked to you for a while. I hope you had a great time in Italy. Um, and it's good to be here.

Good. You know, there's something to be said about Tuscany, but, uh, we'll discuss that another time. John, welcome.

It's good to see you. Next is our Cyber Beat Reporter one and only Terry Robinson. Hey, Terry.

How are you? Good, How are you? I'm completely jealous.

You were in Italy, but I don't blame you. But I did come home kicking and screaming, but they, they got me home. And then, uh, from our neighbor up north, she's runs the, well, I don't know if she would, I think she runs the Canadian DevOps community as well as a bunch of other stuff.

Garima Bal. Hi Garima. It's good to see you and it's great to have you here on the gang.

Hello everyone, and great to be back here. And then last but not least, our favorite Yankee fan. Mike Ard, chief Content Officer here at Techstrong.

Hey, Mike. How's it going? I'm good.

I'm in Midtown Manhattan today in a hotel directly across the street from Madison Square Garden, otherwise known as the crime scene. As the crime. Well, you, you'd still talking about your Knicks.

Knicks, yep. Yeah. I I I wouldn't have fired Tom, but whatever.

I, you know, I think there's a Dolan curse on the Nixon Rangers. Mm-hmm. You know, they, he's like, bad luck, schlepp Rock.

And as long as he's involved, I don't know if we'll ever get anything done here. Anyway, let's, let's talk tech. Um, so Mike, IBM unveiled these big shiny honking stainless steel looking boxes for commercial grade quantum computing.

Yeah. Or, or, or at least something that is a drawing of a box that they're gonna build. 'cause it's not gonna show up till 2029, but here's what they're saying.

But here's what they are saying, and it's kind of interesting on two levels. One is they're saying that, you know, they've kind of solved this issue where it's now an engineering problem rather than a computer science theory. And they think that they're gonna actually build these quantum machines.

And the two things that they're also saying is that the mechanisms for harnessing qubits and the software and the coating that they created wasn't gonna work because it would require processors that were just large and it wouldn't scale, and it would be too cumbersome and too costly. So they basically went back to the drawing board and they're saying, we designed the way the code is gonna be created so that we can have smaller processors that will drive this quantum capability, and that'll enable us to build this, um, amazing machine. They're gonna have some proof of concepts and some testing machines between now and 2029 with an idea of, uh, creating something they're calling the Starling system.

And that will be housed in a data center that they're building specifically for this in Poughkeepsie, New York, Which yay for Poughkeepsie. Yeah. Yay for Poughkeepsie.

And you know, for those of you who do not know, it's, you know, Poughkeepsie is in Westchester County, and you know, that's home turf or IBM. So, you know, rather than building this thing in some other obscure place, they're essentially putting this in their own backyard. So I assume that they're very serious about it as a result.

And they got some money probably from the state and the feds to do it. But Alan, you've been following this space. What's your take on it?

'cause the other side of this coin is, is they're saying that, you know, the other methodologies that people have been talking about won't scale, and they were throwing some shade too. Yeah, they were. Well, so here, here, fundamentally, here's the issue.

You that the, and they, and they're not wrong, Mike, we've been hearing now for four or five years that in order for quantum computing to become real, I think the magic line was at a thousand qubits or something like that, we had to have a thousand qubits or 2000 qubits, you know, and we've seen the, the cubits go from 10 to 20 to 40. I think we've got maybe a hundred or 200 qubit processes that are possible now, but not near a thousand. And so, you know, the goalposts, were pretty far out there goalposts, were pretty, we, we were going to need some sort of material physics breakthrough to, to really achieve thousands of qubits, right?

Or it was gonna take a really long time. And, and we've had some kind of exotic solutions proposed, right? Microsoft inventing a different form of matter, whether you buy into that or not.

Uh, Google has their willow architecture, but still Willow was not going to get you to this level of commercial availability. And then recently, an interesting thing, much like the, when we first went to Linux supercomputers, right? How did we get those Linux supercomputers?

We put a lot of machines together in parallel, right? So a Linux supercomputer really had literally hundreds, if not thousands of Linux cores running. And from what I understand, it's a similar thing here.

They figured out how to run these qubit relatively lower qubit, uh, quantum processors in parallel. And so you have sort of that quantum supercomputer, if you will, if we can call it that. It's what I'm calling it.

I'm sure it's, there's a real dur. And, and that's what this is about. Now, in doing that, you know, this is like cloud native stuff where you gotta go to microservices architecture.

You need now to have your, your, your, your quantum software be able to run multithread in a, in a parallel processing type of thing. And we're not even sure, you know, prior to this, the, a big problem with quantum software was separating out the software calls that would be need to be done on the quantum side of the house versus other processing tasks that would need to be done in a conventional bits and bytes type of processor. And, you know, and how do you, so how do you separate that, then bring it back together into something that works for you?

Now we're adding another level of complexity, which is I need to separate out the quantum from the non quantum, and I need to put that quantum into a, a serial type of, you know, microservices, multi-threaded architecture to use a parallel processing, then bring that back together. And then we still gotta join it up with what comes outta the regular processor processor. This is a very, this is not a simple thing, right?

Let's be clear. However, this is to IBM's credit a path forward in reality that may get this as they say by 2029 in good old Poughkeepsie. Um, we'll see, I, I don't, I I'm sure others will, will go down this path too before they have to resort to, you know, inventing new forms of matter and energy and, and defying the laws of physics.

Um, the other thing is bully on IBM, right? They, they've been leading the quantum computing charge for a long time when a, when it really was pie in the sky. And, you know, you look at the history of IBM Watson was AI before we knew ai, what it would do or could do, right?

IBM has taken the lead in so many from, from PCs to so many things where, and then they just kind of stood by and watched others claim the, the rewards and the, and the glory and fame. I'd love to see IBM take the lead in quantum, they deserve it. Garima, when I was listening to the press conference for this, the thing that crossed my mind to Alan's point about the complexity, I was like, so is there gonna be like a compiler and an SDK for this?

Or how am I gonna actually program to this thing? And what's your take on this as you kinda look at all this? So as Ellen said, that it's a double-edged sword, right?

So it has opportunities and threats. So opportunities, uh, definitely it'll help us, you know, solve, uh, complex problems, which couldn't be solved by the limitation of the hardware, right? And the processors.

But on the other side, it's also creating opportunities for the software professional because, you know, if you think about in advance engineering and the scalability of a modular architecture, uh, there is a lot of, uh, you know, action on the software open source as well as DevOps community. Um, Alan mentioned, uh, quantum software. I would also mention quantum DevOps because I wanna kind of, uh, get this into the mix.

Uh, this will create a lot large set of, you know, uh, revolutionary evolution in that software and DevOps space. I mean, interoperability, for example, becomes a big thing as well, because, you know, there is traditional ecosystem of quantum technology as well as, you know, the advanced engineering techniques. How do you make it work?

Then there is SDK toolkit, you know, there, there are several toolkits available, for example, from Azure, from Amazon, but you know, there will be new toolkits required for this kind of a modular architecture. And this whole claim is unsubstantiated right now, right? So we'll have to prove it from a software practitioner's perspective.

You know, if you think about, you know, scaling it and industrializing it and commoditizing it for, you know, general purpose needs, I think there is a lot of action needed from a software professional. You know, the entire set of CICD pipelines, the DevOps tooling, um, observability, error correction and error, you know, uh, auditing of error corrections and all that, that needs to be kind of in place at quantum, uh, engineering scale, right? So there's a lot of, uh, you know, action for software practitioners to kind of lean into and look at it from a different perspective altogether.

And one of the things that keep talking about is the comparison to classical computers. It's not like development of classical computers is gonna be at a standstill for the next four years, so we will see them get faster too. So it'll be interesting to see what use cases actually lend themselves.

I Know, right? That that's the key. My, I don't think it's a question of speed of classical computers versus quantum computers.

I think what we've gotta remember is quantum computing, at least as we understand it now, solves some very specific use case problems, a lot exponentially faster than classic computing ever will, right? That that's the bottom line. There are some things, like encryption is a great example, right?

We could brute force 512 bid encryption if you had some sort of monster machine. And for all we know the NSA does, um, but it'll still take months, years, whatever, to to brute force that encrypt, break that encryption, where by the very nature of quantum, it can be done very quickly, relatively speaking, right? You're talking years and decades versus minutes.

So that's a great use case for it. But I don't know, you know, other things I've heard, weather forecast, weather forecasting another great potential use for quantum computing because just the, the amount of variables in there make it such, um, but we don't really have, what are, you know, what are the other killer apps for Quantum? What are the other killer use cases for Quantum?

There's tons of stuff in the field of chemistry that will lend itself to quantum, because when you think about Quantum, and what they're saying is that they're trying to mirror the way nature computes and the way that nature pulls these things together, and we know haven't cracked that particular code, and that's what they're trying to do. And so there are probably lots of use cases that will lend themselves to Quantum, but I guess I keep pointing them, the quantum people keep obsessing about, uh, what they can do versus classical computers. And the thing about the classical computers is they too get faster.

And a lot of times so far, every time Quantum said we could do something that classical couldn't do, the classical guys showed up six months later and said, here's our new processor that can do those things slightly faster or with much capability. But to your point, I think it is gonna be a hybrid, right? It's gonna be, you know, when even IBM is talking about using high performance computing alongside Quantum to kind of go build an, an application.

So it will be a set of microservices that you're invoking and, and calling on a quantum to, to run specific classes of workloads alongside a classical computer. And that, that's how that feels to me at least. But there is another aspect of this thing that I wanted to bring Terry in.

Uh, uh, people have been talking about Q Day for a while. Q Day is when we're allegedly gonna break all these encryption schemes. And, um, I guess what IBM is kind of saying here is that will happen no later than 2029.

And it might happen sooner still, but at least we have some sort of date that says that, you know, those encryption codes are most likely gonna be cracked starting in 2029 or sooner. I don't know how solid that date is, but I mean, that's what they're gonna do this by 2029, then I, I guess that's it. Um, or at least it gives us something that fixate on right now.

I I, the best advice right there too is to start preparing for that. Don't just wait till 2029, you know, um, to, to see if it happens. Um, there, I mean, I think that is the, it's the, you know, the biggest concern probably with Quantum is that there, that that, uh, encryption will be broken.

And, uh, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when we were talking about prime numbers, right? Um, not being as random as we thought. And, and really the, the idea there though is that Quantum was gonna pose a bigger issue when it comes to Yeah, but, but we have quantum proof theoretically from what NIST tells us.

We have quantum proof algorithms dig Youer, and many of the other certificate providers of incorporated that, that may turn out to be a big Y 2K thing, as far as I'm concerned. This Q Day. What may be more troubling is all of these bad guys who are sitting on tar balls full of hashed personal information that they've not been able to crack to date.

And now using Quantum, if they had access to Quantum, they'd be able to crack it. But of course that information goes stale over time too. So the longer that, you know, if you wait till 2029, a good chunk of that's gonna be useless anyway.

I think it's gonna be an issue though. And I think, I mean, you're right, Alan, because NIST is on the case, right? They've been working on this and, um, I mean, it's not like people are sitting still, but I, but I really think you need to, you know, as an organization, maybe start looking at what this might mean.

Yeah, no, you gotta make sure, have you adopted quantum proof certificates? What's your, how often are you changing your certificates? Where, where are the, you know, where is your encryption?

What, what data is encrypted and what encryption you're using. Yeah, Yeah. And, and be sure to keep your security audits and, and everything and risk assessments on point, you know, um, you're gonna have to be constantly, uh, vigilant, I think.

Um, but all that's gonna be hygiene anyway. John Schwartz, what's your assessment? That the Chinese come up with a quantum computer that's similar to this sooner?

Yeah, that's, that's, that's likely probably, you know, can I, can I just interject a bit of skepticism into this because I like to do that. Um, 2029 is a long way away, you know, by the time we reach the, this date to have a fall tolerant quantum computer, the Summer Olympics in LA will have come and gone. We may have a new president.

Nope. Unless we change the, unless we change that. Um, I'm just thinking that I bully to IBM for getting our attention, for being at the forefront of something.

Again, I am a huge fan. My dad worked at IBM for 20 years. He was an engineer.

They, they were the leader in the, up through the seventies, eighties, even, you know, into the partially the nineties. I do la them for what they're, what they're trying to do. And I think it's really cool, and I think it's good that we're great that we're talking about this, but a lot of things are gonna have to happen between now and then.

And I and I, I think about this within the context of what happened this week. Remember Monday, apple had the ww DCA year after they announced their big Apple intelligence we're still kind of stuck in the mud. And I'm thinking later today we're gonna have Tesla talk about the robo taxis, which we've been hearing about for years.

So I think sometimes it, it's, it's important to kind of step back and look at the achievability. I I actually asked a couple of people about what IBM was up to, and they said, uh, they don't even know what's gonna be happening in 2026, let alone 2029. So I just want, I just wanted to say that.

But again, going back to this whole discussion fully for them, for, for doing something that's exciting on the cutting edge and, and for being a little bit arrogant and they need more arrogance, they, they've been missing it, they've been missing their swagger. So I do compliment them for that After many decades of swagger. I agree with that.

They, they are definitely missing it. I, I actually, uh, worked on an IBM account, uh, in a brief stint at an ad agency many, many years ago. And, uh, one of the guys, and they were starting to get a little whipped by, uh, some of the other companies that were out there that were a little sexier.

The technology was a little more appealing, at least on the surface. And this guy just looked with me Hope con expression and said, why can't you know, why can't we get the love? Why can't people, you know, see what great things we do?

And I'm like, you know, I felt a little bad for him, but I also wasn't his therapist. But, you know, it's, uh, I think it's, it's nice for IBM to, you know, to kind of get that swagger back and, and maybe well-deserved. Well, they have, like, they have a whole wing of their indentions at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I mean, literally, uh, section is devoted to IBM. You know what I, I, the irony of history is that Apple, if they don't, if they're not careful, they're gonna start getting into that IBM kind of conversation where they're kind of an an afterthought. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, you know, the, the half-life of the Apple products is, is pretty long, but, um, there's more and more attention being paid to what they don't do and what they're not doing well.

And that's something that every tech company is, goes through inevitable. So let me, let me end this. Let me end this, uh, segment with this right here.

You know what that is the smallest violin in the world playing hearts and flowers, because all those people complaining about IBM, all the people I know who've worked at IBM and are sitting on IB m's stock are doing pretty damn good. The IBM stock over, you know, you could look at it short term, but over the long term, their IBM stock has seen them through. And the same goes for Apple.

Poor, poor Apple, just a couple of trillion dollar cap. So, you know, talk about first world problems. Let's take a break here on Text Drunk Gang.

We'll come back. We're gonna talk more first world problems. Cisco, you're watching Text Drunk Gang.

Hey folks, we're back and we're talking about Cisco, which had one of their Cisco live events this week. And they announced, I think I haven't seen this many new product launches from them all at once in a long time. I think this would probably rank as one of their most ambitious, uh, Cisco Live events.

And they basically came along on two themes. One is they've created their own LLM that has been trained to, uh, create agents that will automate the management of networks and a few other things alongside of that, anything related to infrastructure for that matter. And they're pushing along on that, and they showed some previews of that capability.

And we should expect to see that later this year in terms of, you know, actually finding its way into some mainstream IT environments. The second thing is that they're saying is that the rise of AI is gonna create a massive amount of data that's gonna have to flow through our networks, and the current networks are not gonna be anywhere near fast enough. And that will lead to essentially a massive refresh of all the networking infrastructure, starting with the core, and then working your way out all the way to eventually access points.

Um, of course, you know, Cisco has a vested interest in that occurring 'cause they make a lot of that equipment in that gear. But it did seem talking about swagger from the previous episode that Cisco was kind of feeling its oats around AI finally, and that they felt like they were in this game and have something to say. And John, you're in the valley.

Cisco's been awfully quiet as of late. What's your take? Yeah, that's, that's a really, that's a really good summary, Mike.

And it's, and going back to IBM is kind of the same situation. These, these behemoth that are legendary parts of the framework of technology, not just in Silicon Valley, but the whole world, and they kind of get forgotten or, or taken for granted. And Cisco, in a sense, what I think they're trying to do, and I talked to a couple people there about these announcements, is that they get criticized for the breadth and depth of what they do.

Like they do too much, or they have too much. That actually puts them in an actually interesting advantage in terms of ai. So they got the pipes, they've got the, the pieces, they've got the Lego blocks.

Actually, a couple of their executives refer to the Lego blocks that their customers are freaking out about over ai. So what Cisco, if you really oil it down, is they want to build an infrastructure for the AI era. There are three areas that they mentioned to me.

So they're, they're, they're locked in step on this future-proof workplaces, AI ready data centers, and digital resiliency. So they were hammering home that idea, and they're, they gotta tag phrase for it, make AI work for you. If, if you'll see the signs somewhat what they want, what they wanna do is they wanna bring calm to the chaos because given all the AI agent announcements in particular, you've got CIOs, IT managers, semi freaking out over what they're gonna do, um, maybe for the next year or two.

Some of them lean on consultants, but that's not gonna last long, I don't think. Um, so, so this is what the, what they're, what they're trying to do is they're trying to orchestrate, this is what Cisco wants to do, is help you orchestrate. And you know, it was interesting, they kept referencing the chief product officer at G two as the guy who's basically in charge of this massive undertaking to make them relevant in the AI era.

You know, and, and, and I, I think I, I give them credit, I think they, they do have legitimacy because they've been through all the other previous eras, and I think for the first time in several years, you're seeing a little bit of a strut from Cisco. I mean, usually you write about their layoffs, their retrenchments, their, their, their acquisitions to, to try to move into other areas. But I think now they have kind of a cohesive co plan that they put into place, and we'll see if it works.

But you know what I get, again, I'm gonna give them credit. Like, like IBM they're trying to establish themselves in an area, and I think they're off to a, a promising start if they're able to do this. So, again, I'll, I'll play hearts and flowers for all those people sitting on Cisco stock.

Poor, poor, poor people. But, um, but look, you're right. G two Patel is who you're referring to, I believe John.

And you know, I've, I've had the pleasure of interviewing Gita a few times, and you know, he's always been a rockstar there. He, and he's always y you know, look, this isn't 1999 Cisco where they controlled the entire network, right? And everyone else was on also Rent.

It's a different Cisco, but they're also not just about network switches and routers anymore. They have huge software. They have huge security tele, uh, you know, WebEx, that kind of thing.

Um, they, they're all over the place, including ai. But if you look at many of their successful endeavors over the, let's say the last seven years, you'll find G two Patel behind them, including they made some great acquisitions in the security space over that time. Duo security was one, my, my, a lot of friends at Duo.

Uh, Splunk of course is another Splunk, they, they, they really playing up the Splunk aspect of it. Yeah, well, for good reason, they paid a lot of money for that. Um, but, you know, GG two was the man behind a lot of that stuff.

And so he is, I I, you know, I think of him as the number two guy there. Now it's Cisco. And, and, uh, I, I, I see this as, this has his fingerprints all over it because he still does have that vision of Cisco Silicon Valley's royalty, right?

Them in hp, where in many ways the royalty out there, well, besides you of course, John, but, um, you know, this is, this is, uh, I I think there's a great move on their part, You know, so you mentioned something, Alan, that I, I didn't, that I'm glad you did, um, that they were just known, I mean, fairly or not, is the company that acquired a bunch of other companies to try to play catch up. Um, they were, I wouldn't say, I would just say it's, it, it's just, it is just kind the, they, they get criticized for trying to do too much with too many products. But I think in this weird way, this may have, this may help them in this era right now.

Yeah. Well, they got a lot of, a lot of boats in the water. I, I'll tell you something though, John and Terry, you probably know this.

I, I'm, you know, I'm in cybersecurity 25, 30 years for the majority of that time. And it may still, well, I don't know today, but for the majority of that time, what vendor derived the most revenue from security, even before we called it cyber, when we called it InfoSec. What was the biggest security vendor in the world for probably 10, 15 years running during that time?

Cisco right there, firewalls said, were the firewalls, Terry, you know this. Yeah. And I actually was gonna say, you know, some of the things we've been talking about in recent weeks about AI and agent AI and, you know, and the, the security concerns, right?

The shadow ai, uh, you know, tools that, security tools in the hands of the bad guys. I mean, those are all valid. But, you know, Cisco's in a real position with their sort of security underpinnings to, to counter a lot of that and, uh, and mitigate, you know, some of those, those issues.

I mean, they do have a very strong security story. Uh, And this is before Duo and before Splunk, right? Exactly.

Before Splunk, all of that. Yeah. So they definitely, um, have sort of the source Infrastructure for source for that source fire.

Another one they bought. But Terry, you probably remember Sourcefire, Marty Rush. Um, So there's, so there's an aspect to this that I'd love to get Garima's opinion on.

'cause I'm torn on the one hand, everybody shows up and says, I have these AI agents and it's gonna make the technology more accessible. And you, you won't have to lean so much on specialists. And so, we'll, it's kind of part of this mass democratization of it.

And then the next breath you go talk to people, and especially the, some of the more senior folks who are actually are practitioners and they go, this stuff is awesome. I don't need any more of these junior kids around here. I got these AI agents that will just automate all this stuff for me.

And the, and they're going, you know, it's gonna benefit them more than it is the democratization of it. So, I mean, when you look at all this AI stuff, what's your reaction? I think software as a profession has always evolved, right?

So we as practitioners are up for that evolution. We do not want to do the toil work. So if somebody wants to automate this for us, that's great.

You know, we will, uh, we have a lot of other things to do. You know, quantum AI is coming and the AI stack is kind of producing a lot of work for, uh, the practitioners. But having said that, I think I also come back to the point which was being discussed with the Cisco, uh, you know, the, the new products, they're kind of, you know, uh, coming up with.

And what I am seeing is this new breed of AI data centers, right? And I'm not alone in this journey. So what we look at it from an enterprise perspective is that we want a tech stack that works end to end, right?

So, I mean, they can say that we don't have, we have Lego pieces, but I don't know if the industry is ready for the Lego pieces yet. We need the tech stack at full, at the data centers. So now what they're playing around with is AI infrastructure as a service, uh, components.

Like if you see, uh, the recent announcements they have made, like the infrastructure components, the security components geared towards the infrastructure side of it, right? So what I would like to see more from Cisco is like how they are partnering with platform guys, the application guys, you know, how do you make this as a neutral space? Because, you know, if you look at the geopolitics, it is very hard to kind of also scale this ecosystem beyond North America, right?

So if we don't make it a geo neutral, geopolitical neutral place, and how do we do that? You know, do we have consortiums? Do you have partnerships?

Do you have alliances, right? And how do you steer the talent pool? So there's some, you know, more work to be done in that area.

These Lego pieces are great. It's a great start, but I think there is more work needed to be done. And you know, Mike, to answer your question, I mean, um, for us as software practitioners, we probably look forward for that evolution of AI agents, but I think we also look forward for like GPU as a service or infrastructure, AI infrastructure as a service.

And we have to have a neutral space to play around with. Fair enough. Alright, let's take a break.

We're gonna come back and, uh, we have C blocks here. There's a, a new botnet out there. Bed box two oh, uh, wreaking havoc.

Terry will have some news hopefully for us on that. You're watching Textron Gang Join Cruise Con Virtual on June 17th in 2025 for breakthrough strategies to address advanced threat intelligence, proactive incident response, exclusive bonus material and regulatory adaptation. Hear from our keynote speaker, Admiral Michael S.

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It's meaner and darn right, nastier than ever. And it turns out that it's twofold. Uh, the FBI put out a warning saying that it bad box is a botnet that attacks, uh, a lot of senior devices, especially ones made in China.

And historically it was installed at the point of when those devices were made, but now it's being installed not only when they're made, but it can be downloaded too onto these platforms. And the FBI is saying it might be in as many as a million devices or more. So that would just mean, it's just about everywhere, Terry, we, we see a lot of threats over the years, and this one seems to, you know, be pervasive more so than any other.

But what's your take? This sort of emerged right, a couple of years ago, um, and the, the, uh, German authorities, uh, put the kibosh on it, but here it comes back again. That's not so unusual though, uh, when it comes to, um, um, threats.

I mean, we often see 'em come back, but this one is coming back, uh, you know, batter than it, than it was. Um, so they can, uh, the hackers can access the devices and networks, um, through Android devices. Um, and I, I think, you know, we're, I don't wanna say we've ever abandoned the idea of talking about, uh, the issues with, you know, IOT.

Um, it seemed like it was a hotter topic, uh, you know, a few years back and maybe is gaining some steam here. I'm actually working on a piece on maybe how zero trust could be the, the, you know, answer, uh, to this kind of stuff. But, um, yeah, it's, uh, now it's, it's, it's multiple groups that, um, have joined, uh, uh, forces here and bad bot.

And I think it's, you know, including like the sales tracker group, um, mo mo u is that, I guess that's how you pronounce it in the Lemon group. And they all have sort of different facets of this that, um, they're, uh, that they bring to the table. So yeah, it's, it's a comeback batter than than ever.

I'm, I'm glad to see the FBI doing something besides persecute trump's enemies. I'm surprised they had time for it, to be honest with you. So some, some intrepid, some intrepid agent decided to, you know, put the alarm out.

So, I don't know, I, I'm, I am getting a little paranoid about all this stuff, and I'm like, every time I leave my house to go log into something out there, I'm like, well, is this thing infested? And then of course, I think twice about it, and I go, well, my router at home's probably infested too. So, um, at what point, Alan, do we just kind of look at all this and throw up our hands and say, well, there's nothing to be done about it, and it's just the way life's gonna be.

So I, I, you know, I think that's what the bad guys want, want you to feel, right? And I think there was a time where the FBI and cisa and, and you know, these governmental agencies were trying, were, were making progress against that, the right software supply chains and SBOs, you know, but you got executive orders undoing recent executive orders as we discussed yesterday on the show. You know, it's every man, it's every man and woman for himself these days, guys.

Yeah. But I think there are two, uh, things to take, uh, away from this, right? So the first thing is that the DevOps professionals, uh, the boundaries are kind of, uh, also, uh, stretching a bit to hardware.

You know, it's not only at the software level, you, you kind of stop looking at it. So during manufacturing, you know, deployment, post-deployment, how security professionals can play an important role, right? And the second aspect is also user awareness, right?

You know, what is your app store hygiene? You know, are you downloading stuff without knowing, right? If you're doing a firmware upgrade, you know, as a user, I'm responsible and accountable, uh, to a certain extent to protect my devices, right?

So this, this is like, you know, um, an extension to how we look at security from different perspectives and different persona types, right? But, you know, I, I think a lot of security people or teams within organizations still don't know what they're dealing with. They don't know what, uh, technology you or I are using beyond, maybe they, you know, they know about our phones maybe, but do they know we have a toaster someplace that's, you know, talks, you know, pass this data through our network?

I mean, no. And that, how do you get a grip on on that? That's been the, the question for a really long time.

And, and I do wonder if, you know, there's some aspect of zero trust that that really can help hear the fact that you just don't trust anything. You know, I, I did give half a thought to, you know, going through my house and just getting rid of everything that was made in China, but I decided I didn't really wanna live in the stone Age anymore. So that, So you just, you just hit it right there, Mike.

Is that, is that why the F FBI's involved here? Is this the cast shade on anything made in China? Could, could, that could be a piece of it, no doubt.

Yeah, there are a lot of unbranded, unlabeled, uh, you know, hardware as well, which are questionable. And, you know, think about this as well, like, you know, when you're downloading firmware, I mean, from a manufacturing perspective, yes, if it is pre deployed from manufacturing, you know, and you probably can't do anything. So maybe from a user point of view, look at like the white ling or unbranded things, and then you also have to be careful about marketplace, right?

I mean, the hygiene of the marketplace is very important. You know, what kind of, uh, regulated marketplace you have, because there are malicious apps, uh, you know, every day, you know, we see that, right? There are backdoor entry points, uh, in every kind of, you know, uh, updates or firmware updates or any, any kind of, you know, um, software you are downloading from the global system, right?

Yeah. Well, I think the Chinese government requires anybody who makes anything in China, and they put a backdoor in it. So we just, you have to kind of assume that that's there.

I mean, Mike, where why are you spreading propaganda? Yeah. A again, though too, I mean, God, when you look at, of course, like, you know, I think things should be regulated or there need to be firmer controls.

But again, you know, in the rush to get things to market and the fact that people want devices and things that can, you know, take 'em out of the stone age, Mike, you know, and, and, and put them here in 2025. There's a, there's a lot of, um, if not pressure, there's a lot of encouragement to maybe not, uh, get these things secured before they hit the market still. And I, I don't know that that's gonna change.

You know, I would like to see some sort of effort regardless of where the devices are made that requires them to be, um, I guess something you can inspect to see what's in there and, and find that malware and maybe even mitigating yourself would, hopefully, without breaking the thing. But One, one person's malware is another person's remote controlled support, right? The last I checked, I think it was the US government that was trying to force Apple to build back doors into iOS.

So there, this, this knows no board is, I mean, when, when I was selling to the federal government in the nine oh, early two thousands, mid two thousands, the rumor was, don't you know, the federal government wouldn't buy checkpoint? 'cause the Moad had a backdoor nonsense. All nonsense.

Anyway, all right. Hey, I think that's gonna wrap our show for today. We're about outta time.

It's a great Thursday. I hope you've enjoyed it. As usual, we've got a lot of tech drunk TV immediately following this, so stay tuned for that.

But, uh, Garima, Terry, Mike and John, thanks for joining today. Thank you for watching this. Alan Shimel for Tech Drunk Gang.

We're out.