Transcript

[00:00:00.490] Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host here, Suit Longoria.

[00:00:08.850] Ned: Welcome to Tech. Shorts shorty Bites Bite tech shirt. You know we’ll workshop it. I’m Ned.

[00:00:15.890] Chris: Oh, I’m Chris.

[00:00:16.760] Ned: Hi. And this is a quick rundown of interesting stories that caught our eye with a little like commentary and lots of rashly formed opinions. Couple quick notes. This is a new format starting this week. You’re welcome. Our main story was all about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing kerfuffle. Go back and listen to that. It came out on Tuesday. Let’s start with our first story. Go ahead, Chris.

[00:00:39.390] Chris: AI fails at writing Gizmodo stories, because, of course it does. Gizmodo asked an AI model to generate new story about Star Wars. The results given back were nonsensical and hilarious. For example, one concept had Luke Skywalker fighting a giant space chicken, while another had Han Solo and Princess Leia getting married in a drive through. These things, as you may or may not have been aware, never happened in the Star Wars universe. Not even in the inexcusably, terrible new third one by J. J. Abrams that literally no one ever wants to talk about. Nor should they. The article also discusses the potential dangers of AI and how, intentionally or otherwise, things like this to create fake news or propaganda. Now, this is always entertaining territory. For example, AI. I asked AI to tell me about a Philadelphia restaurant that I know, and it’s called Lloyd, and it didn’t tell me about that. It told me all about a place in Old City that’s been there since 1954. Except it didn’t. It wasn’t, and it hasn’t. It even gave me a specific address. Upon googling that address, it turns out that the site is occupied by a goddamn Dunkin Donuts.

[00:02:09.210] Chris: Long story short, if you see an article by Gizmodobot, it’s probably best to go ahead and skip it.

[00:02:16.200] Ned: That’s fair. Although you did say the results about the Star Wars were nonsensical and hilarious, and I think that’s a pretty good description of the recent Star Wars content. In general, I would also pay money to see Luke Skywalker fight a giant space chicken.

[00:02:30.830] Chris: Took the words right out of my mouth.

[00:02:33.810] Ned: JumpCloud leaps into Action Identity as a service company, JumpCloud issued a notice on July 5 to all of its customers that their API keys had been invalidated out of, quote, an abundance of caution. That seems bad. Yes, bad. As of today, they have released to no additional details regarding what the incident was or how bad the impact could be. Resetting API keys can be extremely disruptive to organizations who use those keys in automation workflows. Since we don’t know the details, all we can do is speculate, which I will now do wildly and without regret. Invalidating API keys is a pretty serious action. The most recent example I can think of is when CircleCI did the same thing in January of this year after discovering that their credential vault had been hacked sometime in December of 2022. I suspect we’re dealing with a similar situation where the API keys were stored on an improperly secured system, and once leaked, the attacker would have permissions to do whatever those keys could do on customer instances. The real question is how long were the API keys vulnerable? If I were on the security team of any of JumpCloud’s customers, I’d be combing through logs looking for anomalous behavior and unfamiliar access to my Jump cloud instance.

[00:03:54.430] Ned: Hope you’ve got some good logging enabled.

[00:03:58.170] Chris: And it wasn’t covered by JumpCloud’s API.

[00:04:03.390] Ned: At least the access because API key invalidation.

[00:04:08.340] Chris: The hackers can’t get in if nobody can.

[00:04:12.130] Ned: The most secure computer is the one that’s not turned on and exploded.

[00:04:19.890] Chris: Facebook launches its Twitter clone, and apparently it’s super effective house 70 million subscribers after a long weekend edit in place, that number is now 100 million subscribers.

[00:04:32.690] Ned: Wow.

[00:04:35.210] Chris: The Facebook Twitter rival, called Threads has surpassed 1st 20, then 50, then 70, and now 100 million sign ups since launching last week. The app, like you would expect, allows users to share photos, videos, texts in a thread based format similar to Twitter. Threads is available, and a partner too. Products you might have heard of called Facebook and Instagram, and Meta is reportedly planning to release it as its own standalone app in the future. So far, the app seems to have been well received by users, not least because it’s not Twitter.

[00:05:18.310] Ned: It helps.

[00:05:19.680] Chris: I mean, it doesn’t hurt also that Facebook has approximately 70 zillion users. Just in general, overall, Threads seems like it’s a promising new social media app that has the potential to obliterate Twitter and Blue Sky and whatever nonsense bullshit drug addicted tech dude bros think is the next big thing.

[00:05:40.670] Ned: Sad.

[00:05:41.220] Chris: No comment whatsoever on how well the app will protect your privacy.

[00:05:45.050] Ned: However, Facebook Ours technica has a really good write up on what permissions the app requests when you install it on your phone. And as you can imagine, it wants fucking everything.

[00:06:02.370] Chris: Why do you want my mother’s maiden name?

[00:06:04.730] Ned: Why do you want my mother’s mother’s maiden name? That seems excessive. It’s pretty alarming. I’ll try to include a link in the description. I for 01:00 A.m. Holding off on Threads for at least a few weeks because I hate Meta and all things Facebook. IDC says Public Cloud is winning the race. No one’s shocked. The latest report on cloud spending from the IDC shows cloud infrastructure spending continues unabated despite recent economic turmoil, and that spending is primarily on public cloud providers and not private or colocated data centers. This runs contrary to a growing myth that cloud repatriation is happening in any significant way. Shared cloud, which is IDC’s term for public cloud. Shared cloud spending for Q One 2023 was $15.7 billion, up 22.5% over the previous year, while dedicated cloud, which is their fancy term for private cloud, was $5.8 billion, down 1.5%. The IDC is also forecasting general growth for infrastructure cloud spending across the board, with public cloud continuing to make up a growing share of the total spend from 40.7% in 2022 to 49.7% in 2027. Combined with noncloud spending, which is traditional data center infrastructure, public cloud and private non cloud should be equivalent by 2027.

[00:07:43.460] Ned: That means public cloud is going to be 111. O think in spending and traditional private cloud is going to be 101,000,000,000, which will be the first time the two are the same before public cloud probably continues to pull ahead. I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Amazon are very happy to hear IDC’s report.

[00:08:03.610] Chris: They’re not. Not happy.

[00:08:07.950] Ned: I’m hoping this is the final nail in the coffin regarding cloud repatriation. It’s 100% not happening.

[00:08:16.830] Chris: I’m sure it happens once or twice, right? In very unique and most likely circumstances where a cloud migration was so rushed that nothing ever worked, right? And they were like, just put it back and we’ll try again.

[00:08:28.790] Ned: Precisely. So I think it’s not that it never happens, it’s just not a significant thing. It’s not a trend that’s sweeping the nation, right? This isn’t the new dance, as it were.

[00:08:40.360] Chris: This is not on TikTok and never will be.

[00:08:44.400] Ned: That’ll do it for Thursday Techer Day. Tech newsday. Techer newsday now. We’ll see you next week with more Tech Garbage.