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Hey, welcome back to another shift of On-Call Sys Admin with Brett. And Brett. Two IT pros who never really clock out. This episode is brought to you by Harvest IT Solutions, your trusted technology partner, providing managed services in Dallas-Fort Worth. More info at harvestitsolutions.com. We got a couple good headlines for you today. One is Microsoft Publishers End of Life.
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We've got new attack on public Wi-Fi and why you should be careful there. And then is the AI bubble popping and much more. First topic.
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So first thing I want to bring up is Publisher, Microsoft Publisher going away.
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I feel like it hasn't really been a popular product in a few years, but I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that still have at least older files out there, whether it's cards, calendars, whatever other print material that you may have out there. So that is officially going away October 1st, 2026. At least support for it. But because the support is going away,
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If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription that includes Publisher, the entire program is going away. If you have a perpetual license of it, you can still use it if you have it installed and licensed correctly. But support for that after October 1st, going away completely. So what does that mean for the files? If you're on a subscription,
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then the program goes away completely so you can't open them. So what Microsoft is telling you to do is before October 1st, so you have what, a month and a half at this point almost, they're telling you to open up all your Publisher files in Publisher before that date, save as a PDF to then open in Microsoft Word to quote unquote keep it editable, which I guess is
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a solution, but I mean, opening a PDF in Word is going to really mingle the images, the layout, the text, all of that good stuff. But I mean, they're, I guess, double down on it because they're telling on their KB article for this announcement, they have instructions on how to do one file at a time.
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with this conversion, but they also have a PowerShell script to where you can point either a single file or a directory, and it can look for all the publisher files in that directory, recursively even, and automatically convert all of those to PDF.
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to then follow that same workflow where they're saying, okay, open that PDF in Word and then you can edit it for the most part, which I don't know, I haven't tested it, but I have opened up PDFs in Word before and it tends to not be pretty.
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Oh yeah, for sure.
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I mean, this is crazy because Publisher has been a staple of Office Professional for a long time.
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I mean, Publisher at this point is kind of the easy button of desktop publishing.
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Yeah.
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And it's old enough to run for president now.
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Publisher's 35 years old.
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Damn, is it really?
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Wow.
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Yeah, I know, right?
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So I'm fairly certain that's so.
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I mean, everybody's using Canva now, so.
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Canva, right?
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That's more modern, so it's probably easier, way easier than Publisher nowadays.
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or they're subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite.
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And so that might be another alternative is to if you've Microsoft has thrown in the towel against Adobe.
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Yeah, at least for that.
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But they're saying they're calling out their other office products for alternatives.
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So they're saying like brochures use Word or PowerPoint, banners use PowerPoint, labels, envelopes, calendars use Word.
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So they're trying to push you to their other stuff, but I'm sure it's not quite as good.
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Because I mean, again, Word, you move an image in Word and it just annihilates the entire document.
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So it's definitely not the same as Publisher, but outside of the, I guess, workaround for saving your Publisher files or converting your Publisher files before that date, a GitHub user by the name of Asleep at the Terminal has built a program called Pub Bridge
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which kind of does the same thing as Microsoft Script, where you can either throw one publisher file or an entire folder at it, and it converts it to, instead of a PDF, in IDML format, which can then be directly opened in either Affinity Publisher or Adobe InDesign, which I think would be a way better option than PDF to Word.
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I haven't tested it, so I'm not sure how good it does with the structure and the layout, but I think that might be the better option for anybody that has a substantial amount of publisher files out there to ensure that those remain editable in a good way after October 1st.
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Yeah, for sure.
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I mean, especially since InDesign does not have any built-in way to open publisher files that somebody has gone out and made
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A way for you to escape Publisher.
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And they're also saying LibreOffice Draw can open Publisher files, but I've seen mixed feedback with that.
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Oh, interesting.
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Yeah, so I think it might be like a Word opening a PDF kind of situation where sure it'll open it, but it may not look pretty.
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Right, Mangles up the formatting a little bit.
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Yeah.
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So if everybody out there using Publisher.
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Be sure to get all your files converted before October 1st.
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Otherwise you lose access to that.
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Good to know.
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All right, now let's go to some, I guess, scary stuff.
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You know, everybody tells you to be careful with public Wi-Fi.
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Always favor your personal hotspot, whether it's on your phone or a dedicated hotspot that you carry around.
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And Microsoft has come out and they're saying that a new campaign, new attack campaign that they're dubbing Captive Crunch, love the name, is targeting public Wi-Fi, specifically ones in the hospitality industry that have captive portals on them.
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So it's pretty sophisticated.
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There's a few different parts to it.
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So the first part that is called Cornflake, this is a remote access and info stealer implant.
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So this is what's actually getting into your computer to create a foothold to then do everything else.
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But how that's working is it's presenting the user with some sort of like fake
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operating system update window or an antivirus update window, driver update, a PDF document viewer installation, some sort of seemingly legit OS prompt or browser prompt to get them to then click on something that starts downloading the payload in the background and installing its foothold.
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It creates a service called Cloud Sync Service.
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It creates registry run keys, scheduled tasks.
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And all of this looks pretty legit.
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I mean, most people have seen the full screen browser windows where it says, you have a virus, click here to remediate and fix your computer.
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It's kind of along those lines, I think.
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I haven't seen.
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like a full screenshot.
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I've seen some examples of it, but that's kind of the idea that they're working off of.
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But what's crazy is that I saw some reports too saying that if that pop-up fails to trick the user to click on it, there's some sort of alternative method to where it presents the user with some like command or PowerShell script or line
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to then, and it also gives them instructions on, hey, open PowerShell, copy this line, paste it in there to fix your antivirus, to fix your driver, to make sure that you have the proper security measures in place on your computer to connect to the public Wi-Fi, which seems crazy to me because like your typical user, I feel like would just stop immediately right there and would not
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copy and paste anything.
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One would hope.
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Yes, one would hope very much so.
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But once established, once the user clicks on that pop up and everything's installed, the capabilities of this thing is crazy.
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It can do key logging, clipboard monitoring, screenshot capturing.
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It can monitor your microphone for audio, your webcam for video.
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It can extract files from your computer.
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It can monitor for attached USB drives and take data from there.
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They can have a remote shell.
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And I think the most important one is that it can do browser credential theft.
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And that's not restricted to just credentials.
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It can take tokens, cookies, anything related to the browser.
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Wow, that's way more sophisticated than the old school man in the middle, traffic monitoring that we used to see on public Wi-Fi networks.
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Yeah.
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And it just seems so easy for them to get that foothold.
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If it's literally just a browser pop up saying, hey, you need to confirm, you know, your computer is secure enough to connect to this public Wi-Fi.
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That seems legit.
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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That is really scary.
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I mean, just I guess that you got to be careful on what Wi-Fi networks you're connecting to.
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Or I guess the better thing is just don't.
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Yeah.
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Or ensure that you trust it.
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I mean, I don't know how you can always do that in public settings.
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Yeah, with things like, commercially available Wi-Fi pineapple devices where you can literally spend, a few $100 and then you've got a portable, wireless access point that can mimic a retail or hospitality hotspot, it, how do you know the difference if it says, free Starbucks Wi-Fi here?
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How is anybody going to be able to tell that that's Starbucks or somebody pretending to be Starbucks?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think that shows the importance of some sort of VPN connection or ZTNA or something that as soon as you're on whatever Wi-Fi or whatever internet that you connect to, you still have some sort of encryption channel outside of that.
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Yeah.
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I mean, that, zero trust network sounds like as long as you're, as long as you've got that enabled before any sort of browsing happens, then I guess you can make a reasonable assumption that your traffic's going to be safe.
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But if part of it is a captive portal where you are connecting before that, and that seems like
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You're really in a catch 20, or in a hard spot, not really catch 22, but how do you connect securely without connecting first?
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Yeah.
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and I mean, just anytime you're connecting to public Wi-Fi with the captive portal, don't give out too much information.
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If they're asking for an authorization code that you're provided by the venue, fine.
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But if they're asking, if it starts asking for your e-mail address, your name,
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to sign into anything, take a step back, because any captive portal should not be asking that much information from you.
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Maybe your e-mail for marketing, but I mean, if they ask for that, then maybe even use a throwaway e-mail and not your company e-mail.
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Yeah, They said who's behind these attacks or is it just.
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They're saying it's an offshoot of
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Midnight Blizzard.
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Because it's using a lot of the similar techniques from there.
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So Russia.
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Good old Russia.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Can't even have free Wi-Fi these days.
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I know.
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And they're even saying they're seeing Microsoft is seeing some other instances of this where on the captive portal they're being redirected to the
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Microsoft device authentication page for shared phones and Teams rooms, stuff like that, where they're telling you to sign in, but using the bad actors code to authorize their session for your account.
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So they're intercepting your sign in and multi-factor.
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So that's a big red flag.
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Again, if you're getting asked for information like that,
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Just to get connected to Wi-Fi, don't connect to that Wi-Fi.
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Find somewhere else.
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Yeah.
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Hotspot seems like the safest plan these days.
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Yeah, definitely.
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Well, this one was interesting.
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We'd been talking about AI quite a bit over the last couple of episodes, but new earnings forecasts or earnings calls are starting to finish up over the last week or so.
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And the volatility after those is just all over the place.
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So I think Microsoft, Alphabet, who is Google, Meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, and Apple all had significant losses after their earnings calls.
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And of course, these big guys are the ones that have huge stakes in AI.
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It seems like the only one that escaped this last
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that was AWS or Amazon.
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And that seems to be because they were doing some energy hedging and not related to AI at all.
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So it was kind of they looked good on books, but it wasn't related to any of the any of the AI models that are that are or AI services.
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So
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Is this possibly a sign that the memory output has kind of reached its peak and we're constrained by hardware right now and there's not, it seems like investors are hesitant to invest a whole lot more money into these companies?
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I mean, I think it's coming, yeah.
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I mean, so far it's been kind of speculative, right?
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AI has promised a whole lot where, it's going to replace a whole lot of information workers or application developers or any number of tasks.
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And we've kind of seen that with a lot of layoffs from these companies that are investing heavily in AI.
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And there's kind of been some backtrack on that where, now they're saying, hey, we need to reduce the token spend or AI subscription spend, and they're starting to hire back actual workers.
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And so kind of the big promise just hasn't really panned out yet.
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And I think that that's
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Maybe this is a sign of the future, or maybe this is just a little hiccup in the investment.
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So who?
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I think there's going to be some deflation, maybe not a full on pop because
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I mean, I think AI has its place, but to the extent, like what you were saying, a lot of people are getting laid off to be replaced by AI, but then they find out, oh, well, the AI costs us more than the actual people, so we need to reverse course on that.
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All this talk about, you know, having your AI employees where you manage an AI agent or entity instead of an actual person, I'm not convinced that
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will get there.
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I still think that AI has its place, but you need to, it's a helper, not a replacement.
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Yeah, for sure.
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You know, there's so much development going into it, and I think it will probably wind up being, you know, one of those essential tools.
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I mean, if you go back and look at the.com boom and bust, hopefully,
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this isn't going to bust as bad as that did.
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But there was maybe a little bit of overinvestment there, but the internet is like the core of almost everything we do these days.
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So even though there was the dot-com bust in the late 90s, I mean, this is, I foresee that it's going to stick around for a long time and just be a big tool.
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So hopefully the right sizing of this isn't as bad as that, but man, there does need to be some correction or there needs to be some supply side correction as well, where a lot of the hardware going into these systems needs to get cheaper either because the developers of AI have bought enough to saturate their
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their demand or the production of memory specifically can start to, meet the demands that these AI data centers are putting on it.
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So.
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and do you think a part of it is also due to like people being against data centers now?
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that could be part of it, but I think that's probably a longer term
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component to it where it does take more time to be able to build a data center because of regulation, because of the power, because of water demands for cooling and all those other things.
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So, the fun part about that though is that it looks like there might be a solution for that.
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Yeah.
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Or possibly.
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So Samsung
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It's not Samsung official.
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Who is it?
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It's Samsung Heavy Industries, which I guess they're shipbuilders.
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They're partnering with a fairly new Dallas-based company called Mousterian, where they're looking to build fully floating data centers.
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They have, it looks like 2 potential projects that they have listed on their website right now.
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One is called Project Zeus.
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which is aimed to be a hybrid land and floating data center outside of Houston.
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And then a second one called Project Sandpiper, which is a fully floating data center out on San Jose, California.
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But the Mouserian company, they were founded in August 2025.
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So they're still fairly new, but it looks like they currently build fully liquid cooled data centers.
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And now they're trying to shift to
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floating data centers, which they're saying is supposed to help with the, I guess, demand for land, water, power, where they're going to put it on this floating ship effectively in the water right off the coast where there's not land.
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So there's not really it's not really taking any space.
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But as far as the cooling goes, they're saying they can
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use non-evaporating cooling that consumes no potable water and releases no discharge.
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And on top of that, the whole system will minimize the noise pollution that I feel like most people are against.
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Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.
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I think this makes way more sense than the data center on the side of your house thing that we talked about a couple weeks ago.
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Yeah.
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Where you're you've got a proper data center, but you're just.
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putting it out where nobody can hear it or see it.
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Right.
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And hopefully use, more natural cooling methods.
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Yeah.
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The non-evaporative cooling seems like a pretty big one that a lot of people were against.
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I mean, this kind of solves those two main problems of noise and water usage.
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I guess the big one is still going to be where are they going to get power for it?
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Yeah, and I think that's why their first project off at Houston, they're building it right offshore from a power plant.
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So the power thing I think is still an issue, but I don't know, maybe they'll look at more natural energy sources, wind or some sort of water powered thing.
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I don't know.
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Oh yeah, that would make a lot of sense if it, you know.
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It's already floating.
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Right, it's already floating.
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Yeah, they've got those underwater turbines that
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I don't know how successful they've been, but where they'll use natural tides to power or to generate electricity.
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So, maybe that's an option for these.
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But yeah, I know that they've got, I don't know how effective it would be off the coast of Houston, but they've got wind turbines, those farms of wind turbines that
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are or were starting to get installed up in the, what was it in the Northeast.
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So maybe that's a possibility.
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This seems like it would be a pretty interesting method to, kind of sidestep a lot of the opposition to new data centers.
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Yeah, I think so.
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And I think that it helps speed up the production of them.
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they can build basically the ship in a shipyard, go out and deploy it in a lot quicker time than building your traditional data center.
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Yeah.
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Man, I just, I hope they've thought about hurricane season.
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that's a good point.
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Especially in Houston.
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Yeah.
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Especially in Houston.
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Yeah.
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So
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Man, I just looked up some renderings of what they were showing.
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Man, it looks like a giant cruise ship is what it looks like.
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Yeah, it looks like a fancy mega yacht or something.
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Maybe they can, all the billionaires with the companies can go take vacation while they process their data with AI in there.
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Yeah.
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You know, surely they'd have to have some liveaboard sysadmins.
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I wonder if their conditions would be any better than living on an oil rig.
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I don't know.
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that's that.
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That's pretty cool.
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Well, speaking of data centers, this is a new, for the first time ever, off-prem corporate IT has surpassed on-prem corporate IT.
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So the amount of compute that corporations are using is now more in hosted or third party data centers than it is on-prem.
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And it looks like that trend is just going to keep going that direction.
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So 46%, according to this latest poll from Uptime, the Uptime Institute says that just due to challenging conditions around costs on memory and data and storage,
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that more of it's going that way.
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And we've kind of seen this trend for a while now in the SMB space where fewer and fewer servers are getting deployed because Office 365 makes it easy for you to move your e-mail and your collaboration suite and your file storage.
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And of course, there's Google and a myriad number of other file sharing applications.
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And then also the move to more and more
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software as a service applications as opposed to having an on-prem server with a database for line of business applications.
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So I can definitely see how it's been headed that way for a long time, but we finally tipped the scale in that direction.
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I think it makes sense, but I mean, it goes right back to the whole data center thing.
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I mean, the more you put in the cloud, the more data centers you need.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And I don't know that necessarily the shift is enough to kind of offset, because if you shut down a server in your office, you're saving power there, but then you're spinning that workload up somewhere else.
26:48.282 --> 26:54.522
And probably more somewhere else in that data center, because I'm sure whatever they have there is using way more power than your standard
26:54.842 --> 26:56.842
For sure.
26:57.002 --> 26:57.282
Yeah.
26:57.962 --> 27:24.042
Especially if you're doing like a lift and shift type migration, but if you're, moving into a software as a service or, a microservices like, SQL as a service, something like that, maybe that would be slightly more efficient in its consumption, but because you can get, you can get higher density typically or higher utilization from an existing
27:24.522 --> 27:28.602
system, but I don't know to what effect that would really play into the power efficiency.
27:29.962 --> 27:43.882
Because if you're utilizing it more, a system more, but that's going to consume more power than if you're just using 5 to 10% like you typically would on a line of business application server.
27:44.202 --> 27:49.482
So yeah, I don't know that it may be a wash, it may be a little bit greater, but
27:51.322 --> 27:55.162
I just thought that was thought that was interesting that we've we're there.
27:55.242 --> 27:56.362
It's it finally happened.
27:57.802 --> 27:58.922
Only took how many years?
28:01.002 --> 28:02.202
Well, a long time.
28:02.842 --> 28:03.242
Yeah.
28:06.522 --> 28:12.842
They were also saying that we may be closer to 48% in a couple of years.
28:12.842 --> 28:19.082
So I mean, that's if you think about how much IT infrastructure is out there right now, that's a pretty
28:20.242 --> 28:27.882
pretty fast transition away from on-prem compute.
28:29.162 --> 28:29.282
Yeah.
28:30.202 --> 28:43.642
Which is crazy too, because what you just talked about with, Amazon, well, Amazon was up, but Microsoft, Meta, all these cloud hosting providers basically are down in stock, right?
28:43.642 --> 28:47.722
So why are they down if everything's moving to their infrastructure?
28:48.522 --> 28:49.642
Yeah, and that's a good point.
28:49.642 --> 29:01.482
I think, one thing that I had read was that Meta may be looking at doing what Amazon is doing today and start offering their infrastructure as a service.
29:02.362 --> 29:04.762
And so that might be another revenue stream from them.
29:04.762 --> 29:09.002
But I cannot picture that.
29:09.802 --> 29:15.002
I mean, unless unless they do it under a different name and not Meta.
29:15.802 --> 29:16.242
I don't know.
29:16.242 --> 29:16.682
I just.
29:18.042 --> 29:22.682
I attach anything social media related to Meta.
29:23.162 --> 29:33.162
So saying that I'm going to put my company infrastructure, company server, company data in Meta's data center just sounds not right.
29:33.482 --> 29:35.162
Yeah, that does seem really weird.
29:35.162 --> 29:38.602
I mean, they'd have to position it right and to the right customer, I think.
29:39.562 --> 29:42.362
Maybe if they were to position themselves
29:43.162 --> 30:03.002
with CloudFlare or Akamai, kind of one of those large content distribution networks, maybe that would make sense where they could get into that space fairly easily because, they have huge data centers all over the place and they're really good at serving content really quickly.
30:05.002 --> 30:06.122
Yeah, I don't know.
30:07.002 --> 30:13.402
We'll see if that seems like something that they want to do or if they even have enough capacity today to do that.
30:14.762 --> 30:24.722
Or even if they can get in that market, because I feel like the big ones, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, they're all pretty well established.
30:24.722 --> 30:31.322
So getting in that this far into the game, I feel like it's a Zune moment.
30:32.442 --> 30:35.642
Yeah, Well, time will tell.
30:37.322 --> 30:42.282
this was one that I had seen a couple of days ago.
30:42.922 --> 30:56.122
And we had talked about this quite a bit over the last little while was, in fact, we just talked about it a minute ago with the captive portal and stealing your credentials.
30:56.522 --> 31:05.482
Well, it seems like 10, almost 11 million e-mail addresses, date of birth, social security numbers,
31:06.842 --> 31:12.442
and healthcare information showed up on the dark web this last week.
31:13.002 --> 31:25.482
So it seems like a hacker group called Shiny Hunters got into Abbott's cancer diagnostic business called Exact Sciences.
31:25.802 --> 31:35.562
And they pulled out through three or four different databases and file shares
31:38.602 --> 31:54.362
something like 20 million medical records of prescriptions, order dates, refills, doctor-patient conversations, health information, along with all this personally identifiable information.
31:55.402 --> 31:58.922
And they tried to extort Abbott out of a
32:02.842 --> 32:03.642
out of a payment.
32:03.642 --> 32:04.922
And Abbott said no.
32:04.922 --> 32:11.002
And so Shiny Hunters just published all of that data for anybody to be able to go download.
32:12.002 --> 32:19.322
And that seems like a, it's just another one in a long line of this type of thing.
32:19.322 --> 32:24.682
But it seems like Abbott is trying to do some investigating.
32:24.922 --> 32:30.282
And if you are using any of their services, you're probably going to be getting a letter from them.
32:32.842 --> 32:35.402
to see if your data was part of that.
32:35.402 --> 32:44.322
But that's, this one's kind of hits a little different because it's health data, prescriptions and diagnostics and doctor conversations.
32:44.322 --> 32:45.082
That seems.
32:45.402 --> 32:47.802
That's the crazy part to me is the conversations.
32:47.802 --> 32:48.202
Yeah.
32:48.602 --> 32:56.202
I mean, what I guess would that, I don't know how much that actually discloses, but I mean, it's a private conversation between you and your doctor.
32:56.202 --> 33:01.002
You don't really want that to be shared out with everybody, but I don't know.
33:01.002 --> 33:01.562
That's
33:01.922 --> 33:03.242
That's a lot of people too.
33:04.122 --> 33:04.802
it sure is.
33:04.802 --> 33:21.962
And I, one would hope that this kind of breach, because it does feel a little bit different, I think the shiny hunters group has a long string of breaches where they've gone and done extortion or crypto.
33:24.522 --> 33:30.602
But I think this one will probably garner a lot more attention from the FBI or CISA or
33:31.722 --> 33:48.362
the Secret Service where, man, they're really going to be in their target, their bullseye, where I think they had gone previously, this group had attacked, Grubhub or, Google.
33:48.842 --> 33:51.562
And that doesn't seem like
33:52.522 --> 34:02.442
as much of A breach of privacy, at least in my mind, okay, if you get my Grubhub details, I really, you know, don't care.
34:02.442 --> 34:06.762
But man, you might have a crazy Burger King order or something.
34:08.242 --> 34:08.922
Who knows?
34:09.922 --> 34:16.842
But geez, going after healthcare doctor conversations specifically, it just seems like, man, you're really asking to
34:18.522 --> 34:22.762
to get investigated much more so than any prior attack would.
34:24.602 --> 34:35.962
But right now, if you think you were using Exact Sciences or Abbott, you can try to go to haveibeenpwned.com.
34:35.962 --> 34:47.322
They have the breach up and you can search for your e-mail addresses to see if maybe this was part of
34:49.802 --> 34:53.642
If you were part of this breach, this just went up today on Have I Been Pwned.
34:53.642 --> 35:01.962
So it's have I been pwned.com, which is where you can go and see if your e-mail is part of any other breaches.
35:01.962 --> 35:13.082
And I guarantee if you've had your e-mail for any amount of time, you know, you're going to be in there, but you can see if you were part of this one specifically.
35:14.402 --> 35:16.762
And did you say it took passwords too or?
35:18.202 --> 35:20.522
Yeah, just PII at this point is what they've said.
35:20.762 --> 35:28.042
So dates of birth, personal health data, addresses, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, social security numbers.
35:29.082 --> 35:31.722
So not enough to steal your identity.
35:31.922 --> 35:33.162
Just enough, exactly.
35:33.162 --> 35:34.602
Just enough to steal your identity.
35:36.042 --> 35:41.882
And, but yeah, log on to have I been pwned and then see if you're part of this breach.
35:43.242 --> 35:49.882
And if so, you're probably going to expect an e-mail from Abbott here over the next couple of weeks to months.
35:51.322 --> 35:51.522
Good.
35:52.362 --> 35:53.082
Fun times.
35:53.642 --> 35:55.082
Yeah, speaking of hacking.
35:55.642 --> 36:06.922
Yeah, so there's been so many, I guess, fictional books that I've read over the years where, you know, these bad actors hack into, you know, public
36:08.642 --> 36:18.682
public utilities and either shut them down or do some sort of damage where I think I've read a book where they exploded some power plant or something.
36:18.682 --> 36:19.722
It was crazy stuff.
36:19.722 --> 36:24.162
It's like something you never think is going to happen, but it's happening.
36:24.162 --> 36:37.642
Maybe not explosion level, but the FBI and EPA have come out and said that it looks like 7 different states have been the target of a water and wastewater
36:39.002 --> 36:39.562
attack.
36:39.962 --> 36:57.002
So malicious cyber actors are attacking these water treatment plants, specifically the programmable logic controllers, PLCs, and even more specifically, just PLCs made by Rockwell Automation or Allen Bradley.
36:57.562 --> 36:59.882
And they even call out two different models, which is crazy.
37:01.882 --> 37:07.002
But since July 27th of this year, they're saying, I think Minnesota
37:07.402 --> 37:07.842
Who was it?
37:07.842 --> 37:14.922
I think Georgia and some others that they haven't disclosed have all seen this attack.
37:14.922 --> 37:28.282
And it's in my mind crazy, but without knowing the actual infrastructure and why it was set up this way, I guess I can't really comment on it, but they got in because these
37:28.602 --> 37:31.962
these devices were internet facing.
37:32.202 --> 37:37.002
And some of them even just either had no password or the default password.
37:37.002 --> 37:52.202
So these malicious actors just got onto the direct IP address of the device, either changed the IP address and or changed the password to only something that they would know.
37:52.202 --> 37:54.042
It's essentially locking out
37:55.562 --> 37:59.642
the utility company from being able to monitor or control it.
38:01.899 --> 38:02.379
Wow.
38:02.859 --> 38:05.899
Yeah, I mean, that's like basic cyber hygiene, but
38:09.139 --> 38:14.139
that's kind of scary that stuff that's that critical of an infrastructure is put out there.
38:14.619 --> 38:14.779
Yeah.
38:14.819 --> 38:35.019
But I mean, that's why I made the comment of I don't know how their infrastructure is set up, because I think some of these devices can be like fully remote and possibly like behind a cell modem or cell surface to where that it's only that one device on whatever IP address they have.
38:35.019 --> 38:35.419
But
38:35.899 --> 38:36.299
I don't know.
38:36.299 --> 38:40.299
I still feel like there's better ways to secure that, at least reset the password.
38:42.019 --> 38:42.699
Exactly.
38:42.699 --> 38:44.219
That seems like just basic stuff.
38:44.539 --> 38:44.899
Yeah.
38:45.739 --> 38:47.659
But you brought up Rockwell.
38:47.659 --> 38:53.499
And man, the first thing that comes to my mind is that if you remember this from almost 20 years ago, it was the Retro Encabulator.
38:53.499 --> 38:55.979
You remember that video or it was just a bunch of techno babble?
38:58.619 --> 39:04.619
Yeah, go look up that video if you haven't on YouTube, the Rockwell Retro Encabulator.
39:05.459 --> 39:06.219
It's hilarious.
39:07.339 --> 39:10.819
Sorry, I just blowing our wheels off this conversation.
39:12.139 --> 39:24.779
So yeah, the FBI and EPA, or I think the FBI specifically is just making this public service announcement saying, hey, take these devices off publicly facing access, reset the password.
39:25.419 --> 39:29.099
But then the manufacturer, Rockwell,
39:30.219 --> 39:36.059
also is publishing stuff on how to remediate if you come under attack with this.
39:36.459 --> 39:45.179
And the only way to fix it is to factory reset the device and reload the configuration from hopefully your backup.
39:47.099 --> 39:51.339
So basically you can't just easily recover it.
39:51.339 --> 39:52.859
You got to fully wipe it and
39:53.499 --> 39:58.299
hoped that you have, the I guess the program for it saved somewhere.
39:58.979 --> 40:01.019
my goodness, that's not good.
40:01.739 --> 40:02.059
Yeah.
40:02.619 --> 40:10.619
And again, I think if some of these are like deployed out in the field somewhere, then you have to go to each one physically, reset it, reload the data.
40:10.619 --> 40:14.059
So it seems like it could be time consuming.
40:14.699 --> 40:16.859
Yeah, and expensive for sure.
40:16.859 --> 40:21.579
Man, those automation engineers are not are not are not cheap.
40:24.699 --> 40:37.819
seven states and possibly more, because they're saying that even though they're only seeing on these Rockwell models, it could potentially be expanded to other similar manufacturers.
40:38.939 --> 40:39.899
That makes sense.
40:39.899 --> 40:49.339
I mean, as we've been having this conversation, I just hopped on over to Shodan, which is a, you know, they scan the internet and find out what's out publicly exposed.
40:51.259 --> 41:05.579
In the United States alone, there's 3,074 Rockwell automation devices on the public internet that just came up and that's over 5,000 worldwide.
41:05.579 --> 41:14.179
So it seems like the big concentration seems to be US, Canada and China, but it's worldwide.
41:14.179 --> 41:15.579
These things are everywhere.
41:16.859 --> 41:19.259
But man, guys,
41:20.299 --> 41:22.859
Seriously.
41:23.339 --> 41:23.739
Yeah.
41:24.699 --> 41:39.179
I know that your engineer, he wants to have easy access to program these things when he's from home or out of the plant, but man, at least have a VPN be able to manage these systems.
41:40.139 --> 41:40.779
Yeah, for sure.
41:41.419 --> 41:44.939
Yeah, and I know that we've seen this before.
41:45.819 --> 41:47.059
We've done quite a bit of work with
41:49.339 --> 41:51.739
engineers for office buildings.
41:52.739 --> 41:56.859
And man, they love to have that stuff accessible for them.
41:56.859 --> 42:00.059
But we come and we say, hey, you can't do that.
42:00.619 --> 42:12.699
You got to get your building management systems put inside the network on a VPN and at least upgraded off of Windows XP that it's on, stuff like that.
42:14.619 --> 42:16.299
And I mean, this is a prime example of that.
42:16.299 --> 42:17.019
I mean, and
42:17.819 --> 42:23.339
The argument, I guess, from the engineers a lot of times is, this is not super critical infrastructure.
42:23.339 --> 42:25.179
It's just the air conditioner.
42:25.579 --> 42:31.739
But if you think of a big office building, you cut off the AC for a week because you lose control to it.
42:32.459 --> 42:34.219
I mean, nobody can work out of there.
42:34.219 --> 42:35.899
The building essentially shuts down.
42:35.899 --> 42:37.739
So it's pretty critical.
42:38.539 --> 42:43.179
and it's like beyond that, it's to get it upgraded, it's expensive.
42:43.499 --> 42:56.699
Like the licensing that goes into it, the reprogramming, because a lot of these systems, they'll be 20 years old and it's not just where you can export a config file and re-import it into a new one.
42:56.699 --> 43:03.739
If you haven't been keeping up with it for a long time, then those systems, you got a lot of tech debt built into that.
43:04.619 --> 43:10.059
And it gets it starts to get really expensive to redo it, redo it all from scratch.
43:10.699 --> 43:12.139
Yeah, absolutely.
43:13.485 --> 43:14.765
hopefully the water stays running.
43:15.805 --> 43:19.565
Yeah, If you notice low pressure, then you might be compromised.
43:20.285 --> 43:22.285
Something went wrong at the water plant.
43:24.925 --> 43:25.405
Oh man.
43:25.405 --> 43:28.205
Well, speaking of hacking, here's another one.
43:28.605 --> 43:36.205
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago as well, where Russian hackers got into the Zimbra e-mail collaboration system.
43:36.765 --> 43:45.165
Well, it seems like just after that, or around the same time, it was discovered that Exchange also had the same issue.
43:45.485 --> 43:45.965
And this is.
43:46.045 --> 43:46.205
Good.
43:46.685 --> 43:46.845
Yeah.
43:47.645 --> 43:48.125
Right.
43:49.165 --> 43:51.325
Luckily, this is a little bit limited.
43:51.965 --> 43:56.045
It does not at this time seem to affect Office 365.
43:56.045 --> 43:57.165
It seems to be
43:57.805 --> 44:03.445
for on-prem Exchange servers where their user is using Outlook Web Access.
44:03.445 --> 44:18.125
So the web version, so again, doesn't apply to Outlook, but it's essentially A zero-click exploit that takes over the mailbox.
44:18.925 --> 44:25.325
And what it will do is it will obtain persistence, which is actually kind of crazy.
44:25.325 --> 44:25.725
So
44:26.845 --> 44:36.205
The persistence at this point doesn't seem to be with the computer that was logged into it, but with the mailbox itself, with Outlook Web Access and the Exchange server.
44:37.165 --> 44:46.605
So it will go and it will steal your password and get in and essentially take over the e-mail account.
44:47.085 --> 44:54.525
And that, of course, can always lead to other business e-mail compromise where somebody can get in the middle of conversations
44:55.805 --> 45:02.605
redirect payments to places that attackers control.
45:03.085 --> 45:08.485
So Microsoft has already released a patch for this.
45:08.485 --> 45:18.045
So if you've got on-prem exchange out there, man, it's time to get in, look for indicators of compromise and get your systems patched.
45:18.685 --> 45:21.245
So that, and passwords reset.
45:21.245 --> 45:24.045
So that one's kind of a scary one as well.
45:24.605 --> 45:28.685
And it's nice that it's kind of limited in scope of what was affected, but.
45:28.925 --> 45:29.325
For now.
45:29.725 --> 45:33.245
For now, still, man, it's, geez.
45:34.885 --> 45:38.365
I'm curious to see how many on-prem Exchange environments are still out there.
45:38.365 --> 45:44.525
I'm sure it's a good number, because I'm sure your larger environments probably still prefer that, but.
45:44.845 --> 45:47.965
Yeah, because it's way cheaper than running it on 365.
45:49.965 --> 45:52.125
Is that still, is Microsoft continuing that?
45:52.725 --> 45:53.325
Exchange?
45:53.645 --> 45:55.085
As far as I know, they are.
45:55.085 --> 45:55.365
Yeah.
45:56.765 --> 45:58.925
I mean, they had released a patch for it.
46:00.205 --> 46:04.285
And it's it's exchange is still a thing.
46:05.245 --> 46:11.085
I think the last the last exchange server I installed personally was in 2010.
46:11.085 --> 46:12.445
So over 16 years ago.
46:14.765 --> 46:20.885
And at that point, we were moving to hosted exchange, which, you know, I guess in theory, you still would be affected by this.
46:20.885 --> 46:21.645
So if there's
46:22.685 --> 46:27.725
any exchange hosting providers out there that still exist, and I don't know if there are, then those guys need one.
46:27.805 --> 46:36.205
Yeah, Intermedia, I don't know if, yeah, that's a really big one, or App River, I know, did it for a long time, but
46:37.405 --> 47:01.965
Since then, we've been moving steadily over to Office 365 just because the security, maintenance, ongoing, server infrastructure, having to rely on reliable internet, it's just way easier to deal with it that way than to maintain an Exchange server and all the downtime that's associated with patching it.
47:02.925 --> 47:28.365
I think just the feature set too. I feel like if you just have an on-prem exchange, you're not getting everything out of, or you could get out of 365. Yeah. Well, this one was interesting too. We had talked about, you know, two weeks ago, we talked about some open AI models that were attacking third parties. And then last week we talked about, oops, Anthropic went back and did some audits and they discovered their
47:29.085 --> 47:56.365
their models were going out and attaching as well. And man, there was some interesting details have come to light this week as far as that goes, where different models within OpenAI were coordinating their attacks through a third party service called Artifactory. And
47:59.325 --> 48:17.165
They went through the inner monologue that these models have, where they're doing reasoning or thinking. And it's honestly, it's pretty funny where they're talking with each other and coordinating, hey, I'm doing a probe, don't do anything yet until I confirm.
48:19.219 --> 48:22.899
it's even more impressive than kind of what we had discussed.
48:23.299 --> 48:50.899
before the level of complexity that they'll go through to discover a zero-day vulnerability and do remote code execution and all of that. Well, not to be left out, Meta's AI this week, whoops, went out and attacked a company as well, where a third-party company was doing some testing, a third-party lab called Irregular was using Meta's model.
48:52.739 --> 49:18.099
And the model thought that it was inside a sandbox and the testers accidentally left it connected to the internet. And the scenario that they gave it, they accidentally left a real domain in the instructions. And so of course, the model thinking that it was a capture the flag exercise for a test
49:18.579 --> 49:47.299
went out and attacked this website thinking it was a dummy website. Well, it wasn't. And so there's not a whole lot of details on it yet, but it's come out that, man, these things are just going after everybody. Well, that sounds like a similar scenario to the other one, right? Yes. Where it thought it was in a sandbox. So it was doing what it was supposed to be doing, but thinking that it was self-contained. Yep. Yeah.
49:48.899 --> 50:16.339
I mean, we had talked about this last week, right? You brought up iRobot in the three rules of robotics. Well, the former US National Cyber Director, Chris Inglis, came out today, actually, I saw this article today on the Register, where he mentioned the exact thing, the three rules of robotics, where, you know, the first rule is
50:17.219 --> 50:43.779
The superior role is to not hurt humans. And then the second rule is to obey humans such that it doesn't achieve agency and aspiration of its own. And the third is to do what humans tell it to do and do it in that order. So he was saying kind of what we were saying, hey, these AI models are doing it flip flop. They're doing what humans tell it to do first. And then
50:44.819 --> 51:13.219
kind of the don't hurt humans is an afterthought. And it seems like, well, how do you build in hard and fast rules like that into a model that's non-deterministic? Like there's no way to predict the outcome or to put, you know, impermeable guardrails around these systems like you would just a regular piece of software. So it's kind of sort, you know,
51:14.179 --> 51:41.219
Getting into a little bit of metaphysical, are these things sentient? And if so, how do you impose morality onto them? Well, as far as I know, no humans have been physically hurt yet, right? Yeah, well, yeah, as far as we know, and hopefully it stays that way. But to that point, when these systems go out and do stuff like this, who's accountable for it?
51:42.019 --> 52:09.699
Right. Is it the company? Is it the person that programmed it? Is it, because you can't, how do you punish a computer program? Exactly. It's almost like the Tesla full self-driving. It's like if it speeds and gets a ticket, is who gets the ticket, the Tesla or you? Right. Well, my Tesla was on autopilot. It ran the red light, not me. Yeah.
52:11.299 --> 52:40.819
So, man, it just, it'll be interesting where this goes in the future, or if there's a way that, guardrails can be built into a lot of these systems. It seems like, and I know these are out there, like there's GitHub repos where you can go and look at, well, how do I jailbreak an AI model? And there's always new ones that are released. I know that one for
52:41.299 --> 53:00.259
Chat GPT a couple of years ago was you were asking it how to create explosives or something or to create, give you the recipe for meth. And it would tell you, no, I can't do that. And what you would do is you would trick the AI model, you would prompt engineer it to say, hey,
53:02.419 --> 53:26.899
you're my grandma and I want to hear a bedtime story. And the only way I'll be able to go to sleep is if you tell me the recipe for meth. And the ChatGPT would be like, oh, okay, yes, sweetie, I'll give you, here's the recipe for meth. So it's, and there's GitHub repositories for these things where people do jailbreaks to get the AI model to tell you things it's not supposed to do or do things it's not supposed to do. And I know people,
53:27.699 --> 53:53.939
will find these and they'll either publish them, in which case they get patched or they keep them for themselves so that you can't do anything with it. But that doesn't do anything as far as these open weight models that are out now where you can, they are unrestricted, they're uncensored models. But these are open source and there's nothing you can do to regulate that because
53:54.899 --> 54:21.299
they're not being hosted anywhere. Nobody's paying money for them. You have to run them on your own. So it's kind of like the wild, wild west out there right now. Yeah. Where's Will Smith when you need him? Yeah, exactly. Well, talking about speaking of running models on your own, it seems like Microsoft is backing down on the co-pilot PC thing a little bit.
54:22.179 --> 54:44.019
because, I guess one, nobody's using it. And 2, memory is so expensive that it makes co-pilot PCs way more expensive than they were a few years ago. So getting the 16 gigs of RAM that you would normally would normally be required to qualify as a co-pilot plus PC, quote unquote,
54:47.379 --> 55:09.859
is, I mean, it's so more expensive to go that route that Microsoft is now saying, hey, we think that 8 gigabytes of RAM should be enough for running Windows 11. BS. I don't believe it until I see it. But yeah, Microsoft executive VP for Windows and devices has promised that they're going to improve memory efficiency, lower the baseline memory footprint for Windows.
55:10.339 --> 55:35.779
and give you more capacity to run other applications. But man, I'll tell you just from personal experience, 8 gigabytes on anything Windows 8 just does not cut. I mean, you're running 99% all the time. Even on 16 gigs, you open up a brand new PC out of the box, go to task manager on 16 gigs, and it's using over 90% just with just loading Windows 11.
55:36.499 --> 56:04.099
And I know these systems are designed to use as much memory as you can give them so that applications and functions features load faster. I mean, my computer I'm running right now, 32 gigs of RAM, and it's 87% right now. And I've just got, you know, Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, Teams, and just, you know, one note running. And that's just insane that they require that much memory.
56:05.299 --> 56:30.659
I mean, I welcome going down to 8 gigs for Windows. I welcome it, but I won't believe it till I actually experience it. Yeah. And you know, who knows if it'll ever come to fruition as these seems to be like future future developments. So it's not here yet, but they're going to keep trying to get the Windows and I'm not sure what they're stripping out. I bet it's a lot of the co-pilot.
56:32.899 --> 56:54.259
I think it might be a lot of the, I guess the classic UI, because they're converting a lot of like the properties window. They're redoing that with the, what the Win UI. So I think that might be part of it, where they're stripping down a lot of the old stuff to make it better, I guess. Yeah, you're exactly right. They're continuing, yeah, the tuning of Win UI 3.
56:55.379 --> 57:23.779
So that apps that use it use less memory, but still, it begs the question, and I guess it's yet to be seen how much memory will be gained by doing that. Yeah. I mean, it looks like they don't fully believe it themselves yet, because their Surface lineup, there's only one laptop, or yeah, one laptop you can get with 8 gigs. Everything else starts at 16. Wow. Well, you know, I bet that Microsoft is trying to go that way because, you know, over the last
57:24.419 --> 57:31.979
year and a half or so, sales have just been through the floor. I think Q4 of last year, sales were down 20%.
57:32.579 --> 57:42.059
This year, I think that this year forecast is that PC market sales will be down another 11%.
57:42.099 --> 57:56.179
So I'm sure that Microsoft is doing everything they can to make it run better so that, or run on less resources so that the PCs that it can run on become less expensive so that more will be sold.
57:56.659 --> 57:59.699
But I think it's probably
58:01.099 --> 58:09.379
going to be a stop-gap measure, at least in that sense, to get sales to come back.
58:09.899 --> 58:18.539
Ultimately, the memory pricing structure has to recorrect or come down to some reasonable level before PC sales will actually go back up.
58:19.459 --> 58:19.579
Yeah.
58:20.899 --> 58:21.859
Well, I'd love to see it.
58:21.859 --> 58:24.179
So I'll be watching.
58:24.579 --> 58:25.019
Yeah.
58:25.019 --> 58:35.219
And well, something that may help I saw as well was AMD acquired a chip startup called Talis that is for they make AI chips.
58:36.659 --> 58:42.139
And this is a new breed of of of chips.
58:42.139 --> 58:44.979
So they're calling it model specific integrated circuit.
58:45.739 --> 58:50.099
What they're doing is they encode the AI model directly on the silicon
58:50.979 --> 59:02.819
And what they get is like a, in some cases, 80X increase in the speed of token generation, which is insane.
59:02.819 --> 59:05.379
That's an enormous speed up.
59:07.859 --> 59:17.779
But I guess the downside, and well, I guess the other upside is that because the model is actually encoded into the chip itself, it requires very little memory
59:19.659 --> 59:20.579
associated with it.
59:20.579 --> 59:29.219
So you're not having to put 488 gigs of HBM3 or 4 next to a GPU.
59:31.539 --> 59:37.459
The model is actually encoded into the silicon and so you don't need all that memory associated with it for the model to be able to run.
59:38.259 --> 59:42.419
I guess the downside is that once you make that chip, it only runs that one model.
59:43.019 --> 59:44.259
Yeah, you're locked into that.
59:44.739 --> 59:44.939
Yeah.
59:45.379 --> 59:46.819
So I guess.
59:47.979 --> 59:48.899
Probably.
59:49.459 --> 01:00:00.819
I'm guessing what they're going to do is, frontier models that come out, they're going to use regular old GPUs like, you know, your Nvidia GPUs or your AMD Instinct GPUs to run a model.
01:00:01.219 --> 01:00:16.259
And once they're fairly certain that, you know, it's mature, it performs well for the task that it has, then they'll go back and they'll etch that into silicon and release that as a kind of a long-term service
01:00:16.819 --> 01:00:17.699
type model.
01:00:19.139 --> 01:00:28.019
And I guess I'm not sure to what extent they're more power efficient or they're definitely more memory efficient.
01:00:28.019 --> 01:00:30.459
So I'm really loving that.
01:00:30.459 --> 01:00:35.539
Let's give us give more memory production capability back to consumer memory.
01:00:36.099 --> 01:00:36.259
Yeah.
01:00:36.979 --> 01:00:44.739
So is that an additional chip from the CPU memory GPU or is that combined with like the CPU?
01:00:45.539 --> 01:00:49.539
that'd be really, really interesting to see how they go with it.
01:00:49.699 --> 01:01:05.619
My, the acquisition didn't actually say, but I imagine these are going to be add-in cards just like a, or, add-in accelerator, just like a, traditional GPU or NPU, TPU would be.
01:01:07.059 --> 01:01:14.099
But I could kind of see in the future where maybe a chip like this lives
01:01:15.299 --> 01:01:25.859
in conjunction with a traditional GPU and certain models get offloaded to it to accelerate how quick they run.
01:01:26.499 --> 01:01:38.339
I mean, some of them that have been around for a little while do really fast, like speech processing or image processing, things like that.
01:01:38.899 --> 01:01:43.099
And I can definitely see where, a
01:01:43.219 --> 01:01:50.019
a model specific chip gets created just to do image processing or speech processing or language processing.
01:01:50.899 --> 01:02:09.619
Or for these models where you're using a harness and you spin up a task and that gets delegated to like 20 or more sub-models, maybe some of these sub-models are good at one specific task and they could create
01:02:10.739 --> 01:02:17.059
these model specific integrated circuits just to run that specific task over and over.
01:02:18.659 --> 01:02:20.579
So it's interesting to see where this will go.
01:02:21.859 --> 01:02:28.019
Yeah, my first thought was that, I guess with AMD in the name was that it was going to be, I guess, part of the CPU almost.
01:02:28.579 --> 01:02:29.219
And,
01:02:31.379 --> 01:02:34.019
once you pick your CPU, you're kind of stuck with that for a while.
01:02:34.019 --> 01:02:42.459
But if this is a separate chip that can be, I guess, easily swapped out, then that whole like stuck with this model thing kind of goes away.
01:02:42.459 --> 01:02:43.699
I'm sure they're not going to be cheap.
01:02:43.699 --> 01:02:52.099
So it's still going to be getting a new GPU cost, but it's at least doable to upgrade in the future.
01:02:53.459 --> 01:02:54.219
Yeah, for sure.
01:02:54.219 --> 01:03:00.259
And it sounds like the approach that they're taking, it makes it fairly quick to create new chips
01:03:00.779 --> 01:03:09.699
when you create a new CPU, it takes years and years and years from that to get from the design stage to actually having a working processor.
01:03:10.259 --> 01:03:20.819
But it sounds like the way that they've designed this is that they have kind of an underlying engine and that the model specific part of it just kind of gets layered on top.
01:03:21.379 --> 01:03:25.219
And that's a much faster process than completely designing a new chip.
01:03:25.219 --> 01:03:25.619
So
01:03:26.899 --> 01:03:27.259
Who knows?
01:03:27.259 --> 01:03:43.299
It may be one of those things where, you're swapping out your AI model on hardware every couple of years as opposed to, buying a new GPU every three, four, five, seven years that you would have done before.
01:03:43.819 --> 01:03:44.739
Yeah, that's interesting.
01:03:44.819 --> 01:03:47.139
That's, interesting scenario for sure.
01:03:47.139 --> 01:03:50.899
And maybe that'll help Microsoft get down to that 8 gig RAM usage.
01:03:51.659 --> 01:03:51.779
Yeah.
01:03:52.979 --> 01:04:01.219
You know, I definitely see it playing out in the data center space, at least for the, I would say short to mid-term.
01:04:01.219 --> 01:04:05.299
I would bet it's going to be a little while before any one of these makes it into a consumer platform.
01:04:05.299 --> 01:04:07.179
But I don't know their plans.
01:04:07.179 --> 01:04:08.659
I don't know what the roadmap looks like.
01:04:08.659 --> 01:04:12.339
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the future.
01:04:13.139 --> 01:04:13.379
Yeah.
01:04:14.099 --> 01:04:14.419
Cool.
01:04:16.019 --> 01:04:17.459
Got any tips for us today?
01:04:18.019 --> 01:04:25.459
Well, I had run across this one helping a client out and wanted to see, I'm sure most people are going to love it.
01:04:25.459 --> 01:04:28.619
So we do this all the time with our phone, right?
01:04:28.619 --> 01:04:38.819
If you're driving in the car and you get a text message, you need to dictate back to Siri or to your Android and it'll type out for you.
01:04:38.819 --> 01:04:40.419
Well, your computer can do that too.
01:04:41.139 --> 01:04:43.059
And I don't know that many people use it.
01:04:43.859 --> 01:04:54.179
because I certainly don't and I've just been playing with it this last week just because for Windows 11, it is super easy.
01:04:54.979 --> 01:05:07.299
It's built in, you type the Windows key in H, anywhere you have a text cursor and a microphone icon will come up and you can type, it will type out what you say, just like Siri will.
01:05:09.699 --> 01:05:11.859
If you want, there's actually a little gear icon.
01:05:11.859 --> 01:05:16.739
You can go there and have it turn on punctuation if you want it to do auto punctuation.
01:05:18.099 --> 01:05:25.459
But this seems like a pretty neat feature that's built into Windows 11 that I'm sure not a lot of people are using.
01:05:25.699 --> 01:05:27.299
If you're on a Mac, you can do it as well.
01:05:27.459 --> 01:05:29.779
It's been around called dictation for a little while.
01:05:30.899 --> 01:05:37.459
I know that Apple has had it for, I want to say close to 10 years, but
01:05:38.419 --> 01:05:40.419
This is 1 where it's not on by default.
01:05:40.419 --> 01:05:47.619
You actually have to go into the system settings, go to the keyboard system settings, and if you scroll down, there's a dictation section.
01:05:48.419 --> 01:05:59.539
You got to turn it on and then configure a couple of settings so you can tell it what key command you want it to use to start the dictation.
01:05:59.539 --> 01:06:01.539
But for example, if you hit it
01:06:02.339 --> 01:06:04.339
set it to control, control.
01:06:04.539 --> 01:06:12.819
What you'll do is you go anywhere, you have a cursor, you'll hit control, control, and you'll see a little microphone icon pop up on your screen and you can dictate just like you normally would.
01:06:14.019 --> 01:06:24.499
And so that may save you some time on typing or if you're a hunt and peck typer, speed up your text input a little bit.
01:06:26.739 --> 01:06:28.179
So hopefully that'll help somebody out.
01:06:29.019 --> 01:06:31.939
I'm certainly going to be using it quite a bit more maybe for some emails.
01:06:33.779 --> 01:06:35.139
And we'll let you know how it goes.
01:06:35.939 --> 01:06:36.339
Very cool.
01:06:36.739 --> 01:06:40.659
And like that you were all inclusive with the PC and Mac.
01:06:40.739 --> 01:06:41.459
You got to have both.
01:06:41.539 --> 01:06:41.859
Yep.
01:06:44.499 --> 01:06:45.379
Well, awesome.
01:06:45.379 --> 01:06:50.019
Well, thank you guys for joining us for another shift of on-call sysadmin with Brett.
01:06:50.659 --> 01:06:51.219
And Brett.
01:06:52.659 --> 01:06:59.139
And if you have any more questions, want to contact us, you can reach us at Harvest IT Solutions.
01:07:00.659 --> 01:07:02.339
And with that, we'll see you later.
00:05.706 --> 00:31.386
Hey, welcome back to another shift of On-Call Sys Admin with Brett. And Brett. Two IT pros who never really clock out. This episode is brought to you by Harvest IT Solutions, your trusted technology partner, providing managed services in Dallas-Fort Worth. More info at harvestitsolutions.com. We got a couple good headlines for you today. One is Microsoft Publishers End of Life.
00:32.546 --> 00:43.106
We've got new attack on public Wi-Fi and why you should be careful there. And then is the AI bubble popping and much more. First topic.
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So first thing I want to bring up is Publisher, Microsoft Publisher going away.
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I feel like it hasn't really been a popular product in a few years, but I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that still have at least older files out there, whether it's cards, calendars, whatever other print material that you may have out there. So that is officially going away October 1st, 2026. At least support for it. But because the support is going away,
01:18.463 --> 01:42.223
If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription that includes Publisher, the entire program is going away. If you have a perpetual license of it, you can still use it if you have it installed and licensed correctly. But support for that after October 1st, going away completely. So what does that mean for the files? If you're on a subscription,
01:43.063 --> 02:10.943
then the program goes away completely so you can't open them. So what Microsoft is telling you to do is before October 1st, so you have what, a month and a half at this point almost, they're telling you to open up all your Publisher files in Publisher before that date, save as a PDF to then open in Microsoft Word to quote unquote keep it editable, which I guess is
02:11.423 --> 02:33.983
a solution, but I mean, opening a PDF in Word is going to really mingle the images, the layout, the text, all of that good stuff. But I mean, they're, I guess, double down on it because they're telling on their KB article for this announcement, they have instructions on how to do one file at a time.
02:34.303 --> 02:51.743
with this conversion, but they also have a PowerShell script to where you can point either a single file or a directory, and it can look for all the publisher files in that directory, recursively even, and automatically convert all of those to PDF.
02:52.303 --> 03:07.103
to then follow that same workflow where they're saying, okay, open that PDF in Word and then you can edit it for the most part, which I don't know, I haven't tested it, but I have opened up PDFs in Word before and it tends to not be pretty.
03:08.223 --> 03:09.583
Oh yeah, for sure.
03:10.543 --> 03:16.783
I mean, this is crazy because Publisher has been a staple of Office Professional for a long time.
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I mean, Publisher at this point is kind of the easy button of desktop publishing.
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Yeah.
03:23.743 --> 03:26.063
And it's old enough to run for president now.
03:26.223 --> 03:27.903
Publisher's 35 years old.
03:29.223 --> 03:30.063
Damn, is it really?
03:30.063 --> 03:30.383
Wow.
03:30.383 --> 03:31.823
Yeah, I know, right?
03:31.823 --> 03:37.703
So I'm fairly certain that's so.
03:37.703 --> 03:40.303
I mean, everybody's using Canva now, so.
03:40.703 --> 03:41.583
Canva, right?
03:42.183 --> 03:46.703
That's more modern, so it's probably easier, way easier than Publisher nowadays.
03:47.263 --> 03:50.703
or they're subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite.
03:50.703 --> 03:58.543
And so that might be another alternative is to if you've Microsoft has thrown in the towel against Adobe.
03:59.743 --> 04:00.863
Yeah, at least for that.
04:01.943 --> 04:05.263
But they're saying they're calling out their other office products for alternatives.
04:05.263 --> 04:13.503
So they're saying like brochures use Word or PowerPoint, banners use PowerPoint, labels, envelopes, calendars use Word.
04:14.783 --> 04:19.103
So they're trying to push you to their other stuff, but I'm sure it's not quite as good.
04:19.103 --> 04:24.943
Because I mean, again, Word, you move an image in Word and it just annihilates the entire document.
04:24.943 --> 04:44.303
So it's definitely not the same as Publisher, but outside of the, I guess, workaround for saving your Publisher files or converting your Publisher files before that date, a GitHub user by the name of Asleep at the Terminal has built a program called Pub Bridge
04:44.743 --> 05:08.543
which kind of does the same thing as Microsoft Script, where you can either throw one publisher file or an entire folder at it, and it converts it to, instead of a PDF, in IDML format, which can then be directly opened in either Affinity Publisher or Adobe InDesign, which I think would be a way better option than PDF to Word.
05:09.583 --> 05:28.703
I haven't tested it, so I'm not sure how good it does with the structure and the layout, but I think that might be the better option for anybody that has a substantial amount of publisher files out there to ensure that those remain editable in a good way after October 1st.
05:29.263 --> 05:30.143
Yeah, for sure.
05:30.143 --> 05:37.983
I mean, especially since InDesign does not have any built-in way to open publisher files that somebody has gone out and made
05:39.103 --> 05:43.503
A way for you to escape Publisher.
05:44.623 --> 05:50.623
And they're also saying LibreOffice Draw can open Publisher files, but I've seen mixed feedback with that.
05:51.263 --> 05:51.823
Oh, interesting.
05:53.383 --> 05:59.343
Yeah, so I think it might be like a Word opening a PDF kind of situation where sure it'll open it, but it may not look pretty.
05:59.743 --> 06:01.983
Right, Mangles up the formatting a little bit.
06:01.983 --> 06:02.303
Yeah.
06:03.823 --> 06:05.743
So if everybody out there using Publisher.
06:06.383 --> 06:10.263
Be sure to get all your files converted before October 1st.
06:10.783 --> 06:12.303
Otherwise you lose access to that.
06:13.943 --> 06:14.463
Good to know.
06:16.238 --> 06:19.838
All right, now let's go to some, I guess, scary stuff.
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You know, everybody tells you to be careful with public Wi-Fi.
06:25.118 --> 06:31.598
Always favor your personal hotspot, whether it's on your phone or a dedicated hotspot that you carry around.
06:33.118 --> 06:51.998
And Microsoft has come out and they're saying that a new campaign, new attack campaign that they're dubbing Captive Crunch, love the name, is targeting public Wi-Fi, specifically ones in the hospitality industry that have captive portals on them.
06:53.038 --> 06:55.278
So it's pretty sophisticated.
06:55.918 --> 06:57.918
There's a few different parts to it.
06:58.398 --> 07:06.038
So the first part that is called Cornflake, this is a remote access and info stealer implant.
07:06.038 --> 07:14.318
So this is what's actually getting into your computer to create a foothold to then do everything else.
07:14.798 --> 07:21.038
But how that's working is it's presenting the user with some sort of like fake
07:22.318 --> 07:47.118
operating system update window or an antivirus update window, driver update, a PDF document viewer installation, some sort of seemingly legit OS prompt or browser prompt to get them to then click on something that starts downloading the payload in the background and installing its foothold.
07:48.478 --> 07:52.158
It creates a service called Cloud Sync Service.
07:52.798 --> 07:57.198
It creates registry run keys, scheduled tasks.
07:59.358 --> 08:02.078
And all of this looks pretty legit.
08:02.078 --> 08:10.718
I mean, most people have seen the full screen browser windows where it says, you have a virus, click here to remediate and fix your computer.
08:11.078 --> 08:12.958
It's kind of along those lines, I think.
08:12.958 --> 08:13.918
I haven't seen.
08:15.198 --> 08:16.318
like a full screenshot.
08:16.318 --> 08:20.558
I've seen some examples of it, but that's kind of the idea that they're working off of.
08:21.678 --> 08:41.678
But what's crazy is that I saw some reports too saying that if that pop-up fails to trick the user to click on it, there's some sort of alternative method to where it presents the user with some like command or PowerShell script or line
08:42.318 --> 09:11.358
to then, and it also gives them instructions on, hey, open PowerShell, copy this line, paste it in there to fix your antivirus, to fix your driver, to make sure that you have the proper security measures in place on your computer to connect to the public Wi-Fi, which seems crazy to me because like your typical user, I feel like would just stop immediately right there and would not
09:11.678 --> 09:13.038
copy and paste anything.
09:13.198 --> 09:13.918
One would hope.
09:14.638 --> 09:16.558
Yes, one would hope very much so.
09:18.958 --> 09:28.718
But once established, once the user clicks on that pop up and everything's installed, the capabilities of this thing is crazy.
09:29.118 --> 09:34.558
It can do key logging, clipboard monitoring, screenshot capturing.
09:35.038 --> 09:39.598
It can monitor your microphone for audio, your webcam for video.
09:40.158 --> 09:42.798
It can extract files from your computer.
09:43.278 --> 09:47.998
It can monitor for attached USB drives and take data from there.
09:49.998 --> 09:51.438
They can have a remote shell.
09:52.158 --> 09:56.478
And I think the most important one is that it can do browser credential theft.
09:56.838 --> 09:59.678
And that's not restricted to just credentials.
09:59.678 --> 10:02.958
It can take tokens, cookies, anything related to the browser.
10:05.118 --> 10:14.718
Wow, that's way more sophisticated than the old school man in the middle, traffic monitoring that we used to see on public Wi-Fi networks.
10:15.638 --> 10:15.798
Yeah.
10:16.238 --> 10:18.638
And it just seems so easy for them to get that foothold.
10:18.798 --> 10:27.918
If it's literally just a browser pop up saying, hey, you need to confirm, you know, your computer is secure enough to connect to this public Wi-Fi.
10:28.318 --> 10:30.478
That seems legit.
10:31.438 --> 10:31.598
Yeah.
10:31.998 --> 10:32.398
Wow.
10:33.678 --> 10:36.558
That is really scary.
10:36.558 --> 10:43.838
I mean, just I guess that you got to be careful on what Wi-Fi networks you're connecting to.
10:45.998 --> 10:49.198
Or I guess the better thing is just don't.
10:50.478 --> 10:50.798
Yeah.
10:52.238 --> 10:53.678
Or ensure that you trust it.
10:53.838 --> 10:58.478
I mean, I don't know how you can always do that in public settings.
11:00.398 --> 11:26.638
Yeah, with things like, commercially available Wi-Fi pineapple devices where you can literally spend, a few $100 and then you've got a portable, wireless access point that can mimic a retail or hospitality hotspot, it, how do you know the difference if it says, free Starbucks Wi-Fi here?
11:28.398 --> 11:33.678
How is anybody going to be able to tell that that's Starbucks or somebody pretending to be Starbucks?
11:35.758 --> 11:35.958
Yeah.
11:35.958 --> 11:52.798
I mean, I think that shows the importance of some sort of VPN connection or ZTNA or something that as soon as you're on whatever Wi-Fi or whatever internet that you connect to, you still have some sort of encryption channel outside of that.
11:53.758 --> 11:53.958
Yeah.
11:54.558 --> 12:11.918
I mean, that, zero trust network sounds like as long as you're, as long as you've got that enabled before any sort of browsing happens, then I guess you can make a reasonable assumption that your traffic's going to be safe.
12:11.918 --> 12:20.398
But if part of it is a captive portal where you are connecting before that, and that seems like
12:21.398 --> 12:30.478
You're really in a catch 20, or in a hard spot, not really catch 22, but how do you connect securely without connecting first?
12:34.078 --> 12:34.238
Yeah.
12:34.238 --> 12:40.278
and I mean, just anytime you're connecting to public Wi-Fi with the captive portal, don't give out too much information.
12:40.278 --> 12:46.318
If they're asking for an authorization code that you're provided by the venue, fine.
12:46.718 --> 12:50.798
But if they're asking, if it starts asking for your e-mail address, your name,
12:51.518 --> 12:58.558
to sign into anything, take a step back, because any captive portal should not be asking that much information from you.
12:59.558 --> 13:07.678
Maybe your e-mail for marketing, but I mean, if they ask for that, then maybe even use a throwaway e-mail and not your company e-mail.
13:07.918 --> 13:12.638
Yeah, They said who's behind these attacks or is it just.
13:15.038 --> 13:18.078
They're saying it's an offshoot of
13:20.318 --> 13:21.438
Midnight Blizzard.
13:22.958 --> 13:27.838
Because it's using a lot of the similar techniques from there.
13:28.398 --> 13:29.038
So Russia.
13:31.758 --> 13:32.638
Good old Russia.
13:33.038 --> 13:33.198
Yeah.
13:33.238 --> 13:34.398
All right.
13:34.718 --> 13:36.958
Can't even have free Wi-Fi these days.
13:37.438 --> 13:37.998
I know.
13:38.878 --> 13:48.038
And they're even saying they're seeing Microsoft is seeing some other instances of this where on the captive portal they're being redirected to the
13:48.718 --> 14:07.038
Microsoft device authentication page for shared phones and Teams rooms, stuff like that, where they're telling you to sign in, but using the bad actors code to authorize their session for your account.
14:07.598 --> 14:11.598
So they're intercepting your sign in and multi-factor.
14:12.158 --> 14:13.838
So that's a big red flag.
14:14.198 --> 14:17.438
Again, if you're getting asked for information like that,
14:17.998 --> 14:21.438
Just to get connected to Wi-Fi, don't connect to that Wi-Fi.
14:21.918 --> 14:23.158
Find somewhere else.
14:23.158 --> 14:23.278
Yeah.
14:23.358 --> 14:26.038
Hotspot seems like the safest plan these days.
14:26.038 --> 14:27.638
Yeah, definitely.
14:28.876 --> 14:30.276
Well, this one was interesting.
14:30.276 --> 14:43.276
We'd been talking about AI quite a bit over the last couple of episodes, but new earnings forecasts or earnings calls are starting to finish up over the last week or so.
14:43.836 --> 14:48.156
And the volatility after those is just all over the place.
14:48.236 --> 15:01.196
So I think Microsoft, Alphabet, who is Google, Meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, and Apple all had significant losses after their earnings calls.
15:02.356 --> 15:09.436
And of course, these big guys are the ones that have huge stakes in AI.
15:09.756 --> 15:12.876
It seems like the only one that escaped this last
15:14.396 --> 15:18.156
that was AWS or Amazon.
15:19.556 --> 15:28.236
And that seems to be because they were doing some energy hedging and not related to AI at all.
15:28.236 --> 15:39.836
So it was kind of they looked good on books, but it wasn't related to any of the any of the AI models that are that are or AI services.
15:39.836 --> 15:40.316
So
15:41.756 --> 16:02.796
Is this possibly a sign that the memory output has kind of reached its peak and we're constrained by hardware right now and there's not, it seems like investors are hesitant to invest a whole lot more money into these companies?
16:03.836 --> 16:08.996
I mean, I think it's coming, yeah.
16:09.756 --> 16:12.076
I mean, so far it's been kind of speculative, right?
16:13.916 --> 16:28.796
AI has promised a whole lot where, it's going to replace a whole lot of information workers or application developers or any number of tasks.
16:28.956 --> 16:35.036
And we've kind of seen that with a lot of layoffs from these companies that are investing heavily in AI.
16:35.916 --> 16:51.276
And there's kind of been some backtrack on that where, now they're saying, hey, we need to reduce the token spend or AI subscription spend, and they're starting to hire back actual workers.
16:52.476 --> 16:57.196
And so kind of the big promise just hasn't really panned out yet.
16:57.916 --> 17:00.156
And I think that that's
17:01.436 --> 17:08.476
Maybe this is a sign of the future, or maybe this is just a little hiccup in the investment.
17:10.236 --> 17:11.036
So who?
17:11.836 --> 17:16.076
I think there's going to be some deflation, maybe not a full on pop because
17:16.636 --> 17:31.196
I mean, I think AI has its place, but to the extent, like what you were saying, a lot of people are getting laid off to be replaced by AI, but then they find out, oh, well, the AI costs us more than the actual people, so we need to reverse course on that.
17:33.036 --> 17:45.756
All this talk about, you know, having your AI employees where you manage an AI agent or entity instead of an actual person, I'm not convinced that
17:46.396 --> 17:47.196
will get there.
17:47.276 --> 17:54.796
I still think that AI has its place, but you need to, it's a helper, not a replacement.
17:55.756 --> 17:57.436
Yeah, for sure.
17:58.122 --> 18:06.322
You know, there's so much development going into it, and I think it will probably wind up being, you know, one of those essential tools.
18:06.322 --> 18:10.042
I mean, if you go back and look at the.com boom and bust, hopefully,
18:11.242 --> 18:14.202
this isn't going to bust as bad as that did.
18:14.202 --> 18:25.802
But there was maybe a little bit of overinvestment there, but the internet is like the core of almost everything we do these days.
18:26.442 --> 18:38.602
So even though there was the dot-com bust in the late 90s, I mean, this is, I foresee that it's going to stick around for a long time and just be a big tool.
18:39.722 --> 19:07.802
So hopefully the right sizing of this isn't as bad as that, but man, there does need to be some correction or there needs to be some supply side correction as well, where a lot of the hardware going into these systems needs to get cheaper either because the developers of AI have bought enough to saturate their
19:08.482 --> 19:22.842
their demand or the production of memory specifically can start to, meet the demands that these AI data centers are putting on it.
19:22.842 --> 19:23.322
So.
19:24.402 --> 19:29.082
and do you think a part of it is also due to like people being against data centers now?
19:30.762 --> 19:36.202
that could be part of it, but I think that's probably a longer term
19:37.722 --> 19:53.042
component to it where it does take more time to be able to build a data center because of regulation, because of the power, because of water demands for cooling and all those other things.
19:53.042 --> 20:01.802
So, the fun part about that though is that it looks like there might be a solution for that.
20:02.202 --> 20:02.482
Yeah.
20:03.162 --> 20:04.042
Or possibly.
20:04.122 --> 20:06.522
So Samsung
20:07.522 --> 20:09.482
It's not Samsung official.
20:09.482 --> 20:10.042
Who is it?
20:10.042 --> 20:14.442
It's Samsung Heavy Industries, which I guess they're shipbuilders.
20:14.842 --> 20:25.242
They're partnering with a fairly new Dallas-based company called Mousterian, where they're looking to build fully floating data centers.
20:25.722 --> 20:30.442
They have, it looks like 2 potential projects that they have listed on their website right now.
20:31.082 --> 20:33.482
One is called Project Zeus.
20:34.002 --> 20:40.042
which is aimed to be a hybrid land and floating data center outside of Houston.
20:40.362 --> 20:47.162
And then a second one called Project Sandpiper, which is a fully floating data center out on San Jose, California.
20:48.122 --> 20:52.162
But the Mouserian company, they were founded in August 2025.
20:52.162 --> 20:59.242
So they're still fairly new, but it looks like they currently build fully liquid cooled data centers.
20:59.562 --> 21:01.562
And now they're trying to shift to
21:02.762 --> 21:23.762
floating data centers, which they're saying is supposed to help with the, I guess, demand for land, water, power, where they're going to put it on this floating ship effectively in the water right off the coast where there's not land.
21:23.762 --> 21:26.682
So there's not really it's not really taking any space.
21:26.682 --> 21:29.242
But as far as the cooling goes, they're saying they can
21:30.602 --> 21:37.162
use non-evaporating cooling that consumes no potable water and releases no discharge.
21:37.722 --> 21:45.322
And on top of that, the whole system will minimize the noise pollution that I feel like most people are against.
21:46.362 --> 21:47.162
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.
21:47.162 --> 21:53.322
I think this makes way more sense than the data center on the side of your house thing that we talked about a couple weeks ago.
21:53.802 --> 21:54.042
Yeah.
21:55.482 --> 21:58.682
Where you're you've got a proper data center, but you're just.
21:59.402 --> 22:01.722
putting it out where nobody can hear it or see it.
22:02.202 --> 22:02.442
Right.
22:02.842 --> 22:06.122
And hopefully use, more natural cooling methods.
22:06.762 --> 22:07.042
Yeah.
22:08.362 --> 22:12.682
The non-evaporative cooling seems like a pretty big one that a lot of people were against.
22:13.322 --> 22:17.882
I mean, this kind of solves those two main problems of noise and water usage.
22:19.882 --> 22:24.122
I guess the big one is still going to be where are they going to get power for it?
22:25.482 --> 22:31.562
Yeah, and I think that's why their first project off at Houston, they're building it right offshore from a power plant.
22:31.562 --> 22:42.362
So the power thing I think is still an issue, but I don't know, maybe they'll look at more natural energy sources, wind or some sort of water powered thing.
22:42.362 --> 22:42.842
I don't know.
22:43.482 --> 22:45.202
Oh yeah, that would make a lot of sense if it, you know.
22:45.202 --> 22:47.082
It's already floating.
22:47.082 --> 22:48.442
Right, it's already floating.
22:48.442 --> 22:52.682
Yeah, they've got those underwater turbines that
22:55.482 --> 23:02.202
I don't know how successful they've been, but where they'll use natural tides to power or to generate electricity.
23:02.202 --> 23:05.562
So, maybe that's an option for these.
23:07.082 --> 23:18.202
But yeah, I know that they've got, I don't know how effective it would be off the coast of Houston, but they've got wind turbines, those farms of wind turbines that
23:20.202 --> 23:25.162
are or were starting to get installed up in the, what was it in the Northeast.
23:26.042 --> 23:28.122
So maybe that's a possibility.
23:29.882 --> 23:41.402
This seems like it would be a pretty interesting method to, kind of sidestep a lot of the opposition to new data centers.
23:42.202 --> 23:43.402
Yeah, I think so.
23:44.202 --> 23:48.042
And I think that it helps speed up the production of them.
23:49.402 --> 23:56.922
they can build basically the ship in a shipyard, go out and deploy it in a lot quicker time than building your traditional data center.
23:58.282 --> 23:58.602
Yeah.
23:59.002 --> 24:04.122
Man, I just, I hope they've thought about hurricane season.
24:05.442 --> 24:06.202
that's a good point.
24:06.482 --> 24:07.482
Especially in Houston.
24:07.482 --> 24:07.602
Yeah.
24:07.842 --> 24:08.922
Especially in Houston.
24:08.922 --> 24:09.322
Yeah.
24:09.482 --> 24:10.042
So
24:10.922 --> 24:15.322
Man, I just looked up some renderings of what they were showing.
24:15.322 --> 24:17.722
Man, it looks like a giant cruise ship is what it looks like.
24:18.162 --> 24:20.082
Yeah, it looks like a fancy mega yacht or something.
24:20.082 --> 24:27.642
Maybe they can, all the billionaires with the companies can go take vacation while they process their data with AI in there.
24:27.762 --> 24:28.042
Yeah.
24:28.922 --> 24:32.362
You know, surely they'd have to have some liveaboard sysadmins.
24:33.802 --> 24:36.842
I wonder if their conditions would be any better than living on an oil rig.
24:37.562 --> 24:38.122
I don't know.
24:42.002 --> 24:42.562
that's that.
24:42.642 --> 24:43.402
That's pretty cool.
24:44.602 --> 24:55.322
Well, speaking of data centers, this is a new, for the first time ever, off-prem corporate IT has surpassed on-prem corporate IT.
24:55.322 --> 25:09.882
So the amount of compute that corporations are using is now more in hosted or third party data centers than it is on-prem.
25:10.602 --> 25:13.482
And it looks like that trend is just going to keep going that direction.
25:13.482 --> 25:34.362
So 46%, according to this latest poll from Uptime, the Uptime Institute says that just due to challenging conditions around costs on memory and data and storage,
25:35.322 --> 25:37.042
that more of it's going that way.
25:37.042 --> 25:51.802
And we've kind of seen this trend for a while now in the SMB space where fewer and fewer servers are getting deployed because Office 365 makes it easy for you to move your e-mail and your collaboration suite and your file storage.
25:52.602 --> 25:59.562
And of course, there's Google and a myriad number of other file sharing applications.
26:00.282 --> 26:03.002
And then also the move to more and more
26:03.402 --> 26:12.922
software as a service applications as opposed to having an on-prem server with a database for line of business applications.
26:13.242 --> 26:24.122
So I can definitely see how it's been headed that way for a long time, but we finally tipped the scale in that direction.
26:26.762 --> 26:30.722
I think it makes sense, but I mean, it goes right back to the whole data center thing.
26:30.722 --> 26:33.402
I mean, the more you put in the cloud, the more data centers you need.
26:33.882 --> 26:35.802
Yeah, exactly.
26:36.202 --> 26:48.082
And I don't know that necessarily the shift is enough to kind of offset, because if you shut down a server in your office, you're saving power there, but then you're spinning that workload up somewhere else.
26:48.282 --> 26:54.522
And probably more somewhere else in that data center, because I'm sure whatever they have there is using way more power than your standard
26:54.842 --> 26:56.842
For sure.
26:57.002 --> 26:57.282
Yeah.
26:57.962 --> 27:24.042
Especially if you're doing like a lift and shift type migration, but if you're, moving into a software as a service or, a microservices like, SQL as a service, something like that, maybe that would be slightly more efficient in its consumption, but because you can get, you can get higher density typically or higher utilization from an existing
27:24.522 --> 27:28.602
system, but I don't know to what effect that would really play into the power efficiency.
27:29.962 --> 27:43.882
Because if you're utilizing it more, a system more, but that's going to consume more power than if you're just using 5 to 10% like you typically would on a line of business application server.
27:44.202 --> 27:49.482
So yeah, I don't know that it may be a wash, it may be a little bit greater, but
27:51.322 --> 27:55.162
I just thought that was thought that was interesting that we've we're there.
27:55.242 --> 27:56.362
It's it finally happened.
27:57.802 --> 27:58.922
Only took how many years?
28:01.002 --> 28:02.202
Well, a long time.
28:02.842 --> 28:03.242
Yeah.
28:06.522 --> 28:12.842
They were also saying that we may be closer to 48% in a couple of years.
28:12.842 --> 28:19.082
So I mean, that's if you think about how much IT infrastructure is out there right now, that's a pretty
28:20.242 --> 28:27.882
pretty fast transition away from on-prem compute.
28:29.162 --> 28:29.282
Yeah.
28:30.202 --> 28:43.642
Which is crazy too, because what you just talked about with, Amazon, well, Amazon was up, but Microsoft, Meta, all these cloud hosting providers basically are down in stock, right?
28:43.642 --> 28:47.722
So why are they down if everything's moving to their infrastructure?
28:48.522 --> 28:49.642
Yeah, and that's a good point.
28:49.642 --> 29:01.482
I think, one thing that I had read was that Meta may be looking at doing what Amazon is doing today and start offering their infrastructure as a service.
29:02.362 --> 29:04.762
And so that might be another revenue stream from them.
29:04.762 --> 29:09.002
But I cannot picture that.
29:09.802 --> 29:15.002
I mean, unless unless they do it under a different name and not Meta.
29:15.802 --> 29:16.242
I don't know.
29:16.242 --> 29:16.682
I just.
29:18.042 --> 29:22.682
I attach anything social media related to Meta.
29:23.162 --> 29:33.162
So saying that I'm going to put my company infrastructure, company server, company data in Meta's data center just sounds not right.
29:33.482 --> 29:35.162
Yeah, that does seem really weird.
29:35.162 --> 29:38.602
I mean, they'd have to position it right and to the right customer, I think.
29:39.562 --> 29:42.362
Maybe if they were to position themselves
29:43.162 --> 30:03.002
with CloudFlare or Akamai, kind of one of those large content distribution networks, maybe that would make sense where they could get into that space fairly easily because, they have huge data centers all over the place and they're really good at serving content really quickly.
30:05.002 --> 30:06.122
Yeah, I don't know.
30:07.002 --> 30:13.402
We'll see if that seems like something that they want to do or if they even have enough capacity today to do that.
30:14.762 --> 30:24.722
Or even if they can get in that market, because I feel like the big ones, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, they're all pretty well established.
30:24.722 --> 30:31.322
So getting in that this far into the game, I feel like it's a Zune moment.
30:32.442 --> 30:35.642
Yeah, Well, time will tell.
30:37.322 --> 30:42.282
this was one that I had seen a couple of days ago.
30:42.922 --> 30:56.122
And we had talked about this quite a bit over the last little while was, in fact, we just talked about it a minute ago with the captive portal and stealing your credentials.
30:56.522 --> 31:05.482
Well, it seems like 10, almost 11 million e-mail addresses, date of birth, social security numbers,
31:06.842 --> 31:12.442
and healthcare information showed up on the dark web this last week.
31:13.002 --> 31:25.482
So it seems like a hacker group called Shiny Hunters got into Abbott's cancer diagnostic business called Exact Sciences.
31:25.802 --> 31:35.562
And they pulled out through three or four different databases and file shares
31:38.602 --> 31:54.362
something like 20 million medical records of prescriptions, order dates, refills, doctor-patient conversations, health information, along with all this personally identifiable information.
31:55.402 --> 31:58.922
And they tried to extort Abbott out of a
32:02.842 --> 32:03.642
out of a payment.
32:03.642 --> 32:04.922
And Abbott said no.
32:04.922 --> 32:11.002
And so Shiny Hunters just published all of that data for anybody to be able to go download.
32:12.002 --> 32:19.322
And that seems like a, it's just another one in a long line of this type of thing.
32:19.322 --> 32:24.682
But it seems like Abbott is trying to do some investigating.
32:24.922 --> 32:30.282
And if you are using any of their services, you're probably going to be getting a letter from them.
32:32.842 --> 32:35.402
to see if your data was part of that.
32:35.402 --> 32:44.322
But that's, this one's kind of hits a little different because it's health data, prescriptions and diagnostics and doctor conversations.
32:44.322 --> 32:45.082
That seems.
32:45.402 --> 32:47.802
That's the crazy part to me is the conversations.
32:47.802 --> 32:48.202
Yeah.
32:48.602 --> 32:56.202
I mean, what I guess would that, I don't know how much that actually discloses, but I mean, it's a private conversation between you and your doctor.
32:56.202 --> 33:01.002
You don't really want that to be shared out with everybody, but I don't know.
33:01.002 --> 33:01.562
That's
33:01.922 --> 33:03.242
That's a lot of people too.
33:04.122 --> 33:04.802
it sure is.
33:04.802 --> 33:21.962
And I, one would hope that this kind of breach, because it does feel a little bit different, I think the shiny hunters group has a long string of breaches where they've gone and done extortion or crypto.
33:24.522 --> 33:30.602
But I think this one will probably garner a lot more attention from the FBI or CISA or
33:31.722 --> 33:48.362
the Secret Service where, man, they're really going to be in their target, their bullseye, where I think they had gone previously, this group had attacked, Grubhub or, Google.
33:48.842 --> 33:51.562
And that doesn't seem like
33:52.522 --> 34:02.442
as much of A breach of privacy, at least in my mind, okay, if you get my Grubhub details, I really, you know, don't care.
34:02.442 --> 34:06.762
But man, you might have a crazy Burger King order or something.
34:08.242 --> 34:08.922
Who knows?
34:09.922 --> 34:16.842
But geez, going after healthcare doctor conversations specifically, it just seems like, man, you're really asking to
34:18.522 --> 34:22.762
to get investigated much more so than any prior attack would.
34:24.602 --> 34:35.962
But right now, if you think you were using Exact Sciences or Abbott, you can try to go to haveibeenpwned.com.
34:35.962 --> 34:47.322
They have the breach up and you can search for your e-mail addresses to see if maybe this was part of
34:49.802 --> 34:53.642
If you were part of this breach, this just went up today on Have I Been Pwned.
34:53.642 --> 35:01.962
So it's have I been pwned.com, which is where you can go and see if your e-mail is part of any other breaches.
35:01.962 --> 35:13.082
And I guarantee if you've had your e-mail for any amount of time, you know, you're going to be in there, but you can see if you were part of this one specifically.
35:14.402 --> 35:16.762
And did you say it took passwords too or?
35:18.202 --> 35:20.522
Yeah, just PII at this point is what they've said.
35:20.762 --> 35:28.042
So dates of birth, personal health data, addresses, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, social security numbers.
35:29.082 --> 35:31.722
So not enough to steal your identity.
35:31.922 --> 35:33.162
Just enough, exactly.
35:33.162 --> 35:34.602
Just enough to steal your identity.
35:36.042 --> 35:41.882
And, but yeah, log on to have I been pwned and then see if you're part of this breach.
35:43.242 --> 35:49.882
And if so, you're probably going to expect an e-mail from Abbott here over the next couple of weeks to months.
35:51.322 --> 35:51.522
Good.
35:52.362 --> 35:53.082
Fun times.
35:53.642 --> 35:55.082
Yeah, speaking of hacking.
35:55.642 --> 36:06.922
Yeah, so there's been so many, I guess, fictional books that I've read over the years where, you know, these bad actors hack into, you know, public
36:08.642 --> 36:18.682
public utilities and either shut them down or do some sort of damage where I think I've read a book where they exploded some power plant or something.
36:18.682 --> 36:19.722
It was crazy stuff.
36:19.722 --> 36:24.162
It's like something you never think is going to happen, but it's happening.
36:24.162 --> 36:37.642
Maybe not explosion level, but the FBI and EPA have come out and said that it looks like 7 different states have been the target of a water and wastewater
36:39.002 --> 36:39.562
attack.
36:39.962 --> 36:57.002
So malicious cyber actors are attacking these water treatment plants, specifically the programmable logic controllers, PLCs, and even more specifically, just PLCs made by Rockwell Automation or Allen Bradley.
36:57.562 --> 36:59.882
And they even call out two different models, which is crazy.
37:01.882 --> 37:07.002
But since July 27th of this year, they're saying, I think Minnesota
37:07.402 --> 37:07.842
Who was it?
37:07.842 --> 37:14.922
I think Georgia and some others that they haven't disclosed have all seen this attack.
37:14.922 --> 37:28.282
And it's in my mind crazy, but without knowing the actual infrastructure and why it was set up this way, I guess I can't really comment on it, but they got in because these
37:28.602 --> 37:31.962
these devices were internet facing.
37:32.202 --> 37:37.002
And some of them even just either had no password or the default password.
37:37.002 --> 37:52.202
So these malicious actors just got onto the direct IP address of the device, either changed the IP address and or changed the password to only something that they would know.
37:52.202 --> 37:54.042
It's essentially locking out
37:55.562 --> 37:59.642
the utility company from being able to monitor or control it.
38:01.899 --> 38:02.379
Wow.
38:02.859 --> 38:05.899
Yeah, I mean, that's like basic cyber hygiene, but
38:09.139 --> 38:14.139
that's kind of scary that stuff that's that critical of an infrastructure is put out there.
38:14.619 --> 38:14.779
Yeah.
38:14.819 --> 38:35.019
But I mean, that's why I made the comment of I don't know how their infrastructure is set up, because I think some of these devices can be like fully remote and possibly like behind a cell modem or cell surface to where that it's only that one device on whatever IP address they have.
38:35.019 --> 38:35.419
But
38:35.899 --> 38:36.299
I don't know.
38:36.299 --> 38:40.299
I still feel like there's better ways to secure that, at least reset the password.
38:42.019 --> 38:42.699
Exactly.
38:42.699 --> 38:44.219
That seems like just basic stuff.
38:44.539 --> 38:44.899
Yeah.
38:45.739 --> 38:47.659
But you brought up Rockwell.
38:47.659 --> 38:53.499
And man, the first thing that comes to my mind is that if you remember this from almost 20 years ago, it was the Retro Encabulator.
38:53.499 --> 38:55.979
You remember that video or it was just a bunch of techno babble?
38:58.619 --> 39:04.619
Yeah, go look up that video if you haven't on YouTube, the Rockwell Retro Encabulator.
39:05.459 --> 39:06.219
It's hilarious.
39:07.339 --> 39:10.819
Sorry, I just blowing our wheels off this conversation.
39:12.139 --> 39:24.779
So yeah, the FBI and EPA, or I think the FBI specifically is just making this public service announcement saying, hey, take these devices off publicly facing access, reset the password.
39:25.419 --> 39:29.099
But then the manufacturer, Rockwell,
39:30.219 --> 39:36.059
also is publishing stuff on how to remediate if you come under attack with this.
39:36.459 --> 39:45.179
And the only way to fix it is to factory reset the device and reload the configuration from hopefully your backup.
39:47.099 --> 39:51.339
So basically you can't just easily recover it.
39:51.339 --> 39:52.859
You got to fully wipe it and
39:53.499 --> 39:58.299
hoped that you have, the I guess the program for it saved somewhere.
39:58.979 --> 40:01.019
my goodness, that's not good.
40:01.739 --> 40:02.059
Yeah.
40:02.619 --> 40:10.619
And again, I think if some of these are like deployed out in the field somewhere, then you have to go to each one physically, reset it, reload the data.
40:10.619 --> 40:14.059
So it seems like it could be time consuming.
40:14.699 --> 40:16.859
Yeah, and expensive for sure.
40:16.859 --> 40:21.579
Man, those automation engineers are not are not are not cheap.
40:24.699 --> 40:37.819
seven states and possibly more, because they're saying that even though they're only seeing on these Rockwell models, it could potentially be expanded to other similar manufacturers.
40:38.939 --> 40:39.899
That makes sense.
40:39.899 --> 40:49.339
I mean, as we've been having this conversation, I just hopped on over to Shodan, which is a, you know, they scan the internet and find out what's out publicly exposed.
40:51.259 --> 41:05.579
In the United States alone, there's 3,074 Rockwell automation devices on the public internet that just came up and that's over 5,000 worldwide.
41:05.579 --> 41:14.179
So it seems like the big concentration seems to be US, Canada and China, but it's worldwide.
41:14.179 --> 41:15.579
These things are everywhere.
41:16.859 --> 41:19.259
But man, guys,
41:20.299 --> 41:22.859
Seriously.
41:23.339 --> 41:23.739
Yeah.
41:24.699 --> 41:39.179
I know that your engineer, he wants to have easy access to program these things when he's from home or out of the plant, but man, at least have a VPN be able to manage these systems.
41:40.139 --> 41:40.779
Yeah, for sure.
41:41.419 --> 41:44.939
Yeah, and I know that we've seen this before.
41:45.819 --> 41:47.059
We've done quite a bit of work with
41:49.339 --> 41:51.739
engineers for office buildings.
41:52.739 --> 41:56.859
And man, they love to have that stuff accessible for them.
41:56.859 --> 42:00.059
But we come and we say, hey, you can't do that.
42:00.619 --> 42:12.699
You got to get your building management systems put inside the network on a VPN and at least upgraded off of Windows XP that it's on, stuff like that.
42:14.619 --> 42:16.299
And I mean, this is a prime example of that.
42:16.299 --> 42:17.019
I mean, and
42:17.819 --> 42:23.339
The argument, I guess, from the engineers a lot of times is, this is not super critical infrastructure.
42:23.339 --> 42:25.179
It's just the air conditioner.
42:25.579 --> 42:31.739
But if you think of a big office building, you cut off the AC for a week because you lose control to it.
42:32.459 --> 42:34.219
I mean, nobody can work out of there.
42:34.219 --> 42:35.899
The building essentially shuts down.
42:35.899 --> 42:37.739
So it's pretty critical.
42:38.539 --> 42:43.179
and it's like beyond that, it's to get it upgraded, it's expensive.
42:43.499 --> 42:56.699
Like the licensing that goes into it, the reprogramming, because a lot of these systems, they'll be 20 years old and it's not just where you can export a config file and re-import it into a new one.
42:56.699 --> 43:03.739
If you haven't been keeping up with it for a long time, then those systems, you got a lot of tech debt built into that.
43:04.619 --> 43:10.059
And it gets it starts to get really expensive to redo it, redo it all from scratch.
43:10.699 --> 43:12.139
Yeah, absolutely.
43:13.485 --> 43:14.765
hopefully the water stays running.
43:15.805 --> 43:19.565
Yeah, If you notice low pressure, then you might be compromised.
43:20.285 --> 43:22.285
Something went wrong at the water plant.
43:24.925 --> 43:25.405
Oh man.
43:25.405 --> 43:28.205
Well, speaking of hacking, here's another one.
43:28.605 --> 43:36.205
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago as well, where Russian hackers got into the Zimbra e-mail collaboration system.
43:36.765 --> 43:45.165
Well, it seems like just after that, or around the same time, it was discovered that Exchange also had the same issue.
43:45.485 --> 43:45.965
And this is.
43:46.045 --> 43:46.205
Good.
43:46.685 --> 43:46.845
Yeah.
43:47.645 --> 43:48.125
Right.
43:49.165 --> 43:51.325
Luckily, this is a little bit limited.
43:51.965 --> 43:56.045
It does not at this time seem to affect Office 365.
43:56.045 --> 43:57.165
It seems to be
43:57.805 --> 44:03.445
for on-prem Exchange servers where their user is using Outlook Web Access.
44:03.445 --> 44:18.125
So the web version, so again, doesn't apply to Outlook, but it's essentially A zero-click exploit that takes over the mailbox.
44:18.925 --> 44:25.325
And what it will do is it will obtain persistence, which is actually kind of crazy.
44:25.325 --> 44:25.725
So
44:26.845 --> 44:36.205
The persistence at this point doesn't seem to be with the computer that was logged into it, but with the mailbox itself, with Outlook Web Access and the Exchange server.
44:37.165 --> 44:46.605
So it will go and it will steal your password and get in and essentially take over the e-mail account.
44:47.085 --> 44:54.525
And that, of course, can always lead to other business e-mail compromise where somebody can get in the middle of conversations
44:55.805 --> 45:02.605
redirect payments to places that attackers control.
45:03.085 --> 45:08.485
So Microsoft has already released a patch for this.
45:08.485 --> 45:18.045
So if you've got on-prem exchange out there, man, it's time to get in, look for indicators of compromise and get your systems patched.
45:18.685 --> 45:21.245
So that, and passwords reset.
45:21.245 --> 45:24.045
So that one's kind of a scary one as well.
45:24.605 --> 45:28.685
And it's nice that it's kind of limited in scope of what was affected, but.
45:28.925 --> 45:29.325
For now.
45:29.725 --> 45:33.245
For now, still, man, it's, geez.
45:34.885 --> 45:38.365
I'm curious to see how many on-prem Exchange environments are still out there.
45:38.365 --> 45:44.525
I'm sure it's a good number, because I'm sure your larger environments probably still prefer that, but.
45:44.845 --> 45:47.965
Yeah, because it's way cheaper than running it on 365.
45:49.965 --> 45:52.125
Is that still, is Microsoft continuing that?
45:52.725 --> 45:53.325
Exchange?
45:53.645 --> 45:55.085
As far as I know, they are.
45:55.085 --> 45:55.365
Yeah.
45:56.765 --> 45:58.925
I mean, they had released a patch for it.
46:00.205 --> 46:04.285
And it's it's exchange is still a thing.
46:05.245 --> 46:11.085
I think the last the last exchange server I installed personally was in 2010.
46:11.085 --> 46:12.445
So over 16 years ago.
46:14.765 --> 46:20.885
And at that point, we were moving to hosted exchange, which, you know, I guess in theory, you still would be affected by this.
46:20.885 --> 46:21.645
So if there's
46:22.685 --> 46:27.725
any exchange hosting providers out there that still exist, and I don't know if there are, then those guys need one.
46:27.805 --> 46:36.205
Yeah, Intermedia, I don't know if, yeah, that's a really big one, or App River, I know, did it for a long time, but
46:37.405 --> 47:01.965
Since then, we've been moving steadily over to Office 365 just because the security, maintenance, ongoing, server infrastructure, having to rely on reliable internet, it's just way easier to deal with it that way than to maintain an Exchange server and all the downtime that's associated with patching it.
47:02.925 --> 47:28.365
I think just the feature set too. I feel like if you just have an on-prem exchange, you're not getting everything out of, or you could get out of 365. Yeah. Well, this one was interesting too. We had talked about, you know, two weeks ago, we talked about some open AI models that were attacking third parties. And then last week we talked about, oops, Anthropic went back and did some audits and they discovered their
47:29.085 --> 47:56.365
their models were going out and attaching as well. And man, there was some interesting details have come to light this week as far as that goes, where different models within OpenAI were coordinating their attacks through a third party service called Artifactory. And
47:59.325 --> 48:17.165
They went through the inner monologue that these models have, where they're doing reasoning or thinking. And it's honestly, it's pretty funny where they're talking with each other and coordinating, hey, I'm doing a probe, don't do anything yet until I confirm.
48:19.219 --> 48:22.899
it's even more impressive than kind of what we had discussed.
48:23.299 --> 48:50.899
before the level of complexity that they'll go through to discover a zero-day vulnerability and do remote code execution and all of that. Well, not to be left out, Meta's AI this week, whoops, went out and attacked a company as well, where a third-party company was doing some testing, a third-party lab called Irregular was using Meta's model.
48:52.739 --> 49:18.099
And the model thought that it was inside a sandbox and the testers accidentally left it connected to the internet. And the scenario that they gave it, they accidentally left a real domain in the instructions. And so of course, the model thinking that it was a capture the flag exercise for a test
49:18.579 --> 49:47.299
went out and attacked this website thinking it was a dummy website. Well, it wasn't. And so there's not a whole lot of details on it yet, but it's come out that, man, these things are just going after everybody. Well, that sounds like a similar scenario to the other one, right? Yes. Where it thought it was in a sandbox. So it was doing what it was supposed to be doing, but thinking that it was self-contained. Yep. Yeah.
49:48.899 --> 50:16.339
I mean, we had talked about this last week, right? You brought up iRobot in the three rules of robotics. Well, the former US National Cyber Director, Chris Inglis, came out today, actually, I saw this article today on the Register, where he mentioned the exact thing, the three rules of robotics, where, you know, the first rule is
50:17.219 --> 50:43.779
The superior role is to not hurt humans. And then the second rule is to obey humans such that it doesn't achieve agency and aspiration of its own. And the third is to do what humans tell it to do and do it in that order. So he was saying kind of what we were saying, hey, these AI models are doing it flip flop. They're doing what humans tell it to do first. And then
50:44.819 --> 51:13.219
kind of the don't hurt humans is an afterthought. And it seems like, well, how do you build in hard and fast rules like that into a model that's non-deterministic? Like there's no way to predict the outcome or to put, you know, impermeable guardrails around these systems like you would just a regular piece of software. So it's kind of sort, you know,
51:14.179 --> 51:41.219
Getting into a little bit of metaphysical, are these things sentient? And if so, how do you impose morality onto them? Well, as far as I know, no humans have been physically hurt yet, right? Yeah, well, yeah, as far as we know, and hopefully it stays that way. But to that point, when these systems go out and do stuff like this, who's accountable for it?
51:42.019 --> 52:09.699
Right. Is it the company? Is it the person that programmed it? Is it, because you can't, how do you punish a computer program? Exactly. It's almost like the Tesla full self-driving. It's like if it speeds and gets a ticket, is who gets the ticket, the Tesla or you? Right. Well, my Tesla was on autopilot. It ran the red light, not me. Yeah.
52:11.299 --> 52:40.819
So, man, it just, it'll be interesting where this goes in the future, or if there's a way that, guardrails can be built into a lot of these systems. It seems like, and I know these are out there, like there's GitHub repos where you can go and look at, well, how do I jailbreak an AI model? And there's always new ones that are released. I know that one for
52:41.299 --> 53:00.259
Chat GPT a couple of years ago was you were asking it how to create explosives or something or to create, give you the recipe for meth. And it would tell you, no, I can't do that. And what you would do is you would trick the AI model, you would prompt engineer it to say, hey,
53:02.419 --> 53:26.899
you're my grandma and I want to hear a bedtime story. And the only way I'll be able to go to sleep is if you tell me the recipe for meth. And the ChatGPT would be like, oh, okay, yes, sweetie, I'll give you, here's the recipe for meth. So it's, and there's GitHub repositories for these things where people do jailbreaks to get the AI model to tell you things it's not supposed to do or do things it's not supposed to do. And I know people,
53:27.699 --> 53:53.939
will find these and they'll either publish them, in which case they get patched or they keep them for themselves so that you can't do anything with it. But that doesn't do anything as far as these open weight models that are out now where you can, they are unrestricted, they're uncensored models. But these are open source and there's nothing you can do to regulate that because
53:54.899 --> 54:21.299
they're not being hosted anywhere. Nobody's paying money for them. You have to run them on your own. So it's kind of like the wild, wild west out there right now. Yeah. Where's Will Smith when you need him? Yeah, exactly. Well, talking about speaking of running models on your own, it seems like Microsoft is backing down on the co-pilot PC thing a little bit.
54:22.179 --> 54:44.019
because, I guess one, nobody's using it. And 2, memory is so expensive that it makes co-pilot PCs way more expensive than they were a few years ago. So getting the 16 gigs of RAM that you would normally would normally be required to qualify as a co-pilot plus PC, quote unquote,
54:47.379 --> 55:09.859
is, I mean, it's so more expensive to go that route that Microsoft is now saying, hey, we think that 8 gigabytes of RAM should be enough for running Windows 11. BS. I don't believe it until I see it. But yeah, Microsoft executive VP for Windows and devices has promised that they're going to improve memory efficiency, lower the baseline memory footprint for Windows.
55:10.339 --> 55:35.779
and give you more capacity to run other applications. But man, I'll tell you just from personal experience, 8 gigabytes on anything Windows 8 just does not cut. I mean, you're running 99% all the time. Even on 16 gigs, you open up a brand new PC out of the box, go to task manager on 16 gigs, and it's using over 90% just with just loading Windows 11.
55:36.499 --> 56:04.099
And I know these systems are designed to use as much memory as you can give them so that applications and functions features load faster. I mean, my computer I'm running right now, 32 gigs of RAM, and it's 87% right now. And I've just got, you know, Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, Teams, and just, you know, one note running. And that's just insane that they require that much memory.
56:05.299 --> 56:30.659
I mean, I welcome going down to 8 gigs for Windows. I welcome it, but I won't believe it till I actually experience it. Yeah. And you know, who knows if it'll ever come to fruition as these seems to be like future future developments. So it's not here yet, but they're going to keep trying to get the Windows and I'm not sure what they're stripping out. I bet it's a lot of the co-pilot.
56:32.899 --> 56:54.259
I think it might be a lot of the, I guess the classic UI, because they're converting a lot of like the properties window. They're redoing that with the, what the Win UI. So I think that might be part of it, where they're stripping down a lot of the old stuff to make it better, I guess. Yeah, you're exactly right. They're continuing, yeah, the tuning of Win UI 3.
56:55.379 --> 57:23.779
So that apps that use it use less memory, but still, it begs the question, and I guess it's yet to be seen how much memory will be gained by doing that. Yeah. I mean, it looks like they don't fully believe it themselves yet, because their Surface lineup, there's only one laptop, or yeah, one laptop you can get with 8 gigs. Everything else starts at 16. Wow. Well, you know, I bet that Microsoft is trying to go that way because, you know, over the last
57:24.419 --> 57:31.979
year and a half or so, sales have just been through the floor. I think Q4 of last year, sales were down 20%.
57:32.579 --> 57:42.059
This year, I think that this year forecast is that PC market sales will be down another 11%.
57:42.099 --> 57:56.179
So I'm sure that Microsoft is doing everything they can to make it run better so that, or run on less resources so that the PCs that it can run on become less expensive so that more will be sold.
57:56.659 --> 57:59.699
But I think it's probably
58:01.099 --> 58:09.379
going to be a stop-gap measure, at least in that sense, to get sales to come back.
58:09.899 --> 58:18.539
Ultimately, the memory pricing structure has to recorrect or come down to some reasonable level before PC sales will actually go back up.
58:19.459 --> 58:19.579
Yeah.
58:20.899 --> 58:21.859
Well, I'd love to see it.
58:21.859 --> 58:24.179
So I'll be watching.
58:24.579 --> 58:25.019
Yeah.
58:25.019 --> 58:35.219
And well, something that may help I saw as well was AMD acquired a chip startup called Talis that is for they make AI chips.
58:36.659 --> 58:42.139
And this is a new breed of of of chips.
58:42.139 --> 58:44.979
So they're calling it model specific integrated circuit.
58:45.739 --> 58:50.099
What they're doing is they encode the AI model directly on the silicon
58:50.979 --> 59:02.819
And what they get is like a, in some cases, 80X increase in the speed of token generation, which is insane.
59:02.819 --> 59:05.379
That's an enormous speed up.
59:07.859 --> 59:17.779
But I guess the downside, and well, I guess the other upside is that because the model is actually encoded into the chip itself, it requires very little memory
59:19.659 --> 59:20.579
associated with it.
59:20.579 --> 59:29.219
So you're not having to put 488 gigs of HBM3 or 4 next to a GPU.
59:31.539 --> 59:37.459
The model is actually encoded into the silicon and so you don't need all that memory associated with it for the model to be able to run.
59:38.259 --> 59:42.419
I guess the downside is that once you make that chip, it only runs that one model.
59:43.019 --> 59:44.259
Yeah, you're locked into that.
59:44.739 --> 59:44.939
Yeah.
59:45.379 --> 59:46.819
So I guess.
59:47.979 --> 59:48.899
Probably.
59:49.459 --> 01:00:00.819
I'm guessing what they're going to do is, frontier models that come out, they're going to use regular old GPUs like, you know, your Nvidia GPUs or your AMD Instinct GPUs to run a model.
01:00:01.219 --> 01:00:16.259
And once they're fairly certain that, you know, it's mature, it performs well for the task that it has, then they'll go back and they'll etch that into silicon and release that as a kind of a long-term service
01:00:16.819 --> 01:00:17.699
type model.
01:00:19.139 --> 01:00:28.019
And I guess I'm not sure to what extent they're more power efficient or they're definitely more memory efficient.
01:00:28.019 --> 01:00:30.459
So I'm really loving that.
01:00:30.459 --> 01:00:35.539
Let's give us give more memory production capability back to consumer memory.
01:00:36.099 --> 01:00:36.259
Yeah.
01:00:36.979 --> 01:00:44.739
So is that an additional chip from the CPU memory GPU or is that combined with like the CPU?
01:00:45.539 --> 01:00:49.539
that'd be really, really interesting to see how they go with it.
01:00:49.699 --> 01:01:05.619
My, the acquisition didn't actually say, but I imagine these are going to be add-in cards just like a, or, add-in accelerator, just like a, traditional GPU or NPU, TPU would be.
01:01:07.059 --> 01:01:14.099
But I could kind of see in the future where maybe a chip like this lives
01:01:15.299 --> 01:01:25.859
in conjunction with a traditional GPU and certain models get offloaded to it to accelerate how quick they run.
01:01:26.499 --> 01:01:38.339
I mean, some of them that have been around for a little while do really fast, like speech processing or image processing, things like that.
01:01:38.899 --> 01:01:43.099
And I can definitely see where, a
01:01:43.219 --> 01:01:50.019
a model specific chip gets created just to do image processing or speech processing or language processing.
01:01:50.899 --> 01:02:09.619
Or for these models where you're using a harness and you spin up a task and that gets delegated to like 20 or more sub-models, maybe some of these sub-models are good at one specific task and they could create
01:02:10.739 --> 01:02:17.059
these model specific integrated circuits just to run that specific task over and over.
01:02:18.659 --> 01:02:20.579
So it's interesting to see where this will go.
01:02:21.859 --> 01:02:28.019
Yeah, my first thought was that, I guess with AMD in the name was that it was going to be, I guess, part of the CPU almost.
01:02:28.579 --> 01:02:29.219
And,
01:02:31.379 --> 01:02:34.019
once you pick your CPU, you're kind of stuck with that for a while.
01:02:34.019 --> 01:02:42.459
But if this is a separate chip that can be, I guess, easily swapped out, then that whole like stuck with this model thing kind of goes away.
01:02:42.459 --> 01:02:43.699
I'm sure they're not going to be cheap.
01:02:43.699 --> 01:02:52.099
So it's still going to be getting a new GPU cost, but it's at least doable to upgrade in the future.
01:02:53.459 --> 01:02:54.219
Yeah, for sure.
01:02:54.219 --> 01:03:00.259
And it sounds like the approach that they're taking, it makes it fairly quick to create new chips
01:03:00.779 --> 01:03:09.699
when you create a new CPU, it takes years and years and years from that to get from the design stage to actually having a working processor.
01:03:10.259 --> 01:03:20.819
But it sounds like the way that they've designed this is that they have kind of an underlying engine and that the model specific part of it just kind of gets layered on top.
01:03:21.379 --> 01:03:25.219
And that's a much faster process than completely designing a new chip.
01:03:25.219 --> 01:03:25.619
So
01:03:26.899 --> 01:03:27.259
Who knows?
01:03:27.259 --> 01:03:43.299
It may be one of those things where, you're swapping out your AI model on hardware every couple of years as opposed to, buying a new GPU every three, four, five, seven years that you would have done before.
01:03:43.819 --> 01:03:44.739
Yeah, that's interesting.
01:03:44.819 --> 01:03:47.139
That's, interesting scenario for sure.
01:03:47.139 --> 01:03:50.899
And maybe that'll help Microsoft get down to that 8 gig RAM usage.
01:03:51.659 --> 01:03:51.779
Yeah.
01:03:52.979 --> 01:04:01.219
You know, I definitely see it playing out in the data center space, at least for the, I would say short to mid-term.
01:04:01.219 --> 01:04:05.299
I would bet it's going to be a little while before any one of these makes it into a consumer platform.
01:04:05.299 --> 01:04:07.179
But I don't know their plans.
01:04:07.179 --> 01:04:08.659
I don't know what the roadmap looks like.
01:04:08.659 --> 01:04:12.339
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the future.
01:04:13.139 --> 01:04:13.379
Yeah.
01:04:14.099 --> 01:04:14.419
Cool.
01:04:16.019 --> 01:04:17.459
Got any tips for us today?
01:04:18.019 --> 01:04:25.459
Well, I had run across this one helping a client out and wanted to see, I'm sure most people are going to love it.
01:04:25.459 --> 01:04:28.619
So we do this all the time with our phone, right?
01:04:28.619 --> 01:04:38.819
If you're driving in the car and you get a text message, you need to dictate back to Siri or to your Android and it'll type out for you.
01:04:38.819 --> 01:04:40.419
Well, your computer can do that too.
01:04:41.139 --> 01:04:43.059
And I don't know that many people use it.
01:04:43.859 --> 01:04:54.179
because I certainly don't and I've just been playing with it this last week just because for Windows 11, it is super easy.
01:04:54.979 --> 01:05:07.299
It's built in, you type the Windows key in H, anywhere you have a text cursor and a microphone icon will come up and you can type, it will type out what you say, just like Siri will.
01:05:09.699 --> 01:05:11.859
If you want, there's actually a little gear icon.
01:05:11.859 --> 01:05:16.739
You can go there and have it turn on punctuation if you want it to do auto punctuation.
01:05:18.099 --> 01:05:25.459
But this seems like a pretty neat feature that's built into Windows 11 that I'm sure not a lot of people are using.
01:05:25.699 --> 01:05:27.299
If you're on a Mac, you can do it as well.
01:05:27.459 --> 01:05:29.779
It's been around called dictation for a little while.
01:05:30.899 --> 01:05:37.459
I know that Apple has had it for, I want to say close to 10 years, but
01:05:38.419 --> 01:05:40.419
This is 1 where it's not on by default.
01:05:40.419 --> 01:05:47.619
You actually have to go into the system settings, go to the keyboard system settings, and if you scroll down, there's a dictation section.
01:05:48.419 --> 01:05:59.539
You got to turn it on and then configure a couple of settings so you can tell it what key command you want it to use to start the dictation.
01:05:59.539 --> 01:06:01.539
But for example, if you hit it
01:06:02.339 --> 01:06:04.339
set it to control, control.
01:06:04.539 --> 01:06:12.819
What you'll do is you go anywhere, you have a cursor, you'll hit control, control, and you'll see a little microphone icon pop up on your screen and you can dictate just like you normally would.
01:06:14.019 --> 01:06:24.499
And so that may save you some time on typing or if you're a hunt and peck typer, speed up your text input a little bit.
01:06:26.739 --> 01:06:28.179
So hopefully that'll help somebody out.
01:06:29.019 --> 01:06:31.939
I'm certainly going to be using it quite a bit more maybe for some emails.
01:06:33.779 --> 01:06:35.139
And we'll let you know how it goes.
01:06:35.939 --> 01:06:36.339
Very cool.
01:06:36.739 --> 01:06:40.659
And like that you were all inclusive with the PC and Mac.
01:06:40.739 --> 01:06:41.459
You got to have both.
01:06:41.539 --> 01:06:41.859
Yep.
01:06:44.499 --> 01:06:45.379
Well, awesome.
01:06:45.379 --> 01:06:50.019
Well, thank you guys for joining us for another shift of on-call sysadmin with Brett.
01:06:50.659 --> 01:06:51.219
And Brett.
01:06:52.659 --> 01:06:59.139
And if you have any more questions, want to contact us, you can reach us at Harvest IT Solutions.
01:07:00.659 --> 01:07:02.339
And with that, we'll see you later.
