339: NEW PC Chip Supports 256GB Of RAM?

[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of Technato. I am Sophie, one of your hosts. And just a reminder that Technato is sponsored by ACI Learning, the folks behind it pro. So if you do want a discount on that it pro membership, you can use the code Technato 30. Thanks so much to ACI learning for sponsoring this once again, I'm Sophie, just one of your hosts, and you may have noticed that I am in the Christmas spirit because this is, I guess, what we would consider our Christmas episode. And I'm not alone. I've got Don here to my left. Don, are you looking forward to Christmas? [00:00:35] Speaker B: I am. Nice chance to relax a bit, take a break. We'll pre record a little episode for next week, but this will be our last full episode for the year, and then we'll kick in 2024. And I'm sure it's going to be a brave new world because we won't have any IT security stuff to report on next year and technology will stop advancing. So we got that to look forward. [00:00:56] Speaker A: To because everybody's New Year's resolution is going to be to change their passwords and implement new security measures and. Yeah, so we won't have anything to talk about. So this is our last episode. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Basically, everybody's off the grid. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Daniel, how do you feel about that prediction? [00:01:09] Speaker C: I'm good. I've changed all my passwords to winter 2024 as you update capital w winter. Keep them hacked. That's right. [00:01:19] Speaker A: Well, I feel pretty confident that we're well prepared going into the new year, but this, I think, is going to be probably our last episode in the Christmas set, too, which kind of makes me sad. Maybe we'll. [00:01:31] Speaker C: You can tear the Christmas crap down. [00:01:32] Speaker A: And the Christmas crap, get this tree out of here. We don't need this crap. Well, in the event that we do run out of news somehow to talk about next year, we'll go ahead and enjoy these articles while we have them. This first one comes to us from ours. Technica Broadcom is ending VMware perpetual license sales testing customers and partners. So it sounds like maybe some people are not happy about this. Is that true? [00:01:58] Speaker B: Hey, tis the season for price changes, right? So a lot of people are up in arms about this. And the challenge is, if you're not familiar with how VMware has done their pricing, historically, you have Esxi, the core virtualization product that they give away for free. You can just install Esxi and you don't get any support, but you can install it and off you go. But if you want to manage it. [00:02:19] Speaker C: If you want to do anything, you. [00:02:22] Speaker B: Can at least get some virtual machines up. But if you want to do things like VMotion, where you live, move a VM from one piece of hardware to another. If you want the Vsphere management suite, if you want Vmware, horizon, all that other fancy stuff, that all costs money. And typically they do what are called perpetual licenses. So you pay a base license, and now you own that product, and you only have to pay again when the next major version comes out and you've got to maintain a support contract. Well, VMware was owned by Dell EMC. It all got really kind of confusing for a while there. And when it was Dell that owned them, it kind of made sense. You're like, all right, Dell makes hardware. They make servers. Servers can run VMware or ESX and all that mess. We kind of have an idea what that vision is. Well, then Broadcom acquired them, and a lot of people have wondered, what is Broadcom going to bring to the table? Because Broadcom is known for making networking chips and cellular modems and things of that nature, not virtualization platforms per se. Well, now we get to see the first thing they're bringing to the table, which is a new pricing model. And what they're doing is they're ending the sales of perpetual licenses and they're moving everyone to this should be our word of the year subscriptions. So subscription payments, because why have fixed revenue transactions when you could have recurring revenue? [00:03:43] Speaker C: That's right. [00:03:43] Speaker B: It's a blizzard of money, Don, a never ending blizzard. [00:03:46] Speaker C: That's right. [00:03:47] Speaker B: So that's what they're doing. A lot of people are concerned right now, and I'll be honest with you all this is probably going to blow over and turn out to not be a big deal if you're already paying for maintenance contracts. The odds are the cost is not going to vary that greatly for people who just expect to buy it and then run years and years without paying again. Yeah, you're going to be impacted, right. But that's not the model enterprises follow. Enterprises need support, so they don't follow that model. So it's really just going to impact small businesses, small businesses that don't expect that expense to be there. But the other thing is, Broadcom made this announcement within their sales channel, all under an NDA. And so the salespeople, as of right now, the filming of this podcast, the salespeople are not allowed to tell us what the pricing is going to be. So we don't know. I've had people ask me like, so, don, what's the cost? Because we use VMware in our day job, what's the cost change going to be? [00:04:36] Speaker C: I don't know, $8,000 a minute? [00:04:42] Speaker B: We do renew our licenses every year, and allegedly, under the subscription model, the pricing will be a bit cheaper. So it could be as much as 30% less expensive. But if you're somebody who just pays once and then it's three or four years before you pay again because you're. [00:04:57] Speaker C: Waiting for major versions, it's a much bigger cost. [00:05:00] Speaker B: It's a significant increase. Yeah. So it does completely vary based on your model. [00:05:04] Speaker C: Wow. So they just basically throw the double birds up at those. Do they expect that those small businesses are going to continue on with them or are they going to move to a competitor? [00:05:16] Speaker B: It's hard to say. Think about, like, red hat, right? So let's say that I go and I buy a copy of Rel. I can go and buy one, the workstation. I think you can buy a license for $75 or something like that, right? So I buy a workstation license, and then I say, you know what? I'm not going to pay red hat anymore. And when I buy that, I get one year of updates. And so that one year goes by, and now they shut off the update servers. And I say, well, whatever, I paid for it, I'm going to keep running it and I can. That's my license. What's year two going to look like for me? I'm not getting updates anymore. [00:05:47] Speaker C: No. [00:05:48] Speaker B: Right? And maybe I say, you know what? I don't care. I'm using this to power the animated fireplace on the tv behind me or something like that. So who cares if it gets updates? Then we get to year three. Now I'm significantly behind on security updates. And my fireplace is stuttering a bit because it's mining bitcoin in the background, right? And I'm walking around saying, oh, red hat sucks. Look how crappy my fireplace is running. And it's not their fault. It's that I chose not to pay for updates and so on. So this is broadcom basically saying there's a class of customer we like and we want, and there's another class of customer that we don't give two craps about. [00:06:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:06:25] Speaker B: And this is going to call the herd. That's the way I see it. [00:06:28] Speaker A: You said before you thought maybe this was going to be something that people are upset about, but eventually it'll die down. It'll blow over. Somebody in the. I love reading the comments, somebody in the comments disagrees and says, wow, this is borderline criminal extortion. That is an interesting take. Clearly people got strong feelings about this in shitification at Vmware. Who would have thought? So that's another buzzword we've heard here. [00:06:53] Speaker B: On the show before. [00:06:55] Speaker A: Somebody. I thought this was funny. Some of these execs have clearly learned the secrets of interstellar travel. So few of them seem to live in the same world as the rest of us. People are clearly upset, but this is just in the recent wake of this information. So yeah, I'm sure you're right, it'll die down. People like to be upset at stuff. [00:07:11] Speaker B: Now I like a sensationalist line as much as the next person. If anybody thinks this is criminal extortion, they have never talked to a cable company. This is like not even a business. Cable companies are going, oh, that's cute. Yeah, they're like, hold my beer, I'll show you. [00:07:31] Speaker A: So real quick, before we jump to the next article, I'm curious, I'm not as familiar with if you wanted to jump to a competitor, if you were upset about this and screw this, I'm not dealing with this, who would be the competitor you'd go to? Like what would be your know, it's. [00:07:44] Speaker B: A bit of a divided space right now. So it used to be that you had VMware with their ESX product and you had Microsoft with Hyper V. And so for like on prem data centers, those are the two main ones. Now the cloud providers like AWS, they adopted Zen. And so Zen, which is based on KVM and QEMu, which are open source products. So you could go open source, but it's a nightmare to manage in a closed data center. So your options are you could go to the cloud. So you move to Google Compute or AWS or Azure, you go to one of them or on Prem. Proxmox has been really making some strides. And what's the other one? Proxmox is the big one and there's another one. So there are a couple of other vendors that are out there, but they're not like industry veterans that are tried and true. [00:08:36] Speaker C: People have had it so good over at VMware for so long, things are about to change. [00:08:41] Speaker A: I hear you guys talk about it a lot. And so I just was thinking like, well, who would be the competitor? [00:08:45] Speaker C: They make a great product, there's no doubt about it. We've all probably dealt with a bevy of the different competitors in that space. And VMware Fusion is a phenomenal desktop virtualization software. They really do a good job of making a polished product that you enjoy using. I have moved away from Player on my windows and Linux machines though, and toward virtualbox more. Just most people are using it and it's fine. It works really well. I don't like hyper V that much. I never really have. [00:09:21] Speaker A: It's just, oh, I forgot about HyperV. [00:09:23] Speaker C: Not my bag as it were. But yeah, there's plenty of those things that are out there. And if you're willing to just kind of roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty a little bit more and start figuring your way through the less refined product that they may have or the niceties that VMware is offering you that they don't, and try to figure out how can I get parity with that experience in some way, shape or form? You probably figure it out and then once it's set, you're good to go. You just got to do the hard work of making it happen. And I think this is probably going to be the tipping point where people are pushed into go well, now it's worth my time and effort because you basically cut me off from my drug of choice and now I got to go find something else substitute. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Okay. [00:10:05] Speaker B: And Nutanix was the other company. I don't know if you guys have heard of Nutanix. They've been eating into VMware's market share quite a bit in the last couple of years. So Proxmox is an open source solution. Nutanix is closed source. It's a paid one. So there are competitors in the space, but VMware is pretty well entrenched. If you buy server hardware, you're pretty much guaranteed support for ESX versus some of the other. [00:10:27] Speaker C: They've done the business analysis on this and we don't care to lose those customers. We'll be fine. We'll make. [00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah, when you're somebody like Broadcom, where they have, it's like Apple, right, where they have billions and billions of dollars from other revenue streams that they can take risks and see how it plays out. [00:10:44] Speaker A: Well, given that VMware does seem to be pretty widely used, I guess it's a safe bet that maybe some of our viewers are VMware enjoyers. So if that is the case, I would love to hear what you guys think about this. Maybe refrain from the accusations of criminal extortion because I'm not trying to get in trouble, but we do love to hear from y'all. So if you are watching from YouTube, feel free to leave a comment. [00:11:01] Speaker B: What do you think about this? I think we should start a competition. Who can come up with the wildest accusation? [00:11:08] Speaker C: I can do it. [00:11:09] Speaker B: Let's go full QAnon. Right? It's going to be Vmanon like lizard people have now put that we're going to have subscription. [00:11:20] Speaker A: They'll put the sensor bar over Daniel's mouth and he'll tell us what he really thinks. We'll go ahead and jump. [00:11:25] Speaker C: If you want to libel a company, I can do it. [00:11:28] Speaker A: I'm just saying your superpower. [00:11:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I've got the skills. [00:11:32] Speaker A: I'm not trying to get in legal trouble. So we will move quickly into our next article. This comes to us from the Verge. It says Apple makes remote diagnostic tool available as it expands self service repair programs. So iPhone 15 and more M two powered MacBook owners are now going to be able to repair their own devices. And that seems like a win. I would think that maybe you save some money this way. Seems like a positive overall. [00:11:53] Speaker B: So this is a neat thing. For years when you had a Mac, if it started malfunctioning, right. So I had a MacBook Pro several years ago where the sound card died in it. It was really bizarre. The headphone jack stopped working, the speaker stopped, it would not generate sound, and so there was something mechanical wrong with it. It wasn't like a driver thing, it was something in hardware. And back then, and still today, you can boot a Mac and hold command d while it's booting and go into a special diagnostic mode. And that diagnostic mode would run, it would test all of your hardware, it would run through a number of different things like memory and disk and so on. It would test all the different components and then it would give you a report. Now that report was almost always cryptic. So on this machine where I knew the soundcraft was bad, it said, oh yeah, you've got a hardware issue, it's error code, blah blah blah, this big long number that meant nothing to me. So I could tell there was a problem and it told me I needed to take it into the Apple store, send it in to get it repaired through a valid provider. Right when you took it in. So I took it down to one of the local repair places. It was authorized, they had a different diagnostic tool. And when they ran theirs, it came right out and said, oh yeah, the sound controller is missing, it's just showing is gone. And you haven't disassembled it, so we assume you didn't take it. It's soldered on board. And so they had a better diagnostic tool than what we had access to as the consumer. Well, Apple has been trying to not get sued by the right to repair people. And so they've been making concessions that have largely been, I would say, misguided. But like the $75,000 repair kit that they sell. Oh yeah. And you can rent it temporarily while you do your repair, but if anything goes wrong in shipping it back, it's 75 grand. Yeah, that kind of nutsy stuff. But now they've actually done something I think is neat, which is given us all access to the same diagnostic tool that the repair centers have. So now you can boot a Mac, you still do the command d thing to go into diagnostic, but on newer Macs, so anything with m two or newer and iPhone two, but I don't care about those that on an m two or newer, you boot holding command d and it will reach out over the network to Apple Apple headquarters to kind of report back. Unless you're having a network card failure. Right. Then it's a whole different. [00:14:10] Speaker C: Then it does nothing. [00:14:11] Speaker B: Then you can go to a second machine and in the instructions it says it has to be a Mac. But I tested, it works on a windows machine. You go to apple's website, you punch in the serial number of the machine you're testing, and it'll then give you the extended diagnostics, what the repair center has. And now you can get a better idea what's going on with it. And that's important if you're going to try and repair it yourself. [00:14:30] Speaker C: I found a really good repair kit for old macs. So if you want to resurrect that old Mac sitting in the corner over there, it's called Linux. It is amazing because I have a 2013 iMac and a 2015 MacBook Pro and they run like new, they run like snappy and it's fast. I got a bunch of vms running on them. It is an amazing experience to just slap Linux on them and go, hey look. Because obviously the macOS for those devices are no longer supported, right? So I couldn't update them anymore. I went, well, I got my old friend Linux sitting right here and I was so glad that that happened. So I will say like, I can't do that with this one because it's got the damn light bar. So I think there's some ports and versions that try to. But I really don't like macOS. [00:15:25] Speaker B: I have a 2011 Mac Mini, so it's twelve years old now and it sits at home and it's a docker host for me. It's in a closet. I haven't looked at it in years. But whenever I need something and I can just throw it up in a docker container, I just chuck it on there and it's running ubuntu. [00:15:41] Speaker C: It's amazing. [00:15:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it does really well. [00:15:43] Speaker C: Yeah. Go on ebay and find you some stuff. You ain't going to worry about repairing cheap old Mac stuff. But if you're into that Mac, that apple culture, that. Right, then, yeah, this is a nice thing. [00:15:56] Speaker B: So to me, if you want to quickly eliminate a hardware issue, right. So something's going on and you're thinking, well, I could format it and reinstall the OS. And if it's software problem, that'll fix it. But what if it is hardware? I can just run these diagnostics. I don't have to go to the Apple store. I don't have to call Apple. I don't have to talk to another human. I like that. So I can just run the diagnostics. And if everything passes, it's not a hardware issue, it's software, I can probably fix it on my own. [00:16:22] Speaker C: You ran this tool? Yeah. What did you think of it? [00:16:25] Speaker B: Well, I didn't have a broken Mac test it with, so it told me things are fine. [00:16:29] Speaker C: But still, even though you didn't. Like. I've used tools before and I was like, this is a real piece of crap. Even though it does the thing I wanted to do and it did it, I still didn't enjoy the experience. Like, that happens sometimes. So I was wondering if maybe you had. [00:16:42] Speaker A: No. [00:16:42] Speaker B: It worked and it didn't require me jumping through any magical hoops. You literally go to a web page. I'm not even sure I was signed in at the time. [00:16:49] Speaker C: Wow. [00:16:50] Speaker B: You go to a web page, you punch in the serial number and it shows you the diagnostic data that comes back. Okay. [00:16:54] Speaker A: Now, in addition to this program, now expanding to more devices, it's also expanded to a whole bunch more european countries. It's available in a bunch more languages. So that's good news. But there is a little disclaimer that it comes with that if you're going to do this, this is intended for people that have the knowledge and expertise to be making these repairs. So somebody like me, I'm not a Mac user, so it doesn't matter. But probably I shouldn't be cracking open my MacBook and trying to fix things on my own if there's something wrong with it. [00:17:18] Speaker B: Supposed to learn that disclaimer never stopped anybody. [00:17:21] Speaker C: Listen, that disclaimer prodded a lot of people to becoming tech people. [00:17:25] Speaker A: I don't know that I want to learn on, like, $1,000 computer. I feel like that's just not financially smart for me. I feel like I should probably learn. [00:17:32] Speaker C: On a sense of adventure. [00:17:33] Speaker B: You got to take risks for me. We've talked about this on the podcast before. The first time I built my own computer, right. Very early in my career, I think I was just out of high school, and I'm building my computer, and so I bought all these computer components, and I didn't have the money to. I broke something, and here I am with my antistatic static wristband on because I didn't want to fry. Now I don't care. [00:17:58] Speaker C: I'm like, whatever. [00:17:59] Speaker B: It's memory. But back then, just worried about breaking any little part. So there is risk, but you take that risk, dude, and you learn. [00:18:08] Speaker C: First PC build I did, I was trying to latch the CPU down, and they used to have that thing you put the screwdriver in, and that kind of hooked it. Remember that? I stuck the screwdriver in, and it was really tight. When I went to push down on it, the screwdriver slipped out and just skated across my motherboard. I was like, well, how about that? Well, I guess we'll see what happens. [00:18:31] Speaker B: It fired up. Those are extra pieces that fell off. We don't need those. [00:18:37] Speaker C: You can see this scratch across my motherboard. It gave it character. It worked fine. [00:18:45] Speaker B: Character. [00:18:46] Speaker A: Well, this is another thing that I'm curious about. I guess we'll have to see. Maybe Nate will get a Mac in at some point that will have an issue with it, and he can test this and know how, I guess. User friendly this is. Or how well this works. [00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah. When I had the sound card die in that one Mac, I was tempted to keep it and not repair it because it fully functioned otherwise. And when I filmed training on Macs, it was nice to have a device that was broken to be able to show. But at the end of the day, it was getting close to the warranty being over, and I'm like, they'll fix it for free now. Later, it'll cost a ton. [00:19:17] Speaker A: Okay, so, even now, still being financially smart, that's good. [00:19:21] Speaker B: I don't like to waste money if I can avoid it. [00:19:23] Speaker A: I don't want to perform experiments on $1,000 computer. I'm telling you, man, you got to be careful. Well, it is available now in 33 countries across 24 languages, and can be used to repair 35 of its products. So neat. Self service repair program from Apple. And I'm curious if there are any users out there that have tried this out, like Don did. Let us know what you think, especially if you tried it out on a device that did need repair. Let us know how that went. [00:19:44] Speaker B: I think I mentioned it in passing, but really, if you have an m two or newer, this is guaranteed to work. If you have an m one, I think only one or two of those are on the list. If you have something older, when you boot into diagnostics, it doesn't phone home the way that you expect it to. And so older devices, it will not work. The device is most likely to be broken right now. [00:20:02] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's good to know. It's an ageist program, so we will keep that in mind. If you have an older device, check the list. Just like Santa. Look at that. We're on theme. [00:20:11] Speaker C: Grab a copy of Ubuntu. [00:20:14] Speaker A: Well, this next article comes to us from Tom's hardware, and it says, new desktop pc chips now support an incredible 256gb of memory as rock and MSI update, DDR five support on Intel Z 790 and AMD X 670 e motherboards. I'm going to need you to maybe translate that for me because I read it too fast and I don't think I processed it entirely. [00:20:33] Speaker B: I love picking headlines like this where there's so much garbage in the headline, it doesn't really matter. What matters here is if you've built a computer recently or just gone and bought one, right? [00:20:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:45] Speaker B: You've probably noticed that most systems come with either eight gigs, 16 gigs, or 32 gigs of ram. And it's actually really uncommon to go to the store and find something with more than 16 gigs of ram. And you might ask yourself, like, what is magical about going from 16 to 32? And the answer there is power savings. Right? So once you get over 16 gigs of ram, it takes more power to keep all the memory banks up and going. And so these companies like Apple, who want to brag about their insane battery life, your laptop can go for 12 hours. They're not lying, but the way they achieve that is by holding the memory down. So that's why they always push 16 gigs and less. Once you get to 32, though, you might say, well, why stop there? Let's keep going. Right. My computer at home, through the looking glass here, Don. So my computer at home, I had 32 gigs of ram, and I found that I would frequently get close to using it between whichever web browser I'm using. And it's ridiculous memory consumption, but also the virtual machines and docker containers, things that I tend to bring up for whatever reason, that I would frequently scrape 32 gigs. [00:21:49] Speaker C: Chrome saw that 32 gigs and said, what's everything else going to use? [00:21:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So I intentionally got a computer with 64 gigs of ram right now. I never it 64. In fact, I usually will maybe creep around 40, and that's about as high as I get, so the rest of the memory is wasted. But that's just me. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe some of you out there in tv land are like, man, 64 sucks. I need more. And that's where things got really tricky on desktop motherboards. No one was making motherboards that could do more than 64 gigs of ram. You had to go to a server at that point, server motherboards, to be able to get beyond it. Well, that limit is starting to break down. We're seeing the first couple of motherboards that are coming out, which was all the random letters and numbers. Sophie was saying, the Z 790 and AMD X six seven motherboard alpha Centauri. So motherboards are coming out now, and it looks like the jump is going to be from 64 gigs all the way up to 256 gigs. So you can get 256 gigs of ram in your machine. Now, who would need a desktop with that much ram? The two candidates we always go to are people who do video editing and cad. Right? 3d rendering. They'll eat that memory up like crazy. It'd be nice to have an eight k video file that you're editing fully loaded into Ram. [00:23:14] Speaker C: Right. [00:23:14] Speaker B: They're going to use it. But if you're Dom posette with a couple of docker containers and the rambling on your raspi and chrome and a couple of other things that are just eating up Ram, then it's overkill for us. But it's neat to see that barrier fall. [00:23:30] Speaker C: Very cool. [00:23:31] Speaker A: Absolutely. You mentioned the raspy, and it reminded me that you were able to give one of the newer ones away the other week. I'm curious. It just occurred to me that there may be people watching that won something from that giveaway. [00:23:40] Speaker B: Maybe. [00:23:41] Speaker A: So it's possible. And if you did, we'd love to hear it. I know that's unrelated. It just reminded me, and I know if I don't say I don't. [00:23:46] Speaker C: We got a price point on this new motherboard business. [00:23:48] Speaker B: I didn't bother to look because you never want to. It's like buying the first model year of a car, right? Ford launches the new Ford X 670 E. I'm not buying that for a few years. You got to wait and let us have same thing with motherboards. Do not go on the first year of a motherboard. And you could see like if you go to Asus's product list where there's like, here's this motherboard, V two, V three, V four, and the firmware is not compatible. That's how significant they changes are between those versions. Yeah. So I wouldn't sweat what these model numbers are. And they've got dumb names. I'm not going to buy the X 670 e Tai Chi motherboard. I've got limits to what I'll tolerate. [00:24:34] Speaker A: Jeez. Yeah. I wonder what the cost is. I'll have to see if I can find $1,000. [00:24:39] Speaker C: That's the problem. [00:24:40] Speaker A: I'm curious because, yeah, it's not in the article. [00:24:42] Speaker C: When they hide the price, you can't afford it. That's right. [00:24:48] Speaker A: I'm not in the market for one of those anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter. But I'll have to see if I can. Maybe I'll try to find it over the break. Speaking of which, we are going to take a short break that's going to cover the first half of the articles that we have today. But don't go. We'll have more security news coming up next on Technato. Tired of trying to schedule your team's time around in person learning? Isn't it a bummer to spend thousands of dollars on travel for professional development? What if we said you can save money and time and still provide your team with the best training possible? The answer to your woes is live online training from ACI learning. With live online training, we provide our top in person courses in private online instructor led formats. You get to provide professional development in a manner that fits today's expectations. Entertaining, convenient, and effective, our exam aligned courses inspire the full potential of your team. Visit virtual instructor led training at ACI learning for more info. Welcome back for more Technado. Just a quick reminder, if you are listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts, we'd love to hear from you. So hop over to our YouTube channel as well. Leave a comment there. Let us know what you like, what you'd like to see in the future. Because we just love to hear from all of you. And if you're already watching on YouTube, thanks so much for joining us. Feel free to subscribe so you never miss an episode of Technado. We'll go ahead and jump into our security articles now. I already talked to Daniel, a little bit about this this morning. So I am excited to get more information on this one, especially because it's part of one of my favorite segments. Who got poned? Looks like you're about to get poned. [00:26:10] Speaker B: Fatality. [00:26:12] Speaker A: So this one comes to us from TechCrunch. Us healthcare giant Norton says hackers stole millions of patients'data during a ransomware attack. So I guess there's more to this than meets the eye. Obviously, there's this story here, but I guess there have been developments as well on this that are tertiarily. Tertiarily. Okay, so maybe we'll focus on this one. Mean, it sounds like it's a big deal. It's a us healthcare giant. [00:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Anytime it's a healthcare organization that gets impacted, it's significant. Right. Because what is the information that a hacker is stealing? If a hacker steals my credit card information, that sucks. It's a pain in the butt. But do I really care? Right? The credit card companies end up having to eat it. It's not me. It's annoying, but I don't really care. [00:26:58] Speaker C: They will run your credit up, though, and ruin you. [00:27:00] Speaker B: They can certainly try. It happens a lot. [00:27:03] Speaker A: If it's just your card, I'd imagine it's easier to fix because you can cancel the card, right? As long as it's not your full identity. [00:27:10] Speaker C: You'd have to prove theft. You'd have to prove, which is why one of the good security things you can do just personally is have a freeze on your credit. That's why you're ready to use your credit. Then you unlock the card and you use it and then lock it back. [00:27:24] Speaker B: Now, what's interesting, I mean, if they get your Social Security number, they can then go and try and take out mortgages in your names. And that's when you get in real trouble. Not just like they went to target and spent $300, but when it's your medical records, you might have medical conditions and information you don't want shared. There might be other things that are in there. That's your private information. [00:27:46] Speaker C: It's more significant more effectively as well. [00:27:48] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. [00:27:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Because if they know some medical condition that is personal to you, that you know, nobody would know this other than medical professionals, then they can send you. [00:27:56] Speaker A: Official, they know you have shingles. They can target you. An email about shingles. [00:27:58] Speaker C: You got shingle on your eye for that. People are out there going, you darn right I do. [00:28:04] Speaker B: And this sucks. So in this case, millions of people, I think it was two and a half million people had their information stolen by a ransomware attack. So ransomware spread throughout the hospital networks, and it was some 40 different clinics and then exfiltrated their data. And that data contained a collection of dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health and insurance information, medical id numbers. In many cases, it also contained driver's license number, government id numbers, as well as digital signatures. That stings a little bit, right? So your actual signature digitized. That's some data right there. And not something to be happy with. And not something. You just go and reset and you're back in business tomorrow. This is significant. [00:28:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's always a problem when these things occur, and we hate to see it happen. Now, remind me again, what was the name of the group that perpetrated this heinous act? [00:29:01] Speaker B: It was a completely unknown group that we've never heard of before, which was. [00:29:07] Speaker A: Just popping on the scene. [00:29:10] Speaker C: Where the hell is. [00:29:11] Speaker B: I've lost it on my paper. Yeah, shoot. It's somebody we've heard of, though. There we go. [00:29:16] Speaker C: Also known as Black Cat. This just in. As of like, yesterday or the day before, the FBI seized Alpha's servers and their domains, and they shut them down and provided decryption keys for $65 million worth of ransomware demands. That's super awesome. This just in. AlFv reseased their stuff. This is like an ongoing cat and mouse game. And not only cat and mouse, they are pissed. They are angry that the FBI has done this because historically, black hat has said they're basically malware as a service. Right? Ransomware as a service. You can use our platform, get your money, do your thing. You got a whole access to thing if you're a bad guy out there doing these things. And they have forbade the use of their tool against critical infrastructure in the US. The gloves have come off and they have said we're giving a 90, charging only 90%, so 10% discount and go buck wild. Nuclear facilities, power plants, now they're mad. You name it. Yeah, they are pissed. And they got a new onion link up, and they're back in business. So I look forward to seeing how we punch back. This is getting spicy. [00:30:31] Speaker B: Could be interesting. [00:30:32] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:32] Speaker B: Now, I was really surprised that this healthcare organization, Norton, was busted because it seems like they'd be running Norton antivirus. And once the system was compromised, seems like they could have used Norton system utilities to recover from it, but I guess not. [00:30:46] Speaker C: I don't even want to know who developed Norton ghost that worked at this hospital. [00:30:54] Speaker B: It does turn a little dark, doesn't it? Like a M night Shyamalan film now. [00:31:04] Speaker A: It does say that this is a Kentucky based healthcare system. So as far as the folks that were affected, was this at least limited to healthcare facilities in Kentucky? [00:31:13] Speaker B: Yeah, very regional. Two and a half million people. So think in terms of the US, our population is over 350,000,000. So it's just about 40 clinics and hospitals in the Kentucky area. So somewhat limited, in my opinion. I don't want to downplay it because of that. It could have been Florida. [00:31:32] Speaker A: Sure. [00:31:32] Speaker B: It could have been any state. And really, here's two and a half million people that are completely innocent, that didn't do anything wrong, that broke their arm, had to go to the hospital and get treated, and now all this information is out there and that stinks. [00:31:47] Speaker C: Yeah. And hopefully we are getting better at defenses. I can't wait to see what 2024 comes with as far as, like, new defenses, new capabilities, and the ability to detect, prevent and alert, because that's really what we do when it comes to this kind of thing and to be able to do better emulation against actual threats and start to stop these things. [00:32:10] Speaker B: Well, I'm looking forward to purchasing my copy of Norton Dpa 2024. Detect, prevent and alert. Alert. [00:32:18] Speaker C: Or alert, alert, alert. [00:32:20] Speaker B: All right. Got to get the right thing. So. Yeah, look for that in your local best buy or comp USA. Yeah. [00:32:27] Speaker A: As far as I can tell, I might have missed it, but reading through the article, it didn't look like they had any answers as to how this happened yet. Right. Like a cause it was just, there was an attack. There wasn't like, oh, specifically it was this issue or this thing that. So we don't have that information either. [00:32:41] Speaker B: I think we're at the stage where we don't need that anymore. Right. When it's ransomware, we know the vector. [00:32:46] Speaker C: It's nice to know the initial compromise, though, right? Because there are other organizations out there can learn from that. And that's why Mitre is so important is to see, oh, these are. So if black cat is what's aimed for you, well, you can kind of look at and see what their ttps are and how they typically gain access into systems to start trying to better prevent against that. [00:33:05] Speaker A: Maybe that's something that know. Maybe we'll cover this in a day as a news segment at some point. [00:33:09] Speaker C: Hold on. Let me do my great carnac impression fishing link. [00:33:14] Speaker B: Yeah, the end. [00:33:19] Speaker A: All right, that's our prediction. More of this comes out in 2024. That's going to be the cause. We'll head to our next article here. This is part of another beloved segment here on technato called behind bars. [00:33:32] Speaker B: Bad boys, bad boys. [00:33:37] Speaker C: Break the law. [00:33:38] Speaker A: This article comes to us from bleeping computer. It says, cloud engineer gets two years for wiping ex employers code repos. So we do love to see this. Not that he wiped the code. We don't love to see that. Not the crime. I just mean. [00:33:51] Speaker C: Let me rephrase. [00:33:52] Speaker A: It's good to see, like, you did a crime. You're doing the time. We love to see justice served. I just have to do that disclaimer, not the crime. I'm not saying we love to see. Crime's over here. Like I'm writing down. She's got an evaluation coming up. [00:34:06] Speaker C: So is there any crime happening in our organization right now? Sophia. [00:34:11] Speaker B: Hey, we got to make sure that Netflix has material for more documentaries next year. We need stuff like this. Little did they know, it has been a story we've told more than once. You get the disgruntled employee that leaves. And there was the big one in San Francisco where the guy left, and he was the only one with credentials to their entire fiber optic network, and he would not give them the credentials. They ended up having to throw him in jail for a while to finally get him to share that. These stories happen over time. And I get it. I assume nobody likes getting fired, although sometimes I think I might appreciate it. But I think most people don't like getting fired, and so they get mad and they want to take some kind of retaliatory action. And the problem is, some people lose sight of what's illegal and what's not. And a lot of times, while it stinks to get fired, that's not an illegal act. Then turning around and maliciously attacking your former employer is an illegal act, and then you end up in jail. [00:35:17] Speaker C: Hurt people. Hurt people. Okay. [00:35:19] Speaker B: Yes, that makes sense. I've not heard that before. [00:35:26] Speaker A: People that have been hurt. [00:35:28] Speaker C: Others. [00:35:28] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. [00:35:29] Speaker B: Okay. Well, in this case, that's exactly what happened. So you had this cloud engineer who was terminated, at least formally, because he inserted a USB key into a computer, and the USB key had pornography on it on a work computer. [00:35:45] Speaker C: He's got so many, it's hard to keep them straight. [00:35:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And with stories like these, there's typically a lot more behind it. But that was what the human resources department put down. That's why he was terminated. After he was terminated, he refused to turn in his company laptop, so he told the police it was stolen. So he kept his laptop and the company that terminated him did not immediately disable his account. And so for a 24 hours period after he was fired, he had access to everything and went nuts. Like deleting code repositories, eliminating cloud infrastructure, put taunting messages in some of the source code so the other developers would see it. I mean, just really did some damage. [00:36:27] Speaker C: So you got me thinking over here. I really need to explore more cyber litigation. What makes a company criminally negligent? If they do or don't do these things or if they don't do them correctly? Because we see it all the time, right. You didn't implement this type of security and therefore you were breached. And now you're before a judge and you might have sanctions brought against you because of that. What are those tipping points that push people over? Like, were they negligent for not cutting off his access? Not that I want to victim blame. I'm not doing that. This is purely theoretical. [00:37:01] Speaker B: There's a whole set of due diligence law around this, right. And it actually stems from older stuff. It's not even technology related. So if you do not lock the front door of your house and somebody comes in and steals all of your stuff, there is still a crime there, right? Robbery or burglary or whatever. So there is a crime. There will be punishment. But your insurance company might not have to cover you, right. [00:37:25] Speaker C: Because it's not breaking and entering and. [00:37:27] Speaker B: Because you didn't lock your door, you didn't take simple, basic precautions. Right. And so that's where this kind of stuff is. If they try and file an insurance claim, they may well be found to have been negligent. Like, you fired this employee and you didn't disable their account. We're not going to cover your damages. But there's still a crime here, right? Still a crime, absolutely. That's the difference. [00:37:48] Speaker C: That's where the separation is. [00:37:49] Speaker B: Okay. [00:37:50] Speaker C: Like I said, I want to learn more about that. [00:37:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:52] Speaker A: The route that you were going as far as, like, you're standing before a judge because you were negligent and didn't implement certain things, you should have sort of seemed to me to be more similar to, like, if you're a parent of a kid and something happens to the kid, even if it was an accident, if you as a parent weren't taking certain precautions, then you're found negligent. [00:38:06] Speaker C: Fell and stabbed their eye out with a pair of scissors because they were running down the hallway. [00:38:09] Speaker A: It was the eye that had shingles. [00:38:11] Speaker C: And you had the run with scissors box sitting right here. Yeah. You're in trouble. [00:38:16] Speaker A: A staple in every family's house. [00:38:18] Speaker C: What was that? [00:38:19] Speaker A: Couple. [00:38:19] Speaker C: I think there was a couple in Tampa years ago that got charged criminally because their kid got killed by their burmese python or something. What? Yeah. You keep negligent animal in your house, and it got out of its cage and killed the baby in their crib. [00:38:36] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:38:37] Speaker C: Yeah. Horrible, right? Yeah. But what are you putting oil next to these rags for? Why are we doing this? [00:38:47] Speaker B: I used to work for a law firm, and one of the attorneys. Yeah, a long time ago. It was way back, early in my career. But one of the attorneys told me, she said, don, I have all these law books, and every attorney has a wall of books. They love that stuff. [00:39:01] Speaker C: Look what I read. [00:39:02] Speaker B: And she said, but nowhere in here will you find a law that makes it illegal to be stupid. It is completely legal to be stupid. But then there's things that are crimes, and that's what we go after. Exactly. Yeah. So the burmese python story, that would be negligence and then child endangerment, right? Absolutely. That's where those fall under. But, hey, failing to disable an employee's laptop after they were terminated, it's not unreasonable to expect a terminated employee to not attack you. [00:39:39] Speaker C: My mind was on the idea that what is the most. Well, one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous, threat to your organization is insider threats. They already have trust. You are trusting them with your data, your systems, the people that work there, you are giving them access that hackers out there would love to have their hands on, just right out of the gate, because what is it, my birthday and Christmas holiday? Right. They already have that. So once you got somebody in the state of mind that they're probably pretty pissed, even if they did something wrong, people are irrational, illogical all the time. So when Don and I, when we worked at the insurance company together, I would get phone calls that said, shut down so and so's access. Now, they hadn't even fired them yet. Right. [00:40:33] Speaker A: Preemptive. [00:40:33] Speaker C: Not let them go at that point. [00:40:35] Speaker A: Because why take the chance? [00:40:36] Speaker C: Correct. [00:40:36] Speaker A: You know that it's going to happen. You don't want to fire them and then be like, oh, we'll go and take. You. [00:40:40] Speaker B: Don't wait 24 hours, even if you don't know if it's going to happen. [00:40:42] Speaker C: Right. [00:40:43] Speaker B: So let me walk you through the process. I'll tell you exactly how this happened. So let's say in our day job that they decided they needed terminate me. Okay? So here's how. [00:40:53] Speaker C: Next month, Tomorrow, new year, new dawn. [00:40:56] Speaker B: So here's how you terminate Don. So I have access to accounts. I have significant access to accounts, right? And I have my password manager that has access to stuff and so on. So if I were to flip out and go nuts, I obviously have the resources to be able to do some damage. So the way they do it is first off, they reach an agreement. It's time to terminate this employee, right? So HR is involved and they make sure that all the boxes are checked. It's okay to fire Don. Then they need to schedule a meeting with me to fire me. Right? So they send me a meeting like, hey, it may just be the manager, it might be the HR department, although that normally tips your hat to what you're doing. So it's typically just your manager says, hey, we need to have a one on one or whatever at this time. They then start the offboarding process, and so they go to the IT department or whoever. In our case, it would be our corporate IT department, and they would say, look, we've got a scheduled termination. The meeting is going to happen at 01:00 p.m. So at 01:00 p.m. That person walks into a meeting, you start disabling accounts, and you be ready. And here's from most sensitive to least sensitive. Here's where you start, and here's where you stop and you go to it. And so when I walk into that meeting, I'm not fired yet, but I'm in the meeting and my accounts are being disabled. Right then, right. And by the time that meeting is over, even if it's a ten minute meeting, and I flip them the double birds and I storm out the door, which is how you do that. At that point, my account is all disabled, my badge doesn't work on the doors and so on, I've been terminated. [00:42:33] Speaker C: So why do you think it is a common thing that they, I mean, we read about articles like this all the time where someone was terminated and their access was not revoked. How is that not a process that they. That, or how is it that this has happened? Not that they would go and flip out and do things, but that they would not have revoked that access? [00:42:52] Speaker B: So it's immature. Security controls. ISO 27,001 exists, and sock two exists specifically to look at companies and measure their security controls maturity level. Right. So how far along are they in actually providing proper security and identifying areas like this that are weaknesses? And so when you hear about companies that do stuff like this, it's usually they have underinvested in their IT department, they don't have good processes and procedures in place and so on. And that's why when you do business with somebody, you want to see, do they have these certifications? Has their company been audited to ensure that they're following these processes? And. And unfortunately, just because they're a government agency doesn't mean they're following NIST guidance. And if they did, then these problems wouldn't happen. So that's usually what you are making. [00:43:44] Speaker C: A strong case for GRC right now, and I will have you stop it. [00:43:49] Speaker B: I mean, hey, that's its intent, but. [00:43:51] Speaker C: That'S why it's there. [00:43:53] Speaker B: It can be tons and tons of needless bureaucracy and red tape and an annoyance that doesn't benefit anybody. But when done right, it's super helpful. It is. And it's preventative. It's looking at problems like these and solving them before the problem happens. [00:44:08] Speaker A: It's very analytical, too. I think it's kind of fun. I think it's kind of interesting. As a child, conceptually, in theory, maybe if I actually had to do it for a job, I would indoctrinate doing. I'm doing his GRC masterclass thing right now, or his expert course or whatever. And so it is actually pretty entertaining. [00:44:30] Speaker B: I don't know if you've ever talked to Megan Gerardo, who, at our day job, she is our head of compliance, and she loves it. She's, like, really passionate about that stuff. There's a lot of good that she does in if you know the laws and you know what we're supposed to do. All you do is make sure that the team is doing what we're supposed to do. It avoids a ton of headache and hardship down the road. To me, I'm like, good God, how do you end up in a career like that? What did you do wrong? But some people smarter than me, I guess. So. She's passionate about it and loves it. And that whole compliance team, they're just a group of people that are wired that way. [00:45:10] Speaker C: Listen, I tell people all the time about they want to get into cybersecurity. I'm like, start looking at niche things, like become an expert on PCI, DSS, become an expert in HIPAA, become an expert on NIST. Really focus in on something that not a lot of people really like to do. And if you get really good at it and you know that junk backwards and forwards, and now you're like, well, I'm a unicorn in a field. And now everybody's just like, well, we got to get that person. [00:45:36] Speaker A: Why do you think I'm taking the class, Daniel? Why do you think I enrolled? [00:45:40] Speaker C: It's like you listened to me or something. [00:45:41] Speaker A: It's almost like I take your advice on occasion. [00:45:44] Speaker B: And we've got CMMC in the United States now, the cybersecurity maturity model certification. Got to remember all that. So companies that do business with the government are having to start conforming to CMMC. So it's a whole new market for people who are just getting into cybersecurity, like learn CMMC, and there's an opportunity. [00:46:00] Speaker C: Yes. [00:46:01] Speaker A: Well, in the case of this guy, that is obviously in quite a bit of trouble. This has been ongoing for a couple of years. He was fired back in 2020. He wasn't arrested until 2021. I thought that was odd. Well, it's because initially, when this all was happening, he initially said, oh, my computer was stolen out of my car. It wasn't me. And he maintained that story when he was arrested. And up until April of this year, April 2023, that's when he finally was like, well, maybe I did it a little bit. So he is serving, I think. Yeah. What is it, two years? [00:46:28] Speaker C: That was a part of the plea deal, I'm sure. [00:46:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's two years in prison, three year supervised release, and a restitution of half a million dollars, or over half a million dollars. So he's going to be hurting for some time, but don't do the crime if you can't. [00:46:40] Speaker C: Hope he enjoys his new career field, because it's not going to be in it. [00:46:43] Speaker B: No. [00:46:43] Speaker C: Ever again. [00:46:44] Speaker A: Yeah, he'll get into waste management. [00:46:46] Speaker B: He did only get two years with three years supervision, which doesn't, I mean, seems kind of lenient for something like. [00:46:53] Speaker C: This, but half a million dollars in fines, that's kind of tough. [00:46:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that doesn't test. Nothing to sneeze at. I wasn't even willing to experiment on $1,000 computer, so I can't imagine half a million dollars in fines. That would kill me. We'll jump into our next article here. And this one is actually an issue that we've looked at before, and I know that because it's part of a segment called Deja News, and it does come to us from Tom's hardware. Microsoft's fix for issue that renamed printers and installed extra utilities requires downloading yet another utility. So we talked about this a few weeks ago, where it was just seemingly without reason or without cause. It was just renaming things and it was anarchy. So there's a fix now, but you got to download more stuff to fix it. [00:47:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there has got to be more to this story that we still have not learned. So we will likely have this on another day as on news. But a couple of weeks ago we reported that people woke up one day and on Windows, all of their printers have been renamed to HP LaserJet M 101 106. It didn't matter if it was an Epson or Canon or whatever, like they a brother, they were renamed and they were now HP Laserjet. And once Windows saw that you had this HP Laserjet, it then installed the HP smart suite utility. And that's what people saw. It's like, why do I have this HP software installed when I don't have an HP printer? Well, there were a number of theories that were out there about what happened. Like somebody at HP screwed up with their script and it would check for models and if it didn't match, then it would just default to this one and it hit all your printers. There were people who thought that Microsoft screwed up. Something happened with Windows updates and was messing it up. To this day, we still don't know who screwed up and Microsoft is not telling us how it happened. [00:48:40] Speaker C: There was a dev caker party somewhere probably. And then they were like, let's code something. [00:48:46] Speaker B: I could see this as like just a broken. If, you know, if it's this printer, if it's HP, they were testing and. [00:48:56] Speaker C: That was like their test driver they had or something. [00:48:58] Speaker B: And that would be my guess. A simple code mistake. [00:49:02] Speaker C: But don't drink in code, ladies and gentlemen. [00:49:03] Speaker B: But you'd see that Microsoft could just push an update out with Windows update and solve the problem. But no, and they haven't ruled that out in the future. But for right now, weeks after this issue happened, this is like three weeks ago. If you were affected, you've probably done something about it by now. But the problem can actually come back. That's something Microsoft hasn't talked about either, is that it can come back. So they've now released a tool, a tool that will fix the problem. You run this tool, first off, you have to go to Microsoft's website and download it. It's named Ebony troubleshooter. And historically. Hey, Daniel, what do you think about Microsoft troubleshooters? [00:49:39] Speaker C: It is awesome. And I love every last second of using it. On the fifth of never. [00:49:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Also known as a pointless waste of time. Right? Did you reboot your computer? Have you done? [00:49:49] Speaker C: I love it when it's like I can't get on the Internet. Try the troubleshooter. We tried to reach out to the Internet. [00:49:55] Speaker B: No shit. [00:49:57] Speaker C: You don't say, man. [00:50:00] Speaker B: Well, so this one, it's labeled a troubleshooter, but it is actually just a utility. You run it and it will rename your printers back to what they were originally named. It will uninstall the HP smart suite utility, and it'll make a registry change to ensure the problem doesn't come back again. So it fixes it. [00:50:17] Speaker A: Problem solved. [00:50:17] Speaker B: Right. But if you were affected, you have to know to go out and download this utility. And I took a quick look at it before the show. I didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, but I didn't see a way that I could automate deployment of it across network. You got to be ready for Technato. [00:50:38] Speaker C: Right? [00:50:43] Speaker B: So I didn't see a way that you could do this on any mass scale. And maybe it didn't impact people on a mass scale. Maybe it only affected individuals. I don't know, but it just seems a weird way to roll this out. [00:50:53] Speaker C: Yeah, very strange. Like, just kind of leaving it on you. [00:50:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:57] Speaker C: There's a fix out there, if you're so inclined. Enjoy. [00:51:02] Speaker B: Send us a self address damped envelope and we'll. [00:51:10] Speaker C: Like. [00:51:10] Speaker B: There's a spike in floppy drive sales on eBay. [00:51:15] Speaker A: I like that. It does say, if you're a victim of this latest printer nightmare, this is your best shot. Or it's probably your best shot at getting these printer problems fixed. As if it's not really your only shot at fixing any of this. [00:51:23] Speaker B: Right? [00:51:24] Speaker C: I have a really good fix. It's the same one as the apple problem because you put Linux on it, and if you need windows, you put that in a virtual machine, and when. [00:51:33] Speaker B: It shits the bed but not vMware, you just do another one. All right, so in 2024, it's going to be the year of Daniel as the Linux zealot he's gone over. [00:51:43] Speaker C: I was like, you know what? [00:51:44] Speaker B: Fix that. [00:51:44] Speaker C: Don't just pour a little Linux on that, Don. That'll get you. [00:51:51] Speaker A: Well, there were people in the comments that had the same feelings as y'all did about the troubleshooter, that it's not going to be any better than. Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Wait till we search the Internet for a solution. Sorry we couldn't find a solution. You're screwed. Hopefully it's better than that. But there were people in, in the. [00:52:05] Speaker B: Comments, they're doing the Spider man thing. [00:52:09] Speaker C: It's not me, it's you, right? Yep. You're the one. [00:52:14] Speaker A: Well, if we've got one update on this that tells me hopefully in the new year we will continue to have updates on this and maybe eventually there will be a more reliable, more permanent fix to this problem, or maybe even an explanation as to why this year. [00:52:26] Speaker C: Don doesn't have the dts while we do the show. [00:52:30] Speaker A: Do you think it's likely we'll ever get an explanation for why this happened? [00:52:33] Speaker B: I feel like we have to. I feel like there's a change that happened that required system level permissions to do it. I feel like Microsoft should be responsible to disclose what happened, not apparently it's not a security breach. So I think it's just a code screw up. But we trust, and I know I said this before, we trust Windows update. We trust Windows hardware labs, that they're doing the testing on these drivers. If they want us to continue to trust them, they need to tell us where this breakdown happened because otherwise it undermines that whole ecosystem. [00:53:06] Speaker C: This message brought to you by canonical. [00:53:10] Speaker A: We're doing sponsorships now. That's great. Well, like I said, hopefully in the new year, we've got some new news about this. And speaking of the new year, Don, it sounds like as far as full episodes go, this is going to be our last one of 2023. Is that right? [00:53:23] Speaker B: Yes. We'll do a short little message for the week of Christmas, but otherwise we'll be back in 2024 with more techno boy. [00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you can't get away from us. We will be back. But in the meantime, if you're itching to get your techno fixed, we have all of the previous episodes available on our YouTube channel and anywhere that you can listen to podcasts. So feel free to go back and listen to those. And if you enjoy them, like I said before, feel free to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed this episode, drop a like and maybe even a comment. Tell us what you thought. Tell us what you're looking forward to tech wise in the new year, what your predictions are. We would love to hear it. Do you guys have any predictions for the new year, tech and cybersecurity wise? Other than just that it's going to continue to be a dumpster fire all the time, everywhere. [00:54:00] Speaker C: You're asking so many questions. [00:54:02] Speaker A: I'm practicing my speed. [00:54:07] Speaker B: Know there are some things heating up right now. Daniel, you mentioned around utilities and infrastructure, but that's been going on for a little while now. I think the situation in Ukraine has really created a big distraction around cyber warfare. If that situation continues to progress, we might see some significant activity. [00:54:30] Speaker C: Well, and it creates a battle hardened enemy. Right. If we are in a cyber war, which I would have just. Yes. Then the fact that they have been actively lobbing digital grenades at each other for the last little bit is not good news for the rest of the world because they are battle hardened now. They've got ttps that are tried and. [00:54:51] Speaker B: True and unfortunately, on our side. Like if I was predicting what was going on in 2024, we don't have any significant new cybersecurity developments that are coming out next year. We don't have any government programs or regulations that are in the works that will make a difference. We're all distracted by AI. [00:55:11] Speaker C: AI singularity. [00:55:12] Speaker B: How can we put Chat GPT into crap? And that's what everybody's looking at. So I think people are looking the wrong way, and that might set us up for a very active year. But I could have said that last year. [00:55:24] Speaker A: Well, we did have a decent amount of news about AI this year, so I don't think you were wrong. It'll be interesting to see how that develops and if we've got any more news on that front, which I'm sure we will. Now, I know you had also mentioned to me, I don't know if this is maybe something you want to save for next week's thing, the Christmas homework that you had. [00:55:43] Speaker B: Yeah, let's save that for our next one. Tune in next time we have the Technato homework assignment. It'll be fun. And yeah, tune in the next episode. [00:55:56] Speaker A: So if you miss school and you're itching for more homework, you're going to have to watch next week. Some other things you can look forward to. We've got great webinars coming up in the new year. If you are a fan of all things cybersecurity with myself and Daniel Lowry, we've got already three of those booked into the new year. We're going to be doing them the first Thursday of every month. So in January it's going to be John Hammond. That's on January 4. Then in February we'll have. I think. I know we'll have Heath Adams. Is that February or March? Do you remember? [00:56:17] Speaker C: I thought it was Zach. [00:56:18] Speaker A: First Zach in February and then Heath Adams. [00:56:20] Speaker C: I could be wrong. [00:56:21] Speaker A: I think you're right. I think February 1 is Zach Hill, and then I think March 7 will be Heath Adams. So you can tune into our YouTube channel here or LinkedIn to watch those, but we'll keep updating you all as we get closer. Just some things to look forward to in the new year and then I believe in January also we're going to be doing a webinar on how to get into it, I think so that will be a lot of fun as it's going to be Don and myself. Just some things to get you excited for the new year with Technato and with it pro. [00:56:45] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:56:45] Speaker B: Step one, build a $1000 computer. There you go. [00:56:49] Speaker A: That's going to be the new year's resolution they come up with for me is to build a computer, install Linux and install he's going to be standing. [00:56:58] Speaker B: Over me holding his significantly easier than it used to be. [00:57:01] Speaker C: It really is. [00:57:02] Speaker A: Yeah, but don't use vmware. [00:57:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll give you a copy of Arch Linux or Slackware. [00:57:08] Speaker B: That'll end that experiment. [00:57:11] Speaker A: Well, once again we do want to thank our sponsor ACI learning the people behind it pro and reminder that you can use that code Technato 30 for a discount on your it pro membership. It makes you a great Christmas gift, so just keep that in mind or a gift for yourself. Drop a comment. Let us know what you thought of this episode, what you want to see from us in the new year and otherwise, I think that's pretty much going to do it for me. All right, nothing from the peanut gallery over here? [00:57:33] Speaker B: Yeah, we're done. Tapped out. [00:57:34] Speaker A: Well, thank you for joining us. Just a few short days away from Christmas. We love having you here and we look forward to seeing you next week for a special, shortened Christmas homework. Technato.