Behold the Superbook (Over-Overhyped Edition)

Chris: All right. So anyway, you were watching a TV show about taking over the world.

Ned: And I was inspired, as one is. That was hilarious because the ELM that was presented in the show—the Earth Liberation Movement—was like this pseudo-terrorist eco-organization, and they were all treating them, like, oh ridiculous, these climate people with their climate stuff [laugh]. And I was like, “Shit.”

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: Man, when was this filmed? I’m guessing this was, like, 2005-ish timeframe. So, you know, I mean, solid 15, 17 years old. Doesn’t matter.

Chris: Sure.

Ned: The point is, it felt outdated. They were making fun of, like, people, firebombing SUVs and stuff. And I’m like, “No, no, sweetie.” [laugh].

Chris: That’s hilarious.

Ned: It’s like, A, the actual terrorist organizations we have to worry about, are—they’re not the Earth Liberation Foundation or whatever. It’s probably the white nationalists. And also, climate change is a real thing, and it’s a big problem now. So, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, y’all.

Chris: I mean, that’s your opinion.

Ned: Well, just like facts. Oh. Okay, 2006. I was very close. I had to look it up.

Chris: That’s—yeah, that’s not bad. And I mean, I remember that term, or the name of that series, but I thought it was a movie, first of all, when you said it. Like, Numb3rs was definitely a movie, right? Probably with Jim Carrey? Might have been filmed in black and white.

Ned: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t even tell if you’re doing a bit.

Chris: It’s a bit of a bit, yeah. So, I just melded, like, five things together from the late-’90s, early 2000s.

Ned: [laugh]. Okay. Showtime. Like, yeah, that’s all I got [laugh]. Have you seen the new Sonic movies?

Chris: Oh yeah.

Ned: There’s two of them. Okay, so you’ve seen both of them, and you know that Jim Carrey is excellent in both?

Chris: Yes. He—not only is he great casting, in my opinion, for Dr. Robotnik, he’s the only casting.

Ned: There are very few other people I can think of that could potentially fit the bill, and they would have done it in completely different ways. So, I mean, like, could you imagine Dennis Hopper as Dr. Robotnik? I’m just—

Chris: Well, I mean, he does have the major negative on that front is that he is not alive.

Ned: [laugh]. Well, got to imagine it, then, right? And if he had the forethought to sell his likeness to AI—which we can get to later—it wouldn’t even be a problem. You heard about the Bruce Willis thing, right?

Chris: Yeah, there’s a little bit of fake news involved in that story at the moment. It’s complicated.

Ned: Isn’t it always when it comes to AI? That’s a future episode, I think.

Chris: [laugh]. “AI: it’s complicated.”

Ned: Okay. Oh, let’s get into this one. Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned. I’m definitely not a robot. I abide in a ranch-style domicile, of my own volition. It has nothing to do with the fact that [laugh] stairs are a frightening and insufferable mystery. Everyone has their thing, right? Vacuum cleaners frighten the dog-bot, and stairs—oops, never mind. I just [sigh] I don’t like stairs. With me is Chris, who is also here. How do you feel about stairs, Chris?

Chris: I mean, I can go both down the stairs and up the stairs at whatever speed I choose, so, you know, that’s how legs work when you’re—

Ned: Sounds delightful.

Chris: —alive.

Ned: Going upstairs is perfectly fine. Going downstairs is a terrifying nightmare. I think we can all agree on that.

Chris: So, you’re an opposite cow?

Ned: [laugh]. That’s why they have ramps. Is that really true? I feel like that’s urba—not even urban legend, like, rural legend.

Chris: [laugh]. A rural legend [laugh].

Ned: I feel like there’s a name for that already: an old wives tale.

Chris: You’ve got to imagine, for a cow, they would at least be perplexed.

Ned: I think that’s the constant state for a cow [laugh]. Grass?

Chris: Repeat for 40 years.

Ned: [laugh]. Oh, I’m glad we’re laughing because the rest of this episode is just going to be me cursing a lot, so… let’s do that.

Chris: Strap in.

Ned: Let’s talk about some tech garbage. Supercloud—

Chris: Trademark.

Ned: Trademark, TM, R, copyright, all those things. It’s a thing now, so I guess we need to address it. Fuck.

Chris: Yeah, cool. Cool. Let’s do that.

Ned: I mean, [long, drawn-out] yayyyyy… in the not too long ago, I think we mentioned Supercloud briefly in a larger discussion of hybrid, on-premises, and other things, and my original take was something along the lines of, “This is a stupid term that someone invented so they could own and promote it. The term adds nothing substantive to the discussion on the future of technology, conflates multiple terms we already don’t have a solid definition for, and adds a fluffy, confusing buzzword to the marketing hellscape vendors can glom onto and abuse until it is more meaningless than it started.”

Chris: There is an AI idea. We need to put together a fluffy, confusing buzzword bot.

Ned: I think that’s already taken care of for us.

Chris: Well, yeah, but that’s by IT dude-bros. This would be by AI.

Ned: [laugh]. But [crosstalk 00:05:23] repeat yourself?

Chris: We’ve always wanted to put the IT dude-bros out of business.

Ned: Okay, well, that’s fair. Yes. And yet, despite all of this, all the angry things that I said into a microphone that clearly some people listened to—you—it persists. Supercloud persists.

Chris: And also, no, I’m not listening.

Ned: Okay. Well, I mean… it was the royal you. So, since we can’t simply nuke it from orbit, I suppose we have to engage head-on with a robust discussion on the origin of the term, the evolving use of the term, a working definition that is definitely completely and entirely too long, and the popularity of the term now and in the future.

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Chris: There was actually a couple of split infinitives in there that we need to talk about.

Ned: [laugh]. At least one. Did you know that rule was made up by, like, some German editor in, like, the 1800s, and everybody was just like, “Yeah, that’s the rule we’re going to follow from here on out.”

Chris: Yeah. He noticed that in Latin, you never split infinitives, therefore, that should be a rule in all the other languages that were descended from it. The trouble is, the way that words are structured in Latin, you literally can’t.

Ned: Exactly. And also, English is not completely derived from Latin, as any cursory overview of the language will show you. But anyway, I’ve reached a point in my life and career where I’ve recognized that, you know what, being pedantic and exacting about language is not always the best solution. I know that is heresy, Chris—

Chris: But mostly?

Ned: Probably not even mostly. Are there situations that call for using your lexicon with exacting precision? Certainly. Is that situation a casual conversation with a colleague or friend? No, Chris, it’s not.

Chris: [sigh].

Ned: [laugh]. This is going to bother you so much. I love it. Words mean things, but what they mean is constantly evolving and changing based on how humans use language. There’s no right way, except what we’ve collectively decided is right. Remember, language isn’t physics or mathematics. There’s no natural law or inherent rules; just humans being silly, and trying—badly—to communicate with each other.

Chris: Just remember, language literally evolves.

Ned: [laugh]. Oh, you really wanted to get the ‘literally’ in there, didn’t you? I appreciate it.

Chris: I just wanted to decimate your argument.

Ned: Do you even know what decimate means?

Chris: It means multiply by ten.

Ned: You were [crosstalk 00:08:51] by ten percent. For the most part, I’ve stopped correcting people on the use of on-premises versus on-premise. I don’t care. I know what you mean. I also don’t care whether you’ve capitalized VMware properly. And neither does OneNote, by the way.

Chris: I’m convinced Microsoft does that on purpose.

Ned: As am I. And I’ve just accepted that AI and ML, like literally and figuratively, are going to be used interchangeably, and for most situations, that’s fine.

Chris: Oh, I couldn’t care less.

Ned: You mean you couldn’t care more?

Chris: Or couldn’t I?

Ned: [laugh]. And yet, Supercloud really chaps my ass. Part of this discussion is an attempt to define Supercloud and how it’s used, but the other part is a personal exploration of why this term bothers me so much.

Chris: Cue the soft, soothing zen music.

Ned: There better be, like, a pan flute, or I’m just going to flip a table. But not this one; this one’s too heavy. But I’ll find a table and I’ll flip it, dammit.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: Okay, I tried to go into this with happiness, sunshine, and rainbows in my blood, and just, like, feeling the Zen, feeling the flow, feeling the vibe, and I did not get there, Chris.

Chris: So, what you’re saying is you’re lying to the listeners and yourself.

Ned: Usually [crosstalk 00:10:13].

Chris: You went into this with malice aforethought, and we both know it.

Ned: [laugh]. Okay, I tried. An attempt was made. Bah, bah, bah. So, I’d like to first acknowledge that the term Supercloud has been around since at least 2016, and if you Google slash Duck Duck Go it, you will get a website from Cornell that is an actual software project to allow for application migrations between clouds, having nothing to do with the way it’s being used now.

The second hit is actually an MIT webpage about a project they called Supercloud that was meant to enhance collaboration between MIT Lincoln Labs’ students and faculty. So again, nothing to do with this term. But my point is that the term is not exactly new. People have thought of it before. And we can trace the origin of its use in the current context back to a post on SiliconANGLE called, “The rise of the supercloud,” which is not written in title case, just to poke the pendant in me a little bit more. Thanks.

So, if you’re not familiar with SiliconANGLE—and hey, if they can’t capitalize things right, then I can’t be bothered with their name capitalization, either. You’ll appreciate that if you’re looking at the Google Doc, which you aren’t.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: But here we are. Just roll with it. They are an industry analysis and news firm that is probably best known for theCUBE, which is usually recorded live at various tech conferences, with hosts like Dave Vellante and John Furrier chatting with vendors, other analysts, or themselves about what’s going on in the tech industry.

Chris: Sometimes the microphones are even on.

Ned: Usually on. It’s a professional outfit. They wear suits, Chris. That’s how you know it’s serious.

Chris: I saw a TV show about that.

Ned: That, ironically, was not a serious TV show.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: And I used ‘irony’ properly. Hazzah. All right. As someone who has done some work as an analyst, I can say that your primary job is to make shit up and try to make it catchy so your brand or your firm gains traction.

Chris: I’m sorry, I believe you mean a percentage of mind-share.

Ned: Uughh.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: Ouch. For example, consider the Magic Quadrant from Gartner. You know it. You love it? You might even think there’s some hard science behind it. I assure you, there is not. For all the talk of qualitative versus quantitative measurement of vendor products, most of it is just a gut feeling and a guess. And when I say ‘most,’ I mean all.

Chris: Well, you did say magic, so…

Ned: [laugh]. It’s in the name. So analysts, as a job, you had to take multiple briefings a week from vendors, and you absolutely do not have time to test-drive any of these solutions. In most cases, you do try to apply a skeptical eye to what the vendor is telling you, but not too skeptical because you have to stay in the good graces of the vendor if you want future briefings.

Chris: Hmm, that’s not a perverse incentive or anything.

Ned: I mean, it is fraught, I’ll say that. So, you take the briefing, maybe you read some of the white papers, the marketing, whatever, you peruse the website, and then you do a quick write-up, and move on to the next briefing that you have on your calendar. Now, analyst firms make money in two ways broadly. The main way is by selling their analysis to companies who don’t want to or can’t do the research on their own. They also make money by doing research for the same vendors that they are supposed to be impartially judging.

Look, I’m going to admit, it is a weird industry. I’m not accusing anyone of unethical behavior. You one hundred percent can maintain your morals and still get paid, but it does introduce the potential for pay-to-play and other, shall we say, below-board behavior. So, that was quite a tangent. Why did I even get into all that?

Chris: Uh, Irish coffee.

Ned: Yeah [laugh]. Woo. No. The Supercloud. That’s, that’s what—

Chris: Oh. Oh, yeah.

Ned: Yeah—

Chris: I forgot about that.

Ned: —that’s what we were talking about. All right. So, analysts firms need you, the ostensible customer, to trust what they are saying. They need to be ‘thought leaders.’ They need to be on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the industry, and there’s no better way to do that than making up a new term and convincing everyone it’s useful and relevant. Gartner has their Magic Quadrant, Forrester has the Wave, and I guess SiliconANGLE has rolled out the Supercloud?

Chris: Rerolled it, I guess. Because we—

Ned: Rick-rolled it?

Chris: [crosstalk 00:15:08].

Ned: Never going to give it up there. They might never let it down. I don’t know. Why Supercloud? Didn’t we already have enough cloudy terms, Chris?

Chris: One would think.

Ned: Let’s review some of my favorite examples. Hybrid cloud: running applications in your data center and the public cloud; multi-cloud: running applications in multiple clouds; private cloud: running applications in a non-public cloud; public cloud: running applications in a public cloud multi-tenant environment; community cloud: running applications in a cloud that has really strict rules about who can use them. [fuuu 00:15:43] cloud: how I feel every morning.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: We’ve got a lot of terms here that define a lot of ways to deploy and manage applications, and all of them seem to have this cloud term attached. What’s that all about? Why so much cloud, Chris?

Chris: Well, I mean, we’re talking about the cloud. One would assume that the word would show up every once in a while.

Ned: See, the term Cloud has been used into oblivion. If I had to define it, I think of cloud as an operational model more than anything else. You know, it’s about things like automation, elasticity, self-service, and measuring consumption. You know, that NIST definition? It wasn’t so bad. Like, they did a pretty good job [laugh].

Chris: Yeah. I mean, what ended up happening is the language turned cloud into a verb as well as a noun, and that’s where a lot of the problem comes in as you’re mixing definitions, which is why we had so many names for things that don’t have all that much difference between them.

Ned: Right. But it’s different implementations of the same operational model.

Chris: Right.

Ned: It mostly has to do with where your applications are running.

Chris: Mm-hm.

Ned: So, Supercloud as a term came to exist because SiliconANGLE analyst John Furrier was trying to invent a term to describe a trend he and others had observed in the tech landscape. Simply put, there were a bunch of technology vendors building new platforms based on the primitives of the public cloud vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP. So, we’re talking about Infrastructure as a Service coming from any of those vendors—or maybe even Platform as a Service, like RDS or Azure SQL—and these vendors were building higher level abstractions and offering those to customers as an alternative of building it themselves. Now, if that sounds suspiciously like SaaS, you’re not wrong because—

Chris: You mean, X as a Service?

Ned: [laugh]. X as a Service. Sure. So, I also noticed this trend of what I would call cloud-native companies and products that aren’t SaaS in the traditional sense, but they are using public cloud primitives to build out their platform. And when I use the word platform, I’m using that for a reason. I’m talking about a set of technologies that another company would use to build their product or application that they would offer to end-users. In the same way that Oracle has a database platform used by thousands of companies to build their applications, a Supercloud offering would do the same, but with the added benefit of offering it as a service. I mean, you can get Oracle as a service.

Chris: I feel like a lot of this would be cleared up in 30 seconds with a whiteboard demonstration.

Ned: It might, but since this is an audio medium, I’m going to do an audio whiteboard, which takes a lot longer.

Chris: Yay?

Ned: A picture is worth a thousand words, et cetera, yeah. So, the cognitive dissonance here lies in the difference between a platform and an application, and I’ll be the first to admit that that is a tenuous distinction at best, and it harkens back to the old defense of, “I know it when I see it.” Maybe some examples or an order that might clarify things. So, an example would be Snowflake. They built out a data warehouse and analytics platform that sits astride the public clouds.

Now, your average end-user is not going to directly interface with Snowflake. Instead, they’re going to use an application that leverages the Snowflake platform, but that fact is abstracted from the end-user, hidden from the consumer entirely. Another example is Aviatrix. They are building a multi-cloud networking abstraction solution. Now, you might use that as the transport for your applications, but again, this is never going to be customer-facing. The customer who’s using your apps has no idea that you’re using Aviatrix to manage the network transport across your clouds.

Now, the differentiation here is, traditional Software as a Service is generally end-user or customer-facing. Think Canva, Office 365, NetSuite, et cetera. All of these offerings are consumed by non-technology professionals to get their work done. In some cases, solutions like salesforce.com have drifted into the platform territory, but as I said, the distinction between platform and SaaS can be a bit tenuous.

Chris: Especially for the Salesforce example. Like, that might even end up being its own definition: Salesforce as a Service.

Ned: [laugh]. Well, the thing about Salesforce is, they bought a whole platform.

Chris: Right.

Ned: So—what’s the name of it? Heroku. They bought Heroku. So, that was like, hey, this is literally a platform people build applications on a regular basis. So, they do have that. But also—

Chris: “We’re going to call this Salesforce 2.”

Ned: Yeah. Also within the larger Salesforce umbrella, they bought, like, a web application firewall company, I think, at some point, and they also—just their actual service has a bunch of programming platforms inside of it. So, it’s just, like, yes, it is a platform, but it’s also a service. It’s confusing. Anyway. Maybe they’re a cloud. [unintelligible 00:21:06].

Chris: Oh, God.

Ned: It’s cloud, side of cloud.

Chris: Dear God.

Ned: So, there is a working group definition of Supercloud you can check out, links in the [show notes 00:21:18], et cetera, and it attempts to put some formal constraints around the term Supercloud, and what it is intended to mean. And they lay out three key characteristics or essential properties that a Supercloud offering would have to include. First one, run a set of services across more than one cloud, maybe. Okay. Purpose-built SuperPaaS layer is the second one, which is a new term: SuperPaaS. Gun.

Chris: Wait, so we’re using a new term to define a new term?

Ned: Yes. Yes, we are.

Chris: Awesome.

Ned: Mm-hm. I swear, this is not an ouroboros-type situation. And the last one is metadata intelligence. You probably want me to define that, too.

Chris: I think we should—yeah, let’s take it from the top.

Ned: Okay. So, the first one is pretty intuitive. You know, it’s a… service—

Chris: It’s multi-cloud.

Ned: It’s multi-cloud. Right. This application is available across multiple clouds. Okay, I get that. That’s easy enough. The second one is a new made-up term called SuperPaaS: Super Platform as a Service, which, no. Nope. Nope. Stop it.

Chris: That’s also just multi-cloud.

Ned: They’re trying to describe a platform that spans multiple clouds and hides the underlying cloud primitives. That’s what a platform is. We have a word for it. Don’t need a new one.

Chris: Yeah. It would just be a multi-cloud platform.

Ned: Yes. The third property simply means that the Supercloud offering is aware of the underlying components, and it can make informed decisions based on regionality, cost, reliability, et cetera, and that’s, um, that’s just called native. Already has a term.

Chris: Right.

Ned: [laugh]. Okay. So, those are the properties. There’s also three deployment models: single-cloud instantiation—which really seems to contradict the first essential property—

Chris: Yeah.

Ned: —multi-cloud slash multi-region, and global instantiation, which again, seems like the same thing twice.

Chris: So, that’s a Supercloud of Superclouds?

Ned: Of Superclouds.

Chris: Nice.

Ned: It’s a super-super set. Which actually just gets you back to the empty set, which is different than the null set.

Chris: [sigh]. It’s too early in the morning for math. We’re just going to power on through.

Ned: [laugh]. Putting that CS degree to work, baby. No mention of transubstantiation which, weird, but okay. Trying to pick those terms apart, the key here—I think—they’re trying to make is the distinction of the control plane versus the data services. So, the deployment model is mostly referring to how the control plane itself is deployed.

As a consumer, I shouldn’t have to care about that at all. As long as your control plane is available, and I can access it. Why do I care how it's deployed? Give me the right number of nines, and everything else is just an implementation detail. Like, for instance, does Office 365 tell me where their control plane is running? No.

Chris: Not even if you ask.

Ned: [laugh]. Exactly. So, that’s it, we get three properties of the Supercloud and three deployment models.

Chris: That contradict each other.

Ned: So, if I can summarize, Supercloud is a distributed platform used to build applications from abstracted cloud primitives. It’s a platform for building applications. It’s a platform. You ever say the same word so many times that it just, kind of, starts to lose meaning? Platform.

Chris: Constantly.

Ned: Orange. Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. So, Supercloud is as Supercloud does. Does this new term need to exist?

Chris: No.

Ned: No. Sweet. Episode over. Bye.

Chris: Good work.

Ned: Thanks. Just kidding.

Chris: Let’s [laugh] go get sandwiches.

Ned: In the working definition document, they address that very question in an FAQ, [laugh] and I thought I would just quote it. Quote, “There is broad agreement that clouds in the 2020s are different from clouds of the 2010s”—a lot more cumulonimbus, I think? Sorry, that was an aside—“That something new is happening within the AWS (and other) cloud ecosystems, beyond traditional IaaS and PaaS and isn’t just SaaS running in the cloud. Supercloud is an attempt to describe a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, unique platform attributes and software to solve specific problems that public cloud vendors aren’t directly addressing. Supercloud is an evocative term that catalyzes debate, conversation and thought.” So, that’s the end of the quote. Basically, what that tells me is, this is a term for stirring the pot. It’s a—

Chris: It’s exciting. It gets the people going.

Ned: [laugh]. It’s a term that elevates the profile of those who invented it. It’s a term that can be trademarked and used for marketing purposes, if desired. And it’s desired.

Chris: Right. What do you mean, ‘if?’

Ned: It’s a term that is both useful for debate, and useless for anything practical. It’s the ‘Change my Mind Steven Crowder’ meme. Worse yet, it might even be the Ben Shapiro of cloud terms.

Chris: Whoa.

Ned: Too far?

Chris: Whoa.

Ned: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. That might have been too far. I’ll take that one back. Okay. No one deserves to be called the Ben Shapiro of anything.

Chris: Thank you.

Ned: Okay. And shit. You know what? It’s working. I’m talking about it. It was discussed in an IT roundtable at Cloud Field Day 15, link in the [show notes 00:26:55]. I’ve heard it mentioned on podcasts, in articles, and blog posts. Now, most of them are dismissive of the term at best, but they are engaging. Does that make me culpable? Am I part of the problem?

Chris: I’ve been telling you that for years.

Ned: That’s because we’re all pundits now, Chris.

Chris: [sigh].

Ned: Got to feed the content machine. If you’re an analyst or a marketing firm, Supercloud is a term that will likely be used to imply or imbue some mystical properties on a product or service. “Leverage the Supercloud with Pedantry from Misanthropy Inc.” Eh? But is—

Chris: A subsidiary of Salesforce.

Ned: [laugh]. Probably, they just acquired us. 1.6 million. No. Is it useful to practitioners? Probably not. If I’m an application architect, and I need a data platform, I can evaluate Snowflake, AWS Aurora slash Redshift, and Oracle, and decide which one meets my requirements without throwing some kind of weird terminology into the mix. If I’m, I don’t know, working on a platform team at an enterprise, I might be interested in a Supercloud-type product to integrate into the platform I offer to my product teams in my organization, but again, the Supercloud terminology itself, not all that useful.

Chris: Especially since we’ve already got words for all of that.

Ned: I know. Does the term group similar offerings into a category where they can be compared fairly on their merits? Not really. Which would actually be a useful thing to do. What does NetApp versus Snowflake versus VMware have to do with each other?

Chris: Oh, oh, we can compare the swag bags we get at conferences.

Ned: Oh, that’s true. In my experience, NetApp has been the best with the swag.

Chris: I was going to say one time I got a wind-up dancing robot.

Ned: [laugh]. I got, like, a Raspberry Pi robot assembly from them. It was awesome.

Chris: Yeah, stop bragging about how many Raspberry Pis people give you.

Ned: So, many. So, many. None of these vendors have anything to do with each other, but they all could have a Supercloud product.

Chris: Right.

Ned: So, what we’re really doing here is grouping together disparate product offerings and rolling them into a useless category for comparison and evaluation. So, I think it also fails as a term used by analysts as well.

Chris: Yeah. Which is why I have a feeling, A, if it does continue to be used, it’s going to evolve again, but B, I kind of feel like it’s just not going to get used because it’s not precise.

Ned: Well, that’s never stopped anybody.

Chris: [laugh]. But I mean, at the end of the day, it is what it is.

Ned: Which is everything and nothing at the same time.

Chris: Which is a paradox. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

Ned: I do. And Alanis would agree that this is really just a marketing term with a touch of self-promotion from SiliconANGLE. And we already have a term for what they’re talking about, and it’s called cross-cloud platform. What are you building?

Chris: Or multi-cloud.

Ned: I’m building a multi-cloud—

Chris: Or—multi-cloud is great.

Ned: Yes. “I’m building a multi-cloud platform.” Done. Did it. Have a term. Don’t need another one. Thanks a lot.

Chris: High-five. Nailed it.

Ned: Boom, nailed it. So, I will be happy to never mention Supercloud again. Fin.

Chris: Like a fish.

Ned: Hmm… I like fish.

Chris: Left shark?

Ned: Right shark? Left shark, right shark, left shark, right shark.

Chris: [laugh].

Ned: Okay. Lightning round?

Chris: Sure. This is so gross. Amazon announces pre-order for Halo Rise because Bezos literally wants to watch you sleep.

Ned: This has nothing to do with the Halo show?

Chris: No, it has to do with the Halo stream of products from Amazon.

Ned: I don’t know what the hell that is. Okay.

Chris: It’s a whole—[sputters] can I just talk?

Ned: Maybe?

Chris: Last month brought the announcement that Amazon wanted to buy iRobot, the company that is most famous for the Roomba, which, bad enough that now Amazon wants to know what your house looks like. Now, they’re releasing a sleep tracker slash alarm clock combination that observes your night moves from the bedside table, and of course can integrate into Alexa.

Ned: Will it help me work on my night moves?

Chris: So, you could in theory, have an automation for the Halo Rise to, I don’t know, alert a smart outlet to power on as you wake up, thus brewing coffee at the moment you gain consciousness. Why not? I have little to say about the sleep tracker itself except to remind people that all consumer sleep tracking devices are based on inference and averages, and most sleep doctors recommend against relying on them for anything at all. If you’re having problems, go get a sleep study. For example, my sleep tracker has recorded me having exactly zero REM sleep for the past five days, and that can’t possibly be accurate because I feel completely biscuit doppelganger banana nosedive.

Ned: [laugh].

Chris: [clear throat]. I’m back. The problem I have with this is Amazon’s increasing intrusions into all aspects of our lives, and that is by their own admitted design. They want their Skynet to be all of our individual Jarvis’s. They also want to misuse all of our most personal information for their profit.

For me to trust this kind of uniform visibility into my life would require Amazon to have ever been responsible regarding people’s PII in the past. You would think that this would be, I don’t know, important to Amazon? Well, TL;DR: it isn’t. Unfortunately, much like Facebook, keeping your data safe is a bar that Amazon has consistently and repeatedly failed to clear.

Ned: Yay? No, not yay. Reason number zero not to run Exchange yourself. Late on Thursday, September 29th, Microsoft announced a zero-day vulnerability for Microsoft Exchange servers that ranked a whopping 9.8 on the CVE scale. So, close to ten.

Chris: [whispering] ohhh.

Ned: [crosstalk 00:33:06] done it.

Chris: You know, with a little more gumption they could have gotten there.

Ned: So that’s, um… bad. Yes, I have it written down here: that is bad. How bad is it? There are roughly 220,000 Exchange servers running out in the wild that are internet accessible and vulnerable to the exploit, or exploits rather, since this is a combo attack. The first is a server-side request forgery vulnerability, which allows the attacker to trigger the second, a remote code execution through PowerShell.

Attackers will need valid credentials of at least one email user to successfully run this attack, so hopefully none of your users have weak or reused passwords, and can’t be fooled by phishing or social engineering attacks. As far as we know, this set of exploits only affects on-premises Exchange servers and not Microsoft Exchange Online Service. However, if you happen to be running in hybrid mode, which I know a lot of you are, that pesky hybrid server that you put in a corner and forgot about, that is still very much vulnerable to this attack. Microsoft has an advisory post up that details the vulnerabilities and suggested mitigation strategies. They all basically boil down to adding a URL rewrite to prevent access to PowerShell through the Autodiscover Service, and disabling PowerShell access for non-admin users, which you probably should have done anyway.

As of this recording, there is no patch for the vulnerability, but Microsoft is scrambling to get one out the door ASAP. On an unrelated note, I am available to assist with Office 365 migrations for the low, low price of $400 an hour. Send inquiries via carrier pigeon to Ned’s Northeast Bay Station, care of Cybernetics Incorporated.

Chris: A subsidiary of Salesforce.

Ned: A subsidiary [fumbles] hubidib? Nope. [mutters incomprehensibly].

Chris: OpenAI removes waitlist and gives full, immediate access to DALL-E. Man, the world of AI-generating apps is moving fast. Once upon a time, we had only ever heard of DALL-E. Well, I mean, really, it was [Craiyon 00:35:23] because DALL-E was only available to a select few artists, technologists, AI researchers. That all changed this week, though.

OpenAI has decided to grant full public access to DALL-E, completely removing the waitlist. According to OpenAI, this is to expand DALL-E’s capabilities through widespread use and training, with the company saying effectively, “We need to put it out into the world and let it learn.” Realistically, though, this is probably because competitors in the AI image-generating space such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are absolutely eating DALL-E’s lunch when it comes to popularity. The decision feels fraught, as OpenAI wasn’t supposed to just chase users. The company was designed to work for the benefit of all humanity, and other such high-minded goals.

Many hand-wringing Twitter users have said that this is going to be instantly problematic, as this widespread access could lead to misuse, such as creating offensive or pornographic images. There is also concerned that OpenAI could be overwhelmed with requests, and that the quality of images generated could suffer as a result. Twitter user @_TimOBrien states, “The accumulation of ethical debt will be immediate, while the mop-up of the resulting mess will go on in perpetuity.” Love it. Doesn’t [laugh] that just describe society, though?

Ned: Really, really does. C and C++ are looking mighty rusty. Or rather, they aren’t. Now, I’m going to say this upfront: programming languages don’t die. Just ask any COBOL programmer, and they’ll answer in the affirmative, all the way to the bank. So, while the death of C or C++ is not exactly nigh, there is a young upstart taking the systems programming world by storm: Rust.

The Rust programming language is considered memory-safe by default, meaning that it won’t allow you to make common memory management mistakes like invalid heap and stack access, memory leaks, and mismatched memory allocation. These are the kinds of errors that make up the vast majority of CVE security problems, and it is all too easy to do so in C or C++. Rust was designed with security in mind while still supporting lower-level programming, and for that reason, it is considered a suitable replacement. The tipping point for many was the coming inclusion of Rust in the Linux kernel starting with version 6.1. Side note, 6.0 dropped this past week as expected.

Now, Mark Russinovich, the CTO at Microsoft Azure has said that all of his new projects will be written in Rust. And, as goes Russinovich, so goes Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has admitted that upwards of 70% of its CVEs can be traced back to memory unsafe bugs. Now, that doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to go rewrite the Windows kernel in Rust tomorrow, but future development? We could definitely see a rustatian creation in 2025. Totally unrelated note: guess who started learning Rust this week?

Chris: Definitely wasn’t you. You’re not a learner.

Ned: Mmm, it’s true. I know kung fu.

Chris: You’re wearing a shirt that says, “Down with books.”

Ned: That’s right. Videos only. And podcasts.

Chris: [laugh]. Podcasts are better in every way.

Ned: Live it, learn it, love it.

Chris: Google, moving forward with Manifest V3 mandate, much to society’s general disgust. Advertising company Google happens to be in charge of the world’s most popular browser: Chrome. Recently, advertising company Google made a dramatic change to the codebase of Chrome to make it harder to use ad-blocking and privacy enhancing add-ons. This is solely and exclusively because Google is an advertising company first, and they can’t have us running around blocking ads or protecting our PII from bad actors, now can they? Not when that shit can be monetized.

Now, a manifest is simply the underpinnings of how a browser works with third-party extensions. Manifest V3 changes a lot of APIs and operating procedures, to the extent that extensions written under Manifest V2 are incompatible with V3. In fact, a lot of the processes that were made possible by V2, particularly ones used by the aforementioned ad-blocking and privacy enhancing extensions, are now much more difficult to implement, some, impossible. This is allegedly being done to enhance security. And I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that advertising company Google made the biggest changes to the ad-blocking functionalities.

Oh, and in January 2023, it will be mandatory in Chrome to use only version 3. It’s enough to make people want to switch. And this time, they might actually do it. Many third-party browser companies such as Brave, Firefox, and even Chromium-based Vivaldi have announced that they will continue to support V2 extensions indefinitely.

Ned: Oh, you sweet summer child. Do you really think people are going to switch their browsers [laugh]? Speaking of Google, Stadia fragged by friendly fire. There’s an absolutely fire post on TechCrunch about the unexpected death of Stadia that I recommend everyone go read. Back in the pre-Covid times of 2019, when Chris and I had an eerily similar podcast, we were skeptical, if not downright dismissive and derisive towards Stadia. This was both on technical grounds—the required bandwidth for clients and cost of running at the edge was probably a non-starter—and on historical grounds, I.e., Google is unlikely to fight a protracted battle in a crowded space or really keep any product going for any significant amount of time. Google Reader, rest in peace.

Chris: Too soon.

Ned: Even so, the platform launched with some AAA titles and a few exclusives. Google seemed to be making the right moves by creating an in-house game studio and hiring people from the games industry, most notably Phil Harrison, previously at Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment. However, after the fanfare and confetti settled in November 2019, the sheen immediately started to fade. Sales were mediocre, Marketing was all but non-existent, Stadia disappeared from Google presentations, and the in-house studio was shuttered in February of 2021. They are aware that typical AAA games take at least four years to develop and release, right? Right? [laugh].

Oh, the writing was on the wall. And yet Stadia limped along for another 20 months, loudly denying the inevitable, before Google finally gave up the ghost last week. Stadia will officially shutter in 2023, provide refunds for those who purchased hardware, and stop charging those with pro subscriptions during the wind-down period. Alas, another service killed by Google. I wonder if there’s a site tracking that sort of thing?

Chris: That site is getting large.

Ned: [laugh]. And it’s growing in popularity every time another product is killed by Google, for which there are so, so, so many. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile if you made it all the way to the end. So, congratulations to you friend, you accomplished something today.

Now, go for a hot air balloon ride and compliment a cloud. Make it feel… super. You’ve earned it. You can find me or Chris on Twitter at @Ned1313, or @hayner80 respectively, or follow the show at @chaos_lever, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Show notes are available at chaoslever.com, if you like reading things, which you shouldn’t. Podcasts continue to be better in every conceivable way. Shirts forthcoming for that one. We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

Ned: [unintelligible 00:43:42] by hand, yes [unintelligible 00:43:44] by hand.