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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning there, a spin up. I'm on LTE. Um This is mornings with Mark, excuse me, this is mornings with Mark before. Mark has had his coffee, which means things are interesting. Uh Coming to you live uh from South by Southwest, you can tell by my surroundings. I am uh in my hotel room here.
Um Looking down on the Downtown Core in beautiful sunny Austin, Texas. Um Yesterday, I was on stage uh speaking about rogue robots um and the potential for cyberattack. It was a really wonderful experience. The team here at South by Southwest. Um Fantastic, made that speaker experience real smooth um reception for the talk was really good, which was exciting as you could tell from yesterday's broadcast.
I was a bit nervous. Um And it had been a while since I'd given a talk um in general actually on stage, but that wasn't really, it, it was uh the reason why I was nervous was because the audience um South by Southwest has the Interactive Festival, but also music um comedy and film.
So it's a very diverse audience here and it's not nearly um as technically focused um as audiences. I'm used to speaking about. Um, but it got me thinking more and I actually ran into another security researcher, um, on the weekend, totally serendipitous. Um, a mutual acquaintance of ours is kind of, um, connected everybody.
Um, and we're having a talk about giving, um, security talks to a nonsecurity audience and the other researcher had mentioned that, um, it was interesting for them because, you know, they didn't have the biggest audience that they were used to. Um But what was different was that right afterwards, they had uh some phenomenal questions.
Um And people really wanting to drive change in their area that was very similar to my experience yesterday. Um The talk, like I said was well received, which was um very happy and relief for me. Um I worked very hard on, on trying to deliver that material smoothly. Um But a high level overview um trying to story and really the one key takeaway was that we're building these great modern robots.
Um They're far more prevalent than we think. Um But they're built on a foundation that may not be as stable as, as you would expect because they're built on a foundation that has been um developed and uh a source of innovation for decades. And so very con uh in contrast to the digital domain where we are um innovating uh on days, weeks, months, not years and decades.
So, um that was the key takeaway. And uh it seemed like people got it and very similar to um uh the other research I was speaking to the questions I got afterwards um were fantastic. They um people realizing that this is an issue highlighting um some of the challenges that they're seeing from their position, whether they're selecting technologies for their companies, whether their um suppliers are using these comp uh technologies, whether it was just general community awareness.
And I think that's a really positive thing and that's one thing that I, I really tried last year and I think I'm gonna even emphasize it more this year and especially here on Facebook. Um and uh on my youtube videos, if you're watching this after the fact uh o on the youtube channel um is that I think there's absolutely huge value in going to security conferences and talking to security folks about that, but you can kind of move the needle maybe one or 2%.
It's not um a revolutionary idea. People already have their own perspective on it. They already know the subject pretty well in depth. So you have to go very, very deep and those are encouraging and revitalizing uh conversations as well. Um But when you come to a non technical conference, so last year, I spoke at a lot more development events, a lot more um uh software architecture and sort of talking to the cio organization about security and um transformative abilities of, of uh the cloud and cloud technologies.
I think coming all the way out to an event like South by um where this is more of like a technically uh aware or technically interested audience um who aren't necessarily writing code or dealing with uh it or um ot decisions day to day um that it's um even more effective simply because you're highlighting a potential issue.
People see robots um in com consumer situations in commercial or industrial settings and they're like, oh, this is cool, everything's great. You know, we're well on our way to the future as opposed to understanding the baby step incremental um uh nature of the innovation and then the challenges were there. So I think it's really interesting to see um the response to that message.
But also I think for me um as a speaker um as an educator um trying to adjust my message for that level um is very, very different, that's a different challenge than going into the specifics of saying like here's a TCP/IP packet um in this section and here you can use this field and manipulate this to exploit this vulnerability and going really down into the weeds um which I would do at a security conference.
Um you know, or even to a developer conference where I'm talking about um deploying code and um build processes and the overall impact of it delivery within an organization um to uh all the way up in this higher level of saying, you know, this is the popular perception of a technology.
This is a glimpse of the gritty reality of it and you can notice some of these issues in areas where we need further study, where we need, excuse me, further investment where we need people to be aware of particular challenges. And that is um unknown ground I think for me, um it's not something I'm used to doing, but it's something that I'm really excited uh to work on.
Thankfully, I have a fantastic team that I work with um at Trend Micro um who help me through these kind of things. Um you know, sort of kindred spirits with um different and better perspectives that I can help bounce ideas back off, uh back and forth off of and make the overall delivery better.
Um But I think that's how I as a technologist, I as a um security professional can kind of move that needle is not by talking to security folks all the time. Um But by um expanding that message and getting that out in more mainstream activities um in more um consumable ways um for folks of technical backgrounds um and technical interests.
So I got a bunch of ideas swirling up around here. Um As usual, some of them lately seem even useful. So I'm really looking forward uh to um getting some of those flushed out a little more, trying some more experiments. So this is episode 16 of mornings with, I've been having a lot of fun with it.
Um How have you guys been enjoying it? Let me know in the comments below. If this is useful, it's useful for me. Hopefully it's useful for you guys. Today is my last um useful day here at South by Southwest. I'm heading uh back on the road tomorrow. Um So tomorrow we won't have a, a live episode of mornings with Mark because I will be on an airplane.
Um But today I'm looking forward to taking in some of the um event. Um You know, we could take definitely breathe after you've delivered, uh the content you're here to deliver. So I get to uh take some of the amazing cool activities that are around. I had some great suggestions from friends gonna try to take in at least one or two of those also work on some of these ideas because I, I get reinvigorated by an experience like yesterday being on stage.
Um And there's uh the opportunity to kind of get those out uh ideas out onto um something into the, into a document, um into some code and play around with it to see what's viable, what's not. Um So I'm really looking forward to that. It's exciting stuff. Um But I'm gonna make sure that I take a moment for myself and actually go out and enjoy some of this fantastic festival.
Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon.
