The Hacks

Tom and Chunga have a problem.  It's a problem they haven't had to face before on The Hacks. They're both--at the same time--dealing with a creative "block". For some reason, even though they're working hard to create a great episode for you to listen to, it isn't coming together! So... Lets make that the topic of todays episode!

Writing software is an art form. For programmers, developers, and engineers, a creative block can be a serious problem. It can also be an issue that becomes more and more common if one doesn't address their creativity struggles the right way. Ultimately, it can negatively affect deadlines, releases and relationships among team members. 

While its both scary and frustrating, writers block is something that can be fixed almost immediately if you know the proper steps to take. Tom and Chunga have each spent decades overcoming this problem and the solve, in most cases can be really easy with just a few simple tricks.  What are they?  Listen now to find out!!!! Join the Salt Project Community! We'd love to have you!

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For the longest time, Tom and Chunga have talked about the potential of a large scale breach of U.S. Government Infrastructure by a foreign country, and what the fallout would look like. Ultimately, Tom and Chunga were of the opinion that this type of intrusion would end up hurting the offending country economically and as a result, wouldn't be worth the effort.

This past weekend, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that the Federal Government has been hacked by an un-named nation state. They were able to successfully breach U.S Infrastructure by exploiting a 4-year old CVE, from 2019 with a severity level of 9.8 out of 10.  

There are many questions that still have not been answered. Such as, which government agency's have been compromised and how bad is the damage. Currently, those questions have not been answered. All Chunga wants to know is, who was responsible and what were they trying to find?  Tom says it's a more complex issue that that and they're most likely trying to accomplish several things as opposed to just a few.  What does he thing those things are?  Listen now to find out!

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Tom and Chunga had just entered their respective studios to record this weeks episode of The Hacks, when BOOM! Breaking news reports started coming in saying that Silicon Valley Bank had just collapsed, which immediately changed the topic of the show!

Tom has used SVB many times throughout his career.  He even used it to start SaltStack! He's certainly not alone, most tech startups use this bank to launch their businesses.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank has sent shockwaves through the tech industry and the U.S. economy as a whole! Experts and officials will no doubt say that this failure isn't a big deal and every thing is fine... It's just fine. Do you agree with them, or do you think this is a sign of things to come? Tom and Chunga have an opinion of what they think is going to happen.  Here's a sneak peak, they both say this problem goes all they way back to the fall of Rome!

Chunga wants to give a quick shout out to programmers in the U.K.! Once again, a guy in England developed a scanning tool, and found 57 API access keys for AWS and a bunch of Malware in PyPi.

Tom Forbes built this tool in Rust to automatically scan new packages released in PyPi, and many of the AWS keys he found grant full admin access to the key holder. 

Tom Hatch says there's a lot of similarities between the open source pipeline attacks back in the 1990's and whats happening with PyPi today. So, who's responsible for issues like this? Is it the programmer? Is it PyPi? Or, is it the responsibility of the software user?

Tom Hatch and Tom Forbes disagree on where the responsibility lies.  Listen now to find out what each one of the say!

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It's been a long, hard winter. The western U.S. is suffering from record breaking arctic weather and everyone is getting sick. Somehow Chunga has managed to avoid it--until now. He hasn't been sick since he had Covid 2-years ago!

Tom says his timing is perfect because he's been following recent reports from the U.S. Intelligence Community that claim the Covid outbreak was the result of an "intended leak" from a research lab in China. Tom can draw a lot of parallels between this disaster and the tech industry as a whole.

If you look at some of the biggest challenges tech professionals face, virtually all of them start with a single, unintended, mis-step that often times leads to catastrophe. What do you when this happens? You adapt! Disasters are going to happen; at the end of the day, we're all just people.

In this episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga talk about how important it is for tech professionals to have robust adaptation skills in order to avoid tunnel vision and bad decision making.

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If you've been listening to The Hacks for any length of time, you know that Tom and Chunga LOVE a good conspiracy theory. So far, 2023 has given them a fountain of strange happenings, to  keep their tin foil hats happy!

T-Mobile (Tom and Chunga are both long time customers) suffered a major outage a few days ago that affected tens of millions of people. There were several additional wireless providers that got caught up in the mess as well.  Normally, when an outage takes place, even when it's only for a few minutes, a wireless provider will fall all over themselves trying to explain what happened and why.  This time however, nobody is talking about it--nobody. The only explanation offered was a cryptic statement in the middle of the night.

In this episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga talk about the difficulties in protecting an infrastructure as complex as a wireless network and if they think this was a large scale attack and/or dress rehearsal by a nation state. Listen now to see what they think!

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In this episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga are talking about something they probably should've discussed before now. 

Chat GPT is taking the world by storm. It launched in early December 2022 and is already boasting more than a million users. Depending on who you talk to, Chat GPT is either a fantastic, world changing piece of software, or it's horrible. It's for dishonest cheaters and it's going to put army's of programmers out of work.  So... Which is it?  What do you think?

Tom and Chunga have lots of thoughts and opinions when it comes to Chat GPT, and they'll tell you if they ultimately think it's a good think or a bad thing!  LISTEN NOW!

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Tom and Chunga have learned something about you!  You REALLY don't like it when we talk about self driving cars.  Sorry!  A bonus episode to make up for it is coming soon!

This episode of The Hacks however, is much more serious. This past week, the FBI has announced it was able to stop and large scale, simultaneous  attack on 5 power plants in the Washington DC area. Experts say had this attack been successful, it would've devastated several cities.

As many of you know, Tom has a previous life as a member of the U.S. Intelligence community. Together, he and Chunga talk about how these individuals planned to carryout these attacks, how the FBI was able to catch them, if this victory make us all safer in the long run. Listen now!

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Car lovers this episode is for you! Everyday in Chunga's city, (Las Vegas) there's a news story about some poor, unfortunate, soul crashing their electric car, while its in self drive mode. Because of this, Chunga is of the opinion that self driving cars are, in a word, a novelty. Toms opinion of them is even worse, and he owns a Tesla! He has said many times that self-driving cars can't be trusted and that he's completely lost hope that they ever be anything more that a gimmick.

Well, this week, Mercedes is making Tom eat his words and he couldn't be happier about it!  Mercedes has announced that they have the worlds first "SAE-3" certified self-driving car.  What does that mean?  According to Tom, it means Mercedes is going to change the world--eventually.  Not today, and not with this particular model, but eventually, this announcement will change the way we all commute from one place to the other!   Listen to this episode of The Hacks to find out!

Mercedes has the first certified SAE 3 vehicle!

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Tom has made a trip to Las Vegas to hang out with Chunga at Hacks HQ!

It's too bad they couldn't be talking about something more fun. It's a scary time to be working in tech, we all know this. Layoff's are all too common and tech industry professionals, at every level, are worried. Ten of thousands have been laid off so far in 2023, with more no doubt on the way.

Tom and Chunga have each been laid off at different times of their lives, and Tom has unfortunately had to be someone that has conducted them as well.  Because of this, he has a unique perspective when it comes to making it through this rough climate. 

In this episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga talk about the varied reasons, layoffs become necessary, the appropriate and ethical ways to conduct them and how to deal with the shock and disruption if you've been laid off yourself.  Listen now!

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