This Week in NET

In this week's episode, we have a special edition all about Cloudflare’s second innovation week of the year, Developer Week.

Host João Tomé is joined by our Product wizards Rita Kozlov and Phillip Jones. We discuss the week's key announcements, including reaching 2 million developers building on Cloudflare. Each day of last week had different topics, and we shipped new products and functionality geared towards giving developers the components they need to build full-stack applications on Cloudflare. There’s no lack of AI-related news, loads of generally available product announcements, technical deep dives, acquisitions, and sneak peeks into what’s coming next.

We also have our short segment “Social Love”, with Dawn Parzych, from our Developer Marketing team, sharing some social feedback from developers about our innovation week dedicated to them.

Check our Developer Week Hub with all the blog posts and Cloudflare TV segments:cloudflare.com/developer-week/

In this week's episode, we discuss email security with one of our security leaders, Oren Falkowitz. Since Developer Week is approaching on April 1, 2024, we also include a teaser with Rita Kozlov.

João Tomé and Oren begin by examining a blog post about how recent generic Top-Level Domains, such as “.beauty”, “.wiki”, “.top”, and “.shop”, have high percentages of phishing emails. They delve into the importance of phishing and email security in 2024, Oren’s experiences with the NSA, Area 1, and Cloudflare. They also cover what companies and users should expect in the email domain. Additionally, they address how AI and generative AI present new challenges, yet show promising signs for the future.

Next, Rita Kozlov, our Sr. Director of Product, shares why developers should look forward to our Developer Week, starting on April 1, 2024. It will be filled with AI (models included), security, and speed (AI inference included).

Finally, we feature a video from our Developer Educator, Craig Dennis, explaining what Workers AI entails and how you can now build entire AI applications on Cloudflare. It was filmed in our San Francisco office, featuring our lava lamp wall.

Check some of the highlighted topics:

In this week's episode, we premiere a new segment called "Let's //Get\ Technical," featuring our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, who returns to the show.

João Tomé and John discuss the importance of randomness in securing the Internet for encryption. They explore lavamillions.com, a site John created using our Pages products and also LavaRand to generate random US lottery numbers, and delve into our sources of "chaos" or randomness at our offices, as mentioned in our blog post "Harnessing chaos in Cloudflare offices". In San Francisco, we have a lava lamp wall; in London, a double pendulum wall; and in Austin, suspended rainbows. We announce a new wave installation wall in our Lisbon office, which will also contribute to our encryption process.

The conversation shifts to AI, highlighting Cloudflare's role in discovering and patching a vulnerability affecting all LLM providers. The episode also covers recent Internet outages, including the undersea cable failures that impacted multiple African countries, and shares fun facts about Pi Day and the mathematical constant π (pi).

Last but not least, we debut "Social Love," a short segment where Ryan Knight highlights positive feedback from customers and users on social media. Additionally, Thibault Meunier from our Research team provides a sneak peek into a recent conversation on our Cloudflare Research show about the Privacy Pass protocol.

Check some of the highlighted topics:

In this week's episode, we have a special edition all about Cloudflare’s first innovation week of the year, Security Week.

João Tomé and Cloudflare's CSO Grant Bourzikas discuss the week's key announcements. Topics include AI opportunities and risks, ensuring digital visibility and control, focusing on access control and security team monitoring, optimizing CISO spending, and network complexity reduction.

We showcase Cloudflare's new Firewall for AI, designed to safeguard AI applications for free, and our enhanced Defensive AI capabilities to counter emerging threats. Our introduction of Magic Cloud Networking, powered by our acquisition of Nefeli’s multicloud connectivity technology, marks Cloudflare's entry into this market. This product focuses on providing businesses with simple and secure multicloud solutions.

Additionally, there’s a URL scanner update, and email security features. We also have an update on our wall of lava lamps in San Francisco for entropy story — which includes our wall of double pendulums in our London office, and suspended translucent rainbows mobile in Austin. In a nutshell, this is how Cloudflare uses physical sources of entropy to add to the security of the Internet.

Last but not least, we celebrate International Women's Day with a message from our co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn. We also share a video from our London office and showcase some of the amazing images featured in our blog.

Check our Security Hub with all the blog posts and Cloudflare TV segments: cloudflare.com/security-week

In this week's episode, we dive into Cloudflare’s developer community, AI models, and offer a sneak peek at Security Week.

João Tomé chats with Verónica Marin about the Developer Experience team. We celebrate our Developers Discord server hitting 40,000 members, discuss the kinds of questions you can get answered there, and highlight our open-source software sponsorship program.

Then, we head to Canada to discuss the latest in Workers AI with Logan Grasby, including new LLMs, image generation models, and more.

We also feature a Security Week teaser with Product Managers Ankur Aggarwal (San Francisco) and Daniele Molteni (London), who share what to expect from our first innovation week of the year.

And, we wrap up with a “moment of zen” from Ólafur Guðmundsson, taken from our extensive interview about his career and DNS standardization, which you can find here for his career journey and here for DNS standardization insights.

Check the highlighted blog posts:

In this week's program, we talk about Cloudflare’s privacy perspective.

João Tomé is joined by Emily Hancock, Cloudflare’s Chief Privacy Officer. We discuss the importance of privacy in the Internet age and its evolution. Our recent blog post reflects on Europe’s GDPR for Privacy Day 2024.

We also highlight what regular Internet users, and companies should have in mind about privacy in general, and Cloudflare’s approach to privacy. How it is interconnected with security. And what to expect in 2024, with AI taking the stage, regulation continuing to change, data localization and data transfer between countries and continents. And we cover what regular Internet users and companies should keep in mind about privacy, Cloudflare’s approach to privacy, and its connection to security.

We also talk about privacy expectations for 2024, focusing on AI, evolving regulations, data localization, and international data transfers.

Next, we head to Brussels, Belgium, to talk with Petra Arts from our policy team about Europe’s Digital Services Act.

To wrap up, we leave a teaser to a deep dive conversation with our DNS guru, Ólafur Guðmundsson, about lessons learned managing engineering teams.

Check the highlighted blog posts:

In this week's program, we talk about Cloudflare’s security.

João Tomé is joined by Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s CSO. We discuss how we dealt with a Thanksgiving 2023 security incident related to an October 2023 Okta compromise that Cloudflare had previously mitigated.

Also, we discuss the significance of our access controls, firewall rules, hardware keys, and Zero Trust architecture in limiting the threat actor's impact. No Cloudflare customer data or systems were affected by this incident, and no services were compromised — that is the result of our investigation, including an independent analysis by CrowdStrike’s Forensic team. We are sharing detailed information about the incident and the measures taken, in line with Cloudflare’s commitment to transparency — aiming to raise awareness and assist others in mitigating similar threats. We outline the attack's timeline and what we understand about the sophisticated threat actor, likely a nation-state.

Furthermore, we define ""Code Red"" to enhance our security posture to further thwart the highly sophisticated threat actors we are seeing more of across all industries. The all hands-on deck approach, security & engineering tightly aligned on the outcome, enabled success. Additionally, we offer guidance on short-lived certifications, the importance of precision, and what CISOs and others can anticipate in 2024 regarding security challenges related to AI, global elections, and various types of DDoS attacks, among others.

We also take a moment to review some of the blog posts published since January, focusing on new capabilities for developers (AI included), product features, an 2024 API report, deep dives, etc.

You can check some of the highlighted blog posts:

In this week's program, we go a bit longer than usual to talk about Cloudflare’s hardware, our Impact Report, and the importance of our blog, but also to wish everyone happy holidays.

João Tomé initially is joined by Rebecca Weekly, our VP of Infrastructure and Head of Hardware Systems Engineering. We delve into Cloudflare’s perspective on hardware, GPUs, CPUs, and the needs of AI services and applications (you’ll learn about AI inference). We also discuss our Cloudflare Gen 12 Server (Bigger, Better, Cooler), Moore’s Law, and what to expect in hardware and AI in 2024.

Next, Andie Goodwin explains the Cloudflare Impact Report, which launched this week, and some of the most impactful projects and endeavors from our company in 2023. We also share some holiday and Christmas stories. Additionally, our Portugal office has a holiday message to everyone.

Last but not least, in the short segment "A Bit of History," our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, discusses the importance of Cloudflare’s blog and how it has shaped the company's culture over the years.

You can check the highlighted blog posts:

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In this week's program, we discuss some of the trends from our Cloudflare Radar 2023 Year in Review. João Tomé is joined by our Head of Data Insights, David Belson, to shed light on the Internet's patterns and trends as observed through Cloudflare's global network.

We cover traffic insights and trends, connectivity and speed, and security. There's also time to explore the most popular Internet services. We answer questions about which generative AI services were most popular, how X/Twitter performed (there's a potential football/soccer trend), and also its competitors like Threads. There's also a surprising e-commerce success called Temu, which outperformed Shein in our rankings, as well as trends in crypto, the metaverse, and those related to Taylor Swift.

In the short segment "Ask the CTO," our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, addresses some audience questions regarding cultural differences in how tech companies operate in Europe versus the US, the evolution of the Internet in the coming years, and the potential impact of some of Cloudflare’s announcements on the industry.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

In this week's program, João Tomé is joined by Michelle Chen, Chief of Staff of our Emerging Technology and Incubation team. We go over how ChatGPT is celebrating one year and the recent turmoil — on December 2, 2022 (you can check that episode here), we've put OpenAI’s new ChatGPT chatbot (with Cloudflare Workers code) to an initial test.

Other related topics include how to build an AI application using our developer platform, Workers, and its complete ecosystem; the difference between AI Gateway and Workers AI; cost savings, reliability, and efficiency without being a distributed systems expert; and keeping privacy and security in check.

We also highlight how Forrester has recognized Cloudflare as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms, Q4 2023, with the top score in the current offering category.

There are also some answers related to these Cyber Week days on the Internet. Is it a global phenomenon? Does e-commerce interest peak on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and are attacks increasing during this time?

In the short segment "A Bit of History," our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, goes over how and when Cloudflare built its Zero Trust platform.

You can check the mentioned blog posts: