Criminals...assemble!

Anne Hathaway: Am I being rude?

Sarah Paulson: She's in deep. Maybe half a bowl.

Dave Bittner: Hello everyone and welcome to a special edition of the "Hacking Humans" podcast, an occasional series we call "Hacking Humans Goes to the Movies." I'm Dave Bittner and joining me is my CyberWire colleague Rick Howard. Hey Rick!

Rick Howard: Hey Dave. How's it going?

Dave Bittner: Going good. Going good. On this show, Rick and I look at some of our favorite clips from cinema and television, clips which demonstrate some of the scams and schemes Joe Carrigan and I talk about over on the "Hacking Humans" podcast. We've got some fun clips to share, so stay tuned. We'll be right back after this message from our show's sponsor.

Dave Bittner: Alright, Rick we got some good clips to share this week and I have to say I always look forward to this recording session with you, because I never know what you're going to choose. You never know what I'm going to choose. So far, we haven't both chosen the same things, so that's good.

Rick Howard: Thank goodness, yeah that would be bad [brief laughter].

Dave Bittner: But it's always fun to talk about these things with you and I'm going to start things off for us. My clip this week comes from the movie "Ocean's 8." Are you familiar with this one?

Rick Howard: I am and I love the Ocean's movies, probably not as much as you do, but I--I just love the scheming of it all. So, I'm.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: So glad you picked this clip. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, it's just, you know, I--you can't go wrong with a good heist movie. Although I will say, that I want to say maybe "Ocean's 12" did go wrong with the heist movie, but they redeemed themselves with "Ocean's 13" and so this is "Ocean's 8" which was hmm, I don't think you call it a reboot, but an interesting spin on the whole Ocean's theme. So, this is a 2018 film. This was directed by Gary Ross. Lots of stars in this film. We got.

Rick Howard: That's what I love about this Dave. It's just the star power that it's just amount of wattage that comes across this screen even in the scene that we're going to do here. It's like.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: Oh, my goodness. It's like oh my--that's her! Oh, that's her! Oh, my goodness yeah!

Dave Bittner: Right, And I think when you're doing a movie like this and you have so much reputation of these being fun movies to be a part of, it's easy to get big stars to do either, you know, little--little parts or just to get them to play a part and that's what they've done here. So.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: We've got the star Sandra Bullock. She actually plays Debbie Ocean, the sister of Danny Ocean from the other Ocean's films who was.

Rick Howard: George Clooney's sister let's be clear, yeah.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. So, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, siblings. I--I can buy that.

Rick Howard: I can buy that, yeah.

Dave Bittner: They must have had very, very handsome parents.

Rick Howard: They certainly did, yeah.

Dave Bittner: So, yeah Sandra Bullock; we got Cate Blanchett; Anne Hathaway; Mindy Kaling; Sarah Paulson; Awkwafina; Rihanna.

Rick Howard: Rihanna, geez.

Dave Bittner: Helena Bonham Carter. This is just, you know, this is a list of you know women I admire who would never date me, right?

Rick Howard: Wouldn't even look in our direction.

Dave Bittner: No. No. Not even close. Not even close. So, Sandra Bullock plays Debbie Ocean who is the sister of Danny Ocean and she is fresh out of prison on parole. So, I guess the scheming and thieving is a family thing and, in this film, she hatches a scheme to steal a $150 million dollar Cartier necklace that's being worn by a famous film star who's played by Anne Hathaway who, spoiler, is a famous film star.

Rick Howard: Uh-huh.

Dave Bittner: And so, Anne Hathaway's character.

Rick Howard: You're saying it wasn't much of a stretch? Is that what you're saying?

Dave Bittner: I don't know. I don't think she was, you know, what's funny is that she's kind of a difficult film star in this.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And I don't think that's Anne Hathaway in real life, but she plays a film star named Daphne, and so she's going to be wearing this very fancy necklace at the Met Gala which is the big event, big fundraiser in New York City and, you know, everyone who's everyone is there at the Met Gala. So, the scene I'm using today is the actual heist of this necklace. This is the big scene. It begins in the kitchen at the Met Gala where Cate Blanchett is disguised as a chef and we will start the scene there.

Cate Blanchett: Need a gluten-free and a broiled fish for table 8.

Dave Bittner: So, Cate Blanchett is the chef here in the kitchen. She walks over to a table full of salads and soups that have to--ready to go out to some of the customers. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small bottle and she squirts a couple of drops of some liquid, dark liquid into this bowl of soup, this light-colored soup. What kind of soup do you think this probably is Rick?

Rick Howard: Oh, I don't know but it looks good whatever it is.

Dave Bittner: It does look good. So, the waiter takes the soup over to Anne Hathaway's table. She is very happy to see this bowl of soup. It looks like she's quite hungry. She scoops out a big spoonful and you can tell she's enjoying it.

Rick Howard: And grabs that glop of stuff that was put in there by Cate Blanchett.

Dave Bittner: Yep. Yep. So, she is just devouring this bowl of soup.

Anne Hathaway: Am I being rude?

Sarah Paulson: She's in deep. Maybe half a bowl.

Rick Howard: That's Sarah Paulson.

Dave Bittner: Sarah Paulson, yeah is playing like a worker. Meanwhile, Awkwafina goes in the ladies room, she goes in a stall, closes the door, crawls under the stall to the stall next to it, closes the door of that stall, locks it, crawls on the floor to the stall next to that door and locks it. So, she's just going down the line making these stalls unavailable. And we're back in the restaurant.

Anne Hathaway: And, so anyway I go in, I then this like little D bend, and the queen glares at me and says, "That's not a curtsy." What do you mean? So, now I am in a curtsy standoff with the Queen of England and.

[ Background Conversations ]

Dave Bittner: So.

Girl at the Met Gala: Are you okay?

Anne Hathaway: Yeah, I'm fine.

Dave Bittner: A little tummy trouble.

Anne Hathaway: No, I'm fine. So, and there's curtsy. It's.

Rick Howard: I love Anne Hathaway. She's so good.

Dave Bittner: She really is. She really is.

Anne Hathaway: Just give me one second.

Dave Bittner: So, she is having some gastrointestinal urgency and she gets up from the table.

Rick Howard: That's a nice way to say it.

Dave Bittner: And, yeah, heads towards the ladies room and we see Sandra Bullock's character also on the way to the ladies room keeping an eye on Anne Hathaway's character as Sandra Bullock beats her there, is waiting outside the entrance to the ladies room. And you can see Anne Hathaway come by and run into the ladies room, tries to open the door, tries to open the door, tries to open the door, finally finds booth that's available, a stall, and heaves her guts into the toilet. Sandra Bullock keeps the security guards who are there to guard the necklace from going into the ladies room, because it's the ladies room. So, they're waiting outside.

Rick Howard: She calls them swine, I love it.

[ Laughter ]

Dave Bittner: So, Awkwafina comes back in to the ladies room, finds Anne Hathaway there.

Awkwafina: Oh, you poor thing.

Dave Bittner: Embracing the toilet, puking her guts out. She pretends to be helping her, you know, holding her hair and.

Awkwafina: Breathe.

Dave Bittner: She disconnects the necklace and Anne Hathaway doesn't notice because she's preoccupied with.

Rick Howard: Throwing her guts up, yep.

Dave Bittner: Turning herself inside out. Meanwhile.

Sarah Paulson: You need to get this into the kitchen right away.

Dave Bittner: Sarah Paulson.

Sarah Paulson: Go! Go-go!

Dave Bittner: Asks one of the waiters to take a bunch of dishes from the ballroom back into the kitchen, dirty dishes, and he has to go by the ladies restroom on his way to do that. Sandra Bullock distracts him, slows him down, and while he's distracted, Awkwafina comes out and slides the necklace underneath of one of the plates on this tray that he's carrying right under the noses of the security guards. The waiter comes into the kitchen where they're washing dishes and he finds Mindy Kaling who is there working as a dishwasher. She says, "I'll take that tray." She takes the stack of dishes that has the necklace, dunks it under water. We see under the water into the dishwashing station. She takes the necklace out, see what she's got and rinses it off, puts in her pocket.

Rick Howard: That was a nice shot of the camera going in the water, okay.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: Now that I think about it. That was pretty good, yeah.

Dave Bittner: They're pretty clever. So, Mindy Kaling announces she's going to take a bathroom break. She goes into the ladies room, closes and locks the door. Sits down on the toilet, opens up the baby changing station which has been outfitted to be a workstation to work on jewelry, right, like a jeweler's workstation, right? And she looks over her left shoulder where the dispenser is for the ladies toiletries, she opens that up and that is full of jeweler's tools, and she starts disassembling the necklace.

Rick Howard: To pull the valuable diamond out of the necklace, so.

Dave Bittner: Correct. Correct. And in the movie they're going to swap in for the valuable diamond. They're going to swap in, you know, basically a piece of glass to--so when the necklace gets found that, you know, people will be thrown off the trail for a while. So, that is the scene and let's unpack it here Rick. What sort of elements are we seeing in play here?

Rick Howard: Well, the first thing what I love about all these kind of heist movies is the reason I love to watch them and you know we covered a bunch of them on this show, is that there are--I don't know, what? Maybe forty things that have to go exactly right for.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: That to be successful and they always go without a hitch and I don't know what it says about me, but I love that I get to watch that knowing that, you know, normal people would never be able to make that happen.

Dave Bittner: Right. Right. Right. And I think that adds to the tension while you're watching the film knowing that everything has to go right, and also, for me I'm always wondering how are they going to pull this off? How are they going to pull this off?

Rick Howard: Right. And it's just clever, right? All the little things that they do, right? One of the things that wasn't obvious from the clip was they had staked out the area of the restaurant before and knew where all the security cameras were and they knew where to stand--all of the actresses that had like a two second bit in this, were out of camera range, right? And so, so that when some policeman looks at the tape later they're not going to see any of the crew that was in there.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Yeah. You know, Joe and I often talk about how one of the ways that folks who are trying to pull off scams get away with it is they get people into an emotional state, right? Where they're not--they're not in their right mind. They don't have full control of their senses, and I would say uncontrolled vomiting has got to be one of.

Rick Howard: Yeah, and it makes you instinctively look away, right? You don't want to watch somebody doing it and just, you know, you don't want to embarrass them so you--you're not even going to look what she's doing, right?

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: So, yeah.

Dave Bittner: So, she's--so she's going to get her privacy, right? I bet you ladies room cleared out when.

Rick Howard: Sure.

Dave Bittner: She went in there and was throwing up. But also, she's not keeping track of herself anymore. You know, she's embarrassed probably from being there. She--it's the worst feeling in the world to not be in control of yourself that way, to be in a public place, a semi, you know, you're not home right?

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And heaving your guts out and so the last thing she's thinking about is this necklace. She probably, you know, had no idea that the necklace was taken off of her.

Rick Howard: Well, I mean as this famous actor too, she's presenting how classy she is. She's you know dressed to the nines right? And now she has to run to the bathroom. She's totally embarrassed about this, right? So, you know, it's all that and the other thing that pops up in all of these things Dave, is all the misdirection right, because you're not going to look at her, because she's throwing up. The--when Sandra Bullock spins the waiter around so that he's not paying attention when Awkwafina puts the diamond necklace on his tray. I mean, I just--it's just sequence after sequence where they, you know, it's like a magic show watching this happen.

Dave Bittner: Right, and part of what's going on here too that is so clever is that they're doing all of this knowing that they are being seen by all of the security cameras.

Rick Howard: Right. Yep.

Dave Bittner: So, all of the players in this are deliberately in places where they can be seen and yet they are

Rick Howard: They're not.

Dave Bittner: Manipulating the other people in the scene to basically be their mule to move this necklace from one location to the other.

Rick Howard: Exactly. Yeah. It's so clever, right? It's so clever. I would love to be in the writing room when those guys say, okay here's what we're going to do next to solve this.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Intractable problem.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. I always wonder like what's the point where they say, y yeah that's too far, like that hmm.

Rick Howard: Yeah, no one's going to believe that.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Yeah, that's not the point. That is not the point to [multiple speakers] at all.

Dave Bittner: That's true. Yeah. I don't know. I think you and I probably have that in common that we are willing suspenders of this.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Of this belief.

Rick Howard: I want them, yeah. I want them to do for it, yeah.

Dave Bittner: Right. I am going along for the ride absolutely. Alright, well that is my clip this week. Again, that is from "Ocean's 8." It is the stealing the necklace scene. We'll have a link to the YouTube clip for that if you want to watch it or watch along while we describe it that's fun too. Rick, what do you have for us?

Rick Howard: Yeah, so my clip is a little different this week. It comes from the 2019 movie "Avengers: Endgame." It's the conclusion of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," a 22 film run between 2008 and 2019 starring Robert Downey Jr., that charismatic actor who almost single handedly jump started the MCU back in 2008 when he.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Yeah, when he portrayed Tony Stark, right, in the original Iron Man movie.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: This scene also has a young actress, Lexi Rabe I think is how you say her name where she plays Stark's little daughter Morgan. And at this point, in the MCU story, it's five years after the villain Thanos snapped his infinity gauntlet fingers and disappeared about half the people in the universe.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Referred to as in the MCU, as "the blip" right? And.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: So, Danny's in his kitchen in his cabin in the woods and mourning his friends who died in the blip, but especially Peter Parker, aka "Spider-Man." His colleagues at the Avenger's headquarters are experimenting with time travel to go back and undo this snap, but they're failing at it. And at that moment, he gets an inspiration. So, he goes into his lab, he tells his computer AI assistant, F.R.I.D.A.Y, which by the way Dave, I don't know if you know this, it stands for Female Replacement Intelligence Digital Assistant Youth. Now that's a mouthful.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Rick Howard: Now you know, right? And he's going to perform a test. Now, he's looking and manipulating a model in 3-dimensional space and telling F.R.I.D.A.Y to adjust some of the parameters. So, let's start the clip there.

Robert Downey Jr: I've had a mild inspiration, let's see if it checks out. So, recommend one last sim before we pack it in for the night. This time, in the shape of a Mobius strip, inverted, please.

F.R.I.D.A.Y: Processing.

Robert Downey Jr: Alright, give me the Eigenvalue, that particle factoring in spectral decomp. That will take a second.

F.R.I.D.A.Y: Just a moment.

Robert Downey Jr: And don't worry if it doesn't pan out, I'm just kind of.

F.R.I.D.A.Y: Model rendered.

Robert Downey Jr: Shit.

Lexi Rabe: Shit!

Robert Downey Jr: What are you doing up little miss?

Dave Bittner: He's done it.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Robert Downey Jr: Nope. We don't say that. Only mommy says.

Rick Howard: That's Morgan in the background.

Robert Downey Jr: She coined it. It belongs to her.

Lexi Rabe: Why are you up?

Robert Downey Jr: Because I got some important shit going on here. What do you think? No, I--I got something on my mind. I got something.

Lexi Rabe: Was it juice pops?

Robert Downey Jr: Sure was. That's extortion. That's a word. What kind do you want? Great minds think alike, juice pops, exactly was on my mind. You done?

Rick Howard: So, we can stop it there Dave.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: As Tony walks out of the lab with Morgan, you know, seeking the extortionist payment of juice pops, right, Tony looks back at the 3D model as if to confirm that he just figured out time travel, right?

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: And I love this scene. So, what do you think Dave?

Dave Bittner: Well, I love this scene too and as you say, Robert Downey, Jr. is.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Incredibly charismatic on screen. He has just the amount of swagger that you could buy that he is Tony Stark.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And the combination of, as I say, swagger but also intelligence and he pulls it off, and I don't think every actor could do that.

Rick Howard: No.

Dave Bittner: I mean, you're right. It really did--I mean, how many people were really into "Iron Man" when the first "Iron Man" movie came out? I can't.

Rick Howard: No. Zero, right? Me and you maybe.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Okay, but.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, it was a side character.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: But, you know, now we all know and love "Iron Man" from the MCU. So, a couple of things strike me about this scene; first of all, in the future we will all be manipulating objects in 3D space.

Rick Howard: 3D space.

Dave Bittner: With our computers. Like that trope just goes--can't go away and also, all screens will be transparent.

Rick Howard: Uh-hmm, that's right.

Dave Bittner: Right? Which also makes no sense to me because.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: It's harder to read things when you can see.

Rick Howard: It's clear.

Dave Bittner: What's behind them. Like that's just--that's how you tell some things in the future. It used to be that it was flat screens and then we got flat screens.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: That wasn't futuristic enough.

Rick Howard: No, not at all. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: It has to be 3D space and it has to be clear, so we'll just go with that because if anyone could do it it would be Tony. It's interesting to me that he goes into this thinking that the computer is probably not going to be able to figure this out.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And yet the computer comes up with it pretty quickly and he seems flabbergasted that the computer figured this out so quickly and that it worked.

Rick Howard: Yeah. Right, and it's so what's amazing about that is it kind of fits right into in what we're talking about today Dave and with all the ChatGTP stuff going on and.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: The reason I chose this clip was that you and I were yacking in the slack channels as we do, apparently that's all we do for work is yack on slack channels right?

Dave Bittner: Shh. Don't tell anybody.

Rick Howard: And we were talking about an essay written by Danah Boyd over at the Zephoria blog and she was complaining that with the advent of ChatGPT and other machine learning models, many in the developer community were kind of panicking about what they perceive as a near term existential crisis when the AI models would eliminate all of their jobs and Danah suggested that they were thinking about that advancement all wrong. Instead of machine learning models replacing developers, they are much more likely to augment them. You know, freeing the developer from those mundane tasks of syntax and logic errors and exist in today's popular programming languages and that's why I chose this clip. And it's hard to tell from just the audio, but Tony Stark never touches a keyboard as you were describing to solve the problem of time travel, you know, he just told F.R.I.D.A.Y. to do it for him.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: He had to understand things like, you know, what's an inverted Mobius strip and Eigenvalue and spectral decomp, whatever the hell all that is. I have no idea, okay?

Dave Bittner: That's called techno babble Rick.

Rick Howard: But he didn't have to remember to put the semicolon after the if-then-else clause, you know, that's the point here.

Dave Bittner: Right. Right.

Rick Howard: And what I'm suggesting is that these new machine learning models are just the next level in programming abstraction.

Dave Bittner: What do you mean by that?

Rick Howard: Well, I mean computers forever we've been making them easier to use, has always been about extracting the details away from the user and you can make an argument that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer to use machine language back in the 1800s, but it was really hard to do.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: And to make it easier, we started using assembly language as an abstraction in the late 1940s which makes programming more like writing in English and then the next abstraction we probably got was the FLOW-MATIC programming language; that's the precursor to COBOL developed by Grace Hopper, one of my computer science heroes by the way, and she did that in the 1950s.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: And then for the next 70 years the developer community has been using variations of the FLOW-MATIC-COBOL theme with languages like JavaScript, Python, and C-plus-plus. ChatGTP is just the next evolutionary leap in the programming of computers. It's the next extraction level making it easier to develop code just Tony Stark did in this clip.

Dave Bittner: You know, in the essay by Danah Boyd, she mentions a concept called "deskilling the job."

Rick Howard: Yep.

Dave Bittner: And the example she uses as an illustration is the modern day commercial airline pilot and, you know, a lot of these folks get their initial flying training in the military and then after retirement they join a commercial airline, but aircraft evolution in the commercial space is so advanced that we've got these highly trained military fighter pilots, they don't really fly the commercial airliner anymore, so much as they monitor the machines and software programs that fly the planes for them.

Rick Howard: Right. Right.

Dave Bittner: Right? And Boyd's worry is that as time progresses these pilots are going to get--these airliners are going to get more and more complicated and the pilots won't know how to fly them at all. they'll be dependent on the machine and when something bad happens in flight, they won't be able to grab the controls and save the day like, you know, like Sully did. Remember?

Rick Howard: Right.

Dave Bittner: Sully when he landed his plane in the Hudson River in 2009 and.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: She uses that example. So, isn't that the same problem that developers are going to experience in the near future? At some point they're going to become so dependent on the machine learning tool, that Tony Stark kind of F.R.I.D.A.Y. AI assistant, that when it fails and gets something wrong they won't be able to grab the controls and do the programming themselves. They won't know how this works anymore.

Rick Howard: Yeah. Well, I get that and I understand the trepidation there, but let me point out that today without ChatGPT, okay, when programmers run into a program they can't solve, most of the times their first inclination is not to abandon their project in Python and say, you know, I bet if I built this in a an assembly language it would be easier, okay? Nobody does that, okay? The--so this is just progress. This is the beginning of the next evolution of programming and once we get established there, I don't think we're ever going back. It's just going to be the way we do it in the future.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. I can't--I can't disagree with you. I guess I on the one had I agree that I think we are at a bit of an inflection point here with things like ChatGPT and HAL and I think these are early days.

Rick Howard: Early days, yeah. Who knows what it's going to turn into, yeah.

Dave Bittner: Right. Like we're like, you know, this is like, you know, Macintosh, GUI interface 1.0.

Rick Howard: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: And it seems magical and amazing. But who knows where it's going to go from here. At the--and so, at the same time that's a little scary right?

Rick Howard: Well, I think that's what everybody is, you know, afraid of that all of our jobs are going to be gone, but you know, the human race has done this over and over and over again as it progresses through technology and evolution, and so, yes there's going to be some pain as we learn how to do it in different ways, but I don't think it's an existential crisis. We're going to be so much better at programming. If I could look at a 3D model and get my, you know, my CS101 computer program to work; that would have been a lot easier I think.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: So, I'm on board for that.

Dave Bittner: Well, but going back to the Tony Stark clip, I mean, his relationship is such with this AI, with F.R.I.D.A.Y. that he trusts it.

Rick Howard: Sure.

Dave Bittner: He does--there's no checking its work. There are no footnotes. The AI doesn't say here's the answer and here's how I know it is correct.

Rick Howard: Uh-hmm.

Dave Bittner: So, to me that's a ways off.

Rick Howard: I don't know if that's far off Dave. I hear people complain and I'm one of the ones that's complained about it, right too.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: You know, I was--sometimes the interface would give you not just the wrong answer okay, but a made up answer, right?

Dave Bittner: Right.

Rick Howard: Instead of saying, I don't know, it says well here's a complete thing I just falsified right here, right? I think that's just we're going to figure that out. That's a technical problem with the models that those people will figure out. I think that's a smaller problem.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Rick Howard: The bigger problem is going to be--it's what all them big guys talk about, you know, when there's this singularity.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Rick Howard: When these things can operate on their own, okay, without any supervision, okay, that's what--that's what some of the super brainiac geniuses are worried about. That's the existential crisis for the human race. And I think those are two separate problems.

Dave Bittner: Well, when we hose them up to actual physical systems, right?

Rick Howard: Well, yeah.

Dave Bittner: And they're controlling?

Rick Howard: Yeah, they're already talking about how some of these systems can just plug-in to other like GPT models. Like this one does Wikipedia searches; this other one does airline searches; this other one does medical research and they're already talking about within a few years that's just going to be automatic for these kinds of systems and that's a scary amount of capability in one little piece of software.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, well hold on to the bar, right?

Rick Howard: Hold on [laughter] strap in as we say.

Dave Bittner: Hold on to the bar, yeah. Yeah, as a buddy of mine used to say, you say "Do you hear that clicking sound?" And I would say, "What clicking sound?" He said, "We're going up the first lift hill of the rollercoaster" on to the bar.

Rick Howard: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Dave Bittner: Away we go. Alright, good stuff. Rick Howard is the CyberWire and N2K's Chief Security officer and also our Chief Analyst. Rick thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure and.

Rick Howard: Yeah, it's so much fun doing this Dave. Yeah, so much fun.

Dave Bittner: It's so much fun isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Thanks to all of you for listening. It is because you listen that we're able to do this. So, thanks very much.

We would love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at cyberwire@n2k.com. Your feedback helps us ensure we're delivering the information and insights that help keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. They make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. Learn more at n2k.com. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Eiben. This show is edited by Elliott Peltzman, Our Senior Editor is Peter Kilpe. I'm Dave Bittner.

Rick Howard: And I'm Rick Howard.

Dave Bittner: Thanks for listening.