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**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. I think the big disconnect comes when customers use your -- they have different assumptions and different ways they want to work, and different things that they want to do, and you're like "I built this tool to solve the problem that I had. And now a customer has a different problem. Now we n... |
**Autumn Nash:** I don't think they talk about that enough when you're going to school for being an engineer, about how you can have all the good intentions in the world, and then somebody uses it and you're like "But why?" But also, I think when you're building at a certain scale for you to use and dogfood, and then y... |
**Justin Garrison:** Or just the boundaries around a tool. It's hard to draw those boundaries, because you're like "I want all the customers." |
**Autumn Nash:** Exactly. |
**Justin Garrison:** And things like Kubernetes have been used for all these things... It's like, maybe you shouldn't be using Kubernetes here. I understand you like how this functions, or you're familiar with this, but at this level just go do a different tool. |
**Autumn Nash:** That's why this product especially is interesting, and just having a background as a solutions architect... There's so many times where people are like "I use this" and I'm like "But why? Why do you use this?" And they can't tell you why they use it, or they'll be like "I use this and I love it, but I ... |
There's a reason we have all these tools, and there's a reason that so many tools are built from like compute power, or like infrastructure tools, or database tools, and there's such a variety, because sometimes they don't always work for everything. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[56:32\] I mean tools are sticky, because you're like "I know how this tool works, so I'm going to stick with it." And problems are often invisible, because we get used to it as we build the problem ourself; and we're just like "Oh, that's not actually a problem." No, no. No one else has that prob... |
**Autumn Nash:** It's also why it's hard when you internally build everything for yourself. Sometimes you want to have the old simple stuff that you built yourself, and then sometimes it's like "Dude, at some point we need to not build everything ourselves." It just depends. |
**Justin Garrison:** And that's also hard, because there's fundamental pieces of that tool structure that are old and crusty and useful, but also are so esoteric that they shouldn't be used, because they're also -- like, you can use the new and shiny and not have anyone come in and know how this works, or you can use t... |
**Autumn Nash:** Dude, nobody talks about that struggle. Nobody talks about - like, you're not getting kids out of college that know how to do in-depth Bash. |
**Justin Garrison:** I was working for years as an engineer and I found out that one of our fundamental tools at this company was built using stow. I didn't even know what the -- |
**Autumn Nash:** What is that? |
**Justin Garrison:** The stow command on Linux. It makes a bunch of symlinks for you from a file system. And it stows things in a directory hierarchy. And I didn't know what this was, and it was a foundational piece of most of what we were doing at this company. I was like "I didn't know this existed. I did not know wh... |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. And it's hard to know when, when everything you have is built in that, or you've been doing it for so long. |
**Justin Garrison:** So for today's outro we're gonna talk about a couple of books, some longer reads, some things that are kind of recommendations or summaries around a thing. And since I teased it in the intro, I'll go first, because my book is called The Dark Wire. And Dark Wire is a book all about how the FBI in th... |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh, this is so shady, but I love it. |
**Justin Garrison:** It was kind of amazing. And I was interested in the technology aspects of it from a book perspective... And it obviously goes into a lot of the stories around like the horrible, bad things that criminals do when they think no one's watching. Like, if you're a bad person and you're like "No one can ... |
But the fascinating thing about it to me was the fact that like this was literally the entire startup. It was a quote-unquote startup that ran a cell phone network that had their own devices, and they said "This is all the way secure for you. Everything about this is secure." And then they had a back door that just sen... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's wild. |
**Justin Garrison:** So every message they sent was sent back to the FBI. And it started in San Diego. These people in San Diego were approached by someone. An old secure network shut down because they got hacked, I think, by the French government... I'm losing some of the timelines. But basically, there was competing,... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[01:00:16.09\] That's genius. |
**Justin Garrison:** And the problem, the reason they shut it down - this was like two years ago, 2022-ish they shut it down, and it ended up being the largest worldwide sting arrest in a single day ever in history, because they got all these people... Because they said, they're like "Actually, the problem is we're too... |
**Autumn Nash:** What?! |
**Justin Garrison:** They didn't know. They thought they were working for enterprises, and enterprises want backdoors into messages, and they're like "Oh, yeah, sure. We'll add that feature, because it's enterprise." No, no. Everything was going back to the FBI. So engineers were building this stuff that were like "Oh,... |
**Autumn Nash:** What?! So they were working for the FBI and they didn't even know they were working for the FBI? |
**Justin Garrison:** Exactly. Yeah. So it was completely hidden. |
**Autumn Nash:** That is wild. |
**Justin Garrison:** And so the thing is, they were at this point where they grew too much, and they're like "This startup is too successful. Too many people are going to --" And they started giving access to different governments around the world, in different ways that other people couldn't see... Because as an FBI, ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Have you ever seen the show American Greed? |
**Justin Garrison:** No. |
**Autumn Nash:** Beth would love that. Tell her about it. |
**Justin Garrison:** I'm sure she would. |
**Autumn Nash:** It sounds... That is just wild. I feel like it's American Greed -- |
**Justin Garrison:** This is in real life. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. Well, it's about real life, and it'll be like crazy; it'll be like "This guy BSed his way through being a surgeon, and now he's like operating on like patients, like as a neurosurgeon." And then this dude put a huge life insurance policy on himself and decided he wanted to leave his family and cr... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. The secure side of it was really fascinating to me, of like "Oh, this is this is just all backdoored", and how it worked. And really, they picked a date and they're like "Hey, this is too successful. We have too many messages and we can't go through them, and we can't be responsible if someon... |
**Autumn Nash:** I wonder if that was like so stressful. Can you imagine seeing all these messages and you can't do anything about -- oh, my goodness. |
**Justin Garrison:** And there's not just -- like, there's pictures, there's everything. And they get all the metadata about who they called... So they're building these networks out of being able to see these graphs of how people communicate. |
**Autumn Nash:** I feel like that would be very interesting, but also -- do you know how they talk about how like therapists or like nurses like take on a lot of that like heaviness... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, that burden. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. And like just like the Facebook moderators, you know how they have to have a human moderator for some things...? Can you imagine the things that they saw, and that they knew were happening, but had no control over stopping? |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. So literally, they said "Hey, everyone that knows about this, we're picking this date", and I think it was like June something, and they're like "We don't care if you're ready or not. You get ready." They gave them like a month advance, or two months of it, like "Here's all of the information... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[01:04:09.04\] You know how it's like one of those things where you're like "If we just had more information, we could fix all this." And then all of a sudden you have too much information, and... You know what I mean? |
**Justin Garrison:** And they had to shut it down. Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** It's almost like I hope they find a better, efficient way to redo that at some point, because it seems like it could be a lot of good... But at the same time, you could see how that would be very costly, but also just like heavy, like a human toll also. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. And there's so many questions I have about just like legality of a lot of things, for like "Oh, this is other countries, we don't care." And I'm like "This is humans", and I don't know. |
**Autumn Nash:** Well, not just that, but when they say that they don't wiretap Americans... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[laughs\] |
**Autumn Nash:** And the fact that you would then have so much evidence to justify getting -- you know what I mean? Like, you started off wrong, but at some point you could definitely have a roundabout way of gotten enough information to make it legit. |
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