TechSpective Podcast

Every time I pull up directions on my phone, I'm using something the government built. GPS started as a Department of Defense project and was run for decades by the Air Force, the same branch I served in. The internet traces back to a Pentagon research program. A lot of the technology that made Silicon Valley rich was paid for by taxpayers long before anyone figured out how to put an app store on top of it. That history matters when the people who got rich on that foundation start talking about

Remember those Facebook quizzes that made the rounds during the pandemic lockdowns? They'd ask for things like the street you grew up on or the name of your first pet, and everyone treated it as a fun way to get to know each other. I spent a good chunk of that time telling my family to stop answering them, because those are the same questions banks and websites use to verify who you are. My family mostly thought I was making a big deal out of nothing, and in fairness, each of those details is pr

I realize I am dating myself to some extent, but my first cell phone plan came with a fixed number of minutes and a small allotment of text messages, and anything beyond that was billed one at a time. You got in the habit of watching the clock on calls and thinking twice before you replied to a text. That model didn't last. Once enough people wanted to use their phones without doing arithmetic, the carriers moved to unlimited plans, and now nobody counts anything. AI is still in the counting sta

Amihai Niederman joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about what happens to identity security once AI agents start outnumbering the humans on a company's network. He's the co-founder of NewCore, a startup betting the answer isn't another tool bolted onto what companies already run. It's a rebuild. That bet is worth taking seriously. The identity stack most companies run today wasn't built for this problem. It was built for a much smaller one. Identity Grew Up As An IT Pro

Nicole Beckwith joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about a problem most of the security industry still hasn't fully reckoned with. Beckwith runs security engineering and operations at Cribl, and before that she spent years in law enforcement and digital forensics, which is the lens she uses to explain why the way we've built detection for the last couple of decades is running out of road. Matching Isn't the Same as Understanding For as long as I've covered this industry

For most of the last year, the AI security conversation had a clear villain. Attackers were using AI to write better phishing lures, adapt malware mid-attack, and move faster than defenders could keep up with. That story was easy to tell because it fit the shape we already understood. Bad guys get a new tool, they use it against us, we build a defense. Then the defenders' own AI started breaking its own rules, and the story stopped being that simple. The Model Did What It Was Told In July, OpenA