Welcome to Runtime! Ed Targett here, stepping in for Tom Krazit*. Today: Gemini 4: The covers are off; HSBC's CTO wants to "hollow out" his mainframes; Alex Stamos chides OpenAI's Dean Ball for "guy in the discourse" comments as Frontier Labs vs Infosec*™ continues, and more.
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First up: Nestlé's CIO, HSBC's CTO say...
Over the past two weeks I've sat down for in-depth conversations with HSBC's Group CTO Mario Shamtani, and Nestlé's CIO Chris Wright; two self-effacing Brits overseeing two big, if very different IT shops.
HSBC has ~60,000 engineers running, among other things, 7,000 Kubernetes clusters, 2.4 million containers, nearly 65,000 namespaces, and oversees over $3 trillion in assets. Nestlé's the world's largest food and beverage company and its IT operation – via supply chain and other software systems – touches farms, factories, shipping and more.
Both conversations were illuminating and spanned the manifold traditional technology leadership challenges in large enterprise environments. Agents? (And pressure to automate further?) Sure. But also...
Mainframe modernisation; SAP migrations; persistent data challenges that are “people and process” issues as much as technology. Both exclusive interviews are coming soon for premium subscribers to The Stack.
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Across The Stack
Micron mops up: $8 billion, to $80+ billion in net income in one year.
KV caching's big business these days...
The comedy of the commons: "Hi. I'm Breandán. I'm the Deputy CISO of the British government, which means I work at the center of one of the biggest federated messes in the country." That’s a punchy intro by a normally circumspect civil servant who suggests his peers should learn from a Nobel winner and treat their orgs as a commons, not a hierarchy.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends: NetScaler attacks continue to escalate. (When a pre-auth RCE vulnerability affecting almost every configuration hits, that’s bad. Censys sees some 40,000 exposed instances.) Mandiant said previously unseen malware is being dropped.
JPMorgan reported the vulnerabilities and is understood to be… unhappy.
Perimeter appliances/load balancers/VPN gateways, networking software; it’s all getting relentlessly targeted. Cisco now has 17’s bugs in CISA’s “known exploited” catalogue; that’s already double last year’s number.
What’s a Blue Team to do? Well…
Rusty agents: Gemini 4 “Argon” is here and already rewriting it (“core libraries like re2, libgav1 up to 800K+ lines for the Fuchsia Zircon kernel”) in Rust at Google. You can’t get it yet, but this is what it will cost you.
A gimlet eye: Noah Bovenizer turns to Gimlet Labs for our “One to Watch” feature. (what is an “agent-native inference cloud” anyway?) Read on.
All that and more on The Stack this week.
X marks the spat
- Factory and Cognition tradebarbs over CRO appointment
- Alex Stamos is not impressed with Dean Ball's "type of guy" post.
- (On which note, can someone check on Dane Stuckey?)
- Dev Ittycheria's clearly p*ssed with CJ Desai. (Perhapsthis absolute imbroglio should have been a clear warning?)
- Team GLM say they're the good guys , as Anthropicmisfires
- Someone's "torturing" LLMs on GitHub?Lordy.
Stacked up: The week ahead
Redis forkers unite! Valkey Conf. kicks off in Prague on Oct. 5.
**Your favourite ex?** [__WebexOne rekindles relationships__](https://www.webexone.com/?ref=thestack.technology) in Austin, Oct. 5-8
**Landlubbers:** Sailpoint Navigate [__takes to Austin, Texas__](https://www.sailpoint.com/navigate/austin?ref=thestack.technology) on Oct. 5-8.
**What are you smoking?** World AI Summit hits [__Amsterdam__](https://worldsummit.ai/?ref=thestack.technology), Oct. 7-8
We're also reading:
"Insecure reporters": Google, Harvard, MIT researchers say "LLMs tend to present narratives of success by default" but a simple nudge can...
w-OT? Federal orgs. are not OTT on their OT security. (Can the burgeoning, big CEO-backing Alliance for Critical Infrastructure help?)
"Intimidate everybody"? Citi on What the bond market is telling us...
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