Security Week teaser and Lisbon’s waves of entropy

Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. I'm in the reception of our Lisbon office in Portugal with this cool wall of waves that we premiered this week. This wall of waves has 50 wave machines that are balancing doing waves and that is contributing to make the Internet secure. We're going to talk more about that and about our new wall of entropy. We have several in our offices but we start with our first innovation week of the year. We have innovation weeks throughout the year. This is the first and it's called security week, all about security. For that we have Michael Tremante, our senior director of product management that's going to talk about what to expect about security week. So I'm your host João Tomé as I said in the reception of our Lisbon office in Portugal. Hello Michael, welcome to This Week in NET. How are you? Hello João, good. Yourself? I'm good too. Just for folks who don't know, you're in London, right? I am based out of London, so that's our beautiful county office, Clover, London. Exactly, so security week is just around the corner next week, a full week full of announcements, our first innovation week of the year. I guess that the team is really busy with all of the blogs, all the announcements. Really, what can people expect of security week 2025? Yeah, and it's not just the blogs and announcements, right? It's the actual products and features that we're going to be releasing during security week. Security week, like all innovation weeks, is very exciting for us. It's a full week packed of stories, packed of new features, things we're observing on the Internet, threat intelligence. Of course, the topic is security, broadly speaking. We do a lot of things in both reverse proxy security and application security and Zero Trust and also the things that we observe across the Internet when it comes to cyber. Lots of things to expect. Maybe I can give a little bit more detail. We're going to open on Sunday. We have an opening blog post from our CISO, so keep an eye out for that. Then normally, every single day, we'll have about five to six blog posts with relevant product features, and each one is themed by day. Starting on Monday, we're going to talk about all the things we've been doing to help make the really good announcement that day will be our development in post-quantum cryptography. Joao, you might be aware that's something that's, although not impacting us right now, it could be a big thing for the future. We need to be ready to make sure all of our cryptography is safe. It has been more on the news recently because of the advancements in quantum computers, specifically. It's definitely on the mind of people. We at Cloudflare have a dedicated research team that looks into that. We want to make sure, and that's actually part of what we're going to be talking about on Monday, that all of our technology is post-quantum ready. When and if a very powerful quantum computer comes around and breaks existing cryptography, we're going to be, of course, one step ahead. Tuesday, it's all about threat intelligence. As you know, we run one of the largest networks on the globe. We get a lot of insights into Internet trends, into traffic patterns, new attack vectors. That day is all about threat intelligence based on the Cloudflare network. We're actually going to be releasing some new features related to visibility and threat fees. We're going to be giving access to our customers, so keep an eye out. If you're working threat intelligence within an organization, Tuesday is the day for you. Going on to Wednesday. The big theme for Wednesday is essentially AI. We cannot talk about cybersecurity nowadays without AI. We've been doing a lot of development across all facets of AI. We've got tools for developers building AI systems, making sure they're safe and secure. We've got tools for security teams that may not be building the systems that are responsible for keeping them safe or may even not know where those AI applications have been built within the organization. Then we've got tools, for example, for content creators who may want to be protecting their content from AI crawlers and AI companies out there. Wednesday is all about the new features development we've done in this space. There's actually going to be a whole set of blog posts and announcements and not just one single topic. If you're interested in the broader AI topic and how Cloudflare can help, Wednesday is the day for you. Moving on to Thursday, this is one actually that's dear to my heart and Cloudflare as a whole. We always pride ourselves to being extremely simple to use. The theme for Thursday is simpler security. Throughout the day, there's going to be a whole number of announcements, but the underlying theme across them is making it easier for everyone to adopt our product, making it easier to keep your environment safe, because Cloudflare arguably has become quite a big platform and portfolio over the years. It's not as easy as we used to be. One little sneak peek is we're going to be announcing our new AI agent in the dashboard. We've chosen a name, but I'm going to keep it secret for now. You're going to have to wait for Thursday to find out. It's a good name. It's going to start popping up across the dashboard. You can ask questions to it. It can help you optimize your rules. It can help you retrieve data from the dashboard. Of course, it's just step one. Over the next quarters, we're going to make it better into a fully-blown agent that's able to perform workflows. Then we're going to wrap up the week with Friday. The theme for Friday is going to be data security everywhere all the time. This really leans into our Zero Trust portfolio, how we make sure if you're a security team trying to keep your organization safe, especially now you may have applications on SaaS providers, applications on-premise, on cloud. There's a lot of developments here to make sure you've got track of all of your data, where it's going, it's not leaking, and all the data types are going to the right places, and nothing is misplaced. Friday is the big topic. Of course, what we normally do as well, we're going to do this on the following Monday. We're going to publish also a wrap-up blog post. If you missed any of the days, or if there's too much content to follow, you can look out for the Monday blog post on the following Monday, and it's going to be a nice summary of all of the announcements. Some of the days will also have press releases, especially for the bigger announcements on the day. Really, Security Week is a whole set of activities. You're going to be publishing, of course, Cloudflare TV. This shows on the net. It's really exciting. There's a lot of efforts going on across the board. Absolutely. It's so many teams, so many, from product, to marketing, to logistics. It's a lot of work, for sure. Quite interesting to see. Every time we have one of these, and we have a few over a period of a year. Also, for folks who don't know, they can follow us in our blog, blog.Cloudflare.com, but also we have a dedicated page, Cloudflare .com security-week. All of the announcements, videos, press releases that Michael was mentioning will be there, specifically. Michael, regarding security in 2025, even as a teaser of some of the blogs that we have, what can we say from our perspective of what is security in 2025? Main concerns, main challenges? Yeah, really, I think the two themes are really, besides the daily themes that I mentioned earlier, that cross throughout the entire week, simplicity and security is something that's really important nowadays. We've even talked about this before, the complexity of all the tools. It's starting to cause a lot of burden to teams managing security for their organizations. Everything we were doing throughout the week is actually focused on simplicity as well, making it as easy as possible to solve the problem at hand. I think that's going to be a big theme moving into 2025. Following years, we see in some of the analyst reports, it's all about platformization, reducing vendors, and bringing it all together into one single solution. The other one that's related, in my opinion, is also discoverability of security concerns. This is not a new theme, but it's definitely very much still pertinent. For example, on the AI theme day, we're going to be opening beta, our firewall for AI, so customers can actually start using it. One of the biggest asks was actually, even before we want to secure AI applications, we need to know where they are. We don't necessarily know where they are. Can you give us a tool that, given you're already on our network traffic, will tell us which endpoints and which applications are using generative AI to produce content and interact with users? This is just one example. There's some other announcements throughout the day that follow the theme of discovery, asset discovery, so not only LLM applications, but actually any host names, endpoints that maybe have fallen off of the purview of a security team. It's vital to make sure you keep those secure. Otherwise, a malicious actor will find a way in and compromise your applications. Makes sense. We live in complex times. Things change quickly with AI, with new tools appearing. Any feedback from past months, even from customers that you got, that you could see the challenges ahead? You already mentioned a bit of that, but maybe something more specific that we can highlight? Yeah, I mean, we like talking to customers and users. I'm actually a user myself of the Cloudflare platform, so besides speaking to myself, we do speak a lot to customers of all sizes, both enterprises and self-service. Feedback is very positive across the board. Of course, honestly, it goes back to the themes I mentioned earlier, like simpler security. One of the things that's actually referring also to the simpler security day is we're trying to unify a lot of our products together. There's a constant background theme that as Cloudflare has grown, but also as other vendors grow, complexity comes into the product and it's difficult to understand everything that's going on. One of our top feedback requests, or feedbacks, I guess, is can you bring it down to its simplicity? I just want to log into the dashboard, know what's perking into me, and be able to action. Actually, Cloudflare should tell me what I need to do next to make sure I'm more secure. So that's, I would say, in aggregate, the biggest theme. Another theme that comes back a lot recently from speaking to customers as well is this idea that given we are on the network, unless this is pertinent to Cloudflare, providing the tools for data forensics analysis natively to the dashboard as well. Historically, this is one area where you need to use Cloudflare, for example, for your WAF or for your Zero Trust implementation, but then you might be pushing your logs to a third-party solution to do forensics. Again, it would be simpler if I just get those tools directly on Cloudflare. That's something I've been working on and there's some updates in that space as well during Security Week, which I'm very, very excited about as we start to pull in all those additional use cases to be done directly from our platform. Makes sense. Quite interesting to see the changes over the past few months and the needs that are coming. Actually, you mentioned that try to make it simple perspective and I can remind folks that we had a conversation in the summer in this show, in the London office actually, about WAF, but also about those need to be simple. Customers want plug and play and no need to worry if protection is in place. When they need to be warned, it's easy, it's simple, it's clear. Those are definitely interesting times with AI helping as well. We'll have more. Yeah, we like to find ourselves as being very simple to use, so we're always going to be improving and optimizing that aspect. And it's great to have so many products because it creates really the ecosystem for that. Simplify, which is great as well. Exactly. So, a lot to explore next week. Stay tuned, geek out, as we usually say. And today we're recording and we're publishing and recording on March 14, which is Pi Day. So, we actually have from a research team, someone from our team, doing a short explanation about what is Pi and why we celebrate Pi Day at the end of this episode. Are you eating any Pi? Not really, but it's a good suggestion. Michael, anything we should remind our listeners and audience? I'm really excited. There's a lot of work that has gone in. And of course, even prior to Security Week, the engineering team at Cloudflare, I'm very proud of all the work that they've done. It's a lot of hard work and it's all coming to fruition over the next week. And of course, there's going to be plenty more releases throughout the year. But yes, tune in to our blog. I would say that's the best source to get all the information. There's going to be lots of opportunities to reach out to us and links from the blog. Keep an eye out. And as always, please give us feedback. And if there's anything that's not clear, you can reach out and we'll try and answer as many questions as we can. Perfect. That's a wrap. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Joao. Next, here's my conversation about this wall of waves with Caroline Quick, our Head of Real Estate and Workplace Operations. She's in our London office. Hello, Caroline, and welcome to This Week in Ed. Hello. Nice to see you. In my background, I already have our new wall of entropy full of wave machines. These are not moving, actually, but the ones in our Lisbon office are. How exciting it is after the process of inaugurating the new Lisbon office, and now this week in March 2025, we have already our wall of entropy. How exciting it is to have this project being concluded in a sense. We are so excited that we were able to unveil this new wall of entropy this week to all of our employees. It's something that we've been working on for a very long time. And so it is incredibly satisfying to see it live and welcome it to Cloudflare and the world. So very excited for that. Absolutely. For those who don't know, can you explain to us your role at Cloudflare that is involved, of course, with our offices? For sure. So I lead our Global Places team, which covers everything from our real estate and workplace perspective. So whenever we decide where in the world we might have one of our hubs, from the very beginning of where it might be located, to creating a space for our employees, building it out, how our employees will work together within the space, and making a space that feels like Cloudflare, where people want to come and collaborate and be able to do their best work. Our team is involved in that, creating a great place where people want to come together and can come together, and then creating spaces that help reflect the brand and help secure the Internet, like the wall behind you. Exactly. We have a blog post coming out this Friday that explains the process of creating this wall of waves for Entropy that is dedicated. And potentially we'll also do an episode with you only about our new Lisbon office that has its own wave type of language, in a sense, all over the place. So we'll definitely show that specifically. But about this wall of Entropy, can you tell us a bit on how the idea came about, what we were exploring? And for those who don't know, Cloudflare is for several years now known for its wall of Entropies, first with the lava lamp wall in San Francisco that is being featured even in TV shows in the US and many news articles, but also suspended rainbows in Austin and double chaotic pendulums in London, where you are at this moment in London. But all of those elements, all of those walls of Entropy contribute to us securing the Internet in terms of cryptographic keys, in a sense, that are created with that reality, that sense of reality, randomness from the reality, in a sense. So how did the idea come about? Can you explain to us? When we create our office, we always look to our local community and the space around us to make sure that whatever we do is directly reflective of the environment around us, whether it be the community or lava lamps are directly connected to San Francisco and the feeling and the vibe there. And when we went to Portugal, we looked in the area around us and said, what is well known here? What does the community feel like? And we looked internally and had lots of conversations. And John Gran Cumming, who is there in Portugal, has always wanted a wave machine since he was 10 years old, since he was very, very young. And it's definitely a challenge to also identify something that creates randomness. It's not an easy task. One example is when we went to Austin and we were looking around us there and things that Austin is known for. Austin has a great music scene, right? And we looked to music to say, could we use music to create entropy? But music and sine waves are predictable. So we could not use music or sound to create entropy there. So we had to look towards something else. And we looked to the sky and reflected rainbows there. So in Austin or in Lisbon, we were right on the water there. And it became pretty clear that waves and the fact that Portugal is famous for its waves and surfing competitions became pretty obvious that the wave machine was the perfect opportunity for us to bring John's childhood dreams alive and create a wall of these wave machines where we could really harness that randomness right there and directly connect it to the community. And so we took that theme and we use it throughout the entire design of the space. So it's not just something that you experience when you walk in and that we use in the initial experience of the entropy wall, but you see it flow throughout the design in multiple ways, which really is something that you experience every time you turn the corner, which is something that we get really excited about. True. And being in the Lisbon office, one of the things that one notices is a bit of that, even if it's not like immediate, oh, this is waves related, even the lights and the ceiling, sometimes you don't see it right away, but you feel like a flow that is around. You can feel it in a sense. It has this amazing view to the Tagus river and to the 25th of April bridge. And to be honest, it's really, there's a lot of Portugal there in the waves perspective in the relation to the ocean. For those who don't know, Portugal has like a huge history, 600 years at least history with exploring the unknown in the sea. There's all of these poets doing like how the sea is wonderful, but how the sea is dangerous, how people die in the sea, because it's really embedded in the culture. All of the major cities of Portugal are coastal, are near the sea, further away from Spain, which is also a historic element in some sense. So there's this historical cultural element of the ocean, of the sea, really close to the Portuguese culture in a sense, which makes sense given that is the Portugal's office in a sense. Yeah. We even took it to the level with our architect where when we started talking about this, we took a model of our floor plan after we identified our location and they actually did a digital, kind of created a digital model where they took a wave, a simulation and put it as if a wave dumped in the middle of our plan and flowed throughout it. And so the actual flow of traffic throughout the space is based on how a wave would flow as if it were to crash throughout our space, which is pretty amazing. So as you're walking through the space, you're walking on the path of what a wave would travel throughout the office, which you wouldn't really recognize, but then as you walk through, you're like, you can kind of experience that flow. So it's from every single element that wave motion. True. And I really like, if you look at the wave machines there, first there's this soothing, mesmerizing, but also calming element, almost slow motion. You can feel the actual speed of the waves there, which is really interesting, but also the mirror behind it that has like a wave-like, if someone passes through, you will see a little bit of reflection there. So contributing to the randomness, to the chaotic element that we need for this entropy element. But it's kind of ecosystem type of thing, which is really interesting. Even in the wall itself and the mirror there works really well. Yeah. We did a lot of tests to see the right type of background that would also create reflections of the machines and the lighting, the way the lighting would hit it and hit the machines. So we have some photos that you'll see in the blog posts of us actually testing on the site during construction, the right height of the wall, the lighting, the shelves, where the lighting should sit in the shelves. There was a lot of work and thought that went into that just to make sure everything would work out rightly. And even the face of the shelves, like what kind of material we use on that to make sure that you would have the right experience. And then if you're standing in the space, you'll see that there's a camera that is trained on the wall, and that camera is constantly grabbing images of the wall. And if you walk in front of the wall, you're adding to that entropy as well, right? So those images are constantly being grabbed and served into our back end of Lava Rand. And you're kind of creating that moment of helping keep the Internet safe. So anyone who comes in is helping to keep our Internet safe, which is really great. It's really great. We have an episode actually from last year, if I'm not mistaken, here from This Week in Ed with John Graham Cumming, our CDO, explaining the whole how the Lava Rand and the wall of lava lamps and then the blue pendulums in London and others came about, especially the lava lamps wall in the beginning. It came from the research part of Clouflare, scientific part the need for randomness, for entropy, for encryption. And from a scientific perspective, there was this cool element that was created with the lava lamps. I invite everyone to see that specifically. But one of the things, so this is the wall of entropy in San Francisco is from 2017. Although the idea is from before that, a few years before that. But the evolution really makes it an integral part of Clouflare, joining coolness, but also scientific, different elements that are part of the offices continue to grow, right? Absolutely. It's one of the things that we really love to geek out on also. So we have a lot of fun with it. And it's just one element of, you know, meaning that we put within our offices. And as you walk through, you'll see a lot of different hidden Easter eggs that we like to put within the space, where you can find a lot of hidden codes and other things, you know, cryptography and those types of moments. So, you know, anyone who comes into our offices, who likes to kind of find those types of things, even in the reception in Lisbon, there are a couple different other Easter eggs, which I will not reveal now, for anyone who visits. So keep an eye out. Absolutely. One of the things before we go, I want to highlight is that there was a whole process of creating these wave machines. Those were not available, the popular toys, the desk toys in the 80s, for sure. But those were not easily available right now. How was that process? Yeah, that was a huge challenge, for sure. Because we had to make sure, I mean, these wave machines have a very important job, right? They need to keep running. And so when we originally set out on this task, we searched the Internet, and we scoured it to find something that was going to be able to run for a very long period of time. And so we looked online, we ordered the machines that were, you know, readily available on Amazon or other places, and had them running for a period of time. And we constantly found that batteries could not last long, motors could not survive as long as we needed them to run. You know, anything available on eBay or vintage machines, we couldn't get enough of them. And so after a lot of Internet searching, we found this artisan who is incredible. And it's, you know, just a single person who basically fabricates these by hand. And we reached out to him and asked, you know, can we work with you on this project, and create a really close relationship with him, and worked hand in hand. We had to, you know, he basically had to completely redesign the interior of these units to be able to do the work that they need to do to run as long as they need to do to run for, and also the length of the vessel. And we were able to kind of custom create the colors inside to work within our space. And it was a really, you know, extraordinary process. And just the fact that each individual unit is kind of recreating an art piece in itself was really fantastic. And then, you know, making sure that the motors could last, and we had to go through, you know, hours and hours and hours of testing just to make sure. It was really extraordinary. So. Absolutely. And it's there for anyone to see that visits our office. We're also going to share a time-lapse video just to see, to play a bit with the movement element of it. But it's quite amazing to see for sure. And the team and the artisan are worthy of congratulations for sure for all of the work that over one year, right? Oh, definitely more. It was about almost two actually. A long time, but it's here, it's working, it's amazing. So definitely worth it. Yes. Great. And a huge shout out to the team who worked on it, as well as our architect and our general contractor in Portugal. It was a really fantastic project. So really great work to the team and really excited to be able to share with everybody. Perfect. This was great. Let's talk soon about having like a more detailed perspective of those Easter eggs of the Lisbon office this year. Sounds great. Well, thanks again for having me. I'm very excited to share the story and to share more about this and everyone who was involved. So thanks so much. Thank you. And that's a wrap. It's time to hide and set through the dark and light speed of light. We go data moving fast. Shields are up, you know, safe through every blast. Build it strong and clear. Engineers so proud. Internet's frontier. Living in the cloud, outside. Hey, I'm Thibaut. I'm a Cloudflare Research Engineer. And today is Pi Day. Why is today Pi Day? Because we're March 14th. March 14th, when you write it in the American notation, it's 3.14. 3.14 just so happened to be the first digit of Pi. And so it's Pi Day. That's it. First of all, what is Pi? Pi is a number. It's like a number which is about 3.14, therefore Pi Day. But it's also like a really, really, really big number. It's like so big that you cannot write it. That's what we call irrational. It's also a number that you cannot write as like a fraction, which means as a division between like two integers. You cannot have a fraction of Pi, and that's why we call it transcendental. If we cannot write it, how do we know Pi is about 3.14? Well, that's a good question. And that's a question that people have been asking for centuries dating back even to ancient Mesopotamia. People needed Pi to do some building construction, to do some calculation with stars, and that's a really good question. So we can approximate this with a fraction, even though it's not exact value. When I say 3.14, it's not exactly Pi, but it's the first digit, so it's okay. For certain calculations, you need some more precise digits. For instance, when we launch a space shuttle, we really need to have a precise calculation of Pi because we actually need to know where the shuttle will land. How many digits do we need? Do we need all the digits? Well, we don't know all the digits, so what we do is we also do an approximation, just slightly more precise. People have been computing digits of Pi up until trillions of digits. We don't need that at all. It's really just to test and benchmark new computer capabilities, and also it's a bit of a show-off. It's very cool when you can say that you were the one computing 15 digits of Pi or up to trillions. It's a number that you find a bit everywhere. For instance, in cryptography, when you need a number that you know has not been tampered with, you can use Pi because, well, no one tampers with Pi. It's a mathematical constant. In engineering, when you need to calculate some arcs or do some telecommunication, Pi is very useful from a physics perspective. It presents various physics equations, and you can use it directly in most programming languages. An example where Pi is used is when you launch a space shuttle. The Earth, after all, is more or less round, so when you launch something in space, it just so happens that you have Pi in the equations. It's also very useful in cryptography because if you want a number that has not been tampered with, you can use Pi. No one has been tampering with Pi. We've discussed how to calculate Pi from a geometric perspective. You take the ratio of square circumference with its diameter, but you can also use other methods. Some methods are very efficient to calculate specific digits of Pi, which can be useful if you want to know the tens of thousands of digits instead of calculating the whole sequence. It can be a bit more efficient. You can also use a bit of randomness. You can use randomness via various methods. It could be by throwing a bag of rice, for instance, within a circle inscribed into a square. It can be doing a random walk, which could also help you calculate this number of Pi. This gives you a nice approximation, even though it's not a precise calculation. Since when have we been celebrating Pi Day? We've been celebrating Pi Day since 1988 by physicist Larry Shaw in San Francisco. It was one of his ideas to go and celebrate Pi Day. It just so happened to coincide with Albert Einstein's birthday, which is a funny coincidence. It has been studied for 4,000 years because it's so instrumental to what humans are doing. Should it be building constructions, cryptography, computers, probability, or sending shuttles in space? That's why today, March 14th, we're celebrating Pi Day, and you should too. And that's a wrap. Next week we're going to do a recap about the announcements we did on Security Week. So stay tuned, geek out!