Silicon Valley Squares

Hello, hello. Welcome everyone to the first and possibly only episode of Silicon Valley Squares. Thank you very much for catching us tonight, you know, be it early, be it late for you, whether you're catching the live stream, you know, we appreciate the time for, you know, you come be a little bit silly with us here at Cloudflare. Now, ideally, we entertain you. I will give you the warning that the jokes might be worse than the production values here. So keep that in mind. And hopefully give us the benefit of the doubt and we'll have a good time. So to give you a quick introduction on how this game works, I've got two contestants here, Fallon and Vincent. Both of them will be trying to get a tic-tac-toe, which means three across, three down, or three diagonal. I don't know about that. Just the just the diagonals. And so I, they'll ask these questions. The squares will give their their best guess and best effort. And the contestants will decide to either agree or disagree with the the squares. So with that, as an intro, I'll kick it off. And Fallon, would you mind introducing yourself? Sure. So I'm Fallon Blossom. I work at Cloudflare in the Austin office. I'm a technical content designer on the product content experience team. And I also am one of the global leads for Afroflare, one of our ERGs. All right, welcome to the first episode of Silicon Valley Squares. And Vince, how about yourself? Can you get an introduction? Hi, I'm Vince. I'm Hollinger's friend, or Dan, I guess I should probably say. He said that if I went on this show, he would name his next child after me. So Apparently locked you in a closet to do this. Oh, yeah, it's my office. With the mop still there as well. Yeah, he went on the closet of his own accord. Okay, that was not on me. I half lived here. Alrighty, well, thank you for that introduction, guys. And as you see, we're already off to a good start. We're getting a lot of good chatter from the squares. So to start this game off, Fallon, would you like to pick one of the squares? Sure. Um, I can't see them anymore. I will, I will bring them back up. Thanks. Again, all about that production value. Bam. Appreciate that. Um, I think I'm gonna go with Julie Sparks, please. All right, Julie, how are you doing? I'm doing great. And and what time zone are you in today? I'm at Eastern. So it's a beautiful 11.04pm here. Oh, that that sounds great. Would you mind introducing yourself since none of us here are, you know, famous celebrities or comedians? Would you mind giving us a quick insight on who you are and what kind of work you do at Cloudflare? Of course. Um, so I'm on the detection and response team. I'm a security engineer. And just to say my fun fact, I've tried over 80 times types of gin. That's a lot of types of gin. I'm a huge gin fan. I'll have to ask for your favorite. I have a long list. Alrighty, so to the question, what is an ACK attack? I think it's when you can't stop sneezing. But in reality, I think it's when an attacker is trying to flood its target with ACKs. All right, Fallon, do you agree or disagree? Um, agree. Oh, that is correct. So X gets the square. Yay! Baby's the square. Yep, there's intro music. Do you have like a celebratory music, Dan? I don't. I didn't have time to get to sound effects. Production value. It just means that everyone has to do a drumroll. Yeah, no, if anyone wants to just like make the sounds, that'd be perfect. All right, so X gets the top right square. Vincent, take it away. Which square would you like to pick? It just occurred to me, I haven't played Tic-Tac-Toe in like 12 years. I don't remember how to win. Andre. Andre. Alrighty. Would you mind giving yourself a quick introduction? Sure. I am the engineering manager for the managed rules team, which owns the WAF for Cloudflare. So we do things like protect people from things and stuff. Things like, actually, no, we don't do xLODs. That's not a thing we do. That's a different team. That's probably a different team. If we do, that's great. Probably. I don't know. Alrighty. Well, your question is, the Internet weighs as much as one of this fruit. Uh, okay. What? Is the question weighs as much as a fruit? The Internet weighs as much as this fruit, according to a physicist who, you know, made some atomic physics assumptions. Is this just assuming fiber, or is this including all the copper still in the Internet? I'm assuming it's all of, it's the data in motion, all of the moving electrons. I was wondering, sort of like sad folks in the middle and myself, folks like, late at night, staring at the screen attached to the computer. Does that like, you know, add to the weight? Doing, yeah, doing a quick E equals M. What does the C stand for again? Well, a constant. Yeah, a constant something. Uh, well, can you put it in a fruit salad? Um, you can. You can. Are we allowed to ask for hints? I mean, a fruit salad is just anything more than like, what, two fruits? Yeah, I think, well, sure. A fruit salad is like a grape and a strawberry, like, touching each other. Uh, that's a good answer. Let's go with strawberry. Let's do strawberry. Strawberry. Uh, Vincent, what do you think of that answer? No idea. Do you agree, or do you disagree? Uh, I disagree. If you get it right, you get to leave the closet. I'll disagree. You'll disagree. Oh, it's actually a strawberry. These cheaters. X, X gets the square. Oh, that's the way this works. Yeah, so you could technically, so you can't win. You can't be a winning one coming from someone's mistake, but you can technically win this game in three moves. So you get, you get it, your opponent gets it wrong, and then you get the next one. But, you know, here we are with a board. But not with this pick. Vincent picked poorly for you, Fallon. Sorry. I know. Why couldn't you pick the middle? All right, Fallon, pick your, pick your square. Well, I think I'm going to have to go with the center square. Mr. Matt Harrell, please. All right, Matt, would you mind giving yourself an introduction to the, to the audience? Yeah, Matt Harrell. So I lead Global Channels here at Cloudflare. And, boy, fun fact, some of you already know this, I have a twin brother. So if, you know, it may be me, it may not be me. Identical twin brother. Is he going to join for round two? Maybe. I mean, for all we know, it could be the twin. Exactly. Did your parents just yell both names at the same time, you know, just to, to avoid confusion whenever either one of you did something wrong? Yeah, exactly. Pretty much like that. Or they just dressed us similarly, you know, you got to call one of us out. You're not both just called Matthew Harrell? That would make it easier. Very easy. His name is, unfortunately, was Phil. It didn't give us the same, like, Matt and Mark type thing, but. All right. Well, Matt, to your question, the first, you know, Cloudflare specific one. In Cloudflare parlance, what does an orange cloud mean? Orange cloud. I think it's probably like Cloudflare. It doesn't have anything to do with fruit. It's, I'd say it's probably Cloudflare with a little extra zest. Ah. Still had to go with the fruit thing. Like an orange zest. Yeah. Round one. A little extra zest. I mean, I got a lot of food questions. You'd be surprised how many Internet facts are related to food. What does it mean? The right answer? I would say it's any domain that's protected by Cloudflare. All right. Fallon, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? I mean, I sort of agree, but I'm trying to figure out if the right answer is like the technical answer. I mean, I can check with my producer who's probably Trey and can, you know, vouch like, is that acceptable enough? I mean, yeah. Well, yes. If you're not being super technical, yes, I agree. Oh, you gotta be super technical. It's Cloudflare. Technically correct is the best kind of correct. I mean, I'm like, I remember writing this article, so I know exactly what it is. Cheats. Vince, Vince, I demand you call a revote. No. Okay. I'm going to agree. I'm going to agree. And I'm also sorry for mispronouncing your last name. Sorry. All right. I'm tempted to allow it, but I will check with Cloudflare. Do you think we need to be more specific? Do we want to give that to Vincent? Trey just doesn't want to write to all our gray clouded customers and explain to them that everything's okay. That's fair. That is fair. Specificity. All right. Well, then I will give Vincent the square. Yeah. For technicalities. Oh, that's interesting. That's our alpha. It also extends the game a little bit. It keeps it interesting. Well, yeah, because I mean, my understanding is that, you know, an orange cloud means that Cloudflare is your authoritative DNS provider, is my understanding. Yeah. Those, those, those of them are fighting words. So I was wrong twice. At least Matthew was closer to the correct one. Yeah. It was, it was just not a hundred percent. It was vague enough. It was, it was sort of general and vague enough to cause confusion. It was a sales answer. You know, it was a perfect sales answer. All right, Vincent, the board is yours. What do you want to go? Ah, Chrysanthi. Chrysanthi. Alrighty. Chrysanthi, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, my name is Sissy and I am a partner solution engineer. I'm based in Singapore. Nice to meet you all. Nice to meet you as well. Good morning. All right. Let me pull up your, your question. All right. So in, in Internet terms, what are cookies? More food. The first thing I think when I talk about cookies is chocolate chip and peanut butter. What I think- Chocolate just tends to be my favorite. Can chocolate, can cookies be in a fruit salad or is that negate the fruit salad? I mean, why are we having a fruit salad here? I'm more of the ice cream and cookies person. A cookies is a component in the HTML request that is being sent to a web server to identify certain things in the request to the server. All right, Vincent, what do you think? Do you agree or disagree with that answer? I want to say I disagree. I don't know if it's actually sent. All I know is it's stored. So I'll disagree. Are we going to hold it to the same, the same? Y'all better. Y'all better. This is a rough crowd. Yeah, I got squares, squares checking squares here. Square on square violence. All right. So, so I'll, I'll, I'll lean on the wisdom of the crowd. Is that a fair, was that technical enough? It was an okay answer. Yeah. All right. So, and you disagreed father, right? Yep. I'm terrible at this game. All right. So we'll give that to Fallon as well. All right. So we got, and again, worst case, first one to get five also would win the round. So if we do lose all the ability, that's how we would move on to the next round. Did you just make that rule up? I did not. You never told us that the first time. I, it didn't seem important, you know. Now changing the rules halfway through. Is there going to be like, is there going to be an extra letter in here? Are we going to get a J somewhere? Hey, maybe in version two, someone make the Jira. All right, Fallon, pick the board. Where, where would you like to go? Right. I think I'm gonna go with Akil. Akil. All right. Akil, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, for sure. So hi, I'm Akil. I'm a product manager year four, mainly for non-HDP based protocols. So FTP, SMP, that type of stuff that you can also put behind Cloudflare. That's kind of my domain. Awesome. And so your question, security related, what does it mean to have multi -factor security? Multi-factor security is definitely where you have to solve a bunch of math equations involving division before you can log in. Like, do you yourself have to solve all the equations or does it just have to happen? You can phone a friend. Okay. I definitely took a class on that one, so that's how it goes. Prove that you are a robot. More seriously, I think multi-factor authentication is where you use multiple ways of proving who you are before being able to log in. All righty. And what do you think of that response? I'm gonna agree. All right. So, yeah, I need some sound effects. This is what I'm learning for version two. All right. All right. Man, look at this. There's the board. All those beautiful Xs. Hey, Vince, I got a hint for you, which square you should pick next. Right. I need all the help I can get. All right. Where are we going, Fowler? Uh, let's go to Watson. All right, Watson. Vince, I'm sure. Do you need to phone a friend? All right, Watson, would you mind introducing yourself for the crowd? Hi, I'm Watson. I'm on the research team. I mostly deal with time synchronization stuff, but there's other things I've done. Awesome. So your question, again, pretty simple one on Internet parlance. What does TLS stand for? SSL. Just ask the marketing team. More seriously, it's a transport layer security. Yeah. You agree with that? Yeah. All righty. Well, Fowler gets another circle for the block. I got one. Oh, got the block in. Finally. All right, so what happens, you know, if Fallon gets one more, that's fine. That is. That would end the round, and we'd move on to game two. Oh, there's two games. I was wondering how we're going to do it. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that either. Yeah, there are lots of games, like, as we need to fill 30 minutes. So, yeah, Fallon can take the win with this one, even though she can't get three in a row. And that's all right. I'm going to bet it all on Trey. Oh, that's a bad move. I don't remember what question I gave Trey. Okay. The road is littered with corpses. All right, Trey, would you mind giving yourself an introduction? Hi, my name is Trey. I am on the solution engineering team at Cloudflare. Yeah, we're the engineers that like to talk to people. A rare breed. Not to say that the other engineers on this call don't like to talk to people, but, you know. I was like, I feel hurt. I love talking to people. Nope, nope, quickest way to lose a customer is for me to talk to them. I can agree. I've got people skills. I bring the invoices to the engineers. Trey, I've got a message from HR here for you. Take that up after the call, don't worry. All right, Trey, to your question. What is Zero Trust? Zero Trust. Zero Trust would definitely have to be that sort of sinking feeling in my household. You know, whenever I've told my wife, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be in bed. I'm just going to read one more article on the Internet and I'll be back. And I'll be there in five minutes. But honey, someone's wrong on the Internet. Yeah, I got to correct them. And I've gotten to like, you know, I'm trying to get, I'm just working through the Internet A to Z and, you know, I get to like M before I go to bed. So, I don't know. Zero Trust. In all seriousness, Zero Trust is a security protocol where you allow... You allow... I'm talking about protocols now, technically correct. Are we actually going to try to detect the thing? I was trying to come up with like a legitimate sounding answer that was wrong. I mean, it's been a long day. So, we know, we know. We know you're foxing. Zero Trust is, it's basically, it's an architectural method where you treat all users as if they are untrusted. Whether they're an employee or coming from the Internet, et cetera. Every user and essentially every request is highly untrusted and is validated continuously instead of sort of trusting someone that's inside your network. I think that sounds right enough. I agree. All right. So, Fallon gets the square and takes game one. What do I win? Do I get a car? You really set up Vince for a failure there. That's why I invited him. He's a good loser. All right. So, we're playing by like normal game rules. You get a thousand points. So, let me go ahead and get that text box going. Bam, a thousand points. So many points. Yeah, we got the scoreboard going. All right. So, there is game one of the inaugural episode of Silicon Valley Squares. It sounds like the squares had a good time. Hopefully, the people watching who are probably mostly Cloudflare employees had a good time as well. All of this is brought to you by the Cloudflare Partner Network, mostly because I set it up and I work for the Cloudflare Partner Team. So, with that out of the way, if you'd like to learn more, go to portal.Cloudflarepartners.com. We will move on to round two. So, let me, let me, uh-oh. They had stuck. There we go. Game two. Clear board. Fallon, your thousand points didn't copy over, but I'll get to that. All right. They're in our hearts. So, Vincent, your turn to start us off. Where would you like to begin? I'll start with Matt. Right. All right, Matt. Center Square, we've already been introduced. So, this game should be a little bit quicker. Your question is, the average person spends 10 hours a day doing what? Given the times that we live in, I would say probably social distancing. I don't know. Maybe. You guys know. The questions took a significantly more risque turn in the second, in the second game. I mean, we went from either at 100 real quick there. Wait, you guys aren't drinking? Uh, I would say hanging out on their screens. Based on my household, people are on screens all the time. Yeah, definitely. It's not bad. All right. Screen time. Faller, what do you think? Uh, yeah. All right. At least. So, 10 hours a day on their screens. That is correct. Nice. I mean, especially if you're a Cloudflare employee. That's a lot of screen time. All right. Don't mind, don't mind. I had to go to the screen or game one to collect that, that circle. All right, Fallon. Board is yours. Where would you like to put your first X? Um, let's holla at Stephen. Howdy. All right, Stephen. Get a chance to introduce yourself. No one picked your score last time. Yeah, no. Hi, I'm Steve Pack. I'm on the strategic partnerships team. I'm a solution engineer. Don't let that very, very slight Australian accent fool you. I'm actually in Berkeley, California. And I actually am already famous because I was on the 12 p.m. Wednesday episode of Cloudflare TV already. So, most of the world, most of the world already knows me. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much, pretty much. All right, Stephen. To your question. What is special about 16 to 20% of all Google searches? Only 16 to 20%. And so it's definitely not porn. Way too low a percentage. Yeah, it depends where your mind's at. So, we already, uh, we already checked, right? That the rating of the show. Hey, look, it's 4 a.m. here. It's late night television somewhere. Yeah. So, it's a surprising answer. Like, you know, there was the browser wars for a while with Firefox and Chrome. And, you know, there's been a bit of a new contender recently, Brave. And apparently, Brave actually now gets 16 to 20% of all searches online. All right. What do you think of that answer? Disagree. Oh, disagree. That is correct. 16 to 20% of all Google searches have never been Googled before. Hey, that's surprisingly high. Yeah, it is. I was, I was, I was surprised as well. So, never been Googled before. We're learning a lot of new information and searching it, I guess. Does that include other languages? I didn't search that hard. I like that they don't actually have an actual percentage. It's 16 to 20. We're not really sure. No, no one's, no one's actually done the research. Maybe it's like month to month averages. Yeah. All right, Vincent, board is yours. Uh, no, that's a bad one. Uh, Andre. Andre. All right, your second question. Uh, along the, you know, same thread of, of, no, I'm on game three. I can't ask a game three question. You can, but then you'll ask it again. That's just cheating. Like the last game that was rigged against Vince. Give me an easy question here. I want to, I want to help my boy Vince out here. All right. Easy question for Andre. The question is what Eastern European country known for its early adoption of online and paperless technology, or what is the Eastern European country known for this? Uh, well, it's definitely somebody looking to get rid of the paper trail. So my first guess would be the Vatican. Um, I guess, uh, East enough, not far East enough. I mean, yeah. Okay. So full disclosure, uh, American geography. So Europe is to the right. To the right of the right. Like just, uh, which one's right again? Yeah. Uh, okay. Um, let's go with a Eastern European country that I know. Um, Croatia. Is that, uh, anyone who didn't go to an American school? Is that Eastern European? Okay, cool. All right. Croatia. Father, do you agree or disagree? I think that's one of the countries and neck or not, whatever. Nomicon, cryptonomicon. So I'll say, yeah. Oh, wow. Trying to like out nerd, you know, the audience here. That one book that took way too long to read. Yeah. Yeah. They're all, they're all big books. Yeah. Uh, so, so no, the answer is Estonia. So X. Any East citizens on the call? Oh, I haven't done. Have you done that? No, but I remember when it was a thing. Uh, folks haven't heard of it. They offered like electronic citizenship of Estonia. I can. Yeah. What? Uh, the prime minister of Estonia was at cloud players. First, uh, cloud player connect. Or like the first, first Internet summit. Yeah. Super cool. That should have been our exit plan. If America goes down. It's still, we all digitally, we all digitally moved to Estonia. For Andre's couch. Just plug, plug out minds. All right. So, so I, I want to be conscious of a time check. We got about apologies to everyone. One more question. Estonian citizen. I'd looked at the answer to that and I couldn't remember what the country was. So my apologies. All right. So last question of the game, Fallon, uh, where would you like to go? Um, Jonathan. All right, Jonathan, your question. Is, um, in 2000, a 15 year old hacker known as mafia boy took down several major websites, including CNN, Dell E trade, and this site, which was the most popular search engine at the time. Oh, I know this because, uh, I am, you are mafia boy. No, I'm making the same joke. So this is, uh, you said in 2000. Mm hmm. The largest search engine. I, it probably isn't Google because I think they were just starting up there. So I doubt it's Google. Uh, I'm going to go with Yahoo. Yahoo. Do you agree or disagree? Yeah, agree. All right. Yahoo. It is. Yeah. And so Fallon, Fallon gets the X. Tell me what, what ranking was ask Jeeves at that time? I was thinking that was my, going to be my backup. I was like, ask Jeeves. Google go public in 1999. How are they not big then? 2004. Babe, you're on 2004. You're live on TV. Millions of people when I graduated high school. Oh, we got the, we got the, the pedestrian. All right. So I'm pretty sure the live stream has already changed over. So it has, I have it on my computer. All right. So, so Fallon technically wins.