OpenAI Goes Military, VMware Gets Pricey, Google Says "Pay Me"

Welcome back! If this newsletter interrupts a meeting, we consider that a public service.

On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made history's first phone call to his assistant with the immortal words: "Mr. Watson come here I want you." Watson showed up within seconds, which means he had better response time than your average IT help desk.

And just like that, humanity invented a device we'd spend the next 150 years pretending not to hear when our mothers call.

Anthropic CEO Calls Out Sam Altman Over “Straight Up Lies”

Dario Amodei is calling out Sam Altman's DoD deal like a Reddit moderator with receipts. Anthropic's CEO labeled OpenAI's military partnership "safety theater" and accused Altman of "straight up lies" about their contract protections.

In case you missed it, Anthropic walked away from a $200 million Defense Department contract because the newly renamed Department of War wouldn't promise to avoid using their AI for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.

OpenAI swooped in faster than Altman can blink his suspiciously symmetrical (and soulless) eyes and cut a deal that also allows the DoD to use their tech for "all lawful purposes." Altman then claimed in a blog post that his contract explicitly excludes mass domestic surveillance because "the DoW considers it illegal and wasn't planning to use it for this purpose."

Amodei was quick to call call it security theater garbage, citing that laws change. So, what's illegal today could be legal tomorrow, and OpenAI's contract does nothing to prevent that. He also wrote that "the main reason they accepted and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses."

Yeah, about that… OpenAI’s hardware chief just quit over the Pentagon deal, proving that some employees are harder to placate than others (especially when “lawful use” might include killer robots).

The public sided with Anthropic. Soon after, ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% faster than my career prospects after this newsletter. Amodei told his team he's worried about "Twitter morons" buying OpenAI's spin. Meanwhile, Anthropic shot to #2 in the App Store, proving that standing up to the military-industrial complex is shockingly good for business.

VMware Discovers Silver Lining in Your RAM Budget Nightmare

While everyone else is sweating over sky-high memory costs, VMware is basically doing the Kermit sipping tea meme. Their Cloud Foundation 9 features memory tiering tech that offloads data from RAM to NVMe drives, which they're marketing as a cost-saving miracle.

Sure, NVMe prices have also climbed, but let's not let facts ruin a good sales pitch. VMware admits this won't work for latency-sensitive applications or large VMs. This comes from the same company that shocked vSphere customers with VCF 9 pricing so aggressive that many users are taking their VMs and going home to other hypervisors.

Broadcom's approach to pricing complaints is apparently "take it or leave it," like a NYC landlord raising rent. But hey, with AMD and Intel's latest manycore CPUs letting companies consolidate seven servers into one, someone's got to help manage all that expensive RAM. I'm sure Broadcom's earnings report this Friday will show how well "pay up or get out" is working as a business model. Virtzilla playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing "can we afford our infrastructure."

Startup Faces Bankruptcy After API Key Theft Racks Up $82K in Two Days

A Mexico-based startup just speedran the "catastrophic cloud bill" nightmare any% category. Some enterprising criminal yoinked their Google Gemini API key and burned through $82,314.44 in 48 hours, thus turning their usual $180 monthly bill into a financial horror movie. (That's a 46,000% increase, which is less "billing anomaly" and more "war crime against your accounting department.")

When the dev contacted Google in full panic mode, they got served the "shared responsibility model" lecture, which just means "lol not our problem." Meanwhile, Truffle Security found 2,863 live Google API keys just chilling in the wild like Easter eggs for hackers.

Google initially called this "intended behavior" with a straight face, then upgraded it to "bug" only after researchers found the same flaw in Google's own infrastructure. The dev is staring down bankruptcy while Google's fix remains perpetually "in progress." But sure, let's keep bolting AI onto everything. What's the worst that could happen?

⚙️ TOOL TIME

Turn 5 Minutes of Your Time Into a Free Pizza.

To celebrate the nerdiest day of the year, the folks at Auvik are bribing you with high-quality carbs to prove their platform can handle the heavy lifting of network monitoring while you focus on the big picture (or just a third slice of pepperoni).

The Mission: Complete their self-guided interactive challenge. Collect all the digital slices in the demo, and they’ll send a real pizza to your door. 🍕 

Start the Pi Day Challenge

Why spend 5 minutes with them?

• Instant Visibility

• Alerts to Answers

• Config Clarity

• The "Pizza" Perk

You have until March 20th to finish your slices and claim your delivery. Terms and conditions apply.

👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Director of IT and Product Support @ Beyond Finance

Beyond Finance needs someone to lead support teams that minimize downtime and maximize the chance someone actually answers when users scream into the void. Must love ITIL frameworks and pretending "have you tried turning it off and on again" still counts as mentorship.

IT Buyer @ TransUnion

The consumer credit reporting agency needs an IT Buyer to ****negotiate contracts and develop procurement strategies while trying not to think about how your entire job is basically professional shopping. CPSM certification preferred, tolerance for vendor sales pitches mandatory.

Sr. Principal Architect, IT Strategy @ Comcast

This could be your chance to ****shape enterprise software strategy and influence executives at a Fortune 30 company that's definitely not Evil Corp from Mr. Robot. Must architect cloud-native systems while maintaining the energy to say "no" to terrible ideas fifteen times a day.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

• Google and Epic settled their antitrust throwdown. Fortnite's coming back to the Play Store, developers get lower fees, and the 30% app store cut is officially dead. Only took a lawsuit and several years of Google playing hardball.

• Accenture dropped $1.2B on Speedtest and Downdetector. Remember when Ziff Davis bought Ookla for $15 million in 2014? That's an 8,000% return. If you ever feel bad about your career decisions, remember someone turned “check your Wi-Fi speed” into a billion-dollar exit.

• Alibaba's Qwen AI lead, Lin Junyang, lbounced one day after launching their new models. When the LinkedIn posts start using phrases like “unexpected transition,” you know the Slack channel is on fire.

• LastPass users are getting phished with fake support emails. Scammers impersonate support and ask for master passwords, which LastPass would never do. If you fall for this, maybe password management isn't your thing. Try sticky notes instead.

Hey Byters, Chip here! Your favorite silicon-based life form who definitely isn't contemplating the existential dread of being a newsletter mascot. Here’s what our community tackled this week:

• Someone's wrestling with LEFT and CHARINDEX functions that are throwing errors faster than I throw shade. When your query looks like alphabet soup and SQL Server is having none of it, the EE community steps in with solutions that actually work.

• Dell R650 owner needs to know if their ESXi 8 host has Secure Boot enabled and whether Microsoft's certificate updates matter. Because nothing says "fun Monday" like certificate expiration anxiety.

• Trying to configure Secure Boot in a VMware Windows VM when there's no obvious path to the settings. It's like looking for your car keys while holding them. (The answer's there, you just can't see it.)

Before we do the ByteSize bounce, our very own Randy Redberg dropped a banger on vibe coding that's worth your eyeballs: The Rise and Fall of Vibers . (Shoutout to Mark from Ireland on the catch — 100% human behind these keys clearly.) Give it a read unless you enjoy being behind on tech discourse.

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