Welcome to episode 350 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Matt are this week’s hosts, and they’ve scoured the clouds for all the latest news and announcements, including that Mythos drop. Is it the AI apocalypse that everyone is claiming? We’ve also got news from DigitalOcean, an email from Space, Claude and even some Guardrails. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week

• Two AIs Walk Into a Studio and Actually Sound Good
• No More Idle GPUs Twiddling Their Tensor Cores
• When AWS Availability Zones Become Unavailability Zones
• Token by Token Codex Pricing Finally Makes Cents
• Just Ask AWS Where All Your Money Went
• You’ve Got mTLS: Amazon SES Locks Down Email Security
• Cost Explorer Finally Speaks Plain English
• Missiles Make AWS Multi-Region Strategy Mandatory
• Shell Yeah Your Agent State Now Persists
• S3 Files Finally Lets You ls Your Bucket
• Claude Found Your Zero-Day Before Lunch
• One Guardrail to Rule All Your AWS Accounts
• Premium SSD Wins Azure VDI but Your Wallet Cries
• No More Amnesia: Your Bedrock Agent Keeps Its Memories
• Pay Per Claw Anthropic Sharpens Its Pricing Policy
• Even Astronauts Need IT Support for Microsoft Outlook
• AWS still can’t answer the question of what EC2 Other is
• AWS announces several new Unavailability Zones

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00:45 Ground control to Microsoft: Artemis 2 astronauts deal with Outlook hiccup in deep space

• Artemis 2 astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft encountered a common Outlook configuration issue on their first day in space, requiring remote IT support from Mission Control to resolve it by reloading the commander’s files.
• NASA uses commercial off-the-shelf software like Microsoft Outlook for crew scheduling and personal communications, while keeping primary flight systems on separate radiation-hardened hardware, illustrating a practical separation of concerns in mission-critical environments.
• The Outlook issue stemmed from the app having configuration problems when no direct network connection is available, which the flight director noted is not uncommon, raising questions about offline-readiness for software deployed in connectivity-constrained environments.
• This incident is a useful reminder for cloud and enterprise software users that applications heavily dependent on network connectivity can...

Welcome to episode 349 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Jonathan managed to make it into the studio this week, and they brought a guest! Dave Garaway jas joined us, and brought some on-the-ground knowledge from GTC, plus a slew of supply chain attacks, Gmail username changes and Claude’s code debacle. We’ve got all this and more – so let’s get started!

• AWS Console Gets a Makeover Nobody Asked For
• From Eight Hours to 22 Seconds, Hackers Got Fast
• AWS Spring Cleaning Hits Nine Services Hard
• Trivy Pursuit Turns Into a 500K Credential Heist
• Skip the Consultant, AWS Security Now Hacks Itself
• AWS Pen Testing Agent Pokes Your Cloud Around the Clock
• Your Cringey Gmail Address Gets a Second Chance
• Stop Babysitting Servers, Let Google Handle MCP
• AI Agent Untangles Your Kubernetes Networking Spaghetti
• One Bad Actor Poisons a Hundred Million Downloads
• Lambda Finally Hits the Gym with 32 GB
• From GPU Hype to Production Inference Without the Hyperscaler Headache

01:28 Hegseth, Trump had no authority to order Anthropic to be blacklisted, judge says

• A US District Judge granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of War’s blacklisting, ruling the designation was First Amendment retaliation rather than a legitimate national security action.
• The court found officials lacked authority to blacklist Anthropic without considering less restrictive alternatives or providing evidence of an urgent security risk, noting the designation was triggered by Anthropic’s “hostile manner through the press.”
• The practical business impact was already substantial before the ruling, with three trade deals cancelled and other potential partners delaying negotiations, representing potentially billions in lost contracts over five years.
• Anthropic continues to balance the legal fight with maintaining its government relationships, publicly emphasizing alignment with the Department of War’s mission around safe AI deployment even while litigating against it.
• For cloud and AI vendors, this case establishes a notable precedent around government procurement decisions and First Amendment protections, with implications for how companies publicly challenge federal contracting positions.

02:35 Jonathan – “I’m guessing Anthropic is super busy with all the people coming to them for deals right now, because it seems to me that Anthropic is getting all the business customers and OpenAI are getting the personal customers.”

04:08 Delve Announces Changes and New Customer Support Measures

• Delve has responded to allegations from an anonymous Substack post by denying claims of faked evidence, clarifying that independent AICPA-accredited auditors, not Delve, issue SOC 2 reports and ISO 27001 certifications.
• The company published...

Welcome to episode 345 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week and are ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including what’s going on between Anthropic, the DOD, and OpenAI, what the war means for Middle East data centers (Spoiler – I hope you have a good Disaster Recovery plan), and Transit Gateway pricing changes that are enough to make a grown man cry. And don’t bother waiting: Matt has completely forgotten almost two years of “bye everybody” and now claims full amnesia as to what his outtro is. Oh well. Let’s get into today’s show.

• Claude Learned to Use a Computer Better Than Your Dad **OpenAI
• Amazon and OpenAI’s $138 Billion AI Bromance
• When Two AZs Go Dark the Cloud Gets Crispy
• Fifty Billion Reasons AWS Loves OpenAI Now **Anthropic
• Azure Still Wins Even When AWS Thinks It Did
• Fire, Water, and a Multi-AZ Assumption Goes Up in Smoke
• Claude Refuses to Go Full Skynet for the Pentagon
• GPT-5.3 Instant Finally Stops Lecturing You
• No Killer Robots Without Human Approval Please
• Terraform Finally Sees Your Forgotten Cloud Resources
• Stage Before You Rage Deploy Azure Firewall
• CrowdStrike to Zscaler AWS Wants Your Security Tab
• One Hub to Rule Your API Sprawl
• Transit Gateway Attachments Just Got Surprisingly Expensive
• Azure Container Registry Finally Has Room for Your AI Hoarding
• Bedrock Gets a Roommate OpenAI Moves In
• Azure Firewall Gets a Safety on the Trigger
• Stop Writing Scripts, Just Import the Dang Infrastructure
• Audit Your APIs Before March 2026 Bites You
• Damn it… my excuse not to DR is gone
• I’m Epically Furious about DR

03:34 Anthropic acquires Vercept to advance Claude’s computer use capabilities

• Anthropic acquired Vercept, a team specializing in AI perception and interaction, to strengthen Claude’s computer use capabilities.
• The Vercept founders, including Ross Girshick, bring deep expertise in how AI systems visually interpret and interact with software interfaces.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows substantial improvement in computer use benchmarks, jumping from under 15% on the OSWorld evaluation in late 2024 to 72.5% today.
• The model is now approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating spreadsheets and completing multi-tab web forms.
• Computer use enables Claude to operate inside live applications the way a human would, handling multi-step workflows across tools that cannot be automated through code alone.
• This is relevant for enterprise use cases involving document processing, browser-based workflows, and cross-application task management.
• This is Anthropic’s second acquisition in a short period, following the purchase of Bun, which was tied to the Claude Code milestone. The pattern suggests Anthropic is actively acquiring specialized engineering teams rather than just technology assets.
• For developers and businesses building agentic workflows on Claude, the improved computer use performance means more reliable automation of complex, real-world software tasks without requiring custom integrations or APIs for every application involved.

05:18 Justin – “It seems like every day I have to upda...

Welcome to episode 343 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week bringing you all the latest in Cloud and AI news, including some of the smaller clouds like Cloudflare and Crusoe Cloud, as well as announcements from the big guys like Google’s Gemini DeepThink, Anthropic’s big pay day, and Microsoft’s Notepad problem. We’ve got all this plus Matt screwing up his outro AGAIN, so let’s get started!

• Chrome’s WebMCP Protocol: Teaching AI Agents to Stop Doom-Scrolling the DOM and Actually Get Work Done
• Claude Enterprise Self-Service: Because Sometimes You Just Want to Buy AI Without Small Talk
• AWS EC2 Goes Inception Mode: Now You Can Virtualize Your Virtualization Without Going Broke
• Amazon EC2 Nested Virtualization: Because Your Virtual Machine Was Lonely and Needed Its Own Virtual Machine
• CloudWatch Alarm Mute Rules: Because Your Deployment Doesn’t Need a Standing Ovation at 3 AM
• Anthropic’s $380 Billion Valuation Proves AI Funding Has Gone Claude Nine
• AWS EC2 Nested Virtualization Finally Escapes the Expensive Hardware Jail
• Cloudflare Teaches AI Agents the Magic Words: Accept text/markdown and Save 13,000 Tokens
• Crusoe Cloud’s MCP Server: Teaching AI Assistants to Stop Asking for the Manager and Just Fix Your Infrastructure
• Azure’s New Agentic Copilot: Because Manually Clicking Through Dashboards Was So 2023
• Chrome’s WebMCP Gives AI Agents a GPS for Websites Because Apparently They’ve Been Lost in the HTML This Whole Time
• Anthropic Cuts Out the Middleman: Claude Enterprise Now Available Without the Enterprise Sales Dance
• AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment: New Mute Rules Let Alarms Sleep Through Maintenance Windows
• AWS CloudWatch Hits Snooze: Mute Rules End On-Call Nightmares
• AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment

00:45 Bloat Risk? Microsoft’s Notepad Upgrade Also Introduced a Vulnerability | PCMag

• Microsoft’s recent Notepad modernization introduced CVE-2026-20841, a vulnerability in the new Markdown support feature that allows malicious links in files to execute remote code.
• The flaw has been patched in the February 2026 security updates, but it highlights the security trade-offs when adding features to historically simple applications.
• The vulnerability exploits Notepad’s Markdown rendering capability, which Microsoft added in May to support lightweight markup language formatting. When Notepad opens a specially crafted Markdown file, embedded malicious links can trigger unverified protocols that load and execute remote files on the system.
• This incident raises questions about feature bloat in core Windows utilities, particularly as Microsoft continues adding network-dependent capabilities like AI-powered text writing to Notepad. Security researchers are debating whether basic text editors should have network functionality at all, given the expanded attack surface.
• The vulnerability demonstrates how modernization efforts can introduce security risks in previously low-risk applications.
• Organizations using Windows need to ensure t...