Posts by NoneSuch 2656 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2010
I recall a guy in one of the US Southern states (May have been a Reg story).
Using Tor from a USB Bootable Linux distro, he had gone onto the dark web, bought some illegal goodies (from a site taken over by the FBI) then provided his real name and shipping address for the delivery.
I'm getting more dissatisfied with Cisco daily. Just had to go through a 259 page PDF manual to get three relevant lines of code to program new switches for "Smart Care." Two of those lines errored out and I had to engage tech support. Yes, a tech support case to register switches, FFS.
They make systems and documentation so unnecessarily complex that I'm sure they are employing >500 more people than they really need.
I'm currently playing with Ubiquiti switches in my home lab and they are refreshingly easy to program and use. There are other options out there.
Unsurprising Huawei code is crap. All of the decent Chinese techies were drafted and are in the PLA hacking Lockheed, Boeing and SpaceX.
Nice to see UK Gov growing a pair and sticking it to a dictatorship. After what they are doing in Hong Kong there are no illusions the CPP is beneficial in any way.
The US government routinely hides massive cost overruns, black projects with little accountability, black ops and general feck ups behind Top Secret stamps. Their drone program has killed thousands of innocents and the few good people that have come forward to expose that were threatened with jail in a SuperMax isolation cell for the rest of their lives.
There is a often a viable need to keep things secret, but governments should not be able to classify bad decisions, poor performance and overreaches of power from the people they serve.
When governments hide behind secrets, it never ends well.
Having to fault find why a remote worker cannot connect to a company resource forces us to examine peoples home set-ups, which typically involve a lowest-bidder back alley Chinese router, so old that firmware updates are unavailable, with 10MB CAT 3 cabling that the cat has been chewing on.
It also puts us head-to-head with people who think they know what they are doing when setting up their Wifi, like using the same subnet as the datacenter they are VPN'ing into.
My last experience was dealing with a self described "tech savvy" VP who had a local stereo company install a half dozen 802.11AC Wifi repeaters in their house which had a 25MB down 5 MB up ADSL Internet connection.
He complained it was "slow" and expected us to bring his VPN connection speed up to the 802.11AC standard the stereo guy had promised him given that he had just spent "over a thousand dollars." This is while his wife and kids watch Netflix / YouTube as well.
@AC
All 100% correct. The CCP hates criticism and wants to be seen as legitimate on the world scene while oppressing their own citizens rights / freedoms. Meanwhile, expanding their influence in the South China Sea and across other nations borders.
China:
Free Tibet
Stop bribing South Pacific island politicians for business expansion
Remove installations from the South China Sea
Leave Taiwan alone
Stop internal censorship, one party rule and implement democracy
Then we'll reconsider...
In the days of spinning disks, we had a small team of superior beings that descended from Olympus itself. Each knew just enough about the others responsibilities that a sick day or vacation wasn't an issue. The department ran efficiently and under budget, most years anyway. We ran proprietary Linux software solutions, developed in-house, that drove company production, orders, reporting and updated accounts flawlessly. Think ERP levels of integration at 1/20th the cost. We broke the 100 million gross income barrier with that system when efficiencies allowed us to take on an additional contract worth 14 million. Glory days.
After our senior hands-on VP retired, Finance took over the department and things went south fast. Accountants, with IT experience limited to Excel on Mac, began telling us how things worked "in the real world." We lost people quickly and I was the last to go of the original bunch. Ten years later, I popped in to say "Hi" to a few folks. The IT offices had been broken down and the server space gone. with everything outsourced across a 50MB Internet connection (and 180 employees using it daily). Found a single PFY IT consultant playing Tetris and waiting for something to break. The network was slow (The IT consultants were adding 5 port 10MB hubs on hubs on hubs to expand the network.) Production had been capped at below the levels we had originally established, because the new shiny ERP solution they bought was not utilized properly. The accountants got it working then stopped optimizing as it would take them over budget. The staff were not happy, but finance was. They were saving thousands at the cost of losing millions in new business they simply couldn't handle. The CEO, who was CFO during my tenure and made the dumb calls, was retiring under a cloud and no one wanted to take over their position. I heard he made 300K in bonuses his last year.
Penny wise, Pound foolish.
And I for one welcome our new digital overlords. Omnipresent and all-seeing, I hope they can round up all the doubters and miscreants who refuse continuous surveillance for their protection of democracy.
Privacy, security, control over your own personal data, PAH! That's so 2004. Continuous, unremitting intrusion into your private lives and information is the only thing keeping this country safe. The government needs to know where you are and what you are doing 24 / 7 /365; unless you are a politician or senior police official, of course. We trust them without question because of their Stirling reputations so far.
Accusations of abuse of power is trivial against protecting the public. This is why the government should control everything you see, hear and read. Everything should be approved before publication. D-Notice in effect on everything until the info has been reviewed and authorized for publication. No more journalistic protections. No whistleblower statutes. Just unremitting government oversight, because they just know better.
Trust no one, monitor everything and democracy will remain safe and unassailable. It's worked for the Chinese Communist Party and North Koreans so far!
Joke icon just in case any fool actually takes the above seriously.
We used to have a mature process determining the best solutions.
Then we got a new VP who knew better than the IT Staff. (Accounting background) He ditched multiple on-prem servers on a 10GB managed and redundant network for Cloud apps. He dropped robust two year old PC's so everyone could have a cheap laptop that only had Wifi to go "mobile." Everyone is now complaining the laptops are underpowered to do anything. He reduced our security to cinders because it was "stopping people from doing their jobs" (Downloading PII to personal devices, tablets and phones that had no business holding that info). According to him, Apple is the best choice for business hardware.
And he is the loudest complainer when things do not go well, which they usually don't. Never takes any responsibility for his decisions and blames everyone else for his crappy choices. He's opened the company up to heavy duty fines when the PII info leaks and it's only a matter of time until someone loses an iPad.
The only bright spot was he was hauled onto the carpet at the last BoD meeting by one of the more IT friendly directors. All hope is not lost, yet.
PRC Government Back Door at no extra charge.
Buy the 20TB package and a political dissident will be assigned to guard your data at no extra charge.
Full dedupe, redundant backup and save space as we remove all negative comments about the PRC.
We're sorry: No Winnie the Pooh images allowed.
Coming soon, our new Taiwan office. (Details TBA)
This does not produce a level playing field.
It creates an inverted cone with a very slight semi-vertical angle. At the vertex is the USA.
With no further advantage to being overseas, companies will slip back to the USA to avoid the increasing paperwork and audits involved with operating overseas. US Citizens must pay tax on any income made world wide. I suspect once the corps move back, they will receive similar treatment.
The US just screwed the globe and everyone is thanking them for it.
"Apart from being 'shiny' what is the main reason for upgrading?"
More efficient telemetry sucking up more of your personal info, better ways to monetize your data, hardened communication tunnels to the MS mothership, setting the stage for the inevitable monthly fee to let you log on and of course back door deals with hardware manufacturers to supply you with new hardware.
Oh, you though the end user would benefit in some way? No, not at all. Just MS Shareholders.
Banks used to make money by paying a small interest rate on customer savings, lending that money to others, charging interest and trousering the difference. Today, they charge billions in fees to the point where I need to keep just over 65,000 Pounds in my savings account for the interest generated to equal my monthly account fee. The bank says if I'm not happy I can go to another bank who all charge exactly the same fee structure within a few pence.
We used to be able to buy software for a fixed amount of cash, then use it as we saw fit. Now monopolies are forcing subscriptions, not because it's good for consumers, but to enrich their bottom lines with a continuous revenue stream. Cloud services hold your own data for ransom and if you don't render unto Caesar on a monthly basis then you lose access. They are suspending on-prem versions of their software forcing businesses into their Clouds. None of this benefits the customer, regardless of what the marketing hype says. Instead of having our data flow over a stable and secure 1GB network, it is now over the general Internet and subject to the ups and downs of TCP/IP. We get up to a dozen alerts of various Cloud service outages daily and bandwidth is never fixed or assured.
Our IT department was forced to move our mail/collaboration services to the Cloud by a group of company accountants and "progressive" VP's (That's the name they applied to themselves) who wanted "real-time" Cloud collaboration. Not one person in IT agreed with that decision, nor were they consulted. Today those accountants / VP's are the loudest complainers when their multiple pivot table linked 650 MB Excel files are slow to load. "It was never this slow before!" They write in ticket emails. They drank their own Kool-Aid and hate the taste, then they blame IT. We've lost a lot of good people who gave up in disgust at this behaviour.
One resignation letter of someone who spent 40 years in IT and had enough, said it best before he retired. "We are a client facing business dealing with literal life and death scenarios daily. You have placed both core business processes and contact with our clients in the hands of another company and now pay them monthly to maintain it. If that service ever fails and inevitably it will, people will die. The cost to corporate reputation will far exceed any loss on the GL. I do not wish to see that day."
Cloud services are a Briar Patch. Easy to upload into it and very difficult to get data out or transfer to a competitor. You can go to a rival Cloud provider, but they charge subscriptions as well. Your only choice is who you give your money too; after that you are screwed.
One day, and I suspect soon, some hax group will gain full access to back end cloud systems and cost the subscribing companies trillions in losses. That will motivate a swing back to on-prem, but only when the accountants are ankle deep in blood. And, of course, they will blame IT for it.
I'm of the opinion that some three letter US Government agency has a back door deal with Apple to have deliberate back doors in their OS so foreign people of interest who use iPhones can be pushed, filed, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered.
Yes, that is a Prisoner reference.
"and she has agreed not to commit further crimes."
Love this. Put a proven liar back in a country of oppression, lies, double talk and smoke and she promises not to do anything else shady...
China (and all other regimes that suppress human rights) should be isolated, blockaded and shunned internationally until they adopt proper laws with incorruptible courts.
Until a civilian airliner is mistaken for a MIG-21 and a badly written computer program decides to delete it.
Mankind's recognition of civilian airlines in war zones isn't great, so forgive me if my faith in a human programmed system does not inspire confidence.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28361223
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