and so it begins

When I was an intern in IT in the olden days a manager once decided to send an apology gift to every single employee for his botched project. It was a switch from analog phones to VoIP with Skype that really wasn’t so complicated but left a bunch of people without working phones for days. The gift? A snickers bar in a big paper bag with a sticker on it. I had to put three hundred stickers on those bags and then hand them to people who were very confused to find a tiny snickers in them. Now they told me to hand it out with a smile and tell them we’re really sorry but I’d hand them out with my best I’d-really-rather-be-somewhere-else-face and say “trust me, nobody finds this more stupid than me.”

Privacy Enhancing Technologies. A blanket term for anything protecting your identity (Onion, VPN, etc.) I feel like the people asking for this either have a very limited technical understanding of it or completely different motives. You can’t ban encryption. What they could do is ban VPN services from officially operating or certain protocols but that would mostly hit your regular user.

High availability and security are the bane of IT infrastructure jobs. It makes me anxious to think about my MSP days when I’d sit on my couch on a Saturday fully aware that I’m one phone call away from having my day, weekend or even the next two weeks ruined because some customer CEO has full domain admin rights and would give them to anyone who’d ask on the phone or via email.

The amount of bullshit jobs that exist is insane. So many people in offices that either don’t do anything or barely anything. Then even more who could easily get all work done in half a work day. Then a gigantic amount that could easily do their work in 4 instead of 5 days or 6 instead of 8 hours. I’m typing this at work because of all the downtime I have and I still believe I get more work done then most of my colleagues.

I think the idea would be to have machines replace people wherever possible and then have multiple people split the work time where it isn’t. Why does one farmer have to work 24/7 if two could split the work and actually have a life outside of work?

Every day some engineer would have to answer his questions. “Can we remove brown?” “Pardon me?” “The color, brown, can we remove it?” “I’m sorry I don’t understand, remove it from where? I don’t think our rocket has any b-” “No, I mean from the world. Maybe with our satellites?” “I…don’t think that’s something we’ll be able to-” “How about birds? I don’t like them. They remind me of god.” “We…we’ll look into it.”

Bold of you to assume he’s not already doing that.

Finally the iconic red phonebooths can shine again and big ben will be the primary source of the time in London. Oy, it’s seven bong.

It’s a bit misleading. They’re not private contractors but employees of a different company instead. The union busting in the US is pretty extreme. I just hope these people can put their talents to work in a company that doesn’t have so many issues complying with the rule “don’t be evil”.

There’s some irony in all the comments that participate in this thread by posting “lurker”

We’d bring this down just because we already dropped 68 others and need one more to complete the set.

They store unencrypted passwords in the year of our lord 2023? Be this real?

> In the year 2100 or 2200 the internet as we know it may have been superceded by methodologies we can’t even comprehend right now.

It’s gonna be fax machines again, isn’t it?