IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.

My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.

Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.

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Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.

Companies like Akamai already do this to an extent. My employer is an Akamai customer, and they’ve offered this service to us in the past when we saw a lot of malicious traffic originating from commercial VPN providers.

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Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

You would do well to go read up on the 1990 AT&T long distance network collapse. A single line of changed code, rolled out months earlier, ultimately triggered what you might call these days a DDoS attack that took down all 114 long distance telephone switches in their global network. Over 50 million long distance calls were blocked in the 9 hours it took them to identify the cause and roll out a fix.

AT&T prided itself on the thoroughness of their testing & rollout strategy for any code changes. The bug that took them down was both timing-dependent and load-dependent, making it extremely difficult to test for, and required fairly specific real world conditions to trigger. That’s how it went unnoticed for months before it triggered.

I’m guessing it was actually something internal. If you look at their status page you’ll notice the outage occurred smack in between some sort of maintenance work they seem to be rolling out to most/all of their edge locations. As soon as they resolved the outage they continued with the regional maintenance updates.

20k is a drop in a bucket when it comes to boats. The maintenance, etc. is a significant ongoing expense. And if it’s the kind of boat you keep at a marina and not on a trailer in your driveway then that’s another huge expense. There’s a reason people call boats a hole in the water that you throw money into…

I recently heard Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political dissident, give a talk. He survived two attempted poisonings among other things. He described how the current method of poisoning is for Putin’s henchmen to sneak into your home and put polonium into your underwear. So this guy might want to consider walking around naked for a while as well…

The severed head rolling into view in the hole of the sunken boat still freaks me out. I think it was filmed in the back yard pool of one of the producers.

A number of years ago my wife and I visited Lubec, Maine, which is about the northeastern point of the state. Lubec has a bridge that connects to Campobello Island, which is Canadian. For whatever reason, Campobello is in a different time zone despite being physically only one or two hundred yards from the mainland.

I learned the hard way that the closest cell tower in the area was on Campobello, and since it’s in a different time zone it caused my phone to change time to an hour earlier. Luckily it resulted in us being an hour early for a harbor tour instead of an hour late.

The very first thought when I saw the photo of it:

I am Groot!

You too will soon be able to buy an abandoned datacenter for just $1,000.

The issue with cloud providers like AWS is that they charge for virtually everything, and that makes it easy to rack up charges if you forget about something you spun up as a test last week and forgot to terminate it. For larger companies it can be a significant issue. So there are other companies out there that you can use to scan your entire AWS account, summarize what you’re using, and highlight things you may not need any more. They’ll also recommend cost savings measures like paying for a year of server time up front instead of paying as you go. If you know you’ll need a server for a year then paying annually is a lot less expensive.

On the plus side, you don’t need to deal with things like hardware failures. We have a large AWS environment where I work, and we’ll occasionally get an email informing us that an instance is “running on degraded hardware”. A simple reboot (power cycle) will move the instance to new hardware. And if you decide you need more RAM, more CPUs etc. then it’s also as simple as rebooting.

And chances are these sorts of attacks will continue. That means less and less manufacturing capacity, etc.

Yeah I remember that scene in the Nat Geo one. Hearing that sound was truly surreal. I think it was Rush’s wife working the radio. I wonder how long it took her and the others to truly comprehend what it was they had just heard…