Posts by Doctor Syntax 33111 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"If they have managed to move to Outlook365 (which is the logical move)"
What part of "sovereignty" did you not understand? They will be moving to a FOSS email server. TFA mentions NextCloud which provides calendar and contact servers which work perfectly well with ThunderBird, also mentioned.
" I can't believe that anyone would think that it's a good idea to have hotel door locks controlled centrally, via the web, with no option for handover to local control"
I think there's an hotel chain that's just discovered that. But when your business process development consists of believing what the salesman said...
Assuming he could have performed the Sysadmin gig under his own name it sounds like the only reason for this is just plain nastiness. He deserves to serve every one of those 32 years and whatever he has should go to compensating the victim rather than paying a fine. It sounds as if all those other places that didn't investigate properly should also owe Woods.
If you join in year 2 you'll pay the $122 for year 2 AND the $61 for year 1. To be fair people might not realise each year costs twice as much as the year before or else, not even after a pandemic, will they realise the meaning of "exponential". Just as well it's only 3 years.
You also mentioned user familiarity with OS. Microsoft has a habit of requiring users to familiarise themselves with a new version every few years. I mentioned my SiL sticking with W7. She looked at W10 and decided it was too different.
Familiarising users with a new version once and then sticking with it is much easier.
Imagine you were running an APT and you'd already got one exploit in place. Would you risk another? Yes, risk, because it doubles the chances of being noticed and once that happens there'll be a search for other incidents using the same MO and you end up losing your existing one. It's not necessarily a good assumption the same crew would have something else in place. OTOH the same APT might well be engaged on designing something that could be eased into your mobile,whatever make it might be, something like Pegasus.
The distros would certainly be a channel but it probably needs actual help as well as money. Perhaps an organisation that can take over the role of the sort of manager who keeps users of the techie's back. An organisation with the authority to look at the pressure Collin was coming under and tell them to back off and have the clout to get an offender thrown off whatever platform they're using to communicate if they don't. An organisation that could provide somebody to discuss tech and non-tech problems with.
"which requires, well, actual work, for a prolonged period"
No problem in this case. It was a well organised long term con.
"Then of course there are your peers and your management, who are paid to spend their days looking at and producing code, which likely include yours too."
Are you impyling some sort of QA? That's what Microsoft's customers are for.
Money would undoubtedly be a start. Another would be the availability of someone paid by a foundation (I think this would be the vehicle) to take on overload, discuss problems or whatever.
Perhaps also the entire S/W world also needs to adopt the attitude that something is feature complete and, other than bug-fixes as needed, it should be left alone. A bit of encouragement towards that approach wouldn't come amiss. At present a project that hasn't had recent updates is often regarded as dead and gets denigrated whereas they should be celebrated as not needing updates. Handing out some sort of recognition to such projects could be another line of approach. Dis liblzma need to reach a version 5.x?
There are features of the social engineering - a couple of newly created sock puppets playing good-guy/bad-guy roles as well as "Jai Tan" and it was these pushing for incorporation into distros. Perhaps some automated trawl could be used to look for a similar pattern - it might even be an area where AI could actually do something useful.
In the meantime something needs to be done to support lone developers and maybe scrutinise maintainer handovers like this as they happen.
"you need to be play-booking the worst scenario of what a shutdown means,"
I'm not sure they'd be calling it "the worst scenario", more like a game of chess. It probably means preparing to roll out something called "Tock-Tick" or the like that they've prepared for just such an even and trying to work out how close to 180 days they can get and still be first mover.
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