Stuff

Blogs (Work in progress)

Thoughts

Today I Learned: Brave browser plays youtube videos on lock screen - 2024-11-24

on iPhone, Brave can block ads and play youtube videos when your phone is locked.

On Moving to the cloud - 2024-11-13

More and more, I think its a mistake. We have to decide what our core competencies are, and keep that skill and knowledge in-house. Maybe we don’t want to be in the business of patching servers, or replacing hard drives. Maybe we don’t want to worry about properly securing Active Directory. Thats fine, those things aren’t directly related to our mission, but think about what you are replacing it with when moving to the cloud.

If Identity is central to your security strategy, it doesnt matter if you keep your IDP on-prem, or in the cloud, its still your responsibility to secure. The cloud IDP just gives you less control in exchange for hopefully a competent team of engineers to keep the tools running properly.

If you care at all about privacy, you will try to limit what third parties you are sharing data with. Subscription services and cloud apps are predatory and designed to maximize profit. The most profitable companies in the world are cloud providers and they got that way because its a good business strategy to keep data and engineering talent in-house. Thats a good strategy, and its exactly why you shouldnt outsource your data and operations either.

On Mass Layoffs - 2024-10-30

There has been a lot of big tech layoffs recently. I’m not going to try to list them here. But it is interesting that these large tech companies are able to get rid of so many of their employees and seem to stay afloat. Some possible explanations: - they overhired, and are correcting now - maybe they never needed that many people - they are choosing to decrease their quality of service. - i think this is it. quality doesnt seem to impact sales, especially in the near term - people like to buy cheap stuff - theres a lot of dead weight. 20% of employees do 80% of the work - maybe 10x engineers are real?

Almost everyone I talk to seems to be understaffed at their job. Resturants, office workers, field technicians. We seem stretched thin.

On Tools - 2024-10-03

Don’t let tools drive your workflow
Don’t try to automate a task until you can do it manually.
Using the right tools is more important than having the best tools.

Don’t listen to the salesperson. They will make the tool sound great, it’s their job. I have seen so many times, people will buy some expensive product hoping it will solve some problem, then it sits and collects dust. It’s like buying a treadmill because you want to lose some weight, but then you never use it and it becomes a $1000 storage shelf. Its easier to buy the treadmill than actually put in the work. Maybe you never really intended on doing the work, you just wanted to buy yourself a little bit of hope. In the corporate world, the same thing happens, and people buy some new software because it gives them hope. The hope that all of the problems from the previous software will be gone. But, if the problems are a result of years of negligence or lack of maintenance, you might just run into those same problems with whatever new software you buy.

Don’t try to get clever and offload the maintenance to the software vendor either. Your problems are YOUR problems, No matter how much you pay somebody else to solve them.

Cyber Hygiene

Many cyber-attacks can be attributed to poor cyber hygiene, including failure to patch known vulnerabilities, poor configuration management, and inefficient management of administrative privileges.

I read this from a CIS webinar spam email. It reflects my thoughts on the topic. It usually gets distilled down the fact that we are bad at prioritizing our efforts. We spend time on the wrong things. Typically, the best thing to do is the basics, but the basics are hard.

Today I Learned: “University” - 2024-09-07

Why do we call colleges “Universities”? That word sounds just like “Universe”, but I didn’t understand the connection. Well it turns out that “University” is short for the latin “universitas magistrorum et scholarium”, meaning something like “a group of teachers and scholars”. Interesting.

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