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The Forces of Insecurity

Bernard Lambert September 13, 2021

IT security is in a revolution via the present-day challenges and how they are overcome. Some idea of the future is the speculation that follows.

We are presently countering invasions of the communications systems, the destinations along their routes, the systems at any of those destinations, and theft of the information in those systems. It is a vigil. The most often mistake made toward guarding against these things is to “bolt-on” some device or system and let it do the work. The vigil is left to the robots to alert you when things go awry. A most recent hack even invaded the very systems used to do such monitoring.

We are reacting to such things and not being proactive. High grade, high paid help is not employed here. A NOC or SOC is set up where the labor is cheap and fingers crossed; things won’t go wrong. Because of specialization in applications, systems, and networking individuals seldom have the combined talents necessary and are willing to work for much less compensation. The worst I have seen it is for the 150 monitoring systems in a global enterprise dropping from sight without anyone knowing for a long time.

workThat instance was easily remedied with robots to watch the robots along with continuous visual feeds to the NOC and enterprise management personnel. The vigil was reintroduced and easily used. What can stump everyone after such systems begin a cascade of information coming your way, is the sheer volume of the info stream and the adverse effect it has upon the operators of the NOC or SOC. One cannot keep up with the avalanche of data. This is a self-induced attack.

In all cases, the staffing headcount requirement has been woefully inadequate once problems arose. The “averaging” done on personnel cost neglects the real need in a real crisis. Because these happen in an instant an organization cannot react in a timely fashion with such short staffing. Problems are not “headed off”. Some are postponed to a future project. The response is thus untimely.

My recommendation is to establish a broad-based knowledge team to install and operate this vigil in a distributed fashion. You can use a cloud, do a hybrid, or build a data center. The team you hire to do the systems, application, networking, virtualization, cloud security, and compliance issues must have integration experience and integration skills. Yes, pay the man or woman more than fifty-five an hour.

What is your experience??

About H1B

The email brought me this chart from Dice.Com. It is meant to show what H1B visa workers are making in big American corporations. Take a look:

Company	# of H-1B Filings	Average Salary
Microsoft	32,735	$135,535
Vmware	4,910	$139,299
Apple	11,543	$139,457
eBay	4,635	$143,313
Google	24,896	$144,285
GM Cruise	330	$145,243
Spotify	468	$145,800
Twitter	1,794	$149,188
Bloomberg	2,914	$149,863
Waymo	591	$157,591
Facebook	13,471	$159,597
Doordash	274	$160,444
Lyft	1,174	$167,650
Airbnb	1,451	$168,306

Dice extract of Labor Department Stats

Demand for code producers is high. The methods are myriad. Individuals that make timely, solid code are richly rewarded. The individuals that keep up with the ever-changing platforms for that code are also in high demand. They too reap rich rewards.

I’ll take you back to a time when Digital Equipment was in market favor and the language folks at Maynard were in high spirits. A young fellow from Redmond came and hired everyone at salaries unimagined up to that time. App and OS development stopped at Digital. The fellow from Redmond got the first iteration of Windows NT from the effort.

Paying performers in this IT business is de rigueur. It is also not as common as this chart indicates. Let’s dissect these stats a bit. Small and medium businesses cannot come close to this rate. The organizations hiring these workers charge the entire cost off as employee pay expense. That is the number you see above.

In the case of many H1B workers they actually get paid from the agency that brings them into the country as their sponsoring employer. Their employer bills the hiring corporation. Of course there is an employer’s/sponsor’s cut taken from that total billing. The aim of the sponsoring employer is to bring individuals that produce income for them. They also aim to just undercut what the “running cost” the client corporation is experiencing trying to acquire the same talent. It also allows for the quick “fire and hire” scenario when an individual does not pan out. That total cost is the big corporate “employment” cost shown above.

So does an imported worker enjoy those numbers shown above? No.

Your thoughts please???

The Truth Is …..

Truth should be simple and lasting. Well, I can hope. I can listen. I can think about it. I can seek many sources of information. I can do everything in my power to gain insight into everything I need to survive. It gets complicated in a hurry.

My first concern about truth is time and timeliness. While we cannot get back a minute of time while in the pursuit of truth, we spend it lavishly. Some just wait for it. Some just chase it. All spend a considerable amount of time finding the truth. Learning of it late or when it is no longer relative allows the truth to disappear into the moras of lies in circulation.

My second concern about truth is simplicity. When the only paper document you get with a product or service is a legal agreement in thousands of words, we have successfully evaded the truth. The hate mongers on the Internet build sites just to peddle discord and are successful because of the ease of having such a large audience. None of them offer simple truth.

We have come to a time where civility has been stripped away from public behavior. So far as the individuals who are demonstrating and protesting are concerned, they have been civil. The bad actors amongst them have caused all of the damages. Obviously the truth is being seen by millions of eyes and each of us has a different opinion of what the truth is even then.

While we observe things this political season, let’s try to keep truth lasting and simple….somehow!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020

Liar’s Dividend

I was listening to an interview on the TV where the fellow described the method where one tells a lie and continuously reinforces it to further one’s cause. He was describing Trump behavior. After a thorough detailing of how it works we were reminded that this behavior has a common name; Liar’s Dividend.

What was very interesting was that the way it works was well explained. The one telling the lie can set the agenda by first offering up the lie. Thereafter anything that reinforces that lie is used to keep it out in a debate. In that process, the lie is made legitimate because it is accepted by at least a small group of supporters.

Fast forward to today….

Wharton School gradute speaks dividend!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020

The Angst

I just put a young man on a plane back to his hometown. Our meeting was four days earlier where I found him sleeping in the alley behind my home. My dog had barked all night because of his presence. I asked if he was all right. I also asked him to move on. Initially he did but he returned in the evening.

The next day in the morning he walked by in front of my house and I asked him about his circumstance. He had worked until the pandemic closed his work. He had played out all his string. No money… hadn’t eaten in days. He was in trouble.

I brought him in, fed him, and got him access to get cleaned up and a place to sleep. The next day we got clothes and a phone for him. His had been destroyed. All the email and apps hooked up ok.

His desire was to return home to the midwest where he was from. He knew from checking the Internet that a plane ticket was $149. He wanted to go right away. The bargain fares were days away. We plied the net and found a Friday flight.

On Friday , the two hours after dropping him off to get checked in, I got a voice mail from the young man saying he was getting on the flight home. His mom and dad will be happy.

I asked him what he had learned in his year away from home. He realized that the network of support you have around you is vital. He never thought he would get in the position he was in.

The vigor of youth meets the wisdom of experience.

Bernard Lambert August 29 2020

About Conspiracy and Knowledge

This note is to cover the connectedness of government, business, and the populace with relevant observations on the applicability of current theories and the genesis of such theories. An attempt will be made to connect the dots.

Today much controversy is swirling around the Covid Pandemic and conspiracies. Public controversy surrounds the selection methods state health departments are using to allow or disallow businesses to operate.

The conspirators in this instance are the public drivers of the state health department, the business owners, the public, the medical industry, the insurance industry, and of course banking.

The concurrent need for all involved is for life to return to what it was last summer and fall. Prosperity is measured and perceived in that way. Any deviation from that causes uncertainty and fuels our suspicions. This alone divides us into separate conspiracy categories.

Next add the public-facing actions of each of the stakeholders. Today this causes further division in the public and feeds subdivision in the stakeholders. Add the isolation of the pandemic environments and financial want and you have nothing but time on your hands to scheme on what is conspiring against YOU. At this point, the real conspirators have won as you are totally distracted.

You are allowing this to happen and all you need to do is refocus your attention. The unknown is uncomfortable. A lot of what we are uncomfortable with today is the lack of solid indisputable facts to help us. A sense of macro proportion must be developed to gain some insight into the scope of this pandemic.

How long in time it will take cannot be known right now, progress is being made, miscues have been many. It is dangerous. It spreads before you know it. Normal social behavior is now extremely dangerous. Getting a bunch of us together is now lethal and a spoke in the spread of the pandemic.

I do not believe that any of the efforts to limit spreading is disputable by way of civil rights. It is arguable by way of financial wants and needs. The danger of grouping up inside, in any way, is absolutely guaranteed to affect more people badly. If the effect was immediate, easily observed, and tested quickly, then we would not have the superspreader generation happening at the gatherings.

The pandemic came from social gatherings. Families, restaurants, airplanes, trains, buses, airports, cars, schools, etc. could be infected and the infection carried on to others before anyone knew it. This cannot be fixed financially. Our want to gather has to be changed so we don’t superspread any more. This conduct will be necessary until years after the widespread use of medical treatments that prevent the attack on our bodies.

Bernard Lambert – August 12, 2020

At a Bad Time ….

The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.

I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”

A Good Read For Techies

I got this download today about Apache Kafka from this URL: https://assets.confluent.io/m/1b509accf21490f0/original/20170707-EB-Confluent_Kafka_Definitive-Guide_Complete.pdf
It is the open source of Confluents work. The guide is free. Give it a read if you make or maintain sites on the net.

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!

Two Civilizations?

History tells us that civilizations rise and fall. Typically the nation state rises as it conquers the surrounding countryside and resources. Peoples are assimilated into this. The cycle is to pioneer the frontier, civilize the outlands, redistribute the resources and wealth, centralize power and distribution of the wealth, and tax production until the resources are overrun and go into decline. Concurrently government and its infrastructure further burdens the populace and the available natural resources.

Fast forward to today. We no longer make anything, as individuals, from the natural resources. Corporations have been formed to do most of that bidding with a scant few “hardy individualists” left to attempt it solo. With this love of the corporeal entity has come a furtherance of the civil and criminal rights of the non-human to the point of creating two civilizations.

If the corporation cannot feel pain and is only obligated to generate wealth at any expense then it is free of the normal human encumbrances like pain, hunger, love, empathy, and many other such feelings. Running roughshod over people and protecting their well being is not in corporate policy for the most part. Policy is sculpted to provide legal protections and not human protections.

The work of the marketeers, spindoctors, and politicos then becomes catering to the deep pockets of the corporations. Altered states of awareness are pushed onto the masses by every means imaginable in order to gain acceptance for the behavior of businesses and their representatives.

The general population is kept distracted by finance, need, manufactured want, and entertainment. As in Roman times; bread and circuses. Today it is popcorn, nuts, beer, hot dogs, halftime shows, and sporting events. And it is all sponsored by the corporeal entities.

Two civilizations exist and the general population is NOT the one benefiting the most from the experience.