Category: Technology History

The Takeout on CBS with Major Garrett

The finding is that because the social media linking of these activities follows the clicking through these sites to generate ad income, the more activity (read clicking through) the more the message gets out…however false and misleading.

There was a very interesting show today with the guest Dan Patterson. He works with Major and CBS doing Fact Checking in a big way. He came by it as a technical guy given the job of hunting where all the misinformation and disinformation is coming from…you guessed it; the Internet! Here’s the link to the show:

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/dan-patterson-on-the-takeout-12312021/

On Twitter he is @MajorCBS. See also: @TakeoutPodcast @TheDebriefCBS

The radio/podcast/streaming show comes on at 5PM Eastern Fridays and is repeated any time from CBS or CBSNEWS streams.

Dan Patterson is a CBS News Technologies reporter. On Twitter he is @DanPatterson. He also has written for many many technical, financial, and industry publications.

Today’s show on Disinformation was special as the guys got to drill down into finding from where these outright lies emanate. Dan has gone down all these rabbit holes to follow the “do your own research” links planted in these abundant social media websites.

The finding is that because the social media linking of these activities follows the clicking through these sites to generate ad income, the more activity (read clicking through) the more the message gets out…however false and misleading.

Concurrently there is a disincentive for the website selling the ad click-throughs; more clicks make more money. More controversy or “facts-that-fit-your-mindset” make more clicks. The participants in the media site are followed and recruited by the media peddler while the back end income from clicks is really what the site is peddling.

Pick a topic such as voting fraud and run it into the ground while raising money for yourself and your personal agendas. That’s been done to the point of Insurrection at the Capitol.

Technologists must realize as enablers of the modern tech that they also may bear some social responsibility as well. Good moral judgment must go into all vocation and professional pursuit.

Tech responsibly! Bernard Lambert – January 9, 2022 – @systemwrights

The “Novice Threat”?

Novice threat…

bll_red_shirt_and_beard Bernard Lambert

The idea that novice or inexperienced people pose a threat belies the fact that the process to get those individuals to mastery is a very secure method due to the process of passing through those apprentice, novice, journeyman, and master programs. Absent of that, how will one read about it, write about it, talk about it, and do it?

purple_crocus
purple_crocus

In IT, certification is insufficient without seat time at the consoles of those tools and devices. The addition of deep problem solving skills and a great deal of experience are the necessary requirements of these complex IT jobs.

For those new to IT, the question is often “How will they get any experience when locked out of job experience?”.

Your thoughts please

NANOG > NewNANOG

November 11, 2021 – Bernard Lambert

The North American Network Operators Group originally came out of Merit University as a function of network study and research. I always found it handy to track Internet core transit problems and solutions. It began over thirty years ago. You can join NANOG lists at https://www.nanog.org/resources/nanog-mailing-list/nanog-mailing-lists/

Back in February 2011 – https://www.merit.edu/news/new-agreement-transfers-nanog-trademark-and-resources/

At this seclists.org you can read all the listserve messages that come from them up to today as well as a wealth of other network operating and security lists. They keep all the messages nicely indexed so you can see what is going on or has gone on in the past.

Another resource for you may be the http://readlist.com lists archives.

Bernard Lambert – November 11, 2021

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 FilingsAverage Salary
Microsoft32,735$135,535
Vmware4,910$139,299
Apple11,543$139,457
eBay4,635$143,313
Google24,896$144,285
GM Cruise330$145,243
Spotify468$145,800
Twitter1,794$149,188
Bloomberg2,914$149,863
Waymo591$157,591
Facebook13,471$159,597
Doordash274$160,444
Lyft1,174$167,650
Airbnb1,451$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???

What Our National Security Did Not Do

I just finished watching this documentary called “A Good American”, a film by Friedrich Moser.  The story is about Bill Binney who once worked as an analyst for the NSA.  Oliver Stone is the Executive Producer.  What it offers in pretty clear language and evidence is how badly misappropriation of public monies, corrupt Washington insider activity, political appointments, and gross incompetence lead up to the losses of 9/11 and subsequent years.

Bill and others employed at the NSA developed a program called thinthread which, when placed in the communications streams being monitored by the NSA, traced communications packets from source to destination and saved the data about the data (called metadata) into a large database.  Then, using techniques Bill developed in previous decades, reports could be made showing the interconnections between hundreds of millions of telephone and internet users worlwide.

It was so successful that it could find threats developing well before anything would happen and allow for a substantial advanced warning on threats about to happen.  Bill’s earliest use of the analytical techniques told of the impending Tet Offensive in Hue in Vietnam.  He perfected the automation of the techniques with the introduction of the personal computer.

At the NSA he was given charge of a small team of individuals to automate analysis of the data being collected.  The team quietly did that and demonstrated it’s efficacy at several “research” operations the NSA ran around the world.  It was discovering things that no other individuals or systems were able to discover.

As the world threat levels loomed and Osama Bin Laden began financing the terrorism, Bill’s thinthread was detecting those activities in advance.  The problem was that the appointed head of the agency, the director in charge of analysis automation, the assistant director in charge of analysis automation, and the newly hired systems vendor had a vested interest in making sure Bill’s thinthread did not get to play throughout the agency.  They made millions burying it and touting their nonworking, expensive, protected system offered by the vendor SAIC.

As a good American Bill then pursued notifying the Defense Department of the missteps by the bosses.  What he did not anticipate was the fallout.  The NSA had pulled the plug on thinthread and buried all information about it at the direction of the bosses who were enriching themselves pushing the nonworking system SAIC had produced.  They even went after him, his team members, his Congressional liason, et al as enemies of the state.  Later the FBI’s case was dismissed due to falsified charges.

There was another feature Bill and team worked into the code that prevented anyone in the United States from being spied upon without the proper court authority.  Those same bosses stripped it off.  The NSA is not to spy on U.S. citizens by law.  The bosses were also law breakers.

In subsequent years Bill and team tried selling this technology to other government agencies and were stymied by the NSA at every turn.  Well into the post 9/11 era the NSA still did not have or use the thinthread or any equivalent of it but instead continued to push the SAIC vendor solution.

Bill and the team members are retired now.  They had to “retire”.  Our country is at greater risk without them.  Our government agencies are accelling at their incompetency and trouncing our civil rights to privacy all at the same time.

 

The “Promise” of jobs?

The main reason jobs are an issue is that the “bread and butter” manufacturing jobs of the post World War II economy disappeared over the last 35-45 years.  While the Military Industrial Complex is well in America, it is not the employer of the ages gone by.  The component pieces of our military, consumer, and industrial goods are manufactured overseas in factories whose employees are economic slaves within that country and whose employees cannot rise out of that desperate situation.

We Americans cannot compete with that economically as our costs of living are astronomical high compared to those employees.  Further efforts to tax or tariff the import of cheap goods is going to raise our costs without any increase in employment in our country.  The international cartels of corporations will keep the price just under the level that would make sane business people invest in making the goods within our borders.

When we have frittered away the trillions we needed on infrastructure, gutted the Affordable Care Act, defunded Medicaid, and otherwise allowed the fanatical conservative right of the Republican party to refuse to support the society, we will begin to experience subsistence living akin to what our ancestors experienced around preindustrial agrarian times in America.

Simple things like running water, roads, food, electricity, communications, and transportation will become carefully and closely managed priority needs for every one of the 98%.  The promise of “increased productivity” simply means that the corporations will minimize the use of humans beings and human knowledge to produce the products for those same people to consume.

As that has gone in my lifetime the erosion of “native talent” went with it. In my parents time, post WWII, all you needed to do was produce because the want and need was unfulfilled and you could largely name your own price.  Today incomes are so low that we must return to “going without” or “producing it ourselves”.

Most people do not have the basic tools and skills to accomplish this.  The patient planning, preparation, and forbearance required for raising food is beyond most American’s skills and means.  You can still get a couple of burgers, fries, and a drink for less than five bucks. This will be available until the water, electric, fuel, and infrastructure fail or crumble.

History dictates that all civilizations will rise and fall.  The governments organized by the citizens are the cause of their demise.  Government overburdens the citizenry and causes the citizen to overdrive the resources fueling their lives.  It is gradual and ultimately leads to individuals working alone and away from the encumbrances of the politicos and their surround.  The hard working, thick skinned, determined, and unafraid will wander off and care for their small clan.  The ability to learn will be more valuable that accreditation.  Knowledge will be employed.  Philosophies will be simple.  Actions and their results will be most valuable.

What do you think?