AI Promises??
Bernard Lambert – August 2, 2025
IT has been overtaken by the many promises of what AI can do.
It has been in use for decades in analysis tools used to digest the mountains of data systems produce. The new twist is to feed language and images into the systems to relate the data points in a meaningful way. The discovery that the systems make can be quick and in depth. AI’s answers lack meaningfulness or factual truthfulness. Human need will filter this down to something beneficial.
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
Novice threat…
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?
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
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
The area for scripts has been opened up. It is at https://www.systemwrights.org/expect/ The plan is to put integration, automation, and orchestration examples there to demonstrated mine and others work.
1111
Bernard Lambert October 16,2021
In the old days of broadcast radio we were entertained by the spoken word and sound effects. The human voice and sound was the only mass media.
In the spirit of the “voice and sound effects only” I have many commentaries and opinions found here.
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 |
| 24,896 | $144,285 | |
| GM Cruise | 330 | $145,243 |
| Spotify | 468 | $145,800 |
| 1,794 | $149,188 | |
| Bloomberg | 2,914 | $149,863 |
| Waymo | 591 | $157,591 |
| 13,471 | $159,597 | |
| Doordash | 274 | $160,444 |
| Lyft | 1,174 | $167,650 |
| Airbnb | 1,451 | $168,306 |
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 idea came to me to list the lab projects, their progress, and data.
You arrive here from the main page when you selected “Do It Yourself” .
Below will are links to read up on the details of any project journal.
Please read this article:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-coming-software-apocalypse?utm_source=pocket-newtab
It describes the fundamental flaw in the way most code is produced today and what tools and methods have been produced and used to make software safer.
It is a “must read”!
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.
