What’s Up Wednesday? DOT 9/6/21

9/6/21 MegMegMcGee 36

Happy Wednesday all! Hope you are having a great week.

I’m from Ohio, but I did not get any super powers with my vaccine. Other than the super power of protecting myself and others from a terrible, contagious disease.

This is my shocked face :/

US Capitol attack was planned in plain sight, Senate report finds
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/08/us-capitol-attack-report-finds-intelligence-military-and-police-failings

Where was this person when we wanted to see Trump’s tax returns? Check the new hires, I guess.

Biden administration investigates ‘illegal’ leak of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett’s tax information
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/investing/irs-propublica-leak-investigation/index.html

CEO defends Colonial Pipeline’s ransomware response during Senate hearing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/08/colonial-pipeline-ceo-blount-congress/

Stonks! Has this tool ever been right about anything?

Yay Team!

Alaska Native corporation to protect its land, dealing blow to massive gold mine project
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/06/08/pebble-mine-alaska-sockeye-salmon/

Only two more days til the weekend! You can do it!

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36 Comments

  2. Fuck Art Laffer. Like the average CEO is worth $15M.
    I’m getting my 2nd shot Sunday, looking forward to retiring the telescoping magnets I have all over my house.
    The weather is supposed to break here, we had rain but it is still humid as fuck, I’m sorry, winter, for all the bad stuff I said about you.

  3. Of course the Colonial Pipeline CEO has got to defend their (his) inept response to the (Russian) ransomware attack.  Because if he didn’t then the Colonial Pipeline board would have to fire some stupid ass responsible for neglecting IT security as the expense of profitability (him.)
    Reminds me of what happened some 13 years ago during my days at Nortel.  The then CEO Mike Z was warned by our corporate security gnomes that Yahoo Messenger was extremely vulnerable and should be discontinued as an executive messenger tool.  However, Mike Z was an arrogant fuck and said no (same fuck who would demand some 2 years earlier that Nortel Info Systems FIX not REPLACE his balky printer that he got from Office Depot which wasted the time and alleged talent of about 20 people–mostly managers, directors and a VP because I witnessed it happening live to my amusement.)  Mysteriously, the Chinese (cough, Huawei, cough) hacked his laptop and pinched all the bid materials to a critical (for us) bid (possibly including the stuff I worked on) and out bid us for it thus leading to the demise of Nortel, sell off of the wireless group to Ericsson and my 10 years in the wilderness.
    As unpopular as IS/IT guys can be, they’re usually right about system vulnerabilities and shouldn’t be dismissed but they are because most Corporate execubots seem to be hopelessly ignorant dipshits about the importance of IS/IT systems in running their empires.

    • It’s the general assumption that if you’re running a company then you MUST be the smartest person in the room (as opposed to the reality which is most of these fucking pricks are only there because it’s a gigantic, incestuous, pool of connected rich people) which makes me crazy.  These people only see “expenses” when it comes to literally anything that they perceive as an impediment to their stock prices (and therefore, bonuses), when they need to be looking at them as “investments”–especially the people they manage–which will pay off even more if they just fucking drop the self-centeredness and short term thinking.

      • True.
        I’m currently watching the dept I work for struggle with a new manufacturing IT system.  I think I figured out one of the system’s major glitches last night.   How and why?  I used to be a programmer analyst (a mediocre one), experienced in network implementation, understand the quirks of GUI development, program management and an expert in the work I currently do.  I thought that when this system was proposed three years ago that I would be the leading candidate for program manager.
        LOL, no.  I was deemed unacceptable because of my rather toxic relationship with my former manger and the fact I kicked him in the (proverbial) balls in a couple of meetings when he attacked me (rather than questioned me, there is a subtle difference) over the validity of the Key Performance Indicators I calculated.  I embarrassed him in front of his bosses and peers by showing my work (I always come prepared for any questions I anticipate).  Not my fault he’s not as smart/knowledgeable as he thought he is. 
        It is my fault for being a smirking smug asshole about it and rubbing it in.  Perhaps if he didn’t change my promotion from permanent to temporary then I might have been a bit more circumspect but at that point I didn’t care whose nuts I kicked.
        I have a love/hate relationship (read toxic) with my current employer.
         
         

    • We had a ransomware attack at work back before Black Friday. Systems were out for weeks. It’s largely because our website was built on an ancient version of Sharepoint. One of the defenses that the CIO offered was that “If our systems had actually been up to date, it would have been a lot worse.” This is a true story. 

        • …someone once told the reverse can (or I guess could – this was some years ago at this point) hold true…they claimed to have successfully hacked a thing or two using a device that was limited to a maximum speed that would have been sub-optimal in the days of dial-up precisely because in the early days of broadband becoming the norm what they were up to was so slow the things designed to prevent it simply discounted the traffic as not plausibly any kind of threat/problem

          …possibly the least cinematically viable kind of hacking I’ve ever heard of but allegedly it had a remarkably high success rate?

        • What these dolts don’t get is when you’re left with three people running the show in a paperclip and duct tape system, what you gain in obscurity is matched by a crazy jump in risk in social engineering.
           
          If just one of those guys falls for a smart wallet inspector scheme, you’re toast.

        • That’s pretty much it, yes. The old Sharepoint was vulnerable, and they were able to lock us out of our systems, but the crap we use is so old and cobbled together from wildly different systems, they weren’t able to extract any data. So the “ransom” part of ransomware was largely negated. We joked that maybe we should have paid them a million dollars to clean up the data for us and give it back. We just shut everything down and wiped it all and reloaded from backups (at least we had those). Stuff was down for a few weeks and we missed a lot of end-of-year sales, but overall we were fine. 

    • My wife actually had a patient ask her about this yesterday and demanded she put something up to her head to prove it wrong.  Lady still wouldn’t get the vaccine though.  She asks me, “where do people get these ideas?”  I’m reading this book that interviews a few rightwing writers that told him they don’t believe anything they write but they make great money by just making shit up.  People don’t care if it’s true just that it justifies what they want to believe.  He would even write “this is not true” at the bottom of some of the stories but most only read the headlines and those that made it to the end didn’t care that it wasn’t true.  

      • The crazy is the point.
         
        The reaction from reality-based people is what they want, so they can do the opposite.
         
        The dumb response from some pundits is don’t say anything. Others say just tell them the truth and they’ll magically absorb it. That’s also wrong.
         
        What is needed is a process to systematically attack propaganda. The deplatforming needs to increase so the antivax antidemocratic proviolence kooks are cut off from the mainstream even more. Also, there needs to be a concerted effort to ratchet up divisions within their ranks even more. Whatever it takes — regional differences, sports team allegiance, Carolina vs. Texas BBQ — make them turn on each other and fracture their group identity.
         
        Make it so jobs depend on it, break the mindset of concern trolls in the media — basically start pushing the fact that this is going to be like what was done in Germany and Japan after WWII, and not left to a few pundits in the NY Times and and CNN.

  5. We have a statewide voter mandate of a $15 per hour minimum wage. It’s a weird thing but we can modify the Florida Constitution by a majority vote if issues are put on the ballot. This is because our legislators are criminals, thieves, and sex traffickers. But because this is Florida, legislators try to weasel out of the mandate that the voters put in place. 
     
    One proposed modifying the amendment to exclude convicted felons and teenagers. His “logic” was that they would be shut out of jobs. The actual reasoning is that business interests here (largely hospitality and agriculture) are frequently run on a model of indentured servitude, if not outright slavery. It’s horrifically exploitative. But hey, somebody’s got to clean those hotel rooms around Disney, amirite?

  6. Speaking of hacks, about six years ago we ended up with a virus that knocked out our system computers for several days because an idiot ordered a pizza from a 20 year old machine with almost zero protection and the virus (allegedly) came from the pizza place’s website.
     

    • Once upon a time, many moons ago, I was doing network admin for a small medical clinic.  We’d gotten infected by malware from a forwarded email and it was so bad we basically had to strip all of our hardware and rebuild everything from scratch.  It took weeks and cost a ton of money.  Just before we brought our systems back online I had a meeting with everyone (we were really small) and told them that if literally anything comes through with FWD on it, that it needed to get either immediately deleted or quarantined so we could have it checked.

      Literally one week later we got fucked again by the exact same hacking group (Russian, of course), and had to shut everything down and rebuild again.  This time, however, we were able to determine that the entry point came from our marketing person (who was dumber than a bag of hammers and couldn’t market her way out of a paper bag but I digress).  I went to her and asked her what part of not opening ANY forwarded emails she failed to understand.  Her response:  “But it was from my brother.”  Un.  Fucking.  Believable. 

      I said, “I don’t care if it’s from the Pope.  Don’t ever do this again, or it’s on your head.”

    • …why am I never surprised to see the name koch bob up in these waters?

      …call me a cynic…but I don’t know as I’ve ever noticed that name in conjunction with political funding without pretty much entirely loathing everything involved…for whatever reason it really does seem as though improving the lot of “the common man” is apparently indistinguishable from destroying their concept of civilisation or something…over the years I’ve been forced to wonder whether if they simply hadn’t poured endless piles of cash into trying to influence politics whether they really would have would up worse off on a net basis…because they sure do spend a lot on this kind of under-the-radar bullshit astroturfing…if they really have made more than they’ve spent over my lifetime as a result of that “investment” I’d have a hard time not feeling like you couldn’t ask for a clearer example of why that shit ought not to be allowed…but if they haven’t then they’d be a perfect example of the wrong-headedness of believing that influence should be in proportion to net worth?

      …either way…fuck that for a game of soldiers

      • Yeah, these people would be economically worse off…but not in any way that would be noticeable to them other than a lower bottom line number on their bloated personal balance sheets.  That’s the thing:  if we did all the things that needed doing, these fuckers would still be obscenely rich–just not as obscenely rich as they want to be.

      • When they first started offering licenses for dispensaries my wife actually floated the idea of trying to open one.  I shot down the idea but sometimes question if we should have.  I haven’t smoked in years & she never really did so didn’t think that was the best idea (plus kids were about to go into high school at that point).  I definitely would have had a bunch of my nephews in Hawaii lining up to work for us, probably the only thing that would get them off the islands.  

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