Buckshot

I accidentally saw a youtube ad today. It was a fake product with ai video and voice over. Complete scam. It was several minutes unskippable so i assume that's expensive. They must be hoping to scam a lot of people. I had no idea it had gotten so bad.

I worked on new SCADA for a water company across all theirs sites. Previously they were a mismatch of different systems and all airgapped.

They standardised everything and put them all on VPN. Suddenly you could access the secure water treatment works with 24/7 security guards and the control room was a bunker, from the unmanned rural sewage works with a portacabin for the server, the key hidden under a brick, and wifi for the PLCs.

The sewage works had always operated like that because it was deemed low risk. No one considered the VPN changed the threat model.

Yeah but then someone has to actually read it to grade it

Yeah, it's insane what it costs. We spend about $20k/month and that's after a big oush to reduce costs.

I'm sure that's tiny compared to many but like I said we're only about 20 employees.

It's pervasive as well, all those SasS products are probably running on AWS or one of the other big ones and so their cloud bill is baked into the prices. You end up paying them a dozen different ways.

I work for a really small company (20 people) that uses AWS. We discussed moving off and concluded it would be a multi year effort. I can't even imagine how much work this would involve

A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That's over a billion combinations.

Yeah i have to use W11 for work and the brand new Dell XPS, upper mid range, they gave me compared to my 2017 i3 with linux and all this is true.

About the half the time i boot it and the network just doesn't connect. Wired or WiFi. Have to unplug the dock and reconnect it. DNS will drop for 10s at random.

There's times my laptop shows it age like i was bulk processing a load of photos, just resizing, and it took several minutes when the newer cpu was probably several seconds but that's the hardware, not the software.

My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn't made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn't do half the things it said it did.

He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn't do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.