O(fuck)

I really hope that CS will come up with recipes and emails where the board specificly “strongly recommended” that they reduce operation costs or denied internal investments. It probably won’t happen, because such pressure from investors is usually pretty vague, i.e they don’t literally tell you to cut corners, but they strongly suggest that if you won’t somehow increase revenue, you (the management) will have problems. Of course, it’s up to you how you do it, but to meet their often unrealistic demands, just doing a better job while also investing into internal failsafes is often simply not possible. It’s a loss-loss situation for CS, but I really hope they won’t loose this legal battle.

I’m sure there’s a lot of CS employees that would disagree with that, unfortunately there’s probably not much they can do about it.

I was just a few days ago giving my two weeks notice exactly for that reason. I’m getting so fed up with capitalism and companies working for the vultures who give zero fucks about what you do or whether you do it well or not, prioritizing profits over actually doing your job well. I don’t care about money, I worked in cybersec out of principle, to help people with their security. I don’t really care about money, as long as there’s job to be done for someone, I don’t really care if the project I’m working on is super profitable for me, as long as it at least breaks even. But no, we had to cut corners, basically scam our customers by selling products we had no qualified people for who barely scraped by enough results for the customer to not notice it. Non-existent R&D or training, because several milions of anuall profit are not enough. Fuck all of them, if I’m ever going to work again in cybersec, it will be a non-profit.

This OP’s article infuriates me, the nerves they have to demand more money for what’s entirely their failure, which they also directly cause in every company they touch. I’m sure that the fact that the failure was so devastating for most companies is also by large margin fault of their investors, some of which are probably also part of this lawsuit, that blocked investment into disaster recovery plans or backups, because their millions of profit per year felt low.

I feel like I’m getting pretty radicalized recently, ugh.

While I’m all for holding CS accountable for what happened, thisis not the way how to do it and to whom they should be accountable. If there’s any lawsuit, it should come from the customers who have been affected by the outage, not some fucking investors and shareholders that probably kept pressuring CS for the last several years to reduce costs and increase revenue, that are now scrambling to avoid consequences of their endless greed ruining companies they don’t care about by forcing endless growth at all costs and doing as much as they can to prevent internal investments, because that’s not what makes the line go up.

Fuck them. I hope they loose and have to eat their losses + expensive lawsuit. If CS would be able to actually invest their revenue internally, instead of it feeding pockets of greedy investors who give literaly zero fucks about the product or the service, this may not have happened.

I saw that happen at the cybersecurity company I was working at, when we got acquired by investors. Several milion of profit after costs suddenly wasn’t enough, and we had to reduce already non-existent internal projects or investments, that we have already been lacking to be able to do our job properly.

I guess you are right.

Its what literally changed my life. I was really socialy awkward, spend most of my lide behind a computer, and when I managed to go out to parties in a subculture scene parties I loved, I couldnt talk to anyone, had a few beers awkwardly in a corner and went home.

Then I met someone who introduced me to MDMA. That happened almost 8 years ago, and now I am an organizer of 2/3 of the same scene regular parties in our city, Im helping and DJing on a festival that happens here, and am living my best life in that regard. All thanks to that one best friend who got me something that made me talk to, and get to actually know people in the scene in the extent that I always wanted, and get comfortable enough that I no longer need to be high to interact with anyone. Since now they are friends and regulars, and not random people I wanted to talk to, but was afraid of approaching.

But, it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I was always trying to be responsible and cautious, and In did get bordeline to addiction in the process, which I was fortunately able to recognize early and put a stop to it by getting help in a adictiology nonprofit. It was never bad, more like a precaution. And I caught it in the best possible moment. I’ll never forget my first group session, where literally everyone else said “I’m 35+, I used to take stuff at parties for fun when I was 25, and then I ended for 10 years in meth…”.

Everyone had similar story. And I went “Well, I’m 25, and I take stuff on parties for fun…”. And that was a really strong lesson, where I realized I’m stopping a really huge problem at exactly the right time.

So, it might help. It is definitely fun, but it is so hard to not end up badly. You will need a lot of luck, especially if you are exploring it on your own. I still take things on parties, but with personal experience about the dangers it has. And getting that, is something that no one can give you, unless you see it for yourself. And for most of the people, that comes too late. I was lucky, you probably won’t be. But in conclusion - drugs are amazing, and have changed my life. Its a shame that personal experience will probably vary.

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I self-hosted it few months ago, and it’s actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.

In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided “I’m setting up Matrix tonight” without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.

I’m renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn’t figure out how to message someone with whom I haven’t had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).

Serious EVE players are something else. The mention about IT security isn’t a hyperbole, some EVE players take the espionage meta-game very seriously, and even though it’s not only against the rules but also illegal, that’s not gonna stop them. I mean, once they literally got someone to turn off electricity for a whole town just so they can win a fight (I tried to find a link to the article, because I’m 90% sure I did read about it somewhere, but I can’t manage to find it anywhere, if anyone has a link. Maybe it was just a rummor, or an unexecuted plan?)

I used TS for the first time in like 15 years litterally two days ago, funny timing.

Yeah, I lost EVE. Again.

Yes and no. For ads to make any kind of revenue, you first need an user-base. And if the first thing you do is riddle them with ads, it will probably really hurt the sales.

So, the first generation of smart glasses should be pretty OK as far as ads go. Of course, they will gradually introduce them, but that will hopefully take several years before we get to that point.

And inevitably some FOSS/privacy focused alternative will show up, just like you have with GrapheneOS, PinePhone and similar. Or, assuming they will let developers side-load their apps without going through proprietary store (which may be unlikely, given the current trend of locking everything down - on the other hand, there is a pretty large market of developers who wouldn’t touch anything Apple-level of closed and someone will definitely want to cash in on it), you will eventually get OCR ad-blocks for billboards outside. I bet that would be one of the first apps developed once possible.

I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.

So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.

I’ve just blocked YT in my browser, and use https://freetubeapp.io/ instead. It’s a desktop app, so I don’t have to deal with cookies and storage being deleted after every session, just as i can do subscriptions to channels without requiring an account.

So far, it has been an amazing experience, I totally recommend it. And I second the point about Nano AdBlcoker, since I’ve also been one of the victims, since at the time Nano Defender was one of the alternatives pretty well recommended on Reddit, that was better at avoiding anti-adblock scripts. Plus, any extension you have only makes you easier to fingerprint, thus defeating the point of VPN or privacy focused browser. Especially with Mullvad browser + VPN, which is especially build on the idea of sharing the exact same fingerprint with every other Mullvad VPN user.

I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.

Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.

I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.

Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.

While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.

Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.

Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.

Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.

Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local https://mapy.cz/ , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.

The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.

And for browser, I’m using https://mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.

If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with https://grapheneos.org/?

I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.

I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.

This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.

It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.