CitizenVectron

We currently have no Infrastructure Manager in IT (also responsible for security) as leadership won't pay the position enough to attract good talent. We just fired the last person we hired during her probation as she basically lied about her skills. If we'd had crowdstrike...we'd be fucked. We are a team of 18 people and support around 8,000 windows laptops that we just reimaged and deployed into schools.

16 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Yup, just pulled automatically in the background. Seems CloudStrike told some clients to just reboot their systems dozens of times until a fix was downloaded, but I don't know anyone where that actually worked.

 

Many security apps are like this. AV definitions aren't normally vetted. This is especially true for logic engines in security suites. Think of these as machine learning tools for keeping systems safe.

 

I'm more intimately familiar with McAfee's similar outage nearly twenty years. That one had their AV definitions accidently flag a Windows system file as bad which bricked Windows as soon as the AV quarantined the essential DLL. I'm also pretty familiar with Qualys.  I previously used Qualys for managing security and updates and their tools were automatically updated by DEFAULT. This is part of the problem. The reason I say it's expensive is because you'd need parallel hardware and companies already view IT as a net negative on corporate profits. You can't just test things on one virtual machine and call it a day. Have some physical database cluster? Well, now you need a second similar cluster. Have an entire virtual environment for your engineers? Well, if you really want to test things you need a complicated engineering environment. If you don't, you need to accept that you're not fully testing things and I've never met a CFO that was OK with funding partial tests that can't be guaranteed against.

 

My cheap solution to this was always to push all updates off by a week and then pay attention to news reports about faulty updates. That's obviously not an option for everyone, though. If everyone skips their updates by a week then we're back where we started. Also, all of these companies tell you best practice is to stay updated and on time. If you don't and you get bit by a zero day during that update gap, it's your policy that caused the outage and you wind up with the full blame.

 

It sucks, but that's how it is. I've personally gotten drilled by a CEO that was upset with me for updates that weren't installed per my policies even though we weren't negatively affected. Just big news about some zero day, randomly sees me walking by his office, calls me in and asks if we're patched to prevent this exploit. When he heard we weren't because those updates weren't scheduled to go out for another week, he really wasn't happy. Wasn't happy about it, but I ended up pushing an out of band update for just that one zero day and left everything else as is.

 

I like my job, but working in IT often sucks.

Leadership generally views IT as lesser-than, and also not required. Until they can't print a weird PDF.

If Biden stays I think he is guaranteed to lose. I mean...all these public figures have already said he should step down. What are they going to say if he doesn't? That they now have confidence in him? How does the party come back from that?

Pete is definitely the best communicator the Democrats have. 

The real question is if Biden will actually willingly step down. What if he doesn't? Does the DNC try to replace him via convention vote? I think in order for Harris to win, the party needs Biden to suck it up and endorse her. Then you need the full press of Obama and everyone else (Bernie, AOC, Shapiro, etc) campaigning for her.

43 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

You got the ones that @CitizenVectron modeled for

 

Wrong, as I can't pull off a fedora! 

Seems like support is coalescing around Harris as the alternative.

Majority of Democrats think Kamala Harris would make a good president, AP-NORC poll shows

APNEWS.COM

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As President Joe Biden faces a growing drumbeat of pressure to drop his reelection bid, most Democrats think his vice president would make a good president herself.

Polling in swing states released today also show her outperforming Biden.

DNC needs to exile everyone internally over the age of 55. Most other western democracies have had Gen X leaders for a decade+.

Our dept doesn't use Crowd strike so we're fine, but some of our vendors due. Right now our entire payroll and HR system is down. Fortunately it's summer so no teachers are working or trying to put in sick days.

More:

Our house is pretty much 19C to 21C (66F to 70F) all the time.

Do people feel momentum is actually building within the party to push Biden out?

Edit - and if he is pushed out, do you think he will also resign as President?

1 minute ago, mclumber1 said:

I was just watching My Cousin Vinny last night.  Great movie and Marissa Tomei is superb.

Vance is an intellectual for sure

22 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Musky is giving $45million every month to Trump for the election per wsj

In Canada the most you can give to a political campaign per year is $1,700 ($1,250 USD). The US is absolutely wild.

2 minutes ago, brucoe said:

I suspect his reasons will circle around despair and loneliness, something the MAGA crowd will just ignore completely. Come to think of it, so will everyone else.

He'll have made one comment in 2019 or something about politics, and that is what everyone will focus on.

2 minutes ago, MarSolo said:

Bold prediction: this is going to be a disaster for the GOP like when McCain picked Palin.

If Democrats are smart (and I don't believe they are), they will hammer on abortion (and praise Biden as the last bastion of it) and use Trump and Vance against this. Democrats need to fire up women to win this election.

A Trump victory is handing Ukraine to Russia, and quite possibly the NATO Baltic states. You think Trump is going to go to war to defend Estonia?

If you needed any other confirmation:

Biden is addressing the nation in 3.5 hours:

Jesus, what a moron

On the one hand, I am glad the shooter wasn't trans or a person of colour (as I think that would have resulted in hate incidents). On the other...I think that most people voting for Trump won't care if he was a Maga type that went off the rails. They'll just say it's fake news, he was a plant from Biden, etc.