Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart When the first generation of microcomputers landed on desktops, they promised many things. Affordability, flexibility, efficiency, all the good things still selling IT to this day. Mostly, though, they offered control. PCs moved data processing from the local office and bureau to the person who most needed to control it. Since …
Well fine then. How's about they staff cut the Board and all management, and find out how the company does after that ?
Why is it that layoffs always concern the people who actually do the job, and never the assholes who just file weekly reports ?
You want staff cuts ? Fire everybody. Then ask yourselves who you really need. The CEO with his expensive suit, or the grunt that toils away 12 to 7 and gets the job done ?
The reason upper management seems to be most keen on replacing staff with AI, is because they look at what AI can do, realise it can replace them very easily, and assume that's true of other staff.
So, replace the 'senior leadership team' with AI, which will remove the highest salaries from the wage bill, with no decrease in productivity, because all the workers who actually make money for the company are still employed.
Simples!
Good thing your security team hasn’t taken voluntary redundancy.
They were fired a long time ago because they kept telling manglement they should handle IT differently and manglement does not tolerate voices that contradict their narrative.
And that is the crux. People with real domain knowledge and real expertise are not the ones who are allowed to make decisions. This has been true for many, many moons. All hell breaks loose once the slick suits and moneymen enter the building and sanity is replaced with greed. The building needs to be burning before something changes and then, most often, it is too late.
I have lost track of the number of times across my career that infosec has issued a mandate along the lines of "We must immediately stop using $thing and put processes in place to prevent anyone from re-enabling $thing because it violates our ISO 27001 conditions and/or violates the terms of contract with $customer" and the response is to fire the infosec person who raised the alert and then hush up that $thing ever existed.
When convenience runs into compliance, convenience always wins the second the person being inconvenienced is on six figures or more.
I've spent most of my career in a regulated industry, it's actually much easier for the ISRM/QA/Whatever to say no than to find an acceptable compromise.
The best person I ever worked with in this field was a rare exception, he used to have a great "Tell me what you want to do and I'll help you get there" approach. Luckily for him and less so for us he saw the incoming changes to the company and decided it was a good time to retire.
I would fire them as well. I don't need people saying there's a problem and you must fix it then walking away. What you want is a person saying that there is an issue and here is a plan to fix it, and this is the financial cost of not fixing it (accepting a risk is a valid response) then the business can make an informed decision. Far to many infosec people "ring and run". Learning how to talk to business people is critical to getting things fixed.
You would loose a valuable resource out of sheer pique? That doesn't sound like good business. Why do they have to provide the solutions as well? Their job is infosec, not business processes. It is enough to say that this thing is wrong without researching solutions.
You'd be an incredibly poor leader then. You hired someone to engage in infosec and compliance, and would fire them for not doing something that is not their job?
Accepting a risk is not a valid response when the risk is related to non-compliance with either a legally binding or contractually binding obligation on the organisation. Anyone who thinks it is, should themselves be fired.
You are seeing 2+2 and making the answer 5 there.
The original premise was "infosec person says $X must be disabled because ..."
Then someone says it's not infosec's place to say $X must be disabled - it's for them to bring it to manglement that $X is a risk, for $reasons, and here are $options. In that case, $X was incompatible with some certification the business held - but that doesn't automatically mean $X is incompatible with that certification, it could simply be that they need to revisit their specific certification to see if it can be updated if $X is in fact important to the business.
Going from memory, things like ISO9001 don't mandate you do something a specific way - but that you have a system which is acceptable AND you actually follow that system. If your system doesn't allow for $X then you can't use $X, but it may be that you can update your system to allow for use of $X.
CE and CE+ require a risk assessment signed off at board level. Just saying you can't do X without a justification and assessment of risk and cost is just painfully wrong.
I had this happen at one company that outsourced all it's IT. The mess was still being sorted out when I left 3 years later. The issue was down to IT being run by HR with no input from the senior development team.
Funnily enough I'm now in charge of IT at a different company and we've out sourced the majority of IT to the same company. I've handled it rather differently putting developers and business needs first. That's not to say we don't mandate certain things but we explain why and try and find workable solutions.
The most locked down are the front office.
A typically mealy-mouthed statement from Microsoft claiming that they didn't remove ICC access to their systems but not actually answering the question of whether they removed Karim Khan's account specifically.
In any case, Trump's goons will have had access to all of the ICC's emails etc. for some considerable time after having ensure that a suitably compliant "independent" judge ordered that an effective super-injunction be put in place under the Cloud act to prevent Microsoft from informing the ICC and Khan that this has taken place.
The ICC is a political body.
It once served a purpose, but it was compromised by the processes it is bound by. If enough folks vote a certain way, the court could charge me with war crimes for buying a coffee somewhere they didn't like. Trump's actions and rhetoric are over the top, as he is wont to be-But he's just saying the quiet part out loud.
The corps, like MS, they just will do 'whatever' until he's gone and done. They only care about money this quarter.
You fundamentally misunderstand how the ICC works. Just like any court, a warrant is only issued if there is suitable evidence. The level required for that is determined in international law. Once a prosecutor thinks they have a case, they must provide it to a panel of judges who will determine if there's sufficient grounds in law to issue that arrest warrant, and for a prosecution to actually take place.
It isn't political. It isn't in any way an odd system. It is a normal justice system.
Your silly example is nonsense.
The same companies that made fortunes off the decentralized compute of personal computers have thrown this bus into reverse and floored it back towards centralization, and nothing serves centralization more than fascism.
...The truth is in the business world there has long been a curse on those that Make Too Much Sense. I lost a lot of business and contracts because of it and until The Powers That Be in business learn better they are doomed to repeat past failures.
For an Enterprise to succeed in the long term they must truly think in the long term but that hasn't been happening in decades, at least. Short term thinking has led us down this road and the road gets shorter every day. Yes, open source is great way for us to get off of it but only if there is a fundamental reevaluation of how success is defined. Without that and some other major growing pains like retraining staff and learning to do with more again, well, I think it's a bit bleak. I am old and cynical.
"Willful ignorance is humanity's Achilles' Heel. Once people decide they no longer have to learn then they stop learning altogether. You can't teach them after that. Sadly, they must come to realize the truth on their own and that only happens when things go wrong for them." --By Unknown
"Willful ignorance is humanity's Achilles' Heel. Once people decide they no longer have to learn then they stop learning altogether. You can't teach them after that. Sadly, they must come to realize the truth on their own and that only happens when things go wrong for them."
Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.
An El Reg hack made a reference to "Functional stupidity" in industry and the book "The Stupidity Paradox".
I suggest everyone gets a copy, it lays out the why of a lot of the mess were in and the loonacy of the boardroom and managment mentality.
I see it everywhere now lined in with the general enshittification of everything.
I work with a few people who have taken the step outside this corporate psyche and all of a sudden big businesses is revealed as the utter farce it really is.
Seeing it doesn't stop you getting f#cked over by it unfortunately and I think we've a long way to go down before anyone with the power to change it will have their moment of clarity.
It's probably 50/50 that we'll either see the stupidity and stop or create an AI good enough to tell us how to make the virus that wipes us out.
Yes, open source is great way for us to get off of it but only if there is a fundamental reevaluation of how success is defined. Without that and some other major growing pains like retraining staff and learning to do with more again, well, I think it's a bit bleak. I am old and cynical.
So am I - it doesn't make navigating the modern world any easier, but you get surprised less often.
The point has often been made that one of the major factors hindering wider adoption of Open Source solutions in the business world is the perception that there is no business partner to contract with and shift the blame to when something goes wrong. (Yes, I know that Red Hat, Canonical, et al can at least partially meet this need. Don't try to confuse the issue with facts.)
Another factor is the OSS advocates' mantra of "you have control and can fix things yourself". Companies don't want to have to do that for something like IT which is not part of their core business - even though it now something without which their core business cannot operate. To take the standard analogy of a car: unless you're an enthusiast, you don't want to have to do your own maintenance, you want to use it to get from A to B and if there are problems you take it to a qualified repair shop where, with luck, the problem is fixed, and if the car is still under guarantee it doesn't cost you much[*].
What a company gets when it deals with the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon (and even IBM) is the perception of having a business partner who will deal with the nitty-gritty of keeping your IT running without the costs of having to pay for the expertise to do it yourself, and who will from time to time release improvements so that your use of IT can become more efficient (ie, cost less). We're now at the stage where it's beginning to sink in to businesses that the IT solution vendors don't have their interests at heart, and are much bigger than their customers so they don't have to care what customers want or need.
The only way out of this situation that I can see is for businesses to start banding together - perhaps first in individual sectors since these tend to have somewhat different needs - and setting up their own IT supply organisations so that they have a one-stop shop for their IT needs, and get to share the costs of the required expertise. As a bonus, they also get the necessary ability to negotiate with the vendors on a less unequal basis.
This is going to need some very strong leadership to bang heads together and an acceptance that some cooperation between competing companies is necessary, hopefully without constructing cartels[**]. And it will take time and effort, and if it has any success it will inevitably reduce the glorious variety[**] of the OSS world. (See Mr Proven's recent piece about the proliferation of desktops.) Sorry, but them's the breaks.
[*]My home PC and travel laptop run Linux - I'm still that much of an enthusiast after years in IT - but these days I want them to just work without needing a lot of tinkering. By and large they do.
[**]I knew this piece would become amusing if I kept writing for long enough.
"For an Enterprise to succeed in the long term they must truly think in the long term but that hasn't been happening in decades, at least."
Depends on the business model. Certainly a big problem in the US and the UK. But in, say, the Netherlands and Germany there are still many family-owned companies which take a long term view. One of my customers in NL turns over a billion euros a year, supplies kit to over a 100 countries (UK is an important market to them, and two key sectors in the UK are highly dependent on their products). There are still family members working in the company (after they've first gained experience elsewhere) and their focus is very much on the long term. So they really invest in their products, people and factories. E.g. I've interviewed some of their employees who celebrated their 50th work anniversary, and when they build a factory they do that on land they own - because in the long term that's more attractive. And they're profitable.
But that would be anathema to many US/UK financial folk :(.
And they often never adapt, don't take on debt won't take external investment and can't expand beyond the town of Bielefeld where they have been making the best precision candle snuffers for 500years
Until customers realises that Chinese LED snuffers are cheaper and more efficient
look at morning Star tomatoes in the US, NO supervisory management, just the owner. decisions are made by staff on the ground, it's almost a $billion company. returning growth over and above industry averages & more environmentally friendly & innovative than peers too.
Lego is essentially family owned... incredibly innovative.
the idea that you have to be willing to load yourself up with debt to be a successful company is mba bullshit. Family companies have lasted decades or even 100s of years for a reason. Long term planning. extra profits this quarter putting the comoo o any at risk long term isn't in their interest.
A very good example of this is the Mars candy company, still owned and operated by the Mars family.
Many a time their competition has tried a hostile take over and the family has the in house resourses to negate this action.
The one thing they have done to stop a take over was to drop the retail price of their product below that of the competition to the point that the asshat corporation trying the take over looses so much market share they almost go out of bussiness. This, at times has had a windfall for Mars as the offending company is driven to the brink of bankrupcy and Mars walks in and does a purchase agreement and then a cleanout of the asshole C-suits in charge.
The Mars family has known how to play hardball for a long time, and they do it very well!
Seeing that MS has just announced this:
Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’
Seems there's no end to the tulip mania.
Given the massive financial losses which AI makes, hopefully shareholders (and it will need to be the big ones) will revolt against this continual wastage of billions. Even if they don't, there has to be a limit on how long venture capitalists will continue to pour money down the drain, surely?!
Plan A:
- use the current billions in hand to buy up all the GPUs, memory, ssds, etc. to kill all competitors and non-AI-cloud usage. (Already underway)
- outsource all computing work. "Temporarily", because AI "is not yet" capable of replacing humans, wait for AGI "next year. (Already underway)
- Feds spend 1 trillion on AI cloud usage - NOT a bailout. obviously - just "Efficiency" (Coming soon)
I'm still hoping AGI / GAI turns out to be impossible and a big marketing hype / scam. It is extremely dangerous and we might briefly realise it is the explanation for Fermi's paradox. Why would you create a creature that has the capacity to become the apex predator? Bit like the hybrid creature in one of the Jurassic Park movies. You know it's going to run amok at some point. Now add in the fact it can make decisions faster than we can blink and that all the greedy f'k wits will let it go crazy if it promises them more money and control because that's all they can see.
Doesn't bode well.
"I'm still hoping AGI / GAI turns out to be impossible and a big marketing hype / scam."
I believe it is impossible, but you can't prove the negative so we'll all just have to wait until the blockheads give up trying. A lot of damage may be done in the meantime.
"Now add in the fact it can make decisions faster than we can blink"
That reminds me of a 1970 documentary on the subject, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
But enterprises wishing to regain control by leveraging open source software will have to consciously acknowledge they will need to support and nurture the OSS ecosystem of the software that returns control.
Essentially must be a social contract or a symbiosis otherwise with time the projects behind the software wither and die.
For this to ever be the case in the corporate world a world shattering paradigm shift would be required—so I wouldn't hold my breath... doubly so in N.America.
The economic and environmental brigandage of goblal corporates continuing unabated is very likely to be world shattering but I shouldn't think the paradgm of imbecilic avarice would ever shift — rusted on.
Indeed. OSS is by it's very nature a socialist construct. I give my time to support some project for free, because I benefit from all the other people who give their time to support other things for free and we all gain from the process.
That runs totally contrary to the embedded attitudes of most corporations - who will happily take something for free, but they'll be damned if they'll offer anything back for free. I know it says in my contract that any code I write on company time belongs to the company. I don't know if they'd try and enforce that were I to submit upstream patches to any of the OSS products that we use, but I've been strongly encouraged by my management team not to find out by simply not releasing them.
So here we are, where myself and plenty of others have patched known bugs in systems we use every day, could release those patches for the benefit of all, but are being told explicitly not to do that because the company would see that as us "giving away their property".
Unless that mindset changes OSS is never going to work well in the corporate space.
More a case of "that gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace, so keep it to ourselves".
Similar to the way that hospitals in the NHS used to cooperate and share ideas about best practise until the introduction of free-market principles meant that they stopped sharing as any good ideas they came up with would give them a financial advantage.
So here we are, where myself and plenty of others have patched known bugs in systems we use every day, could release those patches for the benefit of all, but are being told explicitly not to do that because the company would see that as us "giving away their property".
Yet the company has probably already given it away because they've uploaded everything to Azure. If not yours then most. And now it's been fed into Copilot and subject to the whims of the Trump administration (access cut, corporate espionage) and hostile state actors.
It just has different problems.
Open source providers are just as capable of dumping unwanted crap on their users as proprietary. And proprietary software can be better. Open source distros are now bloated, lack backwards compatibility, and are fragile - hissy fits over coders' politics or behaviour or whatever and half your developers fork off.
You had me until the last bit about Open Source. You could have slipped anything in there, socialism, communism, christianity, buddhism, naturism, whatever. There is no magic solution.
The best you can do is keep your intranet offline with no connection to the public internet, eradicating SaaS, AI, the cloud and MS updates from your problem list. Use any cheap crap for online-facing systems, with minimal data on it, and consider it disposable should hackers, MS updates or Trump strike.
Agreed there is no magic bullet. But TFA's point was about control and something that offers multiple choices provides a degree of control. Why do the monopolists generate so much FUD about choice - choice of distro, choice of UI, choice between Linux and the BSDs? Because choice is the the enemy of the control they exert over their customers. There may be no magic bullet but choice is the closest thing.
When I was a younger man, I had a professor tell me about my first iron triangle -- Good, Fast, Cheap. You can have 2, but you never get all 3. Going open source, you gain control (I mean, I was a Slackware guy from way back in the day and can't even imagine how many times I did ./configure make make install, add make menuconfig for the kernel), but while you get control, you have to spend more resource to get exactly what you want that way. People eat the slop, especially corporate types, of COTS and SaaS because it's uniform and easy. Everybody gets the same kibble, so you can buy a big a bag and save some money and a lot of time.
OSS can't save you from the triangle. You can have uniform/compliant, low resource, or control over what you get. Choose two. Can't have 3.
Sure, you could make your own apt or dnf repo, prioritize it above the others, build your own rpms or debs from source to exactly the specifications (God knows you don't want Bill in accounts trying to untar a tgz and build it), and then you'd have all the control. It would be uniform across your organization. But golly will it take some poor folks a while to build all that from source.
It's easier (meaning fewer person hours) and cheaper to buy the kibble and feed the same to everyone than to make it yourself. And if having to get Copilot or GPT or Perplexity or whatever is the cost, risk Macrohard or OldCrackle or Gaggle or Big PurpleHat or whoever turning off your access or having control over your data is the price, guarantee that happens most of the time.
"Good, fast, cheap", you're not wrong there. But with functionally stupid leaders and a lazy disinterested populous Fast and Cheap aways wins.
Props for bringing up Slackware. The first Linux distro I ever got working in about 2002 (after failing to get Debian to work).
In my line "Fast and cheap" only wins when physics does'nt get involved.... because physics always wins
But its nice to see someone else mention the iron triangle as we're constantly trying to explain that one to the buyers at our customers
> Open source distros are now bloated, lack backwards compatibility, and are fragile
No. That is only true of the distros which mimic the shit so that lusers can bring themselves to try them.
Slackware, Devuan and a dozen others all offer lightweight, compatible and rock solid performance.
The problem is in educating lusers to drop the "l" and bite the magic bullet. This is where the AI-amplified and out-of-control enshittification of the proprietary world is our best friend.
Open source distros are now bloated, lack backwards compatibility...
There's still some up for the challenge:
Can a Pentium 1 Run MODERN Desktop Linux?
(I have no idea about Tiny Core's politics.)
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"Good thing your security team hasn’t taken voluntary redundancy",
This will be the security team you had a story about the other day where a 'leader' proudly announced that you won't need security because AI will make them unnecessary
No, really! It’s friggin AWESOME, and you almost can’t detect the slop at all! I'm not gonna exaggerate and say it’s not there, but man, this is WILD!
All of this slaps HARD.
https://youtu.be/JbM2a5TBgFg
https://youtu.be/NlkZi8kd9VM
https://youtu.be/qfUbqBOS-bg
https://youtu.be/KLTU65eEXEU
https://youtu.be/Fp-QvuYdtOI
Each one is my new favorite, and it AINT stopping. If you clicked that last one… yah… sorry for Rickrolling, though you gotta admit, it does bang pretty hard!
Are you real or fake? I can't tell if you're joking. That's a future I don't want to live in. I don't get people at all, or understand how to interact with them, but seeing them being taken away and replaced with automation just leaves me hollow. Technology designed for use by non-techies is even more baffling than the non-techies. I don't see any reason currently to bother with the future. It'll be a little bit interesting to watch (until the means to see it breaks), and staggeringly depressing.
Historically, these things go in cycles. We'll get back to real music with improvisation and mistakes, or a mix more likely. People don't go to live music to see an exact replica of the recording. Maybe we'll eventually learn what being alive means. It's kind of fun these AI creations but they don't generate the emotional connections of human creation.
Rupert, your work in this essay is right for the time. There are systems, processes, and people engaged at this time, that have inevitable and highly negative social consequences entrained.
The problem this time is the pervasive scope. I've been good at finding ways and places to hide, or I've been able to rely on the good nature of a human to give me relief. I simply don't know how to maintain my independence from the coming changes and consequences. There is no quarter.
The best of us will need to find more effective ways to work together. There must be an effective counter weight to this, other than watching it burn down.
Thank you for the broader perspective.
Not only is this caustic to users. Its caustic to software developers as well.
Apps are now broken up into front end UIs and backend API services layered over cloudy databases and filesystems.
Getting anything done requires working across multiple teams or full stacking your way between multiple UIs and backend services. All with a nice layer of CI/CD in-betwixt to give you 5 reasons to wait for a compiler to finish rather than 1.
And data hiding? When you store all your state in databases and S3 buckets, all one ticket away from being exposed to whomever wants it, forget about data hiding. Its all public now and once the data has landed you must be very careful about changing it lest you break N services you never even knew cared about your data.
There are ways to manage all this, but no longer is it within your code itself with private/public/protected or data never exposed in a header file. Control and access is now distributed across cloudy configs and secret stores farther and father away from the actual code itself.
Makes me miss the days of native apps and embedded devices with rom/flash and no internet connections.
However this bell cannot be un-rung.
For the simple reason its development is funded and driven by the same companies you are trying to escape from.
Sure, you can fork the Linux kernel - you just neeed to find (and pay) the people able to work on it, and pay them. At that point, you can also develop a new OS without code from any US or China or whatever company.
Manwhile, FOSS companies are bought, or their licensing changes anyway. How many local forks you need?
The real problem is the lack of competition. FOSS hinders competition because once there is free software no money can be longer made from it, so money need to come from elsewhere. And those money decide where software has to go. Today all software - FOSS included (look at Android, or Chromium...) - must support the huge data hoarding profits are built on.
No competitor can arise to challenge the status quo. It would need to ask its software to be paid and the code not given away to other competitors - and people have been brainwashed into thinking sofware must be free. They are paying it with their personal data and loss of control, but looks happy this way.
Amazcon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. laugh all the way to the bank.
Canadians like me are completely refusing to put ANY data on American infrastructure. They're not trustworthy. Their clown they dare to call a president is a baby that wants nothing but revenge and hate. So let the whole USA be hated. They are doing nothing good in this world but spreading misery upon all. The ICC is leading the way : drop american goods and services and choose alternative products , for IT choose local storage and keep what's your's your's. Why should Americans have access to your data and control your access to it ? It's ridiculous.
I'm seeing this in real life.
Our management is single mindedly fixated on EVERYTHING MUST be in the cloud. They don't understand what that is. They don't know what that will cost and what they will lose.
And most importantly, THEY DON'T CARE.
Everything in the cloud, shutdown all our datacenters.
This has been mandate we are working under for almost 5 years now.
It's like they are hypnotized.
What's really sad is that the systems they have purchased / built in the cloud only have about 70% of the functionality of our home-grown on-prem systems. Again, they don't care. If you point it out, you are not a team player.
Then, the bill comes... OMG how are we going to pay for this? I know, let's fire our engineering staff.
At least I was around for the glory days of computing, RIP.
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