Posts by powerhead

Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often

Re: What Next?

Pretty sure Grok is tailor made for such purpose, apart from also being into much worse kinks such as fascism

FBI: Watch out for these signs Scattered Spider is spinning its web around your org

"First, the FBI and friends want companies to maintain offline backups of sensitive data, and store it separately from source systems. This can help recover business operations if your files are locked up in a ransomware attack or stolen by extortionists. Second, turn on, and then enforce, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA). Finally, implement application controls to manage software execution."

Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, I know the bar is low as far as SMB security goes but these recommendations sound like a bot that crawled an ELI5 reddit post wrote them, this is a suggestion below Security+ level. Then again, since it's a fed agency that recommends it, wouldn't be shocked if an underpaid intern dreaming of being next James Bond just hit up Copilot and pulled the first result that popped up.

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

Why yes, I would love to have my data shared with thousands of your 'affiliates' who 'need' it to 'provide' some absolutely 'excellent services' and whatnot. Just tell me, what is in it for me? Oh, increased digital footprint and conceding that what algorithms feed me is what I will consume for all eternity? Jolly good, always wanted to be made into a marketing foie gras.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Regarding abusive practices

Tl;dr - the market is completely fucked, even for people with junior experience or skillset who want to get an underpaid entry level gig.

So, some background as far as us getting hired there (block of text but relevant):

A lot of the folks had no previous IT experience, landing that gig after a rudimentary 'boot camp' that wouldn't be enough to ensure passing of the networking/VM part of AZ900. They had no other shot at any technical role since the 'we'll teach you how to do stuff' offers fizzled out good five years ago, at least in the region I'm in. Or rather, there are openings but with how competitive the market has become, public offers are mostly bunk, since referrals take precedence. And that's a region that has a ton of outsourcing companies as well as internal IT, in theory a place where it should be easier to get a gig than eg. Western Europe.

I had a year of (pretty good, not just L1) SD experience and was in general competent, if definitely more of a clicker/script kiddie/'oooh what does THIS do' - but even with the scope I was taking care of, which ranged from usual SD stuff up to troubleshooting design/engineering soft and being more of L2/SME/wetwork with elements of L3 I had no luck with getting any responses to absolutely any SD/L1 support outsource offers for a year and a half. Ones that basically boiled down to triaging and using L0 KBs. Even tried to dumb down my resume further to make it look like I was less likely to bail/want to move up after some time, still no dice. For the gruntiest of grunt work.

Some guys had technical college/uni degree in the field as well as either some basic dev or SD experience - same boat as me, no other callbacks even though they sent out a ton of resumes for a longer period.

We got hired via the bootcamp and hit the production in less than two months after starting there. Barely any transition. Learning on the job during a peak period.

In all of our cases we ended in a position where not remaining with the company would mean either taking a massive pay cut to do 'menial'* tasks/physical work. With mental+physical health of a lot of us being in the dumps, that was largely not an option. The money earned in the company didn't allow to build a cushion for couple of months either. And none of us had partners that could carry us for a couple months - most cases, where I am the rent and utilities take 60-75 percent of the paycheck even if you're just slightly below median pay and living alone. Living with someone it does get easier, but not nearly enough for even three months of slumming it.

Being locked to a specific client environ, troubleshooting proprietary backend with 1st party tools meant that we were specialized only in that environment and its logic. Our only way out related to what we were doing would be to work for client directly (max 2 openings per year, most often one) or find another gig requiring eg. cloud networking/VM proficiency but that alone is not a viable skillset to find a gig - you need at least CCNA level knowledge to land a junior net position. And no one I knew of was hiring for strictly cloudnet/cloud sys admin. Most gigs are containers and that's not a forte of mine or anyone I knew.

So, we were stuck. Skillset limited to one thing, lot of folks without any knowledge beyond it, everyone burnt out and overworked AF so barely any strength to upskill outside of work. Most with less than two years in IT and no marketable skills in the area. Bad scene overall.

After experiencing how fucking awful the company is, I was the first one to bolt for the door out of the entire team. Took me over a year of actively searching and trying to upskill to get anywhere, applying even for gigs that would mean getting a 25% cut (from below median pay, mind you), nothing in the meantime came through even as far as shit job offer. I sent out over 150 well-crafted resumes (most often tailored towards the offer and both hiring staff and algorithms), applying for everything, from SD through junior admin, account mgmt, various junior sec and product support offers. Every time minding not to overshoot and play to my strengths in every regard. In that time I got five responses, with two being a result of referrals by my friends. Two others got to tech interview stage, then ghosted me. One ghosted me after getting great feedback from the hiring manager. Over 80% of the offers didn't even have decency to tell me to fuck off.

I took the first offer I got and as luck would have it, it's a brilliant environ with decent pay and learning opportunities, not to mention my dream branch of IT.

I spoke to some of my teammates, most didn't even make it to 30 resumes sent after searching for 4+ months, just getting burnt by the recruitment process. This month a second person left the team, only thanks to being referred and upskilling despite being absolutely destroyed by the job. They were actively searching for eight months. Alongside me one of the three that were the most broken by the company.

I got lucky as did my friend but with outsource you are often set up for failure if you leave. They will lock you in, grind you and leave powerless with no parachute to rely on for surviving when push comes to shove. This isn't a bug of the system. This is - maybe not by design - but nonetheless a feature that is optimal for the operations of those companies. They have no desire nor need to change as long as they perpetuate themselves. Only unions could perhaps change something but good luck with that. We tried organising but before we set everything up, it all ended with a damn bucket of crabs and folks being too scared of losing the job to engage with the idea of standing up for ourselves. Again, in a country that actually has somewhat decent workforce protections.

So yeah, while I agree with needing to leave these environs asap it's unfortunately not that easy, not with the material reality of certain regions and the market being what it has been for past couple of years, especially as far as junior positions go

*not meaning it in a negative way, all work is valid except being a cop, a landlord, a C-suit or a career politician.

Regarding abusive practices

Nothing new unfortunately. I worked for another +91 outsourcing company, one some might have encountered if trying to get help regarding Azure products (don't really care about deanonymisation on the reg all that much so idgaf if you figure out which one, bad practise but burner acc goes brr).

Jesus F Christ on a bike that's falling apart, the management and approach to employees is atrocious in these pseudocorporations (fuck corpos but these companies aren't even close to corp standards). Luckily, being based in EU, the local labour laws are somewhat decent for IT folks and my own team was one of the better manned ones, but even given some protections:

- after two years we had no promotion guidelines, no rules regarding raises, no workplace regulations whatsoever (going against local labour laws of course)

- yearly appraisal ranged from below 10 eurocents to 30 eurocents per hour,

- we got paid two times less than market rates (and contract workers got twice as much despite knowing less than us),

- WORST OF ALL abuse faced by non-EU folks by management was rampant, there were multiple s*xual misdemeanors on part of mgmt,

In general, everything was right fucked up the ass with a cactus. Once one of our own guys got promoted to team leader (the only position that would be considered a promotion and paid pittance in comparison to market rates for doing the same shit), he had to wait nearly a year to have his paycheck recalculated.

I mean, for fucks sake, we had one vile creature yell on the open space at an employee threatening that they'd be fucking deported if they didn't get better results (obv quantity > quality) or complained. At least on one occasion this was the project/department/office head honcho. This happened more than once. The abusive practices were routine. Just dick-waving and propping up egos of the small-souled fucks who were convinced everyone has to obey all whims or be discarded. Just creme de la creme of post-colonial (as in, exploited folks exploiting others to fit in with the worldwide pattern) mentality fixated on generating value no matter the cost, mixed with stratified societal patterns and gung-ho US-style bullshit. Indian capitalism is somehow even worse than central/eastern European flavour and that's not even a contest tbh. And we have pretty bad fucking practices, or had until a decade ago or so, even in 'proper' companies.

Our project was at least somewhat self-contained. The folks in India in central offices were hired just to be benched, given peanuts and 3 months to find a project to be allocated to themselves before given a boot, just a fucking meat grinder if you weren't a senior already.

Oh, speaking of peanuts, the folks in India got 'care packages' of nuts for one of their holidays. Multiple packets were full of literal maggots. Pretty ripe ones at that. Swear on Sir Terry, you can't make up the shit you'll see when you work for a company like that.

Can't even blame the people from overseas that worked on the project with us us that their work was botched all the time, really. How could it be anything more than passable at best when they were working in stressful conditions far worse than ones we had is beyond me. For all the anger and stress our cooperation has caused me over the years, I genuinely pity the Indian folks I worked with. These outsourcing companies are just soul-crushing abattoirs. I got burned out to an extent that if I was younger and less aware of things, I would've probably had to spend some time in an institution due to mental health being just in the deepest fucking pit. If I wasn't living with my partner, I would've definitely drank and smoked way more just to cope with the misery. And I definitely toed the line of being a highly functioning alcoholic for a bit.

Getting a job offer in a field I wanted to pursue was the only thing that helped. Well, that and doing acid during a month-long medical leave to help with processing all the bullshit. Would've gone back to bussing tables if I remained there for a month longer. Or sweeping streets. Or anything that wouldn't mean being a cop, anything at all just to have enough money to survive month to month.

I can't imagine how bad it must be for employees with less options for moving on, or ones brought into the country by the company. This kind of dependency is rotten and anyone that abuses it (i.e. every fucko in the command chain of these 'corpos') deserves a cruel and unusual punishment. I would propose something but I'm on enough watch lists as it is.

Also, fuck TATA, LTIM and all the assorted shits. This year their CEOs had a contest in who will outbid another when it came to proposing optimal working hours in India. I think cookie went to that shit from LTIM who wanted folks to work around 90 hours a week or so.

Burn it all to the fucking ground.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

Doom and gloom are Polish tradition

He's a meme and a half alright - or rather would be had he not entered a position of considerable power given the Supreme Court is uh, a can of shit and rot and has been for a good while. Picking an ex-hool for a president just to spite anyone who's remotely not racist/sexist/phobic etc, 5D chess Poland-style.

Obviously selling the shortcomings of our local libcons quite heavily here, it's not just us that have failed, again, to do anything vaguely progressive because of 'woke' agenda scaring the people, socioeconomic factors overall have been fucked everywhere and it's just that now chickens have come home to roost. Entirety of Europe's been turning far right for better part of this century, but whenever we (people who give a toss about others not being abused) tried to argue it's gonna be more of fashy 20's rather than swinging ones, obviously majority thought we should just STFU and not spoil the fun.

What's the most troubling part is that with the current sea of decentralized disinformation (as opposed to good old state propaganda - at least easier to combat), media and scientific literacy have not risen up to an extent that would allow layfolk to call bull on the most obvious things. Add to it economic pressure leading to people not having enough time to consume other media than what is readily available, just being overworked and afraid for the future and presto, a timebomb with civil rights. I assume this will, unfortunately, only get worse, as the more radical shits have been given the platform again and again despite their horrendous actions (not even beliefs). Antagonist-supported politicians is one thing - major issue is how the rot makes normal people get more vile and how it snowballs.

And with no real answer apart from grassroots movements acting in good faith it's gonna be hard to genuinely, not just nominally change the tides. Creating something is always harder than breaking it. And an enemy, even if imagined, will always get people to act far easier than need to improve, organize or just give a crap about someone else - especially if the else is not a member of the in-group. Hence why most grassroots orgs are way smaller than corpo-like parties and destructive movements. More effort, lesser chances of success, higher chances of burnout and no immediate reward as opposed to dopamine rush when yelling slurs at people just minding their own business or patting yourself on the back for agreeing with preferred political candidate.

I really hope Europe manages to navigate all this well, but with the sodding AI on top of it everywhere the vibes are fucked and a half. Education and organizing are hard as is, in the current climate I won't say impossible to implement, but quite a tall ask.

Japanese company using mee-AI-ow to detect stressed cats

Re: Sounds daft to me.

Not perfectly clear even if you pay attention imo. Pain position in cats is something I struggle with a lot, my partner has her doubts regarding it as well. A monitoring appliance like that could actually help with figuring out the 'oh shit' moment - though definitely agree on the aspect of subbing attention to pet for attention to app. For all the usefulness the app could have, some will definitely fall back to it and treat the pet less as a being and more as a toy/appliance etc.

Re: A golden opportunity

Have to kinda disagree here. Sure, if a cat is stressed the way we understand it in everyday speak - run for the hills or at least have some treats on hand. But the 'stress' itself is not simply frustration of more obvious needs eg. you not having time to play (so the little shit comes at you out of nowhere), bowl being empty or vacuum cleaner stressing it out. The more physiological stress indicators are actually way harder to figure out with cats as opposed to dogs - pain, overheating, feeding habit disruptions etc are notoriously more difficult to sort out compared to dogs. I'm a cat owner by way of my partner having adopted the little ball of chaos and thought should be somewhat smooth sailing since we've had the dog in the family for 10+ years. Nope. Way different patterns, especially when it comes to signalling internal pain or gastric issues - can be hard even for experienced owners. Tl;dr medical stress != common speech stress, this article seems to regard more of the former.

Despite my hatred of 'aRtIFicIaL inTelLiGenCE'

This seems to be - to an extent - a decent implementation, at least in theory. First-time pet owners with limited insight into certain signals pet sends them or people with limited ability to follow up on cues (eg. those with disabilities or some folks on the spectrum) could actually use this as assistance. Issue is that convenience is human's nature and this could easily turn to an excuse not to learn about the pets' behaviour patterns in the long run or use this as an everyday crutch instead of a step to reach a tad higher - not to mention AI being bork fiesta in general. As long as it's used mainly as assistance with figuring out problematic behaviours pointing to a deeper problem should be somewhat useful.

Microsoft is about to retire default outbound access for VMs in Azure

"There is, of course, a fourth response to the change, which comes from organizations with mature architectures and a good handle on their network security. They might not be affected at all."

To be perfectly honest, in my experience (1.5y as outsourced AzNet support), that's maybe around 15 percent of MS customers at best. Typically with internal staff rather than underpaid outsourced "techs" who can't so much as put in correct IP in the local network gateway field when setting up VPN (back when the cases were easier on the desk, this was the majority of VPN issues reported, not joking). Way too many people were using default outbound with NSGs and maybe NVA/AzFW on top of that to secure the environ. And no amount of reasoning with them when troubleshooting default outbound access could make them reconsider even if it'd save them issues in the long run.

I pity my ex-colleagues who remain with the company I worked for, come deadline, there is going to be a massive flood of shite coming their way - as usual any time there is any change on MS part. You'd think that with reminders having been sent out from iirc mid-2024, there would be at least some awareness of the shift, but I've seen couple of those events and I have scars to prove how insipid the customers can be once the change is live.

Re: This will shake out a few of the chancers ...

If only that were true - I worked as outsourced AzNet EU support for past 1.5 years and the amount of CSPs who failed so much as read through the notification, not to mention the links in it was staggering to the point that sheer amount of bull I've had to deal with makes me think clickers will just graduate to the noble job of creating as many SRs as they can and wanting support to design the entire networking scheme (cause why bother thinking for yourself when you can bother someone else). Funnily enough smaller companies with internal IT somehow managed to sort their crap out fairly easily in my experience even if the questions were basic or people had little to no expertise - it's the large enterprises that rely on chancers and people with resumes written by ChatGPT and I doubt that will change. Cannon fodder might be detrimental to a lot of aspects of how corpos work, but for them it's just better business to employ fodder than invest in full times or, god forbid, educating someone with little experience but who actually is able to learn on the job and could stay with the company for a couple of years to handle tasks properly.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Jaysus, worked as Azure support (outsourced to the big bad LTIM, trust me, the company on the inside is worse than the support it provides to MSFT), this post gave me PTSD - amount of customers who would post sev A tickets when deploying/shortly afterwards without bothering to read the MS Learn, or even bother going through the bullet points in the emails was so staggering it burnt me out quicker than any other job I held. Because why bother checking if the VPN should have local/remote addresses put in correctly or cross-refing the peering setup against the tutorial when you can pull someone into an hour call to educate the (often also outsourced) team of 20+ even if they can't bother to change the setup for two weeks afterwards