Posts by FrankAlphaXII

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Re: Seventy-one in six years?!?!?

That's the point. They're asset stripping. It's Icahn and TWA all over again. I'm sure it'll be a model for every Harvard MBA to follow for years to come.

They're more fucked for the apparently systemic securities fraud than anything. Which is complete bullshit, people are more important than lying about sales to gild the garmets of some Ivy League MBA business criminal cabron, but Wall Street don't ever care about the people getting hurt, only how their stack of money may have been affected by one of their own kind.

I'm sure they'll sell more parts of themselves to Lenovo, maybe mainframes this time, especially since it's a toxic asset with a securities fraud investigation surrounding it.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Fair and Balanced

I must say all of the criticism in this article is all very fair and they're all things I've either seen myself or didn't see directly but helped out with remotely.

The only issue is that I have to disagree with saying Pop!_OS a niche, barely used distro with noone working on it because of System76 having paid employees working on it and the fact it comes pre-installed on their notebooks and workstations. HP's even about to start selling a workstation (it's basically a ZBook Studio 15 without the 300 dollar Windows 10 for Workstations tax) in the US called the Dev One that has it pre-installed as well.

I especially liked the bit about trusting Oracle more than IBMhat because at the moment I do. And if you look at my comment history I trust Oracle about as much as a Politician so there's not much faith there. IBM gets even less. Wonder how long it'll take them to sell Red Hat to Lenovo.

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: Business continuity

Amen. I'm in IT (now, again, whatever) but I come from an Emergency Management background. I really hope all of these affected customers had a decent continuity plan that had been exercised realistically and not merely as a means of checking off some VC's checklist to get funding. My standards are probably a bit high but think I know the answer to that by even a more reasonable measure if some of the Twitter threads I've read are any indication.

BCP is like how security used to be back in the day, nobody took it seriously until it started to cost more to not give a shit.

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

About time

I'm in one of the class actions against them over this very same thing, and they're being incredibly difficult, I had to basically give a deposition to their legal counsel stating the same thing over and over, that there was no way to actually file the 1040 for free, especially if you filed Earned Income Credit paperwork too, and just about everyone working who has a child in the United States is filing for that credit. Glad the FTCs suing them too. They deserve it completely.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: Watson

He was also an Afghan war veteran, from the second time the UK Government and British Army thought it was a good idea to try to fight there. He got wounded at Maiwand, which is fairly close to Lashkargah nowadays, there's a highway that runs from Kandahar to Lashkargah that passes right through it. One of the many highways and roads in that country that I've been shot at on myself.

Watson was no fool, he was tough as nails, intelligent, a good shot, flexible and mentally agile enough that he could put up with weirdness out of Holmes, and was a very good physician

French tech giant Atos issues second profit warning in 7 months

Unfortunate

That honestly kind of sucks. I work for a rather large notebook, desktop and workstation OEM doing hardware break/fix, and a lot of the larger businesses that have the expensive contracts with us use Atos as their client support vendor. Compared to the other big ones like Capgemini, DXC, Deloitte, and Infosys, I actually like talking to the Atos techs, they're usually pleasant, professional, well spoken even if English isn't their native language, and do most troubleshooting before calling us, and they're almost always willing to do whatever (even if it sounds pointless) to get their end users up and running again. They don't generally push back except for things that I agree are clearly very unlikely and/or stupid or have already been answered in whatever process flow.

I've been in this business long enough that I know what'll probably happen here, they'll start cutting employees and compensation, people will start leaving and they'll wind up being like most of DXC (pissed off all the time and very clearly unhappy with their jobs) within a year or two. I wish this wasn't as predictable as it is.

CentOS Stream 9: Understanding the new Red Hat OS release for non-Red-Hat-type people

Re: No-one sane runs Streams in any business use

Yeah, Amazon does exactly that. It's Linux for AWS is based on Fedora, and they've never said what sub-version but I suspect that its rawhide (don't quote me on that, but if you're going to do things in an insane manner, why hold back? Might as well go full batshit).

That's kind of what's always stopped me from using AWS except as a backup, production stuff on very unstable code is a recipe for things like last week.

BadgerDAO DeFi defunded as hackers apparently nab millions in crypto tokens

Self-awareness in naming

Spiral? How appropriate.

Graveyard Spiral

IBM researcher suing for age discrimination blames CEO Arvind Krishna for his ousting

Re: Who wants to work for IBM?

If you treat people like they're mercenaries, as most businesses do with contractors or whatever the MBAese for people who are doing work a regular employee would do for less money and no benefits is now (I've heard Contingent Worker, External Solutions Provider, etc), don't be surprised one bit when they don't have loyalty whatsoever and leave for greener pastures or a permanent position with a competitor when they get offered one. Its the nature of the beast, by design, and there are alternatives.

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

I use KDE or MATE when I'm using something UNIXy, so I don't really have a dog in this fight, so maybe I'm wrong but I will say it sure as hell seems like every time someone has an issue with a desktop environment the common denominator is almost always GNOME or its developers not listening to their users.

If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002

Something's gotta give

We really need to start treating critical software infrastructure like we do for things like transportation and fuel, food supply chains, medical supply chains, etc.

As an emergency preparedness and response professional with an IT background, it is woefully inadequate and quite potentially a major hazard that libraries and small infrastructure projects like this hinge on a developer or developers who are volunteering their time and effort with no continuity planning, funding, time or means to respond to a bug or vulnerability because nobody wants to do it. Not everyone has a Google, IBM-hat, HPE/HPI, or Microsoft in their corner giving them time to do this utterly thankless, time consuming, but absolutely critical work to make sure that things will work further up the stack.

It's not flashy, on a resume most employers will give it a glance and even if they know what it is this person does and just how important it is, it rates a little above "that's nice" unless they're "concerned it may impact your productivity". It's a damned shame and I wonder how much chaos, insanity and murder is going to have to occur to get people and business to actually give a shit.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Re: A pain in the rear end

Yeah, after my Pixel 2 finally died I wound up saddled with a Samsung and the fingerprint sensor really sucks. I cannot wait to get a Pixel 5a or 6 just to not have to deal with this damned thing's sensor that works maybe 1 time out of 15 attempts. It reminds me of the blood vessel geometry scanners on some SCIF doors that always fucked up when I was in the Army. Or the hellspawn that was our USB fingerprint readers we had to use to biometrically authenticate with if for some reason we weren't using our CAC readers (or if, surprise surprise, the damned Smartcard readers or their firmware broke)

We use PingID where I work now and before I log in I usually have the phone unlocked so I don't have to screw around with the Biometric nonsense since it hardly ever works.

The more things change and all.

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

Thinking about Reg Standard units makes me miss some things about classic El Reg

I've been here a long time (I'm usually more active when I'm bored, was deployed, or was unemployed after getting out of the Army. You can always tell when I'm fucking off or I'm not working actively as I'll usually wind up with a Silver Badge before too long until a new project starts), but this got me to thinking about some of the crazier shit that this publication's done in my time here, like Boatnotes, all the stories about Rockall, the Playmobil reenactment articles, FoTW, the Standards converter, etc.

Which makes me miss Lester even more than usual because if I'm not mistaken all of those were his brainchild.

We need more insanity and chaos around here. Just my two cents.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Re: ‘Rocky’, eh?

The Multinationals are a hell of a lot more effective than that damned Coyote is, they're more like how actual Coyotes are: they watch and wait until there's a visible weakness and then strike or they keep testing defenses and shifting their internal organization (and leadership) around until they find a hole or an optimum way of attacking the existing defenses that works for them.

Then again, the Roadrunner's a decent representation of open source, but if I've gotta pick a Southwestern desert, scrubland or steppe animal to represent it, I'd probably pick the Tarantula Hawk because while they're largely docile if they decide to attack the adversary may win, but it'll likely regret it.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Surely this is a joke, but its not

What year is it? And hell, I thought it was an April Fool's article myself until I double checked the date.

Its funny, one of the first articles I ever read on El Reg was on SCO vs The World.

Its the same stupid song and dance that's been going on for 20 something years now. And pretty much nothing's changed since the last time they tried this except that Zombie SCO has another new name, this is like their third or fourth one. Same tired bullshit claims. And again, just like last I pointed out last time, its funny (and telling) that they're not suing other commercial UNIX vendors like HPE for HP-UX or Oracle for Solaris.

A definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition, Zombie SCO is clearly insane.

Delayed, overbudget and broken. Of course Microsoft's finest would be found in NASA's Orion

Re: Windows for Spaceships ?

I find your lack of knowledge disturbing.

Do some research. You'll find there's very little of the Toy OS variety involved with anything important in Spaceflight. No Linux, No Windows, no macOS. Its mostly (like nearly all) purpose built RTOS like VxWorks.

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

Re: Problem

They're not saying this, but the way I'm looking at it is that Fedora Server fills that traditional role that an alpha did back when the software lifecycle made sense, and that CentOS Stream fills the beta role. They're both nothing anyone with sense is ever going to use in production.

IBMhat thinks that they're going to drive people purchasing RHEL by doing this, but its going to alienate people who were using CentOS as a relatively stable environment to try to push people to buy RHEL by showing how well it worked

Re: Are people sure they get what Stream is?

Its not just uncomfortable, its a downright insane place for a production environment. No one who values their clients or their job is going to use it in production because its only a matter of time that some untested piece of beta software breaks something very important.

Fundamentally, CentOS stream is a beta where Fedora is an Alpha. It is never a good idea to use beta software in production anywhere outside of a UAT environment with power users, QA testers and developers that know they're testing something and that it might break. That's different from an unsuspecting client who expects the software they're using in production is stable and probably won't unexpectedly break just because the vendor pushed out something that broke a mission critical piece of software.

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

Re: PulseAudio?

I certainly hope so, not being quite a "desktop" audio user but not quite a "pro" because of a musical background where there's certain things that I do a certain way for a specific reason that fall into the cracks of recognized use cases, I've been stuck with Windows and macOS with no real alternative because PulseAudio is flaky (and mind you, I don't mind systemd, it has its advantages and disadvantages like any other piece of software) and JACK is well, itself. In theory I should be able to use it like an expert, in practice its hit and miss.

The thing is, I don't always work in Windows or macOS so hopefully the Fedora folks get it right and it gets adopted outside of Red Hat World (and even Linux land because if I'm using a UNIXlike its most likely FreeBSD or GhostBSD), though if I'm using Linux its most likely a Red Hat-esq distribution.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: So?

You forgot number 4. Sell chunks of the business to Lenovo.

Intel is over GPUs and CPUs – it's all about 'XPUs' now that OneAPI code-abstraction tool is golden

Re: Bye?

I'm not enough of a bastard to want to inflict my ex on anyone else. I'm slightly mean, but I'm not sadistic.

'20,000-plus staff' could face the chop in spin-off of IBM's IT outsourcing biz, says Wall Street analyst

I vote for literature, hear me out.

His statements wishing death to Nvidia's engineers in multiple ways, that OpenBSD developers are a bunch of masturbating monkeys, that userspace was written by other monkeys smoking crack rock, and that a certain compiler's behavior is similar to a sloth that was a victim of a drop on its head as an infant are true classics, and need recognition as such.

Re: In the long run

I'm sure Infosys, Collabera or Capgemini will be happy to hire him, with no benefits and a significant pay cut naturally.

Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers

I've said this for years...

But if Apple were to start selling macOS by itself that is the single Apple product I would buy. And I'd pay a good deal for it too.

Its for-real SUS compliant UNIX with an outstanding graphics and window management subsystem and decent driver support for less than the thousands of dollars that whatever the SCO remnants currently call themselves, HPE, Oracle and IBM are going to gouge you for their OS and the hardware that runs it (in IBM, HPE, and Oracle's cases anyway).

While I'd love to use macOS, I have absolutely no desire to use Apple's overpriced hardware. I value function far over form and on Mac computers the form has been super-ceding the function for quite some time, but I would switch from Free and FuryBSD as my main UNIXlike in a heartbeat if Apple sold macOS by itself. Unfortunately the whole idea makes sense and would work, so it'll never happen.

Motorola Moto G 5G Plus: It won't blow your mind, but at £300 we're struggling to find much to grumble about

Since the Pixel 4a is taking damned near forever to get released, and I really need a new phone (the top 3rd of my Pixel 2's touchscreen isn't detecting inputs and my mic decided it doesn't want to work anymore), this is what I'm looking at, mostly because of it having stock Android, 5G, and not costing a thousand dollars.

The only thing that makes me hesitant is that it's a Lenovo product as I have some issues with them after a suspicious experience on a notebook a few years ago, but I may well give this phone a shot unless Google gets the 4a out within the next month or so.

An unfortunate bit of product placement for Microsoft as Liverpool celebrates winning some silverware

Re: I thought Bork meant "break"

Well if a company the size of BT can't figure out how to activate Windows, its kind of a bork, more of the beancounter variety though

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Yep, because words matter so much when you're trying to simply survive

My question is just how much money and time (same thing, especially in the Bay and in Seattle) is being wasted on something as stupid as PCness in technical terminology.

Yet again, the slacktivist keyboard warrior crowd tilts at windmills related to language instead of the hard thing, actually doing something about inequality in the real world. This shit pisses me off because its a fucking side show designed to make people who are fucking the entire goddamned world over by doing what they do feel better, that they're "doing their part" because their one black "friend", y'know the Contingent Worker at the security desk at Orwell Worldwide LLC or their parent MammonTech Inc told them that changing names of something they do not know or care about and has precisely zero impact on their lives would make them feel so much better and make the world a better place.

Its better to do something like this instead of, y'know, something involving some risk, non-monetized expenditure of time and effort, potential discomfort and arrest, like making sure their "friend" at the security desk with G4S or Securitas or the cafe with Sodexo that's working 33 hours a week (so they don't have to pay for benefits while paying them minimum wage on top of it) might be getting a living wage and can afford to pay for rent and bills AND food, instead of having to pick which is more important and which can get put off, or having access to a decent educational system, living in neighborhoods safe from gangbanging thugs that drive black and white vehicles that might just kill you and get away with it (and also the criminals too), being able to afford to maintain a healthy lifestyle, having relatively clean water, being able to have an illness where you miss four days of work or can afford to take time off to do something besides work for once, or something as small as having access to basic healthcare to prevent serious illness of course.

Because that would be fair, and fairness isn't just wrong, its communist! Can't have that of course.

Bloke rolls up to KFC drive-thru riding horse-drawn cart only to be told: Neigh

This wouldn't be too unusual in Lancaster, PA

I get how it might be odd in the UK, but there are places that this wouldn't be all that unusual like Lancaster in PA or parts of Farmington in NM. In Lancaster they actually have pretty serious problems with the Amish drinking too much (they may not have much technology but they do like to drink) and getting into buggy accidents after passing out behind the reins. A few people die a year from it as a matter of fact.

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

I'm actually from the Space Coast, I lived there for about 30 years, and I've never liked the Worm Logo. It sucked then and still sucks now. When they brought the meatball back (mostly to cover up the Bicentennial Star on the VAB, more than 20 years after 1976) it was a great day. The meatball looks much better, the Worm looked like something a Federal Agency would come up with to look "sci-fi" and "cool"

'That's here. That's home. That's us': It's 30 years since Voyager 1 looked back and squinted at a 'Pale Blue Dot'

Rights issues probably. Unlike the other US Federal military and paramilitary organizations NASA's images aren't in the public domain for most uses, and they're very particular about employees being used in commercial material.

From their media usage guidelines:

NASA Content Used for Commercial Purposes

For more information on using NASA content for commercial purposes, please read NASA Advertising Guidelines. Any questions regarding use of NASA content, or any NASA image or emblem should be directed to Bert Ulrich of the Multimedia Division of NASA's Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For information on NASA involvement in documentaries and films, please see documentary and fictional film project guidelines.

If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA's endorsement of commercial goods or services.

If a NASA image includes an identifiable person, using the image for commercial purposes may infringe that person's right of privacy or publicity, and permission should be obtained from the person.

Current NASA employees, including astronauts, may not appear in commercial material.

Commercials and promotional content cannot be filmed on NASA property

If I'm not mistaken, Dr. Porco is currently an employee on the Solar System exploration committee so unless they go find her CalTech faculty official photo, which may also be copyright, its not something they can use.

You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that

Sounds like typical CoG/ECG stuff to me, and that should scare you

Continuity of Government's something I know real well, working in the emergency management field. There's some really terrifying shit in the CEFR (Code of Emergency Federal Regulations) and the (mostly) classified annexes to NSPD-51, Enduring Constitutional Government and others scattered throughout the various executive orders, CFR and USC. I'll leave you with this, and I'll say they don't make em like Senator Frank Church anymore:

"The President has the power to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, call reserve forces amounting to 2 1/2 million men to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all menas of transportation, regulate all private enterprise, restrict travel, and in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all Americans...

Most [of these laws] remain a a potential source of virtually unlimited power for a President should he choose to activate them. It is possible that some future President could exercise this vast authority in an attempt to place the United States under authoritarian rule.

While the danger of a dictatorship arising through legal means may seem remote to us today, recent history records Hitler seizing control through the use of the emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of the Weimar Republic."

--Joint Statement, Sens. Frank Church (D-ID) and Charles McMathias (R-MD) September 30, 1973

Alphabet's 'love rat' legal chief David Drummond ejects after 18 years at web goliath, no golden parachute attached

Re: Or Brooks, "It's good to be the king."

I don't think anyone's suggesting anything non-consentual, at least I didn't read anything non-consentual into his behavior. At the same time abandoning your child while he's ill to go have a threesome in SF with some side-chick(s) is a pretty trashy thing to do though, no matter how you measure it.

Scumbag lawyer for a scumbag company acts like a scumbag. In other news, Ursines defecate in the woods and the Bishop of Rome is Catholic. Film at 11.

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

Automated service management and the elimination of the contact center is just like the supposedly paperless office, they keep saying its going to happen, and then create five new forms. Considering how fucking clueless end-users and automatic troubleshooters are, I don't think those of us who work in any kind of customer facing tech support position have anything to worry about.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Good job Arizona!

You'd figure Arizona, a very conservative and pro-business state, the home of Barry Goldwater and John McCain, would be the last in the Southwest to do something like this. It sounds like garbage from the People's Republic to the west.

I wonder how many Electrical Engineers who are working as contractors or direct reports at Intel, Micron, the Air Force or Fort Huachuca/US Army Intelligence and Security Command should be very afraid that some tin-pot bureaucrat with all the power of a petty czar might just decide to scour linkedin and come after them too for the high crime of misuse of a non-regulated title.

It just blows my mind, its something that New Mexico would likely do, and something Nevada would do if there was a means of laundering money in it, but then again, we kind of value having two national labs, two directorates of the Air Force Research Lab and an Intel fab, pissing off engineers isn't exactly conducive to being a competitive place for that.

I'll tell you what, what the Navajo ought to do is let Arizona know they're full of shit and that this gentleman is welcome to continue being an electrical engineer for hire from their territory, and if New Mexico's State Government or one of the Pueblo Governments was smart, we'd do the same.

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Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Re: Have to ask...

Very true. Old timers around here would probably agree that he's almost as predictable as Eadon was in that regard. Bob's more entertaining though, I rarely agree with him but every now and then he's got some diamonds of wisdom mixed in with the turds.

Mike drop, DXC-ya later! Lawrie immediately ejects as CEO from IT outsourcing giant

Re: Accenture was not tied to Enron

"The market will decide whether the company lives or dies. And that's fair enough"

Wow. You must actually believe that. How cute.

Or, more hopefully anyway, is that a code for "vacuous corporate raiding investors who don't know what they're doing aside from screwing over the employees and long term investors, and have no business having anything to do with how a corporation behaves dictate whether a company lives or dies"?

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

How does a third equal single figures?

See title.

My math isn't the greatest but two thirds of a hundred would be 66.66... the remainder of that would be 33. That's not single digits, and I strongly doubt that IE has anywhere near that high of a marketshare except in corporate environments where crappy halfbaked enterprise software still requires it.

Just sayin'

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

I'm sure it's been said...

But the only meaning of the word Gimp that I know is a slang term for a submissive in a BDSM context.

To put it in San Franciscan: They're kink-shaming and erasing the identity of those that participate in a BDSM lifestyle by changing the name to this, so I suggest the "Digital Object Manipulation and Mastering Experience", or DOMME. It gets rid of any ableist baggage and allows those involved in BDSM to proudly identify with the project.....

Yes yes, I'll see myself out. Mine's the one with the riding crop in the pocket.

Outraged Virgin slaps IP trolls over dirty movie download data demands

I think I've seen this movie before

This is basically what Prenda was doing isn't it? Buying copyrights to smut, seeding it, and then threatening to sue people who allegedly downloaded it.

I hope the same thing happens with these upstanding parasites too.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Think of the Children (and the spies!)

Its very telling that the UK's ISPA is so dead set against this, because it'll make collection efforts targeting the unencrypted DNS by GCHQ that much harder. I expect that the usual suspects here in the US will as well, especially ARTIFICE (Verizon) and LITHIUM (AT&T). And unlike President Annoying Orange here who thinks that NSA/CSS and the rest of the TLAs are out to get him, neither Johnson nor Hunt is that paranoid over in your little slice of hell.

Facebook staff sarin for a bad day: Suspected chemical weapon parcel sent to Silicon Valley HQ

BW not CW

Huh. I'm kind of amazed that none of the pedants here have pointed this out yet, but Ricin's a Biological Weapon, its specifically a type of protein called a Lectin from the castor bean, and its horrendously lethal. Inhaled LD50 is like 3-5 µg/kg.

Re: Go crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy...

In case you non-Punks miss the reference:

Dead Kennedys - Chemical Warfare

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

FTFY

You forgot something, Apple offered a breakthrough, game-changing and exceptional multi-axis monitor orientation device at a more than reasonable price with enhanced privacy features that far outpace the VESA stand competition.

San Francisco votes no to facial-recognition tech for cops, govt – while its denizens create it

One rule for me, another for thee...

Seems to be the Bay Area mantra.

Sure, they'll fuck everything up for you, but don't count on seeing any of the bullshit they're inflicting on the rest of the world there because they're too preciously diverse and woke for it. Outside of California its foreign policy, amirite?

Ignore the noise about a scary hidden backdoor in Intel processors: It's a fascinating debug port

Re: Hmm.

The way I read it was that it not only required root, it required physical access on top of it, and that's a step above even root.

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Working as a continuity and emergency management contractor I can tell you no matter how good any professional is, devs included, if its not specified and outlined, its not getting done, that likely takes extra work/extra time and nobody rides for free. Plus, there may be a reason for why they didn't ask for it. It might be a stupid reason but its still not worth giving away your time and labor when it very well might just aggravate the client since it wasn't something they asked for. Maybe they're regulated and have to have things done a certain way (PCI, SOX, HIPAA, Title 13, EO 13526) or have security measures that you don't have need to know for that they'll add later.

None of this is to defend shitty practices, bad code, or bad QA, but when you're not told it needs to be done and you're getting paid a pittance even if you think its utterly stupid to not do whatever, it probably won't get done unless you run into the world's dumbest freelancer.

Academics publishing papers, who are universally seeking tenure (which is about the antithesis of temporary or freelance work), are probably the absolute fucking last people I'd ask about anything to do with a freelance job or the gig economy.