Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot wait until we are able to afford to run our critical business infrastructure on our own computers (again).

I have a lot of trust in Microsoft & Amazon, but with the complexity of their organizations, there is no way they can provide the same kind of security assurances as if I were to have my own locked cage at some colo. Certainly, you could spin a fantastical tale about how AWS's 23+ layer physical security perimeter is superior to whatever is available at my local facilities. But, I have grown to classify this sort of stuff under the "what if 2 SHA256 hashes collide" category of fear-driven development.

I almost have to convince myself on a daily basis now that "everything is fine" with how we are currently using the cloud. The selling points for moving to the cloud are very powerful and I agree with most of them. But at the same time, the idea that you are locked into this same combined fate as everyone else leaves me with the constant sensation that I should have brought a parachute with me.

It's scary what was once called "spyware", "malware", "adware" or "other"-ware has become so commonplace and accepted.

You type in Windows 10 search and it sends your keystrokes to Microsoft, you log into Windows 10 OS (and they push hard for this during setup, they actively make it hard to use an "offline" profile) and it records your every interaction with that computer; with "full" telemetry it records every web page you visit, every app you launch, every app that has an error (you can download an app from MS store to see what telemetry W10 is sending to MS, it's quite illuminating)

These days, more and more of society expects you to have a smartphone and "apps"; "please can you scan a QR code to enter this restaurant". A supermarket has an app and offers in-store discounts on food, your data subsidizes the cost of what you purchase. Many offers are locked behind a social contract of "you give me data and I'll give you some money off". It's amusing to see how 'cheap' people are and how much data they are willing to freely give away in the name of a very very small discount (the data is worth much more than the savings you are getting).

An always online, always connected fully digital society is prone to attacks, hacks and disturbances. We've seen hospitals held to ransom and have paid bitcoins to get critical machines working again, something that shouldn't even be possible, yet one person who opens $phishingEmail.exe can bring down an entire network.

Our life is essentially in the hands of crudely built machines, with absolutely no security against basic human errors - and we trust these with the very foundation of society. One day we will witness a truly devastating hack, a disturbance unlike anything we've known previously, and it'll likely be as devastating as the Beirut explosion. It's not an if, but a when.

I want to return to a time without cars or computers, even just for a brief period (the lockdown was so nice this year. the hum of the birds and not the thunder of engines was a blessing).

A supermarket has an app and offers in-store discounts on food, your data subsidizes the cost of what you purchase.

This isn't new to smartphones. Grocery stores have had discount cards for ages. You might even have one in your wallet.

A smartphone is much more valuable, it offers richer data and capabilities than a discount card. An app can access tonnes of 'free' information provided by the OS (model, make, package list), as well as logging each and every tap/interaction and accessing personal information (contacts lists, location data, device identifiers you can trace across datasets)

You can see which offers people engage with most, how often they open your app, well timed push notifications and a reliance on that app. They can also purchase data from that smartphone and have huge data silos to perform studies on. An App provides access to a human being constantly, whereas a discount card is a stateless entity in a wallet that never gets used; it's unlikely someone loses their smartphone, it's a prized possession.

Quite honestly, discount cards are probably quite worthless vs smartphone data and the richness of what you can get. I am surprised they are even still used/offered these days (I know of supermarkets that just have apps now).

Those discount cards didn't track you round the store.

I've found that very often the cashier will swipe their own discount card if you tell them you don't have one of your own. You can also, in practice at Safeway at least, ask for a new one each time. I used to collect them just for shits and giggles, I had dozens before I got bored of it.

As a tracking mechanism, they rely on the customer cooperating and using the card as intended.

There are ceiling-mounted facial recognition cameras for that now. Have a Customer who brought in some cameras for "people counting" from Xovis. Their's gear purported capabilities are down right scary.

[1] https://www.xovis.com

Maybe they realized I'd flip out if they asked but apparently Verizon now encourages people to "install McAfee on their router." This does exactly what you would expect: terminate SSL connections and only allow web access if you install their CA cert.

I only know this because the person in charge of internet at the house my girlfriend currently lives at was convinced by the ISP to set it up and now her machine has malware on it.

> One day we will witness a truly devastating hack, a disturbance unlike anything we've known previously

Yeah I recall Mikko Hyppönen in one of his talks describing how malware got encoded into DNA so it could propagate like a true virus. And there was a story recently of malware getting into some biotech lab and changing the genetic code to create mutant pathogens. If any malware authors are reading this: stop being so ruthless and unethical. You have a duty of care when you write code. You need to wield your technical prowess responsibly!

There is a version of Windows 10 made just for China to remove all the surveillance because China thought Windows 10 was such an invasion of privacy and security risk that they wouldn’t use it otherwise. Think about that when you’re falling asleep at night.

Actually, the Microsoft developers should think about that when they are trying to fall asleep at night.

I believe it'll happen as soon as on-premise hosting is given a marketing-friendly name. Like "cloudless". Host your containers in a cloudless habitat, at a fraction of the cost!

It will be hailed as a hallmark of innovation. Any voices claiming that such a thing has always been possible will be tutted.

There’s something suspiciously similar about getting an AWS outpost in your datacenter and buying an IBM mainframe.

https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/42u/

Run sunny! BE the spurce of business value! Radiate, and let your user's bask in the warmth of...

Eh nevermind. Psychopathic corporations don't need an invitation to view themselves as Sun gods.

Why do we think that 'our own servers' gives us 'better security'?

I think this is the illusion of control.

"security assurances as if I were to have my own locked cage at some colo."

'Locked cage' - is not going to help us secure it from the kind of intrusion we are afraid of.

Scale means more layers of vms, more redundancy, more sophisticated security teams etc..

Physically, Fort Knox has never been robbed, whereas any mom and pop shop can be.

I'm really surprised the US Military has not been working with the FAANGS to produce a new OS that is fundamentally more secure and containerized, including a networking stack with identity built right in, and of course, working on easy solutions for the user side of the equation as well to thwart social attacks. And maybe possibly systems architecture groupings to bifurcate systems from one another.

That would be because the last time DoD did the most workable and approachable solution was one without all those gubbins that you could just bolt on later.

By the way, what you're endorsing are essentially ASICS. They're fundamentally impractical as all hell. The logistics of security causes a verbosity explosion when you actually need to change something. Imagine the world we have now with 1000x the paperwork, and a bigger chunk of the populace devoted to just enabling somebody to go from point A to B to do something.

And even then. You're only as secure as your Users will tolerate.

You can. You just have to use other software that isn't your go-to brand name software. Like: http://www.openoffice.org

Security resources are sparse and large companies pay lots of money and hire them away. So attempting to defend by yourself could leave you more vulnerable. Probably a middle ground is the best- to benefit from expertise on both sides.

Companies are hiring and working with tons of physical security pentesters to assess how much easy is it to enter their offices. At the same time nobody is paying anyone to assess for the security of my house. But I'm sure it is easier to enter a Google office than my home

Good point, that's why the industry is moving (some companies have already moved to) an approach that assumes your device is compromised and your work laptop and identity is treated as untrusted by default which does not get you unvetted access to everything. You might have todo many things to get more access... and still there is no 100% security, just a little more security

We don't get anything by default. Not even slack clone or email. And if we don't use something for 90 days we lose it. It's not uncommon in my role to have to request something every day. Then have to wait for manager approval, sometimes one up approval, Then resource owner approval, Then wait for provisioning etc. Even read only github access requires senior manager approval (A relatively high role, like 3-4 away from the CEO at a Fortune 50 company)

We can't plug in USB drives either and our database queries are logged and suspicious queries (the heuristics for "suspicious" is not great admittedly) automatically get sent to your manager. Even the files on the hard drive are scanned. I've had so many false positives for the prior two things.

Also we're totally moving away from laptops. Everything will be a thin client. The performance on the things is miserable due to oversubscription and technical limitations.

That's exactly opposite of what I see the industry going, with single sign on and authentication services being all the buzz everywhere.

Anyway, how do all those services authenticate your users? By checking their passwords in the MS AD server?

> I have a lot of trust in Microsoft

I’d love to trust Microsoft. They have a lot of talented people working on a lot of cool things.

But, they voluntarily collaborated with the US Government to spy on their users at home and abroad, and those people are still in charge, as far as I know.

btw, one attack vector was that on premise is connected to azure ad and the on premise installation already had malware and the malware stealed security tokens.

Why can't you afford it now?

Capex & salary requirements. I personally don't have the time to drive to the datacenter to fix something. We'd need someone who is available pretty much on-demand to manage the hardware acquisition/install/maintenance/decommissioning. We are a very small organization. One extra person is a big deal for us.

That said, its really close to being possible. We are going to look at it hard next year. With the density coming out of AMD these days, we can probably solve the capex problem pretty easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com