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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Reading the start of this article reminded me of a somewhat unrelated thing I saw: I remember seeing in "tech influencer" youtube video on how "Japan hasn't kept up with the west" when it comes to IT. Not to be super orientalist or whatever and assume Japan is doing better the US in IT, but what should they do instead, go the US route and put every thing on the cloud? Is that better?

I couldn't help it, it's literally in the article that this was part of the "NATO modernization" efforts. Perhaps whatever they had before would have failed too but it's clear that these "modernization" efforts aren't always better.

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System error: Japan cybersecurity minister admits he has never used a computer[0]

And did not know what to do with a USB.

This person was 50 in the year 2000, has clearly given up being part of or informed about modern society, and is made minister of cyber security.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/japan-cyber-se...

In line with the Persident of Nintendo who was reported to never play games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi

I don't have enough context on how well Yoshitaka Sakurada is doing in his job, but at a high enough level it's possible to be a good leader without skills required to do the job few levels below. (not sure it's a good idea to strive for, but still)

> at a high enough level it's possible to be a good leader without skills required to do the job few levels below

Sure. But being 68 and not being able to use a computer in 2018? Not recognizing what a USB stick is?

This is more about the fact that this person is not up-to-speed with society, doesn't really understand what has been happening around him the last 20 years. What dense Japanese cave did they find him in? Basic interest in society seems like a minimum to become a minister. The fact that he is minister for cyber security just adds irony to injury.

Agreed. One of my favourite manager types didn't have the first clue about the actual details of what we did. But he did listen to expert advice from the team beneath him and act on it. Bring the appropiate expert to meetings where it might be relevant and like you say, it can actually work. Obviously in an ideal world they'd know some basic bits, but if faced with the choice of a micromanager or a clueless person who listens to expert opinion i'll take the latter.

These counter-examples are what "prove the rule". They succeeded despite not playing with their own products. Good for them. But they are noteworthy because they are such outliers.

Counter-examples never prove the rule. Otherwise the same logic could also be used for the inept cyber-security minister, that he is noteworthy because he is an outlier. We have had education ministers who have never been teachers, defence ministers who have never served in the military, etc. and they are not noteworthy.

I'd say those people get the same noteworthiness treatment from the members of their respective professional fields.

well, that's the only way to never get pwned

I'm not sure how framing this in terms of IT migration to the cloud is helpful.

This could easily have happened if NATO contracted an equally-incompetent party to create and sysadmin a non-cloud data center.

Stop using fax will be enough to be considered modern by my standards

A type writer is more secure.

Maybe, until you need to send those docs somewhere.

never underestimate the avian carrier

EDIT: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2549

Beware:

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

I am pretty sure they use computers with internet on the government agencies. Unless the entire office uses typewriter or write with pen and the encryption being used by mechanical machines(does any mechanical machine exist provides the safety of AES?) your entire point seems void.

You joke about putting everything on the cloud, but it is one of the things that can massively accelerate innovation because you're no longer bound by paperwork to spin up a new server, or bound by server capacity for that matter.

You can well have a government organization which embraces the cloud, yet keeps exactly the same level of paperwork for acquiring or activating resources. It is a cultural matter well before a technological one.

And your Docker/k8s image provider is not bound by security policies to actually enable the firewall and/or have a default password at all for your database.

Yeah, you can no longer be bound by paperwork. But - having worked in digitalization projects for several megacorps - Bureaucracy is a beast, and it refuses to die - before long, you have now underemployed bureaucrats taking four weeks for registering an (internal) domain or a 14-page-project-outline with no less than 5 alignment meetings (involving ITSec, Compliance, the GDPR lawyer (even though you don't handle user-data), someone who wants to be promoted and 10 guys from Accenture for slidedeck-preparation) for a VM.

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