acruns

Remember Ring's partnership with 1300 local police departments?

https://www.wired.com/story/ces-2020-amazon-defends-ring-pol...

Remember Ring's Android app being full of 3rd party trackers?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-pack...

Remember Ring's implementation of E2EE?

Neither do I.

While I don't really care from the perspective of 'I don't do anything illegal', I don't own any ring / Alexa / Nest / Home automation. Mostly because I don't like the trend towards optimal laziness personally, and it doesn't provide much in the way of value. The video shows this, the guys house is already broken into, is a drone going to stop a burglar from taking your laptop off that kitchen table? I have a better deterent, a dog which is much more effective according to felons (https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/crime/we-asked-86-burglars...)

This is just too creepy to me.

edit:formatting

Wouldn't that be the record companies though? I have heard Kanye is trying to get more money for artists but not really sure. I am puzzled why blockchain+streaming for music hasn't taken off. Artists would maintain rights and profits from what I can tell

That is an absolutely wonderful use of the word cache.

I recently came across a site called all sides.com, it shows news articles from the far left, left, center, right, and far right. Its rather interesting to just compare the headlines, let alone the articles.

Pretty awesome!

Their service plans to compete with Twilio. Very interesting, hopefully they can compete on price also. Twilio is a bit pricey IMO.

Why would they limit there revenue to a single platform? That doesn't make sense to me. But I don't play videogames, haven't since my kids were teenagers, think Call of Duty. I have sold software to corporate, and I can say the revenue from software sales far outweigh hardware revenues.

"if the customers are fake there is no load on the system. How does engineering not figure that out?

There were real customers and the customer growth was happening, especially in 2020. The problem is that the customer base and growth was nowhere near what Adam Rogas was cooking up on the backend."

This doesn't really answer the question. The article states 40-90% of customers were fictional, as a cloud architect I would have to design based on the number of customers ++ and of course I would setup monitoring and alerting with auto scaling and it would be blatantly obvious that my utilization was not going up and that would turn into an engineering investigation.

Would it leed me to the idea that most of our customers were fake? probably not. They might not even request additional capacity, but as a architect that would lead me to ask questions. For example after an announcement or company meeting where they announce the number of new customers, I would wonder wtf? How is it that we haven't added any more capacity for all these new customers?

I would see some red flags and I would like to think I would be smart enough to start looking for something new but I haven't been in such a situation thankfully.

It's difficult to read about 200 ppl being laid off and the impact on them and thier family all bc of one stupid, greedy person.

I am months from being 50 and I am a cloud architect/eng/admin. I am a former Microsoft MVP (rMVP) in System Center, I have co-authored books on the subject, spoke at conferences, blah, blah, I was a pretty big deal in the space, so much so that competitors would routinely try to hire me. I can still recall the moment when I thought 'I need to get out of this space and into cloud' At the time I was part of a sales team for a gold partner standing in an AMEX building talking to a developer who needed to secure Azure bc there was nothing more than a network and VM functionality and 'some VP had decided all new dev work was going to be done in the cloud'. This was the tipping point, not some revelation, I had been thinking about it for about a year. So I started spending my weekends learning cloud, eventually transitioned to a new job that was 50/50 cloud and system center. Did that again in the hopes of moving to 100% cloud, but it's hard when you have a huge reputation to not be utilized for that skill. Eventually I landed with a small firm that worked exclusively with the Azure team at MSFT on difficult customer use cases the MCS couldn't handle. 10 years later....I have tons of peers/friends who still do system center and I have talked to a lot of them about moving to cloud and almost all of them give me push back on it. These are ppl with ~20 years left working. And not that their skills are irrelevant, system center does Windows 10 deployments, patching, config management, inventory, so on. But it is going away as far as a need. They of course disagree, maybe it will always be around but it's not going to be adding features.

I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.

My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.

I didn't read it, and won't. Amazon got out played by msft. Bezos is an amateur compared to the likes of the DOD team at msft, buying a mansion in DC to host parties, come on Bezos, such an amateur move. Getting into a public pissing match with the POTUS, stupid. Crying foul for months and months and then writing a story about your slippery slope theory, amateur, and locks you out of more cloud business with .gov. I have personally been through this process, albeit not a $10B contract but very very large, and it comes down to relationships. Jeff should be doing everything he can to steal away that msft sales team that came in and made them look like fools so they can win the next bid. He isn't playing against Barnes and Nobles, this is a corporation that will spend tens of millions developing a competing product and give it away for free for years to bankrupt it's competitors, they don't play fair.

I think they are the enemy of the people and our nation. Neither side can be trusted to deliver unbiased information and instead do their best to invoke feelings of fear, hostility, anger, hatred, but most of all fear in an effort to sell more commercial time/clicks/papers. And a large part of both sides look to their news outlet to confirm their bias and at the same time grow their bias based on the latest injustice/tragedy/incomprehensible outrage, further driving the (two) sides further apart, growing their hatred for the other side, fear that the other side is going to end their way of life, so on.

People still mostly believe what they watch and read, blindly. Especially when it coincides with their own views. And by making up more lies, more exaggerations, or making it seem like we are all going to die if Trump/Biden gets elected as the next God, they are perpetually making things worse with each story.

How hard is it to be honest and unbiased? Isn't that your job anyway?

You can also use @googlemail.com domain name instead of @gmail.com to double the number of email addresses.

Getting part-time help in sales is going to be hard. It will depend on how long your sales cycle is too.

Sales reps will happily work on commission only if they see a huge market for your product. Which might be difficult to show with a new product.

The commission rate is negotiable at the hiring point. If they are great at sales and know there is a big market they will want a lower base with a higher commission. You should also set a commission cap at some point as your variable costs increase your profit will drop and you could end up at a point where the sales team is making more than the company.

I just assume if a politician is speaking they are lying, at best misleading. Add in marketing, I assume it is a lie, regardless of political party.

A former employer of mine wanted me to relocate to their HQ in NorCal and they were going to give me a raise to cover the cost of living increase. (I decided not too.)

I can tell you generally how this works in Azure, I can't speak for AWS, but unless a customer is using BYOK for encryption of their data, I can't imagine how AWS c o u l d n ' t be capable of accessing data, and even then I wouldn't gurantee they couldn't still get your data. In Azure (as of a couple years ago), in order to access a customer's tenant it required VP approval, the support engineer was granted access for a specific amount of time, and typically only to specific services, all with the customers knowledge beforehand. It may have changed since the last time I had to go through this process and was restricted to blue badge employees. I have worked support cases since then and the support engineer would not even do a log me in/WebEx, etc session as they said they were not allowed to see the portal. But it may have been that they were not a blue badge and/or bcuz the customer was a critical infrastructure customer.

In order for AWS to comply with LEO's they must have some way of accessing data, that is NOT to say they do this for business purposes.

When will this happen to keyboards?

They do this every year at their EOY.

This is a common misperception of foreign infosec. Most foreign infosec is much older and basic than most would believe. This comes from the lack of trust between cooperating countries and basic skills. Not to say they aren't smart ppl but most ppl shy away from this type of work even when it's possible bc of the downside of being the one that leaked 40gb of video, this impacts them and their entire family in ways we wouldn't even consider in the west. And on top of it they don't have the cooperation of their allies in most cases to help advance their tech. Then on top of all that a lot of what they know is stolen instead of learned so when you don't really understand the tech to begin with, it's very difficult to make advances to it. It would be like me, a non-programmer, but great scripter getting c source code that has no documentation and being asked to add a feature to the program.

Yes, you can be sure the c level suite is at least getting updates and monitoring the deal if not involved in the f2f meetings. These types of massive deals always involve back scratching as well.

Yes. EARNIT from earlier this year was bipartisan. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-ba...

it would more likely be that one of their systems being down would cause this ;)

typically you just disable the 2fa requirement until the issue is resolved.

I have found that having a serial killer resting face precludes me from these type of workplace bullies (only kinda joking).

I guess if their DR firedrill assumed their failover router hosting the status page could never go down it would pass, but come on IBM.

Brian has already been through swatting, had a hacker send heroin and police to his home. I believe there was another article where he was warned by the FBI to take precautions as there was a threat against his life (I might be confusing him with someone else... it's been a while since I worked in infosec).

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/02/men-who-sent-swat-team-h...

Do you plan to add the members of the House?

I get this same thing with being invited to an Azure instance. years later I still have full access

I have a range I stay in. I have a SOW that I just use a template, pull things out, put things in, depending on the scoping call/requirements. I don't do MSA's.

Delighted to help.

- When you were getting started, how did you find your contracts? Did you use an agency or recruiters, or make connections on your own?

My network. I had worked in technical sales for several years and had built up a decent size network and a great reputation. I did approach one local smaller agency where I knew they specialized in an area of consulting and I was in the same realm but they didn't have anyone who did the type of work I specialize(d) in so I offered to accompany them on calls/meetings to expand the sale and they took a portion of the revenue. I did the same with another firm that was small and I knew the owner. I haven't used agents or recruiters, I guess I haven't needed to but if they add value I wouldn't have a problem using them to get land gigs. It's always about the work, I don't chase the money, and I find that the works (usually) turns out to be great and the money is too.

- How do you negotiate the length of a contract? From what I've seen, most employers are looking for 6 months to a year, while most freelancers are looking for 2 to 4 months.

I don't do staff augmentation work if I can avoid it. Then it is all project based work, so a few months, typically. Although I had a gig last almost a year last year. I scope out the work and send them a SOW, we can negotiate rates but I always bid high. If I was just starting out and building a reputation I would bid lower, and tell them that I was purposely bidding low and ask them for a letter of reference and/or take reference calls from other customers.

- How long did it take to start charging premium rates?

Not long but I had a head start because of my reputation and blog. The market dictates the rate quite a bit, and I changed my specialty so I went through a period of about six months where I was transitioning and charged lower rates to get gig to build my reputation back up and get the experience.

Obviously it's a tough market right now but I'm trying to figure out how to turn some small contracts into a sustainable lifestyle and would love to learn from your experience.

This is the best thing you can do. I have found if you treat customers like family, they will fall in love with you and want you on all their projects. I get birthday and Christmas cards (yes they still exist) from customers. I get asked advice on other projects that have nothing to do with my specialty because they trust my opinion. I get asked to bid on work even if its remotely related to what I do. I had the worlds largest financial company (you can guess who it is) wait four months for me to be available for work, essentially holding up their entire project for me. I regularly get asked by the largest airline in the US if I know anyone that specializes in 'blah' because we have built a level of trust over the last six years, and I pass that work on to my network.

I feel like if I treat everyone with respect and kindness it is returned back to me 10x. For example, if a dir at said airline calls me at 2am, I pick up the phone and do anything I can to help, at no cost, and then call him about a week later to see if things are working and almost every time I get work from it.

If you can build and maintain those relationships you will have more work than you can handle.