Title: Checking In
Date: 20250222
Tags: me
========================================

Well, I had anticipated returning to phlogging on gopher more regularly right
away after my returning post over a month ago.  This last month turned out to be
a bit of a lot to deal with and a distraction from other efforts.

I don't need to get into the details of what everyone is already witnessing in
the US but there are other, more personal factors as well.  Such as my job being
at the confluence of government contracts, science, and education so there is
much unknown about future impacts we may see.

This all happens to be coming at a point of great dissatisfaction with my job
already.  I'm in an IT role but, as you can probably tell by my use of gopher, I
am growing increasing dissatisfied and frustrated with the modern technology
landscape.  Tech oligarchy aside.  Software I have to deal with is increasingly
becoming more "enterprisey", which I define loosely as being so full of features
we won't use, and so complex as to force the sale of support contracts and
outsourcing of support.  Our company IT department seems to mostly comprise of
people who open tickets with vendors instead of people who can actually fix
things.

The march to the cloud has been a long-time frustration as well.  We're supposed
to care about and prioritize security, yet leave it in the hands of unknown
people who are regularly breached...repeatedly.  A lot of our move to the cloud
has been forced by the enterprise software companies we sold our souls to
previously for on-prem software.  They simply phase out support for on-prem and
since no one internal can support anything, we are forced to go wherever the
vendor sends us further locking us in.

The last shred of illusion of security came when the CrowdStrike bricking of
Windows system around the world touched us.  We were piloting the software so
impact was mercifully minimal.  And we actually made the right choice to stop
perusing CrowdStrike products.  We'll see how long that lasts as we continue to
use SolarWinds, Okta, M365, etc...  However, we have several other products,
running with root or system privileges on every system, that is cloud connected
and allows the vendor to push code in their own.  We had our vulnerability
scanners bricked by the vendor recently, but at least they had the decency to
only break their own software...but leave us to clean up the mess.  The very
idea of allowing 3rd parties to push arbitrary code, as root, to all of our
company systems is madness to me.  "Security" is no longer attainable in this
environment.

Well, this turned into a bit of a venting rant.  And I didn't even get into AI,
modern cars, surveillance capitalism, or the web.  I don't know what I'll be
doing about any of this, yet.  I'm afraid decisions might be made for me
eventually.  Hopefully I can focus on something fun an interesting to share,
regardless.

P.S. It was nice to see my phlog is still being checked by gopher.black after
all of these years.  Not sure I'm still on any other phlog rolls but didn't
want to advertise anyway until I was sure to be posting regularly.  Glad that I
didn't jump the gun on that. :)