Blog – Page 74 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Nopsrisk, Irisk

When it’s time, it’s time. Of course, meaning that the tough get going.
Lately, there has been a resurgence in Risk Management. In particular, in Operational risk management. That has been outclassed. Due to, among others, the calimero hanging-on at the tails of financial risk management but having failed to gain traction because the latter’s models were wholly inapplicable and seriously outright unusable for ops risk, due to having no clothes of one’s own (still, the upstart little peasant kid wanted to be emperor), due to having been outflanked by its little nephew of Information / IT Risk Management. That took on the coat of ‘cyber’ (#ditchcyber!) and gained prominence on all the vast wastelands that were left for the picking — and are now overwhelming the heartland with their successes in actual, frontline, FLOT hand-to-hand combat and battles (won).

Time, maybe, to give IRM the prominence it deserves, and forego the subsumption under ops risk ..?

It’s nothing personal…

[Soon again: Serralves]

Not your clients!

An outcry: Stop calling ‘clients’ what are just mass tools to make a profit (incl public sector…) for your actual clients…!

When, why, did the non-politically grossly in-correct usage of ‘clients’ come from, where not only the Facebooks of this world will serve you crumbs and deliver your value to others ..? Because all sorts, yes the dullest of dullest too or in particular, of public sector organisations fall prey to the emptiest of sympathies when they denote their fully captives as ‘clients’, or at best, ‘civilians’ as if they themselves are not the most average, mediocre, irrelevant of those denominiations themselves ..? ‘Clients’ of a social services organisation ARE NOT; apologies for the shout, they are captives, with no alternative to turn to (like actual clients could) but the actual client is some politician(s) that have just enough brains to be the last one standing / clinging to their seats while everyone of anything approaching intelligence even at great distance, will have left or have been pushed out by actually caring for the ‘clients’s interests.
‘Clients’ are just the mass fodder, nothing (sic) more despite all the efforts to paint a social, relating picture.
Get real. Stop the outright lying.

Oh well.

[Actual palace of the People; of course this is Pistoia]

Cucumber going bananas

Anyone care to share their found most sorry news item re information security this Summer? Since it appears that the Cucumber Season (silly season) of InfoSec has started already. I mean: Is there anything infosecnews that is greeted with more than a wry cynical smile ..? Like, you know, “Been there done that ages ago, like, last May”. And nothing that the General Public panics about, that wasn’t in the same response category on the In side.

Or …? Is there anything that you, as the Insider par excellence, might go bananas about? Your ~~vote~~ opinion counts!

[Prayers ~~go the same way, still~~ may have changed somewhat; insider tip: Old Church Amsterdam]

DAUSA

Maybe we should just push for a swift implementation of the megasystem that will be the Digitally Autonomous USA. No more need for things like a ‘POTUS’, or ‘Congress’ or so. When we already have such fine quality of both and renewal on the way into perfection (right?), and things like personal independence and privacy are a sham anyway, the alternative isn’t even that crazy.

But then, there’s a risk (really?): Not all the world conforms yet to, is yet within, the DAUSA remit. Though geographical mapping starts to make less and less sense, there’s hold-outs (hence: everywhere) that resist even when that is futile. The Galactic Empire hasn’t convinced all to drop ~~the Force~~ irrationality and take the blue pill, though even Elon Musk is suspected of being an alien who warns us we’re living in a mind fantasy [this, true, actually — the story not the content so much].
But do you hope for a Sarah Connor ..? Irrationality again, paining yourself with such pipe dreams.

On the other hand … Fearing the Big Boss seems to be a deep brain psychology trick, sublimating the fear of large predators from the times immemorial (in this case: apparently not) when ‘we’ (huh, maybe you, by the looks of your character and ethics) roamed the plains as hunter-gatherers. So if we drop the fear, we can ‘live’ happily ever after; once the perfect bureaucracy has been established. Which might be quite some time from now you’d say, given the dismal idio…cracy of today’s societal Control, or may be soon, when ASI improves that in a blink, to 100,0% satisfaction. Tons of Kafka’s Prozesses be damned.

Wrapping up, hence, with the always good advice to live fearlessly ..! 😉

[Some Door of Perception! (and entry); De Haar castle]

Print Goodbye World

Somehow, got triggered that there’s a near future where 100 print “Hello world” would meet with Sorry Dave, I can’t compile that not even with warnings (what; no 200 End ..!?) — because one’s not supposed to be able to influence the Machine. No red pills allowed.

Oh the things that keep me awake at night [they don’t]. Soon, baby, soon. Plus:

[Just Lotharingen things; Nancy]

Generation Majordomo

In a slight twist of fate, two weeks ago some fashionable magazine decided to drop caps off ‘Internet’ and just write it internet.
Back then, when drafting this post. About the good times, when people hung out at Woodstock or so, or, well, say, since the 80s, when all sorts of inventions brought one wave of new jargon words and meanings after another.

Also when it struck me that, e.g., ‘majordomo’ seems to be a derelict word. At least, re moderated discussion sites. What Happen — All Your Base Are Belong To Us is almost gone, superseded by Dat Boi (as here). ‘PC compatible’, ‘carriage return’, ‘portals’, ‘surfing’, ‘fax’, ‘PDAs’, ‘modem’ (Hayes compatible, 2800 baud!), ‘Alta Vista’ (the search engine), ‘dynamic HTML’, … all goners.

But apart from the curiosity value, and a few Googled sites with partial information, there’s no real one go-to (sic, or even Goto Considered Dangerous!) site or, in?appropriately, physical location where one can find exhibits of Lost Computer Words.

How sad. We’re losing massive historic reference here, people! Get up and Do Something!

’cause I have no clue how to tackle such a thing… But I do have:
DSCN6309
[A gem oh so easily missed; the Aubette at Place Kléber Strasbourg — sorry old unedited pic, still]

Save a few

Just a reminder; Dutch lower gov’t agencies struggling with storage formats … (Here, in Dutch, but Alphabet Translate (heh that still doesn’t ring well!) may help)

There may be hope for (!) privacy. And:

[Nice, functional (as / where it is), and certainly will look Old before you know it; La Défense]

Pebnickanic

Hey why are so many using PICNIC instead of the age-old PEBKAC ..? No, I’m not complaining ‘because’ old, nor on the ‘ …, got the T-shirt’ route. Just would want to know. Is it that the latter is too difficult to remember the meaning of ..? If so: Sad for its Shallows calibre. If otherwise: Please advise.

Well then…:

[Trismegistus’ view on things. Obvious where.]

Human / Not

Of course Cerf is right. But also … is the opposite side; human error would be harmless (save the Almost part) when vulnerabilities wouldn’t be attacked. As long as they exist, they will. And human error will exist; that’s just the way our genes, and memes, and all of Nature, play it out. The instability of Nature (here and here!) means evolution happens, works. On the Changing-environment- and on the trial-through-error sides.

Hence, you’re still where you started. Still pursuing max fault-freedom but sure to not achieve it. I.e., in danger — the Condition Humaine since the dawn of Time (on that in a PhD thesis, some other time) and dismissing Hegelian progress fantasies, forever.

Well then, to leave in a positive tone:

[No time ?? for R&R; outside Siena]

Overwhelmed by ‘friendly’ engineers

The rage seems to be with chat bots, lately. Haven’t met any, but that may only be me — not being interesting enough to be overwhelmed by their calls.
Which will happen, in particular to those in society that have less than perfect resistance against the various modes of telesales and other forms of social engineering (for phishing and other nefarious purposes) already. Including all sorts of otherwise-possibly-bright-and-genius-intelligent-but (??)-having-washed-up-in-InfoSec-for-lack-of-genuine-societal-intelligence types like us. But these being the ones of all stripes that ‘we’ need to protect, rather than the ones apparently already so heavily loaded that they can spare the dime for development of such hyper-scaling ultra-travelling foot-in-the-door salesmen. Is this the end stage, where none have a clue as to which precious little interaction is still actually human-to-human, and the rest may be discarded ..?

As for the latter … It raises the question of Why, in communications as a human endeavor… Quite a thought.

But for the time being, you’re hosed, anti-phishing-through-social-engineeringwise.

Just sayin’. Plus:

[Retreat, a.k.a. Run to the hills / Run for your life; but meant positively! Monte Olivieto Maggiore near Siena]