All software vendors, 2018:
So then all the customer's data, every tiny detail of their lives, is uploaded into the giant central computer hub located in another country. And your life gets much better! It only costs you $1000 a day. Any questions?
Me:
Uh. um. What, like, stops bad, uh, bad people, all that power in one place
Vendor (laughing):
We knew you'd ask! So we only allow a tiny insular self-selected, rich, social elite to run the giant central computer.
CEO (nods):
Very wise.
One does not simply... NOT put all the things in the Cloud
I thought you understood Computer
Q: "this path we're committed to, is it wise?"
A: (pitying look) "It's happening. You can't stop it. Everything is going this way."
A: "I know everyone's doing it, but is it *wise*. Will we regret this later?"
Q: (shuffle papers) "Let's move on."
Disclaimer: My actual CEO was not actually in the room.
But very few things scare me quite as much, bone-deep, as the average IT person's implicit trust in the pure-hearted goodness of Large Corporations.
The bigger the corporation, the more the trust.
It's amazing.
I don't know whom you've been addressing, but IT people are in my experience some of the most cynical people I've met - with the possible exception of lawyers.
@jankoekepan The vendor was selling a cloud-based antivirus solution, which sends telemetry from every workstation of every running process and every opened file up to The Cloud (in another country), where Big Data Algorithms would do unspecified correlation-y things with all other users' data to detect if there were ongoing security threats.
All the people in the room were security engineers.
They pitied my naive distrust of The Cloud.
You just don't NOT do The Cloud, even in security.
@jankoekepan You just don't DO on-premises servers and even on-premises security analysis consoles. It's all cloud, cloud, cloud.
Security is MUCH better done in another country, by a large corporation.
That way you know it's secure, see.
In fact we should probably be MORE suspicious of all OUR employees, because they're not Cloud.
@natecull @jankoekepan What hellish otherworldly place did this vendor apparate from?
@natecull @jankoekepan *screaming of the DAMNED!!!*
My take on situations like that was usually to put out an email stipulating the perceived risk profile, request commentary on mitigations, and copy it widely. That way when lawsuits arise, I can say that I Told You So.
But you can't stop a C-suite stuffed shirt from doing whatever they decide.
@jankoekepan @natecull EMTs, too.
@natecull convenience beats trust, every time. convenience is always a convincing (but often quite false) synonym for "more efficient" which is then translated to "less expensive" to C-level decision maker types.
@aag And it certainly is less expensive.
Running a physical server room, installing racks, and setting up and paying for air conditioning is a *pain*.
@natecull but don't you see? Because they are rich they are inherently good! Otherwise they wouldn't be rich. Because my pastor teaches me that being good will make me rich, so since they are rich they must be good.
@natecull What do you expect? Techies tend to be geeks and nerds, and get their culture from megacorporations. They won't bite the hand that feeds them poisoned meat.
They don't have the guts for that.
@natecull IBM guy: "We foresee a global market of perhaps five giant central computers."
Roomful of CEOs: (nods)
@bstacey It's scary how prescient that now looks, yeah.
Five might be an overestimate.
Amazon, Azure, uuhh.......
@natecull Facebook, NSA
@suetanvil i remember a big installation of those at sun in the mid-00s (i guess i assume it was x and not some earlier display protocol thing that i don't know anything about), when i was working the mailroom there. the sometime awfulness of solaris as an end-user unix environment at the time aside, it was really a pretty impressive thing. stick your card in a machine sitting on basically any desk in the building and there's your desktop session right where you left it.
@suetanvil anyway now the network is the computer and we've all got android phones or whatever instead of that, was i think @hirojin's point.
and we use HTML5 and Javascript and React running inside of X inside of Java instead of just X inside of Java
@natecull @brennen @suetanvil so android really does run X?
I assume it does... or did they replace it with Wayland or something shinier?
@suetanvil @brennen @hirojin @natecull Android graphics are their own thing, yeah: https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/ and I want to say ChromeOS has it documented down in https://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents and neither are X11 (nor Wayland/Weston) but are of the more modern philosophy of Wayland/Weston.
I read about them but never got to try one. My Xperience (hurr hurr) was in the previous decade using the monochrome NCDs (and later, Unix workstations) my school had.
The latter ended up being nicer because most people didn't know you could log into them remotely and just treated them as (X) terminals for the (often overloaded) servers.
@bstacey we call them AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure
seriously if you want to watch a room go dead still with an embarrassed, pitying silence because there is a very dumb person in it who just doesn't understand Modern Computer
just ask questions about Why Put All The Things In The Cloud, What About Privacy