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The Guardian has a story detailing the firing of Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa)
President Trump made the announcement on Twitter on Tuesday, saying Krebs "has been terminated" and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was "highly inaccurate".
CISA last week released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the statement read. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Krebs, is a former Microsoft executive, and was appointed by President Trump after allegations of Russian interference with the 2016 election.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 20 2020, @01:45AM (4 children)
No, but I applied for work at a payments processing software company in Gainesville, Florida. Didn't get the jerb because I made 2x as much as the software manager, who himself made more than any given two of his code monkeys - not that he didn't think they were worth more, just that their owners refused to pay more. Hardly surprising the state of that "art." And, I'm not a prince or anything, just a code monkey for medical device startups running on academic grants at the time.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 22 2020, @01:19AM (3 children)
I didn't say the code was bad in comparison to all the other code out there. I'd never say it was bad compared to any code involved in healthcare. I said it's not secure enough to trust my money to.
Know why? Random idiots.
In online billing you have every random idiot who coded a piece of software that runs on any of the routers or boxes involved in a transaction; from your computer, to the bank's servers, to the nameserver you query for the A/AAAA record, to your home router that never gets software updates. In voting you have poll workers and those overseeing them.
All of the above should be assumed to be entirely crooked and doing their best to commit fraud for whoever you voted against. Placing blind trust in someone who self-selected to count other people's ballots is foolish in the extreme.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 22 2020, @01:31PM (2 children)
Well, I guess my point was: assuming that shop was typical (they did POS embedded card reader stuff), they had massive turnover in their programmers - in large part because they were paying them less than half of what I was paying zero experience code monkeys for medical device work.
There was a medical billing / office management shop around there that I interviewed with that had a similar situation - average tenure of a programmer was about 3 months, 1 year was rare, and if they stuck around longer they usually had to be fired because of their lack of ability. Being out of work at the time, I offered to work for whatever they wanted to pay, but I think they were afraid to bring in someone who actually stuck with a programming job for 2 to 10 years, they said "you'd just leave when you got a better offer" - well, yeah, or you could keep me if you think I'm worth paying for, but with an average turnover of 3 months what are the odds I'll find my next job even that fast?
Medical device software has its problems, but nowhere near on the scale of billing / finance related stuff. Life safety seems to get slightly better attention than financial safety.
The whole political / representative government system suffers from this problem. If I were immortal, I might try to do something about it. As it is, worrying too much about things you are essentially powerless to fix is even more foolish, IMO. Look for the maximal ROI: voting is low investment, and relatively high impact compared to devoting your life to "fixing the system."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
Most billing/finance code problems are at the admin or individual business level and caused by one person or a small group refusing to learn or follow best practices. Trying to reinvent the wheel or not taking threats seriously enough are the major causes of bad finance code.
It's rarely the code that causes the problem though. Mostly it's everyone having to deal with a bare minimum of two untrusted participants: the CC processing company and the site admin. Which is a large part of why we pawn our part off on the CC processing companies here at SN. They have plenty of time and manpower to get their shat right where we don't.
I still advise folks to never put anything but a single use prepaid card across the Internet though. Nobody's perfect and that money cost you quite a lot of your life, so expose only as much of it as you have to to risk.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 22 2020, @04:42PM
Oh, I finally did get a job at a high turnover shop once - they did video security, had a whole custom system coded over 5 years by a team of 4 programmers. Speaking of best practices, after I had been there about a week I asked: "how do I build this from source?" "Oh, it's all on this server here, ssh in and follow the scripts." "Great, um, when is the last time that system was backed up?" Crickets, followed by lame evasion. I'm barely 5 days on the job so I shrug and go back to my desk. Just after I start walking away there's a flurry of activity and a few minutes later an announcement that the build server is going down for about an hour. Since my work was just interrupted I casually walk over and ask the IT guy who just showed up how's it going? "Oh, great, we're just taking a VM image of this box that holds the only copy of our build system for 40% of the company revenue, on a spinning hard drive."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end