Monthly Archives: May 2017

When Were They Not?

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All IT Jobs Are Cybersecurity Jobs Now goes the headline on a recent Wall Street Journal article, and the subhead reads The rise of cyberthreats means that the people once assigned to setting up computers and email servers must now treat security as top priority.

It’s like these folks—both in the IT arena and in the reporting media—have just had an epiphany.

The global “WannaCry” ransomware attack that peaked last week, and has affected at least 200,000 computers in 150 countries, as well as the growing threat of Adylkuzz, another new piece of malware, illustrate a basic problem that will only become more pressing as ever more of our systems become connected: the internet wasn’t designed with security in mind, and dealing with that reality isn’t cheap or easy.

No, it wasn’t.  But it’s not the Internet that’s at the heart of these failures.  It’s the company connections to the Internet, and the corporate human employees who aren’t being trained in how to handle the company’s connection to the Internet that is at the heart of these failures.  IT has—or should have had—security at its heart from the time the first companies connected themselves to the Internet.

Even if nation-level espionage might not have been on the minds of private enterprise, the proprietary nature of company information and the fact of corporate espionage are as old as corporations.

Christopher Mims, in his article at the link, offered some sound advice for today.  That the advice should have been obvious yesterday in no way invalidates it for today.

  1. Retrain IT staff on security—or replace them. In today’s world of ever-multiplying threats and dependence on connected assets, all IT staff must now be cybersecurity staff first.

Indeed.

  1. Push everything to the cloud. It used to be the job of IT personnel was to build and maintain the tools employees need. Now, pretty much anything can be done better with a cloud-based service.

I disagree with this.  The cloud is no more securable than a corporate’s internal network—and when (not if) the cloud gets hacked, it won’t be only one company’s stuff that gets stolen or held hostage.  Even if it’s only a company’s internal cloud that gets hacked, the whole of the company’s innards get exposed.

  1. New IT investment will need baked-in security.

Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?

Safe Spaces and Clarity of Thought

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As The Wall Street Journal pointed out in an interview with Northwestern University’s President Morton Schapiro, the University of Chicago’s President Robert Zimmer has a view of the nature of safe spaces and the relationship between them and collegiate education.

incoming freshmen [should expect] to expect discomfort—not safe spaces—on his campus.

Schapiro, instead, wants to coddle his pupils as though they’re still two years old.

Northwestern President Morton Schapiro takes a gentler approach.

He believes that because learning is frequently uncomfortable, students need safe spaces—which for him means places where people who share an identity can retreat, relax, and recoup.

Of course, they already have that: their dorm rooms, where students of like mind gather along with the room’s occupants; the school’s student unions, where several groups gather, each one consisting in the main of students of like mind.  Forcing all of that into all of the other places that a school administer deems must be “safe spaces” destroys safety for all—especially those of whom demanders of “safe spaces” disapprove.

And Schapiro had this—and he was serious:

That might mean sharing a meal with students who are all of the same color or religion or watching a movie in a house designated for students from a certain background.

Back to segregation and separate but equal.

The interview continued in that vein.

In the end, though, there isn’t any safer space than the ability to think clearly, even if clear thinking often is uncomfortable.  School administrators who cannot understand both the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe and the critical dependency between safety and clarity of thought are unfit to sit in those chairs.  Their own inability to think clearly renders their entire campuses unsafe spaces.

Budget Cuts and Bribery

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…or budget cuts and coercion, depending on your perspective.

The president’s budget, due for release Tuesday, will spare the two largest drivers of future spending—Medicare and Social Security—leaving trillions in cuts from other programs. That includes discretionary spending cuts to education, housing, environment programs, and foreign aid already laid out by the administration, in addition to new proposed reductions to nondiscretionary spending like food stamps, Medicaid, and federal employee-benefit programs.

What’s going to be ignored in the inevitable hoo-raw over these allegedly terrible cuts to various aspects of our nation’s “safety” net is the truly terrible downside of those aspects.

The Federal monies being sent to the States for education, housing, environment programs, food stamps, Medicaid, and on and on in the seemingly endless, yet growing, list is in large part those States’ own money.  Its income and other taxes collected from each State’s citizens and businesses (which is to say each State’s citizens), with a fraction of those collections then returned to each State (the rest is sent to other States, which does the collected-from State’s citizens no good at all), but with a cynically attached value-add: Federal strings.  Use this money the way we tell you to use it, or we’ll reduce the amount of your money we return to you.

With the proposed cuts to these programs, the States actually will be gaining: the cuts will facilitate associated tax rate cuts, leaving more money in those States—those States’ citizens’—hands.  Just as importantly, though, the strings attached to the Federal funds transfers will be greatly weakened in favor of the States’ own decision-making.

We’ll find out, too and in short order, how sincere the Republican-controlled Congress, whose members ran on and were elected to effect fiscal discipline, really are, whether they’re more interested in maintaining Federal control over States’ individual and varied economic decisions, or whether we need to just keep doing what we’ve been doing the last several Congressional election cycles: firing those who fail to perform, and replacing them.

Congressman Mark Sanford (R, SC) had such a thought:

For a budget to have any meaning, it’s essential we have realistic assumptions in terms of economic growth and in terms of spending reductions.

True enough.  It’s more essential, though, that our representatives not use such excuses to block meaningful tax reform and actual spending cuts and with that continue to exercise too much control over the 50 States.

As an aside, this brings up two elephants in the safety net herd: Social Security and Medicare.  The foregoing—all of it—applies to these two things, also.  In spades.

Yet Another

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…Alinsky-esque distraction by the Ctl-Left.  This one is on the matter of Obamacare subsidies to health coverage providers to compensate them “for reducing out-of-pocket costs for some low-income consumers who sign up for plans on the exchanges.”

The Obama administration paid billions of our tax dollars to these providers, the amount for this year alone looks to be in the neighborhood of $7 billion, with the annual payout looking to rise to $16 billion in 10 years.

The House has sued to block further payments because no funds were appropriated for them, and so they’re illegal.  A number of State AGs are seeking to intervene in the suit.

More than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general took legal action Thursday seeking to preserve billions of dollars in federal subsidy payments….

It’s a fair debate to have in the courts, although, absent appropriation, there’s no money to spend, and so it would seem illegal to spend.

Now comes the cynical distraction.  New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said,

Millions of families across the country—including hundreds of thousands right here in New York—rely on these subsidies for their basic health care[.]

As if that’s relevant to the legality of the matter.  The courts should allow the spending independently of the law because tear-jerking.

Schneiderman is demonstrating the intellectual, legal, and moral bankruptcy of the Ctl-Left’s demands.  They’re wholly unable to present a case, and so they stoop to emotionalism.

Foolish

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President Donald Trump is willing to talk to the Progressive-Democrats in Congress in order to achieve tax reform, and it might seem like a good idea.  In the present situation, though, it’s a waste of time.

As the Trump administration reached across the aisle on tax reform for the first time Wednesday, Democrats communicated some requests of their own regarding the tax overhaul. Those requests included a middle class tax cut and that the overall bill not be part of a reconciliation package….

Of course the Progressive-Democrats don’t want a tax reform to be part of a reconciliation bill.  That way they can hold true reform hostage to their Big Government demands.  This is just Lucy offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown so she can jerk it away at the last moment.

It’s a waste of time to try to deal with a party that, at least since then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) said he’d refuse to work with a President Mitt Romney, refuses to work with or cooperate with Republicans in Congress or the White House (vis., “revise Obamacare our way, or we won’t talk to you”).