Thomas Johnson III

Systems Engineering

Wed, 14 May 2025 20:32:17 -0400 last edited: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:29:33 -0400 from ArrCay

  Linux Systems Expertise (30+ years)
  Custom Programming - Embedded/Firmware, WebApps
Internet Servers - Engineering, Administration, Management
Cybersecurity - Penetration Testing, VPN's, Firewalls
Cloud Services - Web/VPS/App Hosting, Systems Admininistration

One example that covers almost everything listed above would be this site. For more on ArrCay, checkout the Home Page or the ArrCay Site Help Documentation
Another example would be my plain old website listed under "HomePage:" in the sidebar to the left (on mobile screens the sidebar is expanded by hitting the right arrow in the menu bar above). Also found in the sidebar profile under "Identities:" are links to my github and codeberg pages... For whatever they are worth since I mostly use my own private Gitea server; I don't really care much for github - it's gone downhill since M$ bought it, but most of the open source world still uses it so...; and my public commits to codeberg are quite infrequent. A resume link and additional details (!more keywords!!! than those listed below) can be found at the cover.php page on the 7t4 site.

The following is a keyword list of technologies running on systems which I currently manage [not exhaustive]:
Slackware, Debian, Raspbian, Alpine, Proxmox (KVM, Qemu, LXC), Docker, Nginx, Caddy, PHP, Redis, PowerDNS, Bind, mail(postfix/dovecot/etc.), iptables/nftables, Wireguard, MySql/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, OpenWRT, ESP32, C/C++, UBXLib, Gitea, SignalK, MQTT

Services Skills

Botfarms.

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:08:40 -0400 last edited: Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:58:35 -0400 from ArrCay

Here's just another reason why we shouldn't be using these so-called 'free' platforms that willingly allow fake/bot accounts [which they do because more accounts (even fakes) = more ad revenue].

The couple vids about botfarms that I've seen posted elsewhere were from one of the bigtechs which I refuse to link to - I even block access to utube from my own network so unless it's embedded and replayed through some other server I won't even see utube videos, just the could not connect error in a little window. Anyway, I couldn't find a similar vid from a quick PeerTube search, so this one is from Rumble. I'll have to add the embed code for Rumble videos to be watched directly here, til then it'll redirect to Rumble's site to watch.
Botfarms that inject their influence upon an unsuspecting Public is Rising to catastrophic levels...

Botfarms that inject their influence upon an unsuspecting Public is Rising to catastrophic levels...

It's been possible for everyone to have their own platform and connect with each other as if they were all on the same huge platform for at least a decade now.

Of course not everyone has the tech skills or time/desire to run their own social media server, but the technology is available, over a dozen such softwares have been in use for years, and most communities (small business, church, etc.) have at least someone capable of being the admin/managing a website such as this one, if not actually hosting their own server to run it on.

Which they should be doing anyway rather than pointing everyone to a dozen different bigtech social accounts, where some poor soul has to deal with managing all that insane copy/paste-a-salad nonsense. That poor soul is most likely tech savvy enough to Admin this software - that part is really not all that complicated. Even if they don't have someone for the more complicated backend server stuff and hosting there's always someone like me. And in such a case they should be using someone like me for their website/domain anyway, instead of paying godaddy, wix, amazon, whatever other bigtech (or, God forbid, using one of their "free" options). It's time to bring "Buy Local" [back?] to 'cloud' and other IT services.

If a small business, church or any other sort of social group is going to have a website and a "social media presence", why not incorporate their own social media platform into their website?

Other than the million or so (mostly censor-happy loonie leftists) that went from Twitter to Mastodon (Twitter-Mastodon liberals, political theories, and Cluster B pandemic), it seems everyone is stuck believing that the bigtech exclusive/closed-off model with a different account to connect to every different platform is just the way it is. The whole "but everyone's on Fecesbook..." or this/that platform line of thinking; so it doesn't matter what the benefits are, that there are better technical features, or the fact that decentralized platforms (like ArrCay here) can connect with each other while the bigtechmegacorp platforms are all isolated monoliths, etc.

One of those better technical features that exists on this platform (and currently only a few others) is Nomadic Identity. Which means I can clone and/or move my channel to any other platform/server running the same/similar software. The 'identity' of this channel (profile) is not permanently bound to an account on ArrCay.com. It so happens this channel was created on another server before the arrcay.com domain existed. It was cloned to arrcay.com and it still exists on the original server which I now use for testing software updates/new features. As seen in the screenshot below from the "Manage Locations" settings page, the addresses are different. However it's the same channel - the content, connections, permissions, etc. will be the same.

Well, it looks like I have a duplicate entry issue there - thought I had fixed that...
This feature would be like having your various bigtech accounts all linked and mirrored - where logging into one and creating a post shows up on all of them. Of course it's not necessary to have an ArrCay channel cloned to multiple servers/platforms in order to communicate with others on those servers/platforms. The cloning feature can be useful as a censorship/cancel protection or backup. Though the primary benefit is the ability to change the 'home' server where your channel 'lives'. Every bigtech modeled social media account is stuck on whichever platform it's on - you can't take it to any other one, you have to start from scratch, making connections, copy/paste or create new content/posts, etc. Whereas, an account at ArrCay provides a portable identity (channel) that is truly yours - it (along with content/connections/etc.) can be moved to another compatible public server, your company's or even your own personal server at will.

Gab and Truth social (both built on Mastodon) are actually capable of connecting to each other (and thousands of other servers), but they have disabled that feature in favor of the old bigtech model of social media platforms. Technically, I should be able to connect to either one of those platforms from my own account on my own platform (which is not Mastodon-based BTW) and not need to use a separate account on their platforms.

Back to botfarms... I have no tolerance for bot accounts. ArrCay here is up to ~200 registration attempts by bots/fakes per week that slip past my known scam/spam ip and email addr blacklists. Most of these are using some gmail or yahoo email address. If there weren't so many people that still use such bigtechs as their primary email I'd just block them all. Come to think of it, that may not be such a bad idea really - restrict registration to only email addresses on providers which don't allow fake/bot/scam or compromised/hacked email accounts to remain on their servers. Hmmm... I just might consider blocking gmail, yahoo, aol... IDK. This is a valid option for certain groups with their own domains to leave the registration open yet restricted to only those with an email address in that domain (or group of domains).

It's really not all that difficult to keep bot/scam/spam/fake accounts off a platform - doing so just goes against the "free"-for-all ad-revenue model of bigtech and similar platforms. Using blacklists and requiring admin approval (human intelligence) of new accounts takes care of preventing almost all bot/fake accounts. The only ones that might make it through to getting an account registered would be using a process as the girl in the video describes - a real person posing as a valid average real user. Though if such an account were created, it likely would not survive very long. The bot accounts will rarely, if ever, spend much time making intelligent 'poser' content. PSA: RE: "Please rate my work" posts Another problem that bots would encounter on a permissions-based platform like ArrCay here specifically is that the stalker/stalking (aka follower/following) model is not the default and users can choose whether to approve or deny connections, who can make comments on their posts, etc. They kinda rely on that model to fake legitimacy.

One way of eliminating the existence of fake accounts would be to require a payment/subscription. It's not a complete guarantee, but pretty close since there aren't many that would be willing to go that far to create fake/bot accounts. Though I'm sure there probably are some of the more determined, well funded botfarm ops that will pay for a subscription to be 'verified' on X or others.

Since ArrCay is open to public registration there are subscription tiers in addition to the free tier, similar to X. If I removed the free tier/open registration option and changed the registration process to require a payment for all registrations that would basically take care of all fake registration attempts.

Another way to virtually eliminate the bot problem is make registration by 'invitation only'. Most servers run for a particular community (SMB, Church, Non-profit org, family group, etc.) are likely to use a closed registration method such as this.

Point being that the botfarms depend on the "free"-for-all bigtech model - and the bigtechs depend on the botfarms. Well... at the very least, they tolerate them because it inflates userbase numbers and generally results in increased 'engagement' which both equal more ad revenue. The bigtechs typically also have their own bots, as I elude to in Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster, for various purposes which more often now includes soliciting free AI training data - How you can fix AI problems

Stats show an average of ~1 billion fake accounts that Fecesbook removes every year. Actually they've removed over 1 billion within certain 6 month periods. That's easily 30-50% of the accounts on the platform. The average claim of platforms is that ~10% or less of their accounts are fakes. It's safe to say that their reported claims are generally understated since the motivation is to not lose advertising dollars. So there is likely a process of mass removal of fake accounts, create the report, let the fake/spam/scam/bots create new accounts and resume doing their thing, record inflated advert impression stats, ad infinitum. The real percentage of fake accounts is much higher on average than some measly 10%.

So the solution to botfarm influence, being used for AI training, etc.??

The same things I've said for years:

stop using bigtechs for everything/anything
self-host as much as possible
use local independents or small businesses for any IT support, 'cloud' or other tech resources that aren't in-house
use decentralized social media platforms

The Green New Scam Crisis

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:11:16 -0400 last edited: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:22:43 -0400 from ArrCay

US energy use is reaching new levels, AI datacenters are increasing power demands, and the abysmal failure of the massive solar/wind farms is now being realized.

So I figure it's time to state what is rather obvious to most anyone with technical knowledge in "renewable energy".

Wind and solar is kinda like communism.

Hey, I think libertarian socialism (sometimes equated with anarchism or some form of communism) is as great of a political idea as the next guy does. However, I realize that all socialist/communist theories are just that - theories or "great ideas". Such utopian society ideals could be more aptly named unobtainiumism.

Communism in reality can only work amongst a like-minded group of people within a relatively small commun-ity - go figure!

It does not scale well, much less to a massive population. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, attempts at such forms of government devolve into some type of totalitarian dystopia - oppressive societies ruled by an authoritarian oligarchy or dictator. The practical application of socialist or communist ideals become the antithesis of their purported goals. That's just reality. Call it "human nature" if you like. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
myself

Wind and Solar is great on a small scale.
I've been 100% 'off-grid' for ~5 years. At least 90% of my electricity is from solar. The backup is diesel. For a self contained, or self-sufficient, onsite system where the generation, storage and usage is all local; and usage can be adjusted to better match the inconsistent generation, minimizing the energy storage requirement; it's a fine solution.
Wind and/or solar can even make sense powering up to a large-ish commun-ity. However, like communism/socialism and similar political theories, it doesn't scale well. It's wholly unsuitable for a huge population.

There's a point at which the diminishing returns goes negative and bad things happen.

Without doing a full analysis and running the numbers, my guess is that diminishing returns hits zero by the time demand on a system reaches the megawatt range (depending on transmission distance and other variables). So the massive wind and solar farms for general public utility are well into the negative return zone. Which would be the answer as to why everyone is seeing their electric bills continue to increase rather than go down from all the new "green", "free" energy production.
Why?
Well politics and the 'green new deal' scam are the biggest part of it. Typical beauracratic nonsense and the accompanying corruption that makes 'career' politicians and their cronies multi-millionaires. SNAFU.
Or IOW, I would say it falls into the same categories I've outlined regarding why Microsoft products are still used on .gov (and other 'important') systems:

Incompetence
Profit
Plausible Deniability

Further exposition on these categories can be found at the end of the post at this link.

Like the selling of communist/socialist ideals, the green scam is also antithetical (or hypocritical). The environmental impacts from the huge wind turbines and massive solar arrays are equal to, or likely greater than, the impacts of the energy sources they supposedly provide a 'cleaner' solution to.

It's not about the environment; or the fabricated sky-is-falling 'climate crisis' du-jour; or any other emotional/psychological manipulation ploy to garner public support and head nods...

It's about money and control.

PSA: RE: "Please rate my work" posts

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:49:55 -0400 last edited: Sun, 03 Aug 2025 21:04:15 -0400 from ArrCay

I'm fairly certain that 99% of such posts are AI.

Of course these posts are rarely, if ever, seen here or on related platforms, but they are quite common on centralized bigtech type platforms.

It appears that quite a few are connected to, possibly a scam but maybe, a legitimate business. Albeit one with questionable practices, as they masquerade as an independent artist.

So these posts are either someone(s)

trying to sell AI art disguised as real (human created) art
an AI training ploy
both

The cost for AI training data is in the multimillion$ range. And most bigtechs are getting that training data for free (literally free) from the users of their "free" (not really free at all) service.

So the question remains; Why are so many people still feeding the bigtechs that are pushing for these huge AI's?
- How you can fix AI problems

As I stated above, these posts are almost exclusive to bigtech platforms (and the so-called "alternative" platforms which use the same old bigtech model).

"The problem is that this model leads to a garbage platform."

Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster

So... Save your time and don't bother giving away your opinion (which has a very real, significant, value as AI training data) for free.

And remember....

Watch out for those single AI girls...
they seem to have a personality disorder. 😎

This concludes my Public Service Announcements for today.

How you can fix AI problems

Thomas Johnson III

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 01:21:33 -0400 last edited: Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:50:35 -0400 from ArrCay

Seems to be alot of news reports lately about data centers' increasing cooling and power demands. This is a problem of bigtechmegacorp AI. It's not so much of an issue with AI in general.

The first obvious answer is really quite simple. Stop feeding bigtechmegacorps.

Secondly, I've promoted decentralized services for many years. I think it may be even more important for AI systems.

As to my first point - "Yeah, easier said than done", right?
The sheeple using bigtech products generally see no reason to stop or select a better alternative.

Most people don't really care [enough] about things like privacy, their personal intellectual property (aka content they post/create) or copyright, whether their data/content/habits are being harvested, analyzed and sold or used to train generative AI, etc. But they will complain about fake/scam/spam garbage, and all the advertising, censorship and various features or usability problems.
Still for some strange reason people on Fecesbook (or fill in the blank with practically any bigtechmegaco) seem to have no interest in using a platform which has better technical features and doesn't have all the garbage. The whole dopamine/addiction triggers and the huge sums spent on applying such psychological research data to their interface/platforms must be a big part of that "some strange reason."

It's time to bring "Buy Local" [back?] to 'cloud' and other IT services

After all, service xyz or platform abc is "free". Most people will acknowledge that it's not really free. However, their concession, and understanding, typically goes no further than the basic 'yeah they have ad's; I'm ok with the ad's plastered everywhere, I can just ignore the ads.' Even the advertising portion goes deeper than most realize.

For example, take the one I call Fecesbook (because it is now quite a cesspool). I won't even go into the privacy issues, selling user data, violation of FTC orders that has them in the news again. For now, let's just consider the basic ad stuff. In addition to the typical advertising plastered everywhere and injected into one's feed/stream, a few years ago they started a different kind of ad posting that appears like any other normal post. I don't recall what it's technically called but I believe the option to buy such paid posts are available to anyone. While there may on rare occasion be a legit individual or small business attempting some real advertising/marketing, these posts are mostly bought by spam/scam/fake accounts. What matters to bigtechmegacorp (aka Meta, in this case) most is revenue.

Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster

However, it's not just the ad's. If anyone has read a "Terms of Service" agreement lately, one would notice that most of the bigtechs are using their data (posted content aka their intellectual property or copyrighted works) for AI training. Here's the relevant section excerpts from the X TOS (emphasis added).

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose.
...
You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type;
...
Such additional uses by us, or other companies, organizations or individuals, is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services as the use of the Services by you is hereby agreed as being sufficient compensation for the Content and grant of rights herein.

Since the average person just clicks "yes" to accept the TOS without reading the 'legal mumbo-jumbo' they are blissfully ignorant of such things. Add in the fact that most people greatly undervalue their time, creativity, intellectual contributions, etc., etc. so they don't really care what bigtechmegacorp does with their data. An attitude somewhat akin to the "nothing to hide" argument commonly used as justification to violate basic privacy rights/protections.

The cost for AI training data is in the multimillion$ range. And most bigtechs are getting that training data for free (literally free) from the users of their "free" (not really free at all) service.

So the question remains; Why are so many people still feeding the bigtechs that are pushing for these huge AI's?

Practically all the applications for AI used by the average person could be self-hosted and not really use much more than the typical homelab network that most IT people run at home. Or onboard in my case where 'home' is a sailboat - not connected to the grid. Even if I increased the hardware on my network say 2-4x to run some demanding AI stuff, it would still likely use less power than my refrigerator and water pump. For LLM's (Large Language Models), STT/TTS (Speech to Text, Text to Speech), and practically every other AI application there are numerous FOSS (free open source software) projects available. The ability to entirely self-host your personal assistant (ala Alexa, Siri) 'offline' is possible now, and has been for quite a few years actually.

The huge AI's that are placing such a demand on electrical grids and cooling systems are really only good for the types of applications which benefit bigtechmegacorps. This is massive data collection/analysis, surveillance state stuff mostly. Basically a furtherance of all the bad behaviors that Meta has become notorious for. The specialized scientific/medical/etc. applications that use very large data models are another matter, but these don't really fall into the bigtech general purpose AI. Or at least shouldn't - such systems should be running at their respective company, university, .gov, etc. in-house computers / data centers. The number of practical (altruistic or benignly beneficial) applications for such huge AI modeling is very small. Of course, its the marketing that such possible applications exist, and just maybe they might be able to [insert hypothetical altruistic cause here] someday, which helps sell the whole idea.

As I pointed out in AI seems to have a personality disorder, the bigtech AI's have some problems. Not the least of which is GIGO; the old saying that should be familiar to anyone with IT 101 knowledge: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Without even considering garbage training model data and going into examples of typical AI outputs (which can be found on most social media sites [see also: Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster ] or elsewhere online);
It appears that bigtech AI may epitomize this maxim with inherent flaws at the core.
Many of the novelty applications that the average person uses AI for can be done with any old "dumb" program developed by anyone with intelligence on the upper third of the bell curve, maybe just on the upper half. It's even likely that several so-called AI apps really are just that - just very good apps programmed by a really smart dev.

Even those apps which do use AI/ML concepts, as I said previously, could be run locally.

In any case, it looks like the AI genie is out of the bottle. Whether it leads to 'non-AI' or 'human-intelligence only' 'spaces' being something that people place a value on remains to be seen.

I believe there should be more demand for decentralization of AI rather than the current opposite trend. Besides the benefits I've already mentioned, or at least eluded to, it just might be the answer to preventing SkyNet. 😎

3% GDP sale

Thomas Johnson III

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:02:19 -0400 from ArrCay

The US GDP growth in Q2 was 3%, so I'm offering a 3% sale.

I'm offering contracts for the remainder of 2025 at 3% of my annual standard full rate. That's 4 months for $3600 (or $900/mo) of remote IT, Systems Engineering, Linux Server Administration, Managed Web/Domain hosting services, or General IT Consulting.

You can get expert IT support for the rest of the year for less than what most support companies charge to supply you with entry level offshore or H1-B techs.

As I said in It's time to bring "Buy Local" [back?] to 'cloud' and other IT services:

It still amazes me that many small businesses, even those which tout the #buylocal philosophy, will use bigtechs (godaddy, shopify, amazon, etc.) for their website/domain/etc.; and even microsoft for their computer systems these days; and some large IT support company that uses offshore and/or H1-B techs/CS reps. Or use some bigtech freelancer platform to find one-off, occasional, even long-term support. The freelancer platforms are mostly full of side-gigging H1-B's, offshore techs and middleman support companies that just sub out to them.

So here's a chance to bring your IT support in line with your small business promoting #americafirst or just to support America's GDP growth in general.

For details, or to replace your bigtech 'cloud' services with self-hosted and/or more local server resources, or for other discounted custom support service needs, get in touch.

My standard rates are comparable to the equivalent average salary for a number of positions which my knowledge/experience qualifies. For convenience I've included a few below:

It's time to bring "Buy Local" [back?] to 'cloud' and other IT services

Thomas Johnson III

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 23:44:03 -0400 last edited: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:16:30 -0400 from ArrCay

The commoditization and outsourcing/off-shoring that started ~25 years ago along with maybe the start of the H1-B visa program almost made some sense back when there was a shortage of IT talent. Of course those practices were soon abused to replace American workers with foreigners simply because it was cheaper and meant more profit for businesses utilizing such practices, very often at the expense of quality - service and products (software/code, security, reliability, etc.).

Now, after many years of the "learn to code" and "IT certification farm" crowds, the IT field has just as many, if not more, American citizen "code monkeys" and "Certified I_dioT Professionals" as any other country. Well, maybe not as many as India - I'd have to find stats to verify that. However, the reported unemployment rate in the US for IT is nearly 6%. Because self-employed people, like myself, aren't counted in unemployment numbers (generally we don't setup an S-corp and pay ourselves as a W2 employee or otherwise pay unemployment insurance - and were even denied under the exceptions they made for clotshot-19 while they and the SBA were handing out millions in fraudulent claims, but I digress) and many just take a job doing anything even if it's not IT; the actual number is more realistically well over 10%, or somewhere around 500k to over 2mil depending on the numbers used to estimate the number of IT jobs, let's just say 1 million people. These are really rough guestimates based on some dated numbers from a quick search - they are likely alot higher than that, but let's go with it for now. Meanwhile, there's ~400k H1-B visas which are mostly IT, not to mention all the outsourced/offshored jobs which likely total in the millions.

The issue is not just with the bigtechs and global companies. SMB's and home-based entreprenuers are just as responsible for these problems by using the services/platforms/products of the direct offenders.

By practically all accounts there should be zero unemployment in the US IT industry. And personally I, with 30+ years of varied IT, and specifically Linux, experience, should be bringing in well over $100k (freelance or a regular job) rather than living in poverty.

For many years I've promoted using local services and IT support, as well as running servers and so-called "cloud" services in-house (self-hosted) or locally instead of using bigtechmegacorp. See also this post. Since I've spent years trying to provide web/domain hosting, several "cloud" services for SMB/SME and individuals, and convince people to use decentralized social media platforms like my own seen here, mostly to no avail... I've wondered why it's so difficult to lure people away from bigtech products, particularly social media platforms. Most everyone seems to acknowledge at least one issue (spam/scam/fake accounts, force-fed advertising everywhere, censorship/shadowbanning, surveillance state practices, etc.) at such platforms which they are dissatisfied with, but I've had no one express more than a passing interest in better alternative products and services.

I think the answer to the bigtech problem is decentralized services. Basically bring the "buy local" or "support your local farmer, coffeeshop, whatever Main St business" concept to Tech and "cloud" services. Bring that back to Tech really, because once upon a time it was all local - the "tech guy", the servers, the custom programmer/developer, and the internet service provider. Even the online game servers were hosted on 'just one of the guys' PC's - though often 'that guy' was at a university or some company that had at least a T1 line or better internet connection since ~$1000/mo+ was simply beyond reach for the average household.

It still amazes me that many small businesses, even those which tout the #buylocal philosophy, will use bigtechs (godaddy, shopify, amazon, etc.) for their website/domain/etc.; and even microsoft for their computer systems these days; and some large IT support company that uses offshore and/or H1-B techs/CS reps. Or use some bigtech freelancer platform to find one-off, occasional, even long-term support. The freelancer platforms are mostly full of side-gigging H1-B's, offshore techs and middleman support companies that just sub out to them. See also: "FieldNation officially sucks (...and I Reveal the Secrets of the IT Support Industry)"
and My Latest Upwork Proposal

The tech/software to run smaller systems locally which can be interconnected, and otherwise function essentially like the huge bigtech services, has been around for years. I started building ArrCay.com about a year ago from one such open source software project and as previously mentioned, was trying to convince people, to no avail, to use similar platforms for at least a few years before that.

Most people don't really care [enough] about things like privacy, their personal intellectual property (aka content they post/create) or copyright, whether their data/content/habits are being harvested, analyzed and sold or used to train generative AI, etc. But they will complain about fake/scam/spam garbage, and all the advertising, censorship and various features or usability problems.
Still for some strange reason people on Fecesbook (or fill in the blank with practically any bigtechmegaco) seem to have no interest in using a platform which has better technical features and doesn't have all the garbage. The whole dopamine/addiction triggers and the huge sums spent on applying such psychological research data to their interface/platforms must be a big part of that "some strange reason." I was reminded of this in seeing someone mention Josh Hawley's book, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

Practically all of the the large/popular platforms use such methods to draw and maintain their userbase. Part of the model in many cases relies on bots/fake accounts. The startup of most, if not all, such social media or similar platforms, used what I'd call the 'fake it til you make it' method - hundreds to thousands of bots (and maybe all the employees, etc.) posting stuff. I cover more on the bigtech "free"-for-all" ad revenue model in "Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster". Another one of the psych tools is the constant email notifications - "you missed blah, blah, blah..." etc. which on most of the platforms there is no way to completely turn off, even turning off every one you can find in the settings available, they either get magically reset, or still seem to send you notification emails about something. But enough about that.

As I stated earlier, I believe the answer for many of the problems such as I've mentioned here is to abandon the bigtechs and return to using local IT resources (that really are local - not just a local middleman/co. that uses offshore freelancers, etc.) and investing in running as much hardware/tech infrastructure in-house or locally as possible.

BTW, a PSA [because I've seen tons of (likely paid for) spam posting (on other platforms) for it]:
inhouseamerica . com is NOT an American company, not owned by an American, and their site is not hosted, or domain registered with, an American company. It's all South African - the owner, the company, even the website host and datacenter location.
-- And a sidenote on this topic: ArrCay (and/or Hubzilla) could be used to provide small business shopping cart / marketplace functionality.^note A bonus is that it wouldn't require another 'dead-end' account just for access/provide access to your online store. Your account could have your personal Channel and a Channel for your business. Anyone on a compatible platform could use their account/Channel to shop/checkout from your store Channel.
^note - There is a basic cart App available in Hubzilla. A similar App is currently in development for ArrCay. If anyone expresses an interest in such an app or would like to assist in any way or make a donation, it will be available sooner. 😉

If you're going to promote your business as #localfirst #americafirst #madeinamerica #madeinusa #usmade etc., you should start by practicing it with your choices of tech, web/internet/'cloud' services and IT support.

On that note, I'm available for general IT consulting, Systems Engineering, etc.
For services and qualifications visit this Channel's main page to view the pinned post which looks like the following image.

#smallbusiness #shoplocal #supportlocal #supportsmallbusiness #bigtech

Why the legacy social media model of bigtech is destined for the dumpster

Thomas Johnson III

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 18:06:22 -0400 last edited: Sun, 27 Jul 2025 03:03:49 -0400 from ArrCay

Practically all bigtech (and most newer "alternative") platforms use the "free"-for-all, ad revenue model. The problem is that this model leads to a garbage platform.
The following example is rather typical of the high percentage of garbage posts/content, many of which (including this one) are AI generated now, found on practically any platform using the "free"-for-all model.

This AI-alien has three hands and some strange fingers, and on that planet there must be some weird physics for those oval tractor tires.
🙄
Gotta watch out for those single AI girls - AI seems to have a Personality Disorder.

Bigtechs have mostly convinced the general public that [whatever service they provide] is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that this model for everything, including social media platforms, is "normal" or the "only way". It has worked for news media, radio, television, etc. for generations, so why not, right? And it worked for Google; but what was, once upon a time, a very good search engine is now practically useless.

Practically every "free"-for-all platform is now plagued with fake accounts posting things like the above example. To go on a brief tangent:

The related scam to the above 'single female, blah blah blah' example is a long game of personal data harvesting, under the pretext of building a relationship, with an attempt to get a big payout either directly via some sympathy ploy, etc. or through some other method based on the data harvesting. Though they probably are more sucessful at getting bites with better AI pics or with using a bunch of similar pics of real people, etc. that they lifted from other sites.

It's not just the outright scam bait of the example I chose. Some posts may be part of the appear to be a 'normal' real user as I mention later, others could be paid-for spam - usually for some less than reputable business, if not an actual scam and of course there's plenty of fake gofundme scammers.

The evidence has been pretty clear on certain platforms for many years.

For example, take the one I call Fecesbook (because it is now quite a cesspool). I won't even go into the privacy issues, selling user data, violation of FTC orders that has them in the news again. For now, let's just consider the basic ad stuff. In addition to the typical advertising plastered everywhere and injected into one's feed/stream, a few years ago they started a different kind of ad posting that appears like any other normal post. I don't recall what it's technically called but I believe the option to buy such paid posts are available to anyone. While there may on rare occasion be a legit individual or small business attempting some real advertising/marketing, these posts are mostly bought by spam/scam/fake accounts. What matters to bigtechmegacorp (aka Meta, in this case) most is revenue.

Spam, spam, scammer, spam, fake account, spam, scam and spam

The "free"-for-all part of the model allows spam/scam/fake accounts to register because the new account filtering and registration controls are very minimal to none whatsoever - typically any working email account is sufficient. The reason this is not a concern is because the artificially inflated userbase numbers, created by allowing any/every account, is good for business. More users = more ad revenue.

This is also why they allow spam/scam/fake accounts to remain on the platform. Unless the account is doing something which costs more than what they are making from it, they have no real incentive to remove/cancel it. A hundred people could report such an account and nothing happen because that spam/scam account is either a paying customer (as I noted above regarding the Fecesbook covert ad posts), or they otherwise represent income (eg. they count towards impressions for ads where that metric means income, they increase 'engagement' from other accounts, etc.). Now if those hundred accounts just leave and close their accounts specifically referencing scammer XYZ as the reason or start some legal process, then maybe bigtechmegaco will tell scammer XYZ; you gotta go... wink wink... but feel free to just create another account... nod nod. As long as the revenue is positive, spam/scam/fake accounts and their junk posts/content are tolerated.

Stalker - Stalking

The Follower/Following, more appropriately Stalker/Stalking, standard of social media connections only exacerbates the "free"-for-all model. While that mode of operation may be ok for certain public figure types, it ignores the typical rules of social interaction in real life. Though I suppose it helps push the "you too can be a creator/influencer" line.

One of the first things a new spam/scam/fake account does is to follow as many other accounts as it can; and attempt to get followers. Basically the goal is to appear like an average real user. On many platforms there is no way to prevent such users from stalking (following) you. The only real option is to block that account. As noted above, using the reporting feature is often an exercise in futility. On the other hand having to go through the process of adding hundreds of accounts to a blocklist just seems ridiculous. From a server/database admin point of view it's rather stupid to have a large number of real/legit users with a large number of fake/scam/spam accounts in their blocklists. Sure, if/when the fake account gets shut down it can be dropped from all the blocklists, but by then there's been how many more added to the lists. The whole thing sounds like the definition of insanity.

One answer, maybe the only answer, to the fake/scam/spam account problem is to not allow them to register in the first place and have zero tolerance for such accounts. There are blacklists of email addresses (and IP addresses) which are known to be used by sc(p)ammers for registering scam/spam/fake accounts. Here at ArrCay such blacklists are in use. These lists are updated often and there's still around 100 attempts a month that slip past, but upon human review don't get approved for registration.

Now imagine if I just allowed any/every account to register here ["free"-for-all] - there would be thousands of fake/spam/scam accounts. ArrCay is still hardly known to anyone, but without registration controls the vast majority of the userbase would currently be garbage accounts - a whole bunch of scammers mostly trying to scam each other. Now let's throw in ad revenue.

Yo advertisers and regular people, Check it, ArrCay hasn't even started a marketing campaign and it's already got thousands of active users. Buy/Join now for the best spots/usernames.... blah blah blah

The old "fake it 'til you make it" startup method. Once the ad revenue starts rolling in, it's off to the races... Of course, I'd have to spin up a few dozen or so bot accounts of my own to keep the scam accounts busy and convince the real users that they're not alone with a bunch of scammers posting public spam and constantly making connection requests to them. There's enough people that don't recognize the fake accounts anyway, and those that do have usually accepted it as normal. It could work... Well, I'd probably have to make some changes to the homepage and oh yeah delete this post and probably others... might even have to change some core features to accomodate that model of operations.

OK, nah... on second thought, let's not go there. 'Tis a silly place...
There's no need for all that nonsense. One thing that makes this and other similar platforms so much better is that it doesn't matter if there are thousands of accounts on any given server, or only one. They have the ability to connect with each other no matter which server their account is on. There's over a million active users, over 20,000 servers and around 100 different platforms which ArrCay can connect with. So creating a fake userbase to entice new users is rather pointless.
Let's continue on...

To get back on track, related to the Stalker/Stalking part of the model...
Privacy and permissions features either don't exist or are some after-thought feature that was patched in, ala Fecesbook. IOW, it's not really great but it's better than nothing. Such features may be one of the very few reasons there are still 'real' people using Fecesbook. Another might be the restricted (non-public) groups which still have decent moderators. Last I checked those appeared to be getting quite rare. The bigtech model is mostly a public format which fits better with the regular advertising, though for the data collection/analysis part of the ad-revenue model it doesn't matter as much. Of course most platforms restrict that 'public' part to 'logged in users' because they want you to create an account on their platform. Bottom line is that if you want the option of creating real public content (available to anyone on the internet) or be able to control who can see/do what, you have to use a platform like ArrCay here.

Another reason the bigtech model is obsolete is the centralized closed system (monolithic, walled-garden) design. The "free"-for-all/ad-revenue model pretty much demands exclusive (dead-end) accounts on the system. Most of the industry has stuck with this 'create yet another account just to access xyz's service' way of doing things. So people have just gotten used to it "being the way it is". Although there have been several "Single Sign On" schemes in existence for many years, there hasn't been much widespread adoption. Oauth has some use across certain bigtech services. Though it isn't really for cross-platform authentication. It is more a method of proxy delegation - basically allowing one site/app to access another on behalf of the user. To the average user it kinda looks like the site is logged into using their other bigtechco account, but it's not technically. Maybe I'll try to expound on this and see if I can simplify it later.

The overall identity management solution provided by the Nomad and OpenWebAuth protocols (as used here at ArrCay and several other platforms) is a better idea that's been around for quite a few years now. While the login account itself, on ArrCay or another compatible server/platform, is exclusive to that server; it is associated with what is called a "Channel" (an account may also have multiple Channels). This Channel is a unique cryptographically signed identity that is portable (aka a nomadic ID). It allows mirroring/cloning to multiple servers with near real-time sync. If you decide to move your "home" login account to another server (on any compatible platform), you can clone your nomadic ID to the new account and you won't lose anything. The Channel is yours - it can go with you and "live" on any server which uses this protocol.

The OpenWebAuth part provides authentication across various servers/platforms. You don't need another account to access any other server using this protocol. Login to your account/Channel and visits to any other server/platform are 'auto-magically' authenticated. You then have access to whatever content on that server that is available to any authenticated user as well as anything for which your Channel has been given specific permissions to access. If bigtechs used such protocols it would be like only having an account on one of them, say X, and being able to connect to another, say Fecesbook, like any other user and make connections which then allow you to see their photos, etc. and comment on posts, etc., etc. IOW, think of being able to use X, FB, IG, Tiktok, TS, Gettr, etc. and only having a single account on one of them - no need for a separate account for every one.

An interesting sidenote is that technically a similar feature is part of the core software that the Truth Social and Gab platforms are built on. They both were built/derived from Mastodon which is a decentralized cross-platform (aka Fediverse) capable software that uses ActivityPub - the de facto standard protocol that allows various Fediverse platforms to communicate with each other. Since ArrCay also 'speaks' ActivityPub, it can connect with Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms. However, while my account/Channels here can connect with other users/servers running Mastodon^note; the feature that allows the connection with other servers/platforms is disabled at Truth and Gab. They chose to close off their systems and use the bigtech "free"-for-all ad revenue model.

^Note - Mastodon is a pretty crappy software that is, unfortunately, the most well known Fediverse platform. It's a bloated, Ruby on Rails polished turd. It's also where most of the censor-happy "free speech" Twitter crowd went as I said in Twitter-Mastodon liberals, political theories, and Cluster B pandemic, before Bluesky became their latest "safe space". Bluesky apparently created their own federated protocol, though there is something called BridgyFed that allows connection with ActivityPub/Mastodon. I haven't looked into them enough to cover the details, but it appears that the purpose for their AT protocol was to create something like what the Nomad/Zot and OpenwWebAuth protocols have provided since before Dorsey started the Bluesky project at Twitter.

The full chart comparing ArrCay with Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky can be found on the ArrCay HomePage

The Nomad and OpenWebAuth features are currently only available here at ArrCay and a handful of related platforms that use the same family of core software. There has been talk of these protocols being adopted into ActivityPub at some point. I'd have to double check, but I believe discussion of this started, and FEP's (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) were published before the AT protocol was created.

Another related tangent here is that Meta (the Fecesbook/Instawhoregram co.) has already created a Fediverse platform called Threads. So it would appear that even they have seen the writing on the wall. Many Fediverse server admins, including myself here, have already blocked Threads from connecting due to their data-harvesting and related bad behavior. It seems that despite their attempt to be part of the Fediverse, Threads may become similar to Truth or Gab; only in reverse and involuntarily because of other servers not allowing Threads to connect with them.

It's interesting to note that Jack Dorsey left Bluesky because it was "literally repeating all the mistakes" that Twitter made. He has also said

"I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media."

That appeared in an article dated 2024 but maybe it was included as a previous quote, because I find it odd that he wouldn't be aware of several such protocols which have already been in use for many years.

Anyway, my first point in quoting Dorsey is that it seems the habits of the bigtech social media operating model die hard.
The second being a reiteration of this entire post and my closing statement.

The future of social media is decentralized cross-platform communications.

[This post/article may still receive edits, bookmark and check back for updates]

My latest Upwork proposal

Thomas Johnson III

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:07:33 -0400 from ArrCay

Sometimes I just can't help myself.
[Details below...]

The project was for setting up a student lab for Network Security, Pen-testing, Forensics, etc.
Part of the project stated that they preferred to setup a Windows bare metal server onsite and virtual servers for the lab use, with students able to "connect remotely and very securely." 🤣

I don't think I'll get the gig. LOL. Though, I have yet to get a single contract on Upwork anyway. Even after having a profile on that platform for several years now, submitting dozens of proposals, and participating in a handful of 'interviews'.

I suppose the 'interview' is supposed to be for the client to determine that the consultant is actually qualified for the project and some reassurance that they will work out. In reality (at least in my experience) it ends up being used for free consulting more than anything else.

FieldNation officially sucks (...and I Reveal the Secrets of the IT Support Industry)

Thomas Johnson III

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 21:12:23 -0400 last edited: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:24:15 -0400 from ArrCay

First a little rant on FieldNation, and then I reveal one of the secrets IT support providers don't want their clients to know.
FieldNation was never a really great platform. Their android app tie-in to google services makes it almost useless on my phone (I use LineageOS and don't install any Gapps/playstore, etc. on my phone). But as of recently, login on their website just doesn't work - at all. The login button does nothing. No error message, etc. And their "Can't login" link is really a reset password link, not a troubleshoot or report a problem type link.
It could be something I am blocking on my DNS server. Blocking anything google along with the usual tracker and advert sites at the DNS level does break many, what I now call, low quality websites. Somewhat unlikely since I can login from a browser on my phone which is using the same network (not LTE). Phone may be using DOH or otherwise bypassing my local DNS server - haven't double checked on that lately. Anyway, I don't care enough to figure out the actual problem.

It's just now official --- FieldNation sucks.

They were fairly successful at taking the commoditization of IT and being the mostly useless middle-man tech platform to new heights though.

Much of the food service and retail industry onsite IT support runs through their system.

Of all the POS terminals, kiosk machines, in-store photo printers, on-site wifi networks, there's a good chance that the "IT Support contractor" with the retail outlet has very little to no actual tech personnel. They are a customer service call center type operation. Or maybe not even that... They may just sub-contract that part to another company. Who subcontracts to another... and another... and one of them uses FieldNation to contract a local tech to go onsite.

The field tech that actually goes onsite and does the work is often an Independent Contractor. Sometimes they are an employee of a small local IT company that picks up this type of sub-contract work.

On average, there is a half a dozen subcontracts between the retailer and the person doing the actual IT work. Usuallly the client (retailer) just has a support contract and pays some periodic flat rate (eg. monthly/anually), but terms may vary. In any case, they are paying the typical full cost for IT support which is in the neighborhood of $100-250/hr, excluding hardware. While the tech that shows up and does the work gets an average of $25-$50/hr. That's after FieldNation (or whatever platform eg. Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, etc.) takes their 10-20% cut, if the tech is a self-employed independent. After expenses and taxes.... well, it's not great.

Around 75-80% of IT support costs goes to the middle-man(agement). Some of that is justified costs of business(eg. call center/CS reps, HR) but I'd say well over 50% of it is wasted on do-nothing middle managers, etc.

This is typical of the IT Support Industry overall, not just in the case where a platform like FieldNation is involved. The quality of IT support supplied to clients is... inconsistent, to say the least. I've done thousands of dollars worth of work through FieldNation (and directly subcontracting for nationwide IT Support providers). For someone like me, an "IT guy" in the 90's (back when the "IT/Computer guy" was quite often a one-man tech department for the whole company), it's simple/basic filler work. Easy money, one might say. Usually more time spent on paperwork, check-in/check-out procedure, and such BS than actual tech work. And often more than it's really worth (i.e. not profitable). Which is why the onsite tech is typically entry-level and can only follow directions of tech docs and/or phone support. Sometimes, the store personnel that use the equipment are just as, or more, qualified to handle the issue. I've gone out on a few calls where the problem was actually fixed by store personnel before I got there. Still had to go through the motions and verify that it was a "proper fix" (or replace some part that had already been ordered as the likely culprit) and document normal operations.

Just today I got an email on an available work order for a kiosk problem. Since I've seen about half a dozen work orders for the same site/kiosk in the past few months, it would appear that they keep sending techs that can't figure out or fix the problem. I haven't watched it that closely but it may be possible that they've had trouble getting a tech to show up onsite over the past week or three that the WO has repeatedly been posted. Though this is somewhat unlikely as most WO's around my current locale are assigned by the time I get the email notification and try to look at the details on FN's site. Let's check on this one... And.... Yep, it's assigned. Within about an hour of receiving the email.

A typical part of a work order agreement is that the tech "shall present themselves as being with xyz co to client" and "shall not discuss costs, etc." at the very least. This is the secret that so-called IT Support companies don't want their business clients to know. Most of them are empty shells - they have no "tech staff" and blah, blah - whatever their marketing fluff drones on about.

These deceptive business practices (aka no-compete clauses) also apply to other industries where subcontracting is common, such as the construction industry. For example, I also had a flooring company once upon a time and some of our subcontract work was for Home Depot - through another company that they contract with. Customer service (for the actual end client - i.e. the HD customer that paid for the floor/install) comes second to making sure that the represented "service provider" company (HD** - which is technically the subcontractor's client) looks good, doesn't lose their customer, and gets their markup (often ~50% - 100%) on any extras/unforeseens, regardless of whether they deserve it or not.
** - It's essentially HD, as the middle contractor in this case is typically an exclusive contractor that handles certain installation service logistics for HD and that's all they do.

Sites like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr tend to be more of a direct middle-man than FieldNation. Usually the end client and actual provider are dealing directly with each other via the platform, whereas FN is more of a connector or logistics platform between the onsite tech and some company in the chain - the end client usually has no knowledge of FN, just some particular service company in the chain that gets to claim that they are "the one". The more direct freelancer sites try to enforce their status of being a middleman that deserves a cut (~20% give or take a few). I'd say in most cases they provide nothing worth the percentage they take to begin with, much less do they deserve a perpetual cut on any further business between two parties.

All such sites are just a race to the bottom. I've been on several of them and their ilk over the years, submitted hundreds of proposals on projects and could count on my hands (maybe just one) the number of decent projects or clients I've gotten from them.
Two biggest issues on these sites:

clients with unrealistically low budget expectations, or just plain cheapskates; which often are just using the platforms for free consulting, etc. via the proposal solicitation and "interview" processes the platforms have.
lowball providers - either a company that has a pool of dirt cheap labor or freelancers that are happy to work for peanuts (mostly based offshore/overseas)

My posted rate is actually higher on those sites than my standard advertised rate to compensate for the percentage they charge and the extra nonsense/inconvenience involved with using their platforms.

So, small-medium businesses that want to save money and get better quality IT support should look at dealing directly with an independent freelancer or small IT business that actually employs their own techs.

#fiverr #upwork #fieldnation #freelancer #itsupport

Systems Engineering

Thomas Johnson III

Wed, 14 May 2025 20:32:17 -0400 last edited: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:29:33 -0400 from ArrCay

Services Skills

AI seems to have a personality disorder

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 19:51:11 -0400 last edited: Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:25:04 -0400 from ArrCay

To follow up on my previous post - (UBXLib, I2C, and Linux/Raspi) re: google crap results....
Not only can you get a bunch of search results to garbage sites, their AI will even make shit up. Check out the screenshot below.

Here's a text version explanation:
nixCraft posted an example of Google's AI giving an explanation of a phrase that they made up in the search page by entering "meaning" to the search term. The phrase entered was:

you can't leak a linux twice meaning

Google's AI provided a response starting with:

The saying "you can't leak a Linux twice" is a reference to how double-free vulnerablities are handled in Linux. ...

And it goes on from there about memory handling, etc.
The latter explanation on Linux memory stuff is probably correct for the most part. But the whole premise of there being this well-known or popular 'saying' is complete bullshit! It's entirely fabricated, yet presented as a factual statement.

Reminds me of common ClusterB traits. They will make something up that has no basis in reality and present it as gospel truth. Have to wonder how many ClusterB devs are involved in AI programming.

It's fairly well known that a significant percentage of the IT industry consists of liberals/leftists. That number is much closer to 100% in Silicon Valley. Given the studies which I cite in Twitter-Mastodon liberals, political theories, and Cluster B pandemic, there's a very good chance that many of the devs involved with programming and training AI are Cluster B disordered. Since I mention several of the pervasive malevolent traits/behaviors in the article/post linked above and there are volumes of stories from the victims of Cluster B's online, I'll not repeat them here.

Not that AI isn't already without issues, but this will become a real problem. It's SkyNet (or any other 'AI goes bad' SciFi plot) in the making.

FWIW, I don't have any intentions of adding any AI tools into ArrCay. One possible exception I may consider is generative AI detection to maintain quality of content (ie. make sure users/channels and their posts/content are actually real human people).

google AI example fabricating the 'meaning' of 'you can't leak a linux twice' - googlecrap.png

Thomas Johnson III

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 06:35:53 -0500 last edited: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:00:45 -0400 from ArrCay

One of the greatest impacts that DOGE could have IMO, would be eliminating Micro$oft (and practically all other proprietary softwares) on all fed.gov computer systems.

Putting an end to the use of M$ software, which shouldn't be on any system where security and reliability are concerns to begin with, would be a fairly large long-term budget cut. Not just on the stupid proprietary software licensing fees, but all the extra maintenance/admin IT personnel (including some useless managers in the middle) required to keep the insecure, unreliable crap software running with bubblegum and proprietary duct tapes.

Steve Bannon on GETTR : Can’t Have This ‘Bait and Switch’— DOGE Committed to the President a minimum of $1 Trillion of real spending cuts this year on a $6...

The rebranding of a former White House digital office into the new Department of Government Efficiency signals its potential limits, budget experts said.

While the DOGE office is limited as far as direct impact to budget cutting measures which rest on the shoulders of Congress, computer/network/technology systems have become the backbone of the entire regulatory bureaucracy. Improving it potentially has very broad, sweeping effects on overall efficiency; from citizen impacts down to DC.
For those lacking in civics education, and how the American government system was founded, that is the proper order - the citizen(s) are at the top of the pyramid, fed.gov is at the bottom. Contrary to popular belief.

The inefficiences in government bureaucracy and red-tape practices certainly predate the implementation of computer technology. Unfortunately, many of those same practices infected the IT field. I saw it firsthand as a SysAdmin running the IT dept. for a school district back in the 90's. Despite the M$ license subscription for gov/education including all M$ products, at least someone before me was smart enough to spec Novell Netware rather than Windows for the network servers. It's absurd how computer tech, which is supposed to (and can) make things faster/easier/more efficient, gets misused and bastardized into such badly implemented solutions because of bureaucratic stupidity.

The continued use of practically all proprietary software, particularly Micro$oft products, is one of the greatest SNAFU's in the bureaucracy-infected IT field. The Windows OS outlived it's usefulness on any serious or 'critical' computer system by the dawn of the 21st century. From year 2000, if not well before, up to now, the only real legitimate reason to use M$ products is for games and TPS reports. In other words, applications where security and reliability are pretty low priorities; basically falling on the "it would be nice to have" list.

There's a reason Windows hasn't even been included on ITIC's Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Survey for over 15 years.

It's a notoriously unreliable and insecure OS.

It costs more to maintain/keep running and make acceptably (barely) secure than it's worth. Not even counting the losses when it inevitably goes down and/or is breached. Remember the Crowdstrike debacle? Which should make people, particularly in the IT field, ask silly questions that answer themselves like

if the OS is actually secure/reliable why would it have any need for something like Crowdstrike's software?

Anyone in the IT field that fails to acknowledge these facts, and/or spec's Microsoft products for a system where there is any expectation of security or reliability, does so for one or more of the following reasons:

Incompetence
Profit
Plausible Deniability

Further exposition on these reasons below.

The top LargeCorp/SME/SMB's might accept the liability risk and additional IT support/downtime costs on internal desktop systems where the so-called "ease of use" appears to outweigh costs or perceived difficulties of training and/or employing more competent personnel in order to use Linux/Unix/BSD, or even Mac systems; but at the very least, if the ITIC Survey is any indication, their server systems don't run Windows. The idiots making such decisions at various 'critical infrastructure' entities affected by the Crowdstrike debacle notwithstanding.

For many of the same reasons, no .gov entity should be running Windows on any computer system.

I'd go further and say no proprietary software should be running on any .gov system. All .gov systems should run open source (fully auditable) software. This is not as much a public transparency issue (which should be SOP for .gov in any case), so much as it is a security issue. Proprietary code can contain all sorts of unknown security holes, backdoors, etc. And a .gov or '3rd party' auditor to approve a proprietary software for use can always be bought - clearly the business of political favors, preferred contracts, and other corrupt practices in .gov are alive and well. Which is another reason "only open source software" should be a requirement on .gov systems. Not only does it free up billions or more in tax-dollars spent on proprietary licensing fees (and the additional IT support costs), downtime, etc., it cuts down on avenues for corruption.

It's not like the government can't use Linux systems and open source software.
Look at BRL-CAD, which is interestingly enough the oldest known version-controlled codebase in the world that is still under active development. The 3D solid modeling CAD software started in 1979 in the Army Ballistic Research Lab with public release in 1984, and became an open source project in 2004.
It wasn't even available for MSWindows systems until 2006.

At this point there exists an open source software which runs on Linux for practically anything that Windows would be used for. And the old excuses like "everyone knows Windows", "it's just easier", "more user-friendly", blah blah; have been utter BS for a very long time. Personally I have not found any use for MS products, and all my systems have run Linux, for over two decades.

There's little old ladies using Linux Mint and similar distros now as the OS on their computers. So there's no legitimate excuse for not using Linux/BSD and open source software solutions across all .gov systems.

That brings me back to expounding upon the reasons that Windows and related software is chosen to run on systems. [Other than the gamers, TPS report writing NPC's, and the average home pc that generally has no real option to being force-fed a machine preloaded with garbage]...

Incompetence

Let's call this a spectrum ranging from simple ignorance to utter, willful incompetence. Because there seem to be those in the industry that promote/defend Windows as being secure/reliable no matter what, despite decades of evidence to the contrary; I debated including a separate line item to the effect of 'brainwashed by the marketing department' and the related industry which mostly falls into the second category (profit), but it still just boils down to incompetence.
Also, on second thought I'm not quite sure if 'simple ignorance' would be appropriate since I'm referring to someone at a level of decision-making, or at least making a systems engineering/design recommendation. For anyone at this level, I find it hard to offer the benefit of the doubt by including simple ignorance as an excuse. To have the experience/knowledge that qualifies one to make such a recommendation or approval while not actually knowing/acknowledging that Windows is the least reliable, least secure, and most costly option/solution really is plain incompetence.

Profit

There are several profit possiblities. The proprietary license fees (sales) for starters. Of course the constant support and relatively high maintenance that is required. Any third party software products. Of which I would include these subcategories;

software to make it more secure (eg. Crowdstrike, other anti-virus/anti-malware, etc.) or more reliable. I have no examples for that one, I'm sure there are some products out there being peddled that fit this category. The last time I really dealt with Windows systems the best option for acceptable reliability was to spend alot of time in config/tuning to get a decently stable running state and creating an image of that to reload on the machine often.
software that only runs on a Windows system

But wait there's more...
Various Training, Certifications, Consulting, kickbacks... And finally preferred contracts for all the above.

Plausible Deniability

This would include any situation where knowing that the system has a reputation for being unreliable and/or insecure is actually an advantage. From the simple ability to use an excuse "oh, the system is down again", "services will be unavailable for regular maintentence", "there was a data breach", "the server got hacked"... maybe just to cover for incompetence... to the deliberate actions such as creating a system that is purposely unreliable (eg. make more profit on support, etc.) or can easily be infiltrated (dare I say, voting machines?).

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 22:34:25 -0500 last edited: Mon, 30 Dec 2024 02:52:45 -0500 from ArrCay

Since the 90's, I've advocated the use of open source software for many reasons. One of those reasons is self-reliance, or independence from [insert BigTechMegaCorp here].

Related to that is security, which I mean in a broad sense to include personal data privacy, online safety, fully auditable code (unlike proprietary software), etc.

IT/Computer/Network/Systems/Cyber- Security is a balance of risks.
A simplified equation:
more knowledge/control = less risks
and vice versa.

For softwares (including servers and related network services) to best meet such goals of security, they should be run on the end users' own hardware/system. And maintenance/adminstration should be done by the same end user(s), or otherwise under their full control/discretion.

I'm not sure if the whole "cloud" and "[xyz]-As-a-Service" marketing hype was just another step or went hand in hand with the outsource/off-shore movement in corporate world, and the commoditization in the IT industry. [Run-on. hanging participle? Rambling, non-sequitur? Incomplete thought for another day... Eh, whatever. Not fixing it now. Anyways...]

My opinion is everyone should be self-hosting; using their own server(s) for social media/blog/website and all other "cloud"/online services they use.

Or, since not everyone can setup/run their own servers, at least use the expertise of their local IT co. or independent tech guru to implement a solution.

All the services provided by bigtechs are available at the independent or small community level, and often at better quality levels using the exact same or better software/hardware solution.

An example with social media; the tech to interconnect thousands of individual-run servers (millions of users), running dozens of different social media platforms as if they belonged to the same network, has been around for many years now. Truth social and Gab were built on such a platform [Mastodon] but they are closed off systems that don't connect with any others. Meta, the fecesbook co., has been testing Threads (for data-mining, ad-injection and how to profit from a network they have no control of; no doubt), which is another platform that does connect (somewhat) to others.

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"But with BigTechMegaCorp I can register today and it's free."
In almost all cases, it's not really free. It's a barter exchange. You are handing over your data (personal, demographic, intellectual property aka created content, etc.) - 'your' account is on their server(s), so it really belongs to them. Additionally you are usually agreeing to be subjected to targeted advertising or otherwise having your data sold to third parties. So you are generally 'paying' something in addition to being used for maximizing their ad or other revenue sources. Then there's the less obvious "bigger picture" issues like 'what else does bigtechmegacorp do?' 'does their revenue go towards x, y, or z social/political/etc. interests?' Etc. Etc.

So is your time, data privacy/security, control/ownership of your intellectual property/created content, etc. worth the actual services and server resources (bandwidth, processing, storage) provided?

Probably not, in all reality. Particularly considering that most people undervalue their own time. And in the case of posting/uploading content: many fail to recognize that their creativity, personal knowledge/experience, and contribution has real worth.

On the other hand, I'll go out on a limb and guess that providing your own server resources and administration is either; a) not in your skills repetoire; or b) not in the budget to buy/rent the hardware, any additional internet connection/bandwidth, and the personal time and/or trusted tech support dedicated to just the services you use.

Surely there must be something in between becoming a tech nerd with a server rack at home, and just giving bigtechs full control of my tech life!?

As with many things in life, there are options [shades of gray, a spectrum]...

Get in touch for further discussion.
...and don't call me Shirley.

Thomas Johnson III

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 20:06:07 -0400 from ArrCay

Dominion is trying to save face in light of recent issues with their overpriced crap machines.

Of course it's all BS. Their machines use Windows.

That pretty much says it all. An OS that is notoriously insecure and unreliable. Windows does not even appear on the ITIC Global Server Hardware,
Server OS Reliability Report/Survey for good reason. The only reason to use Windows is for playing games and writing TPS reports - things where nobody really cares that much about reliability or security. It does not belong on any "critical" system - like the ones revealed not long ago in the crowdstrike debacle. I would argue it has no place in any .gov computer system at all - a related topic for another day...
Setting the Record Straight: Facts About Dominion - Dominion Voting Systems

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: FACTS ABOUT DOMINION Dominion is focused on supporting our customers who administer U.S. elections. We are closely monitoring claims around the 2024 election. We strongly encourage people to rely upon verified, credible sources of election information – sources that can explain the many layers of physical, operational, and technical safeguards that ... Read more

It appears that on their systems they leave normal desktop apps like antivirus software installed, as well as database admin tools. And their system uses MS SQL database with some overly complex proprietary software interface for the simple process of recording/counting ballots.

So there's no way to audit the entire software system, from the proprietary OS, to the database system used, to the proprietary user interface. And I would guess that the programming is cobbled together by code monkeys that work for bananas.

Of course a cheaper, more secure, fully auditable (all open source software - a custom linux or BSD OS) voting machine system could be made. Hell, I could probably throw a prototype together within a few months even though I'm not much of a UI (user interface) programmer.

But the fact remains that no machine is really 100% secure or reliable. So the idiots in legislatures [that likely received financial benefits to do so] should have never approved the use of machines in elections to begin with.

Paper ballots, hand counted remains the most secure, most reliable, actually auditable, and apparently the faster method of vote tabulation.

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