Gen Z Bible Stories

These things are great. I guess it’s time for a whole new Gen Z Bible translation.

After Jesus started live streaming, and the chat filled up, he began to go off saying:

W to those who aren’t thirsty for this mid life, for they will have eternal life.

W to those who take L’s from this life, for they will receive an everlasting W.

W to those who don’t throw hands, for they will secure the eternal bag.

W to those who want help passing God’s vibe check, for he will say bet.

W to those who don’t cancel others, for they will not be cancelled by the top G.

W to those whose spiritual fit is immaculate, for their hearts will be cuffed by god.

W to those who turn opps into bros, for they will be called CEOs of peace.

W to those who catch hands for being valid, for they will not be left on read by God.

W to you when the opps be cappin hard and do you so very dirty because you’re my fan,

Trust you have crushed it and have the eternal W, for so they did the true bros before you.

https://www.tiktok.com/@gen.z.bible.stories/video/7347722777505402154

Modern Enigma Cracking

The CIA & NSA are running the media, “social” especially. Like the Allies cracking Enigma, and carefully choosing what pieces of intel to act upon, lest they give the game away, the deep state is very careful about what posts to amplify or remove.

The actual link
A screencap in case the Tweet is deleted

Careless Memories

By Duran Duran, 1981

So soon just after you’ve gone
My senses sharpen
But it always takes so damn long
Before I feel how much my eyes have darkened

Fear hangs in a plane of gun smoke
Drifting in our room
So easy to disturb, with a thought, with a whisper
With a careless memory, with a careless memory

On the table, signs of love lies scattered
And the walls break, with a crashing within
It’s not as though, as though you really mattered 
But being close, how could I let you go
Without some feeling, some precious sympathy following

Fear hangs in a plane of gun smoke
Drifting in our room
So easy to disturb with a thought, with a whisper
With a careless memory, with a careless memory
With a careless memory, with a careless memory

Oh, I walk out into the sun, I try to find a new day
But the whole place just screams in my eyes
Where are you now ’cause I don’t want to meet you
I think I’d die, I think I’d laugh at you
I know I’d cry, what am I supposed to do, follow you?

Outside the thoughts coming flooding back now
I just try to forget you

So easy to disturb with a thought with a whisper
With a careless memory, with a careless memory
With a careless memory, look out
With a careless memory
With a careless memory
Look out, look out, look out, look out

Welcome to the “Future” of App Deployments

I’m sitting here watching the braintrust in our IT organization tell everyone about a NEW! “PRO!” product that will do database migrations with Jenkins, and I’m just sitting over here thinking about the native migrations available by default in Ruby on Rails since version 1.0, which I’ve been enjoying for the past 15 years. I’ve deployed Rails apps with Jenkins, but I still like Capistrano better, because it’s “native.” I’ve yet to fool with their new Docker-based deployment tool because cap works so well.

They showed a script to call the Jenkins API to do deployment jobs. Again, I’m just sitting here wondering what in the world they’re talking about. Jenkins literally does all of this for you. They seem to think that Jenkins can’t handle deploying to separate environments, and therefore you need to script it so that you can parameterize the deployment with tags that live in git. I haven’t used Jenkins for 1o years, but — without even looking — I’d bet my eye teeth that Jenkins can do this without needing a script to call its API.

They’re signing off their dog and pony by looking for volunteers to demonstrate new things in this space. I think they’d barf if I demonstrated my workflow with Rails and Capistrano, and by so doing, illuminated how much time, effort, and money is wasted on a default stack using Java, React, and Oracle. It doesn’t use any sort of middleware, and therefore doesn’t have any steps to sit and wait for rubber stamp approvals by useless middle managers who aren’t going to actually review the changes, so I’m sure it would go over like a lead balloon.

I FEEL FANTASTIC

So my new chronic pain doctor gave me a DNA test, and based on the results prescribed me several psychiatric drugs, not for the psychological effects, per se, but because that’s what my brain chemistry supposedly needs according to my specific genetic mutations. I admit the pain is a couple points better, generally speaking, but now I just feel dull and depressed, and taking all this stuff makes me think of this song.

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

The opposite of “Default Permit” is “Default Deny” and it is a really good idea. It takes dedication, thought, and understanding to implement a “Default Deny” policy, which is why it is so seldom done. It’s not that much harder to do than “Default Permit” but you’ll sleep much better at night.

Source: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

This was from 2005, and if your organization’s approach was always Default Deny, then it’s a great idea. The problem with Default Deny isn’t the idea, it’s switching away from Default Permit after decades of acclimation. One comment in the HackerNews discussion about this article says it adds “three more steps” to the conversation with IT to fix your app after the change. I would argue that it’s a whole lot more than that.

A friend of mine has trouble running a very important vendor application used in his department. It stopped working some time ago, so he opened a ticket with IT. It was so confusing to them that it got to a point that they allowed him to run Microsoft’s packet capture application on his machine. He followed their instructions, and captured what was going on. But, despite the capture, they were unable to get it working through the firewall.

Out of frustration, he sent the capture to me and asked me to take a look. Even though our laptops are really locked down, as a dev, I get admin on my machine, and I have MSDN, so I downloaded Microsoft’s tool, and looked over the capture. It was a complicated architecture, using a client/server implementation on the local machine. The front end was working over networking ports to talk to its back end, and the back end was using other ports to talk to the vendor’s servers.

I knew what to look for because I had just undergone a lot of pain with my own development workflow, because the company had started doing Default Deny, and it was messing with my development workflow in several ways. Not too long before, they dropped the bomb that EVERY network communication through the firewall required the Cisco Umbrella certificate (so that they can intercept and inspect all traffic, despite SSL). I had to figure this all out on my own, based on the behavior I was seeing, but I was able to figure out how to download that cert and include it in the chain to work with both bundle and HTTP calls in Rails, and psql for Postgres.

Then they locked out Postgres’ default port entirely. They reopened it for me at my request at first. Then six months later, they closed it again, and told me that I needed to formally request permissions for that, which was going to be a many-years-long process. I “just” rewrote the functions I needed in my Rails app to use HTTPS instead of using a direct database connection.

Anyway, I told my friend what ports IT needed to open, and how that he needed to explain to the vendor that they had to include the Umbrella cert in their chain on the back end, but he’s still having problems. Why am I being vague about the details here? It’s not because of confidentiality, though that would apply. No, it’s because my friend had been “working with IT” for over a year to get to this point, and this was two years ago, and I’ve simply forgotten a lot of the details.

“I said all of this to say” that saying it will take “3 extra rounds” is a bit of an understatement when IT starts doing “default deny,” at least in legacy manufacturing companies.