Punkie

Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

Probably HR (or the NCS equivalent) never told the right people. I am not saying this is actually what happened, but a lot of IT bemoan the fact they are never told some rando employee was fired because HR neglects to inform them. Sometimes it takes months to discover, and even with a 90 day password/login lockout, some halfway decent admin could get around this by secretly building a back door, and using the messed up communication and politics between departments to hide this. Even in the 1990s, I saw people put in “time bombs” in their code that “if such and such is not updated in 6 months, run destructo-script A.”

But imagine someone like Kandula Nagaraju here. Worked in QA, probably did a great jobs with some skills, but had the personality of swallowing broken glass. He was terminated in October 2022 due to “poor work performance,” which could mean anything. “Not a team player.” Or maybe he really was an idiot: I mean, a smart person would have a conniption, but get employed elsewhere and then slam his former company at parties. “Those NCS folks didn’t know what they had with me!” But this guy was probably someone with some anger management issues, probably a jerk, and possibly stupid. He might have had revenge fantasies, and set up a small virtual server posing as a backup code mirror. But outside the audits, it allowed ssh from the outside, and hid it through a knockd daemon. Or maybe only launched ssh at certain hours before shutting it down again. Silently working away in a sea of virtual servers with little to no updated documentation. He gets in, has internal access, and runs a script with admin credentials because they don’t rotate their AWS keys/secrets quickly enough. Or didn’t even know he was let go.

After Kandula’s contract was terminated and he arrived back in India, he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials. He did so on six occasions between Jan 6 and Jan 17, 2023.

That’s embarrassing to the company. Not only did he get in, but SIX TIMES after he was let go. he probably knew what order to run the delete commands (like, say, an aws “terminate-instances” cli command from a primary node), and did so one by one, probably during hours with the least amount of supervision, where the first few alerts would take hours to get someone in the monitoring chain to wake an admin. Given his last day was in November, and he got back in January, the admins probably thought their 90 access credential rotation was “good enough,” but he got in on his 80th day or whatever.

I know this because I have had to do triage when a former contractor did this to a company I worked for. But instead of wiping out instances, he opened a new set of cloud accounts from the master account, put them in an unmonitored region (in this case, Asia), and spun up thousands of instances to run bitcoin mining. Only because AWS notified us of “unusual traffic” were we made aware at all, and this guy knew his shit and covered his tracks very well. He did it at a speed that could have only been automated. Thankfully, AWS did not charge us the seven figure amount that this activity amassed in just three days.

I remember hearing that some Hollywood contracts require that if you sign up for some studio, you must make X amount of films. Big stars get to chose those films to some degree, but once in a while, they have to do “a stinker” to end the contract as “X amount of films done, okay?” or something. Contractual Obligation and all. This film feels like a dumping ground of a lot of those contractual obligation hires from the trailer alone.

1. Things like CNC machines and proprietary interfaces to TOL equipment, like bus fare systems, message boards, etc.
2. Don’t connect them to the Internet (most can’t, anyway, but some systems use a run-of-the-mill PC, so…)
3. Don’t install anything on them that wasn’t supposed to be installed, even wallpaper as this could fuck up the resolution of a small 240 x 180 screen

I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don’t do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life