Human Infrastructure 338: Can We Troubleshoot IT's Public Image?

January 25, 2024

Can We Troubleshoot IT’s Public Image?

by Robert Wildauer

We IT workers have a reputation as a thorny bunch. Stereotypes say we are insular, odd, anti-social, dismissive, condescending, and so on. Our representation in media has reflected this dynamic starting decades ago (Nick Burns is the earliest I can remember, though I’m sure this started before him).

[Editor’s note: Malvin and Jim from WarGames]

In an effort to live up to these low expectations, we even have swag that disparages the very people whom we’re supposed to help.

Of course, IT tends to attract introverts who may not be the social butterflies some users prefer to work with (I’ll count myself in this category). But an introvert is different from a misanthrope; the general perception is that we embody the latter more than the former. While working on this piece, I asked some friends who aren’t in IT about their perception of their IT departments. Here are some samples:

· I don’t like going to their office. It always seems like I’m bothering them

· At least one of them looks at me like he wants to kill me when I ask for help

· I never know when they are around. They sneak in and out of the building like a bunch of wraiths

· They papered over the window on their office door and locked it so no one could see what they’re up to

Frankly, the responses I heard weren’t surprising. What did surprise me was that regardless of how the person I asked felt about their IT department’s performance (i.e. if they were happy with the speed and quality of support), they consistently avoided seeking help from technicians.

On some level, our strained interactions are a product of stress – IT is mission-critical, but often complex and fragile. That’s a tough environment to operate in. Users need technology for all aspects of their jobs while lacking a fundamental understanding of how it works. Work hours can be long, the job thankless, and the knowledge requirements vast. So we have a little leeway to be salty, right? Maybe.

But stress can’t be the only factor here: can we really say the average IT job is more stressful than a doctor or nurse working in a hospital? How about a teacher instructing a classroom full of children all day? Those occupations do not have the same reputation as IT, so it’s worth reflecting on how we feed into those negative perceptions.

Why do users’ attitudes about us matter? In my experience, IT and user interaction is a feedback loop – starting an interaction with a negative valence can push your user to the negative, which causes them to respond negatively and push you more to the negative, and so on. And, like it or not, many people are going to remember your worst day more than your best (the Rage Monster, for example). If users walk into every interaction with IT expecting a nightmare, they are much more likely to get it.

Unfortunately, there’s no top-down solution or magic bullet to fix this. Our reputations are built interaction by interaction. Every call, work order, or hey-do-you-have-a-quick-second is an opportunity to do better. And if enough of us do, perhaps we can change our collective reputation.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

The “fediverse” is shorthand for all of the decentralized instances that make up the Mastodon social network. Mastodon relies on a protocol called Activity Pub that allows individuals or organizations to run their own Mastodon instances and then decide which other instances they want to connect to. This blog post tries to track down where all these instances are hosted. The project that involves finding a way around CDN services such as Cloudflare and Fastly, which are front-ending large swathes of Mastodon instances that might actually be hosted elsewhere. It’s an interesting detective story! Also, if you’re curious about what it’s like to run a Mastodon instance, I interviewed two of the people behind the Hachyderm instance back in 2023. - Drew

The author suggests that shortwave technology can be used for global communications during Internet outages. Those outages could be due to local government interference or other causes. I say “shortwave technology” because the author isn’t talking about voice radio broadcasts that shortwave enthusiasts (like me) grew up listening to. He’s talking about text. “Starting about 2010 I was introduced to the digital modes of amateur radio. I was amazed that such a weak signal, in noisy conditions, could produce text. … The big advantage of text via shortwave is that it can be received successfully in poor reception conditions, in which voice broadcasts are difficult to comprehend. Text can be read and re-read, and passed on to others through personal media.” This aligns with how ham operators are sometimes called up to facilitate communications during local emergencies. - Ethan

I’m pleased to see there’s a new speedbump in our ever-accelerating surveillance state. Ring, owned by Amazon, says it will now require law enforcement to get a warrant before it hands over video footage. - Drew

Quantum Computing has been simmering for a decade or two. There are signs that it's maturing and reaching a level of operation that is fit for some purposes. Many attempts to hype QC have failed when the reality of operating quantum computers is understood. This article details the negatives and outlines the niche markets where it’s a useful tool. I would point out that the success and rapid AI adoption is based on reuse of existing technology. It runs on GPUs and works with well-known software tools like Python. Quantum needs all new hardware, operations, and new software tools. Reason to be cautious about hype. - Greg

You can’t mine rare earth minerals at high ore concentrations. They occur as trace minerals, making processing and extraction very difficult or “rare”. The ore is readily available all over the world. Today lithium ore processing leaves huge ‘ponds’ of seriously toxic fluids in tailing pools with risks to humans and the environment and that require maintenance to keep them safe. As Western governments work to reduce dependency on Chinese sources who are willing to pollute their land with huge processing plants, we need new methods of extraction and processing. Here is a story about that. - Greg

I’ve been privileged to visit Bletchley Park and see a Colossus operating. As a nerd I was more than a little emotional to see what birthed modern von Neumann computing. I’m always a sucker for these retro posts that display images from a different era. - Greg

TECH NEWS 📣

A tale that reminded me of the old BOFH posts from back in the day. (I hope I’m not the only one who remembers “Lettuce Nodes”.) Only this story is true, and includes a VPN tunnel to an engineer’s house where a whole bunch of company files resided. Oh, boy. - Ethan

The OpenWrt project is spec’ing a board that gets around the problem of “binary blobs” needed depending on the platform you’re running OpenWrt on. OpenWrt won’t build this board themselves--probably the makers of Banana Pi will do so. The specs of the board itself? Well…there’s some ongoing discussion about that, such as how many Ethernet ports should be standard and at what speeds, NVMe storage or not, USB 3.0 or not, PoE or not, and more. - Ethan

Internet Pioneer David Mills aka “Father Time” Has Passed - Various Links
David Mills passed away on January 17, 2024. He was best known as the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), but made many other significant contributions to the early Internet, including fuzzball routers and sundry Internet RFCs. For ham operators, his callsign was W3HCF. Read more about David in this ode from The New Stack, this growing collection of stories from people that knew him, and his Wikipedia entry. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

README.md says, “Mega Mesh module takes in 10 Centralized Routers and composes a Full Mesh Transit Gateway topology across 10 regions from existing hub spokes in AWS. It peers and generates routes for TGWs and their respective VPCs.” Excellent. I definitely wouldn’t want to build that mesh by hand. - Ethan

Retriever - Secure Secrets Retrieval 
https://retriever.corgea.io/

By the folks at Corgea, Retriever “lets you request secrets from anyone without any of the data going to a server.” How does it work? The site says, “1 Send the above link to someone you want to get a secret from. 2 They add their secret and share the URL Retriever generates. 3 Only you can open that URL in the browser to see their secret. 🪄” Code is here if you’d prefer to run it locally. Sounds more robust than sending secrets in a password-protected PDF, and sending the password to the PDF via a separate channel for clever obfuscation. Obviously, none of us have ever done that. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Holy bleep. The story of a brutal DDoS, unhelpful help from upstream ISPs, unknown motivations by a bad actor, and standing up a new datacenter pretty much from scratch. This one made me tear up, not gonna lie. I’ve been in some whole-system-down-everyone-panicking bleepstorms, but this one was…wow. - Ethan

Forward Networks builds a model of your network that’s essentially an exact copy. (That’s what the “digital twin” idea is all about.) From that data set, you can perform all sorts of tests and troubleshooting of your own without having to touch production. In this release, Forward has added “AI Assist” to their Forward Enterprise platform. AI Assist “facilitates Network Query Engine (NQE) searches using natural language, thus allowing team engineers of varying skill levels to conduct sophisticated network queries with minimal learning curve. Moreover, AI Assist generates natural language explanations for existing queries, fostering improved collaboration and understanding within the team.” In other words, you can ask Forward plain language questions about the network now. It will even help you convert queries you’ve already written into plain language. Forward also says there’s more AI to come from them. Stay tuned! - Ethan

WATCH THIS!

Surprisingly, this is not comedy. This is an orchestral imagining of the connection sound of a 56k modem familiar to all of us that grew up in the dialup era. Less than a minute long. - Ethan

A somewhat technical video whose intro is as follows. “Starting in the 1970s, the world moved from communicating through copper to glass, and that demanded a series of breakthroughs. The optical fiber network connecting our world is a technical marvel. Light bouncing from one end of the world to the other encased in some of the purest glass in the world modulated to carry billions or even trillions of bits per second. In this video, we talk about how optical fiber helped connect the world.” Enjoy. - Ethan

LAST LAUGH 😆