Google stops discouraging paywalls, we are NOT living in a simulation but we ARE teaching AIs to argue. Is this a good idea?
With Sarah Lane, Tom Merritt, Roger Chang, and Veronica Belmont.
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Show Notes
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I love Veronica’s work on the show, but her microphone does always sound crappy. Actually, I suspect it’s more about the echo in the room, since she sounds great on the IRL podcast. I do hope that gets fixed sometime, as it’s the only regular bad sound quality issue on this or my other favorite podcasts.
And welcome Sarah! And hopefully welcome to your mic tomorrow!
Hey Tom
A note about the IT security experience I have had. A couple years ago I ran into some body, I can’t remember now, that recommended stopping the practice of requiring password changes since everyone does some poor password hygine to bypass it. Either the password is easily guessable, it has an incrementing digit, or they write it down somewhere like a spreadsheet or word document. I sent the article along to the IT security and they already knew about the recommendation but they can’t change it because the auditors said they would ding the controls which would go on the audit opinion which isn’t good if we decreased our security, even though it was lowered by having this. So accountants or IT people that help accountants can also help in harming the security question.
Since then, I have changed jobs and the NIST recommendation came out earlier this year about the same thing. I work with IT a lot and talked to them about it. They said it won’t happen because the person assigned security in IT doesn’t have a background in security and it was just a volentold situation. He was doing something else and someone said we need a IT security person, he was tapped to do it. He doesn’t want it or understand it but he has it. And the IT people I talked to said he won’t change the policy even with NIST recommending it because keeping security is a safer bet than removing it. If he actively removes it and something happens, he will be the fall guy even if that wasn’t related to what happened. If he doesn’t remove it, he can point the finger at something else when the cards fall. And we aren’t a small company. We are very large. So it isn’t like it is an IT dept of 5 people. It is a couple hundred people in IT. So we aren’t a Google but we aren’t a start up or mom and pop shop either. And we aren’t hiring an IT security person, just repurposing a single person’s time a little.
Because updates can bring services down and downed services don’t just lose revenue per accountants, they lose customers. Who will tell friends and write nasty twitter posts or reviews about how bad the service was at such and such. So lose $ today and customers today which is future $ or hope the thieves don’t target you or find a hole? They go with not losing money and customers now than a maybe threat in the future.