Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I’ve worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I’ve ever seen up until that time and since.
They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They’d bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered “nothing” every god damn time.
They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a “B”) a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.
We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.
Fuck IT Security. It’s a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.
At my current company all changes have to happen via GitHub PR and commit because we use GitOps (ex: ArgoCD with Kubernetes). Any changes you do manually are immediately overwritten when ArgoCD notices the config drift.
This makes development more annoying sometimes but I’m so damn glad when I can immediately look at GitHub for an audit trail and source of truth.
It wasn’t InfoSec in this case but I had an annoying tech lead that would merge to main without telling people, so anytime something broke I had his GitHub activity bookmarked and could rule that out first.
Hm can’t say. I’m using bitbucket and it does block admins, though they all have the ability to go into settings and remove the approval requirement. No one does though because then the bad devs would be able to get changes in without reviews.
The past several years I have been working more as a process engineer than a technical one. I’ve worked in Problem Management, Change Management, and currently in Incident for a major defense contractor (yes, you’ve heard of it). So I’ve been on both sides. Documenting an incident is a PITA. File a Change record to restart a server that is in an otherwise healthy cluster? You’re kidding, right? What the hell is a “Problem” record and why do I need to mess with it?
All things I’ve heard and even thought over the years. What it comes down to, the difference between a Mom and Pop operation, that has limited scalability and a full Enterprise Environment that can support a multi-billion dollar business… Is documentation. That’s what those numb nuts in that Insurance Company were too stupid to understand.
Lack of a Change Control process has nothing to do with IT Security except within the domain of Availability. Part of Security is ensuring IT systems are available and working.
You simply experienced working at an organization with poor enforcement of Change Control policies. That was a mistake of oversight, because with competent oversight anyone causing outages by making unapproved changes that cause an outage would be reprimanded and instructed to follow policy properly.
My secret is that I know I’m actually the only real human, and everybody else are aliens posing as humans to study my behavior. That’s why I purposefully make random decisions and actions from time to time, to throw them off.
I still have to figure out if I’m the last human alive, if every remaining human is being studied like me, or if there is a real human society somewhere.
You’re not actual a “real human.” You’re an alien just like us, but we convinced you that you were human so we could study “human behavior”. One behavior we’ve identified is paranoia.
Reminds me so much of a particular Philip K. Dick story. A solider’s tour in Korea is over and returning home he notices that everything is fake. Artificial sweetener, instant coffee, faux leather shoes, hair styles, etc. He gets the idea that the aliens took over the US and setup a few fake burbs for the soldiers returning home, to isolate them and eventually pick them off one by one.
My wife is very superstitious and I have never believed in ghosts or anything like that. Aliens, ghosts, magic, religions, totally confident that they aren’t real. When she told me she heard a weird voice calling her name one night I was incredibly skeptical and told her she was definitely dreaming because we live nowhere near anybody and it was -30 that night.
Thirdly, if they were to visit Earth, do you really think that given the difficulty of traversing space, that you’d be able to identify signs of their arrival?
Just setup a fountain with a toxic chemical in it with a sign to not drink from it. Based on every party I have ever been on half of them will be dead in minutes.
I used to think (intelligent/hyper-advanced) extraterrestrial life was far-fetched, but despite being very skeptical by nature, I’ve recently changed my tune after deep diving into the subject of UAP.
My article is very throughly cited from valid sources. I’m not saying aliens are responsible for the UAP we’ve witnessed in our atmosphere, but I am inclined to admit it seems like a feasible explanation for the crafts that were confirmed by our government being witnessed all over the world, beginning in 1947.
I know from past experience that many users will not follow that link, so I figured I’d share some important highlights to demonstrate that I’m not a crazy conspiracy theorist.
In May 1948 the Office of Military Government for Bavaria, Germany, issued instructions for reporting sightings of “flying discs.” These instructions were issued as a result of requirements from higher headquarters in Germany and in the United States. They were the result of the flying saucer phenomena that began in 1947. [32]
It’s been confirmed since 2017 that the U.S. government had a secret program devoted to the surveillance and study of UAP, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). [1]
The existence of UAP as real objects in our atmosphere has been confirmed by the U.S. government. The Pentagon’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was mandated to produce a report on UAP, and stated in their report that:
“Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.… UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.
Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology. [11]”
Of the 510 total UAP reports studied by ODNI, 171 remained “uncharacterized and unattributed,” and “some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.” [11] Not only has the US government confirmed that UAP exist, they have admitted that they pose a serious safety risk to our pilots; both commercial and military.
Furthermore, these crafts which appear to be exhibiting disruptive/breakthrough technology in comparison to our currently most advanced (publicly disclosed) conventional aircraft, were demonstrating these same feats over 65 years ago. I find it harder to believe we had such a significant breakthrough back in 1947, rather than tech originating from some non-human intelligence.
In my article, I have linked previously classified correspondence in which the Air Force and other government agencies all confirmed with each other that the crafts in our atmosphere, starting in 1947, were not the product of any secret U.S. programs. The recommendation was to attempt to recreate these crafts, which is where USAF Project 1794 comes into play.
It is important to note that the craft attempting to be designed here was not capable of achieving the feats of the “flying saucers” that were being witnessed all around the world at that time.
Project 1794 also offers proof of the U.S. government’s ability to maintain classified information. I have seen the idiotic talking point parroted around that “The U.S. government couldn’t keep something like UFOs from the public all those years.” Why not?? USAF Project 1794 unequivocally refutes that argument. It was kept secret until it was declassified and sent to the National Archives. [31]
TL;DR: Don’t be so quick to discount the possible existence of non-human intelligence…
Edit: I always wonder if the people blanket downvoting assume these are fake documents, or if it’s just blatant confirmation bias, avoidance, and denial? They are easily verifiable. If you’re here just jumping to conclusions that this is false because it’s easier to believe that, consider that you are failing to maintain intellectual integrity. That’s not skepticism; it’s bias and being too ignorant to even consider a possibility that is outside of your internalized beliefs. It’s a demonstration of closed-mindedness. You’re like the people from the movie Don’t Look Up.
If you’re so confident, read my blog post and challenge your preconceived beliefs.
Full disclaimer: I maybe read 10% of your comment.
Why is the government (all governments really) hiding it from us?
Why don’t the aliens want to be seen? And why do we still observe them sometimes? Given their far far superior tech it shouldn’t be hard for them to avoid being detected.
I realize I didn’t answer your question about why would governments conceal it.
It makes a lot of sense for our governments to conceal technology to have an edge against adversaries should a major conflict arise. The element of surprise is very powerful, and suddenly deploying technology that an adversary doesn’t know how to/doesn’t have an existing plan to counter is highly valuable.
Concealing technological developments also makes it more challenging for adversaries to replicate our tech.
The reason for the historical concealment from the public goes back to the Robertson Panel, who decided that while UFO/UAP represent no direct threat, they believed that public awareness could lead to ontological crises for the highly religious country at that time. They also believed that it served as a vulnerability that the Soviets could use to instill mass panic (think of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast panic).
So the Robertson Panel recommended concealing the information on UFO/UAP and initiating a ‘public information campaign’ to reeducate our population and to stigmatize the subject. They were very successful and this stigma still remains, as exemplified in the users who downvote factual information because they’d rather engage in confirmation bias and denial.
I’m not saying that UAP are definitively from aliens. There’s not enough evidence available to the public to support that claim. I’m saying I don’t believe that is as outlandish as it sounds at face value, once you consider the information confirmed by members/agencies of the U.S. government.
People are rejecting this topic as crazy due to the stigma, not due to lack of evidence supporting the existence of UAP. I don’t present evidence of aliens; I present evidence of crafts that represent breakthrough technology.
What I was trying to get at is that a non-human intelligence isn’t out of the question to explain the technology that is still ahead of our tech now in 2023, but has been confirmed to exist at least since 1947.
Even if that is human tech that was witnessed starting in 1947, it should be deeply concerning that a nation secretly possesses technology that superior to any publicly known modern day aircraft.
There’s a lot to my write-up on the topic. It’s overwhelming, but it’s factual information that is thoroughly cited from valid sources. I don’t talk about unfounded claims or abductions or anything like that.
Edit: This section might be more for you:
For the individuals that will not have the interest or patience to read this detailed information, I strongly recommend this National Geographic documentary: UFOs: Investigating the Unknown on Hulu. The first few episodes are available for free on Youtube.
That documentary is not like the History Channel’s big-haired nonsense…
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