Yeah. It's essentially this bad almost everywhere.
You think "surely X" but no. Almost never X. Almost always some lazy Y or nothing at all.
After a couple consulting contracts / vuln disclosures I updated my priors of how competent the government was. I'm actually getting worried now that everything is going cyber-physical and corporations can pull the wool over their eyes. The government is great at offense, but defence is boring. Especially at non-fancy agencies / departments. And the salaries are low.
But it doesn't even matter really. Basically so many things are broken and offense gets better over time while defence gets worse. I'm fighting for regulations, etc. But this stuff is so ill-defined that the government has trouble understanding it.
I have come to blame the universities. The CompSci department should have gone to the Civil or Nuclear Engineering department and said "ok, how do we think about time frames over 100 years?" and built out courses out of that. But other than a handful of rare exceptions, right now most grads come out not understanding the true gravity of their decisions.
The one nice thing is that offense is usually incompetent too. I've been on projects dealing with real crime[0]. The number of people nailed with just getting an IP is lolsy. Most criminals are stupid. I partly want to relay what the smartest 2%ile did just to show how low the bar is, but I fear educating the lower 98%.
[0] Not stupid drug war stuff.
You think "surely X" but no. Almost never X. Almost always some lazy Y or nothing at all.
After a couple consulting contracts / vuln disclosures I updated my priors of how competent the government was. I'm actually getting worried now that everything is going cyber-physical and corporations can pull the wool over their eyes. The government is great at offense, but defence is boring. Especially at non-fancy agencies / departments. And the salaries are low.
But it doesn't even matter really. Basically so many things are broken and offense gets better over time while defence gets worse. I'm fighting for regulations, etc. But this stuff is so ill-defined that the government has trouble understanding it.
I have come to blame the universities. The CompSci department should have gone to the Civil or Nuclear Engineering department and said "ok, how do we think about time frames over 100 years?" and built out courses out of that. But other than a handful of rare exceptions, right now most grads come out not understanding the true gravity of their decisions.
The one nice thing is that offense is usually incompetent too. I've been on projects dealing with real crime[0]. The number of people nailed with just getting an IP is lolsy. Most criminals are stupid. I partly want to relay what the smartest 2%ile did just to show how low the bar is, but I fear educating the lower 98%.
[0] Not stupid drug war stuff.