This is a good reminder that while some security policies are pointless or ineffectual, many exist for very good reasons. I haven’t worked with this guy so I have no idea how skilled he is but even bona fide experts make mistakes or get targeted by sophisticated adversaries. Layers of defense, monitoring, and especially requiring multiple people to do sensitive things all seem like overhead until you see an attack get past some but not all of your defenses.
The endless corners cut by DOGE significantly increase the odds of that happening and we are likely not to know about everything which happens because the administration is going to do damage control and any smart adversary is going to be as quiet as possible. I especially wonder about data leaks where you can’t do anything like rotating keys, and things like personal data might show up on the dark web without enough context to determine where it came from.
secos · 15h ago
Really? This is... dumb.
indrora · 14h ago
Welcome to the reality of anything that Elon Musk has extensive control over.
SpaceX is useful because upper management actively subvert him. Tesla had a functional process before he decided to smear his face all over the public image of it. Twitter was one example of interesting architecture before he gutted it (and caused a LOT of problems; I'm informed about 80% of the infra he took out has been put back in).
He's the very real example of an accidental success without any understanding of why he succeeded.
secos · 10h ago
I meant the article was dumb. The clickbait title on HN doesn't match the meat of the article.
The endless corners cut by DOGE significantly increase the odds of that happening and we are likely not to know about everything which happens because the administration is going to do damage control and any smart adversary is going to be as quiet as possible. I especially wonder about data leaks where you can’t do anything like rotating keys, and things like personal data might show up on the dark web without enough context to determine where it came from.
SpaceX is useful because upper management actively subvert him. Tesla had a functional process before he decided to smear his face all over the public image of it. Twitter was one example of interesting architecture before he gutted it (and caused a LOT of problems; I'm informed about 80% of the infra he took out has been put back in).
He's the very real example of an accidental success without any understanding of why he succeeded.