‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

My god, I cannot second this enough.

We talk craptons about "innovation" and torrents of words on "cybersecurity" yet underpin daily life on recursive kludges on 1980s operating system and software technology. It's quite Kafkaesque!

This isn't just a matter of "spending more on IT" - they likely already spend too much. It's just spending on the wrong things.

No amount of layering crap on top will overcome the rotten, slapdash foundations of systems like windows, nor the diverging motivations between MS and and their customers. Especially customers like the U.S. Government. The amount of vendor lock-in to the shitty MS ecosystem, begetting atrocities like critical data living on godforsaken Sharepoint, is profoundly saddening. It's remarkable how everyone just uses hardware that's orders of magnitude faster than 1990s computers, yet interactions are far slower.

I once tried (reluctantly) connecting my USG-issued laptop onto my fairly locked-down home network. The amount of spew it continually issued onto the network was disgusting and I just disconnected it and drove in to complete whatever mandatory update they demanded.

Instead of creating yet another goddamn "cybersecurity czar", how about we try to take what we've learned in the past 40-50 years in computer science and try to properly engineer the software foundations for the next 30 years? This is absolutely something the USG could instigate and accomplish, if the initiative was run by the right people. I know some of them!

I've decided that anti-virus and other security software slowing down the computer is a feature. If the software was super-efficient, people would think it wasn't doing anything. The slowness provides the appearance of work being done.

In a vacuum, someone will step in, and that someone as of now is China and/or Russia.

The US is certainly no saint, but I think someone(s)? have said that considering the alternatives *, you could do a lot worse.

* Realistic alternatives that is. I too would love to see us achieve world peace and ditch all weapons. But that's probably never going to happen as long as humans are not extinct.

Hackers - is there a good way to diagnose or fix this without a USAF comm admin account? Ie find out specifically what services are doing it?

Some context:

  - It takes 20-30 minutes to go from login to having excel or outlook up
  - Opening a program like Outlook, Chrome etc takes on the order of minutes once booted up/settled
  - Regular problems regarding permissions, popups that take minutes to close, licenses for things like Adobe etc
  - If you call comm, they blame it on Sq leadership not buying faster computers
  - Substantial latency on every action
  - Each computer is often shared by a rotation of ~30 people, which may contribute to the issue
  - I harbor suspicions DoD comm leadership has been compromised by a foreign power

I've worked around our scheduling and training software being useful by deploying a webapp used in an unofficial context. The AF dumped an updated to the official software recently that made it go from bad to unusable, and now I get new account requests every week.

One approach - not ideal: Non-DoD computers on squadron Wi-Fi. Can't connect to network drives etc, but is a lifesaver for one off mission planning products. Or get whatever queep you can at home before coming in.

This is a windows issue. I have had a lot of public sector clients, and rules have prevented me from doing a forensic analysis on the machines they provision, either MSFT's products are so egregious and unusable that we just pretend to use them, or the more plausible idea that corporate IT groups are using enterprise laptop fleets to run bitcoin mining.