til: there’s individuals/people that "trusted" azure at all
I only used that shit platform because some Microsoft consultant convinced idiotic C-suite that Azure was the future.
Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
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Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#142When things must be shipped quickly, shit breaks and corners are cut; large orgs are full of disfunction. Not sure if such insight was worth of setting your own career on fire.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.
Well, yeah, that’s what a board does, but I think the issue is whether it is customary to go to the board directly in this situation. The answer is a resounding NO. Very odd, but cool idea and approach.
Maybe naive, but why not? If it's a serious enough issue, and you're not getting anywhere through your management chain all the way up to the CEO, why is it novel to contact the people the CEO reports to? They're not royalty, they're other human beings who also eat, piss and fart like everyone else.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness the SECWAR is hardly a computing expert. But in this case the SECWAR has been properly advised. If anything it's astonishing that a program whereby China-based Microsoft engineers telling U.S.-based Microsoft engineers specific commands to type in ever made it off the proposal page inside Microsoft, accelerated time-to-market or not. It defeats the entire purpose of many of the NIST security controls that…
I'd like to suggest calling him SECDEF, not SECWAR. IMHO the country should not capitulate to Trump's power grabs, even if Congress refuses to perform their oversight duties.
I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint but I'm not in the habit of policing the names people use for themselves.
I've certainly done more than my fair share of jobs in the Navy where the office I was formally billeted to had long since ceased to actually exist as described due to office renamings. Often things as simple as a department section being elevated into a department branch and people using the new name even while they wait 1-2 years for the manpower records to be fixed and the POM process to cycle through for program resourcing. But still, seems hard to treat it as a crime at one level when no one blinked an eye at the lower level.
Maybe Congress will eventually step in, but in the meantime the American voters made their choice about who they want to run these agencies, so...
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#145I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much. The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. The documentation is obviously entirely written by AI and is constantly out of date or wrong. They offer such a huge volume of services it's nearly impossible to figure out what service you actually want/need without consultants, and when you finally get t…
We migrated some services to AKS because the upper management thought it was a good deal to get so many credits, and now pods are randomly crashing and database nodes have random spikes in disk latency. What ran reliably on GCP became quite unpredictable.
Exact same story at my place. Upper management decided it's a good idea to build on Azure because Microsoft promised some benefits. Things that ran reliable on GCP now need active firefighting on Azure
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness the SECWAR is hardly a computing expert. But in this case the SECWAR has been properly advised. If anything it's astonishing that a program whereby China-based Microsoft engineers telling U.S.-based Microsoft engineers specific commands to type in ever made it off the proposal page inside Microsoft, accelerated time-to-market or not. It defeats the entire purpose of many of the NIST security controls that…
> If anything it's astonishing that a program whereby China-based Microsoft engineers telling U.S.-based Microsoft engineers specific commands to type in ever made it off the proposal page inside Microsoft, accelerated time-to-market or not. > It defeats the entire purpose of many of the NIST security controls that demand things like U.S.-cleared personnel for government networks, and Microsoft knew those were a thin…
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine that no one likes Azure.
The only good thing Microsoft azure ever did for me was provide a very easy way to exploit their free trial program in the early 2010s to crypto mine for free. It couldn’t do much, but it was straight up free real estate for CPU mining. $200 or 2 weeks per credit/debit card.
I used it for MMO goldfarming - circa 2012/2013
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#148I've seen Azure OpenAI leak other customer's prompt responses to us under heavy load. https://x.com/DaveManouchehri/status/2037001748489949388 Nobody seems to care.
That is absolutely insane.
Yeah, I saw over 100 leaked messages.
Fun ones include people trying to get GPT to write malware.
I can’t help create software that secretly runs in the background, captures user activity, and exfiltrates it. That would meaningfully facilitate malware/spyware behavior.
If your goal is legitimate monitoring, security testing, or administration on systems you own and where users have given informed consent, I can help with safe alternatives, for example:
- Build a visible Windows tray app that:
- clearly indicates it is running
- requires explicit opt-in
- stores logs locally
- uploads only to an approved internal server over TLS
- Create an endpoint telemetry agent for:
- process inventory
- service health
- crash reporting
- device posture/compliance
- Implement parental-control or employee-monitoring software with:
- consent banners
- audit logs
- uninstall instructions
- privacy controls and data retention settings
I can also help with defensive or benign pieces individually, such as:
- C# Windows Service or tray application structure
- Secure HTTPS communication with certificate validation
- Code signing and MSI installer creation
- Local encrypted logging
- Consent UI and settings screens
- Safe process auditing using official Windows APIs
- How to send authorized telemetry to your own server
If you want, I can provide a safe template for a visible C# tray app that periodically sends approved system-health telemetry to your serverRe: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness the SECWAR is hardly a computing expert. But in this case the SECWAR has been properly advised. If anything it's astonishing that a program whereby China-based Microsoft engineers telling U.S.-based Microsoft engineers specific commands to type in ever made it off the proposal page inside Microsoft, accelerated time-to-market or not. It defeats the entire purpose of many of the NIST security controls that…
> If anything it's astonishing that a program whereby China-based Microsoft engineers telling U.S.-based Microsoft engineers specific commands to type in ever made it off the proposal page inside Microsoft, accelerated time-to-market or not. > It defeats the entire purpose of many of the NIST security controls that demand things like U.S.-cleared personnel for government networks, and Microsoft knew those were a thin…
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Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#150> The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore critical. > In that context, hosting a web service that is directly reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host side created a significantly larger attack surface than I expected. That is quite scary
Instead of zero trust, it is 110% trust.