I have first hand experience with this.I am late 50s and still at top of my game in my area of expertise. It was time to move on from last job last year and had zero interest from anyone. All through my network so no cold calls either. I know for a fact those positions were filled with late 30s mid 40s people.
So my answer was luckily i retired. The interesting thing is after being in tech for 35-40 years i have no interest in any of it now. Hell after 3 weeks of retirement i didnt.
I have a small farm now and play with tractors and such all day.
A sad day. My buddy and I were the original developers of anandtech when it went live running on cold fusion and oracle as the backend. I started a hosting company and hosted anadtrch for a few years. Lots of memories there.
I remember religiously checking the hot deals forum then for insane dot com boom pricing choices (and errors). Fun times. A bunch of us moved to IRC but then Fatwallet sort of ruined things w their volume of users.
It was super ahead of it's time with all the crazy functionality and connection.. flowed together really smoothly.
I think there's a need for this kind of thing still, if you have a passion for it you should consider reimagining what kind of content could be needed in 2024.
YC seems to like the kind of esoteric knowledge you probably have.
I retired from tech after 40 years this spring. Im now a farmer in the middle of nowhere.
The big thing i see missing from long ago times is a real sense of community and an all in one site ( article , forums etc). They try and some are decent but there just isnt the connection and i dont think that will ever return. I think reddit and the like sucked all that away from sites and the audience is much much broader so i feel they lose some of that “likemidedness” i dunno im just old and cant really relate to the younger “techies” of today.
Long ago times there was a sense of community, but also of loneliness/isolation at the same time. There was also much more accessibility/approachability, there was less to understand and it was easier to understand because we were spoonfed in bits as things were invented/developed and the reasons behind them. Trying to get my son tech skills I had a challenge, where do I even start? It's all just uninteresting dogma you just need to memorize now but for us it was 'this spec/software developed from this and ah ok I see the reasons why'.
Since 40 years ago there have been what, 400 million people years of development work done? That is harder to digest, harder to approach, harder to feel you are a part of something unique and exciting or of a small community.
Yea we worked on his old site before anadtech. Sheesh so much fun at CES with the gang in lv. Was fun times. My buddy started fusetalk by writing anadtech forums from scratch. It all moved to .net after a couple years and that when i left. Jason stayed on for years
You both can be right, US Gov will write well-intentioned policy that none of their live teams can keep up with, even after 20 years, and I haven't yet seen a practical enterprise authentication architecture that doesn't fall back on passwords somewhere.
Within the DOD the most common solutions are SSH keys using the CAC, Kerberos with PKINIT, or using some type of intermediate systems to handle the auth like CA PAM.
There can still be a root password for emergencies, but it wouldn't be available for remote access -- ILOM or some other BMC (or even a serial port concentrator) would be configured for HSPD-12-compliant auth for remote console access, then you would use the root password for system access (though you could also just reboot into a separate operating system, since disk encryption isn't required except for mobile devices).
I'm not sure what the above poster's command or organization was doing to comply with HSPD-12, but they were most likely doing something. The compliant reports are generally public, also.
Yes but PIV/CAC identity is not related to break-glass passwords. They both serve different purposes and it's safe to assume that the typical government worker will only ever need to use their smart card to authenticate into systems.
I started out as a federal civil servant in the late 90s working for the Navy and switched to contracting shortly thereafter, working at mostly US DOD customers (Navy, Army, USSOCOMHQ), but also DHS (HQ and all components minus SS and CG).
In my experience, at every place we had a different approach but all satisfied HSPD-12 and did not use passwords shortly after the various directives were promulgated through the various channels, except on classified systems since there wasn't a procedure at the time to declassify the CAC/PIV after periods processing -- though there were plans for changing that, and it may be resolved by now.
PuTTY-CAC was an interesting, although imperfect solution to using PIV/CAC cards together with SSH. I remember piloting it from 2013-2014 at an agency. Back then, it was maintained by Dan Risacher[0]. Nowadays it is maintained on GitHub[1] and adopted some interesting features like FIDO.
But could you get into the network to access the UNIX boxes without a PIV card? That's how the NIH works -- the UNIX boxes do have passwords, but unless you are on campus you have to connect to the VPN with your PIV card first.
NIST has a similar setup. There’s an exemption for e.g. summer students who are issued temporary non-PIV badges, but they’re issued a yubikey that’s required to access the network from off campus
There is a lot of variety in how different places implement Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), but the reports on compliance are public and since it's an initiative that's been going on since 2004, compliance is high.
My father worked on a multi year project to replace their darling (but very old mainframe system) with SAP. Apparently it's just awful and basically everything required a custom and tons of SAP consultants. By the time you're done, you had to reimplement the entire system on top of SAP with a ton of workarounds. That was his experience anyway.
This is exactly what im doing this year. Though im 30yrs in. I bought a farm next to my dad in idaho. Im done in march and moving cross country and growing alfalfa and potatoes
Our county did basically same thing in rural va. Our coop who the county partnered with is now expanding to 5 other counties. 1gb 75 mo. Its been down once in 4 years
I've actually seen this elsewhere as well. The local rural telephone cooperatives tend to have better service and better support if the customer base decides it and can afford it.
Proxmox helper scripts maintainer who went into hospice a couple weeks ago passed. This post on gh is from his wife