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- cross-posted to:
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A website dedicated to naming ICE and Border Patrol employees is coming under a “prolonged and sophisticated” cyber attack after the Daily Beast revealed it planned to make public 4,500 names of federal immigration staff.
The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia after the Beast reported that a huge cache of personal IDs had been leaked to the site by an alleged Department of Homeland Security whistleblower.
The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault, which began on Tuesday evening and is still ongoing at the time of publication, saw a huge number of IPs simultaneously access the website of ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative.”
This has successfully overloaded the ICE List’s servers and is preventing people from accessing the site. The timing coincided with ICE List founder Dominick Skinner telling the Daily Beast he would make public the first tranche of names in the dataset, which was leaked following the shooting by an ICE agent of mom Renee Nicole Good.
People are getting dumber about computers, not smarter. You heard it here first.
No, I’ve known this for a long time. When I was a kid I was conscripted into doing tech support for my older relatives. Now my generation is doing tech support for the younger generations.
When my generation dies it’ll kick off a post-apocalyptic future where people have to rediscover how all this technology works.
Or having to teach them how to write and debug code in COBOL.
I agree about people getting dumber about computers, but sadly you’re not the first to say it.
I see it in my IT work everyday. It makes for some good job security, but I wonder what happens when the last of us that know how to work the dark magics shuffle off our mortal coil.
Then the AI overlords’ takeover will be complete. Dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
In an ideal world, as they see your knowledge is harder and harder to replace, they’ll start paying more for it, and that will hopefully be encouraging enough to the current workforce to learn the skills.
This is true and happens to me.
Here’s the challenge. Someone new that doesn’t have the skills that is enticed by the money has to make two evaluations:
For me to learn the skill wasn’t difficult because is it was modern and contemporary technology at the time. Training and support resources existed, and I was able to incrementally learn how those older technologies continued to evolve or be accommodated as new technologies arrived to replace them, but then didn’t. That won’t be the case for someone new. They can’t even use the old training material I used (assuming it was even still around) because that was written assuming the technology pervasive and well supported while the opposite is true today.
As for marketability, this is an even larger gamble. Many of these technologies should have been retired decades ago, but weren’t for a variety of niche reasons. No organizations are putting out new deployments of these old technologies. The customer base/employers wanting these skills decrease every year as old legacy systems are finally retired leaving even fewer opportunities for a new person to exercise these newly acquired old skills. Its a fact that someday there will be no users of them, but when will that be? It should have happened already so what new worker would want to try and gamble on going into extensive learning on technologies that should be dead by the time they master them?
Oh, if you’re talking about outdated technology as well, then that definitely gets harder.
They might have to face the decision to at least redo it with modern tech as these people are at least willing to learn that.
Or it could go like COBOL where the change is just so insurmountable, at least some jobs might exist for a very long time.
All of us who grew up as computers became mainstream had to learn how to use them and troubleshoot things, we also got to grow up as it was maturing.
These newer generations are handed tablets with apps and that’s it, and all the apps they want to use are focused around tiny attention spans and how to manipulate them.
Well, back in OOUUURRRRR DAYYYYY, the only computer was Windows and nothing ran until we edited the AUTOEXEC.BAT just to find out the .dll our sneakernet shareware software installed munged up the TCP/IP stack and we had to spend two hours and find the Windows install media to remove and replace it and THEN it would work until we installed something else.
And we LIKED it that way! We loved it!
I had to learn how to navigate Windows 3.0 using keyboard commands with no screen. I had to fix the resolution when I set it too high and the display was a 4 pixel tall line across the screen. Way back before preview and accept changes existed.
I remember back in the day in my highschool computer science class, altering the autoexec.bat to mess with the next student in fun ways. Nothing that would stop them, but simply give them pause.
Same as with cars. Everyone just wants to press a button and go.