I'm still stunned by the ICC having their evidence on Azure.

…might work for coffee…

This enrages me even more.
GET IPv6. Especially if you are worldwide. The not so rich countries will need it to access your stuff sooner or later.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite @EUCommission I really hope they are making overtime with copying all their data an e-mail...

Angela Scholder

@onepict And the Dutch government, municipalities, etc. have acted just as utterly insane with their, our (!), data in Azure, AWS, and Google clouds.
And that is just only a part of our dependency on US provides services.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@AngelaScholder @jaredwhite @EUCommission western digital black do some external 5tb hard drives for a reasonable price.

They could do a job lot

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Hey. I've worked on the UN infrastructure, and while there's extensive, secure and self-hosted infrastructure located in places such as Valencia and Brindisi, each body and agency chooses how or if they use it.

Needless to say, everything is severely underfunded and the UN may not attract the best of the best for its ICT teams, so they often choose the path of least resistance and use business grade services such as Microsoft 365.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@alda Yeah, there was a point in time where you could do no wrong picking a Microsoft solution.

Generations of us now were weaned on Microsoft from Windows 3.1 onwards.

It's been the corporate choice. The large organisation choice.

Our landscape just changed.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite @EUCommission Well,5TB is probably a bit small.

I'm generally usingcthe WD Elements 4TB, the Toshiba Canvio 4TB, and the Seagate Expansion 5TB in exFAT to backup project data.
I also have a few Seagate Expansion 10TB disks for backups of our data on a NAS (one 58TB, an other 64TB).

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@AngelaScholder @jaredwhite it would take a lot of drives and some organisation.

Be nice if we had those European public clouds

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Very much, yes. But competence is not something that brings you far in the public sector.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Now, the UN hosting infrastructure exists, it is highly secure and available to any UN body.

But you can imagine that I can't always wait until next Tuesday when they have a committee meeting about my request to have ports 443 and 80 opened in my VMWare instance group's firewall.

Self-hosting requires competence and capacity that simply isn't always available and often depends on US vendors as well.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite We have plenty of Cloud Storage in the EU, but Azure is very easily implemented with Windooze computers.

And, as we have managers without any real digital literacy make the decisions it's very easy to go for the relatively consistent and known cost for the services from MakroSof than having, or keeping, the knowledge in house.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict I've had a couple of UN gigs and I can assure you that in at least one of them, the principle of "working as if an adversary has compromised the system" had become "we generally assume that Mossad has compromised our systems in one way or another".

There just wasn't the budget available to ensure that things were secure — and bureaucrats generally don't GAF about things they can't wrap their heads around.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict But here's the kicker — my systems seem to have been sufficiently secure because a couple of years after I quit, I was approached by a state actor who knew about the data therein and had seen the reports generated by them, but they did not have access to the raw data.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict So I guess that the morale of the story is that the UN has the means to self-host in geographically redundant, military grade data centres in Europe, but lacks the competence and will to do so in general.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@alda now that's pretty much the best compliment to your work.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict I may be breaking confidentiality on tech specifics, but at least I didn't hand the keys over to Mossad.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@alda sadly the UN is not the only organisation.

Which is a frightening prospect.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@alda we have to pick our battles.

So much is wrong with the world, but where we can do something we should.

I don't think you have anything to reproach yourself for.

Eddie

@onepict Seems like a good time to remind people of the site: https://european-alternatives.eu/

Stĳn van Drongelen

@AngelaScholder @onepict @jaredwhite The Dutch public sector is effectively married to Windows laptops. If there's any good competing mobile device management solution for Linux or *BSD endpoints, I'd love to know about it. Without it, there's no way to use a laptop while complying with governmental security standards.