Forcepoint has some implementation issues, but it did the job.
Our problem with it was that it would fail closed in the appliance in the DMZ went down for any reason.
I didn't work with it on the implementation or support side, though I know it wasn't painless. The actual function of providing web security worked well for us. Once we had it up and running we stopped getting hit by ransomware 3 times per week.
I like Forcepoint just fine. It's a complex beast that ingests data from multiple sources and spits it out to multiple consumers. It's one of the highest-footprint systems we have. But despite its complexity, I never find it unwieldy.
One of the very nice features it has it that you can feed it data from SQL databases and have it trigger on real data, not just on patterns. So instead of saying "send me an alert if somebody sends something that matches this regex pattern for a home address," you can have it send an alert it if matches (or even fuzzy-matches) a real address pulled from your CRM. Not all DLP solutions can do that, and of those that do, there are often limitations in the fine print.
Honestly, the technicals aren't the problem, it's the business side. Tuning & tweaking DLP takes a lot of work and requires a lot of conversations with the non-IT business departments, acting on DLP alerts requires buy-in from HR & management.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Forcepoint has some implementation issues, but it did the job.
Forcepoint has a tight partnership with an IT services firm called ESPO and we used them for implementation. I liked ESPO a lot. EPSO managed to avoid all of my (numerous and capricious) pet peeves about IT professional services. They have techs who really know what they're talking about, are good at answering questions with a response appropriate to the skill level (whether it was me asking or a non-IT person asking), their project management practices never felt like bureaucracy for its own sake, they did a bang-up job with documentation, etc.
I would not have attempted to implement this without a partner. It's just too big. Maybe after I'd done it a half-dozen times, sure.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
As a mechanical engineer, I still take issue with the compsci people taking our title. Doubly so that when someone says 'engineer' now in normal discussion, people automatically think that person is a software dev/programmer/person.
Given the person apparently has no relevant skills for creating applications, I assume it's one of those entirely made up things for a completely unrelated job, like "sanitation engineer" for janitorial staff.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
As a mechanical engineer, I still take issue with the compsci people taking our title. Doubly so that when someone says 'engineer' now in normal discussion, people automatically think that person is a software dev/programmer/person.
I mean some of the stuff we work on needs the same care and thought that mechanical and electrical engineers need to deal with. There just isn't really a licensing body to gatekeep the term.
But if you fuck up something trivial on an airplane that kills people you'll still probably lose your job, unless your managers are the ones who turned off what you did and sold it as a DLC for it. Not like that would ever happen, right?
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
an application engineer is what application analysts/admins get promoted to
:rotate:
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
an application engineer is what application analysts/admins get promoted to
:rotate:
I don't even know what it means!
it's one better!
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I talk shit about these folks but they are, sincerely, hard-working and smart. We just hire people and promote people into positions where they are unsuited. We tell ourselves, "Oh, we'll train them later," and then we never do. Then they end up extremely busy, but mostly because of inefficiencies and technical debt either they generated, or other people (who are also promoted into positions in which they're unsuited) generated.
If I'm Dr. Cox in this scenario, then imagine that 10% of the "doctors" at this (unregulated) hospital have MDs. Because MDs are expensive. The other 90% of people with "physician" or "doctor" title are actually nurses. Then the people with "nurse" titles don't actually have nursing degrees, they were just front desk workers or janitors who expressed an interest in medicine so we threw them in to nursing jobs with no training. Almost everybody is working a job 1-2 levels above their training & experience.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
So I work at a company that provides a software service to franchisees. This is a core business solution that does scheduling, payroll, billing, product management, just... the works to run your company.
Recently I got a new task to do the software deployments which requires me to grab the new binaries from devops and put them in the proper places for deployment.
I log in to azure with my new credentials and look for the project that holds our product....
It's empty, except for a "My First Project" placeholder...
I went to a dev and said I didn't have access because [software name] didn't show up when I logged in.
Turns out... nope, the application is under "My First Project".. It's been like that for so long everyone's terrified to change the project name least it horrifically breaks something. It looks so incredibly unprofessional it amuses me every time I see it.
halkun on
+15
Options
BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
I've ran into that sort of thing back when AJAX was first rolling for data driven web apps (bout 13 years ago). A large chunk of crap for backend DB read/writes and custom parsing was all lodged in custom libraries but in a generic folder and they never wanted to update the pathing because they had no idea how many calls and references would have to be changed.
For shits and giggles I offered to investigate exactly how many by getting them to let me take their non proprietary stuff home to experiment. After about a week I'd tracked down nearly 80 unique functions and references to that freaking folder in the javascripting (god, I don't miss JS) doing the asynchronous calls and crafted my own updated version using far more logical and documented pathing and what they'd need to do to do it on their live site.
Gotta decent chunk of billable hours out of it at a 1.2X rate and a hell of a nice reference from them.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
0
Options
lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
Oh look. It was a DNS issue.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
I still need to do the haiku cross stitch I've been meaning to do for years
It's not DNS
There's no way it's DNS
It was DNS
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
+9
Options
lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+11
Options
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
During COVID I was promoted to laptop fairy. More specifically I'm doing general quotes, general general ordering and install of new computers. With COVID and all the demand for Laptops, I've had my hands full. I'm going full Opera with it. You get a Latitude 3410. You get a 3410. And YOU get a 3410. I'm having to search far and wide for stock too. Lead times from Dell are on the order of months now. Occasionally our vendors like Ingram or TechData have stock but I gotta get lucky.
We've been doing well with HP stock up until now, we're now on backorder for USB-C docking stations for at least a month, monitors are just as bad, maybe even worse.
I've also finally had a chance to catch my breath and look at more than help desk calls. It's a good Friday for setting up a terminal server.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
I have an older lady user that has trouble with a regular mouse because her hands shake. I don't have a lot of experience with folks with that issue and how it relates to computer usage for work, would some kind of trackball be easier for her to use ya think? I figured I would ask before just bringing it up.
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
I mean, if her hand is too shaky to operate a mouse with the tracking speed turned way down, she might also struggle with a trackball mouse. Something like this may be easier to operate but I would be leery of recommending products intended for disabled children to a client.
Yea that's why I'm wary. I don't know what/if she has any condition, and it's none of my business. I just notice she has a hell of a time getting the mouse around and clicking the right things when I'm troubleshooting stuff with her.
I would casually drop the idea I think, like the next time you're around for some other issue.
all "oh, and, let me know if any of your equipment isn't working out for you, we can get different styles of mice/keyboards, etc"
so not "hey I think you need a new mouse" but "did you know, you could get a new mouse if you wanted?"
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I have shaky hands, maybe not as bad as hers. Vertical mice help me a lot, for much the same reason that I endorse SiliconStew's suggestion above with the AirO2Bic.
We subscribed to a cloud service. let's call it 'cloudshit.com'
Cloudshit wants to send emails to our customers when they log in. Fine. No problem. We just add mail.cloudshit.com and the relevant IPs & domainkeys and such to our SPF & DKIM records. No big deal.
But in the same instruction guide, Cloudshit also says that we need to forward our root domain to them with a CNAME. They want us to change contoso.com to point to cloudshit.com.
um how about no
and also what the fuck
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
after I complained to cloudshit, they came back and told me that there was a "typo" in their instructions and that i needed to create a CNAME for a host like csmail17.contoso.com, not a CNAME at the root
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Posts
Our problem with it was that it would fail closed in the appliance in the DMZ went down for any reason.
I didn't work with it on the implementation or support side, though I know it wasn't painless. The actual function of providing web security worked well for us. Once we had it up and running we stopped getting hit by ransomware 3 times per week.
One of the very nice features it has it that you can feed it data from SQL databases and have it trigger on real data, not just on patterns. So instead of saying "send me an alert if somebody sends something that matches this regex pattern for a home address," you can have it send an alert it if matches (or even fuzzy-matches) a real address pulled from your CRM. Not all DLP solutions can do that, and of those that do, there are often limitations in the fine print.
Honestly, the technicals aren't the problem, it's the business side. Tuning & tweaking DLP takes a lot of work and requires a lot of conversations with the non-IT business departments, acting on DLP alerts requires buy-in from HR & management.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Forcepoint has a tight partnership with an IT services firm called ESPO and we used them for implementation. I liked ESPO a lot. EPSO managed to avoid all of my (numerous and capricious) pet peeves about IT professional services. They have techs who really know what they're talking about, are good at answering questions with a response appropriate to the skill level (whether it was me asking or a non-IT person asking), their project management practices never felt like bureaucracy for its own sake, they did a bang-up job with documentation, etc.
I would not have attempted to implement this without a partner. It's just too big. Maybe after I'd done it a half-dozen times, sure.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If any of y'all have Linux boxes make sure to check for an updated sudo version.
@bowen The application engineer in that story isn't a programmer. She wants to be and she's taken some classes, but she isn't one yet.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
what in the shit kind of title is that even
Given the person apparently has no relevant skills for creating applications, I assume it's one of those entirely made up things for a completely unrelated job, like "sanitation engineer" for janitorial staff.
I mean some of the stuff we work on needs the same care and thought that mechanical and electrical engineers need to deal with. There just isn't really a licensing body to gatekeep the term.
But if you fuck up something trivial on an airplane that kills people you'll still probably lose your job, unless your managers are the ones who turned off what you did and sold it as a DLC for it. Not like that would ever happen, right?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
:rotate:
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
What's my job? I add value. I'm a value-adder.
I don't even know what it means!
it's one better!
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Pretty much. It goes like this:
Do you have experience using Application? Can you help end-users use the Application? Then you're an Application Analyst!
Have you been an Analyst for two years? Now you're demanding a raise? Okay, we'll give you a 10% raise and change your title to Application Engineer!
See, watch:
Can you show people how to clear their cache and cookies in Firefox? Great! We need somebody to do that. Now you're an Application Analyst (Firefox)!
In two years, you'll be an Application Engineer (Firefox)!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If I'm Dr. Cox in this scenario, then imagine that 10% of the "doctors" at this (unregulated) hospital have MDs. Because MDs are expensive. The other 90% of people with "physician" or "doctor" title are actually nurses. Then the people with "nurse" titles don't actually have nursing degrees, they were just front desk workers or janitors who expressed an interest in medicine so we threw them in to nursing jobs with no training. Almost everybody is working a job 1-2 levels above their training & experience.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Recently I got a new task to do the software deployments which requires me to grab the new binaries from devops and put them in the proper places for deployment.
I log in to azure with my new credentials and look for the project that holds our product....
It's empty, except for a "My First Project" placeholder...
I went to a dev and said I didn't have access because [software name] didn't show up when I logged in.
Turns out... nope, the application is under "My First Project".. It's been like that for so long everyone's terrified to change the project name least it horrifically breaks something. It looks so incredibly unprofessional it amuses me every time I see it.
For shits and giggles I offered to investigate exactly how many by getting them to let me take their non proprietary stuff home to experiment. After about a week I'd tracked down nearly 80 unique functions and references to that freaking folder in the javascripting (god, I don't miss JS) doing the asynchronous calls and crafted my own updated version using far more logical and documented pathing and what they'd need to do to do it on their live site.
Gotta decent chunk of billable hours out of it at a 1.2X rate and a hell of a nice reference from them.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I still need to do the haiku cross stitch I've been meaning to do for years
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
My day:
Fixed the DNS
The problem still there
It was DNS
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I've also finally had a chance to catch my breath and look at more than help desk calls. It's a good Friday for setting up a terminal server.
I have an older lady user that has trouble with a regular mouse because her hands shake. I don't have a lot of experience with folks with that issue and how it relates to computer usage for work, would some kind of trackball be easier for her to use ya think? I figured I would ask before just bringing it up.
This looks promising as well: https://www.steadymouse.com/
https://www.amazon.com/BIGtrack-2-0-Trackball-Buttons-12000006/dp/B0006ZM7VY
all "oh, and, let me know if any of your equipment isn't working out for you, we can get different styles of mice/keyboards, etc"
so not "hey I think you need a new mouse" but "did you know, you could get a new mouse if you wanted?"
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Cloudshit wants to send emails to our customers when they log in. Fine. No problem. We just add mail.cloudshit.com and the relevant IPs & domainkeys and such to our SPF & DKIM records. No big deal.
But in the same instruction guide, Cloudshit also says that we need to forward our root domain to them with a CNAME. They want us to change contoso.com to point to cloudshit.com.
um how about no
and also what the fuck
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.