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Re: [LUG] computer stuuuuuuuuufffff

 


On 07/11/2019 18:51, mr meowski wrote:
On 07/11/2019 18:17, Giles Coochey wrote:


I think this is potentially one of those "on the internet" things where
people with similar thinking end up accidentally arguing with each other
for no particular reason.
you might be right there, I have not need to argue.
  Please imagine everything I'm typing in a
mild, non-judgemental tone - my days of fighting over details are over,
I'm tired! Everything you say makes perfect sense so I'm not even
disagreeing with you - it was more a wry observation that things rarely
work as well in practice as they do in theory.

I'm kind of taking the opinion that it you take on a process, by its very design incorporates design and operation improvement then a lot of things will take care of themselves, over time.


Don't take my previous
comment about "magic systems" as a dire insult or dripping with sarcasm
or anything.

I am growing to accept your approach on these things, and would start to consider it just tolerating your personalty.

  If you have excellent processes and systems engineered so
well that you have five nines worth of perfection, well, good for you.
And again, that's not being sarcastic, I mean it! Perhaps I'm just
unlucky but most of the stuff I end up being involved with wishes it
could do 5 _minutes_ of stability...
The new generation needs to work this way, question, improve, and so on.

  >> PS I have yet to find a citation source from you on the Pfsense
"tainted" issue you mentioned when you replied to my last input on this
list.

Oh yes, my bad. "Tainted" was a pretty poor choice of word on my behalf
to be honest, talk about vague terminology. All the same you didn't look
very hard - the pfsense wikipedia page only has three lines in the
history section and about half of the entire section is:

"In November 2017, a World Intellectual Property Organization panel
found that Netgate, the copyright holder of pfSense, had been using the
domain opnsense.com in bad faith to discredit OPNsense, a competing open
source firewall forked from pfSense. It compelled Netgate to transfer
the domain to Deciso, the developer of OPNsense."

That's just the tip of the iceberg, a bit more looking into the history
of the controlling corporate entities for pfsense will rapidly turn up a
whole bunch of stuff such as incorrectly assigning contributor
copyrights, dubious re-licensing, dirty tricks that ended up with them
losing in court, etc. There is a reason opnsense was forked after all.

But in fairness I feel I must add at this point that I've used pfsense
on/off for years and years and still do maintain a few of them.
Technically it's not a bad product at all, in fact, it's pretty damn
good so I'm not criticising it there. Also there's undoubtedly two sides
to the whole pfsense/opnsense drama, most of which is old news now anyway.

I don't know if any of it even matters any more, or did in the first
place - I'm just old enough to remember it being a big issue in the
community at the time so it's kind of stuck in my head that pfsense =
bad in the same way perhaps that most of us have just ended up
internalizing stuff like Microsoft = bad. Which isn't necessarily even true.

Personally, because I don't trust myself much, I try to throw out my
assumptions and make each decision about technical stuff from scratch (I
definitely have bias and pre-conceived ideas that may not turn out to be
helpful). It's entirely possible that tomorrow I might have to spec a
firewall/gateway/etc type box for someone and after considering all the
evidence as it stands right now, pfsense is entirely the way to go. If
you're using it and it works fine for you then good ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't normally expect anyone to care much about my random opinions
anyway, for the love of god don't take my word for anything without
double checking it comrades!

I get where you are coming from on this, whenever I introduce a product like this, I like to ensure that I mention:

(1) It is not my product.
(2) When it comes to implementing a product that some form of trust needs to be implied between the user and the provdier of that product.


I had to interject in the talk so many times "if you trust", that I almost think it became a mantra for the talk, and I think it would be a mantra I would repeat in any similar conversation, because that it the crux of the whole privacy thing, if you choose to outsource, or move your traffic elsewhere, you are only moving the point of "trust"

--
Giles Coochey


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