I lost a co-worker from the Ansible team this week. I’ve been struggling to get past the insanity of people younger than dying. 2021 is off to a real shit start. But, I think the biggest tech story of the week comes from Elastic. Keep reading for the details on Elastic’s idiocy. Here’s your weekly reminder that open source isn’t a business model, though. But, there’s been a moment of justice for those here in Michigan who were impacted by the Flint Water Crisis. Ex-Michigan governor indicted for ‘willful neglect’ in Flint water crisis. Here’s the grand jury indictment of Former Michigan Governor, Rick Snyder. The Judicial System better not mess this up. I also learned about the term Sealioning this week. I’ve seen it done before but did not know it had a definition that I could shut folks down with. Nice! Note: I’m looking for an intern this summer to help with OpenShift.tv (live streaming). If you know anyone that may be interested, please ask them to apply. If they have questions, feel free to send them my way (Twitter DMs, Telegram). Please apply ASAP as I’m already reviewing resumes this weekend. ...

The first full work week of the year has already been filled with news. But, Monday saw a Slack outage, Wednesday saw an insurrection in the US, and there is a new twist in the Solarwinds supply chain compromise. We’ll discuss two of these topics and more. Note: I’m looking for an intern this summer to help with OpenShift.tv (live streaming). If you know anyone that may be interested, please ask them to apply. If they have questions, feel free to send them my way: have them apply. People Linus Torvalds tears into Intel, favors AMD After Spectre/Meltdown, I can’t blame anyone for being mad at Intel. What Buddhism can do for AI ethics “Buddhism teaches us to focus our energy on eliminating suffering in the world.” Jobs report shows 140,000 jobs were lost in December. All of them were held by women “Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000.” ...

Note: If you’re reading this, you’re winning. You beat 2020. Also, the DevOps’ish Solarwinds supply chain compromise Index has been updated. I was talking to DevOps’ish readers a bit this week. One reader, in particular, has mentioned in the past that they’d be willing to help put the newsletter together when I’m recovering from surgeries or need a day off. This morning I sat down to get a headstart on the newsletter and realized I should instead work on a checklist or HOWTO or whatever it would end up getting called. Let me introduce you to DevOps’ish’s WRITING.md file. It details how the newsletter is made and some of the guidelines around writing a newsletter, in general. It’s made me realize that I need to look into automating more of what I do. That’s one of the beautiful parts of checklists or good documentation; it tells you where to start looking into automation points. Another thing we discussed is profit sharing and how that would have to get figured out. Or rather, we need to talk about how to figure that out. Which then triggered an early afternoon of getting GitHub Sponsor up and running. Getting good, long term newsletter sponsors is difficult. Larger newsletters generally outsource it. That seems a little much for me right now. If this system proves to work well, I will flip regular sponsors over to it potentially. ...

Remember last week how I said things would be punchier? Well, I updated the DevOps’ish Solarwinds supply chain compromise Index. By the way, Microsoft says it was, “used by a different threat actor.” I wrote the parts of the newsletter below, which are probably helpful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The past few days have been incredibly challenging mentally and physically. I’m not sure if I would do it all the same way again. Sadly, I think I’m going to have to sideline myself a little more next year. The good news is, I get to try again next year. For that, I am truly thankful. The holidays, especially religious-based ones, are challenging for me. I have a challenging relationship with religion in general. That’s for a different blog though. For those celebrating holidays the past few weeks and the weeks ahead, I wish you all the best. DevOps’ish is brought to you by Accurics People Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine “In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine.” Damn. That’s awesome. ...

This being a holiday break my intros will probably be a little bit shorter than normal. “More punchy” as my first boss at Red Hat would say. Let’s start with the thing with an ever-increasing blast radius: Solarwinds. Solarwinds Supply Chain Compromise For the record, Reuters has been all over this coverage wise. I can’t do them justice. This story has been evolving so rapidly that by the time I hit send, my coverage will be incomplete. Everything from Russian hackers to insider trading to putting a global sinkhole in place for the command and control (C2) domain. This is a truly terrifying compromise at a company I genuinely enjoyed working for in the past. No, I never touched the Orion product while I worked there. Perhaps I should have. But, over the years, I’ve been in contact with more places than I can count that use Solarwinds Orion. It really is everywhere that has a big enough footprint to justify it. Governments included. This might turn out to be bigger than the OPM hack when the dust settles. I decided to build an Index page to provide continuing coverage of the Solarwinds supply chain compromise. When in doubt, go to this page for vetted info. ...