This starts touching on theology. The reasons you explained are one of the main reasons I am a fundamental believer in agnosticism. That is, I believe we see reality through a human lens, therefore we're fundamentally incapable of understanding the reality of our universe unclouded by our own limitations (or assumptions). That's why I think the safest wager is not Pascal's, but to say, "Yes, there may be some order to things, but no, I don't have any idea what governs my reality, nor could I."
I don't say this to incite a religious war or discussion (I've purposely omitted the use of the word "God" here), so if we could keep things philosophical that would be appropriate for such a site. I'm curious if this school of thought has another name beyond agnosticism.
I think you're on to something here. I wonder if a gradual loss of empathy is a product of the evolution of a first world country or advanced economy?
People die less, and without the threat of random deaths, life itself ends up valued less overall.
Humans seem less inherently empathetic toward emotions they haven't ever experienced close to themselves, loss being one of millions of negative human emotions that when experienced less, is less able to be empathized with at a macro level.
Perhaps this partly explains the current political climate and recent spike in authoritarianism among the average citizen in the US. Maybe we've hit a point where the life necessities and healthcare needs historically only enjoyed by the powerful are available to almost everyone and as a result, life expectancy has goes up (meaning statistically less people are dying in any given time frame). People start feeling subconsciously both slighted (economically) and invincible (biologically), and assume everyone else should be invincible too and there is no room for softness (empathy).
Perhaps this is even how humanity self-regulates. What if "dark ages" where reversals in progress are experienced are caused by this ebb and flow of the spirit of cooperation and empathy?
There is a nice, short (12 pages!) scholarly article on this topic called "Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died?". Evidently, this question (and the more specific question of child mortality) has seen quite a bit of study. I strongly recommend that article, but if you can't access it let me give a sketchy recap below.
The article makes a few points. First, child mortality in Greco-Roman times was very high, maybe 30%. Second, art from that time has many references to the terrible emotional pain of losing a child -- grief seems to have been common. Third, handing over child-raising duties to another party (wet nurses, or even entire foster families) was also far more prevalent than it is today. Fourth, the death of a child was often mourned in a communal, ritualistic way, but it was also not uncommon to simply bury a child in the home with little fanfare.
These things are all hard to square, but the rough conclusion I got was: even when mortality was high, losing a child was keenly painful if that child was loved in the first place, which was less of a given at that time. However, even in that case, mourning and grieving -- by being both diffuse (by community) and following predefined rituals -- seem to have been more self-contained. In other words, the pain came, and then it (mostly) went. Child mortality being such a common experience, there were established societal ways to deal with it (plus your friends and family knew what it was like), and this made it genuinely easier. Your post makes some similar points.
My own take is that today is the worst time in human history to lose a child. Communities are more fractured, there are far fewer people who understand the experience, and parents have every reason to expect to never see any of their children die (and are consequently less prepared for it). Plus, in ancient times there were at most a few ways you or anybody around you would know how to raise a child, so a death that came from that process was in some sense excusable, or somehow just a stroke of fact. Contrast that with today, where we have maybe more freedom and choice than ever, and for every decision made we can find an argument against it -- there's just less certainty of having "done everything right". It's an ugly price for agency.
I had the privilege of working in this environment and I can vouch for Chris here. The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. Communication was isolated to where it was needed, and conference rooms exist for when communications need to be had in private. It's the perfect mix. It may have cost more to do it right, but the bottom line wasn't money, it was productivity and the ability to have heads-down time to get real, meaningful work done.
Disclaimer: Though that's not hard to measure, I did not personally measure it.
All I can attest to is that in terms of the macro level of productivity, it was a better experience. The slider between focus work and social interaction across the team went closer toward focus work when working at the office. Social bonds aren't diminished at all by the fact that everyone has a space to do the best work they can. They're strengthened. Team members feel trusted.
I certainly have some street cred here too: I have been in this industry long enough to have experienced the misfortune of working in an open office. A few years ago, I worked with a company that had private offices -- then moved to an open layout. In my experience, productivity tanked for a majority of the engineering team. The problem with that floorplan? Distraction. There was nothing but "stuff" happening all around you at all times. Imagine debugging an issue, or responding to a particularly precarious situation after a PagerDuty alert comes through, all while the following items are happening:
* Nerf darts randomly flying through the air with a frequency of about 10-30 per hour.
* People using their outside voices.
* People walking around (getting coffee, going to the bathrooms, getting something to eat).
* Journalists trying to advertise the company walking around getting tours.
* Hour long discussions right in the middle of the work area, even though we had conference rooms within distance.
* The constant feeling of being "surveilled" by the management team.
As I stated originally, I've been in this industry for a long enough time, and -- at running the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory (hopefully not) -- I'm primarily intrinsically motivated. No amount of management is going to change my level of motivation, because I find motivation with or without the presence of any external forces. They might sway me just a hair, but generally speaking, for me personally, the MORE I feel managed the more demotivated I feel. That's just my personalty.
I bring this up for a reason: It's not great, it's not terrible, but in my observations, it (intrinsic motivation) also happens to be a trait in the personality of a lot of the great engineering talent I've had the pleasure of working with over the years. People who aren't intrinsically motivated don't typically put in the time and effort required to be a great engineer who gets things done. Intrinsic motivation means that you put in your "10,000 hours" in earnest, with a pure desire to constantly improve because you're enjoying what you're doing. It takes time, blood, sweat, and even tears to be a great engineer, and if you're doing it only because someone else is making you, I just can't see how you're going to be anything more than "passable". Therein lies the challenge in hiring and focusing great talent on a unified goal.
All that said, when you hire for skill and talent, get the cream of the crop, and then put all of those bright folks in a room where they feel like they're being monitored, that leads to a feeling that "I'm not trusted", and that feeling of not being trusted leads to a feeling of "I don't trust them if they don't trust me". It's a very visceral and primal feeling. You see security cameras pop up in your neighborhood, and you first think, "They're watching me", then you think, "What are they up to watching me?". Distrust (even the sense of it where it may not exist) breeds distrust. It sows a feeling of distrust when you configure your company like a panopticon, and that's essentially what many open floor plans end up becoming. The modern day version of a factory line, with a foreman looming at all times.
You can see where I'm going with this. A lot of folks felt like they were being watched when working in the open floor plan, and I'd argue it sapped from their more useful, more lucrative creative energy. This isn't something that's talked about a lot when discussing the pitfalls of open floor plans because it's a sociology subject, but I observed it as a very real, very prolific problem in the organic culture (that is, the bottom up culture) of that organization.
My point is, I have seen and worked in offices that are designed wrong, and Wildbit got this right.
It happened to be at the same time I was getting things configured to connect to a new VPN that I hadn't used before for the first time. Until about 7am today my home network was a 10.0.0.0/8 network. VPN kept bombing in the last phase of connecting and I couldn't figure out why, so I thought it was an IP conflict with my internal network range.
So naturally, I then went into my router and changed my subnet for my entire home network to the more common 192.168.1.0/24 range to see if it'd help. It didn't. Until suddenly VPN "just worked" -- which makes me wonder if I needed to change my network at all to begin with.
Then I started experiencing all sorts of weird issues where the Internet seemed to disappear from one minute until the next.
Then I hit IRC when things finally stabilized and see "Did you hear about Dyn?".
My reaction: wut.
TL;DR: I rearchitected my home network at 7am for no reason.
Even better, use CSSDEVCONF for $15 off. I bought it for $10 off and then found this code after, and now I'm kicking myself as much as the guy who bought it for $5 off. :)
Though on one hand I'm inclined to agree with you regarding Nagios, on the other hand I disagree. What you're missing is the concept of developer empowerment. I am a sysadmin / operations engineer, and one trend I've noticed over the course of the past ten years is one toward developers venturing further and further into what could be labeled "traditional" systems administration. Do not underestimate developer demand. It's fueled many technological "movements" in the past ten years, infrastructure automation being a huge one.
I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of "should you hire a sysadmin", but I think the priorities of a lot of these businesses are really screwed up.
Fixed costs like an employee are scary even though services cost more and security isn't even a real concern.
I can't argue with you there. I'm fortunate that my current organization isn't this way, but I have worked at places where this has DEFINITELY been the case. It was mind boggling then and it's mind boggling now. The only explanation I can think of is the (at least perceived) speed and impatience of the modern customer / market. Maybe businesses feel a pressure to make these sacrifices? I'd even go as far as to say the marketing teams for these various "services" capitalize on this feeling of urgency, and try to perpetuate it culturally (e.g. "If you don't use <insert ultra insecure SaaS app here> your company is going to fall behind. Here, look at this list of all of the other companies that aren't yours that use our service!"
The problem here isn't whether companies are using DDoS mitigation services, it's whether they have ISPs null routing them. The weak point here at the top tier ISPs, not necessarily the individual companies being targeted. You can have the best DDoS mitigation service ever, but if the top-tier ISPs black hole you, you're in a very bad spot.
Why would a "tier 1" (I hate that outdated term) transit provider ever null-route an IP that's not in their block nor in a customer's block? I haven't heard of them doing that. That would be a very shady thing to do.
Transit providers will null route traffic that's inbound to you if you request it. This lets you stop the traffic at their core, instead of overwhelming your edge gear.
You are the customer after all; you have a say in what traffic makes it to your edge from your upstream provider.
He was referring to being nullrouted by transit providers that he's not a customer of. Short of something like a replay of the Morris worm, I can't see that happening.
Transit providers get paid to provide transit. They don't filter traffic that isn't bound for their customers.
No, they don't. Transit providers acting in a pure transit manner do not null route destination networks that they're not responsible for. Provider B, providing transit from AS A to AS C, will not block traffic bound for C or beyond. They might block some things bound for AS B or a customer of AS B, but they're not acting in a pure transit capacity there.
Content and eyeball networks are free to do whatever they want with regards to routing and blocking. Transit providers? No, they just provide transit. That's the business they want to be in. They're not in the blocking business.
Thanks for the NANOG tip though. I'm a member and active participant. See you in Seattle.
The main NANOG threads are about detecting the NTP traffic and blocking malicious requests in content and eyeball networks -- not transit. There's also the OpenNTP project discussion -- http://openntpproject.org/
I'm sorry I used a term you don't like -- let's get past that though -- What about if the customer you speak of is the DDoS mitigation service?
Even without doing this though, if they remove a BGP route and other ISPs cannot route through them, that's a problem for whoever lives at the destination AS number.
I'm really confused here. Why would a DDoS mitigation service announce routes for a network they don't serve for a customer? That would simply be an old-fashioned BGP hijacking.
Transit providers don't simply send traffic to Prolexic and Defense.net because they think they should. They send traffic there for routes that the mitigators are announcing. They'll only announce client routes (and only when clients announce to the mitigators).
I don't say this to incite a religious war or discussion (I've purposely omitted the use of the word "God" here), so if we could keep things philosophical that would be appropriate for such a site. I'm curious if this school of thought has another name beyond agnosticism.