Corona Tech Impact

Hah my coworker was looking at webcams an hour ago and was like “yeah… guess that’s a no”

Teams voice is now starting to act wonky. We’re getting calls working to mobile devices (running Teams) but the fat client isn’t showing a thing. Since we -just- went fully to Teams for voice, this is going to curb a lot of the flexibility of working from home if it isn’t corrected.

I found a Logitech 922 Pro Stream on Best Buy online, and it’s supposed to be in store for pickup on Friday. I’ve been using an ancient Logitech Orbit thing my wife had in her office, it’s like ten years old, but really need something better for the webinar-style online class components I’m working on. The camera in my Surface is meh. But webcams are sold out all over, so I’m crossing my fingers that my order, which they already charged me for, will actually arrive.

I manage the online learning system for a 30k student University. It runs on somewhat old repurposed hardware, it has always been a zero budget project even tho it gets a fair amount of usage in normal circumstances.

We closed all the buildings last Friday so now the University is me, sorta. I saw things coming earlier in the week and prepared in advance as well as I could with what I had available.

Yesterday traffic was 3.5 times any previous record levels, with crazy peak hour demands. Watching the resource usage graphs shoot up was terrifying, but everything held up throughout the day. If I could graph my own stress levels I bet those would be as scary.

Take 'er easy, my friend, I’m sure everyone is very appreciative and you did a great job. Now have a St Patty’s day beer (if that’s your thing) and relax.

WFH stress is the worst stress!

My virtual hat is off to you, indeed. My school is much smaller (about 2000 on-campus students, but many times that online, handled by a part of the school that is in many ways separate from the traditional side). We use Canvas as a LMS, primarily, with a host of other apps used for specific situations, but mostly Google Suite stuff in terms of mass usage. We have been on break, and extended it to include this week, so the real test is next week when remote instruction for all begins. Will not impact our online component directly though, as they operate pretty much outside of the rest of the college’s IT structure in many ways.

Stressful, but also awesome, that it actually held up. Kudos on a good job. As I always tell our devs and ops guys - if we do our job perfectly, no one (other than the ones paying the bills) knows all the work we’ve done to keep things running smoothly.

So, how vulnerable are companies going to be to espionage now. My guess is very?

We’ve gotten a report of significant increase phishing attempts just in the past week.

Oh yeah. We’ve been getting warnings against phishing attempts almost every day, for the past week. The hackers are out in force, now.

Our Fortune 500 company has been using Zoom as of about a year ago (GoToMeeting before that). Now that desk-sitters like me are mostly remote, it’s not holding up too well. Granted, it’s only been a couple of days so I assume they’ll beef up capacity.

We normally do video via computer but audio via phone. Zoom in Outlook gives you around 5 or 6 call-in numbers you can dial into for a specific meeting. I’ve always been able to use the default one on my IPhone in Calendar. As of today I had to tick through each one before I could get a connection, usually on the 4th or 5th (“all circuits are busy”). The video was also laggy, with a 30-or-so second pause before anyone could see what changed on my screen.

So I think I jinxed it. I said webex hasn’t had issues. There was several global service problem this morning. Since fixed, but… oops.

I’m sorry? We use it a lot?

When we were liberated from WWII occupation in '45, suspected traitors and collaborators were rounded up, driven through the streets and interned for later prosecution. Not really our proudest moment. But I am beginning to understand the mindset behind that. Those who take criminal advantage of such a global crisis really are the worst scum.

True dat. At least the collaborators had de-facto guns pointed at them as an excuse. No excuse for profiteering.

One of the most interesting viewpoints on collaboration that I’ve seen was in Paul Verhoeven’s Soldier of Orange, about the Netherlands under Nazi occupation and the actions of a group of friends whose lives were put on hold by the war. Rutger Hauer was great as the guy who became a British Commando and later adviser to the Queen, but the rest of the group included other freedom fighters, a guy who joined the SS, one who just laid low and stayed out of the way, and a woman who collaborated, or was seen to have done so because she survived by being friendly with the Germans. A good action flick, but also a fairly nuanced look at a small country under a big boot heel.

The EU is now requesting that people stream Netflix in standard mode, rather than HD, whenever possible, in order to lessen the pressure on bandwidth.

Quite literally a first world problem, then?

The EU as a whole has costlier connection rates for higher speeds and at least from the sites and datacenters we are in, more oversubscription for services.

This … doesn’t surprise me. Our VPN headend there is having issues, not because of licensing or platform or whatever, but because the connection to it from outside is 1Gb. That’s fine for normal traffic. That is not fine for where we are sitting now which is about 10 times that.

And there is NO quick fix. Circuit delivery times there are horrendous for enterprise connections. Quotes of up to 90 days are not uncommon, but we’re hoping within the month for this fix.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if a silver lining here was the realization that the USA needs to treat high-speed Internet access like a vital utility, like we do power or water?

They finally moved webex traffic off of our vpn. They might even consider suspending some of the extra spyware they run every time you connect to vpn. Like the one that sends a shit ton of telemetry (including your whole event log!) to splunk. Idiots.

This is being described as a Zoom security flaw, but it sounds like a Windows security flaw to me. Why do apps have access to this info at all?

More problematic for Zoom, it seems they have been lying about having end-to-end encryption.