They are so often stateful and fall over when some scanner comes by, or if a light DNS DoS attack happens, compromising the entire access link, when the scanned systems or the DNS server weren’t even bothered by the amount of requests.

They introduce weird unexpected restrictions, like preferring to blackhole our customers traffic rather than accepting some asymmetric routing. And then we get blamed for their setup, which they don’t even know.

They ossify protocol development in general, requiring things like header encryption in QUIC to force them to ignore things that aren’t their business anyway.

They are apparently also expensive as hell, multiple customers have declined upgrades because they don’t have fast enough firewalls and not enough budget to buy faster ones.

Those are the ones that come to mind right now. There are also occasional bugs that make our or our customers lives difficult, but I can’t recall a clear one at the moment.

giving out my IP to trusted friends

Just in case you ever get back into it: We regularly see scanners scanning the internet with a million packets per second at work these days. That means it takes them 4000 seconds to scan the entire IPv4 Internet to check who responds on port 3784. So handing out the IP selectively won’t be enough.

I also learned that the hard way privately with my Minecraft server. It was found in a scan and listed on Shodan at some point, and I hadn’t put up a whitelist. Some shitty kids came and destroyed whatever they could find before finally putting up signs to mock me lol

Firewalls in general.

And as a follow up, Teams was never good because it was never native to anything (instead it was Electron and is now some sort of React/Edge homebrew).

How long until it degenerates to a bunch of Copilots exchanging gibberish, and people forgetting there was ever a real meeting? :D

Skype for Business LTSC 2024 is still supported until 2029. You just need to already be running an On-Prem Skype for Business Server and migrate it to the new Subscription Edition come October. I bet it will get really costly for the holdouts.

Your title is borked. Maybe edit that

Oh yeah, and wasn’t there a Vampire who became crime scene photographer but had a vial of blood in his chest pocket. Just in case the flash would kill him, the vial would break when his clothing drops and blood would instantly drip onto his ashes and revive him. (Could be the same vampire, not sure)

To avoid any misunderstandings between memes and reality:

Source: David Moir photographed the opening of Trump International Golf Links for Reuters on 2012-07-10

at least constantly struggling for recognition, and are exploited as night shift workers in the emerging industry.

This reminds me a bit of Reg Shoe, leading dead rights activist in Ankh-Morpork.
Of course the Discworld is more funny, less grimdark, compared to your ideas.

It’s like people still don’t know about Schrems II or the Cloud Act.

Or they somehow seriously think that the EU-US Data Privacy Framework resolves the issues that killed the EU–US Privacy Shield?

In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider’s response makes no sense it’s forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.

My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.

And we’re still a god damn tech company. We’re a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it’s a sad state of affairs.

Worth to mention that all the babies had to be born alive.

As in, only the alive ones counted, or a single stillbirth would invalidate your entire record?

I feel like it’s a CEO’s job to care about all aspects of the company he is supposed to lead.

You just reminded me of one of the Life is Strange fanfics I read once. Where Max and Chloe have these time and space warping powers and just go the opposite way, they determine the status quo is fucked and needs to be rectified globally and then start doing it in an actually thoughtful sensible way. (There was some shadowy confusing adversity but I can’t recall its nature)

Yeah “willingness to pay” is quite an imperfect proxy for “necessity of the drive”, but on the other hand trying to administer it differently to find out the validity of a given drive would create a huge administrative burden, and space for interest groups to lobby for exceptions, and attack surface for political opposition to prevent the entire system from ever going into service.

Yeah I’m with you in wondering about that.

semiconductors for example

Agreed. That makes the apparent dislike from the Republican administration of the chips act so weird. It would work well in tandem with a reasonable long term tariff precisely tailored to the goods you need to produce indigenously in future.

If anyone really cares, that’s because Pope Francis was from the Jesuit Order. The first pope to be one. They swear poverty among other things, so the golden chair wouldn’t look appropriate.

I mean 26 separate sets of law regarding what is taxed and how highly in each of the 26 cantons. Not one law with 26 paragraphs.