If you follow the blog you’ll know I’m on a mission to get my 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i to roll over into six figures on the odometer. I picked up the bike with under forty-K on it and have done the majority of the now high miles on it. Over that time I’ve had an ongoing battle with the early fuel injection on the bike, but other than that it has been my preferred ride even as a series of other bikes passed through the garage.
Once again the fueling has gone off on the bike just as I was hoping to push it over the 100k mark in its 20th year on the road. If I lived somewhere that wasn’t trying to kill me for four months of each year this would be an easier goal, but trying to do it in Canada where the bike has to sit through minus forty winters and then navigate the frost heaved results in our too-short riding season? It’s technical a flex I’m up for, but it’s a shame that Triumph isn’t.
I tried the usual solution of rebalancing the fuel injectors, but the bike is still stalling out and running rough. I checked the valves less than 15k ago so that isn’t likely it. If it isn’t throttle body balancing, which the bike is prone to needing, perhaps it’s time to, at over 90k, to finally replace the o-rings and gaskets in the fuel injection system, but Triumph tells me that the majority of these parts are discontinued.
One of the reasons I enjoy the old Tiger is that it still catches eyes and prompts conversation when I’m out and about. Another reason I like it is that it can pretty much do anything (I’ve trail ridden on it and done multi-thousand mile two-up road trips too). It fits me better than anything I’ve ridden, is fun to chuck around in corners and has handled axle deep mud when I needed it to. The engine is full of character and pulls well even two up and, considering the miles it has done, the amount of TLC needed isn’t unreasonable. I’d love to keep this bike going indefinitely, it’s a shame that Triumph don’t feel that way.
I had a chat with the dealer (who isn’t particularly local, it’s a 170 mile round trip to go there physically – I usually get parts delivered), and they said that this is a problem with Triumph – they don’t support their older machines. He then went on to say I couldn’t use generic o-rings because the Triumph parts are strangely size specific. I’m going to try anyway because I really want to be able to jump on my old Tiger and ride. I wish Triumph felt the same way.
Never standing still, always pushing to get the best from ourselves, for our riders. Building iconic motorcycles that celebrate our past while embracing the future through bold design, original styling, purposeful engineering and a genuine passion for the ride. Always focused on delivering complete riding experience, creating bikes with the perfect balance of power, handling and style that totally involve the rider and bring out the best in them. This is our passion and our obsession. We are chasing the same thing as our riders THE PERFECT RIDE. Nick Bloor CEO Triumph Motorcycles
All good stuff, but maybe focus a bit more on celebrating Triumph’s past, Nick? That includes the bikes your reborn Triumph have been making since the nineties.
When you market on brand history and provenance, shouldn’t you support brand history and provenance? I’m coming at this hard because I want to believe… and keep my old Triumph rolling.
Alas, the Tiger’s fuel system is acting up (again), so it’s all Concours14 this fall, but the big bike is doing the job. It handles two up without breaking a sweat and when I want to ride it like a sports bike, it never misses a beat. It’s heavy, but once it’s in motion it seems to loose one hundred pounds. It’s no Fireblade, but it’s surprisingly willing in the (few) twisties we have around here.
This time of year the fall colours mean you can enjoy a ride even on our tediously straight roads…
If you’ve read this blog you know I’ve written a historical fiction of my granddad’s time in the RAF during World War 2. The two books I’ve done already are about his time behind Nazi lines in France in 1940, but after he escaped he got sent to Africa and spent the the next chapter of his time overseas crossing the Sahara (in 1940s vehicles!) and fighting in Egypt and Libya. I’m keen to eventually trace his steps but when am I ever going to be on the east coast of Africa?
The Allies didn’t have control of the Mediterranean in late 1940 (remember Guns of Navarone?), so the Royal Navy took Bill and his RAF squadron down the east coast of Africa to Takoradi in Ghana. There they unloaded their Hurricanes and ground support vehicles and then they (incredibly), saddled up in their 1940s vehicles and leapfrogged with their planes ***across the Sahara***!!! It’s a 5000+ kilometre odyssey that leaves me absolutely awe struck:
Sure, Tim, you’re saying, but when are you ever going to get to Ghana? Well… I applied to the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Expertise’s cyber-research proposals in the summer and my paper on quantum disruption in cyber got accepted… which means I’m going to Accra, Ghana to present it at the end of November at the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building. That puts me about 200 kilometres away from Takoradi where I’d have a chance to stand where Bill stood in late 1940.
I’m feeling pretty scrappy. The dream ride would be to get a collection of 1940s RAF bikes, cars and lorries and repeat that astonishing trek across the desert to the southern coast of the Mediterranean. That’s some pretty gnarly country, so doing it as part of a documentary with a film crew that looks at what life was like in the desert in World War 2 would be the dream part of this ride.
Some of my cousins ride and some of their kids are old enough to do it too. There are several times in Bill’s military career when he shouldn’t have made it out, but he had a knack for it. An opportunity for his descendents (who wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have that knack) to repeat this Sahara crossing while talking about the history and passing through the heart of the desert on 1940s technology would be… epic.
Yep, that’s what epic looks like.
Austin Vince did Mondo Sahara, which was ambitious. This is… more.
I’ve been watching the inestimable Austin Vince lead his latest VINCE trail riding adventure in the Spanish mountains on Facebook. Austin’s Mondo self funded world trips have gotten me through many a long Canadian winter. The chance to ride with the man himself through some of the most beautiful and remote parts of Spain would be epic.
We drove through Northern Spain last winter but it was in a rental Kia. This is Spain next level!
Puebla de Sanabria in a very empty Northern Spain in December. The mountains with Austin next?
I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in Canadian classrooms from St John’s to Vancouver over the past year. Canada is the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy, so this isn’t something many educators get to experience. The only people who do span our country are the edtech companies that have surged into being to resolve a digital skills gap that doesn’t look to be going anywhere any time soon.
At its heart the widening digital divide is a inclusion and equity problem. Students who can’t afford tech at home lack familiarity and fall behind when schools bring it in with no training for staff or students. It would be more productive if education in Canada did more than talk about DEI, but that would require vision which we lack.
In my travels I’ve come across many edtech ‘solutions’. These often involve off-the-shelf technology that has has been branded to meet a specific need in a ‘turn-key’ way so learning essential digital skills doesn’t actually require any on the part of the instructor. Of course, this all comes with a huge bump in price. I love seeing $15 open source Arduino microcontrollers paired with $10 in sensors and called a ‘climate change’ edtech kit, yours for $80! In many cases a hard sell accompanies these kits that are guaranteed to teach the STEM skills you don’t have. UNESCO has something to say about this global phenomenon:
The frustration around this has been gnawing at me and when I woke up this morning I had the edtech hockey stick floating in my mind, so I made some marketing for it:
It’s satire, it’s supposed to be over the top or it won’t land the satire.
The hockey metaphor (I hope) brings home the absurd nature of the edtech dance we’re in. Anyone who actually plays hockey will take one look at it and laugh. It looks like it might work like a player goalie stick, but it will actually do neither job – it’s the product catering to ignorance.
The actual solution is to learn digital technologies and media from the ground up instead of implementing patches like Chromebooks, the edtech hockey stickest of them all. This is a one trick pony that ties learning to a single multi-national’s browser and cannot provide any locally processed content. The cloud is where edtech solutions thrive because you can easily monetize access. The hard sell for strapped school IT departments is that Chromebooks don’t give you network headaches because they can barely do anything. Like the edtech hockey stick they look like they can do it all.
NOTES
There is no such thing as “Canadian Education”. The PISA results everyone waves the flag about happen on the back of the four largest provinces. If you’re elsewhere in the country you may be below the world average.
“PISA results show each of the Big Four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia achieving significantly higher average reading scores than all G7 member countries except, of course, Canada. The Big Four also outperformed five of these six G7 countries in math and science (the exception being Japan, which scores below Quebec in math and below Alberta in science).”
“…if we only consider PISA results for the remaining smaller six provinces, Canada fares much worse, placing 17th in reading (below the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan), 18th in science (again, below Japan, the U.K. and U.S.) and 30th in math, just below the OECD average.”
That edtech companies are feeding off this siloed inequity is part of a larger problem. Next round of PISA is looking at digital skills (because we’re in a global shortage). I’m curious to see how that gets politicized. Wouldn’t it be something if we actually did something about it?
No pride here at TMD. The other weekend I went out for a ride with my lovely wife and we stopped for a snack. The parking lot wasn’t even but the bike was full of fuel and had the top box on and it was a very windy day. I had to lean on it to get it to stand up and thought it would be ok – you might see where this is going.
I was once told that bikes fall over, it happens to everyone, but I’ve never had it happen before. I’ll be more cautious next time. My best guess is the road behind the restaurant channeled the wind making for even stronger gusts and it toppled the bike. We were around the corner on the patio when I heard the worst kind of smashing sound and immediately got up to come around to see Big Blue on its side. I remembered the lift with your legs holding the handlebar in and the back of the seat, and got the big thing upright again.
It started right up and I rode it around the corner to another spot on more even ground out of the wind tunnel. Much swearing ensued but it was really my own fault. I checked it twice to make sure it was stable, but that second check should have told me I didn’t like how it was sitting and I needed to find a better spot. Lesson learned.
The wing mirrors on GTR1400 / Concours 14s are (big) plastic pieces over an aluminum frame. They’re one of my least favourite stylistic choices on the bike. They work well but they are enormous and make what is already a big bike look enormous, so my first reflex was to find a lower profile alternative. The bike looks much more svelte when it’s mirrorless.
The only aftermarket option I could find is pretty much the same thing – industrially big. I might be tempted to customize something, like perhaps an electronic rear view option, but something stopped me. I’ve worked hard to get the C14 to fit, but it never has. Bar risers, modified foot pegs and a pang Corbin saddle and it still feels like it was made for someone else. Love the engine and it handles well enough with the rear tire mod (slightly larger profile balances the bike forward a bit more) and getting the suspension set for my size helped too, but it still feels like someone else’s bike, so I started looking at other options.
I reached out to the metal shop teacher at my school but he can’t weld aluminum. He suggested Fergus Welding & Machine Shop just up the river from us. It was described as ‘turn of the century – 18th Century’. I gave them a telephone call (because they have no digital presence at all) and went over to show them my broken mirror frame.
Our shop teacher wasn’t kidding. This place is in an old stone building and it was indeed old-school with paper filing upstairs and blacksmith come metal shop downstairs. The broken bit was in fact aluminum and their Yoda-like welder said that if it was ‘white metal’ he wouldn’t be able to do anything with it and that he’d only find that out when he ‘hit it’ for the first time. I left my phone number on the box and off I went.
I got the bike undressed and cleaned everything up. I’m amazed at how strong the fairings are on this thing. Even with seven hundred odd pounds coming down on it the thing held up with only scratches.
Fergus Welding & Machine Shop called back end of the next day and Dave said he was able to sort it out. It cost me $25 and I tipped them with a six pack. The part was impossible to source used and a new metal piece was asking $260US, so I came out ahead there.
The job was really well done. Dave tacked the part back together following the break and then filled it like the magician he was described as. When I put the assembly back together it fit like a glove – all the holes lined up perfectly and when I took it out for a spin tonight everything is tight and works as it should. It gives you an indication of how over-engineered this bike is that it can tip over, break the metal mirror frame but not smash the mirror itself. There’s a lot to like about a C14, but me fitting on it comfortably isn’t one of those things.
Undressing the whole bike gave me a chance to clean it up properly. The owner before me parked it in a shed for several years and spiders made it their home. Many webby nests were found throughout, but they’re all gone now. It also gave me a chance to lubricate the throttle cables and clean all the electrical connections of which there are many. This bike continues to amaze with how complicated it is, but it’s build like a nuclear submarine.
Next steps? Sort out the fairings. If it were a more popular bike I could get some Chinese knock-offs and get them painted for a grand, but I’m not that lucky. I looked up Color Rite who I got the Neptune Blue touch up paint from when I first got the bike. The previous owner had it tip over on him (on the other side) and the touch up made it all but disappear.
Color Rite does good stuff, but it ain’t cheap and their shipping (at nearly $100CAN!) is astonishing. If I’m $200 in to touch up, perhaps I can remove the panels, flat them myself and then find a local paint shop to do them up for me. I’ll have to see what that costs.
To my surprise I made the finalists list out of hundreds of applications from across the globe (Netacademy runs in almost every country in dozens of languages – it’s a truly global platform). When I read about some of the other finalists I was thrilled just to be included with them.
On August 15th I was driving through the countryside to the University of Waterloo, listening to the awards being announced on spotty cell phone coverage. It cut out just as the innovation architect award was announced and then came back for the next award, so I didn’t hear I’d won when it happened.
At CEMC at UWaterloo I took a room full of computer studies teachers through cyber-range activities and while that was going on we heard that I didn’t just win the Innovation Architect Award, but also the Shooting Star grand prize which has me in NYC in mid-September for the Global Citizen Festival.
.As part of the prize Cisco gave me some communications and asked for shoutouts, and there are many. Innovating can often feel like a lonely exercise where most of what you’re doing seems to aggravate management, but it’s really a collaborative exercise, otherwise you’re by yourself in a room doing cool things that no one else knows about. The idea of a lone inventor hidden away working on their own is a fiction.
I could never have built the program I developed without getting my school board onside. There are two people in particular who became supporters and advocates for the unique work we were attempting. Charles Benyair was our SHSM lead and he provided the resources that my school would not to get us in motion, and Sandro Buffone in our IT department made a point of understanding what I was trying to do and helped clear away the technical bureaucracy to let it happen.
Convincing students to take on an international competition in a subject we’d never studied before was a challenge, but Cam, Cal, Nick and Justin were seniors in 2017 and bravely jumped into cybersecurity with me. We learned new concepts and got a handle on things to such a degree that we discovered we were going to the first Canadian national cybersecurity finals in Fredericton. Three of those students had never left the province or been on a plane so you can imagine the impact.
As the teams gathered for a photo I happened to be standing next to Sandra Saric, the vice-president in charge of CyberTitan at the Information & Communication Technology Council (ICTC). As the photo got taken she said under her breath, “where are all the girls?” Out of seventy odd students only a handful were girls. That observation put me on a mission.
Sandra went back and established a program for encouraging all-female teams to sign up and I went back to my junior computer technology classes (the exacting gender expectations of our rural high school make sure that there were no girls in senior computer tech classes) and cajoled six girls to give it a try. That next year we had three full teams instead of two-thirds of one. I encouraged them to find a name that speaks to their experience and the girls came up with the Terabytches (terabyte with a twist).
Those six pioneers faced derision from our school and when they went to nationals a member of one of the other all-male teams said to one of them, “you’re lucky you’re pretty, because you suck at this.” That year emphasized for me how important it is to give girls their own space away from the often corrosive male culture that forms around technology.
In a radio interview in Ottawa at those finals Rachel said something that stuck with me. “We used this name so that it couldn’t be used against us.” 2019 was an incredible year for getting my head around diversifying access to technology learning, particularly in the hyper-male dominated field of cybersecurity. But it was also a year of finding allies. Joanne Harris at the school board enabled us to attend nationals by coming along as our female chaperone and I got to meet Diana Barbosa, Sheena Bolton and Hayley Heaslip who ran the competition.
That summer Philippe Landry from Cisco Canada got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in working toward my CCNA Cyber Operations Instructor qualification. My last I.T. certification was CompTIA’s Network+ way back in 2002, so this would be my first run at a technical certification in seventeen years, and in a subject I’d only been looking at for a couple of years. Claude Foy at FTI in Quebec was my instructor and he was patient and very giving of his time. Over the summer I became familiar with Wireshark and all sorts of other cyber-tools and in September I wrote the exam and became the first K12 teacher in Canada qualified to teach cyber operations – I think I am still the only one five years later. Yes, innovating can sometimes feel a bit lonely.
Attending Cisco Live in the fall of 2019 I was again reminded of just how cloud based (and cybersecurity dependent) things have become. I also attended my first University of Waterloo Cybersecurity & Privacy Institute conference (bringing a bus load of students with me) which opened my eyes to the current state of networked technology where we’re barely hanging on. To underline that I had my local OPP detachment asking if I could forensically analyze digital evidence for them because they weren’t resourced to do it themselves.
We ground through the pandemic but CyberTitan was one of the few events that never cancelled on us. The diverifying of our teams in 2019 led to a richer and more effective co-ed senior team. Some of the girls wanted to join the best of the boys and that mix of skillsets led to a string of top five finishes including a top defender award. The girls team also continued, missing nationals in 2020 but earning top wildcard spots in the ’21 and ’22 finals.
In 2022 I discovered that I had been seconded to ICTC for the year to advocate for and support cybersecurity education nationally. In this role I’ve been in classrooms from Newfoundland to British Columbia and many points in between. I’ve supported two new provinces in joining the competition and continue to bang my drum for recognition of essential Twenty-First Century digital skills that are so often ignored in our school systems, like cybersecurity.
This spring I joined Katina Papulkas’ Dell K-12 Education Innovation Accelerator, Part of that program was an opportunity to mentor with someone in the edtech space and I was lucky enough to be placed with Julie Foss, who helped me re-contextualize myself in my first role out of the classroom in two decades.
The experience empowered me to apply for the Cisco award. Had I remained lost at sea in terms of understanding how to do what matters in my new role, I would never have done it.
Innovation is often lonely work. It can antagonize status quo types who are intent on maintaining a system that put them in charge, but innovation is also thrilling and can empower those not privileged by that status quo. If you’re serious about diversity, equity and inclusion, innovators aren’t people you want to be labelling as troublemakers, they’re simply committed to finding a better way.
The other nice things about innovation is that you meet the most interesting people. From Ella in UBC to Kyle at Inspiretech to Eric George at the CPI, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some fascinating people who don’t status quo anything and are always looking for that better way. Cisco, both as a company and as individual employees, have been wonderful enablers of innovation, providing me with resources in a subject that everyone uses all day every day in every classroom, but almost no one teaches. Being acknowledged as an innovator by such a forward thinking organization makes me think that I’m on the right track, even if annoys some of the powers that be.
I grew up next to the sea as a kid and miss it everyday. Sometimes I’ve just got to see some water. The nearest/nicest way to do that which actually hits the odd corner (I get what I can take in the corner desert that is SW Ontario) is over to the Niagara Escarpment and up it to Georgian Bay. Saturday was a 24°C perfect August day, so off I went.
Some quiet time on the trails at the end of Beaver Valley in the woods and then it was an hour blast back through the tedium to the maddening crowds.
Imagine you’re buying a car from a reputable manufacturer. That manufacturer doesn’t build all the components itself. It partners with other reputable manufacturing specialists and works with them to tight tolerances so that all the bits fit together and work properly.
In a tightly controlled supply chain like that you end up with complex systems that can take you hundreds of thousands of kilometers through extreme environments with only regularly maintenance. When engineering is taken seriously like this, amazing, resilient machines are the result.
If your car was built like the cloud infrastructure your business/school/government depends on to operate every day, your ‘manufacturer’ scours the internet looking for free bits and pieces of code that will do a job that they can’t be bothered to code themselves. This freeware, often taken without consent and seldom supported, becomes part of a stack of under engineered software that makes your magical, money saving cloud infrastructure work. Any time someone decides they want additional functionality, another piece is patched into this mess.
Imagine if your car was built like this. Every tire would come from a different manufacturer with different specs but they all got chucked onto the car because they filled a need at that particular moment. Some of the tires come from tire manufacturers, some came from a guy who thought he could build a better tire in his shed, and they’re all different makes and sizes. Some are tested for safety, some aren’t even legally tires. The other parts of your franken-car would also be sourced like that, with simplistic needs met but with little thought for integration or upkeep. Some parts of your rolling nightmare are updated regularly, others never have nor will be, meaning what fit together this week might not next.
One day your engine bolts might update themselves and suddenly the motor won’t start because nothing fits. The horn that got installed might not actually be a horn but a fire hazard waiting to burn your new car to the ground when you press the button. You might be running a 1990s transmission with a 2023 chassis that only superficially work with each other but will fly apart the first time you take a corner.
If there were any consistency in how open source software is integrated into business systems, this might work, but in most cases complex cloud based information management systems are cobbled together collections of corporate systems and under-resourced open source freeware. Why would this chaos suit some companies?
“Tech” companies seldom make the technology you’re purchasing from them. In most cases that fancy new operating system you’re buying was lifted from freeware and modified to fit the money-making paradigm – in many cases while ignoring the original intent of the freeware developer to provide functionality to those who need it while not supporting a profit mandate.
The stack of hardware and software your data passes through to use the internet is staggering. On your computer (laptop, smartphone, whatever, they’re all computers) you’re using a browser likely made by one company on an operating system made by another. The drivers that run the hardware that connects you online are a third company and in all three cases they may well have ‘grabbed’ some open source software to make their piece of the puzzle work. Once your data actually leaves your device it hits your router that is running another bunch of hardware and software before getting fired out to your internet service provider (ISP), who is running goodness knows what (but probably with ample amounts of ‘free’ open source software). From your ISP your data bounces from server to server on its way to its destination. If you’re reading this through social media connections you’ve now picked up all their bad habits (Twitter, Meta, Google, though notice that they all make monetizing free software like a community service). In many cases they throw trackers on your network traffic so they can sell to you.
This mad hack-fest is how the internet works and it’s how the cloud based programs everyone finds so convenient are built and maintained. Your ‘mission critical’ new cloud based accounting software depends on the slap dash engineering to work… all day, everyday. This approach almost begs to be abused, and it is.
How can we possibly secure this mess? Well, it’s nearly impossible, which is why you see so many criminals taking to this new frontier. The people using this technology are now decades into a digital skill crisis that shows no signs of ending, so the people who drive these terrible cars don’t have the skills to know just how bad they are. Our information and communication technology illiteracy also affects management who make ill informed decisions about how to integrate technology with resilience and best engineering practices first.
The vast majority of online systems depend on open source software that introduce all sorts of chaos into what should be a coherent and carefully engineered system. When you pile on missing user and management digital fluency, it’s amazing that the lights are on and your ATM is giving you cash at all.
Imagine that you are the under-resourced mechanic for that franken-car. When something breaks you may find that it doesn’t fit into what the car has changed into as other parts got upgraded. You might find that the intention of the part you need to replace was misunderstood and it wasn’t the right thing to use in the first place. Whenever you open the hood you’re not expecting to see branded parts that were designed to be engineered together, you’re seeing a hodgepodge of bits slapped together to work in a given moment. Your maintenance of this car becomes a panicky grab at anything that might make it work, which only makes things worse.
That under-resourced mechanic has a lot to do with cybersecurity specialists. When I read an article like this scattered piece in the Globe and Mail I get a sense of just how panicky and clueless management is. What’s particularly galling in that article is the insinuation that many cybersecurity experts are somehow untrustworthy criminals because they’re able to recognize the under resourced mess we’re sitting with. Incredible.
Cybersecurity is an uphill struggle. You can expect the systems you work on to be cobbled together messes, your operators don’t know what they’re doing and the people working against you (many with organized crime or foreign government support) only have to get it right once while you have to get it right (on a nightmare software stack) everyday. It’s no wonder we’re in a decades long shortage of cyber-talent and seeing burnout becoming a major factor.
The decision to start taking online security from software development up seriously is going to take a revolution in thinking. Perhaps the coming quantum disruption to encryption in cybersecurity will prompt this change. The hacked together mess we’re working with today is begging to be burned down and redone properly.
Imagine you’re buying a car from a reputable manufacturer. That manufacturer doesn’t build all the components itself. It partners with other reputable manufacturing specialists and works with them to tight tolerances so that all the bits fit together and work properly.
In a tightly controlled supply chain like that you end up with complex systems that can take you hundreds of thousands of kilometers through extreme environments with only regularly maintenance. When engineering is taken seriously like this, amazing, resilient machines are the result.
If your car was built like the cloud infrastructure your business/school/government depends on to operate every day, your ‘manufacturer’ scours the internet looking for free bits and pieces of code that will do a job that they can’t be bothered to code themselves. This freeware, often taken without consent and seldom supported, becomes part of a stack of under engineered software that makes your magical, money saving cloud infrastructure work. Any time someone decides they want additional functionality, another piece is patched into this mess.
Imagine if your car was built like this. Every tire would come from a different manufacturer with different specs but they all got chucked onto the car because they filled a need at that particular moment. Some of the tires come from tire manufacturers, some came from a guy who thought he could build a better tire in his shed, and they’re all different makes and sizes. Some are tested for safety, some aren’t even legally tires. The other parts of your franken-car would also be sourced like that, with simplistic needs met but with little thought for integration or upkeep. Some parts of your rolling nightmare are updated regularly, others never have nor will be, meaning what fit together this week might not next.
One day your engine bolts might update themselves and suddenly the motor won’t start because nothing fits. The horn that got installed might not actually be a horn but a fire hazard waiting to burn your new car to the ground when you press the button. You might be running a 1990s transmission with a 2023 chassis that only superficially work with each other but will fly apart the first time you take a corner.
If there were any consistency in how open source software is integrated into business systems, this might work, but in most cases complex cloud based information management systems are cobbled together collections of corporate systems and under-resourced open source freeware. Why would this chaos suit some companies?
“Tech” companies seldom make the technology you’re purchasing from them. In most cases that fancy new operating system you’re buying was lifted from freeware and modified to fit the money-making paradigm – in many cases while ignoring the original intent of the freeware developer to provide functionality to those who need it while not supporting a profit mandate.
The stack of hardware and software your data passes through to use the internet is staggering. On your computer (laptop, smartphone, whatever, they’re all computers) you’re using a browser likely made by one company on an operating system made by another. The drivers that run the hardware that connects you online are a third company and in all three cases they may well have ‘grabbed’ some open source software to make their piece of the puzzle work. Once your data actually leaves your device it hits your router that is running another bunch of hardware and software before getting fired out to your internet service provider (ISP), who is running goodness knows what (but probably with ample amounts of ‘free’ open source software). From your ISP your data bounces from server to server on its way to its destination. If you’re reading this through social media connections you’ve now picked up all their bad habits (Twitter, Meta, Google, though notice that they all make monetizing free software like a community service). In many cases they throw trackers on your network traffic so they can sell to you.
This mad hack-fest is how the internet works and it’s how the cloud based programs everyone finds so convenient are built and maintained. Your ‘mission critical’ new cloud based accounting software depends on the slap dash engineering to work… all day, everyday. This approach almost begs to be abused, and it is.
How can we possibly secure this mess? Well, it’s nearly impossible, which is why you see so many criminals taking to this new frontier. The people using this technology are now decades into a digital skill crisis that shows no signs of ending, so the people who drive these terrible cars don’t have the skills to know just how bad they are. Our information and communication technology illiteracy also affects management who make ill informed decisions about how to integrate technology with resilience and best engineering practices first.
The vast majority of online systems depend on open source software that introduce all sorts of chaos into what should be a coherent and carefully engineered system. When you pile on missing user and management digital fluency, it’s amazing that the lights are on and your ATM is giving you cash at all.
Imagine that you are the under-resourced mechanic for that franken-car. When something breaks you may find that it doesn’t fit into what the car has changed into as other parts got upgraded. You might find that the intention of the part you need to replace was misunderstood and it wasn’t the right thing to use in the first place. Whenever you open the hood you’re not expecting to see branded parts that were designed to be engineered together, you’re seeing a hodgepodge of bits slapped together to work in a given moment. Your maintenance of this car becomes a panicky grab at anything that might make it work, which only makes things worse.
That under-resourced mechanic has a lot to do with cybersecurity specialists. When I read an article like this scattered piece in the Globe and Mail I get a sense of just how panicky and clueless management is. What’s particularly galling in that article is the insinuation that many cybersecurity experts are somehow untrustworthy criminals because they’re able to recognize the under resourced mess we’re sitting with. Incredible.
Cybersecurity is an uphill struggle. You can expect the systems you work on to be cobbled together messes, your operators don’t know what they’re doing and the people working against you (many with organized crime or foreign government support) only have to get it right once while you have to get it right (on a nightmare software stack) everyday. It’s no wonder we’re in a decades long shortage of cyber-talent and seeing burnout becoming a major factor.
The decision to start taking online security from software development up seriously is going to take a revolution in thinking. Perhaps the coming quantum disruption to encryption in cybersecurity will prompt this change. The hacked together mess we’re working with today is begging to be burned down and redone properly.
