Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

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Solarpunk ethical work within IT? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Looking for perspectives about the above. On my meanderings around the web I've found cybersecurity is all the rage now, cybersecurity experts are desperately needed. Looks a bit like a protection scheme to me - first have everyone save their data in the cloud and buy a smart fridge, then flood everything with ethical hacking courses and cybersecurity certifications.

Reminds me of my marketing translation days working on copy where you always were supposed to outpace your competitors by using some [insert software here]-as-a-service solution to 'compete in an increasingly fast-paced business environment'. Yay rat race.

On the other hand, as to cybersecurity experts, we will need smart people who can re-stupidify our smart appliances when they go rogue.

What would you consider ethical work within IT? Now and in a brighter future?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not in the security area, but I can understand why it's all the rage at the moment. We are replacing legacy applications that were built with zero security oversight, and were built in the last 10 years. Externally facing web applications that are running on servers that have never had security updates after the original vendor left, are running software that is many versions behind with known security exploits, and where no one ever considered what might happen if someone decided to trick the system with multiple accounts, or by submitting something 1000 times with a bot.

Security is probably all the rage because there's a lot of catching up to do.

And I feel like the type of role you have in IT isn't the important part of being ethical. I feel it's the place you work that determines if your job is ethical or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Everything from doing taxes to registering your car to all sorts of civil stuff can be done online here, also every public website runs you through a half-hour captcha marathon, and most sites are old and really strange. I'm always torn between cheering the system on as it crumbles, and help making it work again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Almost everything can be done online here too, and it's amazing seeing how many fancy looking front ends are hanging on by threads in the backend.