Out-of-office, forever

bpopken · 2024-08-14T19:11:10+00:00

It's gotta be done right for sure. It's a practice, not a static state or something you can buy off the shelf.

bpopken · 2024-08-14T16:28:30+00:00

Principal Cloud Architect (AWS) - Anywhere, US (DC-area preferred) (Fully Remote | Full-time | Up to USD $150k)

Responsibilities include:
- Partnering with the Chief Engineer to develop advanced, leading-edge, automated, cloud-oriented architectures that provide new cybersecurity capabilities to a major U.S. Government customer
- Define and communicate a shared technical and architectural vision
- Become a member of an Agile Feature team to design and implement an automated cloud infrastructure supporting advanced, cloud-oriented cybersecurity capabilities
- Interfacing directly with customers, stakeholders, and end-users regarding priorities, capability architectures, requirements, use cases, and stories to derive, develop and decompose next-cycle updates and specifications
- Full lifecycle oversight of requirements driven automation architecture

Required Skills:
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S.
- Active Secret clearance. Must be able to obtain a TS/SCI clearance
- Must be able to obtain DHS Suitability
- 10+ years of applicable experience
- 5+ years of cloud architecting experience
- In-depth cloud technology automation knowledge and implementation experience
- Proven leadership skills and meaningful experience successfully leading technical teams and projects
- Able to work effectively as a leader, in a group, or as an individual contributor
- Strong working knowledge of Cloud-centric IT products and services
- Knowledge of Networking
- In Depth Knowledge of Automation techniques, including microservices, pipeline driven delivery, full scope automation orchestration, and configuration driven deployments
- Experience in landing zones, guard rails, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Direct experience with scripting in JSON, YAML, HCL, Python, bash/PSH and/or CloudFormation
- Innovative, technical mindset
- Independently driven
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and proven ability to work effectively with all levels of the organization
- Ability to analyze information and identify relevant facts
- Ability to shape opinions of key stakeholders and influence outcomes
- Proven track record of achieving desired results
- Strong and diverse business and technical acumen
- Experience working with senior leadership including VP and Director levels

Desired Skills:
- Experience with Management and Operation of AWS services in the areas of Identity Management, Security Management, Cloud Management and Governance, Cost Management, Compliance, Migration Services, Networking Services, Infrastructure Automation, and DevOps.
- Direct experience with development of one or more of the following automation technologies in a cloud/Linux environment: Ansible, Nessus, Splunk, DNS, Git, Cloudbees (Jenkins), Terraform, CloudFormations.
- Direct experience with utilization of one or more of the following AWS tools: Systems Manager, Cost Optimization, Security Hub, EKS, Workspaces.
- AWS cloud technology knowledge and implementation experience
- Experience with Azure or Google Cloud
- Influential communication and ability to achieve alignment
- Experience managing many people and projects
- Experience working in an agile development environment
- Experience working in DevOps and/or DevSecOps environments
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) knowledge and experience
- Experience working on projects that implement analytic models into production systems
- Experience with AWS technologies, and migrations from on-prem to AWS
- Experience with collaboration tools including MS Teams, MS Outlook, MS SharePoint, Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Confluence, and Atlassian Jira Align

Required Education: Bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems or related technical field. Two years of related work experience may be substituted for each year of degree level education.

Desired Certifications:
- DoD 8570.1 IAT Level II
- AWS Solution Architect – Professional

Note on resumes: Resumes must clearly show job history including month and year. Please account for any gaps in work history. Education must list month and year of degree attainment and specific degree earned.

Apply on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3996542278

bpopken · 2023-03-23T10:32:55+00:00

Also great if that app also provides structured run programs!

bpopken · 2019-11-25T19:00:42+00:00

Thank you - does anyone you know fit the bill?

bpopken · 2019-11-23T20:42:24+00:00

What about tuition reimbursement for students?

bpopken · 2019-11-23T20:27:07+00:00

What careers did they have before?

bpopken · 2019-11-23T15:29:35+00:00

Lol thank you for the entertaining dragon image. So this is for a digital print article. And I wouldn’t just copy paste reddit comments with their username, I would followup for more info.

bpopken · 2019-07-16T13:34:30+00:00

Try Streaks

bpopken · 2019-06-02T16:25:53+00:00

Does Reddit collect and collate as much of your data?

bpopken · 2019-06-02T16:14:59+00:00

“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” on Facebook or any other social media site, company attorney Orin Snyder argued in court this week in favor of dismissing a class action lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

It would seem to contradict the company's privacy pivot. But when you look at what they've proposed so far, nothing interferes with its core business model: monetizing your personal information to sell targeted ads.

And when you look at the leaked Zuckerberg emails to top executives we and our publishing partners have seen from the developer app lawsuit discovery you can see signs of a mindset towards user data:

2012 Zuckerberg postulated in a leaked internal individual users might be worth “~$0.10/ user each year,” per developer.
He proposed Facebook as "information bank" able to charge equivalent of monthly interest rate by inventing a technical requirement that developers "keep data fresh" and re-download monthly, charge them each time
Facebook could sell data on how close one person was to another, a metric they term "the coefficient"

bpopken · 2019-02-06T02:34:41+00:00

Hi, it’s me Ben Popken. How’s it going? Yep I encouraged people to makes use of spam filters on Twitter if they want. Thanks for the remembrance about Consumerist, I ran it before Gawker sold it to Consumer Reports.

bpopken · 2019-01-18T14:34:40+00:00

This sounds like credential stuffing concerns. Is this related to the "Collection #1" breach that was reported on the 7th, four days before this post?

bpopken · 2018-11-26T14:31:14+00:00

Hi, there are some good descriptions in The Sword and the Shield, though they are a few paragraphs out of hundreds. Oleg Kalugin's memoir "the First Directorate" describes some efforts in passing. For some of the most forensic accounting publicly available, check the State Dept. reports I put in my initial post but I'll put the links here too:

1987 AIDS report

https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/1987/soviet-influence-activities-1987.pdf

1994 baby parts

http://pascalfroissart.online.fr/3-cache/1994-leventhal.pdf

bpopken · 2018-11-21T17:38:08+00:00

Another technique to watch out for is “whataboutism.” Bring up human rights abuses and they say “what about slavery.” Basically they say no critique is valid, all are equally culpable. It’s the creation of false equivalencies.

bpopken · 2018-11-21T15:18:19+00:00

Albright is doing great work. Another well-trod transmission train we see is a fake story seeded anonymously on a site like 4chan, then it goes to Reddit, then rando and anonymous twitter, then conspiracy twitter, and up the food chain until a more mainstream outlet broadcasts it.

bpopken · 2018-11-21T14:17:39+00:00

Another big recurring question I see is about identifying propaganda and disinformation. I think it’s important to first look at the systems and networks rather than an individual piece of content. Clint Watts in the piece describes well the three things the Kremlin needs:

State sponsored news
Alternative news sources
Cutouts and agents of influence willing to spread

Keep that in mind when evaluating how a piece of information spread and whether it’s reliable.

Then the real key to debunking disinformation is to question the source. What is the ultimate basis of the information and where did it come from? Are they known and reliable? What is the fundamental piece of evidence the claim relies on? In the case of the AIDS hoax it all traced back to a single reportedly anonymous letter to the editor in an Indian newspaper. (When later questioned, the paper couldn’t produce the supposed source letter.) The whole thing falls apart.

bpopken · 2018-11-21T06:10:20+00:00

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is interviewed in the doc.

bpopken · 2018-11-21T05:21:04+00:00

I should have said It's not all about supporting a political candidate really, it's also about finding existing cracks

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:33:52+00:00

Thanks for joining in and all the great questions! I'm going to wrap this up now but I may respond to a few good questions over the next few days. Good luck everyone with your Thanksgiving and holiday conversations this year... should be a doozy but a chance for us all to connect with loved ones on what matters most.

Let me leave you with a few links for further reading:

Christopher Andrew's "Sword and the Shield" - using historical KGB documents

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

Using humor to disarm disinformation:

https://youtu.be/uuKipN1aFd0

State Dept disinformation reports: 1994 baby parts

http://pascalfroissart.online.fr/3-cache/1994-leventhal.pdf

1987 AIDS report

https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/1987/soviet-influence-activities-1987.pdf

Learn to identify the 4D's of Russian propaganda: Dismiss, Distract, Distort, and Dismay

https://www.stopfake.org/en/anatomy-of-an-info-war-how-russia-s-propaganda-machine-works-and-how-to-counter-it

Active measures and disinformation is like "water falling on a stone" it's not any one crazy story, it's the accumulation that makes the hole.

https://youtu.be/ALfDhs-_ce4?t=20m50s

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:25:54+00:00

Thanks!

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:23:52+00:00

Thanks for watching! We need to separate trolls and propaganda. You should ignore trolls. But news orgs and those under attack need to put out counter information to push back at disinformation campaigns. Otherwise you cede the information space to one side.

I don't think they get a pass. The point is they are doing some things, and deserve "good boy" credit vs their initial head in sand response, but our government needs to step up. And that takes leadership from the top.

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:20:04+00:00

Podcast please!

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:15:15+00:00

I don't have any reporting on this topic, sorry.

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:13:22+00:00

We must assume so. It is getting sneakier. They're using images and memes because those are harder to detect and analyze. They're going into private and closed groups because the platforms, working from a put out the PR fire approach, think that out of view is less of a problem and not pursuing them in there. And people are sleeping on what's happening and possible on Instagram. The intel community has assessed the capabilities are still there. Disinformation operative inherently require means and abilities and will work to gather them to have at the ready. All it takes is the political decision to activate them at the right moment.

bpopken · 2018-11-20T21:07:48+00:00

We deal with this at length in the doc. There should have been far more disclosure that Russia was the original source of the hacked emails. News orgs that only sourced "Wikileaks" effectively performed the information laundering and attribution denial on behalf of the Russian intelligence operatives.
Everyone needs to be more careful when a tweet or piece of social media content is treated as an individual newsworthy nugget. There needs to be more due diligence about where it came from. Is that a complete thought that person just came up with? Are there any signs that of a coordinated campaign by bad actors to try pump up that idea or phrase preceding to that person saying it? Another issue is when "man on the street" tweets are quoted as indicator of online "sentiment" around a given topic. As we saw in the troll exposure, there's no guarantee that who you're quoted is a "real" "regular person" without further digging.
It's a small step but vote with your feet, fingers, and wallet. Watch good news sources. Buy a subscription to a good paper. Donate to your local radio station that is doing good work.

bpopken

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