By Mr. 0 — Management Notes
Cloud week.
Feels strange saying that as someone who came up online when the web was wild, messy, and gloriously decentralised. Back then, if a node went down, the rest carried on like nothing happened. Now? One AWS hiccup and half the internet has a nervous breakdown.
We’ve standardised ourselves into fragility. Convenience always sells better than resilience.
I’m not against the cloud; far from it. But I refuse to accept that centralisation equals progress. Hybrid models with local redundancy make much more sense. Costlier, yes. But I’d rather run a small, clunky setup that keeps working than a perfect system that fails beautifully.
Right now my office looks like a sysadmin’s fever dream: cables everywhere, fans humming, Fedora boxes whispering through VPN tunnels. I’m building small but thinking big — a private network that values encryption, isolation, and control. VPNs. Tor. SSH transfers. Encrypted backups. Nothing glamorous, just the fundamentals of a disciplined ITSEC journey.
Privacy isn’t paranoia, and it isn’t guilt. We’ve been trained to trade our data for ease and we do it gladly. We upload our thoughts, our photos, our identity, all wrapped neatly for someone else’s rack. Professionals should know better. Our job is to question defaults and design healthier systems.
Digital hygiene isn’t a side quest; it’s getting uncomfortably close to survival. Misinformation moves faster than truth. Every click, every login, every “Agree to terms” erodes the line between public and private. Governments are too busy waging physical, economic, and informational wars to teach personal security. They preach privacy while backdooring encryption. They promise transparency while classifying anything that matters.
So the duty falls on us — the ones who still care about sovereignty and signal integrity. Educating the people around us is damage control. Everyone needs to relearn the basics: strong auth, encrypted comms, trusted networks, and the confidence to say no to unnecessary data collection. Digital and mental hygiene are the new public health, and if we don’t spread it, someone else will spread something worse.
Here’s the working plan:
- Encrypt local backups.
- Automate secure transfers with
rsyncover SSH inside VPN tunnels. - Test hybrid off-site storage with least-privilege RBAC.
- Audit every hop: VPN, SSH, encrypted media.
None of that’s fancy — it’s just functional. Talking security means nothing if you don’t live it. I’m wiring this mess together while grinding through CCNA 1, catching up on the labs I owe myself, chasing uptime, caffeine, and a bit of redemption.
Stay functional. Stay tactical. Stay sovereign.
— Mr. 0 // FTRCRP Management