Every day, you prove you know nothing.

Why do you do it? For the love of losing the game?

It's crazy-making but not completely crazy since their goal was to scapegoat.

It's still a little crazy, because whose fault is it the user wasn't trained?

A typical "modern" (as in, recently developed, the only meaning of the word which usually applies to government IT) solution is to pay a contractor way too much to develop a solution. Your IT department is barely involved.

Government software is seemingly always super duper specific to the task at hand with no thought for the future, so then you get to pay more millions (or billions) for a new system or major revisions to the old one in a few years. But at least it doesn't generally have this kind of problem.

College debt is also a bad thing, but at least you get a chance to participate. If there's nobody willing to take you as an apprentice, it keeps you from participating completely. It doesn't sound like you know anything at all about the subject at hand, nor have you even read what you're replying to...

I've (apparently) got news for you, governments use excel spreadsheets for sensitive data constantly. For a lot of purposes it is the right tool for the job... doesn't sound like it was this time, to be fair, but that doesn't change the general statement. Spreadsheets are often a great place to do data munging before giving the data a final home. The spreadsheets are not the problem, a policy of sharing spreadsheets without having them verified safe to share is. It's a much better policy for example to print to a PDF and then share that. Like spreadsheets, PDFs have their own problems when misused, but in this case it would have solved the problem because the hidden sheet wouldn't print.

It's an insane thing to do with sensitive data. It's a great thing to do with tables the users don't need to access when you're using Excel for something that really should be done with a database application :)

The leak happened when an member of MoD personnel sent an Excel file outside of government. They thought the data sheet had the details of around 150 Afghan applicants in it, when it in fact had a hidden tab with details of over 18,500 others. The breach "could still have been prevented" if MoD personnel had "received basic training" on this, the report concluded.

Sure, that's one way the breach might have been prevented, which is a much better word than "could" here because the worker would still have had to first know look for a hidden tab, and then actually do it. People forget to do things they know how to do all the time.

A better way would be to prevent sending any consequential attachments (bigger than a signature image - or even block those too, as sig images can be sourced from the web) and use a sharing portal which prevents embarrassing accidents like this by stripping out any questionable content and being extremely strict about it.

If you're depending on a single worker to remember and do something to avoid people losing their lives, you have already created a bad process, and people will die for it sooner or later.

Of course they can invade. They just don't want to break it, which is what invading it would do. They want to take it over through other means, because they are not stupid enough to think invading is a good plan. But invasion remains on the table, if it's better than the alternative of allowing themselves to fall further behind technologically.

Past tense and past tense. Join us in the present, thinking about the future.

It's wrong because it's against rules to which they agreed. If everyone is doing it, then everyone is wrong.

It's a continuation of the guild system, and it's a way to enshrine mediocrity or worse by keeping down competition. You, sir, are missing the point.

Don't really need any changes to FCRA because it already doesn't protect us from abuses like your credit score being used to determine if you will be employed. It's already designed to screw us. Furthermore the biggest players love it that it's not cheap and convenient to use for everything, they want the advantage

Yes, that's what talking to you is ALWAYS like. You nailed it.

Some of it is also certainly closed source code that was leaked.

Indeed..I assisted one with such a job in a casino. We took out a wall in the cashier's office comprised of metal studs, cut it short at the top, and put a shelf under it. No wood to speak of in that building either, except the bar top.

Requiring apprenticeship is a problem. It's protectionist. If a person can get through the licensing exam without enough knowledge that's the problem, and "fixing" it with an apprenticeship requirement is only intended to reduce supply in order to protect entrenched workers who may not deserve it because they aren't in fact doing their job, and/or supply constraints are doing harm to others.