Another one for anoraks: USENET - a trip back in time

Indeed, but there are degrees of what I would call “defensive practices”.

Building a “house of cards” is great for IT staff job security because something is always blowing up and needs to be fixed.

Yes; I know about that. You set up a cron job for certificate renewal. That works automatically, until one day it stops, and then you have to pay somebody by the hour to dig around and find out why it stopped Often, the certificate issuer has vanished, changed its API, etc.

Of course those who get paid by the hour to do IT work are very happy about this. One certificate issuer I saw the other day expires its certs after 90 days, and put out a long blurb about why this is good practice, blah blah blah.

Now try running a community site, donation funded… I am fortunate to have some good volunteer help but some tasks require root access and one can’t hand those credentials out to just anybody. And all of those have to be paid for – hundreds of € per day. The moment anybody needs to be paid at a commercial rate, the cost of that dwarfs the cost of hosting the site.

You still have to install new certificates on the server…

Yes indeed; “anorak” is derogatory if used to describe somebody else, but I referred to myself as an “anorak” so that should make it ok in this case

I too don’t like the anti-nerd attitude which has always been fashionable among the “thicko classes”. Practically all people who have ever achieved anything of value are people who are able to focus on something for long enough to get it solved, and they get called “nerds”.