Old head engineering serial founder here with a partial grey beard that from reading the comments herein sees myself and my security practices as an edge case, an experienced lonely outlier it appears.
First to the OP mentions about schooling experiences which struck a nerve with me, I would add that in my 4th year of College programming classes; Assembly and C, I too helped the other 6 people in my class while in the computer lab. This was the 1990s long before the dotcom boom and classes were very small in software development, folks even laughed at me for taking programming then however they do not laugh at me now. The point in this paragraph is that I too had my entire projects stolen and turned in verbatim by 3 others in my class and the professor, who was a systems programmer at Bank of America at the time, knew whose work they had turned in since I was the only person in class that understood it. She spoke to me in private and advised me to not share my code with anyone and dumbass me should have carried that forward into the real world then.
Code theft has been a thing since code was first written and this should be no surprise when most people have no idea how to formulate large sets of code into a unified function for business let alone the time it takes to write and prove that approach. I started writing software professionally in the 1990s and was the architect and sole developer of a payment processors gateway that had PayPal and several other Fortune 500 clients for many years. My company acquired another small entity within this time and unknown to us our action of interest proved to be the point of proof needed to set in motion a lawsuit from an outside third party. That third party claimed that the acquired owner and his business we bought stole their code which in time laid the interest for us to acquire that business. 10 years later and after many a court hearing that acquired owner lost the lawsuit after he was proven to have stolen the code and built a business making significant revenue from that stolen code. He was fined 5+ MM USD and had his wages garnished which he likely is still paying to this day. Yes, code theft is a real thing but many here likely have no idea.
Fast forward some time later after I had entirely rewrote my intellectual property from the ground up again into version 5 and I founded another payment processor with my intellectual property work, Yup, that code was then too stolen and used to build yet another competing business by a former business partner that felt he was entitled to my intellectual property. Yes, code theft is a real thing or maybe it is just me?
A few weeks back I attended a patent meeting discussion North of Washington DC that had several tens of people there, many younger than myself. The lawyers running the presentation were cracking jokes about the current and coming tsunami of lawsuits involving A.I. code theft and after the presentation over half the people there in discussion groups stated they were attending in an attempt to patent their A.I. solutions. The lawyers very clearly stated that they would most likely be wasting their time and money as the courts were now wise to the trolls that have no intention of applying the patent they seek to a use other than just blanket patenting mass ideas in a hope to cash in on a patent lawsuit down the line.
After nearly 30 years of doing this it has taken many scars to understand the correct approach to protect my intellectual property that is still powering past payments companies of which I founded and built. I am now applying those lessons in a way for my next venture that will ensure only I can execute my ideas with my code since the world is overrun with many liars and cheats that now exist only to claim others work as their own in hopes to get rich easily from all the big tech hysteria and FOMO. I will continue on doing what I do using my old school proven ways to build what I am building now that continues to excite me even more with each passing day as that idea manifests into my next business venture that everyone alive will need, energy storage.
Your mileage will vary greatly from my own but I leave everyone with this point to think on; why hasn't Coke published their recipe on a publicly open forum? Code is just a recipe after all but maybe it's really the chef that matters?
The operation efforts of distraction are very very real however what has never ceased to amaze me about the U.S. governments lack of "intelligence" is why they do not take the same approach in hiding the gas stations in the sky. Some here may have seen this distraction as it occurred and given enough exposure to said data, aka experience, when an event occurs it certainly stands out as an obvious data pattern anomaly against what is normal. The old magicians trick of distraction however some here are old and wise enough to know the elephant did not disappear. ADSB data is an amazing thing and the fact the the U.S. government pays to keep in suppressed should be an indicator towards its revealing power. What you cannot see matters most and the world is coming to learn this with each passing day.
I think people would be surprised by the extent to which scientific sensing and commercial data sources are systematically scrubbed of data that has specific intelligence value.
This is much less effective these days due to the pervasiveness of network connected sensor data but it is still commonplace.
I cannot disagree at all with this statement however I ask what about those connected devices that have no displays but still exist in our world "unseen"?
Take for example the Kohler poo cam announced a few weeks back that has no screen but maybe they secretly included a small speaker that after a firmware update will plop ads on bowl users if management is not seeing the profits from selling only the hardware. Won't that be some funny sh!t?
Or how about brain implant computers, so I ask where will the line be drawn when more and more profit at any cost appears to be the M.O.
Exciting times as connected technology that can see and hear gets smaller and smaller while battery power to weight ratio increases allowing these devices longer and longer life in secluded places.
Quite the mix of comments in 2025 from something that has existed and been foundationally critical in many unseen systems.
I designed and built my first POE system in 2004, at my own house as a dogfooding POC, and that system stills works to this day. Since that time I have built and installed many more without issue that continue to move along doing what they were intended to do, protect life and property via recording activity privately. My own home footage has been called upon several times by law enforcement and was critical in convicting at least one home break in crew.
The benefit of install is simple to comprehend for those with significant experience in the electrical field, run one small wire for data and power and ensure the POE supply is on a battery - done. Additionally I add those using WiFi for security are laughed at daily as losses pile up, web search MLB player home break-ins, as running a hardline cannot be jammed but many foolishly put all their assets solely behind WiFi security. Also these surveillance systems require no external cloud by design so no one is watching remotely, unlike the Fed and State viewing your Ring cameras for years and now which recently partnered with Flocker. No one cares more about you than you so if someone is selling you security ask yourself what it is you are actually paying for.
In closing, as we move into a new era of technological efficiency forced by rising energy prices and costly electrician labor hours, one is going to witness an uptake of POE adoption in more and more nontraditional places. It is already happening and its moment will come as more recognize the cost benefit to this greatly simplified power delivery method with integrated battery backup.
Yes, nostalgia. This teleported me mentally back to the 1990s as I love seeing the old things resurface, that pattern and cycle thing that always holds true.
I recall sitting in board meetings playing games between other tech members as we had written simple games using the earliest means of direct connect device communication well before this was common. With the introduction of the Palm VII having the first mobile cellular smart device available and being a payment processor to large dotcoms at the time we of course we would also move into mobile payments on that Palm VII. This was yet another idea well before its time but it was fun working through the engineering issues of doing payments over cellular as well as satellite long ago. I still have NIB Palm VIIs with NIB payment cradles on my tech shelf of history, maybe some day I will dig them out again to play for inspiration and curiosity.
This is already happening along the internal Eastern Shore exposed to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland were I live and it is documented in recent publications by those accredited in such topics. The low lying wet forests that have lived just above the salt line are now all dying from the rising salt water intrusion. I have one of those low lying forests right behind my property and in the last 10 years I have witnessed all the trees within this area die. As an avid walker of these shores near daily in the last 15 years I have also witnessed unprecedented erosion of the shoreline of at least two vertical feet thus extending the beaches however these are not those types of beaches.
As a collector of things lost in time, such as Native American artifacts of which I have found thousands immediately around me in the last 15 years, I can say that erosion does have its benefits. Just as we are now reading from those exploring glaciers finding previous human tools and more. The word "benefit" here is clearly subjective.
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The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?
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I too am preparing for an entire rebuild of my home lab so the posting of this information is greatly appreciated at this time.
My home lab has been rebuilt 3 times in the last 20 years and the continuous mention of energy usage within this post is a main driver and one of several primary objectives towards my effort. My 36U rack as configured now with Dell Servers having Intel Xeons E chips has served me well for all the tech stuff that interests me both in hobby and profession. My entire setup now with all devices running draws 200 watts continuously and my existing home energy renewables generation and battery storage system will greatly benefit from this home lab rebuild as I am targeting energy use and floor area recovery outright while learning many new things as well. This rebuild is also a lead into my fourth tech company I'm starting so my motivation is strongly tied to many factors not discussed.
Looking forward to the future posts, Stay Healthy!
I haven't had a huge issue with power draw, but I live in a place where electricity is really cheap. I had 3x Dell R720s, an R210ii, and an Aruba 48-port PoE switch and felt like I had way more power than I knew what to do with, but it still didn't seem to have a substantial impact on my power bill. Maybe I lucked out with some components. Or maybe the overall power draw in my house is so pants-on-head stupid that I just don't have realistic expectations anymore.
I would encourage every single person reading this to have your water tested for PFAs.
Several years ago now an executive friend at WLGore, yes the very place that created it, gave me some information in passing. It was the kind of information in hearing from one someone you know that makes one pause for a moment in hearing it but then when one considers time against the statement it became less alarming in that moment. Now years of time have passed since that conversation occurred and the statements have manifested into reality.
I live literally down stream from WLGore and they have been dumping the toxins in the waterway for decades. Our local jurisdictions have been talking on PFAs for a few years now and in January of this year my time was up on my friends statement made years prior. I spent months doing research and in April I had our water tested. The EPA recommends 4 part per trillion is "safe" but in reality my conversation with medical professionals state NO amount of consumption is safe. My water test came back at 70 parts per trillion and I immediately purchased the special filtering needed to remove PFAs and installed it on our existing water filtering within days. I have also bought a whole house PFA filter that I intend to install in the coming weeks yet our water we drink, cook, and make ice with has been clean for months now as the post drinking system PFA filter test reflected <1 part per trillion.
No matter your wealth no one can purchase time, the only way to obtain more time is with your health.
Test your water because what you cannot see matters most!
The planet's rising temperatures will be the least of some regions' concerns as the knock-on effects from the redistributed water will be much, much deeper than current awareness.
The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data?
We do not know what we do not know however we act like we know everything yet learn new things about the planet daily. The things the survivors are going to learn about the changes that are setting in will be the last thing those that did not survive experienced from those cataclysmic moments.
First to the OP mentions about schooling experiences which struck a nerve with me, I would add that in my 4th year of College programming classes; Assembly and C, I too helped the other 6 people in my class while in the computer lab. This was the 1990s long before the dotcom boom and classes were very small in software development, folks even laughed at me for taking programming then however they do not laugh at me now. The point in this paragraph is that I too had my entire projects stolen and turned in verbatim by 3 others in my class and the professor, who was a systems programmer at Bank of America at the time, knew whose work they had turned in since I was the only person in class that understood it. She spoke to me in private and advised me to not share my code with anyone and dumbass me should have carried that forward into the real world then.
Code theft has been a thing since code was first written and this should be no surprise when most people have no idea how to formulate large sets of code into a unified function for business let alone the time it takes to write and prove that approach. I started writing software professionally in the 1990s and was the architect and sole developer of a payment processors gateway that had PayPal and several other Fortune 500 clients for many years. My company acquired another small entity within this time and unknown to us our action of interest proved to be the point of proof needed to set in motion a lawsuit from an outside third party. That third party claimed that the acquired owner and his business we bought stole their code which in time laid the interest for us to acquire that business. 10 years later and after many a court hearing that acquired owner lost the lawsuit after he was proven to have stolen the code and built a business making significant revenue from that stolen code. He was fined 5+ MM USD and had his wages garnished which he likely is still paying to this day. Yes, code theft is a real thing but many here likely have no idea.
Fast forward some time later after I had entirely rewrote my intellectual property from the ground up again into version 5 and I founded another payment processor with my intellectual property work, Yup, that code was then too stolen and used to build yet another competing business by a former business partner that felt he was entitled to my intellectual property. Yes, code theft is a real thing or maybe it is just me?
A few weeks back I attended a patent meeting discussion North of Washington DC that had several tens of people there, many younger than myself. The lawyers running the presentation were cracking jokes about the current and coming tsunami of lawsuits involving A.I. code theft and after the presentation over half the people there in discussion groups stated they were attending in an attempt to patent their A.I. solutions. The lawyers very clearly stated that they would most likely be wasting their time and money as the courts were now wise to the trolls that have no intention of applying the patent they seek to a use other than just blanket patenting mass ideas in a hope to cash in on a patent lawsuit down the line.
After nearly 30 years of doing this it has taken many scars to understand the correct approach to protect my intellectual property that is still powering past payments companies of which I founded and built. I am now applying those lessons in a way for my next venture that will ensure only I can execute my ideas with my code since the world is overrun with many liars and cheats that now exist only to claim others work as their own in hopes to get rich easily from all the big tech hysteria and FOMO. I will continue on doing what I do using my old school proven ways to build what I am building now that continues to excite me even more with each passing day as that idea manifests into my next business venture that everyone alive will need, energy storage.
Your mileage will vary greatly from my own but I leave everyone with this point to think on; why hasn't Coke published their recipe on a publicly open forum? Code is just a recipe after all but maybe it's really the chef that matters?
Stay Healthy!