MissConstrue on Nostr: Y’all, here’s the thing. That codebase is #cobol. There’s probably a couple ...

Y’all, here’s the thing. That codebase is #cobol. There’s probably a couple hundred people in the entire world that are fluent in cobol. Almost none of them under 50. That system is spaghetti, customized for the environment, and is probably 60 years old for some of it. I have written the manuals for multiple mainframe and supercomputers supporting similar code bases. Each of them was its own special darling. Something as small as tabbing, or a misplaced period can make the whole system fail. There is a reason you don’t work in prod, you don’t push untested code, you don’t skip tests and deployment strategies.
This is a nightmare. Even as we speak, blackhats are looking for a way to exploit a system that until now has been untouchable. Already, USAID accounts have been brute forced and used to do crypto mining on the govt cloud account. People are reporting that their SS accounts are missing years of data. We are fucked if we don’t stop this now.

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