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SVP Technology at Fiserv; large scale system architecture/infrastructure, tech geek, reading, learning, hiking, GeoCaching, ham radio, married, kids
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There have been rumors floating around for the past couple of days that MFJ was going to discontinue production. That seemed almost impossible to me because they’ve become such a big part of amateur radio. Nonetheless, the rumors are true. Martin Jue sent out this message earlier today:
April 25, 2024
Dear Fellow Hams and Friends,
It is with a sad heart as I write this letter
As many of you have heard by now, MFJ is ceasing its on-site production in Starkville, Mississippi on May 17, 2024. This is also the same for our sister companies’ Ameritron, Hygain, Cushcraft, Mirage and Vectronics.
Times have changed since I started this business 52 years ago. Our product line grew and grew and prospered. Covid changed everything in businesses including ours. It was the hardest hit that we have ever had and we never fully recovered.
I turned 80 this year. I had never really considered retirement but life is so short and my time with my family is so precious.
I want to thank all of our employees who have helped build this company with me over the years. We have many employees who have made MFJ their career for 10, 20, 30, 40 and more years.
We are going to continue to sell MFJ products past May 17, 2024. We have a lot of stock on hand. We will continue to offer repair service work for out-of-warranty and in-warranty units for the foreseeable future.
Finally, a special thanks to all of our customers and our dealers who have made MFJ a worldwide name and a profitable business for so many years. You all are so much appreciated.
Sincerely Yours, 73s
Martin F. Jue, K5FLU
I would be surprised if someone didn’t buy the company—there was talk that DX Engineering made an offer—but at this point, it doesn’t appear that there’s a buyer. Stay tuned.
Bummer.
Atlanta, GA
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday.
The attacks against Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliances firewalls are the latest in a rash of network compromises that target firewalls, VPNs, and network-perimeter devices, which are designed to provide a moated gate of sorts that keeps remote hackers out. Over the past 18 months, threat actors—mainly backed by the Chinese government—have turned this security paradigm on its head in attacks that exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in security appliances from the likes of Ivanti, Atlassian, Citrix, and Progress. These devices are ideal targets because they sit at the edge of a network, provide a direct pipeline to its most sensitive resources, and interact with virtually all incoming communications.
Cisco ASA likely one of several targets
On Wednesday, it was Cisco’s turn to warn that its ASA products have received such treatment. Since November, a previously unknown actor tracked as UAT4356 by Cisco and STORM-1849 by Microsoft has been exploiting two zero-days in attacks that go on to install two pieces of never-before-seen malware, researchers with Cisco’s Talos security team said. Notable traits in the attacks include:
Atlanta, GA
Edward Zitron, citing emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, writes about Prabhakar Raghavan: And Raghavan -- a manager, hired by Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man and a manager by trade -- is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large. Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dramatically declined, with the numerous "core" search updates allegedly made to improve the quality of results having an adverse effect, increasing the prevalence of spammy, search engine optimized content.
It's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what "Google" means anymore. Prabhakar Raghavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of "did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is." This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when "management" is synonymous with "staying as far away from actual work as possible." And when you're a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth. You're not a user, you're a parasite, and it's these parasites that have dominated and are draining the tech industry of its value.
Raghavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict (or, if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder. Perhaps more remarkable, he's achieved this while maintaining a certain degree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan's known only in his corner of the Internet. Or at least he was. Now Raghavan has told those working on search that their "new operating reality" is one with less resources and less time to deliver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death with his bare hands. Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot economist, and one of the many managerial types that have caused immeasurable damage to the Internet in the name of growth and "shareholder value." And I believe these uber-managers - these ultra-pencil-pushers and growth-hounds - are the forces destroying tech's ability to innovate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Atlanta, GA
Never go public until you're ready to milk the heck out of it to become rich(er) and then walk away.
Atlanta, GA
Yesterday, I had an Intro to netlab presentation at the wonderful RIPE SEE meeting in Athens. The presentation is already online; I will update this blog post once the recordings are published.
Atlanta, GA
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