They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues.
Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.
> My wife and I have a profitable business here in SF that would be perfect as a startup
Keep doing what you're doing.
Being VC funded shouldn't be the holy grail - the holy grail is having a business you enjoy doing, that's making you the life you want.
For some the life you want is pitching, raising, getting the kudos of the big numbers, onto the next raise etc.
For some the life you want is the complete opposite and bootstrapping it.
For some it's just all about the technical aspect, coding the next crazy thing.
There's no wrong or right answer in how you get to the 'happy place'.
You know in your heart of hearts what drives you, and what you'll be happy doing.
Me :
I'd been with the money men for a period of years and it's super stressful, board reporting, projections, market analysis etc.
Now I've got my little B2B SaaS startup that's blended a life long passion with my software chops, and our clients love us, we get to work with the absolutely best people in our industry, we're making a difference in their lives, and they in turn pay us money.
It's hard, rewarding, graft. At the end of the week when the money lands in stripe (for me..) there's nothing artificial, there's no projections, there's no-one to pay back, it's a 100% value exchange of 'heres my(our) hardwork, here's a product and you're giving me money for it'.
Sure - could I potentially have gone the VC route (maybe!). Would it be different, hell yes. Would I (probably) earn more ultimately 5 years down the line (sure?). That 5 years would be very, very different...
The VPN (much like Meta's) is doing some root cert trickery to filter content that is deemed inappropriate or potentially inappropriate. This appeared to be controlled by a Company A in another country that undoubtedly contracted to Y religion to be their central point of content filtering globally.
So, member of the church? you get this VPN on your phone, (not sure whether phone was supplied by the church, but certainly this VPN was on it)
VPN is effectively content filtering and blocking content.
I had our app whitelisted by that central company (literally raised a ticket with them, next day magically fixed).
It's not corporate level it was/is religious group level (of which this particular org I'm guessing largely employed staff from that religion). They are well known within our country to be quite insular.
It certainly seemed for all intents and purposes if you were a member of _____ group (wider than the company) you had the vpn on your device, and it was filtering content. I've found other reports in other countries of that happening with the same group.
So it's not corporate content filtering, it's personal content filtering and our app got caught up in it (and approved).
It certainly made my skin crawl for anyone in that religion. That means the central filtering service could be reading messages. Not sure if they're that sophisticated but certainly they didn't want people to see random images/videos.
So this one time, I had a bug report at a client site. The business was largely a member of _______ religion. Our images wouldn't load in the app, but did on the website. How odd I thought, that doesn't make sense! Luckily I was able to be physically present, so I hopped down with laptop in tow, ssh'd into the server and started tailing logs....
Sure enough all the API requests for data were coming through, but whenever a request for image happened - nothing would hit the servers.
What the heck I thought to myself?
I said to the client 'that can't be, that's almost impossible....the only way that's possible is if the SSL traffic is decrypted, inspected, and images blocked from being requested, which, is a MITM attack".
He redirected me to his IT provider. I phoned them up, and explained the situation.
"Ahh so they're _____"
Me: "So what does that have to do with the price of fish?"
Them : "Content filtering..., you need to talk to ____"
Sure as the day is long, the content filter was a VPN all members of ____ had to have on their mobile devices (I don't know how widespread this is, whether it was just this business, or the entire ____ )
I applied to have our system approved, it was, and just like magic the next day photos started coming through.
I'm guessing basically it detected any .jpg/.mp4 etc URL's in https requests and flagged it up and blocked them from being requested. You can be sure on those devices the VPN would have been somehow locked in with device management, and there's no way on gods green earth they were getting at Facebook/insta etc.
So, it's not just meta. That really hammered home how seamless it can be to end users that they really can't trust what's actually happening on their devices.
2017 through to around 2020/21 was insane worldwide .. All the big co's soaked up the talent, then that sucked the air out of the market worldwide. We were getting people outside of the US headhunted from the US, which had constant ripple effects. Now it seems the rebalancing is definitely taking hold and times are a lot tougher for devs world wide.
Trying to hire in 2020-21 was impossible. You would get people between interviews get massive offers (days/week apart). 50/50 whether even after accepting the offer they'd actually turn up... If you saw someone that had a decent shot at coding you needed to hire right then and there. Reddit/HN was absolutely filled with devs making hay while the sun was shining job hopping and say things like 'if you're not getting a 30% payrise...'
Now the credit crunch has just switched the tap off. I'm about to contract out a small bit of work via one of the freelancer sites and I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like getting freelancers now....