Why DTNS Doesn’t Cover the DOGE - DTNSB 4950  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: Why DTNS Doesn’t Cover the DOGE - DTNSB 4950 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6e1a5c22-1421-4263-aae2-b93b9e6bd174 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Tech-Focused Coverage** - Tom Merritt prioritizes tech-focused news. - He avoids political stories unless they have significant tech implications. Transcript: Tom Merritt Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. So, every once in a while, I find it necessary to cover why I'm not covering a story that a lot of people want me to cover. And today is one of those days. Longtime and very trusted member of our community, TechnoMensch, posted an open letter to the DTNS subreddit with a plea for me to cover more of the stories coming out of the U.S. Presidential administration. It's well intentioned. It's an honest request. He only threw a little bit of shade at me. So I'm going to address it by talking about what I think is asked for and explain why I haven't covered it. On Monday, we did mention a story in Wired about some of the people working for the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency. That department runs out of the U.S. Digital Service, which is a non-congressionally appointed advisory group that was first set up by President Obama in 2014. So that's something to understand is this kind of thing, this kind of department itself is not new. They date back into the 60s and 70s. So the existence of an advisory non-congressionally appointed group isn't the controversy here. Tuesday, Jason asked if we should cover this more, and we decided we shouldn't. Here's what that story, that Wired story is, and some of the other stories that TechDement published to our subreddit. And I'm going to give an estimation of what I think the tech content is, and in the end, why I haven't been covering these for you. So the Wired story focuses on a 25-year engineer named Marco Elez. Three sources told Wired that Elez, who previously worked for SpaceX and X, allegedly had access to Treasury Department systems, the U.S. Department of Treasury. Now, that would include systems that make payments for the U.S. Government, which is, of course, what the Treasury does. Two of the sources say that he has permission to write code on the payment automation manager and the secure payment system at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, or the BFS. Wired also looked at his GitHub history and found that he's got experience with distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. Also, other sources told Wired that he has admin privileges and visited a Kansas City office which houses BFS systems. That story also notes that some of the other people working for the Department of Government Efficiency are young and describes the kinds of harms that can come from someone who abuses Admin access to systems. They haven't been shown to abuse it. Wired is saying when you have admin access, you could do these kinds of things if you wanted to. On the same topic as the Wired story, Politico reports that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent authorized access to the payment system to be given to Tom Krause. Now, Tom Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Group. He is also working for Treasury. So he is an actual government congressionally appointed agency employee. And he is the official government liaison with the Department of Government Efficiency. A source told Politico that there are safeguards in place that give anyone from outside Treasury read-only access. That would prevent them from making changes to the payments system. So different sources are saying different things about the level of access here. As previously reported on DTNS, Senator Ron Wyden has posted about this on Blue Sky, and acting Treasury Secretary David Leverick resigned. Now, originally, I just reported that he resigned over these incidents, which is true, but I did not note that he was placed on administrative leave before he resigned. So that probably played into his resignation as well. I think Politico has some of the best reporting on this issue that I've read. This is about fighting fraud in the payment systems, allegedly. That's what the department is saying they want the access for, is they want to root out fraud. Politico has a very good article talking about what kind of fraud there is, what kind of fraud prevention there has been in the past. This is a story about government personnel. It's maybe about financial fraud, but in my opinion, it's not technology. There's a lot of reporting about what could happen if tech access is abused, but not what has happened. And the bulk of the story is about whether people should have certain jobs or should have certain access. These are important issues. I'm not trying to minimize that. They are important issues not only for the citizens of the U.S., but have implications beyond its borders. In my opinion, these aren't tech stories right now. Wired also has an in-depth article about the appointees to the Office of Personnel Management. This story is largely about their personalities, about what their loyalties are, and for the most part is also not about technology. For example, plans have now been detailed in a memo to convert roles such as chief information officers from career appointments to general, meaning they would be considered political Appointments, and they could be more easily replaced when a new party took over the executive branch. They could also be replaced more easily by the existing administration. That is also an important story, but it's an important political, non-technological story. It's about personnel. It's about politics. It's about running of the government. There's also some reporting about allegations that an email server was installed without going through proper security vetting and therefore potentially could compromise the Data of federal employees. Now, that is a technology story if you can find good information about what happened. But the story is very vague in its details and is also right now more about possibilities rather than anything that has happened yet. There's also other stories here. There's reporting on an email asking employees to alert the email address deiatruth at opm.gov about employees working on diversity and inclusion initiatives. Another story talks about removing a feature in Office 365 that automatically included pronoun preferences. Again, these are both important stories, but other than involving an email address and an Office feature, they're not particularly technological. Other links posted to our subreddit had no tech side, at least from my opinion. One was about a website exposing information about government workers. Again, an important story, but long ago, being a website didn't count for me as tech coverage. You can reasonably disagree with me about all of these choices and should express that if you do, but in the end, I have to make my own decisions. I've gained the trust of a lot of you not to inflame things unnecessarily and be a place you can hear things away from exaggeration. I have to make these kinds of calls to maintain that. And in times like these, it's going to aggravate plenty of people. That's not new to me. I had the exact same situation when people were pressuring me to cover Secretary Clinton's email server, which, aside from being an email server, had very little tech content. There wasn't that much that was technologically interesting about it. Now, I know a lot of you have expressed appreciation that we don't stray into politics unless ([Time 0:02:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c40324d9-9da0-40f5-9b95-06b89f0544e4)) - **Mini PC Experience** - Roger Chang bought a Beelink SER5 mini PC for its specs and size but returned it. - Video artifacting during shows and fan noise during intensive tasks led to the return. Transcript: Jenn Cutter In December, our producer Roger Chang wrote a Patreon column about why he was excited to get the new B-Link SER5 mini PC. But then he followed up last week with a column about why he returned it. So, are mini PCs a bad idea? Not necessarily. Roger told us why. Tom Merritt So, Roger, thanks for talking about this again. I know people should probably go to the Patreon column if they really want to get all the details. But I figure a lot of people may not quite understand what we're talking about. So why did you get the mini PC, the B-Link SER5? What was attractive about it in the first place? Roger Chang So there were two things. I was originally in the market for a new PC laptop or a newer PC laptop, and I was trolling all the Black Friday sale sites and amazon actually had one uh but i was scrolling through and i Also saw that they had this mini pc and it's uh a very small pc it's about the size of two uh 12 ounce cans of sodas together this tiny um and what attracted to attracted it to me one was the Price It was $300. Not bad. Two, the specifications, it was an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 32 gigs of RAM with either a 1 or 512 gig NVMe. Also, it was just a very small form factor that seemed very, very easy to integrate into my existing setup without having to move a lot of existing equipment out of the way to accommodate It. Tom Merritt Because the idea with the mini PC is you have to provide the peripherals, the keyboard, monitor, and all that, right? Roger Chang Exactly. But you pay less. You get pretty good specs, it sounds like. You get pretty good specs. I don't need a new monitor. I got four monitors or three monitors. I have five keyboards, and I have an untold number of mice. So that wasn't what I needed. What I needed was the computing portion of it. And it seemed like it fit the bill. I needed something to have as a backup to the Dell workstation I typically use for all the DTNS stuff. One, because I always like having a backup. Not with this machine, but the machine I replaced with my current Dell workstation had a couple of instances where either the power supply or one of the drives conked out during the middle Of the week. And it was very stress-inducing trying to get it back up and running in order to accomplish all the work. So I just wanted some sort of safety net. Tom Merritt Yeah. And you got a decent price. You got good specs. You were very enthusiastic in your column in December about it. And it sounds like you're not totally saying it's bad. Why did you end up returning it? Roger Chang I ended up returning it because for two specific reasons. One, Joe and I, Joe, the individual behind the scenes who sets up our streaming and produces all that aspect of it, we couldn't figure out what was causing my video artifacting in the Show while using it. And I went through a number of issues. I decrypted my drives. I turned off BitLocker. I did a number of things that we could not fix that visual artifacting on the tools we use. So, I mean, that was a big strike because I can't really do the show if I'm looking kind of weird. Yeah. So it's a specific use case for you. Tom Merritt Was there anything else? If somebody's like, well, I don't do shows, sounds great to me. Yeah. Roger Chang Two was the noise. So once it a laptop fan to cool it. And if you're doing most tasks, it's fine. It's actually very quiet. But because I do live streaming while also recording the video through StreamYard OBS, it's taxing the processor. And it's not that the processor can't take it. It's just generating a lot of heat. So the fan really cranks up and you hear it. And more people are going to run into that. Tom Merritt Even if they don't do streaming, they might do something else that's CPU intensive. Roger Chang So that's something to note. If you do, for example, I was using Premiere Pro with it. And for most cases, it worked fine. But once you started doing 4K video or you were exporting, it was definitely noticeable. The fan was really noticeable. And I don't know if it's just my ears, but it just hit that frequency that I found very annoying. I thought I could live with it for a week, but at the end of the week, I felt like, yeah, it was sort of annoying. It's like having a car alarm that you think you can sort of ignore, but it's like car alarm again. And it was sort of that. And those were really the only two issues. Everything else I found actually I really liked about it. Again, it was small. It actually comes with a VESA bracket. So if you wanted to and you had a VESA-compatible monitor, you can actually bolt it to the back of the monitor, making it sort of like a... Tom Merritt Oh, VESA, the standard for attaching things to monitors and displays and stuff. Correct. Like TVs, a lot of TVs have that too. Roger Chang Yeah, a lot of TVs so you can mount it on the wall. Well, it uses that to mount itself to the back of your monitor. So you can effectively have like an all-in unit keeping a very clean space. Very powerful for what it is. It's essentially the guts of a very powerful laptop without the laptop screen. And if you're fine with that, and most people generally are, they're very affordable workstations. If you need to outfit, say, four or five people with a low cost but a very functional Windows. And I will add this. It comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed with a legitimate key. Yeah, okay, good. And you need all that, and you just need to set people up. It's like $300, $350. It's perfect. You do office work. You do any kind of light photo editing, any light video editing. It's perfect for that. Tom Merritt So that's the Beelink S-E which didn't work for you, but it sounds because of your specific situation, if you had a different situation, you might've been satisfied with it. What would you say to people interested in mini PCs in general? What if they're not able to find this or they don't want to spend the money on B-Link because they don't know the company, but they're interested in mini PCs. What else would you tell people? Roger Chang There are a number of manufacturers that make them. I will say that Asus, Zotac, and a few other well-known brands make what they call mini PCs. They're basically PCs that are smaller than a small form factor PC. But they are pretty expensive because they're outfitted with discrete GPUs that allow you to do moderate to high-end gaming on a very small platform. But you're going to be paying at least a grand or more. Still less than you would pay for a complete system in some cases, but not the $300 screen. If you want to look at the $300, $400 range, B-Leak isn't actually bad. From everything I have read in my personal experience, I didn't have any issues with malware. I didn't have any issues with the machine just breaking and conking out. I know there ([Time 0:25:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1758606d-6db0-40f7-93cd-f7006a56696b))