We have a customer at high levels in the US government who suddenly presented us with a requirement that our product not write a console log, due to new privacy commandments handed down from on high. We explained how they could do that, along with a warning that the console log is generated for a reason and it would be very difficult if not impossible to support their licensed copy of the product if they suppressed the log.
Naturally, less than a week later, they had a problem about which we could provide only educated guesses regarding its cause.
Why would this customer suddenly want the log suppressed? What information does it contain that their SMTP server logs don’t contain? Did they also suppress the SMTP logs? Is this actually legal under government regulations dictating how records are to be kept?*
The problem is that this is a typically-idiotic reaction to the competing and escalating accusations of who hacked, surveilled, or wiretapped whom, and for what reason. Both sides should shut up, climb down, and move on. The American public at large — the so-called “silent majority” — is getting extremely tired of it, from both sides.
Unfortunately, we have one party running the government by Twitter, and the other party refusing to accept that it lost, and going more and more insane by the day on the way to probably having an even smaller minority after 2018. Fun times in America 🙂
______________________
* Probably not, under 44 U.S.C. 3301, but IANAL.