The fact is that you can't assume competence by those you obtain services from. Why should they be competent? 'Nobody ever got fired by buying IBM', so the story goes, so it really doesn't matter to the IBMs of the world if they do a good job or not. They still get customers, still get advertisers, still get users. It's why Microsoft can sell OS' that have security holes by the thousands to government agencies, banks and high-end corporations. They don't need to do a good job, it simply won't impact the bottom line. It never has, it never will, no matter how much money people lose.

Same reason one corp I worked for got a line leasing agreement from MCI, MCI violated the terms and the corporation simply let it slide - because contract terms don't mean a damn thing and both sides knew that going in. It would cost the corporation too much money to find an alternative, too much time to switch over, and too much prestige to admit failure. So MCI didn't have to honour anything and they'd still get their money. Even if the corp did eventually switch, one deal amongst millions is peanuts and no new customer would be deterred just as the corp wasn't by MCI's already uncertain reputation at that time.

The rule of business, though, is not about doing the right thing, it's about not getting the blame. Outsourcing is about blaming others for your mistakes and incompetence. Always has been. That's why nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Has nothing to do with IBM being any good, it has to do with IBM being someone management could blame when things go south, thus protecting management for not taking anything seriously.

No, this is all common knowledge. Ozzy's tech crew knew they should have secured things, that they should never trust an organization with nothing to lose to always do the right thing, but by having Discord do all the dirty work, Ozzy's techs could rest easy in the knowledge that when something went wrong (and that's inevitable), then it's somebody else's problem, not theirs. And that's how this game has always been played.

Which is why so much goes wrong in technology. If nobody takes responsibility, then nobody has to ensure the right thing is ever done and nobody has to fix the problems when the wrong thing is done.

It's also one reason corporate IT managers don't do anything about security. If they did and the company gets hacked, then it's their fault. But if security has been outsourced to someone else, then it's somebody else's problem.

(Another being that IT is always listed as an expense, and competence is a much higher expense in the short term that beancounters are concerned with than incompetence. That it's cheaper in the long term, because the risks are lower, doesn't matter because high expenses now hit profit margins and dent share prices. And as it's a continuous drain, will continue to hit profit margins and share prices. A major scandal that may last a week or two at most, even if it's ten times the size, only dents profit margins and share prices for those couple of weeks.)

It's why the NHS got stiffed for a fortune over Heartbleed, even though the systems that were compromised should never have been on the public Internet to begin with. It's why there are hydroelectric dams with SCADA gear also on the public Internet. It's why almost the entire corporate IT sector is a mess, with a few exceptions. And it is only a few. Doing things right is rare, but doing things wrong is cheap and if the dice keep rolling in your favour until you're promoted, you get a nice bonus for doing a crappy job that costs the bosses less and you don't have to worry about the next guy complaining because the bosses will argue that the last guy (who they now play golf with) did the same job (as far as they're concerned) for less.

Because this is the standard mode of operation pretty much everywhere, if Ozzy wanted to hire someone then these are the sort of people who would be applying. The sort of people with the most experience, because good guys don't last in a toxic envir

I mean, if you can't trust vast amounts of imaginary money to an Ozzy Ozborne tweet, what can you trust it to?!?

What is this world coming to??