Cybersecurity Vendor Error Message: Taking Heat in UC Campus Big Data Surveillance Dispute?

Screenshot from Fidelis XPS web page 

The handling of a cybersecurity appliance manufactured by Fidelis is at the center of a dispute between University of California cybersec experts and UC administrators working to contain recent breaches. 

Whether by design or by accident, the vendor's web page describing the particular model involved is throwing this inelegant error.

SNIP According to a Univ of California faculty expert, . . .'These appliances, depending on how they are configured, can be privacy doomsday machines.'"

Full packet inspection = #BigData threatening #privacy | @academeblog @FidelisCyber #governance #standards http://bit.ly/1pj87IB @bigdatastandards #computersecurity #cybersecurity

Skype Network Issue - Except for Business Users

Skype is currently unusable in our East Coast USA location over the Verizon FIOS network. The symptom is a failure to connect, even if already logged in.

The Windows client does not suggest the Heartbeat site for status, but here it is anyway. Nor does it send a notification of the outage to users by email or text.

Skype Heartbeat reports:

Skype Heartbeat Announcement

The symptom in the Skype Windows client presents itself as:

Skype Windows Connect Fail

Lastly, here's the information provided via Twitter:

"Sitting Tight" at LinkedIn

In the course of some routine site browsing at LinkedIn.com yesterday, the error shown above was thrown. It's polite, aesthetically acceptable (if not pleasing) -- even hopeful, but the message implies that one should take no action. Just "sit tight." 

I struggled to think of an error condition that had visibly recovered itself in a timely way with no interaction required from me. It's possible that some exist, though none came to mind, and my skepticism was rewarded by having this screen remain static for 90 minutes. An auto-refresh might have effected a change, but starting a new session seemed like a better plan. I did reproduce the situation on the same computer with a different browser (and obviously different session), and it too remained static after encountering the error.

Self-correcting errors -- even user-advised self-correcting errors -- are not unheard of, and this may have been one of them, but any correcting that took place was not visible to this visitor.