Posts by iam_sysop

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

Re: Another reason......

The Venn diagram for snake oil salesmen and AI techbros is the same --

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Just remember - even the scraps of garbage the billionaires don't even want is STILL off limits to you.

#EatTheRich

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

Lazy Technology (pronounced AI) will be the end of us all --

Ionos customers fume at mid-contract Plesk hike

Your memory of how it behaves/functions and how deeply embedded into a server it is are absolutely accurate - for Plesk "then" and Plesk "now".

One of our clients is a developer/marketing company and they lease several managed servers from us. Plesk gives us the ability to let him manage his own hosting resources (within reason) without having to worry about him breaking stuff - so it definitely has it's benefits - but it's a monster to deal with sometimes...

-- and yes, it has lots of attention directed at managing entire fleets of Plesk servers - regardless of the underlying OS.

-- and yes, whatever shortcomings it has, if you have to implement your own solution, you have to always worry about when (not if) Plesk will undo/break it.

As much as I love to hate it, it's a very functional product as long as you're willing to live within the walled garden and pay lots of money.

How monopolies work --

Plesk spent decades buying up every bit of competition there was - and when they basically wiped everyone else out - then the license pricing started going up.

Plesk used to be 10.99 per server. Now it's 52.99 USD... (FOR THE SAME LICENSE).

Yes, it is VERY capable software - IF you host websites according to how PLESK says you should. But it leaves no room for variation - and they tend to concentrate on the wrong areas of improvement.

If there was anything else, we'd be using it...

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

The LAST Windows

Directly from Microsoft, Windows 10 was supposed to be "The Last Windows" you have to install, as it was supposed to be "Windows as a Service" after that.

Our org has moved to Linux for almost everything - with a pair of Win10 VMs for Visual Studio - that's it.

We are not feeding MICROS~1\BORG_AI any further.

Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

-- in the end...

In every movie, every scenario, every example - the AI eventually kills everyone.

That said -- make sure to hit the "browser.ml" config prefix - there's close to 50 settings -- including "browser.ml.enable" which one would think is the "grandaddy" of turning this garbage off...

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

name one - name 'em all

Meta is one of the most abusive crawlers there is - and their lack of any kind of controls from stopping harvesting "through" their platform by 3rd party developers doesn't help.

Microsoft admits it's not you, Classic Outlook can be a real CPU, power hog sometimes

when it's not DNS, it's AI...

Outlook has always been a random disaster. That's a known fact.

That said - for the last year (probably longer), every time I open Outlook, I get a lovely process alongside it called ai.exe -- this little bastard lives in your Office installation folders in both 32 and 64bit locations - and ever since it started appearing - Outlook runs like a dog - eating CPU - going from it's random crashes to more predictable ones (as if that's some form of benchmark, but this is Outlook we're talking about).

I nuke the contents of both AI folders that house this demon - but of course, it gets re-added every single time there's a Windows Update (they don't even have to say "Office Update" anymore). Now there's a scheduled task for deletion - we'll see how long it survives before for MS to start looking for that and disabling it behind my back as well...

PS: Office (and Outlook) doesn't care when it's missing - it returns back to it's "normally unpredictable self" - which is as reliable as it'll ever get - but it's sure not the CPU sucking monster when big brother is missing.

This is a fully licensed on-premise Office 2021 install.

The moral of the story is that everything else has already moved to Linux in one way or another... This is the last one...

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

The REAL problem

Every email message processed by "New" Outlook is proxied through MS servers (at least for IMAP and SMTP) - which means that micros~1 AI farms get copies of everything - and if you believe them when they tell you that's not the case, I have a some great oceanfront property in Kansas for sale.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Missing an important detail --

New Outlook proxies every single mail request through Microsoft servers.

The "old apps" did not do this.

This is why MS is forcing the change -- it's all about the data. It's all about the harvesting.

-- and of course they say "includes AI" - so that rightly tells you what's REALLY happening...

Clues to Windows Intelligence found in Windows 11 builds

The only way

they can ever call it intelligence is if they give us a switch to turn it all off...

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

In the end, AI kills everyone... Every time.

Soooo let me get this straight --

Going to the chat-bots for your script code to run automated attacks using the browser was just too much.

Now, the browser will just do it for you in real-time and delete the middleman...

Human greed and laziness (the whole heart of AI) will be the end of us all.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Making the decision for me --

Microsoft's refusal to make AI components "optional" and defaulted as "not automatically installed without permission" has made the decision for me and my organization.

Linux has the alternative - leaving the OWNER of the hardware in control.

At this point, Windows 11 is nothing more than a data grab mixed in with a nod to hardware vendors to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, millions of pounds of e-waste will be generated by hardware that is perfectly usable - even running Windows 11 (as noted in the article).

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

AI MUST BE OPTIONAL

Out-moding billions of dollars of hardware for a landfill when nothing is wrong with it, combined with the inability to remove AI features and data-harvesting from local PCs is why Windows 10 will be the last iteration on our networks.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Nothing like breaking things that always worked.

As is tradition, MS continually needs to break and ruin things that worked for decades, replaced with something incomplete, non-functional, and in may ways deliberately hides settings and access to controls that should be available.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

The part that is bullsh*t is that for operations that serve public facing sites, not all clients have IPv6 connectivity -- so we're FORCED to pay for the IPv4 space if clients we have can't support IPv6 (including anonymous users/visitors) or lose their traffic.

It's like when we had to support IE 6-8 for YEARS because of client requirements or lose their traffic.