Posts by parrot

Google nukes 3,000 YouTube videos that sowed malware disguised as cracked software

Dubious disguised as dubious.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Illegal document

I did a similar naughty prank when I worked in a school. On April fools day I waited until a particularly anxious colleague was teaching in one of the computer suites and sent a few pages to the printer which simply said, “illegal document blocked”.

My colleague assumed that a student had tried to print something unwholesome and went off to tell the head of ICT, whose instinct said this was something to do with me. They made a point of mentioning to someone else while I was in earshot that the deputy head had got wind of the prank and was looking for the person responsible.

I was pretty sure they were bluffing and didn’t rise to it, but after a couple of hours my resolve weakened and I had to ask if they were serious. After stewing on it that long the joke was definitely on me.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Words fail me

Today I received a document in the format filename.docx.xlsx

It opened in Excel.

I’m worried about my colleagues.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Re: So what you're saying is...

I’ve heard of dictation software but this is something new…

Browser wars are back, predicts Palo Alto, thanks to AI

Re: to perform tasks like booking a restaurant or reserving accommodation

Would sir like the spam or the fish paste? With the house sparkling vinegar? It’s very exclusive.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: Focus options

Focus on Windows is particularly annoying with multiple screens. You launch an application from one screen and it pops up somewhere else. Also I think it would be helpful if the taskbar on each screen showed just the applications that are open on that screen instead of showing all of them.

Copilot rabbit hole not suitable for work

The other day a Copilot pop up appeared on my work computer. Titled: “Ready for a career move?

Beneath it said, “I’ll help you find roles that fit your location and career goals.” There were two buttons, “Dismiss” and “Continue”.

Maybe it was Morpheus trying to get my attention, but I chose the blue pill, and immediately uninstalled the Copilot app which I definitely didn’t put there.

I’ve always thought it’s inappropriate for your work computer to distract you with quizzes and news articles, but inviting you to change jobs is a whole other level!

Microsoft gives in to Chromebook bullies and drops Windows 11 SE

Bad taste

First Nokia now this.

Good job there’s Linux to keep the hardware going for a while.

Way to put the “win” in Windows, Microsoft(!).

Etc etc.

Massive browser hijacking campaign infects 2.3M Chrome, Edge users

“Malware to the masses”

Chortle. A cynic might speculate this is a broader remit than you think.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Gnome is my favourite… I think

Some of the extreme reticence to switch from Windows 10 to 11 surprises me. Forced obsolescence I accept is awful. But aside for that, from an admin point of view there’s not much to learn, and if you don’t like the start button in the middle just move it to the corner. They’re both Windows. They’re both dull. But in terms of the difference between the two it’s quite minor really. I’ve been using both for years now. Feels like old news!

I’ve switched gui in Linux so many times lately I keep forgetting which one is which. I loved KDE until I didn’t, Cinnamon was ok, XFCE was great but a bit glitchy rendering video on my system. I didn’t like Gnome but once it was installed I forgot to keep trying others. And after a reinstall to KDE the week before last I miss it. So maybe Gnome is my favourite? Didn’t see that one coming, but then again I thought Metro was quite good as well…

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Bananas

Bananas are more of a stealth fruit in my opinion, you can pull small chunks off with your fingers which can be scoffed quietly and quickly without making much noise.

Apples are the best balance of practical and conspicuous, crunch, crunch. You could show up to a meeting and start chopping up a pineapple or a watermelon but it’s a lot of effort in comparison to just pulling out an apple and biting it. I’m tempted by the pineapple though.

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Re: nullllptr has been core dumped

I’m not sure anybody ever *wants* to purchase Citrix products.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Mildly off topic

About ten years ago my Dad had laser eye surgery, he asked me to drive to the appointment as he wouldn’t be able to drive home afterwards.

When he came out with a clear plastic eye patch taped to his face I laughed and said, “is it ok if I tell some pirate jokes?”

He sighed and said, “go on then.”

At which point my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of any!

Perhaps some kindhearted commenters would like to share a joke they would have told under the same circumstances? Replies please!

Citrix slated to axe its Technology Professional program

Re: "the needs and priorities of our key customers"

Yeah, I winced when I read that. I guess some key someone will feel special though.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: Interleave at 9pm for the other office.

Lucky it wasn’t a platter, after wiping the source disk.

Friend of mine did the same thing, face went white like they’d seen a Ghost. Would have been SMART to check the disk first. Luckily we were able to recover the most important Partition. Magic! Luckily it wasn’t my other colleague who did it, Zero Phil.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: Ah, GIMP

Weird, for many years I used GIMP and Photoshop and I always said Photoshop was alarmingly unintuitive compared to GIMP. Which was annoying because Photoshop could do more overall (working with RAW files for example) but I took that to be the natural consequence of more powerful software.

Haven’t used either very much lately, Lightroom has replaced them for what I mostly do.

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Re: Service module destruction

It would still be vulnerable to inspection by rogue temporal agents from the distant future.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

Borland

Worst theme park I've ever been to.

Green Berets storm building after compromising its Wi-Fi

We’ve known about you for so long

Been packet sniffing and not too shy to say it.

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Re: Gimme Linux/Compute

What a guy.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: cue the wailing

Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.

Discovered last week that the only way to push out a setting for which we previously had a group policy is to use something called “Intune Remediations”.

Sounds a lot grander than it is. It just lets you deploy a PowerShell startup script. Using a web based gui. It’s the worst of both worlds.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

MSPAIN.EXE

Lol yes I know it’s childish… remember though, pain is just French for bread.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

This workplace has been incident free for X days

Guessing the trophy will sit next to such a sign?

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: WordStar

Luxury! I used to have to save my communication to a floppy disk, give it to my friend at school the next day, then wait at least 24 hours to get it back again.

Re: WordStar

Responsiveness should be valued more.

I find unresponsive systems stressful to use. I’ve used plenty of systems where the latency is so bad I find myself watching the words write to the screen several seconds after typing them. The cloud based CRM and ticketing system we currently have can sometimes take minutes to load pages or submit information. I’m convinced this has an adverse effect on productivity and mental health. You’re trying to get through your workload as quickly as you can but the system is a bottleneck. It just keeps making you wait.

My sense is that decision makers see a loss of responsiveness as acceptable if it allows them to access the benefits of using the cloud (mainly just shifting liability/responsibility off themselves). But if you asked the user, responsiveness would be their number one priority. In my opinion systems should be responsive enough for the user never to think about it.

The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world

Re: Rage against the subjective machine

Well, exactly. Not sure the timing makes much difference, perhaps I should have said “alleged”?

Rage against the subjective machine

A few weeks ago I was having a lovely chat with someone about how they were fundraising to help homeless people. Suddenly it switched and they went off on a rant about immigration, shoot them before they get off the boats they were saying, no apparent awareness whether I might not agree or share their view. Perhaps they just assumed I would.

Last week a similar thing happened with another person I don't see very often, seemed like they were permanently plugged in to twitter. Their phone would ping and they'd be making comments condemning far right violence, then suddenly celebrating violence against Israel. Then we had an airing of views about supposed trans boxers in the Olympics, and "the trans agenda". They'd be upset if they knew what pronouns I was using for them here... ;) Again, no apparent thought to what I might think or feel about any of it. It was just awkward.

I believe it's healthy when we talk about our beliefs and values with people who have different beliefs and values, and I get into that kind of conversation occasionally with people I know. It doesn't have to be heated and it challenges you to examine ideas which might not be immediately intuitive to you. I think there's a societal norm now that we avoid those discussions to avoid awkwardness, which I understand. It's not always appropriate. But a hallmark of someone caught in an echo chamber has to be obliviousness to the views of others.

That said, I don't think having conviction is a bad thing, because some things are right and some things are not. But that is subjective, and I find myself considering the things which make me angry, even the music I listen to, and wondering where my own blind spots are.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 called out for 'worker surveillance'

Re: Not Even a Fig-Leaf

I would have used my robot hand for good.

Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

SaaS

Software and assorted stoppages

Happy Sysadmin Day, the Bitlocker keys are in a bowl on top of the fridge

Re: Giving them a day off and doing the malware update myself

Funny, you know, I did have today off. The whole week in fact. Have been wondering what's in store for me on Monday.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Ah, the good old DNS redirect

That’s hilarious. I laughed out loud!!

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

Re: unsullied by ads

I very much share your sentiments. Up until the pickaxe at least. The inclusion of advertising another distracting crap in the start menu has always struck me as completely inappropriate for a business product. I have to switch a lot of these things off because they affect my focus when I’m working. The same goes for the default home page in most web browsers, disappointingly I have to include Firefox in this.

When I am supporting other people I notice they are affected in different ways by this type of thing. Many, as you say, just accept it as an everyday annoyance and work around it. There are some whose work can be significantly impeded when presented with something they don’t know how to respond to. In my experience, with the most excruciating irony, it’s all the tips and tricks and welcome messages that cause the most hassle. They don’t help people to use the product. They just get in the way.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: There's something familiar about all of this...

“Beyond this lies naught but trying to work out why all the numbers are wrong, only to realize that Excel thought those IDs were integers and dropped all the leading zeroes.”

This should come with a trigger warning.

Peloton faces lawsuit over claims it pedaled past privacy

Re: So..

No they were freewheeling with it.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Finally!

A way to fix all those broken biscuits.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Very much the opposite problem

I had the low tech version of this as a child; sibling desperate to pee breaks the door handle and I'm stuck in there until my Dad got home. No air freshener to worry about. Managed to receive a delivery of a book, and a plate with my dinner on, through the tiny window. Could have been worse.

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Is washing one's hair completely out of the question?

EU accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations for bundling Teams with O365

Vikings

Waitress: You can't have Word Excel Teams and Outlook without the Teams.

Wife: I DON'T LIKE TEAMS!

Husband: Now dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your Teams. I love it. I'm having Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Slack Teams Teams Teams and Teams!

Waitress: Slack is off.

Husband: Well could I have her Teams instead of Slack then?

Waitress: You mean Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams and Teams...?

Vikings: LOVELY TEAMS! WONDERFUL TEAMS! TEAMS TEAMS TEAMS TEAMS! etc...

Levi's and more affected in pants-dropping week of data breaches

Customers with names exposed...

... wish they'd used a pseu-denim.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: It'll be far worse

Just wondering if "all hail the fast-moving rocky orb" nutters are a subset of group F or deserve a category in their own right?

What's up with Mozilla buying ad firm Anonym? It's all about 'privacy-centric advertising'

Re: No search engine

Unfortunately that didn't work but I found instructions to set keyword.enabled to false which worked for me, after I'd switched off search suggestions. Now I have separate address and search bars which I much prefer.

Re: No search engine

Thanks for that. I’ll give it a try :)

No search engine

Quick question, sort of relevant but a bit tenuous, I’ve often thought it’s a bit annoying that there’s no obvious easy way of setting up the address bar in Firefox so it doesn’t search. Why can’t we have it like in the old days, where a malformed url just goes nowhere? I know there’s a risk of malware from typo squatters but for most stuff I use bookmarks anyway and if I do press enter too quick when typing a url I’d rather see an error message than trigger a search query.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

Re: "We value input"

Reminds me of these lines from The Overload by Yard Act:

“Show some respect and listen to my advice, cause if you don’t challenge me on anything you'll find I’m actually very nice.”

Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out

"Extreme approaches to data and AI"

"As Europe stands at the threshold of society’s next major technological evolution, some activists are advocating extreme approaches to data and AI. Let’s be clear: those positions don’t reflect European law, and they amount to an argument that Europeans shouldn’t have access to — or be properly served by — AI that the rest of the world has. We deeply disagree with that outcome."

This actually makes me feel a bit sick. Even if Meta believes its "AI" is going to have a positive effect on the world, this will at best be an "end justifies the means" sort of endeavour, which is always dubious, because the only reason anyone is letting them use this data is they can't be bothered or don't know how to stop it. Does that really constitute consent? If it was the other way around and, presented with clear accurate information, people had to opt in, would anyone actually do it? When it comes to an "extreme approach" Meta take the biscuit.

Source (linked from the Reg article): https://about.fb.com/news/2024/06/building-ai-technology-for-europeans-in-a-transparent-and-responsible-way/

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: Comming soon....

That’s numberwang!

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

rm -rf (not big not clever)

Many years ago on 1 April, whilst working in a school, I logged a support ticket with RM saying their command had broken my Linux server. It was a stupid obvious joke and wasn’t really very funny, but I must have worded it more convincingly than I realised because I got a call from an account manager who sounded very worried.

Somehow the words “April Fool” did little to diffuse the situation. My boss seemed unconcerned and just sat opposite laughing.

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

More puzzles

Manuscript

Aylesbury

Miscreants claim they've snatched 560M people's info from Ticketmaster

Re: "the last four digits of the cards plus names and expiration dates"

I stopped saving card details in websites for convenience a couple of years ago, even though some sites make it tedious and annoying (talking to you, ParentPay). I no longer trust any online retailer to be secure enough not to leak something at some point. Perhaps it was naive I ever did.

PayPal is planning an ad network built off your purchase history

Re: Explotation works both sides

“need”?