Posts by Cheshire Cat 254 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
I would agree to hang Colin out to dry -- except that, in that situation, by far the most important things are to secure the data and restore it. Had Dean gone to the law, COlin would have wiped/destroyed the dink to cover his tracks. At least this way, the data restore is done, it is confirmed that the data have not leaked, and Colin hopefully learns a Very Valuable Lesson.
It always surprises me that the USA, which claims to hate absolute monarchs, has a system in which the President can apparently rule by dictate. This could not happen in the UK for example as the PM would have to get approval from parliament -- and the King does not have the power to make unilateral orders like this.
> If I didn't have over twenty-five (maybe thirty?) years' worth of email, calendar & contacts history in my Outlook .PST files, I'd switch to LibreOffice, but Outlook (Classic) owns me.
You can import PST files into Evolution, and from there store them into other mail services or open formats such as maildir. Not sure if they also import contacts and calendar items though.
Not to mention the difficulties of doing automated rotation for public certs, when your service is not HTTP-based, and runs over a cluster of hosts (do they have one cert each? One for the cluster? How to do challenge/response when the cluster is load-balanced and you don't want to give DNS admin rights to the whole network ...)
If done correctly, an Exit Interview is the chance for the ex-employee to give candid reasons why they are leaving, which the management should listen to as it can expose problems that may be hidden by people who are still employed and feel their jobs may be at risk if they speak truthfully.
I too am on some list, somewhere, that puts me at the front of the queue for "random selection". Though I have avoided travelling to the USA for the last 10+ years because of this, and seem to be immune when travelling with my family. The last time I visited the USA, some rude TSA agent insisted I boot up my laptop and log in (to show it is 'real') at which point they whipped it away for an hour, presumably to copy off data and browse through anything confidential they could find, without any explanation or by-your-leave. As if I would put anything incriminating on an unencrypted laptop hard disk.
The problem is that AV pattern updates are very very time-dependent, which is why they have 15min or lower update cycles.
This issue was a pre-existing bug in the code which was tickled by a subsequent pattern update. While the code updates can be staggered, the pattern updates have to be quick, so cannot be delayed by a month, or even a day.
This is why extensive pre-release automated testing should have been performed, and clearly was not (at least, not sufficiently)
"In truth, though, I don't think they need worry too much. There will always be demand for live music, together with the associated merchandising opportunities - nobody is going to buy t-shirts featuring an AI, or go dance in a data centre."
A large number of Hatsune Miku fans would disagree with you
3. The example image: 1200 down, 200 up for only $109.99? As long as it's not one of the major coax cable companies, sign me up! I'll even move for that deal!
Here in New Zealand, thousands of km from the centre of the internet, we get that, plus unlimited usage and free phone service, for the same price in *NZ* dollars, which is about 60 USD. You yanks are being ripped off.
... because most of the Windows in China is pirated anyway.
I'm more interested in whether or not this new architecture will become available outside China, and if it will join x86 et al as a standard linux build. A bit more competition for Intel might get things to improve in general
This is why its doing it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/13%C2%B058'59.7%22S+143%C2%B011'06.6%22E/@-13.9832575,143.1829237,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m47!1m42!4m41!1m26!1m2!1s0x697862555ba22413:0x400eef17f207860!2sCairns+QLD,+Australia!2m2!1d145.7709529!2d-16.9203476!3m4!1m2!1d143.2541971!2d-14.1483235!3s0x6999af9ce9644b71:0x4a50f2a26b96eacf!3m4!1m2!1d143.2528997!2d-14.1407584!3s0x6999afa267b1bbcd:0xb4c3d13967f1c431!3m4!1m2!1d143.2831829!2d-14.1036521!3s0x6999aea119b44c41:0x94d58f7045aabcdf!3m4!1m2!1d143.1900959!2d-13.9599422!3s0x69984d0be4c3961f:0xefc441f59ebc6a77!1m6!1m2!1s0x69baa201d6daf179:0x400eef17f20d810!2sBamaga+QLD,+Australia!2m2!1d142.3871554!2d-10.892344!1m3!2m2!1d143.1854248!2d-13.9862892!2m1!3b1!3e0!3m3!8m2!3d-13.983262!4d143.185157?hl=en&entry=ttu
Theres an incorrect break in the map data at 13°58'59.7"S 143°11'06.6"E and Mr Google doesnt think its a through road.
This sort of thing happens when the map data has a break in a road - zero length, but the calculations think it isnt joined. So, it sends you via the next-best route as it sees things - and this is then compounded by it not knowing the differences between a standard minor road and an outback dirt track that is 4wd-only. This is why people should always sanity-check their planned routes rather than blindly following...
There was one of these up north of here near Kerikeri, that sends you a great long aroundabout route rather than the simple trip by a ferry. I found the break and reported it to Google years ago, and it seems to be fixed now.
I can understand the director of IT on this one.
Unauthorised servers on an internal (and privileged) network are a security nightmare. They are rarely kept in line with security standards, probably never backed up, or regularly patched, and cause unanticipated load on network infrastructure.
Plus, at some point, they go wrong or are crypotolockered, and then IT are called in to help fix the shitshow caused by the office cowboys.
In a university, which likely does not have much (if any) internal firewalling on the staff network segments, a vulnerable machine can cause chaos if it is compromised, and you can't recover what was not backed up.
As a young, green techie I was sent on-site to some offices of BAT (British American Tobacco) to help sort out some desktop computers.
In those days, their employees were given free cigarettes and, of course, could smoke in the office as much as they liked. You can imagine how unpleasant it was in the building.
After opening up the nonfunctional computer, I found a thick and heavy layer of ash and tar deposited all over, which may have been the reason for overheating and failure. Still cleaning things off and unblocking vents somehow did the trick, though my clothes had to be fumigated after returning home and my hands were stained yellow.
Added a smoking icon because ...
When I went to Warwick uni in the early 90s, one of our Maths profs wrote his own book for the course -- "Derek the differentiable dinosaur". It was available for about 5 quid which covered photocopyiong charges, or we were free to photocopy someone else's copy if we wanted to, since it was all public domain.
This guy was very, very popular.
When I married in Taiwan 20y ago, I had to prove that I had never been married previously. This is much harder than you would imagine, and required several contacts with the British embassy, and taking out an advertisement in the local newspaper to meet certain criteria. After almost 3 months of to-and-fro, the resulting "Certificate of no impediment" document was very impressive, with seals and ribbons and the like.
This is, of course, all Management jargon.
The big difference between Technical jargon and Management jargon, is that with Technical, everyone knows and agrees exactly what it means, but disagrees on how or if it should be implemented; whereas with Management jargon, they all agree it is Necessary and Important but cannot clearly define what it actually means...
Nonono... more than x failed connection attempts, using different passwords, in y minutes from the same IP, and you deny the *login* for 24h, not the connection. But tarpit by 4s. Don't deny the *connection* - then they won't realise they've been blacklisted, and will continue to waste more time in the tarpit, and will think everything in their database is a bad password.
Evolution (add evolution-ews for O365/Exchange access) or Thunderbird (add OWL for O365/Exchange access) seem to work well for me. Thunderbird was a bit ropey a few years back but has improved in the later versions. They are also both much better than Outlook at handling multiple external calendars.
I don't want thing to appear in my calendar just because someone emailed me an invitation; I want to explicitly accept them first.
Google's change here sounds good to me, and is in fact how my current Evolution mail client works as well.
No wonder the spammers are complaining when they no longer have a way to push things into my calendar without my approval.
If the local police *asked* me to help them catch a pedo who was stealing my wifi to try and cover his activities, by adding a snoop to the network for a week and keeping quiet about it, I'd have no problems helping them out. The key word here is "asked".
Though I'd not be such a jerk as to have no auth on my wifi in the first place of course.
"I am trying to convert many of them to python scripts "
Yes, convert a simple, working shell script to something that is understood by fewer people, and now has a dependency on the whole of Python being installed, plus a few extra libraries...
If you don't need to have Python (or Perl, Ruby, Php, GCC, etc) installed on your server it's inherently more secure, less to keep patched, less disk space required, and so on. At least shellscript is a universal that everyone knows, and unless you need something really esoteric or high performance I'd go with the KISS principal
I remember that as far back as 91, at University, a couple of us wrote a simple Eliza-type program that took generic input, and then programmed it up to write scripts for Neighbours (old Aussie soap opera starring Kylie for those of you who are still whippersnappers). Later datasets produced a university-based soap, rap songs, and a new soap imaginatively based on students in a computer lab.
On average, the US population have *worse* teeth than the UK. It's just that the rich have a fashion for cosmetic dentistry, and the rich and beautiful are the only ones they show on their media. The majority of the population cannot afford dentistry at all, and so have worse teeth than the average in the stereotypically-awful UK.
Though, with it now becoming impossible to find an NHS Dentist the UK is doing its best to join the US at the bottom of the pile.
But - if you don't measure it, how will you know how much work you're not doing because you're measuring things?
Any timesheeting system that requires "filling in timesheets" as a loggable category is clearly too cumbersome. Similarly any monitoring system where useful metrics or alerts are buried under noise or false-positives.
> And even so, there is now this thing called electronic loans, so the availability of hardcopy texts is not the constraint.
Because of the publishers desire for $, the electronic loans are still limited to the number of licenses the university purchased in exactly the same way as with hardcopy. So you still can only have a couple of people 'borrowing' the electronic copy at a time, exactly the same as with the physical copies.
We already mandate 2FA for our devs using Github. Yes, they try and push you to use Microsoft Authenticator app but it is certainly possible to use Google, 1Password, or even YubikeyAuth with a Yubikey v5, I've tested all of them. 2FA is easy to do and makes it more secure, and is an open standard. What's not to like?
If you are a small user; need to create and destroy many ephemeral instances frequently; need to be able to quickly scale up or out and then quickly scale back down again; or have a workload that is large but only at specific times; or are able to take advantage of the long-term reservation discounts; then you should be able to do well in a cloud.
Companies with a very large and stable workload, who already have in-house knowledge, would likely find colo far cheaper, even if they have to hire a few more operations staff to manage it. There are also issues for companies based in a country without a cloudy datacentre who care about data sovereignty or low RTT.
The shortage of women in datacentres and programming is like the shortage of men in HR, kindergarten teachers, nursing, general practice, and so on. We all know they can do the job, and there are examples of people proving just that, but the fact is that proportionately fewer want to enter the profession and go through all the required training. You don't see them in those professions because they are less interested than the other gender.
People seem to get far more upset about the lack of females in IT than the lack of male GPs and nurses.
Of course there are some industries that have places where they would rather hire nobody than hire a female (construction and auto mechanics come to mind) but I've never seen that in any IT place I've worked.
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