Posts by AustinTX 229 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2008
Yes, it would be nice to have a resident program that blocks microsoft's resident infection. Something that auto-updates so I can put it on customer's PCs and leave it. I have "GWX Control Panel" installed on several machines, but it really just watches for KB3035583 and, ironically, it puts an even more prominent [10] icon on the task tray.
Ran the updates the other night. For whatever reason, KB3146449 wasn't installed on my machine.
However, KB3035583 was included in the list of "Important Updates" again FOR THE FIFTH TIME.
I keep unchecking it and hiding it. It keeps coming back like pernicious cancer.
Here's my compiled list of unwanted WX and telemetry "updates" which I keep an eye out for. You can put these in a batch file and run as Administrator:
wusa /uninstall /kb:2952664 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2976978 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3022345 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3035583 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3068708 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075249 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3080149 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3146449 /norestart
I have W7, so there are actually several more which W8it users should worry about. Once you run the batch, reboot, then launch WU, Search for updates, and manually hide each of the KBs which come back. That'll keep them at bay until microcrap sends the secret signal to unhide them again, heh.
This reminds me of when I and a girlfriend dropped off some film at a 1-hour place at the mall. I was distracted arguing with her about the personal nature of the photos (she didn't care) that I didn't notice, until returning, that their developing machine displayed photos on a conveyor along the front window. And to think the staff gave *us* dirty looks!
I guess what surprised me the most, when I worked on one client's PC, was who the photos showed that it was that did what. You see, one of them looked like Johnny Weir, and the other like Colonel Sanders. Johnny Weir does not look good in a leather chest harness, and Colonel Sanders does not look good wrapped in saran wrap.
I also used to work for a local dialup ISP which did a really piss-poor job of setting permissions on user directories. They had a telnet address where, upon connection, all guests were provided the text-only web browser Lynx as a shell. There, customers could access forms to update their password, contact info, etc.
Did you know, Lynx isn't a half-bad file manager too? Not as good as Midnight Commander, but you can browse around, and it even facilitates downloading files locally. So, the keystrokes are "(press G, period, enter)" (Google that WITH the quotes for a treat), and they were not disabled by the ISP.
Years later, after they had supposedly "hardened" their network to try and sell "security services", anyone could still browse the private folders and files of most customers. The ISP had been very popular at one time, and had a ridiculously short domain name, so many of my friends and colleagues had email and web space there. It was amusing to find out who among them were furries, prostitutes and foreskin-restorers.
BTW, if you want to visit Gopherspace, there are still, well, dozens of servers to connect to and thousands of relatively updated links. Google 'em. You'll likely find that your browser no longer supports gopher:// addresses, but if you install Lynx on a Unix/Linux system, it still supports it. Lynx actually makes a handy file manager if Midnight Commander is too heavyweight for ya. See paragraph on bottom right here: io.fondoo.net
Back when I was a college boy, I got my Internets for free by dialing up the local university's free Gopher-only dialin for library book availability. You dialed in just like it was a BBS or CompuServe, only you just got their Gopherspace.
I could maneuver my way into a real free Unix account provided by cyberspace.com by using Gopher search engines (Archie, Jughead and Veronica were the Google, Yahoo and Bing in those days) to find a "gopher to telnet gateway". I typed the destination into the gateway's Gopher page field, and if it was agreeable, my screen turned into a telnet window.
Cyberspace gave free trial accounts to anyone who applied online, so from that point I had a real commandline and tools like Lynx and Pine. Pine got me my email and newsgroups and Lynx got me my web pages sans images and file downloads. If I wanted anything on my local machine, I had to mail it to myself at a local BBS (9JACK9) which connected periodically to the Internet since the nature of my connection prevented X/Y/Zmodem from working.
An FTP server generally displays folders full of files and symbolic links in the order which they actually appear in real folders on the server. Like an HTTP directory listing. The FTP server generally only displays files and folders on one server - it doesn't span servers (though this can be accomplished). Also, FTP is technically a command-line interface though this is masked by using a GUI FTP client. FTP directory contents are fundamentally bound to real accounts existing on the server.
A Gopher page's content is arranged at-will and contains hot-links to pages and documents on various servers. Just think of Gopher as the web without embedded images or self-launching widgets (though there can be entry fields and submit links for search engines and such).
Well, that's if the discriminator is inspecting packets. Inspecting host names is trivial. I've paid attention to this when I've encountered "you can't tor us" messages. Refresh the 'identity' a number of times and you'll find that the one they accept doesn't have 'tor' in it as I said.
I don't think they tested productivity in the right sort of setting. Call centre workers are pushed to the absolute limit no matter what kind of desk they have. You spend a whole working day with your mind separated from your body as you talk back and forth and record details on keyboard without thinking about it. Being really uncomfortable doesn't much impact productivity.
Let's see how productivity is affected when you test the sort of environment where a comfortable Airon chair is an invitation to tip back with feet up and browse the Internet with the mouse. At a standing desk, you'll remain alert and your full range of tools and supplies are always within hand's reach.
One last thing is that the article's title almost sounds negative about standing desks. Spin it a different way and you could have said that the healthier desks did not *impact* productivity, so readers see that it's an advantage.
I'm a long-term Austin citizen with Google Fiber partly installed (the fiber's not live yet, so they haven't brought the router out). While I see clues here and there that the subcontractors doing various legwork and digging are a bit detached from the smiley-face Google Fiber cheerleaders, they've been very helpful and personable for us.
My experience with Texans, Austinites, and particularly with my south side neighbors compels me to disclose that no-one loves a shark frenzy like this mob. You simply would not believe what kinds of things they whip into some sort of social or safety crisis. Picture a city packed solid with small-town busybodies. Once a target has been selected, everyone jumps in and tries to tear a hunk of flesh out for themselves. No-one is ever *for* anything; they're always just opposed to something.
Google Fiber is doing a fine job, though they do seem to be about 1-1.5 years behind schedule, heh. I credit the delay with them moving with necessary diligence. My only complaint is that they chose the deplorable "teleNetwork" call center to serve as their local customer service. I worked for them at one time.
So what the hell is happening here? We know 'retired' FBI/CIA/NSA/GCHQ types like to launch "private" companies which find the government all the contractors they need to do their dirty work. Companies who provide all of the data-vacuuming services which the government is unable to do legally. And make a profit doing it.
Now, are we seeing private industries who are not part of the shadow brotherhood being gobbled up so that there are no freelancers capable of feats which the spooks can do?
Bad enough when it's a company's network that looks like spaghetti... how about when it's an actual Internet Service Provder? Behold Illuminati Online circa 2000:
https://imgur.com/a/flhlT
Yes, THAT Illuminati Online. Originally the BBS of Steve Jackson Games, the USA secret service decided to seize the entire contents of their office on the pretense that they were training the public how to hack teh internets. Actually, they were designing a role playing game. You know, roll 2D6 for 11 or higher to see if you'd "hacked" that server, durrrrr. SGJ never got their shit back. Years later, SJG miraculously won their lawsuit and launched the ISP with the money.
And check out the old 2000 website:
http://io.fondoo.net/
Reminds me of when I did Dell tech support. One lady asking for help adjusting her monitor WOULD NOT STOP trying to mouse the on-screen menus. I'd get her to do one thing using the buttons on the frame, then her hand would apparently shoot back to the mouse for another playful round of "nothing happens".
It being RATHER OBVIOUS that true criminals and terrorists and Russians (oh my!) will continue to use secure encryption instead of the weak encryption being offered to them by snooping governments.
Pushing weak encryption on the masses simply makes them vulnerable to foreign governments, corporate espionage and hackers. And outlawing strong encryption only inflates the power of snooping governments.
I just want to say how honored I am that you feel my theory presented an imminent danger of catching on! As to whether such imagination has a role in the scientific process; consider that inspiration often comes first, eventually followed by the math to describe them. Visual analogies like mine are far from uncommon. If there's the slightest chance that I've given a real mathematician an idea, then it's worth it. It would not be the first time I've read about a scientific discovery which was an awful lot like an idea I'd had years earlier. People keen on making personal attacks should realize they just make it less likely anyone will collaborate with them.
I'm no scientist, but it seems to me that what a black hole does is convert matter into gravity. Sort of like a standing wave that grows and grows. The way the information about in-falling matter is represented and preserved is in changes in the black hole's mass and angular momentum. In other words, it vibrates. Obviously, this makes the information far too subtle and complex for mankind to interpret, but it works fine in the reverse direction. Imagine a white hole which vibrates and loses mass in precisely the reverse way a black hole has encoded it. The result could be the creation of particles possessing velocity. Where are all the white holes? I suspect they're a wide-area effect instead of objects. Perhaps particles disappearing into black holes re-appear throughout the galaxy's bulge, which helps to explain the relationship with the bulge's size and the mass of it's minuscule central black hole.
And without duplicates, that list is:
wusa /uninstall /kb:2952664 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:2976978 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3022345 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3035583 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3068708 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075249 /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3080149 /norestart
Launch Windows Updates. "View update history", then select "see Installed Updates" and search for:
KB3035583 (Win10 nag)
KB3068708 (telemetry)
KB3075249 (telemetry)
KB3080149 (telemetry)
and right-click to uninstall them.
Reboot and launch Windows Updates again. Go to automatic updates settings and select 'download but do not install'.. also uncheck ' install recommended updates with critical updates'.
Reboot... run automatic updates and look at recommended updates.. uncheck and hide the four listed above. KB3035583 will occasionally be unhidden and added again to your "recommended" updates so keep your eyes peeled.
Other unconfirmed "telemetry" updates:
KB3022345
And to keep an eye on things, you might download the GWX Control Panel, though ironically, it also adds a [10] icon to your task tray. It has some rudimentary cleanup options, but mainly just watches and warns about KB3035583.
Seems like LastPass is now a password SHARING app with many options and methods to do so. That can't open the door for exploits, heh.
Also, if the corp can hand our passwords over to our bereaved wives, it seems obvious they can decrypt the file supposedly only held in escrow on their servers.
Laid off half our staff "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Closed most of our offices "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Using cheaper ingredients "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Lowered quality standards "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Slashing our product line "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Jacking our prices up "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
CEO fired "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Getting sued by industry peers "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
Suing our customers who complain "in order to better serve customers with quality products"
WISE CHOICE OF WORDS. Give that PR hack a raise!
As usual, as always, you give a business a little leeway, and they try to take over. And they're at least a little bit accountable. Imagine what the unaccountable agencies, who insist that you let them keep their loving eyes on you at all times, are up to?
I've done something like kicking a plug out of the socket. Or to be more precise, I apparently tapped the power button on a UPS I didn't know was under my desk. I was a new employee in a call center, and we sat at different desks each shift. To be honest, the reason I called for a supervisor was because we were trained not to do anything outside our role or we'd be reprimanded.
If you've ever been in this kind of training, you tend to feel like whatever happens your first few weeks could be a stealth test... I could easily see this being the concern of anyone working with "sensitive" data. I didn't know how they felt about us rummaging around with cables and things. [At a previous CC job, I'd been admonished for simply tilting my monitor a bit and pulling my keyboard closer. They liked all of these things to look identical all up and down the rows of desks. Ugh.] I'm pretty sure they also told us not to mess with our work PCs, due to people stealing parts and bringing unauthorized peripherals.
I didn't know if my PC had a known issue, and if it did, thought it was best to have IT in the loop on it. Well, whatever. Someone dragged the huge bundle of filthy cables out from under the desk, pushed the UPS button, started my PC booting and let me at it.
I've written extensively about this here and on slashdot before, and it's worth proposing again.
The idea that I have to pay a significant amount of money for permission to tack a dot and some sort of pre-selected word to the end of my website name is onerous. I have to pay $8, $15, $30 per year and I'm certainly not receiving services costing that much in return.
1: Screw ICANN and their TLD system. The idea of TLD itself is prehistoric. All we need is to have another DNS network that lets us "register" most any combination of characters, up to 255 long, as FQDN.
2: The alternate DNS network would just pass ICANN-formatted FQDN over to legacy DNS networks where they would work as always.
3: The "walled garden" problem would exist, but for everyone who opted-in, the Internet would be free-er and have more destinations.
I would have liked to see Google do this, but they have chosen to kowtow to ICANN. OpenDNS and others like it would still be ideal, as they do provide services where you can choose to redirect requests for certain domains to a destination of choice (family filtering, etc.)
Clapper cleverly interpreted the Senator's choice of language using his profession's secret definition of it. to "Collect" means that a human analyst personally examines recordings or metadata which has been intercepted* (*this word also has special meaning to NSA), stored, filtered by computer and flagged for potential interest. We peasant folk would of course consider this data as "collected" before it's considered "Collected" by NSA. "Intercepted" in NSA language also means something happens after information is intercepted. IIRC, it's about the appearance of search results which they were consciously looking for. So you understand, all that data they intercept and collect is only Collected and Intercepted when they look at it and like it. They can do virtually anything they desire to get it, find it, and use it, but none of that exists until they define it into existence.
I have this little POS, and while all of it's ports are gigabit, the web interface is agony. It's in the form of a windows 10-like gui of tiles, configurable widgets and many many sub-compartmentalized panels. Some of the config items are very poorly placed, being more suited to a different area. IIRC, DD-WRT runs on it, but was not stable in my experience. Fortunately, you can set it to appear as a dumb switch, and all I use it for is an extension at the far end of the house.
I got fired unexpectedly from my contract job at the world hq for an, em, "comprehensive food" corporation here in Austin. The mean lady from the corner office whose name I never caught, materialized at my elbow growling "collect your things together and come with me". Quite without thinking, I squawked out loud "You're firing me? WHY?". I'm certain everyone heard it. *chuckle*
I was one of two contractors hired to work sharepoint tickets, and set up or update employee accounts on active directory. Lots of clicking around in the MMC snap-in. SP ran so slowly that sometimes it took 5 minutes to open and save a ticket. I timed it. The AD server was slow as tar, too (overburdened citrix desktop). It didn't help that they kept firing the drooling idiots hired to partner with me. We were falling days behind in getting tickets done. So I wrote a dandy little tool to assemble powershell commandlets, and this soundly doubled my productivity. I could have done the whole job myself at that point. My non-mgmt handlers were very impressed and I showed them how to use the tool for emergency requests.
After being fired, I watched with interest how use of my tool started escalating. You see, the tool was web and javascript based, and was hosted on my own server. I let them use it a couple of weeks, and then stuck an .htaccess file in the directory, with a pleasant "Access Denied - Contact your Admin" message embedded in the AuthName field. Every morning, for several more weeks, someone would give it a try. Knowing their office culture, they probably thought the 'server was down' or such, and were waiting for word that someone had worked the ticket to fix it. Not a ticket I'd have been responsible for, but someone who surely had no idea what the tool was.
Never mind the missing mountain of skulls, the missing body bones, and the practical inefficiency of burning a body to power a matter assembler (!!!!). He had a shovel... probably two of them. He could have used them to chisel at the wall far faster. He'd even get new shovels when the garden and hallways reset. He could have done it in a single lifetime, and then let himself get reset so he could exit at the age he entered. I guess none of the current writers ever played a text adventure?
...they'll keep doing it. So let's have a nice open-source service we can install which intercepts microsloth's telemetry and replaces it with lies. Ones which fall within valid limits, but which completely protect the privacy of the PC user.
I'd also like to hear what deals they're giving to corporations which weirdly choose to run on W10 (or is that WX?) I can't believe a corporation is going to permit all their personal activity to be broadcast outside their firewall. Even if there's just a few W10 devices, there should be a provision to silence them.
It's all OK, since they've agreed to stop spying eventually, and since they haven't (yet) refused to stop upon arrival of that date, there is no offense to address yet! All legal-beagle!
Only a terrorist would make an observation such as "if I promise to stop killing kittens 100 years from now, then it's like I have a 100-year license to keep killing them." Amurcah!!!
Dear Shadow Systems: Not one bit of text was blacked out. If you read the article, and it is clear that you didn't, the article is simply padded with black lines for humorous effect. Blind people will have no trouble reading the article. When you lose one sense, the others become enhanced. This is why people with no sense of humor have an increased sense of self importance.
We all can see why you didn't get the joke.
Furthermore, it is not theregister.co.uk that is making you listen to screen readers gibbering about BlackRightPointingTriangles, it is your screen reader's manufacturer who made that decision. Either learn to program and offer your blind compadres a superior alternative, or close your arrogant face-vent and hold your helpless frustration inside. It'll fester there, and likely take you to the sweet release of death sooner that way. Good day.
"The balance between our security and the civil liberties..."
NO. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that we fought for our security or oblige the government to guarantee it.
There IS NO BALANCE to be negotiated between our security and our civil liberties. That was never part of the deal. Our civil liberties come first and foremost. Without our civil liberties, security does not matter whatsoever.
None of our civil liberties make us unsafe. It is a fact that they are all specifically inspired by government behavior that is hostile to freedom and intent on eroding it. It is past time for the US government to stop treating our civil liberties as a sort of bank account to debit from in order to bring us "safety".
"We were made aware that someone had maliciously and illegally hacked our product, subsequently making this hack public rather than bringing it to our attention privately and in confidence," Impero told The Reg in a statement.
That there is what we call "slander". Sue Impero into the stone age.
You've got my complete support! And no worries over the "ICANN-controlled Internet". ICANN controls the leading DNS database, not the network. That does give them quite a bit of influence, but not ownership of it. It's like assuming Google and Yahoo own the concept of email just because they have popular webmail. We can all walk away and play at someone else's house any time we want. :P
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