Posts by Danny 5

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers' data if needed

When Microsoft loses in court, EU data will be made available to the US party that won the case. I've been trying to get more people to be aware of this for ages (I'm a Dutch techy who provides support for MS on prem and cloud services) and it looks like people are slowly waking up and smelling the napalm. We need European alternatives to at least host our data, it's not in safe hands with US suppliers. A US company has to adhere to US laws first and foremost and if a US judge orders them to fork over data, it doesn't matter where the data is hosted, they're going to have to fork over the data.

End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box

When will the hurting stop?

Can we please end this discussion? These nincompoops have no idea what they're talking about. For years all sorts of agencies have been complaining about encryption, requesting bans, requesting backdoors, requesting all sorts of things, without the burden of knowledge. You break encryption, you break a LOT of other things, it's as simple as that.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: My simple way of avoiding Zuck's ads ...

I have an account, had it for almost as long as the network exists, but have moved away from it a few years ago. FB and Insta are bad for my mental health, I actually lost sleep over posts that upset me.

I'm still on Reddit, but that's the only social network I still visit. Much easier to avoid toxic content on there, I don't have the same issue as with Meta's networks.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

I owe my soul

to the company store.

All these company bigwigs worrying about their corporate real estate losing value (because we all know it really isn't about anything else, right?), you'd almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

Lucky I guess

Reading about those speeds is just SO weird if you're not used to them. We have the benefit of being a European hub here in the Netherlands, so the infrastructure here is generally top notch. I was with the same provider for well over a decade and had a 50/50 Mbps connection, not the fastest by any margin, but fine for what I was using it for. Due to several changes I didn't support and the high price of their services, I recently switched providers, I got connected for half of what I paid before and now have a 400/400 connection (yeah I know, I'm crazy for not having switched earlier, I'm beating myself up over it too), still nowhere near the fastest that's on offer, but a massive step up from what I had. To think a highly developed country like the US is still using low speeds like that is just baffling to me.

Flirting hard with India doesn't mean US is breaking up with China

You're joking, right? I'm trying to find the /sarcasm indicator, but can't find it.

Immoral

In its current state, globalisation is downright immoral. It leans on the explotiation of people for cheap labor, it's the absolute worst exponent of capitalism. Globalism can only work in a level playing field, where workers have the same rights, regardsless of the country they work in. I'm not anti-globalism persé, but I am firmly against what's happening now. It just boils down to modern day slavery in too many cases.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

Re: Time to die

hahahahahahahahaha

Oh you're serious? let me laugh harder!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Time to die

I cannot wait for twitter to go bankrupt and be pulled from musk's hands. I can't imagine a more satisfying result. It's not that I want twitter dead perse, I'm just looking forward to musk's imminient faiilure.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Want to get disconnected from the rest of the world?

Because that's how you get disconnected from the rest of the world.

Let's forget for a moment how ludicrous this proposal is in the first place, do any of them have any idea what the real life implications are? Do they think every single international bank is going to give them a backdoor? Every global CA give them access to the root cert? Even if they go ahead an push this insane bill, it's utterly impossible to enforce without irreprably damaging their access to the global internet.

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

Deja vu!

When I still worked for Atos in NL, I saw them lose a contract under similar circumstances, more than once actually. Guess they have the same issues in other countries too.

Where are EU going with that Teams antitrust probe? Microsoft wants a word

Re: Microsoft Torture Suite

That's pretty insane, because I hardly know a single person that doesn't like teams. It also sounds like you just have a shit setup, because the one I previously worked on (we're in the process of introducing it on my current project, I'll likely be involved with the rollout) rarely had any issues. In fact, I am yet to work on an environment where it didn't work near flawlessly.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Please keep going!

If that madman keeps this up, it won't take all that long before twitter gets blocked in the EU. musk thinks he's above the law, I hope he finds out very quickly that he's not. twitter will just get worse, advertisers will bail, legislation will hit twitter hard, here's hoping it'll all go to shit before summer 2023!

Twitter needs WAY more moderation, but musk seems to think the opposite is true, this can only end in tears.

Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader

Please stay, Elon!

Twitter is rapidly going into a death spasm, Elon's insane behavior is a great catalyst for its imminent demise, please let him stay till it's completely and utterly destroyed. From it's ashes we can hopefully get a social network that's once again properly moderation and not turned into a hate filled cesspool. Twitter is a digitel sewer, please let it die.

Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk

Re: Cultural Problems

For the filthy rich, the US is better than Canada.

Free speech absolutonist

Musk claims to be a free speech absolutionist. I guess that only applies if his fragile little ego doesn't get hurt.

Boffins find COVID changed the way sysadmins work – probably for the worse

Example

Had a good exmaple of that the past weeks. I've been dealing with an issue with a newly installed Exchange 2019 environment. Even had an MS case to get it to work properly, but in the end their help didn't resolve the matter either. I've been talking to colleagues to get to the root of the issue, but it was just one on one talking. Today we all came into the office for a combined session, where all the involved engineers were available to check stuff. After some brainstorming and checking stuff that should be correct, we identified two issues that were at the root of the problem, everything started working as expected pretty much as soon as we changed the needed config.

I really think we could've nailed this down much, much faster, had we not all been working from our own, private islands.

Atos investor says turnaround plan 'too ambitious and complicated'

Ex employee

I enjoyed my time working for Atos, my colleagues were a pretty decent bunch of people, still hoping to get an invite for the retirement part for one of them, should be coming up next year. I've come to know the company as suffering from reorganisation sickness though, consistency simply isn't in their books, I've been in the situation where we were in the middle of one, when a new top manager took over and he pretty much reversed it, stuff like this happens constantly. If they could just have a stable policy for a couple of years, perhaps things would run a bit smoother, because everyone knows what to expect, but I know that's too much to ask for this company.

Zuckerberg: Yes, Facebook kept Hunter Biden's laptop under wraps

A Dutch saying

We have a saying in Dutch: "Zoals de waard is, vertrouwt hij zijn gasten", which transpates to "an innkeeper will only trust his guests to the level of his own trustworthyness" People that keep pushing this whataboutery the hardest are likely the most corrupt themselves.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: Brilliant...

They had me at "You mean were the head of Direct Marketing?"

Atos CFO to follow CEO out the door following 'Evidian' split plans

Kill off operations

Atos has been trying to kill off their operations division for ages, I guess this is the latest attempt to do so. I worked there for almost 15 years, the company was constantly in a state of reorganization, clearly nothing has changed. I pity the people that still work there.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Sigh

Really, we're back here again? We've been going around in circles for years now, can we please stop these shenanigans and move on please? I'm all for protecting the most fragile in our society, but at some point you have to accept that some "solutions" are just not feasible.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

Dummy mode on

My eyes lit up when I read that..... Been a while since it was invoked!

DoJ accuses Google of training staff to make 'false requests for legal advice'

Don't be evil

Well that certainly ages like milk, didn't it? Every time you think they can't stoop any lower, they prove you wrong.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Re: 10,000 ppi

VR isn't the issue, it's how faceb.... ehr Meta intends to use it that seems a tad far fetched. I have a PSVR set and am now also playing my non-VR games with the headset on, simply because it projects a massive screen, well over 100", for my gaming pleasures. Even though it's "only"HD and I can regularly see pixels, it still massively enhances my gaming experience, I see no reason to return to playing games on my TV as long as I have the VR set.

shut in

This sounds like a nightmare to be honest and that comes from someone who loves being home alone. I have no problem with an extended lack of contact with people, but if there's one thing that covid has taught me is that even the most fervent hermit will start to miss human contact at some point, I certainly did. Only a company as removed from reality as faceb.... sorry Meta can come up with something like that. The Matrix anyone?

BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master

"Dirt, Dandruff and Donkey porn"

I once had to repair the machine of my brother in law, he's reasonably tech savvy, but he had not remembered to delete his browsing history and such. I made a backup of his stuff, but forgot to delete it afterwards. Quite some time later I found myself looking for old videos that I had saved, so I did a search on AVI files and landed on the stuff he had been watching. Turns out he has a certain kink that I did NOT expect (nothing horrible). I laughed my ass off and proceeded to delete the stuff. Small hint, he'll only get more attracted to my sister as they age XD

I'm not going to hold it against him, I won't even mention it, but I thought it was absolutely hilarious.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Too much?

I was thinking in the lines of "social cancer", or something similar, or is that a bit too much?

Behold the Megatron: Microsoft and Nvidia build massive language processor

Nooooooooo

Did they have to call it Megatron? I mean come on, that's the same as calling a new supercomputer skynet.

Chinese web giant Tencent predicts Beijing has more internet regulations coming – and welcomes them

Re: "[Martin Lau] welcomed whatever's coming"

That's really all there is to it, moderation. Same as facebook, all they need to do is make sure closed groups are fully moderated, open groups don't even need such a high level of scrutiny, closed groups do. We are in an information war and the only way to win it is to put all our effort into fighting misinformation.

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

Re: easy

classic XD

Re: easy

I archived a couple fun ones for personal use, always funny to read back some of those old shitstorms ;)

memories

That story triggered a memory of a similar thing happening to me just over 10 years back.The customer used office and Exchange 2007. We were suddenly faced with a mail storm of our own, the logdisk of one database just kept flooding with streams and streams of logfiles, gigs at a time. Those disks weren't all that big, so it filled up to capacity in a matter of hours. We were frantically trying to figure out what was happening, even involved Microsoft to try and find the root cause (all the while manually deleting logfiles, which had been sanctioned as a one time workaround). After several hours of searching we finally got the root cause. A user was transfering to a new department and thought it was a good idea to zip up all his work and email it to himself as sort of an archive. His mailbox was about 1.2 GB when he performed the action, the file was 800 MB. In itself this would not be a problem, unfortunately we used Exchange caching and that's where everything fell apart. in Outlook 2007 an OST could not exceed 2 GB, it simply stopped working after that. The user with the 800 Mb attachment (they had no limit, customer enforced) sent his mailbox to 2.8 GB, filling up the OST to the 2 GB mark, crapping out and restarting the process, with the massive log flood as a result.

Good times!

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Re: It's been a while....

That was the first thing that came to mind here as well! Classic BOFH.

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

Security is a journey, not a destination. ;)

The best security with always lost to the best hacker. ;)

Lastly, your mother's tactic is called "security by obscurity" and it's more effective than a lot of people would think. Hiding things in plain sight, or using dummies can be very useful.

ohhhhhh

I thought I was about to hear a song of praise about crypto-currency! I had not expected to read something about one of my favourite subjects, cryptography in the public space!

Relaly just commenting for the sake of commenting, I have very little to add and agree with the article completely.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

Ha ha

So we're really going to continue letting incompetent people try to do the job eh? Typical. You'd think this lady would've gotten herself more informed by now, but apparently she's one of the people that thinks and uninformed opinion is just as valid as an informed one. smh.

The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL

Wait.... what?

You obviously don't know the first thing about Exchange and should therefor really refrain from commenting on it.

Setting up, administering, maintaining and recovering Exchange is extremely easy. Powershell gives admin administrative tools far beyond anything that monitoring can offer and the robustness of the software guarantees it'll usually keep running till the end of day. All you have to do it make sure the environment is kept up to date, another extremely easy process. The only gripe us admins had over the years is the loss of the console, although the EAC is a fine replacement.

Please tell me this is satire.

Microsoft fixes four zero-day flaws in Exchange Server exploited by China's ‘Hafnium’ spies to steal victims' data

Re: Why is Exchange so hackable?

Having worked as an Exchange engineer for just under 15 years, I can tell you your assumption is way off. Exchange has become a very solid product, but due to the nature of the content, it's a highly sought after target. Email is one of the biggest treasure troves a hacker can get to. Your remark in regards to security fixes is ridiculous, Exchange updates are published quarterly now and there are generally very few bugfixes in between. You're still thinking about Exchange 5.5, the world of email has changed substantially since then.

Fun!

That was an exciting 24 hours, we were scrambling to get the fixes installed. I love stuff like that, the emergency process kicks in and all responsibility falls firmly on the people executing the updates, no layers upon layers of management that need to put their 2 cents in, short lines and fast turnover, this is what I love most about working in IT.

Got all my customers sorted out, was done at 22:30 last night with the last 2010 server (customer is slow to migrate, they should've been gone last year, but they're still with us on the EOL 2010 servers). Very satisfied with a job well done, this is one of the things the company I work for excels at, normally it's just as bureaucratic as any other large company, but when shit hits the fan, it really shines.

Australia facepalms as Facebook blocks bookstores, sport, health services instead of just news

Typical

And again we see a perfect example of what can happen when people without the proper technical knowledge make decisions beyond their capacity, there are a LOT of unexpected side effects.

It's not that I disagree with the spirit of that law, I totally agree that if articles are completely/largely posted on facebook, the original poster of the article should be compensated, Facebook makes money off it too after all, it's just that this half baked effort is ending up doing more harm than good.

I get Facebook's argument that posting news on facebook can help the publishers, but that's only valid if a small portion of the story is visible (clickbait anyone?). There needs to be consensus on what qualifies as a link and what qualifies as a full post that requires compensation imho.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

Colleagues

I was working from home 4 days a week before corona hit and was actually planning on reducing that to just two.I was missing the interaction with my colleagues and since I'm currently in 2 teams, I felt I needed 1 day to spend with each of them and 1 to keep up connections with the rest of my company network. I've been working from home 5 days a week for over a year now and look forward to ending that period. Working from home certainly has a lot of advantages, but days seem so much longer. When I get up the first thing I do is get behind my laptop and check if anything happened overnight. I'll have been busy for an hour before I get to breakfast and my first cup of coffee.

UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer

Re: teach them how to use dd

If you think DD works on every and all devices with storage, I have some bad news for you.

France's cyber-agency says Centreon IT management software sabotaged by Russian Sandworm

Re: All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want

I like the BOFH quote myself "security is a journey, not a destination"

Microsoft's underwhelming, underpowered dual-screen Surface Duo phone arrives in the UK this month for £1,349

Bah

Anyone who suffered through the Lumia/Winphone debacle will think twice before ever getting an MS phone again. How they butchered the beautiful Lumia line still brings tears to my eyes, what a way to turn something great into a big, steaming pile of dog excrement. The surface slabs/hybrids are decent, be it overpriced, but this device has no appeal at all.

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

Re: Kill it now

I was forced to use Circuit for quite some time, Teams is an absolute delight after that, believe me!

Amazon coughs up $62m to shoo away claims it stole driver tips, cut pay rates without telling them

Re: Utterly absurd ...

That's how punishment works in the EU, the US should take notice. Just fine them a percentage of their revenue, that will have them shaking in their boots. $62 million is a pittance to their bottom line, they're laughing all the way to the bank.

Re: Just say no

I did some minor shopping on their webshop, but have stopped doing so early last year. It's just scandal after scandal after scandal, that company is pure evil.

Plenty of people still so little problem with their actions though, judging by the still massive amount of money they make.

In wake of Apple privacy controls, Facebook mulls just begging its iOS app users to let it track them over the web

Re: Shameless

I have a seperate gamer facebook account for that, it's sole purpopse is to log in to facebook so my game progress is saved. I never connected those to my personal facebook account to begin with.

Shameless

I have actually deleted the facebook and messenger apps from my phone, this whole saga was just one too many for me. The utter shamelessness with which fb is complaining about Apple being unfair and how fb holds our privacy in the highest respect just makes my skin crawl, it had to go.

I'm still on Android, which is a massive info hoover of its own, I hope they will follow Apple's example in this though. I don't mind my data being collected persé, but it should be my choice and not enforced, it's that simple. (I have a Nokia 8 btw, I have a bit more faith in the completely stripped down version of Android).