* Posts by usbac

432 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2010

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Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either

usbac Silver badge

At home I made the transition many years ago. Here in our climate where the humidity runs around 10-15% a lot of the year, ink cartridges last about 3-6 months whether you use them or not.

At one point I went to the local store to buy a set of ink cartridges, and found that the black/color combo was $59. That was the end for me with inkjet.

I ordered a Dell color laser printer for $210 shipping included. It's been at least five years now, and I'm still on the original toners. And, since the printer is now five years old, I can get aftermarket toners for about $15 each.

In hilariously petulant move, Apple shuts Texas stores and reopens them few miles down the road – for patent reasons

usbac Silver badge

Re: My daughter learned in medical school...

If I were a doctor, I think I would refuse to treat lawyers. Mostly just out of self preservation!

At least make them sign a release before treating them. Unconscious, too bad!!

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

usbac Silver badge

Re: "Insane homeowners association"

When we bought our house 18 years ago, I said I would never live where there is an HOA, but we bough our house anyway. The thing was that we were house number 6 in the development. There weren't even enough homeowners yet to set up the HOA until our house was finished.

I figured that the best way to avoid problems with the HOA was to be a board member. I was VP for the first two years, and then president for the next four years (no one would run for a board position). Finally, someone very reasonable was dumb enough to run against me. She got stuck with it until last summer.

My approach was to ignore most complaints and tell the complainer that the bylaws required complaints to be put in writing and mailed (certified mail) to each board member. That usually ended the problem right there. People will bitch, but they usually won't put it in writing and pay for certified mail. I think in 6 years, I only had one person submit a written complaint. And, that was against the builder of the subdivision who already had a written exemption from HOA rules in the bylaws.

We recently voted to disband our HOA, and I'm so glad we did. Some people at my work are actually glad they have an HOA. I usually suggest psychological treatment when they tell me they like having an HOA. I guess there are enough sheep in this world?

French data watchdog withdraws probe from location data guzzling adtech biz Vectaury

usbac Silver badge

The big problem...

...is that idiot users don't care. If all they have to do is click accept, and then get "free" stuff, they don't care. Google has made billions from people willingly giving away their privacy. So has Facebook!

What good is it to have data protection laws when the public at large doesn't care?

When I ask people around me why they are giving their data willingly to the slurpers, they look at me like I'm some kind of wacko...

No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air

usbac Silver badge

It's a modern aircraft. He probably had a modern EFIS with the ability to plot his track over ground. It wouldn't be all that hard for a very good pilot to do this. Someone with "Test Pilot" in their title is usually an extremely good pilot!

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

usbac Silver badge

Re: Remember DAT?

Yeah, we used them in the recording studio back in the 80's. It was a hell of an update for sending out CD masters. It sure beat Sony's system of using U-matic video tapes for masters.

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

usbac Silver badge

Re: Not always helpful

I have owned several Triumph Spitfires. The same thing applied with the inaccessible manifold bolts. To this day I don't know how the factory ever put the thing together!

I had both the Haynes manual and the original British Leyland factory service manual. I don't know which one was worse?

"This is true - engine removal was usually recommended!" I got really good at removing/re-installing the engine. I could drive the car into the garage, pull the engine/transmission, fix whatever little ting that required removing the engine, and drive it out about 2.5-3 hours later. About the 7th or 8th time you do it, you start to get good at it.

The Spitfires were a nightmare to keep running, and I sure like the reliability of modern cars, but damn I miss those little cars... So much fun driving our mountain roads in the summertime with the top down.

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

usbac Silver badge

Many years ago I was the service manager for a local computer store (remember them?). My best friend owned a competing computer store across town. We always had a good matured rivalry going on.

One day my friend calls about a PC he got in for repair. He tells me that the customer said that we had worked on the PC last. He asks me some questions, and I told him that I would have to ask the tech Jeff about the repair. I go and find the work order. I tell my friend that the major problem we found with the PC was that the customer is a total idiot.

It turns out that my friend had me on speakerphone (which he seems to have an annoying fascination with), and the customer was standing right there. He learned not to do that again. Me, I really didn't care that much. The customer was pain in the ass, and a total jerk in general, so I wasn't upset to see him gone.

We always tried to take great care of customers, especially ones that need a lot of hand holding. But when you get someone that doesn't understand computers, and they act like a total ass when you try to help them, what can you do?

My friend later regretted trying to help this guy also...

Accused hacker Lauri Love to sue National Crime Agency to retrieve confiscated computing kit

usbac Silver badge

Re: Representing himself

"It's entirely possible that it triggers a quicker prosecution on the original charges, in fact."

It's entirely possible that is the reason why his lawyers would not represent him on that issue? They told him something like "don't push the issue..."

So, he went ahead anyway, representing himself.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

usbac Silver badge

It's the sock grinding mechanism in the dryer that takes them. I contend that accurate machine vision systems have secretly existed since at least the 80's. How else does the dryer know to eat one of each pairs of socks?

I though I would outsmart the dryer by doing what 'Persona' above mentioned and buy all the same socks. But alas the dryer still has an apatite for socks.

Where do you think all of that lint in the filter comes from? There's no way all of that is just coming off of your cloths, right?

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

usbac Silver badge

Re: I can believe it!

I once had a call out at 3:00am and had to drive an hour in the middle of the night to put paper in a printer. We had a full time help desk (24/7) with four techs on each shift, and somehow they couldn't figure out that the paper was out, and had to call in a senior admin!!!

Needless to say I started looking for a new job that same day. Horrible place to work. The other two senior admins left within a year of me leaving. I should have known how bad it was when I found out that the person I replaced only worked there for six months.

It's a Christmas miracle: Logitech backs down from Harmony home hub API armageddon

usbac Silver badge

Re: Joy to the World

It's too bad that Logitech only does it when forced! It should be the default, but the tech industry seems to prefer to kick their customers in the balls first.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

usbac Silver badge

Re: Cut the red wire

Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcaWQZlPXgQ

Bruce

Germany pushes router security rules, OpenWRT and CCC push back

usbac Silver badge

We just got rid of all of our handheld bar code scanners that were WEP only. The problem is that they are pricey (about $2600 each), so replacing over a dozen, and having to re-write all of the custom software that they run, was a big expense. We just had a separate wireless network firewalled off from our other segments, just for the scanners. It worked but was a pain to manage.

Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes

usbac Silver badge

The question I have is did they sell any?

Memo to Microsoft: Windows 10 is broken, and the fixes can't wait

usbac Silver badge

Well... everyone wish me luck with the big lottery tonight. I told my wife that if we win, I'm giving $10 million to the React OS guys (she looked at me like I was from Mars). Maybe even more if it looked like they would actually finish the thing.

I would even fund an open source replacement for Outlook. For us, that's the one app I would have huge problems with prying from people's hands. I think it's the case for most enterprises. I could replace Word/Excel with Open Office or Libre Office, but Outlook is where I would get the most resistance.

usbac Silver badge

"It's entirely possible that the absurd breakneck pace of change we're seeing masks a complete breakdown in Microsoft's ability to produce reliable software," wrote Woody Leonard. "All I know for sure is that Windows is on a vicious downward spiral."

Two comments:

1) Did Microsoft ever really produce reliable software? If they did, I don't seem to remember it. And, I've worked in IT for 27+ years.

2) The "vicious downward spiral" started about 20 years ago.

I don't think any of these things are a revelation?

Equifax exec's inside trade shame: Software boss sentenced for mega-hack stock profit

usbac Silver badge

Re: So only getting caught trading on knowledge is punishable

The leaked information only affects the little people (like us). So, no it doesn't matter...

World's largest CCTV maker leaves at least 9 million cameras open to public viewing

usbac Silver badge

Re: Security? We've heard of it.

We run a bunch of these cheap Chinese cameras at several sites. What we do is put them on their own physical network segment (not VLAN) fire-walled off from the rest of the network. They don't have access to the internet at all. We then run Blue Iris NVR software on rack-mount servers that are on the isolated segment. These servers are accessible from the internet through an enterprise class firewall for certain authorized people.

Any security contractor that installs a camera system that is not isolated from the company's internal network should be sued out of existence.

I once tossed an alarm contractor out of the building when the technicians (with very poor IT skills) insisted on having access to our internal network. I told our CFO to find a more cooperative vendor, and he did.

Russian rocket goes BOOM again – this time with a crew on it

usbac Silver badge

"But astronauts are a different breed. They probably said "wheeeee! Can we go again?"

I remember during my flight training the day we went out for spin recovery training. After our first deliberate spin and subsequent recovery, my comment was "that was fun, can we do it again?" followed by a cold stare from my instructor. I was young then. It's amazing how we change when we get older...

Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials

usbac Silver badge

I don't think it's that difficult to do something like what is mentioned in the original article. Everyone needs to understand that the "chips" we see on circuit boards aren't the real chip. The actual die inside the package is much smaller than what we see on a board. The die can be as small as .1mm square. The dies are placed into much larger packages so that they can be soldered to a circuit board.

If properly done, a die could be placed between layers like an embedded via. It would take a great deal of knowledge and skill to do it, but it could be done. With some of the innovative assembly techniques being developed by companies like Apple (as much as I dislike Apple), the Chinese contract manufacturers have been taught how to do some crazy things.

Tapping something like an SPI bus isn't that hard. It's only 4 signals. One could create a chip that would normally be a pass-through, but would change commands when it needed to. I have done quite a bit of SPI software and hardware, and I can see how this could be done. It would be rally hard, but when state sponsored, it's possible.

Our government would not even blink at spending $100 million on something like this. With that kind of money, it would be easy to find a few very talented engineers that could pull this off.

I remember back in the 90's people were opening up ICs and probing them under a microscope in live running circuits to break the encryption on satellite TV receivers. If people will do this to get free TV channels, what do you think a government with nearly unlimited funds can do?

Convenient switch hides an inconvenient truth

usbac Silver badge

Re: Surely this shows...

I've worked with many "licensed" electricians in my career, and I'm not sure that would have changed anything here. My experience has been about 50/50. There are many good electricians, but there are just about as many that should never be around electricity!!

From a previous el reg post:

We share a large industrial building with a ball bearing factory (I know, it sounds like a line form Hogan's Hero's!) A while back we had a sudden power outage. Our data center has good UPS backup power; enough for about two hours for all of the systems including cooling.

Senior management called the power company, and they said they would investigate, but that it would likely be the end of the day before they had an answer. So, management sent almost everyone home (almost, meaning I had to stay to shut down all of the production systems when we got close to UPS exhaustion).

So, I had just finished shutting everything down, when my boss and another VP came by and said "let's take a walk next door, and see if they know anything that we don't?" As we are walking around the side of the building, an electrician comes out of a side door. We stop him and ask him what he knows about any of this. He suddenly has a horrified look on his face. He then makes some half-assed excuse about having to check something, gets in his truck, and literally leaves long black skid-marks across the parking lot.

It turns out that the stupid jackass had turned power off to the whole building! There are four very large electrical boxes at the end of the building. Two are for us, and two for the neighbor. None of them are marked, of course. We turned them all back on, since if someone was actually working on something, they would be properly locked-out, right? Needless to say, our boxes are all padlocked now.

usbac Silver badge

Dave,

If you use a low voltage control circuit, you need other components like step-down transformers, etc. If this is controlling an entire data center, you want as few components in the circuit as possible. The last thing you need is for a $20 transformer to bring an entire company to it's knees.

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

usbac Silver badge

Re: And then billed 3 extra hours?

A few years back I bought a fancy new digital oscilloscope. The scope was offered in both a 50MHz and 100Mhz version with about $200 difference in price..

The manufacturer actually went to the trouble of adding parts to make the 50MHz version. They added an RC filter to the input to limit the bandwidth. Someone discovered that you can just lift the capacitor, and you have the 100MHz version (and thus voiding your warranty).

Then, someone else figured out that it's not even that hard. All you have to do is load the firmware for the 100MHz version, and the filter is disabled by software.

It still baffles me that they would spend money to make the scope slower? Why not just offer the 100MHz version only?

Microsoft 'kills' passwords, throws up threat manager, APIs Graph Security

usbac Silver badge

@TonyJ

You want to see how fast I can lift one of your fingerprints off of any surface and be logged into your AD account?

There should be no problem finding a copy of your "password" laying around everywhere you have been today...

usbac Silver badge

"give users the option of using Authenticator to sign in via a PIN, fingerprint, or face scan on their iOS or Android device."

So instead of a secure password, now we are using a numeric only password (a PIN - that will surely be easier to brute force than a password) or fingerprint (a password you leave a few thousand copies of laying around everywhere you go every day)?

This sounds like something Microsoft would think is progress!!

usbac Silver badge

Re: Phones ? really ?

What if you don't have a cell phone? I guess you just don't exist anymore if you don't?

What a fucked up world we live in now...

No, that Sunspot Solar Observatory didn't see aliens. It's far more grim

usbac Silver badge

Re: Unconvinced

This is America. We seem to lead the world in overreaction. We practically invented it.

It's what makes terrorism so successful here...

What's that smell? Oh, it's Newegg cracked open by card slurpers

usbac Silver badge

Re: Certificate does not equal legimitate - never has

@FlamingDeath

Most browsers would also warn with something like "this page contains insecure content". That should be a big red flag on a checkout page!

I remember when you had to show that you are a legitimate legal entity to get an SSL certificate. Those days are long gone, and now we have this crap. It seems that EV certificates were an attempt to make certificates attributable to a legal entity again.

If you have to simulate a phishing attack on your org, at least try to get something useful from it

usbac Silver badge

Re: What's the metric?

The security team member that clicked and tried to enter their credentials should be either reassigned or dismissed. They clearly should not be on the security team!!!

We just started using an outside service for testing for phishing. I sent out the first wave of emails without letting anyone know ahead of time. Even senior management wasn't informed. Frankly, I wanted to know if they would click through?

Fortunately, our CEO very much values efforts to keep us secure, and he has a good sense of humor (and a lot of humility). If he would have fallen for it, we could have just had a big laugh about it. When I told him about the test (a few days later), his response was "good job!, oh crap I didn't open it did I?" No one from senior management fell for the test. That is a very good thing.

I did get a good butt chewing from a couple of managers during the test for not sending out a company-wide email warning everyone about the phishing attempt. This would have of course ruined the test. They understood later when everything was explained, and some apologized.

Out of 45 people, I had 2 open and click the link. No one tried to enter credentials. As people mentioned above, what does this data mean? It's good news, I think? The two people that did click have openly admitted it to everyone, and thus been humorously embarrassed internally. I wasn't going to name names, just speak to them personally. They outed themselves!

Overall, I think it was a successful educational moment. I was very happy that so many people called or emailed me asking about this suspicious email.

What I wasn't mentally prepared for was how to answer the questions like "what should I do?" or "does this email look suspicious?" The fact that the user called me to ask, I considered that a success. What I didn't think through was the effect of, if I told someone that "yes, that does look suspicious, don't open it" they would warn other users. How many of the other users might have clicked through if they didn't get warned ahead of time from other users?

Bruce

No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy

usbac Silver badge

@vir

Many years ago I worked for a managed services provider that had a contract with a major US bank. We provided support for the entire half of the state.

Their corporate IT folks had a very strict password policy. They required a password change every 30 days, unique passwords, and over 10 characters. What this did however, is to create an environment where no one could remember their passwords. So, on EVERY monitor there was a yellow sticky note with the last few passwords crossed-out, and the current one at the bottom of the list. Even the director for the whole state had the sticky note.

So, in the end, no security whatsoever!

Abracadabra! Tales of unexpected sysadmagic and dabbling in dark arts

usbac Silver badge

Re: Case sensor

Many, many years ago I was the service manager at a local computer store.

One day we had this very nice older gentleman come in with a really old PC. He was an accountant, and (you can all see this coming) had no backups. He was about in tears. There was something like 15 years of his clients records on the hard drive that just failed.

We mentioned the option of sending in the drive for data recovery. In those days there were only two reputable companies in the US that did data recovery, and the bill usually ran between $5,000 and $15,000. He told us that he couldn't possibly pay that kind of money (this was in the early 90's).

I told him that I would take a look at the drive, but that we didn't have a clean room, and we might make the drive unrecoverable by opening it. He told me to go ahead and try.

It seems that somehow the drive managed to seek too far towards the outer edge of the platters, and the heads went over the edge. Since they are kind-of spring loaded, they were stuck. So, I very gently spread the heads apart and slipped them back onto the platters. What do you know, the drive worked again. The fact that I opened it in a dusty back room meant that the drive would not run very long, but it ran long enough for me to get the data off of it.

We sold him a new drive, copied his data to the new drive, and he was off and running. The joy on that man's face made up for a lot of the BS from cranky customers we otherwise had to put up with! I kept a copy of his important data in our safe on a zip disk for quite a while, as I figured that even after this event, he would never back up his data.

When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

usbac Silver badge

Re: If Apple didn't knuckle under to the FBI

Well, if Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. stop importing devices into Australia, how long do you think the political career of these idiots will last? If all of the device manufacturers put a note on all of their websites like "* devices are not available in Australia, contact your MP for details why." how long do think this nonsense will last?

We will see how long the citizens of Oz like living in North Korea?

'Unhackable' Bitfi crypto-currency wallet maker will be shocked to find fingernails exist

usbac Silver badge

Re: Business plan

You forgot part 3b:

3b) Make the rules of the so-called bounty program so razor thin that you can wiggle out of paying the bounty.

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

usbac Silver badge

Re: alert emails

Years ago I was working on writing a new alert system for HVAC in our data center. I missed a flag in code and sent about 1000+ text messages to both my boss and myself (personal cell phone).

My boss went from fairly pissed off to laughing his ass off when I explained to him that HE had unlimited texting, however I pay 25 cents per text!!

Sen. Ron Wyden: Adobe Flash is doomed, why is Uncle Sam still using it?

usbac Silver badge

At some point soon, I intend to block Flash at our corporate firewall. I know I will hear a lot of wailing, but I'm very tempted to see how broken the web will be for our users.

If the C-suite folks don't scream too loud, I might get away with it!

I demanded that our in-house web developers remove flash from our sites years ago. There was a lot of whining about it but I simply told the developers that I'm going to block Flash access to our sites on a specific date. I told them that when some executive asks why our sites are broken, I would send them to the web developers.

I've been putting a lot of pressure on any vendors still using Flash. We'll take our business elsewhere, kind of pressure. Some are complying, some aren't.

No big deal... Kremlin hackers 'jumped air-gapped networks' to pwn US power utilities

usbac Silver badge

Re: More detail please

@DougS,

There was a research paper a while back where they were able to re-program the microcontroller in some USB flash drives to turn them into a keyboard emulator.

What do you know, it was on El Reg...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/31/black_hat_hackers_drive_truck_through_hole_in_usb_security/

Fix this faxing hell! NHS told to stop hanging onto archaic tech

usbac Silver badge

Re: User story

How about option 4 - set things up properly so users can easily email scanned documents?

4. Place document on scanner, select your name on the touch-screen, press scan. Go back to your PC and find the reasonably named document under the folder "Scanner" in your "My Documents" folder, right-click, then send as attachment. Done.

With modern VOIP phone systems, supporting FAX machines is an absolute nightmare. Yeas, I know T.38 and all that, but just try to make it completely reliable. We tried for about a year, and about the fifth time some executive comes in on a rampage about their FAX not going through, you give up and order an analog line. We run a consumer call center on VOIP, and yet our one analog FAX line costs about 1/2 of our total monthly phone costs!

Insurers hurl sueball at Trustwave over 2008 Heartland megabreach

usbac Silver badge

I don't think anyone in IT security has ever thought that being "PCI Compliant" means you are un-hackable. It just means that you maintain a certain baseline level of security.

No one is un-hackable, and if you think you are, you are delusional. It's really just a matter of how hard you are to hack, and is it worth the time of the hacker to break in? High value targets will always have a very hard time keeping systems secure.

I'm sure Heartland paid huge insurance premiums for years. The insurance companies (like someone above noted) are just trying to double-dip. It's sort of pathetic to bring the lawsuit after 10 years.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

usbac Silver badge

Re: Exit the Cleaner

@ gnasher729

A similar thing happened here. We share a large industrial building with a ball bearing factory (I know, it sounds like a line form Hogan's Hero's!) A while back we had a sudden power outage. Our data center has good UPS backup power; enough for about two hours for all of the systems including cooling.

Senior management called the power company, and they said they would investigate, but that it would likely be the end of the day before they had an answer. So, management sent almost everyone home (almost, meaning I had to stay to shut down all of the production systems when we got close to UPS exhaustion).

So, I had just finished shutting everything down, when my boss and another VP came by and said "let's take a walk next door, and see if they know anything that we don't?" As we are walking around the side of the building, an electrician comes out of a side door. We stop him and ask him what he knows about any of this. He suddenly has a horrified look on his face. He then makes some half-assed excuse about having to check something, gets in his truck, and literally leaves long black skid-marks across the parking lot.

It turns out that the stupid jackass had turned power off to the whole building! There are four very large electrical boxes at the end of the building. Two are for us, and two for the neighbor. None of them are marked, of course. We turned them all back on, since if someone was actually working on something, they would be properly locked-out, right? Needless to say, our boxes are all padlocked now.

Our CEO sent the bill for all of the lost work to the company next door. He suggested they pass it on to the electrician's insurance company.

It took me the rest of the day to get all of our systems back up and running.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

usbac Silver badge

Re: DEC Engineer

@The First Dave

"This is _exactly_ why you MUST let the outside person do it. He might be more likely to make the mistake, (though is more likely to check things properly beforehand,) but when things go wrong, it's not _you_ that gets the bullet."

Back when I worked in consulting, I often thought that was the reason we were there. I though the in-house guys were more than capable of doing some of the projects we worked on. I think the reason they called us was to have someone to blame if things turned to shit!

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

usbac Silver badge

Re: "Act normally! Ginni and the team are here to see what Austin is really like."

@IT Hack

Our CEO eats his self-packed lunch in the break room with the rest of the staff.

Everyone shares the same tables, from VP's to forklift drivers in the warehouse. None of this elitist bullshit here!

Trainee techie ran away and hid after screwing up a job, literally

usbac Silver badge

Re: He started a new life

@Phil

"I've never understood what drives normal, non-psycopathic, people to take up dentistry anyway, even if they were competent with power tools. Yet they do. Funny old world, sometimes."

To me there is a long list of professions that I wouldn't want to do, but like dentistry, I'm very glad someone does! It gives me a lot of respect for those people.

Cops: Autonomous Uber driver may have been streaming The Voice before death crash

usbac Silver badge

Re: Dick Heads

I really do like the concept of recording "parallel" data sets. I think where the concept breaks down is that it would only work if the human driver was a highly trained professional driver. Letting just any driver be the source of one data stream isn't going to be a big help. Look at how many terrible drivers are on the road. Would you want them to be the "control" data set with which to compare the computer's idea of how to drive?

Amazon staffers protest giant's 'support of the surveillance state'

usbac Silver badge

Yeah, they think pressuring their CEO for doing what CEOs are supposed to (even required by law, in some cases) do for their companies, is going to help. The CEO is legally responsibility is to generate as much revenue for the company as possible.

These same people (who I happen to agree with), need to focus on voting out the oppressive, power hungry scumbag politicians that are buying these service from Amazon.

Even though I agree with what they are saying, if I was the CEO, I would tell them to go work elsewhere if they don't like the work they are doing. If they were my employees, they would do the work assigned to them, or they would be gone.

As people above have said, there is a consequence for standing up for one's beliefs. If you aren't willing to accept the consequences, then why should anyone listen to you? That's the problem today, people moan and wail about things, but aren't willing to sacrifice for their beliefs. Not many anyway. We've become a society of cowardly complainers.

US Supreme Court blocks internet's escape from state sales taxes

usbac Silver badge

Re: Death and Taxes

We run several e-commerce websites. We already subscribe to a service that provides a web-API to calculate sales tax based on the full address of the customer. They handle the tax holidays, etc. They also deal with the other "ouch" here, remitting to each state (and having to fill out each states confusing sales tax form).

Remitting is actually the worst part of this mess.

Hold on. Here's an idea. Let's force AI bots to identify themselves as automatons, says Cali

usbac Silver badge

Re: The bill is probably sponsored by telemarketers...

Does this mean I have to make "Lenny" play an announcement first? That will kill most of the fun...

Microsoft gives users options for Office data slurpage – Basic or Full

usbac Silver badge

Re: Firewalls?

I actually put this question to our Firewall vendor. We are a corporate customer with a paid support agreement. I put in a feature request to be able to block "Telemetry" from the various software companies. I asked for telemetry to be a category in their web blocker module. They already have a long list of categories like adult, hate speech, advertising, etc. Each category has various sub-categories. I thought that having telemetry as a category, and each slurping asshole company be a subcategory would be perfect.

I knew they would never do it. The pressure from Microshaft, Adobe, etc. would be too much. I just wanted to see them squirm. At first their approach was to ignore the feature request. So when our sales rep called about a major upgrade and support agreement renewal, I told her that we are considering switching to PFSense, and oh, by the way, what about the feature request that wasn't ever answered?

After that little poke, I did actually get an answer from a manager in software development. Their explanation was actually fairly legitimate. They agreed with the need for it, and confirmed that I'm not the first customer to ask for it. They gave me several good reasons why it's not workable. The first was the wack-a-mole problem of many (hundreds of) IP addresses that change constantly. Then, they said that Microshaft has tied Windows Update into the same servers that receive the telemetry. So, blocking the telemetry at the firewall would break Windows Update. There is a similar problem with Adobe they said. If you run Adobe's rent-ware Creative Suite (which we do), it will stop working if you block their telemetry.

So, as long as we have to run the crap from Microshaft and Adobe, we are stuck. If I owned the company, we would be 100% open source. It's possible to run a company on open source, one just needs to have the balls to do it. For us, it's not even all that big of a stretch. Several of our major systems already run on Linux servers, and have both Windows and Linux clients. Others are web browser based, and the client doesn't matter. The killer apps for us are MS Outlook, and Adobe Creative Suite (which to be run on Macs - almost Linux). Man I wish there was an open source replacement for Outlook!

Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive

usbac Silver badge

"And OS/2 booted up instead of Windows"

So, it was an upgrade?

usbac Silver badge

No need for physical drives

I do something very similar, but with a cool little tool called Drive Snapshot. I make an image of any PC I need to reload/refresh before blanking the hard drive. I put the images up on a NAS share that only I have access to.

Drive Snapshot allows you to mount an image as a local drive. So, when the inevitable "I know I told you about everything I needed backed up, but I forgot this one extremely important file/folder/etc." situation comes around I can mount the image and retrieve the file. It happens all the time. Here it's usually the damned Excel macros that people don't think about.

I could even recover the entire bootable drive if I really had to. I haven't had to go that far yet.

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