* Posts by gryphon

252 publicly visible posts • joined 2 May 2011

Page:

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

gryphon

Re: Features

Problem being that vehicles with that engine are being banned from most major cities in England due to Low Emission Zones.

Although in England you can at least pay a toll if you have the temerity to actually want to get somewhere but not have the money to buy a new vehicle.

In Scotland banned from all major cities LEZ's AND it's a £60 fine that doubles with each subsequent 'infringement'.

Although in saying that if you drive a vehicle more than 30 years old it's exempt.

Trump admin's purge of US cyber advisory boards was 'foolish,' says ex-Navy admiral

gryphon

Re: Is 'learnings' a word?

And the inevitable Terry Pratchett quotation.

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

GNUTerryPratchett

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

gryphon

Re: WTF is "leepfrog.com"

I thought the max size of an SPF record was 255 characters / 512 bytes?

Each line is nearly a hundred characters.

And I doubt leepfrog.com will last long.

Their About Us says - "Leepfrog’s 140+ team members, affectionately referred to as “Froggers”, enjoy a start-up culture focused on inclusivity, health, advancement, and work-life balance. Our in-house (and free!) coffee and tea bar is a central, bustling hub in our Iowa headquarters."

The inclusivity bit alone is enough to get them banished in MAGA world.

Exchange update refusenik? Consider yourself warned by Microsoft

gryphon

I'm surprised some 3rd party hasn't come up with a GUI replacement which runs the PowerShell in the background.

Which is all EAC does really.

gryphon

Re: We have you by the short and curlies

They can't remotely disable.

However Exchange Online won't accept SMTP traffic from on-prem Exchange servers that aren't in support.

After October 2025 that means Exchange SE.

gryphon

No choice after October next year if you have to run a supported version of Exchange unfortunately.

If you have Software Assurance on your Enterprise Agreement that's already a subscription of a sort anyway.

British tribunal claim aims to take a bite out of Apple over App Store fees

gryphon

Re: I guess so?

Presumably they think many developers won't even bother since they won't see the return on investment for the time and effort when they have to give 30% away to Apple.

Therefore lower number of developers and lower choice of products.

Agree that it is unlikely prices would fall, there will probably be many more apps offering a wrapper for cat videos from YouTube at a £4 a month subscription,

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

gryphon

Re: "Everything in Australia is deadly"

I'm sure GNU Terry Pratchett said some of the sheep weren't deadly.

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

gryphon

Was a lot of it not down to the influence of the 'rum corps', i.e. corrupt army officers who snapped up all the best land, used convict labour to work it etc.?

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

gryphon

Indeed I've noticed Lenovo doing that but only for certain laptops and certain specs.

And the 'discount' for not coming with Windows varies.

Sometimes it's £100, sometimes £50 and so on.

Microsoft shuttering dedicated licensing education, certification site

gryphon

Most people think the possible 67 million possible rail ticket combinations in the UK are excessive, unwieldy and hard to comprehend.

They've obviously never tried to get their heads round MS and Oracle licensing.

To do X you need license A, but you can also do X as part of license B a bit more cheaply but only on a Thursday while standing on your head drinking a glass of water, if you can only do that on a Friday then that will be license C at 3 times the cost (still a bit cheaper than license A) but only if you can also pledge allegiance to Larry or Satya while drinking the water in a clear and audible fashion.

EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs

gryphon

Last time I tried it, a couple of years ago admittedly, it wouldn't let me do it because I had an open subscription to Apple TV.

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

gryphon

Supposedly FJ rather than PO had the hands-on access but could certainly have been at PO's request.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

gryphon

Re: Issue diagnosed in 0 seconds/fixed in about 6 seconds (excluding walking time)

Had that with a judge in Scotland.

Senior Sheriff for Edinburgh so a very smart guy.

Admittedly it was an HP cartridge with a very small sticky on it which was easy enough to miss if you didn't look at the picture on the packet.

He took it in good part unlike some of the prima-donnas I had to deal with when they realised their common sense had failed them.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

gryphon

Re: Users...

Seen similar.

Had just started with a new company and a lady called me in tears because Outlook had for some reason marked all her mails as read.

I didn't grasp the issue until she spelled it out.

Her workflow process was to look at every mail that came in then mark the ones she had to go back and deal with as Unread. She had hundreds of mails that she needed to go back to but didn't know which ones they were.

She'd never been taught to use flags, or that you could create sub-folders to put stuff in. Exchange and Outlook had just been chucked in and users left to fend for themselves.

I had pity but there was nothing I could do of course.

gryphon
Unhappy

Had a guy at previous company would always have loads of mails open, would get MAPI resource error messages but was senior enough to give us the brush off to our polite recommendations to perhaps not open so many mails at a time.

This was back in Exchange 2003 and 2010 days. Microsoft.Mapi.MapiExceptionSessionLimit., event 9646

Ended up having to give him View Information Store Status rights on Exchange to get around it.

iFixit to the rescue: McDonald's workers can rescue their own ice cream machines

gryphon

Can't remember if it was a Wired or Arstechnica article but the callout/repair fee for Taylor's was $1000 per hour.

Ouch. Gotta sell a lot of ice cream to make up for that.

Delta officially launches lawyers at $500M CrowdStrike problem

gryphon

Didn't Microsoft offer them early support as well which was also rejected?

Senator accuses sloppy domain registrars of aiding Russian disinfo campaigns

gryphon

Re: Ecce, Capitalismus!

Aren't many registrars tending to discount the fees for the first year of registration anyway so they aren't actually making much margin?

Maybe not for .com though perhaps.

After the first year they tend to take the mick with at least 100% markup over nominet etc. fees.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

gryphon

Certificate Costs

Not to mention the extra costs of the certs themselves.

SAN cert seems to run about $300 a time, now that's money for old rope, so with renewal every 45 days you'd be up to $2400 a year in theory.

I notice however that Digicert seems to have gone over to a subscription service with 'unlimited issuance / replacement' on one of their options.

I guess they've been reading the tea leaves.

My run teams have to be dragged kicking and screaming at the moment to renew certs and that's only once a year for a small number of servers.

They'd probably start making noises about a 'certificate manager' role if it gets to be as often as this.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

gryphon

Indeed.

Lotus 123 msdos executable was something like 167Kb and probably did 90% of what most people use a spreadsheet for.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

gryphon

Re: Never say never

Except when the design office which uses the things is up 2 flights of stairs with no lift.

Same thing with the big LaserJet 3si's and 5si's. They were always stuck in a corner with tons of paperwork piled around them so it was impossible to easily get at the back without shifting the whole thing with extreme danger to back.

Scammers in the slammer for years after ripping off Apple with fake iPhone returns

gryphon

Re: Stealing phones worth 5 million or whatever

But article suggests these weren't 'stolen' phones per se that they sold on.

They were brand new, absolutely legitimate phones that came directly from Apple and could probably be sold for 75% or so of their retail price.

Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract'

gryphon

Re: Hyperlinks in a contract?

Yup.

eBay and PayPal are specialists in that.

Send out details of contract changes in emails but only links to them so you've no real record, in the hope that very few people will look at them.

And in the main the changes are tiny - a sentence here, a sentence there, no reason they couldn't have referenced in the email itself.

My bank and power company either send things out in writing with all the bits that are changing clearly explained, often with a before and after, or if very simple just spell out the changes in an email.

I'm looking at a new broadband subscription at the moment. Surprising, not, the number of companies that make it very hard or indeed impossible to find their T&C's for stuff like annual increases if they aren't upfront about it, many don't even put links in the signup page so you have to open up their main page and have a hunt from there. Off the list they go of course.

A very few give you a direct link to a PDF rather than a web page so it's easy to download the thing then email it to yourself as a basic record.

Still a load talking about RPI+3.9% which I believe has been banned now, albeit with unforeseen consequences.

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

gryphon

Re: Efficient free market

Locos + Trains = ROSCO - Rolling Stock Company which then leases to the TOC

I believe the ROSCO's make out like bandits, i.e. massive margins and profits compared to the TOC's

https://weownit.org.uk/blog/riding-rosco-gravy-train

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

gryphon

Certainly more dumb I should think. :-)

It's already happened with phone numbers, I have no idea what my son, daughter's, or fathers mobile phone numbers are because I never learned them just added them straight to the phone memory.

I can remember my grandmothers landline number from childhood, the landline number I used for a BBS, my wife's mobile, all the landline numbers my mother ever had and the landlines I've ever had but that's about it. Oh, and my sisters mobile number before she emigrated.

I've also done the 'list out commands from memory over the phone' gig.

Used to work for a bank and did on-call support but it was reasonable in that they provided a mobile dongle along with the laptop so you didn't have to rush to somewhere with wi-fi which wasn't ubiquitous back then or go home or to office, or rely on a hotel network when travelling. Important fact here was that the dongle was used very infrequently.

Had gone out with the family to a National Trust place a good distance from home, which turned out didn't have very good mobile signal. Got a call saying we have an issue with some workflow in Exchange public folders, don't ask, we need fixed soonest or massive penalties, but no data signal.

Move to a location with some signal and try to dial-in, nothing doing.

Ok, drive about ten miles leaving family behind to find a good signal. Still nothing doing.

In desperation called one of my managers who was an AD guy not Exchange to see if they happened to be at home and could dial-in, while I'm sitting in a car on a 30C day, couldn't run AC so he could hear me, and couldn't open window because it was a busy road that I'd ended up on and SLA was creeping up.

Managed to talk him all the way through checking and fixing it though so was pretty pleased with myself.

Turns out accounting had killed the mobile contract because it hadn't been used in the last 3 months, there was no tag to say it was infrequently used.

But of course they hadn't said to me that they were doing so even though my name WAS tagged against it so they could bill my department.

Thanks so much. Words were exchanged shall we say.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

gryphon

'protect vulnerable claimants from racking up debt'

How is this supposed to work? If peoples overdrafts are too high call them in for a chat to see how the government can help?

Somewhat unlikely.

And I thought most vulnerable claimants only racked up debt when they were sanctioned, i.e. benefits stopped, for breaching one of innumerable petty rules.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

gryphon

Re: What about to OPTIMIZE your code, this will help even more !

Indeed.

You can see the bloat with phone apps as well, storage and compute is free as far as the developers, or more likely their project managers, are concerned.

Microsoft Authenticator on iOS is something like 250MB which seems excessive for the little it does.

Revolut's banking app was up at over 500MB but they seem to have brought it down to 373MB currently.

Paypal is an unbelievable 355MB for the minimal amount of stuff it does.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

gryphon

Re: Cigarettes?

Send one to Big Clive on YouTube for a full teardown with schematics.

Biden tackles trade loophole used by cheap Chinese e-tailers

gryphon

Very similar for European VAT I think.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

gryphon

Nothing as grand as Domain Admin or even Account Operator required.

Exchange Recipient Management membership is normally all that's required.

Exchange has delegated permissions to more or less all users objects normally and it's delegating it's delegation to the admin account via RBAC.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 might boost productivity if you survive the compliance minefield

gryphon

Re: Sounds like a nice mess

I agree.

BUT.

As I understand it, and it even mentions in the article "Copilot for Microsoft 365 only accesses data that an individual user has existing access to, based on, for example, existing Microsoft 365 role-based access controls."

So users would have had access to the data all along, they just wouldn't have been able to find it easily.

e.g. buried 30 levels down in a SharePoint site with a top level folder called 'Beware of the Leopard'

If nothing else I suppose it might scare people into actually tightening up their security controls, access rights etc.

Transport for London confirms cyberattack, assures us all is well

gryphon

I wonder if this is like the Kevin Bacon character in Animal House who keeps saying 'Remain calm, all is well' then gets knocked over and trampled on.

In other words, they would say that wouldn't they.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

gryphon

Re: Good timing

Indeed.

I fail to see how their ineptitude and inability to manage a major project can be blamed on central govt. if that body didn't say, you must use XYZ product with these exact customisations.

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

gryphon

Re: Long tail

A lot of diesels are having to be scrapped early or offloaded for very low values due to the Ultra and Low Emission Zones springing up all over the place which doesn't help.

Diesel's that do fair amounts of mileage are barely broken in at 100K miles.

Japan mandates app to ensure national ID cards aren't forged

gryphon

Remember that the private key of the great god certification will no doubt be protecting the details on the chip on the card.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

gryphon

Despite Microsoft's pushing of Defender as the answer to everything is it not best practise still to have different Anti-virus / anti-malware products on servers and clients.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

gryphon
Pint

Re: The Nightmare Is Becoming Real

Technically that was John's speech not Sarah's.

Mega-city's Oracle system won't have effective cash management until 2025

gryphon

Re: Central IT

Indeed.

Pavement parking is a case in point.

Edinburgh (Capita I think) have already rolled it out and are happily fining people.

Glasgow (again Capita) were going to roll it out but hit 'snags' with the software so can't start happily fining people until September.

One would have thought that Capita would have happily rolled out the same software to both councils which they've been using for various London councils for decades and charged them both for the 'customisations' as usual which would no doubt be very similar in both cases.

But it seems not. No doubt Glasgow wanted all the bells and whistles or somesuch.

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

gryphon

I had an NT4 file server that I inherited with 512Kb or so free on the C: drive that ran quite happily, even with reboots, for a couple of years before we managed to scrap it.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

gryphon

Re: H&S Rules! @Paul

Commuting is usually classed as driving to your permanent place of work only.

So if you worked in Manchester office say and were asked to drive to Liverpool office instead for a meeting you’d likely not be covered. Same with airports, training courses etc.

In saying that, a lot of insurance policies will ask if you want say 1000 miles of business cover within your estimated annual mileage and won’t charge much if anything more for it.

Although as usual always pays to read the small print and check if you are switching to someone who is cheaper, might only be on their ‘premium’ policies.

I believe it catches a lot of consultant type people out since they aren’t commuting per se when driving to the employer since it isn’t their permanent place of work.

That PowerShell 'fix' for your root cert 'problem' is a malware loader in disguise

gryphon

If a company is allowing outbound access to the open internet on a device that allows a normal user to get to an elevated command prompt or shell that's just foolishness anyway notwithstanding this issue.

For home users then that unfortunately goes back to an education issue.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

gryphon

Re: That will NEVER work

"Oh I see now, IDs for children..."

Scotland already has that via the back-door.

Look up Young Scot National Entitlement card.

Basically gives under 22's free bus travel amongst other things but all 'helpfully' taken care of by schools.

VMware security advisories now behind bureaucratic Broadcom barricade

gryphon

Broadcom are also very hectoring about not using out of date software versions even if properly licensed.

Apple broke the law with anti-union tactics in NYC, labor watchdog barks

gryphon

I think a lot of the EU laws, possibly some UK ones as well, are written as fines up to 5% / 10% etc. of worldwide revenues.

Unfortunately there haven't been any cases where the maximum penalty has been imposed that I know of.

$150K here, $2M there. Barely more than the lunch budget for board meetings so who gives a damn.

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

gryphon

Re: Not all a bed of roses

I think any time there are direction arrows on the road they should be repeated a good few metres behind at the side of the road. Preferably both sides if at all possible since trucks always obscure.

It's always a nightmare if you don't know an area and the road arrows go left turn in left lane to straight on on rights, then left or straight on in left and straight on in right etc.

October 2025 will be a support massacre for a bunch of Microsoft products

gryphon

Sorry to burst your bubble but support for removing Exchange itself and managing M365 mailboxes purely via PowerShell came out in CU12 in April 2022.

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

gryphon

Re: The problem is all or nothing "agreements"

Paypal and eBay are always fun that way.

Send you an email saying we are making minor updates to the T&C's please go to this website to find out what they are.

Guys, you've already taken the 'trouble' to send me an e-mail to say there are changes, maybe you could, I don't know, tell me what those changes are in the same e-mail?

Possibly a bit too much like radical thinking for the likes of them, or that they know 99.9999999999999999 recurring percent of people will never click through and be aghast at what they signed up to.

These 17,000 unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers are a ticking time bomb

gryphon

Security Updates can be delivered as .MSP files via WSUS etc. but wouldn't normally advise that even with multiple highly-available Exchange servers.

Too much risk of something going wrong and taking out all the servers if patching teams aren't checking things properly between each server.

Plus they should really be properly put into Exchange maintenance mode while carrying out OS patching let alone Exchange itself.

gryphon

Re: 17000+

Can't remember the stats but I'm sure the FBI know, for US at least.

Remember they went in to a massive # of servers in the US and removed web shells back in 2021 so they'd obviously been scanning for all the servers with public IP's that they could fine.

Page: