Re: Aston Kutcher's startup Thorn has its finger prints all over this push for client side scanning
Well, the service did have hosting 'problems', but it seems to be working right now.
94 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2011
Yes, there are some decent alternatives.
I self-host BBB and it is quite good, although it's easy to break as there are so many sub-systems, however the installer has got significantly better in the last couple of years.
Jitsi is way easier to set up, but personally I don't think it has quite the same level of features as BBB.
I should try Apache OpenMeetings again. It was a bit rough a couple of years ago, but i'm several versions behind now :/
Are any of them enterprise-grade? Not sure, but they are certainly worth a try, and I've never trusted Zoom.
If i have to use it, I run it in a sacrificial VM :(
I started a new job earlier this year, fully WFH, and it was a lot harder to get up to speed than if I was in the office.
It takes longer to find out if someone is free or not, and if they are really busy or just avoiding getting back to you about things.
We have daily dept and team meetings (takes 1-1.5h in total), which is useful, but not particularly efficient.
We only go in 1 day a month usually, for a big dept meeting, which is fine, but not enough.
During the last one someone in our group from the helpdesk said he would prefer it if we were in the office more often, which I agreed with and had to say it in front of everyone.
I was looking around the room to see if anyone was giving me evils, but there wasn't much reaction one way or the other.
I'm kinda making a rod for my own back as it takes me over an hour to get there, and I would have to pay for travel myself, but it feels so inefficient at the moment.
I'm sure it's fine for people that started before covid and knew most of their dept before lockdown etc, but I was doing a lot of thumb-twiddling during the first couple of months....
I was looking at the 4-module version when I was after a laptop a few years ago, and it seemed a bit pointless to have a modular laptop that you'd have to fill with standard modules just to get it back to a decently-ported laptop.
I would like to support them though, it's a great idea, and more laptops should be built with repairability in mind like theirs.
I had to agree to bs ts & C's with my recent Sony TV.
I couldn't even use it without agreeing to Google's crap.
I can't use the iPlayer app unless I agree to some non-bbc ts & C's, why?
I'll agree to the BBC's iPlayer TS and C's directly, thank you very much.
I wish is just bought a dumb ilyama display instead ;(
"So although the message might be end to end encrypted they can identify who is talking to whom and their locations. "
Sometimes that is enough - in the early nineties in the UK, it was said that the police hardly ever needed wiretaps of (landline) phone calls, the mere fact that 1 person was talking to another person they knew was dodgy would be enough to put you and others you called under suspicion.
No, it's because the "certain services" must be using an out of date GeoIP database, and your actual public internet isn't changing at all.....
I get it all the time, but as the error is meant for lusers, it doesn't give enough details to be useful in actually checking whether your account is actually compromised.
You can already get DC PSUs for both HP and Dell servers that fix the "common slot", although they are stupidly expensive new, and they say you can't mix DC and AC PSUs, which is a bit crap.
I bought a second hand 48v dell one so I could run a server direct from a solar battery, but it's got some random connector, neither pin says whether it's + or -, so I'm a bit scared to try it as I can't find any documentation about it.
I guess I've got a 50% chance of being right first time, and 50% chance of it letting out the magic smoke......
The TSA are wankers, in particular spent ages going through by shit, asking "why" i had some documents in french, and if a pack of glow sticks would explode if they opened it. They were being deadly serious. All that security BS has put me off travelling there.
They also had security theatre of a box I had to put my feet on soon after 9/11 happened - it was away from anything else and wasn't even plugged in, it was just a stupid wooden box with a picture of a footprint on it. What was that for? just to scare retarded terrorists?
Hmm, not sure it's feature equivalent at all - I tried it as I really didn't want a Domain Controller at home, but wanted something similar.
The equivalent of AD Users and Computers GUI is rubbish, and there's no way of creating OUs easily. All users are just shown in a massive list, with not heirarchy.
You have to use something like "Apache Directory something" as a client instead to get the structure.
It also uses Dogtag for SSL certs for clients, and I thought, great, I can also use it for my CA, and asked in forums/IRC (can't remember) on the best way of doing this, and was told in no uncertain terms that this would be a bad idea and to use a separate instance for my CA, which adds complexity for no reason.
I'd like to like it, but gave up as after a while, a reboot would destroy the LDAP indexes and I would have faff about sorting it out before any auth services would actually load.
Ok, it was the Turnkey Linux image, so maybe if i had used something else it might have been more stable, but it in general if was pretty disappointing.
As much as I hate MS, I do like AD, it's just a shame they are trying to get rid of it so eventually you will only be able to useuse their cloudy crap....
If anyone else can recommend a decent OSS (LDAP) alternative to AD, I'm all ears....
I'm sure contractors can also improve stuff.
I do so myself from time to time.... Most of it falls on deaf ears and they're still doing easily-automateable shit when im asked back again to do similar stuff, and I'm like... 'What? You're still doing it that way???'
<sigh>
They could be dangerous, but we've just bought some 12v ones that use <50w, This sounds rubbish, but if you turn them on 20mins before you go to bed, they're more than toasty-eough for my perpetually-cold gf, and usually she turns it off once she gets into bed.
Unfortunately you can only use it in public orgs (in my case, a council), but seems a good idea. You have to request your IP range to be whitelisted so you can use their servers are resolvers, and you get a "portal" which shows you reports of usage.
In theory it will then warn you if it sees too many requests for dodgy domains, and wierdly our org has gone from "green" status (no problems) to "orange" in the past few days, but annoyingly I can't find out what actually caused the state to change.....
You can also give them your website URLs and they will scan them for known vulnerabilities periodically, which is also useful.
@Mike 137 - totally.
Some of it may be security requirements - because vendors don't support old firmware or software, and the firms' security standards (or PCI-DSS), require replacements for perfectly good equipment in case they might have a security problem in the future, which the vendor is too cheap to patch.
A mate of gave me loads of Cisco 3750 switches and some old dell servers (they have 2003/2008 stickers on them) from where he worked. The switches are perfectly usable, and after patching I am using them in a council for a migration project, as it's a right waste of money to buy new ones which will only be temporary.
For the Dell servers, they've got crappy chips in them, but I will be slowly replacing them with multi-core ones, maybe adding some RAM, and they will be more than adequate to run VMs on etc. for a small company.
I can't blame my mate's company necessarily, maybe they had a big increase in users or newer software versions, but then they could have swapped the CPUs and added RAM/HDs etc themselves.
It is ridiculous how much money is wasted on replacing stuff that's perfectly adequate, but just done because the vendor wants to extract more money.
@codejunky - thank you for the links, interesting stuff.
Chairman Mao did loads of stupid things, that is just one of many. I'm not exactly sure that more data would have helped, as he would have done his own thing anyway. How many others that suggested he was wrong about things and were subsequently shot/imprisoned etc?
Unfortunately the video of Allan Savory doesn't load. I'll look for it elsewhere, but yeah, that's sad.
I wouldn't call Greta "tarnished", maybe there's people behind her telling her what to say, i don't know, but thanks to her, at least more people are thinking about the problems our economy and lifestyle is creating for future generations, and that is to be applauded.
I don't know, I'm not an export on the subject, but there's a shitload of reports etc on the subject that recommends sensible things. The "energy shortage" is lack of planning, not lack of data. References for the rest please...
Anyway, don't worry about too many insects, we're killing them off too.
"Yes! That's what we need! More reports and stats! There are only a few thousand reports on what is required to avert climate catastrophy, which is obviously not enough. This data collection and reports will only take a few years, only then will we actually think about fixing the problem."
.
.
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Fucking morons. We need more action, not more data.
HHJ Clarke said "...it appears from the evidence before me that even if an activation zone is disabled so that the camera does not activate to film by movement in that area, activation by movement in one of the other non-disabled activation zones will cause the camera to film across the whole field of view."
.... no shit Sherlock, that's how it's supposed to work
You can have IPv6 if you choose a non-shit ISP.
Until recently you could also have a a range of static IPs, and unless again, you use a shit ISP that uses carrier-grade NAT, then you can also request a static IP. Even ISP-provided routers allow you to do either port forwarding, and/or a default IP to forward on to a specific machine as a "DMZ".
Whilst hoarding IPv4 addresses is shitty - a previous company I worked at up to 2017 had a /16, and only used < 50 IPs.
The number of national ISPs that will give you working IPv6 (even mine had non-working DNS servers until I told them about it), whilst small, is >0, pick one if you're bothered.
However, I have just realised you're probably in the US, so maybe the situation is crapper than the UK....
Sadly WD were no better years ago for speed. I have had nothing but problems with drive replacements with them, even before brexit.
Another WD was "fake", even though I bought it from an authorised reseller, and the last one, they were complaining about the serial number, even though it wasn't fake in the end.
It took so long to get 1 drive replaced (a month) another one started failing and eventually I lost the array.
Before you laugh at my lack of planning, it was a personal system and I wasn't rich enough to have spare drives lying around...
For that reason I'm no buying WD ever again.
"The US couldn't possibly acknowledge that someone else could come up with something good, so they had to give it a new name.." - Not quite.
They'd already picked the name "AES" as a sort of competition to replace the "DES" standard. There were 8 (ish) competing algorithms at the start of the process, so whichever won would still have been called AES....