Posts by Mr. Flibble

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Router appliance

I've not used pfsense, but it's derivative, opnsense is pretty good for free too.

It's still nothing compared to Checkpoint or Palo Alto, but then I don't want to pay £10K + permanent subscription at home....

It's not the easiest to configure some of the more complicated settings, but the GUI is nice, and after a drive (or openbsd upgrade, not sure which) failure, the config restore process worked perfectly.

I did actually pay for a year of support at the beginningt, which is reasonably priced.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: Learned helplessness...

I wish I could award more than 1 up vote for this!

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Apart from from laptops and maybe portable speakers, everything else on the list is low power, what is your point?

I'm sure the exporters in non-EU countries have plenty of other countries to which they could export the old phones.

This legislation been on the cards for years, so they have had more than enough time to find other markets.

It's not like there's a shortage of secondhand, affordable phones in the EU already.

Does it matter? It's physically the same port, and must adhere to the usb-c specs, so who cares?

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

"administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services."

If they were good administrators, they would have been wondering this /before/ the move to the cloud, but were probably ignored....

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

... you mean farm, not garden: https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/category/solar/

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Re: Being fair

General Europeans? no, but Europeans in the HR dept of a company where they are responsible for offices in other countries? Absolutely!

Yeah, I tried getting my local council to switch, but they weren't interested :(

DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage

Re: Bad choices all around

That's the trouble with a lot of Hacker con badges, it all has to be done in <1 year, every year they change size and shape, and use different components, so every year there are different hardware and software problems to deal with.

Sometimes Neopixels are soldered on the wrong way round, sometimes aerials don't work well, etc etc, and then all that knowledge is dumped for a totally new design next time.

EMF this year tried to do a sort of backplane that will be the same for the next few years, so in theory parts can be upgraded - I just hope it doesn't turn out like the Intel overdrive socket fiasco.

It's all fun and interesting, and people usually want to play with new and shiny things, but I bet after the conference most of it just gets left in a drawer at home or becomes e-waste :(

Sadly I am guilty of this myself....

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Re: That is an absolute dick move

If you have loads of bandwidth and the time to set it up, I would recommend playing with peertube.

I set up an instance and it was quite easy.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Re: Firefox just does not work on some web sites.

Sure, but if it's too much in the minority, then nobody will listen to them, and the bigger players will just badly implement standards or create their own crappy ones, unless there's some competition to stop them.

Microsoft tried with stupid tags, Google tries with their FLOC etc.

I know there's the W3C, but they shouldn't be the only voice.

Re: Options.

Yes, that would be great, however, linking all this back in would be a bit of a nightmare I would expect.

I love Thunderbird, but there's loads of people that are frustrated with them not adding new features or fixing bugs quick enough, which seems to have spawned this: http://betterbird.eu/

Thunderbird is always complaining they don't have enough money to do what they want, which is sad. I do donate, but not as regularly as I'd like :(

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon is pounced upon by fast-acting admins

what? you mean like all software since the dawn of programming?

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Re: BASIC

I'm sure you could get BCPL (in ROM?) for the BBC, is that close enough?

Re: I still have the real thing

I snapped the spring mechanism in my joystick playing Elite - it now flops up and down and doesn't return to the centre automatically:(

My dad wouldn't let me play Hypersports in case I smashed the keyboard!

EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'

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.

World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule

Re: Malicious compliance.

V true, and read this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-service-iphone-repair-kit-hands-on to show how helpful they are now they will allow you to do your own repairs....

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

Alternatives

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 :(

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Re: Yes, We Will Honor Our Pledges

Yes quite, it's just another externality

Re: unpopular opinion: no, WFH and WFO are not the same.

Yes, quite, and what do your kids and dogs know/care about your job?

.. having said that, maybe better than the users you have to support :)

Re: unpopular opinion: no, WFH and WFO are not the same.

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....

Framework starts taking orders for 16-inch repairable, upgradeable laptop

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.

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Re: Dealing with scammers

Cool, there's even non-english swear words in there!

Today has been an education....

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: I bought an expensive OLED TV from LG...

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 ;(

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

They are - I've just had a letter to say we are scheduled to have one :(

NHS England spends £8M to extend Microsoft deals by a month

Re: Maybe not Linux but Office maybe ditchable

Pictures by fax?? really??

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: New password for everything

Use a local one, no a stupid cloudy one

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

Re: Why no WhatsApp ban?

"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.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Re: The only problem with pihole is...

you can whitelist things though....

The era of cloud colonialism has begun

Re: Two for one!

Ahh, that's why the Empire faded away - they started using expensive contractors?

Re: Website hosting?

Sadly it could be due to energy costs, all the stuff I run could be replaced with more efficient devices, but I still don't want to do it. It's all perfectly functional, and seems shitty to get rid of it :(

TikTok confirms it tracked journalists' locations as part of leak investigation

Re: Something’s not right here

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.

Equinix to cut costs by cranking up the heat in its datacenters

Re: We make a rod for our own backs...

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......

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

Re: I don't understand

Also, you can't take more than 100WH of batteries..... unless you're disabled, then you're allowed more than, so surely just "employ" "disabled" terrorists....

Re: FWIW

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?

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: Not sure I agree about that...

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....

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

Re: Apple is not making bank on $19 Lightning cables

So what is it about then?

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: Most of those red flags are complete nonsense

They have to use points??? Damn, I need to waste more of their time, sending me jobs that are totally outside my skillset/interest,..

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

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>

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

Oracle did that shit all the time... Log in to fix a problem, and then the session just sat there doing nothing for hours, got billed for the whole day....

Reds on the beds: Putin's war sparks Chinese chip boom, starting with electric blankets

Re: electric blankets and blackouts

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.

HP pays $1.3m to settle dispute over printer security chip

"The agreement cannot be considered as an acknowledgement of any fault or wrongdoing by HP nor as an acknowledgement by Euroconsumers of the groundlessness of its claims," it added.

So it will happen again.... great...

Xcel smart thermostat users lose their cool after power company locks them out

Re: Control issues

Nice!

I use this; https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/technical/emonpi/, it's not particularly cheap, buy it's all open source, which is nice, and is realtime. U can monitor as many circuits as the number of CT clamps you have for the device.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Thanks for the money but your stuffed.

No, quite, hence the "should".....

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

Re: Isn't it funny...

Fiat isn't an acronym, it means currency that isn't backed by something tangible, like precious metals.

It has nothing to do with the small car manufacturer either...

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

Re: Work in the cloud...

Disco biscuits?

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: Bollocks statistics

It;s because there's no "+1" option to rate the comment above

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

“We believe the changes wrought by the permanency of hybrid work and flexible learning will enable faster refresh rates across all user segments,” said Chou.

Great news! How many Hz are we talking about???

You wanna use GCHQ offshoot NCSC's threat intel feeds? Why not, say bosses

We've signed up for pDNS at work

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.