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.
Posts by Mr. Flibble
94 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2011
EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'
World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule
Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom
Thursday 17th August 2023 14:31 GMT 
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
Thursday 17th August 2023 13:52 GMT
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
Tuesday 25th July 2023 13:05 GMT
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
LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions
Thursday 13th July 2023 20:53 GMT
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
NHS England spends £8M to extend Microsoft deals by a month
Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'
India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck
Friday 12th May 2023 13:35 GMT
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
The era of cloud colonialism has begun
TikTok confirms it tracked journalists' locations as part of leak investigation
Thursday 29th December 2022 16:35 GMT
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
Wednesday 7th December 2022 19:57 GMT
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
Thursday 24th November 2022 18:34 GMT
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
Saturday 29th October 2022 15:49 GMT
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'
CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs
Wednesday 19th October 2022 19:32 GMT
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>
Reds on the beds: Putin's war sparks Chinese chip boom, starting with electric blankets
Tuesday 18th October 2022 19:28 GMT
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
Xcel smart thermostat users lose their cool after power company locks them out
Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025
More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz
ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power
Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows
The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC
You wanna use GCHQ offshoot NCSC's threat intel feeds? Why not, say bosses
Sunday 21st November 2021 18:52 GMT
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.
Techies tell BCS: More and richer data required if COP26 climate pledges are to be met
Saturday 13th November 2021 09:11 GMT
Re: "the hardware range will be 100 per cent recyclable in the not-too-distant future."
@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.
Thursday 11th November 2021 23:06 GMT
Re: @Mr. Flibble
@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.
Wednesday 10th November 2021 14:00 GMT
Re: @Mr. Flibble
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.
Wednesday 10th November 2021 13:36 GMT 
"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."
.
.
.
Fucking morons. We need more action, not more data.
Judge in UK rules Amazon Ring doorbell audio recordings breach data protection laws
Thursday 14th October 2021 12:16 GMT
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
The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time
Google staff who work from home might see pay cut under corporate policy – reports
It's time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc
Thursday 12th August 2021 16:02 GMT
Re: IPv6
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....
Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations
Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class
Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands
Friday 26th February 2021 18:55 GMT
Re: Should not have Netherlands VAT ...
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.
China bans encryption exports – including quantum and key management tech
Monday 7th December 2020 19:20 GMT
Re: @Christoph : Now I begin to understand
"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....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
