Posts by J. Cook

F5 emits fixes for critical flaws in BIG-IP gear: Hopefully yours aren't internet-facing while you ready a patch

That's about the only saving grace- it only affects the control plane and management UI.

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

Re: Will this be a problem for embedded device certs?

Chromes throws it's toys out of the pram with any cert that it can't validate, or ones that are not in the computer's trusted store, so business as usual.

Re: That kinda sucks...

... the two that I've worked with (Digicert and GoDaddy) don't do that. And to my knowledge, no 3rd party CA does that. They'll grandfather in the current 2 year certs, but switch them down to single year after they expire.

They'll auto-renew the certificate and charge you for the auto-renewal, but the onus is still on the purchaser to either install the new certificate, or step through the process to produce a new CSR, re-issue the cert, install it, etc.

Internally run CAs, on the other paw, are pretty much anything goes; if you want your internal CA to issue a certificate that has the same lifespan as the root CA's certificate, it'll do it, more or less. It's contrary to best practices, but who follows those? :)

Stinker, emailer, trawler, spy: How an engineer stole top US chip designs, smuggled them to China to set up a rival fab

Re: So what about Chinese non-nationals?

Things get strange when you're talking the difference between mainlanders and Honkies (blame the wife for that one) who tend to be somewhat confrontational at the moment.

Sadly, in the US, "Honky" means something entirely different, but it's just as bad as far as pejoratives go.

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

In tents and porpoises? Kinky!

*shows self the door one step ahead of the bouncer*

Step on it, I've got the police on my hack: Anon swipes, leaks online 269GB of crime intel docs from cops, Feds

Re: Nice

er, withOUT redaction... I could have sworn that I typed it correctly the first time.....

Re: Nice

That, and you'll get it with any redaction, too!

Netgear was told in January its routers can be hacked and hijacked. This week, first patches released – after exploits, details made public

That's perfectly acceptable- I bought an R7690P back in december which apparently has a flaw in it that when you power cycle the device, it reverts to factory defaults. Netgear's response is "take it back to the purchase place for an exchange, or pay for a support call to swap it, even if it's under warranty."

I replaced it with a TP-link something or other and DD-Wrt'd it- even though that firmware is still beta, it doesn't lose it's config after a power cycle...

I'm done with Netgear at this point for good.

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Re: No drivers.

Yep. those Canon EX based printers are my personal favorite. major things that go wrong with them are the pickup rollers and the fuser assembly. Give me 20 minutes and a 'maintenance kit' for them, and it'll be good to go for another 50,000 prints.

Re: "I'm the IT director for ..."

... I try to not buy those printers, or buy ones with an actual UI on the damned machine.

I also don't work with the general public anymore, and I try to not interact with the bulk of my users either.

(Being at that company for 10 years and having the letters 'senior' in my job title generally means that If I'm busy doing something, best not to bother me, because either a) I already know it's broken and I'm neck deep trying to fix it; b) on the phone with the vendor doing same; c) doing something which, if done wrong, will cause items a or b. )

Re: "The IT manager turned up clutching a clipboard"

When I was working as a field technician (B2B repairs, service agent for various extended service companies, etc.) I kept my work orders and a pad of paper in a contractor's clipboard. (basically a hinged box with a divider inside to hold writing utensils, and a clipboard clip riveted to the lid) Kept my paperwork tidy enough, and it was part of my tool bag.

Re: Ah IT 'managers'

"A manager's role is not to hire and fire, but instead to lead and inspire."

I heard this from somewhere (reddit, probably), and the intent from Maxim 63* is present as well.

* "The brass knows how to do it by knowing who can do it."

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

Re: different this time?

"(For many jobs -- I'm thinking medical -- it's tablets that have helped make the transition. Portable and about the same size as the paper you're replacing.)"

And if they are properly encased, spill-proof, easy to clean and sanitize. paper... no so much.

Re: One might wonder

"I don't know now but 28 years ago I was made to investigate the content of black laser printer toner cartridges and it was all carbon and iron. An office worker had complained it burned her skin, and there was no 'rational' reason but the burns were undeniable."

The office worker was one of the Fae, that's the only explaination for iron burning one's skin...

58 Starlinks scattered across sky, Rocket Lab aims for back-to-back launches, and Skyrora hops 6km above Shetland

Re: Cape Shetland

Well, mythical for you, possibly- we've got buckets of sunshine here in Arizona.

Adobe about to pull the plug on Creative Cloud freebie 'at-home' access for students

Actually, the BOLTR (Bored Of Lame Tool Reviews) videos are pretty damn funny.

Re: Are Adobe products the only ones ...

You forgot to mention that the pig was wearing lipstick.

I could never get a hang of OneNote, but then, I'm horrible at taking notes.

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

We ran into that allll the way back with 2008 R2. There's a service called Network Location Awareness, and by default it tries both passive and active probing to determine if there's internet access. Usually the result of it is that a browser window is brought up (usually to perform a proxy authentication against a web security appliance or gateway), but more often than not it's just another ill-documented annoyance.

To fix this 'issue', disable Active Probing in the registry: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4494446/an-internet-explorer-or-edge-window-opens-when-your-computer-connects

I'm willing to bet money that this is what's happening with some of these folks.

Microsoft disbands three-ring Windows Insider circus and replaces it with 'channels'

I'm thinking someone in charge (HA!) finally got the circus connection and got upset...

Re: what about a channel for...

This, perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOIhM0NcHakhdBqvdrWxMBg

(with apologies to all swedes out there)

Oh, you wanted one that does not go b0rk... can't help you there.

Living up to its 'un-carrier' slogan, T-Mobile US stops carrying incoming calls, data in nationwide outage

Re: What's an "un-carrier"?

Indeed; it's double-plus-ungood.

(finally get a change to use this icon correctly...)

US senators propose $22bn fund for new fabs on American soil because making stuff is better than designing stuff

Re: Unlikely to succeed

Yep; that's why it's being built in arizona.

Frenchman scores €50k compensation for suffering 'bore-out' at work after bosses gave him 'menial' tasks

Re: 4 Years

oooohhh. soda | nose = tingly!!!

Lettuce Encrypt, Encrypt We Must: Hobby projects change name after Let's Encrypt fires off trademark complaints

Re: "Heavy-handed or..."

I was wondering where my neutronium gloves got carted off to...

Microsoft's own operating system should finally start working on its own hardware ... 'in the coming weeks'

Re: Sums up Microsoft's quality control

Add "lock-in" to that list; a lot of shops are MS shops, because their line of business apps are all windows based.

NASA launches a challenge to fund AI systems for future spacecraft – hopefully without HAL-style errors

Re: The AI will just...

As one who never actually saw the movie until recently and had read the book years ago, I was a little surprised that it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the movie about why HAL went insane.

And while I know that ML is still in it's infancy, we are putting far too much trust in it without fully understanding it's logic.

We really need to make any ML or AI system be Three Laws Compliant before we trust them fully.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: nutters

It's really bad when they try to disguise it as a pine tree... in the middle of the ('effin) desert. I could see it working in the northern area of my state (arizona, US) where we do have pine trees, and even tall ones, though...

(technically, the other disguise they use (palm trees) aren't native to my area either, but the tree species that are don't grow that tall...)

Re: Sigh...

Sadly, unlike genius, stupidity has no known limits.

Re: "a suspended sentence"

Possibly.

I'm more fond of the phrase "A short drop and a sudden stop" as popularized by a certain mouse-eared movie about pirates in a tropical island...

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: No, don't check how long it will be supported!

The problem is that in the consumer realm, a 4K capable TV with basic HDMI and a digital tuner doesn't really exist- I know, I've looked. I ended up settling on a RokuTV made by TCL, which made sense because we already had a Roku on the projector it replaced. (turns out that 4K projectors are still buttock clenchingly expensive)

Now, if we move into the commercial and entertainment sectors, Yes. You can certainly buy an 85" diagonally measured 4K display from NEC that has any combination of inputs you want- HDMI, Displayport, etc. You can even get them with a digital tuner if you want. What most people don't want is the $21,000+ USD cost; however, these things are designed and rated for 100% duty cycle over their rated lifespan of 3-5 years, IIRC. (i.e., mount them, connect cables, turn on, and three- five years later turn it off and replace it because the display quality has degraded)

My employer chews through these displays at an impressive rate.

Re: Scott Helme on expiring TLS root certificates

And the trusted root store issues are typically resolved with.... a patch update. Which leads us right back around to the Internet of Shite devices which don't get patched, or get obsoleted after a frighteningly short life span.... Tablets included. (same with Smart TVs, which are in the same class as IoT devices.

Ask anyone that used windows 2000 and windows XP about the "root certificate update" patches... This is not a new issue, or even a 'end of the internet as we known it' issue.

Re: A solution looking for a problem

For music in my kitchen, we bring in either a tablet or phone and play it there if we care enough about it, or possibly one of the bluetooth speakers we have lying around.

I have a binder labeled 'recipe file' that has a bunch of printouts in it- it sits next to a couple cheap cookbooks we bought. I go the extra mile and use the 'almost out of" shopping list pads made by Knock-Knock, because I like whimsical things.

Re: All part of the planned obsolesence

... and the Note 8 (from 2015) received two years worth of updates for it, and while it was possible to jailboreak it, root it, and install Lineage on the poor thing, I lost the functionality that made it a neat product (the drivers for the pen) and, strangely enough, audio. And to add injury to insult, Lineage ran like a dog on the thing, too.

Re: Never understood this

I wish that whoever owns the IP for Sunbeam would bring back the Radiant Control toaster; paying over $100 USD plus shipping on ebay for used ones that either need repair or are parts corpses is a little on the nose. (there's zero microcontrollers in the thing- it's all clever application of levers, spring tension, and thermodynamics...)

On the same side of that piece of toast, why is it so difficult for companies to make a toaster that Just Works? I run into units that either burn the toast on the light setting, or give me a piece of stale, dry brad on the 'turn it into charcoal' setting.

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Re: Forcing us to the Cloud 'Solution' and Subscription Hell?

*gloats at being able to restore files off an LTO1 tape once a drive and machine and software were found for it.*

If it's important, back it up to multiple places, on different types of media.

(bring on the downvotes- You know I'm right about tapes!)

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Re: 640K

I'm assuming that's the sound it makes when it melts the case it's put in? :)

*wanders off to source a fan and duct for his PiCade*

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

I knew it was a crock at the phrase "proprietary holographic nano-layer catalyst technology".

Technobabble belongs in Star Trek, dammit.

26 million logins believed to be stolen from LiveJournal in 2017 pop up on hacker forum

FWIW, Dreamwidth is a much better place to host a journal that's Not FailBook. The only thing in common between the two was the source code, which DW has since (heavily) improved upon in the last 11 years or so.

Bias: I'm a seed account holder, and I've met Denise in person. (She's cool.)

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

Re: 50% are dumber than you

"Think about this: think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that." - G. Carlin (RIP)

Apple promises third, no, fourth, er, fifth time's a charm when it comes to macOS Catalina: 10.15.5 now out

Re: It's UNIX

uh... no.

MacOS only vaguely resembles the FreeBSD kernel that it was based on those many, many years ago.

Unless you mean "wipe the storage and install an Open source OS" on it, in which case I wish you the best of luck.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: The Wheel of History

I've used Notes (casually, and largely as a tech doing installs and troubleshooting). I've used Groupwise back during the Netware 4.x / 5.0 days. I've used Outlook in all it's forms; We'll leave Outlook Express (later renamed to simple "Mail" for win10) out of this discussion.

They all that their good points, and at some level, they all suck various amounts of goat urine.

While I've never used the back-end of Notes and Groupwise, I imagine they are on the same level as Exchange.

I've yet to work with any application that does what those products do nearly as well and with that level of integration.

Re: Excel excels

*nods sadly*

At [RedactedCo], we have some spreadsheets that our finance department uses that pulls in data from multiple sources, folds spindles, and mutilates it into a format that the analytical accountants can read through. Back in the early windows XP/7 days, we had to fit several of the computers that used these spreadsheets with more memory, because excel took all of it.

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

Re: Well there's the problem

Easy-peasy, if you know where the database instance holding the tickets resides, and something common to all the spammed tickets. A single T-SQL line will take them all out.

TSMC to build new 5nm chip factory in Arizona with US government backing

Part of the problem with the Foxconn deal in wisconsin was that the state gave them some monsterous tax offsets, and behaved pretty poorly in other ways. (like claiming eminent domain on some of the properties in the way of where the factory was going to be built, which included houses- that's not what that's for) And Foxconn kept changing it's position and scope of what they were going to build after they got those incentives...

I'm hoping my state didn't do the same thing.

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Re: WTF ?!!

Might be a tear gas launcher, too, but that sounds a lot more plausible.

Our police use the (infamous) Taser guns in our chunk of the world.

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

And now I have the opening theme to the Rocky Horror Picture Show running in my head.

But then, it's friday, it's payday, so I guess I'll make a jump to the left... then a step to the right.

DEF CON is canceled... No, for real. The in-person event is canceled. We're not joking. It's canceled. We mean it

Re: But why the bother??

It's not vegas, it's pretty much *any* convention where people from different area of the world are flying into.

It's commonly known as 'Con Crud"

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Re: Labels people, and read them!

Or slap em on the bezel/vanity cover. Even if it's removable. 'cause unless you are making major changes, who pulls half the bezels off a room full of servers on a lark?

Re: Labels people, and read them!

If the DHCP server (windows, 'nix, etc.) doesn't support HA, you split the damn scope, like the best practices state. It's not that hard.

FWIW, Server 2012 R2's DHCP server does support HA, although it takes a bit of effort to set it up.

And also. LABEL THY PRODUCTION SERVERS. Even if it means you print a label out of paper and cellotape it to the front of the server.

Prepare to have your shonky password hygiene shamed by Firefox 76

Re: Mozilla FF... dead in the water AFAIC

Don't forget the 'whoopsie- we let the SIGNING CERTIFICATE FOR OUR PLUGIN SYSTEM EXPIRE AND BROKE *EVERYONE'S* PLUGINS' incident which was the final nail in the coffin for me, so to speak.