Posts by J. Cook

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

Re: Microsoft Active Directory

For Azure, there's actually two different things:

Azure ADFS, which is essentially a hosted version of ADFS that one your AzureAD tenant. If someone is moving from On-prem ADFS to Azure, they'll support configuring it, but not really recommending it because from what I was told, it's as much of a pain to setup and manage as the on-prem product.

AzureAD Connect, which is different enough that it's a separate product and SKU, but included with the AzureAD subscription. It also has hooks (more or less) built in for most products that support the SAML SSO specs.

Microsoft still has support for ADFS in Server 2019, but they really are pushing companies to move to Azure, because 'recurring revenue'.

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

Re: I don't have an ad-blocker....

It took some finagling on my setup, but my ubiquiti stack has a Pi-hole next to it, and I have a secondary Pi-hole sitting on elsewhere on the network in case the first one dies (again.)

I'm honestly more surprised that Ubiquiti doesn't offer it as an option in the cloud key.

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

Re: The C waord

I *thought* that video actually existed. (And it's both NSFW (put on headphones!) and hilarious at the same time.)

Re: Regional differences.

Yep. It's also different country to country.

Oh goody, the report is free to download. Time to start adding to my masterwork on the profane and obscene. :D

Re: It's "NOB" !

And the center of the venn diagram is shaped like a-

::gets picked up bodily and thrown out the door::

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Y'all are missing something...

Pointing to the law's ban on spam blocking and its establishment of a private right to action that allows blocked spammers to sue service providers, his exasperation triggers a full caps-lock outburst.

As if the texas courts were'nt clogged up enough from the previous law they passed, this one oughta do the trick as every single spammer around the world decides to sue texas based ISPs for having a spam filter.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Sshh!

Yup. 'bang' is right, along with pretty pretty sparks and lots of magic smoke and unhappy noises.

That's one of the things on the punch list for my pool remodel- put the pool on a proper two phase circuit instead of the janky 'hang one leg of each phase off breakers on opposing phases' arrangement that's currently in place, which is also Not Code. Thankfully, I have a pair of two phase breakers that aren't in use...

Re: Personal heaters

RV owners who don't want to pay an electrician for a proper 'shore power' circuit as well...

Re: Personal heaters

heh- you occasionally find those in the US, usually for an 'DIY RV shore line" when someone can't be arsed to set up the proper connections on the house side.

Or someone who was making up a power entrance cable for a very specific purpose. :whistles innocently:

(to be fair, it's a standard US outlet plug on one side, and a L5-15P on the other, which goes to power a table lift; I wanted the cord to be removable for transportation purposes, but also to not be able to be kicked loose like a normal C13/14 combo.)

Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover protocol found leaking hundreds of thousands of credentials

Also, I don't think it's Exchange Server, but the implementation for Autodiscover on the client side that has the issue. If anything, I don't think the original authors of the protocol dreamed it would be implemented over the internet. Also, the internet was a slightly more trust-worthy place back then. Slightly.

I'll offer up that the team that originally implemented it either: a) didn't know what they were doing at the time; b) made bad assumptions based on how the internet was designed at the time; or c) knew about the issue, tried valiantly to put in a proper fix that wouldn't overly break things, was overruled by manglement in favor of getting the product shipped, and left in disgust shortly thereafter with the junior varsity team to try and untangle their code.

My personal opinion is that it's a combination of all three.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: “The idea that these chatbots can be dangerous seems laughable,”

::Inception BONG::

Re: “The idea that these chatbots can be dangerous seems laughable,”

.. I see that you and Pascal Monett have both watched Inception all the way to the end, then.

Swift 5.5 unleashed with async keyword to fix 'pyramid of doom', plus other changes in 'massive release'

Re: await

Is there a way of saying "Run all these, get back to me when they're all done" rather than "do this, then do that, then do that, then do that"?

Great, now I have Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" running in my head. (not necessarily a bad thing, though...)

Boffins say Martian colonists could pee in buckets, give blood if they want shelter

Re: I wonder if fecal matter could be used

I was going to make that joke myself, but you beat me to it.

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

Re: Testing the UPS

... and powering the techs putting it all back together. :D

THIS.

Back when I was doing the 'roving field engineer' gig, I had a few client balk at the cost of a replacement for their failed DLT drive, which we had priced at ~$700 USD. (This was back when DLT was on the way out, and it was easier to buy a refurbished drive for some of our clients who had service contracts that covered labor, but not parts.) My response of "well, how much is your business really worth?" kind of shut them up on that one.

Re: An SFW tale to share?

I wouldn't know- I never went to band camp.

Re: Color coding

Had that happen to me with a storage appliance; Turns out that Nimble storage appliances get REALLY cranky when the second shelf of three expansion shelves loses power, because some chucklehead* plugged both leads into the same PDU whose upstream breaker had tripped. Thankfully, it was only DR, so once I got the power cabling sorted out and reset the breaker, the site came back to life and started to re-sync with production.

* That chucklehead was, in fact. Yours Truly. Whoopsie.

I'd give you multiple upvotes if that were possible- that's the best explanation I've seen of that.

Re: An SFW tale to share?

*giggles*

That reminds me that that one time where [redacted] did [redacted] to that system, and boy was [redacted] pissed! I didn't even know that [redacted] HAD trained goats that could do [censored], let alone [cens- ARE YOU KIDDING US?!?!?!]

If your storage admin is a bit excitable today, be kind: 45TB LTO-9 tape media and drives just debuted

Did the companies all get into agreement to not sue each other over who can produce the media this time? Getting LTO8 tapes was a right pain in the tuckus for the longest time because one of the companies decided they wanted the entire pie instead of sharing it...

(and it's kind of irrelevant over here anyway; we went tapeless at the beginning of this year.)

Re: Their expected compression ratios are a bit optimistic surely?

Well, yes. And if you use the hardware to encrypt the data, the hardware level compression gets turns off as the two are mutually exclusive. (it also opens a can of worms for getting that data back in the event of a DR event.)

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

Re: So true...

A little from column A, and a little from column B.

For example: I would make a terrible manager, mainly because my personality is not suited to managing people. I can manage machines just fine, and my current position is about where I've been wanting for a while now.

Not only were half of an AI text adventure generator's sessions NSFW but some involved depictions of sex with children

Re: MIMO

Yep. People KEEP FORGETTING THAT. You can't just shovel your entire dataset into these things without knowing what you are feeding them.

Feed a Nueral net processor garbage, and you'll get more potent garbage as the output. It's not magic, it's a selective pattern matching system that self amplifies because there's nothing there to tell it "no, that is not correct, this is what it should have been" and then people wonder why they get the worst quality of results from it.

After failing to make it to orbit, Firefly Aerospace asserts it has 'arrived'

Re: No power in the verse can stop us...

It was the entry coupling that did it...

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

Re: I wish I could afford one...

It might even run Crysis at full settings too. :grin:

Microsoft Azure deprecations: API changes will break applications and PowerShell scripts

Re: Rationale?

Indeed.

I've been getting the Azure-based Information RIghts Management module spun up to replace our older on-prem ADRMS system. Getting the on-prem file scanner setup and running has been a pain, because it's still using the Azure Information Protection(AIP) module, which was deprecated back in April; However, it's replacement (the Microsoft Compliance Information Protection) doesn't have nearly the same features, and in fact, still uses most of the AIP back-end code and data that is produced. It's... quite frustrating. Add to it the mess of documentation (multiple versions in multiple places, and a lack of coherency or combining things) and it goes from frustrating to aggravating.

(and even microsoft's own advocates and experts for the systems have trouble with it too.)

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

Re: year 2000

Back before ThinkGeek was assimilated by Hot Topic, I had bought both the V1 and V2 annoy-a-trons from them. I deployed them at work, and then after a day UN-deployed them.

That beep carries quite far in an open-cube farm...

Re: Cliche

Installers, too- we had a company installing some new gear in our lab, and they somehow managed to unplug one of the vmware hosts in there, and in the process of plugging it back in, glitched it in such a way that the BMC on it locked up..

Logitech Bolt devices support secure Bluetooth Low Energy – but forget the 'Unifying Receiver'

Re: No thanks

Huh. Never heard of that flavor of RSI, or that test. Thank you!

In Microsoft's world, cloud email still often requires on-premises Exchange. Why?

That'll be one of two reasons why we will be keeping an On-Prem exchange server, the other being that we have it connected to Call Manager for voicemail and a few other things that Unity would have otherwise provided if we were to license it again.

Microsoft does and doesn't want you to know it won't stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Re: Crashes?

also known as Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. (WIth an optional fourth of 'Damned Statistics'. )

Cloud load balancer snafu leads to 3D printer user printing on a stranger's kit

The people behind Juicero were also into the 'raw water' movement, which is a good way to give yourself food poisoning or worse by drinking untreated, unprocessed water without any form of removing any potential bacteria or other nasties in it.

Not the best product idea in the world, unless you were looking to 'juice' your customers of their money...

Yep.

My first was a printrbot simple metal I put togather from a box o parts. it was decent enough for 2014. It got a few factory (and non-factory) mods and replacement parts put into it, but what killed it was the hot end dying, combined with printrbot as a company going casters up.

I tried to refurbish a flashforge dreamer, but hit the wall of "for the amount of money I need to sink into it for replacement parts, I can buy a new one" so I did. my CR-6 has been more or less solid for me, Although the Community firmware for it blows the factory firmware out of the water in terms of features and usability. (that is one of two mods I've done, the second was hard-wiring a power cord to the supply and trashing the power entrance that blew out on me and is listed as a "known issue" with the first-gen run of that model...)

You mean like several other models that had an RFID chip in the filament spools and refused to use the spool unless it could read the chip, and which kept track of how much filament was used from the spool and refused to let one spool fresh filament to it?

or the current generations of Makerbot, which have reduced the hot end to a proprietary module and has become user-hostile to people who want to mod them?

Or other printers that are dependant on a cloud server to drip-feed them commands, because the controller boards don't have engough grunt or a smart enough firmware to process gcode?

Or all the various ideas that have been floated to try and limit what people can print on their machines? (I have a separate rant about this one and copyright, but that's out of scope for the moment.)

Playdate handheld game system torn to pieces, crank and all

Re: "what exactly is an analogue crank"

... it's not making you cranky, is it?

OW! I'm going! OW!!!!

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Re: The other thing is

just need some youtube idiot to mention toilet paper is running out again,

I got news for you, at least in the US...

mines the one with the spare rolls in the pockets.

Re: No surprise there...

A third party company even went so far as to research, design, build, & market a small device that intercepted the machine error codes so the operators could order the parts they'd need to do their own repairs. The icecream company sued that company for interfering with their business.

Not quite. It's the other way around- the third party is suing the franchisee and the company that makes and services the machines for breach of NDA, breach of contract, and trade secrets violations.

I never thought that industrial espionage would be found, in all places, an ice cream machine manufacturer.

Re: Border Bureaucracy?

Well done, enjoy the upvote(s).

Re: My milkshake

Was waiting for this comment.

I counter with this:

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/286096-verbose-classy-memes

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

My guess with that one (which has hit me many times) is that the programming call that creates the folder creates it first with "new folder" as the name, and then performs a second call to rename the folder. And due to write caching vs read caching, you get a mild race condition where you are trying to open the folder by it's new name before everything catches up.

It's probably in the same class as the bug I ran across in windows 7 and has yet to be fixed in the GUI with moving folders with a lot of children objects (folders, subfolders, and files) in it. One of those things where it's faster to spawn a command prompt, map the UNC path to a drive letter, move the damn folder, unmap the drive letter, and close the command prompt then wait the several to many minutes while the GUI walks the file tree for that folder.

Now, I could see where it's checking to make sure that things like file path limitations aren't being violated while it's doing so, but it never says it, it just sits and spins and gives the appearance that it's not doing a damned thing when in reality it's actually gone and done it, it's just doing something in the background to make sure it did it safely. An annoyance at best.

Boston Dynamics spends months training its Atlas robots to perform one minute of parkour almost perfectly

It's an interesting demo, for certain.

I'd love to see a blooper reel of failed attempts, though.

Re: Boston Dynamics didn't release any information about their battery life.

Probably longer than that; maybe twenty minutes of full performance, but with reasonable power management, possibly as long as an hour?

And of course there's no information on battery life publicly available- that's a trade secret.

(my guesstimate is based largely on power usage from how fast some of my cordless tools can drain the larger capacity battery packs I have for them.)

Re: Cue 'robotic overlords' panic from the internets

You forgot the reciprocating saw in that list of-

:is forcibly ejected from the room:

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

You get an upvote for the Far Side Reference, good sir!

Re: Sumption is wrong

There is an overlap between Qanon and the "Sovereign Citizen" movement.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's another movement I need to take.... in the restroom, which is a more productive version of what those folks spout. :D :D :D

IETF rates itself 'minimally acceptable' on key measures of community, efficacy

(and I note that in the mobile phone space they've managed to go from 2G in 1991 to 5G while the IETF has been struggling with the acceptance of IPv6 over almost that whole period)

To be fair, going from IPV4 to IPv6 is not a trivial thing for most companies, who are quite satisfied with putting their DMZ hosts behind a NAT; Most ISPs are loath to hand out static IPv6 addresses either.

To wit: what they got works- why fix it when it's not broken?

Un-carrier? Definitely Unsecure: T-Mobile US admits 48m customers' details stolen after downplaying reports

Re: Shouldn't I be hearing this first from T-Mobile?

The fun part will be that, as a former T-mobile customer who went to a different carrier a number of years ago, I'd like to know a) if they still have my information on file from over 10 years previous; and b) if so, WHY IN THE FIREY INFERNAL REALMS DO THEY STILL HAVE THAT INFORMATION?!?!?!?!!??!

::sighs and goes over to the credit bureaus to ask for yet another "information theft" lockdown::