Posts by el_oscuro

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

Re: Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with.

Well their marketing department was the first against the wall when the revolution came. And in this timeline, there is long line to be the first against that wall.

Microsoft slaps Windows 11 update hold on hardware connected to eSCL devices

Re: Hi ...

I still have a fax - connected to second phone line. And I still use it enough to justify that line.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

Well they also make Iron Maiden videos.

https://youtu.be/gKFm1gXVoaA

But old fashioned humans make better ones.

https://youtu.be/vA1oUEBIx94

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Cables

If you haven't already, make sure you do so with an email to get it in writing. And save the copy somewhere safe to protect you if someone else abuses the account.

Fedora 41: A vast assortment, but there's something for everyone

Re: Fedora here

For me there is one feature that keeps me tied to Ubuntu distros - LTS support. Not only do you get a full 5 years support, but they offer in-place upgrades. I have a laptop that I have been running Ubuntu for almost 10 years and it has 22.04 on it. It is my work daily driver, so I haven't gotten around to upgrading to 24.04 yet. But I have the option to do just that without reinstalling. Other distros like Debian and RHEL are just beginning to get in place upgrading capabilities, but Ubuntu has had it for decades.

Why we're still waiting for Canonical's immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop

Re: I’m not a fan of ‘snap’

I also have issue that I know are snap related. One of my work requirements is to use a badge reader with a PKS library that is configured in Firefox as a security device. After the upgrade to 22.04 which made Firefox a snap, it broke that. Since snap packages have their own virtual filesystem, I can't load the library and it makes Ubuntu useless for that application.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Wat?

Actually, that is even more ironic, given that both of them are actually in liquid form.

Healthcare Services Group discloses 'cybersecurity incident' in SEC filing

I'm probably in it. Today ends with "day". Equifax, OPM, Cigna, Home Depot, MOVEit, a former health insurance account, a former mortgage account and a few more. Most within the last few years. I might as well post my name, DOB and SSN on the dark web. At least I have my credit frozen. That is unless someone breaches them again and runs this SQLi query":

name=smith'; update accounts set frozen='N' where frozen='Y'; --

IBM scores $45M zinger from Zynga in patent wringer

Re: Software and business patents

Hopefully, they can both go bankrupt, stiffing the lawyers in the process.

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Re: Alas, no "Internet Keyboard Pro"

I still have one of those too - it is currently hooked up to a 20 year old PC in an arcade cabinet that runs MAME on Lincade.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: Raise

The original Windows 98 has entered the chat. While it didn't have that active desktop crap, it was still a steaming pile of shit.

Re: cue the wailing

If you are going to have to use a command line anyway, why not skip the GUI entirely and just run Linux?

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

Re: Eating Tips

If you are in Germany, you *must* get the local bier. Even if you don't drink beer. It is that good. And speaking of good, make sure you also hit the Imbiss (German food truck). Get the brat wurst or chicken schnitzel with the pommes frites. You *must* get the pommes frites from the Imbiss. They are life altering. They are the best fries on this planet. And you can't get them anywhere but the Imbiss. If you go to a restaurant or hotel, forget about it. Those fries will be disgusting, even worse than fries at most restaurants on the other side of the pond. And that is saying something.

If you don't go to the Imbiss while in Germany, you are missing one of the best parts of Germany. And don't forget to pick up a 6 pack of the local bier too.

Referencing your icon, I am currently on the other side of the pond drinking an Tucher Helles lager, imported directly from Germany. And the weird shit is, it is actually cheaper that most crappy American brands.

Texas sues GM for selling driver data to analytics, insurance companies

Re: They're just mad

My first thought was that they want that info themselves for their new abortion police squads.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: The tools are wrong.

I wrote critical production web C++ code at the turn of the century (that was used at least a few billion times over its 10 year time in prod). And how did I manage memory? I didn't. I just used the ANSI string library which wasn't even really new then.

Re: Yees but ..

I have seen that with Oracle PL/SQL. One developer wanted to run a process in a loop, kind of like a cron.hourly. Sure enough, when we tested it, it leaked memory.

Re: Choices

In my C++ based web front end (which was used a few billion times in the 10 years it was in prod), I never mucked around with memory management. I just used the AnsiString library which handled it for me.

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: Three cheers for Linux! I guess..

[i]If you'd care to list what you actually run/do on Linux, it would be more interesting, possibly even useful.[/i]

OK, I'll bite. I run all of these without having to install drivers, fiddle with config files, command line, or anything like that:

1. Office - Office 365 (https://office.com), Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Outlook, Word, Excel, One Drive, etc. I actually switched from Windows 10 to Ubuntu for my work daily driver - because all of these worked better - on Linux.

2. Media - Photo Manager, MP3 music libraries, video editing, scanning documents. All of these tools are either pre-installed in Ubuntu or can be downloaded easily through the software center. All GUI, no command line required.

3. Games - Subnatica, Starfield, Jedi: Fallen Order, The Expanse, Control, and probably about 100 others. Just finished Subnatica last night (300 hours). All installable and playable through Steam/Proton. NVIDEA drivers are installable through the GUI, or on my latest system76 model came pre installed.

4. WI-FI - drivers used to be an issues with Linux - 20 years ago. But it isn't 2005. Every computer I have owned since has used WI-FI without any issues. I have never installed WI-FI drivers or anything like that, and I have installed Ubuntu on a lot of different laptops, Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc.

There is one issue on Linux that I have struggled with. When I first got a 4K monitor, fonts looked tiny. This has largely been addressed in the last few years but it still pops up occasionally.

Re: Still Disingenuous

To run Microsoft Office on Linux, just point your browser to https://office.com and login. That is it. Microsoft actually has Linux clients for things like Teams, but you don't need them. The browser based edition has all of the same functionality of the local clients.

Re: Something we all know, but isn't said out loud enough in the press

For spider solitaire, check https://cardgames.io which has it and a lot of other games. Or install AisleRiot which almost every distro has, and also has all of those games. You can probably use one note through the Office 365 web client. I don't use one node, but I see it when I use the rest of Office 365. And as far as I can tell, the web client has the same functionality of the locally installed one.

Re: Will most people know or care though?

It isn't 2005 anymore. Zoom, WebEx, Office 365 (web based) all have installers and work on Linux. MS even has a Teams (no web based) client for Linux, but I never use it as the web based one works perfectly. I have installed Linux on about a half-dozen commodity laptops (Dells, Thinkpads, HPs and so on) and every thing has worked flawlessly out of the box. The only device I had to download drivers for was a scanner. And despite that scanner being 20 years old, it still works flawless on the latest version of Ubuntu.

And by a strange coincidence, 2005 the year of Linux desktop for me - simply because tasks like this were easier. I was taking pictures of my kids with an el-cheapo Kodak camera. It was out of storage, so I needed to download pictures to a computer so I could take more. I plugged it into a Windows computer, hoping to see an E: drive pop up. No dice. After about a half-hour of googling and downloading 100MB of crapware, I was finally able download my photos.

Just before I went out, I plugged that same camera into my Linux box. A dialog box popped up: "A USB camera has been detected. Would you like to import your photos into F-Spot?"

That is the day that Linux officially became easier than Windows for most common tasks.

Re: Happily switch to Linux, but.....

You know that one drive works fine with Linux too, along with the rest of the Office 365 (browser based) suite?

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

Re: It's not a Recall

Seriously, I have made some pretty ghetto repairs to my cars interior, but have never resorted to double sided tape. At least I use the correct tape, duck tape.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

Most of those formulas existed more than 20 years ago. How much have they changed since then? And those formulas ran on that hardware without issues, so why would they suck now? Because: Micros~1. Your modern Windows is spending too much time hoovering up your data and showing ads to actually do something useful.

I routinely run the latest Ubuntu on hardware that is over 10 years old without any performance issues. And Ubuntu isn't exactly a light distro.

So why does Windows require an high end PC just to display a desktop?

Adobe users just now getting upset over content scanning allowance in Terms of Use

Re: When wil people learn?

I use Oracle because that is my job. While all of the criticism is justified and they practically wrote the instruction manual on enshitification, they don't hoover up your data. Yet. Then again, I run my databases on my equipment, not on their cloud.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Fragile and Waterfail

That sounds kind of like ITIL. Know what you have, where it is, what you need and stuff like that.

The last time I saw an "agile" project, it involved hundreds of people attending 2 day planning ceremony meetings. Fortunately, WFH cured that, and we can put those on zoom and ignore them while we do actual work.

40 years of IT and the lesson is the same

Knowing the requirements before you start cranking out code

Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last – with human crew aboard

Here on the other side of the pond, our ARS overlords explained it well. They were in max-Q when the SRBs shut down. They had to get a little higher so the SRBs wouldn't hit the rocket when they separated.

Both of them have to have some real brass ones to get in that thing.

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

Re: MS Needs Broken Up

Can we also break up Facebook, Boeing, Google, Nestle, Unilever, Kroger, Bayer while we are at it?

Re: Pump it

Here on the other side of the pond, are ARS overlords are reporting record numbers of people taking the plunge and switching to Linux.

Re: Mixed Reality group

Is that like managing to both having tea and no tea, without your brain exploding?

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

They already have all of this on urs.microsoft.com. Several years ago, I was pentesting an internal corporate web app with an intercepting proxy using Windows 7 and IE8, with the default recommended MSFT settings. As soon as I logged in to the app, the proxy recorded a strange out of bound HTTP request to https://urs.microsoft.com. This request had an XML payload of my my entire request to the internal app, which included all of my login details, sent to MSFT without my consent.

Googling it, it turns out that URS stands for "URL Reputation Services" and supposed to check URLs for malicious websites. A reasonable idea if it was explicitly opt-in, as the list of websites you visit is also sensitive. But sending the complete requests, that is a straight up MiTM attack, and who knows how many terabytes of sensitive info are on urs.microsoft.com.

Re: There's a gem of a good idea in there...

I'm sure you could set up a cron job to do that in Linux if you needed it, and you would have complete control over it.

Re: Doomsday virginity

Probably the same people who will try to monitor women's PCs to check if they attempted to get any sort of maternal healthcare.

Re: Maybe everyone DID point out "This really, really sucks"

The first time I heard that joke was from my dad - almost 40 years ago.

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: TOTAL RECALL

https://youtu.be/IA3k-T7ciAU

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

My first Linux gaming rig was a MAME arcade cabinet that I built in 2006 running Lincade. The custom video drivers for my Wells/Gardener CRT are so good that vector games like Asteroids and Tempest look like actual vector games despite it being a CRT.

And my latest gaming rig is a System76 running PopOS. Every single game I have tried under Steam proton works perfectly. Starting a new game of Starfield now.

Re: All I want to know

Most Linux distros allow you to boot directly off of a USB stick without affecting your Windows installation at all. And should everything work to your satisfaction, you can easily install it right along side Windows and use either one.

Re: You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table

As someone who is both:

1. A woodworker knows that your tables will explode if you fail to account for wood movement.

2. A DBA knows that your tables will explode if you don't sanitize your inputs and someone names it "Bobby".

Re: users don't know a gigabyte from a pint.

selects appropriate icon...

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

I have never had issues printing in Linux in 2 decades. For my document scanner, I have to install some drivers (which are now 15 years old). But they still work perfectly, as does the SimpleScan program that comes with most distros. Wi-Fi has been a solved problem since about 2006. Sound was also an occasional issue until about 2005.

2005 happened to be the same year that I stopped using Windows. I had just bought an El-cheapo USB camera and was taking pictures of my kids. I used up all the space, so I needed to download them before it got dark. I initially plugged the camera into Windows, expecting to see an E: drive or something like that. Nothing. Took 30 minutes to download and install 100MB of crapware before I could copy the pictures. Just before I went back out, I also plugged the camera into my Linux computer. "A USB camera has been detected. Would you like to import your photos into F-Spot?"

And earlier today, I decided to boot one of my work laptops in to Ubuntu to see if I could use the Office365 suite with it. Our organization uses a custom keycard TFA, so it is not trivial. I booted up it up, updated the packages and fired up Office. The TFA worked perfectly as did Teams in the first meeting I attended. In fact, everyone said they could hear me better than on Windows.

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

Well as easy as it is, most users never change the defaults on their preinstalled O/S much less install a new one, so there is that. Most people would need their "computer guy" to do it.

Installing Linux on bare metal hardware has been easier than Windows for decades. These days, it is mostly answering questions like how much space should be allocated, the computer name, language and stuff like that. Once set up, Linux "just works", even games. Steam proton works so well that I don't even bother to see what platform it is for. Starfield worked perfectly right out of the box.

Re: Domestic Abuse

... Or what one of those forced birth states could do with a woman's PC.

Micros~1 has been watching you for a while

Several years ago, we were pen testing an internal web app on IE8 with Windows 7. I set up Burp Suite as an intercepting proxy and watched each request as I logged into the application. Imagine my surprise when out of nowhere, the browser made a request to HTTPS://urs.microsoft.com. And in that request was an XML payload containing my complete request to the internal app, including the login credentials.

This was literally the definition of a MiTM attack, and researching URS.MICROSOFT.COM, it stands for "URL Reputation Services". Supposedly, it is supposed to identify malicious URLS, and was turned on in a default Windows 7 installation. I could see some sort of opt-in for sending the hostname for checking. Even that is evil if not opt-in. But this? It destroyed what little trust I had in MSFT and ensured I would never use one of their products again.

Enterprise browser maker Island says it's now worth $3B

A quick way to bypass this

Take a picture of the screen with your phone. Then use one of the many OCR apps to exfil the data.

Re: At least one of us is confused by this

As a former high school student 40 years ago, I can attest to this. Someone (who shall remain anonymous) wrote a fake login screen in BASIC for the teletype that connected to LAUSD's PDP-1170. Once we had the teachers password, we could play Zork all period instead of whatever boring lesson was being taught.

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

Re: ByteDance have already done everything they need to

Well we also managed to have a quarter of the worlds COVID deaths with only 5% of the population, thanks to Trump and the GOP.