Posts by Screepy

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

@NickJP - thanks for those links.

I added them to my pihole, disabled my uBlock origin, and can confirm that I got no YouTube adverts within the video.

I hopped about across 8 or 9 different videos, no issues, none of them had adverts.

I did notice one or two ads appear alongside the comments section of the videos which I never usually see, so I assume uBlock has been sweeping those up for me in the past.

But thank you, please accept this -->

Re: This is not the first time this has "accidently" happened

"PiHole works for Youtube, as long as you view via a browser. When you use the app, it serves ads directly from Youtube servers, making blocking them a game of whack-a-mole."

That's interesting. I've been running PiHole for years and I've never seen it block a YouTube advert (in browser or app). It blocks loads of ads but never ones embedded in the YouTube video.

I need to use uBlock Origin to get rid of the YouTube ones.

Are you doing any extra tweaks to your pihole config to get it to block YouTube ads?

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

" Linux Mint CInnamon is my main distro"

It is mine too.

Mainly thanks to Liam tbh.

I'm a MS sys admin, and have been for 20 years.

At home everything was MS, mainly as it was easy for me to fix due to familiarity.

Last year I read one of Liam's articles and it convinced me to try Linux Mint.

Has been my main OS for just over a year now. I'm still pretty crap at troubleshooting it when I have the occasional hiccup but overall I've been impressed.

There are bits and pieces that still annoy me (particularly around certificates. If we update our certs on our Citrix servers, the next time I try and connect from home I get all sorts of trust issues) but that's down to my skillset rather than anything wrong with Linux Mint.

Certainly won't be going back to MS for my home daily driver.

Thanks Liam -->

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

Re: Rumours...

"The oops being buying networking gear that can be disabled if licences expire.."

All our new Aruba kit (Switches and APs) is subscription license only.

No other option :(

It concerns me greatly.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Re: Follow the money

It's frequently not as nefarious as that.

As someone posted in another thread, a surprising amount of these 'finds' are university students doing some research.They get a batch of unexpected results and things snowball from there..

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: I spy a business opportunity

The bigger corps I've worked for, there were always security guards watching the entry gates. Standing there scanning a load of cards one by one may attract their attention (unless off course you can cut them in on the sweet deal)

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Re: Concorde, so loud

"I wasn't aware that the Concorde flew supersonic over land."

I don't think the OP was saying that it went supersonic over his area, just that the engine noise as it came over was really loud.

My grandmother's house was on the flight path and when we visited we all would stop talking and listen to the cups and saucers rattle on the shelves as it came over. It was really loud - I loved it.

A couple of years before Concorde was cancelled. BA took a load of RAF war vets up on a short circuit flight as a thank you for their services during ww2.

My grandad (rear gunner on Lancaster bomber) had already died by then but the widows were still invited.

My gran went on the flight.

When I asked her what it was like she just shrugged and said it was '.. a bit bumpy and quite chilly, but the air crew were gorgeous"

My dad pointed out that it was the only plane she'd ever flown on and consequently had nothing to compare it too :D

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Re: he starts his day with octopus, a bowl of ice cream, eight oatmeal biscuits, and a donut

I wasn't a big octopus eater but growing up on the coast, I ate my fair share.

Watched My Octopus Teacher a few years back.

No chance I can eat another one.

I know it was heavily anthropomorphised but there's still no way I can eat one again. There is just a little bit too much 'intelligence' there for me.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: Interesting

"I've been onboarding new people for the last year or more, all entirely remotely. We don't have problems - then again we are not stuck in the management dark ages either."

Precisely this.

Onboarding remotely may be different but it's not necessarily more difficult or worse.

If your onboarding processes are still stuck on the ark with Noah then of course you'll struggle.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Pi-hut have Pi 4 8GB 'starter kits' available right now, £104 - hdmi cable, power supply, case, SD card, and pi4 8GB.

Not ideal as i know a lot of us would prefer just the board and then pick and choose what we want depending on our project of choice but at least it's something.

I nabbed one as I'm going to be setting up BirdNet-pi in the garden :)

https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

Re: Unfortunately...

What a totally shit OP.

"Why have one oldie at £90k when you can have 3 youngsters at £30k each?"

I'll tell you fuckin why!

It's because when I log in in the morning it will take me 30 minutes to fix the finance system issue that your 3x juniors spent all night on and are still no closer to fixing.

Sure, they answered the phone, and the customer got to speak to someone. What good did that do if that someone is still too inexperienced to know how to fix it?

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

Re: Hmm.

I'm not sure this is the fault of the authentication type though.

That is just a time limit implemented by the admins when they set up the application, in your case Canvas/ Workday.

There is usually a setting in the config of the app for how long an auth session will last - controlled by the sys admins obviously.

At least that is how a number of our applications were set up with when we added 2FA - we could set timeouts from minutes to hours to days, or just x min of inactivity.

So either your orgs security policy has stipulated a time limit or the admins left it at default and/or their best guess at a suitable timeout.

Benchmark a cloud PC? No way. Just trust us, they work, says Microsoft

Benchmarks are important sometimes..

We spent 2022 moving a big SQL data warehouse into Azure and onto some of their beefier VM options.

For the next 6 months we struggled with performance. Data cube analysis that would take us 5-6 hours on our previous on-prem servers was now taking double that.

MS had helped us spec the cloudy VMs - we provided our on-prem specs and they provisioned us with the VMs that would supposedly outperform our older system.

Not even close. Our SQL DBAs spent days/weeks trying to tune the system but we just couldn't get anywhere near our old system. We even bumped the cloud VMs up a couple more performance tiers (which completely wiped out the planned budget for the system) but still had issues.

Back and forth we went with MS support until they eventually said that the setup you was running as optimally as it ever would.

So, I had to rebuild the system on-prem again and we migrated back (what fun that was).

During the switch back we had a couple of days downtime.

DBAs and I took the opportunity to absolutely smoke both systems with some benchmarking tools. The on-prem kit was so much better it was a joke. And we're not talking high-end kit here. Midrange hybrid Nimbles as storage layer, with good, but not amazing Aruba switches and a well oiled but nothing special VMware layer running the VMs.

The main weakness that we spotted on the benchmarking for the cloud stuff was disk IO, it just couldn't get anywhere close to the on-prem Nimbles.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Tesco and Morrisons both offer 'no bags' option now - in fact I think it's the default option.

Food shop comes in plastic crates, which you empty and hand back to the delivery driver.

We've got plenty of AI now but who asked for it? El Reg's vultures chime in

Re: Why Kettle? It's the collective noun for vultures in flight

Interestingly, or at least I find it interesting..

If the vultures are on the ground or in a tree it's a committee of vultures.

If they're feeding on a carcass then it's a wake of vultures

:)

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

@Doctor Syntax

"Of course they'll all end up in land fill one way or another."

Sadly not just landfill, pop over you YouTube and search

'No Lost Shoes | A film by Max Romey'

Only 10 min, an interesting, if rather dispiriting video.

I'm an ultra runner (a very amatuer one!) and have been trying out NNormal shoes - they're trying to stop shoes ending up in landfill (or on distant shores) - after you've worn out your shoe you can send them back to NNormal and theyll break them down again and recycle it all (hopefully)

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

@Sampler - you haven't said whether your Xiaomi was bought in China or not.

The article is suggesting that the android phones made for the Chinese market are the ones of real concern. ie. they are slurping way more personal data than the same model of phone sold outside of China.

Basically, all phones are sucking up too much of our data, however it appears that if your phone is made for the Chinese market then it's sucking up even more.

Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers

Re: Just what we need

Yes, it was an office in Ghana that had the single surviving DC

The Maersk story is a great read..

https://www.industrialcybersecuritypulse.com/threats-vulnerabilities/throwback-attack-how-notpetya-accidentally-took-down-global-shipping-giant-maersk

Enterprise IT giant layoffs happened because 'some CEOs got ahead of their skis'

Re: A few more to the company list.

MS is mentioned in the 2nd paragraph.

But agree with your other point. There do seem to be IT jobs out there at the mo.

We've got Sys Eng positions in our team but we've been unable to fill them as candidates have been counter-offering hard on salary which usually means they're not that desperate.

Good luck to all who find themselves in 'looking for work pool'

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: TVs and cars

"The car I have

each time it goes in for a service, it gets a software update"

My motorcycle gets over-the-air updates now.

My eye always twitches slightly when I turn the key and it says,

"Hi, there is a new firmware update, would you like to install it now or postpone?"

If I postpone it installs during the maintenance window you have to stipulate when setting up the bike in the app.

To be fair it has never bricked the bike but on occasion I've ridden off in the morning looking at a dash that is completely different to the way it looked yesterday.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: re: Patch Tuesday

"If I was responsible for a business that used exclusively MS products, Patch Tuesday would become a Patch Tuesday from a month before at the earliest."

Sadly that's no longer an option for a lot of orgs.

We used to be 1 month behind for production (with Dev/Test getting patches a couple days after patch Tuesday which gave us a month to notice any issues), however our insurers now require us to have our entire environment patched within 10 days.

It's all rather stressful and since running with this new remit (June 2022) we've hit a number of bugs (particularly with on-prem exchange) where the latest patches bork something and degrade our production environment.

*Sigh

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: Circling the toilet bowl

Who gets to pull it out the bowl on regular occasions to charge it?

Re: A gummy printer?

Gummi is slang in German for condom, add that to the list of fails for this product..

Salesforce to chop 10% of workforce in $1.4 billion restructuring blueprint

No Slack for you

Got a friend who works for Salesforce.

She's got colleagues messaging her that they've been locked out of Slack... guess they're part of the 7000

Microsoft patent eyes ads in streaming online games

Sounds ghastly

Since the ads are to be served through separate streams hopefully it means those clever people updating Pi-hole (or your alternative favourite ad blocker) will be able to block the ad content.

Although it may start to look a bit ugly in-game with big blank billboards/shirts/car bumpers etc where the ads were supposed to appear

Using personal info for ads without consent puts Meta in EU's gunsights

Re: Who else does this apply to ?

Not quite on topic but since consent options have been mentioned...

A couple of months back Ghostery implemented their automatically 'opt out of all' functionality in their browser plugin.

It works surprisingly well I find.

Whenever I visit a new site, I see the consent pop-up window appear and then disappear as Ghostery automatically says no to all.

It makes me happy each time it happens - small victories :)

Morgan Stanley fined $35m after hard drives sold with customer info still on them

Lol at sub-heading.. Bueller Bueller Bueller

Fry Fry Fry

Have one of these sub-editors -->

Uber reels from 'security incident' in which cloud systems seemingly hijacked

Re: Just changed my password..

@iron

Curses!

You're right. I didn't think that through did I.

Now all I've done is flag the account is certainly active (I hadn't used it for months before changing pw today)

Rats.

I guess one good thing is my payment method is linked to PayPal which pings me with an MFA message before going through, other than that my phone number/address/last trips etc are probably all in the hands of the fiend.

It's the dunce hat for me.

Just changed my password..

I have used Uber quite a few times and have found it fairly handy.

Saw this article and nipped into the app to change password.

It didn't prompt me for MFA when I logged in.. odd.

Checked my account settings and MFA was disabled, also odd as I keep track of when I enable MFA on my accounts - with Uber i enabled it end of last year.

Not sure why it was disabled again, either something nefarious going on or an update to the app over the last few months reset some stuff including MFA but didn't let me know.

*sigh

password changed, MFA re-enabled.

Switch and router sales surge, with 200/400 gigabit Ethernet kit growing fastest

Re: A glitch in the matrix

Agreed @Sam

We moved from Cisco to Aruba during our last infrastructure refresh. We finally got our core switches replaced some 8 months after ordering. We're still waiting on our 40 edge switches, 10 months and counting..

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

I share that distinction, but am no where near the 100 year old mark.

Lived in Ghana as a teenager, bought my car license there - the whole system was rather corrupt.

Moved to South Africa for university. SA has an agreement with Ghana that the license is recognised as valid so got it converted to an SA one.

Moved to Germany in 2010ish, they recognise the SA drivers license, converted it to German license.

Moved back to blighty in 2012, DVLA is quite happy to convert German license to UK... and there you have it.

I have a valid UK drivers license but have never taken the test.

Postscript to that story - When I arrived in SA I happened to mention to mother that I hadn't actually passed a test in Ghana. She, quite rightly, gave me a clip round the head and promptly booked me for a full learners course. So I was trained, just never had to take the tests.

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

Re: "the world's largest publicly known particle collider"

Came here to ask the same question.

What an odd choice of phrasing.

Microsoft: The deadline to get off Basic Auth is approaching

@tiggity

Although it does feel like a 'f the users' approach some orgs have no choice.

In my org (+-3000) employees we have to enable MFA otherwise a good chunk of insurers won't even quote to insure us - others will, but at far higher (unaffordable in our case) rates.

Moving across to MFA for us was pretty smooth. But it needed good clear communication to the user base and good clear training for the helpdesk who would answer the inevitable calls that would come through.

If some users didn't want to use their own mobiles we provided a work one - not ideal as they then had to carry two mobiles (but their choice)

We've been on MFA at our org for 4 years now, the user base is pretty comfortable with the concept by now and it hardly generates any noise on the helpdesk.

@ThatOne

You can set your mail client not too ask each time. So on setup you obviously need to follow the MFA request, but you get the option to 'trust this device' so it won't prompt again until you reinstall the app or do anything else that will reset the MFA settings.

If anyone else tries to log into your mail on another device they will obviously get a MFA prompt which will certainly make the baddie's lives more inconvenient.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

"If I understand the concept of V2G, cars serve as energy sources. Does that mean one could be unable to go home because his/her EV was discharged because of high demand?"

No, because with the EVs that are capable of V2G you control (the EV owner) control how much you want to be able to discharge. So you could say once battery drops below 70% then stop V2G.

Just a side note, I follow a lot of EV news and the aren't that many V2G enabled EVs yet. Not sure why that is, possibly it's a bit more expensive to develop/install for the manufacturer?

UK's largest water company investigates datacenters' use as drought hits

Re: if only there was a use for a constant supply of hot water !

This is being done in quite a few places now. DCs providing heat to surrounding houses (mainly winter, not sure what happens when they don't need the heat, wasted I guess?), some have been connected to community swimming pools so they don't have to heat them themselves.

One of the better ones I read about was a DC and a huge vegetable grower linked up and used the waste heat to maintain the warmth of the greenhouses and Polly tunnels.

All nice ideas but still they are few and far between as the majority of DCs don't bother as it costs more to implement.

Perhaps it needs to be legislated in some way...

Ukraine's cyber chief comes to Black Hat in surprise visit

Re: "advanced feature sets is they require complex protocols, "

"we have never had any problems that we know of since they setup the security."

FTFY

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

@Gene Cash

Subscription stuff is probably very close for motorcycles - particularly electric ones.

I've had a Zero SR/F since November 2019.

Now they've released the to Cypher III+ operating system you can now buy more range, or more power, or Sat Nav sync for the main screen, and some other stuff (reverse gear?)- it's all over the air updates as well

So far it all looks like one time purchases but suspect it won't be long until a sub based features appears on their Cypher store.

Still love my bike though :)

CityFibre loses appeal against Openreach discounts for ISPs

Re: OpenReach and CityFibre

CF dug up all our pavements last year some time - slightly annoying at the time but not serious.

Now offering gigabit up/down link for £50/pm.

Am on BT fttp at the mo, but max they offer is 300mbps for £80/pm.

Annoyingly I'm only halfway into a 24 month contract with BT but will be jumping ship once contract is up.

In fairness to BT the link has been rock solid for the last 4 years but their customer service is appalling. Any changes I need to get made on my account are almost never done properly the first time and I have to phone up and slowly feel my life drain as I get "put through to someone else" who also can't help.

Meta asks line managers to identify poorly performing staff for firing

If you work for Meta..

..get out as soon as you can

Don't wait, just go asap.

Hopefully if enough talent jumps ship Meta will slowly sink below the waves.

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Re: Frustrating...

Asp ey? Someone's doing well ;)

Scout or Explorer?

Did DW2 in T7 Transporter - basically flew a brick to beagle point

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: Am I the only one

I have pondered this question for many years and I'm still not sure.

I think part of the answer to this is that once we humans produce too much of something we tend to start destroying our living conditions.

The sheer volume of internal combustion engines in the world all pumping out foulness means we appear to be doing some damage to bits of our life systems.

EVs don't generate the same foulness as ICE vehicles, but the do generate other foulness that we're only just starting to properly be able to monitor.

Once EVs become the dominant transport choice (and I suspect they will) we'll no doubt discover we're shredding some other critical support system and we'll need to find a solution to that.

One thing to consider is that the ICE method has really really been perfected (ok not perfect but they're very very good)- very clever people have worked on them for over a 100 years, so any efficiencies that can now be found in them are teeeeny tiny.

EVs on the other hand are relatively new, and certainly new to mainstream manufacturers/consumers so there are probably a lot more efficiencies that are waiting to be uncorked in the EV realm which may ease our rampage on the planets resources.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

"I'll never understand either how they think they'll get away with it, or why they sometimes get responses"

Try living with someone who has early dementia :(

Father in law is slowly losing his capacity to work out fake/real etc.

He falls straight into those phishing traps. He's a kind fellow so he wants to help (and is time rich), so he spends ages replying to some total f****r about how he hopes they're doing well and here are his details, please do get in touch and he'll try and help..

I've got a delay rule set on his outbox so anything he sends is held. Then at the end of his emailing session, I quickly check the held mails and bin the 3 or 4 that were giving his life away.

Extremely stressful.

Millions of people with early dementia, those phishing b******s only need 10-20 successful hits from their spam and they'll get a decent lil payday.

It's truly disgusting practice.

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

Re: re: It's not surprising......

Some of us care.

It's not much I know but I regularly ask our local Amazon/Ups/Dpd/Hermes/etc delivery drivers whether he/she needs a bottle of water/choccie bar/toilet break when they knock on our door.

The offer is rarely accepted but occasionally it is and hopefully I've made their day just a teeny tiny bit more bearable.

Rackspace considers selling part of business: 'Everything' on the table

They need to do something..

We've been with Rackspace for about 12 years.

They host our critical web infrastructure.

Over the last 3 or 4 years the support had just got worse and worse. Particularly around the NetSec stuff (firewalls, load balancers, IDS etc)

The London datacentre (LON) shed a load of the experienced techs as management pushed the support East.

I've had a couple of recent zoom calls with the newer NetSec teams where I'm correcting their iRule scripts/pointing out something they've missed, and basically helping them to sort out issues that we're paying them for.

Patience is wearing thin, I suspect we will be moving away from them once contact renewals hove into view - they just aren't good enough any more :(

Autonomous Mayflower to attempt Atlantic crossing, again

Re: Not the ultimate goal ?

There are probably some good uses.

A good example would be searching for wreckage on the ocean floor.

When the Air Malaysia flight disappeared off Western Australia a few years ago, ships spent days/weeks scanning the ocean floor.

If you could get a fleet of these automated ones to head out, scan an area and report back, I be think that would be pretty useful.

Ideally they'd run off solar/wind and not rely on fossil fuel (removing the need to return for refuel).

The fact that they're still trying to just get the ship to sail in a straight line between two points suggests we may be still quite a way off my example though - baby steps ;)

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

We very rarely updated our switches unless there was some really annoying bug that we had to solve.

However, a recent insurance audit indicated that in fact the unpatched switches could be grounds for the insurance company not to pay out in the event of something unpleasant happening.

We now have a remit to keep all switches up-to-date :(

We have a mix of old Ciscos, Extremes, and some newer Arubas.

The Arubas should be easy right? Just deploy from Aruba Central and sip tea while they all update seamlessly... Wrong! A good chunk just refused to update, some updated and rolled back, some successfully updated and then disappeared from Aruba central - never to be seen again. We now have a priority call logged with Aruba asking for them to get us visibility back on the switches (they appear to be running fine though).

Haven't even looked at the Ciscos, and the Extremes only get mentioned in hushed whispers.

Would be interested to hear if any other techs have similar remits...

Microsoft hikes prices for non-profit customers, ends on-prem software grants

Re: well yes, but...

"I hope they pay to do so as your a paying customer, so if they want good PR from that they should also pay for it!"

No, it's very rarely a payment, more usually an offer of greater discounts the following year or a load of training vouchers for the Tech teams (which can be very useful)

However, there are very very few requests we can say yes to as the charities remit and reputation means that it is quite tricky for us to align things with big corp.

Thankfully that's up to to our legal/pr/procurement teams to iron out ;) I just go on a nice MS course if they happen to tick all the boxes :)

Re: well yes, but...

I work for a large non-profit (+-2500 employees) and we'd be dead in the water if we had to pay commercial licensing fees. Our SQL instances alone would be enough to sink us if we had to pay full price.

We're an old organisation (+100 years) and when IT became a thing we were pretty good at getting on board with the tech. I wasn't around then but at the time MS and in particular MS SQL was the way to go for our org. Fast forward many years and we've pretty much trapped ourselves as an MS house. Now all MS have to do is charge us just enough to not cripple us and we'll stay.

On a side note, another reason the big corps like to attract NFP's (particularly the bigger more well known ones) is that it's good for PR. Whichever big cloudy company we've dealt with we usually get a friendly email at some point asking if they can use our logo on some presentation they're doing.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Television repair

"The manufacturer saved all of about 3$ by using the crap capacitors, on a $1200 TV!"

To add, $3 saved per TV when you're selling squillions of them means the CEO gets another yatch this year instead of next.