Posts by Screepy 119 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2018
I feel like ShinyHunters should probably not have poked this particular bear.
The resource and reach of the FBI means that they'll probably get you eventually if you annoy them enough.
And defacing their website would really annoy them...
I suspect there are presently quite a few ShinyHunter members now packing a bag and doing research on "How to live in a cave"
Yes, we've been doing that for years across IE, Edge, Chrome and FF.
All extensions/plugins blocked by default and only vetted, tested and approved ones are added to the allowed list.
Once implemented it's not too admin heavy either, other than perhaps placating the odd annoyed user who can't understand why their beloved "cheap deals tracker" plugin shouldn't be allowed because "I've used it for years and never had any issues"
@cyberdemon
Assuming you're using a 'normal' Android (IE. Not de-googled) you can share location via Google maps with anyone in your contacts, and they can share their location back.
And it lasts until you turn it off.
I have been keeping track of my elderly parents for years using this method.
Both parties need an android phone and then..
Google Maps -> Click on your profile -> Location Sharing -> New Share
Keepass isn't multiuser though.
Only one person can be accessing the kdbx file at time. Which is fine if the team is 2 or 3 people but once it gets into the +5 then one of them is going to open Keepass to grab a PW and then forget to close it and go to lunch. Leaving the DB locked for the next poor soul who just gets a message "Retail password.kdbx is locked by another user" and has to wait until the luncheoner has returned.
We used Keepass at our org for years, but eventually we had to go with a multi-user solution.
Keepass is excellent though if it fits your use case.
"Take some personal responsibility and put the damn phone down if you feel it's addictive, you know that's possible, right?"
But that's the issue with addiction, you can't 'put it down', and FB know it.
Some people are more responsive to FBs foul tricks than others.
Some people find it easy to escape (like you), but others will drop into the black hole of the zombie scroll. Those are the souls FB are after, and there are millions and millions of them.
Just look at compulsive gamblers. They know very well it's damaging them but they just can't let go.
Precisely this.
It's very straightforward to create a group policy that has a list of accounts that are exempt from MFA.
Think service accounts etc..
When we rolled out MFA at our org quite a few years back, we had a good 30-40 accounts that could not have MFA on them for various reasons. We still rolled it out to the rest of the org of 3000+- users.
There was then a follow up project to slowly and careful churn through the service accounts to get them over to MFA.
We still have 3 service accounts that aren't protected by MFA, so we have additional monitoring on them etc.
Indeed.
I worked on a coal mine for 4 years during my early IT years.
My goodness they're filthy.
Even with loads of automated tunnelling equipment etc the workers who went underground in the morning all returned black as soot. And these aren't people with pick ax and spade, these are technicians and engineers situated 100s of metres back from the coal face.
I rarely had to enter the mine, but on days I did I blew black dust out my nose for 24 hours afterwards.
They are horrific to work in, or near.
Status pages really get my goat.
There's this reluctance from orgs to admit a failing and so they drag it out as long as possible before finally admitting with *sigh "yes, we've got an incident running".
It's so frustrating because sys admins will sometimes spend hours troubleshooting something that has nothing to do with them.
I would respect companies way more if they updated their status pages quickly. Shit happens, but just let me know so we can get on with planning mitigation (if necessary) on our end.
"So, gien that Natural Selection has failed to curb the ever-increasing dominance of Man over Earth.."
Fear not, natural selection still works just fine.
Your mistake is looking at it from a human timescale.
A thousand years is a blink of an eye for natural selection.
I don't believe your brother's experience is typical.
I have three devices in my house running different Linux flavours.
All three run either M.2 or 2.5" SSD or a combo of both.
One of mine is actually running a Samsung 870 Evo.
None of them have ever had any issues with the drives.
A lot of my team I work with in my org (15 of us) have also been bitten by the W11-is-the-last-straw bug and hopped over to Linux.
We have a Linux teams chat dedicated to helping one another answer questions etc.
SSD issues have not cropped up once since we started the thread 16 months ago.
Sounds to me like your brother was unlucky.
I haven't seen it mentioned in the comments so just letting people know..
If you're thinking of gaming on Linux take a look at the ProtonDB website.
If the game(s) you play are ranked as platinum or gold , you'll generally be fine out the box.
When I switched to Linux 2 years ago I used ProtonDB to see which of my games would come across with me too Linux.
Amazingly, 38 out of 41 in my Steam library!
Obviously your mileage may vary depending on your game choices. As others have already mentioned, quite a few of the triple AAAs have anticheat that makes life more tricky.
It's also surprising how fast games get ranked on ProtonDB nowadays. It used to be a couple of months following release before you got an idea of whether the game would be ok on Linux, now it's usually a day or two.
Anno 117 has already got Platinum status, and that only gets released on 13 Nov.
Yeah it whacked our org website as well.
Also had issues with our InTune portal.
Was messy indeed. Web dev lobbing tickets at infrastructure team for two hours this morning. Infra team desperately trying to work out if it's us or a wider problem.
MS really need to sort out their status pages, it's infuriating troubleshooting something that they just haven't admitted to yet.
This works for sure, buy not for enterprise that has compliance audits.
I upgraded three of our still very powerful W10 desktops that had been flagged as non-W11 upgradeable.
I used the Rufus method you described and it was a straightforward upgrade.
2 days later the security team got in touch to say the machines had flagged up as non-compliant and were not allowed to run W11.
It annoys me so much that MS are throwing BS requirements at W11. These desktops are Core i7s, 64GB ram, Nvidia quadro cards, 2x 1TB SSDs.
They still absolutely fly along!
We've got 40 of these machines, all heading to charity on October 14th. And we're replacing them with 40 new desktops at £2600 each.
Indeed, for personal use it is a yawn.
However for businesses it's much less of a yawn and more of an eye twitch on whether their older office versions will pass security audit.
Hint, they won't pass.
So they have two choices, accept the risk and the price jump from their cyber insurance or begrudgingly migrate to a newer subscription based version.
WhatsApp is a really difficult one.
Everyone uses it because everyone else has it.
It's so frustrating.
When Meta bought it in 2014 there was a mini surge of leavers as people went to Telegram or Signal but it wasn't enough and most people snuck back to WhatsApp when they realised their family/friends hadn't bothered to move.
Upgraded our NetScalers this morning, surprisingly the download portal was working (last time it melted when every sys admin hit it at the same time).
The recommendation to run the kill pcoipConnections and icaConnections makes this upgrade slightly more annoying as you'll punt all your users off even if you're using HA pairs.
May your upgrades run in calm seas
"The outcome of this is that they may start from far behind the Americans.."
This is a key point.
The outsourcing is too fast and not done properly.
In my work I endlessly have to deal with companies that have outsourced to India but have done so at a pace that the new engineers are not yet ready to absorb.
The end result, a shit experience and a whole load of frustration.
+1 for Mint.
I'm by no means a Linux power user - I still get confused when people get angry about snap or systemd .. etc.
I went with Mint because Liam recommended it a couple of years back as a good option to make the hop across from Windows.
I really like it, and it stays out of my way so I can just get on with things.
I game on it a lot as well, all through Steam, and don't have any issues, but like others have said check protondb for your games of choice.
"it has a small internal combustion engine that powers the batteries. One tank of gas gives a range of up to 1,000 to 1,200 kilometers."
This is really nothing new at all.
Like a couple of you have pointed out, there are quite a few of non-chinese brand cars that do this.
All Honda hybrids are the same I believe, not just the Accord. The hybrid Jazz/Fit certainly uses the petrol engine as a generator to charge the battery.
Also quoting range of a vehicle without also quoting the efficiency is useless.
Sure it can go 1000km, but what is the actual mpg or km/l?
It reminds me of an advert several years ago when Toyota brought out a new Land cruiser Prado model.
It advertised a range of 1200km as standard, which was amazing for a big 4x4.
What the stats didn't show was it had a 180 litre fuel tank, so the mpg was just a rubbish as all the other big 4x4s but this one made your eyes water a bit more when you filled the tank and saw the total price on the pump.
I wonder why they have to destroy the craft at the end of the mission. I understand they don't want to contaminate Europa but we're ok with contaminating Ganymede?
Does anyone know why they can't just slingshot away from Jupiter and it's moons and send it off into the dark with it's sensors running sending NASA data until it runs out of power (a la Voyager)?
@Mikus , while I agree that Teams is less than ideal, I've been running it on Linux Mint for over a year and it's been fine.
I have no real issues with it at all.
The version I use is the first hit in software manager.
I suspect it is just the web version in some sort of wrapper but it works fine for me.
There are a few quirks; like it doesn't highlight which screen you are sharing in red, so you need to keep track of which one you've shared, and you can't pop out a video call into a separate window.
But overall I think it's workable - it means I can stay away from W11 and still continue to work for my curreny employer ;)
@James - are you saying that the big edu institute will pay for extended support for the W10 devices or just 'wing it' once official support ends?
The problem a lot of orgs have is that their cyber insurance won't cover them if they continue to use unsupported (and therefore unpatched) machines/OSes.
My org isn't massive (+-3000 users each with a W10 laptop) we can't afford extended MS support as it's incredibly expensive so we're forced to go W11 as otherwise our insurance won't cover us...
"The last terror is probably printing / scanning which had always been a bit of a nightmare in previous Linux experiments."
I had a similar experience to Boothy.
When I installed Mint last year, i chose default setup for printers and scanners during the install and my Xerox C235 has worked flawlessly right out the gate. I was most pleasantly surprised.
Interesting link, thanks.
If you click through that link to the site where they got the data from there are some other interesting bits in there.
RAM really not coming out looking very good - topping the charts in a lot of those results - more incidents (not accidents) than any other brand.
BMW has the most drivers caught driving under the influence of alcohol.
And, as you mentioned, Tesla, which are the most accident prone.
Also, a small point but important, your subject line says it's electric cars, but that study covers both EV and ICE - which makes it a much more interesting dataset.
"Do you you grow sustainable lettuce? No you grow it as big, watery and unsubstantial as you can, cut the head off, and sell it quick."
Not done much gardening in your life have you?
The individual lettuce isn't sustainable, you eat/sell that.
What needs to be sustainable is your ability to continue to produce lettuce of suitable quality for years and years.
So, instead of being greedy and harvesting all your lettuce at once, for a huge feast/profit, you need to let some lettuce run to seed, harvest that seed and then replant them for the next season. Rinse and repeat - sustainable.
So what that rather messy metaphor means is Broadcom are harvesting as much money as they can with no apparent thought of the future of VMware. Ie. Not planning for it to be a sustainable long-term..
On your point a)
The answer is, mostly everyone :(
There's hardly a country out there that hasn't connected critical infra. Main excuse is to allow remote troubleshooting/monitoring.
But also, air gapping won't always help (it certainly reduces the risk though)
Stuxnet ran riot on the Iranian centrifuges and that complex was air gapped. A suitably placed agent just needs a usb/network port or whatever and off they go.
When it comes to state-sponsored hacking, you can probably assume they will eventually find a way in. What you need is suitable mitigation for when/if they launch their bot/worm/malware/etc
I'm with you on this GraXXor, I loved Elite Dangerous.
The scale was mind boggling.
I went on both Distance Worlds expeditions and travelling with all the other commanders across the galaxy to beagle point has been one of the gaming highlights in my life.
In 2017 I went to FX17 in London to listen to some talks by the devs on how they designed and coded the game.
The astrophysicist who worked with the devs on creating the stellar forge have a brilliant talk on how the universe was generated in game.
There were certainly some disappointing decisions in the game, and some clunky multiplayer issues - trying to get hundreds of commanders in the same instance for a mass launch was always a lottery.
I eventually finished with about 1500 hours on ED.
Has been one of my favourite games.
This is true but I don't think the cybertruck is coming to the UK or Europe as far as I've read.
US licenses are a bit more relaxed on the weight limits.
I believe it changes from state to state but 10,000 lbs (4,545 kg) seems to be quite a common limit over there. So that would give users about 1,000kg to play with.
Hopefully one of our US readers can give us a better idea of the allowed weight limits on standard licenses..
@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 -->
"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?
" 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 -->
