Posts by Quenda

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Mick West has done a great job analyzing the Go Fast (and other videos). Go Fast is consistent with it being a balloon based on triangulation etc. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

This is liking arguing if VHS or Beta is better ...

Is this now a redundant argument? With modern IDEs (example Visual Studio) they automatically do the indentation - I don't know if they use spaces or tabs and I don't really care. Lets find a 21st century trivial issue to argue about.

A friendly guide to local AI image gen with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111

Haven't the people heard on installers?

Why can't a simple installer be created to do all this - especially for Windows? Plenty of other programs are able to be installed without all of these steps of going backwards and forwards to Github and entering the masochist world of the command line prompt. It seems the view of the AI/Linux crowd is why use one step when 17 will do the job.

Court gives FTC 30 days to swing again in privacy bout with location data slinger

Tracked by big Mac

According to https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/kochava/kochava this lovely bit of tracking is on the McDonald's app!

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

6 stages of a project

The 6 stages of a project:

1. Enthusiasm.

2. Concern.

3. Panic.

4. Search for the guilty.

5. Punishment of the innocent.

6. Praise and honours for non participants.

Guess where Steve fitted in.

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

The coffee cup crash

At one place I was working an intern lost her coffee cup.

Solution: send an e-mail with a picture of missing cup to everybody in the address book by clicking on first entry, ctrl shift End, To, then send.

Unfortunately she did not realise the address book was for the whole global corporation (about 120,000 email addresses) so the email was huge just with all the e-mails, the picture of the cup was the icing on the cake.

Result: Mail system ground to a halt for hours. Not helped by her realising her mistake and trying to fix by recalling the e-mail (3 times as this didn't seem to be working) effectively quadrupling the load on the servers.

I don't know if she got her cup back.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

What should I use instead

Ok we should not use Excel. What should a non programmer use instead? If you are going to destroy the city you need to build something in its place. And it needs to be as easy to use, as powerful and not require a small army or programmers or consultants to maintain.

Had a bad weekend? Probably, if you're a Sectigo customer, after root cert expires and online chaos ensues

Re: Yesterday (1st July), (3rd July)

Key revocation lists are not checked by most browsers (including Chrome) and are generally considered to be broken. Better to have short expiry with an auto renew process like Lets Encrypt.

Boffins step into the Li-ion's den with sodium-ion battery that's potentially as good as a lithium cousin

Lithium is only a small part of the cost of a Li-ion battery. Even if the lithium raw material was free the cost savings would be <10% off the cost of a battery. These guys should focus on performance (longer life, power density, better electrodes, charging times, safety etc) if they want to replace lithium - not likely to happen on economics alone.

If you never thought you'd hear a Microsoftie tell you to stop using Internet Explorer, lap it up: 'I beg you, let it retire to great bitbucket in the sky'

Re: Needed for SharePoint

Agree - these SharePoint issues means we have to keep using IE (recommend internal only, otherwise use Chrome). Edge just does not work as well as IE - strange given they are all Microsoft products and Edge and SharePoint are major parts of their cloud strategy which is Microsoft major strategic thrust.

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

The FBI and the congressional advocates should lead by example and put a back door in their systems to prove how safe they are.

No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy

How about limiting the number of login attempts?

Surely if there is a limited number of failed logins (say 10 failures and the account is locked) then unless the user has completely stupid passwords like "password" then a dictionary attack won't work. Limiting the number of failures seems to be able to overcome these type of attacks and protects users from themselves.

Any system that allows thousands of failed logins is asking to be hacked - you can't rely on users to have sufficiently complex passwords to resist millions of brute force attacks.