Posts by Jadith 67 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2018
Wanton acts of violence and destruction are usually left to young men in their twenties. Folks at middle age usually have too much to lose, but, it seems, not so much with these people.
My worry is, this is just a sign this is going to get worse. Especially as it is being cheered and these people are being regaled as some kind of hero by the younger set.
Even worse was the 2020 election.
Historically in the US, if an election is held during a big crisis like the Covid panic, the incumbent loses. yet, the Dems still went with Joe as the 'safe candidate'. They could have put just about anyoone in office, and they went with Biden. I gave up on the Democratic party long ago for this kind of feckless, half-hearted move making.
Are you implying these positions are not being filled based off merit and experience*? I say they most certainly are!! I'm afraid you may have missed the fine print though
*All mentions of merit and experience refer to the merit of the person's lips and the experience of placing them on a certain orange posterior.
Indeed 2FA can be compromised. Take a guess how?
That's right, social engineering. I think it was an Uber employee some scammer just hounded until they approved by MFA.
I have also heard of using MitM type attacks used to srcape the one time token from the MFA and pass it on. This is mostly for bot style attacks and is mitigatable. Microsoft, of all companies, has started putting the number on the computer, that way you really do need both devices to authenticate.
Carbanak got away with like $900 million in acutal money. As far as I know they still haven't caught all of them.
Hell some of the big ransomware payouts can get to the millions, easy.
Those two are just some clowns and some producer thought he could get some Tiger King money out of them.
Thing is, there already are minimum security standards in place. It's called HIPAA, I believe the article covers it.
Not sure what adding a second set of what would be the same standars is supposed to accomplish. Maybe to signifiy they are super serious for real about them this time.
Indeed, the AI hype bubble has been deflating recently, as is also true for green initiatives. It will be interesting to see the reactions of these big computing firms now there two favorite reasons for buying their kit are running out of steam.
As for AI hype, it can't go away fast enough. It would be nice if the field was able to get on with proper R&D instead of being inundated with rabid MBAs looking for their next fix.
I wonder, how many new customers they have signed and how does this compare to previous business? Seems that would be the better measure of how the business is going. Especially considering all the increased profits comes from cutting costs and jacking up prices. From what I understand, they are putting the screws to their customers hard.
However, the migrations are coming. They don't happen over night and can take many months, if not years, to plan and implement, but they are coming. In fact, our vendor, Logicalis, just this week asked for a timeframe to complete a migration off VMWare for all the services they run for us. That is not quite a small mom and pop shop running in the back of someone's office. Apparently, the tools to do such migrations have all seen a massive uptick in development and usability lately. I imagine this is why Broadcom has been so forward in bleeding the current customers as much as they can.
My experience was quite different. I have never worked for an Indian firm, not for lack of trying. I have had more than a few interviews that ended abruptly after the first question. That question being "what is your visa status." After explaining I have been a citizen since birth, I am awkwardly told they require someone more experienced for the role.
Once I had to take a technical interview. We only got to one question:
Interviewer: How would you recover from a a corruption in your primary domain controller?
Me: I would promote another DC to that role, then wipe and rebuild the one that was corrupt.
I: There is no other DC, only the one
Me: I would restore it from a snapshot or backup
I: There is no backups or snapshot, what would you do?
Me: (jokingly) I reckon I would be looking for another job considering I have not done the basic DR planning and tasks
I: (Not amused)
Me: Ok, I guess the only thing is to do a recovery restoration if not just building a new one outright.
I: That would be the correct answer (the restore/recover feature)
I realized later he was basically reading from the Microsoft certification test. (or at least a study guide)
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Later that year I interviewed with a large and respected accounting firm. Among the things I noticed:
All the wall clocks where on Pune time
The lead was bragging about how his system was so big Microsoft said it was passed the limits of what SQL Server was capable of handling. He did not like me asking if they had plans to migrate to a more capable system.
At the end I was straight up asked what my role on the team would be ("What are you going to do if we hire you:Powershell, database tuning, development, etc") This was hands down the most confusing interview question I have ever heard. The interviewer was visibly frustrated when I asked what role he was hiring for along with a list of my capabilities.
I was later informed they needed someone more accustomed to a fast paced environment.
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Since, I have had the pleasure of working with teams that work directly out of India. I found the management culture to be something like "throw enough bodies at it till it works" if someone couldn't figure it out, it simply got ignored with the hope somebody somewhere would fix it.
I even had a manager describe an engineer's explanation of a problem and fix as "magic." The problem was with a bug in Microsoft Defender that caused it peg the cpu with excessive scans which ran everytime NTFS acls were checked.
Also, everything had to be Microsoft and Microsoft support was heavily relied upon. If it wasn't a Microsoft product, they would ignore it completely.
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I have since steered clear of any recruiters or angencies with a strong H-1B vibe.
On one hand, satelite broadband is an excellent way to bring access to rural communities, which is what the subsidy exists for.
On the other hand, it seems deploying these satelite clusters provide access regardless of population density. Meaning, there isn't any barrier between building for rural or urban as there is with wired broadband. Not sure how the extra money would help Starlink provide rural access over any other kind of access, other than just building more of it in general.
This needs to extend to installation practices and expectations, as well. I can't tell you the number of times I have been provided with installation instructions or even a helpful 'installation engineer' that expects a service account with admin privledges (I remember SolarWinds and CommVault specifically wanted accounts with Domain Admin provledges) or some other careless configuration that flies in the face of any security best practices. One may think the answer is to provide more limited configurations yourself, in order to keep configurations in line with security policy, etc. However, if you deviate from the given instruction set, the vendor will turn around and refuse to provide any of the support you paid for because you did not install it to their specifications.
Your first two links reference the same Standford paper. It's a good read, and it suggests full remote work may lead to productivity loss, but hybrid work may actually lead to productivity gains. Though, the only studies they elaborated on for the fully remote work were both located in India. One of them a call center and the other an intesting study involving software engineers and the amount of code comments.
However, what I found most interseting was the disparity between how workers and managers measure these productivity changes.
The third link is paywalled
The Goldman Sach's report is more about investment futures. The only conclusion it seems to draw is that a comparison of methodologies used in gathering productivity data in regards to remote work, the metrics driven methods show more negatives than the survey riven methods. Honestly, it is rather vague and never puts forward a specific conclusion. (though it has lots to say about realestate and service consumption in city centers.)
VMware by Broadcom rejects accusations it has increased prices, suggesting rather that the market misunderstands its new bundles are cheaper than the previous combined cost of the products they contain, and that support – previously a separate purchase – is included in its subscriptions.
This is such an infuriating insult to here from Boradcom. It is essentially accusing people of being too stupid to know what they want/need from VMware. PAYING FOR THINGS WE DON"T WANT OR NEED MEANS OUR COSTS ARE GOING UP. Just because you bundle the product everyone wants with some crap that noone wants does not mean you are adding value. It means you are adding shit. You are enshitifying your product. The fact that Broadcom just keeps repeating this over and over doesn't make it anywhere near true, unless you are some delusional stockholder, perhaps. Or maybe someone desperately clinging to the delusion that you haven't taken a garunteed money maker and enshitified so noone wants it. (Seriously, if they would have bought VMware and just let it alone, it likely would have just output value to their portfolio for years, even decades.)
Also, adding a support package hasn't added value to anything in many years now. Unless you are platinum toilet paper level, you would be lucky to get a 'have you tried turning it off an on again'. (reboot procedures take too much call time nowadays.)
HPE has created a virtualization product that looks a lot like a direct rival to VMware.
At this point, anyone that uses anything from HP deserves what they get. (Yes, technically HPE is a separate company, but they are the same in practice)
I believe that it is an apporpriate channel, but no links should be sent along with it. The current guidance on securely using emails is to verify using a secondary source entirely separate from the recieved email.
It should be something like:
"Public health warning: Green goo disease currently spreading. Please look at the agency website for more details"
It has the added benefit of limiting the survival of anyone not able to find a website with a google search.
That should read either "Sponsered" or "Satire"
I mean, and argument could be made the Settings App is more attractive than the Control Panel, until you try to use it anyway.
Take the printers section, for example. It does make a nice looking list of printers, but once hit the add printers button, the damn thing wants to survey your whole network for anything plugged in. Only after you see a hundred random things pop up does it even allow you to see the link (that should say "No, seriously Microsoft, I want to add a printer") at the very bottom among all the clutter that will pop up the printer install wizard. This wizard that looks exactly like the one you get in control panel or print management.
The networking section looks great, unfortnatel, that is about it. You may find some of the information it displays useful, even. But the only reason I am usually there is to access the "Network and Sharing" app where I can do some actual work and find the actually useful info. Ofc, I can always just windows key > type 'Control' > bring up control panel to have direct access to what is needed.
Should we talk about the apps section. now? Seriously, that one can take a flying leap. I am having trouble coming up with any redeeming qualities for that one. I don't think I have ever gotten it to do anything purposeful. I mean, maybe the default program stuff is useful, but we never even needed the control panel for that as it was always easier to do through explorer. Once I stumbled across the left shift + click to bring up the old context menu (I shouldn't have mentioned that...thing. I mean seriously, what is wrong with the words "Copy" and "Paste"? (Ok, one rant at a time, Jadith...))
How about we go on to display settings? Or the fact that you need to crawl through I don't even know how many menus to find different things hiding in the corners of different areas that may or may not actually do anything at all?
The settings app is just another coat of paint on an OS that Microsoft has no intereset in actually improving.
to the question of having an IT department should be: "Please stop and go talk to the people you pay to sort these things out." Honestly, I doubt an IT professional would rely on such things as opposed to simly looking at what they need and cross referencing that with a list of products included. Granted, it may take a while for an IT professional to find the actual list, so perhaps a psychic may need to cunsult, but, either way, you should have the professionals do what they are paid to do.
That being said, the suggestion default is still, likely, the correct one. The Business Premium subscription gives you access to all the fiddly bits the IT folks will be ineterested in utilizing, such as the Hybrid AD model. The rest are better for people at smaller scale that are essentially just trying to buy office.
The distance of the incursion into Russia looks quite large, indeed. However, if the Ukranians were to try encircling the Russian forces, they could not do it in one swoop. It seems to me, a person with no intel or knowledge of what is going on*, it looks like this was a test of sorts. The intention being to try and draw forces away/open a second front, and rading the Russian supply lines.
However, I think the long term planning here is important. If the Russians don't act quickly, the Ukranians will have the option of fortifying their new position. This means they can encircle at their leisure. Continuing raids as they slowly move deeper behind the Russian lines. This would make their current postion actually quite smart of this sort of strategy. If the Ukranians had pushed in closer to the current front, it would be too easy for the Russians to simply extend the current front to handle the situation.
*I mean it's the internet, what would expect :P
A viable solution is for Humans to start watermarking their own content as certified human generated. Right now all you get is an "Oopsie, we didn't think everyone would be so mad", but if they decide to include a certified human watermark, then that would defintely be fraud.
Ofc, these types of labels can have their own problems. At least in the States, we have several such labels that are complete bs. I could see these companies try to skirt such requirements by having someone type the minimum number of characters to qualify as human generated.\
Oddly enough, though, something akin to NFTs may be required here. Fight the newest fad with an older one?
For such an optimistic interpretation of the IRS response. See, to me it sounded like they wanted nothing to do with replacing legacy systems and just want to kick the can down the road as long as possible. Likely they put some people in charge of the plan and either a) balked at the expense or b) just plain like the way things work now and there is almost never a direct replacement for outdated systems samey enough for that mindset or c) the people put in charge of the project where some greybeards in charge of the current systems that only understand the old ways and do not wish to boot themselves out of a job.
Although, with that numbe of legacy systems, surely they are including desktops in that? Otherwise, why they hell does anyone need 344 different systems at all. I have worked for some pretty big organizations that would stretch to have 344 separate systems. But then again, it is the IRS, whose specialty is unnecessary complication of all things.
Saying the quiet part out loud?
I'm not down for this public objectification of women, but, they only thing that makes this different than what is seen, well, all over marketing/advertising is that it draws explicit attention to it. Honestly, if they didn't have the lampshades on their head, noone would have batted an eye.
IMO, PAN missed an opportunity to own it as a statement, as it makes a good and direct one.
(To the Professional Performance Artist, that would be a ridiculous way to make the statemtn, as objectification of men takes quite the different form. You would need something like lamp shade woman and a guy with a bag of money for a head or something.)
They way I understand it, many of these scammers already have this in place. If the Indian government takes action or the name gets flagged for some reason, they just roll out a new one. It should also be pointed out, many of these folks already have more than one company running different scams as is.
My environmental concern is more along the lines of atmospheric pollution. How much of what exactly gets introduced to our air everytime one of these things burns up on re-entry? How long does it stay in the atmosphere? What does the spread look like and what would it take to make the air toxic? Not necessarily London smog toxic, but rather lead in the drinking water type toxic. Yanno, the type of toxic that introduces problems during childhood development that continues to cause problems over a person's lifespan.
Wait, Google has competitors for its play store? I have heard of a few other stores, but nothing you could really see as a competitor. Like, maybe a few apps, but never anything I need to pay bills, bank, etc. Was google forced to disclose these competitors? or were they talking more in the theorectical sense, like "Let's say we had competitors, then this would be unfair"
We tried implemetning the hard spf rules before, but many of the businesses we count as customers were getting blocked by it.
Of course, these same customesr tend to get compromised, which results in their emails being used to try and do the same to us, so, maybe we should tune it up again...
I generally agree with this, but I also see the problem a bit different.
Computers strictly follow logical processes, even the big AI constructs are, at their core, stricly logical processes. The same is true for factory machinary. The difference, however, is machinery has it's roots in engineering, from the start and, generally, businesses have stuck to that trend. The engineers are in the design from the beginning and often determine what the requirements are based off physiucal measurements, observation, expected outcomes, etc. While it has it's flaws, these engineers can typically operate with a good idea of what is needed from the design to fit the process.
However, Humans are not logical. We are capable of logic, but it is not necessary or required from us. So, when we try to integrate these logical computers into a human process, it becomes not so easy. One will quickly find most people have no idea why they do something or even what they are doing. Most folks just know they follow the process they have been taught. Try going up the chain and you will find the processes don't even matter that much, as all the managers are more engaged in keeping customers, higher ups, shareholders, etc in a particular emotional state, not necesarily in ensuring processes run smoothly and standards are being met. This leads to countless little compromises, fudging of some numbers, or just sort of skipping all process whatsoever, because the actual end result is not important nor does anyone actually care about it.
So, when you got to design a system, often there is no actual logical requirements at all. What they want you to design is a system that keeps the right people happy and uses fewer resources to do it (and even that last part is not particularly important anymore). Agile attempts to solve this problem through a sort of 'feel it out as you go' method. While that method is fine in theory, what it has turned into is a way to remove any accountability from anyone in a management position. It means managers don't have to try and come up with a reason why they do anything or risk showing their ignorance by trying to explain what is needed or why anything works the way it does. It also means no pesky people poking around and potentially finding out just how terribly run most things are (which might make them look bad). This means more projects can get off the ground rather than dying in the early phases of waterfall because noone can past the planning or requirements phase.
I would argue the same can be said of an upvote. Is the upvote for a well reasoned and insightful post? Is it because you found it funny? Is it an upvote for trolling purposes, like you want it to be seen by more people for a bigger flame war? Is it simply because the person writing it has a following? Is it because it has lots of upvotes and people like being part of the 'winning team' as it were.
It seems the downvote gets all the attention because of the association with negative emotions, but the elimination of downvoting on social media platfors seems to inevitably lead to a state that is "worse than Reddit" leading me to believe it serves just as important a purpose as the upvote.
Alos, the upvote downvote mix leads to an aggregation that, overall, shows how that particular online community of viewers accepts or rejects content. The more people in an online community that participate in the up and down votes, the more it takes the shape of the general acceptance by that community as opposed to the specific motivations of the individuals.
That being said, a more filtered, nuanced, or even larger scope of options could be a good thing, and something I would be interested in seeing in play.
If it were just that simple, I'm afraid. Music industry revenue basically comes from three streams
The music industry (at least in the US), uses two forms of rights to the product, rights to the master physical copy and rights to the work itself.
Record companies keep rights to the master which gives them the rights to copy and control who can distribute copies made form that master. The record companies can offer a royalty to the artist which goes to pay the advance given by the record comapny that the artist used to make the master. Only the very highest selling artists will ever actually see these royalties, as most won't ever cover the advance. Honestly, most artists don't really value these rights as they never really do much for them.
Publishing rights are generally held by publishers and writers, often in a 50/50 arrangement. These are the rights needed to broadcast the music, use it for an event/commercial/movie/etc, allow it to be played in a venue, or allow it to be used on an album. The artist only ever sees money from this stream is if they wrote the music. Publishing rights are traded rather frequently, too, so the rights holders change on these. Artists tend to get more out of these rights, even long term, but it takes a few hits and years of writing to turn this into a steady income. You never know when a movie, series, or commercial will come along and decide a song you wrote thirty years ago is perfect.
The third stream is basically income from venues as well as merchandising. This is where most bands make their money. The reason for getting a record with a label is because it means marketing and distribution of albums that get people into seats.
The internet disrupted the industry by heavily blurring the line between what counts against master rights and publishing rights. Spotify is an easy example. Should they be paying for rights against the master? against the Publishing? or Both? Streaming would seem to be akin to broadcasting, but Spotify allows you to download them as well, so that would count against the master. Then there is the fact that streaming is on demand and used in the same way a copy of the master is used, does this make streaming more like owning a copy of the master and less like broadcasting? Should the publishers or the labels be paid more, then?
Everyone wants their pound of flesh and the artists are often the runts being pushed to the back. Also, when you do get a big name artist in the fray, they are typically after something that benefits themselves more than artists in general.
I would argue there is one other. The software in question has had so many modifications, plug-ins, and other bits stuck to it over the years it becomes nigh unusable. Any update or minor fix causes a cascade of unexpected and unknowable new bugs to take care of, each one with it's own cascade ready to go. Now you have a business running on software that shouldn't be running anywhere, with all that is left is to take it for a long walk to a farm somewhere.
Of course, that's not what the software company says. They can keep it going forever, no worries. However, they do expect us to pay for new features, then the fixes for the bugs in the new feature, then the the fixes for the bugs in other parts of the software caused by fixing the bugs caused by the new feature, then the fixes for bugs caused by the fixes for the bugs caused by the fixes for the bugs caused by the new feature....
Not to worry, though, thy think they have a new feature that will make the software at least 12% better, as soon as we pay them for it...
While Biden's track record with minorities is not "openly" hostile, it was never really that great. Honestly, at this point, any good or bad done by either party feels entirely accidental. They would have to actually spare the American people a single thought in order for intentionality to be proven.
Before the next round of internet flame war starts, I should say I am voting for the candidate most likely to bring the whole current political situation down. Honestly, I don't think there is any saving what is there.
Essentially, voting for the lesser of two evils doesn't seem to do anything helpful, so might as well try the other option.
In my experience the people that stay the longest are usually the ones so bad at their jobs they have to stay put.
If you want to move up, in pay or position, the answer is usually to find something elswhere for one of two reasons. One, year over year pay rises barely cover inflation, if they do at all, but moving companies can get you 10-30%. Two, moving up usually means you have to wait your turn, which can mean the person currently in that position has to retire, leave, or get let go, which can take years if not decades.
The ones that stay put usually have no ambition, motivation, or ability to develop professionally, prefering to coast as long as they can. This tends to lead to folks with decaying skill sets as the industry changes and they don't keep up, which leads to greater difficulty if they ever did try to find a job elsewhere, meaning they stay put for longer.
I don't think the spying is really the big issue here. If it were, then I doubt it would have such support.
The big fear is the Chinese government having direct access to so many American viewers. Not much effort would be required to weaponize some propaganda and push it right in front of those eyeballs.
Step One: Contract with a call farm in Dubai, Pune, the Phillipines
Step Two: Have the scammers contact your targets with the usual (You have been hacked, the IRS is afer you, Rich uncle, doesn't matter really)
Step Three: Collect all the data you want on whoever you want wherever you want in the name of tracking these international criminals down.
Yanno, it didn't seem as simple in my head as it does now, written down.
Hey, do ya'll think this would be more or less morally corrupt than protecting cocaine traffickers in order to supply guns to folks in Nicaragua? Asking for a friend.
The sad thing is how many people have been brainwashed into thinking that it's a choice between being treated with some basic dignity and respect, and having a job.
Thing is, in the US anyway, the brainwashing is a function of overwhelming evidence. Walmart is one example of a company notorious for using the 'slash and burn' strategy of closing stores to avoid unions.
Manufacturures here can always find someone cheaper, in cash and dignity, just a bit to the south. Go across the western pond and they can go even cheaper and find people even more willing to sacrifice dignity just to get the basics.
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