Posts by Cliffwilliams44 1189 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2019
Why are you storing secrets in a file IN YOUR PROJECT!
There are many solutions that you can create a local secr4t store in your computer, there are also many ways you can store secrets in locations accessible over the network or internet! AWS Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, I am sure there a many! You don't have to store a secret on your machine to access them, there are so many ways to do this securely it amazes me that people still do this stupid stuff!
The article quotes the 1st law without understanding the problem with it!
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Computers (robots) make binary decision, e.g. when 2 people are in danger the robot (AI) will make a decision based on probability of outcome, without consideration as to who the 2 people are. For instance, save the child instead of the adult, save the President instead of the aid!
Wow, that's rich!
I work (in the US) for a British company. I can't tell you how many times we have had to implement some really stupid idea (and waste a lot of money) because the "blokes" over there just had to use the new "shiny" thing! The current "shiny" think is AI of course; we're spending thousands on it, it doesn't work, but we are "full speed ahead"!
" don't think I'd ever read programmers were propping up the US economy"
You didn't, maybe you are too young, but it did happen. In the 90's with the .COM boom.
I started in the industry in the 80's and getting a programming job was hard. Most programmer worked in the mini/mainframe space and that was a club hard to crack. By the time the .COM boom hit I already had a career as a sysadmin. Programmer made this boom happen! Then everyone had their web site, their e-commerce site, the data centers were built, they had their programming staff, and it all came crashing down
AI is going to plateau; we are not going to reach the SkyNet/Matrix level of AI until quantum computing becomes a real thing.
What the AI movement may do if force the building of the Energy infrastructure the world should have been doing for the last 60 years and put to death the political scam that is Climate Change forever!
"...at some point there may be an opportunity for wider adoption of a desktop/endpoint OS in large organisations as Windows and Microsoft generally may be seen as either too expensive(*), unnecessary, or a possible risk."
Wake up, you are having a dream!
Why won't this happen? Because the people responsible for the primary support of those desktops WILL NOT learn another desktop OS to support! This is why Macs have not infiltrated the corporate environment en-mass!
There are 2 types of people who work the primary service desk.
1. Entry level people with limited skills. The good ambitious ones don't stay there long and are replaced with more entry level people
2. The lifers! The 40-50 year old service desk tech who won't learn anything new, only knows his company systems (that all run on Windows) and pisses and cries whenever he's asked to learn a new skill!
Any cost saving on licensing will be lost once the cost of replacing these people with qualifies support staff (that is if you can find them and they WILL cost more) is factored in.
"It is similar to the UK's long-held ambition to break end-to-end encryption (E2EE), packaged using similar themes – disrupting child sexual abuse, tackling terrorism, and so on."
As long as you're not a Muslim! The, it's culturally fine to rape young girls! God forbid anyone in the government be accused of being racist!
I see this a lot of times in places with existing conduit. The conduit is so full of other cables you cannot pull the fiber through without stretching it. If it stretches too much it develops micro cracks in the fiber.
I've seen this in office buildings where the main conduit that runs up the elevator (lift) shaft is so full you can barely run any new cable. 50% of the cables in the conduit are no longer in use because each tome a tenant wants new or replacement service the provider runs new cable because they cannot use or remove the old one.
“The political views of children inform the electoral choices of many current electors, including their parents and their teachers, as well as others interested in the views of those soon to reach the age of maturity,” the company’s court filing states. “Preventing children from communicating their political views directly burdens political communication in Australia.”
And here-in lies the reason for the downfall of our western societies!
Only someone who does not understand how AWS works would make a statement like this!
AWS may fail over hardware behind the scene because of many factors you are not aware of, and the actual IP address of your load balancer may change, that's why you always use the assigned DNS address.
Your targets are references by service, e.g. Instances NOT IP addresses for the very same reason!
Speak not of what you do not know, because you do not know what you do not know.
Let me corrupt all the SRV records in your internal DNS and see how long your wonderful on-prem infrastructure stays working!
The problem was not the cloud, it was not the architecture, it was a human fucking something up! Which can happen on-prem just as well as in the cloud!
The entire internet, intranet, your on-prem infrastructure is ALL built on a line of dominoes known as DNS! When DNS fails, everything fails!
Dork up your DNS in Active Directory and watch your entire enterprise come to a halt!
All of these services and their dependencies rely on functioning DNS to work because IP addresses change as instances are spun up, swapped over, etc.
It kills me how you server jockeys think you can provide the complex interdependent infrastructure that AWS provides On-Prem.
The simple answer is not use Microsoft. Sure you need to use them for Exchange if you already have it but putting your infrastructure workloads in Azure is just asking for trouble!
We've been in AWS for 7 years and the reliability is outstanding, the support is outstanding!
Re: Desktops. If you can get away from Windows on the Desktop, more power to you. Unfortunately, that's just not an option for many!
Seriously? Apparently, you have no idea what went on during the Biden regime!
The FCC has every right to regulate the public airwaves, that is written in the law! The FCC has no authority over cable/streaming and has never said it did!
The Kimmel situation had nothing to do with Trump, it was the affiliates who pressed the issue, and THEY still won't broadcast his show!
We are only arresting people who have violated out law by entering the country illegally! The LAWS passed by congress!
You are the one living in a closed echo chamber full of ridiculous absurdities!
Trump did not do this, Congress did, and Biden signed it!
Trump tried to make this work and keep TokTok working in the US. The alternative was a complete ban!
Claw yourself out of your echo chamber for Christ's sake!
"He is presumably also looking for a stock price boost with the announcement."
And that is what this is all about, layoff a bunch of staff, spout all the AI nonsense jargon and get dumb investors and stupid wall street analysts to pump up his stock.
This will fail, as many of these efforts are failing, and when it does, he either hires back the humans or his competition (that didn't jump on the AI train) eats his lunch!
Nonsense!
I can tell you what happened!
DOS -> Lotus 123 & WordStart/WordPerfect
Windows 3.1 -> Lotus 123, Wordstar/WordPerfect, Microsoft Works
Windows 95 -> Microsoft Office & still Lotus 123, WordStar/WordPerfect (I used to support law firms who refused to get off of WordPerfect text version for YEARS After MS Word came out)
Then all the enterprise software that came out in Windows, Great Planes (not MS Dynamics), JD Edwards, etc., and all the industry vertical software!
All throughout this time there wasn't an option for Linux/Unix, there wasn't a good desktop, no real replacement for Office, WordPerfect, WordStart, Lotus.
Then came MS Exchange and again, there was no competitor on the Linux side! Novell had a nice offering but that's not Linux. As did Lotus, but that was Windows.
Then came the Microsoft propaganda, freeware is BAD! Anything you are not paying for will not be supported, etc., etc.
By this time, it was done!
I love Linux, (though I'm a bit pissed with kernel 6.16 being a holy bug filled mess!) but for the corporate desktop it is too stratified! There are too many disparate players that don't work towards the same goal, (while many others do). Libre Office, while a nice product just cannot compete with Office, why? Because the team that maintains it are perennially "stuck on stupid"! Common features available in Excel for years like tables they refuse to support for some unknown philosophical reasons, Writer IMO is just annoying to work in if you are used to Word. There is WPS, I've tried it, it is a wonderful product, probably the most Excel compatible Linux product I've used, their Word equivalent is also outstanding, BUT, it is a Chinese product and in this current climate, THAT is not going to get anywhere near the corporate desktop!
Unless SOME company is going to build a Linux distribution with a solid desktop (maybe a version of KDE as it is the most polished), with a set of MS Office compatible (truly compatible, not the half-assed Libre compatible) application, including a feature compliant Outlook replacement, charge a nominal license fee for support, offer quality support AND TRAINING FOR IT STAFF, You can forget ever having Linux take over the corporate desktop, EVER! Support is the biggest issue, Help Desk staff DO NOT know Linux, most of them WILL NOT LEARN! They know Windows because they've used it their whole lives, it's the same for the business staff!
The Senator is an idiot and so is the author of this article!
"Microsoft continues to use RC4 as its default encryption algorithm"
Browsers and Azure: Microsoft completely removed RC4 support from its modern web browsers (Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11) in 2016. The company also removed it from Azure services in 2016.
So, how can this be blamed on RC4, it cannot! Now if the contractor was using an old, unsupported Windows version with Internet Explorer How the hell is that MS fault!
Which is probably most likely the case! Yes, browsers are not safe! Windows PC that are not secured properly are dangerous in the hands of morons!
But seriously, how does an infected contractor PC disable an entire organization? It does it by the organization's network, computers, and systems being insecure! By having certain users with credential owning the "keys to the kingdom!"
MS Still supports RC4 in Active Directory, the problem is in many organizations, many things will break if you disable it! There are certain large enterprise applications (who will rename nameless) that will cease to function if you shut this off. Just like if you require LDAPS!
What they are killing is VBA in the Office apps. No mention int e article what they are replacing it with.
The VBScript interpreter (cscript.exe) hasn't been "officially" supported for years. Unless they are going to declare cscript.exe a virus and have all AV software delete it, It will still function. So, if you have old VBScript script files out there, they will continue to work.
#1: Wrong! You can run PowerShell scripts without showing that console! You can run PowerShell and use forms! You can even create a web application in PowerShell (Pode).
#2: Wrong again! PowerShell core 7+ is under 2 MB without any module loaded.
#3: Strike 3! If you need to do anything the least bit extensive in VBScript it's a snail! I know, I've written many, many VBScript scripts over my 30-year career! Poor performance in PowerShell is 100% the fault of the author! There are many techniques that work well from the command line for convenience's sake that will drag your script down. Overuse of piping, using += to add items to a large array, using extensive string concatenation using + or +=. The list goes on! There are better, faster ways to handle all these situations. Don't blame the hammer because you are using it backwards!
What benefit do you get out of a physical SIM card? None.
Traveling to another company? Get a local eSIM, scan a QR code and now activate it! Return home switch back to your local profile!
If you routinely travel to a specific country, you can have that profile available, no need to physically switch cards!
Over the last 30 years my employer has rolled out multiple "collaboration" solutions that were supposed to be the 2nd coming of collaboration! None of them were even remotely successful!
People don't want to collaborate unless they have a reason to. They will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to do so. What you are not going to do is make the collaborate more than they are already doing!
What dragging people back int the office only does is now they are going to get on a Teams call with people in a cubicle 30 feet away! Why? Because the conference room is already booked and what they are meeting about need to get done now!
Go back and read the damn article! WiFi is not being removed from public libraries. What is being removed is the lending of cellular hot spots. Why should the taxpayers be subsidizing this?
Jurs because something sounds good and makes 'you' feel better about yourself doesn't mean it is a good thing to do!
I use Claude daily but Claude is no where near perfect by any means. You have to keep it "on task" or it can go way off on tangents. Ask it about a simple revision and it may just suggest a total re-write of your code, none of which will work! I've have to prompt it with "just give me the answer, do not re-write my entire function. If you are not aware of this you can go down a rabbit hole that is hard to get out of.
And it makes shit up! It will suggest things that just don't exist!
Yes, all this is true, but as someone who has had to change providers 3 times in the last 3 years, as my PC 1st changed medical groups (he left on not so good terms), and then the group she joined when out of business (in our area), it was a pain getting my records moved between providers, it took months. The only upside is that my new PC is part for the group my previous PC was originally part of, so there's that.
The biggest problem with this new system is going to be social engineering. If the patient is the arbiter of access, there really isn't must that can be done to stop that. People are stupid, they can be talked into giving away their children if they are told there is a benefit to them in doing so! (that's sarcasm BTW)
While that may be true, it all depends on the 3rd party chosen. I use Zoho Vault free edition, and it serves my needs very well. I get an encrypted, password protected backup every day sent to my personal email of all my data, so if something happens with their app and my data I have it as of last night.
Even with all this, it will not happen until there is a viable alternative to Office! I am sorry Libre IS NOT IT! WPS is amazing but it won't be accepted the world over because it is a Chinese product!
Many ERP apps and targeted vertical application are now we based so that isn't a hurdle.
There are other issues:
1. I would not recommend our development team switch to Linux as they are married to Visual Studio. Visual Studio Code is not the answer to this.
2. Linux IS NOT novice friendly! I run a Linux desktop but there are members of my IT team I would not recommend this to. They are not IT novices, but they lack any Linux skills they could call upon when the inevitable "issues that Linux will eventually have" comes up. I have the skill to deal with these relatively simple issues, they DO NOT!
3. Poor enterprise network services. Connecting to SMB shares, this is a serious pain in the ass! Linux doesn't handle disconnected SMB shares well. It can hang up the system. (Macs are even worse)
I could go on. Until these things are dealt with, and presented from a single source, i.e. a company "selling" a Linux desktop they are willing to support, the Enterprise will not embrace it!
There are 2 types of generally accepted UIs.
1. The standard desktop US with a categorized start menu and desktop icons.
2. The touch screen UI seen now on phones and tablets.
Every attempt to "improve" #1 has been met with scorn and derision! People DO NOT want a version of #2 on their desktops or laptops! Even if those systems have a touch screen! I own a Service, which I have TURNED OFF the touch screen because it is basically useless!
The latest versions of GNOME are a terrible implementation! An attempt to create a tablet UI for desktops in some vane hope that there will someday be a Lunix tablet (that no one will want)!
The mere fact that many, many people are screaming bloody murder that they cannot revert Windows 11 back to the not so popular Windows 10 UI is telling!
Which is an extremely small market!
Americans for the most part don't want EVs. Tesla's entire outlook was based on EV subsidies and mandates! THAT's what Musk got all but hurt about, not the deficit! He got in a shouting match wuth Sec Treasury on this exact subject!
If your business cannot survive without subsidies, then it's not viable business!
Tesla is NOT the Model-T, the "everyman" car.
The major auto makers are scaling back their EV programs because they are money losers!
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