Posts by The Basis of everything is...

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Extra Irony

Adverts for Google Cloud (El Reg is one of the few sites I don't block ads for) and googletagmanager is enabled here (but blocked!). So no doubt I've got a file somewhere now marked as an undesireable...

Kill the young to save the old

Nextcloud is an alternative to Google and Microsoft (dunno about the iThing services) and is ideal for small orgs, community groups or even families if you're willing to put in a little time to manage on a home server from Raspberry Pi upwards - or pay any half-decent web hoster a few pounds per month to do so. You can store docs and either sync or directly access from Linux, Win, 'Droid and iThing denying Google the chance to read, sorry, profile your content. It has shared calendar and tasks, denying Google access to your activities, there's even a webmail frontend for any accessible IMAP server if you're into that, a very usable online editor for Office docs, plus a huge number of other apps you can enable natively or integrate with. The only thing I wish it could do is share individual Notes with other people like Keep can.

Google depend on reading your data to build their profile of you so they can sell you. Anything that gets between them and that data is obviously a threat to their income. With Nextcloud you can pretty much take Google out of your own data. And the same also applies to Microsoft as well - you don't need a Office365 / Teams / Sharepoint subscription for example.

Google have also pulled the "security and privacy" card on a few other apps I use, which is pretty rich given their long history of ignoring your privacy when it comes to their bottom line so I doubt Nextcloud will be the last thing they screw over in search of dollars.

I wish Nextcloud well but I suspect they're shouting into the wind on this. Us users will of course be ignored by the needs of big business and politicians alike.

[Nextcloud user - home and for a couple of community groups, and by day I'm a cloud architect so if that also makes my a hypocrite then so be it. If my boss and clients want to do different that's their call]

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

Re: Fine, I'll say it

Big upvote.

I had the "pleasure" of working on a SAP project for a southern council many years ago. There was one particular process involving the minutae of what got printed on payslips. Not the amount, just wording so they could get some consistency across departments and simplify the overall process. This got turned into a dispute about working practices and terms and conditions with the unions insisting on getting so much money for agreeing to the change they gave up and cancelled that part of the project completely. And then got lambasted by the same staff for not sorting out the stupidly complex payroll process.

It was one the most poisonous working environments I ever had the misfortune to be in. Behaviour I saw there would have resulted in dismissal in most other places I've worked.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: A reasonable solution is needed

Standard feature on Androids is Family Link. I control when my kids phone is locked or unlocked. I can set a limit on how much they can use it during the day. I can put limits on individual apps usage. All installs need my approval.

I periodically ask them to let me look at their phone and check messages and browser history and we do have chats about the content found. And we do occasionally talk to thier friends parents about the same. And no, my kids don't hate me for that that (yet), we've explained about why and if they get messages they're not comfortable with they do show us and we have raised it with teachers and other parents.

They also know that even though they'll shortly get the option to opt out of control (cos Google decide they're chronologically old enough at 13) they will lose their phone if they do so (my wifi, I pay the bill too. I have ultimate control) and they will be given a dumb phone instead as ultimately that's just as good for arranging pickup when the train home from school is cancelled.

I know it won't last and at some point there will be a huge bust-up about how unfair life is, that's part of growing up / having kids. But my house, my rules. Their education and protection.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

Ping / ICMP blocked by default

On average each of our customers will have 2 or 4 internet facing machines for support and interfacing purposes. For one purpose we allow two specific ICMP sub-types from 1 specific IP address and a couple of other ports. All other access is blocked.

For the others we block all inbound access unless it's a reply to a previously established outbound connection.

Still got to have the public IPv4 addresses to make it work, but as far as the rest of the internet is concerned they're unused.

So yeah, treat the stats with suspicion. And massive over-provisioning in the only way cloudy providers can operate. When we can spawn, use and kill of fleets of VMs within the hour they need to have a goodly supply of addresses to keep us happy.

Bit rich given they're blocking of IPv6 ISPs

My ISP doesn't support IPv6 and seemingly has no plans to. Hurricane Electric provide a free "tunnel broker" service to you can use IPv6 while waiting for your ISP to either get their act together or for contract renewal to come around.

For the last several weeks it appears AWS, Google and a few others have taken to blackholing the entire /32 address range HE use. Not just a simple deny that would allow browsers and applications to fall back to IPv4, but instead causes them to lock up until eventually timing out, leaving the only option to disable IPv6 completely. And this affects any site who use services provided by this group so the knock-on effects are widespread.

As an end user you cannot even get a response (Google policy is to not discuss this, others likewise) let alone ask for your own subnet to be exempted, so a spectacular own goal in driving adoption.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: Wrong problem targeted

But Google have decided that childhood ends at 13 and your kids can opt out of all controls and restrictions at that point. So your choice becomes trust your kids or get them a dumb phone. Except that schools already mandate they must use certain apps so that's not really an option.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

Several years ago one of my cousins came out of retirement to do some design work on high voltage engineering that wasn't taught at the universities any more. And yes, it was after spending an evening in a bar with a bunch of random other engineers lamenting what kids these days take don't know and take for granted.

I don't recall the details, but at the currents and voltages involved integrated circuits don't so much as go yellow and runny as sublime. Pretty much the same happens to people too. I just hope that some unfortunate soul didn't discover both facts at the same time.

China requires any new domestic Wi-Fi kit to support IPv6 and run it by default

Re: Are there any routers that don't?

Plenty. My ISP-supplied router (Plusnet) appears to have deliberately disabled it even though the same router from their parent company (BT) apparently works nicely. The first versions of the Draytek Vigor routers I had claimed to be IPv6 ready but in reality their support for it was very basic and nowhere near feature equivalent to what they could do with IPv4. Happily they've got so much better.

Hurricane Electric provide a free IPv6 tunnel service which works very nicely with the Vigor, and you get a choice of a /64 or a /48 even for a home network - which is billions of internets worth of addresses.

Even in the day job I've noticed a subtle change from "What's that?" to "yeah, we don't need to worry just yet" when asking if they need to consider IPv6 in their connectivity plans.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

There's ODBC drivers for all the SAP databases, assuming you're allowed to connect directly (and don't risk the hellfire of indirect access licences). Otherwise it is possible to connect to SAP application servers using RFC calls via VBA and bits of SAPGUI (says google) to get at the higher level data constructs. Having a friendly ABAPer around would probably help along with a supply of bananas and fiddle toys to keep them contented. Or was that for librarians?

Quite why you're having to muck about in Access when you're migrating to SAP is another question - and one that does not bode well. I feel your pain and frequently dispair at the repeated mistakes of this industry.

UK IaaS market: Deeper probe by competition regulator lands soon

Yep, you can do that. For a fee....

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

PlusNet plussed off

Just to see what the options for a new customer are around here (semi-rural just south of Birmingham) and PlusNet will very thoughtfully save me the hassle of dealing with a real phone line as "Our Fibre package is phone line free. Simple and straightforward broadband. Simple as that."

With their mobile being phased out in favour of EE (33% price increase), an unknown cost to find another phone service / buy VoIP kit and hassle of number changes, and a DSL option that promises minimum speeds they've never achieved this is not looking good.

And apparently my contract, which still has 13 months left to run, is now only for broadband and line rental. Why do I feel that "We'll do you proud" is turning into foxtrot uniform?

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: If Only ...

And if I recall correctly, continually criticised NATS about their charges and blocking investment in the systems and processes that only exist to make sure his aeroplanes get to where he wants them to go so he can make money.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but if I have two identical systems fed the same data, then I'd expect them both to give the same result. Especially if it's something safety critical like making sure airplanes that have been carefully shepherd into close proximity to each other don't actually bump heads.

Or maybe there's a missing irony icon?

(Not that you'll find much iron in an airplane of course, or these days much metal at all given the preference for making everything out of araldite and burnt string.)

Linus Torvalds calls for calm as bcachefs filesystem doesn't make Linux 6.5

Re: Rights and Wrongs

BtfFS is my go-to filesystem for Linux, mainly for the snapshot that lets me implement near-instant backups as far as users are concerned (which then get copied off somewhere safe at leisure.)

At $MAIN_JOB I'm stuck with EXT3 or XFS 'cos that's what the vendor demands where it really counts - and the Lords of Chaos have decided we might as well use XFS everywhere else for simplicity.

In practice I've found that BtrFS is horribly slow for databases in all but the tiniest MariaDB case, but it's not difficult to stick an XFS filesystem in for that - a little more complexity but get the best of all worlds. Yes you can turn off CoW where you have DB files if you really want and maybe one day I'll do a performance test with that.

And running BtrFS on the desktop (and sandpit servers) makes patching, upgrades and other tests boring - if something doesn't go right just Timeshift it back and try again.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: The best

"Also, support is essentially unending."

Not if you still have a Samsung NC10 (still in mint condition too) as 32-bit support finished last month.

Any recommendations on where to go next? I'm thinking LMDE might be worth a test.

US adds Euro spyware makers to export naughty list

No matter what, you lose

And yet nothing said about what Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft can do in terms of tracking you, your content, device usage and 3 of those have rights to directly muck with your stuff too. And before anyone says linux is different, when's the last time you did a full analysis of all the packages that apt/mintupdate deployed for you? And that's before thinking what's going on with CPU microcode and firmware updates.

Microsofties still digesting pay freeze upset by Nadella's 'landmark year' memo

Re: Stockholm Syndrome

If you have a notice period in your employment contract you're taking a huge chance if you quit without notice. Companies can (and do) sue for that and the damages can be very expensive.

Not something to be considered lightly.

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

X400 do you? There's probably a few other users of it out there still. Somewhere. Maybe?

Proof that doing it properly v a quick bodge is only ever going to end one way...

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Re: Emgineering 101

Surely the change must have had some effect on the final product, or why else you you be changing it?

And for all checking and paperwork in the aviation industry it still has it's fair share of "oh $hit" moments where everyone has signed off on the paperwork with what turned out to be less than a full appreciation of exactly what they were signing off on.

Having said that, the engineering discipline I learned back then has proven invaluable for many subsequent years of swearing at bits instead of pieces. While in many ways things are better than they've ever been, we've still got a lot to more to [re]learn.

(I'll raise a cocktail to the memory of the Mods and Docs office. It might be Finnish inspired though...)

Re: tip of the iceberg

Progress....

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

Re: Puts me off sharing my Wi-Fi

Any modern phone should default to a randomly-generated MAC so no tracking is possible. And consider using VPN client so the wifi operator still can't snoop on the sites you visit, one that links back to your home router should be sufficient to preserve your privacy on open networks.

When wifi first came in pretty much everyone in the area left their wifi wide open for neighbours to make free use on the basis that AT&T were already making too much money and with a 10MB service we couldn't use all that bandwidth ourselves so might as well share. Reportedly I could walk from my apartment into the city center and have free wifi virtually all the way. AT&T didn't like it, but there was nothing they could do.

I can't help feeling this is less about saving the children as enhancing donor profits - on both sides of the pond.

Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices

it's all about API monitisation

Look at any API Management platform and you'll find features for monetisation. It's a key feature, not just a nice to have. Develop a free service, persuade other to use it, adopt it, grow it and base their existence on it and then when you reach sufficient volume you start charging. Your uses either have to pay up or go out of business.

Monetization with Azure API Management https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/monetization-overview

Monetize your custom HTTP APIs via AWS Data Exchange https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/awsmarketplace/monetize-your-custom-http-apis-via-aws-data-exchange/

Overview of Apigee monetization https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/monetization/overview

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

I'm guessing many of those dedicated hardworking public servants in the Houses of Parliament must have been teenagers in the 80's, and would surely have encountered the "age verification" in that most educational game Leisure Suite Larry?

Nuff said....

Google Cloud slips over in Europe amid water leak, fire

Re: Resilience?

Not quite.

You pay for cloudy services in a selected zone or region, depending on the service

If you want more resilience, you pay for cloudy services in multiple zones and regions, at a multiple of the cost.

And if a service goes pop, you'll get a a few dollars back for that particular service. If everything else is up but not actually usable you'll still be paying full price for that.

Which I'm sure is great consolation if you've just lost hundreds of dollars in lost business, disruption etc.

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

You would have thought so.

But councils all seem to be fiercely independent, especially once the members get involved. I've previously worked with a Birmingham-based services company that claimed a "Template for Local Government" that had some some success with a few groupings of councils, but eventually all of them fell apart over political (office and party) differences rather than technology. Quite often even getting different parts of the same council to agree with each other to sign off a common spec was near impossible. It's amazing that local government is able to function at all.

Local authorities typically have:

payroll & expenses

hr - benefits, hiring, reviews, time, approvals, reporting

stock, consumables and stuff they give out/distribute

distribution & warehousing of stuff

assets

purchasing, goods receipt, accounts payable

finance & management accounts

reporting on anything and everything

orders, fees, subscriptions, taxes, receipts

treasury

CRM for handling "customer contact" e.g. green bins, pest control, pemits

Think of anything that every type of business might do, somewhere in local authority somebody will be doing just that. At least until it all gets reorganised/split up/tendered/outsourced/merged/abolished.

Maybe using the word enterprise in association with the stereotypical council is a bit hard to swallow, but it's still the same processes. Even if somewhat twisted and mangled into their own worldview.

Yes. Many. But nobody cares as it doesn't make a good headline.

How fiends abuse an out-of-date Microsoft Windows driver to infect victims

MS have a lot of problems, but that ain't one of 'em.

You're now expecting Microsoft to block the installation of applications on your machine at OS level? Just think about that for a second, and then take a guess at how long until they get sued.

If you don't want stuff installed on your computer, or the ones you managed, don't give users the ability to install stuff. Or get one of the many security / endpoint protection tools etc that will give you the control over what actually happens on your computers, and even then keep install rights restricted to as few as possible.

And you owe me a beer for potentially defending M$ too. I feel dirty....

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

It's all somebody else's fault

“Tech firms haven’t been held to account when harm, abuse and criminal behaviour have run riot on their platforms."

"Government hasn't been held to account when harm, abuse and criminal behaviour have run riot on their streets"

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

Home auto-archive

Last year I finally got around to sorting out home email properly. I did think for a while that maybe I was being a bit too geek as who in their right mind sets up email for fun when it's virtually given away for free? This is why. That and my wife kinda likes the domain name we have. She's not a geek either.

So I'm paying £2.50 per month to Mythic Beasts to host the domain and be a mail service and so it ain't free, but then I spend more than that on beer. It "only" gives 5GB storage, but it's never gone above 500MB 'cos I have getmail picking up mail from them and saving it to a little postfix server and then cleaning off MB after 2 weeks.

Multiple getmail configs isn't going to scale well, but for a family or even small business it's doable. Postfix is free. Dovecot is free. Ubuntu is free. This is all within the capability of a Raspberry Pi to run, with as many TB of disk that you care to hook up to it. If you want webmail, shared calendar and task I've heard you could even run a Nextcloud instance on there too although that sounds a bit optimistic, but that does work nicely on an old PC or small VM. But then I guess that's not cool and cloudy, especially when MS want you to pay £80 per year, every year, forever.

Quite why anyone want to keep gigabytes of old email is another question. One that I ask my missus every so often. When I'm feeling brave...

Publishers land killer punch on Internet Archive in book copyright court battle

Re: Libraries vs "digital lending services"

For UK: I've just grabbed two books at random (Second Variety and The Essential Calvin & Hobbes for those that need to know) and both have the following statement on the first few pages.

"All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser."

For USA: I'll have to check back on that - don't have any USA editions to hand although I don't recall seeing any such wording in theirs.

Which I guess mean IA are bang out of order (that's a legal term apparently) if they tried this in the UK - maybe they'll get sued here too? And also if my kids rip the cover off a book it appears I can't then give the book away. Although if they rip the cover of any of my books I'll likely be wanting to give them away...

UK spy agency: Don't feed LLMs with sensitive corporate data

Browsers all leak info too

No need for ChatGPT to be giving the game away, it seems all browsers now make the address bar double up as the search bar so if you miss-type or truncate a copy/paste of a URL, for example one that references a document repository like sharepoint or any other WebDAV server instead of just giving a 404 you now get a page full of irrelevant crap and you've also just given your default search engine some interesting keywords. And if you're tied into their cloudy work offering too they also know who you work for, everything else you've searched for and are in a nice position to start joining the dots as to what your company is up to.

Or should I be upping the dosage of dried frog pill again?

NB. With a lot of hassle you can make Firefox separate out search from addresses, but it seems with Edge it ignores the so-called privacy setting to stop this at the moment. How convenient.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

You should be so lucky

It will all be mandated as safety-critical and you won't have a choice.

And because it is safety critical only those holding a current manufacturer licence (aka dealers) will be allowed to do any maintenance.

And because it is safety critical the car will have to be services on a schedule as mandated by the safety licence holder (aka dealer)

And because it is safety critical the car will have to be connected to the manufacturer online safety monitoring facility at all times (at your expense)

And the worst part is, all this is already being put into place in current cars. It ain't the future, it's here already.

German Digital Affairs Committee hearing heaps scorn on Chat Control

Software freedom?

So pre-scanning is going to apply to cloud storage and communications?

I presume then the scanning code, integration config and any training data needed will be made publicly available free of charge for anyone implementing things like Nextcloud, Syncthing, Postfix/Dovecot, Thunderbird / K9 et al, which are freely available to anyone who wants to runt their own private cloudy groupware & communication apps can do so.

Thought not.

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Re: ROMulans

Gotta say +1 for shooting your own argument down - software and firmware has to be assumed to have bugs, so if it can't be updated then it's only a matter of time before it becomes known insecure instead of merely presumed insecure / not proven secure.

But yes, a physical enable/disable update that actually makes a difference (SD-Cards anyone?) should be mandatory. Sorry, you don't get a +2

Re: Network Service == Single Point Of Failure

FWIW I installed a brand new Win 11 machine 2 months ago and was able to do so without creating a personal Microsoft account. It took a lot of googling to find there is a very small link hidden away to let you configure against a traditional domain, which then lets you get an old fashioned install and to be fair it then worked as perfectly as you'd expect for a Windows laptop.

Second day on the job and I then had to join the Azure AD domain and all the goodness of M365 et al...

How much longer this will be allowed is another question - they seem hellbent on creating a master directory of the human race and controlling everything you see and do.

Europe to consult on making Big Tech pay for the networks it floods

Customer pays twice

If you send data to anyone, you pay your ISP.

If you send data from any of the cloud providers, who besides being Big Tech themselves also provide a lot of the infra to the rest of Big Tech, you also have to pay egress charges for every byte sent, whether that is data to yourself or directly to your customers/users.

So you're effectively paying both sides already.

Now if the argument is certain organisations are not paying enough because right now in many there is a choice of provider to use (but certainly not all - have a look at regional data egress pricing to see the effect of competition) should we really be saying that telcos and ISPs should be allowed to pick on organisations to pay more? Who do you think is ultimately going to foot the bill? Hint: See above.

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Re: We all depend on the cloud, whether we like it or not.

There's still a huge amount of private WAN out there. Running VPNs over the internets may well be nice and cheap, but there's no service guarantees so if you've got workloads that need a guaranteed throughput or have sensitivities around latency or response time, or you're simply not allowed to use internet for security/policy reasons then buying a WAN service is still the way to go. And unless you're big enough to be laying your own fiber you're still at the mercy of a provider not screwing up.

There's always a fallback option

If you're all-in on O365, and especially if working remote, then do a little homework and prepare yourself for the inevitable local glitch that cuts you off the interwebs. Funnily enough all the capabilities of working offline are baked into the products. e.g.:

Teams: Keep key contacts in Outlook and/or on your phone and actually talk to them the old fashioned way.

OneDrive / Sharepoint: Use offline folders and keep a local copy of key docs

Exchange: Send/receive might be problematic, but you can at least keep recent mails locally on any decent mail client if you tell it

Install the apps on your PC rather than use the web versions

I've lost much more worktime due to muppets digging through phone cables or running over street cabinets. Most organisations should be able to come up with a plan to keep the important things going for a week or two with little cost given all the tools we have available to us now.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The biggest killer of working time has been pointless meetings that could have been completed much quicker and amicably in a lunchtime pub. Now maybe Teams needs to come with a beer tap?

University still living in the Nineties seeks help with move to SAP S/4HANA

Re: Cloud

That's true some of SAP's own cloud offerings, but there's also other options to have S/4 in a cloudy environment and still have all the modifications. Of course SAP want you to move to one of their own cloudy as-a-service offerings, some of which you dance entirely to their tune, with minimal configuration options and constant pressure to subscribe to more more more.

It shouldn't be a surprise that any customisations created for ECC6 or other products will need some attention to work with or on S/4. And by attention I mean anywhere from review and test through to start again from scratch or switch to some equivalent standard feature instead.

Just like in the real world, there's a lot to be said for having a major cleanup whenever you move house. If nothing else it gives you more space to fill with cruft again.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Keepasses and Syncthing works well

I've used Keepass for years since a (now former) employer who handled stuff for a bunch of very security aware clients made us standardise on it. And taking a leaf out of their book, I don't put all passwords in the same file.

Example

Mobile file has everything you may need to access from a device while out and about. This is synchronized to all devices and desktop using Syncthing. No cloud involved, and any updates while away also get synchronized back home too.

Home file has everything else, lives solely on desktop (with backup) and never goes anywhere near a mobile device.

For the really paranoid you could use an Offline file on removable storage for really important passwords that you don't use frequently if you don't think your deskop is secure enough.

Most likely issue for me is mobile broken or gets lost / stolen, in which case if somebody gets into it they have a chance to crack Keepass and be rewarded with a bunch of low value passwords. I suspect you'd make much more money from selling the knowledge on how to crack Keepass than cashing in some almost-expired airline and hotel points...

Of course the strength of your master passwords / fingerprint reader is still a weakness. And if you're truly paranoid you'd not be using a fingerprint reader as your frontline security method would you?

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: Someone Else's Password

Keepass is as good a password manager as any - and I've worked in secure sites where it was the mandated solution so I figure if it's good enough for them it's good enough for me.

Syncthing also works well for secure synchronisation of the password DB between devices (Linux, Window and Android all proven, not tried any others) but of course like any replication based solution you must make sure you don't try to update the password DB on two devices at the same time. It#s also handy for automagically backing up photos or other files on your mobile back to a system you control too.

I'd also recommend having one keypass file for passwords you'd want on a mobile device, and a second for any that you definitely don't want to have on your mobile if it gets lost, stolen or otherwise attacked. And of course you'd be making periodic backups of your keepass files won't you?

Being one of the 1% sucks if you're a Rackspace user

In that case you've picked the wrong plan or the wrong MSP. Or both.

Outsourcing done well can save you a whole lot of problems and money, and most techies will go a above and beyond, especially if treated with courtesy and respect, whenever something interesting occurs.

But you have to make real sure that you have the right contract and you're buying what you need instead of the cheapest you think you can get away with. If your sole aim of outsourcing is to cut costs and to screw every last penny out of what should be a partnership then you are very likely going to end up with regrets.

Re: I just wonder ..

Exchange Backup for small/home business

Bacula triggers script to call Exchange backup to dump the database to a file, backups up that file, and them sweeps it to an archive area and delete yesterdays archive. Nothing fancy beyond a bit of config and a bash script. Using free Bacula edition too. Annual VM export to speed up a full rebuild should the worst ever happen.

Exchange Restore for small/home business

Upload VM export in the event of total loss. Restore backup file if that's been lost. Use Exchange tools to restore what you need from that. Win.

Only time I had to do it, it took most of a day to get some lost mails back - and that was mostly googling for the clue on how to do it for real. Not difficult, but not exactly scalable either. And not something for the non technically minded to attempt so hardly suitable for most small businesses to attempt to do in-house.

Bootnote

Now the whole lot has been migrated to postfix & dovecot for mail and Nextcloud for shared xDAV calendar & contacts - and the other goodies it can do which I'm still playing with. Mail is easy to restore (at least under test conditions) the calendar & contacts will be a problematic if somebody accidentally deletes something - still not something for the non technically minded to attempt. And yes, getting postfix to work was an interesting learning experience...

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Re: "This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment..."

A friend of mine is an environmental health officer. He was used to hearing certain service calls over the tannoy whenever he went into a local branch of a certain supermarket carrying his official hat and coat to do an inspection.

It was when he started getting met withing a minute of entering other branches - even ones outside his area - by a friendly helpful manager when he was not in work clothes he started to get suspicious that perhaps the systems used to spot known shoplifters were perhaps being put to other uses too. Maybe not entirely ethical by the supermarkets, but he found the personal service was a nice way to beat the checkout queue and for quickly finding everything on his shopping list.

As for is it legal, there are some huge loopholes under the heading of security / prevention of crime and protecting health & safety when it comes to using surveillance tech.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: Somebody's talking bollocks

IPv5 has been and gone. As have IPv7, IPv8 and IPv9. At this rate it won't be long before we have to start doing NAT for the Protocol Version Header

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_version_numbers

Re: ?

Worked on an as-a-service project a few years ago, where thanks to having to allocate multiple subnets at design time (and before launching too, so no idea just how big the subnets would really have to be, or how many we would actually sell) the 10.x.x.x space wasn't big enough.

Also brought home just how wasteful IPv4 subnetting really is, and how inflexible a lot of networky things are. For home use I have an entire IPv6 /48 just for fun, and I can't afford the 'leccy bill to use even a tiny percent of that. Even assuming I could get a gazillion RPi's in the first place.

Used to get IPv6 on the work and personal mobiles, which was handy for testing out an IPv6 tunnel on the broadband but noticed a while back that both had quietly dropped it and now only get a 10.x.x.x. I can only guess that CGNAT must be cheaper that IPv6. Pity.

How legacy IPv6 addresses can spoil your network privacy

Re: "I wonder if it’s so that they can charge extra for a “static” IPv6 prefix."

Assuming that other people also have IPv6. Did a small project with some overseas techies that needed some small servers for a few weeks. Figuring this will be easy as everyone out east already has IPv6 just run up a few VMs on the lab server and sorted. Oh well, at least Plan B worked....