Posts by diguz 41 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Mar 2020
well not entirely. Yes my phone can have all the factors for the login (like the password saved in the keychain and the mfa token-generating app), but each of those factors require an additional authentication step, be it biometric scanning or another password. You might say that even a biometric scanner can be cracked, but afaik that requires specialized equipment, so the normal facebook account thief won't target the average john doe.
oh and don't forget about apple declaring "obsolete" perfectly good and working machines. So no more software updates, and worse, browser updates. I couldn't care less about the macos version by itself, but when mainstream browsers stop getting update it's a seciurity issue, so bootcamp and windows it is. Hell, my mom is still rocking a 2007 mac mini (with maxed out ram and SSD), and with windows 10 it perfectly trottles along - tried linux but we're talking about the stereotypical mom that doesn't wanna be bothered with linux "quirks" so windows it is.
Hold on a minute, imho calling the hololens "a success" is quite a long stretch. I never saw one "in the wild" - only at the local tech fair. So i don't think that it can be considered successful. And i don't remember hearing about any hololens-specific software, not even games for that matter.
this is to be expected with EVs that don't have an "inverter" heat-pump. Air-con is done via said heat-pump, that has an efficiency tipically in the 400% range (for every unit of energy consumed you get 4 units of heating or cooling), whereas most EVs have simple resistive heating, basically a wire with high resistance that gets hot, just like an old light bulb, and that is at best 100% efficient, but often not even that.
So yes, your EV uses less battery to cool the cabin than to heat it.
I'm quite baffled that Lenovo still doesn't have some kind of "online recovery". Even my company's Latitudes have an online emergency boot (found out after swapping the SSD on one), just like a mac. And lately i don't particularly like Latitudes, they're way too plasticky - heck even HPs feel better even though they almost certainly will stop working in less than 3 years. I was looking into thinkpads, but i think i'll stick with XPSs at home, my 2014 xps 13 still goes strong (obviously with linux on it, windows 10 runs kinda ok but with 8gb ram i have to be careful how many tabs i open)
my dad still has a perfectly fine epson EPL-5500, and would still be using it once or twice a year if it wasn't for its parallel port, and the fact that the 2 or 3 parallel to usb converters we tried all sucked big time...
Last year he finally got a samsung (hp) cheap-ass ML-something, and it does great....
I have to say that also my epson inkjet that i use maybe once more a year than he does works great as well, every time i turn it on i fear the dreaded "cartridge not recognized" message, but it just whirrs away and spits pages....
"Always wondered how these phone-home software packages will work on a secure network (i.e. disconnected from the Internet) nowadays."
really simple: DON'T use products that phone home. They are insecure by design if they phone home. I never saw libreoffice complain about being on an air-gapped machine.
never heard of "security endpoint"? I'm a sysadmin in a medium company (500-ish people) and we have been WFH'ing for the past year... Filtering content on company laptopts whatever network they connect to? Piece of cake: new security endpoint with tamper protection and cloud management...
I've seen many things scrolling through the logs, from torrent traffic to people installing steam (i don't even know why - company laptops only have the iGPU)...
well i can say that "Linux is definitely more secure than windows" because i can prove linux's strength and weaknesses by looking at the code and without causing a world incident by disclosing a vulnerability that MS minions won't patch anyway (think about PrintNightmare).
The point here is that if you find a weakness in linux, and if you have sufficient skills, you can patch it yourself and push the fix to the rest of the world, whereas with proprietary kernels, even if you let the companies know that they have a problem, it is NOT guaranteeed that they will do anything to correct it, until it's maybe too late.
This reminds me of a time in my early days tinkering with electronics and pcs, i was literally a little more than a toddler, and my dad had a small pc selling and repairing business.
One customer brought his pc in for support, because it was "randomly freezing and had to be powered off". It was a big full tower with 5 5inch bays and 2 or 3 floppy bays in the front. My dad was trying to investigate a software issue, after all these were the days of the freshly shipped Windows 95, but it seemed nothing was out of place, all the drivers were looking fine and a fresh re-install of windows didn't solve the issue.
Meanwhile, being a curious creature, i crawled under the desk to look inside that chungus while the case was open (no shiny glass side panels in those, the two sides and the top came out as one piece)..... and EUREKA, the little cpu fan (think Pentium I 133MHz) was not spinning.
A quick replacement, et voilà, the machine got back to full performance.
I even had to make the call to the customer telling what had been wrong with his pc.
I miss those days, now i'm a sysadmin in a medium-to-large company and i have responsibilities... oh well, TGIF, cheers!
yyyymmdd? this is why i'm confused by english-speaking countries, UK and US mainly (i'm italian)... why the hell use the year first? i want to know first which day, then which month and finally which year someone's talking about. the use of a different measuring system crashed some planes (like the Gimli glider) and made NASA overshoot Mars by a good margin a couple decades ago...
*rant over*
the most irritating thing is that i quite liked the old control panel, i knew where everything was and how to edit any setting. Now since windows 8 things are split between control panel and the settings app, and obviously you have to use both.
Like a couple days ago, when i had to change language in a colleague's laptop, first download the language pack in settings, then go to control panel>region>administrative settings and change the UI, then go and change the date/time formatting, it's a mess! if it was all in the control panel like win7.
Rant over...
this reminds me of the secretary that worked at the last company i worked for... she was always cold, so the boss gave her a heater, an electric radiator one.
She always used it under her desk, to keep her legs warm, until the day the plastic coating of said desk started melting and the whole office had to be cleared for half an hour (in february!) to let the smell get out. Fortunately i had my new car whose climate control worked perfectly.
If i were Canonical i'd be popping champagne bottles now. I forsee a massive shift from centos to ubuntu server.
Personally i'll keep using the old and trusty debian in my homelab, but i know that companies that use centos today without any kind of support contract will move to ubuntu.
Still have one of those, as you said, never found a replacement, and unfortunately i can't use it anymore because of the lack of driver support and because my ps2->usb converter doesn't even recognize it properly... and without the usage of the red scroll button i can't use it.
Still using my microsoft elite keyboard from the same period (late 90s) though, thankfully it came with a usb adapter in the box.
yeah, i know that feeling.
Until a couple years ago, also here in Italy you could fly with your (valid) driving licence as ID.
It was fine for all airlines, except a not-so-cheap-as-they-would-imply irish one. They didn't let me board the bloody plane even if all the airport staff told them it was ok, given that the flight was domestic...
I stopped flying with them, even if this meant paying double for the same route.
And i am thankful for my job that some years later made me able to afford a car... especially in those times, when being alone in your car is more healthy than flying with some idiots who think that face-masks are for clowns...
This report isn't credible... of course Luxembourg has fast internet, it's a tiny state in the middle of the continent.
Take Italy for example: in my house in Bologna i have FTTH with 1gbps, and that's stable, whereas at my parents' house in Sardinia we have a pokey ADSL which is sold to be 20mbps but in a good day reaches 12 (measured wit ookla speedtest).
the solution is pretty simple: edit the hosts file so that the *critical* machines think that windows updates are downloaded from 127.0.0.1
i was thinking about doing that to a print server a cuople years ago, before i got the greenlight to just use CUPS (we lost the scanner - i was too young and naive to know about SANE - but hey, at least it wasn't rebooting every couple hours).
when i was a child, (early 90s) my dad used to sell computers, and give support to his customers.
One day a tower came in that had "random freezes". We're talking a full tower case (about 1m tall) fully loaded with a P1 166MHz.
My dad startet running the usual series of troubleshooting tests, and the bloody machine seemed to work flawlessly.
Being the before-pf-youngster that i was, i crawled under the table and peeked inside the beast - we had removed the side panel.
EUREKA: the tiny cpu fan was not spinning!
So when the customer hit the machine with a serious load, the cpu would just thermal throttle and halt everything, and then when we tried to troubleshoot, we didn't do much more than open a couple of programs and look at settings.
Now, 25 years after that, i work at the IT helpdesk of a medium-large company........ Coincidence?
As many people said in other comments: this is what IT folks would do and preach, but unfortunately the decision to use other methods for spamming all the staff about the next company event, like fbworkplace or other mailing list services, are made by the marketing/HR departments, who don't give a single "f" about security or best practices, but just want the least amount of clicks to get the job done.
you reminded me of my middle-school, they had a w95 lab with a "server" (it was just a 486 machine running some custom sw) could take control of one or multiple "students" (p1 75hz workstations)... in that building I was one of the handful of people who knew how to use the whole shabang... god how much i laughed when my classmates screamed "my pc is haunted, it's telling me that i'm a moron!" when said words "magically" appeared on a word document.
This reminds me of that time (not that long ago) that a colleague had to show another chap something on his pc, and he didn't know about a space-age thing called "desktop sharing". He instead put his laptop in front of his secondary monitor, so the webcam was seeing the screen. All great until i passed by and noticed 1. that there were the usual post-its with passwords on the monitor (if you haven't done it or seen anybody do it you're a liar!) and 2. that the chap on the other end was connected to the projector in the meeting room, thus showing everything to everyone in that office.
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