wizardbeard

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Man, Microsoft's purchase of SwiftKey still bugs me.

It's frustrating that after so many years, there's still no open source mobile keyboard where you can "import" your typing history from multiple sources to tailor autocomplete to your own "voice".

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

As I understand it, most companies are making transition plans away from VMware. A lot of contracts are multi-year, and transistioning your virtual infrastructure is one hell of a project if you have any amount of complexity to your infrastructure.

It's also one of those types of projects that is likely to be pushed down in priority whenever there's fires to fight. The price hike is absolutely insane, but in the balance of things it might be better business sense to keep paying while you investigate alternatives and migration plans.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Protecting your traffic over the wire also doesn't stop them from getting the data directly from the OS or program itself.

It's their hardware, you're just allowed to use it (and according to papers you signed when hired, likely only for work use).

My company uses a similar MITM technique on all our network traffic, but we have also used a number of other tools that don't have the ability to snoop on the network traffic but can still get browsing data from user machines. Most browsers have "enterprise mode" features, or just store browsing history in a file that other programs can read.

We've also used systems that installed at the BIOS and/or bootloader level to allow us to track the location of and take certain remote actions on company hardware that was taken off the company network. If the device got an internet connection at all, it was still ours to control. Was very handy for people who tried to keep their laptop after they quit.

Technically they could use OCR on automatic screencaptures, which would bypass anything you could do. There's a ton of "management" software that does automatic screen captures, or allows someone to look at an overview of desktops like a security guard looking at a bank of camera monitors. Usually that's something schools use, but it is available for companies.

They could use a keylogger too.

The point is, you cannot control, or have any foolproof knowledge of, what they have installed on your work machine. That means that you cannot effectively work around or bypass it. If you absolutely need to, make a new "personal" email account to use for things like spotify or youtube on your work machine, and just use your damn phone for personal stuff.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

With the right settings on Pro, you can get it to give you a week's warning before an update is forced, with multiple subsequent warnings if you don't restart in the meantime.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

I work in a Windows environnent but often use Linux at home. I find that the level of difficulty is equivalent once you're familiar with either OS, their general design, and how their management tools are meant to work. It's mostly a familiarity problem. You don't use Windows regularly so you have no idea where to even start troubleshooting, or how to tell at a glance if the instructions you've found pass the sniff test.

Plus, it's always considerably easier to troubleshoot your own shit than to troubleshoot some random person's jacked up configuration where you don't know how they use their machine or how they managed to fuck it up.

The biggest difference I find is that Windows has such a massive user base that any "user based" help (like the microsoft support forums, yuck) is far more likely to be written by some shmuck that doesn't know what they're talking about than you see with Linux. Alternatively, it's just content farm site after content farm site regurgitating shit advice stolen from the users who don't really know what they're talking about. Finding useful information and guides can be more difficult.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Think what you want about 4chan, but I generally start with the links in the OP of the "/g/ - Technology" board's regularly recurring "friendly windows thread". Being 4chan, it is decidedly unfriendly, but the guides in the OP are usually good. Always read up thoroughly, fully, and apply your own common sense before using any tools or running commands.

Wish I could be more specific, but I'm still using 10, so I'm not familiar with the 11 specific stuff.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Huh? You only need the Pro version for Group Policy and all the registry settings, and you can get licenses for ~$20 if you buy an OEM license through an authorized reseller.

There's some limitations to the OEM licenses, but I've never run into them.

As far as I'm aware, LTSC just effects the update channel that Windows Update pulls from, with LTSC getting non-critical updates later and for longer after support "ends". Usually you can switch that in the registry.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

You should be able to disable your monitor's non-existant audio device in one of the settings menus. On Windows 10 it's in the old style control panel's audio device settings.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Also there's the aspect of just... not caring. As someone who technically could read the email, browse the files, or track the apps installed and used on the phone of nearly any person where I work, any small bit of idle curiousity died before I was done my first day.

Even if I was nosy, 99% of people are just not that fucking interesting. What would even be the point of abusing my access?

I've seen someone put it like this: male gynecologists don't get excited looking at lady bits at work.

wizardbeard , 3 months ago

Only if you aren't interested in a conversation where all parties have a clear understanding of what's being discussed.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

I'm always surprised when this seems to be news to people. Was the whole "elsagate" mess really that long ago?

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Not true, there is a distinction between your reply address and any secondary addresses you have configured on the mailbox. Still, as far as I know that's not something they should be able to see from outside your email server. You are setting up aliases on your own server right, not using some third party as an intermediary? Using a third party intermediary would possibly be something they can see from the delivery routing.

It's most likely that this is just them shitting on you for using an "untrusted" provider. Most big sites and email providers are really getting stingy lately with who they'll accept email from and what is accepted as a valid email domain. There's also a big push for properly configured SPF and DKIM records that aren't set to allow spoofing sender domain. It's combining to cause a lot of issues for self hosters lately, and also for companies that have vendors who insist on sending email from the vendor's servers but appearing as from the company itself.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Likely that they don't "trust" your email provider, but there's a lot of strange A/B testing going on behind the scenes of that data harvester.

Setting up a dedicated spare gmail or outlook account solves that issue.

Registering a "cell number" helps too, but it's hard finding a service that offers "free texting numbers" that isn't set up in a way that they can see that it's just one of those services. Wish I remembered what finally worked for me.

Lastly, if you're using a modified Discord app or desktop install, be sparing with the non-standard features. That can flag you sometimes too.

For most servers though, I find it easiest to just access them in browser as a not signed in guest.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

need to be checked manually

You're joking if you think that this couldn't be scripted to a significant degree.

CNAMEs, where whatever it resolves to is an external site, where the external does not respond to ping or where the external site's WHOIS/ICANN records were updated or created in the last year. Filter out records that match known partners/vendors.

Adjust specifics as makes sense and you cut the problem space significantly. The final steps will still need human verification, but there's no need for this to be manual checks of literal hundreds of records.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Unless you're automating business processes as a contractor brought in to be a hatchet man, the general momentum of a company and thr business politics at play are going to reduce what's possible significantly.

The big wigs might want to see cost savings, but they want to see big numbers fast. They don't want long term payoff from improved efficiency that also causes all the people under them to bitch and moan about how much they don't like change.

I say this as someone who automates shit and gets different systems to speak to each other in order to improve quality and efficiency as my job: the only way we're going to see major changes in this is if new lean companies somehow out-compete the existing monoliths by using automation. Otherwise we're just looking at incremental changes over time, not some unemployment event horizon where all goes to shit suddenly.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Spoken as someone who clearly has never used a VR headset for any sort of video content. To get even passable framerates at resolutions that don't look atrocious, you're looking at multiple GB for scant minutes of VR video content.

Unless you just want to watch the same crap you already do, but on an effectively building sized flatscreen, bandwidth and even local data storage and transfer rates become an issue fast.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

They'll be able to. Stop bellyaching. Anyone can spin up their own lemmy or mastodon instance and federate it with meta if they want, or they can just join any existing instance that federates with meta.

That's the wonderful thing about federation: if you don't agree with the choices made by the people running your instance, there's plenty of other instances to choose from! Most instances will still have access to all the same content, so it's not like telling someone to just leave an entire social media platform.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

The dreaded Candiru, a naughty little fish with a penchant for swimming up a man's urethra to feed on the damaged tissue of the miserable little lump of flesh you once called your penis!

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

This also further consolidates Google's advertising power. Block all their competitors from gathering the information and give them a neutered "topics list". Google still maintains every ability to allow their own products and ad platform to bypass and use the full information.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Cookies serve important purposes for doing things like keeping you signed in as you navigate through multiple pages on a site.

The issue is that most parts of the internet were developed by people more interested in all the cool stuff you could do with it, and not at all concerned about the potential misuse by large multi billion dollar corporations.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Can we be certain this isn't in the obsfucated binary blobs provided by Google? How can people act like Chromium and Chrome based browsers are free from Google BS when most of them still use precompiled hunks of executable provided by Google that we can't see into?

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

To be clear, Ethernet cable has no bearing on whether a connection was/is dial-up. It just means that it's a wired connection instead of wireless (WiFi).

At that time WiFi wasn't super widespread, so it wouldn't be super surprising if a laptop didn't support it. Especially if the laptop itself was a few years old.

With enough speed for youtube, you probably had some form of DSL, coming into your house through a coaxial cable, into a coax modem, then back out through ethernet cables.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Louder for the people in the back.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It's important to note that a big part of that book is repeated evidence that Ender is not a "normal" child. He is heavily implied to have murdered one of his bullies before he was ever pulled out of society and into training (where he explicitly kills another bully).

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It's shoving down throats when Linux is brought up in every single Windows discussion. The complaints about Linux are in response to Linux users never being able to just let it lie, people aren't just bitching in a void.

This is absolutely not people being mad for people just talking about something. I have an extremely hard time believing you truly believe that is the issue here.

There are countless places to discuss Linux without bringing it into the comments of every Windows post. Windows users are not commenting on every post in the Linux communities about how much more straightforward running Windows is.

It would be like vegan eaters commenting about how good it is to be vegan on every post in food communities that features non-vegan food.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

I'd be shocked if the dbzer0 (piracy) instance blocked it.

I'd also expect that this has more to do with cloudflare than the specific instances.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

my only input device to the medical records will be the AI transcriber

I understand that you keep steering away from legal arguments, but that can't be legal either. How could a doctor not have direct, manual access to patient records?

Anyway, practical issues:

You need some way to manually interact with patient records in the inevitable event the AI transcription gets it wrong. It only takes one time messing up transcription on something critical and you have a fucking body on your hands. Is your hospital prepared to give patients the wrong dosages because background noise or someone else speaking makes the AI mishear? Who would be held responsible in the case of mistreatment due to mistranscription? Is your hospital willing to be one of the first to try and tackle that legal rats nest?

A secretary is able to do a sanity check that what they heard make sense. AI transcription will have no such logic behind it. It will turn what it thinks it heard into text and chuck it wherever it logs to. It thinks you've called for leeches when you said something about lesions? Have fun.

Whenever there's an issue with the transcription service you'd be screwed too. That could mean network outage, power outage, microphone breaks, any part of this equipment breaks, and this whole system falls apart.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

I see that lasting until the first time some record ends up reading "backspace backspace backspace! No you stupid delete! Delete. Dee feet delete".

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Just to stave off anyone else coming in and going "ackshuallee"... it's true that you could technically do that with libreELEC. It'd be a fool's errand of using SSH to get to the terminal and install all the programs and dependencies, and you'd still need some way to do arbitrary terminal commands from the kodi menu (I think there are plugins for that and for launching arbitrary programs though).

I played around with that myself for a few hours and gave up.

I'd love something actually good, but the closest you'll get probably is running Kodi or whatever media frontend you want on top of a stripped down "normal" OS, with a separate frontend for games/programs like HyperSpin. Find a way to launch one from the other and you'd be set.

You'd still have to deal with Kodi not being able to pull full quality video from streaming platforms too, assuming you aren't just sailing the high seas for your media.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

This is my big concern. Right now Gemini is an option you can switch on to replace the existing assistant, which I expect has similar terms. But how long will it be until Google just integrates this with their email, search, and online office suite with no options to disable it? They'll tout it as an improvement and new features.

Microsoft at least has to cater to business customers, so there will be options for systems administrators to opt-out for longer. With their government contracts they will have to prove adequate security. I still don't like the AI push, or Microsoft as a whole, but I trust them not to have a data leak, or to sell business data to whoever. They don't have overwhelming financial incentives in advertising or data collection for it, just normal sized incentives.

On the other hand, Google's biggest revenue stream is advertising, and that works due to the absurd amount of non-paying users they have with their free services. They have no business or financial incentives whatsoever to not just offer all this data they collect up on a silver platter. No incentives not to train horrible dystopian AI to maximize advertising effectiveness through A/B testing specific market/interest groups on an unimaginable scale.

Google also has a history of collecting more data than they were allowed to, pinning it on a "rogue employee enabling a feature they were told to disable" when they are caught, and then proceeding to use that data anyway for their projects after the news dies down.

I've always wanted to see a true "AI" personal assistant, leveraging tech to make lives easier, but this shit is not the way.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Lol, I get your point, but for right now the more we can make these feel like normal limbs to the people who need them, the better.

No need to further press down the gas on the potential dystopia. Welcome to your job at the smeltery, please enter surgery room 4 for your mandatory limb replacement with company owned propriatary hardware that is set for our needs to turn you into a disposable meat puppet and blind you of senses of danger, because accounting found that was cheaper than proper safety or using actual robots.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Wait what? How in the fuck could an HOA prevent you from charging your car or installing a charger inside your space? The charger lives inside your garage, so it doesn't effect curbside appearance and isn't within what they can control.

At absolute worst, if you have no garage and street parking, wouldn't you just be running the cord over to your vehicle? Non-commercial charging stations aren't normally weather proof, so that wouldn't be outside, and again, none of their business. If they have an issue with an extension cord running across your lawn, or a cable slightly larger than a hose, then they'd have to make sane rules about how long it can be left out, like not just leaving it plugged in for a whole weekend straight. Otherwise they're making it against the rules for people to use corded yard equipment or use a hose.

I might be missing something here, but I don't see any way an HOA could do anything against it.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

So providers just prevent people from using what is potentially their only transportation option as it suits the power company?

Hot water isn't usually a survival need as long as you have liquid water available. Means of movement can be.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I mean, how is anyone going to crytographically verify a video? You either have an icon in the video itself or displayed near it by the site, meaning nothing, fakers just copy that in theirs. Alternatively you have to sign or make file hashes for each permutation of the video file sent out. At that point how are normal people actually going to verify? At best they're trusting the video player of whatever site they're on to be truthful when it says that it's verified.

Saying they want to do this is one thing, but as far as I'm aware, we don't have a solution that accounts for the rampant re-use of presidential videos in news and secondary reporting either.

I have a terrible feeling that this would just be wasted effort beyond basic signing of the video file uploaded on the official government website, which really doesn't solve the problem for anyone who can't or won't verify the hash on their end.

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Maybe some sort of visual and audio based hash, like musicbrainz ids for songs that are independant of the file itself but instead on the sound of it. Then the government runs a server kind of like a pgp key server. Then websites could integrate functionality to verify it, but at the end of the day it still works out to a "I swear we're legit guys" stamp for anyone not techinical enough to verify independantly thenselves.

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I guess your post just seemed silly when the end result of this for anyone is effectively the equivalent of your "signed by trump" image, unless the public magically gets serious about downloading and verifying everything themselves independently.

Fuck trump, but there are much better ways to shit on king cheeto than pretending the average populace is anything but average based purely on political alignment.

You have to realize that to the average user, any site serving videos seems as trustworthy as youtube. Average internet literacy is absolutely fucking abysmal.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

That's why I feel like this idea is useless, even for the general population. Even with some sort of visual/audio based hashing, so that the hash is independant of minor changes like video resolution which don't change the content, and with major video sites implementing a way for the site to verify that hash matches one from a trustworthy keyserver equivalent...

The end result for anyone not downloading the videos and verifying it themselves is the equivalent of those old ”✅ safe ecommerce site, we swear" images. Any dedicated misinformation campaign will just fake it, and that will be enough for the people who would have believed the fake to begin with.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It doesn't help that in a lot of cases, this is actually accepted by a shit ton of important institutions that should be better, but aren't.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

The issue is making that green check mark hard to fake for bad actors. Https works because it is verified by the browser itself, outside the display area of the page. Unless all sites begin relying on a media player packed into the browser itself, if the verification even appears to be part of the webpage, it could be faked.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It being potentially fatal to be within five feet of strangers for a few years sure as shit can't be helping either

wizardbeard , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Edit: the deleted comment was talking about how this has legal compliance implications, effectively that companies have to do this.

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Thank you for highlighting this, I was struggling myself on how to word a message like this.

I work tech in a heavily regulated type of business, and have been neck deep in work on things with legal compliance considerations lately.

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The issue with your "corporate snap chat" idea is that it would inevitably be used to share information relevant to potential legal proceedings.

Any space like that needs to be out of the business's control and view to provide a legal air gap for any responsibility. Businesses would prefer their employees do that shit where they can safely argue no control or responsibility over it.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

I would assume that for any reasonably large business, with a competant legal team, there is a certain amount of this considered to be an acceptable risk.

Employees discussing shit on your systems? You're (most likely) legally responsible for it if things come to a court room. Employees discussing shit through their own side channels? You've got plausible deniability of awareness and a strong legal argument for it being outside of your responsibilty due to having no control of it.

This is literally a strategy for some shady and unscrupulous companies to attempt to avoid liability. Conduct any questionable communication over official "unofficial" third party channels.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

There seems to be a shocking amount of people that expect any amount of privacy on corporate owned systems, property, or hardware.

As someone in tech: as much as I don't give a singular speck of interest in spying on what you're doing, intensive monitoring of every single thing happening within the company systems is important and useful. Often these logs are vitally necessary for things like malware detection and remediation, data exfiltration detection and investigation, investigation into system and network issues, legal investigations or action (both for us, and when subpeona'd).

The amount of data we log, and I have access to, on employees actions on our systems is disturbing. But I would be lying if said that I haven't encountered a legitimate need for a shocking amount of it.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It's in the business's best interest that any questionable discussions happen outside of their systems.

The simultaneous chances of data exfiltration are a considered risk, and there are already legal actions available to the business for that aspect of it. This is effectively a solved problem.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It's already been ocurring for a while now without the summary and analysis by AI.

Automatic audio transcription has been kicking around for a long time now, at various levels of accuracy. The only important distinction of the speaking party is which side of the call (employee or customer) it's coming from, and that doesn't require any complicated analysis, just that your recordings capture incoming and outgoing audio on separate channels (which is how phone calls work in the first place).

As far as consent goes, any time you hear "this call may be monitored for training purposes" and stay on the line, as a customer you have consented to the recording. As an employee they usually just include it in your contract or one of the many things they get every employee to sign. Only really matters from a business standpoint if someone is willing to take you to court over it.

Most call center software/systems have these options built in at this point.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

It's more that it was originally a theoretical white paper meant to present a potential solution for a very specific problem space. Energy use wasn't a consideration in the design, because that wasn't part of what it was meant to address. Likewise, anonymity in the sense of hiding transactions wasn't part of the design either, besides avoiding centralized banking's requirement that every "wallet" is associated with a government ID.

It was a fun toy meant as a proof of concept solution to centralized banking.

Eventually market speculators saw what the nerds were getting up to, got some ideas, and everything freaking exploded. It wasn't meant to drive speculative markets.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

What in the absolute hell are you talking about with the IP shit? I feel like I've had a stroke.

In normal circumstances, your IP address is always available to each and every server you connect to online to retrieve content from.

Like at a restaurant, you put your order in, they need to know the table you're sitting at to bring the food out to you. The table is your IP here.

This is absolute base line principles of TCP/IP! It's the reason "servers" are called that, they serve the content to you!

You could always have someone else go to the restaurant, then bring the food to wherever you are, that would be the equivalent of a VPN, or a proxy, etc.

But tl;dr- everything you access online sees the IP address for your connection. It's not some security issue that any specific site points that fact out. It's how the internet fucking works.

Sure as hell isn't a red flag in a privacy policy. Most sites leave it out because it's like saying the sky is blue.

I can't even. You get wet if you go swimming. Your IP address is seen if you do anything online.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Maybe because they were getting tired of hearing from admins frustrated that Azure AD still doesn't have full feature parity with "normal" AD? Now it's clearly a separate product at least.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Yeah, I get that it can be a pain to type long commands out the first time, but if you're using a terminal or an editor without tab completion in 2024 then you've chosen to do things the hard way.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

You do you, but it's not anywhere as rough of an experience leaving it enabled as things used to be back then. This also exponentially increases the risk factor that some malware will fuck your shit right up.

I also wouldn't advertise it either. Like telling facebook that you never lock your door.