ocdtrekkie

mastodon.social

<p>Privacy advocate, sysadmin, geek. Born and raised on the mean streets of the Chicago suburbs. Contributor to the Sandstorm.io self-hosting project.</p><p><a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/tfr" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>tfr</span></a></p>

Recent twts from ocdtrekkie
In-reply-to » I look at the stream of opportunities that were available,squandered, or avoided by me. Looking back. I am just glad I didn’t do more damage.

@Myunfocusedlife@mastodon.social It’s very hard to be sure, even in hindsight, what would go differently. An amazing opportunity could backfire and send you into a worse outcome. There’s really no way to be sure. Sometimes making a mistake actually leads you to dodge a bullet you never knew was coming your way.

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I know it’s no longer a point of pride for a server to have a long uptime… so I’ll say I shamefully admit that I just sent the reboot command to a server with an uptime of 1767 days. I shan’t let one go that long again.

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So BJ’s Wholesale Club… which I purchased a single thing from in like 2020 which included a one-time membership charge, just decided to notify me that it was ā€œupgradingā€ me to a subscription membership and would begin billing me.

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In-reply-to » I'm going to let app devs declare an "accent-color" in their #Dropserver app manifests. It's a very cheap, easy and safe way of giving apps more personality inside the Dropserver UI.

@teleclimber@social.tchncs.de I like it! Though I generally want apps to have less personality so they feel more interchangeable: I kinda would love to make it easy for more apps to use Sandstorm-style UI elements so they look more uniform.

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In-reply-to » @ocdtrekkie Oh, and Chicago is shortlisted in cities to escape from Texas to. Any thoughts on that, if that's in your backyard? šŸ˜€ No pressure, just curious. It occurred to me today that we could use Fly's home base advantage to poke around there ourselves. I knew there was a presence there, just not how substantial it was and had intended to ask.

@nolan@venera.social I mean, the only people who suffer worse weather than us is Minnesotans, in my opinion. But if ice, snow, and occasional -20 below zero windchills are okay, Chicago is decent. 😃

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In-reply-to » A lot of people have been really critical of HBO's rebranding as "Max", but I have to hand it to them about one thing: nothing makes you more excited about the renaming of a service than being automatically logged out of all your devices and having to spend half an hour of your one and only life bouncing around broken phone apps, websites, and TV apps trying to reset your password to get in again

@AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social The fact you have to install Max and unstill HBO Max is wild. And the fact that I had to install HBO Max and uninstall HBO GO like two years ago is also wild.

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In-reply-to » A lot of people have been really critical of HBO's rebranding as "Max", but I have to hand it to them about one thing: nothing makes you more excited about the renaming of a service than being automatically logged out of all your devices and having to spend over half an hour of your one and only life bouncing around broken phone apps, websites, and TV apps trying to reset your password to get in again

@AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social The fact you have to install Max and uninstall HBO Max is wild. And the fact that I had to install HBO Max and uninstall HBO GO like two years ago is also wild.

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In-reply-to » I want to see a graph of Netflix announcing their account lockdowns and worldwide torrent activity by combined bandwidth

@ruhrscholz@toot.kif.rocks I can’t wait to see them decide how to handle how to limit usage to a ā€œhouseholdā€ while allowing the users of that household to use it while on the go, and somehow handling people who live in a given household 50% of the time or less but having legal residence there.

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In-reply-to » @Bluedepth On the other hand, I can do an in-depth investigation of the issue, research the bugs, etc. for hours only to discover it was already fixed in an update which I can let run while working on another problem.

@Bluedepth@mastodon.social Don’t get me wrong, it’s frustrating that I come across IT people whose competency *ends* there. But to treat each issue as a problem that you need to independently analyze means you are assuming every bug you face has never been reported by anyone else before, and in many cases, patched already.

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In-reply-to » There seems to be a kind of blind reflex with #Windows systems. It starts with reboot, then chkdsk C: /f, then sfc /scannow, and then all the dism.exe faff. Windows Updates. Manufacturer Updates, in this case HP, so HP Support Assistant. All of this consumes hours and hours of work, waiting around, hoping that something fixes something else.

@Bluedepth@mastodon.social On the other hand, I can do an in-depth investigation of the issue, research the bugs, etc. for hours only to discover it was already fixed in an update which I can let run while working on another problem.

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In-reply-to » Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. I recently tracked down and interviewed a Russian hacker responsible for a series of particularly aggressive crypto spam campaigns this month that prompted several large #Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange@renchap@oisaur.com I dunno why I was hoping for something more interesting than ā€œit’s worth the money because pay for legit work in Russia is garbageā€, but I suppose it tracks.

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In-reply-to » Having a better day today. Had a medical procedure to treat chronic pain, and at first glance it is working. Walked to the doctors office and back and stopped for a latte. These are proven techniques to reduce depression.

@Myunfocusedlife@mastodon.social Unfortunately we don’t get out for walks often, but I will say when we did go out like a week or so ago, it was surprisingly relaxing.

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In-reply-to » @ocdtrekkie it's only free if you're already getting it in the neck from MSFT for seat licenses/subscriptions of other things (e.g. MSO365, et al.). There *are* MS Teams equivalents (or better) that would be effectively free for any organisation with vaguely competent tech people... I'm finding Matrix and NextCloud to offer a very compelling experience, and the cost is a few hours of my time per year and a small share of tens of $s in VPSs per month.

@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz Indeed, but if you’re paying those seats anyways, why spend the time/few dollars on hosting an alternative? Ultimately Teams succeeds solely because it’s an expense/burden people already paying Microsoft just… don’t have to worry about.

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In-reply-to » Hmm - a 'cyber security' company, apparently working for a consulting customer of mine - just asked me to take part in a future meeting... using MS Teams. I had to alert that I'd be happy to take part in the meeting, but I don't use MS Teams. I offered them use of a BigBlueButton that I run... We'll see what they say.

@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz As for why all the Microsoft-based tech stack companies use Teams… it’s free. Nobody in their right freaking mind would pay money for it.

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In-reply-to » @ocdtrekkie Windows has got better to be sure (although it's from a very low starting point). That said, though, there're quite a few fundamental flaws in Windows design and in its standard/conventional policy that make it far more vulnerable, particularly with unsavvy users (i.e. nearly all users). Also, it's got the weakness inherent to a uniform monoculture (similarly MacOS). Linux, in the wrong hands, can also be insecure, but it's more secure by convention & has vastly more diversity.

@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz Windows’ fatal flaw has always been a deep commitment to backwards compatibility. It has a ton of 20 year old security flaws get discovered ultimately because someone was maintaining this or that solely for XP-era compat.

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In-reply-to » The fact that a 'cyber security' firm runs Windows already calls their credibility into question... If you really want secure computing... step one: purge all Microsoft products from your organisation.

@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz I remember sitting at a presentation demonstrating what you could do with a Kali install, and he tried making fun of Windows security, and I had a Surface Pro 4 (which was modern at the time) on the same Wi-Fi network. I encouraged him to go ahead, and hack my basically stock Microsoft tablet.

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In-reply-to » I have an idea and I need help with it. I need your favorite, your most commonly seen, your most hated, or the most obscure but relevant event log entries you've seen. Single line or a series, error code and product is fine, no context needed, no details wanted.

@BetoOnSecurity@infosec.exchange Freaking TileDataLayer 455. Should get you to the right details. But basically PCs upgraded from early Windows 10 expect to have this stupid file pertaining to live tiles or some garbage, and Windows removed the directory in an upgrade but not everything that refers to it. And for a while any time I had tons of ESENT 455 errors in the event log I’d just have to create the two missing levels of file folders for this and the error would go away.

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In-reply-to » @ocdtrekkie@BenRossTransit Indeed when I had my first child in Chicago in 2011, childcare was more than my rent. If I quit my job I would have had to pay $12k/yr to be added to my husband’s health insurance. The whole system is very broken

@mpusto@urbanists.social@BenRossTransit@mastodon.social Yeah I think it’s becoming a hard question if a second parent can make enough working to justify not staying home with a young child right now when all the expenses are added up.

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In-reply-to » @ocdtrekkie@AbandonedAmerica Good question. It IS a rather large building. Maybe a Tron themed hotel?

@TheWerewolf@mastodon.social@AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social I think it’s pretty attached to the Galaxy’s Edge park, right? I don’t know if changing the theme would make sense, but I presume the specific design for a very high cost hotel with ā€œquartersā€ that aren’t very comfortable is maybe a miss on the actual product design.

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In-reply-to » So, I'm testing out Chat GPT at the request of work & I'm asking it random questions. Here's what it had to say on the subject of section 172 Companies Act & our water companies

@ What is your company interested in it for? One of the things I’ve noticed is ChatGPT tends to look good on a first read, but reveals a lot of mistakes and logical errors when reviewed closely. Also, ChatGPT has a ā€œvoiceā€ of sorts you start to pick up on eventually: I can generally tell when someone has used it to generate text.

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