Posts by /dev/me

Re: Why don't they name the sites so they can be avoided?

Because these sites will probably be victims themselves, compromized using some vulnerability in an out-of-date CMS or one of its plugins. But notfications will have been send out to the hostng providers of these websites. And in all likelyhood the websites will have been taken offline, and a call to the website owner explaining they have been compromized and they have to clean their website, update their CMS, change passwords and whatnot before their website can be allowed online again *)

Besides, if you have google safebrowsing turned on, your browser will shield you from the known compromized websites.

*) Or at least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory.

Re: Time to grow up

"nearly half of whom don't bother to vote even in Presidential elections"

Ehhh, 95% of the people don't even get to vote in US presidential elections. Please remember that statistacally speaking the Americans are the foreigners. And the data gatering affects us, natives of our lands, who have no rights under the US constitution and who are spied upon by a foreign power and yet we are not even mentioned by Obama in his quasi-we'll-look-into-it statements.

As long as we have nation-states, we have sovereignty, and we can tell you to fuck off. Top German telco's are currently moving their email away from US businesses, at my company we see Amazon as less and less of a competative threat due to all this, there's rumors that US spying policies cost the US economy billions of dollars in lost sales. Rightfully or wrongfully, keep these practices up and it'll only get worse.

Re: Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean its a good idea

Those poor poor email servers where never meant to move large files. Just because our users don't want to learn about a protocol like FTP doesn't mean we should try to widen the maximum attachment size into what I've come to call FTP over SMTP. (and a promising DOS attack vector)

And now all the webmail vendors seem keen on inventing some two step program where email is integrated with a service that is basically nothing more than FTP over HTTP.

Sending large files over the internet is perfectly valid and we have a fine protocol for that. If the major browsers had put just a little more effort into supporting the FTP protocol more fully than they did, we wouldn't have to be in this mess... le sigh

Re: The problem here is shitty IT departments

Paranoia is a good thing for a sysadmin.

But; at my old job we had a very active BYOD policy. User devices where physically separated from company infrastructure and didn't even share the same internet connection. But as dozens of soon to be disappointed users found out they could not mount network shares on their iPhones/iPads and one of them, a user with half a clue, found the solution.

By the time we found out about it, they had been building a shadow-fileserver using Dropbox for months. They had been emailing their documents to themselves so they could upload them and where now using Dropbox as the online collaboration suite they had always wanted. We found out because some overconfident conspirator joked that soon we wouldn't need no stinking fileserver because everything was in the cloud these days.

Luckily for me, it befell to my boss to explain to our CEO why exactly this was a Bad Thing(tm), as I wouldn't have had patience enough. Because the CEO was of the sorts that actually applauded this sort of initiative. So despite all our measures of keeping the network and data safe, the shadow-network had no better protection than the assumption that no one would be interested.

May I compare thee to a nice looking car...

Except that the Lada Riva wasn't designed and marketed as beautiful. It's sole purpose was not to break down and strand it's occupants somewhere on the Siberian tundra at -40C because they would suffer the cold and die.

Oh, and it had to be cheap as hell...

Re: Why doesn't someone hack into NASA's computers to find out?

Hacking the NASA servers by penetration testing port 80, I've found the secret documents that reveal both the location and the nature of the prints. And a movie-file disclosing the individual who found them.

It turns out, NASA has used an old but neigh unbreakable form of encryption that we used to know as README.TXT-encryption (the most secure method of hiding useful information) but is now modernised by the HREF (or linked article)-encryption standard. Even Real Haxxors have trouble with those.

__

Anyway, the noise of those black helicopters is starting to drive me crazy and I hear footsteps on the roof. I think I'm off to the US of A!

Damn you sir, I say, damn you!

After a quarter of a century, I now have that tune stuck in my head again...

tududup tudududum tadadatatada jadadadadadada tadadatatada

Re: Cyborg uprising

Yeah, I was thinking this should be filed under RotM; human victory.

/Paris, for want of a WIN icon

Re: Microsoft in schools IS a GOOD thing

Children should be taught concepts, not products.

And what are 'Windows skills' anyway? regedit?

Re: "result in a P45 and/or a prison sentence"

Only if you get caught. Which is unlikely, if you're a pro-BOFH.

The security guards will be pleased with access to youporn and .xxx domains, and so may have inadvertently recorded over the CCTV tapes some user claims holds the evidence of his abuse.

And you can always casually mention to someone in upper management that you are working on long term resource usage analysis in order to compile your multi-year hardware acquisition recommendations and that you stumbled on the curious fact that /some/ users have gigabytes worth of data in hidden folders in their home directories.

Upon being asked to investigate, which you will only reluctantly agree to after receiving a signed order to do so, what with you valuing your users privacy as much as you do, you then have carte blanche to shove donkey porn onto whichever user you need to get rid of quickly.

Then, of course, your admin status on the proxy server, specially the write permissions on the log files, can be put to good use to get rid of said upper manager because it's bad practise to leave witnesses.

Re: Back to school!

As 0 degrees Hilton (0H) is the temperature of Hilton at rest (36C)

And 100 degrees Hilton (100H) is the temperature of Hilton during intense activity (38C)

So the iPad3 can get as hot as 550 degrees Hilton. And now you know why this is newsworthy.

For comparison, room temperature, what most people feel comfortable in, is -700H. And that's a big difference. So there's no argument; it's all proven facts and science. The iPad gets hot and makes you sweaty. Whether that's a Bad Thing, I'll leave to the philosophers...

Earth (planet): mostly harmless

[citation needed]

Re: Times change

A one eyed monster is something /quite/ different in my book. It's something (see above) Paris would eat. But lets not get into this any further *that's what she said* for the mere thought causes harm and distress to children and vulnerable people.

Like a pro

Just drink without spilling, who needs physical media anyway?

Re: USB ports shuld be closed

When we buy machines they are have empty disks. We load an image in it. Then hook it up to the domain, and from there it gets its policy as to what to do with inserted media. And you can differentiate between mice/keyboards and storage devices. You can do that in Windows just as well as you would on any *nix flavour.

And yes, we get on average one person per day asking us to enable USB ports for storage devices. And we say 'no'. Most of the time in this line of business you'll find that most of these common problems have been solved already technically, even by MS. Although the settings are not always in clear view. Sometimes you have to search a little, but what's more difficult is keep telling the users 'no'.

Most of these problems aren't technical problems. They have to do with users demanding the same kind of functionality from their workstation as they have at home, and that includes demanding laptops, USB storage, local admin rights, world writeable shares, flash plugins and certainly no screen lock or strong passwords.

/enough about work

real sysadmins...

...don't use third party recovery tools. They just promise the boss they'll have it fixed by Tuesday. Then they get out for an early beer. Let the whole company sweat for a few days. Then log in via the pub's wifi on Monday afternoon, restore the snapshot taken 10 minutes prior to the corruption and take all the credit for fixing the catastrophe ahead of schedule.

Re: Why don't you learn English?

Who knows English, who only English knows?

Some languages are more flexible than others, and in some adjectives, nouns and verbs are interchangeable. In Dutch and German I could easily use HTML5 as a verb, and in context it would even make sense. For example: "we're currently HTML5-ing our Webinterface."

That said, I can see what an HTML5 experience is. You /can/ use HTML5 as an adjective. Perhaps this strokes against the 'Current Best Practices of English Language Usage' but it certainly does not disagree with semantic rules of other languages.

So it is possible to deliver an HTML5 experience. And, when the look and feel of a website is akin to a local app, one might even say, indeed, a native HTML5 experience.

Please note however, that the keyword here is 'experience'; a clever marketing word that has nothing to do with any technology involved. It is subjective, unmeasurable and only vaguely defined in terms of look&feel (which in turn is also subjective and unmeasurable). And you can claim exclusivity on a certain kind of experience, simply by changing the definition.

So, there you have it. IE can deliver a native HTML5 experience, at least from an end user perspective. Programmers, developers, administrators et al might get confused by using otherwise well defined jargon in such a marketing manner. But that is sales people for you*). They will gladly tie some buzzwords together with vague concepts to form sentences that reveal nothing to the initiated.

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*) If you like this sort of thing, we at work call our serverpark 'the fat clients' we call the patch panels 'the servers', we call desktops 'thin clients' and we call the databases 'the intranet' ... all according to real life misuse of IT jargon by sales people and consultants.

That's wrong with VB

If time were of the essence, why would you need to write a GUI interface to tie outputs of existing commands together? Notice how she did not say she was going to write (perhaps back-end; that too sounds cool) tracking software.

She specifically said how she would "create a GUI in VB; see if I can track an IP address" which by itself is like saying "I'm going to install a switch that lights the room". This is Catweazle's "sun in a bottle" territory at best. Magic.

And what is 'track an IP address' in this context? I know of Windows types that might choose to run tracert and Unix types that are content typing traceroute, whereas Hollywood types might prefer some custom 3D interface and preferably (oh please) if not a touch screen then a laptop with the rubber feet removed so you can slide it across the table... but whatever your reason and whatever your platform of choice, for the task at hand I see no reason to prioritize on the GUI.

And that is what's wrong with VB.

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And to go on a bit>People who claim a WebBlog is updated in Real Time might do with a lesson in stateless protocols. Is that JavaScript I hear ticking? :p

In Uni

The big college classes where students(N=700), it was too large to effectively aim a piece of chalk, and sometimes the inattentive students outnumbered the available pieces of chalk 50:1

A professor of mine solved said problem by showing (on a roughly 2~3 meter screen) a close-up of an injection needle being injected in a human eye. Maybe it was just imagination, but I saw Real Fear in that eye.

As sound effect behind it, the screaming brakes of a cargo train making a full emergency stop. You think 'nails on chalkboard' is bad?

Suffice, it was quite efficient in getting our attention...

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Really, all you need is a .gif, an mp3 and a few lines of code to tie it together as an app. Call it iScream and you can sell it in the app store for $1,99

Kids: wash your hands after you've used the public fingerprint reader.

And the next generation of stand-up comedians will joke:

I always wash my hands after I use a public fingerprint reader. So how come they say it's a source of infection? Oh! Because I wash my hands *after* I use the fingerprint reader.