wizardbeard

joined 2 years ago
[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

So, it's easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?

There's plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.

Those are some pretty damn big claims for "trust me bro".

It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like "Hey, I've analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it's sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn't generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent." with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone's image thumbnails.

Now it's just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!


Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don't want.

Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I'm not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.

I disabled it within the first hour post-install.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Now that's what I call shitposting!

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Blaming a shit situation on some form of failure of morals and/or effort in the victims is a far more platable concept than accepting that these situations grow from complex causes and many years of history, and could happen in their own environment to them.

Doesn't help that the billionaires love this sort of attitude because it helps keep the little people playing crab bucket instead of coming together.

Sneering "Why would I ever want to work with people so dumb they could let this happen to themselves?" while the rope continues to tighten around the neck of the whole damn world.

You can look at a lot of crisises in history and see this sort of thinking used to push down groups living through them.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 hours ago

Spill so much blood you'll need a bucket and a mop

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 16 hours ago

Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you'll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You'll also get a handful of people here who can't help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn't just the fucking worst.


I'm primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone's college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn't just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.

I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else's debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I've had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I'm in control of my own updates (although you can't delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I've set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.

But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure "engineer". I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.


As far as Linux goes, I'm no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I'm the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don't belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.

But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00's as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.

I'm out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.


Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn't possible at all... and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.

But I'll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that "just works" on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.

I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That gives me vague ideas for a fun short story: The AI "revolution" has occurred, but due to training data issues it's all optimizing for some random specific boring schlub. Harold from Oklahoma or something.

Had to argue my case to the transit overseer AI about how me getting to work is vital for Harold's quality of life again. So fucking demeaning.

Harold posted something to social media 15 years ago about having a bad experience at the restaurant chain I worked at. Overseer shut the while chain down and now we're all on the run from enforcers that want to kidnap and make us personally apologize to him. I worked on the other side of the country.

Trying to get a new car but all that's on the market are ridiculous scaled up hotwheels the guy liked as a kid, a shitbox he made teenage memories in, or some generic suburbanite thing that lasted him the longest.

New fashion trend: White t-shirt and green plaid boxers are out, jeans and a grey t-shirt are in!

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You can't seriously be suggesting that lying to people about the sitaution is in any way helpful.

Fuck off and sow FUD elsewhere.

The original game is 75% off ($4.99) as well, with the complete edition for $5.99.

First game has a better story, second game has better gameplay.

First game is absolutely fucking amazing with mods to reimplement a ton of the features they had to cut to push it out the door.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Lol, lmao even. That's some careful word play for the sake of unneccesary hyperbole.

They have shot innocent white American citizens. In some other places they have gone door to door. Those are independent actions, not a combined reality. We can all agree they're god awful as a massive understatement without lying about door to door murder squads.

Inb4 "if you have to make that kind of distinction you're already fucked" yeah, we are, but accurate information about the ground situation is vital for any forward movement.

Lol, same. I spend more time writing guard rails, setting up verbose debugging output/logs, figuring out how I can test without blowing up shit, backing up data before, backing up what it's going to do, and then trying to set up automated confirmation of success or failure than I do coding the purely functional parts.

I've run the "person has quit, yeet their access" script I made on people days early more than I should admit. Had to put in a lot of extra checks on that.

If you're at a place still using VMWare, a tip: if you're trying to automate shutting down all the VMs for some hardware moves (get list of VMs, send Guest OS shutdown command, wait a certain amount of time, if VM still showing online force shutoff), VSphere will return the VM management devices/servers/whatever they're called (what vSphere runs on) in the list of VMs, and it will accept Guest OS shutdown commands sent to the thing hosting VM management/vSphere. Halfway through shutting it all down for a move I started getting "cannot reach VSphere" errors. Added an extra hour or two to that weekend project as we had to get into things through some other back end shanigans to finish shutdowns manually.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't disagree, but corps are going to push the settings in their software and products that makes them the most money. It sucks but should be expected.

It'd be better if there were competitve open source options with the same ease of use, of implementation at scale, and ease of management at scale, but unless you're willing to do custom forking and dev work, most of the time it's easier to go with whatever is the overwhelming standard is and work around the rough spots, as at least then you'll almost never be in completely uncharted waters.

I spent a few years building a custom solution for integrating a semi-popular but still relatively new HRIS system with a hybrid AD/Entra environment with a somewhat unique hybrid Exchange (email) setup. Doing it live, no real documentation to speak of because the few other places that had done it turn out to be consulting groups that sell their solutions for ridiculous amounts of money. My workplace has now hired an entire team and spent at least half a mil on a new software suite that will replace my solution eventually, after more dev work by this new team.

That was after I burned a year trying to figure out how in the hell I could programatically try to clean up a horribly misconfigured and mismanaged old SolarWinds Orion setup that had accumlated tech debt for years, only to be stymied because they don't allow public discussion of their fucking database structure, and what I found out myself was batshit. Don't trust software that use their own custom bastardization of SQL.

After those experiences I'm pretty damn content to stay in the land of "well documented and popular" and just work around the rough edges. Keeping up with patch and update news and delaying updates a little usually gives plenty of time to effectively opt-out by changing the settings before it hits our environment at large.

Fuck Microsoft's bullshit, but at some point it's the enemy you know, especially in a corporate environment. I'm no stranger to masochism through tech work, but I've gotten used to MS's brand of fuckery, as a lot of us have.

No... then they don't do what I'm talking about. I'm sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.

My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.

Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that's not relevant to the discussion.

I didn't even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.

There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it's obvious bare minimum life support.

Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.

We also don't have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I've already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it's in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there's rules on max space).


TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do "essentially what I described", which is a large contributor to the issues you've seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.

Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That's horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.

 

Someone gifted this to my wife and I after our successful IVF. Still haven't put our photos in it, and everytime I see it I giggle.

Miracle Love Baby sounds like some magical girl anime shit.

 

Honestly? That's rookie numbers.

 

Bah humbug.

 

PrefaceI'm not trying to call out the mod action of removing my post from the comm so much as I'm calling out the complete lack of mod action leading to the comm becoming shit and having the current top post by scaled, hot, and active being a post that explicitly targets another lemmy user.

That out of the way... !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world has clearly been slipping from the purpose of the comm for a while now. Most of the posts are actually infuriating and/or political. I understand that what qualifies as either of those can be different for different people, but I feel most of this shit clearly isn't mundane or simple enough to fall under the label of just mildly infuriating.

Here's some examples from the first page right now, sorted by scaled.

While I could have sworn the sidebar had a no politics rule, it doesn't at the time of me writing this up, so politics are arguably acceptable, although I personally feel these all clearly don't match the theme of the community, violating Rule 7.

Sidebar, and expanded rule 7

A few other posts have been made calling this out.

Mod harder and [META] What actually constitutes "mildly infuriating" content?

################################

Beyond all that mess, we have what was the final straw for me.

Rule 1 (and less so 5), and the current top post by scaled, hot, and active.

I cannot accept that a post to mildly infuriating that targets a specific user while not even removing their username is respectful, and I personally consider it harassment (while it may not violate rule 5 as there is no call to action). Removing the username is usually the bare minimum even in the fucking reddit brigading subs, for plausible deniability.

And regardless of whatever arguments can be had about interpretations of the community's specific rules, it's a dick move. Just block the guy. It reminds me of the god awful reddit dogpiling and brigading. I don't want any of that to come to lemmy.

So I reported it, then saw the recent posts asking mods for action that got no response. I then looked at the mods.

  • LillianVS@lemmy.world (Aer) has not been active in two years.
  • STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world (Striker) has not been active in one year.
  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world had not appeared to be active for six days at the time I reported the post, but upon checking the community mod log was likely active two days before (assuming that the other two wouldn't be just lurking and modding for over a year).

So I did something dumb as hell. Roughly an hour after I reported it, I made my own post (now removed from the comm). I find people who make call out posts about others, and the absentee mods allowing it, mildly infuriating. Yeah, childish as shit. What's done is done.

Modlog:

Removed for "doesn't fit community", but what do you folks think? Does it really not fit when the top post is what it is? Personally I think both should be gone, lest that comm descend further into shit.

Either way, now that I have this yell into the void out of me, I'm blocking the comm. Maybe I should have made my post in actually infuriating? (kidding)

 

That is a threat.

From some back to school flyer.

 

We understand that this is a jarring and sudden change, but we're proud of our audio team's ability to create suitable replacements with such short notice. We hope that in time, these new sounds will grow to hold a place in your heart just like the old ones.

(Original post: https://lemmy.world/post/38428736)

 

I have so many great memories from childhood vacations to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. I cant believe the disaster happened all the way back in 2007.

At least someone has been collecting and documenting everything they can find from the old place: https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com/

I still can't make it all the way through the disaster report.

 

This ancient video has ruined this song for me. My toddler is getting into Sesame Street, so the original song is on rotation in the car for the kid friendly playlist. Hard to keep from giggling.

Post name is from the video.

 

Jerboa's not too bad, as the URL field is the same field the link to your uploaded image ends up overwriting, but I swear I see people making this mistake every fucking day. End up posting just an image when they wanted image + link.

Apologies, as I'm sure there's proper channels for this, and open source projects tend to not have the best UIs. Just shouting into the void.

 

Definitely a repost, but it fits the season

 
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