Life imitating Spaceballs

Source notes and PDF at this dropbox.

Time to move the unacceptable line farther away again.

Bank checks and account balances.

/usr used to be the user home directory on Unix…well most of them. I think Solaris/SunOS has always been /export/home as I recall.

You need SPF, DKIM, DMARC with a RUA set up to an email that doesn’t bounce. That’s pretty much it. I’ve been running email servers a long time and actually set up email from a new domain/IP a couple of years ago as well.

This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.

I’m sure laws on this differ everywhere in the world but I assume you’re talking US. It is doubtful an employer could win a law suit against you for not showing your specific methodology unless you have a contract and that was part of it.

As far as firing goes, there aren’t very many situations that an employer can’t fire you over for cause but obviously also can fire you without cause.

Would they own the templates? Yeah but they’d also have to know to look for them unless you told them. Otherwise they’d probably already have created some templates and expect you to use and perhaps improve them.

Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.

So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.

He’s super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he’s done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said “Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line.”

So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he’s able to be the most productive person they’ve ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss’ boss because they are super impressed. I said “No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They’ll eat that right up.” He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.

Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.

She couldn’t talk to the American public without appearing elitist and smug either.

It does represent freedom.

Kent can fork the kernel if he wants with all the fixes he wants in it and distribute it as he sees fit. This particular instance of the kernel (which happens to be original – the upstream), Linus has to balance allowing some fixes other developers want to include versus a ‘minor’ release of the kernel during this cycle (because it is a minor version release, not a major one). Kent could then also stop other developers from contributing to his fork but then those people could just fork his kernel fork and do what they want.

You as a user are free to use any of them. You’re even free to take Kent’s PRs right now with everything done in the kernel at this point, compile it and run it yourself if you want. You could even market it as something and sell it all if you want for a profit if you can get the customers. You’re free to do all of that. You can do it right now if you want.

Like I said if they change their policy (even for a user) and allow someone else to use it, it is better than having all of your identifying information tied together under a username.

You should delete your account. It can’t be used again on Reddit (unless they change their policy). If you’re worried about being identified, then it’s better to just delete the account anyway than the alternative.

Here’s how to delete the SBAT policy that the Windows Update applies.

It updates Secure Boot in the BIOS, so you could completely remove Windows but the Secure Boot update would still be in the BIOS and affect the boot loader.

When Tim Pool endorses your decision, you know it is a bad one.

The article says that the OSBI is investigating the use of force but what about the 4th amendment violation?

Will this be another ranking cop involved fired; the other suspended and then the cops move to a new department with a clean record? If a private citizen did this, they’d be charged for the crimes that they committed.

If they go to court, you know they’re going to defend themselves with qualified immunity with the age old “I didn’t know the law, so I can’t be held accountable” even though that does not work for regular private citizens.

The sheer lack of accountability for police officers in the US is abhorrent. We all though ‘finally’ when most police officers had to wear body cameras so that when they are caught maliciously committing crimes, lying and at best, being incompetent that things were going to change. But they haven’t. It is still too rare for police officers to be held to any sort of accountability and for departments with horrible trends to be reorganized.

There are a couple of OEMs like System76 and Starlabs that sell laptops with Linux on them, provide tech support for customers and so on.

And no, installing most distros aren’t hard. You just click the buttons to proceed and fill out the username and password box, select your time zone and select your wi-fi network if you’re using wifi.

You can do manual partitioning but why would you if you don’t know what you’re doing?

Installing software in the GUI is as easy as installing software from the Microsoft Store. Just search or look around and when you see something you want, just click the Install button.

I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn’t be at enormous risk nor should critical services. Even if it’s your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn’t be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you’re just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn’t do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource’s update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you’d be using if you aren’t allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.

Crowdstrike is just another lesson in that.

What I usually do is set next boot to BIOS so I have time to get into the console and do whatever.

Also instead of using a browser, I prefer to connect vmware Workstation to vCenter so all the consoles insta open in their own tabs in the workspace.