I’m working on building a little demo with Saltcorn before bringing it up to my boss probably in a week or two as a strong contender for our EHS system replacement. We’ve got a mess of an EHS system with a ton of stuff that isn’t actually EHS-related bolted on that we’re replacing it with 3 systems, and one of those three will be for the non-EHS stuff which my boss is currently wanting to build in-house from scratch using AI. I’m hoping to help him dodge that thermonuclear warhead of a mistake by showing him an existing platform that will scale much further before costing us a ton in development costs to maintain

My big argument is going to be on cost+effort front with the added benefit of being open source so we can control it no matter what happens with the vendor

100k offense from negligence. I’ve not worked anywhere that would shrug that off. Of course, he could be family or otherwise protected.

I’ve seen negligence cause costs approaching 100k at my current job (and thankfully leadership has changed so that isn’t happening anywhere near as much) but the way I see it, if he’s a really good employee and Google writes off the charges he could possibly narrowly keep his job. But I don’t see him keeping his job if Google doesn’t write off the ad fees. (Barring of course being owner/family to owners)

Yeah GDID works the same in a VM as it does on hardware. It’s actually easier to see in action on a VM:

1. Create a Windows desktop VM
2. Copy the VM
3. Create a Window server VM and promote it to being an AD Domain in a new forest
4. Try to join both copied VMs to the AD Domain. You can’t join the second one because the GDID is the same, and you’ll literally have to do a reset to get a new GDID for your VM

This was the most annoying part of messing with AD in college was running through the windows setup repeatedly because that’s the only way to get more than one client VM for your virtual Windows network

I mean Epstein was actively talking about his crimes over plaintext Gmail

This article is super vague about this as well. How does Microsoft not only have the GDID->IP link, but they have Web history as well? Are they just exposing all this through advertising telemetry?

My interpretation was that they had an IP that they suspected was the perp’s home network, and subpoena’d some major platforms to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt. Given the perp’s sloppiness in using the same machine for both personal and illicit computing activities, they could even have some network traffic in the capture to indicate which platforms they should subpoena

Or if we want to be more conspiracy-minded, maybe they installed a trojan on his computer and this is the parallel evidence trail that law enforcement created so they don’t have to admit to hacking the hackers

In any other context I’d agree with you, but hacking is the one context where you really do want to do things the hard way. Use ephemeral VMs with passwords only saved in your head, have a dedicated machine for your illegal activities to help isolate your real identity from your hacking.

Honestly even if you’re just doing HackTheBox and similar best practice is to spin up a Kali VM and only use that VM for the activity since you’re literally connecting to a network with a bunch of hackers, even though what you’re doing is entirely above the board

Alternate headline: Lord of a crumbling, gutted empire struggles to maintain relevancy

Oooh I didn’t even know about Voron but I’m very intrigued now by what I’ve read about them

So what would you recommend to someone who wants to get their hands a bit dirty and is reluctant to put anything on the network?

Also realistically the printer would live in my detached garage which I haven’t yet bothered to setup any sort of wifi in, so a connected printer would balloon the scope of such a project and cause it to intersect with and be blocked by other queued network projects, and sometimes I just don’t want to faff with networking after working how many hours faffing with networking professionally

Jumping off of this, as someone who’s been adjacent to 3D printing spaces for over a decade now, what is a good beginner 3D printer for someone who would rather spend less up front and spend more time calibrating and tinkering? Is it still the Ender 3 Pro?

From my understanding Bambu is playing “who has the bigger pile of money” while others are stepping up and playing “who has the legal right to fork AGPL code?”

That’s exactly who an ODM is, and Original Design Manufacturer. In the mobile space it’s generally some tech giant like Foxconn which makes tons of devices for tons of brands, and they generally have their own generic designs that they’ll happily white label for any brand

Well, there over 200 million adult US citizens, assume 1/3 are trump supporters that’s 60 million potential customers, it’s not unrealistic for 1% of them to have placed a $100 deposit on a trump branded phone.

I’m just more surprised they decided to not ship anything. They could’ve simply gone to any ODM ordered a generic design but in gold color and called it a day. Heck they could run an actual MVMO sell some overpriced android phones as carrier branded devices, sell some overprice cell service, then sell the brand off to wash their hands of it and probably would’ve made far more than the paltry $6 million that they did make in pre-order deposits

Edit: I was off by a zero they made ~$60 million in deposits

I was helping another team at work a couple of years ago, and during the pandemic shortages they had ordered pallets of computers at a time rather than just ordering as needed like they usually did before and after the shortages. I was tasked with babysitting 5 of those laptops which had been sitting in storage for over a year while they applied updates and whatnot.

I kid you not, babysitting those 5 laptops took the entire business day to get up to date (they for whatever reason did not have any flash drives so I couldn’t simply install the latest ISO) and one of the laptops managed to delete all of the keyboard drivers from itself so I had to use the onscreen softkeyboard to attempt to fix it, and ultimately used the manufacturer restore partition to reset it and restart the update process as the cleanest solution

I also got minimal other work done that day as every step of course required some manual intervention on the laptops. I shudder to imagine the scale of lost productivity across the entire world at the hands of Microslop

Hirens Boot CD might have sufficient utilities to perform a bios update? I’ve not tried because I usually don’t bother updating the BIOS unless there’s an actual problem I’m hoping to fix

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play