r00ty Admin

r00ty Admin , 20 hours ago

Exactly. Either they're going to make Windows Defender have the monopoly on antivirus and endpoint protection (EU will shut them down faster than a crowdstrike bluescreen), or they will need to grant the access to those providers.

If Microsoft think they will be able to curate every single device driver and other kernel module (like antivirus etc) and catch the kind of bug that caused this error? They're deluded.

I'll wait and see what they actually propose before outright ruling it out. But, I can't see how they do this in any realistic way.

r00ty Admin , 2 days ago

You don't prevent it. You add exceptions for their Web crawler in robots.txt and pretty much all the current Web crawlers respect that.

r00ty Admin , 4 days ago

I would have thought the plastic screwdriver was more likely to be able to adjust variable inductors/capacitors with minimal interference? Using a metal screwdriver you have to adjust, move it away check result since the presence of the screwdriver adjusts the result too.

r00ty Admin , 4 days ago

This was normal back in the days of CS 1.5/1.6. People would play at 640x480 on a monitor that could handle 1280x960 because they could drive 640x480 at like 150+hz.

r00ty Admin , 4 days ago

No no no. You need to at least let someone post about getting up 2 hours before they went to bed, licking the tar off the road and whatever else it was. THEN you say the last line.

You closed this off for the rest of us to join in!

Kids of t'day.

r00ty Admin , 4 days ago

Yeah, I have a problem too! No, wait. It's because I don't have an X/Twitter/whatever account.

r00ty Admin , 4 days ago

Take control of that line from independence day, with a slight change. "In the words of YOUR generation. UP YOURS!"

r00ty Admin , 6 days ago

I think there's a good argument for bitlocker on laptops.

It's much less of a sell for servers and workstations in what should be secure locations.

Having said that, where I work they just enabled enforced windows hello pin with only numeric pins with minimum 6 digits. Seems like a pretty good way to entirely negate the protection bitlocker provides. But hey ho.

r00ty Admin , 5 days ago

I think it's most likely a little of both. It seems like the fact most systems failed at around the same time suggests that this was the default automatic upgrade /deployment option.

So, for sure the default option should have had upgrades staggered within an organisation. But at the same time organisations should have been ensuring they aren't upgrading everything at once.

As it is, the way the upgrade was deployed made the software a single point of failure that completely negated redundancies and in many cases hobbled disaster recovery plans.

r00ty Admin , 5 days ago

That's interesting. We use crowdstrike, but I'm not in IT so don't know about the configuration. Is a channel file, somehow similar to AV definitions? That would make sense, and I guess means this was a bug in the crowdstrike code in parsing the file somehow?

r00ty Admin , 5 days ago

Thanks. That explains a lot of what I didn't think was right regarding the almost simultaneous failures.

I don't write kernel code at all for a living. But, I do understand the rationale behind it, and it seems to me this doesn't fit that expectation. Now, it's a lot of hypothetical. But if I were writing this software, any processing of these files would happen in userspace. This would mean that any rejection of bad/badly formatted data, or indeed if it managed to crash the processor it would just be an app crash.

The general rule I've always heard is that you want to keep the minimum required work in the kernel code. So I think processing/rejection should have been happening in userspace (and perhaps even using code written in a higher level language with better memory protections etc) and then a parsed and validated set of data would be passed to the kernel code for actioning.

But, I admit I'm observing from the outside, and it could be nothing like this. But, on the face of it, it does seem to me like they were processing too much in the kernel code.

r00ty Admin , 8 days ago

Apparently at work "some servers are experiencing problems". Sadly, none of the ones I need to use :(

r00ty Admin , 8 days ago

It might not even be that. A lot of places have many servers (and even more virtual servers) running crowdstrike. Some places also seem to have it on endpoints too.

That's a lot of machines to manually fix.

r00ty Admin , 8 days ago

My favourite thing has been watching sky news (UK) operate without graphics, trailers, adverts or autocue. Back to basics.

r00ty Admin , 14 days ago

He thinks he's a lot of things. In reality, he's just a living, breathing example of Dunning-Kruger in action.

r00ty Admin , 15 days ago

Yeah, basically as soon as money changes hands, a recommendation becomes an ad.

r00ty Admin , 17 days ago

I always read this as "legitimate for them, and not for me" and untick it.

r00ty Admin , 17 days ago

I've not seen that. I have seen all the boxes except legit interest unticked. So I untick all and "save" preferences (I mean, technically how can they save my preferences if I reject all cookies?) and they're all back next time, but just the legit interest ones.

Sometimes there's a lot of them.

r00ty Admin , 20 days ago

We are at war with the cat at number 23. We have always been at war with the cat at number 23.

r00ty Admin , 22 days ago

I think that is indeed the best you can hope for with new labour in control over the tories. Slightly less backhanders and tax breaks for the already stupidly rich.

I don't expect anything far left of centre. I say this as someone that is somewhat centre left (UK centre left to be clear, USAans don't judge me on your political compass), I don't really think I resonate too much with the current labour party.

I think the thing that terrifies me, is that the tory party we had, that pushed through a no-deal brexit (when there were many other less disruptive ways to leave the union available), that has wet dreams about planes flying immigrants to Rwanda weren't right wing enough for our population.

What is the tory party's solution to this going to be? I doubt it will be returning to the centre right position they occupied in the Cameron era. They either accept their death, or move further right. I suspect we'll see the latter. When we find out their new leader, I suspect it will cement their direction for us all to see.

r00ty Admin , 22 days ago

I think it's important to note that the primary reason the conservative party lost many of their seats is because their vote was split between them, and an even more right wing party led by Nigel Farage. It wasn't because of a huge shift to the left (or at least the centre left position the labour party occupy right now).

In my constituency for example, if you put the conservative + reform votes together, they would have beaten the nearest competitor by a country mile.

r00ty Admin , 22 days ago

That's what I originally thought would be the case. But, just statistically (looking at voter share here):

2019: Cons: 43.6% Lab: 32.1% LD: 11.6% SNP: 3.9%
2024: Lab: 33.7% Cons: 23.7% Reform: 14.3% LD: 12.2% (Weirdly, wikipedia has yet to include reform in their share ranking had to use BBC)

Labour picked up less than 2% more of the vote share. Reform took the vast majority of the tory lead away.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the tories are out. But, it's mostly because reform split the vote and Labour were second place in most constituencies. This is important to bear in mind while the conservatives sort themselves out to decide how they deal with not being right wing enough..

r00ty Admin , 22 days ago

You could be right, but I am not so sure.

In terms of percentage, the lib dems made a smaller gain than labour. I'd also suggest that while maybe some of those votes came from wavering labour voters, I expect that at least a similar number would have also come from the tories. I don't think the lib dems split the vote any more than they normally do.

Reform, while not new, last time round they did not compete against the tories. This time, they did and the result is clear.

r00ty Admin , 22 days ago

Too late, I voted against him. If only I saw this before I left!

r00ty Admin , 24 days ago

Everyone's hell, is a personal hell.

r00ty Admin , 28 days ago

Killing for your government: Government will track you down, kick your door in and throw you in prison for refusing to.

Fixed thar for you :P

r00ty Admin , 28 days ago

Humans? I knew it! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!

r00ty Admin , 29 days ago

So between 0 and 20. 😛

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Pretty sure mine was 16399753. But, not logged in for probably 15 or more years, so could be wrong.

No idea whatsoever about the password :P

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Weird. Ipv6 and YouTube stats for nerds shows between 140mbit and 600mbit depending on what's being watched and the time of day.

Is it possible your isp has problems with their ipv6 setup?

IPv6 overheads should only have a marginal impact on max speeds.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Well good news. Because ipv6 has a thing called privacy extensions which has been switched on by default on every device I've used.

That generates random ipv6 addresses (which are regularly rotated) that are used for outgoing connections. Your router should block incoming connections to those ips but the os will too. The proper permanent ip address isn't used for outgoing connections and the address space allocated to each user makes a brute force scan more prohibitive than scanning the whole Ipv4 Internet.

So I'm going to say that using routable ipv6 addresses with privacy extensions is more secure than a single Ipv4 Nat address with dnat.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think people's experience with PLE will always be subjective. In the old flat we were in, where I needed it. It would drop connection all the time, it was unusable.

But I've had them run totally fine in other places. Noisy power supplies that aren't even in your place can cause problems. Any kind of impulse noise (bad contacts on an old style thermostat for example) and all kinds of other things can and will interfere with it.

Wifi is always a compromise too. But, I guess if wiring direct is not an option, the OP needs to choose their compromise.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

OK, one possibility I can think of. At some point, files may have been created where there is currently a mount point which is hiding folders that are still there, on the root partition.

You can remount just the root partition elsewhere by doing something like

mkdir /mnt/rootonly
mount -o bind / /mnt/rootonly

Then use du or similar to see if the numbers more closely resemble the values seen in df. I'm not sure if that graphical tool you used that views the filesystem can see those files hidden this way. So, it's probably worth checking just to rule it out.

Anyway, if you see bigger numbers in /mnt/rootonly, then check the mount points (like /mnt/rootonly/home and /mnt/rootonly/boot/efi). They should be empty, if not those are likely files/folders that are being hidden by the mounts.

When finished you can unmount the bound folder with

umount /mnt/rootonly

Just an idea that might be worth checking.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Aha, glad to hear it.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think it's more twitter slang. Sure it can be applied elsewhere. But I've mostly heard it used regarding twitter posts.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Most smaller instances will let you make a new community.

Getting people to subscribe, that's your problem.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think we should qualify the question. I think I'd like to hear a reason for society as a whole to exist that is reasoned and has a firm basis in logic and has no emotive or circular reference.

Because I cannot see the point of it (and I've been accused of being a pessimist, depressed and worse for expressing this opinion). So, I would really like to hear an actual reason for us all to be here.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

You should only assign static ipv6 to servers, in theory you could just define a host id and use a prefix too. But, most people at home really aren't running enough servers to make that worthwhile. Everything else should just pick up new addresses fine using ND.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Hah. But to be fair, ATM did have a specific use that it worked great for. That is the move to digital voice circuits. The small fixed cell size and built in QoS meant that if you had a fixed line size you could fit X voice channels, and they would all be extremely low latency and share the bandwidth fairly. You didn't need to buffer beyond one cell of data and you didn't need to include overhead beyond the cell headers.

ATM was designed to handle the "future" or digital network needs. But, the immediate use was about voice frames and that likely dictated a lot of the design I'd expect.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Only if you're a masochist.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Yeah, but they're not. That's the modern world. But also even if it was a web server there's usually ways to advertise the IP for the app to connect to. I've seen other stuff do that. So getting an IP is easy. Once the app knows the IP and if you really want to allow connections from outside to your IOT devices (I wouldn't) it could remember the IP and allow that.

You really don't need to give a fixed IP to everything. I think I've given 1 or 2 things fixed IPv6 IPs. Everything else is fine with what it assigns itself.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

No! Those trickle-down economics they told us about will be kicking in any time now! I'm certain!

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think this really comes down to whether the employee was IT (and to an extent part of the network team). If so, I'd say there's a lot of questions to be answered here. If not, there's also a lot of questions to be answered but not from that employee :P

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Per 100g is quite normal across Europe too (because you can kinda treat the values like a percentage or at least compare to any other product). We usually in the UK have per 100g and either per serving size or package size.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think in 99% of use cases, upgrading isn't a problem. Most of the time new SQL versions are backward compatible. I've never personally had a problem upgrading a database for a product that expects an older version.

They do have compatibility modes too, but those only go back so far too.

But, I think companies with their production databases for perhaps older complex systems are likely very weary of upgrading their working database. This is most likely where this situation comes from. Imagine being the person responsible for IT, that upgraded the DB server and database to the latest version. Everything seemed to be working fine. Then accounts run their year-end process, it falls over and now there are months of data in the newer version that won't work properly. It'd be an absolute pain to get things working again.

Much safer to leave that SQL 2005 server doing what it does best. :P

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I'd go further than that and say that deciding to leave the house or not, are both gambles.

But in the context of spending money with the only net result being you lose money, make money or retain the same money with no other goods or services provided in return. Then gambling is the primary attribute of that spend.

Bookmakers and investments meet that criteria, your other purchases are not.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

Are you sure it was CRT technology? Because bear in mind, colour CRTs had to focus the beam so accurately that it only hit the specific "pixel" for the colour being lit at that time. What there was, was blur from bad focus settings, age and phosphor persistence (which is still a thing in LCD to an extent).

What DID cause blur was the act of merging the image, the colour and the synchronisation into a composite signal. All the mainstream systems (PAL, SECAM and NTSC) would cause a blurring effect. Games on 80s/90s consoles generally used this to their advantage, and you can see the dithering effects clearly on emulators of systems from that period. Very specifically, the colour signal sharing spectrum with the luminance signal would lead to a softening of the image which would appear like blurring. Most consoles from the time only output either an RF signal for a TV or if you were lucky a composite output.

Good computer monitors (not TVs) of the time were extremely crisp when fed a suitable RGB signal.

r00ty Admin , 1 month ago

I think most people that were gaming held onto their CRTs as long as possible. The main reason being, the first generation of LCD panels took the analogue RGB input, and had to present that onto the digital panel. They were generally ONLY 60hz, and you often had to reset their settings when you changed resolution. Even then, the picture was generally worse than a comparable, good quality CRT.

People upgraded mainly because of the reduced space usage and that they looked aesthetically better. Where I worked, we only had an LCD panel on the reception desk, for example. Everyone else kept using CRTs for some years.

CRTs on the other hand often had much better refresh rates available, especially at lower resolutions. This is why it was very common for competitive FPS players to use resolutions like 800x600 when their monitor supported up to 1280x960 or similar. The 800x600 resolution would often allow 120 or 150hz refresh.

When LCD screens with a fully digital interface became common, even though they were pretty much all 60hz locked, they started to offer higher resolutions and in general comparable or better picture quality in a smaller form factor. So people moved over to the LCD screens.

Fast-forward to today, and now we have LCD (LED/OLED/Whatever) screens that are capable of 120/144/240/360/Whatever refresh rates. And all the age-old discussions about our eyes/brain not being able to use more than x refresh rate have resurfaced.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating.