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JoshCodes

@ joshcodes @programming.dev

Posts
4
Comments
164
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending

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  • Many can't upgrade to 11 and don't want to buy a new device. They'll believe it's their only option unless told otherwise. It's not necessarily a "Win11 is bad" or "Linux/BSD is better" scenario, just a "to keep using your current device which you paid for less than a decade ago, do the following".

    Times are hard and people shouldn't be forced to buy new hardware because of the current monopolistic software companies's latest money making scheme, especially when their old one works perfectly fine and the environment is going to suffer.

  • LibreOffice is pretty damn good

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  • I'm sorry your team is like that, they should do better. I get along with my company IT team, obviously working close with them has benefits, but we have a lot of oversight and executive support so giving two word answers isn't a thing where I work, they have to give a written justification etc.

    In the same sense that not everyone works where I do, not everyone has assholes in IT who deny everything. Neither of our experiences are default and I was trying to write for someone in-between. Apologies if it didn't come across that way.

    There are businesses who don't allow spotify on the corporate device, for sure. I saw a talk delivered by a guy who did. He worked for a mining company, they wouldn't let people install things and were inundated with policy violations. He had to change the entire company culture around who IT were, and started by letting people make install requests for apps they wanted to use. They just tracked the requests so they knew who had what, and by helping, they could be selective about where the software came from.

    When people don't have IT as a support and see them as a regulator, they don't work with them and bad shit happens. This dudes mining company was hit, also with ransomware (this one worked), because the CFO had local admin since he didn't want to talk to IT.

    My point is

    • a. they should be helping in this instance. Sorry they don't, that's frustrating to hear. Work culture is hard to change and I'm lucky with where I do work and the culture we have.
    • b. don't bypass security controls regardless. Sorry. It's still not the answer. If work makes you do things a slower or more annoying way, that's their time lost. HR will throw you under the bus for the policy violation.

  • LibreOffice is pretty damn good

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  • That may be true for Discord but for FOSS products the security concern is the attack surface (more to patch).

    Like I said to the other commenter, if they say no they should have to justify that (in written form, argued, with points), even if the reason you want it is familiarity with the tool, workflow speed ups, or it has a nicer UI. Make them work harder if they say no, and make it really clear you will go away quietly if they say yes.

    I do think that companies asking users to use standard tools so they can build processes and training materials is reasonable. Using other tools means more attack surface, it means more updates, more documentation, less familiar people and it means more risk.

    Also assuming your company is like most and forgets to document everything alongside the crucial processes, if you know how to do something and tie it to a FOSS product instead of say excel, they won't be able to hire a grad that can work for cheaper and do the thing half as well.

    My point is it does do something for them, but not as much as they think. They didn't pay for the office suit for you to not use it. However, if you don't need it, they can also stop paying for it. Justification is important. So is making ITs life difficult by making them justify decisions.

    Bypassing them makes the incident response team's life difficult, not ITs.

  • LibreOffice is pretty damn good

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  • Okay maybe I should have said they can't say no and appear reasonable? Was there a justification or is this guy Joseph Goebbels or something? I bet you didn't use AI 2 years ago but probably have that running rampant.

    I'd love to live in a world where I trust everyone to install software on computers, but Mr Ransomware, albeit not common, is out there waiting to fuck up the business with a portable application he found. He wanted to do something for a colleague, but we all nearly suffered for it.

    Install things the right way, and if you can't, make a case for it and get managers involved. Justify the time saved or the comfort it provides: everyone hates AI, blame it on copilot being in excel.

    Bypassing security instead of working with them doesn't help anyone and it almost always ends badly.

  • LibreOffice is pretty damn good

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  • There was a trend of malware authors making websites to give away free video editors, I think this one appeared as capcut. They patch the binaries or use other techniques and include malicious DLLs.

    Edit: you and I both are fine with people installing FOSS from github, but what happens when they get the name for the repo wrong? What happens when they go to the fake site a malware author spun up, that even has all the files they wanted?

    Security is there for a reason, sorry, I know we can be annoying and add hurdles to important roles, but people get things wrong. We help with that, and bypassing us means you didn't give us a chance to save you before you messed up (again I assume everyone on lemmy is a sysadmin Linux user so not 'you' but a generic user you).

  • LibreOffice is pretty damn good

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  • On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can't really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software... seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.

  • Is it bad that I'm not graduating on time?

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  • I retook 6 classes and finished 2 years late. I'm regarded by my colleagues as a good person to work with and they think I'm good at what I do.

    Don't let school define you, some people excel, others don't. Also, working for money is completely different than intrinsically motivating yourself to complete assignments.

    I had mental health issues that I probably should have dealt with. If you feel like you're struggling, talk to a counsellor or a therapist, mostly because the college or uni has to listen when they say you're struggling. Also because they can look without judgement and tell you what you might be doing wrong with motivation and study habits. For me, I needed someone to remind me I mattered even if I didn't do well. That's just my 2c worth.

  • Can someone explain Australian parties to me?

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  • I'll preface this by saying I'm not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.

    We don't have first past the post.

    Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).

    The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There's a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.

    Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don't worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).

    Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won't go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we'd be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they'd make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It'd be nice to have but stupid to run on it.

    They didn't have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.

    Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.

    Parties:

    • Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
    • the coalition is two parties, they're supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat's to back me up.
    • greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
    • there's the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
    • there's one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
    • independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.

    TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he's better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we'll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren't a cult.

  • McDonald's suffers worst U.S. sales decline since 2020, warns of 'anti-American sentiment' abroad

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  • Near me it's none of the above, teenagers arent winning any races and I dont expect them to. $15 minimum for a meal, and $30 for my partner and I, so fuck it, might as well go to the local burger joint where it's $36, feeds us both ,and I get a blue cheese and bacon burger for my trouble.

  • Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

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  • Yep sorry, I said a dumb thing.

    My point is probably more to do with the marketing around VPNs than anything else. As you very nicely put, there are a thousand ways to track someone without having their IP address. VPNs don't cover all bases but the marketing teams talk about them like they do.

    Amazon can still sell your info to data brokers without having your home ip address: they have your email, name, delivery address and search history as a start.

  • Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

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  • I am not OP, I just decided to reply.

  • Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

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  • Oooo close. It's a shit algorithm that favours the company that paid the most for the spot. So people rely on paying for a good spot to get promoted on the most minor fucking chance of someone buying their shitty item. I heard someone say the average best item you search for is found 17th place.

    They're scamming the buyer and the seller and profiting off of being terrible for everyone.

  • Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

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  • There are definitely some VPN providers to worry about.

    VPNs are a security tool but they don't protect people as much as they think. They hide DNS traffic your ISP would have received, so that your ISP can't tell everyone which cuckold or affair site you access (except you probably forgot to turn the VPN on one time or another so...)

    Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic [I need to proof read before I press post - this is just misinformation]. Good opsec is a nightmare. Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do (except for certain human rights circumstances but I'd wager they're actually going to be careful).

    My personal tip is use DNS over HTTPS/TLS where possible, and don't use Cloudflare or Google. Add an ad blocker and it's far easier to setup and way more cost effective than VPN.

  • The inarguable case for banning social media for teens

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  • Sounds like it's the platforms that are the issue, not the kids. Would you believe that maybe the corporations havent been acting with ours or our children's best interests at heart and should, shock horror, be forced into doing that? It's almost like designing social media to be an ad casino shouldn't have been allowed.

  • Any opinions on Cozystack?

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  • I've got no experience with it but at first glance it seems like a very positive direction for the project:

    Collaborate, not Compete

    We are proud of our community and closely interact with projects around it. If we build a platform feature that can be useful in an upstream project, we prefer to contribute it to that project, rather than keep it in the platform.

    You don't hear that often enough these days, everyone seems to be siloing information.

  • AI models can generate exploit code at lightning speed

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  • I'm referencing this:

    Keely told GPT-4 to generate a Python script that compared – diff'ed, basically – the vulnerable and patched portions of code in the vulnerable Erlang/OPT SSH server.

    "Without the diff of the patch, GPT would not have come close to being able to write a working proof-of-concept for it," Keely told The Register.

    It wrote a fuzzer before it was told to compare the diff and extrapolate the answer, implying it didn't know how to get to a solution either.

    "So if you give it the neighbourhood of the building with the open door and a photo of the doorway that's open, then drive it to the neighbourhood when it tries to go to the mall (it's seen a lot of open doors there), it can trip and fall right before walking through the door."

  • AI models can generate exploit code at lightning speed

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  • The vulnerability is the scary part, not the exploit code. It's like someone saying they can walk through an open door if they're told where it is.

  • From $30 parmigianas to $15 pints, can Australia still afford the pub?

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  • Parma sounds like a phrase uttered by the absolutely deranged. Even the children here know it's parmy

  • Soy milk

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  • That's super informative, thank you.