Posts by AustinTX

"Fast Lanes?"

It blows my mind how nobody can understand that they're not building "faster lanes" for people who pay more.

They're slowing everyone's speeds down unless they pay more! It requires resources to impose the throttling!

And still ISPs operate at a 95% profit margin and yet whine that they must raise fees to keep up with expenses!

Why do the reports 2 months after activity has ended?

Why can't they just do reports monthly but just hold onto them to distribute 2 months later when they're expected?

Or do they need 2 months to fudge data from previous months?

Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

Someone is going to figure out that the problem started while these guys were in the server room and then later stopped when they went back!

My CSB

When I worked for Austin TX internet provider io.com, you could telnet in as guest and just browse the filesystem directories! You could go to /home and just harvest all of the usernames at that level, and often you could dip into customer's /home/%username%/mail folders to get additional mailbox names. You'd just send your spams to %usernames%@io.com.

How could you just telnet in, you ask? Well, they had a public telnet portal to log in and reset passwords, update PLAN and open help tickets. It was based on using LYNX browser as the shell instead of BASH. So, aside from failing to set permissions properly throughout the system, to keep customers from browsing outside their own account folders, they forgot to disable LYNX's file browser feature (press g, period, enter). Pretty sad, considering the staff liked to think of themselves as burningman_cybergods and the company was boldly claiming to run a "hardened network" and selling security products on that basis!

Search for io.fondoo.net on archive.org if you want the detailed story (which I added to the sidebar of my snapshot of the company's website).

Companies that jettison their UG never turn out to be the good guys

We've seen this before. I went through it with Fon.com community forums.

Companies don't just want to protect themselves from the release of sensitive information or surging complaints. Companies want to sidestep their inability or unwillingness to provide what the community wants. They want to declare what users wanted even if, said users wanted no such things. They can't do that with people who aren't under their control.

I can only conclude that some serious, unresolved probems are going down at Citrix, and they are moving to lock it all down. They would rather protect their value by sweeping things under the carpet than spend a little profit on fixing things.

I AM clicking on the screen!

While employed as CST at a glade/glen/vale based PC manufacturer, I got a call requiring assistance to improve a CRT monitor's display. They were able to press the physical buttons on the bezel to open the embedded menus, but could not select anything. Of course, because they were taking up the mouse again and trying to select with that. I was fairly sure my instructions had been to use the up/down, < > buttons on the bezel, but they probably thought they knew better. I'm ashamed to say how long that call lasted.

Browser makers maybe don't have to just accept holy poison gov certs silently

They could display prominent click-through messages announcing that the user is now "enjoying" the benefit of a non-negotiable government encryption certificate.

Add a few links about which legislators they can reach out to "thank" for this, links to organizations working to take this awful burden off the shoulders of our dear, overburdened government, etc. Just do things you're still allowed to do in excess of just accepting the holy poison certs silently.

They could have the browser shut down immediately upon getting one of these holy goverment certs. Might not be a great solution when the gov starts employing in "ads" that use their holy certs.

Add your clever solution below:

Are'nt Leaf blowers standard equipment?

I used to use a leaf blower to clean out my PCs all the time! Once or twice a year, I took them outside and gave them a good flush. While doing this, I placed them in the stream of a carpet-dryer blower to create an artificial breeze to carry away the toxic cloud. If I wasn't careful, I spent a day or two suffering from pollen allergies owing to the resevoir of crud within the case.

Another thing I did that I thought clever was to open a window about 6 inches, and set up my 12-core Dell T7500 workstation so that it backed up through this hole horizontally (padded on the sides with foam rubber blocks) which blew all of the hot air straight outside in the summer. In the winter, I flipped it around and it sucked in cold air directly from outside. I was able to do some serious SETI@home without concern for over heating. The poor beast had powerful fans, but undersized heat sinks inside and would ordinarilly never be able to run high loads continuously. Also, Dell had crippled the fan controller so that they would never ramp up in speed to respond to heat spikes. I used SpeedFan to manually turn them up as high as they would go. I would still do something like this in the summer, but it turned out that in winter, there was condensation and this led to rust on the case.

Sort of met her

I was in a Teams group chat with her about delays in using the latest corporate image on M1 Macs.

100 Kyndryl employees in Austin TX?

Dafuq? 100 Kyndryl employees in Austin TX? Kyndryl cut me loose last June where I was the sole IT staffer working at a marketing client site in Austin. They gave me every impression that I was the only Kyndryl employee in the county other than my boss who lived closer to Houston and rarely came to Austin. "My Team" was about a dozen people based in various cities from coast to coast. We only interacted via Teams and Slack. When I joined the team, I met with and was briefly trained by a guy they flew in from St. Louis because they needed someone to catch up on work at this site so badly. He was nice. He quit a couple weeks later.

I won't go into how difficult it was to get up to date on company processes and knowledge transfer from the others who were always "too busy", or how insane their ticket transfer process was (I had very limited admin powers, but if a ticket originated from someone working at my office, 99% of whom were working from home (and often, out-of-state), they would punt it to me instead of the actual team who had power and visibility with the issue) but I got things inventoried, did a huge pc refresh, and helped provide technical support for a drag show of all things. Their remote-desktop sw, based on what had been called "Tivoli" didn't work from my work site's network (it worked from home, heh) so I couldn't do much if people didn't bring or ship their equipment to the office for me to see.

I had a couple week's advance notice of my demise since Service Now stopped giving me tickets, and all of my work came from "walk ups". The sudden appearance of a mystery "file backup" program in my task tray was also noted. I think they waited for me to finish my big inventory spreadsheet before pulling the trigger. 2 out of 10, would not work for them again.

Description of RSS

Here is the description of RSS I wish they'd written instead of the one they did:

When you're on a website which supports RSS, you can click "Subscribe", and whenever there is new content, it will promptly become available in your RSS reader. This is like "following" a person or page on social media, except that instead of allowing the social media platform to block and manipulate what you see for their benefit, you can see EVERYTHING, miss NOTHING, and can apply filters of your own choosing. An RSS reader looks like an email inbox, and depending on your preference, may show only a title and link to open in your browser, a picture and summary, or you may even read the whole thing right there in a unified fashion.

Parallel Construction

Anyone who knows anything about USA investigations knows that they located their suspect by less-than-legal means and then assembled a parallel construction out of all the trivia they collected about their target.

We Have Received No Complaints, And Don't Expect To

BECAUSE SHUT UP, CITIZEN, THAT'S WHY.

I've always felt uncomfortable with this statement

I had a W95 toughbook from a user who worked out in the field which had somehow gotten a virus. Field workers had admin rights on their toughbooks. By pure chance I noticed that some of the items which appeared to be in the Start menu, which I took as "recent" items, were not in My Documents. He was putting the documents in the actual Start menu folders.

What about telecomuting?

I find it absolutely astonishing that they would prefer to develop black boxes which misunderstand what people say to them, and reply with nonsense, than to allow people to simply work from home without a smouldering boss stomping around behind them.

Flinders, Keepers!

"But Your Honor, if we're not allowed to keep our pile of seized loot to admire, we'll lose a significant motivation to do our jobs!"

Excellent Story

Great writing Alistair, I loved the in-jokes and pop references. This piece went perfectly with my morning coffee buzz. You may owe me a new keyboard, though!

User Gets No Priority

It's 2019, and my PC still freezes up HARD waiting for some network or disk activity to be responded to.