Posts by Medixstiff

"And she suggested that the government hold companies liable for selling vulnerable products that criminals and nation states later exploit in cyberattacks."

The biggest exploiters of this being the US themselves? I wonder how quickly she would be disappeared if she tried saying this to the faceless men at certain US government agencies?

"Making software "secure-by-design," and thus putting the liability on the vendors to sell safe products out of the box instead of pushing that responsibility on to consumers and businesses, is a drumbeat that CISA has been pounding under Easterly's leadership."

See my previous point, or how about when the same country wanted Apple et all to build in back doors, but make it safe at the same time?

What I will find interesting is when AI starts going through code and then starts using the same lines of code because they "just work" and are the most efficient ones to use, will someone sue about using their IP and if so, will someone grow a brain and put into law, that AI generated essential code is exempt form copyright violations, so the world can move forward and away from previous coders dodgy or lazy coding practices?

I want the one that starts with "Hello, You have reached the Australian Federal Police..."

Well so far I've been done as an ex-Optus customer, a current Medibank customer - this is where the SPAM SMS messages and phone calls really started ramping up, luckily Android phones have a SPAM call alert system - and now as an ex-Latitude customer.

It's getting to the stage of needing a full time credit reporting service along with the regular subscriptions for internet and mobile phones.

As it is, I've brought iiNet up on their IronPort SPAM not quarantining emails form dodgy iiNet support scammers, even though the feature is turned on.

I've also asked NAB why they don't currently offer 2FA through Microsoft or Google's authenticators, considering banks accounts are what most scammers are after.

This is where the EU needs to grow a spine and say, US you idiots have been drinking too much brake fluid again, we do not recognize these patents as they are like the vast majority of your laws and politicians, stupid beyond belief.

I wouldn't be heading to China ever again if I was a Foxconn exec, I might be taken into custody on false corruption charges or similar and then put on trial after 2 years.

Well with the recall of 362,000 cars, Ford, Merc and GM coming higher up the ladder for their driver assist products, I'm sure the sacked staff will be laughing when they get snapped up by the opposition and watch Tesla falling even further behind.

Is it any wonder that PC sales are slowing, since multi core CPU's and SSD's came out, the refresh cycle for home users in particular is non existent.

We are well and truly past the bad old software bloat days of the Pentium era in the late 90's early 2000's.

We bought an Arm based Surface for the CEO, everything was fine up until it came time to install the Fortinet VPN client, they had none for Arm.

As he's online at home and both of our external sites all the time, it was a deal breaker and sure enough was put back in it's box.

I did some contracting work for Arthur Anderson a few months before everything hit the fan for them and one warm Friday I noticed a procession of nice young ladies heading into the Server room to cool down after lunch.

I could not understand why the two IT guys had the biggest grins on their faces ever until said young ladies walked out of the Server room suitably refreshed.

Having dealt with HP, Lenovo and Dell notebook products, I can say HP are the worst for excess packaging, especially how many pieces of paperwork have their own zip lock bags, which whilst a waste., at least I use when I can.

"As of late February, Conti's primary Bitcoin address contained more than $2bn in digital currency, according to a Rapid7 report."

So if they know the address, how long before the US requests the funds be frozen?

Reminds me of the number of times we have had company wide team building exercises yet none of the Manglement team did them...until last year.

One of the exercises was to to throw objects of various sizes into a box. There were two teams, each with two teams, one to guard the box and return whatever fell out and one to collect the returned objects to the throwers. And there was a line midway neither team could cross.

So the Manglers thinking they knew better went first and more than 5 minutes later they finished.

Now one thing the presenters said was you could use everything around you to help, so we folded three desks over and put them around the box so nothing would bounce out from the sides and back and then we threw the smallest objects in first and worked our way up, because when the bigger items went in first, everything else would bounce off them and out of the box.

36 seconds later we were finished and the looks on the Manglers faces ware priceless.

Good old APNIC flogging the IPv4 thing again.

For the best part of 2 years they were sending out "IPv4 addresses are being bought up at an alarming rate" emails like a dodgy real estate agent trying to sucker you in to buy x amount of said dwindling addresses, on a weekly basis along with all the other useless drivel emails about electio0ns etc. that they were spamming us with so we re-directed them all to deleted items and had a calendar entry to check when our products were due for renewal.

So Senator Rubio is definitely heading over to China for the Winter Olympics then?

Or is he too gutless to stand up for what he believes in? But would rather try score easy points attacking someone else or a company.

As the third doctor in the joke says: I like working on politicians because they are spineless, gutless and their heads and a-holes are interchangeable.

When we first rolled out our Win10 pilot program machines, I advised one Manager that she might want to swap out her keyboard, when she asked why, I mentioned that it's probably 5 years old and you don't know what food or skin cells have made their way into the keyboard and not all of the skin cells would be hers.

About 30 minutes later my boss advised me that the Manager had asked for a new keyboard.

It still gives me a chuckle when an a-hole to everyone, sends out an email, realizes their Oops moment and then can't understand when we try to explain that the Recall email feature only works on the companies mail Servers, not external companies mail Servers.

"The Secure Equipment Act yesterday, legislation that prevents US regulators from even considering the issuance of new telecom equipment licenses for companies deemed security threats"

Considering the number of times our Cisco equipment wouldn't work with other Cisco equipment, add Cisco to the list.

We've replaced most of our Cisco networking kit for Dell for roughly a third of the price and are slowly replacing other kit as we find suitable alternatives.

As someone that's gone through many an Oracle audit and sit down to discuss licensing, Oracle can EABOD.

At one stage we had to rethink the CPU configurations for our new Blade's after sitting down with Oracle's own people, they then had the gall to state we had violated the licensing and we had fun and games showing them all the communications where they stated what we were doing was correct.

Then there was the audit 3 years ago where we ran the scripts, they again accused us of being wrong, we sent them communications again and then heard nothing back for two years.

Or the fact that their own installs turn just about every feature on and you have to then turn them off or they shout license violations.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your IT department is, when there's the senior Manager that likes to build his own kingdom, while white anting every other Manager and the IT department, until they either retire or a new CEO comes in and they realize they can only get away with things for about 6 months, so they jump ship rather than get the boot.

Been there a few times, I put the wind up the last one when I mentioned that staff do 95% of the workload and Managers are usually there to make the hard decisions and sign off on documents etc. then when he tried to respond - this was in front of his entire department mind you - I said "So when are you getting on the phones to show us how it's done".

He wasn't happy, I didn't care and I also got plenty of drinks bought the following Friday night.

My last role was at a home loan lender, we pushed for paperless because we were printing a couple of tress a day worth of 200 - 300 page loan documents.

Nearly 2 and a half years later we had a document management system in place, mainly because of the legal side of things making sure all the relevant laws were kept to, privacy protections were adhered to etc.

In the first month, staff started noticing content started missing from the document, a few characters on one page, then whole lines of info, so of course we panicked and called the vendor and got the "We've never seen this before" response.

It took them nearly 6 months to sort out the issue and in that time we had to go back to paper printing and scanning them in as separate documents in a file share.

This was going on 12 years ago.

I remember when I was working for the biggest outsourcer in Oz at the time, that Canon and HP both realized the money is made on the consumables, hence why inkjet MFP's were being sold at AUSPost stores for $59 and Laser MFP's for $99.

But can it survive a brain fart?

I expect if he tried to go the whislteblower route, he'd end up like Epstein, unless they get him out of the country altogether.

We rolled out some brand new Lenovo X370 Yoga's a few years back and people started complaining that their LTE connections would intermittently drop out.

Three other staff looked at the issue before I got to it, updating the firmware/drivers wouldn't work, Lenovo said they've never seen it happen before.

So I took one of the SIM tray's out and with the notebook on it's side, noticed the SIM would move slightly when I slowly inserted the tray to see what was going on.

Stuck the tiniest bit of bluetac under the SIM and problem solved.

Then did a two page email with photo's to Lenovo support with the CIO and Ops Manager cc'd in, on how to fix the problem.

Never had the issue on any other Lenovo's after that.

Back in 2010 when the AUD was at parity with the USD, I had to buy a copy of VMWare Workstation.

On the US site is was $199AUD and the AUS site it was $299AUD.

So I bought it from the US site. Not even a few days later the other techs all were forced by the US site to redirect to the AU site and pay the higher price.

Now considering there's no support in that pricing, that was just pure greed on VMWare's part and if there was a way I could live without needing at least some of their products for work, you bet I would do so.

Good luck getting my ugly mug, my Failbook profile has a chimp scratching it's head as my profile pic. Which is usually what I'm doing when a user comes up to me with one of their "why would you do that" issues they have caused.

I only have the account for keeping in touch with my sisters family overseas.

It's even better when your Devs hard code path's, credentials and give themselves Admin rights for the test environment then don't go through their code and come back with "It works in Dev" when they roll it out to Prod and the inevitable starts happening.

Too bad none of the Dev teams I've worked with got bollocked by Manglement when it all went Total Inability To Support Usual Production.

No the Ops team would get that privilege and the Devs never apologized afterwards of course.

When Yagan Square was first opened here in Perth, someone didn't think to disable the touch screen on a very large display.

Whereupon some joker decided to play a P*rnhub video on the display.

Meanwhile downunder in Wait Awhile, we had some people three years back yanking out ATM's with an SS Commodore ute and to my knowledge they were never caught...or perhaps they were caught for something else which is why it stopped suddenly.

We had a Test Lead that decided to change the existing permissions setup we had where you could tick the boxes of the roles, to making new roles named after a persons job description.

Unfortunately the Dev. team didn't actually sit down with the worker bees, just the Mangelment Team, so inevitably on day one the Help Desks streamed in from staff that could not longer do their jobs.

Of course when that happened, his response was "They shouldn't have that access" and the Manglers started getting staff asking how were they meant to do such-and-such which the Manglers didn't realize staff did, because all they do is make a few harder decisions and sign stuff, the staff do 95% of the workload after all.

Anyway after a few days it was decided to push role changes and merges to the Ops team because the Dev. team could see the wave of changes heading their way and didn't want to deal with it.

Four months later the Team Lead's job was made redundant but we were still feeling the after affects 5 years later until I left in April.

Lenovo don't seem to be having much luck the last few years.

We bought new notebooks in 2018 which worked fine for the first year before the SSD's started failing.

It took us quite a while to work out it was the Union Memory drives after finally starting to see posts in Lenovo's forums from other people having the same issue.

Out of 144 notebooks, we replaced the SSD's in 80% of them over an 18 month period and earlier this year moved over to HP X360's thanks to the problems this SSD issue cause.

We had been buying Lenovo notebook's and desktops since before I started there in February 2010, so were definitely a long term customer.

I was working at setting up a small network for a client, went outside to get a cable tester and when I came back, one of the monitors decided it was going to commit suicide and flames were licking at the ceiling, so I grabbed the nearest extuinguisher and drowned everything in powder.

That worked...unfortunately at the time, no-one was aware that dry powder extuinguishers are really good at eating electronics, so 6 months later all sorts of weird gremlins started popping up.