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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Locking a company out of their systems isn’t the most lucrative part of ransomware anymore. Data exfiltration and threatening to release the data to the highest bidder is now the norm.

    Ransomware also typically sits on a system doing nothing for ~6 weeks before ever starting to encrypt and upload data. Even if companies have backups to restore from, they need to choose whether they’re going to restore entire machines quickly and risk still having the ransomware on the restored machine. Or they can take the long a painful route of spinning up new machines, then restoring just the data itself to individual apps/services to ensure you don’t still have ransomware after the restore.


  • This is actually the worst type of end-user.

    Doesn’t make a ticket or notify anyone that there is a problem and then proceeds to try and fix it themselves incorrectly. When it does become a ticket, they won’t remember exactly what steps they took to troubleshoot and will waste 5x as much time from support staff trying to fix it than if they just didn’t touch it in the first place.

    Guaranteed didn’t wipe the machine from the built in reset/recovery screen and instead used a windows installer that was created on a different computer and doesn’t have the correct network drivers in the image.







  • The Oracle Cloud VPS only has SSH key authentication enabled by default. You can also set it to only allow SSH from your home IP in the virtual firewall before the machine is ever spun up.

    Their current free ARM offering is 1 machine with 4-cores and 24gb RAM for life. You can also add another 2 AMD machines with 1-core and 1gb RAM and still be in their free-tier.

    If you’re going to set it up and take advantage of the ARM machine, make sure you pick a home location for your account that has multiple availability zones. San Fran right now only has 1 zone, so if the shared ARM instances are all used up, you’ll have to wait a few days and try again. Phoenix I think has 3, so you can try with another zone right away.


  • M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.

    If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.

    The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.

    I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.

    It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.

    Absolute baloney from Apple.




  • Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.

    For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don’t know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.

    No way in hell I’m digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can’t do everything for you if you’ve never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.