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Not to get too far off-topic…  Do you have an Amazon link for the KVM you’re using?

Some nostalgia.  When I was a wee lad, my grandfather was a professional tax preparer.  He acquired a Leading Edge Model D (fancy IBM XT compatible) PC for doing all that tax preparation stuff for clients.

Being a wise and sage grandfather, he realized the future potential computers would have, and bought each grandchild a Commodore 64.  I think I was about 10 years old at the time.

Grandpa was a member of a local computer group/club/association (I don’t recall the exact nomenclature they went by).  One of the things they had were lots and lots of freeware and shareware programs written in BASIC.

Whenever I visited grandpa, I would play the various shareware and freeware apps he had.  When I found one I enjoyed, I would print out the entire BASIC programing code on his trusty old (new at the time) dot matrix printer.

Now, IBM BASIC and Commodore BASIC aren’t simply drop in and go.  I would enter the lines and lines of the IBM BASIC code in my Commodore 64.  Once entered, I would save the code and try to run it.

When it failed, and it always failed, I would track down the line(s) of code causing the problem.  I would then find the equivalent Commodore BASIC commands to perform the same function.   I was so proud of myself when my slot machine, Oregon Trail, and Monopoly games from IBM BASIC would finally run on my Commodore 64.

And that’s about as far as I went down the path of becoming a programmer.  Nonetheless, it was an educational and entertaining experience.   I think it also gave me the knack for troubleshooting anything and everything computer-related at a relatively young age.

Now, I’m just a grumpy old Systems Administrator who pictures current batches of programmers as 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters.  Instead of creating the works of Shakespeare in 1,000 years, they’re endlessly churning out Swiss-cheese software, with security holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through…

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zat_so

Microsoft 365 – Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel – Version 2408 (Build 17928.20392)

The January 14, 2025 security update is causing, at least for us, problems initially opening attached files (so far PDF and DOCX).  By default, our PDFs open using the Edge browser.

The issue is when you initially double-click the PDF attachment, you receive an error from Microsoft Outlook “You don’t have appropriate permissions to perform this operation.”

[Edit:] Tracked it down to our anti-virus software causing it.  I’m not smart enough to know how to delete this reply.

I fed both examples through Perplexity.ai, the favorite of one or more AskWoody authors.  Without hesitation, it provided the correct math computation of the kiwi’s and even stated the 5 smaller would still be included.

I then fed it the “If it were true that all corgis are reptiles, and all reptiles are plants, does it follow that all corgis are plants?” logic question.  At first it rebuked it as being “biologically impossible”, and asked if I wanted to rephrase it in a way that maintains biological accuracy.

I instructed it, “No, analyze it as if it were true.”

It then “apologized” and provided the correct logic of “if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C”.

Now, if only it could reason “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”  And do it in less than seven million years…

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Michael Covington, LH, rizzquery, SueW, Elly, Alan Hoffberg

I use some old iPad Air devices on my flight simulator for various instrument panels.  The battery on one device finally crapped out, sending it into a boot loop.  As a old techie, replacing parts since the days of the IBM XT, I thought I’ll Google how to replace the battery.

When the search result from a well-known self-repair site came back with over 100 steps and ranked it as “extremely difficult”, I finally realized just how much of a disposable society we’ve become, and there’s not a chance I was even going to attempt replacing the battery.  More simple and cost effective to just search the local electronic classifieds for someone selling their old Air to replace it with.  Even Apple won’t offer me 3-cents of “trade-in” value, but they’ll gladly “recycle” it for me…

I guess it’s just a sign of the times, but also sad commentary on our ever growing issues with eWaste.  Everything should at least attempt to be end-user serviceable, with “right to repair” laws.  But that’s just me turning into a grumpy old man.  Who knows?   Next, I’ll be shouting at neighborhood kids to stay off my lawn…

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Lars220, Elly, rc primak, SueW, Myst, Tem, satrow

Thanks for the heads up about the forced migration GPO.  I must have missed that.  Time to keep it classic for now…

One thing to mention might be the crowdsourcing of defeating “patent trolls” with the “prior art” technique.  There was a fairly large case in the past couple of years where a larger tech company crowdsourced its userbase to defeat a patent troll that had filed a claim against it.  If only I could remember the details of who, what, when, where and why…

Looks like the HTML version is still the old one (the link itself is a bit messed up, too, with only the “L” in HTML being linked).

After applying the Oct 2024 patches to Win 10 Pro v22H2, when clicking a hyperlink in  an Outlook message (Outlook Microsoft 365 v.2402 build 17328.20612 Click-to-run on the semi-annual enterprise channel), get an error “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”

Yet, the default browser opens behind the popup-error and loads the page in the hyperlink.

And fun times were had by all…

Casey

Interesting thing about the CUPS service, specifically cups-browsed…  Why would some vendors decide to turn cups-browsed on by default?  Might the plan to have been to enable it for several years prior to exploiting it?  Not knowingly by the vendors, per se.  Moreover, some long-term social engineering, like had been done with “xz”.  So it would it be seen as benign, until it wasn’t?  Was the long term game plan to get all major distros to enable cups-browsed by default?

I’m thinking back to the “xz utilities” in Linux that were appropriated by a “helpful” third-party from the original author.  And subsequently used to attempt to usurp control of SSH via a backdoor.

Another great, free backup utility is Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows (they also have free versions for Linux and Mac).  If you’d like to tinker with their server backup solutions, they offer “Community Editions” of their Backup & Replication services.  Great for a small home lab setup.

https://www.veeam.com/products/downloads.html

One of the reasons I’m such a supporter of Veeam is back in the day, we were using Backup Exec and looking for a other options.  Veeam sales provided me with a 1-year NFR license in order to test their solution.  So, we ran Backup Exec and Veeam side-by-side for that time.  Gave me a chance to learn the ins and outs of Veeam while still having Backup Exec.

Some County Recorder offices in our state offer free email notification services for any recorded changes to a property.  It’s a nice service that allows you to receive alerts, and hopefully if there’s some type of shenanigans going on you can nip it in the bud.

It’s great the local sheriff was more than willing to take on the case.  (For some reason, I imaged my kid’s cartoon show, Paw Patrol, and “Chase is on the case!” when I typed that.)

However, the best law enforcement to contact for cases specifically involving the U.S. Postal Service would be the Postal Inspection Service.  They are a federal law enforcement agency who’s primary job responsibility is crimes involving U.S. Mail (theft, illicit drugs, pyramid schemes, sex crimes).

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Bill C.

I always instruct users to lock their workstations on breaks/lunch, and to reboot at the end of the day.  All of our automated IT housekeeping is done after-hours, to keep the workday as productive as possible.

I remind them if they don’t, and they leave files open overnight, it’s at their own peril.  Hardware manufacturer driver and BIOS updates, Microsoft Updates, and our third-party endpoint management software will reboot their workstations (and the servers), in the middle of the night to apply patches.  Nightly backups may skip open files.

Like everything else in life, some folks learn by reading, others by observing, and others by doing (or not doing in this case).  It typically takes only one occurrence of a corrupted Excel spreadsheet to drive home the point.

I can only give our personal results with one site using Starlink in the middle of nowhere…  YMMV…  24ms-28ms…

Compared to HughesNet Gen5, Starlink is significantly less.

HughesNet doesn’t give me a pretty graph with 30 days history, but if I open up a CMD prompt and ping it, it’s typically in the 500ms-700ms range.

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windbg, TechTango