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FYI, the Universal Service Fund, established by the Communications Act of 1934 was expanded to include financial incentive to bring internet access to the frontier with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

In 2009, Congress pushed the FCC to develop the National Broadband Plan, with the goal of bringing broadband to the boonies.  This led the FCC to churn out their USF/ICC Transformation Order in 2011.

This order included the provisions for the Connect America Fund.  Somewhere along the lines of government doing what government does best, promulgating the endless drivel of programs with acronyms, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) arose.

Long story longer, Starlink initially received funding/subsidy of $800 million “ish” from the RDOF to facilitate expanding broadband in the boonies.  None-the-less, someone, somewhere, in the bureaucracy with just enough clout and power and a distain for anything scented with Musk, pulled the funding with the reasoning Starlink can’t prove that it can “deliver the promised service”.

Our wonderful tax dollars at work, and waste, on the whim of a frivolously fussy federal functionary.

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windbg

If you don’t qualify for any of those, another option is to look at warehouse clubs and see what they offer.  Costco, for example, offers Office 365 Family plan with a 15-month subscription for $99, which works out to a similar savings per month ($6.67 vs. $5.83).  They may throw in additional offers (like a $10 eGift card), which brings the monthly costs even closer ($5.93 vs. $5.83).

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Peter Deegan

I agree.  Hopefully Microsoft has a way to track feature use (metrics), and the “New Outlook” doesn’t get bogged down with “feature creep” things that 99% of users will never use, but seem to inevitability happen.

Inscrutable, inevitability, inconceivable!  Cue the “Princess Bride” sound bites…

Has someone told the armed forces of the world, and the industry that supports them, about the 1st law?  These will be the bots that destroy humanity…

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Toa Of Justice, Mr. Austin

Maybe I’m suffering a senioritis moment…  Doesn’t Susan generally reference a monthly patching vulnerability summary YouTube video by a third-party vendor?  A guy gives a bit of an executive summary / overview?  I’ve searched the past few DEFCON posts, but can’t find it.  I thought I’d bookmarked it, but perhaps it’s all a dream?

Could Google have filtered the images based on IP?  Perhaps your hosting provider’s been a bit naughty, even inadvertently, and let SPAM images use the same infrastructure your newsletter uses?

For example, our Outlook blocks some images.  “Click here to download pictures.  To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message.”

Boot into the OOBE first (Ctrl-Shift-F3) and run scripts like Spiceworks “Decrapifier” that delete all the crap-apps, and manually delete any others you don’t want from the default profile (this profile is what’s cloned to new user’s profiles every time a new user is created).

Reboot from the OOBE, then bypass the network requirement using oobe\bypassnro

Bill and company have always been seduced by envious neighbor syndrome (ENS), or in legacy parlance “keeping up with the Jobs’…”

I would much prefer fixing the myriad of bugs and half-baked redesigned interfaces (I’m looking at you Settings vs. Control Panel), where split-brain doesn’t refer to DNS, but to an Admin trying to find where new/old settings are now hidden in the latest release.

How about implementing on/off “switches”, like they have in Outlook for example?  Where new features are toggled “off” by default, but it’s easy-peasy and in a prominent position that never moves (I’m looking at you show desktop sliver in the lower right-hand corner), so users who want the latest and greatest fresh batch of bugs can simple toggle them on.

This panacea would, of course, be tied to a permanent registry / GPO policy object  that weary admins could easily hide/disable the diabolical “new features” switch from end-users.  Only then would the Utopia mirage of an otherwise dystopian future keep smiles on weary admin faces…

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Toa Of Justice, Cybertooth

Looks like a big mess for Outlook 2016, requiring multiple patches to fix a RCE vulnerability with a CVSS 9.8 rating…

https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2024-21413

 

She created a video a little while back showing how to use block a patch to hide/unhide updates.  It’s available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfUtMK02dgw

Casey

We have two fancy Canon multi-functions attached to our network.  Originally, we set static IP addresses and had everyone print directly to them IPP.  Turned out IPP couldn’t handle “fancier” features of the print driver (larger paper sizes, duplexing, etc.).  So, we settled on RAW.  Everything was fine and dandy until some firmware update added or enabled WSD.

Chaos ensued. Finally got WSD disabled, yet problems still existed.  I’m guessing the firmware update introduced some other “undocumented feature”.  As users printed, end of jobs were not being flagged correctly.  So a user’s job would finish, and hang the que leaving others jobs pending.

After enough aggravation, ended up setting up a Windows print server to service both Canons, and pointing everyone and everything at it.  Things have been smooth sailing since.

Casey

Ask your Network Administrator if RAW printing using Windows Print Server is right for you.  Side effects may include reduced help desk calls, ability to print color duplex tabloid pages with offset collation.  Serious, sometimes fatal PrintNightmare reactions have been reported in poorly designed and secured Print Spooler services.

 

I agree an overhaul is overdue.  A prime example is John Stossel’s lawsuit against Facebook for defamation.  Stossel posted videos regarding climate change that were flagged by Facebook, via a third-party activist group, as false or misleading.

Facebook claims their simply a carrier, and exempt.  However, I believe they were anything but.  When Facebook added the ability to modify or brand content created by others with their own “subjective” labels, they became a publisher.

In putting lipstick on a pig, “…DeMarchi concluded that fact-checking is a subjective undertaking. Neither Facebook nor its third-party reviewers can be liable for defamation because they’re not making statements of objective fact, she found.”  So facts aren’t facts, their subjective opinion, so says the court.

In Stossel’s case, I believe had they threaded the needle correctly to have it first determined Facebook was a “publisher”, the outcome would have been different.  Instead, they went for the classical “libel/defamation” argument.

I would hope a common sense approach would be found to prevent the need for moderation of all content, as Intrepid has expressed.

We’ve had problems with the default IOS and Android calendar  apps when used with Exchange Online.  The calendars would not sync everything.  Events created on the device would sometimes not sync to Exchange.  It was random, and there was no error or notification things were not synced.  It would also occur when modifying calendar entries on the default calendar apps.

There was a kludge fix of installing the Outlook app, then selecting the option within it to sync calendars.  This made the Outlook app the go-between the device default calendar app and Exchange.

It was such a headache, we finally told users the Outlook app was the only supported method for Exchange.  They were welcome to use the default IOS and Android apps for their personal, non-work, accounts.  However, work accounts require the Outlook app.  Things have worked since.

An optimal or ideal solution?  No.  A necessary one?  Yes.

Nope.  No sleep for the wicked (at least that’s what some users probably think of their IT department).  It’s either on or off, with the screen set to an appropriate timeout / sleep value.

Since most of our IT maintenance is done automagically in the wee hours of the overnight/morning, and some of our users are old school and were trained early on to turn off their PCs,  I’ve even had to go as far as setting some PC’s BIOS to auto power on if it’s powered off.

This allows for that magic maintenance to happen, all so the users can hopefully have a productive day, without “we interrupt your work with an important update from IT”…

Just peeked in

• Control Panel > Programs and Features,
• Settings > App
• Services.msc

… and all I have is Brave, no additional Brave-branded VPN software.  Was this “fixed”?  Brave says it’s up-to-date:

Brave is up to date

Version 1.59.120 Chromium: 118.0.5993.88 (Official Build) (64-bit)