-
-
My email addresses are probably in tens of millions of databases already. None of them are secret, even if I want to keep them confidential. Once I send someone an email message, my address is out of my control.
The goal here is to find out how it’s being abused, and haveibeenpwned has proven that it’s trustworthy. Don’t use it if you don’t want to, but others may have decided differently based on facts that you might not care about.
Group K(ill me now)1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Agreed. KB5000802 is the one with print driver problems.
Also, NEVER install “preview” updates. Ever. Don’t even fantasize about it. If the thought enters your mind that it might be a good idea, consider taking a vacation, instead. Leave them for the people whom Woody called “unpaid beta testers”.
Group K(ill me now)1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
Also, as Susan Bradley has mentioned a few times, the “Select the target Feature Update version” setting underneath that in “Windows Update for Business” can prevent unwanted feature updates. I’ve set that to 20H2 (after having it set to 1909 for over a year).
I also set “Select when Quality Updates are received” to give me a two-week buffer between when Microsoft publishes an update and when a machine thinks it’s available. While we use WSUS for most of the network, I use WuMgr to manually install updates when I’m ready to on some critical machines.
Group K(ill me now)1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
That’s an excellent point about corporations wanting government to do the job that they don’t want to do, and I think that’s the most important issue: Who should be responsible? I think the First Amendment says that we, as private actors, should be responsible for our speech and that the government should have no role in regulating it. In the case of Parler, that appears to have worked out very well. But if some corporation is afraid of losing money simply because it stands up for a human principle, I have no sympathy for it at all. Profiting from hate may be protected from government regulation by the Constitution, but it isn’t protected from the actions of private individuals. Sometimes, we kill corporations that do such things.
Group K(ill me now) -
-
-
I firmly disagree that government should play any role in speech moderation.
First, Mr. Oppenheimer is wrong when he says that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater”. While the proprietor certainly has the right to throw someone out when they disturb other customers, those customers may also be grateful that that person saved their lives. Furthermore, the SCOTUS ruling cited by Mr. Oppenheimer in which Oliver Wendell Holmes made that famous statement was later overturned. In any case, the statement was ancillary to the case at hand (whether or not statements in protest of participation in World War I were constitutional) and did not have the force of law.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not illegal. Causing a disturbance may be illegal, but it isn’t always, and many notable First Amendment lawyers wish people would stop using that trope. See It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote, by Trevor Timm of EFF.
Second, the First Amendment clearly prohibits government regulation of speech. Do we really want to change that? We’ve recently seen that a President, at war with media that is critical of him, might want to punish people who criticize him. At this point, there is little reason to doubt that, if he had that power, many reporters and journalists would be in prison today.
While many people complain about others’ tone and boisterous behavior in the public square, and claim that useful discussions are interrupted by disruptive “trolls” in online forums, whose fault is that? Is it the people who respond to trolls and give them air, or the trolls, themselves? I don’t have to allow myself to be distracted by someone who’s only response to my post is a four-letter word, and I’m fairly confident that no one who is interested in a genuine debate would take them seriously even if they wished to argue against my ideas.
So who is responsible for regulating intemperate participants in an online forum?
If someone makes credible threats or engages in criminal communications in furtherance of a crime, then law enforcement can step in. But other than that, responsibility falls to the participants, including the hosts. I am responsible for my speech, and I am responsible for how I react to others’ speech. If I get angry about something someone else has said, that’s my decision, and it is wrong for me to try to pass the blame for my feelings onto others. Furthermore, if someone insists on standing on my front porch and saying things that I don’t want them to say, they might expect to get a few bruises when I haul them off of my property and into the street. But I’m more likely to ask the police to do it for me, since it then becomes an issue of tresspassing and not one of speech.
The answer has always been that the solution to bad speech is more speech. Peer pressure, in particular, is an effective weapon. As we’ve seen in recent days, even a President can be cowed when those who had supported him for years begin criticizing him publicly. Moreover, Parler, a forum favored by criminals who participated in last week’s insurrection, was “regulated” off the internet entirely by private actors. The government wasn’t involved in their demise at all.
We should not invite government to regulate the arena of public speech. It is unnecessary and invites abuse by those in power. We are a self-governing people, and we must take responsibility ourselves. We have the power to do that. We should use it, and not run crying to mommy and daddy every time our feelings get hurt.
Group K(ill me now) -
-
Flash is EOL? I knew that all the fireworks and partying that was going on last night meant that something good had happened. I just wasn’t sure what it was.
Group K(ill me now)1 user thanked author for this post.
-
Initially, Microsoft blamed their SolarWinds problems on hacked customers using O365 (It’s not our fault, nothing we could have done…). Then we found out that they, too, use SolarWinds’ Orion product. Even worse, while cleaning up their own SolarWinds installations, Microsoft found a SECOND backdoor into their systems.
I want to know what was done to Microsoft’s systems before they closed those backdoors. “Microsoft says it has not found evidence hackers breached customer data or used its systems to attack others” sounds like famous last words to me. Microsoft is not unhackable, and neither are their updates.
Group K(ill me now)5 users thanked author for this post.
-
This probably depends upon how many hundreds of machines you manage. “Operating system not found” is still a thing on SSDs. SSDs don’t manage file system indexes. File system management is the responsibility of the OS. I’ve always been able to fix that error by booting into a WinPE environment and running chkdsk /f.
Group K(ill me now)1 user thanked author for this post.
Author
