dendory

Being part of design meetings, it's amazing how many endless customizations and workflow adjustments people like project managers and consultants like to request for a new piece of software. But when it comes down to it, most users don't want a complex, hard to understand interface that has so many features it's supposed to improve everyone's productivity. Most people want to use their spreadsheet, their Outlook calendar and their IE browser. Not because it's best at the task, but because that's what they know and are used to.

Obvious question I know.. but why were the SSNs of sailors on some HP contractor's laptop?

I think there's multiple things there and I don't think taking any particular stance is wrong. I love technology, in the sense that if I get a problem to solve which makes me dig deeper into an area to figure out how things work under the hood, I really dig that. But I don't use Facebook, Netflix, Siri, Alexa or any of those things. I want nothing to do with the Internet of things. I suspect this is common among those of us who grew up with technology, as opposed to those who had technology by the time they grew up. They see technology as a service they should always have available in every facet of their lives, while we see it as something that used to be cool and mysterious, but now has been wrapped by so many commercial interests.

Pretty much every router is sold with UPnP turned on.

Many IOT devices use UPnP to open their interface to the world.

I don't consider myself a programmer, just someone working in IT that writes a lot of code, and to this day when I want to write any type of web page or web based "app" PHP is my goto tool. I can write my HTML and add PHP logic directly inline whenever I need it, and get the job done in no time. Sure I could spin up a node.js framework, use routing, create classes and objects, etc.. But to 99% of my needs it's just not worth the extra time.

In the short term, there's always a lot more risks in scraping an old system and spinning up a new one, especially in large complex organizations. However, in the long term you're really better off with modern systems.

So it really is a difficult trade off.

Private key stored in a passworded file on an encrypted disk, plus a key fob as second factor.

Pretty hard to get better security.

It's a bit of a catch 22, if you lose your iPhone then you need some way to locate it / erase it without having your iPhone. I don't think it's a big deal, you should have backups anyways.

One thing they could do is, if you have more than 1 device on your account, then force you to use another device for 2fa.

I'm not sure I get the point of this article. Travel nomads are a real thing, and more and more numerous. They typically don't have a lot of money and often work at local menial jobs or by doing freelance gigs online, but then again it's no coincidence that Tailand is the world's digital nomad capital. When your cost of living is ridiculously low, it's not impossible to work from the beach and spend your time traveling.

I made https://dendory.net/coding a while back as a cheatsheet of syntax between languages.

Guess it's luck that I started using Python when they released 3, and went straight for that!

A long time ago I started to use the iPhone music app. Then I quickly discovered that songs sent to the iPhone could not be sent back the other way. This was just the beginning of Apple's lock-in. I got out of it right then and there. Now I store my music on my own server and use one of the many third party music apps to play them.

If a service smells of lock-in, you can be sure things won't become better, they will become worse like the issues people get with Apple Music and iCloud. You care about your files? Then you manage them, don't trust some service you have no control over.

It's all fine and good to point out how insecure SMS is, and various ways that 2-factor auth may have been improved, but I think the bottom line is that when your adversary is the government, police and telecom provider working together, the means you use to protect yourself are irrelevant, if they really want to bring you down, they will. The solution is in democratization and lobbying for proper laws to be passed.

It's interesting to see how Google, a company that has arguably some of the best engineers in the world and the most brilliant technologists, still only makes a decent revenue on online ads. All of their other startups are losing money.

In Quebec a lot of our modern taboo words are religious themed. Unlike many other cultures however, it's not religion that made them taboo, but rather the fact that we had a heavier than most religious presence in our political and education systems up to the 1960s, and when we 'woke up' as it were, a lot of religious terms became swear words. Today the province is much less religious than say the US, on average, and most of our swear words remain that way.

I think the security aspect is the best option. If a CEO can't access some proprietary web app and is told "You need to use browser X that supports DRM", then they will be "Why isn't that already installed on my system". But if they are told "The web app uses hidden code that may be insecure, and cannot be audited" then you'll have executives, people in actual power positions, say "Get that stuff off our network".

Too bad that content outside the US is a fraction of what's available in the US.

I remember using AVG many years ago when it was a decent product. I recently had the displeasure to have to install it again. AVG Free right now is malware, plain and simple. It highjacks your home page in every browser, changes your search page, and silently installs an extension. And if you go and switch the home page back, it shows you a popup asking you to set it back to AVG. This is pure malware behavior.

I really cringe when dealing with spaces, which is a real problem since I code in Python a lot, which cannot deal with a mix of both. I don't understand people using 2 or 4 spaces at every line, it's so much slower. Sure the first time they probably use a tab and their editor is setup to replace with spaces, but as soon as you go back to edit you need to deal with the multiple spaces.

I say tabs for all!

You'd be surprised. While the -official- code will typically always get QA'd and reviewed, there are plenty of cases where custom code for a specific use case is done by one engineer and bypasses the proper channel because of deadlines.

I wonder if non-TLS based VPNs could be used around that? And if those are blocked, how hard would it be to build a SSL over HTTP proxy outside the country?

Ironically, just this week I had several cases of attempting to install Python modules with pip, and every error that came up had to do with compiling parts. Then I used apt-get to install binary packages and they all installed just fine, in 1/10 the time.

Password rules are needed, otherwise passwords would be even worse than they are now, with people going back to using '1' or '1234'. They just need to be better designed:

Must have at least 16 chars, OR Must have at least 8 chars with 1 number, 1 letter, 1 symbol, AND Must not have more than 3 repeating characters

HP is everywhere in the enterprise, from servers to desktops and every peripheral in between. I doubt they are going away any time soon. But as tech evolves, it does seem like the company is being left behind. I predict another IBM in the making.

You know they still sell mainframes? You just don't typically see that in the news.

Ironic how Twitter, who turned their backs on developers years ago, are now forced to backpedal now that they are in decline. The same day, YouTube turns their back on content creators. A preview of things to come?

Registrars can say whatever they want, it doesn't mean anything until the domain is properly listed in the TLD's main database, in this case VeriSign.

If a company can reasonably show they own a trademark for a name in a region and should be awarded a domain, registrars will give away the domain. There has been plenty of cases where even old domains were taken away.

I rely heavily on Evernote. I actually thought about making my own notes system before, but the native apps and doing synch right is a hard thing to do, especially when talking about a complex system of notebooks, notes, tags, file attachments, search, etc. You don't get that with a file system.

There are tons of cases out there of clear abuse of the legal system, where the facts are as close to black and white as you can get. This doesn't seem like it is. From an outside view, reading about employees who had access to trade secrets, even source code, leaving together to make their own product in a similar field while retaining access to said secrets (the ongoing support role) seems like a very murky case, and something that the court system is probably best to sort out.

Yet at the end of the day, the CEO will overrule the IT's multiples productivity arguments and tell them to get him an iPad Pro because it's Apple, because his Golf buddy told him today's presentation was awesome and because he is very satisfied with his iPhone.