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  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • And despite security recommendations, too many IT depts still force password resets every 90 days…

    It could be for contractual or for insurance reasons. We have some contracts with government agencies that require it, and our cyberinsurance also does. Even though NIST has been recommending for years to do long passphrase + MFA and no reset unless you suspect compromise.

    So yeah, the reason behind this might not be just plain incompetence.




  • Yep. I’m not making a proclamation, just stating an opinion. I don’t have a problem with what they’re doing, and if other people do, that’s fine. Some people like their cucumbers pickled, let them have their pickle.

    I actually wouldn’t be surprised to see it go open source in the future, Microsoft has been doing that a lot recently, like VScode and the whole of .NET and friends like PowerShell. Pretty much the only things worthwhile from Microsoft are already open source, except Copilot.


  • My feelings on the subject is that they don’t live nearly long enough to not give them a simple pleasure like sleeping with their people.

    Even when he wakes me up at 4am because his paws must be licked for 20 minutes.

    Or when he wakes me up at 5am whining to get under the covers.

    Or when he sleeps like this, which is all the time:


  • My feelings on the subject is that they don’t live nearly long enough to not give them a simple pleasure like sleeping with their people.

    Even when he wakes me up at 4am because his paws must be licked for 20 minutes.

    Or when he wakes me up at 5am whining to get under the covers.

    Or when he sleeps like this, which is all the time:



  • and how hard it was to get x11 working

    Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.

    That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.

    Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.


  • Copilot was trained on copylefted code while itself being closed. What was brought to attention by @[email protected] isn’t efficacy, but Microsoft’s lack of ethics and social responsibility when it comes to their bottom line.

    I honestly don’t have a problem with that. Everything that it was trained on is publicly-available/open-source code, and I’m not aware of any license that requires you to distribute your modifications if you don’t make modified binaries publicly available, not even GPL. And even then, you’re only required to make available the code that was modified, not related code. And I don’t even think that situation would apply in this case, since nothing was modified, it was just ingested as training data. Copilot read a book, it didn’t steal a book from the library and sell it with its name pasted over the original author’s.

    This isn’t really any different of a situation than a closed-source Android app using openssl or libcurl or whatever. Just because those open-source libraries were employed in the making of the app doesn’t mean that the developer must release the source for that app, and it doesn’t make them a bad person for trying to make money from selling that app. Even Stallman is on board with selling software.

    And even if you take all that off the table, you’re free to do the exact same thing and make a competitor. Microsoft didn’t make their own language model, they’re using a commercially-available model developed by OpenAI. There’s literally nothing stopping anyone else from doing this as well and making a competing service called “Programming Pal” and making their code open-source. In fact, it’s already been done with FauxPilot and CodeGeex and the like.

    So yeah, I really don’t have a problem with it. This ended up a lot longer than I had originally thought it would, sorry for the novel.



  • At work/for business, you can’t beat Veeam. It’s the gold standard and there is literally nothing better.

    At home, Duplicity. Set it up once and then just let it go, and it supports a million different backup targets you can ship your backups off to, including the local filesystem. Has auto-aging/removal rules, easy restores, incrementals, etc. Encrypts by default too.



  • I pay for it just because it’s cheap and to support them

    I did this too when it first came out, and then the product became robust enough that I recommended we implement it at work because secrets management was non-existent. We have a bunch of licenses on the Enterprise plan now and it just keeps getting better each update.

    My only complaint is that migrating the data to a new server is a pain in the ass and never works correctly, even when following the migration instructions to the letter. Always have to open a ticket with them for that. Not enough of a pain to move to another product, though.

    I also still pay for my personal plan. It really is a fantastic product.







  • Is this really that useful though?

    It’s very useful if you don’t use a password manager and/or reuse passwords.

    The most useful part about it to me is the API. You can tie in to Active Directory to blacklist all hashes that appear in any breach, plus expire/force a password change if any user on your domain uses a password that has been in a breach. It completely eliminates that vector from threat actors immediately.

    So yeah, I would call this intensely useful.