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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • Step 1: License the technology for very cheap or free to competitors.

    Step 2: Include features but its free because ads. Pay small monthly fee for ad-free.

    Step 3: Revise CANNBus or replace it with new system. Make it a ‘standard’ so that aftermarket units can provide features but will also serve ads from the original car manufacturer and its DRM. Anyone reverse engineering the system gets sued into the ground for DMCA/Copyright laws because now they are bypassing DRM.

    Step 4: Everyone gets ads regardless. Also, you must pay subscription fee to basically use the car. Ads are to “keep costs down” for features and/or car purchasing price.

    Step 5: After everyone is mad, give slightly higher cost for subscription for ad-free.

    People that complain are told 'It’s just one coffee a month. No big deal."

    Step 6: Offer a 5-year (non-transferrable or refundable) plan that you can just roll into the price of the car loan and ‘locks in the price’ and 'You don’t have to worry about it anymore." Maybe toss in lame very small discounts for certain branded charging stations while on the plan. People already sign up for credit cards, give away their personal info. and become loyal customers to gas stations to save single digit percentages off on fuel.

    People that buy new every 5 years usually buy the package.

    People that try to save money and buy used cars pay the subscriptions.

    Step 7: Double monthly price for ad-free tier and market it to “we had to raise prices for those that want a premium experience but kept the ad-based subscription fee cheap. We had to pass the cost somewhere.” This will increase the demand for those 5-year plans.

    Overall new car purchase demand increases a bit because of those plans.

    Over the course of 15 or 20 years there will be an entire generation of drivers used to ads always being in cars and will just accept subscriptions and ads are just the way it’s always been that way and that it must be that way.

    For the EU, it’ll probably be different where the car can perform basic functions without ads but ‘premium features’ for stuff like traction control, auto lane following, etc. will probably still be behind the system I’d imagine.




  • This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.




  • I used to do this on one of my sites that was moderately popular in the 00’s. I had a link hidden via javascript, so a user couldn’t click it (unless they disabled javascript and clicked it), though it was hidden pretty well for that too.

    IP hits would be put into a log and my script would add a /24 of that subnet into my firewall. I allowed specific IP ranges for some search engines.

    Anyway, it caught a lot of bots. I really just wanted to stop automated attacks and spambots on the web front.

    I also had a honeypot port that basically did the same thing. If you sent packets to it, your /24 was added to the firewall for a week or so. I think I just used netcat to add to yet another log and wrote a script to add those /24’s to iptables.

    I did it because I had so much bad noise on my logs and spambots, it was pretty crazy.



  • There are a couple of OEMs like System76 and Starlabs that sell laptops with Linux on them, provide tech support for customers and so on.

    And no, installing most distros aren’t hard. You just click the buttons to proceed and fill out the username and password box, select your time zone and select your wi-fi network if you’re using wifi.

    You can do manual partitioning but why would you if you don’t know what you’re doing?

    Installing software in the GUI is as easy as installing software from the Microsoft Store. Just search or look around and when you see something you want, just click the Install button.



  • I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn’t be at enormous risk nor should critical services. Even if it’s your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn’t be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you’re just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn’t do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource’s update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you’d be using if you aren’t allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.

    Crowdstrike is just another lesson in that.




  • Needing to use command line for some things that should be a right click, not supporting right click, ambiguities galore when looking at a package repository, odd defaults in packages that one really wouldn’t expect to have to check (e.g. Selecting RDP connection in a Remote app, but it defaults the security to something other than RDP?)

    Sounds like you’re using a GNOME Desktop. You should give KDE Plasma a try instead. KDE Plasma basically gives you a Windows-esq experience without trying to install something like GNOME extensions.

    For a regular user there’s not much point into going into the command-line anymore.

    there’s problems like Libre Office devs …

    Sure but there’s also alternatives. LibreOffice doesn’t try to emulate Microsoft Office and they never really have. They won’t even try to be compatible with MS Office but rather they do with OOXML which Microsoft created for other Office suites to be compatible with it but then just never supported it very well. Some alternatives do however. WPS Office is perhaps the most popular alternative for this that does try to be compatible with MS Office and emulate its feel and features but ONLYOFFICE is also a contender.


  • Just a heads up, if you use an AMD GPU, the drivers are built into the Linux kernel itself by AMD engineers (and others helping/supporting/contributing to the kernel like themselves). So you don’t even have drivers to install, unless you’re one of the 10 people that want to use AMD GPUs for Machine Learning. Then you’d do a quick install of AMD PRO (those are proprietary so that’s why they aren’t built into the kernel).


  • To be fair, I find that people with a Computer Science degree are pretty much just like most other users except that they need more privileged access somewhere because they are usually software developers or somewhere in that orbit. A Computer Science degree does not prepare someone to be a sysadmin. That doesn’t mean they can’t be an excellent one but it certainly isn’t because of their degree path.


  • I don’t know, I like using Fleet Commander with FreeIPA (where it stores the profile). You just spin up the template VM for whatever like-clients on the network you want to make default profiles for and make the changes, shut it down, checkbox the changes (the configurations and stuff) that you approve and let it apply the profiles across the network. Easier than depending on Puppet or Ansible playbooks IMO.

    I have had issues with SSSD as well though and it had to do with Kerberos tickets but I can’t remember what I did to fix it. We’d have to manually use kinit on each machine when it’d basically fall off the realm. I want to say it was a DNS issue but it was so long ago, I just don’t remember.

    We used to use Centrify for Linux and Solaris and it was easy using Access Manager to basically handle AD users and computers with Active Directory and had some GPO support (you could push config writes with GPOs for example and organize it all via OUs for example) but it would get a little wonky between trusts in the forest sometimes (in regards to zone management in Centrify) and they kept getting more expensive. Maybe they’ve fixed that stuff now but it was really simple to use and you could basically manage a lot through the AD and create group profiles in the Access Manager. I think the last straw was wanting to force us to license the entire suite regardless of whether we were using it or not. Personally, I never liked it because it wouldn’t use SSSD or kclient/nsswitch and if some service tried to join the realm/domain, it’d join using the same computer accounts and basically break the account since Centrify used its own client, so you’d specifically need to join the computer accounts via Centrify as a different name. It wasn’t detrimental or anything – just annoying that it was a problem at all. Also, sometimes the user cache database saved in specific users’ appdata that use Access Manager would corrupt from time to time and you’d need to manually delete it to use Access Manager. I’d hope they fixed that by now too though.

    All and all, I’m not saying Active Directory isn’t an excellent product because it is and I’m not saying that there is a 1:1 solution for Linux but I’m saying it that in my experience it isn’t terrible either with FreeIPA and products you can use with it. I definitely hated other 389 solutions prior to FreeIPA though.


  • For Linux user management you can just use an LDAP solution like FreeIPA. You can even tailor sudoer rules based on security groups, so like you can allow someone to reboot the server but not actually make configuration changes to system config files and what-not. It’ll also handle CA and PKI with smart card support and of course DNS. It has a web interface as well.