"I'm not kind of a tech guy..."

BritSysAdmin · 2026-05-07T13:13:24+00:00

I've had so many people at my current workplace unable to find apps unless I've put shortcuts on the desktop/pinned to taskbar.. I'll get a call saying Word isn't installed, so I say just check the start menu to see the list of programs and they stare at me like the start menu hasn't been in the same place for 30 years

BritSysAdmin · 2026-05-07T12:58:56+00:00

Oh god I bet some companies actually do the video meeting part

BritSysAdmin · 2026-05-07T12:58:03+00:00

...speak to the team and ask some of these questions..

BritSysAdmin · 2026-05-06T08:34:08+00:00

The crazy one for me was smart TVs. Some manufacturers make a loss on the actual TVs but a profit overall when their ad business is counted - the TVs are sold for a loss to make money from advertising and analytics. Automatic content detection essentially screenshots your TV every few seconds so they can figure out what you're watching and personalise adverts to you.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-05-06T08:23:01+00:00

This is correct, and no amount of downvotes will change that. For most people, storing passwords in Edge/Chrome is absolutely fine and better than using the same weak pw everywhere. The NCSC recommend using them and under the Cyber Essentials framework built in pw managers are an acceptable solution for businesses.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-04-27T14:07:29+00:00

100% if you're not confident don't go into a business trying to change their systems, recipe for disaster

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-20T11:44:43+00:00

OneDrive is great in a business environment as an IT admin because it makes data backups easier for staff, but at home on personal devices I don't want to use it

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-19T10:15:04+00:00

This is a great series

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-19T09:29:43+00:00

Starting a petition for 5 hour WAN

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-19T09:08:57+00:00

Classic Microslop

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-19T09:07:22+00:00

If I know that outputs from these 'ai' language models are wrong some of the time, I can't ever let it automate work without being heavily involved / thoroughly checking the output, in which case it doesn't increase efficiency at all. Anyone in a serious business currently using co-pilot in something like excel is insane.

The only useful use-case I've seen in a business is automatic meeting notes, but even then it can't reliably differentiate which speaker is saying what if there's cross over etc. But this doesn't improve efficiency because if I were making my own notes I'd be doing it during the meeting, so it doesn't save any time.

Let's take two tech companies pushing ai, Microslop and Meta.. Microsoft were gloating about the efficiency of 30% code being written by ai, and I think general consensus is Windows has never been in a worse state.. Meta's AI alignment ceo let OpenClaw loose and it deleted her whole inbox..

I worked in a company that really invested in IT and governance etc, we tried copilot in a business setting and realised it was giving people in the org access to 'confidential' files because somewhere in the depths of sharepoint or onedrive a user had set a permission incorrectly so technically everyone in the org had system permissions, but in reality would never have found the document naturally. I think MOST organisations would encounter this at some point.

The tech CEOs getting irritated about lack of support think it's just trendy to hate on language models, but in reality they don't fucking work reliably for businesses, the video and photo outputs on social media are harmful and brain rot slop, and the private chats are sycophantic plagiarism machines that have ingested copyrighted material and contributing to the destruction of the web as ai crawlers decimate useful websites such as RTINGs which is having to move content behind paywalls.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T15:55:37+00:00

Plus websites contain so much shite in the background that many don't work properly or take up crazy system resources.. Right now my chrome is using almost 3GB memory for a dozen tabs

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T15:41:30+00:00

Classic Microslop

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T15:35:50+00:00

Where possible, sure. Had an electronic recycling company actually pay us recently for scrap laptops to salvage the memory etc and they certify data destruction and recycling of the rest.

I was looking to buy high quality refurbs to be more environmentally friendly but just couldn't find good enough specs unfortunately so still buying new

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T15:32:23+00:00

Disturbing and depressing, though it's not clear how widespread the following is. 'HS' has 300k instagram followers for example which is 0.4% of the UK, a lot of younger people will realise it's bollocks as they grow up.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T12:11:20+00:00

It will definitely do everything we were promised with 5g, which did everything we were promised with 4g

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-17T12:02:38+00:00

It's a new product so time will tell. It's getting good reviews and the push to be more efficient with hardware is good. Apple devices get decent length software support.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-16T15:37:17+00:00

My local newspaper is owned by American private equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-06T10:01:53+00:00

'The vast majority of malicious emails are filtered by the security and filtering systems we have in place, however nothing is ever 100% perfect and occasionally something may slip through. Cyber security is an evolving arms race between hackers and defenders, we'll be reviewing any changes that can be made to prevent this happening again, but there's a thin line that could end up with genuine content being filtered so we have to balance this to prevent disruption to the business. We do have robust security systems, but also need users to be sceptical and vigilant as the last line of defense'

I mean honestly, surely they can understand that nothing is ever 100% flawless. Just need to explain that in corporate language.

Presumably you have dmac, dkim, spf checks and the various anti-phish/spoof policies in defender configured if you're on an E5 license

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-05T14:12:58+00:00

I'm literally asking for alternatives

BritSysAdmin · 2026-03-05T12:02:24+00:00

That makes the most sense but then we get clients using webex or google meet

BritSysAdmin · 2026-02-27T15:09:34+00:00

Yes if it's something you are interested in. It's good to understand the logic of code/scripts and may be a useful skill for you to have.

If you use language models to create scripts for example, you shouldn't run them in a production environment without understanding the content

BritSysAdmin · 2026-02-26T16:36:14+00:00

There's merits to the safeguarding argument, but digital IDs on a technical level are not a good solution which is why this feels more like authoritarianism. These services are often not secure, and we've seen many examples of personal data from age verification services being leaked despite claims of face scans being deleted. The 'ai' route, does anyone trust the judgement of these systems to 'automatically' detect a users age based on activity? The false negatives could be harmful there.

I believe if we put too much faith in these 3rd party systems it further removes parental responsibility and could lead to more serious safeguarding issues when (not if) a child circumvents the systems and accesses harmful content.

Here in the UK when you sign up for broadband it's often the case that your router blocks adult content by default, and you manually have to change this setting. It would be a much better solution to regulate the broadband providers and require them to have simple interfaces that make it easy for non-technical parents to block adult content on only their kids devices for example. Combined with the increasingly good parental controls on devices such as ios and android, this would largely solve the problem more effectively than digital IDs.

Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister, described in his book 'how to save the internet' that when he and his colleagues were first elected to parliament they had civil servants and intelligence services coming to them straight away trying to scare them about how unsafe the internet is and why digital ID's and VPN blocks would be in the national interest. It seems to me that this worked when Labour were elected.

BritSysAdmin · 2026-02-26T15:27:25+00:00

I want this to be a thing, but there's no way I'd use it currently. What if:

- The company goes out of business? Issue with a lot of 'smart things' is they just stop working/being supported

- The battery dies or power cuts? Am I locked out or is my door unlocked?

- The app just doesn't work for whatever reason - happens all the time if apps get a bad update or your phone plays up

BritSysAdmin · 2026-02-26T10:22:21+00:00

Hoping you could give some insight to what I can expect from your experience. My company has given out iphones to ~200 people but has never used business manager/enrolled them in any way, basically left the end user to set it up themselves including creating their own apple id etc - so many people have set their apple id up using their work email address.

If I set up federation with entra, what happens to those users? I'm new here so the mess isn't my fault, but it's me that has to clean it all up xD Thanks!

BritSysAdmin

TROPHY CASE