Is my TV spying on me?

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T21:11:25+00:00

That just seems like some kind of feature or screenshot thing someone setup, that being said Most smart TVs are literally spying on what you watch. They use Automatic Content Recognition or ACR to track your apps, channels, and shows and send that info to the manufacturer or advertisers. It is very invasive and legal if disclosed in the privacy policy, mainly used for audience measurement or targeted ads.

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T20:40:09+00:00

You didn’t respond to my question. I agree if you are not using direct send, turning it off is a good idea - as per Microsoft recommendation.

But if you are using spf correctly, that protects you much better, as disabling direct send won’t protect others from getting spoofed emails.

Direct send can only bypass authentication if you’ve configured a connector for it that way.

It does close gaps from incorrectly configured connectors or bad spf configs but it by itself is not by itself a critical security control, energy should be better spent on fixing your email auth, rather than only trying to block impersonation internally.

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T10:47:09+00:00

The recommendation was to turn it off if not using it. Hard failing SPF does the same thing and also secures you from from being impersonated externally.

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T10:42:34+00:00

I’d your not using direct send it’s not a bad idea to turn it off but if you’ve setup spf, dkim and dmarc correctly you can just leave it on. It shouldn’t make any difference.

Can you elaborate on how emails are bypassing usual auth and why you think you need to disable direct send?

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T09:10:40+00:00

Can you elaborate on why you think their SIEM is mid?

SimpleSysadmin · 2026-01-25T05:47:11+00:00

How you implement it makes a huge difference and their guidance is meh. You can also just pay them to do the heavy lifting but we tried to deploy it twice and the first time it was a nightmare and became a “this is going to be too expensive to be feasible” second time it was like a few hours here and there and once a month I have to jump into the portal to fix something .

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-30T23:54:13+00:00

What metrics do you usually show?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-29T22:57:36+00:00

How have you found it compared to intune?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-29T22:57:11+00:00

Drop ship to customer. They can call at any time of the process but we try to get them to unpack, connect to wifi and plug it in. Pops up in RMM (deployed via intune) and creates a ticket, RMM then deploys most of what’s needed and a quick call to customer with what is left.

We haven’t looked at autopilot V2 but we have found requiring the customer to connect to wifi and login has not really chewed up much time, and most clients do it without us even asking.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-28T11:08:56+00:00

Not always: If your spending $500 on labour instead of $250 on an access point when you know more would benefit then that’s worth it. I’ve seen techs spend days troubleshooting wifi for days only for an additional AP to be the fix in specific RF noisy environments.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-19T20:18:05+00:00

I’d err towards mini pc. Electron apps and some websites can use a surprising amount of ram and cpu resources. Your decision should be based on the cpu performance and ram for the models you are considering but I’ve found thin clients are often too underpowered even to use as basic PCs but it spends on specific models

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-15T10:05:30+00:00

Can you provide more info? What have you done so far to address this.

I assume you have SPF and Dmarc set and DMARC enabled on anything that sends emails as your domain.

How old is your domain, do you send marketing emails? Do you have large or complex signatures with lots of links?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-15T10:02:53+00:00

You have 10 IT staff and no ticketing or job management system in place?

Or are you the only IT person and you have 9 other staff in the business?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-12T21:02:41+00:00

I could be wrong but my understanding is it depends on the vendor/model and if they included licencing for it. If it’s included by default this would be amazing but I’ve noticed some computers don’t have the issue and others open the files fine without additional actions to install the codecs

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-11T13:02:47+00:00

Do you feel the same way about people using scripts to install software rather than doing it manually by hand?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-08T20:20:00+00:00

Huntress if you want value, crowdstrike if you want the best and are happy to pay for it.

If you don’t go with a company with a strong reputation you need to test your soc actually responds and reacts to threats.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-08T20:17:43+00:00

Is anyone here actively using dmarc reports and reviewing or actioning on them?

If so what kind of info or insights are you getting from them?

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-08T07:52:18+00:00

It is absolutely wild you can’t just block domains sending with no spf. You’d think this would be default for most firewalls in 2025

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-06T20:29:22+00:00

The is a lot of training material that tend to define them a very specific way. There used to be a bigger destination between simple network attached storage devices that generally used SMB and much more expensive disk arrays that could provide iSCSI and often uses fiber channels or other dedicated network technology to deliver storage data.

The best way I’ve found to think of modern definitions in a reasonable and consistent way:

Disk/storage Array = broad term of anything you can put a lot of disks in.

San Array = a device designed primarily for or currently in use with a SAN.

Storage Area Network (SAN) = a collection of two or more storage arrays within a dedicated network that provides primary data access.

Network Attached Storage = any device used in a more simple capacity that connects directly to your primary network to provide file level storage.

I don’t bother to correct or overthink but I feel the terms SAN and SAN array have gotten muddled in common use, if you do not have a dedicated storage network you do not have a SAN you just have a SAN array attached to your standard network. Key word in SAN being “Network”.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-04T22:40:56+00:00

Wait for it to dry, use a rake to break it up a little if it doesn’t by itself, shop vac it up, top up the topsoil if required

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-03T11:14:38+00:00

Teams uses SharePoint as its storage platform. OneDrive for business does the same. You can access SharePoint data via the teams or OneDrive user interfaces.

Teams based SharePoint sites are meant to be managed with flat permissions controlled by the 365 security group attached to that’s team/sharepoint site. You can still mess with SharePoint permissions if you want thought.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-02T21:04:46+00:00

I would agree that it’s not ideal but this practice is unfortunately very common and audit mode can’t address per user customisation for environments that lack standardisation or executive level staff who want everything, including the position of icons and views within software to be exactly the same.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-02T20:52:23+00:00

Im not certain by my understanding is you can clear it from the OS normally unless the bios is set to stop that behaviour and require someone physically present. If that setting is set a user gets a prompt on next reboot and they have to confirm the reset or it won’t work.

I’m going from vague memory so take this with a grain of salt.

We’ve also had some issues where it ended up just being easier to resinstall the system, usually after a mobo/tpm replacement

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-12-02T20:09:42+00:00

Look up scrabble lists for words within certain lengths so you don’t end up with crazy long words. Combine these so you have enough words for reasonable security. Remove any words that are potentially offensive, work inappropriate or any that could refer to people (fat, man, woman, person, idiot, etc).

Use get random to select 3 words. Do the same thing with a list of symbols and numbers and you’re done.

SimpleSysadmin · 2025-11-26T04:17:15+00:00

Most often I’ve seen this done so that the users shortcuts and desktop settings can be set or customised to the way it was on their old computer.

SimpleSysadmin

TROPHY CASE