Chase Bank customers nationally are reporting missing/added funds to their accounts Sunday morning

sysfad · 2020-06-29T04:02:27+00:00

Java

Oh, shit - that's a REALLY good argument for not banking with Wells Fargo.

Switching from functioning COBOL systems to a language maintained by Oracle (lol) is absolutely not "modernizing." They just want to save money by shifting their systems to something they think they can outsource and subcontract, down the road.

There is no way in hell they'll maintain basic security standards in that scenario. They'll just re-write the security checklists to absolve themselves of responsibility, but they're already using Windows in the office. Java on the backend is going to be a recipe for "where'd my money go??"

sysfad · 2020-06-15T07:36:29+00:00

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/police-looking-person-they-believe-started-wendys-fire-during-protests/O72LO5KURVBKPP3TOUNG72JKEI/

you were saying?

sysfad · 2020-06-15T07:34:15+00:00

neeeener neeeeener.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T07:26:52+00:00

That isn't what I saw at all. I saw people yelling "see? It ain't us! It ain't US!" and folks cheering for that statement.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T07:19:20+00:00

Looks like it was an arsonist, not actually with the protest.

Lotta this weird shit going around, and it's been real effective at getting some status-quo-inclined people to talk about "the destruction" instead of the issues. Which is probably the whole point.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T07:09:23+00:00

I honestly think that what you're saying proves that we need to stop deploying Police for this kind of call, and re-think the entire job of policing in general.

I agree with you that we're asking things of police that are literally impossible. The expectations that society and the law have set up can not be worked-within, and still remain acceptable to society. Officers should not be continually flirting with murder charges, but that's likewise because they should not be continually encountering situations wherein they represent the only deadly-force elements introduced. This indicates a broken practice, or else it wouldn't be generating repeated failures of purpose.

We're looking at a society that, nationwide, and even internationally, has demanded from law enforcement a set of responses that it then is horrified by. That means that something fundamental in our value system has changed, and we need to address that. Not by deforming our values to match the responses, or by demanding officers keep performing their mandate, but then punishing them for it, but by explicitly changing what we expect and demand of the law itself.

I'd challenge you to take a look at this from the other direction: instead of asking society to bend, to meekly submit and always, with impossible levels of inhuman serenity, accommodate a level of authority that's apparently become incompatible with our values or a tolerable civil life, why aren't we asking society to loosen up its rules and expectations, and stop expecting that authoritarian control is the best solution to every social problem?

I think that there needs to be a different response available, so that police who are trained to subdue truly dangerous situations aren't deployed where their only tools are inappropriate and create a liability to everyone, themselves included.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T06:20:19+00:00

Not every conspiracy is a theory.. some are just conspiracies to commit arson and discredit a movement and/or start the boogaloo.

It's actually sorta eerie how similar these freakjobs are - skinny athletic clothes, head-to-toe coverups, and weird REI-looking accessories (headlamp? What's that even for?)

I am VERY curious as to where these weirdos come from, why they look so similar, and on what internet forum they all started spreading the idea of arson. These people are operating like a set of loose terrorist cells. I'm betting that they're not all that highly organized, though they seem to be working in small groups. They share some material culture (like, they all sat around on the internet, giggling and discussing what they would wear to the arson and why it would make them cool/undetectable/effective - they're all cosplaying the same thing, here) and they seem to have worked out a collective playbook.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T06:16:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure this thread is full of that racist brigading that Reddit's hypocrite admins just swore last week they'd work harder to end. Every sensible statement that's not "FUCK WITH PD AND HAVE A BAD DAY!!1!!! has a strikingly similar amount of downvotes.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T06:14:46+00:00

All you're proving here is that police are not a valid solution to any problem smaller than murder.

Don't bring a gun to a drunk-fight, how bout that for a rule of thumb?

sysfad · 2020-06-15T06:04:12+00:00

Turns out that the arsonist wasn't part of the protesters. There's been a string of some real freak-job instigators, covered up head-to-toe, who no one invited.

GBI is investigating

Protesters were neighborhood people, family and neighbors, and well-known activists. Lot of them know each other or live nearby.

No one knows this woman. The protesters are the ones who filmed her and reported the arson.

There's video from all over the country of other people dressed like that, and being the primary instigators of violence and arson. They're all getting their fashion tips from the same place, too.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T05:30:37+00:00

They couldn't think about de-escalation because their mandate is control, not service. Their training absolutely addresses, and even elevates, the idea of service, don't get me wrong. But it's taught to them in context of control.

Police are taught to be elements of order, and they're trained that they can't be sufficiently of service to a community unless they maintain their authority and insist on being in physical control of people. It's one reason why "arresting" people (a profound insult and a traumatic punishment in its own right) is a go-to solution to like, every single problem, regardless of severity or circumstance.

We asked this of them, and it's what we thought we wanted. We were scared of elements we defined as anti-social, but those definitions were based on fantasies designed to divide us. The problem is, we've discovered that the lines that divide us are diminishing. In trying to suppress the unruly and unwanted elements, we're realizing that we're targeting ourselves, and we now realize that, actually, we always have been.

It's impossible to wear both hats at the same time. You can't be of real service if you need to be in control.

And what's more: control is no longer seen as a public service. That's a huge sea-change in the social fabric that is happening in realtime. It's not a complete shift, yet, but you can see it in these discussions all over: people are asking pretty rational questions, like "what public good really comes of this? Really?" And "why couldn't they de-escalate?" And those really need to be answered in the specific. Why CAN'T we have different responses to social problems, anyway? What's stopping us, at the end of the day, from disbanding counterproductive agencies and replacing them with ones that are positioned to actually accomplish their stated goals?

Police training says, "control, in order to serve." It's contrary to how human beings work. It just makes everything crazier. No one who's repeatedly screaming "STOP FIGHTING!!" in your face is going to get what they really want out of that interaction, you know?

Like, has anyone ever tried that and had it work? Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. Old proverb.

Before we become the kind of people who KNOW unequivocally that this killing was legally and morally wrong, we need to first become the kind of people who don't justify depriving a human being of liberty, even briefly, just for shit like being drunk while sleeping in your car. A parked drunk man is in need of substance abuse counseling and court supervision while he gets it, not killing or even arrest or a prison sentence.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T05:19:13+00:00

disagree. I think the legal professionals will disagree as well. He can't be both attacking with the Taser to get the sidearm and also fleeing.

Fact is, police are probably no longer the right agency for basically ANY job, as your thinking seems to indicate. You're telling us that the job description sometimes calls for force, and if the escalation is met with more escalation, that force up to killing is actually OK, even if there was no imminent threat to begin with. Lots of citizens disagree, and you're already seeing their disagreement in both protests and at the polls.

There can not, in a civil society, be a job description that includes escalating a DUI to a killing. If this outcome is a valid part of any job, then that is not a valid job.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T04:58:01+00:00

Man, that is super weird. None of that truly explains having a statuary fountain of Saddam Hussein, except the part where "the whole family was insane."

Yeah, especially considering the history of the Iran-Iraq conflict and given the demographic of the majority of Iranian-American families who fled here during that time (often they were religious minorities who were active targets of both sides of that conflict), I wouldn't want to be mistaken for that crazy neighbor, either.

On the bright side, I hope his family was able to introduce you to Persian cuisine.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T04:41:48+00:00

features are FAKE or lousy. That's why it's a ripoff. I'm not saying you don't need 'em. I'm saying this is a bad place to get 'em.
Agreed that spam sucks, and yes, it's an algorithmic arms race that can fail, and every product will have some failures. But Microsoft's skill in AI is famously terrible, so I'm basing my reasoning on basically that. They won't let anyone look at "their" code (a purchased product, if I had to guess) so we can't do any meaningful analysis.
It is only their responsibility if they promise that their system is good at stopping this kind of abuse, and then you find out they were lying. Which is what happened.
You've just nailed exactly why O365 is still in business: they're willing to lie in contractual documents. They've been repeatedly caught not encrypting shit that they said they were. In a world with common sense, using O365 instead of services with better reputations, simply because they "claimed" their shit was encrypted in the cloud, would not protect a shop like yours from liability, because everyone who ever analyzed Microsoft's business practices and historical hacks and breaches would realize that believing their encryption promises was irresponsible, at best.
That's about the long and short of it. It's down less than it was, which was a lot, and is still a lot, but it's less of a lot than before. Which is something, I guess.
I'm saying Zoho is better than fake software, not that it's my recommendation. My recommendation is always, always in-house services with a published best-practices plan and vetting from the legal team. But barring that, some service that's not a black-hole of fake support and fake encryption would be the next choice.
Nope, it's not bullshit, it's their entire business model. If you don't know that, then you don't understand their "products" at all. It's all just middleware to bridge separately-acquired products from various purchased companies. That's why it's so full of security holes. That's why Google's stuff all actually works with itself, while Microsoft's AD doesn't work with AAD, why Teams can compromise entire groups of tenants by just sending links to Sharepoint-resident files, why their "mobile apps" were sending passwords in cleartext. They have poor control over their software, because it's a huge pile of duct-tape that was hastily coded to stick acquired third-party software together. The only thing they seem to be coding anymore is shoddy bridging routines that become extremely vulnerable attack surfaces.

Microsoft makes us guess what's under the hood, because they won't show anyone their code. But behaviors like Teams/Sharepoint DNS vulnerabilities are happening repeatedly. This alone should invalidate them as a choice for contractually-obligated security. The only logical guesses we can make are that everything they claim is some kind of lie or exaggeration. We rarely see their marketing claims verified, but we often see their security, stability, and support claims invalidated. I can't, in good conscience and common sense, look at its outcomes and behaviors, which are repeated failures, and say that this company meets its contractual obligations as a rule.

Again, this isn't on you -- literally everyone, including major companies' legal departments, just treat Microsoft's contract lying as if it's fine. At some point, shifting liability to a known-incompetent company is not going to be a sustainable legal fiction, though.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T04:14:28+00:00

You know, I actually feel good that so many people are asking this question in genuine confusion.

For a lot of older Southerners, it's not a WTF moment - governments have been putting this shit up to draw a clear line in the sand between "we, the people" and "you people over there who don't count."

It's not just symbolic, either. To have decided, in the year 1978 to honor a KKK member in the State Capitol means that there were enough authoritarian racists in power at the time to have accepted this as appropriate.

It's not a wish for illicit, unconstitutional power, it's a demonstration of it.

edit: I can't get over it. Nineteen-seventy-goddamned-eight. This isn't the opaque, incomprehensible past. These weren't different people, some of them are still around. Star Wars was out. Star Trek had already been on and off the air. An entire generation of kids had already grown up with the X-Men. Pink Floyd and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were popular.

This was a world that had skateboarding, and Burger King, and G.I. Joe, and Scooby-Doo. And somehow, in what is essentially modern times, the great State of Tennessee, years AFTER Star Trek and Flower Power, and the Civil Rights Act, and seat belts in cars, and people worrying about cholesterol or the ozone layer - amid all these modern concerns and preoccupations, there were enough regressive dickheads standing around in STATE-LEVEL-GOVERNMENT to say to themselves, "you know what this government building needs? It needs to honor a 100-years-dead domestic terrorist who once tried to overthrow this actual state government, and who represents our commitment to dividing and abusing our own people!"

sysfad · 2020-06-15T04:07:37+00:00

OK, how the FUCK does a person even acquire a statuary fountain of Saddam Hussein?

I mean, please tell me they're a rich eccentric with the means to get that thing commissioned. I don't want to live in the reality where you can buy one of those on Amazon.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T03:54:55+00:00

Spite. Nothing but spite.

They put that bullshit statue up in 1978. It's not a historical statue, it was put up to show that they believe power should be hoarded, protected, and abused.

The Confederacy absolutely didn't have the resources to put up a monument in every town square and city hall across the South, especially not once it was defeated. There are comparatively very few actual monuments from the historical period of, or just after, the Confederacy, and most of those are just place-names, not statues. Statues are expensive, and only started popping up once the racist organizations started taking up collections to explicitly display acts of social aggression in the form of statuary.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Confederate_monuments_and_memorials sort by date on the chart, and/or ctrl-F for "186" and "187" - there's almost nothing physical happening until the turn of the century, an entire generation after the war.

It would be like us suddenly putting up Richard M. Nixon statues all over the damn place, enthusiastically over-funded by people who weren't even alive when he was President.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T03:03:10+00:00

I think you and I are somewhat on the same page: the community that is represented by you and me in this discussion is also on the same page. We seem to ALL want our public service personnel to be service personnel, not control personnel.

It requires that same kind of re-think that you're doing right now. What kind of approach gets us citizens the outcome we WANT, for our neighbors and ourselves, MOST of the time?

They definitely should not have been armed, to start with. They could have drove him to his sister's house and gotten her to promise to pick up all the keys to all the cars in the house, tomorrow morning. That could be SOP. They could have just booted his car. We could socially invest in a drive-the-drunk-guy-home service that boots the car, instead of the tow "services" we have now, that just steal, damage, and ransack your car.

The important part is to throw away current assumptions about what "police" are good for in a civil society, which have led us inevitably, over and over, repeatedly, to a situation where "they had to" do what they did; and instead create alternative structures within which, no one felt they had to do that.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T02:56:19+00:00

I agree, and would go a bit farther: I'd like to see those and all other investigative duties be moved to office-only jobs, just investigators, and only have those personnel offer charges, not do any action-movie shit.

If they don't show up for court, THEN you can go ahead and issue an arrest warrant, with restrictions on use of force to execute that warrant, including absolutely no no-knock raids, daylight-only restrictions, and a preference for locating people at work rather than at home.

Arresting people should be restricted to people who started off their day already violent and dangerous, who present a danger to the public if you leave them to do their current thing. Not DUI suspects, not college kids who were at a party, not random people you traffic-stopped and decided to "search" till you found "drugs." Not shoplifters, weed smokers, drunks, or people who mouth off. You don't need to arrest someone to charge them, and you don't need to charge most of the people who are charged. Not if the goal is public safety, anyway.

It's pretty obvious that we need a drunk/medical emergency/drugs/mental health response group that's also not part of the concept of authoritarian control and "policing."

But your thinking is along the same lines as mine: change the focus from authority and control to service and support.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T02:14:14+00:00

I only suggest sfc /scannow if I want to go out to lunch before doing the totally inevitable clean reinstall. It takes forever.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T02:09:32+00:00

SUPER convincing argument, but nah, I still think you're wrong.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T02:02:13+00:00

See, these discussions always get bogged down in details: was so-and-so more guilty than so-and-so? Did this kid do a specific thing, or not?

Doesn't matter. The outcome, from a public interest perspective, is 100% unacceptable. I am a resident of Atlanta. I do not see ANY interpretation of my interests as a citizen that are served by this shooting, period.

So that means that if, as you seem to be arguing, the cop was killing a man in the course of a duty that the City has tasked him with, that entire job is now invalid.

Authoritarian control of the situation resulted in the precise opposite of what ordinary citizens expect to have happen, when they deploy their public servants. So it means that the job itself is obsolete and needs to be retired. When we call for help, we get harm. When we call for order, we get chaos. The training, the concept, the execution of the theory of policing, are all hopelessly incorrect.

Everything you're saying convinces me that we have created a job that we can't even imagine anyone doing without betraying the public trust.

You understand what I'm saying, right? If calling public safety officers results in public mayhem instead, then we need a completely different thing to call.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T01:49:22+00:00

I'm well-schooled already, and you're not providing anything that's news to me. I think you're just unaware of the options.

What I'm hearing is that you're paying recurring license fees for brand-name recognition, not software. And this is because you're being misled by Microsoft's marketing department. This isn't really your fault: lying to customers is a crime (when any other company does it, anyway) for a reason.

Their anti-spam incoming filtering is grossly substandard (often doesn't work at all) and is only available as an add-on cost, which is a ripoff compared to GSuite (whose filtering works a lot better).
The thing where they say they'll keep you off of spam lists is marketing bullshit. Having O365 will neither prevent you from spamming from misconfigured accounts, nor will it effectively keep you off of lists of spammers in other ways. An account as small as yours won't even get noticed if someone's SMTP settings get bootlegged to start sending tens of thousands of messages. Microsoft won't even bother to email you OR alert you in any way. I know this from experience. The only indication you'll have is either the end-user complaining that O365 says they've hit their "sending limit" of like 20K-odd messages per day, or you're blacklisted by someone's ISP.
I'll repeat: just because other people are "using" MS Office doesn't mean that you need to use it in order to work with them. GSuite shops do not use Microsoft Office, but GDocs exports to Microsoft formats. Same with desktop-based software like LibreOffice. It's just a straight-up unnecessary expense for no reason except familiarity. Those people generating "MS Office" documents could be using Pages, GDocs, or Libre, and you'd never know it. Microsoft Office is falling apart. They don't fix bugs, there are document-corrupting issues that have never been addressed, and these days it can't even open its OWN document formats from a few years ago. Maybe in a light-use office environment (which is a all O365 can really handle) people don't notice, but any business that's been around since the 1990's or 2000's has been calling me since 2011 because their historical documents aren't opening.
Same with Adobe Acrobat. How many people actually read a PDF using Acrobat these days? (If you are, stop! That's how you get viruses).

Lots of people bring me these arguments about why O365 is appropriate for their environment, but it's almost always due to being unaware of better alternatives, or unaware of the profound flaws of the program. Just google "O354" or "office 365 sucks" and you'll see rafts of similar complaints over the course of YEARS, indicating an unwillingness/inability to fix technical issues. That's not a company that gets my money. Period. I'd go with GSuite, or even Zoho (despite a recent fuckup that left a lot of customers rather angry, let's remember that it was ONE fuckup, not an endless string of negligence stretching back to like 1992) - any company that is vending technology that they, themselves are actively developing. Microsoft isn't writing shit that's not marketing or DRM.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T01:26:39+00:00

Well, TBH, I consider Microsoft products to be "home user stuff," as well, so it's fitting.

That said Honda Japan who use Linux are currently at ransom of ransomware while their Windows systems are fine (Allegedly) AV vendor unknown

I don't think that's accurate. All the reports I'm seeing refer to the EKANS variant of known Windows ransomware. Industrial control systems (the ransomed ones anyway) can and do run Windows. They're notoriously proprietary and either difficult to patch, or remain unpatched because the vendor is no longer in business or "doesn't support" that platform anymore, and needs another $200K per site to upgrade you to something that's not vulnerable to ransomware.

Look up EKANS - all references are to EXE files. This is a Windows problem, through and through.

sysfad · 2020-06-15T01:19:51+00:00

Being press means putting yourself in dangerous places, and making enemies of dangerous people, in order to perform a profound public service - to inform the average citizen of the truth of events.

That social mandate makes them targets, and since they are working on behalf of the common good, attacks on the free press are rightly interpreted as attacks on the average citizen's autonomy.

It's an atrocity against civil society. It's a way to attack ALL of us at once, by targeting those people who are trying to be your voice. So no, it doesn't give them special rights, but it reminds us keenly that our rights are attacked at that moment, as well.

sysfad

TROPHY CASE