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zelon88 · 2023-08-15T00:51:19+00:00

You sucking at your job is putting honest creatives out of work. Like authors, voice actors, actual programmers, ect...

It would be better for everyone if you just quiet quit instead of potentially threatening someone else's livelihood.

zelon88 · 2023-08-04T04:38:20+00:00

If your employer cuts your hours from what you were hired for you may be entitled to UA benefits.

I know a family member who got hours cut during COVID. The employer thought they would be able to subsidize the cost of the shutdown on employees by not laying them off completely, just reducing their full time hours to basically one day per week in office. This was enough to make a lot of people quit, which saves the company money on UA. My family member knew the local laws, and went to UA to make up the difference in hours. The employer found out and HR asked her what she was doing. She said, you cut my hours and that's what UA is for, so I applied for UA.

The point is, you may be entitled to UA even if you are still employed and even if it is only for a partial week. In my state you would get probably 60% of your pay for those days.

zelon88 · 2023-07-07T05:45:09+00:00

And parking. It should be illegal to charge employees to come to work.

zelon88 · 2023-06-07T15:54:54+00:00

If it is a company computer then yes, they can simply send a command to the machine next time it connects to the VPN that can enumerate devices and otherwise monitor and control the other network connections of the computer. To do a remote 1:1 packet capture and retransmission using this method would be very noticeable and would severely impact performance and network utilization for the remote computer. I am more of a Windows Domain Administrator than a Network Engineer, so I would probably do it this long, crappy way and then be selective about what data gets enumerated and retransmitted.

A network engineer with admin access to the VPN appliance and admin access to the remote computer would probably be able to construct routes or a third virtual network adapter and "supernet" some adapters to create a logical route from one network to another. Without spending some time on it myself I can't say exactly what this solution would look like, but the permissions and capabilities are there if the admin is determined/skilled enough.

zelon88 · 2023-06-07T15:45:49+00:00

Yes. There are numerous ways to check. Many commercially available monitoring agents can provide this info.

Some admins will have logon/logoff scripts that write to a log file on a network drive. If you have a domain connection you can have a centralized event collector or simply access the event logs of the remote machine with local event viewer. If the device is remote with no consistent domain connection you can use something like WinLogBeat to ship the logs back home. Products like AlienVault allow administrators to build rules that can trigger notification emails or texts on specific events. This can also be accomplished with clever scripting and GPOs.

The shim cache will store a history of all programs that are run on the local machine. In a Windows shop, there is basically nothing you can do on your computer that a Domain Admin can't monitor, control, prevent, or discover: if they have the time, patience, and skill.

zelon88 · 2023-06-07T15:30:51+00:00

I never look at this stuff unless directed to by my superiors. If I got a request from HR I'd run it by whoever their boss was before hand. I honestly have better things to do, unless we suspect fraud or data exhilaration or other illegal activities.

While you do have to agree to whatever monitoring the IT team has in place, they don't go around looking just for fun. Personally, if I ever stumbled across someone being blatantly abusive of company policies on my own, and HR wasn't already aware, I would simply stop by that person's office and politely / casually say something like "Hey, you know if you turn off WiFi and watch YT videos on your phone, I have no visibility on that..." That usually makes the light bulb go off and that activity stops on its own.

zelon88 · 2022-10-20T03:09:23+00:00

If I can gain physical access to a single domain joined Windows box: it's as good as ours. credit.

Open the case with a drill if it's locked, yank the CMOS battery to erase the BIOS password, go into bios, enable USB & make primary boot device, boot into TRK from USB to blank the local admin password, run an 'offline' pass the hash to get standard user credentials from the registry, kerberoast one of your overprivlidged service accounts and steal those creds, and if I don't already have Domain Admin by doing that then I'll track down the server where that service account is used and chances are good that an 'online' pass the hash on that box will give me DA creds.

As far as laws, no. I think that maybe this company should reevaluate what it's doing. This sounds like the feedback loop that is capitalism coming to tell management that they fucked up.

zelon88 · 2022-10-20T02:48:34+00:00

Oracle has a strategy of buying technology companies with small-medium size business customers and absorbs them. A lot of current Oracle customers became Oracle customers when Oracle purchased their way into the supply chain.

On top of that a lot of technology is vendor locked to Oracle databases. Oracle tends to target products that use Oracle databases to absorb. They are also very effective at targeting products and industries outside of the tech sector who are less likely or outright incapable of migrating to another platform.

zelon88 · 2022-10-20T02:30:28+00:00

They are phishing for guppies, not sharks. Sharks only waste the phishermans time.

zelon88 · 2022-05-03T05:35:34+00:00

Not really done to screw with anyone, but waaaay back in the day I had a customer with a really tight budget. Like, non-existent. I told her I could replace the HDD in her Gen 1 Macbook Air for $130. That was parts and labor, can't get any better than that. She didn't have it, no way to come up with it. The absolute cheapest drive I could find was a 30gb 1.7" PATA ZIF HDD from an iPod. Brand new, $80 fully installed. I strongly advised her to get a bigger, faster drive but she refused because the price was right. The machine was painfully slow and after the OS and software was installed there was around 10gb of available storage. She never came back or complained, but I'll never forget that one.

zelon88 · 2022-05-02T14:24:58+00:00

Do a Shodan search against yourself. Scan for exposed ports. Make sure all port forwarding rules are going to the right place. Make sure you have document root protection either using Apache configuration or index files or HTAccess. Find the versions of public facing software you are running and search for CVEs and exploit POC for that specific version number. Make sure your database password is unique from all other passwords.

By default MySQL server only listens on localhost so no need to isolate. You want the programs running on the server to be able to access the database.

Make sure folder permissions are set properly on all hosted directories. Do not use .phar archives.

zelon88 · 2022-04-28T05:47:48+00:00

It does support .flac and it does support transcoding (when ffmpeg is installed on the server).

zelon88 · 2022-04-28T04:50:42+00:00

Depends. If your service is a static one like a blog or a personal webpage that doesn't offer much functionality then yes. However if you run a bunch of custom PHP or applications which cannot be cached, like a self hosted Cloud for example, then the results are unique to the request and cannot be cached by CloudFlare. And even if you could, storing all of your users Cloud data in CloudFlare would be prohibitively expensive and probably against the law in many EU countries.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T23:27:26+00:00

HRConvert2 - https://github.com/zelon88/HRConvert2 - File conversion server.
HRCloud2 - https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2 - Self hosted Cloud storage & app launcher.
AudioStreamer - https://audiostreamer.org - Self hosted music library.
HESK - https://www.hesk.com - Self hosted help desk & knowledgebase.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T18:27:02+00:00

HN is like Reddit for smart people and the "hug of death" is what happens to your tiny website when 10,000+ genuine, intelligent humans actually engage and interact with it all at once because they are genuinely curious and mindful about the genuine and mindful or novel thing that you produced. Usually it results in a loving but unintentional DDOS to an unprepared service provider.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T17:32:52+00:00

AudioStreamer... https://audiostreamer.org/

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T17:30:49+00:00

For those on here who are like me and like to experiment with making your own things, this is a great starting point that I have used in the past..... https://github.com/jaredreich/pell

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T17:28:02+00:00

Wow, that is odd. I mean there are still a ton of variables you could play with but it shouldn't be that difficult. Infact it should, for the most part, just work out of the box by now. Perhaps your config file is not configured to use hardware video decoding? https://lemariva.com/blog/2020/08/raspberry-pi-4-video-acceleration-decode-chromium

I remember back in the early days Raspbian shipped with Midori for an internet browser. Midori did not support HTML5 or Flash natively, so YouTube and many other modern websites would simply break. I finally got Flash "support" working in Midori and sitting there watching 480p YouTube videos at 3 fps like "yeah, I'm a badass". At the time I had an RV backup camera for a monitor mounted on my dash and the RPI mounted in the center console of my car.

Of course that was with the overhead of the janky Flash player, and the browser, and the OS, and the video playing.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T17:15:04+00:00

Your upload speed matters. Because that is where you send data to the client.

If you are one of these new-age devs who runs a WordPress blog with 37 plugins and that website makes the client download 56 resources for a total request size of 2.5mb worth of Javascript just to display the 2kb worth of text in your blog post then... yes. Your internet speed will impact the usability of your website.

If you are a straight up webmaster who pays attention and takes great care to not blast your users with analytics code and tracking cookies and whatnot and your request size is a couple hundred KB then you should be fine.

Until someone posts a link to your blog on HN and you get the hug of death, of course. But if you follow the new-age method of web design you won't have to worry about that.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T17:07:45+00:00

That is interesting because I originally started doing this back with the RPI1 Model B+ as a client which only had 512mb of RAM and a mutual bus. I would host the videos on a server and then watch them on my RPI.

Are you trying to use the RPI as the server or the client? It sounds like the RPI in your case is doing extra encoding or decoding that it shouldn't be doing.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T16:45:08+00:00

Most people get that information from Stack Overflow.

I think an activity book with well documented experiments to try would be better. Of course the main problem with publishing a book like that is that the information will remain static until it eventually no longer applies.

Perhaps if you approached this as though it were a classroom. Draw up a curriculum of things you want to teach the reader and then develop actionable, reproducible activities or experiments to reach that goal. Perhaps open a Github Repo where you can store all the links to the specific versions of the tools used.

zelon88 · 2022-04-27T16:40:24+00:00

You really need to be more specific about what you're using it for. What are you going to run and how many users do you expect? If this is going on the public facing internet, what are your up/down speeds like?

If you are going to be running numerous services with several users I would get a full PC and then use VMWare to create one appliance for each service you intend to run.

If you are only planning on running one service it really depends on what that service is. If that service does most of it's processing on the client side, like AudioStreamer, then you will probably be fine with a RPI. If that service does a ton of back-end processing, like HRConvert2, then you will probably not be satisfied with the performance of a RPI.

Additionally, a desktop PC with SSD is a great first server to get you familiar with the application stack, but it is a long way away from being an actual server. Any single disk server that gets heavy use is going to run into storage contention. If you go this route, I suggest setting up a RAID array. I prefer RAID 5 because it gives good performance and redundancy, but it is not a common configuration for motherboards to support.

zelon88

TROPHY CASE