This is Trump playing chess. ByteDance, Greenland, The Gulf of Mexico, Panama Canal- All this, and he's not even President yet. It's all part of a bigger picture and a bigger plan with sizable levers. Some love this, others find it terrifying.
This is sort-of an existing feature since Windows 10. You can download the latest Windows 10 (or 11) media creation tool and create a USB. Click Setup.exe, and even if it's the same build of Windows, you can reinstall it, keeping all existing apps and data. This will effectively reinstall the existing OS, even fixing horribly broken installs (given the user profile isn't also corrupt). I did it a few weeks ago & helped a student to get through finals.
:eyes: Did it actually keep all existing apps? I ask because I've seen a similar feature in the past that said it would keep apps after a fresh install, but only apps downloaded through the Microsoft Store. Which for me works out to... one, maybe two total. It'd be great to do a fresh install without removing all the others!
I believe it does not touch HKLM\SOFTWARE or HKCU\SOFTWARE. But the machine I fixed a couple weeks ago had all the apps from the windows store & third party apps working fine. :shrug: I use macos & debian for my daily drivers.
Many spew entries all over the registry (adding stuff to startup, context menus, special icons, etc), and it seems like those entries are also often responsible for the issues in the first place. Keeping those across a clean install seems counterproductive.
Likewise, installing the latest version of all the random apps is probably going to help more than hurt, and that's just as likely the actual thing that "reinstalling windows" fixes. If it retains older versions you lose that benefit.
All of this is ultimately bad software. If software can get a different state by installing fresh than it does going through the upgrade process, it is broken. (This includes the OS.) Too many vendors just don't care though, or have figured out it's more profitable to make their users do a reinstall than actually make their software not suck. This applies equally to the OS as it does to every app.
For like 99% of apps it's not even that hard to do it right, it just takes a tiny bit of knowledge, effort and caring.
When I did desktop management at a college, we would use SCCM to do this way back with Windows 7. We would routinely re-image machines remotely and keep the users profile on the machine. Mostly all using features that were actually built into Windows.
> An entry-level admin is now unemployed, just before the holidays.
I highly doubt that entry-level admins at Microsoft have access to DNS for their primary domain. My guess is that this incident is a lot more interesting than that.
Yep, this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you can just toss a couple approvals on and change at a company as big as Microsoft. How this made it through the review process would be very interesting
I'm wondering how such a change would get "merged" in to begin with. I imagine even non-network engineers would get this huge itch having a large corporate contain a private IP in the changelist (I'm the non network engineer and can't really explain why it's bad. But it FEELS wrong and sometimes you at least need to use instinct to get another pair of eyes on something).
I hope not. Failures are on a spectrum and this was unfortunate but probably not malicious. All things considered this should be a lesson learned. There should be more failsafe mechanisms in place so juniors can fail safely and learn from them. The absolute worst thing we can do is shame an individual so they don’t attempt to try new things in fear of ridicule.
well theoretically you could argue the structure of this task should have 'dual control' / multiple people should be involved in the process checking each others work. preferably even split it up people who do not know or interact with each other on a regular basis. yes it would be slower but its important to get it correct.
might as well throw in some automated poke-yoke or whatever too.
in that case there is no fault in any of the juniors or operators, the fault is in management for failing to implement infrastructure to force a critical process to have more than one control
This is most likely a honest mistake. Smart managers don't fire employees for such mistakes unless their behavior regarding that mistake is inappropriate.
As the story goes, after a junior admin wiped a production database. The boss was asked if he should be fired. To what he answered: "Fire him? No way! Not after such an expensive training." Now, he knows.
I'm not 100% sure what the destination platform was that was only 20% the AWS cost. Digital Ocean? A "myriad of other SaaS platforms"? Self-hosted in a colo datacenter somewhere? How does this newer solution scale? What are the intangible costs, and are there additional staff considerations? Do you answer the pager at 2AM when a physical piece of hardware goes down?
Digital ocean doesn't charge traffic costs. I'm not sure if that was used in the article, but DO can provide significant savings for high-bandwidth services.
This is the #1 reason I use Firefox Container Tabs.
I can have a container for my work, personal, project, etc. where Google is logged in, and not commingle any of them, and all of the tabs are a different color, clearly distinguishable from one another. I have containers for separate Microsoft accounts as well. My "normal" tab is not logged in to any Google or Microsoft accounts, because why would I want them tracking me all over the web? Seriously, container tabs is one of the primary reasons I stick with Firefox, and it's FANTASTIC if you have multiple identities you need to manage.
Because there was a discussion about a stripped windows 10 iso yesterday with a link to the China Government Edition. It's the Hackernews cycle of lazy ass karma farming.
Put linux on the net with a weak ssh enabled root password and watch it get infected within minutes - I did that with a memory only installation, and multiple different people attacked it.
I assume they fought with each other for control of the machine, but I rebooted it instead.
Try it - it's interesting, use a USB stick to boot it, and make sure to physically disconnect all hard drives.
I think they mostly just want to send spam emails.
Worked at a smaller mom and pop business. We only had two sys admins. One day, I went over to ask about some web hosting. The one admin was sitting there, eating lunch and giggling, while lines and lines of code kept scrolling by on of his monitors.
ME: "What's so funny?"
Dan: "You see that? Take a closer look."
ME: "What am I even looking at?"
Dan: "Simple script I built to track bots trying to break into our Linux box (server). What you're watching is a metric fuck ton of Chinese and other bots trying to brute force the login."
He explained that any new server being connected to the internet, regardless of OS will be instantly attacked like you said. The server in question was only online for about 30 minutes and we were watching an endless stream of automated attacks from different bots. The failed login attempts were blocked after two attempts and the IP addresses logged for further review; but the bots would just respawn at different IP ranges and try again, it was pretty crazy.
It was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea it was that bad. Man, was I naïve!
It was also 'yet' for the first 20 years i used MacOS.
Get a large enough user base, and malware will follow, and that may be the reason Linux is still relatively free from malware. Despite advancements, normal people still don't run Linux. It's either IT people or people who had their IT friend/child/whatever install it for them.
With browser extensions being used as delivery platforms, it may not be long until it hits Linux as well. The same delivery method (using a user lauchd job) would work for a user systemd job.
Wine got good enough to run at least some malware. You might need some weird config flags though. Don't really know if this is a pro linux or contra linux comment.
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