Yeesh, I didn’t even know there were consumer grade WiFi transceivers that were strong enough to cover such a massive area. Was it a small farm or just a big property? That had to have been a pretty expensive WiFi system regardless. Did you use Ubiquiti directional access points or something?

I have a sister that runs a small family farm and she asked my brothers and me (3 of us have IT backgrounds/careers) for viable coverage solutions to their various livestock areas. We settled on just running copper to one barn from her house and broadcasting from there with a few repeaters equipped with trunk channels in order to maintain full duplex.

Ackshually, being too close to high power radio frequencies isn’t safe. I remember at one base I was stationed at in Afghanistan, there was a smoke spot we all used to take breaks at. For some reason, I started developing really bad headaches and feeling kind of nauseous. I figured I was just acclimating to the local climate or something. After a few weeks, I was up on our building installing one of our satcom dishes on top of it when I noticed something. Right on the other side of the fence of that smoke area, was a ~2m high powered dish pointing just above above where the smoke area was. I pointed this out to the Norwegians that ran the camp and the break area was promptly moved, lol.

But seriously, I do not understand the anti-5G nutters.

With the supreme Court overturning the Chevron decision last week, I’m not so sure that any federal regulatory bodies have much power anymore unless there’s a specific law passed by Congress. That’s what made that decision so dangerous, because the same applies to the FDA now regarding drugs and food.

Yikes, that’s ridiculous. Microsoft incompetence and greed at its finest.

Ah, I misunderstood. If there’s no Internet during initial install, pretty sure it’ll just default to using local. I’m not 100% certain, though, as I’ve not setup a totally offline install in a long time. I also haven’t used any edition of Windows that wasn’t at least Professional or Enterprise, so I’m guessing there’s differences there as well for account management.

Afaik, it’ll just use a cached login

These companies don’t care about combating bots. They don’t even care they’re directly enabling the rise of fascism across the globe. It’s typical short sighted capitalistic greed that’s driving their lust for higher and higher engagement to sell more and more ads. They simply don’t think about that once fascism is fully in place, capitalism goes away and their companies are at the complete mercy of whatever dictator takes over. And since it’s a global phenomenon, there will be no where for them to flee to.

Without a doubt! I played DS1 after DS3 (was always intimidated by the series until a visiting friend forced me to sit down and actually play it, thankfully), so I had that, “whoa!” moment numerous times whenever I’d somehow end up either right inside the hub area or quite close to it after spending hours traversing dungeons and ruins that felt miles away from the hub.

Truly wish FS would make another game designed like it.

Haha, I actually don’t hate DS2, it’s just pretty badly balanced (PvE wise, of course; I can’t speak on PvP). The levels are the bosses in that game (with a few exceptions), which makes going through them quite tedious after a failed run. If they dialed down the density of enemies and possibly buffed some of them in compensation, it could possibly almost tie almost evenly with the other 2 games for me. Oh, and got rid of the obnoxious Soul Memory system, god what a terrible idea that mechanic was/is.

What I do really enjoy about the game are the interesting and somewhat diverse locales, with some levels having some great design going on. I love the item and gear variety. I also really liked being able to reinforce my armor along with weapons. It made light armor a lot more competitive in the late game and I am a little sad they got rid of that feature in DS3 (among other things DS3 abandoned). I also enjoyed the sheer number of secrets in the game (Side note: One thing that saddens me in Elden Ring, is how little fake walls and secret passages there are). But it’s not just walls/passages; for example, in No-man’s Wharf, accidentally discovering that those freaky spider things fear fire/light and seeing them retract into the shadows was an awesome detail.

Anyway, I’d love for them to someday truly remaster DS2 and bring the enemy placements more in line with the original DS2 (SotFS is the current “remaster” and there are way more enemies/gank squads in it than vanilla DS2). If they did that and got rid of soul memory, replacing it with the same MP system as DS1R and DS3, I’d love to play through it again.

Sorry for the tangent, I’m just in full on Souls/ER mode this week.

I like DS1, but it really just depends on my mood. If I want faster paced combat, I go for DS3. If I want slower paced combat, I go for DS1. Also, the first half of DS1’s world design is unmatched in how it’s all interconnected, so I really enjoy the beginning of that game over DS3’s. That being said, fuck Bed of Chaos and that whole lava level. It’s just so bad (even Miyazaki agrees, as they unfortunately ran out of budget and time).

Regardless, I’m beyond hyped for Shadow of the Erdtree this week! Haven’t taken a day off work for a game launch in ages, but I sure as hell did this time.

Fair point. Though, the source is data center dynamics, which does seem a bit niche.

Well, I’m not a cybersec specialist, but my job requires us to comply with NIST cyber security frameworks, including going through external audits every year. In my opinion, your basic generalities are fine for those not working in that field specifically.

However, for cyber security analysts and other specialists, I think specific subcategories are necessary. The reason being, IT is an absolutely massive field that contains a ton of specialties. As such, that means there are roughly an equal variety of malicious actors in the same field.

There’s no such thing really as a general “hacker” anymore. Especially when you take into consideration the rapid expansion of state sponsored cyber attacks/warfare. You’ll have specialists for various types of:

• phishing (e.g. targeting general pop/employees, or those going for specific people)
• cryptography (e.g. those who try to compromise an org’s PKI, or people finding vulns to exploit expired certs like what happened with Azure last year)
• vuln hunters/exploiters (e.g. people that monitor known vulnerabilities and probe orgs’ defenses to see if those vulns are present/unpatched/unmitigated, or even people who try to discover new ones)
• malware engineers (e.g. fairly self explanatory, but malware is a very broad term and can come in numerous shapes and sizes, like even using infected images on a website to conduct RCE on mobile devices like what happened a year or two ago)

Sorry, tangent is getting a bit long-winded now. Anyway, tldr; general terms are fine for laymen or non-specialists, but more precise terms are beneficial for experts in that field.

I’ve worked in IT for 15 years and it’s the first time I’ve heard SMS phishing condensed to smishing. But I specialize in servers and server security, so I’m not too surprised it’s a thing.

I just like the sensory feedback of feeling buttons clicking downwards. I’ve used solid state buttons before and while they’re far better than pure touch control “buttons,” they still don’t feel like real buttons to me. Haptics help the illusion, for sure, but it can’t match the analog feeling perfectly.

And like the other comment said, how do they get around frozen software and being able to use the buttons to force power cycle a device? Unless the buttons have a completely separate controller outside of the OS?

An onion popsicle… 🤢🤮

Pretty sure they’re being facetious

What an insane valuation, lol. I wonder how gullible their seeders/initial investors were when they pitched the company initially. Needing to get that much money to settle bills and debts just blows my mind. Shit like this is why I sold my AMD shares at its peak a few months ago and why it’s probably worth considering selling Nvidia now as it’s peaking. The AI boom may peak a bit higher, but I think the frenzy is going to begin waning within the next ~6 months as more and more investors realize the tech is still very limited outside of backend enterprise use (e.g. using LLMs to ingest all your SOPs, regulations, technical documents, etc. and then make it available for employees to query for random work questions).

But who knows, I’ve been wrong before.

I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS’s stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There’s no way the data they’re spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they’d lose in sales.

…Then again, we’ve seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before… I guess we’ll see.

Yeah, that’s why I mentioned in my comment that enterprise/professional versions will almost certainly allow it to be completely disabled via GPO, as this would be a death sentence for Windows. Businesses and governments across the world would immediately begin planning to off board to something else otherwise.

The snapshot feature is only going to be available on certain laptops that have the Snapdragon + AI chip. DoD will likely simply just not buy those laptops and ban any org from purchasing them, like they already do for certain hardware that have been found to be especially vulnerable. Additionally, this feature isn’t turned on by default and costs a subscription fee (i.e. Copilot+), so people will have to consciously enable and pay for it. Lastly, in enterprise versions of Windows, I would bet money that it can be disabled via GPO, as it’s not only the DoD that would have serious issues/concerns with this feature.