Recent Posts

176

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10: merge the bugs now, we'll fix them later

« Last post by Stoic Joker on October 24, 2018, 07:08 AM »

I can, SAMBA v1 has been disabled by default after Windows 10 updates.  Now I have to access my 4TB NAS, (no updates available), via FTP because re-enabling it didn't work on my computer.

-4wd (October 23, 2018, 06:42 PM)

You mean SMBv1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support? We've run into issues with that on a few network devices, but never had a problem with reenabling it on Win10. It is however in two pieces for Client and Server connections under Turn Windows Features On and Off.

IIRC a reboot is required.

177

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by Stoic Joker on October 12, 2018, 08:00 AM »

Anybody else run into the after WU BSOD Stop Code: WDF Violation?

Apparently it's a - now known - issue with one of the drivers that come with the 10/18 cumulative update.

From command prompt rename [OS Drive Letter]:\Windows\System32\Drivers\HpqKbFiltr.sys to fix

https://www.bleeping...-windows-10-updates/

178

Living Room / Re: I'm getting married, wish me luck!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on October 08, 2018, 06:31 AM »

Congratulations man! I'm just a few years shy of 30 on mine, and its been well worth it … Hoping yours goes as well.

179

General Software Discussion / Re: Question about console programming in C#

« Last post by Stoic Joker on September 12, 2018, 06:57 AM »

IIRC when you select console application project from the MSVS IDE it adds that switch automatically, so I shouldn't think it would be an issue. There's really not much point in dragging all the GUI stuff around if it's not needed.

180

Coding Snacks / Re: Custom WinPE build

« Last post by Stoic Joker on August 08, 2018, 06:54 AM »

Sounds like a job for Windows 10 IoT Edition, as it's already stripped down to run on minimal (pie class) hardware.

181

Living Room / Re: Animal Friends thread

« Last post by Stoic Joker on July 26, 2018, 02:28 PM »

So I'm at a client's office the other day, that has several large and friendly dogs. The dogs had already come by on several occasions for petting and attention - as they're prone to do - because this is one of my favorite clients so the dogs all know me.

But... There is always that one time...when you're doing that one thing...that makes for all sorts of the wrong king of interesting.

I'm trying to put a matte overlay on the currently high gloss screen of a laptop. I'm sitting in an office chair pushed back from the desk with the laptop in my lap (screen down), trying to get this #@!& overlay to lineup and lay straight … When the dog comes by for a visit... Nose first... Tung out... I just spent half an hour cleaning the screen on this thing...so a large tung print would be, bad...

I turn in the chair away from the dog trying to frantically wrestle with the film, and not drop the laptop … But that of course instantly turns into a game...according to the dog.

Now I'm spinning around in the chair, yelling No Tungs! No Tungs! with the dog in hot pursuit … while frantically wrestling with the film, and trying to not drop the laptop. This went on for some time, and I'm sure it made for a hell of a sight, but the security cameras did not have an angle on that office - So there is no YouTube of this little dance. But I did finally get the film down - Mid spin - in time to give the dog a pat on the head, and tell him he was a good boy for helping me take care of my cardio for the next freaking month.

182

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 27, 2018, 04:48 PM »

My key is from an MSDN subscription that has since lapsed, so I'm out of luck there.

-Deozaan (June 27, 2018, 03:46 PM)

Windows 7 Ultimate with SP1 x86 or x64, I have both..

183

General Software Discussion / Re: Print spooler missing after win 10 update. Saved by old freeware!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 27, 2018, 07:03 AM »

Oh dear... I played with their updated instructions and they're still a bit off. Just typing TrustedInstaller doesn't find the account. Typing NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller does, but if you're on a domain you will need to switch the account search location to LM because the account does not exist at the (default) domain level.

*Shrug* ...Damn pesky details.

184

Living Room / Re: Beware of punycode phishing attempts

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 21, 2018, 06:48 AM »

I don't have firefox installed, but I opened this page in Edge, navigated to it (fine), copied the text from this page, and pasted it into Chrome, and it was fine....

I just got what you meant.  You right-clicked on it, and it pasted wrong.  Is that right?  I was selecting and copying it, and it was right.

-wraith808 (June 20, 2018, 11:49 PM)

Correct, I'm using the context menu's copy link/copy shortcut options for the test, not the select and copy method.

185

Living Room / Re: Beware of punycode phishing attempts

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 20, 2018, 09:49 AM »

Actually the point I was driving at is the Windows shell itself fell for the exploit when I put the link on the Windows Clipboard and pasted it into the FireFox address bar. FF never got a chance to pass/fail, it was just being used for an edit field.

Case in point, copy the link to the clipboard and paste it into Notepad … It comes off the clipboard as apple.com

-Stoic Joker (June 19, 2018, 09:20 PM)

Strange.  Mine worked - it just pasted the url direct.  Do you have something else in the background that might be the cause of it?

-wraith808 (June 19, 2018, 10:22 PM)

I'm not really a fan of addons, so there shouldn't be.

I tried it starting with this page loaded in different browsers:

IE got the link hover name correct and threw a Punny error on navigation to xn--80ak6aa92e.com, but botched the paste (аррӏе.com)

FF got the link hover name wrong, navigated to "Apple.com", but got the paste right (xn--80ak6aa92e.com).

Edge got hover link right, navigated to xn--80ak6aa92e.com, but got paste wrong (аррӏе.com).

SlimJet got hover link wrong, navigated to "apple.com", and got paste wrong (аррӏе.com).

186

Living Room / Re: Beware of punycode phishing attempts

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 19, 2018, 09:20 PM »

Actually the point I was driving at is the Windows shell itself fell for the exploit when I put the link on the Windows Clipboard and pasted it into the FireFox address bar. FF never got a chance to pass/fail, it was just being used for an edit field.

Case in point, copy the link to the clipboard and paste it into Notepad … It comes off the clipboard as apple.com

187

Living Room / Re: Beware of punycode phishing attempts

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 19, 2018, 06:56 AM »

Interesting... IE caught it and through a warning when I clicked the link. But when I copied the link to paste it into FireFox it came off the Windows clipboard as apple.com.

That can't be good..

188

Living Room / Re: The irony of MS trying to trouble shoot internet connection

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 15, 2018, 06:53 AM »

Two things occur to me about this:
1. I'm totally with Shades on (personally) never using the troubleshooter.
2. Working in support...yes, most end users really do need to be told to (reboot...) do things that are that basic.

189

Living Room / Re: Fake reviews are now a firmly entrenched business model

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 15, 2018, 06:42 AM »

I heard a story on NPR where a lot of people randomly receive merchandise from Amazon they didn't order, because a lot of the fake reviewers make verified purchases and have the products shipped to random addresses.

-daddydave (June 14, 2018, 12:02 AM)

Depending on the product, I'd like to be one of those random addresses... 

-wraith808 (June 14, 2018, 09:06 AM)

Damn Straight! ...Where do we sign up??

190

General Software Discussion / Re: Print spooler missing after win 10 update. Saved by old freeware!

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 12, 2018, 06:41 AM »

Interesting, but I find step 1 in method 2 quite troubling. In that granting full control to the everyone group on a system file (or any file for that matter) is a total no-no. Default permissions for spoolsv.exe only grant read and read & execute permissions to the System account...only the TrustedInstaller account has full control.

191

Living Room / Re: Looking for smartphone

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 07, 2018, 10:06 AM »

Okay... Now ^That's^ funny

192

Living Room / Re: Hating on AVG antivirus/firewall (internet security)

« Last post by Stoic Joker on June 05, 2018, 06:55 AM »

Vote 3 for Windows Defender, as all the latest trends in security point to AV being virtually useless because of the focus on hacking the wetware (user). So low resource usage "good enough" AV (e.g. Windows Defender) is the most common recommendation coupled with the need for reduced permissions, and "Human Firewall" training. Which gets the user into the habit of slowing down just a bit and thinking about what they're about to click on. Anything hot-button or excessively emotive should be reflexively deleted.

It sounds tricky as hell - Eek! Training End Users!?! Impossible! Sacrilege!! ...But it's really not as bad (or completely insane) as it sounds. I've had really good luck with it here for quite a few years.

193

Living Room / Re: Fake reviews are now a firmly entrenched business model

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 31, 2018, 11:07 PM »

I tend to avoid anything that doesn't have at least a few bad reviews. I tend to learn more from the bad reviews by measuring their complaint against their perceivable skill level.

194

Living Room / Re: From the Tinfoil Hat Department - FaceBook Listening?

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 10, 2018, 03:56 PM »

Hay, I'm not saying I believe it's happening. I'm just saying it's difficult to confidently discount with some of the current goings on.

FaceBook has been caught scraping information out of Emails and text messages on Android phones.

Voice activated TV's and "electronic assistants" (like Alexa etc.) have been caught recording everything and uploading "telemetry".

So the technology is there, and the necessary contemptuous attitude toward personal privacy by corporations is also available on spades.

And if the most common kneejerk reaction is like Stephen's above … Well... It wouldn't really be that hard to get away with.

195

Living Room / From the Tinfoil Hat Department - FaceBook Listening?

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 10, 2018, 01:14 PM »

Okay, so I was talking to a client, and they were telling me about some rather odd behavior they had noticed FaceBook appearing to be engaged in. That being ads appearing that were relevant to conversations that they had had while in the vicinity of their phone. Not on the phone...just near it. And these were discussions that had zero relevance to any phone or internet activity past or present. These people are non-Millennial strictly business kind of folk. Ya know... Older people (like me) that only use there phones for talking on..

And that struck my as quite odd … But not as something that I could easily dismiss considering the shenanigans going on in our current electronic world.

So when I got off the phone with client X, I casually mentioned it to the guy that works with me here in IT … And he said yeah, he's noticed it too. Conversations that he an I have had here - in the presence of his phone - have resulted in ads relevant to our discussions show up on his FaceBook page at home. He does not FaceBook here at the office.

So... Not to sound insanely paranoid - That's Renegade's job... - But this really does have me quite curious. It sounds crazy... But these days... I just don't know what to think anymore.

Anybody else notice something like this happening?

196

General Software Discussion / Re: Unstoppable Copier -- freeware that saved my bacon

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 10, 2018, 12:48 PM »

How "crashed" was the hard drive? Chkdsk [drive]: /R has been good to me in the past.

197

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 10, 2018, 10:43 AM »

Two workstations both HP Z400 series, both having the latest - as of last week - BIOS firmware, and both having been updated to v1803 b17134.48.

HP Z420 took 2 hours and came out fine.
HP Z440 took less than an hour (has SSD), and is now complaining about the TPM "firmware" being out of date … Which I'd have to assume - since it is not listed separately - should have been part of last weeks BIOS update.

198

Living Room / Re: How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

« Last post by Stoic Joker on May 03, 2018, 06:46 AM »

...And the other shoe hits the floor … Now we get to hope this thing ain't an octopus.

Christ I miss the tactile simplicity of being a mechanic - This black box crap is just a never ending battle.

199

Living Room / Re: Public WiFi

« Last post by Stoic Joker on April 25, 2018, 01:52 PM »

Best practice?  Pretend that it's all open, and don't do anything that you don't want anyone to see.

-wraith808 (April 25, 2018, 12:34 PM)

Exactly.  With the right equipment and setup, it's exceedingly easy to MitM attack an HTTPS stream.

Disclaimer: I'm a systems engineer with Fortinet, one of the world's largest cybersecurity hardware vendors.

-skwire (April 25, 2018, 01:13 PM)

I'm with these guys - There is no such thing as privacy in public. Or on the internet period depending on which part of the food chain is want to eyeball your knickers...

200

Developer's Corner / Re: The Art of ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING

« Last post by Stoic Joker on April 25, 2018, 06:47 AM »

Love the writing style, it makes me want to keep reading just to see what they come off with next. Hell, I might even be able to (stay awake) learn assembly from it.