@JaredBusch said in Is it legal? Windows 10 or 11 as a server:

I put client in quotes because they are acting as their own IT. Why are they bothering to hire you.

Right, in this example, this isn't an IT relationship. It's a store relationship. @CCWTech is a legal representative of Microsoft in this case and the client literally told @CCWTech (and asked them to repeat it on to Microsoft) that they wanted to not pay because they intended to pirate the software instead.

In this case, the theft is not only from Microsoft, but from @CCWTech as well. Both have financial damages to claim from the theft. And the "client" actually stated TO THE VENDOR their intent was to pirate the software.

So it's not actually about reporting to Microsoft, it's only about filling out the official and required documentation internally.

Not doing so would actually be actively covering up an act that the client themselves reported.

Yeah, overall they seem to be headed in a poor direction. I'm not doom and gloom, their new Dream Machine strategy is extremely foolish to me, taking something that worked so well and making it convoluted and fragile by comparison. It's not the worst thing, but there are benefits to the old, proven approach.

I'm not 100% against the Dream Machines now that they have the rack mount units. But they used to have a far better lineup of hardware and the software approach was better and now documentation has gotten even worse.

@Pete-S said in Allow Binaries on Linux to Run on Well Known Privileged Ports:

FYI
https://mangolassi.it/topic/25022/bind-linux-process-to-well-known-web-ports-when-not-root

I THOUGHT I had posted that, but I couldn't find it in a search. lol

The issue is that it is a VM file used by Hyper-V. If it was a normal VHDX file, used for say file installation (they are basically ISO files) then Defender does need to be scanning it. Ideally, Hyper-V would tell Defender where its resources are and at least default to not scanning them.

Some people want their VMs scanned from the base platform. Hosting companies sometimes, for example. But that should not be the default.

@jt1001001 said in Unifi cloud controller going the way of home office?:

@CCWTech The Omada products "mirror" Ubiquiti; so much so that I wonder if they stole Ubiquiti's interface? They use a model of hardware controller; self hosted software controller, or their cloud controller; that model requiring a license per device per year. I have some demo hardware at my office we're just getting set up to play with I'll let you know the results later this week. You can have super administrators with access to all sites and an admin per site.

Now that is honestly promising.

@gjacobse said in Unifi cloud controller going the way of home office?:

@jt1001001 said in Unifi cloud controller going the way of home office?:

One bad mark already (well,for me anyways) right off the bat; the software controller requires Java.

Ouch,.. but so does Ubnt controller Iirc.

Yeah, hence the suspicion that it was copied.

@scottalanmiller found it. I hate how hard this is to find. I really like this tool, but wish that it was slightly more robust.

http://logio.org/

@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

Being able to stand back, look at something, and say, "I did that!" is a pretty amazing experience. So, did none of the folks bastardizing their writing ever have that experience?

Yes, but college isn't work. It's busy work. The entire point of university isn't education or work, but to buy a degree. ChatGPT is the logical path to that. If the students (or their future employers) valued education, they'd test for that. As long as they prefer a piece of paper over actual learning, there is no dignity in the process.

@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

Have we really gone that far that "grey" justifies virtually any kind of behaviour?

Try it in reverse. Try to justify to me being a PhD student or an employee and having access to ChatGPT and not using it. As an educator and employer, I see avoiding the use of the available tools as lazy and wrong. If you feel that it is justified to excuse the grey area of doing manual work where none is needed and doesn't add value (in my estimation) then explain to me the opposite.... how do you even excuse not using the available tools and just filling the student and/or employee's time with pointless busywork?

@Obsolesce said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

That sounds more like the kind of situation being those people would have gotten infected just the same regardless of web browser used. Latest version of the web browser prior to infection?

As far as we can tell. It's on managed systems that are automatically updated, AV is up to date and active, firewall is on. But just takes clicking on something.

We project that Edge puts people at additional risk because it is the default product on the most insecure platform, that is also a default choice. It makes it super likely that your target is "accepting everything because it is default" rather than being thoughtful in their technology choices. It makes it an ideal public "flag" to make someone a higher than average potential for malware.

@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

I've come to realize that will never again trust anything from anyone without proof that they know what they have presented.
That's going to be the differentiator in my mind.

Ah, but I think this just exposes something big. Why did you feel that they knew the material before? This is why PhD students defend their thesis... anyone can produce the paper, it's explaining and defending the concepts live that get you a degree, not the paper.

If you were using the written paper as a proxy for testing someone's knowledge on something then yes, I can see why you care about the mechanism rather than the output. But I'd say, again, all that is happening is that what was already true is being exposed.

As someone who made a living for a while in high school writing essays by request, I know how common it is to not have written your own paper. I don't know why people bought essays from me, whether they used them as source material, cited them, used them to summarize research, or turned them in as their own, not my concern. I was hired to write papers on topics. I didn't even know who got them. But I know actual intelligence went into writing papers that were used by people who knew nothing of the material.

When I went to university, the top ranked uni in the US at the time that I went, it was expected, that you had copied answers from previous years. They assumed what other places called cheating as a baseline and tested only above that. If you didn't take the time to obtain and memorize previous years tests you would almost certainly fail. They didn't test only on that, they assumed it as a baseline of available knowledge.

So I see what you are saying, but what I'm saying is that the inability to trust that producing a paper that has good words on it to reflect on the knowledge of the person turning it in was already there. ChatGPT isn't changing the game there, in any way. Authors of works, even if they wrote every word themselves, rarely understand the material deeply. Writing an essay simply is not a good test of that.

So the issue, and the solution, should be pretty clear. Essay writing was not ever a great process for education (or work), we've just exposed it beyond question now. But for many of us, that happened long, long ago. Now you need to focus on discourse, which has always been the case.

@stacksofplates said in Beelink PC issues:

I've bought a couple of the micro form factor Optiplex computers (9020) and have been happy with them. You couldn't have saved too much by buying something like this I can't imagine? I think I paid $250 for the last one and it came with 8GB RAM, an i7, and a 250GB SSD.

The 9020 lists as running a Four Generation processor. That's eight generations old. That's dramatically old. Ten years, in fact. Those came out in early 2013.

Similar price for high end, brand new genuine AMD fro Beelink. The fact that it died sucks, so that's a real issue. But the two aren't comparable in performance.

Maybe you have the wrong Optiplex number of Dell has the wrong info on their spec sheet? That looks like a $20 computer to me....

https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/optiplex-9020-micro-technical-spec-sheet.pdf

@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:

Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.

Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.

Just remembered another example: Cole's Notes.

Papers written based on a reading of Cole's Notes as opposed to actually reading the book, absorbing it, understanding it, and then being able to see the author's intent would be very different.

I want real the real person and their real experience.

https://open.spotify.com/track/73CKjW3vsUXRpy3NnX4H7F?si=ac956108dbb54fd4
^^^
Fake Plastic Trees

If reading Cole's Notes produces enough to write a good paper it tells us one of two things...

1. The notes are as good as the "real thing" or...
2. The evaluation of the assessment is bad and pointless.

If the goal is to enjoy the material, you don't need to be tested on it. If the goal is to pass a test, the notes are normally vastly superior.

If you know the goal, you can decide which is the better approach. If doing this for school and not for personal growth (the two are opposing concepts) then Cole's Notes are much better as the time spent reading something not good enough to read without it being assigned is wasted and the value is in passing the assessment.

@dashrender said in Remembering the MCSE+I, Microsoft's Terminal Certification:

the NT 4.0 workstation books left out all kinds of unix/linux connection/printing part meaning you didn't stand a chance on those parts on the workstation test unless you had external knowledge.
I barely passed the workstation test because of this.

I never took the NT4 Workstation. I did the WIndows 98 / DOS test instead, the one where the study book was over 2,000 pages. It was harder than the rest of the MCSE+I combined. It was definitely the foolish choice as it was easily 20x the work of the NT 4 Workstation test and not one single item of all of that did I ever use, ever, in my entire career.

@Cagatay said in Remembering the MCSE+I, Microsoft's Terminal Certification:

Lol here is mine... does it still have value these days? or are we considered as dinasours?

Oh man, I don't remember getting a cool card like that. But it does look a little familiar.

That's very cool that yu still have it!

@WLS-ITGuy said in Debian 11 & php8:

One of the applications we use just released a new version and the update requires php8.0 or above.

We're using Debian 11 and since 11.7 was just released, which doesn't have php8 in the release. I was wondering how do I find out when things like php. Mariadb, Apache, NGNIX, etc get applied to distros?

If you want any kind of modernity, Debian isn't really for you OR you use Debian as a base and do not use it as your package testing and repo system - which is generally not advised in production, but it is an okay approach as long as you accept it. Basically it means you are using Debian as a base and assembling your own distro instead of trusting the vendors.

With my CIO hat on, we never do that. If we want modern software, and we normally do, we run Ubuntu or Fedora. Both of which have had PHP 8 and 8.1 (8.2 is current) for quite a long time. Debian is great as a base and when you want things that never change. But it is not good when you want things that are keeping up to date.

@Pete-S said in Debian 11 & php8:

Not a challenge at all but the reason to run "stable" is for stability.

Once you start abandoning the integration, though, you are abandoning stability. The idea of using an LTS and then replacing the parts of the OS that aren't up to date is counterproductive. Choose the most up to date, best supported, most stable version and use the fully tested and integrated components instead.

The idea of "stable" is not stability in IT terms, that's a myth. It's actually against that. The idea of current is for IT stability. Stable, in reference to an OS like this, is in reference to the versions of products remaining stable so that unsupported, out of date software from bad vendors can be used without updating for long periods of time. Not a positive stable, it's a bad stable.

I think what you want is a completely external device. That's how this is normally handled. Meaning it's common to have a dialer / ringer on a computer but you answer the phone. Same thing could be done to make a loudhorn blast anything you want as well.

Mostly this is taken from Mastodon's documentation but some of it is wrong. I tried their Docker configs, but couldn't find any that worked and it isn't clear if they have an official Docker image or just third party ones. They don't actually list Docker on their official site. So this is a traditional install.

As root...

apt update && apt install -y curl wget gnupg apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | bash -
curl -sL https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | gpg --dearmor | tee /usr/share/keyrings/yarnkey.gpg >/dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/yarnkey.gpg] https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian stable main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/postgresql.asc https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/postgresql.asc] http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/postgresql.list
apt update && apt install -y imagemagick ffmpeg libpq-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev file git-core \
  g++ libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler pkg-config nodejs gcc autoconf \
  bison build-essential libssl-dev libyaml-dev libreadline6-dev \
  zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm-dev \
  nginx redis-server redis-tools postgresql postgresql-contrib \
  certbot python3-certbot-nginx libidn11-dev libicu-dev libjemalloc-dev nodejs
corepack enable && yarn set version classic
adduser --disabled-login --gecos "" mastodon
sudo -u postgres psql -c 'CREATE USER mastodon CREATEDB;'
ufw allow http && ufw allow https

As Mastodon

su - mastodon
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv && cd ~/.rbenv && src/configure && make -C src
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc && echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec bash
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-jemalloc rbenv install 3.0.6
rbenv global 3.0.6
gem install bundler --no-document
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon.git live && cd live
git checkout $(git tag -l | grep -v 'rc[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1)
bundle config deployment 'true'
bundle config without 'development test'
bundle install -j$(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN)
yarn install --pure-lockfile
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake mastodon:setup
npx update-browserslist-db@latest
exit

As root again...

cp /home/mastodon/live/dist/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon
certbot --nginx -d  yourdomain.com
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mastodon
vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
systemctl restart nginx
cp /home/mastodon/live/dist/mastodon-*.service /etc/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now mastodon-web mastodon-sidekiq mastodon-streaming