@IRJ said in Are Minimal installs really better?:

@DustinB3403 said in Are Minimal installs really better?:

A lot of these issues can be addressed with tools like Ansible or setup scripts, so I find your topic a bit awkward.

Whatever way you want to slice it, package management is more difficult for OS level packages.

Define OS level package, because I have no idea what you mean. I'm guessing it's something from Windows world, but even there I haven't heard about such thing.

How is this any difficult when managing packages:

- name: install some packages
  package:
    name: "{{ item }}"
    state: present
  with_items:
    - package 1
    - package 2
    - etc.......

It just hit me, Real Player was main competitor to WinAMP, loaded with adware and spyware.

@srsmith said in zip and . rar files?:

Everybody seems to forget about (or don't know about / care for) foobar2000

Never looked back once I switched to it from WinAMP. Yeah, it's a bit minimalistic, but it plays music without being a pile of useless eye candy, so it works for me.

Foobar2000 wasn't released until late 2002, and probably wasn't widely used/known for a while. WinAMP was around for years by then.

WinAMP was THE mp3 player on Windows. Alternative was.... I can't think of anything, windows media player, classic one, if that was your thing, but that didn't play mp3 if I remember correctly. WinRAR is just a legacy app, you mostly see .rar files on torrent sites, and that's about all the use cases for it.

@Pete-S said in Managing spam posting:

@marcinozga said in Managing spam posting:

Phone # verification. I'm not sure if anything else is effective against spam. Captcha has been ineffective pretty much since introduction, you can buy services in India where they have real people solving captcha in real time for peanuts. Like 2-3k captchas for $2.

If you can buy services in India to solve captchas, maybe you can buy services to identify and remove spam manually as well. And an infinite loop of work is created. :crazy_face:

It would be nice, unfortunately while solving captcha workflow and integration with bots is trivial, catching and removing spam is not. Not to mention potential security implications.

@Obsolesce said in Managing spam posting:

Captcha will help against bots. Try that first. Also, start blocking posts if they contain certain spam phrases. Block known ip spam lists.

Um, it won't. Well, maybe just the ones written by script kiddies. Bots have built-in captcha solving, either with services like anti-captcha or some even include OCR and other advanced logic to solve captcha. Google xrumer or scrapebox.

It doesn't matter what the solution is, spammers will find a way around that. The only way to stop spam is to force them to spend money.

Phone # verification. I'm not sure if anything else is effective against spam. Captcha has been ineffective pretty much since introduction, you can buy services in India where they have real people solving captcha in real time for peanuts. Like 2-3k captchas for $2.

@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

When they are very young, playing and learning are the same thing. What extra "learning" would a laptop provide?

idk, first time parent here. Give me a break!

I have 16 months old, our first too, he's very keen on pushing buttons, I had to put plastic cover on receiver and disconnect power button in the server, but iPad button gets abused. I'm also thinking about getting something dedicated for him.

@IRJ said in One of the configured repositories failed (Unknown):

I also think you may be looking at the wrong file.

In Ubuntu it is located here

/etc/apt/sources.list

You can also add sources by file here

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/

He's using Centos, and location was correct. Both distros store config files in slightly different locations.

@IRJ He couldn't clean it as visible in that screen. There was probably a zombie yum process somewhere locking cache files.

yum clean all && rm -rf /var/cache/yum/* && yum update

See if that helps.

Install yum-cron, set it up to email you when updates are installed and stop worrying about updates.

@flaxking said in Any Way to Automate Adding a New Computer to an AD Group?:

@marcinozga said in Any Way to Automate Adding a New Computer to an AD Group?:

Ansible can do that. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/win_domain_group_membership_module.html#win-domain-group-membership-module
You can add new PCs to domain, and change their group membership, you just need to know computer names in advance.

Which is just a layer on top of Powershell. The Active Directory Powershell module is still required.

It's not required, or that module is included already in Windows 10 by default. Because I haven't had to install it on any machine I managed with Ansible.

Ansible is the correct solution, and I guess you could save output to log file with log_plays plugin. Perhaps AWX or Tower have reporting capability, I haven't used Tower and I briefly looked and AWX.

Other configuration management solutions might do what you need too.

Ansible can do that. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/win_domain_group_membership_module.html#win-domain-group-membership-module
You can add new PCs to domain, and change their group membership, you just need to know computer names in advance.

@RojoLoco said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

@IRJ said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

@marcinozga said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

@IRJ said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

@marcinozga said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

The title is nothing but a click-bait. Apple is not locking down batteries, it's displaying a message that it's unable to diagnose battery health, which is not surprising, since replacement batteries are probably lacking diagnostic chip that's present in original batteries. Your replacement battery will continue to work just fine.

Yes, but Apple has talked about actually locking out 3rd party parts before

Do you have source for that claim? I know they did that with fingerprint readers, but that was a valid move. They do make their hardware harder and harder to fix, but I don't recall any claims that they were actually blocking 3rd party parts, with some exceptions where it would compromise security, like with above fingerprint reader.

They could even claim 3rd party batteries are dangerous (they can be).

They are dangerous... to Apple's profit margin. They didn't spend a gazillion ad dollars creating their whole "pay more for it because it's what all the cool kids use" thing so you could save a few bucks on a battery replacement. I'm actually shocked that they haven't announced that installing 3rd party batteries voids your warranty.

These batteries can be dangerous. They are cheap garbage in most cases, built in some Chinese sweatshop without any quality control in place. Remember a girl that got 3rd degree burns from exploding battery in her Samsung phone? Yup, 3rd party battery. Or how about BestBuy recalling 5000 Macbook Pro replacement batteries? Cheap junk again.

And installing 3rd party battery does void the warranty, that shouldn't require any explanation. You need to open the case, and that alone voids warranty. But this isn't something anyone would be concerned with anyway, if you have warranty, why would you pay for 3rd party repairs when Apple will do it for free?

@IRJ said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

@marcinozga said in Apple locking down iPhone batteries:

The title is nothing but a click-bait. Apple is not locking down batteries, it's displaying a message that it's unable to diagnose battery health, which is not surprising, since replacement batteries are probably lacking diagnostic chip that's present in original batteries. Your replacement battery will continue to work just fine.

Yes, but Apple has talked about actually locking out 3rd party parts before

Do you have source for that claim? I know they did that with fingerprint readers, but that was a valid move. They do make their hardware harder and harder to fix, but I don't recall any claims that they were actually blocking 3rd party parts, with some exceptions where it would compromise security, like with above fingerprint reader.

The title is nothing but a click-bait. Apple is not locking down batteries, it's displaying a message that it's unable to diagnose battery health, which is not surprising, since replacement batteries are probably lacking diagnostic chip that's present in original batteries. Your replacement battery will continue to work just fine.

@Dashrender said in Equifax claims process is now open:

@marcinozga said in Equifax claims process is now open:

I'm getting the cash. 10 years of credit monitoring is worthless, same with their insurance. It won't prevent identity or credit card theft. And their reaction time is piss poor, you'd get a notice 1-3 months later of someone opens new account in your name, and by that time crook will probably charge thousands. Credit freeze is the only option and they don't offer that. Discover bank offers credit monitoring for free to anyone: https://csp.discover.com/free-credit-score/index.html

Who doesn't offer Credit Freeze? All three of the credit agencies offer credit freezes now - for free. It was a law passed a shortish while ago.

I managed to freeze Experian and Equifax 2 years ago.. but had issue getting into Transunion... well, in that time, it's become free and all three have made it much easier (though still not brain dead easy) to freeze unfreeze your credit). As of this morning I have all three frozen.

What I meant was they didn't list that as an option in settlement, instead they offered some useless services. If you don't know about credit freeze in first place, you won't get it. And even if you do, you have to do all the work, and you have to contact all 4 credit bureaus.