I got spammed by Privado -- no link, they really want a link -- which claims to be a privacy-enhanced search engine. Investigating their privacy policy, you can see that they are a proxy for Microsoft Bing. In effect, they exist in order to put ads in front of Bing searches: it's …

In the spirit of "the best way to get a correct answer is to post an obviously wrong answer on USENET", I hereby present the most efficient method of mass-alteration of LDAP user entities I can think of.

You probably shouldn't do this.

As you know, LDAP is a terrible …

• Is it plugged in?
• At both ends?
• Does the other end work with something else?
• Are all the power switches on? Including the one on the strip, the one on the back, and the one that's not connected?
• Is DNS working?
• Are you out of disk space?
• Are you out …

Email disclaimers are stupid and they make your company look stupid.

The only email disclaimer that seems to have any legal effect whatsoever is when a lawyer says "This email does not create a client confidentiality relationship." All others are completely bogus. The lawyer one is almost bogus, since it …

Who do you trust? And do you trust them indefinitely far into the future?

If you have specific reasons to believe you will be targetted by an interested, competent, resourceful attacker: you need serious information security measures, which will be painful and potentially expensive in both time and money. I …

Since this class of bug just bit me, I figured I would write it up in the nearly futile hope that it might prevent me from making it again.

This bug is most often evident when we have a software stack that has varying levels of configuration available in each …

One of my kids wanted a new computer badly enough to pay for most of it, and I have been wanting to upgrade the main house server for a year or so. Parts for both arrived this week.

Let's start with the kid's machine. For some reason, he thinks esthetics …

The scientific method goes boing.

1. Form a question.
2. Observe evidence.
3. Form hypotheses.
4. Create experiments.
5. Observe results.
6. Compare hypotheses.
7. Be critical.

The scientific method runs off the rails in step 2 and explodes into uncertainty in step 3. It turns out that observing evidence is rarely easy or straightforward: it's a …

Work asks that I bring home an Apple laptop so that I maintain some sort of fluency with the systems that the majority of our employees use. For the last while this has been a 2011 MacBook Pro with 20GB of RAM and an SSD. The keyboard finally sputtered its …

If you have a Linux system that was using systemd as its init system, and you changed it to something else, and now nearly everything is incredibly slow:

Remove libnss-systemd; check for and remove systemd options from /etc/nsswitch.conf.

As you will no doubt recall, that config controls the …

Suppose that you are sending out email to all of your customers, letting them know about a thing that you are sure they will want to know about. Then you decide to send it from a fake email address, one named "no reply" or similar. You have immediately eliminated a …

The Google Nexus 6P was an excellent phone, until it developed severe battery issues when it was about a year old. Google did me the courtesy of replacing it with the Pixel XL, which was a reasonably good phone until two years in, when it developed moderate battery issues which …

Centralized facilities are easier to manage. Centralized facilities are easier to control.

Distributed facilities are harder to manage, harder to control.

Centralized facilities need expensive, difficult redundancies to maintain function during a partial outage. Distributed facilities need coordination.

Centralized is cheaper than distributed if you don't pay for the things …