sylver_dragon

It was the auto-hiding replacement for the task bar. You opened it by moving the mouse pointer to the upper right or lower right corner. But unless you remembered where it was at, you’d get stuck asking, “where the fuck is the start menu”. It especially sucked when you were a normal version of windows and RDP’d into a Sever 2008 box and couldn’t use the Win key.

Then no one would have noticed and sysadmins everywhere wouldn’t have their PTSD triggered by the words “charm bar”.
Shit, now I need whiskey.

You missed
winMe: you can’t change the thing because the OS already crashed.

You can delete them?

And people wonder why CCTV footage is always low res and grainy. I worked at a site with something north of 100 cameras and a requirement for 30 days storage. Their server room was mostly just racks and racks of hard drive chassis all wired up to the DVR system.

Step one: Document, Document, Document.
Step Two: Did we cover documentation yet?
Step Three: Complain, with documentation, to the apartment management.
Step Four: Document.

Recordings such as video and audio are useful. Just keeping a log of all such interactions can help as well. But, you want to have the documentation to prove your side of things. If things go really sideways and you end up in court, the judge won’t give a fuck about what you say, only what you can prove. Be ready to prove your claims. As we say in the DFIR world, “logs or it didn’t happen”. Then, start complaining to management. And document (keep a written log, you probably won’t be able to record) your interactions with management. All logs should include date, time, who you spoke with, what you spoke about and any actions which management said they would take or actions you said you would take. If it’s an option, keep your communications with management in email. Both the sending and received emails will be timestamped and the headers will provide a reasonable record showing that the emails were to or from management controlled email servers and addresses. And they log what was talked about quite nicely.

Ultimately, the goal is to move this from being your problem to management’s problem. And it’s possible that your problem neighbor is also someone else’s problem. If management has three tenants all complaining about the same neighbor, they have more impetus to take action against the problem. Of course, this assumes a neutral management, which can be an open question. But, this is likely the least costly way to resolve the issue.

So, he finally took Andrew Llyod Webber’s advice from Jesus Christ Superstar and popped into the age of mass communication.

Not humming, but I do make noise intentionally. I’m a big guy and understand that I could be threatening to women in the wrong circumstance. I also walk fairly quietly just as a matter of the way I walk; so, I’ve scared folks on more than one occasion by “sneaking” up on them unintentionally. So, if I think I am doing that, I’ll land a few footfalls hard and flat to make my foot slap the ground and alert the person of my presence before I get too close. I also try to give space to strangers while walking. Things like moving to the other side of the sidewalk/street, slowing down or speeding up to pass. Basically, trying to not look like I’m stalking them.

And then imagine what is creeping around, above that tapestry, waiting to get you while you sleep.

Anyone can build a bridge which stands. It takes a engineer to build a bridge which just stands, while not costing an insane amount of money.

That said, engineers throughout history were incredibly smart and shouldn’t be discounted.

Spaceballs?!?!

Stopping Windows from running, probably not. MS could stop sending updates and could deactivate it, but it would mostly keep running. And, if any EU/Russian systems were not connected to the internet (yes, this sort of thing still happens in 2025), nothing MS did would matter. Office/Azure and other cloud based services are more vulnerable. Yes, Microsoft could geo-fence those services such that they did nor work if you were coming from an IP address in EU/Russia. Though, the simple workaround for this is to install a VPN. And given US sanctions on Russia, this is probably happening right now anyway.

As much as the tin-foil hat crowd likes to think about MS having some master control switch, it’s incredibly unlikely. The problem with backdoors is that hackers are constantly looking for ways to attack systems, especially Windows. If there was some sort of master “off switch” baked into the code, it’s likely some one would have stumbled upon it by now. Even if it’s that well hidden, it’s a “one use” item with high reputational damage attached. Stop and consider for a moment, what happens when that kill switch gets used? It’s going to be picked up on. People record internet traffic for fun. As soon as that kill command went out, security researchers, the world over, would be dissecting logs to find the command, and then it would be reversed engineered. That MS had such a kill switch in their codebase would cause massive distrust in MS software going forward. No one would want to take the risk of having that kill switch running in their environment, certainly not on anything critical. Also, given how bad people are at updating Windows, we’d probably see a lot of systems killed by hackers just doing hacker things. Since the versions with the kill code would be know, you’d get bored teenagers searching Shodan for vulnerable systems and sending the kill command for fun. And all of this would be “Microsoft’s fault” for having the backdoor. It would be a PR nightmare. And since everyone would now know what the kill command looked like, anyone who mattered would install filters to block it at the firewall. So, it got used once, caused some damage with a lot of damage to MS’s reputation but is now neutralized. Was it worth it? Probably not to Microsoft.

I never get any responses, until like 3 days later when I check my spam folder and realize my scheduled interview appointment came from some random server that got deleted as spam mail.

It sucks, but this is kinda on you. Spam filters are pretty terrible at what they do. And with everyone and their dog adding “AI” to their security tools, it’s only getting worse. There is a fuckton of spam being sent to email addresses all the time. And the spammers are doing their level best to make that spam look more and more like legitimate emails. So, the terrible spam filters and crappy AI are hard pressed to filter out all the crap and not catch legitimate emails. And this problem with false positives is one of the reasons a lot of spam still sneaks through, most of the filters tend to err towards false negatives over false positives. Still, false positives will happen. If you are expecting an important email, you’re going to need to dive into the cesspit which is your spam folder regularly and make sure that email didn’t end up there.

As for the issues around job hunting, ya that whole process can suck. Depending on your skillset, experience and job criteria, the pool can get pretty small pretty fast. And online job hunting means that companies are getting hundreds of resumes for postings. On top of that, companies have stopped training and don’t do anything to build internal talent pipelines. So, if you are earlier in your career, you get stuck in a loop of not having experience, so no one will hire you to get experience. It just sucks and I don’t have an answer for you, only to keep plugging away and understand it’s a numbers game. Eventually the dice will come up for you, but that “eventually” can really, really suck.

This is why many communication options these days advertise that they are encrypted.

Like Signal. You know, the app they were using, as was mentioned in the article, multiple times. You did read the article, right?

Option C “222444”.
I coded successes as positive values and failures as negative values. I arbitrarily used a doubling for each greater success/failure level and came up with the following value coding:

This results in the following expected values for the offered dice:

A: -2
B: -1
C: -1/2
D: -1

All dice are bad, option C is the least bad. And this kinda makes sense. For option A, you may have a fantastic success, but you are also just as likely to complete crash out. And a “crash out” should happen after very few rolls. Option B is a slightly less extreme version of this, but any gains from the 5 results should be more than wiped out by the 1 results. And those should be happening with similar frequency. Option C is again the same thing, but with a slower circling of the drain. 4 results let you recover some, but the 2 wipes out that 4’s benefits and more resulting in a slow decline. And option D is just straight out bad, every result is a failure.

It seems that the only good choice is not to play. ;-)

EDIT: I realized, I made a mistake in my original numbers, I forgot to divide by 6. And this is why coffee should come before math. The conclusions are still the same, but the numbers are different. I’ve corrected those.