It's 2023. If your company doesn't offer chat or phone support in this era you are that store that doesn't take credit cards. You're not going to make it.

Lansweeper only offers support via email, and those emails are not returned. I suffered a license issue that took two days to get resolved, all the while down, and Lansweeper could not have cared any less. I decided not to renew our license. Two weeks later they sent me a renewal with a 40% increase.

I had a chuckle as I deleted that email.

Hello everyone.

I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database.

ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this.

I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh boy, here we go

"Move to the cloud" they said

Ever since I’ve came to the company as a sole Sys admin (where there was none before) I’ve tried to keep it simple as possible… everyone has MS Office Home&Business, I’ll move everyone to Outlook from the damn Windows Live Mail… and sure thing, I’ll also install Outlook on their phones whoever wants to have Email access on their phones.

And it’s been a mess… people on Windows complaining that they dislike the new Search inside Outlook, sometimes when they try to start it up it doesn’t even open but hangs as a dead process so I had to put a shortcut on their desktop that does ‘taskkill /IM outlook.exe’… it happens on both old Windows 10 setups and brand new Windows 11 setups of all kinds… Also they’re pushing their new look a bit by bit and I’m thinking of migrating to something else before it even happens

On Android sometimes it has hard time syncing with IMAP and the search is also broken… it doesn’t work at all if only one IMAP account is logged in, so I had to login a dummy IMAP email account as a second one because only then you get the search option of which directories to search for and only then it works… idk how else to explain this but I found many people complaining about the same thing and using a solution like this for years…

So, what are your top alternatives for Email clients? It doesn’t have to be free (but a one time payment would be preferable), but it has to be a stable and simple experience for the workers on both Windows and Android. Body

Hi all. I'm not ready to die on this hill, but I am willing to suffer some serious injuries.

Here's the question: Should an IPAM product hand out static IPs when called upon by API for next available address?

Say I setup a machine on vRA using API calls to an enterprisey-IPAM solution using their documented API to poll, and perhaps subsequently pull, the next available IP address.

The API assigns an IP, but the IP assigned is the next IP available in a static range, not an IP address in an established and advertised DHCP range. Thus, any of a number of reserved static IPs will be dynamically assigned via API. The API is not using the IPAM product's built-in DHCP server to dynamically assign addresses. The IPAM product's DHCP and DNS are authoritative.

Bug, or feature?

As an engineer, my take is that the API calls should always pull from DHCP. Static IPs must be considered to be reserved, even if marked unused in IPAM, and should never be assigned whereas DHCP keeps records of IPs assigned and can be trusted to hand out an IP not being used. The idea is, when a new machine is brought online and gets an IP, that machine can either retain the DHCP-assigned addresses or I can assign it a static IP if necessary. Never, ever should my IPAM product think it is OK to hand out a ~~private~~ static IP address.

I can see how some people flip this and want their DHCP pools to be untouched by IPAM, but that's just backwards in my eyes.

I thought this was the right place to ask, let me know if somewhere else was better.

I have a classroom in a public school with around 30 PCs (windows) I need to install software on (python and codium). They are all the same PCs. In the past there was a management system but due to some licensing issues that does not work anymore.

How its been done before: Go to each and every PC and setup everything manually, or do it once and mirror the HDD 30 times .... both ways very time consuming.

I thought there might be a better way to do this, do you have any idea?

In celebration of Bitcoin Black Friday 2023, we're offering a 10% discount on all BusKill cables sold between Nov 18 to Dec 03.

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BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

What is Bitcoin Black Friday?

Black Friday is ~1 month before Christmas, and it's the busiest shopping day in the US. The first "Bitcoin Friday" (launched by Jon Holmquist) was Nov 9th, 2012 (at the time, one bitcoin was ~$11). The following year, the two ideas merged to become Bitcoin Black Friday.

This year, we're joining Bitcoin Black Friday by offering our products at a 10% discount if you pay with cryptocurrency.

Why should I use cryptocurrencies?

We've always accepted cryptocurrencies because:

1. They're more secure than pre-cryptocurrency payment methods
2. They're a more egalitarian system than pre-cryptocurrency finance
3. They're more environmentally friendly than pre-cryptocurrency financial systems
4. The fees are less than pre-cryptocurrency transactions
5. They allow for anonymous purchases online
6. Their transactions are censorship-resistant

Security

Before cryptocurrencies, making an online transaction was horrendously insecure and backwards.

"Conceptually, pull-based transactions are really not that different than giving three parties the password to your online banking service and trusting them to log in and take what they need. You have to trust the merchant, their IT supplier; the acquiring bank, their third-party processor; the card network; and your own card issuer---and everybody who works for them and has access to their systems. If a bad guy gets hold of your card details at any point in this process, they could drain your account.
The picture shows the scope of all the entities with access to your critical card information" source

Asymmetric cryptography has been available since the 1970s, but CNP (Card Not Present) transactions to this day still don't use public keys to sign transactions. Rather, you give your private keys (that is, your credit card number, expiry, etc) directly to the merchant and you authorize them to pull money out of your account (trusting that they take the right amount and not to loose those precious credentials).

Bitcoin flipped this around to actually make transactions secure. With bitcoin, you don't give others the keys to take money out of your account. Instead, transactions are push-based. You sign a transaction with your private keys, and those keys are shared with no-one.

Even today, pre-cryptocurrency transactions are abhorrently insecure. In the US or Europe, if someone knows your account number and bank, they can direct debit money out of your account. For the same reason, losses due to credit card theft is enormous. To quote Satoshi Nakamoto's criticism of pre-cryptocurrency transactions, "A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable"

In fact, fraudulent transactions in the banking industry are so common that your bank will generally reimburse your account for any malicious transactions that you tell them about within 60-90 days. But if someone drains your account of all your money and you don't notice for 12 months? Too bad. All your money is gone.

In Bitcoin, transactions are push-based. source

Tokenization and 3DS are merely bandages on a fundamentally backwards, pull-based transaction model. But because bitcoin is push-based, it's magnitudes more secure.

Egalitarian

If you have a bank account, then you probably take a lot of things for granted. Like buying things online (with a credit card). Or getting cash when traveling abroad (from an ATM machine). Or taking out a loan so you can start a business.

Before crypto-currencies, it was very difficult to do these things unless you had a bank account. And in 2008 (the year with the first-ever bitcoin transaction), McKinsey & Company published a report concluding that half of the world's adult population is unbanked.

But with crypto-currencies, anyone with access to the internet and a computer or smart phone can use bitcoin to send and receive money online -- without needing to first obtain a bank account.

Environmentalism

The energy required to facilitate transactions in decentralized, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is minuscule by comparison. And, most importantly, the amount of energy used to solve the proof-of-work problem does not grow as the number of transactions-per-second grows.

Traditional financial institutions require an enormous amount of overhead to facilitate transactions in their centralized networks. Unlike bitcoin, which was designed specifically to eliminate the unnecessary overhead created by a trusted third party, pre-cryptocurrency transactions required humans to verify transactions. These humans require office buildings. These office buildings require energy to build and maintain. And, most importantly, as the number of transactions-per-second grows on their network, the number of humans and office space also grows.

Bitcoin versus other industries

yearly energy use, in TWh source |

This fact is often misunderstood because there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet that makes a few disingenuous modifications to the facts:

1. They calculate the energy usage of the computers processing transactions only, maliciously omitting calculating the energy usage of the entire industry's infrastructure (eg energy used by office buildings)
2. They calculate the energy usage per transaction, maliciously omitting the fact that the amount of energy expended by bitcoin miners is automatically adjusted by the proof-of-work algorithm (so energy usage does not increase as the network scales-up)
3. They offer statistics about "energy usage" without mentioning the energy sources. It matters if the energy source is coal/nuclear/natural-gas or solar/wind/hydroelectric

"...estimates for what percentage of Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy vary widely. In December 2019, one report suggested that 73% of Bitcoin's energy consumption was carbon neutral, largely due to the abundance of hydro power in major mining hubs such as Southwest China and Scandinavia. On the other hand, the CCAF estimated in September 2020 that the figure is closer to 39%. But even if the lower number is correct, that's still almost twice as much [renewable energy sources] as the U.S. grid"

source: Harvard Business Review

Nic Carter

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

Low Fees

The introduction to the Bitcoin White Paper (2008) clearly states that Bitcoin was created to reduce costs by using a distributed ledger (the blockchain) to eliminate the need for a trusted third party.

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs...
These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions."
source: Bitcoin Whitepaper	Satoshi Nakamoto

At the time of writing, the average transaction fee for a bitcoin transaction is $0.06. And unlike pre-cryptocurrency transactions, you can increase or decrease the fee that you pay to increase or decrease the time it takes for the transaction to complete (at $0.06, it will get added to the blockchain in ~1 hour).

By comparison, the way to send funds internationally through the Internet via pre-cryptocurrency banks is via an international wire transfer. Fees very per bank, but they typically charge $15-$85 per transaction. And unlike bitcoin, wire transfers won't make move on nights and weekends, so they can take 1-7 days to complete.

Also, with bitcoin, that $0.06 transaction fee only applies when you're sending money. Many banks will also charge a fee for an incoming wire transfer. In bitcoin, there is no transaction fee to receive money.

Anonymity

Though early cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't ensure anonymity like newer privacy coins, ZCash and Monero were designed specifically to provide private transactions.

This allows our customers to purchase from us anonymously, which can be extremely important for activists and journalists whose lives are threatened by their adversaries.

WikiLeaks started accepting donations in Bitcoin 7 months after PayPal froze their account

We accept both ZCash and Monero. If you'd like us to accept another privacy coin, please contact us :)

Censorship-Resistant

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are peer-to-peer and permissionless. Transactions exchanging bitcoins occur directly between two parties. There is no middle-man that has the power to block, freeze, or reverse transactions. Before blockchains were used to maintain a public ledger and enable peer-to-peer transactions, we were dependent on big financial institutions to move money on our behalf through the internet. That antiquated system allowed them to censor transactions, such as donations made to media outlets reporting war crimes and donations to protest movements.

"For me, that is one of the coolest things about bitcoin...
People can potentially use it donate more anonymously to dissident groups and causes in a world where mass government surveillance threatens freedom of expression and certainly harms activists' ability to fundraise for their work, when people are afraid they could be targeted by a government for donating to a worthy cause."
source	Evan Greer

After PayPal froze WikiLeaks's donation account in 2010, WikiLeaks started accepting bicoin in 2011. From Occupy Wall Street to Ukraine, defenders of democracy have utilized permissionless cryptocurrencies to accept international donations without the risk of transactions made through financial institutions.

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I've been trying to swap out a dead computer that operates a scale but the scale software is a pain in the ass. What have you guys been up to?

I started a new job at a school district as a systems manager and one of our bigger problems is our new Windows 11 AIOs are getting stuck on a "please wait" screen at boot which, after enabling verbose, saw it's actually "Applying Computer Settings"

Slight background I came in since they were renewing the entire district, I've been with them about 6 month now and have primarily been their JAMF admin in all honesty. We use WSUS, on prem AD, and an older MDM called ZenWorks or MicroFocus. (Idk but all the docs are for XP and Win7 when I look at it..)

I've worked closely with the network engineer and have taken out any ACL or possible blocking.

It happens on Wi-Fi and ethernet. At seemingly random times, I can never consistently get it to reproduce but one room at one of our schools is having it happen about once a day.

And yes, we're investigating DNS but it all seems in order when we check.

One thing it could be is the server admin was also shouldering my job when I got there so he just simply kept the old Win10 GPOs and never did any updating or checking. I'm not in control of this but he's really helpful and is going to take a look when he can.

I've been grasping at straws and I'm not looking for answers but a bit of venting and curious if anyone else has come across the same thing because I don't have many more straws to grab at.

I just stumbled across this on Newegg and it looks like a nice board for desktops in rugged environments

I'm confused about protecting backups from ransomware. Online, people say that backups are the most critical aspect to recovering from a ransomware attack.

But how do you protect the backups themselves from becoming encrypted too? Is it simply a matter of having totally unique and secure credentials for the backup medium?

Like, if I had a Synology NAS as a backup for my production environment's shared storage, VM backups, etc, hooked up to the network via gigabit, what stops ransomware malware from encrypting that Synology too?

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

cross-posted from: https://bolha.forum/post/199189

I need indications of email servers that accept relay transmission.

The MX will point to the Microsoft Exchange server, but emails that do not exist on the MS server will be relayed to this secondary server.

I just registered another domain name that doesnt support whois privacy and I would like to hide my actual details.

How have you done this? Post office box?

From The Hacker News

Personal rant: AI is definitely NOT ready for production.

The University of Michigan says in a statement today that they suffered a data breach after hackers broke into its network in August and accessed systems with information belonging to students, applicants, alumni, donors, employees, patients, and research study participants.

I'm so absolutely sick of it.

I'm new to Windows deployments, and I need some help. I've gotten as far as setting up a new system from a Windows 11 image downloaded from MS, configuring it/installing software, and then running sysprep. I made a WinPE boot thumbdrive, but I'm stuck at capturing the Windows image part. Part of my problem is that I'm trying to make this in a VM. Is that more trouble than it's worth?

Is there an easier way to do this? I've seen people saying I can use Linux tools like Clonezilla, which sounds good to me, since I'm very comfortable with Linux-- but I read that might cause problems. One thing mentioned was licensing.

I would be deploying these images 100% onto Lenovo machines that we purchase from CDW, so I'm not sure how licensing would work. Is the license tied to the MAC? Will they auto-register once I boot them with the new image?

Thanks for anyone that takes the time to help me understand this :)

Oct 17 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) is preparing to bring Amazon.com (AMZN.O) as a customer for its 365 cloud productivity tools in a deal worth over $1 billion, news site Insider reported on Tuesday, citing an internal document and a person familiar with the matter.

The e-commerce giant has committed the amount for over five years and to secure more than one million Microsoft 365 license seats, according to the report.

Microsoft, whose shares gained nearly 1% in extended trading following the report, declined to comment. Amazon did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Amazon is expected to start setting up the new systems in early November, the report said, adding that the company currently uses a local, on premise version of Microsoft's Office products.

Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/323269

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

Hey guys,

We are struggling with our Azure joined machines used by multiple people during the day. Each time they log on to a new machine we get a helpdesk call for us to set up OneDrive / Sharepoint libraries synchronization in the client.

We know Intune can do this but Intune settings can take up to 8 hrs to propagate by which the user has already called us. This takes too long.

I've made a support call with Microsoft which has been open for a month now with what I think is a fairly straight forward question but they keep telling me they' re discussing this with their team.

Is there a scenario that sets these settings instantly that minimizes helpdesk calls? Or is this made for 1 user per device scenario's? Apart from reinstating on-prem DC's and whatnot ;)

Hope you guys can point me somewhere because Microsoft doesn't seem to..

I keep a machine around just for gaming, and I run windows on that. Periodically it needs to be refreshed from a clean install. And it's laborious work.

What are people's recommendations, for installing Windows Enterprise headless, triggering some sort of system configuration to install steam, drivers, games, networking config?

Ideally I'd like to use some declarative configuration language, but I'm open to options. My least favorite approach is to simply image and known good drive, and then have to apply updates to the known good drive. Periodically, creates more maintenance overhead.

From ItsFOSS