blackbeard

Yes they're factory pressed Windows administrators who are to be honest fucking useless unless it comes to pointing at someone else but that's another story...they're being replaced piecemeal by bits of Ansible and Linux machines.

Realistically we don't want to deploy a host file and AFAIK it doesn't work anyway; we want to control the network itself which we do via firewalls and DNS but it's a compromise between flexibility (our users still need to use the internet) and security.

We're already doing that but it's hard work keeping up with it all.

You can, but we have 450 workstations and about 600 servers.

That somewhat multiplies the problems.

I think that depends on what data people manage to sue out of them and then react upon...

process explorer: htop, vmstat, iostat.

procmon: strace.

tcpview: netstat, wireshark.

They're all pretty easy to use.

We have an enterprise edition VM in test and it appears to react the same as Pro at least. Haven't tried home.

What is scary is the lack of GPOs to turn this stuff off which you'd expect in an enterprise product. Technically we can't apply policy to make this compliant with our data protection requirements.

Their funeral to be honest.

Possible. I suspect anything interesting will be C++ however, possibly by design.

You're right hence the extensive reverse engineering. I think you can expose call graphs and assembly with SoftICE or some product like that and infer which windows API calls are used so that's a starting point. However some of the things that talk are going to be heavily optimised binaries, code signed and difficult to poke inside.

The problem is that it's TLS encrypted traffic going from a black box component to a remote black box service so it's pretty hard to determine what is going over the channel. Without extensive and complex reverse engineering, you can only infer what is going over it and draw some hypotheses that need to be tested. I think that the article is spot on with respect to that.

And of course there is no word from the horse's mouth (Microsoft) at all on ANYTHING related to this. Silence is always worrying.

They do by default: http://i.imgur.com/NSQs5Ux.png

I've been on Windows 10 for a couple of days now.

VPN traffic doesn't leak if the default route is the VPN interface. I tried it and my firewall went silent apart from the tunnel.

I have absolutely no fucking idea what it is sending out though. It's always talking to something. I've turned everything off that is documented and use a local account and remove-appxpackage'd everything. Sorry but this release is a write off. My host/vm relation is being inverted to Ubuntu as a host this week rather than a guest.

If I don't know what it's doing, how can I trust it?

You don't.

Also car user.

The battery in my Fiat is the one that was in it when I got it in 2006.

Use python or go instead.

I have log paper and lab notebooks stashed away in case of armageddon or something. I like paper still, a lot.

I use both. The friction is way lower on the Linux side of things. Sure you can knock up a 50 line powershell script to thing X but if you do it in 97 lines of python it takes less time because you didn't have to download a later version of management tooling which then required a reboot followed by half an hour arguing with script signing followed by an hour of trying to scan through KB articles to work out why your PS script didn't run in task scheduler only to find it was an obscure compatibility flag followed by it failing after two days because a CIFS share suddenly went offline...

And today visual studio 2013 crashed on me a relatively low 11 times...

Oh and I had to fix a script that tried to deploy sql server instances and pretty much entirely fucked up my workstation.

This is every day when your product gets large.

Good points :)

You need Windows 8.1 for it due to the Hyper-V and WDDM dependencies.

Easier to understand than the American/Imperial one :)

I'm not sure it is universally consistent with that. I saw it change for a Metro app in Windows 8.1.

The problem is that we deliver everything via the web so people will barely notice if we move our stuff over to an alternative platform from Windows.

Microsoft knows it has lock in from a lot of people and it will abuse this. I think their aggressive cloud move with Office 365 and Azure's PaaS stuff is an example of how they are moving this forward further yet retaining a subscription. NOTHING is portable away from them without significant cost.

Edit: just the effort I started two weeks ago to move all my data to platform neutral formats and shift to Linux is less than 50% of the way through and that's just one person with 20 years of data.

If someone builds this into a database engine it'd be a big win.

Please note that the manifest id above (cw5n1h2txyewy) may change if they update the app rendering the rule invalid.

It is indeed. That was my point. It's difficult to discern megacorporations from their dystopian film counterparts now.

Use Powershell: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj554843%28v=wps...

You can get the rules and enable/disable them easily.

This is a big problem for us in the finance sector. We're SOL when it comes to Windows 10. It's a complete dead end if we can't lock stuff down with GPO.

There are meetings taking place to work out what to do about this in various companies and the general answer so far is jump the sinking platform ship and "thank fuck we wrote everything in Java". Some of the big guys are already rolling out RHEL desktops.

I'm starting to think I need to worry about things getting out of my firewall more than things getting in.

Sounds like Google is turning into Umbrella Corporation: http://umbrellacorporation.jp/aboutus.html

Life sciences, life extension, military, information, telecommunications all under one umbrella company.

I don't think what we do is very interesting so it only attracts people who are shit or weird. I fit into the latter category :)

This.

You can't iterate through something without parameters and do the same. Look what happened to me: http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg

Mostly that bad or worse at the moment. I think we've got around a 1-2% hit rate through agents and job sites.

Despite being finance sector, we don't expect any qualifications or finance experience, just people who know their shit. We do a "pin the data structure on the problem" thing. Even people with fair amounts of experience rarely know the difference between a list, a set and a dictionary.

Some guy, supposedly a technical architect, just sat there and smiled awkwardly through the questions and didn't answer them.

It's actually quite depressing until you realise you could probably walk out and can another £30k because you can actually do this stuff.