First question which popped into my mind was, “Will they force Defender out as well?”
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it’s position to stifle competition? Again.

War is Peace. Freedom is slavery.
And now for your Five Minute Hate.

You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.

In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.

I kept hoping to see one of the drones fly up an air intake. Perhaps not the best way to damage an aircraft, but goddamn it would be epic to see one blow up from the inside. Sadly, the air intakes are probably also covered while on the ground.

He got tired of shoveling corporate shit and decided to put those skills to use for himself, shoveling chicken shit.

The short answer is, it’s what we were taught in school. Like many preferences, it’s shaped by the culture we grow up and live in.

I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Of course not, you were raised and live in a different culture; so, your preferences are different.

Ultimately, the right answer is ISO8601. It’s unambiguous and sorts well on computers. But, I don’t think any culture is teaching that as the primary way to write dates, so we’re stuck with the crappy ways.

Huh, I had been thinking about dumping Netflix. It’s been nothing but Anime and disappointment for a while now. And I’m not that much of an anime fan.

ServiceNow is very much aimed at the managers. It’s good at reporting metrics like SLAs, ticket counts and anything else management dreams up to track metrics on. The interface for analysts putting data into it is slimy shit on toast. I swear, one of the questions I plan to ask, the next time I’m interviewing for a job is, “what do you use for security case management”. If the answer is “ServiceNow” or “ServiceNow Security Incident Response (SIR)”, that’s going to be a mark against that company. The only thing worse than ServiceNow ITSM is ServiceNow SIR. It’s all the terrible design of ITSM, but with basic security case management features implemented by clueless idiots.

The entertaining question would be: what do the salaries of the new employees look like, compared to the old ones? I’d suspect that the administration is thinking they can fire a well experienced, but expensive employee and hire on a cheap replacement. However, I also suspect many of those positions are fairly specialized and they are going to end up paying to get rid of all that experience and then end up paying a premiums to hire someone with the needed experience for the position.

“the arrestment failed,” said the official

I wonder at the nature of that failure. I’d immediately think this means “the cable broke” or “the hook broke”. But, it could also mean “the pilot missed the cable and failed to respond correctly”.

I think it’s best to start with the classic mantra:
If you aren’t paying for the service, you are not the customer, you’re the product.

It’s easy to think that Discord isn’t reading your messages or listening to your calls, because the utilize End to End Encryption. And this is a good thing for them to be doing. It means that no one can intercept the conversation, as it passes over the web. However, there is one glaring loophole, the data is decrypted by the Discord app on your device. Does the Discord app then send any/all of that data up to their servers? Probably not, but they probably also have the app scan it for keywords and categorize it so that they can upload that metadata about you to their servers. Also, for public Discord channels, you can bet that they are reading, scanning, and categorizing everything on those channels. The Discord app is also collecting as much information as possible about the device you are using it on.
From their Privacy Policty:

Information about your device. We collect information about the device you are using to access the services. For example, this includes information like your IP address, operating system information, browser information, and information about your device settings, such as your microphone and/or camera.

The ultimate goal of this is to use this data to build a customer profile of you and sell that profile to advertising firms. As for how bad this is, that’s up to your personal level of paranoia. For most people, this is probably a reasonable trade off, most of the time. If you are not the type of person who needs to protect their privacy carefully (e.g. a journalist in a hostile government) and the conversation you are having isn’t all that important (e.g. talking about a video game), then it’s probably fine. But, if you are having a conversation which might actually matter or you are worried about a repressive government, then maybe pick something with a better privacy track record (e.g. Signal).

Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is good. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.

I have a 6 year old phone which gets charged overnight as I sleep. It still makes it though the day. What the heck are you running which is chewing up your battery so badly?

If the device is encrypted and single-user there is no good reason to require further login after the first.

The reason is non-repudation. Ignoring the fact that the drive’s encryption should have been handled by TPM and not be bothering the user, the drive encryption password does not establish who is using the laptop, only that they know the unlock password. Unfortunately, those unlock password are usually centrally assigned and managed, which means that they are not something that only the user knows. Also, it doesn’t have a good second factor. If the laptop is stolen, there is nothing keeping an attacker out, if they know the password. Their account, on the other hand, should have a password only the user knows. Yes, central IT can reset the password, but this creates logs which show the reset and can be used to prove that the password was reset, and who reset it. And the user’s password can be backed up with a second factor. So, a stolen laptop isn’t an easy on-ramp to the organization’s network.

As for logins after that, it gets harder to justify. OS, email and most web portal logins should be handled via SSO. For most users, this should mean that their drive gets decrypted via TPM, they type their password into the OS login prompt, deal with 2FA and that’s it. For users with admin access to stuff, there will be a separate login step when they need to elevate permissions, but that should largely be limited to IT staff and developers. For the original poster, it sounds like their organization’s IT is being run on a shoestring by someone who either doesn’t know or isn’t allowed to do it well.

Deuteronomy is originally from the Hebrew Bible. According to Jewish mythology, the book is from the sermons of Moses. Though, it’s believed to be much more recent (something like a 1000 years) than the time period where the figure of Moses (or the person(s) he was based on) would have existed. But, even taking Jewish and Christian mythologies at their word, Jesus had nothing to do with that rule. Also, Jesus probably meant for this rule to end for adherents of Christianity.

Mark 7:14-23:
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this.
15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable.
18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?
19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them.
21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder,
22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.
23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

So, feel free to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. Jesus is A-ok with that.

No. Math isn’t just doing sums, or other numeric operations. Math is the application of logic to solve problems. Part of what you should be learning, is how to break complex problems into more manageable steps and then solving those steps to solve the overall problem. And this skill carries well into lots of other areas of life, even those that don’t seem immediately “math-y”.

I’ve not returned an item over it, but I’ve often wondered if there was a market for a company which de-LEDs items.

Is it possible to move a windows install to a different drive and then install Linux on the main drive instead?

It should be possible to clone the current drive to a different drive. First and foremost though, backup any data you care about to a safe place (e.g. an external drive). Data loss is a real possibility. I’ve been in a professional context explaining to a customer just exactly how fucked they were, because they screwed up in cloning a drive. That wasn’t fun for me and it was expensive for them. Don’t be that guy.

If you have BitLocker enabled, I’d recommend disabling it. It shouldn’t cause problems; but, Microsoft software has a bad habit of giving you the middle finger when you least expect it.

The last time I did something like this, I used Yumi to create a bootable USB drive and selected a CloneZilla ISO. Once booted, you will want to do a device-device operation (WARNING: be very, very certain about the direction you are copying. If you screw that up, you will lose data. You did make a backup, right?) clone the whole disk and not just the partition. You can expand the partition with the actual OS, if you want, but leave any EFI or recovery partitions alone. There may also be a small amount of free space left on the drive (MS does this by default), leave that free.

Once the clone is complete, try booting and using it before you overwrite the old drive.

Second doubt is if I’ll have many issues daily driving Linux if I have an Nvidia card

I’m running an RTX 3080 myself and it’s been nearly flawless. That said, my next card (probably years off) is likely to be AMD just to avoid possible NVidia driver issues.

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.