2.5 Admins

Secure boot is compromised on hundreds of devices, Amazon’s desperate attempt to make money from Alexa, and how to decide which open source software on GitHub to trust.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from 5 big device makers old and related Amazon’s paid Alexa i...

How and why the recent huge Windows outage was caused by a bad CrowdStrike update and how it could have been avoided, a hilariously dumb ESXi vulnerability, and using SAS drives with a PCIe card.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News A closer look at what caused the CrowdStrike Windows crashes Ransomware gangs are loving this dumb b...

How a Bitcoin mine made life in a Texas town absolutely miserable, why paying for extended support for end of life Windows versions is just doubling down on technical debt, and the best way to manage router redundancy.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Inside the ‘Nightmare’ Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoi...

A widely-used login system is still using MD5 which is bad news, miscreants took over some domains when they moved from Google to Squarespace, Linksys’ sloppy app isn’t a huge problem but is a bad sign, and why backing up an Android phone in one go is pretty much impossible without root.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes  ...

We didn’t get to all of your questions for our Episode 200 free consulting special so here is another full episode of your questions and our answers. Our thoughts on a new UK smart devices law, backing up 30TB off-site, how to learn ZFS, SMB vs other ways to share files, and backing up secrets.   Smart devices: new law helps citizens to choose secure products FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS FreeBS...

Why we didn’t mention pocket fluff when we talked about USB-C charging issues, Microsoft abandons its promising underwater data center experiment and didn’t monitor it’s SSL certs, why you should be careful which WordPress plugins and themes you install, an Australian ISP’s tech debt comes due , and remoting into desktop Linux.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an a...

Vulnerabilities in Asus hardware make us think there should be some regulations about what can be sold as a router, a VPN feature that we hadn’t heard of is removed from Windows, and why we don’t believe that Microsoft will ever take security as seriously as they claim.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Hi...

It’s our episode 200 free consulting special. Jim and Allan answer your questions about hard drive availability, USB-C robustness, ZFS performance on a VPS, cold storage with a 2.5″ form factor, how we gained our level of knowledge, disk enclosure issues, and monitoring Windows servers.             Tailscale Tailscale is an easy to deploy, zero-config, no-...

How to prepare for your loved ones to have the access they need if the worst unexpectedly happens, Joe’s weird issues with wireless access points, and dealing with email accounts that shouldn’t exist.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion After you die, your Steam games will be stuck in legal limbo EAP225 AC13...

Microsoft is tightening up SMB security in Windows which might break access to your old NAS, a Cogent root-server mysteriously goes out of sync without them spotting it, and protecting hard drives from electromagnetic pulses.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News Installing Windows 11 24H2 might mean binning that old NAS A root-serv...

Linux kernel developers were infected with malware for 2 years, another nail in the coffin of proper federated email as Exchange Server moves to a subscription model, followup on zfsbootmenu and IPv6, and learning unfamiliar topics.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Linux maintainers were infected for 2 years by SSH-d...

Microsoft’s new Copilot+ feature will record everything you are doing on your computer for some reason, but it will only work on new Arm hardware for now. Plus Apple’s weird iOS bug that restored deleted files and photos, and sharing files over the Internet from a NAS on your LAN.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Allan was on...

Why Windows 10 might be gaining users at Windows 11’s expense, an old DHCP option is a potential risk for VPN users, we should probably say “renting” rather than “buying”domains, and avoiding tracking when using IPv6.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Jim was on Late Night Linux again   News Has Windows 1...

Mastodon’s link previews are causing downtime for web servers without properly configured caching, locking down DNS inside Windows networks, why using write-once backup media is a bad idea, and increasing the performance of a Microsoft SQL Server with SSDs and ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Jim was on Late Night Linux  ...

How a smart TV broke a Windows machine on the same network by pretending to be hundreds of different TVs, Jim’s alarming theory about AI malware, and encrypting offsite backups.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Is your PC having trouble? Your smart TV might be to blame   Free Consulting We were asked about...

ZFS on root is back in the Ubuntu installer but there’s a better way to do it, next-generation hard drives are proving to be reliable but prices are going up thanks to storage-hungry AI, why getting started with ZFS is really easy, and the best filesystem for a single SSD (take a guess).   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes How to upstr...

Why updating iPhones in their sealed boxes might have some downsides, Amazon’s “AI” turned out to just be people, LLMs hallucinating imaginary dependencies is potentially a security risk, Aruba backs up its government data to the Internet Archive, and disk queue schedulers in Linux.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes  ...

A backdoor has been found in xz-utils, OpenZFS improves ZVOL performance on Linux, Twitter devs fail at regex, and adding SATA ports to a home NAS.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Hybrid Cloud Show is a new show that’s part of the Late Night Linux Family!   News backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise OpenZFS...

Glassdoor seemingly doesn’t understand its raison d’etre, Telegram wants to cheap out on sending verification codes, law enforcement makes YouTube give them details of everyone who watched certain videos, and tuning a low end VPS to host a blog.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Users ditch Glassdoor, stun...

The FreeBSD version of TrueNAS is going away, a major Apple antitrust case begins, encrypted LLM chat responses are relatively easy to read, and scaling a fleet of FreeBSD hosts with jails.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version zVault Apple’s antitrust fight begins US DOJ’s blo...

Prison officials took away inmate student laptops for no good reason, Warner Bros. ruined gamers’ experiences, Google’s terrible office WiFi, and managing gold images.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion An engineer bought a prison laptop on eBay. Then 1,200 incarcerated students lost their devices Devs left...

Roku stops its users watching TV until they accept a new ToS, the line between journalism and computer fraud and abuse, and when using jumbo frames on a network makes sense.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News Roku disables players and TVs with attempt to coerce arbitration agreement Over 15,000 hacked Roku accounts sold for 50¢ e...

The boss of Nvidia says kids don’t need to code because they can just use AI, companies sell their users’ data to train models, and why 2.5Gbps networking probably isn’t worth bothering with.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Jensen Huang says kids shouldn’t learn to code — they should leave it...

More cameras leak footage, Avast is fined for selling user data, a vending machine quietly scans students’ faces, using a small NVMe drive with ZFS, and taking snapshots of VMs.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News “So violated”: Wyze cameras leak footage to strangers for 2nd time in 5 months Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘pr...

Why it’s not a great idea to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, quantum computing hype has been replaced by AI, toothbrushes can’t be part of a botnet, Google has killed cached search results, and testing your backups.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “...