I worked in IBM for a bit before Notes and it was even worse. Everyone was given terminal software that connected to some mainframe to read email. The terminal didn’t even refresh so if you wanted to see if you had gotten email you had to refresh it manually. Fortunately I was only a contractor at the time so didn’t get much email although I did get one from an employee apologizing for cheating on me, and a followup saying the message was meant for someone else lol
I think JIRA is okay. I’ve used MUCH worst bug reporting software. The worst thing I can say about JIRA is that it is designed to implement scrum and IMO scrum is cargo cult programming.
The best that can be said of Sharepoint, is it could be worse, you could be using Notes.
I’ve been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I’ve been forced to use:
IBM Clearcase. Absolutely the worst dogshit source control system ever to exist. Complex, fragile, arcane, slow, network intensive. The company had to employ people fulltime on each of its sites whose only job was creating branches and mirroring repos on other sites. The operational & licensing costs of running it must be insane. Some defenders might claim “but it’s so powerful!” or “look how we can create fancy layered views” as if that excuses it for being terrible in the most basic ways. Fixing it must have been intractable because IBM Clearcase eventually produced a faster remote client that talked to a proxy of the view running on a server somewhere. More expense and complexity.
IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino. Another complex, arcane, slow, unintuitive, frustrating product by IBM (though owned by HCL now). Originally a content management system with an email / calendar with its own terminology and workflows completely divorced from any other email / calendar system in existence. Various iterations attempted to rework the front end to appear more user friendly but it was illusory - click button or two and you were confronted with dialogs that hadn’t changed in 30 years.
Internet Explorer. I’ve worked in company after company that had some really awful in-house expenses system or clock-in/clock-out or some enterprise junk that NEEDED Internet Explorer and no other browser would do because it was so badly written that it couldn’t render properly or it used an ActiveX control.
HP/Microfocus ALM. Another over-engineered, arcane, unintuitive piece of enterprise software. This time for tracking bugs, features, testing etc. Complicated and slow, heavily dependent on Internet Explorer and other deprecated Microsoft tech.
Trend antivirus. Almost every corporate antivirus is bad but this one has been the bane of my existence. I write code which does stuff like encryption and compression/decompression and this piece of shit would constantly trigger warnings and delete binaries I was trying to build and develop. When it wasn’t interfering with my work, it would just be constantly hogging CPU and slowing down disk activity.
Enterprise software in general. This crap is sold like Kirby vacuum cleaners - a pushy salesman convinces a clueless CTO to buy junk that can seemingly do everything and a sign contract for $$$. And then this stuff is there FOREVER. Management will ignore complaints and the obvious shortcomings of the system because its paid for and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
To be fair it happens here. Made a comment about far left & right being manipulated by Russian BS about Ukraine and some very tedious people started at me about how Ukraine are Nazis etc. I suppose it demonstrated my point in a roundabout way.
Not sure what the thumbs down is about. It’s right there in their own FAQ.
In fact it ends by saying - “Wine is not just an emulator” is more accurate.
I doubt many people are ever going to do what I suggested so the effort / payoff for malware writers makes it very unlikely they’d bother. They’ll just assume 99.999% of people running the binary are doing so on Windows and code accordingly. Of course anything is theoretically possible.
Read their own FAQ. It’s not an emulator in the classic sense of emulating the OS. It is however emulating the API of Windows. I quoted the pertinent line of the FAQ elsewhere and made my point clearer
I know what WINE is and the gist of “Wine is not an emulator”. I have used it extensively and for a while it even contained some of my code (not sure if it still does). But it is still emulating but not in the way people think. WINE is not emulating the operating system but it is emulating the interface that an executable interacts with Windows, aka the Win32 APIs and other DLLs.
They even touch on this in their FAQ - *That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode. *
As far as a potentially malicious executable is concerned, you can create a throwaway wine folder to run the thing and delete it as soon as it is done, e.g.
e.g.
export WINEPREFIX=~/tmpwin
winecfg
# disable wininet from libraries tab, remove Z:, unlink all desktop integration folders
wine keygen.exe
# when done...
rm -rf tmpwin
It doesn’t matter if keygen.exe is evil because it can write anything it likes to the fake C: and the fake registry and it’s blown away. As a precaution disable networking so it can’t reach out either. In the extremely unlikely event that keygen.exe had code to detect it was running under WINE, it would still be subject to the permissions of the uid you had run it as, so you could take even more precautions if you felt so inclined. You could even use a dockerized WINE if you felt like it.
I wouldn’t trust anything from a P2P site that purports to be:
Movies, audio & books are generally safe providing they use a recognized extension - mp3, mp4, pdf, mkv, aac, flac, epub etc. Stuff that runs under emulation like console games is generally safe. I say “generally” because an exploit could still be crafted to escape a popular media player or emulator and cause actual harm to your computer.
All the ads and 3rd party scripts should be considered malicious too and should be erased with an adblocker, or even better use Tor.
So basically use some common sense and if you really want some game or app, just buy the damned thing or wait for it to go on sale.
When an account is signed up, is there information such as client ip address that could also be used to spot more inauthentic activity? And more generally, sign up should probably be made resistant to automated bots by randomizing HTML layout & ids and using captchas so it’s not so easy to drive sign up through scripts.
I do front and backend work. Biggest issue I see is people not thinking through interfaces properly (e.g. efficiencies & atomicity of operations), sanitizing inputs on both sides, error handling, and putting in the appropriate validation, authorization & testing.
I don’t think any platform collapses overnight. What you have to do is do is make something “better” and engage in a campaign of attrition to get people to move over. Produce content that other visitors see and like. Submit links to that content to aggregators (e.g. Slashdot / Fark etc.). Even start submitting links on Reddit that lead over to Lemmy and so on.
Make Lemmy feel as normal as Reddit. People will get used to the interface, the quirks and perhaps stay. Every person who stays is one less for Reddit. Now “better” is doing some heavy lifting since Lemmy has some advantages (ad free, federated) and some disadvantages (inline media & limits, sign up confusion, app). The disadvantages need to be addressed and the advantages need to be made stronger.
When I was at school and we’d rent a couple of VHS tapes to watch once a week and this was one of them. It stuck in my mind even though it was a pretty terrible movie. I think the premise was great and I remember a couple of scenes from it.
As a kid I watched the Clonus Horror and watching The Island I realised it was a straight ripoff of that earlier movie. Can’t say Clonus was much good but at least it had an original premise.
I saw Judge Dredd in the cinema and hated it. Not at all faithful to the books and you just know that some studio exec said “we’re paying for Stallone to be in this picture so he’s gotta take his helmet off!”. And Rob Schneider was in it. Apparently it was a lot more violent but they cut it all to get a better rating. The Dredd movie from a few years back was awesome.
I liked Demolition Man though. Much better comic tone to it.
I think all big orgs, NGOs, news agencies should do this.
docker is part of it but not everything in and of itself. You probably need a docker compose where database, frontends, backends are separate images but possibly something more than that, kubernetes pods, and storage being separate. Probably cloud based or has cloud based backend options. I think a script could make the process easy and scale appropriately.
All governments, large NGOs, and news orgs should do this. Maybe there should be a “mastodon in a box” which is a simplified containerized version of the service which makes it easy to set up and secure.
The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.
I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.
As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.