To summarize my comment on your post of this article on lemmy.ml:
Literally who?
How in the absolute fuck does any group not involved in hosting the largest fediverse instances even begin to justify looking for $1.3 Million in funding?
I’ve used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I’d admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.
When I’m making anything else from Windows, I’ve always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.
Meanwhile I’m here laughing in Jerboa. No fancy auto refresh for me.
I’m probably overdue for checking out other lemmy apps.
Unfortunately LastPass had some issues over the past years with hacking where encrypted vaults were stolen. Between myself and my friends in tech, I know of a few conpanies that ditched it after that.
For individual/personal use, I’d reccomend KeePass (whatever fork of it is up to date and maintained lately) and using somethung like syncthing to sync it across devices. That may not be super user friendly for non-technical users though, and I’m not sure how well it works with iPhones.
Wow, what a trick! Much exploit!
“deceived victims into running PowerShell as an administrator and pasting in malicious code”
Once again, people are the weakest link.
Vaguely interesting delivery method. Spearphishing emails with an attached PDF with the instructions and the code to copy paste in it. Claims that it’s the way to “register windows”. Maybe putting it in a PDF bypasses email filtering?
A user blocking an instance does not block the users from that instance from interacting with the user who blocked.
It’s not well explained, but my understanding is that an instance block just prevents communities from that instance, and posts made by users on thay instance, from showing for the user that blocked the instance. Comments from users of that instance still show for the blocking user, and the block is one way anyway.
because it shuts out everyone on that instance.
But it doesn’t. Unless they’ve changed the functionality in the last 3 major revisions or so, a user blocking an instance blocks all posts from that instance. Not the users or their comments on other posts.
It’s an easier way than blocking each community from that instance individually.
Anything supposedly said by “Anonymous” as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate “outlets” for their statements… but there’s also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit “anon news outlets” and little script kiddies running around. It’s important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more “serious” factions.
Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you’re in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.
No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there’s the fact that more than one of them have “serious black hat hacker” backgrounds.
Going to be one wild ride.
My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It’s a complete game. It’s in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don’t release major updates without multiple ones being added.
Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I’m sure there was more, but those were the standout things.
The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that’s only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn’t find through internal testing. Once it’s balanced and stable (maybe a year), they’ll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).
Then they’ll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.
Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn’t have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.
But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.
Everyone keeps labelling GabeN as the only one holding VALVe to standards, but by his own admission he’s more of the equivalent of a board member now, not deeply involved in the day to day anymore. I think the only ones that truly know his level of involvement would be people at VALVe.
What I’m getting at is that I have the same concerns about what will happen after he passes, but I don’t think he’s the only person standing in the way of VALVe going full corporate.
In my experience the “privacy and security” argument is a smokescreen.
The real reason is that it makes someone else responsible for zero-days occuring, for the security of the tool, and for fixing security problems in the tool’s code. With open source tools the responsibility shifts to your cybersecurity team to at least audit the code.
I don’t know about your workplace, but there’s no one qualified for that at my workplace.
A good analogy: If you build your house yourself, you’re responsible for it meeting local building codes. If you pay someone else to build it, you can still have the same problems, but it’s the builder’s responsibility.
Windows and Office are incredibly easy to generate an activation key for using MASgrave. As I understand it, it tricks MS into giving you a valid Windows key, but the Office side does some trickery to fake activation.
Either way, very easy and no need to install shady cracked versions. Just install like normal then use MASgrave after.
If you want to go more legit for any reason, you can find OEM key resellers for Windows (and for Office too I think). OEM Windows keys are only good for one install, but they’re also only around $30.
There’s also a ton of benefits to installing Windows yourself instead of using the manufacturer’s version with even more added bloatware from the manufacturer. There’s a lot you can do to roll back Microsoft’s bullshit through customizing the installer ISO yourself. Unfortunately it’s pretty technical though. Not something easily explained in a single comment.
As a note to myself: When I get around to upgrading to Windows 11, record all the shit I do so there’s at least something vaguely reputable for the community instead of bits of good info across tons of otherwise crap SEO spam articles. Remember to cite the sources too.
Don’t feel dumb! This is just normal learning!
Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren’t used by anything official.
Windows’s weird “psuedo folders” thing it does with “Documents” etc is something else entirely.