The Technology blog and podcast

beware of this

Hi.

Link is below

https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/e/message/view/6746641/67602834/123ea4e109a06028d92eff5e3e59b126?utm_content=3-subject&utm_medium=email&utm_source=transactional&utm_campaign=user-email-digest

So obviously, scammers are calling saying you have a gift which is real
and after you sign for it well you are scammed.

Its really getting tricky I guess they have wized up a lot.

Comments (0)

thinking about installing google play on windows11, think again

Hi.
This appeared in my google search feed today from win11.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/windows-11-tool-to-add-google-play-secretly-installed-malware/

So google play is not part of windows 11.
There is a software package called toolbox that will declutter your windows, and install google play.
It will also install some malware which almost doesn’t do much right now.
To be honest in my opinion microsoft could fix part of this issue by adding google play as a native app on their store or make something that could do what this does or whatever.
Its a shame that a free opensource tool is abused in this way.
Now because of this we will see a lot more scrutiny on opensource software as a whole.
That could be a good thing but that will insure that companies don’t use it.
Just think for a second about that.
Because of bastards like this, we may not be able to install nvda because its a potential security risk.
We may have to buy and use jaws for everything.
The guys that make this don’t care but us users sure do.
Really should be a toolbox but who knows.

Soon enough people will say github is bad, cloudflare is bad, the cloud is bad, anything that is free is bad.
Microsoft defender is bad enough now I have to exclude my cloud drives before they are all deleted.
It would be nice if something was done and the idea continued but it won’t

Comments (0)

something to think about

If you are a cloud user that has multiple backups of stuff, good for you.
If you are one of those modern users that just uses the cloud and thats it you may want to make offline storage options, etc.
While google will probably never shutdown as will microsoft, and any large companies this could happen to anyone.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/shameful-insteon-looks-dead-just-like-its-users-smart-homes/

So in summery, a cloud company shut down suddenly taking everything with it.
No resets, no anything.
Its possible users may get back up and running but you can see my issue with a microsoft account.
Now I use one on one of the systems and while I have a pin when I pulled my new system out of sleep it required a revarification of everything for no reason.
I couldn’t even turn it off.
Thankfully it was not a laptop so I pulled the powercord and plugged it back in.
It started up and I used my pin to log back in again.
I have not retested it but I think I will have to turn off sleep signin which is unsecure but if I can’t just repin after waking up I won’t bother at all.
For myself even if I do make a microsoft account I will make a local as soon as I can even if that account stays in the system with a pin as backup.
Win11 is pushing you and 10 does actually pushh.
As long as you have a stable network its ok.
One of the things with the pandemic is that networks got upgraded to 300 by 100 instead of 100 by 20 on the basic fibre plan so that is good and nice and quite fine.
Lets hope amazon or google never shut down.

Comments (0)

Podcast 90 update

Folks,

I was notified that the RSS did not have podcast 90 on it. I checked, and I uploaded it to our other feed for the duel Independent artist shows. My mistake!

In any case, we’ll try to do better on making sure we upload to the correct account on anchor, they’ll just have to deal as I don’t know how to delete episodes.

Anyhow, if you go find the earlier post, you can download the file directory through our partner and I apologize for the inconvenience this causes you. Thanks so much for listening, participating, and reading!

Comments (0)

scramble

Hi.
Just to let everyone know that I have put a little scramble on the usual places so go and have fun

Comments (0)

discord hell

Can anyone explain why in the 9 hells I was thinking when I agreed to do discord again?
Its not like I didn’t need to do much but all hells will hit you when you do this.
Weather you are just starting out with account creation and everything I recommend you have an email program or whatever open.
One of the first things you will recieve is a message about your ip.
I don’t know what the limit is to clear that with the link but its like 30 seconds or so and just a little to fast for my liking.
So basically by the time I tried this the first 3 times the links were expired.

Next h captcha.
Who made it, a baby in nappies or what?
Seriously, so first I had to find and click the link for the accessibility cookie which didn’t appear to work the first time and well does now.
No indication I had made it but still it was in mail.
Next save that file to somewhere you won’t get it lost like to an important file on your dropbox or something.
There isn’t any way you can automatically get it back if you lose it and you will need that link so save the file as html and then it will work.
Once you set cookies and such and get your account for discord all setup and check all the settings.
The only thing to remember is that alt shift f4 is minimise and alt f4 is exit.
That stumpped me for a bit.
Still not sure if I will use it as such but I am crashmaster #6488 if you care to bother looking me up.
I have it here, now I don’t think I will ever really run it but I have it now sitting about on my ssd chewing another 100mb space.
I made my account ages back when I thought I’d use it but oh well.
Discord has 2step auth but I don’t see its needed unless for whatever reason someone hacks into your laptop on the road or your mobile gets stolen or something.
Phones have qr codes anyway.
One thing is after logging into discord unless you actively logout its going to just do it no matter what without any interaction so once you exit and relaunch it will do it.
It also checks and auto updates on launch.
As for the other cast unsure when or if I will do it.
I have various eye issues and one of these is when the light gets in thhe wrong angle or straight on is I get a headake of massive size.
So the best time to seriously work is between 8pm and 2am in the morning.
This will probably pass but it may be a winter project

Comments (0)

another optimisation run

Hi all.
Well this is just a note that due to downtime at the end of a sunday night I found some extra things to do with site performance.
While looking through jetpack I found another free boost plugin made by the jetpack maintainers.
Things like only loading images that people see, adjusting when certain tasks are handled, and when css is processed and how all that works.
It may not increase performance much but the latest tests show that mobile performance has gone up from 39% to about 47%, and desktop performance has gone from 83% to 91% whatever that means.
Hopefully this will stop the sitekit complaining about things.
So there is an extra boost icon.
Next you will notice a themes warning in health status.
Have no idea why that is how it is.
I cleared all the themes managed to clear 1 to many so put an older theme back, in case the other one fails.
However the tracker assumes I still have to many themes but I don’t so ignore it.

Edit, managed to reinstal 2022 and cleared the extra fixes I had put in place so now the issue is gone.
I activated then reactivated both themes and it looks like it is fixed.
I regenerated the css database again as instructed and it should all work fine enough.

Next, this is mostly for rss feeds.
Some posts at least 6 scheduald for release at certain dates either were never released or the release soon dashboard is glitched and never showed them as such.
Luckily editing their status or publishing info, immediately canceling the edit and republishing them made them disappear from that status.
As usual I need to check user counts but there hasn’t been any issue even when ipstack complains about request overload.
I may regenerate the css boosted files every so often like when I do a site run which is probably once a year if that since the thing manages itself.
The next is podcasts.
Currently thinking about a programming environment runthrough, there may be a couple audio games on the way down the road and well a radio unboxing in the following weeks.
One thing I need to seriously try to redo is get on dischord.
It seems a popular chat panel system for the blind gaming community as well as unigram.
However I’ll probaby do dischord first.
Laters all.

Comments (0)

Kevin Mitnick presenting a webinar from Knowb4

Knowb4 sent me this webinar notice which I will be attending. Here is what you’ll learn:

• • Why you shouldn’t always trust legitimate providers like Microsoft Teams
• • How something as innocuous as an office printer can be weaponized
• • Why pre-texting bots may be your organization’s biggest threat
• • Kevin’s top 3 tips for preventing cyber attacks
• • Eye-opening hacking demos you won’t want to miss

The time the webinar starts is 11 am PT.

Please grab your seats. I’ll be there, I hope you will too.

In this exclusive webinar Kevin Mitnick, KnowBe4’s Chief Hacking Officer and The World’s Most Famous Hacker, and Perry Carpenter, KnowBe4’s Chief Evangelist & Strategy Officer, show you why your users should think twice before trusting even the most established platforms.

More in the link and edit boxes to register. Enjoy!

Comments (0)

Time change

Hello everyone. This is a note to indicate that we’ve changed the time on the blog to match Pacific time for standard time.

I’ll be starting to blog again, I’ve been lackluster at best, but i’m still here. I hope that you find the blog of interest and make it a great day!

Comments (0)

Don’t miss what’s happening People on Twitter are not the first to know.

Hi all.
Well I thought about posting this thing on my own blog but thought I should really release something on here which is not behind the scenes.
I have been reading titles and articles I am interested in, but due to the current apocolipse, I just don’t have the energy I once had to well actually post.
With each country and its dealings with covid, I have noticed the following 2 lines when visiting twitter.
Don’t miss what’s happening
People on Twitter are the first to know.

Now this appeared on twitter way before covid.
Don’t miss what’s happening
People on Twitter are the first to know.
Hmmm don’t miss whats happening, yeah a lot happens on social media.
People on platform x are the first to know.
Oh yeah?
So does that mean that everyone on social networking site x know before the media.
And is all the information on that site the best information?
Suggestions from governments to local media to even the lockdowns which exist here and other places would suggest not.
The line should read
Don’t miss what’s happening
People on Twitter are not the first to know.
Neither are they on facebook, youtube, etc.
Hell I wouldn’t even trust my email, my friends are not the first to know.
Now before I get hated on, I don’t trust the government, or the media, or anyone online but at least the government and media are official.
Maybe their social networking platforms.
But social networks in general while we as humans depend on them are as trustworthy as spam email is.
There is no verification on social media, no fact checking.
There are all sorts of groups.
Social media has enabled us to associate with who we want but the down side is if you want to stick your head in a bag and say obama is an alien parasite then you can.
No one is stopping you.
Yet social media in some cases updates faster than news so we actually use it more, so does the media but even so raw data is raw data.
Especially if it is just that.
This text by the way is my own opinion, its not fact and I admit it here obviously.
But no one is going to jump down my throat if I down out lie through my teeth and trousers.
At worst maybe I get my account banned from here but thats it.
You can be whoever you are on the social network just like you can be on email or the net with little to no checks or ballences if you wish to maliciously or by accident screw up.
So yeah its dangerous.
We consume a lot of the net.
Not saying its dangerous but if we were so scared about our privacy one thinks we wouldn’t post random garbage.
Now in some countries people don’t unlike some of us westerners have the luxury to just shoot off our mouths at just about everything and maybe its because we are to comfortable but who knows.
The net aint free, in fact the average 100 megabyte connection costs most of a hundred bucks there about so it has to be more than that.
Mobile phones, where you live depending, well data aint cheap,in fact it can be darn right expensive and roming even more so.
Boredom maybe but I doubt its the issue.
Maybe its because we can post what we want to people that want to hear it and can block people that don’t so we continue to believe what we want and screw everyone else and maybe thats it in a nutshell.
No one is going to call me out on this.
I am unsure about the answer, but I do think that places like twitter shouldn’t be so blatent with their titles of their pages.
It may have meant something back before, but this is now.
Social media while being one of the best things out is also is as dangerous as a nuclear reacter meltdown or a firework held in the hand.
Its not even the legal thing either, its commen sence we are talking about.
You don’t yell a certain black racest word in public without getting a swift kick to the chops.
But if I chose to I could do it freely.
If I got banned from my whatever site I could make another.
I know rules on the net are hard and well we don’t want massive control but its got its problems.
The fact you can post what you want and like without any action is a bit of a concern.
Even on social media I am making up profiles of people in my head without even meeting them and then when speaking with them later realise its different on a completely different level.
I have also fell into that trap on email and other forums being banned from some of them after mouthing off without thinking.
I was on my system and it was a nameless list and I lost it for a second.
After one of these big blowups, I have learned that text is really poor method of communication.
Its fast and small, and officient but thats about it.
Its not video or voice and it can lead to other issues.
For example your average whatever domain website could be registered somewhere, stored somewhere and its data stored somewhere else.
Ie your .com site may not be american or you are not on a american server.
The net is not a binary on and off thing its more than that.
Sadly its something some of us haven’t got round to thinking about that well.
The fact we trust an unknown user on a site we don’t know about is also an issue.
Then there are the terms on social media.
Lets get one thing straight.
None of the people you add on social media or the net, or email online or interact online with are ever your friends!
They could be mass murderers for all you know thats why we have scammers.
The social network idea sounded nice but its a pipedream at best and dangerous at worst.
I have many people that follow me, so at most they are subscribers but not my friends.
I have a lot of people I email, including friends but if they had been only online then they wouldn’t be my friends.
No one on the net is your friend they are just people.
No one you chat with on a forum or anything is your friend.
No one online at all no matter who they are is your friend.
If you physically meet them, chat to them, have some parties or go out, over a long time, say 6 months to a year then yeah maybe then or at least you can trust that link a bit more.
A friend is not a follow link, unfriending is unfollowing someone but it really doesn’t make sence.
Maybe some terms on social media need to be changed.
Friends could be followers or subscribers like on youtube.
I know we want to make it a nice friendly place but that ship sailed in 2007 or maybe even before that when all those ransom ware writers started making our lives hell and its only worse.
And until we learn that the next voice in the void can be totally trusted without question we will have issues.
Even those I know online, I trust to not do or do a certain thing but its not like I’d fully trust them.
Offline, its the same but because I have physically met them maybe more so, maybe not.
Now once your social text chat becomes more, like a voice call via zoom or skype, or maybe you trust them to give them your phone or cell number and you really talk for ages, maybe.
I have several methods of communication and use them a lot.
Nothing is secure as such but just basic commen sence security.
At the front of all this stuff is my email.
Its open to the net, anyone can use it.
I don’t mind who has it.
Same with my twitter though I don’t use it as such.
If I need voice I use zoom or skype.
If its a business and its local like in my country then yeah I’ll call them offline and conduct my business the old fashioned way.
Online though, most people only see my email.
My email aint timezone dependant.
I can block a certain person, or not respond to them.
If I need someone to get more involved than that then I have a skype I can use, or zoom or something like that.
So if it gets a bit more than that, I have my mobile phone and my landline.
For obvious reasons I don’t want my landline or even mobile phone known, I mean both aren’t hidden or anything but even so.
Rarely if ever unless its a business do I like to share my phone or mobile numbers which are offline contacts.
If it goes belly up online, I can easilly take action to secure myself, change my address, block people.
But if its on my phone or even someone comes about physically then its a bit more of an issue.
Now with that in mind if its a local business and its in my country I like to deal with the person direct because of the same reason as I just outlined.
We trust to much in what we read and lets face it reading is the thing here.
So when you look at your next twitter or social media post don’t take it at face value.

Comments (0)

Facebook has started returning

Just a note that I’m in a clubhouse room, and they were mentioning that Facebook is up. Because of the Internet DNS issues, it may take 6-12 hours if not a day for all of this to be resolved. Security Now! will have a post-mortem report tomorrow on the show.

Comments (0)

supporters webpage

Hi.
I have a supporters/ partners webpage.
It can be found here.
https://wp.me/P1ssMG-1v6
Currently I have the blind perspective and top tech tidbits magazine listed.
Sadly perspective hasn’t returned a request but tidbits has.
The site will be featured in the next issue as a 1 off and this site is classified as a supporter/ partner.
www.toptechtidbits.com/partners.html is the site for the profiles.

I will be working on more casts but these may take a bit.

Comments (0)

the vale complete playthrough

Hi well just uploaded the vale playthrough which I have been wanting to get out for ages.
Look at the blindvms page.
Its on the cutt.us/blindvms, page as always.
Anchor.fm and mixcloud have it to.
Anchor has it in full episode form at least 6 hours though, and mixcloud has it in part form because you can only upload 1 file at a time.
In addition I have made this have its own folder on keybase.
https://keybase.pub/shauneve/valeplaythrough/
There are 5 episodes numbered.

The first is the introduction and is basically the demo.
The second is rivertown itself.
The third and 4th should have been 1 but I had to end it prematurely because dad started mowing the grass and I had to stop due to noise.
Part4 is crow itself and part 5 is basically what was left.
This ends this current itteration of audiogame work and it looks fine.

Comments (0)

my responce to recent comments and posts

Hi.
Well for whatever reason my comments just don’t take and not sure why.
Also I can’t seem to be able to comment it just wants me to sign in nothing wrong but oh well I have 2 things to comment on.
1. zoom.
I have never had issues with zoom and use my google account.
I like google knowing about my meetings and calendars notifying me, usefull as hell.
I don’t do many meetings though.
I have never had a zoom bomb but maybe I was just lucky.
Zoom is new, but yeah I am in 2 camps about sharing information with google.
Its actually not that bad, by going on google/amazon/facebook, etc you are sharing information.
What information were you sharing exactly.
Email addresses can be easily gotten its after all the main form of communication.
Addresses and phone numbers while a little harder, well address can be gotten easily enough.
Phone numbers I am unsure but probably easily enough.
I’d be concerned if my credit card was being sold or something like that but its hard to get to pissed about whats already in public record.
Becides we share most of that just by being online.
The apple things yeah I have read about it but I can’
‘t be any judge as even my little country is not as stable as some would like and some of those are on the other side and others are on the other side and I am in the middle.
Any tech can be used incorectly by anyone.
Even the most secure can be hacked, have we forgotten about all those breaches in helifax and yahoo?
At any rate it appears that you would have to hack apple and the databases in question and somehow bypass the human checks so no one notices to actually modify the images.
Apple aint going to scan all images it would impact on performance and becides I’d doubt they would last long, no company is that stupid even the most corrupt.
So the only thing is look before you click.
And if you wana go there, use a vpn and don’t use your phone not that I condone any of this shit of course.

Comments (0)

The Security box email list

I now have the list created for the Security Box. If you’d like to join, please go to the mix web site and look for a link to subscribe in the social media section of the site.

I’d like to thank our main manager Herbie for allowing me to host the list there, and I hope to see all of you soon!

If you can’t find the link, or don’t want to use a web form, send a blank email to:

and follow the prompts by email to confirm.

I’ll be posting within a few days. Thanks for joining! I’ll also continue to blog here too.

Comments (0)

An email sent by One Medical exposed hundreds of customers’ email addresses

I think this was an honest mistake, which sadly made the headlines. I personally would have used an email list, ran by mailing list software, to contact those people. I would not use the “to” or “BCC” field to do it, and some mailing list software allow you to personalize your email specific to them. Check this out.

The primary care startup admitted the mistake was not caused by a security breach.

Source: An email sent by One Medical exposed hundreds of customers’ email addresses

Comments (0)

The Security and tech podcast email lists

I’ve posted this to the Mix’s listeners list where my programs are broadcasted or aired, and I’m curious if you guys are interested.

Here’s the email I’ve sent.

---

I’ve been thinking lately about a list specifically for the security box and technology podcasts whereby interested listeners can subscribe to the list, get articles I may cover for the podcast, we can discuss them, and the like. I’ll post this to the blog to see if there are any comments, and then I can move forward.

If you’re interested in such a list, let me know.

I could install a forum, but with Spam rampant on those, it would have to be constantly monitored.

You can also choose to subscribe to the blog and get things delivered to you. Let’s see what ahppens with this one.

---

If you’re interested, send me an email, and I’ll either host the list through this domain, or my lists.jaredrimer.net domain. I can send articles I’ll be covering, and I’ll even subscribe using my tech address instead of my list specific one.

Comments (0)

Its time for patch Tuesday, 50 vulnerabilities this month and some good news to share this time

Hello folks and welcome to patch tuesday week and I think we’ve got some excellent news coming out of Redman this week.

First, Krebs and Trend Micro are both reporting that Internet Explorer will be retiring this month on June 15th. If you’re still using IE, its time to change, because now it won’t be supported any longer.

More good news is that we only have 50 patches across the variety of Microsoft software to fix, 6 of which are being exploited now, and several reported through the ZDI program.

CVE-2021-31985 and CVE-2021-31978 were the two vulnerabilities reported, at least one affect Defender.

Want to read the entire article of whats new? There are two to choose from, so please pick the one you want.

• June Patch Tuesday: Internet Explorer Finally Laid to Rest Trend Micro
• Microsoft Patches Six Zero-Day Security Holes Krebs On Security

Want to comment? Feel free.

Comments (0)

podcasts and rss

Hi.
This started with me upgrading my brouser from old waterfox which has had issues lately back to firefox.
I descovered that in chromium and firefox rss just didn’t work at all.
Currently there are several options.
1. install or get a portable version of waterfox 20.08 or firefox below version 64 so firefox 52 will work.
If you use all windows from windows xp through to 8 of course you can use internet explorer.
The issue is of course that microsoft is retiring internet explorer next year so no dice with that.
We will cover the addons I use.
Note, this does not cover rss feeds for subscription.
If you have chrome you may use this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en
or this
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pnjaodmkngahhkoihejjehlcdlnohgmp?hl=en
Just add to chrome as you would an extention by selecting add to chrome and the add to chrome button that will pop up then close and reopen your rss.
This is shoyu rss and atom preview.
pronounced show you rss and atom preview.
The link is this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shoyu-rssatom-feed-previe/ilicaedjojicckapfpfdoakbehjpfkah?hl=en

A note to this addon.
After adding this in chrome/edge /brave/ whatever other rss you have, your feed will open in a new tab.
When you close the tab it will have a spare window which you must close.
I don’t know why that does that but it works.
For firefox
go to addons.mozilla.org and search for rss then I want my rss.
Link is
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
I want my rss does what it says, it will actually display the rss as you are used to in the same window and it will work.
To add an extention to firefox, select add to firefox link somewhere on the page, under the addon heading then hit alt a several times till a checkbox for private windows appears, check or uncheck as you want then hit ok then close and reopen.
Small note.
These are not rss apps, this tutorial doesn’t cover rss readers, news agrogaters, or podcatchers.
This is to simply restore the lost functionality for reviewing feeds.
I don’t subscribe to feeds or casts rather I download indevidual files.
In the case of chromium this will render the rss feed as a standard webpage and not a pile of junk.
With firefox you won’t be needing to download and save the rss file or anything like that.
To be honest I don’t understand why the removal but oh well thats progress I guess.

On the subject of articles, I have been reading a lot of them over the week.
Like a lot of places the local hospital or rather one of the country’s hhealth services got ransommwared.
The person that got this on their system clicked a link in an email.
We can assume this person was probably expecting something rather than being dumb and clicked in error because this trick is old as the hills.
Systems are still being restored but its not that easy.

In other news using an app and taking down encripted networks, the fbi was able to arrest several gangsters and bust several gangs world wide which is a win.
Sadly, as is the case, there is probably another attack vector out there.
No panic just yet but now the fbi has an app to handle the encripted networks, it means that everyone’s network could potentially be gotten into.
The method or rather idea is now live and the fbi can’t really stop someone else using the same concept to get control of who knows what.
Last night a glitch appears to have caused a lot of the net to shut down for an hour due to an issue with a large cloud previder though they are not saying anything.

I will continue to read things.
Please note, when adding posts the latest wordpress puts it in a category called general updates and announcements.
Please uncheck this because if you don’t the post will not appear at all.
On another small note if you are a sighted reader please check if the mobile view works, I did doodle with the theme today and it looks ok but either wordpress or the current theme we have.
Currently there are reports of small letters and elements to close, though there was another issue last year.
I assume it just works but oh well.

Please note if you notice doubled letters my keyboard probably needs cleaning.
I havn’t done it yet but its something I need to try to actually do.

Comments (0)

Telephone voice mail update

It was announced this afternoon that the old telephone numbers will be discontinued by the end of the day.

This means that callers wishing to utalize telephone voice mail access will need to start calling 602-887-5198 as soon as possible.

As I put in the podcast at the beginning, I mentioned it could be a day, a couple of days, even longer … but we didn’t know.

Now, we know.

Please make a note of the number if you wish to leave your comments by traditional phone. The number should still be working like the old one and I don’t need to make any changes.

Thanks for your attention in this matter.

Comments (0)

Older Posts »

go to sections menu

---