sylver_dragon

And people wonder why CCTV footage is always low res and grainy. I worked at a site with something north of 100 cameras and a requirement for 30 days storage. Their server room was mostly just racks and racks of hard drive chassis all wired up to the DVR system.

Step one: Document, Document, Document.
Step Two: Did we cover documentation yet?
Step Three: Complain, with documentation, to the apartment management.
Step Four: Document.

Recordings such as video and audio are useful. Just keeping a log of all such interactions can help as well. But, you want to have the documentation to prove your side of things. If things go really sideways and you end up in court, the judge won't give a fuck about what you say, only what you can prove. Be ready to prove your claims. As we say in the DFIR world, "logs or it didn't happen". Then, start complaining to management. And document (keep a written log, you probably won't be able to record) your interactions with management. All logs should include date, time, who you spoke with, what you spoke about and any actions which management said they would take or actions you said you would take. If it's an option, keep your communications with management in email. Both the sending and received emails will be timestamped and the headers will provide a reasonable record showing that the emails were to or from management controlled email servers and addresses. And they log what was talked about quite nicely.

Ultimately, the goal is to move this from being your problem to management's problem. And it's possible that your problem neighbor is also someone else's problem. If management has three tenants all complaining about the same neighbor, they have more impetus to take action against the problem. Of course, this assumes a neutral management, which can be an open question. But, this is likely the least costly way to resolve the issue.

So, he finally took Andrew Llyod Webber's advice from Jesus Christ Superstar and popped into the age of mass communication.

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.

And then imagine what is creeping around, above that tapestry, waiting to get you while you sleep.

Maybe we should consider, not letting everyone setup whatever the fuck they want, whenever the they want, however they want and assuming it's all good because, "it's in the cloud". And then that setup gets either dumped in IT's lap in it's half-assed state (if you're lucky) or is left running, long forgotten, until an attacker finds it and informs the organization about it's continued existence by spinning up a coin miner.

"The cloud" does need a lot of work on configuration management. But, that doesn't mean just another fancy tool to fix the fuckups. It means policies and procedures to make the broken configs harder to implement in the first place. But that doesn't have AI and flashy dashboards to wow the execs into spending more money. It just has users whining about waiting for an understaffed IT organization not getting things done "right now" for a project that has a deadline i tomorrow, which has been known about for three months.

the rights it licensed to Otherside for System Shock 3 had been sold on to Tencent

Be careful what you wish for.

Why am I expecting to need to buy "energy" or "gems" or some other bullshit "pay to keep playing" mechanic? Likely with some other "pay to skip grinding" mechanic.

Anyone can build a bridge which stands. It takes a engineer to build a bridge which just stands, while not costing an insane amount of money.

That said, engineers throughout history were incredibly smart and shouldn't be discounted.

Spaceballs?!?!

Stopping Windows from running, probably not. MS could stop sending updates and could deactivate it, but it would mostly keep running. And, if any EU/Russian systems were not connected to the internet (yes, this sort of thing still happens in 2025), nothing MS did would matter. Office/Azure and other cloud based services are more vulnerable. Yes, Microsoft could geo-fence those services such that they did nor work if you were coming from an IP address in EU/Russia. Though, the simple workaround for this is to install a VPN. And given US sanctions on Russia, this is probably happening right now anyway.

As much as the tin-foil hat crowd likes to think about MS having some master control switch, it's incredibly unlikely. The problem with backdoors is that hackers are constantly looking for ways to attack systems, especially Windows. If there was some sort of master "off switch" baked into the code, it's likely some one would have stumbled upon it by now. Even if it's that well hidden, it's a "one use" item with high reputational damage attached. Stop and consider for a moment, what happens when that kill switch gets used? It's going to be picked up on. People record internet traffic for fun. As soon as that kill command went out, security researchers, the world over, would be dissecting logs to find the command, and then it would be reversed engineered. That MS had such a kill switch in their codebase would cause massive distrust in MS software going forward. No one would want to take the risk of having that kill switch running in their environment, certainly not on anything critical. Also, given how bad people are at updating Windows, we'd probably see a lot of systems killed by hackers just doing hacker things. Since the versions with the kill code would be know, you'd get bored teenagers searching Shodan for vulnerable systems and sending the kill command for fun. And all of this would be "Microsoft's fault" for having the backdoor. It would be a PR nightmare. And since everyone would now know what the kill command looked like, anyone who mattered would install filters to block it at the firewall. So, it got used once, caused some damage with a lot of damage to MS's reputation but is now neutralized. Was it worth it? Probably not to Microsoft.

When I was first switching to Linux, I installed Arch on a USB3 stick and ran from there for a month or two. It worked pretty well, however I did seem to have issues with I/O contention. During some read and write operations and multi-tasking, the whole OS would just hang up until the operations were done. Since moving that installation to an SSD, that issue is gone. So, it does work, it's a pretty good way to "try before you buy"", but do keep in mind that performance will suffer.

At the same time, I'd definitely recommend working through the pain of getting it setup right. When you have a problem (and they will crop up), it gives you a better understanding to work from for troubleshooting. You may also want to try our different distros. I used Arch, because I hate myself. But, that may not be the right choice for someone else. Something like PopOS could be a good choice for something that is aimed more at gaming, but is supposed to "just work". Ubuntu is a good choice for a more "mainstream" look and feel. There is no good reason to do things the hard way, unless you really, really want to. The goal is to have a functional system, don't tie yourself in knots getting there.