Deep-Live-Cam goes viral, allowing anyone to become a digital doppelgänger. Using one photo and free software, someone can impersonate your appearance in a video chat.

Meanwhile, Redditors will insist this is “impossible” 5 years after it becomes common.

Working at a non enterprise level is weird.

I’ve swapped back and forth from enterprise to smaller orgs over the years. And it is certainly odd to go from working with the largest companies on the planet planning networks that serve 60,000 people to a smaller place where a user base of 60 people is considered huge.

At the smaller place, you’ll still do some complex networking and other stuff¹ but you’ll also be pulled into calls with three people who have tried and failed for half an hour to help a salesperson unmute her headphones. Or you’ll have to crawl under the desk to plug back in an Ethernet cable someone kicked out of the wall. And then five minutes later, jump on a call with the Federal Reserve (happened to me a few months ago when I went to a physical office for a few in-person meetings). Even if none of the above is your job, it becomes yours because you’re the only one who can solve things.

1. The difference is at a smaller org, you’ll be doing it all by yourself with no assistance at all. You either figure it out or it does not get done. At the larger orgs, I could have 10+ people to help me out when I got stuck.

Cisco is cutting over 4,000 jobs for the second time this year.

Things are rough in the tech world. Glad I’m not having to look for a job right now. Nearly 300,000 people laid off in a year and a half, and even more than that not counted because RTO and other slimy methods were used to do stealth layoffs. So, say, 500K tech jobs lost in that time. That’s a helluva lot.

I’ve written so much complicated-ass CSS for this site it’s getting to be that I can’t remember what half of the older stuff does. My brain is too big for my brain.

Oof.

I’ve written over a thousand lines of CSS for this site. Learned a few tricks and some of those I wish I didn’t know. It’s been a while since I’d goofed around with CSS all that much. I kind of enjoyed it because there was no deadline and it was just playing; would not want to do this for a job.

I wonder how much of the Chinese tech we’ve all bought (including the government and military) is backdoored? Probably a lot of it. Guess we’ll find out when the invasion of Taiwan happens.

That should be fun.

Which piece of information should your users know that they never know?

The name of the application they’ve been using every day for 10 or 20 years. Typical dialogue goes something like this:

User: It’s crashing. I can’t open it.

Me: What is crashing? What application?

User: Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s called Microdobe Macropedia or something like that. Or Mozzarella Flatfox. That is your job.

Me: 🤯

I just can’t imagine using something for years and not knowing what it’s called. The lack of awareness and curiosity is astonishing.

Why did users start calling computers “hard drives?” That confused me greatly when I started working help desk. I just can’t imagine how that happened as the average user never even sees a hard drive.

So how in the hell did that become so common back in the day?

How Windows DNS actually works.

I was expecting this to be wrong but it is actually correct. Even in that subreddit, that does not happen often. I’ve gotten into arguments with clients and with people who should know better about Windows DNS behavior. And many times I’ve walked into clients with an external DNS configured on their domain-joined endpoints “for redundancy.”

Of course, their crap half-works and they don’t understand why. Then they get angry because you take their fake redundancy away while making their domain and network 100x more reliable. People are fucking weird. It seems most people want to shoot themselves in the foot and become resentful when you tell them that blasting away at their own appendages is a bad idea.

Hackers exploit VMware vulnerability that gives them hypervisor admin.

This has been around forever. I used to use this trick to get back in control of VMware installs when someone nuked all the admin rights by accident. I was using this all the way back in 2012 at least. Been around a loooooooooong time.