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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • From my reading this is misleading at best and likely wrong. I don’t work with CrowdStrike Falcon but have installed and maintained very similar EDR tools in enterprise environments and the channel updates referenced are the modern version of definition updates for a classic AV engine. Being up to date is the entire point and so typically there are only global options to either grab those updates from the vendor or host them internally on a central server but you wouldn’t want to slow roll or stage those updates since that fundamentally reduces the protection from zero days and novel attacks that the product is specifically there to detect and stop. These are not engine updates in that they don’t change the code that is running, they give the code new information about what an attack will look like to allow it to detect malicious activity as soon as CrowdStrike knows what the IoCs look like.

    In this case it appears that one of these updates pointed to a bad memory location which caused the engine to crash the OS, but it wasn’t a code update that did it (like a software patch). That should have been caught in QA checks prior to the channel update being pushed out, but it’s in CrowdStrikes interest to push these updates to all of their customers PCs as quickly as they can to allow detection of novel attacks.


  • These are small cell antennas, generally used for mmWave 5G due to the poor penetration the high frequency signals have or to increase capacity of a network where a lot of devices are used in a small space (places like stadiums, airports, city centers, etc) in which case they may have LTE antennas as well. They usually cover about a city blocks worth of area so you’ll see them spaced much like you describe.

    The box on the ground is the actual radio and power supplies with the antennas behind the shroud on the pole. You’ll sometimes also see the radio cabinet mounted about 1.5m up the pole so it’s off the ground.

    Source: a company I used to work for installed these (Crown Castle).


  • No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.


  • As an introvert that likes the idea of hanging out with friends but gets exhausted from the thought of social interaction, I can’t stress enough how much I value friends that include me like this. I even usually have fun and will sometimes even join in after a while.

    PSA, always invite your introvert friends, and don’t take it personally if they decline.




  • To play devils advocate here, Protons costs are not fixed. The storage, compute, and people behind your email (and other services) continue to cost more today than they did when you signed up. I would also expect, as a business user, that your prices to customers have increased at some point to cover higher costs of supplies and needed overhead. It seems fair for Proton to do the same and I wouldn’t expect this to be how it always works (and in fact I’d expect at some point in the future you’ll get hit with a catchup increase, either because you’ll need to change your billing cycle or Proton just can’t continue to deliver the service for what you pay on your grandfathered rate). As long as rate increases are not egregious and are well communicated by companies I respect, I see them as an unfortunate but fair way to keep those companies in business.