After my improbable love story with the MacBook Pro M1 I have descended further into madness. Awed by the ARM architecture of the MacBook Pro, I decided that I needed to get my paws on one of those new Windows ARM-based Copilot+ PCs. Being a longtime fan of Dell’s XPS product series, I bought the XPS 13 9345 Snapdragon® X Elite X1E-80-100.
My Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop is currently running the Fedora Linux distribution and receives firmware updates automatically from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). So far so good, but I recently became aware that the same firmware version is not provided on Dell’s drivers and downloads page.
Imagine my despair when my Microsoft 365 OneDrive account got flagged by Microsoft Defender SmartScreen for containing phishing threats. I guess you really either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Is there anything more annoying in this world than dealing with Microsoft support? You might assume that Microsoft would appreciate reports detailing the abuse of its services or even act upon that information. But alas, in both cases you’d be wrong.
Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.
A few months ago I was complaining about the lack of MTA-STS adaptation with major email service providers besides Google. Recently though, I’ve noticed a new player connecting to mta-sts.paranoidpenguin.net to retrieve my MTA-STS policy.
I’ve been getting quite a few emails from people wanting to know if I’ve made any progress on the deliverability issues I was facing when delivering email to outlook.com. As good fortune would have it, Microsoft accepted my request to delist my mail server from outlook.com’s internal IP blocklist.
Recently, I was trying to respond to an email delivered to me from an outlook.com sender address. Unfortunately, my response immediately bounced back, and I was informed that my mail server’s IP address had been added to outlook.com’s internal blocklist.
On occasion, I’ve noticed the following HTTP referer when going through my server logs: http://www.bing.com/search?q=your+search&go=Search (notice the HTTP part).
I thought it would be interesting to see if this HTTP referer was sent from Microsoft’s search engine as a result of someone performing a search over an unencrypted HTTP connection.
After installing and running Microsoft Teams for Linux on Ubuntu 18.04 for a couple of days, the application suddenly stopped working. Starting Microsoft Teams would load the application menu in the top bar, but it was not possible to get the actual application window to load. Clicking “Open” from the application context menu would do nothing at all.
Why on earth would there ever be a need to write such an article one might ask? Well, the current Outlook Office 365 version had me puzzled as I was unable to manually configure an IMAP account according to my preferences. Apparently, “set up your account manually” now translates to let Outlook autoconfigure the account.