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.
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.
I recently learned that it’s possible to use Google Authenticator (or any other authenticator app) with Office 365 for 2-step verification. That’s great as I’ve always believed it was Microsoft Authenticator or the highway. I’m sure Microsoft Authenticator works fine, but I don’t want multiple authenticator apps on my phone.
About one and a half months ago I experienced a lot of botnet traffic originating from major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure. Against my better judgment I decided to see if reporting a few bad IP’s to the MS CERT team would make a difference.
My plan to install the latest Windows 10 Creators Update fell short during the weekend due to an error identified as 0xc1900200. I was using the “Windows 10 Update Assistant” to perform the upgrade, and the assistant did initially confirm that my system was ready for the upgrade.
After reading the latest horror stories depicting the Windows 10 anniversary update as a merciless destroyer of everything Linux, I was somewhat concerned before applying the latest and greatest from Redmond. Sure, it would make absolutely no sense if Microsoft was actually deleting data from their customers devices, but mistakes do happen so I made sure to back everything up before upgrading.
When using a client other than Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) to connect with your Office 365 account, you’ll need to provide the Microsoft Lync servers with a user-agent string they recognize as an “acceptable” client. The reasoning behind this is surely to give you the best possible experience and not at all to lock out other messaging clients.
After Windows 8.1 had performed an unscheduled reboot, I was greeted with the following error message when trying to start up a virtual machine in VMware Player:
This virtual machine appears to be in use.
If this virtual machine is not in use, press the “Take Ownership” button to obtain ownership of it. Otherwise, press the “Cancel” button to avoid damaging it.
Trying to start the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men from the Steam client on a default Windows 8.1 installation will not work. Furthermore, you’ll get no error message other than the obvious lack of the gameplay.
With the release of OTRS Help Desk 4, it seems that running OTRS on a native Windows environment for all intents and purposes is no longer viable. By killing off the Windows installer and recommending migration into the OTRS appliance, the OTRS Group seems to be subtly hinting that OTRS on Windows is dead in the water.
A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report) in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.
I bought BioShock on a Steam sale once upon a time and finally got around to playing it. However, a few minutes into the game I realized that the lack of sound was not due to my character going deaf from an initial explosion.
I usually prefer VirtualBox for my non-commercial virtualization needs, but since I already had VMware Player 6.0.2 installed on a Windows 8.1 64-bit host I decided go with it for my Slackware Linux 64-bit guest.
So your phone has been syncing your mail, calendar and contacts with Office 365 (Exchange Online) for months without problems when everything suddenly comes to a halt.