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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Yes as a historical event that happened in English, linguists talk about it’s impact and what it was as a cultural moment in the language’s history but if you know linguists, you know that they do not care one little tiny bit about prescriptivism or the rules of English. Linguists study how people use language not how people should use language. That’s what English teachers are for.


  • A linguist would tell you that this is a stupid argument to squabble over and pronunciation and rules are less important than how people use the language they speak. Linguists don’t correct grammar, pedants on the internet do. And if you want a prescriptivist take on the rules outlining the pronunciation of acronyms, there are none. Every acronym ends up being pronounced the way it gets pronounced by the people who pronounce it. There are just as many acronyms that are pronounced like the words they use to make it up as there is that aren’t. You don’t say Jay-feg (JPEG) or Skub-ah (Scuba) so you should have no qualms with someone using a soft G in GIF. If you have an issue with a soft G in GIF then you should absolutely have an issue with a soft G in Giraffe or the hard G in Graph. Your rules make no more sense than the coinage of the term deciding how it should be said.



    1. The company makes the rules under which you are employed. If you don’t like it, legislate against it or find another employer. Also, like I said, there are no 3rd party authenticators that are more secure with entra ID.

    2. Like I said, M$ auth literally does not report location while authenticating. It only pulls location requests when signing in through the app to create the authentication token and even then it is not a requirement. Entra pulls location using your IP address on the device you are signing in with.



  • Ms auth is a mobile only application. Not even available on windows or macOS. The point of it is to provide a second factor of authentication in the for of “something you have”. There are a few factors that can be used for authentication. Something you know (password), something you have (hardware like a key or a phone), and something you are (iris scan, DNA, fingerprint, other biometric). Ms auth uses something you have and something you are to authenticate most users. You provide a password and then you prove you have your cellphone and your cellphone checks your biometrics to see if you are you. In that way, it is effectively checking all 3 factors.



  • I work for an MSP servicing 5k users all of whom I force to use M$ Auth app. Because it is the best Authenticator on the market, their company is paying for it, and because I look at the sign in logs for 3-4 different organizations every day to see literal hundreds of foreign sign-in attempts that fail due to M$ MFA. Yeah fuck monopolistic megacorps but understand when they provide an actual good product that is safe to use and actively protects you as an individual better than anything else out there.

    All that said, the most likely reason is that they don’t want to make a document explaining how to set up MFA for each of the dozen+ apps out there and they certainly don’t want to talk to users who don’t know what they are doing with which ever app their kid set up for them

    I’m sure you know what you’re doing better than 80% of the other employees in your office in this regard but I can tell you from experience, when one person gets their way, everyone wants theirs too.









  • If you brute force using single iterations of all possible combinations sure. But people don’t do that. They use fully readable passwords and letter substitutions. This makes dictionary attacks viable. There are a known number of readable words and phonetic combinations that are significantly easier to brute force. And also the vast majority of numbers are also guessable because most numbers are dates. Series of 2 or 4 or 8 numbers to form important dates means there are lots of numbers between 1940-2024. People don’t usually unconditionally random alphanumeric passwords. Therefore peoples passwords will never be fully secure against sufficiently advanced brute force methods.



  • They also use microscopic yellow dot patterns. Black and white only prints use a microscopic grey print pattern at the print boundary. The technique is a form of steganography. They aren’t tracking you btw. It gets used primarily to investigate fraud. Printer companies do it primarily because if they don’t, their brand will become associated with print related crimes. There are lists of printers that do not do steganographic serialization but those machines are almost entirely too poor quality to produce any convincing counterfeits anyways.


  • It’s for the purpose of serialization for counterfeit purposes. Also, high end copiers have a device installed called the BDU (Bill Detection Unit) that all scans pass through before being post processed. If the BDU detects a bill being scanned it can error and shut down the whole device until the manufacturer can send someone out to fix it. I used to be one of those people resetting BDUs at schools where a teacher thought it was a good idea to copy images of money for teaching students.