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Submission + - How a Cheap Barcode Scanner Helped Fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs In a Flash (theregister.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards. That knowledge nugget became important as the firm tried to figure out how to respond to the mess CrowdStrike created, which at Grant Thornton Australia threw hundreds of PCs and no fewer than 100 servers into the doomloop that CrowdStrike's shoddy testing software made possible. [...] The firm had the BitLocker keys for all its PCs, so Woltz and colleagues wrote a script that turned them into barcodes that were displayed on a locked-down management server's desktop. The script would be given a hostname and generate the necessary barcode and LAPS password to restore the machine.

Woltz went to an office supplies store and acquired an off-the-shelf barcode scanner for AU$55 ($36). At the point when rebooting PCs asked for a BitLocker key, pointing the scanner at the barcode on the server's screen made the machines treat the input exactly as if the key was being typed. That's a lot easier than typing it out every time, and the server's desktop could be accessed via a laptop for convenience. Woltz, Watson, and the team scaled the solution – which meant buying more scanners at more office supplies stores around Australia. On Monday, remote staff were told to come to the office with their PCs and visit IT to connect to a barcode scanner. All PCs in the firm's Australian fleet were fixed by lunchtime – taking only three to five minutes for each machine. Watson told us manually fixing servers needed about 20 minutes per machine.

Comment And... (Score 5, Informative) 380

It was quite swiftly found out to be the MD5 hash of (remove quotes): "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

News at 11..

Comment Roddenberry’s Mac (Score 1) 227

Considering Gene Roddenberry’s Mac was auctioned for $8,260 back in October which was also discussed here, I'll have to say yes, it would make some money, though the number would probably depend on the owners popularity. For example I am no crazy fan of Cormac McCarthy, but just imagine what the Ubuntu box of someone in the likes of Elvis or Marilyn Monroe or Linus Torvalds (as mentioned above) would fetch if it was to be auctioned.

Comment Hoping for Windows 7's success... (Score 5, Interesting) 350

What this article tells me is that a quarter of the internet users are still using a web browser that was released on August 27, 2001. From a peak market share of %95, it has only come down to %23 in eight years (and change). This survival is against massive "IE6 must die" campaigns, introduction of fairly decent, and standards compliant (comparatively) browsers such as Firefox, Chrome the ever improving Safari and the somehow still surviving gem named Opera.

I was hoping that the rise of social applications like Facebook, Youtube, Digg and popular business applications such as the ones made by 37signals would put an end, a final nail in the coffin if you like, to this monster from the digital stone age.

But obviously I was, surely together with a whole bunch of other fellow /.'ers, wrong. Obviously, the failure of adaptation of Vista played some role in this outcome. But seeing that building a better (faster, compliant, etc.) browser is not the answer, I'm now genuinely hoping that Windows 7 will massively succeed so that we can put an end to this abomination.

Comment Re:They might lose (Score 2, Interesting) 865

If - by some miracle - Apple would be legally forced to allow 3rd parties to install OSX on non-Apple hardware they would be knowingly selling OSX for non-Apple hardware. Wouldn't that automatically give them SOME support requirements?

Can't Apple just lower the service level for OSX?

How do companies like Microsoft and Red Hat handle this?

Comment Esoteric Naming System (Score 5, Interesting) 255

Couldn't help myself, from TFA (emphasis added):

Before the discovery Saturn was known to have seven main rings named A through E and several faint unnamed rings.

What kind of a messed up numeral system do they use in NASA?

Joking aside, the ring divisions are labelled (from the closest to furthest) : D, C, B, A then F, G and finally E as the outermost ring.

Wonder what they will name this one, anyone good with sequence puzzles?

Google

Submission + - Amazon, MS, Google clouds flop in stress tests (itnews.com.au)

Eponymous writes: A seven month study by academics at the University of New South Wales has found that the response times of cloud compute services of Amazon, Google and Microsoft can vary by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day services are accessed. One of the lead researchers behind the stress tests reports that Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud services have limitations in terms of data processing windows, response times and a lack of monitoring and reporting tools.
Image

Finnish Guy Gets Prosthetic USB Finger Storage 113

An anonymous reader writes "Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB 'finger drive' to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution as part of his hand."

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