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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure about the current state of the science but there were a bunch of studies that showed that first contact with Europeans had transmitted smallpox as early as 1520 which over the next couple hundred years wiped out maybe 50% or more of the native population in advance of colonization such that later arriving Europeans had the mistaken impression that the continent had always been largely empty when some estimates put the native population pre-colonization at 120 million or more.


  • The only people to know about it would be IT, if we even have an alert for it (we generally don’t) because we don’t care about someone trying to access something is blocked, we know its blocked so its no threat. Things we care about are real security concerns like when your machine suddenly is downloading a bunch of exe files, connecting to a database server in Brazil, scanning the network for open file shares and running powershell scripts to encrypt every file it finds. Most well-set-up places are running endpoint protection now though so the first thing you’ll notice is you will lose your internet. THEN you might get visited, but by then you’ll probably be calling us since nothing works LOL


  • Your personal security concerns are valid but every company is different, and it seems most people don’t work at a firm their whole lives anymore so there is less trust and less loyalty and decency, really. In my case the wifi given to employees for their personal phones is totally segregated from the work LAN so while it is definitely monitored and protected in the same way, its far less of a concern for company security. It is also throttled so watching videos is almost impossible, it blocks a hoard of malicious stuff (which makes using it safer for the user than when they leave), and many of those using it are on cheap limited plans so they might not be able to leave their comms open to their family or check the location of their kids during the workday, or even get updates otherwise. Many use it to stream radio stations or listen to podcasts usually into earbuds. Properly classified porn sites, etc. are blocked. However, I recently heard there will be changes imposed on us from above and all these users may soon be kicked off this wifi entirely. Managers and office workers will certainly be still allowed to use it but the people who really need it? I guess they are SOL.


  • The company firewall very likely is using a “content filtering” function which for Sonicwall, for example, is a subscription service where the admin can select any number of “categories” of content to block. I found lemmy.world was being blocked because Sonicwall had that domain categorized as “gaming” which was disallowed. I reported the error to Sonicwall that it should be “social media” but haven’t heard back (it takes a while) but some companies might block that category also. In short, it might not be blocked because of any positive action by your company but instead by accident because whoever first classified the site didn’t understand what it was.





  • My suggestion is to find some older laptop that nobody wants anymore and put linux on that. Dual booting is more PITA than its worth to just try it out, and you’ll probably run into issues with the clock which will make you frustrated. Also, having another working machine that you can look stuff up in real time while you work through issues is gonna be key. Def approach linux on the desktop as a challenge / puzzle and you will be accidentally and painlessly learning everything you need to one day be a sysadmin lol