SwizzleStick

Not out of the goodness of their own hearts mind. It’s probably more because Euro NCAP are going to be deducting score for not having physical essentials in 2026.

Basically what techradar is as a whole. Ad pieces and listicles with baity headlines.

With any luck, they’ll take some of the users bailing out of Reddit on the nostalgia factor, become mediocre, and die. Again.

There was a special time in the XP heyday before WiFi routers (hell, just routers even) were common for home users. Without some kind of AV, loads of folk were basically just rawdogging the Internet with ADSL modems.

Simply being connected this way long enough at the height of the MS Blaster worm would almost guarantee a drive-by infection.

I love those little Lenovo boxes, also recommend.

Proxmox has also been good for me - great for just quickly spinning something up to play with before committing.

A third, and hopefully final attempt at getting an iredmail setup going. SPF, DKIM & DMARC all checking out fine. It’s actually working this time. Need to get the ISP to change our PTR record though, last bit of the puzzle.

Also picked up a used negate device, so we now have pfsense fronting everything. That’s allowed me to move the original router to a better location and put it in AP mode.

Emby media server moved off a Synology and into a proxmox container. Finally, we can stream high def with the hardware acceleration we weren’t getting before.

Used FF forever, even though the birth and rise of Chrome.

We’re done. The company I IT for therefore is also done. As are friends and family I sort computers for.

The shit now stinks and must be taken out.

You might not have access to the keys for a long period of time.

Only need a moment to take a code and leave the keys there. If the car isn’t otherwise monitored, theft of contents without keys would be trivial.

You’re probably getting busted anyway, but the concept is there.

Grab some keys out a bag in the office while the owner isn’t looking.

Grab a code (it’s out of vehicle range, being inside).

Go to the car park, replay the code and loot the car.

You’d be caught quickly, but it’s doable.

An SDR can be made to jam, even if that is not the normal purpose. Just like a kitchen knife can be used to murder people, instead of its normal culinary purpose.

Of course an F0 can’t clone a rolling code as-is. I never said it could. But it can harvest and replay a single or multiple consecutive codes just fine, providing the original key is not used in the meantime. Only need physical access to the key while it is out of range of the vehicle.

This alone puts the F0 on dangerous ground as an “electronic device (such as a signal jammer) for use in theft of a vehicle or theft of anything in a vehicle”

People have locked out their original keys by messing with this before.

The point is that our laws are reactionary, vague, and open to too much interpretation.

If someone gets shit stolen out their car and I happen to be nearby, then I will become suspect merely through possession. Even without intent.

Typical BBC reporting of anything technical.

Keyless repeaters and signal amplifiers scramble the signal from remote key fobs inside people’s homes, enabling criminals to unlock cars.

No, they don’t. The situation described is a relay attack on keyless entry/start. Jamming is used in a two stage attack, where the device intercepts the first signal and stores it without allowing the car to ‘see’ it by jamming. The user then tries a second time.

This time the signal is intercepted the same way, and the first signal is played back to the car from the device. The second signal is stored and can be replayed later to bypass a rolling code setup.

It’s very niche and the stored signal quickly becomes obsolete anyway.

Sophisticated electronic devices used by criminals to steal cars are set to be banned

Making or selling a signal jammer could lead to up to five years

Jenny Simms said the possession, manufacture, sale and supply of signal jammers had provided an “easily accessible tool for criminals… for far too long”.

These devices have no legitimate purpose

Basically, fuck you if you happen to have or build a Software Defined Radio (SDR). Again with the UK ‘clamping down’ on something that does have plenty of legitimate use.

I use an F0 for toying with my own equipment, as an interface for my smart devices and as a general purpose keyfob. I may be arrested just for possessing it.

The crims will not care a jot and this only serves to restrict/annoy legitimate users.

The fault and solution lies with the manufacturers who implement insecure tech, and with the users who blindly sacrifice pounds of security for ounces of convenience.

Not another genre, but you should definitely check out Savlonic if you have not already.

Here’s the opener from their latest.

The more services that lock out my country, the better.

Even my home instance has done it.

Direct consequences are the only way to get it into the thick skulls of the people that This Is Bad.

If your devices rely on a service that you do not control to work - then accept the fact that one day, suddenly, they will not work.

Find out what IT likes and bribe them for a little GPO adjustment…

Does the job & will let you pare down the menu to the essentials, move start position etc. Can also be deployed and configured by GPO, which has been a godsend.

For the issue that you can no longer tell Windows to show all icons in the system tray, you can manually drag them out of the overflow into the visible part - or slap this into a powershell script and have it run at logon to do so automatically:

$Name = 'IsPromoted'
$Value = '1'
Get-ChildItem -path $RegistryPath -Recurse | ForEach-Object {New-ItemProperty -Path $_.PSPath -Name $Name -Value $Value -PropertyType DWORD -Force }

For the right-click menu being shit, hold shift before clicking, or put this one-liner into an adminstrative command prompt for a longer term fix. Restart explorer or the PC as a whole to apply afterwards:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

Snappy Driver Origin is great for obtaining up to date drivers. I’ve also had good luck pasting the hardware ID into search with site:driveridentifier.com to snag better drivers. IDs can be grabbed from device manager, under the details tab for the device properties. Example.

Not that you should have to, but there are a lot of ways to fix the most annoying issues. Usually reg edits, better drivers and Powershell scripts.

Openshell makes start at least usable: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Am going through this on our corp PCs.

Years ago, I’d laugh at this.

Yet it slowly becomes reality with every passing year. It’s bad enough that we’ve essentially lost pay-to-own in favour of subscription models for a lot of popular software.

On our corp network, the amount of GPOs I’ve had to mangle together just to make Win11 usable is insane. The users are still going to have a fit in October.

I’d honeytrap this with a software camera that just plays filth and shock sites on a loop :)

I lean on Irfanview+plugins for this kind of processing - it’s the bedrock of some of my workflows.

Will definitely give this a try though, thank you for sharing :)