SwiftOnSecurity Profile picture
computer security person. former helpdesk. Microsoft MVP in Security 2018-2023.
82 subscribers
Feb 18 9 tweets 2 min read
The thing about Active Directory, is you can't understand any of it unless you begin from the past before it. You cannot examine it from the future. You will get only nonsensicals.
And that's really where most commentators fail. They don't know why. Because there is a reason. The reasons Active Directory fails is deeper than technology. It is from inception, to ironically be more open than you conceive. It is the sourcing of philosophy in staff whose only job was one portion. Whose users, absolute experts. Whose salary paid one. This... didn't happen.
Feb 15 9 tweets 2 min read
I live on a secluded area of my street with little traffic but I purposefully make it evident my surveillance and you know what every dog walker picks up their poop. Image 👏Always👏be👏engineering👏perception👏

Even on gate I don't lock I have a fake one that makes it appear always padlocked. I have spike strips that are just plastic on areas you could boost over my fence.
Feb 12 8 tweets 2 min read
One of most interesting artifacts of Windows was in Vista when they laid out their most optimistic dreams of how what they would be built would be used. A real tragedy, writing how they hoped troubleshooting framework would be adopted in proactive remediation. It was just killed. Image Windows has only had a few true revolutions. 95, NT, 2000 Server (Active Directory), XP, Vista, and 8.
Windows 7, Windows 10, they are the inheritors of surviving the revolution. They are the good times. Unfortunately I don't know what Windows 11 is.
Jan 11 21 tweets 8 min read
==Training Lesson==
INVESTIGATION NARRATIVE: SSH Kill la Killed 🧵

My job is to solve the Weird Problems as the Final escalation tier. I do this with generalist knowledge and practical experience.

New InfoSec/IT entrants often ask what this looks like in practice. Follow below. Image NOTE: You can mute this thread if not interested it will be long.

I have a seedbox in Europe to coalesse torrent downloads from other servers at 10gbe uplink to many other similar colocated servers hosting the content. I then collect finished over SSH file copy at my leisure.
Jan 5 6 tweets 2 min read
In 2009, I got on a helicopter piloted by my friend. We lifted off with careless abandon, in the online mode of Grand Theft Auto 4, for the first time. We were normally talkative, but we both fell into wordlessness as we flew at night through this impossible city. And I realized. Every story can be told here. Labor of untold people who toiled to Truman Show you made a city we flew by with only glance. On the streets, raced-by. There are innumerable conceits, things started and never finished. Left over from dreams aborted. But someone made this. For what?
Dec 7, 2024 7 tweets 2 min read
So my outsider impression is all cloud AI services have essentially nuked themselves in endless layers of safety and political conformance, while also desperately trying to save on compute. If you've watched o1 work it has layers of reasoning for "safety" before it answers. And that cloud AI is essentially in a death spiral of mainstreaming concerns instead of delivering. Yes you've created a corpus of the sins of humanity and you're not remotely brave enough to just be a fucking adult about what your API returns.
Nov 16, 2024 5 tweets 1 min read
The fact is as an American with raw exposure to efficient manufacturing buy-in I can easily justify a new comb, new socks, 20 plastic straws, every single day of my life. And basically none of it ends-up in the ocean. Give it to poor in Oceania it does. Perfect moral incongruity. This isn't remotely fair. And it doesn't capture other pollutants nor plastic effuse from manufacturing. But I'm not killing turtles with plastic. My straws have never touched salt water. It was imaginary. Which nonetheless we were somehow convicted under because of vibes.
Nov 3, 2024 4 tweets 2 min read
Modern mass-storage calculus is so interesting for home labs. You don't need striping for performance use NVMe. You don't need drive pooling you've got 12TB+ disks. Okay you've got a 6 drive 48TB RAID6 that could just be two 24TB you back up. You're pantomiming enterprise. There was a time you had to have immense calculations and trade-offs. Tranches of 73GB 15k RPM disks you pooled together for screaming speed, now blown away in actual cosmic magnitudes by a $40 SATA SSD. Racks of millions of dollars now in a disposable chip held by children.
Oct 24, 2024 6 tweets 1 min read
It's legit crazy how open the US military is on medical and tactics stuff. You should strongly consider their public materials especially on field treatment for SHTF. They are literally saying any challenger's logistics are so shit it doesn't even matter the plans here's our PDF. All the tactics and training of US ground troops – you can just read online it's not secret. Fuck you, you can't do this anyway, we're not going to try to pretend you can't find a copy on Limewire. Good luck dumbass.
Oct 13, 2024 4 tweets 4 min read
I cannot recommend @Examinecom highly enough if you care about supplements and medical interventions. They have expert staff that go through and monitor all published studies and give an expert breakdowns, as well as focus on specific topics and feed of research+their analysis. Image
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It's most often used by medical professionals and universities, but I pay $19 a month to get similar access and have for about a year.
So much supplement information is just not based on massive review and compromised by conflict of interest. They don't even recommend products. Image
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Oct 10, 2024 5 tweets 2 min read
Everything fucked up with latter GenZ is from not having to read Hatchet. They're soft and weak, oblivious to the world's axioms. That is not their fault, but it is to their detriment. If you know what I say is true, it should compel tears. They were never allowed to succeed. 😔 Image It is a public good to have common cultural touchstones and shared experiences that bind us in mutual endurance of their unfolding premise. Where we control cadence, and in that, saturate our mind in blood squeezed from its medium. To abandon stories in whole is doom wrought.
Oct 5, 2024 6 tweets 2 min read
When you make a lot of money you quickly learn how easy it is to waste that kind of money and realize these people are just fucking morons Lifestyle inflation isn't even the only problem it's cumulative "not needing to find out why the water bill is so high every month" except for everything
Oct 2, 2024 9 tweets 2 min read
Unfortunately the way the average citizen models the government as essentially a dictatorship where a singular figure controls everything. Has some point in executive staffing and judicial, but even then they're blamed for the legislature's dysfunction, state and federal. It kind of speaks to the difficulty of our Democratic system that people don't actually seem to want it. Hell the Supreme Court has been picking up the pieces of cultural pressure relief for decades now, that's why I understood why conservatives wanted it. They're right about it.
Sep 27, 2024 7 tweets 2 min read
I spent a lot of my early years making objective arguments. I argued about AD schema and naming conventions for shared folders and their corresponding access rights. And the most important thing I gained was understanding that assent was the only metric. Adoption. Not technicals. In my early years in my career, I tried making pronouncements as if law. As if you can speak into the world and make fact. Yes the fact that law is fake, is technically true. But it's the bodies and guns that make that argument irrelevant. All you have in compliance, is assent.
Aug 15, 2024 6 tweets 3 min read
I was among the first in world to have a laptop/tablet at school, due to an accommodation IEP... and living in Silicon Valley. It was a Toshiba Portege 3500 I got ~2005. I was the literal first wave of the populace to do this. These are my thoughts on its impacts, looking back.🧵

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Giving students electronics is generally not a good idea. It is not a replacement for books. I've looked in despair as this has happened. I loved my machine, it helped. But I had my Windows XP Tablet before schools had WiFi. Before there were online apps. I used OneNote offline.
Aug 13, 2024 5 tweets 1 min read
There is just a level of destiny, of purpose, seemingly not appreciated at-large. The US and its allies built weapons of war for a single purpose. An opponent of doom, under auspices of preventing the greatest calamity in the history of Man.
And now its void-fillers are target. Generations of technology earnestly endeavored under cause of never succumbing to invasion – and thus preventing it. All that purpose, imbued into stored product. Mislaid but appreciated by soldiers of another worldly action. Now, returned to the chance of original fulfillment.
Aug 12, 2024 8 tweets 2 min read
I imagine it can be hard to start with nothing to do, but learning to endlessly optimize and improve in small ways showed me how much time I could free up. Went from 14 Helpdesk ppl 10 years later to ~5. And so I had free time to run this account too. That work made me who I am. Note the downsizings were not my idea and would have mostly happened regardless, the point is I increased free time as resources shrank. That's the dumb business assumption of how it's supposed to work but rarely actually does. But you can do it for yourself. For your career.
Jul 30, 2024 5 tweets 1 min read
Free advice, worth what you paid, for reasons I won't convey: Confident incorrectness is very dangerous in high-level work. It's been made clear to me if I don't know something for a fact as of today and the CISO asks, you go check first. You are not here to bullshit visibility. Something time in IT and Cyber teaches you is the sheer monumental weight that "incorrect assumptions" and "configuration drift" cause. It's basically everything. You're getting paid to find out how your system is configured RIGHT NOW, not HOW YOU CONFIGURED IT YESTERDAY.
Jul 27, 2024 8 tweets 2 min read
wtf Temu's email unsubscribe link goes to a webpage that says your WiFi is disconnected Image Here's the link, stripped of my identifying information. If you click unsubscribe on Temu the website says your WiFi is disconnected. Over HTTPS.
temu.com/bgms_unsubscri…
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Jul 25, 2024 4 tweets 1 min read
I have C-suite asking for how we and our vendors are planning to avoid a Crowdstrike scenario. If you're a security vendor you need to document this right now and also get on improving it. There's discussions about risk reductions. Crowdstrike situation is putting a very firm pressure on removing software agents without mandatory need, especially kernel-mode. This is real I'm in the middle of it.
Jul 22, 2024 6 tweets 2 min read
Something really undersold in the Taylor Swift discourse is how fundamentally she has altered the discussions and power of musicians in licensing deals. She's a star even to stars, with enormous cachet amongst peers. Her maneuvering is just all-encompassing in strategy to win. You'll hear from people even early in Taylor Swift's career how much she did not want to be simply managed, she wanted to know the business and how to rise. Her positioning as a teen girl darling completely obscures her machinations. Which were shunted, then rose like a phoenix.