WTF Bites
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But sometimes it'll fail to resume the podcast, at which point you have to put down your beer and fiddle with the phone to get it back
Which sounds dangerous because you might spill your beer.
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This bug has existed since Server 2019 was introduced. Or at least it has existed since my very first experience with Server2019. If you attempt to change the time zone via the Settings app, it fails without showing you an error. If you attempt to change it via control panel it fails saying you do not have the required permissions to change the time zone. The workaround is to run timedate.cpl as administrator.
That is fucking retarded and it is a bug that should have been squashed a long time ago. Yet it remains. I have to assume at this point that some enterprise software relies on the bug for functionality and fixing it would break some mission critical government application.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
If you attempt to change the time zone via the Settings app, it fails without showing you an error. If you attempt to change it via control panel it fails saying you do not have the required permissions to change the time zone.
You know, I've never actually paid attention to the time zone on servers, I'm curious...
Seems Microsoft thinks I'm a little off, and can't change it because the Change button is disabled (and actually does not react to clicks, unlike some other looks-like-it's-disabled-but-actually-isn't buttons...). Most likely because it thinks I set a group policy to fuck with the users...
And yeah, it doesn't auto-elevate for control panel "Change time zone..." button (yet apparently auto-elevates transparently for changing the time itself?!?!).
Yeah that's just stupid...
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Apparently, the time zone on Windows Server is a system-wide setting, not a per-user one. So it makes sense that you can't change it without admin access.
It still should prompt you for elevation when you try it, or at the very least not fail without warning.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Apparently, the time zone on Windows Server is a system-wide setting, not a per-user one.
Is it per-user on Windows Client?
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I don't think so. I just wasn't sure how Windows handled time zones, and I found an answer mentioning Windows Server.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Apparently, the time zone on Windows Server is a system-wide setting, not a per-user one.
Is it per-user on Windows Client?
Well, given that it keeps the system hardware clock in local time by default, the answer is obvious.
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@PleegWat which is pretty stupid, but that’s hardly news.
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@PleegWat which is pretty stupid, but that’s hardly news.
Given the history, it's less stupid than it appears, except that the history in question is now almost thirty years ago, and probably wasn't relevant even back then.
WARNING: Speculation. Informed speculation, but still, it's speculation.
OK, so what history is that? Well, back in the day, MS-DOS and PC-DOS didn't even have a concept of timezone settings, so there wasn't a viable distinction between "local time" and "GMT/UTC". For whatever reason, they felt it necessary to support dual-booting between Windows NT and MS-DOS, so NT's default had to be "store the time and date in local time", poor thing, to avoid problems where Important People got confused by the machine having two different opinions about the date and time.
What I really want to know, though, is whether anyone out in Customerland actually dual-booted between NT and DOS.
Needless to say, this whargfflfiuazoubuyb thing was then propagated forward, and allowing per-user time zone settings would have introduced all manner of flibble, so it was left as a system-wide setting.
Personally, I wish they had just told the said Important People to get over themselves, and/or to See Figure One.
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Your speculation is right on.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in WTF Bites:
whether anyone out in Customerland actually dual-booted between NT and DOS.
I don't suppose I count though.
I also (for a while) tri-booted DOS, NT, and Linux. For shits, and once in a while a giggle.
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"In the early days, people often dual-booted between Windows NT and MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. "
Who are these "people"?
Maybe the Microsoft devs working on Windows did this. Maybe a few other weirdos, who eventually ended up here. But I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of normal people were ever doing this.
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Changing the time is security-critical, as digital certificate expiry, Kerberos tickets, subscription-based licensing, usable audit logs, et cetera, et cetera, all require a reliable and accurate source of time.
Changing the time zone hasn't been security-critical before, since all the aforementioned things use UTC. Even though it requires changing an HKLM setting. So... ?
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"In the early days, people often dual-booted between Windows NT and MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. "
Who are these "people"?
Maybe the Microsoft devs working on Windows did this. Maybe a few other weirdos, who eventually ended up here. But I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of normal people were ever doing this.
I knew a few hardware developers who did, both for testing and because some of the equipment they used didn't work in NT 3.5. (Neither did their "hardware stress testing software".)
I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
At one job I had a server that dual booted Windows (NT 4 Server) and Novell NetWare; we had a customer who reported a strange issue that only happened when using a NetWare server via NetWare protocols. Never did figure out what was going wrong.
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF Bites:
Changing the time is security-critical, as digital certificate expiry, Kerberos tickets, subscription-based licensing, usable audit logs, et cetera, et cetera, all require a reliable and accurate source of time.
Changing the time zone hasn't been security-critical before, since all the aforementioned things use UTC. Even though it requires changing an HKLM setting. So... ?
Yeah, which is why the two different actions are inversely doable. I can change the time with no approval, while chanting incantations of dark Magicka is required for the timezone...
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@Parody
Only thing I remember of NetWare was that it used dos to boot
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@Zerosquare in a freshly dedicated thread: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/27326/virtual-not-so-private-network
Our administrator-in-chief has requested to try splitting out things some more, so that's what we're trying to do.
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@Tsaukpaetra You hit a UAC wall that you don't notice because UAC got neutered in 7. However, the control panel has to know that it needs to elevate. Apparently sometime in the Server 2019 timeframe the requirement changed but the panel did not, which is why it doesn't prompt you to elevate and thus fails. I don't know why it now requires elevation though.
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra You hit a UAC wall that you don't notice because UAC got neutered in 7. However, the control panel has to know that it needs to elevate. Apparently sometime in the Server 2019 timeframe the requirement changed but the panel did not, which is why it doesn't prompt you to elevate and thus fails. I don't know why it now requires elevation though.
So even Microsoft doesn’t know how the Control Panel works anymore. Sweet.
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF Bites:
?
We need this emojicode to actually have an emoji behind it, even (?especially?) if it isn't an official Unicode emoji.
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I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was pretty big in enterprise adoption. But XP was where it came into personally owned machines.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was pretty big in enterprise adoption.
You mean that before 2000, Windows NT was NOT very popular in enterprise?
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was pretty big in enterprise adoption.
You mean that before 2000, Windows NT was NOT very popular in enterprise?
Nah, just in theory.
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@Tsaukpaetra I don't think any Windows was ever popular among theoretical scientists.
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@Tsaukpaetra I don't think any Windows was ever popular among theoretical scientists.
No no, not theory persons, theoretical persons.
This is why they push so hard for the cloud.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was pretty big in enterprise adoption.
You mean that before 2000, Windows NT was NOT very popular in enterprise?
I think that 2000 was a big turning point. I remember seeing a lot of 95 (then 98) prior to Win2K taking over.
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@boomzilla TIL. I don't know much about those years because I was barely alive back then, and Poland was severely behind on computerization anyway (many people's first PC was their child's first communion present around 2000.)
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
I don't think many normal people were exposed to "NT" before Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was pretty big in enterprise adoption.
You mean that before 2000, Windows NT was NOT very popular in enterprise?
Nah, just in theory.
In the late 90s I worked for a pretty big company and nobody used NT except a few of the IT guys (and on servers). All the regular users were running Win 95 or 98.
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Windows 98 (and presumably 95) having the amazing security that, by default, bypassed the login screen when you pressed Escape even with network login.
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Yeah. But it kind of made sense, because there was no (local) security anyways under Win9x. Even if you logged in as user A, you had complete access to user B's files on the hard drive (and everyone got the equivalent of admin privileges, too).
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Windows 98 (and presumably 95) having the amazing security that, by default, bypassed the login screen when you pressed Escape even with network login.
Not even Escape. You could simply click the close button on login dialog.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
But it kind of made sense
Doesn't make it any less silly.
Not even Escape. You could simply click the close button on login dialog.
Or click Cancel. Like a lot of Windows dialogs, multiple ways of dismissing are available.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Doesn't make it any less silly.
Think of it like this: under Win9x, if you cancel the login, then you're using a guest account. It's just that the guest account has full local access.
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@Zerosquare still doesn't make it any less silly. Why have passwords at all?
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Doesn't make it any less silly.
Think of it like this: under Win9x, if you cancel the login, then you're using a guest account. It's just that the guest account has full local access.
After all, physical access is root access
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Doesn't make it any less silly.
Think of it like this: under Win9x, if you cancel the login, then you're using a guest account. It's just that the guest account has full local access.
The fun bit was that if you moved the password files, you could log in as any user by entering not password and do whatever you felt like as that person. You could then put the password file back and the login would be the same as before so people wouldn't know you'd been fucking about with their login.
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@Zerosquare still doesn't make it any less silly. Why have passwords at all?
Honestly, with a PC back then, if you had hardware access nothing would stop you from reading any files. Didn't matter if it was linux, windows or solaris. Hardware access meant full access. In most cases, it still does today.
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In most cases, it still does today.
Me and my family still configure all our home PCs with just a single paswordless account that also has admin rights. All security aside, it's just so much more convenient for everything.
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@Zerosquare still doesn't make it any less silly. Why have passwords at all?
Because Win9x machines could be part of a network, and thus need "real" login credentials for accessing network resources.
For non-networked machines, it didn't matter ; Win9x had no local security anyways. In addition to full disk access, any application could load and run kernel-level code without any check from the OS.
Of course, it seems now, but back then it was considered acceptable ; I believe MacOS Classic had no real security either.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
In addition to full disk access, any application could load and run kernel-level code without any check from the OS.
There were so many other ways that applications could crash everything too. There was simply no protection at all.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare still doesn't make it any less silly. Why have passwords at all?
Because Win9x machines could be part of a network, and thus need "real" login credentials for accessing network resources.
For non-networked machines, it didn't matter ; Win9x had no local security anyways. In addition to full disk access, any application could load and run kernel-level code without any check from the OS.
Of course, it seems now, but back then it was considered acceptable ; I believe MacOS Classic had no real security either.
Without hardware support, all "security" is meaningless. When did we get protected mode and virtual memory, 386?
The lack of a security model in Windows 9x was then surely all backwards compatibility.
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There were so many other ways that applications could crash everything too. There was simply no protection at all.
Yes. It was just an example.
When did we get protected mode and virtual memory, 386?
286, actually. But it was still a 16-bit processor, the address space was limited to 16 Mbytes, and it was during the DOS era. So those features saw little use until the 386.
The lack of a security model in Windows 9x was then surely all backwards compatibility.
Yes.
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The lack of a security model in Windows 9x was then surely all backwards compatibility.
Or just .
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Status: Installing Unity engine 5.3.7 (because apparently we're not allowed to use anything newer because license mumbo jumbo that I think doesn't actually apply in that context), and as it's going...
Yeah, it's fucking the newer version because of course it is.
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Dear Amazon, when I search for something I'm usually looking for the thing I'm looking for, not something different:
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare still doesn't make it any less silly. Why have passwords at all?
Because Win9x machines could be part of a network, and thus need "real" login credentials for accessing network resources.
For non-networked machines, it didn't matter ; Win9x had no local security anyways. In addition to full disk access, any application could load and run kernel-level code without any check from the OS.
Of course, it seems now, but back then it was considered acceptable ; I believe MacOS Classic had no real security either.
Without hardware support, all "security" is meaningless. When did we get protected mode and virtual memory, 386?
The lack of a security model in Windows 9x was then surely all backwards compatibility.These were the days when your "enterprise" software was accessed using a terminal emulator (and you logged into that with a username and password). Unless you were severely unlucky and had to use something like SAP.
You had to login to your email but anyone could send you a virus that would take over your machine and every other machine in your office just by looking at the email in the preview pane. Good times.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
anyone could send you a virus that would take over your machine and every other machine in your office just by looking at the email in the preview pane
HTML emails have always been a stupid idea.
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HTML emails have always been a stupid idea.
HTML emails that are allowed to link to external resources. HTML itself - even including scripts, if run in a proper sandbox - is safe enough.