Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups
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Remember this from, ohhhhhhhhh..... 72 hours ago?
And it was a great big hairy hoax and how could anyone be so stupid?
Well.... I enter into the record, this; http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36072240
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The company that I just left (after 14 years) still had some marketing shit (sorry, "collateral") left on 123-reg. Every year we told them that it would be the last year we would renew the domain and every year they swore that they would get the collateral (sorry, shit) moved to our main domain, hosted at a competent company.
I kinda hope they were one of the affected websites so that they finally get the sorry-shit-collateral moved!
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Oooh, I like this. They're throwing marketing BS in their response...
"Customers who had purchased 123-reg backups can be online now."
Uh-huh. Go kill yourself, k?
Try this one instead...
"Customers who purchased from a competent company can be online now - in fact, they never went offline!"
Seriously. Don't try to sell your stupid VPS backup or whatever as an advantage here. All that looks like is like someone who screwed up trying to take advantage of the customers they just screwed over.
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@sloosecannon Ayup. And that's why we kept on at our marketing folks who had all their shit on this god-awesome company, rather than Rackspace where all our backed-up (and not-deleted) shit lived.
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@skotl said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Well.... I enter into the record, this;
We use them for DNS for some of our domains (the ones not on
.ac.uk
) but not for hosting.
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Another horror story about this company.
https://webdesignfromscratch.com/blog/how-123reg-almost-crippled-my-business/
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I wanted to migrate a domain name off of theses clowns way back when... I had to send a fax...
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@julianlam said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
send a fax
@Onyx I found one of your fax users!
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@Luhmann Damn it...
Fuck you @julianlam, give me money!
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@julianlam said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
I had to send a fax...
I can do this! I remember that I can do this!
Now to boot up that broken laptop I smashed into being a Fax server to see if it actually still works. I remember it would randomly shut itself down (gracefully) for no apparent reason, so.... beans?
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Actually, the Canadian Revenue Agency prefers faxes too (though they will accept mail as well).
As it turns out, for the one time in a million you need a fax, there are Fax-as-a-service websites available for a monthly fee.
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@julianlam The funny thing would be that, since fax-to-mail is a thing, all these services and telcos just route everything that way in the end and all that happens is a few emails get exchanged between the services. Congrats, you just paid extra to send an email in the most convoluted way possible.
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@Onyx said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Congrats, you just paid extra to send an email in the most convoluted way possible.
Charging a bit of money per email is an excellent way to weed out spam and unwanted messages though.
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@Onyx said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Congrats, you just paid extra to send an email in the most convoluted way possible.
But that adds security!
Seriously. I recently had occasion to change the details of the bank account my large, reputable online broker uses for settling my stock trades and paying me dividends. Every other provider who can set up direct debit (ISP, electricity biller, even the fucking local gym) has a simple online web form you just fill in after logging on to your account, and they just do it. Can CommSec do that? Can they fuck. No, with them you are supposed to download a PDF, print it, fill in and sign it by hand and fax it back.
In an apparent concession to existing in 2016, they do now accept scanned documents attached to emails as well as faxes. What they don't accept is their original PDF form with all the details filled in using a PDF editor. That's a "digital signature" and we don't do those. Wooden table or GTFO.
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
In an apparent concession to existing in 2016, they do now accept scanned documents attached to emails as well as faxes.
Ah! Progress! I still find places around here that will only accept faxes because "security". Why they think those can't be doctored in the same way a scan can is beyond me. Hell, if anything it's even easier, given how shitty regular fax compression is it's easier to mask any artefacts that way!
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@Onyx I am tempted to set up an imagemagick filter that will import a PDF, overlay a slightly-wrinkled-paper blur, greyscale it, tilt it by a random amount between ±2° and scale it by a random amount between ±2% before saving it as a jpeg. I would expect that to be sufficiently secure.
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@flabdablet Protip: use TIFF, that's what fax software uses internally. For additional legitimacy, of course.
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@Onyx Not convinced that most recipients of email attachments would be set up to open a TIFF correctly.
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
@Onyx Not convinced that most recipients of email attachments would be set up to open a TIFF correctly.
That's how they'll know it is a genuine Fax!
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@flabdablet Single page? Would probably work. Multipage? Loads of fun inbound! My favorite fail is when a viewer (can't remember which) displayed all the pages, but it put them all on a single sheet of A4, full width but squished vertically to
1/<number of pages>
size.
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
In an apparent concession to existing in 2016, they do now accept scanned documents attached to emails as well as faxes. What they don't accept is their original PDF form with all the details filled in using a PDF editor. That's a "digital signature" and we don't do those. Wooden table or GTFO.
If you try to open an account in a bitcoin trading site, you'll be asked for a scan of your ID and of any "proof of residence". Proof of residence means any utility bill with your name and address. And they have to be scanned, though if you just print them yourself and re-scan them they won't notice.
There's so much wrong with the entire process that I don't even know where to begin.
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@anonymous234
I would start with "bitcoin".
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@Onyx said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Multipage?
Even if it displays you'll get a shitload of reports because people can't figure out to click 'next page' in the default viewer
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@julianlam said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Actually, the Canadian Revenue Agency prefers faxes too (though they will accept mail as well).
As it turns out, for the one time in a million you need a fax, there are Fax-as-a-service websites available for a monthly fee.
So for the very rare occasion when you need to send a fax, you can pay monthly fee to not send a fax? :/
Or for a onetime fee of ~$20, go to a second hand store or any tech liquidation company, and buy a standalone fax machine.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
buy a standalone fax machine.
TIL about the existence of Free Wireless Faxing.
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
@Onyx I am tempted to set up an imagemagick filter that will import a PDF, overlay a slightly-wrinkled-paper blur, greyscale it, tilt it by a random amount between ±2° and scale it by a random amount between ±2% before saving it as a jpeg. I would expect that to be sufficiently secure.
You'll make MILLIONS!!! Remember us when you're rich!
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@dcon Turns out I don't need to do even that much work to get quite a convincing result.
Original form:
#!/bin/sh convert -density 300 "$1[0]" -strip -colorspace gray -virtual-pixel white wrinkles.jpg -blur 5 -compose multiply -composite -rotate 0.3 -crop 2480x3508+0x0 -monochrome "${1%.pdf}.tiff"
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@flabdablet I notice that the form has yellow stuff on it. Turning those white (“because I ran out of yellow ink”) is reasonable. Making the “paper” look like it was folded would be awesome, as that could make it look like utter incompetence.
Still, it's a wonderful effort, and a one-liner too.
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@dkf said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
I ran out of yellow ink
I don't have one a them fancy color printers. I hadda print it in black and white.
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@dkf said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Making the “paper” look like it was folded would be awesome
I made wrinkles.jpg by grabbing a piece of pink paper, shaking it a bit and scanning it. I'm sure folds.jpg prepared similarly with a few extra creases would work equally well.
ImageMagick actually has a composite blur function, where the lightness of a mapping image tells it how much blur to apply to the base image, but I found that my scanner yields pretty good focus even for quite heavily creased paper and just using
-blur 5
to knock off the super-sharp edges and-compose multiply -composite
to apply the paper texture looked closer to what actually comes out of it (especially with-monochrome
as a final step to half-tone the thing into that "scanned as a text document" look).
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@flabdablet The result certainly has that “pushed through some document processing system that JDGAF” look.
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@dkf Security by JDGAF! Is that better or worse than security by obscurity?
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@julianlam said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
As it turns out, for the one time in a million you need a fax, there are Fax-as-a-service websites available for a monthly fee.
Here in the US, there's stores you can go to and fax stuff for a per-page fee. Plus, if you're in an office big enough to have a rented photocopier/printer, it's probably also a fax machine.
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
What they don't accept is their original PDF form with all the details filled in using a PDF editor. That's a "digital signature" and we don't do those. Wooden table or GTFO.
Fill the form with the PDF editor and then print it and send that in. You stuck it to the man!
There's probably some stupid government regulation that requires them to have paper--or rather, that they've interpreted in such a way that they claim they have to have paper.
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@flabdablet The hardest part will probably be finding a handwriting font that makes it look convincingly like you signed it after printing
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Bitch all you want about fax -- I know I did when I administered a fax server -- but email is still a best-effort-delivery and no guarantee of a secure transmission channel. Fax isn't perfect, but email is essentially directly inferior in all ways except convenience.
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@BaconBits said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
email is still a best-effort-delivery and no guarantee of a secure transmission channel
I've never observed faxes to be that much more reliable in terms of delivery, since who knows whether the other end actually has enough paper and toner? As for security, I would not want to go round claiming that the telephone system is secure either. Not unless you layer a proper security protocol on top, but then you can do that with email too.
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@Yamikuronue said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
The hardest part will probably be finding a handwriting font that makes it look convincingly like you signed it after printing
I have a png of my signature that I use for pasting onto idiot forms like this. This is the first time I've had a PDF prepared that way rejected. Next time I have to do that, wooden-table.sh will certainly be part of the workflow.
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@dkf This was more than a decade ago, but the place I worked had secure phone lines set up. We had a series of 15 or 20 places (some of them our locations, some other clinics, some government or insurance or contractors) we'd send to that had similar setups. The whole thing guaranteed security and did some kind of authentication or identity verification. I didn't know the system that well; I just had to fix it when the hardware needed replacing, which usually meant swapping modems out of the Avaya rack. The system was good enough for HIPAA when the first set of requirements came out, but I left before the later phases.
The biggest problem we had was the modems themselves being a pain in the ass, but that was more due to Arizona electrical storms than anything. Didn't seem to matter what protection we used; a few times a year one of them would get fried.
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@BaconBits said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Fax isn't perfect, but email is essentially directly inferior in all ways except convenience.
Except that only a small percent of modern faxes are send from fax machine to fax machine. A lot of it is at some time or the other transmitted as a digital document. Offent inside an e-mail. That makes the 'reliability' argument rather week.
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@Luhmann said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
@BaconBits said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Fax isn't perfect, but email is essentially directly inferior in all ways except convenience.
Except that only a small percent of modern faxes are send from fax machine to fax machine. A lot of it is at some time or the other transmitted as a digital document. Offent inside an e-mail. That makes the 'reliability' argument rather week.
And in the US every freaking doctors office wants you to fax in paperwork. I've got a MFC scanner at home but I need to pay for a shitty online faxing service (eFax!) or else visit that wasteland, Kinkos (sorry I mean "Fedex Office")?
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@NTW you got to fax in paperwork? Usually they just hand me a ream of paperwork and expect me to fill it out and hand it back before they'll see me.
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@FrostCat said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Fill the form with the PDF editor and then
printwooden-table.sh it and send that in. You stuck it to the man!...is the plan.
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@flabdablet I admire the whole Quixotic effort you're going to, but it seems like too much work.
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@FrostCat Meh. I had to brush up on ImageMagick anyway for other reasons, and this kind of fell out as a side-effect.
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@JBert said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
I would start with "bitcoin".
Tell that to Valve, they just added this
https://i.imgur.com/N2oFy5Y.png
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@flabdablet said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
Congrats, you just paid extra to send an email in the most convoluted way possible.
But that adds security!
Seriously. I recently had occasion to change the details of the bank account my large, reputable online broker uses for settling my stock trades and paying me dividends. Every other provider who can set up direct debit (ISP, electricity biller, even the fucking local gym) has a simple online web form you just fill in after logging on to your account, and they just do it. Can CommSec do that? Can they fuck. No, with them you are supposed to download a PDF, print it, fill in and sign it by hand and fax it back.
In an apparent concession to existing in 2016, they do now accept scanned documents attached to emails as well as faxes. What they don't accept is their original PDF form with all the details filled in using a PDF editor. That's a "digital signature" and we don't do those. Wooden table or GTFO.
Jesus TapDancing Christ on toast, TRIGGER WARNING, PLEASE!
You're giving me 'Nam flashbacks to my fights back in the late 90's/early 2000's with companies that used to pull that fax shit. Jesus, the last time I dealt with that crap was like 4 years ago, and that was an outlier. PLEASE don't tell me that shit is still going on? o_O
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@Vaire said in Dude *really* does (almost) ruin company who had never heard of proper backups:
PLEASE don't tell me that shit is still going on?
That shit is most emphatically still going on.
It's been three weeks now and ten emails, and they still haven't managed to update my direct debit account details.
On the upside, the shares I bought through them this month have already made me 1.65%.
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@flabdablet yes, yes it is.
I just had to build a registration system for a youth summer camp where people download an auto generated form, sign it, and upload it.
Because if we did electronic signatures, the kids could totally fake their parents' signature!!!
(As if they couldn't already. On paper)