UPDATE: Purchasing is now open. https://www.askwoody.com/2020/windows-7-esu-for-2021/

About 3,000 of you purchased the Windows 7 ESU from Harbor Computer Services last year. We offered to make this available to Woody readers after so many IT firms recklessly said that they wouldn’t. My feeling is that while I’d prefer that no one was running Windows 7 anymore, for those that are they need access to updates to retain some degree of security on those systems. We aren’t here to judge. My firm is also an advocate for healthy IT communities and so we agreed to sell the ESU license to all comers even though there’s no money in it for us to speak of. In our regular business, selling stuff is not our thing. We’re a services business.

The backup solution space is crowded. There are a multitude of applications, commands, and methodologies that are available. Choosing the right one is a daunting task that can definitely leave your head spinning. After having tried a few of the options out there, I have settled with Restic and here’s why.

First and foremost, Restic is completely open source. This is important especially when you are choosing a solution that will handle your very own data, which often times is personal and sensitive in nature. That’s the whole reason that it is being backed up in the first place…because you deem it as important. So, when it comes to backups, it is a requirement that the solution be non-proprietary, open source, and auditable. There should not be any concern of nefarious data harvesting or data siphoning to an overly interested third-party. Your data should remain your data.
Deduplication
Encryption

Restic is compatible with Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows. In addition to being able to create backups to local, SFTP, and REST servers, it is also capable of backing up to major cloud storage providers such as Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Openstack Swift, Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc..
Simplicity and Sophistication

Restic provides you with a set of commands that can be used as building blocks for a variety of backup strategies, from simple to complex.
Snapshots

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A pigeon that Australia declared a biosecurity risk has received a reprieve after a U.S. bird organization declared its identifying leg band was fake.

The band suggested the bird found in a Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 was a racing pigeon that had left the U.S. state of Oregon, 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away, two months earlier.

On that basis, Australian authorities on Thursday said they considered the bird a disease risk and planned to kill it.

But Deone Roberts, sport development manager for the Oklahoma-based American Racing Pigeon Union, said on Friday the band was fake.

Many gun owners prefer to wear protection when practicing at firing ranges, where there are various guns and gun owners around.

ISO 6346 is an international standard covering the coding, identification and marking of intermodal (shipping) containers used within containerized intermodal freight transport.[1] The standard establishes a visual identification system for every container that includes a unique serial number (with check digit), the owner, a country code, a size, type and equipment category as well as any operational marks. The standard is managed by the International Container Bureau (BIC).

Sanoid is a policy-driven snapshot management tool for ZFS filesystems. When combined with the Linux KVM hypervisor, you can use it to make your systems functionally immortal.

sanoid rollback demo
(Real time demo: rolling back a full-scale cryptomalware infection in seconds!)

More prosaically, you can use Sanoid to create, automatically thin, and monitor snapshots and pool health from a single eminently human-readable TOML config file at /etc/sanoid/sanoid.conf. (Sanoid also requires a "defaults" file located at /etc/sanoid/sanoid.defaults.conf, which is not user-editable.) //

Sanoid also includes a replication tool, syncoid, which facilitates the asynchronous incremental replication of ZFS filesystems.

John Henry Smythe, an RAF navigator from Sierra Leone in West Africa, was shot down and captured in Nazi Germany in 1943.

War had broken out four years earlier when he was 25 years old, and Johnny volunteered to join the fight against fascism after a call from Britain to its colonies for recruits. Again and again, he and his comrades risked their lives in the skies above occupied Europe.

After he was liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp, he would go on to become a senior officer aboard the Empire Windrush and then an amateur courtroom talent of such promise he was invited to train as a barrister in England. As the attorney general of Sierra Leone, he would meet President John F Kennedy in the White House.

RBe
@RBPundit
So... they just impeached Trump for something he didn’t do.

The Spectator Index
@spectatorindex
JUST IN: CNN reports that Federal investigators have indications US Capitol riot may have been pre-planned. //

Yes, our great and hopelessly anti-Trump FBI finally came in promptly to drop this development after the Democrats had set this "remove Trump" train into motion. And of all outlets, CNN was the one to report on it:

Evidence uncovered so far, including weapons and tactics seen on surveillance video, suggests a level of planning that has led investigators to believe the attack on the US Capitol was not just a protest that spiraled out of control, a federal law enforcement official says.

Among the evidence the FBI is examining are indications that some participants at the Trump rally at the Ellipse, outside the White House, left the event early, perhaps to retrieve items to be used in the assault on the Capitol.

A team of investigators and prosecutors are also focused on the command and control aspect of the attack, looking at travel and communications records to determine if they can build a case that is similar to a counterterrorism investigation, the official said.

Gophish is a powerful, open-source phishing framework that makes it easy to test your organization's exposure to phishing.

For free.

I always used to sweat, and sweat bullets, when it came time to replace a failed disk in ZFS. It happened infrequently enough that I never did remember the syntax quite right in between issues, and the last thing you want to do with production hardware and data is fumble around in a cold sweat – you want to know what the correct syntax for everything is ahead of time, and be practiced and confident.

Wonderfully, there’s no reason for that anymore – particularly on Linux, which boasts a really excellent set of tools for simulating storage hardware quickly and easily. So today, we’re going to walk through setting up a pool, destroying one of the disks in it, and recovering from the failure. The important part here isn’t really the syntax for the replacement, though… it’s learning how to set up the simulation in the first place, which allows you to test lots of things properly when your butt isn’t on the line!

Just one week after creating a House rules package removing the words from any legislation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to herself as “a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a daughter” during her opening of the impeachment debate.

She is technically not in violation of her own restrictions, as gendered language was only banned from legislation and other written texts, not speeches or conversation. However, there is something deeply ironic about forbidding others’ use of words while so prominently centering them in her speech.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) says that companies should avoid using third party DNS resolvers to block threat actors' DNS traffic eavesdropping and manipulation attempts and to block access to internal network information. //

"NSA recommends that an enterprise network’s DNS traffic, encrypted or not, be sent only to the designated enterprise DNS resolver," the US intelligence agency said.

• Screen Lock (iOS and Android): Means you have to enter your biometrics (Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint or passcode) to access the app

• Enable Screen Security (iOS) or Screen Security (Android): On the iPhone this prevents data previews being shown in the app switcher, while on Android it prevents screenshots being taken

• Registration Lock (iOS and Android): Requires your PIN when registering with Signal (a handy way to prevent a second device being added)
  Incognito Keyboard (Android only): Prevents the keyboard from sending what you type to a third-party, which might allow sensitive data to leak

Nancy Pelosi
@SpeakerPelosi
·
May 16, 2017
Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts