omh

It's mind boggling how bad Microsoft have made this.

I just want to install a few apps and manage their settings. But the combination of Windows, Intune, modern Store apps, multiple similar settings, and licensing, make it a full time job full of footguns.

If they just had one team with responsibility for end user experience they could bring this tech together in amazing ways.

But instead there's probably at least one FTE is every IT department in the world just managing Microsoft's bullshit

There are some SFF PCs that can take USB-C power.

Lenovo have some,but sometimes require adapter cards. And a few of the Chinese N150 units will take PD power

It's great for hot swapping and more portable than a laptop.

I'll take that bait ;-)

IP filtering is a valuable factor for security. I know which IPs belong to my organisation and these can be a useful factor in allowing access.

I've written rules which say that access should only be allowed when the client has both password and MFA and comes from a known IP address. Why shouldn't I do that?

And there are systems which only support single-factor (password) authentication so I've configured IP filtering as a second factor. I'd love them to have more options but pragmatically this works.

Thanks. That wasn't clear from the Mail article above.

But the Times article also says:

> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.

So I think the categorisation is a mess, and probably not even consistent across forces

This is based on statistics for the Malicious Communications Act. That includes people sending, for example, threatening messages to an ex partner.

Not all of them are online posts, in fact probably a minority

And Microsoft own the client, so they are the one company who don't need to do this!

If you really want to check every time someone clicks on a link then you can do this in the client and keep the visible link the same for the end user.

But instead there are different teams working on this in Outlook, Teams, Exchange, Defender and god knows where else.

(I'm one of the people in corporate IT trying to turn this off and often struggling)

One use case might be if you have limited bandwidth, perhaps only a voice call, and want to join a video conference. I could imagine dialling in to a conference with a virtual face as an improvement over no video at all.

Spying how?

If you embed a URL in emails then a lot of corporate email gateways will blindly follow the link, trying to check it for malware.

This may or may not be a useful security measure but it has many issues. One of which is that it could look like spying.

Good point.

But what's the threat model here?

I didn't think of 2FA as being protection against password reuse. People should still avoid reusing passwords and change them if they know of a breach.

Are there really attackers who are picking up breach databases and then sim-swapping to get the 2FA as well?

The article conflates two issues that have different security implications.

The "1-click login" links are a concern and just having access to the SMS would be enough to take over things like WhatsApp.

But 2FA codes seem notably less worrying. They are the second factor and require an attacker to have the password too. For these cases I'm much more relaxed about the use of SMS and the risks of interception.

I agree that it would be fine to not have phones - we'd all cope.

But when my daughter hasn't got home on time if I can check her GPS and see that she's in the park then I can relax a little.

If she needs to say she's staying out late, using a group chat to let the whole family know is easier than trying to phone mum, then dad, then grandma.

Or she can include a photo showing how much fun she's having.

My life is richer because of communication on things like family group chats. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose that

This debate seems to conflate two or three different issues.

1. Use of phones in classrooms 2. Having phones present in schools, but unused 3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren

(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.

(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)

(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues. The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.

Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".