Root Access

12:25 AM

@Run5k one of their writers basically republishes HNQ with minimal changes ;p

@JourneymanGeek, apparently so. One way or another, it is nice to see a question from within the community get highlighted on a relatively high-profile IT web page!

@Run5k ... uh. SU is a high-profile IT web page.

@Bob the second CPU on dell workstations of that era is mounted on a sled with its own ram

its a bit finicky

@JourneymanGeek ah.

@djsmiley2k @DavidPostill the customer changed their mind literally as i logged off and the freelancer is now cancelled

12:33 AM

@Bob, absolutely... I couldn't agree more! I am simply a big credit-where-credit-is-due type of guy, and thought that it was nice to see.

QuizGate Scandel

we were announced as the winners, had accepted our prize and then the quiz master noticed that someone had marked a sheet wrong and someone else had actually won

we came second after the recount but were allowed to keep our prize

@Burgi, it's nice that your team was allowed to keep your prize. In that regard, you fared better than the cast of La La Land did!

and miss world I think

lets be honest though beer is a way better prize than some boring gold statue

@JourneymanGeek if there is a quiz where i can win a miss world i'd enter it

No doubt! However, gold statue = bigger salary = more beer! ;-)

12:40 AM

heh

nn all

KronoS

Does "flagging" to close on the mobile app = voting to closing?

I vaguely think so

I have no idea since it autocloses for me as a mod

and the mobile app... is a bit odd

Journeeeeeeeey

catch 22 huh?

Yes

553 days later…

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19:28
Journeyman Geek has unfrozen this room.

yay for journey :D

12:56 AM

Well, its a moderator function, @KronoS is a person who's a core member of the community, and it was clearly productive

KronoS

> core member

wow. I feel special

please dont ban me T.T Im running away

@CausingUnderflowsEverywhere you could stand to learn from listening more and talking less

@KronoS Well - to a significant extent, some people really get what the community is about better than others

and it isn't about being a moderator, or even a high reputation user

For one, I'm certain you're not going to waste my time XD

2:20 AM

TIL Share permissions override NTFS permissions.

@MichaelFrank IIRC when share permissions and NTFS permissions collide the most restrictive wins.

@GypsySpellweaver Yea, that seems more likely.

I think it's most restrictive always. When you grant a user access, but they're in a deny group it counts as a deny.

@MichaelFrank True. The problem often happens that someone thinks the share permissions are outside the NTFS permissions. In a way, they are, since they refer to network access. What can also be tricky is when share permissions are set at multiple levels of directory structure. Unintended consequences can occur, and their "inheritance" isn't as easily seen as it is with the NTFS permissions.

I don't recall seeing and "effective permissions" option in the share dialog box. It's been a few years though.

2:37 AM

@GypsySpellweaver Yea, there's no effective permissions in the Share dialog.

@MichaelFrank That makes it hard to know what is inherited down the tree :(

Makes it a nightmare

Buuuuuuut, in the NTFS security Effective Permissions screen it does tell you if the access is limited by the Share permissions.

arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/…

Heh... Someone filed a Firefox bug report because the site security warning was informing users that the site was insecure.

@MichaelFrank So, if the share is more restrictive, you will know, but if it's less you won't.

@MichaelFrank A bug against FF? Don't they like to be warned?

@GypsySpellweaver By someone, I mean a business owner that was having customers complain.

Anyway, approximately immediately after they filed the report, their database was popped. :o

o_o

@MichaelFrank file that bug ;P

2:44 AM

That Ars article is an amusing read. Basically a how-to for designing insecure websites.

@MichaelFrank Is it caveated as "things not to do" ?

No, it's not actually a how-to. But whoever runs the site has been pretty negligent.

aaaand apparently the entire site is offline.

Imm back and extremely talkative

@MichaelFrank As I can well imagine. If the part about card info in http is valid, they probably got slammed by Visa/MC/etc.

@MichaelFrank having a way to turn that off would be nice tho

Do I need to be told that a webui for say qbitorrent or btsync is insecure?

2:55 AM

I bet the site was set up years ago, and has just been chugging away happily ever since.

A: Desktop Tower Wire solutions

@JourneymanGeek Is it appropriate for images in an answer to link to product web pages?

0

Try a search on pc case "exterior cable management". Some of the items on this page look interesting and might be adaptable. Here's a case that includes integrated exterior cable management. Here's a case that has the motherboard rotated 90° so the cable attachment is at the top under a co...

In this case, maybe

But the real question is "is the question on topic in this day and age?"

@JourneymanGeek New enough to SE that I can't say. Maybe better on a hardware target site. Not sure. Found it while doing the HTTPS image fix.

>

javascript:txtEmail = window.prompt('Enter your email address to receive your password.',''); if ((txtEmail != '') && (txtEmail != null)) {document.location.href='emailpassword.asp?email=' + txtEmail} else {void(0)}

This doesn't seem like good code...

s/code/idea/

3:00 AM

@MichaelFrank @Bob Neither.

hmm

Quick sanity check

would you guys consider superuser.com/questions/1191038/… a dupe of superuser.com/questions/1034137/did-i-just-get-hacked/… ?

I don't think you'll get a better answer.

Yeah, thought so

@JourneymanGeek ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

@Bob the basic answer is "backup and nuke" ;p

3:07 AM

@JourneymanGeek I wouldn't have found the old one when searching before posting the new one, but agree with @MichaelFrank, good answer to both (and others).

@GypsySpellweaver I quite literally remembered the old one cause I answered it ;p

and marius' answer was rediculously mad skillz.

@JourneymanGeek Yea... I wouldn't be game enough to download and run the hack tools just to answer a question...

If you have a nukeable box to play with, it's not too bad. I don't.

@GypsySpellweaver then you back up

here's the thing. You don't ever know if you got all of it out

@JourneymanGeek That's why I like one suggestion I've seen, more than once, in SE somewhere: "Nuke the server from high orbit." Probably from the same user, but answer to different questions.

3:17 AM

@JourneymanGeek it's more that the great big voted/ticked answer is rather specific to that question

which makes it not so great as a dupe target (or canonical)

!! Caat

@GypsySpellweaver "nuke and repave" is the conventional answer :P

Rare question from me to chat: Friend has an unremarkable Dell XPS Skylake desktop. 1 x 2 TB HDD. Windows 10. BIOS indicates the mobo has one SATA controller (6 Gbps) -- it's a cheapie. It doesn't allow customizing the protocol of SATA devices on a per-device level, only RAID, IDE or AHCI.

That sounds... pretty normal

I always thought that's on a per controller level

right now the HDD is set to "RAID" (that's how it came out of the box).

3:18 AM

@allquixotic with one disk?

That sounds like a Dell...

He bought a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO, plugged it in, and it won't recognize because it needs to be AHCI. But if he changes the setting in the BIOS to AHCI, his OS disk won't boot.

@allquixotic backup, switch, restore, and install disk? ;p

@allquixotic that's how any and all SATA, SAS, and RAID controllers work

@allquixotic would reinstalling be an option?

3:21 AM

@allquixotic That's normal. I've never seen a per-port SATA mode select.

@JourneymanGeek preferably not

en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/t/… breaking the "raid" might work, but ugh, feels risky

@Bob there was on my old X58 mobo... or maybe that was because it had so many damn SATA controllers (two SATA 6 Gb/s and a 3 Gb/s, as I recall)

@allquixotic What won't recognise?

It should recognise fine.

3:21 AM

@allquixotic hence me saying "per controller"

Vodafone, your email sucks. Make it better...

@Bob the evo

@allquixotic IIRC the 6 and 3 would share a controller but the second 6 was probably a Marvell or similar

@Bob yup

@allquixotic highly unlikely... Never heard of such a thing happening and can think of no logical reason for it to happen. I have personally used a 250GB 850 Evo in RAID, AHCI, and IDE on a Dell and it works fine in any mode.

3:22 AM

@allquixotic For reference, I'm currently running with an Intel (Z270) controller on RAID mode, one pair of disks RAID-1'd, a couple of SSDsincluding an 850 EVO working fine under "RAID"

If he takes the EVO out, and changes SATA mode will it boot?

The only issue so far was Samsung Magician refusing to "recognise" the SSD unless it's AHCI. But 5.x fixed that.

But if you insist on changing controller mode, there's a hundred how-tos on SU and Microsoft have their own KB article on it too.

@allquixotic First question. Is there a small SSD (mSATA/M.2) for caching?

That's often the reason they have "RAID" enabled. So they can use Smart Response

@Bob ahh! I think he put in the CD that came with the SSD, and it was probably Magician < 5.x

@Bob nope. I helped him buy this computer, it doesn't have that

3:24 AM

@allquixotic So, that's why I asked: what do you mean by "not recognised"?

Does the OS not see it, or is it just Magician?

@Bob I want to use smart response but I'm not smart enough :-(

cause honestly Magician is a piece of shit

@Bob he probably just needs to format it, but I haven't had a chance to teamviewer with him yet

@allquixotic It wouldn't hurt, if Dell still does this, to create the restore disk before working. Used to be on the Start menu.

5.x is less of a piece of shit but it's still a piece of shit

3:26 AM

facepalm

I've got 840 EVO disks here with the faulty firmware that was never upgraded cause Magician can't see them unless I turn RAID (and SRT) off

So nothing to do with AHCI, BIOS, SSD or anything...

@TOWMN ?

@Bob :-(

@allquixotic actually my SSD didn't even come with a CD

wat

but yea initialise it and format it :P

see if it comes up in Disk Management, that's the real test

or diskpart if you prefer

@allquixotic Speaking of SSDs... PrimoCache has a bunch of updates :O

It's simultaneously scary to see so many bugs (...corruption?), and nice to see they're fixing them.

romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/changelog.html

but if Optane prices drop enough... :D

3:39 AM

@Bob they're something like 2 dollars a gig for big drives, right?

4:00 AM

heh. While he's not on my top 3, I really like Ulincsys's answer to my "unofficial" question meta.superuser.com/questions/12200/…

@JourneymanGeek Thoughtful at least. If he hangs around a while, he just might end up becoming a mod someday.

yup

@JourneymanGeek brand new though. and already much cheaper than DDR4

32 GB cost me something like $280

Adding another 32/64 GB of Optane cache for <$150 would be ... not bad at all

Though, I could just add SSD cache... decisions, decisions

4:49 AM

@JourneymanGeek Check out this answer. It does answer the OP, and unintentionally points to a duplicate, though newer question. But is excessive, and obtuse, and a good answer? superuser.com/questions/224502/…

Maybe the "answer" should be removed, and the question marked as a duplicate of superuser.com/questions/324019/… even though the time sequence is reversed. The answer has no votes, so he won't lose any rep because of it. I already flagged it, but I'm not sure about the timing issue. Can a "duplicate" come before what it duplicates?

Its fine to close an older question as a dupe to a newer one

That said, the newer question is not as good, and OP on the newer question posted the older question

so I'd personally close the newer one as a dupe of the older one

But the answer in the newer one is accepted, and is better (more correct)

Can a mod move the answer to the older question?

Merged the questions (dog help me, its a pain if I did it wrong)

which does that

It dosen't set an accepted answer but shrug

That's right you are a mod, doh

I'd be almost inclined to close the older question as a software recommendation

@GypsySpellweaver Dog of the people and all that.

Yeah, I'm a mod. Its perfectly fine if people don't notice me underfoot tho. Just don't step on me XD

4:59 AM

They are both, in the end, recommendations, just the wording of the newer one escapes that: "I'm trying to remember......"

The older one describes the problem much more clearly

It's only 6 years old, but this is a blatant recommendation request. superuser.com/questions/243736. Good answer though. No "I prefer, or bashing, just simple listing."

Well, the site's changed a lot in 6 years

That one looks fine to leave alone.

Rather thought so. Almost looks like something useful in Personal Productivity site. Though they don't do recommendations either, I think. It's my next fix, that's how I found it.

5:24 AM

._. engadget.com/2017/03/21/…

So, tool used to test applications can be used to inject arbitrary DLLs into common anti virus apps (or anything), turning them into malware in theory.

@JourneymanGeek If 2, soon 3, anti-virus vendors issued patches against it, it's probably not theory anymore. But will MS patch for it?

Yeah, that's a good question

The whole vector though ><

Scotty in Star Trek III "The fancier they make the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

@GypsySpellweaver Eh, most software-rec can be trivially reworded as "how do I" and most answers will still be valid (in the form of "you can do X by using Y")

so I find the whole software-rec ban rather weird

@JourneymanGeek ...I think this falls under "not a security hole"

5:39 AM

I think the presence of the ban allows for an easy excuse to delete a question that starts to turn into a bashing war instead of real help to the op

in other news, you can inject libraries into other applications given the permission to do so

amazing!

unless app verifier has special privs for some reason

@GypsySpellweaver the history of software rec questions here is odd.

@GypsySpellweaver it does seem more like it's used as an excuse. and many rec questions are truly terrible and attract poor answers. but the ban was a knee-jerk reaction imo

SO blog post "shopping is bad" => implied ban

It was ok. Then it wasn't. Then folks worked around it

and it's just that, implied

AFAIK there's nothing at all apart from a blog post explicitly calling it a ban

well, I suppose we got an off-topic close reason added at some point in the last couple years

5:41 AM

@Bob and an official close reason

@JourneymanGeek which is pretty new and came on the heels of a few years of the implicit ban

the ban isn't particularly well thought-out, the reasoning is flimsy, and the scope is unknown

Sort of fits in the "avoid asking" help center superuser.com/help/dont-ask

But that's the tricky bit of se moderation. A ton of things are precident documented across Meta

(reasoning: products become outdated. huh, so? are we not accepting/answering MS-DOS questions anymore?)

@GypsySpellweaver also edited relatively recently

5:44 AM

MS-DOS questions go to retrocomputing, they can still get answers there.

Rahul2001

Hm. Orthodontist just told me that I need to get two teeth extracted for braces :/

There used to be a nice single help page

@GypsySpellweaver SE policy is that as long as a Q is on-topic here it does not get migrated

except at the request of the asker

also, retrocomputing didn't exist a year ago

@Rahul2001 Yuk

and even though it does exist, it handles questions far older than we do

5:46 AM

@Bob we don't migrate to betas either

@Bob Still in beta, might make it, might not.

Rahul2001

@GypsySpellweaver Eh, has to be done. A lot of people have it a lot worse than me...

we still take questions about, say, XP, Vista, win2k3, Linux 2.6... all of which might be considered outdated (like the reasoning for banning shopping Qs)

but it's got nuance that's hard to define

I mean, ok, "what's the cheapest/best" is subjective and a bad shopping Q

but "what's the difference between X and Y" is very close...

There's still a significant user base in XP anyway. Outside the US/Eruo market it's still big.

the famous shopping question has got to be the mechanical keyboard one. which mostly survived cause Atwood was involved :P

5:48 AM

If the Q is solid, and the A's are fact-based rather than fights or bashing, I see no problems.

@GypsySpellweaver I've seen what I would consider decent Qs, trivially converted to "how...", closed because they include the phrase "what tool can I use"

because now it's asking for a product-rec! oh no!

that's the problem with a rule like this

Like the one I referenced earlier. The answer was "five choices" and left it at that.

it can start with the best of intentions, because the category often attracted bad questions

but then you get a horde of people who can follow the letter of the law but don't know or understand the spirit behind it

those same people, incidentally, could be replaced by a very small script :P

@Bob I brought that up on meta :p

I'm willing to trust a script to suggest but not to judge. That's why I don't use the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google search. I want the list to review, not what the script thinks is the best choice.

5:54 AM

@Bob like Smokey? :P

I wonder if using the PortableApps platform, being mostly independent of the installed Windows, is less susceptible to the Double Agent exploit?

@GypsySpellweaver 'twas a joke implying that many reviewers are no more effective at judging than a simple grep

The power of One is often diluted by the Many. The giraffe is a cow designed by committee.

@Bob and are unaware on how to fix such posts

ok, found out why that 'exploit' smelled fishy

> one needs to create a verifier provider DLL and register it by creating a set of keys in the registry

hmm... *checks*

Oh lookee, they're in HKLM

which is conveniently not writable to normal users

what a surprise, you need to gain admin access first

do you know what else you can do with admin access?

*cough*

... "malware with admin access can inject libs into other processes, more news at 11"

sigh.

6:01 AM

@Bob HOw many users automatically accept the verifier as valid?

MS has trained the users to accept that automatically.

@GypsySpellweaver None at all should, because the Application Verifier tool is a dev tool that comes with VS but not Windows itself

This is talking about using built-in "verifier" registry keys, but it's loaded with a custom program

actually lemme double check that

@GypsySpellweaver meh, there's only so much you can do with privilege separation

if you're talking about accepting all elevation without checking what's requesting, quite honestly that's the fault of no-one but the user

an OS dev really only has two options here: run everything as admin, or prompt the user when necessary

if we're going to use another example, elevate to root on Linux and you have write access to the entirety of physical memory

elevate to admin on Windows and you can do the same

giving away admin is giving away the entire game

if you're talking about "training" users to click yes... it's only shown on system-wide changes and program installs. which, again, is common amongst OSes

your typical web-browsing user should never see a UAC prompt during normal use

Fortunately most users aren't like my step-daughter was. She'd click on anything that wiggled, clashed, or sparkled. Damn magpie. I just turned off all safeties, and reimaged the disk every week.

@GypsySpellweaver ok, I just confirmed that the Application Verifier tool does not exist on a win10 system without VS installed

@GypsySpellweaver there's ways to fix that too :P

namely, not giving them an admin account in the first place

it's even possible to lock down admin accounts, but that's a pain and it's hnestly easier to just treat them as root

this entire "double agent" rubbish has a strong stink of FUD

6:17 AM

Something I used to do was, after a fresh install, log into the created account, which is an admin account, and change the name of "Administrator" to something else, then log into that, delete the other admin account, and create the needed accounts.

Intruder could never hack the password for Administrator, because it didn't exist.

> What is the requirement to use it?
Administrator rights required to write access for the IFEO registry key (IFEO = Image File Execution Options) and write access to the %systemroot%\system32 directory.

kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3418

so yea

olllllllllllllllllllllllld news

that post was 2014

there's even older ones if you really wanted to dig

'Course, I had to log in as Administrator at least once or the user directory wouldn't be created until after the name was changed/

and there's other (admittedly less stable) DLL injection methods

I've never understood the mindset that leads to people using exploits or creating viruses. Of course, there's lots of mindsets I don't understand outside tech too.

@GypsySpellweaver these days it's purely commercial

6:24 AM

you know, I have an even better way to disable the antivirus

@Bob Don't install it?

And a certain amount of ego

if you can assume admin privs, you can just turn it off (using said admin privs), modify the A/V's files on disk, and poof!

turns out, if you can assume admin privs you can change a lot of things in malware-ish ways

I just know this is going to be all over the news as some super advanced hack

sigh.

I hope Raymond says something about it :P

@Bob How long before it gets onto security.SE?

@GypsySpellweaver I almost feel like asking it myself.

6:29 AM

@Bob Why not, you've already done the leg work.