VBA Rubberducking

Duga

12:03 AM

REFRESH!

[Minesweeper] 135 Games Played. 92 Bombs Used. 18065 Moves Performed. 12 New Users

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1:31 AM

"Epsihootamoo doopsiquorps" --the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom

this

3:09 PM

Why in the hell does Excel have LInkedin integration?

FreeMan

Because Faceborg owns LinkedIn? Oh, wait, that doesn't make sense either...

this

I know it was mentioned here years ago, and apparently it was so traumatizing that I have repressed any memories of it until I made the mistake of popping open Excel's Options dialog.

Even now, it's mind-blowing that someone thought that was a good idea. <narrator> No, it wasn't. </narrator>

IvenBach

3:27 PM

@JimmyHu If you haven't been welcomed yet, welcome to the pond (chatroom).

BigBen

3:38 PM

@this Blame ... Satya?

HackSlash

4:20 PM

@FreeMan LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. So it does make sense.

List of mergers and acquisitions by Microsoft

Microsoft is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The...

FreeMan

meh... I knew someone big bought 'em. Pretty much all the same these days.

this

@HackSlash no, doesn't because I don't see why me making a spreadsheet should require a linkedin connection.

HackSlash

@this it's not required. Where are you even seeing the integration?

this

not sure I saw it in work, but that doesn't answer why is it even there and why it's enabled. This only sets off my paranoid klaxon.

FreeMan

Mine's been going off about so many things, I've almost grown used to it.

HackSlash

4:37 PM

@this if you like that, you're going to love this new add-on that magically appeared in Outlook and is running on every computer in the world. It's called the "Outlook Social Connector" support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/…

When I saw it, I had to script up some magic to remove it from every computer in the company. So much of my time is spent fighting Microsoft it kinda makes me mad. Just think about the man hours spent by every admin in every company in the world. Each organization needs someone like me to hunt and disable these crazy inventions. What ever happened to sane defaults? If I want something, I install it.

Don't get me started on the news and weather widgets. They need your location information to show you local news articles a relevant weather... So they send your location information every few seconds. What could go wrong? (This is more a problem on mobile devices but now your Windows PC does it too! Because reasons)

FreeMan

Because Microsoft features are released based on "Hey boss, look at this cool thing I wrote!", not because of any real need for them.

There was actually an article written for a local newspaper in the late 80s that my dad sent me. The reporter was embedded at MS for 6 months and that is exactly how things worked.

@HackSlash Even if you disable the display of the weather/new widgets, I'd imagine that it's still phoning home with your location. :(

HackSlash

Or because they work for the department of defense and the DoD says, hey can you integrate this nice weather company that is totally not compromised by the CIA? Send them location information of every PC on the planet please. It's for your own good.

The weather is provided by MSNBC which is owned by NBCUniversal which is owned by Comcast.

The largest cable ISP in the US and the largest Software company in the world. Best buddies. They own your OS and the internet lines, and the news...

NBC being the company that controls all Olympic games coverage.

It's all six degrees of Kevin Bacon

BigBen

5:02 PM

@HackSlash wow MSFT, this is a terrible idea.

FreeMan

@HackSlash I can hear your paranoid klaxon from here!

On the bright side, but that's only Faceborg, it seems.

HackSlash

Yeah, the modern world is strange. We always knew about powerful organizations that keep secrets. It was commonly believed that it was to protect our nation. So Americans were always very proud of their spooks. Now we are waking up to the fact that they are just people like any population; capable of making terrible mistakes, corruption, and hideous crimes. That they aren't always the good guys. That there is no such thing as "good guys".

I love spy stories like 007 and mission impossible. The truth is stranger than these fictions.

FreeMan

@HackSlash Sadly, this is true.

HackSlash

Maybe people shouldn't be trusted with so much power. There is no way to make it safe.

this

@FreeMan see, you already lost that particular battle the moment you installed Windows 10.

FreeMan

5:13 PM

@this true. very, very true.

this

@HackSlash the MI TV series were far better than MI movies, IMO. But yes, those stories tend to assume that we have a benevolent secret organization. Interestingly, I understand that the MI TV cast walked out during screening of the MI movie since it went against the whole idea of a benevolent spy.

HackSlash

And just like the military, the boots on the ground often don't know what they are doing or why. Just following orders. So they are vulnerable to bad orders just as they are vulnerable to the spies themselves being bad actors. Nobody knows what anyone is doing.

this

at least there's some people trying to change that. Whether they'll succeed is another question.

HackSlash

Yeah, FOIA is helping uncover secrets that don't need to be secret anymore.

EFF is fighting for privacy

Those are good steps

We need to know more about the government and they need to know less about us. They serve us not the other way around.

this

and some guy announced something called "freedom phone" to stop the censorship and spying as well.

HackSlash

5:20 PM

lol, in true "newspeak" fashion the "freedom phone" is a lie

this

Totally agreed. I kind of want to add Reagan's "The most terrifying nine words in English language is 'I'm from government and I'm here to help.'" to the pledge of allegiance so that every schoolchild will learn to fear and be wary toward government.

HackSlash

The PinePhone is real: pine64.org/pinephone and so is the Librem: puri.sm/products/librem-5/pureos-mobile

You can tell they are real OSS projects because they are terrible. (J/K) it has potential but neither of them are suitable for daily driving

BigBen

hahahahaha

this

Interesting. However, the real problem is that people need to be first persuaded that those features that are added to the smartphone is not a good thing for them.

HackSlash

Legit. As long as people are livestreaming every thought in their head on Facebook we have no hope for privacy.

this

5:25 PM

Exactly. Worse, they are conditioned to think that privacy => something to hide => you're a conspiracy tinfoil nut engaging in bad stuff like porn.

It's much easier to see a molester or a drug lord as a evil than some generic governmental entities of faceless drones.

HackSlash

Most women I talk to understand the fears of being stalked. These same women broadcast every place they go on FB. So they understand the concern and they are scared but they won't give up their social addiction.

FreeMan

@HackSlash honestly, I'd looked at the PinePhone, but yeah, it looks terrible for attempting daily use. :( I'll let it mature a bit more, then give it a serious thought

@HackSlash some of these folk are the ones screaming the loudest about privacy. They're missing the irony...

this

@HackSlash oh yes. I still vividly remember when I read an opinion article in my college newspaper about how the author was stalked by some guy she'd friended on Facebook. I hadn't heard of Facebook back then; it was very new. I remember shouting at the newspaper "WHY ARE YOU GIVING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION ON WEB?!?". I guess she needed an article to write....

HackSlash

I wouldn't call it irony. They want to share what we are doing with friends. That's why they use the social media. They don't want spies, creeps, and advertising companies to have all their data. It's not unreasonable to say "Let me talk to my friends on the internet without listening in". Wire tap laws should protect us.

this

@HackSlash See, the problem is that even if you have SSL encrypting the communication, you are still leaving your data with the company itself and the company might use data in ways you don't want. Lot of big tech are happy to cooperate with government entities, after all. So you still end up sharing with spies and creeps.

The question "why do you think they offer their service for free?" seems to wreak their brain.

HackSlash

5:31 PM

And E2EE with dynamic groups is technologically difficult to do. The internet wasn't designed to be secure.

IvenBach

Helpful Hotkey Find: F2 is the hotkey for renaming a file/directory. If you Tab to confirm the rename you then get to edit the next visible file/directory name.

this

@HackSlash ironic, considering that it was developed by military originally....

HackSlash

Sort of. There were two Internets and there still is. One for DARPA and one for colleges. The colleges are the ones who actually did the work of developing hardware and software we use today. It was also an international effort with CERN being pivotal .

this

Interesting. But was DARPA's version secure?

HackSlash

It was designed for sharing scientific discoveries internationally. It was open for the greater good of information sharing

@this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

this

5:36 PM

Right. That made sense back then, since sharing was very expensive... without the internet, you'd have to pay a hefty fee for journals to be mailed and it was a huge PITA to get your hand on it since you'd have to share with 100s other students.

HackSlash

ARPANET will give you the history. And if you look at SIPRNet you will see the security practices: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet

I believe it travels on physically separate fiber lines with the ability to tunnel through the public internet if needed. They use a system like TOR to do the public tunneling.

TOR was developed by the Naval Research Laboratory: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

FreeMan

@this is a favorite statement of a friend of mine, "If you're not paying for a service, you are the product."

this

6:00 PM

Exactly!

They sure ain't giving it out out of goodness and benevolence from their bleeding heart!

Quack Exchange

6:12 PM

0

Q: To what degree is my VBA Array size function safe, robust, and performant

Coming from a Java/Scala background with a strong focus on OOP+FP, I recently started working with Excel+VBA to implement a front-end for a SaaS. It was like stepping way back in time, over two decades, in software engineering trying to understand how to use and exploit VBA. In the ensuing 3 mont...

BigBen

6:47 PM

@QuackExchange "It was like stepping way back in time, over two decades, in software engineering trying to understand how to use and exploit VBA"

HackSlash

@FreeMan, that shouldn't be the case. Television was a huge success that required zero feedback from the user. It was paid for by advertising. The internet started out the same way. Where things took a dark turn was when "targeted ads" became popular. This went far beyond showing cleaning products to housewives on daytime TV and beer during action films. That wasn't good enough. They wanted to show YOU and ad for YOU, not just people like you.

FreeMan

> It was paid for by advertising.

HackSlash

If we could ban just that one practice then these shady "ad profiles" of users would be worthless overnight.

FreeMan

which was targeted at the expected audience. Loooong before the internet was "a thing"

HackSlash

Correct, the target audience. Not any member of that audience.

Selling private information should be a crime.

FreeMan

6:57 PM

Valid. Cookies (and a variety of other technology) just makes it easier and more specific

this

too bad there's no right to privacy in bill of rights. Should have been there, but back then, they didn't think it'd be a thing, I guess.

FreeMan

@HackSlash except that you and I both agree to it when we click the "I accept the terms" button and haven't bothered to read them.

this

Right now, it's only implied via other rights but not affirmatively defended.

@FreeMan My biggest gripes is that it usually include a provision that they reserve the ability to change TOS in future without telling you. They may do you a courtesy of telling it was updated, but then proceed to encouch it in layers of legalese that nobody can even read it anyway.

FreeMan

I'm certainly NOT saying it's right, but we do agree to it. We just don't bother to pay attention to what we're agreeing to. :(

this

I think that's why Hackslash is saying it should be criminal -- then it wouldn't matter so much.

HackSlash

7:06 PM

Just like you have to fill out a form to release medical information that includes a line item for each individual information is released to. If that was the way of all private information then people would not be signing legal documents to release their information to Cambridge Analytical. It would make the process so cumbersome that it wouldn't be as viable as a business model for people like Facebook.

this

the problem, though, is that it's hard to get the spirit of law complied with - they can find ways to circumvent it. "Oh, we didn't get that information from him directly. We just inferred he was 30-50 years old male based on his browsing habits!"

BigBen

I mean fingerprinting is worse too...

FreeMan

7:21 PM

and then there's crap like this:

> The next step in the application process is completing the survey below. We have partnered with HireCredit to qualify applicants for a tax credit program, the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC). To determine eligibility for the credit, we'll ask you some questions such as your employment status, whether you've received financial assistance from the government, and whether you're a veteran.

That was part of an automated email in response to a job I just applied for.

They do, at lest, say it's not mandatory, but what the heck do they need to know that for, unless they only hire people who earn them a tax credit?

And, if that's the case, I'm 99.99999% certain I won't get them any tax credits. Christian, white, male, conservative <- Nope nothing protected or worthy there...

this

they're just used to everyone being so compliant and so open with their personal data...

FreeMan

actually, it's the perfect storm: Those qualify me for the only group that you're legally allowed to discriminate against.

this

wouldn't call it legal, though. it's still illegal to discriminate against white conservatitve male..... on the books.

but yeah, they do certainly act like it's already legal. :-\

HackSlash

7:56 PM

Religion, Race, sex, political affiliation, and veteran status are all protected classes. If you honestly believe their anti-discrimination hiring practices are in themselves discriminatory then you have a solid case. Hire a lawyer. legalmatch.com/law-library/article/…

Vogel612

8:29 PM

I don't think you can argue that case in court that way.

I mean, you're welcome to try, but I doubt it will get you very far

Duga

11:48 PM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] 1376 stars vs. [decalage2/oletools] 1647 stars

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