[16:33] <davef> Happy Monday-eve everybody
[16:33] <daftykins> \o
[16:33] <daftykins> how goes?
[16:34] <penguin42> not bad, yourself?
[16:34] <zxmpi> happy long dark tea time of the soul
[16:36] <daftykins> been off IRC quite a bit of late as work has been horrendeous
[16:36] <daftykins> just yesterday i lost 2 hours to a client's WiFi printer, then upon making it to the job i was really in the neighbourhood for... discovered a client had taken a laptop away to England i was meant to look at, so she wasted my time D:
[16:37] <penguin42> damn portable computers
[16:37] <zxmpi> what?! you needed the laptop here to work on it? i've never heard of the like! :-P
[16:38] <daftykins> well worse still is that i was up there a previous Sunday moving her from her ex-husband's M365 tenant to her own - and explained it would need all devices reconfigured - only to receive an email from her this past week saying she couldn't send
[16:38] <daftykins> "well duh, you haven't been in contact to get them reconfigured yet"
[16:40] <daftykins> in the meantime i'm still fighting through this Cyber Essentials thing the NHS are making a friend's business do
[16:40] <daftykins> we're having to revoke email access to all their staff smartphones because they all break policy right now
[16:41] <daftykins> we discovered some of the numpties have up to 3 different smartphones all logged into their accounts and regularly syncing D:
[16:45] <daftykins> the cert demands that you have an anti-malware product installed on staff phones, an ability to confirm if the device is jailbroken or rooted, and you should be able to look at the full apps installed list - if you can't do it via a technical control, you're expected to do a monthly video call with your employees where they show you what's on there xD
[16:48] <zxmpi> that sounds... fun?
[16:48] <penguin42> of the ones with 3 smart phones, how many have any clue what the other 2 are?
[16:50] <zxmpi> i can understand having more than 1 phone but for a secure network like 1 with medical records i'd only have 1 attached to that
[16:50] <daftykins> well the device admin page lets you see what model they are, so it's not too hard
[16:51] <daftykins> well it's not a secure network at all, and most of the staff don't touch medical data - and even if they do it's certainly not in email
[16:51] <daftykins> honestly the whole thing is horrible because you can tell they've just designed their questions around Microsoft 365 and the features it has available - at a given high price point
[16:52] <penguin42> what are you using?
[16:52] <daftykins> Google Workspace
[16:53] <penguin42> nod
[16:53] <daftykins> to get better mobile device control, i.e. to require a new login to be manually authorised by a manager, everyone would need to be bumped up to a higher tier which is 3x the cost compared with now
[16:54] <daftykins> M365 is 2x the cost at the typical tier... but only secures Apple devices included within that, Android controls are very limited
[16:54] <daftykins> neither do anything for anti-malware though
[16:55] <zxmpi> seems to me mobile platforms are a security nightmare
[16:56] <daftykins> absolutely, there's no good reason 90% of them even need mobile access to the company email
[16:57] <zxmpi> set up a email -> sms gateway :-D
[16:59] <penguin42> are they actually using it for email or for calendaring?  Mobile calendaring is more useful
[17:00] <daftykins> couple of staff had gone off for maternity leave so it was a more convenient way for them to keep informed that there's work needing attention rather than them firing up a laptop daily to find out, was the gist i was getting
[17:00] <zxmpi> which i can kinda see
[17:00] <daftykins> only one of management relies heavily on the email since his day job is Doctoring so he can manage the staff from afar
[17:02] <daftykins> i had to ask, "is convenience worth all this hassle and extra fees?"
[17:03] <zxmpi> all the consultants said yes :-P
[17:05] <daftykins> i thought i'd found a nice solution with this product from Bitdefender anywho, but the guy trying to resell it to me doesn't answer my questions accurately... and the product itself doesn't match with the company's own documentation, so i'm struggling a bit there!
[17:06] <davef> Speaking of M365.. for the people who have set it up and used it, I'm considering the basic plan. I'm using Fastmail, but find the calendar frustrating to use and I like how the Outlook calendars just seem to work across organizations. 
[17:07] <daftykins> £9.60 / mo for a single user, full office suite on a tonne of devices and email with your own domain, it's certainly the preference for some
[17:08] <daftykins> I personally won't use MS Office
[17:08] <zxmpi> ^this
[17:09] <davef> I don't need the full office suite, just e-mail, calendars and cloud storage.
[17:09] <davef> Which costs around $7/month, same about what I'm paying now for FastMail.
[17:10] <daftykins> ah right
[17:10] <davef> I don't use Word/Excel enough to justify the "Professional" version
[17:12] <daftykins> yeah, since 2021 came out it's more cost effective to get the 'buy once' edition, i often run the numbers for clients but if they have a tonne of devices then it gets harder
[17:12] <daftykins> Google Workspace does me fine though, £4.70/mo odd
[17:12] <daftykins> diddledani: psst i have more work for you!
[17:14] <daftykins> i best draft an email
[17:21] <davef> I can't support Google, when they get bored they tend to just kill stuff off so it's put me off buying into any of their services long term.
[17:22] <zxmpi> ^also this
[17:22] <davef> https://killedbygoogle.com/
[17:22] <daftykins> if it were some small thing i would understand, but this is their entire business apps platform earning them moolah, not the same imo
[17:23] <daftykins> but so what if it did? i've done plenty of migrations of email heh
[17:26] <daftykins> the peeps with the evil wifi printer was an interesting one, the family is known island-wide because they run high-street shops and hold the M&S franchise license over here
[17:27] <daftykins> his IT provider, a pretty sizeable company, is trying to shift him from in-house servers to all M365, so he's in the midst of drowning in their very wordy proposal at the moment
[17:28] <daftykins> seemed like they just fired a template full of useless unrelated stuff at him to me
[17:28] <daftykins> had a good laugh when he pointed at the marketing sticker on his printer listing OS support
[17:28] <daftykins> "Windows and Mac i get, but what's this penguin?"
[17:29] <daftykins> at which point i of course burst into a full speech "have you heard the good word about our lord and saviour, Tux?"
[17:31] <daftykins> what a comedy of errors though, didn't know their router password, didn't know their WiFi password, had the printer on WiFi despite whole house being wired for LAN
[17:32] <daftykins> unit was on originally shipped firmware still, huge version leap to become current - then Windows 10 kept picking a driver they'd previously installed ~2016 which wasn't working anymore
[17:32] <zxmpi> sounds like it was set up by 5 different people
[17:32] <daftykins> haha yeah that's quite possibly how many he'd had have a go
[17:33] <daftykins> i only recently started doing some domestic tasks for them because a client of mine had supplied a laptop to his wife that i'd had to configure, for a non-profit she handles admin for
[17:35] <daftykins> quite hoping he'll let me come and see his setup, they have several places in town here that are along the street from one another, so he said they're linked up by just standard broadband services or some microwave point to point links here and there
[17:38] <zxmpi> look for the cooked pigeons on the ground :-P
[17:40] <daftykins> i know a gov employee that's in a satellite office with a radio link, he said he can tell you how long a print job is going to take solely by the weather
[17:41] <zxmpi> at least it's not by the headache he gets :-P
[17:41] <daftykins> :D
[17:51] <zxmpi> but yeah, wifi can drop by about 10% here if it rains heavily. even though ap is about 20ft from device under same roof
[17:52] <daftykins> not the same tech *shrug*
[17:53] <daftykins> biab supermarket run
[17:53] <zxmpi> radio waves can suck where water is involved. also sitting on granite which is also a big feck off to radio
[18:30] <daftykins> yeah i get that, just odd to bring up when surely the path between your devices and shared AP would be inside
[18:35] <zxmpi> l shaped house and signal is passing through 2 wet outside walls that seems to do the trick at kyboshing the signal strength
[18:38] <daftykins> can't really guarantee that's the path
[18:39] <zxmpi> true but when those walls are wet signal usually drops a smidge.
[18:41] <daftykins> such science xD
[18:41] <zxmpi> you should see the fun when it's sideways rain and those walls remain dry :-)
[20:21] <davef> Ugh, I don't like the "new" Ubuntu logo
[20:22] <davef> https://ubuntu.com/blog/a-new-look-for-the-circle-of-friends
[21:59] <zxmpi> yeah, comes across as very white
[22:02] <daftykins> hmm the heads got bigger
[22:03] <zxmpi> that's the hazmat suits we'll all need outdoors in 6 months :-P