Technology

Stealing this info and posting it publicly is an important way to fight back. Once prole hear their credit card is being defrauded because of recall it will be untenable for it to stay

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

• Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
• Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
• Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
• Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
• Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
• Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution.
• MS = Microsoft
• OSS = Open Source Software
• Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
• Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows.

Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry

Basically, a playbook is a set of instructions or baselines for how you want the system to look/be setup, and the provisioning tool will engage in however many tasks are required to configure the system to your specifications. I played around with something similar with PowerShell DSC, and its pretty cool to be able to eliminate config drift when it checks against the config and remediates any changes that weren't updated in the playbook.

I would guess my company absolutely wants it, but wants the I fo sent only to them.

In fact if they didn't already have something like this installed on our PCs I'd be floored.

"pay us money to not do something" sounds like some mob shit

So, pay more it is.

*sigh* you're not wrong but the constant posts are annoying.

Chromebook? Lmao

Well, if they say it's secure, it must be secure!