Senators Asking FCC to Delay Net Neutrality Vote

Citing concerns over the possibility that fake comments will be used to file the agency's public comment, twenty-eight senators are calling on the FCC to delay it's vote on repealing net neutrality rules that were put in place during the Obama Administration.

Via The Hill:

The group, led by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), wants the FCC to conduct an investigation into whether the net neutrality docket’s public comment record was tampered with. 

“A free and open Internet is vital to ensuring a level playing field online, and we believe that your proposed action may be based on an incomplete understanding of the public record in this proceeding,” the senators wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “In fact, there is good reason to believe that the record may be replete with fake or fraudulent comments, suggesting that your proposal is fundamentally flawed.” 

The group included Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). All of the senators who signed the letter are net neutrality supporters. 

The FCC will vote on Dec. 14 to scrap the Obama-era rules that prevent internet service providers from discriminating against certain content. The agency was flooded nearly 22 million comments, a record, when it sought public input on Pai’s plan to repeal the rules.
The letter cited New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into fake comments filed with the FCC on net neutrality. Schneiderman said last month that his office had found that “tens of thousands” of New York residents may have been impersonated by fake commenters. 

The senators also noted that 50,000 net neutrality consumer complaints may not have been included in the public record.

Hopefully the FCC will listen to the senators and delay the vote. Many people are rightfully up in arms over this. The idea of net neutrality is to keep the internet free, and not allow ISP's to charge you extra to view the content you want to see.

Here is a pretty funny infographic explaining it via Imgur from back in July:

What do you think about this? Are you for or against net neutrality? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!

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The end of an era. StartCom is packing up shop.

I was a big proponent of StartCom SSL certificates. I wrote about them in the past, and used them quite a bit over the years. I mean, the price was right. How can you beat free?

Well, last year around October Google announced that they were dropping support for StartCom and WoSign SSL certificates because they didn't maintain high enough standards. This was shortly after Apple and Mozilla did the same.

Via Google:

Certificate Authorities (CAs) play a key role in web security by issuing digital certificates to website operators. These certificates are trusted by browsers to authenticate secure connections to websites. CAs who issue certificates outside the policies required by browsers and industry bodies can put the security and privacy of every web user at risk. 

Google has determined that two CAs, WoSign and StartCom, have not maintained the high standards expected of CAs and will no longer be trusted by Google Chrome, in accordance with our Root Certificate Policy. This view is similar to the recent announcements by the root certificate programs of both Apple and Mozilla. The rest of this post provides background to that decision and how we plan to minimize disruption while still protecting users.

Apparently this struck a major blow to StartCom, and after trying to fix the issues laid out by these browser providers, they apparently still fell short. Because of this, StartCom has issued the following statement via email:

Dear customer, 

As you are surely aware, the browser makers distrusted StartCom around a year ago and therefore all the end entity certificates newly issued by StartCom are not trusted by default in browsers. 

The browsers imposed some conditions in order for the certificates to be re-accepted. While StartCom believes that these conditions have been met, it appears there are still certain difficulties forthcoming. Considering this situation, the owners of StartCom have decided to terminate the company as a Certification Authority as mentioned in Startcom´s website. 

StartCom will stop issuing new certificates starting from January 1st, 2018 and will provide only CRL and OCSP services for two more years. 

StartCom would like to thank you for your support during this difficult time.
StartCom is contacting some other CAs to provide you with the certificates needed. In case you don´t want us to provide you an alternative, please, contact us at certmaster@startcomca.com. 

Please let us know if you need any further assistance with the transition process. We deeply apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause.

Best regards,
StartCom Certification Authority

This sucks to be sure, but truthfully, there are better providers out there. I mean you can get wildcard SSL certificates these days for as little as $38.00 per year (Click Here for that). Named certificates go for as little as $9.00 per year.

Anyway, I'll be on the lookout for another free SSL provider. They are super handy when you want to stand something up fast and cheap! I've heard good things about Let's Encrypt, but I haven't used them yet.

If you have any recommendations, let us know in the comments!

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Testing out a new way to monetize using Coinhive!

Ever since Google implemented their Panda angorithm years ago, and ever since Google booted me off Adsense for no reason whatsoever, I've been struggling to monetize Bauer-Power. To add insult to injury, Ad Blockers have become ever so popular as well, which kills monetization even more.

Look, I get it. Ads are annoying, however they are what keeps many websites free and their content free. It's a lot like terrestrial television. I digress...

Anyway, I discovered an interesting way to possibly monetize Bauer-Power recently. And it doesn't cost you a dime! At the top of the page, you should see a Coinhive banner like this:

Loading...

When you click on it, a simple javascript kicks off that borrows some of your CPU power to mine Monero cryptocurrency for me. When you press the pause button, or leave the site, the miner stops. Simple! While you are reading my content, you can throw me a bone by letting me borrow some CPU. No big deal right?

If you click on the links in this post, you may also notice that they take you to a Coinhive redirect page first. That also mines a little Monero for me to help out as well.

Hopefully this method works, because to be honest, I have yet to find a truly viable alternative to Google Adsense. On top of that, if I made more money on Bauer-Power, I would be able to add content more frequently.

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How to log X-Forwarded-For events in IIS 8.5+ and in Apache

At my day job, we use a cloud based content delivery service called Incapsula that also acts as a cloud based load balancer. Like just about every load balancing solution, when traffic finally hits your web server, the only IP addresses you see are usually that of the load balancer. The same holds true with Incapsula.

Well, the other day I was asked to identify certain traffic by IP address, and I couldn't. The logs only showed that of Incapsula. I asked Incapsula for their logs so I could correlate, but they only keep security related logs due to PCI compliance, which is understandable. That meant that I needed a way to log X-Forwarded-For header information going forward.

If you are not familiar with X-Forwarded-For, according to Wikipedia:

The X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header field is a common method for identifying the originating IP address of a client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer.

Makes sense right? Well, the good news is that both Apache and IIS (8.5 and above) support logging X-Forwarded-For natively with some slight modifications.

For IIS:

• In IIS Manager, click the server name in the left panel to go to the Home screen
• Click on Logging
• Click on the Select Fields button
• Click on the Add Field button
• In the Field Name box enter x-forwarded-for
• Leave Source Type set to Request Header
• In the Source box enter X-Forwarded-For
• Click OK
• Click OK again
• In the upper right of the Logging page click Apply
• Restart IIS

Your logs will now be appended with _x to show that the logs contain custom fields. You can also follow this same process at the site level if you want. The above example makes the change global for all sites on the server.

For Apache (In Ubuntu):

• Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
• Find the line that says
  LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
• Change it to
  LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
• Restart Apache

Simple right? Now you will be able to see actual client IP's in your logs!

Did this post help you? Let us know in the comments!

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How To Use Remote Assistance (Quick Assist) in Windows 10

Holy smokes! I discovered today that Remote Assistance still exists! It's actually been re-named to Quick Assist apparently according to Wikipedia. If that's true, it's funny that the application windows all still say Windows Remote Assistance still, but I digress...

Anyway, I used to use it all the time in my old Windows XP support days, but for some reason I thought it went away after Vista. I'm guessing that is because it became less intuitive to find it.

Well, the company I work for recently moved out of one office into two smaller offices, and the guys who work for me that support the users in both places are located at just one of the offices. That means remote support for everyone in the second office now.

We had Skype for Business through our Office365 subscription, which was "good enough" up until now, but the problem with that is it won't give the support person the administrative rights they need to actually help people remotely. My team and I talked about it, and we decided we needed to find something that works better in our new multi-office setup.

I decided to do a quick Google search, and lo and behold there it was! An article talking about how to use Remote Assistance in Windows 10! Bam!

It's pretty simple, you just have the user open a Run line by pressing Windows + R, then have them type in msra and click OK.

They are then presented with this screen:

If the user clicks the first option, they can save an invite file, email an invite file or use Easy Connect. Once they select an option, another window pops up with a temporary session password that the person giving support can use to connect with.

If the person giving the support clicks on one of the invite files, they are presented with a prompt to enter in the temporary password of the user needing help!

Once the password is entered, then the user needing help shares their screen, and the person giving support can request control in order to troubleshoot issues! All of this is free and built into Windows too!

What remote support tool(s) do you use at your company? Let us know in the comments!

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Long overdue post! mRemoteNG is back baby!

I have been an mRemote user for years. Even when the original project went tits up, and the new fork of mRemoteNG emerged, I've continued to use it.

A few years ago I wrote an article about switching over to Terminals because there was a bug in the version of mRemoteNG I was using that the developers weren't going to fix. Despite that, mRemoteNG was still my multi-terminal client of choice unless something went seriously wrong.

I've been using 1.72 Beta for what seems like forever. It would do weird things like freeze up my computer for 10 minutes if I had too many windows open. If that happened, I would switch to Terminals after my computer unfroze. I never made the full switch to Terminals though because of the amount of servers I have to manage. I just didn't want to take that time to manually re-create all the connections!

Well, on a whim this morning, I decided to check back with mRemoteNG and to my surprise they released a new stable version back in June! You can download their latest version here: (Download)

I just installed it, and re-imported my connections XML file. It will still be a few days before I know if all the old bugs have been worked out, and I can remove Terminals!

Do you use mRemoteNG? How do you like it? Let us know in the comments!

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How To Solve Facebook Math: 6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2)

This is an older video I put out back when I was still doing Tech Chop. Lately, the Facebook math problems have been making their rounds again, so I thought I'd post it here. Check it out:



In the comment section on Youtube, there are a bunch of people still arguing with me over this, and the way I implemented the order of operations. In the video, I reference an article from PurpleMath that says the following:

When you have a bunch of operations of the same rank, you just operate from left to right. For instance, 15 ÷ 3 × 4 is not 15 ÷ (3 × 4) = 15 ÷ 12, but is rather (15 ÷ 3) × 4 = 5 × 4, because, going from left to right, you get to the division sign first.

So, as mentioned in the video, if you follow the order of operations when solving 6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2), we handle the stuff in parentheses first, which is 1+2 which equals 3.

That now leaves the problem as  6 ÷ 2 (3), which is the same as 6 ÷ 2 x 3. Because everything is the same rank now in the order of operations, we go back to what PurpleMath said, and we solve left to right. The first problem starting from the left is:

6 ÷ 2 = 3

Which leaves us with 3x3 which of course equals 9.

If you want to argue in the comments, fine, but please note that your argument is not with me. It's with PurpleMath and the order of operations.

===============================

EDIT: Okay, TotalMedia in the comments pointed out that PurpleMath actually explains why 9 is not the correct answer on page two. They say:

This next example displays an issue that almost never arises but, when it does, there seems to be no end to the arguing. 

Simplify 16 ÷ 2[8 – 3(4 – 2)] + 1.
16 ÷ 2[8 – 3(4 – 2)] + 1
    = 16 ÷ 2[8 – 3(2)] + 1
    = 16 ÷ 2[8 – 6] + 1
    = 16 ÷ 2[2] + 1   (**)
    = 16 ÷ 4 + 1
    = 4 + 1 
    = 5 

The confusing part in the above calculation is how "16 divided by 2[2] + 1" (in the line marked with the double-star) becomes "16 divided by 4 + 1", instead of "8 times by 2 + 1". That's because, even though multiplication and division are at the same level (so the left-to-right rule should apply), parentheses outrank division, so the first 2 goes with the [2], rather than with the "16 divided by". That is, multiplication that is indicated by placement against parentheses (or brackets, etc) is "stronger" than "regular" multiplication. 

So, because of how 6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2) is written, with the multiplication not clearly defined like 6 ÷ 2 x (1 + 2), then according to the example above we need to simplify what's in parenthesis first which makes the problem  6 ÷ 2 (3), and since 2 is next to the parenthesis, then it is in essence a multiplication problem that is a part of the parenthesis and must be solved first, and the left-right rule doesn't apply because parenthesis is higher up in the order of operations.

That means that we have to multiply 2(3) which equals 6, and now the problem is 6÷6 which equals 1!

Son of a bitch! That is a tricky problem!

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