Decade and a half ago I torrented all the time and didn’t get caught until I stupidly downloaded something from the top 100 torrents on pirate bay.

Not sure how safe torrents are now.

Never have had any issues with direct downloads and streaming. Just use your head, adblock, and virus scan your downloads (knowing that keygens or cracked exes may show as viruses).

For safest option and free: Use an up to date web browser with a good adblocker (ublock origin is the current best), stick to direct downloads using a download manager to manage the 12+ parts, and virus scan everything that you download. Download from trusted sites from the megathread. Direct download is generally safe, unless you live in one of the few countries cracking down on fitgirl repacks specifically. Then that site is off limits for you.

You can use torrents without a VPN, it’s just not safe. You could be caught and the penalty will vary based off of what you’re downloading, where you live, and who you use for an ISP.

Most 365 mail admin work doesn’t end up touching the routing stuff, domains, or DNS records too often, so I’m by no means an expert. Last year I got rid of the last on-prem exchange servers in our environment. Here are my thoughts anyway, for what its worth.

At my workplace, domain as internal relay was used as part of our hybrid exchange setup, where we still had an on-prem exchange server largely for recipient management (for stuff connected to AD objects and thus mastered on-prem instead of in the cloud) and for a mail relay for internal recipients so that automated emails coming from legacy systems bypassed all filtering. I’m not familiar with other use cases.

Stuff that may not apply (minimize the lift)

I would approach this by using it as an opportunity to raze those hundreds of redirects. Surely the recieving systems have other ways to categorize incoming email than destination address. Stuff like system to system you could probably add shit in the body text and change the filters on the recieving end. So each external system would only have one destination address. That’s ideal world though and probably touches a lot of shit outside your control.

Second thing is that I would look into setting the destination email addresses directly in the sending system. It takes management out of your hands, but why does any of this need to hit your infra in the first place? Again, that’s ideal world and also probably touches shit you don’t control.

Point is, I’d look to minimize how many of these things you actually have to deal with, because they’ll just keep being a problem and a pain in the ass to manage forever otherwise. That’s the real underlying problem, if you can do anything about it.

Stuff that more directly lines up with your ask:

If you can script routing rules you can probably figure out scripting the creation of contact objects in 365, and export of them to csv for verification.

PowerShell is going to be your friend with Exchange Online/365, and most things Microsoft. Exchange Online has a dedicated module (think library if you’re used to terminology for other languages).

You can make a csv with the internal email address, external destination address, internal contact name, display name, and whether or not it’s hidden from the address book (do end users need to send to it?). I’d reccomend using some clear prefix in the internal name to keep them obvious compared to any other contacts not related to this fuckery.

You could use full mailboxes and forwarding rules on each one but that increases complexity significantly.

In PowerShell, you’d connect to exchange, import the csv, then foreach over the csv contents throwing the values from it into New-MailContact.

If you want to be fancy you could wrap New-MailContact in a try/catch to spit failed ones out into an array and export that back to csv at the end for review.

“Memes” being just rage faces and advice animals to the wider internet was probably the most infuriating time period for me.

It was like the whole world collectively and simultaneously chose the most embarassing ways to anthropomophize their emotions.

The left hand goes on the left or the middle depending on the game.

Hey, if grandpa is old enough to recognize this one, he probably remembers the attempts by /b/ users to find some definition of “meme” (or at least internet memes) that excluded the garbage that reddit popularized to the point of ending up being shared by “normies” on facebook.

I get it, it used to be important to me too. Gatekeeping was the point for a lot of people who defined themselves by membership to a sort of secret internet “in-club” when they didn’t fit into any groups or cliques irl. At least, that was the case with me like 18 years ago or so.

It was never about the literal definition, but about making a definition for “internet in-joke” to create lines of separation between the in-group and the out-group.

2011? Get off my lawn whippersnapper! I was lurking chan sites in 07 when I should have been underageb& and having a remotely decent time in highschool.

No one cries for EFG. His name has been long forgotten.

Seriously, I’m pretty certain EFG was the progenitor to f7u12, and 4chan was pissed that reddit kept stealing their memes and beating them until nothing but a horse shaped hole in the ground remained as reddit kept growing. Pretty sure I witnessed the first advice animal threads too. That little pup with the rainbow background was spammed to hell and back for around a month before it made its way to reddit.

I too, enjoy plugging a USB-C to A adapter into my Android phone so I can use an ethernet to USB adapter. :P

More seriously, two of the hard requirements of my house was fiber connection available from the ISP to the house and wired ethernet to the major rooms.

Missing Plan 9 from schizo tier.

Do we even need to make the torment nexus joke anymore? Come on now. This is absurd.

It already has the drain topper removed for easier log stomping. How considerate! Make sure to thank your host because that is some grade A hospitality.

Meanwhile parts of Texas and the East Coast have gotten more snow than they’ve seen in a decade.

Note to self: never move to the American Midwest. I get sinus migraines from changes in barometric pressure, and can usually tell when a rainstorm is coming from the sinus pressure.

You can look this shit up you know. 3 yachts each retrofitted into marine research vessels and one under construction as another research vessel. Two “support vessels” whatever the fuck that means. The one under construction will house 75 scientists. His marine research company, inkfish, releases all findings publicly and for free.

But nobody knows this shit because he isn’t burning money on a fucking PR firm.

Two yachts for pleasure, which is entirely two yachts too many.

Look, he’s sitting upon an empire largely propped up by the fucking invention of lootboxes, the marketing of them to children and whales, and all the second and third hand markets and gambling sites that have sprung up around this shit. I’m not going to sit around and suck his dick.

But inkfish isn’t even the only “public good” organization he’s founded. And he’s also just directly donated money to existing things as well, such as considerable money into pediatric ICU in New Zealand.

On the scheme of ultra rich, he is one of the better ones.

Edit: Especially if we’re putting Gabe Newell up against Tim “banning Twitter because it allows AI generation of CSAM is gatekeeping” Sweeney

Re-read the title. considering halting plans to. They aren’t using them yet.

Almost all of the settings are a simple on off switch. Group policy and the settings menu. Both are easily navigatible GUIs with clear descriptions of what the switches do. You only have to go the hosts file route if you want the extreme of completely disabling updates.

I work in sysadmin in a Windows environment. I haven’t had to touch the registry (for Windows configuration, we won’t talk about dumbass software devs) in over four years, and it was only because I didn’t check group policy first.

Please, for the love of all that is worthwhile in this world, don’t lecture others on the ease or difficulty of configuring systems if you aren’t actually familiar with how to configure those systems.

At the risk of sending you down a rabbit hole, there are some people who use Reshade on non-online games to do “game photography”. You could go as light as overlaying a grid, or more complicated stuff like simulating lens focal length, removing fog, adjusting colors, adding bloom, bokeh, etc.

It’s meant for overlaying complex graphical effects while you play, but there’s a small dedicated community of people using it to set up the perfect still shots. It’s definitely a deep rabbit hole.

You can delay Windows updates up to 30 days at a time, and do that indefinitely. Or just black hole the update server in your hosts file to disable updates entirely.

There are also ways to not download updates until a certain amount of time after their release, and then to give yourself something like two weeks before it auto installs during a period when the computer is not in active use.

I haven’t had an update happen unexpectedly since Vista.

And lets be real, do we really want to just let the average chucklefuck run around with insecure shit? There’s an element of protecting people from themselves going on here as well.

Welcome to Lemmy, where people aren’t willing to even try to get Windows to work for them, but are absolutely convinced they know exactly how it works.

I’ve had conversations here where I’ve led with the fact that I’ve got a decade of experience in IT and sysadmin in a Windows environment, had someone insist I was wrong about some configurable functionality, and they ended up admitting they hadn’t touched Windows in a decade.

People running wild with complete ass pull speculation about how stuff like OneDrive functions instead of taking 30 seconds to do a search on their engine of choice.

I had someone insist that the handwriting and typing analysis feature was a full on keylogger capturing all input including passwords across every program on the whole damn OS, then tell me I wasn’t researching right because 100 articles with the same copy pasted clickbait headline and instructions for how to turn off the feature but no actual source for the keylogging claim does not make fucking truth. The other commentor kept hiding behind a piss poor excuse of not being willing to spoonfeed me, while spending considerably more effort telling me I was stupid.

I offered to edit every one of my ~4000 comments to sing their praises if they just stopped grandstanding and linked me the goddamn proof. Guess who hasn’t stepped up?

I’ve said across multiple comments at this point that when I get enough free time to putz around with getting 11 set up in a VM in prep to upgrade my desktop that I’m going to make a guide on how to configure all this shit.

I hate that learned helplessness with Windows is being fucking championed as a failing of Windows and reason to switch to Linux, when these same users end up having issues with Linux and being hung out to dry there as well.

And are you actually using the HDR features? Most can be run fine in SDR mode.

Hey, that’s I am a bunny! Didn’t know Nicholas went that hard.