Programming

I field tickets all day, which is fine.

We have a set of questions we go through to fill out a quick ticket before we start the work over the phone.

We get a name, a computer number, and an external phone number because most users call from teams, and we tend to want to reboot computers, which kills a team call.

Well, today, a user didn't want to give an external number.

Then after they were given explicit instructions on how to proceed, they called back and hung up, likely hoping for a different agent.

Sorry, ma'am, I'm the only one here. I have caller ID and I've noted that you hung up on me.

Not today.

Nothing special, I want to try and make an operating system with folders and windows and stuff as practice, how do I begin?

Rant: We have policy set to empty the bin every week of items that are 30+ days old to keep the drives light.

User get upset because the files they had been storing in the recycle bin were deleted. You can create 10,000+ folders anywhere in your user profile to store things. OneDrive and OneNote are enabled. We have a file server sitting around. Why oh why in the year 2024, are you storing things in the recycle bin? Why are you using the recycle bin as your own personal, digital episode of Hoarders? Do you also store stuff in your trash can in your office and get upset when the cleaning crew removes it?

What about the rest of you, anything else strike a chord with you recently that feels like such a dated thing to happen?

TL;DR: Apono is creating fake posts with fake user review comments, who get vote manipulated, then end up on google, also shit on competitors and block me in an attempt to silence alternatives/critique.

Hi , I've already commented on a few of their posts and wrote a longer linkedin post on the topics. Feel free to read the full story there:

But there is no better place to call them out than on the very communities that they are trying to manipulate, is there?

Who is Apono.io even?

Apono.io is a cybersecurity, privileged access management software. That is used to allow developers and other members of an organization, to access restricted resources like databases, servers, etc. at least this is what I got from their web page, correct me if I am wrong.

The only reason I noticed what they are doing is because I tried myself founding a company in a similar space and ended up open-sourcing it. But this isn't a self promotion post, look into my post history if you're interested.

What are they doing?

Apono is systematically creating posts on various subreddits where they post a problem statement in on way or another and then comment with another account how Apono was the best solution for a person. Problem is: Neither the original Account, nor the user responding are actually real. Both of them are usually bought accounts with minimal relevant post history. And they never answer anything else, often aren't even used again after this usage.

These threads are also heavily vote manipulated on the thread from wednesday, my comment suggesting my open-source tool went from +6 votes to -4 within half an hour (now it's even at -8 but this could also be the hivemind).

Why would they do this?

Developer/Tech People marketing is notoriously difficult. Engineers are well known to be more or less immune to Ads, and hang up on Sales calls. Instead we often rely on social proof (recommendations by friends and colleagues) or user reviews on what we think are somewhat neutral platforms like reddit, hackernews and Github. Additionally Reddit has been ranking very highly on Google since about one year so if you create a reddit post "Alternative to xyz" and the first comment is your tool, this can drive a lot of traffic to your website for cheap.

Examples

As you can see this has been going on for a while, and I think if you check any of the accounts you'll most likely agree that they look quite suspicious. They usually have little history and no activity in any engineering subreddits. Then suddenly come with a production access problem or recommend Apono as the magical solution for such a problem.

One thing that baffles me a bit is: They blocked me from any account that is newer than ~8 months. Which is roughly when I started being active and trying to market my tool. Probably in the hope that I wont see their posts and don't recommend my tool as an alternative. This however lets me tie all of them together in the same scheme and made me suspicious in the first place. I have never interacted with most of the accounts that they blocked me from, so why would these random users put me on their block list?

An additional thing I find extremely scummy is that they are bad mouthing their existing (probably leading) competitor StrongDM continuously in a lot of their posts. In one of them they claimed a double price hike and the StrongDM CEO even commented "that they have never raised prices this much" but of course the OP never answers and there is an Apono recommendation in the post.

So what? Everyone buys reviews.

Maybe true, but that doesn't make it right and if you get caught you deserve being shamed for it. Especially selling a cyber security product that relies on trust should not use such scummy marketing campaigns in my opinion. I for my part will recommend people to rather use StrongDM or Teleport if they want to pay for a solution. Maybe we as a community can spread the word and make them stop this.

Note: This is not about Aponos product, I have never tried it. It might very well be a good solution. I'm just trying to shine some light on how a company is flooding reddit with fake reviews.

One of my friend marked attendance of someone by swiping his I'd card for 2-3 days .Now he got termination notice from HR . Will this affect seriously in future bgv and what to do reduce the consequences of this act. He just entered into corporate , 4 months into IT industry. He is very depressed thinking of his future . What should he do now?

My wife & I have built a free, open-source tool to lock scammers out of their domains.

Github:  
Website: 

Here's how it works:-

The tool does a WHOIS lookup to get the domain registrar's abuse contact email. Then it uses Groq's llama3-70b-8192 model to use the context and target URL provided by the user to generate an abuse report email with a matching subject. Using Mailgun, it emails the domain provider at their designated abuse contact.

The tool works for any illegal websites, including but not limited to investment scams, crypto pump, and dump, phishing pages, animal abuse, etc. All domain registrars, hosting providers, and TLDs are legally required to take action when they receive an abuse report. It typically takes several days to a few weeks to take down the website.

We were learning Next.js 14 and figured the best way to learn something, is to build projects with it and here we are!