BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So the PFY is on a protracted holiday in a part of the world with more favorable (to him) climes, so I'm left holding the fort – and not only do I have to do my own work, but I have to cover his responsibilities as well. So I'm swapping the M and N keys on all the Beancounter keyboards …
To remove the earworm from your head you just have to listen to it until the end.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/05/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-australian-research-reveals-the-science-behind-earworms
“You may be able to wrap up an earworm by either finishing off the music, consciously thinking of another piece of music, or by removing yourself from the triggers, such as words or memories that relate to the music or lyrics,” Schubert said.
I had done this an *ahem* few years ago, as a terminate-and-stay-resident program for DOS.
Hooked the keyboard interrupt, and when keystrokes were close to each other (i.e., someone typing fast) introduced random key swaps.
When the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Huser took notice and typed slowly, all was normal. Speed up, and the fun began.
Hilarity ensued.
《The key swaps would be best done with remotely via software at random intervals 》
Just changing the key repeat rate would be really irritating. I have been working with two decent mechanical keyboards that have a slightly different rates. Swivelling between the two every 5 to 15 minutes this is most annoying.
I know I could fix it in software but in the BOFH line you are used to quickly adapting to the shittiest keyboards and most commonly in quite unpleasant surroundings.
Ended up shoving a remote console on one of the systems.
Agreed. And you don't do things to all of them. Just some graphite spay in one laptop here, dud batteries there, this laptop persistently chaing to dvorak keyboard layout whenever a certain keyword is typed, a mouldy mouse eaten candy bar in the back of that drawer, The q key becoming non-functional on one of the keyboards, 1-2 doctored tea bags (e.g. an emetic) in one of the boxes, someone excel auto-correcting annum to anus or 4 to 9, etc. Then they are just unlucky. Persistently unlucky.
On the Dartmouth Time Sharing system we once changed the conversion tables so 2's were entered as 3's and vice versa. The output tables were also swapped so 2's looked like 2's and 3's looked like 3's. People entering programs with line numbers (remember BASIC) for some reason had the lines beginning with 3 sorting before lines beginning with 2.
This must have been 1965 or so. Oh well - I guess I'm more mature now.
No, see, swapping the actual keycaps is genius, because depending how well someone touch-types they could go for hours or even days without noticing.
But you know when people, even touch-typists, are most likely to look at the keyboard as they type? — Well, I have no idea, honestly, but every damn one of us was thinking, "When they enter passwords!" because that feels like the right answer. So, for the sake of... well, my argument, I say we all just agree to assume that's the correct answer. It's certainly plausible enough and makes a fair amount of logical sense.
...So, assuming a victim won't actually see that the keycaps are swapped until they end up having to peck out an unfamiliar password, I think I can already hear the anguished screams echoing down the hall as they end up with a three-strikes lockout. Ah, the song of our people!
It's a great day when HR contracts mention namagenemt instead of management. Especially when an AI audio bot has to attempt to pronounce it.
Some of the servers I look after do a lot of swapping. I didn't realise that there were two kinds. Namagenemt may wonder about the increase of swapping entered into my timesheets from now on.
It's sad how unimaginative this key swapping is. Think about it:
On your keyboard, press Windows + I.
Select Time & language.
On the left pane, click Region & language.
Under Languages, highlight English (United States), then click Options.
Under Keyboards, click Add a keyboard.
Choose United States-Dvorak.
Close the settings.
How many accountants know what a Dvorak keyboard is, or would be able to diagnose one?
Back in the days of DOS, we used to edit the .bat file to do some very evil things. The screams from the next office were shear music.
I wasn't thinking vers as in who's better at opening, I was more thinking...
This is the lock picking lawyer and today I'm stuck in this lift in a UK office building after a meeting with the IT staff... However, I do have my covert companion with me, which I sell over on... ;)
Only vaguely on-topic, but the escapade reminds me of an episode from my school days (a looong time ago). I want to a boys-only school and when we needed girls for games such as mixed-doubles badminton (yes, as innocent as that - but we were quite competitive and I went on to represent my university at the sport). Anyway, it was considered more suitable if us three boys went along to the girls school to play, rather than three girls coming to us (which kinda makes sense - and we had no objection). Training was held after normal school hours and we were given use of one of the girls changing rooms - the girls we'd be training alongside used a staff changing room.
All was fine for the first few weeks. Then, one day, a group of other girls at the school decided to burst in on us whilst we were changing. We were significantly outnumbered and, besides staff intervened quite quickly. However, we decided to take some revenge. In that changing room, the girls chained their tennis rackets to clothes hooks using torpedo-style 4-digit combination bicycle locks - the cheap sort that are easy to undo by feel. Which is what we did, and then swapped them around so each racket was now secured by a different combination. Nothing was said when we were back the following week, but we never had any problems with changing room invasions again.
I initially felt a bit guilty about changing around the locks but soon realised that the girls would have had no problem as they would have been just as adept as undoing them by feel - it was a common skill.
But I'll still post this anonymously :)
I remember surprising a girl with that skill (she had initiated the canoodling that led to it!). So surprised was she that she made me demonstrate the technique to her as she was always having trouble fastening/unfastening her bra and I was just sooo much quicker at it :-)
That reminds me of when I was in shared accommodation.
A lad used to chain his bike on the bannisters at the bottom.
Every morning, he would find it hanging by the back wheel from the top of the bannisters.
After a while he muttered that someone must know his (3 digit) code.
I showed him how to open it without the code because those, grey metal locks with the 3 brass number rings are hopeless.
Students...
《Richard Dawkins used a bike combination lock as an example for something in one of his early books. It turns out that he'd used his real number as he got his bike pinched...》
Nah...!
It must have been Tom Baker - with a sonic screwdriver and a motive who needs the combination?
(Probably in company with Douglas Adams.)
I asked Gemini to write me a long story about the BOFH and got this
The fluorescent lights buzzed a low drone in the server room, casting an eerie green glow on Simon, the BOFH. A particularly dense email from Doris, the Marketing Director, sat on his screen, demanding immediate action on "slow internet speeds hindering our brand synergy." Simon snorted. Brand synergy. Right.
Suddenly, the network went haywire. Printers began spewing gibberish, screens flickered wildly, and a chorus of panicked user calls flooded the help desk. A virus, Simon thought, his fingers flying across the keyboard. But this wasn't your average malware. This one seemed to target specific users – the ones who'd annoyed Simon the most. Doris's inbox was flooded with spam emails singing the praises of rival companies. The CEO's calendar displayed a series of appointments with clowns.
As Simon delved deeper, he discovered the culprit was none other than the Pimply-Faced Youth (PFY), his perpetually acne-ridden apprentice. Turns out, PFY had gotten hold of a script he found online, a "harmless prank" according to him. Except, the script had a hidden payload that targeted specific user profiles.
"You absolute donut!" roared Simon, sending a rogue stapler clattering across the floor. PFY, wide-eyed and sweating, looked like a cornered hamster. This was bad. Really bad. Simon knew he had to fix the mess before the CEO discovered his clown calendar.
He spent the next few hours in a caffeine-fueled frenzy, battling the virus and its after-effects. He rerouted emails, sanitized infected systems, and even managed to rewrite the CEO's calendar with "important meetings" (which were actually just reruns of 80s sitcoms playing in Simon's office). When the dust settled, the network was back online, (mostly) unscathed.
But Simon wasn't done. He needed revenge, sweet revenge. He subtly reconfigured Doris's computer so every time she typed the word "synergy," it autocorrected to "hamster." He set up an automatic email forwarder for the CEO, directing all emails from Doris to a spam folder titled "Marketing Nonsense." Finally, he planted a whoopee cushion on the CFO's chair, just for good measure.
The next few days were filled with delightful chaos. Doris fumed about her "synergy" problem, the CEO wondered why he kept getting spam from clowns (a side effect of the virus Simon "accidentally" left unfixed), and the CFO blamed his sudden flatulence on a dodgy curry.
Simon, meanwhile, enjoyed a smug satisfaction with his work. He'd not only fixed the mess, he'd also taught a valuable lesson – don't mess with the BOFH. The server room echoed with a low chuckle as he popped open a cold beer, the flickering lights seeming to dance in approval.
Gemm's version of the BOFH with significantly more verbiage and provocation hasn't propelled anyone from a window.
Suicidal if somewhat dense marketing Doris would have been the first to ponder her brand synergy on the way to the car park.
I can see Gemm confusing Lucifer with Gabriel but itself the spawn of the pit might knowingly do so. :)
When I first (mis)read Gemm's effort I thought it was Doris that was sat on BOFH's screen - not her email.
I thought uncharted territory here as I don't recall recall anything remotely erotic let alone kinky in our hero's history.
"I asked Gemini to write me a long story about the BOFH and got this"
The best new use for AI that I've seen, a prank generator. Even if it doesn't come up with new and novel pranks, it might suggest a few that are heretofore unknown to most. I'd have to say that the ones I had a part in were mainly variations on previous themes. Since we were engineering students, there had to be a solid engineering aspect to them to (unofficially) avoid repercussions. They also couldn't cause too much damage or injury. I expect it's harder these days with CCTV aimed at everything. We had to make sure we didn't leave behind any incriminating evidence.
Swapping various keys around reminds me of the ancient MS-DOS skullduggery of swapping font tables out for Cyrillic or mirrored fonts. That could cause some havoc (especially the Cyrillic) with people trying to change back to regular, or at least semi-readable fonts
That's the thing with kids' humour/mischievousness and level of inventiveness. Most of it is not original and they learn it from the year/grade above them so it sort of stagnates at a particular age group with each new year group passing through the "humour field", with possible minor variation based on technology or social changes.
Same seems to happen with technology in general. There's always some "bright kid" whose just "(re)invented something that's been around for years, but they give it a shiny new name and the new kids in marketing spend millions telling us it really is new, honestly!.
I thought about the dream angle... no PFY, everything moving along too easily. Put this one in the maybe pile.
I wouldn't call it running out of steam, but more of a deep breath before the next push. No one had an unfortunate accident (yet), no big score was had (yet). Where is the PFY? In whose pay is he this week?
This reminds me of a prank we pulled on a coworker. He had the ratty, falling apart dictionary so two of us decided to glue and tape it back together. In order to make sure everything was held tightly, we wrapped about a dozen rubberbands around the book. And taped them to his desk.At the end of the day he went to put his dictionary in his desk, after thanking us for trying to repair it. He gave a yank, the rubberbands yanked harder, and he almost face planted into his desk.
Portuguese is just as much fun, if not even more. A-Z is all in the same place, but suddenly all the punctuation has moved... and where have the curly and square brackets gone? But the quote is still in the same place - look - so it must still be a UK keyboard, right?
I used to support a multinational with strong connections to Germany. QWERTZ keyboards are ALMOST the same as English ones. Close enough so that when you relax a little, the differences bite you.
It's still not as bad as sorting out how Windows deals with modem connections when you are working with menu items you can't decode, all of which seem to have words with two dozen characters in them. I had to remember the order they appeared on a UK machine.
QWERTY/QWERTZ is even more fun on early versions of windows if:
1) The default key map is QWERTZ
2) The daily user's key map is QWERTY
3) The local Administrator's password includes the letter "Z" (while the daily driver used neither Z nor Y)
That one took a while to figure out. I could elevate to Admin from the local account just fine, but couldn't log in as Admin directly.
Similar shenanigans happen when the systems default to American and one has as £ in the password somewhere. Naturally this leads to lots of "it's all English, there are no problems" type response from the blinkered American developers who repeatedly struggle that they are one of only three backward countries on the planet that still use Imperial measurements and to add to this they routinely get the date format incorrect (all English speakers, apparently, prefer dates in backwards form of M/D/Y).
Dear left pondians
PLEASE just stop with the crap mm/dd/yy insanity.
stop writing file names with that abortion format
stop writing that insane date type into log file text
surely even you ignorant incompetents have realised IT DOES NOT SORT
so dear left pondians
JUST STOP USING THE TWAT THING
Sigh ... it does sort, if you are consistent, like use leading zeros.
Still, the m/d/y date format remains an abomination to the FSM, blessed be their noodley wisdom imparted unto us.
No excuse for any log file to NOT use "YYYY/MM/DD:HH:MM:SS", in some CONSISTENT, leading zero, format. First line of any log file "# All dates in YYYY/MM/DD:HH:MM:SS format. If any discrepancy is found, please submit a bug report" (at least, mine say this) Log files should only be human readable, after they have been computer GREPable. (You'll never guess what I had to debug this weekend and what was the primary debugging tool?).
"That one took a while to figure out."
Over the years, I've come across that sort issue often enough that if I or a user can't log in for some reason, try typing the password (or something using the same set of characters) in the username field first so can see if there any oddities indicating a different keyboard layout.
One day doing a round of hardware drop off's & installs at a certain very large drug facility in Stevenage, I was intercepted by Security regarding the integrity of Laptop Kensington locks for after realising they weren't trying to pin weekend laptop thefts (& had a cast iron alibi of not even being in the same county at that time) on me transpired someone had got into locked offices via the ceiling tiles & roof space.
The evidence for this modus operandi was two very large dirty boot prints on one of the desks though they apparently used the door for a more conventional exit with ill gotten gains.
Love the old school BOFH antagonism, but when you find a brand new yet insecure lock on something, IMHO the last thing you want to do is let the beancounter know that you can defeat the lock. Ideally you want them to think it's the deskside equivalent of a bank vault.
Then continue to investigate the contents at regular intervals. If the beancounter is reasonably savvy, beware of honeypots.
Reminds me of the desks at the first place I worked. I originally used to leave my laptop locked in the desk and not take it home (recent graduate, so no need for "on call" or needing to answer any important emails in the night).
One day I forgot my key for the drawer at home, so asked our facilities guy who managed the office if he had the spare. He turned my attention to a pot with about 100 keys in it, and told me to knock myself out. After the shock on my face had subsided he showed me the trick....
While the drawers were securely locked, the actual locking mechanism went into the desk itself. All you needed was a person to lift one side of the desk up by about an inch or so and another person** could open the drawer and retrieve anything you needed from it, before closing drawer and lowering desk back down.
** It could have been done by one person if savvy enough, but the facilities guy didn't want H&S on the case so he always recommended working in pairs!
would have killed a keyboard had I read it at work.
Instead its made Mrs Roach wonder what I'm laughing at here in the Roach hotel where things are going very nicely for a change in my post-pub kebab'ing
Looks like there'll be a patter of tiny roach feet here soon... not mine... but from one of the kids.
The PFY has passed her exams too ("Intermediate bastard'ness" and "Cold revenge:A systematic approach") I tell people not to take the piss out of her finacee... do they listen...no.... hence her passing the exams.....(you dont want to know what she did... heck I dont want to know!)
Right must go... Mrs Roach has bought me a beer ..... and got a decent'ish movie (Starship troopers.... hey you cheer on your side , we'll cheer on ours "Get them squishy humans heroic bug brothers!")
In the old days when we had DOS based PCs, I used to edit the keymap files to swap some keys on my cow-orker's PCs. Somehow they always guessed who had done it, as well as when I redefined the font files to make all the characters look blurry on a Monday morning.
Many years ago I was friends with a Detective in the local CID. This was back in the good ol' days when smoking and drinking alcohol whenever, numbed the brain into allowing work to be done. It was well known in his office that he had a bottle of the Scottish elixir in the secure locked file drawer of his desk to be used for emergencies only. That day came for his colleagues when he was at court giving evidence. Upon his return to the office, he immediately opened the drawer for a reviver from the bottle only to discover it's disappearance. Subsequent investigation found that the drawer lock had none of the scratch marks of being picked, while questioning of potential suspects was futile as the normally busy and crowded office was suspiciously now empty. Finally, a colleague took pity on him and explained that the desk had carefully been taken apart, piece by piece, the bottle removed and the desk fully reassembled before the libation was shared out and the now empty bottle lost as evidence.
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