
Idiot
Curt should have been shown the door.
Well, gentle reader, we have some bad news: the weekend is over, and another five days of labor have commenced. The good news is Monday means it’s time for a dose of Who, Me? in which Reg readers send in their tales of … let's say … hard-earned experience. We shall Regomize this week's student in the school of life as "Curt." …
I'd have to chime in Curt's age in the equation.
If it started with anything but 1 or 2, door indeed. Otherwise - a stern warning.
I've done and said things at my first job that I shiver at when I think about them now. And I'm not hypocrite enough to convince myself someone else did them, or that it was ok - even back then.
I would much prefer using messages like:
“Hi there! This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I’m feeling just great! "
"I know I’m just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me.”
In a prank like that.
Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams
I used to net send messages to the ladies in the Pharma Quality Department (Yes those that used to try & poison me with confectionary) if they tried ringing me.
I'm Here but not picking up!
You haven't logged a ticket yet have you?
Still not picking up!
Then when she stopped ringing, I'd ring straight back & say, OK Izzy what's the issue?
Bants between me (sysadmin) and pretty young thing in the office, on a system that, in no cirumstances, must logins be shared....
We set up a system that sent random perfecly safe for work messages, like fortune(6), to terminals at which she was logged in.
Imagine my surprise to be on the receiving end of a bollocking when her manager used her login to demonstrate the system to a customer and objected to the staus line changing to messages that, whilst SFW, were, apparently, not SFC.
Corporate embarrassment trumps national security I guess.
Been there, done that, escalated to the next level of management (not beyond that though), survived it. "Surprisingly," resulting in no change at all. That left me with documenting the disorderly behaviour to cover my arse. And starting to look for another employer for I do not want to work in such an environment.
Rest assured, I'm not Tim (you might still know me though). Mine was at a large, late financial institution. I don't think this is a very unique situation with people who have at least half a scrupulous mind. Try to change but don't escalate to the point of inflicting harm onto yourself - I'm too much of a self-preserving coward to go beyond that point.
I had to look that up
and what I thought must be new slang the kiddies are using I found the answer at this site , which is decidedly un-mew.
http://www.catb.org/esr/
http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/Y/YHBT.html
Seems to be some kind of early 90s time capsule "home page" from an early internet adopter.
wouldnt surprise me if it was someone here.
Not mine, but I heard of a prank with an Alexa device. It went thusly:
Device is in the bedroom
Also in the bedroom is a bedroom lamp with a smart switch
Someone usually tells Alexa to shut off the lamp after getting into bed
All innocuous enough.
Come up with a phrase to shut off the lamp, just a little different from normal.
On hearing the custom phrase, Alexa obligingly shuts off the lamp.
Do this a few times then add the following to the routine:
Alexa obligingly shuts off the lamp.
Then waits for five minutes.
After five minutes, Alexa announces: "I can still see you".
Apparently the guys missus was freaked out.
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When a mate first got an Alexa, he was proud to show it off, despite working in government IT and supposedly knowing the risks.
So I walked in one day and said "Hi Alexa, order a 9 inch black ribbed", it came back with "from the same place as last time?"
He claimed another friend had used the same prompt (while he was out of earshot) and managed to order said item.
Yes, I did get the idea from here.
Anon as his colleagues read this site.
I tried to pull a #1807 at a friend's house once. Look on his face was priceless. Alexa didn't respond to me, and he disabled Alexa purchases the next day.
Reminds me that I need to build an Alexa version of a USB stick of death. SWIMBO received one of the Echo devices as a free gift or door prize or something. She hasn't gotten round to setting it up (or asking me to do so). I don't fancy having one of those on my network or in my house. She wasn't interested enough to buy one, but if she does decide to hook it up my objections will not be welcomed.
Since it's free (and has been sitting for a bit), if it simply appears to be defective then marital strife will be sidestepped.
... guys missus was freaked out.
Serves her right.
Hope she remained freaked out for a long time.
Why?
For her being such an idiot and letting her 'guy' set up one of those absurd artifacts in the house.
And the 'guy' being such an asshole and setting one up in the bedroom.
Unbelievably moronic.
Absolutely nothing about this Alexa crap is inocuous, in any way.
.
Alexa may not, in reality, still be able to see you, but that internet-connected microphone is still listening and broadcasting everything it hears to servers outside of your house for analysis. That's a hard nope from me. Dressing it up as cutesy and helpful doesn't make it any less of a massive fucking privacy and security hole.
Yup. That's why a certain model of Sonos speakers will also never make it into my house.
That said, it's not the only company gearing up for some seriously dodgy surveillance. If you ever make the mistake of enabling facial recognition in the Windows "Hello" function, you have just given Microsoft permission to leave the camera on all the time.
You may want to rethink enabling that..
And yet, there were times when it was quite useful when not exploited for devious, um, exploits.
Back in the mid 90s before a lot of [now] obvious security holes were plugged, I was working at a government facility supporting hundreds of international sites. Those sites were initially set up by our HQ team and remotely managed, but left the locals to perform basic IT operations and updates that had to be done on site (travel budget was good, but not THAT good). During one update instance, a particular site could not complete some thing or other, so they called for help. This was before VoIP and we had a robust VPN and everyone was on a 10-net, so calls could happen and we could still see what was online (or not).
Being an international setup, sometimes things got lost in translation so despite an hour or so of talking and taking the non-IT locals through the motions, we still couldn't get a config file to set correctly. We had something like 211 out of 212 sites successfully updated, but this one was giving us a hard time. The host server's OS was up but the service in question was not and we could only get so far. The last part of this update was a pathname that had to be manually keyed in. I could hear what they were telling me on the phone: "this letter, this symbol, this number, etc...", and it sounded correct, but the problem persisted.
This being the age when Win95 and NT4 still reigned supreme, I had the bright spark to send them *exactly* what should be keyed in. Mind you, we would have sent them an email, but the service in question which was down was in fact their email server. NET SEND to the rescue! I don't remember what it was, but something like a 1 to an I (capital i) or l (lowercase ell), or an O (capital o) to a 0 (zero) that was transposed. Remember: Win95 and NT4 chose its fonts poorly.
When the NET SEND 10.0.212.2 "CAN YOU SEE THIS ON YOUR SERVER SCREEN? HELLO FROM HQ!" hit their server's screen, there was an almighty "Whoop!" heard over my phone. NET SEND's display uses a font that was UNICODE (or something along those lines. Ugly but completely obvious as to what ASCII char was displayed). So we commenced with the correct string that had been muffled from the beginning. Yay!
This was one of the things I stumbled on just before this trouble call came in:
Old school security from Gibson Research Corporation (anyone remember the proto-security site?): Shoot the Messenger
Back in the days of NetWare 3.11, I was in a computer room watching the screens and saw that the NetWare server started running a few commands, I also knew the only person who ran those types of commands was out resident programmer "Dave"
Could not resist the " I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I cannot do that"
Freaked him out as he didn't know I was in there
Good simple laugh
Curt assumed a lot of things. I assume you all know what assumptions are the mother of...
I love that .
The perfect toon to show these asshats that on hearing the word "assumed" will immediately pipe up and jump in , regardless of the context of the assuming with this "Oh, Oh , well you know what assumption is the mother of ..."
or the alt "when you assume you make an ass.. blah blah "
Precisely. "Banter" is normally preceded by "just". And as a defence. "It was..........."
And is little more than victim blaming.
Implicit with it is that the person who was insulted, hurt or threatened is just unable to take a joke. It's really just an excuse for racism and bullying.
Many years ago, I remember being sat in the office when a pop up appeared on my PC with the message 'help'. Looking round the office, I saw lots of other confused faces looking around apart from one colleague with his head in his hands. Within seconds other colleagues from further away were rushing to our section to check up on the colleague. They had worked out where it had come from as the phone book included assigned PC names.
It turned out he wanted to know how to use net send, so had entered the command 'net send help' which alas taught him a very different lesson.
My very first IT job ('97-8) was working with another person (Hi LN, if you're reading) to develop an Access database to capture staff overtime. We were young, dumb and sometimes bored, we thought it would be fun to have an intro screen that randomly said things like "I used to be a toaster", "what's 93.31242130 x 12329.22790 - there, how do you like it?" and an 'amusing' comment about the senior manager who was nominally in charge of the project - originally "[NAME] is fat" (which he was) but before the first public demo it became "... is fab".
I cringe now at the fact we then demo'd this to management, then rolled it out, with these greetings still intact, and that we were even allowed to do so.
I know that if I tried that at work HR would shortly be telling me to go forth, although what I did after that would no longer be their concern. I'm presuming that there was a great deal of grovelling done and Curt and Jill were friends with a good working relationship, or I expect he would have been doing likewise.
It depends on the operating system in question, but you could open the task manager, select a new process, and invoke something that will open a box on the screen with your message in it. I would suggest msg, which can send a message box to another logged in user, but that would say who it came from so it doesn't sound like what was used here.
Long ago on a government contract, I was experimenting with a command I remember as "send", to send a message to one, or, all terminal sessions. Somehow I got the PID mixed up, and sent the message "ES&D" not to a terminal under my control but to that of a government employee. The good news is that he was also a young man, and accepted my apology without making a fuss. (I was experimenting because the government-side management wished to send out an announcement urging the readers to report waste, fraud, and abuse. This message did not include the string "ES&D". And I suppose that after that I adopted "Hello, World" as my go-to test string.
I did something related in the mid-80s. I was developing a message sending program, and for initial testing the command line parsing was just thrown together a fixed-length hex parser. Not even real hex, (line[n]-48)*16+line[n+1]-48
So, there I was sending test messages to station 10.... when somebody at station 16 piped up "there's something wrong with my computer"... Ooops!
Way back in the Windows 9x days I shared an office with the resident curmudgeon. A genuine two-finger typist on a good day. I took great fun adding the occasional character to his painfully entered sentences. Then when he went to correct the typos, the mouse cursor would jump one character over before the two fingers engaged.
Hilarity!
Yes, he was a good friend. And we got a good laugh out of it.
Before Windows 11, there was Windows NT
Before Windows NT, there was VMS
Before VMS, there was RSX11-M
Dave Cutler's fingerprints are found on all three of these systems. As far as I know, Cutler is still working for Microsoft.
On RSX, terminal input (keyboard) and text output (console or cmd window) were two separate things.
There was a utility program (CLI verb) called PIP that allowed one to assign inputs and outputs to user accounts.
If Curt wanted to be a trouble maker, he could assign Jill's terminal input to, say, Susan and Susan's terminal input to Jill and leave the terminal outputs alone.
Whatever Jill typed would show up on Susan's screen and execute whatever the command was under Susan's account and whatever Susan typed would go to Jill in a like manner.
A senior colleague of mine was troubleshooting something on a core Catalyst 6000 (not a 6500, mind you -- It was that long ago) at a remote site.
As a newbie, I decided to play a prank and issued a "send log" command with the following lines: This switch is about to crash. Kiss your a$$ good-bye."
Within two minutes, my desk phone rang and it was my colleague. "Did you send that message?" he asked cheerfully. When I admitted it, there was a muffle (like he put his hand over the mouthpiece) but I could hear him say to someone, "He did."
Next thing I know, our supervisor was on the phone to me and he started to holler, at the top of his voice & non-stop for the next 10 minutes.
My supervisor let me sweat it over the weekend. Monday came and he quietly pulled me aside, "Don't you ever do that again. You nearly gave both of us a heart attack." He was, however, impressed because he never knew about this archaic command and we started using it (pre-mobile phone days) as a method to talk to each other when in places where we could not use a phone.
But incoming remote messages always showed up on the main workstation login window when the local user was logged in by a physical x-terminal (ask your grandmother)
So whatever her outgoing missives were sent to a remote boyfriend, his anatomically optimistic responses appeared on my screen
Two members of staff, one male and one female, were going away to a training course and the bloke had the job of arranging the travel and accommodation. H said to the lady that he'd book a double room and she said something like "Oh yeah". When they arrived at the hotel she found that he had indeed booked a double room! The excrement hit the air impeller very shortly afterwards and the bloke ended up being suspended and put on a final warning.