One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates your escapes from dangerous tech support requests. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Tom" who told a tale of his early 1980s experience as the de facto tech support guy for what he's pretty sure was the first Air Force squadron to adopt PCs …
Er, no. "Five" is pronounced "fife" and "nine" is "niner", to distinguish between the two and because the English "v" sound is difficult for some non-native speakers. There are a few more (scroll down for numbers), but I don't remember ever hearing native English speakers using "wun" or "tree".
I think dialect might be involved to some extent. I grew up in SE New England where 'merry', 'marry', & 'Mary' have different pronunciations. Also, 'party' and 'potty' have VERY different pronunciations. Yet people from other parts of the US will insist the trio are pronounced the same as are the pair. In some places 'pin' and 'pen' sound the same. So I've no problem envisioning people getting numbers confused.
but I don't remember ever hearing native English speakers using "wun"
The lady who does the morning BBC Radio Leeds traffic announcements[*] says "one" as "wun". Although it may be questionable to describe Yorkshire people as "native English". Ey Up lads! :-)
*she may be the morning show presenter, I don't listen to that station, I just get the TAs if I'm passing through at the right time :-)
In the phonetic alphabet, I think internationally, the number 5 is pronounced as "FIFE" to distinguish it from "FIRE".
Also, if you don't hear a transmission clearly you respond with "Say Again" because "Repeat" is a fire control order. That is, bomb something again.
Radio comms in the field are not something you want to get wrong lest you unintentionally call in an airstrike on your own position.
Doing that intentionally on the the other hand is a Hotel Mike (Hail Mary) move.
I don't know about German radio procedure, but "Zwo" is an older german word, which I think is used more commonly in southern Germany and Austria. I've certainly used it a lot, and I prefer it to zwei, but as my son is now learning at school I'd better not get him into trouble by using the wrong one... err... two?
German here: "Zwei", as pronounced by RAMMSTEIN, is the official correct version. "Zwo" is local, mostly southern, but you can hear it everywhere since it is a "too lazy to move my lips to pronounce a clear zwei" variant. Similar to "Baltimore Accent speech test", where the first speaker switches to actual clean pronunciation since he notices "WTF do we really talk like that?".
The reference is as in Sonne von Rammstein, not in Links which uses the lazy variant.
If you want to dig deeper: There were several German languages around, especially before Martin Luther translated and printed the bible over 500 years ago. And even after that many variants could have ended up as the official version, but "zwei" is it, with "zwo" as spoken variant, but usually not written unless for a specific reasons like song/poem or citing old text. For the marching version is it a harmonic reason, easier to speak after "links". Iz zed klearr nov? Orr mußt ai trrill it intu ya?
As for right wing tendencies: Before Rammstein was formed, in their youth days, some members leaned to the right. But there is a problem when you make music and start traveling: Your mind opens up since you meet so many different good people in every part of the country, Europe, and later world. That extreme stuff just fades as it shows up as it is: Narrowminded nonsense. And the truth shows: The wilder the genetic mix, the better are the offspring, proven so many times over many centuries.
After we were taken over by a much bigger concern, I was tasked with forwarding the monthly 'Management Reports' because I knew how to use Kermit...... These reports were apparently highly confidential and obviously, I could not read them because they were password-protected..... Whilst this might have been a challenge, security was rather undermined when they used the same password as the Kermit transfer-protocol....
You will have guessed this was some time ago but the password is still in my memory: 'cabinet'. Their accountant had decided this was a word he could remember. Of course all companies in the group had to use this password.
Somehow, we learned that they were considering changing our working hours to match the rest of the group; we finished early on Friday afternoon.... they wondered why the other companies started to push for similar conditions to the newcomers. It might have been mentioned in the reports.....
Nostalgia, indeed.
Brought back memories of me implementing a filedistribution system for the Royal Greenland trading company based on exchanging files via Kermit - over some very dodgy and unstable phone connections with fairly high latency (often satellite-based). Back in the 1980's.
Gawd I am getting old ...
Worked for a firm where they cared about staff and we had a Christmas and Birthday present each, health insurance, death in service etc. Then there was a merger with another firm and we discovered through their intranet that someone had given users of our network access to, that they treated their staff like crap. None of the benefits that we had were there and anything like health insurance was available only of you paid for it which was crap. Then suddenly staff from the other firm found their access to our intranet was pulled too. Some of them had questioned whether the benefits we were getting would also apply to them. You can guess what happened after that, we were not amused with the results of the merger.
True. He should really have only confirmed the files appeared to have been recovered than passed the disk back to the "owner" to confirm the contents of the files were correct. Although back then, there was probably little chance of any kind of evidentiary chain, unlike nowadays when it's quite probable that every action you take on a computer is logged in same way. On,e place I work at likely has that, but I can neither confirm nor deny that. So I never do anything not job related and authorised, just in case :-)
I find a bit hard to believe they put in the format command parameters when trying to convert a file, as the one mandatory parameter for format is the drive letter and filenames are not allowed... but then, people will be people, they might even have used format /? to check the correct syntax
IIRC - early versions of format (DOS1, 2) didn't need the drive letter. Entering format would just go ahead and format the default drive regardless. No questions asked. Eventually common sense prevailed at microsoft (never thought I would be saying that) and you had to specify drive letter.
A Tandy SX1000 was my first PC. Bought as a student back in 1988 (?) after I had spent the summer job working extensively with PC's and fancied one myself. I seem to recall the local Tandy were selling it cheap, last one in stock, as it was end of line. I was first one in our course to have a PC at home - helped me excel (bad pun) at computing and open up a career trajectory. I think it is still up in my loft.
Only came to DOS at version 3 but there must always have been some form of prompting and interactivity: consider a single floppy system. When entering the command you will need a system disk (or at least a disk with format on it) inserted and only after it has loaded can you swap for the disk you want to format.
Equally you couldn't simply assume the current drive or else you would never be able to format previously unformatted or bulk erased media as you wouldn't be able to set it as the current drive.
Working on a colleague's computer, I noticed an odd anonymously-named folder, which contained another folder, and another, and another, and eventually, many layers down, were the "Page 3" photos of another work colleague. Never mentioned it to either of them.
I'm pretty sure everybody here has had a friend ask to have their computer fixed and you've run across swinger party photos.
or is that just me?
Going back a few decades, a very good female mate of mine admitted something one night after a good few drinks. Her mother didn’t have a VCR, her TV was first rate but she lacked any way of watching videos. For Christmas though she was given for Christmas few copies of some Merchant Ivory epics despite the poor woman having no way of watching them. So her dutiful daughter decided to loan hers to her mother, a very benevolent gesture I’m sure you’ll agree.
Sadly she hadn’t checked what was in the machine before wiring it up and leaving it at her mum’s place. She only realised hours later that the video that was in the thing was a homemade affair and not the sort of thing she wanted anyone else let alone her mother seeing. So she slipped round to her mother’s place and using her set of keys nipped in and ex-filtrated the tape which was thankfully still in the machine.
When she went to pick up the VCR she asked her mum how had she enjoyed the films. Out of Africa I think was mentioned as being the best of the bunch and she’d watched them all one weekend. My mate was relieved she hadn’t been embarrassed so she unhooked the VCR and tried to make good her escape. However as my friend was at the door her mum asked her if she’d had that tattoo on her arse for a lomg time or was it relatively recent? Whoops. She said she had no idea how much of it had been watched but it was one of those moments where she said she wanted to curl up into a ball and die.
In the last few weeks I have upgraded the hard disks and memory in laptops for my sister and a female cousin, both of whom are in their 70's.
I made damn sure NOT to look what was on the disks. They booted into Windows and that was enough for me to hand them back, along with the original drives.
Bringing flashbacks of countless students asking me he help get their homework from mangled 3.5" disks.
The cause of this was I.T lecturers telling them to store their data that way. When I quizzed them on why these so called experts were telling their pupils to store precious data solely on the single most unreliable media around (and not the it dept provided safe secure backed up network home drives ) they replied:
"its on the syllabus"
.
My poster campaign advising against this did little to stem the flow.
"store precious data solely on the single most unreliable media around (and not the it dept provided safe secure backed up network home drives ) "
In their place I might have decided on both. It's not unknown for an academic institution to have a loss of data. In the days of floppy-only PCs the floppy was looked on as a standard storage medium and not necessarily compared to alternatives by users except in terms of capacity.
We had a network of diskless (but not floppyless) workstations. All their data was stored on reliable VAX disks that were access-controlled and backed up depth, with offsite storage etc etc. But the Accounts Department insisted on storing their files on floppy disks and locking them in the filing cabinet "for security". Then they'd call us because the disks were unreadable.
But even in those days, when I was training primary school heads and deputies to use the new shiny computer their school had just bought I made a point of telling them to make two copies of anything important, on two different floppy discs and keep the two sets of discs in separate places. (When dual floppy machines arrived life got much simpler).
In an early job at the local college I was left no choice but to accept the students using FDs for their data after the Business Studies department, without any consultation with IT, ordered an IBM PS-2 network that only had the standard DOS filesharing, so effectively no way to secure their data on the Model 60 server, and only a limited number of fileshares. Of course their entire budget had been spent on the purchase with nothing left to actually sort out the resulting problems.
I didn't work there much longer!
When I had a project at an insurance company, I had one (1) 3.5" floppy disk, with a laser-engraved serial number, duly signed for (by me) when I received it. Even then it was mostly but not quite outdated technology in that some PCs still had drives.
Sending data within the building was often faster by in-house physical mail than by email - the mail service was very good (30 minutes, usually) while my Notes account had some issues and got delivered only during scheduled garbage collection runs on the mainframe, every 3 hours or so.
I once did some work that involved connecting some new software to access the Police National Computer. The only test that was allowed to be run "live" when I was present was to query my own car's index number. (At least it proved I didn't own a stolen vehicle.) Though maybe auditors did get to wonder why that same query was being issued multiple times in a short period.
I work in a hospital: I'm not allowed to use myself as a test query, another real person even less so. There are specially designated test patients, that are guaranteed not to have national ID number that will ever be used for a real person.
And yes, technically I could get fired for checkoing my own records. Even if I in the role of a patient have the right to see those same records.
These days he'd have to be on apixaban or rivaroxaban, warfarin resistance is way too common in the rodent population.
Just a couple of days ago, a nurse I was working with logged into her patient allocation system to find a random bunch of patients, all surnamed Papasmurf, most with dog breeds as given names, allocated to her cubicles. No-one else in the department logged into the same system could see them.
After uni I temped in a "Health Records Library" taking folders of medical records off shelves and putting some back. There was a computerised index and from time to time you by chance came across the files of someone you knew.
At uni there was a guy in a sports team I was in who had persistent rumours about having STDs. You have no idea how tempted I was when I came across his file whilst looking for a misplaced file. In the end I was good and didn't take a peak.
Yeah, this can happen with paper files too.When I took over running an SEN team we had paper files clogging up our cabinets going back decades*.I was always worried that I'd find stuff about one of my friends, several who'd gone to one of the local schools a decade or so previously.
*Long standing staff members who would never throw anything away, "just in case" . I dealt with it by pointing out that since the kids' schools held the authoritative, legally required reports and stuff, these files served no further purpose after a few years at most once we'd ended our involvement with the child, and to be in compliance we should have destroyed them anyway. It still took some effort to get this sorted out, accompanied by much grumbling and "what ifs". Oh and not just old files. All sorts of old crap that "might come in handy". My responses to that being to ask "Did you even remember that we still had these?" and "Would you have known where to find them anyway?
Obviously both answers were "no". But it didn't stop the agonised cries when I dumped the stuff.
I think that that is meant to be: ""What if we had a surprise audit and we were found to be in possession of files we shouldn't have?"
Redundant extra quote mark must be the mistake that appears in any attempt to correct someone else's mistake on the internet. I'll leave it. Oh, and the other one which I haven't seen yet, but which must be there, logically.
I happen to work for the company that is responsible for the PNC (although the bit of the company I work for is nowhere near it), and my wife, as civilian police staff, has reason to use it. I've seen the UI for it, and it looks like something designed 35 years ago. I can confirm that all access is very strictly limited and audited, and police officers can (and do) lose their jobs over inappropriate access.
AC, for very obvious reasons, and no, I've never used it myself, or seen it actually in use, because my wife doesn't want to lose her job either, I don't want her to, and I don't really have the sort of fetish where I want to be looking up information I have no right to see.
Way back in the 70s, I worked as a hardware engineer for a then large mainframe company on a large Australian government site. On of my jobs was to look after the diagnostics (such as they were), they would be compiled on one of the customer’s machines during maintenance downtime. I would grab two scratch tapes, one for the compiled output, the other for the compiler printout which I would take to another machine to print the results.
On this occasion, I waited by the printer which seemed to be taking a lot longer than usual. Eventually I pulled of a rather large bundle of fan fold. There was my printout followed by the printout of most of the pay run for the entire public service, names, addresses, bank account numbers, pay amount etc. Apparently the tape drive had missed the end of file marker and had carried on printing what was previously on the tape. It did fleetingly cross my mind that this was a valuable document, worth a lot of money in the right (wrong) hands, but I couldn’t wait to stuff it into the paper recycling unit
I once worked on a visualization package for CT and MRI scans, and we tested our iso-surface rendering tool on a public, anonymized data set of a CT scan of a girls head. At the appropriate threshold level you could readily visualize the bone structure and observe a huge hole in the bone (we initially thought it was a bug in our code), where some bone-destroying bacterial infection had done its gruesome work. All well and good, but at another threshold setting, you could visualize skin and hair, showing her face clearly. Now I did not know who this person was, but we decided not to use this data set for visualization labs, on the off chance that some students might see a familiar face.
(AC for a reason)
I work in a school, I'm not tech support, but the staff often use me as first line support as I'm easier to find than the IT guy.
Sometimes people don't need real tech support, they just use me because they're too bone idle to do something themselves.
One case in point was when the Learning Support lead needed to know how much money we were given by the Government for each child with learning difficulties. This is important so we know how much money is in the budget for the department.
The problem is, we straddle two counties, and the counties have a different format for their Education & Health Care Plan (EHCP) documents, so the grant award is in a different place in the two documents, and the manager really couldn't be arsed looking through them all.
The second problem I encountered is none of the files had sensible names, so I had to open each file and skim through them all for names and grant values.
Many of the files were confidential for very good reasons.
My god, some kids have horrific home lives, I needed a good dose of mind bleach after reading that lot...
One team I was in charge of used to get pestered by the "can't be arsed" type of people you describe.
So I implemented an unofficial rule whereby the team would wait an hour before replying to any query which was obviously of that nature. During that hour, most of the people would realise that actually they did know how to do the thing themselves after all, leaving us to concentrate on the work which did genuinely need our help.
Thus our efficiency improved as a result. I would like to say it also educated the "can't be arsed" people, but it's more like it forced them into doing stuff they should have already been doing anyway.
This post has been deleted by its author
"I needed a good dose of mind bleach." You mean this? It's on me -- after all, it's Friday. ----->
Schools are horrid microcosms of society. My wife serves lunch at a US public elementary school. Some kids are whiny, lying, demanding little assholes, and she can tell that's how they're taught/reinforced at home -- no respect for authority or rules/laws, just gimme gimme gimme. Whereas she can also tell which kids eat next to nothing at home, and when they ask for more -- politely, more often than not -- she is happy to oblige, rules be damned. ("However you treated the least of these" is one of the many tenets we try to follow.)
Schools... I often had to assist counselors and the school nurse. One day the nurse called as she was having problems with saving to a network share. I sat down, and moved one browser window, and there was a doc open, one sentence had been highlighted, it was enough for me... moved the browser back, and fixed the share issue. I was never there, there was no ticket. I know nothing!
Sgt. Hans Schultz
As a sysadmin at a major hospital I was responsible for the care and feeding of a PDP-11 that ran a horrendous flat-file database of text documents (histopathology and cytopathology reports) that needed a regular archiving procedure run to avoid it filling up. That archiving process had a maximum document size smaller than the primary database for some insane reason so occasionally on the larger documents it would puke and stall the entire batch. The largest documents to be found on that system were autopsy reports. When the archive job stalled, I had to identify the document responsible and manually break it into two linked documents, with the requirement that I didn't break it up in such a way that reading either half standalone could give apparently incorrect info. This was why they wanted a techie from a bioscience background, which was why I got the job.
Every document that stalled the process I had to actually read and understand before choosing where to split it.
Twice, I encountered the report on the death of somebody I knew in this process.
...you haven't worked in desktop support.
As a side note, looking after the (large) phone system at my last company, I'd set up fraud detection monitoring to look for things such as premium rate abuse (this is the days when you couldn't do a blanket ban), extended international calls and potential phreaking
One of the conference phones was making strange out of hours calls to the same number in an Asian country.
I reported it to the IT Director who looked a little flustered, then told me it was the business setting up a brand new follow the sun support centre, a highly confidential project and to drop all these numbers out of the fraud detection.
Or, that was the ‘cover story’ and the real reason was something else.
After all, if you believe that you have been ‘let in’ on a confidential project, then one of two things will happen. Either you keep it quite, hoping that this will gain favour with the aforementioned Director, and show you are a trustworthy employee; or you spill your guts to the entire workforce, in which case no real damage but they know who to sack!
This does, of course, presuppose that the company was sufficiently on the ball to have a cover story set up and ready to go - which unless they are one of the three letter agencies, does seem a bit of a stretch!
While in 6th form at school we had a presentation by the father of one pupil, he was an army surgeon who had been on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. He had to deal with death and injury from both sides of the conflict had some very interesting and amusing stories to tell, and a small slide show of some of things he had to deal with. He saved the most grisly for last - a picture of an IRA bomber who was sat on a bus when the device he had on his lap exploded unexpectedly. There was most of a top half, and most of a bottom half, of a body. Just nothing much in the middle, very graphic and disturbing. The officer took his slide carousel and left. The next group in that classroom were 1st year geography, being given a slide show on cloud formations. Yeah, that last slide from the previous show, was still in the machine and now unwittingly the first slide for the wide eyed 11 year olds.
The diagnosis coding system we use is ICD-10, which, when it came to injuries, just made a two-dimensional array, body-part on one axis and mechanism of injury on the other, and filled it up with codes.
Finally someone found a use for "Traumatic amputation: Abdomen".
I've seen the abdominal X-ray of a man who was the first out of a helicopter in Vietnam - into a minefield.
The second man out was the medic, who had with him their standard means to achieve haemostasis - a sheet of wooden board, applied transversely to the site of haemorrhage, then lean on it, as hard as you can, lest your patient bleed out. It worked, and they were able to get him straight back into the helicopter and to a field hospital.
The X-ray stopped at the third lumbar vertebra, which had been fractured, but had healed. There just wasn't anything left caudal to that vertebra - no bone, no soft tissue, nothing.
Back in the day I was a shooter, Section 1 firearms licence, with a number of legally held weapons. With a fair bit of explosives knowledge.
Operated as range marshall on many occasions - both civilian and military ranges.
The first-aid training to be qualified obviously centered on trauma injuries. Including quite graphic images and details of what happens when someone fcuks up with either of the above.
Anyone who can deal with that stuff in action deserves medals.
Our first office email system was a single box for the whole office (long time ago) and the messages were printed, cut into separate messages (folded and taped) and put in the persons pigeon hole. As such all messages were supposed to be clearly address to the person involved. Unfortunately, one time a highly confidential eyed only HR message came in unaddressed and it was necessary to read it to find out who it had to go to then act as if I'd never seen it.
At tech support for a tiny ISP in the early 2000's, we used to routinely access customers' mailboxes in order to unclog them when over quota.
One of those times, I came upon a treasure trove: thousands of emails clearly and unambiguously detailing the life and work of an arms dealer, including the roundabout ways in which heavy weapons like artillery and helicopters were offered to African warlords via straw companies in Cyprus(?), IIRC.
Security being this lax, I simply copied the whole lot without anyone noticing, thinking it might one day interest some journalist, but nothing came of it. I might actually still have the files somewhere....
was tax records. who was paid what.
Which was fine except for one entry. that should not have been there, nor was the any sign of that person working there or indeed of that person being connected to the company in anyway... except for this tax record.
got told to forget it so I guess it was a dodge of some sort.
That will teach me not to know howto recover data
Going back a very long time, when CP/M was dominant and 10MB hard disks were an expensive rarity, I was testing a format program I'd written in assembly language for a very non-standard carttridge hard disk drive. I'd just fixed a minor problem, put in a blank cartridge, ran my program for a short while until I was happy, then stopped it half way. I thought. So I took out the test disk, put back my work disk with all my source code, and then noticed my program carrying on formatting from where it had left off, clearing everything from the middle of my precious disk onwards. Didn't do that again...
One of my jobs, back in the late 80s/early 90s, was repairing esoteric hardware that had no service information available and nobody else wanted to tinker with.
Once upon a time I was tasked with repairing a weird, large magneto optical drive that had a disk stuck in it.
The drive had come from a university hospital and, when ejected, the label on the disk indicated that it contained case studies and patient data of a few hundred AIDS patients.
I guarded the damn thing with my life and phoned the hospital to insist they collect it immediately instead of trusting it to put usual next day courier service.
Years ago we were moved in to a new office with new phone lines.
A few weeks later the fax machine started printing out a medical report, so we stopped it and faxed back 'new number, who dis'. It turned out they were meant for a major research unit at the nearby hospital. Over the next few months we had more faxes, from all over the world
Unfortunately the number had been embedded in too many many old documents and we had to get the number replaced. We did try to get it marked not for reuse or offered back to the hospital, but I suspect the suggestion was ignored, but I suspect it just went back into the pool after the standard 6 months or whatever suspension
Wun, Too, Tree, Fore, Fife, Zix, Zeven, Aight, Niner, Tun, etc.
For anyone interested...
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India / Indigo
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quibec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whisky
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu / Zebra (depending on UK/US because of how the letter is pronouned Zed or Zee)
> No. I is never indigo.
OTOH, the RAF Museum's Mobile guide and trails takes you into building H1 and asks you to find aircraft, given their phonetic alphabet markings - including one craft labelled as "Sierra, Papa, Indigo, Tango, Foxtrot, Indigo, Romeo, Echo" - so not one, but TWO Indigoes (Indigeese?).
Which also tallies with the tale told by the H2G2 page, which discusses earlier phonetic alphabets, such as the RAF's usage around WWII. I've also had this corroborated by members of the Old Geezers brigade.
Sources on the WWW also say that UK police used to use "Indigo", but so far the rozzers I've asked only used the NATO-style "India" - but messages have been sent out and ear-trumpets are being pulled out of closets, so there may be an update on that.
> I think it is pretty common error amongst people without a uniform in their past though.
Maybe you were thinking of the wrong uniforms - or just didn't look far enough into the past?
PS of course, at the time of the Indigo (indigo, where the chilly winds, winds will blow) the alphabet started with words like Able, Baker etc (other phonetic alphabets are available, signal flags may go up or down) but people on da Webs seem to take those differences in their stride but are strident about Indigo in particular.
"Zulu / Zebra (depending on UK/US because of how the letter is pronouned Zed or Zee)"
And yet, the US military have "Zulu Time", although that could be from the UK origin of GMT time zone being Zero offset and commonly used world wide as Zulu Time. Also, the official NATO phonetic alphabet uses Zulu, nor Zebra, so I'd expect US military forces to be fully conversant with using Zulu for Z or NATO exercise and/or operations could get "interesting"
Arguably a missed keystroke - or else keys pressed in the wrong order.
The original user was expected to type F O R M A T S (Enter).
They typed F O R M A T (Enter).
So either S didn't happen at all, or - as happens with two handed, ten fingered typing - the left hand S wasn't pressed until after the right hand Enter. Before Enter is what should have happened.
However, the point was made that the program should have had a safer name. It's like naming a backup program "DeletEverything", as in "Now you can DeletEverything and not lose your job." Unless you typed "DeleteEverything" instead.
(I hope a program doesn't actually exist with a stupider command line than a file copier named FORMATS.)
Call a few weeks ago. RTI outside a customer premises. We'd just upgraded the outside cameras to 4K from potato vision (tm). So off I trot, not knowing what has happened, to prepare footage for police.
Ill ask for more info next time.
I got to watch the last few seconds of a young persons life including the HGV incident that took it.
There isnt enough brain bleach in the world fir that one. Its changed our policies on CCTV and for what it's worth secured a conviction against the driver, but still... I think the gent in this got away lightly
For non 'muricans like me:
HGV stands for heavy goods vehicles, i.e. usually trucks around 7 to 12 ton (metric, Europe). Didn't find the clear US definition.
RTI possibly maybe stands for "Response-to-Intervention" ? (and not Railtrans International, not Research Triangle Institute etc etc etc, or which RTI it is if I am wrong? Pick yours from over 50 possibilities)
CCTV is clear in that context, "Closed Circuit Television" and not "China Central Television" - but that is just a guess.
"HGV stands for heavy goods vehicles, i.e. usually trucks around 7 to 12 ton (metric, Europe). Didn't find the clear US definition."
FWIW, the UK legal definition is any goods vehicle over 3.5 tonnes, including the cargo. That may need redefining since some electric cars, esp. pick-ups could probably come inside that range. The UKs first road legal EV pick-up truck, the Maxus T90EV has a kerb-weight (ie unladen) of 2.3 tonnes and can tow 1 tonne. I didn't check the bed carrying capacity but could see it easily hauling enough to take it into the legal definition of an HGV, which is a bit silly :-)
I forgot to mention that the limit tops out at 44 tonnes, fully laden. Abnormal loads are probably the same in most countries, ie requiring permissions, escorts, or more, even if the maximums of width, height, weight or traveling speeds may differ between jurisdictions.
>> "HGV stands for heavy goods vehicles, i.e. usually trucks around 7 to 12 ton (metric, Europe). Didn't find the clear US definition.
> FWIW, the UK legal definition is any goods vehicle over 3.5 tonnes, including the cargo."
"HGV" is UK, never heard in the US. It lays near "CDL", "Commercial Driver License", which is poorly defined in most states and covers the human not the machine.
US EPA smog rules change around 7,500lbs, 3.75 tons gross (loaded) weight. My "3/4ton" sat over 6,000lbs in the driveway meaning a load of manure and a 6-pack of beer put it over 7,500 pounds. There was a LOT less smog-crap on that machine than any smaller rig of same vintage.
Federal-funds highways have nice conservative weight limits (80,000lb), and most states are happy to enforce that with weigh-stations (and fuel-log checks). Certain heavy industries got the in-state number jacked, notably car-part shipments in the old rust-belt states and heavy timber from our Maine woods. Not like Australia's Road Trains though. Ultra-heavy loads like megawatt transformers for wind farms are overweight permit heaven.
Anyone in the company could look through the proxy logs by connecting to the proxy server directly. Frequent web searches included one particular horny engineer who couldn't stop looking at porn on company computer systems... Following that ip address's outgoing log it was an education of where not to go on company time. We were not in the business of moderating internet content.
People watching porn at work is far more common than a lot of people might expect.
I used to run a freight business, I reluctantly took over from my old man when he had a triple bypass and couldn't run the business anymore. Old man still liked to hang around the office though, even though he had no active role in the business anymore...anyway...I came in one day in the afternoon, old man was sitting in a corner of my office having a glass of wine with a perplexed look on his face. He waved me over then pointed out of my window and turned me around and said "if your mum see's that, she won't be happy"...there I was looking directly at an employee (we'd hired him roughly a week earlier) with his personal laptop open, headphones on, working away while watching some hardcore pornography...nothing illegal or controversial, just regular, run of the mill, internet based shagging...initially I warned the guy, as we'd only caught him once and figured a stern warning might sort out the problem, but I caught him again, the same day in the lunchroom watching the same video only this time, it was another employee that complained because he had taken out the headphones and simply decided to use the speakers on his laptop instead at what I assume was full, fucking, blast...at that point I just fired him. Told him to fuck off.
I was a fairly relaxed boss when it came to the working environment...I really didn't mind how people got their work done, as long as it was done and I didn't mind an informal atmosphere, especially since the line of work meant that some afternoons were just dead and some parts of the year it was just dead because the business was reasonably seasonal...it was actually quite productive most of the time and I had a highly motivated staff...however, brazenly watching porn at work...I've got no time for that.
Long time ago.
Volunteered for the Xmas shift in return for guarateed New Years Eve/Day without being bothered.
I built and managed the email system. Noticed the inboxes were queuing up.
I could see and open up mails in transit without going into anyones personal mail file.
Transpired that the reason for the roadblock was emails of an unusually large size going hither and thither.
Told - not asked - my manager that I was going to deal with the situation.
Diverted all mails over a certain size to a parking place so normal ones could get through.
Then started skimming them. Regular readers here have probably figured where this is headed.
Yup 90% porno. The pic that's indelibly etched on my brain was a guy's engorged member jammed into a ladies stilletto shoe.
Like learning what felching is, it's somesome can't erase from your brain ;-)
Something around 35,000 users got an email from me telling them that any more mails of such nature would be forwarded to every police authority I had contacts for.
Important to note though: I didn't mind the porno per se - some of it was pretty entertaining. I just wanted them to stop fcuking up my mail system!
...but I was once exposed to a large collection of videos of a pair of old company directors (60+) going at it in the office...about 20 years ago now I was called in to a client to recover data off a disk from a laptop that died. It belonged to the CEO...I promptly did a solid job recovering files, but there were a load of timestamped video files that were quite big, I thought they might be CCTV recordings or something...nope...turns out the CEO and COO (both married with kids) were having a secret gay old time on the "night shift" and for some reason they were filming it...I was offered a very nice sum of money to keep quiet, which I refused as I would keep things confidential as it's none of my business anyway.
From that point onwards I was always requested specifically by them if they needed support...but not that kind of support.
The pair of them sent me a Fortnum & Mason hamper at Christmas every year for 5 years (until I left the support company).
Last I heard, their kids had grown up and moved out, they divorced their wives and they lived gayly ever after...presumably.
Picture this if you will these were early 2000;s and i was touching up a video conference installation at one of the largest brewries in trhe world. . President;s office .. I needed to clear local cookies and needed to dive into the computer , got his secrateary in the office , explained and with her sitting besides me i got to dive in explorer and it's cookies. Made a search to get the Polycom cookies and we stood staring at the screen. It was page after page of pr0n websites and a maany with names like kiddiepr0n.com etc etc .. We didn't know what to do. This was the head of a MAJOR brewery and we didn't know what to do. Call the cops or close eyes. We chose the second option reluctantly and silently. There's a lot of things in this world i don't care to know , having to dive in someone's internet activity and tracks isn't one i care to repeat.
It was one of the worst work experiences ever the hell ever.
well in keeping with the story...
I once had to do some work on the laptop of the owner of a certain company related to property rentals
The MDM system's feature of tracking where things go showed that he likes to frequent naughty bars where ladies take their clothes off and was an avid attendee of fornication parties
It was often an office rumor but the saved wifi info confirmed it
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