Lost in translation and adrift in cloud storage Welcome to a cautionary Who, Me?, a warning to all those lured by the promises of the cloud storage giants and a language lesson for all. Our story concerns "Dirk", who at the time of our tale was hard at work in a Netherlands IT department. Dirk himself didn't actually speak much Dutch; his first language was English but that …
beheerder
Came across such an account some years ago. At that time, for all I knew, this looked just like any another user name following more or less their naming convention. I wondered though (in fact, I got quite shirty), why a person who didn't even belong to the IT department had administrative permissions on the system.
It can be hard to find some words in a dutch-english dictionary just because they tend to construct complex concepts from word fragments. In this case the word takes 'person', adds a prefix to turn it into a verb and then adds a suffix to mean someone who performs that verb.
So it's a person who points people at tasks. A manager.
1) google translate still is sort of... unreliable
2) it was doubly so waaay back
3) who creates admin accounts with a localised name? I'm not a native English speaker, and have worked in countries where English is not the main language. I have not come across that in the last decade at the very least. Not even two decades ago in a very small group - I'm not saying it does not happen (it does), but, hey, who in their right mind... (ok, wrong question)
4) his predecessor basically shrugged - not sure if he/she was dutch speaking - maybe? Should have spotted that.
Oh, and hindsight is 20/20, as they say...
> who creates admin accounts with a localised name?
Maybe the localisation system? I don't know this particular system, but if you install Windows to use Finnish, it helpfully shows nearly everything in the UI in Finnish. The underlying admin user name might not be altered, but what the GUI shows is.
My son accidentally set the language to Spanish when taking his new Windows PC in use. That was fun (and lucky it was not Hebrew or Chinese). It still occasionally shows some texts in Spanish, even after trying to tell it we want to run it in Finnish. Probably would require a reinstall.
Cantonese IIRC
Went to university (in the UK) with several guys from the PRC, only problem was 2 of them spoke mandarin with a smattering of English and the other spoke Cantonese with a smattering of English....doing a project with them was "fun" particularly as the 2 who spoke mandarin were lazy sods who spent their time outside smoking (when they turned up) and rarely made any input into the project, cue me and the other trying to complete a 4 person project....that was a fubar....
In the U.S. the ATMs of at least some banks allow you to set the language to be used for your account. One fellow of my acquaintance set his to Italian, because he was studying Italian and wanted a bit of light "immersion". Apparently his bank stored (for his account or possibly on his card) not the language per se, but the index into a table of languages supported by a given ATM (or group of ATMs?)
At least that is the best we could guess for what happened when he was across town in a Polish neighborhood.
"[...] ATMs of at least some banks allow you to set the language to be used for your account. "
A friend was born in Hong Kong but lived in English-speaking countries all her life. When she visited her family in HK she found that the ATMs only prompted her in Chinese - in which she had very little competence.
A colleague was the son of HK immigrants who lived all his life in the UK. On visits to HK he found that the taxis had an increasing scale of tariffs - one for Chinese speakers, one for English-speakers, and the most expensive for people like him who were Chinese but didn't speak the language.
"1) google translate still is sort of... unreliable"
Yep it is, I have huge issues with german, myself.
"3) who creates admin accounts with a localised name? I'm not a native English speaker, and have worked in countries where English is not the main language. I have not come across that in the last decade at the very least. Not even two decades ago in a very small group - I'm not saying it does not happen (it does), but, hey, who in their right mind... (ok, wrong question)"
More people than what you think. In China or Japan, it's quite common, as is also common to ask you for support and connection to the localized systems. It's not funny ...
It might sound strange to an outsider, but my Wife hasn't been stung in the nearly thirty years she has been helping me take care of our bees. I get stung once every two or three years. The disparity is probably because I'm a clumsy oaf compared to her. Honey bees in general go WAY out of their way to avoid stinging.
No, they don't always die. Here's a short safe for work clip demonstrating a couple bees surviving after stinging a beekeeper. The third one stays on the gent even after working herself free, without a care in the world. Honey bees aren't out to get humans.
Note: If you are in an area where so-called "africanized bees" live, life is a trifle more complicated. For safety's sake, don't approach an unknown hive without the advice and consent of a beekeeper ... Occasionally, even the most docile of hives will get pissy for a couple hours. A beekeeper will see the "come back later" signs that you might miss.
"are all the Preppers sealed in their bunkers for the duration? Will this raise the average IQ?"
From direct observation here in Sonoma County, yes and yes. One such armed-to-the-teeth dude living in his hole in the ground (literally ... they are living in their fall-out shelter for the duration) called me and asked if I'd be kind enough to put some dog, cat, chicken, goat and rabbit food outside his gate ... seems he only had enough on hand for two weeks. I didn't bother telling him that the cats, rabbits, chickens and goats could fend for themselves ... and that the dogs would do just fine on rabbit and chicken. Takes all kinds, I guess ...
I wonder how many other Preppers have just realised they forget certain essential items too? Greta fun while it's still just a "game", but suddenly they think it's "real" and the mind is suddenly more concentrated on what really is "essential". You can't eat guns'n'bullets.
One can argue about Google Translate and its relevance back then, or how the previous admin should have been a bit more knowledgeable, but the real problem has nothing to do with the admin name.
The real problem is that this Dirk launched a file operation without checking what he would be transferring. It's that second of inattention that always gets you, and it got him.
When you are the admin, you never initiate a file operation without checking and double-checking what you're doing. With your access, it's way too dangerous not to. He didn't check, and the mayhem lasted a month. I'm guessing that was a learning experience for him.
"In the DIY business, it's "measure twice and cut once."
A friend was renovating a farmhouse as his new family home. To trim costs he ordered and fitted the large kitchen worktops himself. One section had needed a corner cut out. When he put it in place the cut out was too long - he had measured incorrectly. So he re-measured and and ordered a replacement - which turned out to have the same mistake. It stayed like that for years.
One day he was sawing a piece of wood on the kitchen table. As he was sawing he related how - many years ago - he had cut into the table top by mistake. This time when he finished - he found he had done the same again.
My door was having its two custom stained glass panels fitted. The acclaimed artist found that they were 100mm too wide. She had take them away and hack them down to size. She said that was the first time she had ever mis-measured. In fact the loss of part of the design actually improved it - as the brain subjectively expanded it to wider than the missing slice.
Yeah, we called it the FuckNoSecond too. We were never able to define the duration accurately although the duration seemed to be inversely proportional to the severity of the result while having a gut chill factor of about 11 so the subjective duration was about 11 times longer than the objective duration.
"[..] the duration seemed to be inversely proportional to the severity of the result [...]"
Our brain's perception of time is subjective. In an emergency time slows down.
Half of that was automatically and unintentionally done by setting up the system in Dutch.
Even being Dutch I don't understand that as most of the translations are atrocious (although getting better) and the automatic keyboard lay-out selection of Dutch isn't really helpful either as 99.99% of the keyboards here have a US lay-out and selection US-International works best with the diacritical characters Dutch (like most other continental European countries) uses.
"I'm under the impression that renaming root /admin is a security feature."
You are under the wrong impression. That's like hiding your front door--any serious threat will either watch you go to the hidden door before repeating your actions, search thoroughly and find the door anyway, or smash through the wall. Root can be called root, just secure it. That means secure passwords, no login to root directly unless through hardwired or trusted interfaces, limited need to go to root anyway (E.G. programs that need to run with special access being run in a user account with that access when possible), and limited knowledge of how to get to root.
According to my OED, dyke is a modern (1930s) British misspelling of the Middle English (13th C.) dike, meaning (roughly) a barrier preventing passage of something ... Yes, that's right, the British can't even splel their own words correctly. And yet they presume to attempt to "correct" the rest of us at every opportunity? There is probably a word for that ...
"[...] did lesbians exist in the 13th C [...] "
The word did not exist until the Victorians started labelling people as rigid boxes.
It's like asking if men had male lovers... both are normal human sexual affinities noted in the earliest stories of human civilisations.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
