The Usual Suspects
We had issues with all the usual postal addresses in Scunthorpe, Penistone, Chorlton cum Hardy and so on. Oddly, it didn't find Clitheroe to be a problem.
Welcome to Who, Me?, where hallowed ground gets trampled as a reader inadvertently cleans up the collective act of the senior staff. Our story, told to us by "Susan" takes us back a quarter of a century to her time working for a well-known seller of mortgages in the UK (a firm that, for reasons that will become clear, will …
It couldn't fine the last one...?
When I put our companies first mail filter in back in the late 90's it would send the whole email when it found some keywords to another - in this case shared - mailbox for us to review. Not sure in hindsight how they get away with it because there wasn't such a thing as an acceptable use/monitoring agreement policy in place back then.
I had a rather stern female colleague from sales come badgering us aggressively because she wasn't getting emails through from a colleague (if filtered on all emails both internal and external).
I pulled up the shared mailbox they went into and the first one she hadn't received was pure filth. As was the first one from her that was blocked.
She was outraged that it was interfering with her love life (oh - they were married as well, just not to each other). I tried to explain that whilst I really didn't care one way or the other, maybe sending pornographic emails to one another via their corporate accounts wasn't a good idea but she was adamant she was going to report us to the IT Director... as far as I know she never was that daft, but maybe he just laughed her out of his office.
We still got the odd email flagged from them with the same explicit descriptions of what they planned to do to one another so some people just don't learn.
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Accidental use of "forward" rather than "reply" can also yield results. Particularly if you're careful who it gets forwarded too.
We all know the right destination. The person who, if loose lips really sank ships, would ensure there'd be nothing left afloat in the world.
Yep, I worked in a council back from 2004-2006 and we regularly had to review the filters in Lotus Notes. To be honest, there wasn't any filth (or at least not that I saw - although it being fully open plan may have helped there), but we regularly had to release e-mails mentioning Scunthorpe and the likes. The rest were mainly silly videos and picture memes. I built up a bit of a collection of the best ones if I recall...
Probably round about the same time and despite me being in the same team has him, the guy who was "administering" (i.e. snooping at the logs of) our newly-installed firewall proclaimed in a loud voice that I was the person who spent most time on t'Internet at the website of Sun. At first, I was adamant - "I've never been to the website of The Sun newspaper as far as I kno... oh, Sun, as in Sun Microsystems? Well, I am the Solaris sysadmin, so..."
Please see my recent post regarding DTK.com - it was supposed to be DTK.co.uk, the website of an engineering company that I regularly dealt with, but when I accidentally misspelt the URL, I was somewhat surprised to be deposited in the lap of Dangerous to Know, a BDSM supplies site. Management were, surprisingly, highly amused at my blunder.
(Oh! and yes, we were also cursed with a Coventy postcode).
Around the 1990ies, a bit before the phoebe disaster, i searched the naughty words:"Acorn RiscPC Verkäufer Westdeutschland" in that wonderfully new search engine named goggle or suchlike.
What i got was not adresses of Acorn hardware vendors in west germany but entries like a BDSM gay club in Hamburg and similar, not necessarily IT related information.
No wonder the phoebe was never produced. Think of the cauldrons or something like that.
Search engines... maybe they really search but a find engine might be better once in a while. ;)
... at Stanford and Berkeley in the early.mid-90s, I had a handy list of seditious, lewd &etc addresses to filter on, which I happily sold on for the purpose of corporate firewall stocking. It wasn't just the new kids going to iffy sites, it was professors and grad students, too.
Daft thing is that officially the schools did NOT monitor which USENET groups were subscribed to, nor which posts a user "read". It was a privacy/freedom of speech thing. We even told the users that up front, it was part of the "using USENET" package. But for some reason, the PTB insisted that we had to log all WWW activity ... and we told them THAT, too.
So they knew that USENET use was unlogged, but the WWW was logged ... and (essentially) the same content was available on both. The vast majority chose the pointy-clicky-thingy anyway, at which point we knew society was fucked.
It's all been downhill from there.
Jake: "It wasn't just the new kids going to iffy sites, it was professors and grad students, too."
As the great Tom Lehrer* called Grad School:
'That hotbed of celibacy'
*He claimed that one of his favourite reviews said "Mr Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as, taste." If you are not familiar with is work, you are in for a treat. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03922-x
Well, to be fair you were seemingly advocating (or at least condoning) abuse as a choice ... not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
Personally, if I were prone to such things as thumbs, I'd down vote you for using that tired old hoary meme of an icon.
"Sticks and stone may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me." —Unknown, mid-20thC
I would have thought that any sensible person reading the thread would have seen that the previous two posts referred to Tom Lehrer. Even if the reader had never heard of him (and if not, why not?), I think that a basic level of reading comprehension would suggest that that was a quote.
Edit - just to add; not that it's my thing, but there's a world of difference between whatever consensual (and legal) activity gets you off, and abuse. Conflating the two is just stigmatising the sexual preferences of others, which is a course of behaviour that everyone should steer clear of, under the adage of "mind your own business".
The ElReg Oracle has pondered deeply upon your question "Do women still wear slips?" and replies:
If you are old enough to reach the keybr0ad and still have to ask, the Oracle must regretfully inform you that you'll probably never know.
You owe the Oracle a pint and a smile.
Emily Postnews' two-bits: "A gentleman would never ask."
In the middle of a silly but not especially pornographic chat with a colleague I sent an email offering to be her toyboy, but I had a brain fade & sent it to my manager instead.
Fortunately he had done something similar to me a few weeks previously, so the only response I got was "I think that makes us even."
I know of one manager who was having an affair with his manager, and were having an torrid exchange through email.
The 2nd line should have realised that her secretary had full control over all the emails. The secretary told me, and I had "a quiet hint" to him. I knew what was going on, because going out for a run one day I found them walking in the woods, "discussing the salary plan" as they guiltily said. At the end of the year he got "an outstanding performer". She got one "excellent manager" and 9 "terrible manager" feedback from her team.
Anonymously because they know where I Iive.
Once upon a time I wanted to know about looking after a fox, which was living in the woods at the back of our industrial estate and had just had a litter. She looked like a young one and seemed to be having some trouble feeding the kits.
So rather naively I typed
nursing vixen
into the Google search box.
I was once given one morning special dispensation to go looking for anything unsavory I wanted on the company internet connection for the purposes of building some testing scripts to make sure the "grot filters" worked correctly!
Interesting conversation down the pub that lunchtime...
"So what you been doing all morning locked in that conference room on your own?"
"You know, work stuff."
Back in the late 90s I worked at a midsized manufacturing facility. Since PCs with Internet access were largely replacing PCs, they decided Internet monitoring software was in order. Some sites were clearly NSFW, others weren't obvious. A PFY from the IT dept. was assigned the task of "verifying" a list of sites.
The PFY reacted with a combination of bemusememt and horror. "You want me to do WHAT?". Probably didn't help that his workstation was in a common work area.
Might be a poke at the useless local police. Back in the late 1980s a small newspaper here in the Bay Area used to run an article on Fridays listing the best places to buy whatever, from drugs to stolen property to hookers to tax-free booze and tobacco, name it. With addresses, prices, and rough operating hours.
The police, instead of shutting down the illegal activity, decided to sue the newspaper to put a stop to it. Until the paper hinted that in an upcoming issue they'd include cops, judges and politicians for sale. With prices. The (obvious) illegal activity stopped practically overnight. Imagine that.
Arrived at a small web firm early 00s, CEO proudly pointed at the rack and told me they had an internal network, external network with prod on it and a firewall. IT hardware person had left under a cloud. I spent a day in that flipping freezing server room labelling spaghetti wires but not unplugging anything. Found that the firewall was connected to the internal network, not the external/rest of the world. Don't think it was deliberate but the room was such a state that I wasn't surprised it had happened.
I remember when word-of-mouth got round that NCSA Mosaic (I never figured out how to drive it) on our Solaris network had been supplemented with Netscape Navigator (then still unversioned, because v1), and you could use Yahoo! or Lycos to search for stuff. Links to the US averaged 50 *bytes* per second at busy times during the day, but you could get as fast as 1MB per second at night.
But even in those early days, smut was pretty front and centre. As an electronic engineering student in the mid-90s, I inevitably used Microchip PIC microcontrollers for projects because they were cheap and fairly well supported by the community. So of course I went looking for other people's source code I could reuse - and I brought up a search engine and typed in "pics". Let's just say the page titles that came up were not what you want shown on a large screen in a busy computer lab.
Ahem. That’s not Sister Mary Peter. She’s too short, doesn’t have a mustache, and doesn’t have a steel 18” ruler.
Yes, I was in Catholic school all the way to undergraduate level. Though the nuns mostly roamed at elementary level. At higher level were Jesuits. They didn’t use steel rulers, they used words, and were much more cutting. They were also, mostly, smaller than Sister Mary Peter. Or Sister Mary Hildegarde, who could probably have played on an NFL offensive line.
Not all that long ago, one of the mail filtering services had an option where mail with rude words was not only blocked, but deleted from the logs. When the client wasn't getting emails from Mr Cockson, we had to ask for the rejected email headers to have any evidence the mail hit the filter at all.
For the rest of is, it was often the case that IT couldn't or wouldn't tell us what was banned. Our salesman was trying to communicate with an acquaintance as a client, and d'd if they could work out why his email had been deleted. By cunning testing of small parts of the message, they worked out that "a large international cigarette company" had decided to block and discard any email containing the magic phrase:
Just do the right thing
One of my colleagues received a severe and formal dressing-down for his email use.
"Fair enough," you might say, "he's obviously been sending inappropriate emails to people."
Not quite. He received the dressing-down for incoming emails addressed to him. Which were filtered out before he saw them. The IT manager also wouldn't tell him who had sent the mails to him, or what they contained. Which probably tells you all you need to know about how much that particular IT manager actually understood his remit.