Posts by Stuart Castle 1892 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2007
A colleague told me of a query he got from a Professor of mathematics.
The Professor phoned up saying we was using his computer, and none of the windows will open.
My colleague went to the guys office and verified what was happening. About 30 seconds later, he noticed why.
The professor had put a pile of books on his desk, and one of them was sitting on the escape key.
Back in the early 2000s, when a lot of people didn't have fast access to the internet, my then employer came up with the bright idea of inviting a load of school kids for special training sessions, as we had a good internet connection.
So, myself and my colleague spent a couple of days teaching these kids how to browse the web, how to search. That sort of thing. Well, that was the idea.
Once they discovered Google, we spent our entire time stopping them searching for porn, usually nude pictures of Britney Spears.
Oh, I have run ins with them before.. I am actually a fan of Linux, but there have been a few times on here where I've asked a question about something (for example, remote fleet management for Linux similar to System Center), and the only answers I've got have been given were downvotes and responses of "Google it"..
I'd like to see more Linux use where I work, but I've been told, to put it bluntly, that the problem with Linux (and all Open source software) is we didn't purchase it, so have no rights if it fails to work as advertised, and we also have no one we can sue. Microsoft can afford better lawyers than we can, so any legal action is likely to fail, but with Windows, at least we do have a entity we can sue.
I'd still like to see more use of Open Source..
Re "“A headteacher’s laptop is not just a laptop; it's an entry point to the most sensitive information a school holds,” Walker told us. If a cybercriminal got access, they could effectively break into the school without ever setting foot in the building. "
This is something people forget..
Whie a senior management user may assume that hackers would have little interest in their day to day responsbilities (and, tbf, hackers probably do have little interest in the day to day responsibilites of the manager), they forget that they often have a lot of rights to access a lot of company systems. Even assuming that company has compartmentalized it's security, that compartmentalization often doesn't apply to management. Sometimes because they need access to everything, and sometimes because they shouted when they found they didn't have access to something they didn't really need access to.
Where I work, we have a few machines that require specialist control software that requires Windows XP. (and some that require 7). These machines would need to be replaced or have major upgrades to work with newer versions of the software. In either case, the cost would start in the high five figure range, venturing into the six figure range if the machine does need replacing.
So, we opted to remove them from the network, blocklist their MAC addresses on the the network, and restrict physical access. Not saying a hacker won't get them on the network, but it'd be bloody difficult..
This whole AI thing reminds me a little of the dotcom bubble (sadly I was alive, and even a reader on this site, then).
Back then, it got to to a point where it seemed like anyone who had an idea, and could set up a website could make an awful lot of money. Some did (e.g. Google), but a lot just appeared to be sucessful, but burned through capital and ultimately failed. A lot of these companies vocally made use of other tech startups, and presumably invested in them..
This last bit is already happening in AI, but openly. Nvidia is profiting heavily from AI, but are also investing heavily in their customers. As is Microsoft, and as is Oracle. Hopefully, a lot of these companies will collapse, but hopefully they won't take out the world's economy while doing so. Sadly I think they will. The dotcom boom arguably contributed to the 2008 crash.
As I understand it, Elon has relatively speaking, only a little actual cash. Most of his fortune is in shares in his companies..
Note: I said relatively. I suspect Elon still has more than enough cash to be considered wealthy, and more than most of us will ever see. I think this means that when his Empire eventually does come crashing to earth, it will take him with it.
I used to work for a Uni, doing tech support. As part of our student facing website, we had a system where students could request that their MySQL password be reset. You know the drill. Click on the link, answer a couple of questions and then enter a new password.
I was walking through the lab one day, and a student stopped me. He was looking partly offended, and partly confused. I asked what happened, and he said he'd recieved a wierd error. He showed me the error, which said "Get back, thickyhead." I apologised to the student, and explained that the phrase was an in joke withing the team, and not meant offensively, and that I would talk to the page developer, and get the error removed.
I advised the student to give it a couple of hours, and retry the operation. The student seemed happy with that.
I spoke to the developer, who explained that several things had failed that caused the error (the site emailed him with the technical details of any errors), and that he would both fix the failiures, and replace the error with something a bit more appropriate.
A few years ago, I did lab based tech support for my Uni. The lab had two networks. One for general use and one for teaching communications, hacking and digital forensics. The second network was isolated from the internet (and main university network), and ws only accessible from a second install of windows on each machines. Each machine had dual ethernet ports, with each install of windows disabling the port connected to the network it wasn't supposed to have access to. That arrangement generally worked as we'd somehow locked down each install of windows so it was impossible for students to control the ethernet ports. Even swapping the cables didn't work because the MAC addresseses for the comms network ethernet cards were not registered with the main network dhcp server.
One day, one of the academics had arranged for some school kids to come in and spend a day trying out the equipment. I was supporting the lab along with a couple of other techs. Around lunch time, the network started to become sluggish, with increasing numbers of PCs losng their connections. The lecturer arranging the day was furious, started complaining, and we agreed that she shoud send the pupils for lunch, so we could resolve the problem.
After about 45 minutes of working (including rebooting the switch connecting all the PCs on the isolated network several times, which only worked for a couple of minutes), one of the techs noted that there was a *lot* of traffic coming from one port. So, he went to investigate the PC.
As an exercise, the class had been given the ip of a local webserver. One pupil had entered the wrong ip into their tool, and as a result, flooded the switch with incorrect ip requests, overloading it's cpu. When he stopped the tool, and rebooted the switch, all was well..
It will when enough people realise that the only thing keeping their investments valuable is the fact they are investing more, and they start to panic and pull existing investments. It's a ponzi scheme. These usually collapse eventually when people realise the company they are investing in will never make any profit.
I do, as a consumer, use various AI chatbots. Primarily Siri 2 (which uses Gemini) and ChatGPT.
However, i do not think the current AI models are sustainable. If the planet is going to survive, we need for AI to reduce it's hardware footprint massively. I truly think LLMs are a technological cul de sac because they do require massive amounts of compute power. Which requires massive data centres, which require massive amounts of power, and frequently water. Water which they frequently poison, thus reducing the supply for local towns.
Musk has proposed that the answer is putting the computers in space. It isn't. They won't be able to generate nearly enough power without miles of solar panels, and space, while extremely cold, isn't a good heat conductor.
Admittedly, I am by means an expert on any of this, but I do think we need a replacement for LLMs that uses little enough processing power that it can operate (perhaps with some restrictions) entirely on device, with no cloud accsss.
I used to work in a university computer lab. We had a particularly obnoxious fire alarm. One day the alarm went off, and I went through the lab making sure the students left. This involved me shouting at the students and asking them to leave via the nearest exit.
When I got near the fire exit, a student walked up to me asking what that awful noise was and complained it was interrupting his work. He even threatened to complain.
I explained that awful noise was to warn him he might be in danger and that he needed to leave the building as quickly as possible. I also said he was welcome to complain, but that the university would be unlikely to do anything as they did have other computer labs he could use in other buildings on campus.
Is it unfair? Possibly. It’s also something a good Phisher is more likely to do because a form or email offering something nice like a free day off is more likely to hook the reader.
So it’s actually realistic. It’s also good they are doing tests like this.
My employer does, regularly. They send out a vaguely official looking email , and if you report it via the relevant system, you get an email congratulating you and asking you not to mention it to colleagues.
Thankfully my company is fairly hot on security.
We have strict password rules, a proper password reset form that does not generally require us it techs to intervene, and we have MFA for all externally accessible systems.
Its not perfect security. No security is.
That said, when we introduced mfa officially (just as we were about to go into lockdown), we had several sessions where the MFA system was introduced.
At the session I attended, the woman sitting next to me stuck up her hand. When the presenter said she could ask her question, she asked if the unions had been asked about this. She then refused to use any systems that used MFA until she had the go ahead from the union. Which would have prevented her accessing teams and email, the primary communication systems we used.
I have no idea if she did get the go ahead, as I never saw her again. But it’s a big company, on multiple sites. I could just not have seen her because she doesn’t work on my site.
Years ago, I worked in a Uni computing lab. We had some high end (for the late 90s) tower PCs dedicated to video editing. These were all SCSI.
They had dual Pentium IIs (IIRC) and tons of ram.
One day, one of them had developed a fault, and to keep in practice, my boss decided to strip the PC down and rebuild it. He did this, checked it and as fair as he could see, it was correctly set up.
So, he plugged it in to the mains, hit the power button and the ribbon cable connecting the primary hard drive to the SCSI interface on the motherboard (yes, they hand on board SCSI, which was unusualy for PCs) caught fire.
We think he'd plugged the ribbon cable in so that it was one pin up from where it should have been. Either way, both Motherboard and hard drive were toast. That was an expensive repair.
Talk about a torture chamber for seldom used PCs. I've been handed a laptop to update to Windows 11. It's not been updated since at least 2024, and judging by the fact the clock was showing it was 2024, likely not been connected to a network since then. OK, I know the user could have reset the clock, but she has no reason to, and if she had connected it to a network, the clock would have updated.
I got it at about 2pm. It installed an impressively long list of updates, and is currently installing Windows 11. It's pretty much automatic, but soo slow.
Windows update is usually fairly painless on my main home PC. Well, apart from when someone releases a driver that torpedos the windows install..
Joking aside, it is farily painless. But then the PC is used daily, and properly shut down at the end of each day, so it's rebooted daily as well..
I also have another PC, that runs Proxmox on Linux (as a host OS). This has several Windows and Linux based VMs that are not used regularly, and Windows update can be fairly annoying on these, sometimes requiring several reboots (I've had it require up to five) as part of installing updates.
Likely deliberate.
I read years ago that they think the reason a lot of scam emails and texts have bad spelling and/or grammar is the people likely to spot that it's a scam are likely to notice the bad spelling or grammar, so will ignore or report it, leaving the scammer with more time to deal with those who have been fooled..
As I've posted elsewhere, Vivaldi works well for me, so I use it wherever I can..
Sadly my employer is a Microsoft house, so all company devices only have edge, set to use Bing for a search engine, and in future all the various corporate web apps and pages will require Edge to access.
That said, I don't really have a problem with Edge. It's more a problem wth being forced to use it.
I find the build in privacy features of Vivaldi good. I have to admit, I don't generally use ad blockers, preferring to just ignore any ad I don't like. This is mainly because I follow a lot of very small youtubers (a few hundred to a few thousand followers), so I think that while Google doesn't really need the money from the ads, the Youtuber does. I don't work for free, and therefore I don't expect them to either.
Vivaldi just works for me, and if I want better ad blocking, I still have access to the Chrome web store.
Windows isn't actually so disorganised as to liberally spray files everywhere. It can seem that way. Even in the default setup (which, tbf, is much looser than Unix/Linux), you are still slightly pushed into storing any install programs in one of three locations (c:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86) and your own user profile). If you have Admin rights, it does allow you to install programs anywhere though. Libraries used by the programs either go in the program folder or Windows System folder. Microsoft Store apps generally keep all their files/folders in the program folder, although it *is* possible to bypass that.
Data, as with Unix, can be stored in any folder the user has write access to. The difference being that in Unix, users without root privilages, only have access to their home folders by default. Windows can be set up that way and, on my work issued laptop, is. Because I am not an admin on the laptop (I don't need to be, and it is best practice to run with the mininum access you need), I cannot write to any folders or file outside of my user area.
Windows isn't perfect. It's far from perfect, TBH (far too much telemetry and tracking for instance), but it's nowhere near the out of control mess it was, and is still portrayed as by some. Ideally I'd like to see Microsoft remove the Administrator rights by default from the consumer installs, but I think their hands are tied. Microsoft have nearly 40 years of Windows software to run, and a lot of that software assumes it is admin rights. Certainly if it was made before 2010.
If Microsoft suddenly removed home user's rights to run that software, or even asked them to create a 2nd account to only be used for admin purposes, people would complain. Not everyone has access to someone knowledgable to do things like install software. People will complain, and they may even sue.
Your copy of Linux may be set up like that. You presumably know what you are doing, and having multiple accounts wouldn't be a problem..
What do Microsoft do for users who don't have knowledge, or access to someone who does? Do they restrict rights, and ask them to contact them to get Admin rights? Do they restrict Windows so that applications come as package folders, and can only write to those folders and the user's home folder? iOS already does this, but has done it from the start, so it doesn't get a lot of complaints. You can "virtualise" apps on Windows so they run like this, but I've tried it. It breaks a lot of applications because they expect to have much less restricted accesss.
I used to think that. After all, Musk made an awful lot of money and was coming up with what were, on the face of it, wonderful ideas. He, through Tesla, also made the electric car the most marketable alternative to fossil fuels. And whether you like Electric cars or not, we do need an alternative to fossil fueld sooner rather than later. Fossil Fuels will run out, and, thanks to the fact the entire industry is relying on a strait consisting of a few miles of sea to transport about a third of the world's oil, are vulnerable to an idiot with a few missles and an army holding the entire world to ransom..
But, I digress. I used to think Musk was a force for good. Perhaps he was, but then he started believing his own hype, and is clearly in it just to gain power. I don't even think he is really interested in money. But even if you look at his original ideas, apart from the electric car, and the household/industrial batteries, none of them are feasible. Even the Hyperloop was, by his own admission, developed to divert funding away from high speed rail.
My old sotware engineering management lecturer talked about secure coding. Basically security in the 90s wasn'r really much of a consideration, but even then, he touted providing (and testing) decent error checking on function calls, as well as ensuring users have the minimum rights they need..
He also said something else that it true. He said that no security system is perfect. Every one has flaws, even if you never find them. He also made the point that if anyone did actually invent perfect security, they would become very rich very quickly.
The problem is with spending money on security (or even backups or infrastructure) is that it doesn't directly generate profit, or even new features for people to get excited about. It *is* necessary to keep the company functional, but if you spend all that money, on the face of it, all you've achieved is the system is doing what it should have been anyway.. That won't get the beancounters excited because it costs money and doesn't give them any return they wouldn't have got anyway.
They forget that if they don't have security, and the system is compromised, the costs to the company may be many times what the security would have cost, and may include the company itself.
One of our users in one of our rooms reported that he was given a shock everytime he touched an electrical appliance (even a switch or socket) in that room. Being concerned there was a problem and being unable to find it, having unplugged all the electrical equipment and him still having the problem, we got an electrician in. He checked all the sockets (over 30), and all the light switches and fittings. He tested each with every test he could, and they all passed. He was confused, until he realised the user was wearing polyester.
Yes, the user almost exclusively wore polyester and tended to shuffle while walking, so over the several hours he was in the room (he tended to walk), he was building a large static charge.
We asked him to change his clothes, and the problem went away.
I purchased (well, not me personally) a couple of Hololenses for work.
The tech is good, and it is an interesting gadget, but tbh, it has always seemed to be an expensive solution looking for a problem. IIRC, the consumer version was over £1000, which is what you pay for a high end consumer VR headset for something that isn't as useful. The enterprise edition is the same hardware, running essentially the same software (Windows Holographic), but adds the ability to integrate with Active Directory and be managed by System Center. It is also over £3k.
FIA, you are right. Microsoft made plenty of noise about the end of support for windows 10 (and still are) because it's a consumer product, and most consumers would not know if they didn't make that noise. Windows Server isn't a consumer product, and, TBH, anyone using it *should* already know that it's EOL. Microsoft does tell admins these things, just not as openly...
The rewriting of the Cobol isn't the hard part. The hard part is the testing, and fixing any errors that come up (and there will be errors). If it was as easy as rewriting the COBOL, everyone would have done it. After all, during the millenium, it would surely have been cheaper to port all of the old systems in uses to modern servers and ditch the mainframes if it was as easy as just rewriting the COBOL..
The fact is it isn't that easy. There is often more than just COBOL at the heart of these system, and any changes would need testing anyway. Certainly if you are planning to run your business on it.
This might seem like I am anti AI. I am not. It is a tool with a lot of uses, but I think we need to be careful to avoid the hype. AI companies need a lot of money, and they will only get it if they can get people think they are making regular and impressive breakthroughs that are going to disrupt industries.
Years back, I was doing tech support, and was also a massive fan of the open source remote desktop system, VNC.
I worked in a University computer lab. We have about 50 PCs, and 1 Power PC based Mac.
My boss managed both staff and student support, and his office was a couple of floors down. I was (and am still) friends with the technicians who did staff supoprt, and they were based in his office.
One day, we were going to lunch, and my friend came up with an idea. He asked me to install the VNC server on the Mac, put an out of order sign on it (to prevent the students using it), turn the monitor off and give him the IP. He also asked me to disable power saving.
Then, when our boss went for lunch, he leapt on the boss's PC, installed the client, connected it to the Mac, and made it full screen.
When the boss came back, he was rather confused to find that his Windows NT 4 desktop had apparently been replaced with a desktop he didn't recognise (he was one of these people who viewed Macs as a a waste of time, so never bothered to use one).
It's not the same. Security measures, non-discriiminatory hiring policiies, working at home, honesty , staff training and ecological awareness are not marketed as boosting your productivity and / or reducing costs. In fact, in some ways, they add to your costs. But if all of those are done well, businesses will see beneifts in various ways, including, perhaps, an increase in productivity or profit. But they've not been promised either.
AI *is* almost exclusively being marketed on boosting your productivity and reducing costs, which means that businesses will be looking for those benefits, and if AI doesn't deliver (it isn't in a lot of cases), they will cut funding.
My employer couldn’t do anything like that. Initially because during Covid, we gave staff usb headsets and laptops so they could work from home, but now because we’ve switched a policy of giving out laptops and docking stations in preference to desktops. You have to have a pretty bulletproof business case to get a desktop now. Most docks require usb connections now.
I used to get the 108 bus in London fairly regularly.
For those who don't know, London buses have automated announcements in them that give the bus's destination, next stop and a whole load of other announcements. This is part of a london wide management system called "iBus", which also powers the various apps and journey planner websites that tap into TFL's journey planner.
The iBus hardware on each bus is essentially a small PC that as well as doing the announcements and digital signs for the passengers, also tracks the bus's position, and reports it to the iBus servers via a mobile connection.
Buses on some routes have dot matrix indicators, some have LED screens.
The buses on route 108 have quite large LED screens. For the first few weeks they were running, they were on, and clearly running the iBus software, but not displaying anything remotely useful. Then, while the announcement worked, the screends just displayed the top of an AMI Bios screen. I wish i'd have got a photo of this, because now the screesns are just left off. The announcements still work, which suggests that they have a seperate computer for the displays.
I used to be on the on call list at work. Thankfully I was so far down it that I think it would have taken a major disaster for me to have been called.
I say thankfully because I can’t drive, and live far enough from the company that it’s not practical to walk, and difficult to cycle.
As such, me getting to work if something had failed over night, I would have had to get a cab.
Thankfully I was never called.
Same here.
The 380z did have a green screen monitor and keyboard, but was there primarily to be a file and print server, and was hooked up via a parallel cable to an Epson Dot Matrix printer (I *think* it was the fx40,but can't find it).
The 480z's had colour monitors, which were (of course), Microvitec cubs.
Windows is terrible for a lot of things (particulalry the amount of data that gets sent back to microsoft with little or no knowledge of the user, let alone consent), but one thing it does have is mature and powerful systems for deployment and management at scale.
We use System Center at work, and while it's a beast that ideally you need training, and time to master, it's powerful. I could, should I need to, log on to the Console and get thousands of machines to wipe themselves, reinstall windows and any software needed for the machine. This would take a couple of days to complete, and in terms of my interaction, about 30 seconds. I am not going to do so because it would be too disruptive. Want an application on 1,000 machines? Ignoring the time required for creating and testing the deployment, it would take, again, about 30 seconds of interaction and a couple of days. If Microsoft issue a new update, we can have it on 99% of our estate 48 hours after it completes testing.
Linux is also good, particularly on machines that aren't necessarily as powerful as the latest machines. Despite how this post might sound, I love Linux.
But Linux has problems. One of which is the sheer number of distributions. I like Ubuntu, but if I were a newbie, how would I know which linux to use? There are dozens, all seemingly very similar. Also, I had a project at work a few years ago. We needed a lot of digital signs quickly and had almost no budget to install them, so couldn't afford the £1000 windows based totems used elsewhere.
i came up with an incredibly cheap solution involving mounting a raspberry pi on the back of a monitor and mounting the monitor where we wanted signs. The Pi's would just have displayed a webpage, or still graphic with the sign. It would have cost about £150 per unit as opposed to £1000. I'm not counting power or networking, because both solutions would likely have needed that.
Our IT department refused to authorise the project unless I came up with a decent way of managing updates to the Pis. I considered Pi Server (the Raspberry Pi produced VM that enabled netbooting pis (which would have made updating them easy), but it didn't look like it would scale up.
I needed an integrated management system that could, in theory, manage hundreds of pis. I asked on various Linux forums (and on here), and didn't get a sensible answer, with every query being answered by a general "Use Linux U noob" type response, and usually a lot less polite than that.
Sadly, becase of that, my company just bought a few more totems (they can be managed with our existing infrastructure) and called it a day.
Unfortunately, in that case, ideology lost out to practicality, even though practicality cost more.
When I was a green young support bod, I supported a lot of university researchers.
One had a fault with his pc and had likely lost data. Of course it wasn’t backed up and he was shouting at me. The university had a policy that because they provided network shared areas that were backed up, they didn’t back up individual workstations. Users were expected to either use the shared areas or back up their own data. This researcher had done neither.
The researcher was shouting at me when his boss heard. His boss came over to see what was happening and stopped him. The researcher explained and called me an “oily rag” while doing so.
His boss replied pointing out the university policy on backups, and explained calmly that “The person you called an oily rag knows more about computers than you ever will”. He also ordered the researcher to apologise.
Part of me almost wishes they'd go back to shipping the OS on floppy disks, I should imagine the cost of shipping hundreds, if not thousands of floppies to a customer would make the vendor think twice about any bloat they add. Not to mention requiring the customer to sit there for the best part of a week swapping disks while installing.
OK, so that's not really practical, but I suspect with a little work, Microsoft could get Windows to a point were the install media is less than a gig.
But then I also wish they'd offer a paid option for Windows that disables most, if not all, the telemetry, or at least gives the user the option to opt in, with a detailed explanation as to what they are opting in to, what data is shared, with whom, and what they will do with it.
I used to support a Uni computer lab. Just off the lab, we had a small Audio/Video studio that I also supported.
This studio had a powerful (for the time) PC that as well as doing any AV capturing also controlled the Audio mixer via MIDI. The mixer had, however, analog sliders that were powered by motors. As such, if you sent a Midi command to increase the level of a certain channel, the slider for that channel moved up, apparenly under it's own power.
Because it was a sealed off room, that could be booked freely by students, it frequently got booked by students for purposes other than AV work. Us techs could see this because it was covered well by a couple of CCTV cameras. As a couple of students found out, covering these CCTV cameras was a good way to get thrown out of the lab and have your login account suspended for a few days.
For support reasons, I had, long before, installed a VNC server on the machine, which I generally used if there was a problem on the machine.
One day, I noticed a bunch of students, sitting in a circle. I did not know what they were doing, but it clearly wasn't anything that needed the facilities of the studio. They weren't, strictly speaking, breaking any rules, but they were taking up a resource other students likely needed to use, so I decided to have a little fun with them.
I logged on to the computer remotely and fired up an application that could control the mixer. I set all the channels to their maxium level, then to their minium. I knew that when each slider reached the maximum of minimum level, it would hit the casing of the mixer and make a quiet click. 24 of them doing it nearly simultaneously would make a fairly noticable bang. When I was sure the students were looking, I started setting the channels to random levels. This scared the students and they packed up their stuff and left. I don't think I saw any of them again.
I like the phablet style of phone. I have an iphone 16 pro max, and I love it. I do a lot of things on the iphone that that take advantage of the larger screen. Mainly accessing work related apps and websites.
While doing work related stuff, I usually also have a Macbook Pro with me, but it's not always practical or safe to get that out, so a phone with a relatively large screen is good for me.
One thing I wish phone manufacturers would move away from though is this idea that we all only want thing phones. I don't. I have pockets large enough for a slightly thicker phone, and i suspect i'm not the only one.
I think having a larger battery would benefit me more than a thinner one, and perhaps they could use the power saving tech to ensure my phone lasts for a week on one charge, rather than the day that a thinner battery would allow. Perhaps even go back to interchangable batteries.
One of my old colleagues used to tell a story of when he was a young, newbie support person. We used to have a PBX and the extensions were patched in using the structured cabling used for the computer network with each patch room having a dedicated voice panel. Each socket on the voice panel was assigned a phone number.
One weekened, my colleague was in tidying the connections on the patch panel. He'd assumed that patching the phones was the same as patching the network. IE as long as you plugged each patch into the right switch, it didn't matter which port on that switch you used. He thought it was the same for the voice panel.
It wasn't. As he discovered when, having removed all the cables from the voice panel, he plugged one back in and tried to ring the extension he thought he'd plugged in.
He spent the whole weekend plugging cables back in, then rining extensions and seeing where he could hear the phone rigning. Of course, had he done this during the week, he could have contacted the switchboard, who did have plans of the all the patch cabinets showing what was patched to what.
We currently have a VOIP switchboard, with extension numbers assigned to IP addresses, so it wouldn't matter which port on which switch you plug the cable into, as long as it's assigned to the right vlan.
Re: "The EFF said previously that although Trump's executive orders are designed to target student visa holders, because these individuals' networks likely include fellow students that are US citizens, the surveillance likely infringes their free speech rights also."
Ironically, one of Trump's legal cases (and, as a result, his claims his phones were illegally tapped) likely came from the fact that one of his lawers had *his* phone tapped because of some other wrongdoing by him or someone else, and Trump was caught because he phoned the tapped phone.
