Posts by philbo 255 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2007
If you use it once, will it break?
My favourite password story comes from the very first network install I was involved with, about 25 years ago. Netware v2, and so wonderfully secure that when the admin changed the supervisor password to "fuckme", it did: it accepted the password change, then wouldn't let him log in again. He ended up nuking the install and starting again from scratch.
I've got dozens of the buggers...
e.g. "Shut Down the Server" to "Waltzing Matilda"
"Mend my PC" to "Under the Sea"
"No IntToReal" to "Run to the Hills" by Iron Maiden
"Three-fingered Salute" to "Four-Legged Friend"
..and one for the real old-timers: "The Oldest PC In Town"
..and possibly one of the most fun choruses about the TCP/IP application programmer's interface
I was thinking exactly that: the voting machines that posted all their data back to an Access database, so perfectly secure that any noddy techie could change the results.. and no audit to check against.
One hopes that the banks who consider using this technology will do more rigorous testing than the Ohio (& other) electoral boards managed
It means that the unattractive majority can go through without turning the stomachs of the unfortunate operators, but the pervs still on duty can get their jollies with the aforementioned "test" button (I wonder whether the (in-the-)raw images get saved when you hit "test", or the outline-with-icon one). No prizes for guessing why the Paris icon...
Cynical, moi?
I'm sure half the people here have a story like this: going back on-site to fix a customer's ID card database, I find that the tape in the tape drive was the one that I put there five years earlier, and the backup on it was the one that I had taken all those years ago.
Nobody had clicked the "make a backup" icon once. Sigh.
I'm a developer rather than an admin, too, but for a while now ninite has been my first port of call for any new (or rebuilt) PC. Well, second, after installing Total Commander.
Only complaint with Ninite is they still haven't added TC.
..and looking at the rest of this thread, it's great to see that I'm not alone in hurling verbal abuse when the Flash updater ignores my choices from last time and starts trying to install shit I have neither the need for nor the desire to have, unless I keep telling it not to.
Bugger..
shitter.com owned by Worldwide Media Inc.. "mostwanteddomains.com". er.. *most* wanted??
..they suggest I make an offer..
I looked up "shittier.com" to see if that had gone (it has), to find whois.net suggested "crapline.com" (available for $400) as an alternative.
St Helena TLD is available, though: shitter.sh ..
@Simon Westerby 1
>" ... IT training rooms in prisons are not the same as IT training rooms in normal companies."
>Yes they are, and neither should allow access to ANY other network... (interwebs included!)
..in an ideal world, you're probably right; in practice, most places I've worked have their IT training rooms on the same network.
@AC 09.28
>When I was at EDS they never had any computers that the inmates used, granted I didn't spend too much
>time on that account as mentioned in my previous post. No CRB check and a whole list of passwords that
>could lock down courts or open prison doors.
My experience of EDS in prisons was uniformly bad: including them showing up at a private prison (not one they were contracted for) and informing the IT staff there that they now "owned" all their PCs; charging surreal costs for support which rarely materialized; and not being entirely honest to the prisons about what their remit was.
..Confict of Interest warning: EDS spent years telling Home Office prisons that they weren't allowed to buy the system I'd written, because they were going to be supplying one to do the same job. If EDS had been half-way ethical (e.g. in admitting that they didn't have a working system, and were utterly inept when it came to writing one), I'd be if not rich, then finanically secure. Life's a bitch, ain't it?
I've been inside more nicks than the hardest of prisoners.. door control will never be on the same physical network as the PCs; they used to have a proper mainframe-based system called LIDS which couldn't be on the same physical network as the rest of the prison IT (given that it ran on VT-100 sort of terminals). Then you'd have the 4x4 Access-based prisoner records system (the pet project of a PCO from HMP Preston that got used so widely it became a de facto standard)
But that all changed when EDS took control of the Home Office, fucked up the system they were supposed to be delivering, and from the sound of it managed to get prison training PCs on the same network as their IT systems - IMHO the people who should be disciplined in this are not the course trainers, but whoever set up a training room for inmates that actually hooks up to the same network as the rest of the prison IT... some numpty at EDS, no doubt, not realizing that IT training rooms in prisons are not the same as IT training rooms in normal companies.
>IIRC, his last comment as the Hitch-Hikers offices collapse around him after being destroyed by a
>neutron-ram is "What a depressingly stupid robot"
"What a depressingly stupid machine"
</pedant>
...mine's the one with the 6-cassette recording of the radio series in the pocket. And the full H2G2 scripts that I was given as a birthday present a couple of years ago, but still haven't read completely (yet).
..for all those malapropisms and weird interpolations of something that is obviously the wrong word.
People blaming predictive text (e.g. for my wife becoming "Heavier" in texts) can't get away with some things that show they just can't spell, but now completely the wrong word can happily be blamed on the soffits.
No, not the only one. I'm another who (after the initial setup hassle which turned out to be Pipex at fault, not Talktalk) has had very good service from Talktalk (far fewer problems than my neighbours have had with BT).
What I like most about them is that they don't treat their long-standing customers as cash cows to be milked: they are the only company I have been with for many years who have offered money off and bonuses for staying loyal - most depend on customer inertia and put prices up as a reward for loyalty.
The one irony of the Fail's campaign to remove porn by default is that any self-respecting porn filter would deny access to mail.co.uk as one of the biggest purveyors of borderline-dodgy pix on the net.
Much as I hate the idea of these kinds of controls (for various different reasons), the thought that they might cause traffic hitting Dacre's Den of Iniquity to vanish overnight almost makes them worthwhile. Almost.
That raps really rather well.. well, for the first three lines (even if you kind of have to say "marketing" with two syllables):
Hello, fanboy, repeat after me
There is no such thing as a "retina" screen
It is useless marketing-speak, it means nothing
..as for "beyond retina".. optical nerve?
..me, too: I was a huge AltaVista fan when it came out, and remember with some sadness it changing from the simple search engine to a "portal" that in the days of dial-up took minutes to load.. causing a jump to the wonderfully simple "just a search box" and the word "google"
Back then, though, you'd try out all the different engines as they'd be returning different results, and meta-search engines had some real utility; nowadays, they're pretty much all in google, it's more a question of ranking.
It's a bit more complicated than that - ISTM that the problem we're seeing now is exemplified by the tweeting twit, Sally Bercow: things that are mentioned as one might down the pub with your mates - possibly after a drink or two - with no thought about exactly what you're saying and to whom.. these things can be picked up and passed on by thousands (though I do feel more than a bit exasperated by hearing that Ms Bercow has tens of thousands of people hanging on her every tweet - they can't all be journalists waiting for The Speaker's Wife to make (yet) another faux pas).
You wouldn't "go down to the street corner and hand out notices saying your neighbour is a pedo with no proof", but in an unguarded moment, you might very easily make a joke about him that someone else might take as such and a rumour is born.. sites like twitter combined with smartphones which mean you can text your mate's "joke" that was so very funny down the pub after a few pints... I think the law does need to be updated to reflect this state, and let's face it there aren't enough jail places in the universe to lock up everyone who says something dodgy when under the influence.
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