Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway It's Monday morning and we've all been buried under the avalanche of emails we abandoned at pub o'clock last week. Take solace in the latest instalment of Who, Me?, where Reg readers confess their past blunders. And email is the name of the game this week. Reader "Steve" tells us about the time he was a sysadmin at a small …
My colleague tells a tale of the time he was working for a company that prepared and sent mailshots for external clients, to a mix of commercial and private entities in a database. As part of the data cleansing for people, one of the tasks was to perform a find and replace for the word 'The' at the start of names of people and businesses, and putting it at the end, so The Reverend Green would become 'Reverend Green, The' and so on. They got a new member of staff in, and gave him this task.
Unfortunately, said new MoS misunderstood his instructions, and instead of finding and moving 'The ' from the start of company and person names, he just removed the three characters 'the' from all names in the database, and sent them off to print, thinking nothing of it.
The first they knew of it was when one of their clients rang up, very angry, as they had just had a call themselves from a very upset customer demanding to know why they'd sent a letter to their animal therapy company addressed to 'Horse Rapist'.....
(Note: This may be apocryphal, as it is a third hand tale. But it's still damn funny.)
... AOL learning to filter "naughty words" and promptly causing Scunthorp to disappear. And several dozen other similar things that have happened over the years. It's the natural result of a million monkeys with a million keybr0ads being set loose on an unsuspecting Internet with little to no training. Or concept, for that matter.
As Paul 25 mentions:
Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.
His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn't count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here's what does matter: Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he's certainly someone to watch in Beijing.
“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
- One News Now, outlet of American Family Association
The old "Scunthorpe" problem , or in France the Marseille problem and in the US the Massachusetts problem!
I once had to write a profanity filter for a company and spent ages persuading them NOT to profanity check addresses otherwise anyone who lived on Dick Turpin Lane or wanted to find the Two Cocks pub would disapointed!
I know of one current blog where the triad "tit" anywhere within a comment will make the comment queue for moderation. "Constitution", "constituent", "titular", "title", all earn a timeout.
Scunthorp would probably trigger the same reaction.
AI, machine intelligence, so smart.
An online grocery customer complained at not receiving their order confirmation email; investigations showed that the receiving school email system was rejecting the mail for "profanity". Much scratching of heads finally twigged that the customer had ordered "two chicken breasts".
Had similar very recently - system automatically puts a keyword (start of line, in upper case and followed by dash) in comments and other systems pick it out as trigger - works ok for such a cludged process. Well untill the newly developed system took over and ignores the keyword context/case etc. so suddenly we have the trigger going off for keyword being in a name - I'll am sure you can guess what sort of development teams we have to use now
Something similar with less disastrous consequences happened with our mailing list: we wanted to remove all 'Dr' at the start of people's names for a conference. So the person deleted all instances of 'Dr' in the name field, not even case sensitive. Well, that's great unless your name is Andrew, or in one case the newly named 'Alessano'. Nobody noticed until people pointed it out on their name badges.
... doing an emergency powerectomy on servers. Bulk email boo-boos were almost common for a while, and of course we all know about recursive file deletion when in the wrong directory ... One Friday afternoon I actually watched a so-called Sr. Sysadmin unleash a network aware trojan on a 100,000+ seat network while demonstrating what NOT to do to his underlings. Unplugging servers didn't help with that one, but he tried. Oh, how he tried. I was there for an unrelated reason (consultant, drawing up an upgrade for the datacenter), and was nominated to clean up the problem without having to bid on it. Took all weekend, and I had to call in a couple friends to help, but the company gratefully paid my "emergency services" bill on Monday morning. Quite lucrative, that kind of work.
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A power-ectomy is one option, but I've always tried to go for the network cable first. It might have made stopping the email a bit more tricky, but it avoids the risks of data-corruption and head crashes that just yanking the power might cause.
Some of us grew up with properly bolted down network cables. The power cord was by far the fastest, and thus the only, option in these cases. Data corruption was bad, so we took steps to guard against it. Disk crashes were always hardware failure, and thus the fault of the vendor.
"we all know about recursive file deletion when in the wrong directory"
I did that last weekend. I had created a temporary directory in my home directory on my server, filled it with files, then SCPed the lot to my home computer. Since it was only temporary, I then deleted it. Only some network glitch, or perhaps a keyboard bounce, or just plain fat fingers meant I was doing it in the home directory instead, one level up from where I thought I was. Though I noticed a couple of seconds later, and desperately tried to abort the delete, it was too late, everything in my home directory was gone. I still had mc open on that directory in another tmux session, which confirm my suspicion that there was nothing important there anyway. Important stuff on that server actually gets backed up in several places.
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The aptly named "Fixation Rock" is coming up on the right:
https://youtu.be/TthMG8qeKOo?t=855
Folks misjudge the corner and stare their way into the rock, from either direction. I knew one guy who hit it once from each side; sadly he didn't survive it the second time. Helpful hint: Look in the direction you want the vehicle to go, muscle memory usually takes over. Works with horses, too.
Now you know why skid-marks on freeways often point unerringly at immovable objects. (Note: What looks like a recent skid mark in that video is actually the shadow of overhead wires.)
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Beaver College changed its name to Arcadia University in part because of overeager web filters, with smutty jokes providing the rest of the motivation.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/23/web_filters_force_beaver_college/
I note that Wikipedia makes no mention of this reason for the name change - are there any wiki editors reading this? The story was reported in dead tree news outlets and the BBC at the time if you want to cite a source other than The Reg.
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The city of Leicester is pronounced exactly the same as Lester Haines' first name. The city of Worcester is pronounced pretty much the same as Bertie Wooster's last name (except this is slightly more confusing: the stress is on the last syllable, and the "oo" is a bit more of an indeterminate vowel).
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