Posts by Evil Auditor 2628 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009
In a former life, working for a large financial institution, we found some unsecured SMTP servers on the intranet. Their purpose was to send notifications of some sort.
When discovering such an issue there are different possible ways to get it rectified. Being an auditor, an obivious way would be to raise it in a report. If found outside of a regular audit, a memo would work, too. Or even a phone call. But we, very cleverly, decided that best would be to send and e-mail from the CEO to the person responsible for maintaining those servers. Luckily, no typos. And only now I'm getting aware of the risk involved... it was not exactly the type of CEO to fsck with.
Symon, excellent teamwork! That reminds me of a job interview I once had. The line manager gave me a "problem" to solve: you have two sandglasses, one with five and the other with three minutes - how do you measure four minutes? (It was a wee bit more complicated than this, something with three hourglasses.)
I thought for a few seconds and gave my answer.
The manager was not amused. He proudly mentioned that this is a test they use at Google and it is to see how an applicant communicates in problem solving.
Needless to say, I wasn't interested in getting this job and, presumably, neither was he very eager to hire me. Anyway, if someone wants to see my problem solving communication skills they better give me a problem that I cannot easily and infallibly solve on my own.
As a side note: my answer wasn't what was in his paper and grudgingly (I'd like to believe) he had to admit that it was also correct.
With or without GDPR - I can't really follow the argument with teleworkers; I don't buy this. If it's about teleworkes, give them some remote desktop solution! Easier to maintain, easier to keep (more) secure.
This rather seems to be an excuse. For what I don't know. Even after 15 years I wouldn't underestimate the resistance to change or to adapt to Linux. Especially not after having been in between the fronts of a long-lasting Win vs. Mac war. And neither would I exclude some other motivation for the change...
CORRECTION: Elon built a vacuum cleaner* from salvaging a useless miniature submarine that no one neither wanted nor needed. And he called Matt Damon a pedo.
*For future reference, noun: the musk (plural: musks); verb: to musk (muskt, muskt); use: "have you muskt the Martian dust?"
I agree, also to me it seems counterintuitive using wave forms instead of score, e.g. midi. Especially, as I believe that it would be easier to detect/learn the structures of a piece of music from musical notations rather than from wave forms. (Having played and failed with artificial neural networks doing midi many moons ago, I might be a bit biased though.)
On second thought, it is maybe not a bad idea. Musical notations are, after all, only a limited language to describe music. They are not music. Going back to the actual music, which is much closer represented by wave forms than notations, might be an interesting approach.
Haven't listened to the samples yet. I'm curious how they sound, being first samples. And comparing to how far "AI midi" got (or didn't go) in all the years it's been around...
@jake
Nobody's even given me a passing glance, so far as I know.
With USA immigration officers I've only had pleasant, funny experiences, every single time.
I assume, you, living around Napa County, are a citizen of the USA. I'm not but used to "profit" from the visa waiver programme. But now would have to apply for a visa and if you'd check what information they ask for, you might understand why I prefer to stay away. For example, IIRC, they ask information about former spouses which I don't even know.
Proud, here at least. Born, bred and absolutely insane.
That's what I like about Cal! Unfortunately, since having visas of some "evil" countries in the east in my passport, it's out of question to go back there any time soon*.
* Yes, I could apply for a USA visa. And no, I certainly won't go through that.
Programmer, QA, Audit...? It's not unheard of that the specifications that the techies get do not entirely reflect what the business needs or wants - unit tests might not pick that up. Someone on the business side, however, must have tested the bloody thing and signed off UAT results.
Although, having worked at the UK headquarter of one of the major banks at that time (later known as G-SIBs) I'm not surprised by Bob's experience - both the code and the manager's resonse.
Taking life-or-death decisions in split seconds is not easy*, not at all. It is something, however, I expect professional police forces to do with high accuracy. Just like I expect them to evaluate the reliability of their sources.
*In an earlier life I'd been trained to do exactly that. Luckily, I never had to apply - wasn't very good at it.
Is there also a firmware update which prevents its battery from catching fire? After a crash, that is. Anyhow, the guy who crashed and burnt last week in his Tesla is not going to complain but his family probably will.
On an even more serious note: for petrol tanks there is rather strict regulation of what they have to endure without leaking. How is that for battery packs? A mobile phone battery fire is unpleasant, to say the least. But sitting on a whole bunch of such beasts, I'd rather they don't start burning.
Just like Dabbs I thought that we, we all, learnt how to use toilet facilities already as small children. Now working in an office without any instructions in the toilet it amazes me that quite a few people don't know. "Flush the toilet", "clean your crap tracks", "do not pee on floor", "put paper towels in the bin and do not throw them on the floor" - just to name a few obviously needed instructions.
The false alarm didn't mess me around. Rather, I messed my colleagues around.
My office was facing south and had no aircon. During a hot summer period, one evening being the last one in the office calling it a day, I left the window wide open. The idea was, of course, that the during the night the office would cool down a bit.
Arriving next morning I stumbled into a bit of a turmoi - fire brigades just leaving, colleagues standing around chatting. It turned out that early morning, before anyone was in the office, there were some roadworks going on with pouring tarmac right underneath my office window. And the fumes from the tarmac entering my office triggered the fire alarm. Oh well, the company had to pay the equivalent of around 5'000 quid for a false alarm.
Having had worked in help desk myself I have great sympathy for helldesk staff. It comes to a limit though when a guy half across the globe remote controls my computer for five hours straight without solving the problem. Only after these five hours and resetting all my custom settings in MS Office/Outlook he could be convinced to relay to someone who could solve it.
Maybe it was karma biting back... Then again, a colleague of mine got it worse: one day and a half -a total of twelve hours- of not being able to work because one of those helldesk drones tried to solve an issue.
there is no way Audi and BMW drivers are highly evolved
That is what we - the ones neither driving Audis nor BMWs - would like to believe to bolster our sense of superiority. Be reminded though, that intelligence is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. And neither is moronism necessarily a disadvantage for successful procreation. Very unfortunately.
Beware internal messages. After all, during an audit we had found unprotected e-mail servers. And the next thing I know is that someone (no, it wasn't me, honestly... anyway it's a long time since and I can't remember any of this) sent e-mails apparently from the CEO to some people making them aware of their wide-open SMTP servers hanging out in the network.
yoganmahew, I fully agree.
first-born has been kidnapped by HR
I used to work in a place where this probably could have happened. This being in the mid naughties, among other things they also tried to dump sub-prime securities products on to employees after the clients started to be suspicious and refused buying that crap. So, the company was sitting on a steaming pile of dung and wanted to sell it to its staff. Abducting close ones, blackmailing into submission - wouldn't have suprised me.
The proper backup suction that I came across some decade ago. Setting up a backup procedure just about as manually as Ben did. For checking if the procedure worked as expected they didn't want to wait until the tape was fully written. Instead to the tape they directed the data stream to /dev/null - the backup ran flawlessly, answered with a success message and was ready to be deployed.
Problem was, no one changed the device to write to the tape. Until their auditor asked if they ever did backup restore tests.
Re Nerve Agent
Well, AC, call me too dumb. Then again, I don't have an MSc in chemistry either. So far, all I know -from the media- is that it was neither VX nor sarin. That leaves a few substances left which I remember from CW training, both persistent and non-persistent ones. But I've got no bloody clue if any of those had links to something north-easterly. From the little I've heard I'd guess something from the V series. But please, dear AC, enlighten us, the dumb.
Unless you only accuse those you are bias against?
I thought that's the first and general rule of this game, isn't it?
Anyway, for all I know it could have been Elbonians made it look like Russians made it look like Norks made the malware.
He lost his job for a single mistake in two years, I am still a bit angry about that
Angry that he made this single mistake or angry that he lost his job?
Depending on the type of business 45 minutes downtime may or may not be reason for dismissal. Apparently, more than 5 hours of downtime for approx. 90% of the staff of about 20k (a bank) was no reason for dismissal. Than again, it wasn't due to an operating error but a management decision to implement a half-baked release.
@Not Spartacus
Am I allowed to sleep instead?
I had tried this many times during the monthly, dreadful "team meetings". For two years I'd been waiting for a complain about my regular snoozing activity. I had elaborated an eloquent answer about meeting efficiency, target audience, information relevancy. But no, nothing. Not one comment. Finally I gave up and started to draw and design houses. And soon left the company.
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