Re: I person miltary helicopter you say?
Perhaps more prosaic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAANHP6R0IE
(Hiller XROE Rotorcycle)
1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
If a six year old can buy a monster truck with dad's PayPal creds, what makes you so sure none of your household can figure out how to install a Trojan Browser?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/21/6yo_buys_19k_monster_truck_off_ebay/
(Single-person households may be compromised by attacks injected in/by Tinder or whatever floats your boat :-)
Gets you into Catch 22. If you use a browser that does not implement all the misfeatures of Chrome, you will not get the "full experience" of a growing number of websites. OTOH, a website that does not use those misfeatures will be penalized in search results.
Resistance is Futile! Have a nice day.
A friend was flown to a customer site to troubleshoot a problem (circa 1974, no "just telnet in" option). He was chosen because he had written the software, running on a PDP-11, that logged various sensors once an hour. The 2300 report came in fine, but the midnight one did not, every night.
So he sat up with the system, ready to jump into the debugger to figure out what the obvious software problem was, because tests with a clone and messing with the RTC had not uncovered the issue. Right about 2345, cleaner comes in, plugs in the vacuum, and the system hangs, _before_ the vacuum is turned on. But it was plugged into the same duplex outlet as the PDP-11.
If I mention that the customer was in Las Vegas, would it surprise fewer readers that the glitch was due to static electricity?
ISTR some years back when a prison was contracting out inmates as call-center workers. Some contracts involved, e.g. processing medical or unemployment claims. The sort of task that would provide access to private info that could be useful for ID theft. But of course, prison inmates would never be tempted to a life of crime, right?
In early 2000, an OS update, caused by a hardware update (y'all know the drill) finally killed off support for IBM 1401 emulation on a System/360 descendant. The emulator was introduced in the mid 1960s to ease software migration, and the last IBM 1401 rolled off the assembly line in 1974 (IIRC). So, 25 years of IE is not exactly a match for 35 years of 1401 emulation, but not bad for these days when "What kind of loser expects software over 3 years old to work?"
OK, I've been retired for a while, but since when is it up to user code to handle the plumbing of TCP/IP?
Does Chrome have its own stack? Or does (user mode) HTTP/2 reach down into TCP to change the specs?
(Commenting mainly because it was once not uncommon to see a packet with both SYN and FIN set,
and some stacks didn't crash.)
In addition to an Apple ][, a cassette player, and a TV, you originally needed to buy and install an RF modulator.
At the time, standards for RFI were tighter than now, and tighter for "home use" than commercial. The legally distinguishing feature (in the U.S. anyway) was whether it depended on a TV for video. Apple got around this by not providing an RF modulator. The buyer had to go down the counter in the computer store and buy a modulator, which by some wild coincidence matched a header on the Apple ][ motherboard. You could have known? Why would anybody do that to our _clearly_ commercial (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) computer? Well, it was not _Apple_ that caused the problem, just those pesky users.
(This is all reminiscent of the early "electronic experimenter devices" with big warning labels on the line of "WARNING: Do NOT connect the blue wire to point A, lest this device become a radio receiver and incur a patent license fee")
A short while later TI managed to get a judge (in Texas, what a surprise) to mandate a loosening of RFI standards, on the basis that then current standards were "impossible to meet", despite there being systems like the Atari 800 on the market at the time. And Apple could actually throw in the modulator.
I think I have already mentioned the use (during acceptance tests) of "Spread Spectrum Clock" on modern PCs to similarly skirt the letter of the law today.
You can add Steve Mayer, Ron Milner, Joe deCuir, and probably others. Success has many fathers..."
Note that this article follows the traditional path of ignoring Ron Wayne, in re Apple.
In the last 15 or so years I have noticed that Silicon Valley has swung quite sharply from recognizing great engineers/designer and toward celebrating "great corporations" (and their often rapacious heads).
(Pedantry alert: At the time, it was called the VCS. After Warner and their product marketing folks got on board, it became the 2600)
A friend worked as a student for the "consultant" office at his campus computer center. He said the most effective troubleshooting session went something like:
User: "The computer is broken"
Him: "What makes you say that?"
User: "This program worked yesterday and now it doesn't"
Him: "What changed?"
User: "Nothing"
Him: "Why did you run it again?"
So, you get a message like
“immediate assistance to finalize an urgent business deal."
there are two very obvious ways this could happen:
1) it is an inept attempt at phishing
2) The Executive Search firm your board hired has managed to place an idiot/crook as CEO.
Meanwhile, those who suggest that an employee would know what the CEO sounds like?
You must not be familiar with the sort of place where the only time you hear from "El Jefe" is when you personally are in deep ____ or the lot of you are about to be declared redundant to usher in a Golden Age for the company.
Although, I will say that I once got an email (consisting entirely of a Word .doc) "from our CEO", in the same batch of email as one "from Steve Case", pushing Penis Pills. IT admin wondered why I was hesitant to open the CEO's message...
They are apparently not all that rare. My PCB-based one came from a yard-sale, where a friend ran across it in a box of "Free items". He remembered that I had been asking for one to serve as a "second witness" while reviving my wire-wrap one and grabbed it for me.
My Jolt, OTOH, was not so lucky. Stored in a shed, it succumbed to some chickens that had flown the coop and decided that shed was a great new clubhouse, and the Jolt an acceptable "litter-box" or whatever euphemism chickens use.
Good advice. Wish I had taken it one time I was leaving late (like, midnight) having just finished a task on deadline. As I heard the building door click shut behind me and reached into my pocket for my car-keys, I realized I had left them in a lab-coat, in the lab, with my access card...
This was before mobile phones, so I had to walk a mile or so to a service station with a pay-phone to wake a friend to come get me. Next morning, bus to work, explain to security, get boss to vouch for me...
At one (formerly) major corp, a minion thought he'd be energy conscious and exhibit that fact by turning off a whole room of semiconductor testers during the night shift. Despite costing a bundle to re-run tests of that batch (and figure out if any damage to the chips had resulted from the abrupt shutdown), apparently his zeal was noted. His "punishment" was to (eventually, but not that much later) be named V.P. of R&D.
Found a copy of Les Earnest's tale about problems with telling the truth about a childhood incident:
http://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/security_clearance.html
Or an expanded version which includes a link to what happens when you decline to self-identify as one of the 5 official "races".:
http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/crypto.htm
RFC2142 says (among other things):
---
... mailbox name(es) must be supported, resulting in delivery to a recipient appropriate for the referenced service or role.
---
But just because email is "delivered to a recipient..." does not mean that any particular action will be taken by that recipient. I did not read the whole RFC in detail, but I have to wonder if the recipient can be a bot that just replies:
"Sorry to hear about your problem. If you want anything to actually be done, you will need to send your message via paper mail (certified, and maybe return receipt requested) to the following post-office box which we are assured is occasionally checked by somebody who claims to work for a legal firm. Have a nice day"
Hmmm, it looks like bots are accounted for:
------
Implementations of these well known names need to take account of the expectations of the senders who will use them. Sending back an automatic mail acknowledgement is usually helpful (though we suggest caution against the possibility of "duelling mail robots" and the resulting mail loops).
-----
Although:
1) I would assume that, these days, the "expectations of senders" with any experience of the current internet is that pretty much nothing will be done. Or that the whole process will resemble that of phone-response systems: "Your call is important to us. Please wait for someone to give a damn. Meanwhile, enjoy our music-on-hold rendition of Warner's Ring Cycle, as performed by the Kazoo section of the student orchestra of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople."
2) They seem to assume that duelling robots are the main issue (as opposed to "don't care, won't act", the new normal)
Beware the Leopard!
I assume they read this as a bit short of MUST.
That was apparently the way Adobe treated it when I tried to report porn-spam in less than an hour after giving them a (nonce) email address to register some software. The _only_ documented way to contact them was via registered (paper) mail to a lawyer in Los Angeles (well, using a L.A. post-box )
Linkedin is not quite that bad, but yeah, pretty much totally useless other than getting solicited by dodgy recruiters. Maybe twice I have been contacted by a former co-worker who had no other way to find me.
And then there was the resourceful chap who found me on LinkedIn based on my name in the documentation for some software that his company had bought several years before. I was a sub-sub-sub contractor on that, but hey, it was nice to know someone was actually using it, and the docs.
Why would they not continue their belief? The allies (or that subset of them who had been read in) went to a great deal of effort to nourish that belief, well past the trials, as they were keen to read the mail of many "friends" who used the Enigma well past the end of the war. See Also Crypto AG
This is not recent. Just off the top of my head, RCA managed to get the FCC to move the FM broadcast band, _after_ it was allocated and infrastructure was built, driving the inventor to suicide. Same lovely folks changed the Color TV standard ex-post-facto. Now, in that case, their proposed standard was at least plausibly better, but the main effect (intent?) was to cripple CBS (a competitor to RCA's NBC).
As for "just say no" to such crap, note that unless your sites uses whatever The Big G is pushing, you can expect to be shuffled _way_ down in search results.
But a bit less daft might be to translate things like the Foxfire books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire_(magazine)#Books
to something like Ikea directions, print them on similarly robust media, and "plant" them in a number of places (physical LOCKSS archives).
Not that it will help when the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything requires a .DLL (or .so) that somehow was missed.
_maybe_ this time people will have become less of a laughing stock in the universe, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Of course, it would require that the Disney lawyers haven't managed to extend copyright to "life of the solar system plus 70 years".
If you are using an uppercase-only tty, and an appropriate getty, and gettytab (or wherever the option is hidden these days, on your system) it just might.
Or, you could follow Curious Marc's path:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE
(discussion of UC/lc starts at about 7:00)
Yeah, that worked out so well for Epstein, protecting himself from _his_ former associates/clients.
Note to auto-downvote folks, I am _NOT_ Saying that Trump was an Epstein client, Barr and Epstein are different people in (somewhat) different circumstances, but there are only a couple ways blackmail (for profit or protection) turns out,m especially when you are blackmailing a person more powerful (or ruthless) than yourself.
I'm just here to point out the main occupational hazard of blackmail (either for profit or protection). Sometimes the person you are blackmailing decides to take an alternative form of crisis resolution.
I've just had a brilliant product idea, which I offer to the world for development because I can't be arsed.
We need a bluetooth dartboard (maybe one of those plastic ones with the field of holes), or suitable machine vision of an actual dartboard. The face to be done in the typical colour-picker wheel motif, so that after a few pints the designers can pick the colours for pending products quickly, then get back to "real work" (a few more pints).
Meanwhile, my first memory of computer colours is two shades of grey for the frame, IBM Blue for the panels. Mid 1960s, when less stodgy computer users could also get Yellow, Green, and "Coral".
One employer neatly "de-fanged" a friend and I, but deputizing us as "Junior admins", with knowledge of the passwords. This served two purposes:
1) Spared them some calls from users when the real admins were not at work
2) Removed one (big) incentive to "experiment", as "It doesn't count if you have root already.
The only time I got a "stern warning" was when I mass-emailed an ASCII Art Xmas from "Santa" one December, then deleted that email account. The Powers claimed that my stunt had gotten them a bunch of complaints from folks who replied and got "Santa: Now Such User". How DARE I?
Clearly, they put Spock in charge, while he was time-travel slumming in whatever that movie was.
Meanwhile, those who are fans of floating point and/or absurdity might want to watch
this talk, (about 10 minutes) about the Secret Life of Not-A-Number:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jddE24Ep54&list=PLofFli6PGTsB0QpGpJdVxFZDoLhXwQCx4&index=20&t=0s
Mine doesn't smell either, but it did succumb to what was apparently common with the model ("Dual USB iBook" in my case). If you have that one, which I agree is lovely, you might want to buy some tea-lights, or some such, for when the video goes into witness protection. At present, mine works fine over VNC, but neither the LCD nor the VGA output is intelligible. Lots of opinion on the interwebs, ranging from the aforementioned tea-lights to more vigorous applications of heat. I've not gotten the nerve to try it yet.
But it is allegedly possible.
Anything could happen, but I suspect a hockey game in Hades before the remedy for that bad publicity includes dealing with the basis of a grievance.
Not specific to this case, of which we all have too little data, but the purpose of HR is right there in the name: To treat humans as resources, i.e. commodities, no more important than floor wax or paper clips.
IIRC, the Red Scare was indirectly responsible for the creation of the much loved (in some quarters) LGP-30.
WARNING: From memory, not re-researched for this comment ---
Stan Frankel lost his security clearance (after working on the Manhattan Project) because his grandfather had some connection to the Communist Party. As a result, he ended up teaching, but he had caught "The computing disease", and become dependent on computing, so he designed a _very_ simple computer for Cal Tech, which was then licensed and produced, and sold well.
Without politically motivated harassment of tech types, where would (useful) new products come from?
"Vast numbers of Users"... I won't disagree with you that _some_ crap is actually sought out and bought by clueless users, but in my (work) experience of crap software (and hardware), it is very often down to the _buyer_ not being the _user_. For an appropriately lavish junket, er, informational seminar, it appears that a large number of mangers are quite happy to saddle their "grunts" with appalling tools.
A grunt who objects is faced with a simple choice: Make the best of a horrible situation and settle for griping anonymously on the web, or "find another job" (with no 100% effective way to know if the new job is actually any better on the provided tools).