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Extra Effort
I was due for an appointment with the gynecologist
when early in the morning I received a call from his office: I had been
rescheduled for early that morning at 9:30AM.
I had just packed everyone off to work and school and it was around 8:45.
The trip to his office usually took about 35 minutes so I didn't have any
time to spare.
As most women do, I'm sure, I like to take a little extra effort over
hygiene when making such visits, but this time I wasn't going to be able to
make the full effort. So I rushed upstairs, threw off my dressing gown, wet
the washcloth and gave myself a wash in "that area" in front of the sink,
taking extra care to make sure that I was presentable.
I threw the washcloth in the clothes basket, donned some clothes, hopped in
the car and raced to my appointment.
I was in the waiting room only a few minutes when he called me in. Knowing
the routine, as I am sure you all do, I hopped up on the table, looked over
at the other side of the room and pretended I was in Hawaii or some other
place a million miles away from here.
I was a little surprised when he said: "My...we have taken a little extra
effort this morning, haven't we?", but I didn't respond.
The appointment over, I heaved a sigh of relief and went home.
The rest of the day went normal, some shopping, cleaning and the evening
etc. At 8:30 that evening my 14 year-old daughter was fixing to go to a
school dance, when she called down from the bathroom, "Mom, where's my
washcloth?"
I called back for her to get another from the cabinet.
She called back, "No I need the one that was here by the sink. It had all my
glitter and sparkles in it."
Irish Bank Robbery
Excerpted from an article about a bank robbery
which appeared in the Dublin Times (metropolitan edition, page 2A) on 2
March 1999:
Once inside the bank shortly after midnight, their efforts at disabling the
internal security system got underway immediately. The robbers, who expected
to find one or two large safes filled with cash and valuables, were
surprised to see hundreds of smaller safes scattered throughout the bank.
The robbers cracked the first safe's combination, and inside they found only
a bowl of vanilla pudding. As recorded on the bank's audio-tape system, one
said, "At least we'll get a bit to eat,"
The robbers opened up a second safe, and it also contained nothing but
vanilla pudding. The process continued until all the safes were opened.
They found not one pound sterling, a diamond, or an ounce of gold. Instead,
all the safes contained covered bowls of pudding.
Disappointed, the robbers made a quiet exit, each leaving with nothing more
than a queasy, uncomfortably full stomach.
The newspaper headline read:
IRELAND'S LARGEST SPERM BANK ROBBED EARLY THIS MORNING.
Netscape Technical Support Folly
Tech: Internet Technical Support this is so-and-so
speaking. May I have your username please?
Female Customer: Yes I want to speak to the person in charge immediately!
Tech: Speaking. What can I do for you?
Female Customer: I want to complain about the pornographic bookmarks your
company put in my web browser!
Tech: We didn't put any pornographic bookmarks in your web browser.
Female Customer: Oh yes you did! I'm looking at them right now!
(Tech remembers the Netscape history list and grins to himself)
Tech: Where exactly are these "bookmarks" located?
Female Customer: In Netscape!
Tech: And where exactly in Netscape would that be?
Female: In that little list that comes down when you click the little down
arrow!
Tech: The one right above the Net Search button?
Female Customer: Yes that one!
Tech: Miss, that's the Netscape history list. Netscape keeps the past ten
links you typed in that box. The only way to put an address in that box is
for someone to physically sit at your computer and type in a web address.
Female Customer: Well I certainly didn't type in those X rated web
addresses!
Tech: Well somebody did. Who else has access to your computer, and uses the
Internet?
Female Customer: Just me and my husband!
(Several seconds of silence pass ... Hey! I wasn't going to say it!)
Female Customer: ........ oh............. OOOH! ... Thank you.
(She quickly hung up)
Real Life Dilbert-Type Managers Memos
"My boss spent the entire weekend retyping a
25-page proposal that only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave
her was damaged and she couldn’t edit it. The disk I gave her was
write-protected." (CIO of Dell Computers)
Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)
My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told
my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on
the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to
Friday. He said, "That would be better for me." (Shipping executive, FTD
Florists)
"We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to
discuss it with the employees." (Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines
Division)
We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to
inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the memo mentioned
above." (Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)
One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a
project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He
said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask
for it!" (New business manager, Hallmark Greeting Cards.)
As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our
company’s training programs and materials. In the body of the memo in one of
the sentences I mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the
training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive
committee, I was called into the HR director's office, and told that the
executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I
asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for perverts (pedophiles?)
working in her company. Finally, he showed me her copy of the memo, with her
demand that I be fired and the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR
manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his
dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me
not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later, a memo to the entire
staff came out directing us that no words which could not be found in the
local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I
resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo
by pasting words together from the Sunday paper. (Taco Bell Corporation)
Classic Hack
Here is a story about one of the classic computer
hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola
discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox
CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was
possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of
the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection
does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its
`privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to
bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the
system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn
door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official
`level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be fixed
yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that
could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved
procedure: they simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached
all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the
severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary
operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official
patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to
no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to
Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how
thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly
devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of
programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck
were designed to run as `ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they
would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the
necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order
to keep the system operator (in effect, the super user) from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development
system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These
included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job.
* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt
to walk across the floor. * The card-punch output device would occasionally
start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in the
punch. * The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin
Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The Xerox card reader had two output
stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack
into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed
into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code
to the card-reader driver... after reading a card; it would flip over to the
opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half
when they were read, leaving the operator to re collate them manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They
found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again
surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took
place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and
would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few
milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them
simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter --- only to find that the
bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out that
these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the kernel file, in
UNIX terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs that were to be
started at boot time.
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the system
staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the
monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management about
the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It is not
recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against either of
them.
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