Somebody is destined for somewhere hot, and definitely not Coventry
- Reference: 1627284608
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/26/who_me/
- Source link:
Our story, told to us by "Susan" takes us back a quarter of a century to her time working for a well-known seller of mortgages in the UK (a firm that, for reasons that will become clear, will remain anonymous.)
Susan was ostensibly employed as a Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft SQL Server developer, as – let's face it – an awful lot of us were back then. Client/Server was where it was at, and Cloud Native was yet to trouble administrators.
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Susan also had what she described as "a few years' experience as [a] Novell Netware / UNIX / Network engineer" under her belt, and so when the firm got in some new firewall software, it fell to her to set it up.
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Hard though it may be for the internet users of today to understand, many companies lacked such basic security measures in those earlier times and often simply connected their network to the web, believing that everyone online was lovely and lacked ill intent. Happy days.
"The firewall," she said, "came provided with several standard rules, one of which was obviously a pr0n filter, another was one to prevent CVs leaving via email."
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She also noted that the entire board was comprised by devout members of the same, occasionally strict, religion. "I'm not having a pop," she said, explaining that she too numbered among its ranks.
This fact became significant when the firewall was switched on. "The firewall logs," she said, "showed that every board member had been blocked from accessing sites that offered…" what we can only describe as people purporting to be of a rival religious order getting very friendly with each other.
Susan was a little more specific, but we'll draw a discreet veil over the grim details.
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Suffice to say, we're pretty sure there are rules in several instruction manuals for deity-botherers against this sort of thing.
We asked Susan what became of the executives caught viewing such unsavoury and possibly blasphemous material. A trip to the kerb with a cardboard box of belongings? A stern talking to by HR? Or perhaps IT simply turned a blind eye to the bosses' peccadillos?
"The latter for sure," Susan laughed, "but we plebs had a good laugh!"
The fountain of filth aside, the newly implemented and ill-thought-out Firewall also took a very literal approach to the CV blocker rule. This was, after all, nearly a quarter of a century ago and, while the consultants of today might charge a fortune for an algorithm that could identify what looked like a curriculum vitae, back then a belt-and-braces approach was taken. Got the text "CV" in your email? Then it ain't being sent.
Great for catching staff silly enough to apply for jobs with the corporate email. Not so good for confirmation postal addresses when a customer had a Coventry postcode.
"Not a good look for a mortgage firm!" exclaimed Susan.
Firewalls were a source of constant amusement when they began to proliferate, occasionally causing flushed user cheeks and the odd trip to the HR office. What unexpected consequences has your fiddling with the network had? Tell all with an email to [7]Who, Me? ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YP6Hw6NPwYYeeG8pI@OrpQAAAIk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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Re: The Usual Suspects
It couldn't fine the last one...?
When I put our companies first mail filter in back in the late 90's it would send the whole email when it found some keywords to another - in this case shared - mailbox for us to review. Not sure in hindsight how they get away with it because there wasn't such a thing as an acceptable use/monitoring agreement policy in place back then.
I had a rather stern female colleague from sales come badgering us aggressively because she wasn't getting emails through from a colleague (if filtered on all emails both internal and external).
I pulled up the shared mailbox they went into and the first one she hadn't received was pure filth. As was the first one from her that was blocked.
She was outraged that it was interfering with her love life (oh - they were married as well, just not to each other). I tried to explain that whilst I really didn't care one way or the other, maybe sending pornographic emails to one another via their corporate accounts wasn't a good idea but she was adamant she was going to report us to the IT Director... as far as I know she never was that daft, but maybe he just laughed her out of his office.
We still got the odd email flagged from them with the same explicit descriptions of what they planned to do to one another so some people just don't learn.
Re: The Usual Suspects
A quick way to put a stop to such "interesting" emails is to make it policy to print out all flagged emails with the bits that triggered the filtering highlighted so the recipient/sender can tell what phrases to avoid next time. Print out the email, highlight the trigger bits, & leave it in plain sight on the communal printer for everyone else to see. She won't send another one from work if she wants to keep her dignity much less her job.
Re: The Usual Suspects
Accidental use of "forward" rather than "reply" can also yield results. Particularly if you're careful who it gets forwarded too.
We all know the right destination. The person who, if loose lips really sank ships, would ensure there'd be nothing left afloat in the world.
Firewall Police
Probably round about the same time and despite me being in the same team has him, the guy who was "administering" (i.e. snooping at the logs of) our newly-installed firewall proclaimed in a loud voice that I was the person who spent most time on t'Internet at the website of Sun. At first, I was adamant - "I've never been to the website of The Sun newspaper as far as I kno... oh, Sun, as in Sun Microsystems? Well, I am the Solaris sysadmin, so..."
Oops!
Please see my recent post regarding DTK.com - it was supposed to be DTK.co.uk, the website of an engineering company that I regularly dealt with, but when I accidentally misspelt the URL, I was somewhat surprised to be deposited in the lap of Dangerous to Know, a BDSM supplies site. Management were, surprisingly, highly amused at my blunder.
(Oh! and yes, we were also cursed with a Coventy postcode).
An inquiry from a friend who wasn't a native English speaker about 'dogging' and me sending back a link to him to get on with his education had ended up with him chatting to HR about what links are appropriate to open in the office and what aren't.
Having access to the system logs ...
... at Stanford and Berkeley in the early.mid-90s, I had a handy list of seditious, lewd &etc addresses to filter on, which I happily sold on for the purpose of corporate firewall stocking. It wasn't just the new kids going to iffy sites, it was professors and grad students, too.
Daft thing is that officially the schools did NOT monitor which USENET groups were subscribed to, nor which posts a user "read". It was a privacy/freedom of speech thing. We even told the users that up front, it was part of the "using USENET" package. But for some reason, the PTB insisted that we had to log all WWW activity ... and we told them THAT, too.
So they knew that USENET use was unlogged, but the WWW was logged ... and (essentially) the same content was available on both. The vast majority chose the pointy-clicky-thingy anyway, at which point we knew society was fucked.
It's all been downhill from there.
Hot Stuff
We had similar issues - biggest problem was that we wrote industrial control systems for large foundries, but our emails addressing the issues on hot strip mills kept getting silently blocked.
Yeah, I once wrote a very explicit email explaining to my girlfriend what I planned to do to her at the weekend.
Unfortunately I sent it to my manager's PA by mistake.
I got fired.
Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons.
Once upon a time I wanted to know about looking after a fox, which was living in the woods at the back of our industrial estate and had just had a litter. She looked like a young one and seemed to be having some trouble feeding the kits.
So rather naively I typed
nursing vixen
into the Google search box.
The Usual Suspects
We had issues with all the usual postal addresses in Scunthorpe, Penistone, Chorlton cum Hardy and so on. Oddly, it didn't find Clitheroe to be a problem.