Does a click-through barrier to email help security?
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My company uses GMail. Every 20 minutes you are logged out, and must click a button and log back in. This takes about a minute, it is not instantaneous. This causes two problems
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You cannot use a client, such as Thunderbird, to access your email. You must use the GMail web interface.
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It is annoying to be in the middle of writing an email to have to log back in, or to have to log back in just to check to see if there has been a response to your email discussion.
The company believes that this will help prevent malware. I think the company would not do this unless there was a reason for it, as it is a large, well-established company.
Are there any actual benefits to this? Do the benefits outweigh the frequent disruption to the workflow?
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I think the company would not do this unless there was a reason for it, as it is a large, well-established company.
The reason is probably bloody stupid but at some point it has become Tradition and thus nobody really dares to question it anymore.
It falls in the same league as the "Must change passwords every x days!" policies where nobody ever sat down and actually measured if that was a good idea (until they did. And even then there are people who don't believe it or point to Tradition).
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
The company believes that this will help prevent malware
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Are there any actual benefits to this?
I can't see how that behaviour could possibly help. Some of my users use OWA and most of them use desktop Outlook, both are just as prone to clicking things they shouldn't.
We use defence in depth. Email is filtered, an IDS/SIEM looks for strange things afoot in the network in real-time, we have a neat behavioural virus/malware scanner, and I do regular user training.
We still got clobbered by a 0day cryptovirus sent in via email that was pretending to be an invoice, but that was just a minor nuisance in that we simply restored from backups.
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I think the company would not do this unless there was a reason for it, as it is a large, well-established company.
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It is annoying to be in the middle of writing an email to have to log back in, or to have to log back in just to check to see if there has been a response to your email discussion.
Wait... so, you're saying it's 20 minutes, period? Like, not 20 minutes of inactivity but whether you're actively using it or not, once 20 minutes pass, you have to log back in? I've never heard of anything like that, except that one time we had a bug that ignored whether someone was idle on a certain browser of ill-repute. Anywhere else, including all my bank accounts, have the much more reasonable policy of logging you out after a period of inactivity.
The company believes that this will help prevent malware.
No, your company's IT department is full of morons. Either they actually think that, or they don't know how to detect one's idleness and to save face they tell any complainers of this bug that it's intended because they won't admit they aren't the caliber folks people think they are. Either way, they're probably wearing their pants on their head in that office.
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@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Some of my users use OWA and most of them use desktop Outlook
For some reason, OWA logs me out every time I'm not looking at it. I decided to put my work email credentials into the Windows 10 Mail app and it hasn't logged me out ever.
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@ben_lubar said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Some of my users use OWA and most of them use desktop Outlook
For some reason, OWA logs me out every time I'm not looking at it. I decided to put my work email credentials into the Windows 10 Mail app and it hasn't logged me out ever.
Are you using IE/Edge? If you aren't then in all the versions of OWA I've admin'd you are restricted to the 'light' version of OWA. The light version has quite a few features missing and one of them is the 'private computer' login option that bumps the session expiry value right up.
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@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@ben_lubar said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Some of my users use OWA and most of them use desktop Outlook
For some reason, OWA logs me out every time I'm not looking at it. I decided to put my work email credentials into the Windows 10 Mail app and it hasn't logged me out ever.
Are you using IE/Edge? If you aren't then in all the versions of OWA I've admin'd you are restricted to the 'light' version of OWA. The light version has quite a few features missing and one of them is the 'private computer' login option that bumps the session expiry value right up.
You get the non-light version on Firefox, too.
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@boomzilla said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
You get the non-light version on Firefox, too.
It depends on the Exchange version - at some point they started offering it to other browsers. (The info I found said 2010 but either that’s wrong or my company sat on 2007 for longer than I’d consider safe.)
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@Unperverted-Vixen true.
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@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Are you using IE/Edge? If you aren't then in all the versions of OWA I've admin'd you are restricted to the 'light' version of OWA.
I'm using a browser with the same rendering engine as Visual Studio Code.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@boomzilla said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
You get the non-light version on Firefox, too.
It depends on the Exchange version - at some point they started offering it to other browsers. (The info I found said 2010 but either that’s wrong or my company sat on 2007 for longer than I’d consider safe.)
That's good to know, that was an annoying restriction. I'm waiting for budget to move off Exchange 2007. Ours definitely does not allow full with Firefox, I've just tried it.
@ben_lubar said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I'm using a browser with the same rendering engine as Visual Studio Code.
Chromium apparently. While getting the answer to that I noticed Spotify is Electron based, that's interesting.
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@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Spotify is Electron based
Somewhat pedantic, but Spotify is not built using Electron. It runs on top of Chromium Embedded Framework, which was there before Electron (formerly Atom Shell) came along.
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@AlexMedia said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Spotify is Electron based
Somewhat pedantic, but Spotify is not built using Electron. It runs on top of Chromium Embedded Framework, which was there before Electron (formerly Atom Shell) came along.
Challenge: Name a program that displays text and images and uses the network but does not use CEF.
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Firefox?
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@ben_lubar said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@AlexMedia said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Cursorkeys said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Spotify is Electron based
Somewhat pedantic, but Spotify is not built using Electron. It runs on top of Chromium Embedded Framework, which was there before Electron (formerly Atom Shell) came along.
Challenge: Name a program that displays text and images and uses the network but does not use CEF.
Your challenge is bad and you should feel bad.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
It is annoying to be in the middle of writing an email to have to log back in, or to have to log back in just to check to see if there has been a response to your email discussion.
Wait... so, you're saying it's 20 minutes, period? Like, not 20 minutes of inactivity but whether you're actively using it or not, once 20 minutes pass, you have to log back in?
Correct. So if I start a reply, start typing it for two minutes, and then I reach the 20 minute limit (sometimes I think it's less) since I logged on, when I try to send it I'll have to log back on.
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Correct
You have permission to make at least one IT member "vanish".
You may let the rest of the team discover as much of the body as needed to get the point across.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Correct
You have permission to make at least one IT member "vanish".
You may let the rest of the team discover as much of the body as needed to get the point across.
I had wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but now I think it's possibly just security theater so they can put it on a list they give to their main customer of security measures they take. This customer is known to be impressed by lists like that.
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I had wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but now I think it's possibly just security theater so they can put it on a list they give to their main customer of security measures they take. This customer is known to be impressed by lists like that.
As someone who's the main security contact to customers like these, I can somewhat sympathize. However, with ridiculous requirements like this, I always push back and explain why it's idiotic, and they will eventually back down. I've never had a customer who didn't.
We had a customer who required us to give them a tour of our data center to prove we are compliant. We told them we were hosted on AWS and they don't grant "tours" of their data-center (they were more than welcome to put their security to the test by sending a disposable intern to the facility to see how far they'd get before they were arrested or sniped). That didn't sway them. They had a checkbox to check, and they weren't going to check it off until we satisfied them. They didn't get satisfied. We got the contract anyway.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Correct
You have permission to make at least one IT member "vanish".
You may let the rest of the team discover as much of the body as needed to get the point across.
This reminds me of a Dwarf Fortress bug where if a dwarf gets some teeth knocked out in a bar fight and then (much later) dies in an unrelated circumstance, anyone within line of sight of the lost teeth will immediately know that that dwarf died.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I had wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but now I think it's possibly just security theater so they can put it on a list they give to their main customer of security measures they take. This customer is known to be impressed by lists like that.
As someone who's the main security contact to customers like these, I can somewhat sympathize. However, with ridiculous requirements like this, I always push back and explain why it's idiotic, and they will eventually back down. I've never had a customer who didn't.
We had a customer who required us to give them a tour of our data center to prove we are compliant. We told them we were hosted on AWS and they don't grant "tours" of their data-center (they were more than welcome to put their security to the test by sending a disposable intern to the facility to see how far they'd get before they were arrested or sniped). That didn't sway them. They had a checkbox to check, and they weren't going to check it off until we satisfied them. They didn't get satisfied. We got the contract anyway.
I don't know if we're talking about the same customer, but if not, our customer is bigger than yours.
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@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I don't know if we're talking about the same customer, but if not, our customer is bigger than yours.
We very well could be. :) We have several international customers that are a household name. And they all have security policies they require their vendors to abide by, and some of their policies are either misguided or misinterpreted by the people enforcing them.
What often happens is they contract a separate contractor to work with the vendor to be compliant with their policies, and these contractors are robotic peons who simply take the letter of the law and take it to the extreme. In your case, the wording might've been "All user accounts shall be locked out after 20 minutes" without specifying the key phrase, "of inactivity" and thus the contractor takes that to mean what you're facing right now.
In cases like these, I'm aware that the people I'm talking to are simply "following the letter of the law" so I go through the points of contacts at the company itself (we always have contact with someone at the company who is interested in closing the deal with us) to speak with their security department in IT, inform them of the situation, and usually they're able to say, "Oh, yeah, that's worded poorly. We'll correct that. No problems on your end."
You gotta have a spine with these folks. Otherwise, you'll find yourself drifting towards Security By Insanity.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I don't know if we're talking about the same customer, but if not, our customer is bigger than yours.
We very well could be. :) We have several international customers that are a household name. And they all have security policies they require their vendors to abide by, and some of their policies are either misguided or misinterpreted by the people enforcing them.
What often happens is they contract a separate contractor to work with the vendor to be compliant with their policies, and these contractors are robotic peons who simply take the letter of the law and take it to the extreme. In your case, the wording might've been "All user accounts shall be locked out after 20 minutes" without specifying the key phrase, "of inactivity" and thus the contractor takes that to mean what you're facing right now.
In cases like these, I'm aware that the people I'm talking to are simply "following the letter of the law" so I go through the points of contacts at the company itself (we always have contact with someone at the company who is interested in closing the deal with us) to speak with their security department in IT, inform them of the situation, and usually they're able to say, "Oh, yeah, that's worded poorly. We'll correct that. No problems on your end."
You gotta have a spine with these folks. Otherwise, you'll find yourself drifting towards Security By Insanity.
Our customer has never punished anyone for obedient insanity.
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@tharpa does your customer's name start with
govand end withernment?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa does your customer's name start with
govand end withernment?I wouldn't be surprised if it were Equifax, myself.
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@ben_lubar said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Lorne-Kates said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
Correct
You have permission to make at least one IT member "vanish".
You may let the rest of the team discover as much of the body as needed to get the point across.
This reminds me of a Dwarf Fortress bug where if a dwarf gets some teeth knocked out in a bar fight and then (much later) dies in an unrelated circumstance, anyone within line of sight of the lost teeth will immediately know that that dwarf died.
This sounds like a feature. Magic teeth.
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch - as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been .My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars - in the character of the family mansion - in the frescos of the chief saloon - in the tapestries of the dormitories - in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory - but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings - in the fashion of the library chamber - and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents - there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes - of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before - that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? - let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms - of spiritual and meaning eyes - of sounds, musical yet sad - a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow - vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land - into a palace of imagination - into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition - it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye - that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers - it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life - wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew - I, ill of health, and buried in gloom - she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-side - mine the studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation - she, roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! -I call upon her name - Berenice! - and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And then - then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease - a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went! - and the victim -where is she? I knew her not - or knew her no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself - trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease - for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation - my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form - hourly and momently gaining vigor - and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury , he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous , although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, " De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei; " St. Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De Carne Christi ," in which the paradoxical sentence " Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est, " occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder, frequently and bitterly, upon the wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice - in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.
During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning - among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday - and in the silence of my library at night - she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her - not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now - now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet, bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year - one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon , - I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.
Was it my own excited imagination - or the misty influence of the atmosphere - or the uncertain twilight of the chamber - or the gray draperies which fell around her figure - that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and I - not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to he contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface - not a shade on their enamel - not an indenture in their edges - but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! - the teeth! - they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They - they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, " Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments ," and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees . Des idees! - ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! - ah therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.
And the evening closed in upon me thus - and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went - and the day again dawned - and the mists of a second night were now gathering around - and still I sat motionless in that solitary room - and still I sat buried in meditation - and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the ante-chamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was - no more! She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.
I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware, that since the setting of the sun, Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror - horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed - what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, - " what was it? "
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat: - " Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas ." Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?
There came a light tap at the library door - and, pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he? - some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night - of the gathering together of the household - of a search in the direction of the sound; and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave - of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing - still palpitating - still alive !
He pointed to garments; - they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
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@Gribnit you took "post not long enough" a little too seriously there...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
@Gribnit you took "post not long enough" a little too seriously there...
And at the same time he did not!
