Stories of inappropriate visuals...



  • I would like to share some of my stories of users who liked to view inappropriate visual images on their work computers.  Back in the day's of pre Bluecoat web filtering.

     ------------------ 

    While working as a Captain in the miltary a Computer technician and an armed Security Forces officer showed up at my desk.  "Can you tell me where Lt. XXX's desk is at?" they asked.  I proceeded to show them where he sat while asking what this was about.  I was told it was a "Security matter" and nothing more.  When we arrived at the Lt's desk he was told by the Security Forces officer to move away from the computer.  Then the Computer tech sat down, inserted a floppy disk, ran a few commands, pulled out the disk, and then they left, sharing no information with us.  I turned to the Lt who was starting to turn a bit pale and asked "WTF?".  He replied that the only thing he could think of was he noticed an advertisment for Victoria Secret on Yahoo and since his wife's birthday was coming up he spent some time browsing through the site...  Nothing ever came from this event but he was thouroughly spooked by this pre-firewall site-blocking 'porn' incident.

    -------------------

    While working the help desk one of our sergeants received a call from a user that their computer wouldn't boot to windows and could we come help.  The sergeant hung up and proceeded to browse to the computer over the network.  Her first thought was the computer was out of Hard Disk space (this was back in the days of 50 Meg drives)  After a quick review she realized this was the case but couldn't find the missing disk space until she searched for hidden folders...  There she found the dubious 'Pics' folder filled with nicely categorized images for ready review.  Subtract one government civilian from the roles of the government payroll.

    ------------------

    This story was told to me by a friend who worked at Symantic.  He had a co-worker who went out of his way to reconfigure his cubicle such that his monitor did not face the hallway just like every other monitor in the huge Dilbertville like expanse of cubicles.  My friend thought it was odd but paid him little attention.  Until one day when the co-worker said to him.  "Hey come look at this."  My friend approached his workstation and there was an e-mail displayed from the computer IT department stating something like.  "We have been monitoring your activities for several weeks and your browsing to inappropriate websites will stop immeadately or your termination will be imminent."

     

    Dr. Phil

     



  • @DrPhil said:

    "Can you tell me where Lt. XXX's desk is at?"
     

    They were probably just profiling him based on his last name.



  • @DrPhil said:

     

    a call from a user that their computer wouldn't boot to windows and could we come help.  The sergeant hung up and proceeded to browse to the computer over the network.

    Damn clever, these army folk.

    Zad



  • Still cannot fathom why people would browse porn at work. Are they really that addicted? Can they not hold off for a few hours?

    Really, no JPEG boobies are worth losing my job over.



  • @Nexzus said:

    Still cannot fathom why people would browse porn at work. Are they really that addicted? Can they not hold off for a few hours?

    Really, no JPEG boobies are worth losing my job over.

    I used to have more privacy at work than at home.  I had a buddy living on my couch for a few months and had very little alone time.  Worked fine until they moved a security cam to monitor my desk while my boss was in Shanghai - it previously monitored the server room door.



  • @HighlyPaidContractor said:

    @Nexzus said:

    Still cannot fathom why people would browse porn at work. Are they really that addicted? Can they not hold off for a few hours?

    Really, no JPEG boobies are worth losing my job over.

    I used to have more privacy at work than at home.  I had a buddy living on my couch for a few months and had very little alone time.  Worked fine until they moved a security cam to monitor my desk while my boss was in Shanghai - it previously monitored the server room door.

    So I guess someone Shanghai'd the security cam.

     


  • Garbage Person

    @Zadkiel said:

    Damn clever, these army folk.

    Zad

    You know, there was a time when you booted to DOS *FIRST* and Windows loaded afterwards. It was remarkably coincident with the era of 50MB disks.


  • @Weng said:

    You know, there was a time when you booted to DOS *FIRST* and Windows loaded afterwards. It was remarkably coincident with the era of 50MB disks.

     

    Yep, I remember it fairly well. I don't remember, however, connecting to that machine running DOS across a network and browsing the contents of it's disk. DOS wasn't particularly well known for it's networking stack and it's filesharing capabilities.

     But, like I said, clever guys these army folks...

     The first hard-drive I ever bought was 20MB. And I picked it, rather than the more expensive 40MB version, because the salesman told me, and I quote: "You'll never fill 40 megabytes - never in a million years"

     Zad



  • @Zadkiel said:

    @Weng said:

    You know, there was a time when you booted to DOS *FIRST* and Windows loaded afterwards. It was remarkably coincident with the era of 50MB disks.

     

    Yep, I remember it fairly well. I don't remember, however, connecting to that machine running DOS across a network and browsing the contents of it's disk. DOS wasn't particularly well known for it's networking stack and it's filesharing capabilities.

    I'm guessing the words "startnet.bat" mean nothing to you?

     



  • @HighlyPaidContractor said:

    @Nexzus said:

    Still cannot fathom why people would browse porn at work. Are they really that addicted? Can they not hold off for a few hours?

    Really, no JPEG boobies are worth losing my job over.

    I used to have more privacy at work than at home.  I had a buddy living on my couch for a few months and had very little alone time.  Worked fine until they moved a security cam to monitor my desk while my boss was in Shanghai - it previously monitored the server room door.

    Not to mention that, back in the day, it was common to have a much better and faster internet connection at work than at home. Of course in that case you'd be well advised to put stuff on floppies and take it home rather than leave it on your work machine. I remember once downloading a 50+ MB game at work and taking it home over the rest of the week, ten floppies' worth at a time. :)


  •  I remember my army days... The good thing about that experience is that no matter how bad things become afterwards you can always look back and say "Well, at least it's not as bad as the army".



  • One of our clients has alerts setup on their servers so that the sysadmins get mailed when certain events occur. A couple of months ago the admins started getting daily warnings about low hard disk space on a particular (non-vital) server. However, when they got to work the next day, the disk space was always fine again.

    After about a week of this they installed a hidden program that surreptitiously copied any new files created on the server, to a different network share. When they got in the next morning and checked the copied files, guess what they found?

    The source of the porn was soon (and embarassingly) determined to be one of our employees working on-site at that client. Every evening he was Remote Desktop'ing to the server in question to start his downloads using the client's high-speed Internet link; in the morning he'd move his illicit downloads off the server to his personal external hard drive. The stupid employment laws in this country precluded him from being fired outright for this, but thankfully he resigned before his first disciplinary hearing. (Our HR lady was also quite relieved about that... she's not uptight, but talking about pornography in a business environment is uncomfortable, regardless of the context, and she would have had to run the hearing.)

    @Scarlet Manuka said:

    @HighlyPaidContractor said:

    @Nexzus said:

    Still cannot fathom why people would browse porn at work. Are they really that addicted? Can they not hold off for a few hours?

    Really, no JPEG boobies are worth losing my job over.

    I used to have more privacy at work than at home.  I had a buddy living on my couch for a few months and had very little alone time.  Worked fine until they moved a security cam to monitor my desk while my boss was in Shanghai - it previously monitored the server room door.

    Not to mention that, back in the day, it was common to have a much better and faster internet connection at work than at home. Of course in that case you'd be well advised to put stuff on floppies and take it home rather than leave it on your work machine. I remember once downloading a 50+ MB game at work and taking it home over the rest of the week, ten floppies' worth at a time. :)

    When I was in high school I didn't have Internet access at home, so I would download game patches and dev tools at school to take them home. (This was 1999 - 2003, I ain't that old!) Only problem was that the USB ports on all school computers were disabled for "security reasons", so the only method I had of getting those downloads to my own PC was, yep you guessed it, floppies. I used to carry a 10-pack of 1.44" disks around with me in my school bag at all times, and at least 1 would go bad on me each week... not-so-fond memories.



  • @DOA said:

     I remember my army days... The good thing about that experience is that no matter how bad things become afterwards you can always look back and say "Well, at least it's not as bad as the army".

    +1 .  Ditto for the Marine Corps Infantry.



  • @Zadkiel said:

    The first hard-drive I ever bought was 20MB. And I picked it, rather than the more expensive 40MB version, because the salesman told me, and I quote: "You'll never fill 40 megabytes - never in a million years"

    The first Hard drive I worked with (did NOT buy it personally) was 32KW (yes, 32768 12-Bit words of memory...FWIW, it was a Drum, not a "Disk".....



  • "your browsing to inappropriate websites will stop immeadately or your termination will be imminent."

     Wow, I'm glad I don't work at a place where the IT management spells that badly.

    Oh wait, actually I do :(

     



  • @TheCPUWizard said:

    @Zadkiel said:

    The first hard-drive I ever bought was 20MB. And I picked it, rather than the more expensive 40MB version, because the salesman told me, and I quote: "You'll never fill 40 megabytes - never in a million years"

    The first Hard drive I worked with (did NOT buy it personally) was 32KW (yes, 32768 12-Bit words of memory...FWIW, it was a Drum, not a "Disk".....

    I never worked with drum personally, but was working in a place with a drum based computer which also had lovely moving coil (as opposed to digital) meters showing CPU, Disk etc usage . The first hard drive I worked with was (washing machine sized) 10MB drive split as 2 (12"??) 5MB platters and one of the platters was a removable disk pack. That system was running on an 8bit Intel CPU and there was a PL/M system for it.

    The first PC I dealt with was an XT with a full height 5MB hard drive. I also dealt with 8" floppies up until the '90s

    On another system I worked on the production code was originally Fortran, but the company was too cheap to have bought the development system. So all mods were made by patching machine code and marking up paper copies of the source.



  • @DaveK said:

    @Zadkiel said:

    @Weng said:

    You know, there was a time when you booted to DOS *FIRST* and Windows loaded afterwards. It was remarkably coincident with the era of 50MB disks.

     

    Yep, I remember it fairly well. I don't remember, however, connecting to that machine running DOS across a network and browsing the contents of it's disk. DOS wasn't particularly well known for it's networking stack and it's filesharing capabilities.

    I'm guessing the words "startnet.bat" mean nothing to you?

     

    Ah! but that has to be run on the client machine.  Of course it could have been run from autoexec.bat.



  • @Zadkiel said:

    I don't remember, however, connecting to that machine running DOS across a network and browsing the contents of it's disk. DOS wasn't particularly well known for it's networking stack and it's filesharing capabilities.

    For the love of god...




  • Oh, thanks for the correction

    So, an example of correct usage would be:

    "2003 called, it wants ITS meme back, you pedantic little shit"

    Right?

    Zadkiel



  • @Zadkiel said:

    Oh, thanks for the correction

    So, an example of correct usage would be:

    "2003 called, it wants ITS meme back, you pedantic little shit dickweed"

    Right?

    Zadkiel

     

    FTFY.



  • @Zadkiel said:

    Oh, thanks for the correction

    So, an example of correct usage would be:

    "2003 called, it wants ITS meme back, you pedantic little shit"

    Right?

    Zadkiel

    Do you know what is a meme from 2003? Signing your name at the end of your post WHEN EVERYONE CAN SEE IT NEXT TO YOUR POST ANYWAY.

    Also, getting schooled on how to use punctuation correctly by a random Internet person means that you pretty much fail at life. If I can use it correctly, and Zylon can use it correctly, why can't you? I mean, if you can't remember the easy things you learned in school like punctuation, how do you manage to do the difficult things like apply logic?

    But maybe I'm making an unwarranted assumption here, namely that you went to school. If you are a homeless person who has learned English by reading beer cans and wine bottles and just happened to stumble into an Internet cafe, I apologise for my rudeness.

    Last thing - when someone makes a valid criticism of you, spewing obscenities at them is hardly a way to disprove that criticism.



  • So... how about them Fallout 3 guns, huh? There sure are mini-nuke launchers in that game! Sure are!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So... how about them Fallout 3 guns, huh? There sure are mini-nuke launchers in that game! Sure are!
     

    They had to actually call them "nuke launchers" in the Japanese version, because they thought the name used elsewhere, "Fat Man", would be historically insensitive. 

    Nothing historically insensitive about the gun that literally enslaves people, though.


  • Garbage Person

    @Someone You Know said:

    Nothing historically insensitive about the gun that literally enslaves people, though.
    Wait what? Did I miss a gun, or was that DLC junk?



  • Really? That's the best you can do? A completely factually incorrect statement in a sad attempt to mimic me, a pathetic attempt at a putdown and a baseless personal attack? I might have been slightly offended by the attack if not for the fact it made me laugh at how wrong it was. I must remember to tell my editor about it, or one of the other directors of my company.

    2/10. Must try harder.

    Oh, and the correct spelling is "Café" - Someone recently told me that being corrected by a random internet person means you fail at life. Sounds like a load of rubbish to me, though, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

    Zadkiel (Yes, I sign my name. Force of habit I'm afraid, you see I was taught to do it, that it was the 'polite' thing to do when corresponding, and it stuck)



  • Hey Zadkiel, maybe take the hint that we're trying to change the subject? Maybe? Christ.

    And yeah, the slavers in the Paradise mall thing have a gun that stuns people so you can put the slave collar on them (IIRC, been awhile.) The problem is some of the people you have to enslave for that quest overlap and appear in other quests, so unless I'm totally mistaken it's impossible to fully complete all quests if you're doing the slave collar thing.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Zadkiel said:

    Yes, I sign my name. Force of habit I'm afraid, you see I was taught to do it, that it was the 'polite' thing to do when corresponding, and it stuck
    Which would imply that either they didn't teach you other polite things to do when corresponding, or they didn't stick if they did.



    HTH. HAND. etc.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    ARGHGHARHAARARAAARRGHGHARAR
     

    I distinctly remember a thread by you where you asked if you were a dick.

    The answer is yes.



  • @Zadkiel said:

    Zadkiel (Yes, I sign my name. Force of habit I'm afraid, you see I was taught to do it, that it was the 'polite' thing to do when corresponding, and it stuck)
     

    You're not writing a letter. You're not corresponding. You're typing a post on a forum. It's not like email or letters. It's like chat.

    I don't care or mind that you manually and redundantly put your name everywhere, I'm just pointing out why it is redundant.

    Yours truly,
    – dhromed



  • @PJH said:

    they didn't stick if t
     

    I really like that essay.



  • Just upping the ol' post count.



  • @DaveK said:

    I'm guessing the words "startnet.bat" mean nothing to you?

     I thought I'd forgotten about startnet.bat

    Yours in reminiscence,
    RTapeLoadingError



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The problem is some of the people you have to enslave for that quest overlap and appear in other quests, so unless I'm totally mistaken it's impossible to fully complete all quests if you're doing the slave collar thing.
    You can also enslave random people. Annoyingly enough you get negative karma regardless of who you enslave, even raiders. I can beat them up, blow them up, shoot them, set them on fire, melt them, burn them to ash, boobie trap them, nuke them, microwave them, but god forbid I put a collar on them.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    And yeah, the slavers in the Paradise mall thing have a gun that stuns people so you can put the slave collar on them (IIRC, been awhile.) The problem is some of the people you have to enslave for that quest overlap and appear in other quests, so unless I'm totally mistaken it's impossible to fully complete all quests if you're doing the slave collar thing.
     

    I think you just have to use all these people for their other quests before you enslave them. It's possible that this won't work for all of them (e.g., another quest results in them getting killed or otherwise made inaccessible).  Been a while for me too.

    Surely dhromed can set us straight on this?



  • I never enslaved people. I just went to PF, killed the black pimp, got his coat, and them calmly murdered the rest of the enraged settlement as the sun came up.

    I failed the Lincoln's head mission,  because I wasn't quick enough to exterminate the slaver assault group at that slave haven building, and the free slave leader got killed.



  • @dhromed said:

    @PJH said:

    they didn't stick if t
     

    I really like that essay.

    ... really?

    That essay is pretty much the worst of open source.

    Lessons it discusses:
    1) You're a fucking idiot by default, because you might think slightly differently than we do, so make sure you spend hours/days/months until you're part of our collective before asking questions. Then we won't consider you a fucking idiot. FRESH IDEAS NOT WELCOME.
    2) We're rude fuckers, but it's ok because we're smart rude fuckers. ("smart" in this context meaning, "know a lot about Linux".)
    3) It's perfectly ok for us to be rude fuckers, but not you. Because you're a fucking idiot by default, remember? If you post enough, we'll let you be just as rude as we are without calling you out on it. But if you call us out on it, we'll ban you.
    4) Also we still use IRC and spammy mailing lists because it's still 1996 in the little timewarp open source exists in.

    @essay said:

    Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.

    What awful, misanthropic brain would think those two things are mutually-exclusive? Jesus, this guy is considered a leader in the Linux community! No wonder it's so full of assholes who don't give a shit about anybody with fresh ideas. This is like one step up from fucking Lord of the Flies.

    And what makes it worse is that it's written so condescendingly as if, oh well obviously ESR is right! Nobody would ever disagree with ESR!

    I mean, I admit it makes *some* good points. But so does almost any essay of length.



  •  @blakeyrat said:

    Jesus, this guy is considered a leader in the Linux community!

    Actually, from what I've gathered, he's universally considered irrelevant (and an insufferable prick by many).



  • @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

      he's universally considered irrelevant (and an insufferable prick by many).

    That pretty much embodies the spirit of a big part of the Linux community so he must be a head honcho



  •  TRWTF is the military caring about people watching porn.



  • @Bumble Bee Tuna said:

     TRWTF is the military caring about people watching porn.

    Things have changed.  The military is so progressive now. 

    You used to be able to go to the PX and browse porn mags openly before making a selection (in the 90's, before the internet was easily accessed).  Now all nudie mags are banned from being sold on base.  They also give you a hell of a time for using tobacco products now, from what I hear.  When I was in, you could get cartons of cigarettes tax free, which translates to something like a 60% reduction in price.  Furthermore, they don't want to see any visible tatoos in uniform.  It used to practically be a requirement. 



  • @dhromed said:

    @The_Assimilator said:

    ARGHGHARHAARARAAARRGHGHARAR
     

    I distinctly remember a thread by you where you asked if you were a dick.

    The answer is yes.

    Yeah, I'm not very good at titling things. That thread should've probably asked "am I being more of a dick than usual?"

    Apologies for derailing the thread, it's just that proper spelling/punctuation is really really easy and every time I see mangling of the English language I get... twitchy. And please, let's not turn this into another thread about how language is constantly evolving etc., I'd rather have a lobotomy than see that happen again.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    And please, let's not turn this into another thread about how language is constantly evolving etc., I'd rather have a lobotomy than see that happen again.

    If you had any real respect for linguistics, you'd know that here's no such thing as "proper" spelling/punctuation, and that language is constantly evolving. There's no basis for being a grammar nazi either socially or scientifically. It's just being a dick for the sake of being a dick.

    All: I know it looks like I'm starting up a new annoying debate here, but I'm thinking about the long-term: once The_Assimilator is lobotomized, no more grammar nazi!



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    Apologies for derailing the thread, it's just that proper spelling/punctuation is really really easy and every time I see mangling of the English language I get... twitchy. And please, let's not turn this into another thread about how language is constantly evolving etc., I'd rather have a lobotomy than see that happen again.

    I hear the French are good at controlling that sort of thing.  Maybe you should move there. 



  • @blakeyrat said:

    once The_Assimilator is lobotomized, no more grammar nazi!

    FWIW (and yes I know you don't care, blakeyrat), I agree 100% with The_Assimilator on this one. Incorrect grammar and/or punctuation and/or spelling can make a very expensive difference to documentation.

    Case in point: when my wife worked for a life insurance company in the 1980s, they got hosed for £150,000 (which I believe is about 300,000 of your dollars) because of a single character error in a letter. Instead of the final sentence stating "We are not prepared to accept your claim." the letter was sent out stating "We are now prepared to accept your claim." (I added the bold attributes, the letter didn't originally have any highlighting, being typed in the days before word processors.)



  • @OzPeter said:

    The first PC I dealt with was an XT with a full height 5MB hard drive.

    XT? Luxury! The first PC I dealt with was a PC-I (one) which had a mighty 64KB of motherboard RAM, which we upgraded to 256KB by manually plugging chips in to a 64KB/256KB memory expansion card. This was a full height but half-length card, as I recall.

    Unless, of course, you count the ACT Sirius 1 'clone' PC which I worked on for about 3 months before that, which had multi-speed 5.25" diskette drives, and wrote different numbers of sectors on the inner and outer tracks (!) of its diskettes.



  • I well remember the very first IBM PC. Released on August 12, 1981- I got my first hands on experience the next month....For those who dont remember the birth....

    The $1,565 price bought a system unit, a keyboard and a color/graphics capability. Options included a display, a printer, two diskette drives, extra memory, communications, game adapter and application packages — including one for text processing. The development team referred to their creation as a mini-compact, at a mini-price, with IBM engineering under the hood.

    The system unit was powered by an Intel 8088 microprocessor operating at speeds measured in millionths of a second. It was the size of a portable typewriter and contained 40K of read-only memory and 16K of user memory, as well as a built-in speaker for generating music. Its five expansion slots could be used to connect such features as expanded memory, display and printing units and game "paddles." The unit also ran self-diagnostic checks.

    Containing 83 keys, the keyboard was connected to the unit by a six-foot coiled cable, which meant users could rest it in their lap or on the desktop without moving the rest of the system. It also included such advanced functions for the times as a numeric keypad and 10 special keys that enabled users to write and edit text, figure accounts and store data.

    Options included:

    • A printer that could print in two directions at 80 characters per second in 12 different character styles, and also check itself for malfunctions and provide an out-of-paper signal.
    • A color/graphics monitor with 16 foreground and background colors and 256 characters for text applications. Its graphics were in four colors.
    • Multiple 32K and 64K memory cards that could be plugged into the option slots to increase memory to 256K.


  •  What's kinda sad is those old-as-hell machines would probably still work today if we dug em outta the attic and plugged em in, whereas the new computers usually die on their own (repairable or otherwise) by their 3rd year of operation.

     They just don't build em like they used to...



  • @Master Chief said:

     What's kinda sad is those old-as-hell machines would probably still work today if we dug em outta the attic and plugged em in, whereas the new computers usually die on their own (repairable or otherwise) by their 3rd year of operation.

     They just don't build em like they used to...

    My 1968 DEC PDP-8 still works. Primary problems iswear on magnetic surfaces, and the companies that did the plating are long gone.

     My ASR-33 Teletypes are not is that good of shape (although they stil semi-work). If anyone knows a teletype repairman (sure to be old and retired), let me know. I am willing to pay significant $$$....

     [The above is 100% serious!]



  • You'll have to excuse me, I'm a youngin...

    My first computer was a hand-me-down from my step dad, a Gateway with a blazing fast 400 MHz processor and 32 meg of ram running Windows 95.  I played Hover! to DEATH on that when I upgraded to Windows 98.

    In fact, that computer is still in my house, somewhere...



  • Remember, "being a youngin" is a self curing situation...


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