Whiny Computer Twerp
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Heya, folks. Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Be gentle. My fragile psyche bruises easily.
Back in high school, I and four buddies of mine were the unofficial "tech support" for the entire campus. If anyone had a problem, we came in and fixed it, seeing as our technologist was always too busy playing Call of Duty on his Alienware computer with its huge flatscreen LCD. We didn't mind, though, because it made us heroes in the eyes of a lot of people. Especially the librarians. Student computers + no way to track users == loads of viruses.
So, one day we noticed that one of the labs dedicated to teaching CAD was acting up. Someone was installing pirated versions of the PC version of Halo on multiple computers, and it was sucking up a lot of precious space on the hard drives. Seeing as it's against school policy to load any personal software on the machines, especially games, we uninstalled Halo from every one of them, and all was cool.
Until the next day, that is. We found it had been REinstalled. Irritated, the five of us repeated the process, uninstalling Halo. When it popped up AGAIN the next day, we asked the professors who used the room to watch for any weird activity around those computers, and repeated the uninstall.
Well, we didn't need to wait long. In fact, the next day, the one installing the game onto the computers, a lanky, dorky beanpole with bad acne and a worse attitude, stormed up to us... and threatened TO OUR FACES that if we uninstalled Halo again, he'd send us all viruses that would wreck our computers.
We stared at him. Then we laughed. Oh, we laughed. Not only did he oust himself, but he just drove the final nail into the coffin housing his computer usage privileges by threatening us! The banhammer came down, and the guy was effectively banned from using any of the labs on campus. Not only that, but we got back at him in our own way. Every student on campus has a personal folder on a central server, accessible via VPN, in which they can store any school-related data. Well, one of us worked with the guy who managed those folders, and conveniently forgot to copy the twerp's folder (which was full of pirated Mp3's he had downloaded using WinMX installations all over campus) over to a new server we were migrating to.
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I hope have matured since High School and would no longer violate the trust that has been put into you as an IT worker.
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I think you can find your fair share of people like that at any (high) school or college that you go to. There have been many posts here about people installing Quake, etc. across the school networks.
Somebody in our school district managed to get Quake 3 on the entire district WAN.
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It doesn't sound like you needed to "forget" to copy his folder. It might have been more fun to get some authority to have him explain how all those pirated mp3s are "school-related data".
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@Girtych said:
Enough said. Anyone playing Halo on a PC instead of Doom/Quake deserves the full wrath of the BOFHen. ;)
So, one day we noticed that one of the labs dedicated to teaching CAD was acting up. Someone was installing pirated versions of the PC version of Halo on multiple computers, and it was sucking up a lot of precious space on the hard drives.While I do admit we used to setup some Quake servers on campus back in the days, we used to go for the slow-ass, unused PCs that nobody used anyway. We'd setup quake -dedicated 16 and it would run fine enough, as long as we all used the campus' dialup access. 300ms pings, dude!
However, its terminally stupid to rage against the admins if they decide to remove your gamez. It is wise not to awaken the BOFH...
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@morbiuswilters said:
I hope have matured since High School and would no longer violate the trust that has been put into you as an IT worker.
Oh, of course. We were young and reckless back then. No more shenanigans.
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@danixdefcon5 said:
While I do admit we used to setup some Quake servers on campus back in the days, we used to go for the slow-ass, unused PCs that nobody used anyway. We'd setup quake -dedicated 16
Indeed. A few of us from the marching band at my high school with key access to the band room would set up the band computer as -dedicated 16 for our entertainment later in the day as we all shared a programming class in the morning blocks. The teacher didn't mind, as long as we finished our assignments and were willing to pause as necessary to help him debug another student's code. (Yeah, it was a 'joint teaching' setup.)
As far as why the band had a computer? We never figured that out. It was never used for any "educational" purposes, as far as we could see.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I don't remember "backing up mp3's", "installing Halo" or "subverting to raging luser" being into the IT worker's trust.I hope have matured since High School and would no longer violate the trust that has been put into you as an IT worker.
Actually, they're pretty much covered on that, as any complaints by the luser would get the backup guy to cite that the missing folder's contents were in violation of IT policy, so they weren't migrated at all. Though it would've been even better if he had some pr0n in there ... try arguing why that didn't get migrated to campus staff.
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@danixdefcon5 said:
I don't remember "backing up mp3's", "installing Halo" or "subverting to raging luser" being into the IT worker's trust.
Actually, they're pretty much covered on that, as any complaints by the luser would get the backup guy to cite that the missing folder's contents were in violation of IT policy, so they weren't migrated at all. Though it would've been even better if he had some pr0n in there ... try arguing why that didn't get migrated to campus staff.
It doesn't matter, "revenge" scenarios like this are not the right way to go. If the content was a violation of privacy, that should have been brought up with administrators so they could make the decision. Policing of content should not be done by IT workers.
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@morbiuswilters said:
It doesn't matter, "revenge" scenarios like this are not the right way to go. If the content was a violation of privacy, that should have been brought up with administrators so they could make the decision. Policing of content should not be done by IT workers.
Agreed. While it was satisfying at the time, in retrospect, we should have gone to a higher-up before making any decisions. The student's folder probably would have met the same fate, but at least that way, it would have been official. That, and we'd be off the hook from any backlash.
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@Girtych said:
Agreed. While it was satisfying at the time, in retrospect, we should have gone to a higher-up before making any decisions. The student's folder probably would have met the same fate, but at least that way, it would have been official. That, and we'd be off the hook from any backlash.
Exactly. I appreciate you not taking my comment personally and I'm glad you've moved past that. I did lots of stupid stuff in High School as well, but I have since learned that it's better to CYA. I also think that trust is a large part of working in IT: we are often privy to very sensitive information and to abuse that position weakens the trust of the whole field. Then you end up in positions like I have in the past, where management doesn't trust the tech people with sales info, etc.. so you have to troubleshoot systems you have no access to and build test cases off fake data.
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@Girtych said:
Student computers + no way to track users == loads of viruses
Before somebody shouts "Windows Suxx", it's very easy to lock those XP installations up, and nobody would not be able to neither install Halo or Quake, nor catch a virus.
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@alegr said:
Before somebody shouts "Windows Suxx", it's very easy to lock those XP installations up, and nobody would not be able to neither install Halo or Quake, nor catch a virus.
Oh, how I wish... how I WISH we could have done that. We dearly wanted to set up a domain controller and a group policy that would manage accounts on a student-by-student basis, thus restricting their ability to screw with the computers... but we couldn't. And the technologist wouldn't. And it drove us BATTY.
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@alegr said:
Quake1/WinQuake will run happily without requiring an install process, which means it'll run even in a locked up XP machine. College started locking up their win2000/XP boxen, so I resorted to a hidden shared folder served by a small Linux server from the CompSci lab that had the aMSN client. Worked from USB too; given current flash memory storage capacities, its quite possible to bring a fire up Quake1/2 from a USB dongle.@Girtych said:
Student computers + no way to track users == loads of viruses
Before somebody shouts "Windows Suxx", it's very easy to lock those XP installations up, and nobody would not be able to neither install Halo or Quake, nor catch a virus.
Of course, run-from-USB games are not an administrative burden for IT staff, the OP's trouble was Halo eating away the PC's harddrive.
@morbiuswilters said:
I also think that trust is a large part of working in IT: we are often privy to very sensitive information and to abuse that position weakens the trust of the whole field.
True. While the case mentioned did have a CYA escape, there are other cases where doing this sort of thing would end up badly. I merely pointed out that this case in particular didn't have much standing ground from the "twerp", due to the content's nature.IT opens up a world of information, and depending on where you're working, it might be of a highly sensitive nature. DBA's for financial institutions might have access to stuff like HR data, employee records and such. They could abuse such access in very dangerous ways: use the info for stalking, sell the info, or outright delete/destroy it. IT's kind of like that overused Spiderman quote: With great powers come great responsibilities. Same applies to IT.
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@danixdefcon5 said:
IT opens up a world of information, and depending on where you're working, it might be of a highly sensitive nature. DBA's for financial institutions might have access to stuff like HR data, employee records and such. They could abuse such access in very dangerous ways: use the info for stalking, sell the info, or outright delete/destroy it. IT's kind of like that overused Spiderman quote: With great powers come great responsibilities. Same applies to IT.
That's especially true here. I work on a college campus, so I'm constantly working with data from the professors' computers. Sometimes we even end up handling the campus' financial data. Gets a little nerve-wracking.
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Man up. If you're going to work in IT, you have to get used to that. Always be respectful of the data and have high ethics, but don't let the data intimidate you.
When I interviewed for the tech support/programming job at a 911 dispatch center, one of the interview questions was "In the course of a day we run many criminal investigation checks through the computer. If you happened to see the name of a friend being investigated while you worked here, what would you do?" THAT was a tricky one (and a darned good interview question, I think). The answers that I tossed around in my head were:
a. Warn my friend and know that my job was toast (with a possible accessory charge on top),
b. Say nothing to my friend, but tell the boss I know him and where he can be found (friend, meet bottom of bus),
c. Say nothing to nobody and try to forget I saw anything.
I answered C and apparently picked well. Fortunately, the scenario never actually happened to me while I worked there.
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@Girtych said:
@morbiuswilters said:
If the content was a violation of privacy, that should have been brought up with administrators so they could make the decision.
Agreed. While it was satisfying at the time, in retrospect, we should have gone to a higher-up before making any decisions. The student's folder probably would have met the same fate, but at least that way, it would have been official. That, and we'd be off the hook from any backlash.
i think it would have been even more humiliating for the dweeb. you missed a great opportunity.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I hope have matured since High School and would no longer violate the trust that has been put into you as an IT worker.
If so, he has matured more than my old school's admins, one of whom spent an inordinate amount of time playing a cracked version of SoF II [0] and reading TechDirt (before it jumped the shark) and /.[1], while the other (who left his laptop unsecured on the network for a while) had a remarkable amount of pirated music, some of which had definitely been copied form students' workspaces before they were deleted.
[0]The cracked version was based on the MP test version, and had added maps (including CS maps) and changed weapons. It couldn't connect to legitimate servers, and he occasionally ran servers with the added maps.
[1] It is a dead give-away when he posted anecdotes under the same screen-name as he gamed under, and revealed that he worked as an IT admin in a school with certain very unique features which matched those of my school, posting during school hours
PS: if there are ever a set of forum rules, perhaps one of them should be a note that school it admins are as a rule useless, and that unless they do something blatantly stupid (as opposed to just ordinarily dumb), stories about them are pretty well automatic candidates for a mug. This one was better than the rule, but as MPS said, "That is like saying dried dog shit is better than fresh dog shit because it is easier to pick it up."
PPS: these thread seem to spawn exactly the sort of post I wrote, which is precisely whats wrong with them. Oh well, Hypocrisy FTW
