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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Where I work, the infra folks are way overworked. Getting them to do things is impossible given their existing todo list. And when you do get them to do something (by throwing managers at them) they half-ass it.

    (I’m not blaming them. I blame the managers. It is frustrating though. Anyway.)

    And as a result, there’s one system that I use frequently that they set up, but cut corners and never hooked it up to our single sign-on solution. And so in order to get into this system, everyone has to use a shared username/password. “readonly:readonly”. And every time I log in, my browser nags me about the known weak password.








  • Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:

    Real story.

    I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin’ weekend. Didn’t really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn’t even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)

    I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies – particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit – don’t know the difference between programmers and PC support.)

    So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the “ok” button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn’t interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.

    Turns out he’d gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from “My Computer” down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.

    So, I mused “hmm, I wonder if it’s just giving one error message per email that was affected.” I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.

    So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.

    And everyone marveled at my “genius.”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn’t say for sure.