• (cs) in reply to pc
    pc:
    The "happy ending" does end up being a surprise when it happens. You do never quite expect it.
    No TDWTF reader expects it... but this one was so great I almost wept. Just restored my faith in mankind.

    Nah, better keep my WTF-radar sharply tuned!

  • Nickster (unregistered)

    This story is completely unbelievable. It's not even remotely realistic.

    In the real world, there is no way the incompetent parties would be fired and the whistleblower given a promotion. Try again, suckers!

  • (cs) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    You're butt hurt much, Remy?

    *Your

  • (cs)

    I wonder if the whistleblower laws passed (relatively) recently helped Nick keep his job...

  • Pluvius (unregistered)

    How did Nick log into a machine he was supposed to have nothing to do with? This smells like passwords written on post-it notes.

    And how does decomissioned hardware of that huge residual value manage to get out of inventory and "end up" in the hands of the same employee, repeatedly, and at such rapid turnover?

    That company had much bigger issues, such as loose security policies and an accounting department that couldn't find their asses with both hands. Ted was playing the system because it was so damn easy. Ironically, it was the same thing that allowed Nick to turn it around.

  • (cs)

    This story is not a WTF. The definition of a WTF is a story that makes you want to exclaim "WTF!".

    Someone misusing company property for illegal activity is reported and gets fired. Not a WTF.

  • (cs) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    I wonder if the whistleblower laws passed (relatively) recently helped Nick keep his job...

    That or the fear he might go to an even higher authority, e.g. the police, if he got fired as a result.

  • Ben (unregistered)

    Wow, a WTF with a happy ending. Justice was served!

    Well, except for having to deal with Windows servers.

  • Sebastian Buchannon (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius

    You assume the police would take a complaint by an ex-employee seriously. I sure wouldn't and I am reasonably familiar with the law on this. Ex-employee = disgruntled employee and just can't be trusted. They might claim bank data was lost but how can they prove it? they can't. Police 1, disgruntled employee 0.

  • AGray (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    This story is not a WTF. The definition of a WTF is a story that makes you want to exclaim "WTF!".

    Someone misusing company property for illegal activity is reported and gets fired. Not a WTF.

    Aah but the horrible misuse of the technology elicited the WTF. Thus, a case can be made for it being in fact a WTF.

  • neminem (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    chubertdev:
    I wonder if the whistleblower laws passed (relatively) recently helped Nick keep his job...

    That or the fear he might go to an even higher authority, e.g. the police, if he got fired as a result.

    Yeah, at that point you really only have two options, I think: either fire everyone clearly responsible for such dramatic incompetence, and fix the issue, or make the guy who uncovered it "disappear". For good. Outside of tv shows (where all manner of publicly-trading organizations seem to be that crooked), the second option is, happily, generally only available to the Mafia and other such obviously-criminal organizations. (Not saying there aren't all variety of not-criminal actual companies out there, I think they just generally stick to the usual white-collar stuff, crime-wise.)
  • (cs) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    You assume the police would take a complaint by an ex-employee seriously. I sure wouldn't and I am reasonably familiar with the law on this. Ex-employee = disgruntled employee and just can't be trusted. They might claim bank data was lost but how can they prove it? they can't. Police 1, disgruntled employee 0.

    Oh, I am sure many "tip-offs" have come from former employees. And forensics are VERY good at recovering data should they wish to cover it up by wiping it, which they were no doubt too incompetent to do.

    Selling it on e-bay isn't the way to remove the evidence. Changing the hard-drive would work, as it isn't the computer itself or the RAM but the hard drive that holds the evidence.

  • Sebastian Buchannon (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    This story is not a WTF. The definition of a WTF is a story that makes you want to exclaim "WTF!".

    Someone misusing company property for illegal activity is reported and gets fired. Not a WTF.

    Sorry but if major theft isn't a WTF then what is? Put it this way, if you owned a shop selling widgets and someone walked in and took 5 widgets and ran out without paying, would you say "well that's not a WTF", or would you scream "WTF!!!" and chase after them?

    On a slightly off-topic, but related note, I always strongly advise people not to chase thieves. Instinctively people want to but you have no idea if the thief is armed or even has accomplices. Without the proper training civilians are apt to seriously injure themselves, the suspect, or an innocent bystander. Besides taking the law into your own hands is frowned upon by law enforcement.

    Fact: Your property is never as valuable as a life.

    Call, don't run. Call the police who are better equipped to confront criminals. I always say once you are 70 and shuffling round with a zimmerframe you won't be able to go chasing criminals anyway so you might as well get used to not running after thieves now.

  • (cs)

    Well it was a cascade of events that allowed Nick to keep his job:

    1. Tom and Larry would selling the old hardware for profit on eBay
    2. The company was losing a lot of money for no gain due to this
    3. Nick went over Tom and Larry's heads (I'm surprised that he didn't get fired here, he should have gone to the SEC/whomever first)
    4. Tom and Larry were fired
    5. It would cost the company money in lawsuits if they fired Nick for uncovering incompetency in the company, so they just promoted him to appease him

    IMHO, the people above Tom and Larry probably did not like them, and were more eager to see them go than cover up their tracks.

  • mag (unregistered)

    I'm glad the good guy didn't get fired in this post.

  • ih8u (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Well it was a cascade of events that allowed Nick to keep his job:
    1. Tom and Larry would selling the old hardware for profit on eBay
    2. The company was losing a lot of money for no gain due to this
    3. Nick went over Tom and Larry's heads (I'm surprised that he didn't get fired here, he should have gone to the SEC/whomever first)
    4. Tom and Larry were fired
    5. It would cost the company money in lawsuits if they fired Nick for uncovering incompetency in the company, so they just promoted him to appease him

    IMHO, the people above Tom and Larry probably did not like them, and were more eager to see them go than cover up their tracks.

    For your recommendation in #3, he SHOULD have been fired. Allow the company a real chance to fix the problem internally before calling in the Feds to tear stuff up. It's one thing to go over a boss. It's another thing entirely to, basically, rat out the whole company when, as far as Nick knew, Ted and Larry were the only ones screwing up. Once the big decision makers don't care or are "in" on it, then go get the "SEC/whomever".

    You might get fired first. I'd rather be fired than shut down a company, ending many honest jobs, just because I found incompetence/theft/whatever among two workers.

    Captcha: abbas -- Jackie Chan's on me!

  • Baad Puns (unregistered) in reply to Infidel
    Infidel:
    more RAM than a goat festival

    Don't you mean a sheep festival?

    BAA!

  • (cs) in reply to ih8u
    ih8u:
    chubertdev:
    Well it was a cascade of events that allowed Nick to keep his job:
    1. Tom and Larry would selling the old hardware for profit on eBay
    2. The company was losing a lot of money for no gain due to this
    3. Nick went over Tom and Larry's heads (I'm surprised that he didn't get fired here, he should have gone to the SEC/whomever first)
    4. Tom and Larry were fired
    5. It would cost the company money in lawsuits if they fired Nick for uncovering incompetency in the company, so they just promoted him to appease him

    IMHO, the people above Tom and Larry probably did not like them, and were more eager to see them go than cover up their tracks.

    For your recommendation in #3, he SHOULD have been fired. Allow the company a real chance to fix the problem internally before calling in the Feds to tear stuff up. It's one thing to go over a boss. It's another thing entirely to, basically, rat out the whole company when, as far as Nick knew, Ted and Larry were the only ones screwing up. Once the big decision makers don't care or are "in" on it, then go get the "SEC/whomever".

    You might get fired first. I'd rather be fired than shut down a company, ending many honest jobs, just because I found incompetence/theft/whatever among two workers.

    Captcha: abbas -- Jackie Chan's on me!

    That attitude creates presidential platforms. :)

  • Not Dead Yet! (unregistered) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    I always say once you are 70 and shuffling round with a zimmerframe you won't be able to go chasing criminals anyway so you might as well get used to not running after thieves now.

    Well, let's all check into a nursing home right now and wait to die, then.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Garrison Fiord:
    Remy:
    Those two boxes were so loaded with viruses it was time to call in a nuclear strike to keep the infection from spreading.

    Is there any damn, change that we could get an editor who can right at a 3rd grade level at least? What happen to that call-out for new writers? Did someone set us up the bomb?

    Ok, I've been at work since 4AM, so I'm a little groggy, but... an illiterate sentence critiquing a correct sentence?
    You should open up google and run a search for "Irony"

  • Jerry (unregistered) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    I always strongly advise people not to chase thieves. Instinctively people want to but you have no idea if the thief is armed or even has accomplices. Without the proper training civilians are apt to seriously injure themselves, the suspect, or an innocent bystander. Besides taking the law into your own hands is frowned upon by law enforcement.

    Fact: Your property is never as valuable as a life.

    Wrong. My property is more valuable to me than a thief's life. If he feels otherwise, he should choose a different career.

    Call the police who are better equipped to show up a few hours later and write a report and then say they can't return your unique property when it is found because you didn't report the serial numbers
    FTFY.
  • Phelps (unregistered) in reply to Moonraquel

    Not really. Ted wasn't kicking a cut up to the CEO, so he was stealing from him.

  • Garrison Fiord (unregistered) in reply to PiisAWheeL
    PiisAWheeL:
    snoofle:
    Garrison Fiord:
    Remy:
    Those two boxes were so loaded with viruses it was time to call in a nuclear strike to keep the infection from spreading.

    Is there any damn, change that we could get an editor who can right at a 3rd grade level at least? What happen to that call-out for new writers? Did someone set us up the bomb?

    Ok, I've been at work since 4AM, so I'm a little groggy, but... an illiterate sentence critiquing a correct sentence?
    You should open up google and run a search for "Irony"
    I entered a bunch of posts that painted Remy in a really bad light. He modified all of them to make me look like an idiot. My original post said that he had all the language skills of a 3rd-grader. Despite the fact that he's been doing this to my posts consistently, I keep posting. It's almost like I'm too stupid to get the hint.

  • (cs)
    “There are two Windows boxes in the data-center,” Larry explained. “Those are mine. Do not touch them. Ever. Nod if you understand.”
    Nod? At what point did it become normal to insist on non-verbal response?

    What's next, "if you disagree, signify by sticking out your tongue and crossing your eyes"?

  • (cs)

    Thinking about it, TRWTF is that it seems like this is a big enough of a company where there would be IT people who could see network activity, and realize that a box has gone rogue. Hitting tons of .ru sites and IRC traffic? How does any company that has an IT department with more than 25 people let this happen?

  • monhts (unregistered)

    Nick gained a few important facts during those monhts.

    I assumed it was a typo for the word 'months'. Since the postings are usually quite precise, I assume that it is a reference to another story where monhts is another unit of time or trwtf in another post?

  • (cs)

    I don't even want to think about touching those servers. I'd be afraid of catching something...kind of like touching road-kill.

  • Dann of Thursday (unregistered)

    Garrison Ford is a much lamer troll than Nagesh and that says a heck of a lot.

    Why is it that this site has the most boring trolls? Come on guys, you can do better, pretend I said I liked PHP or something.

  • Kjella (unregistered) in reply to just stop it
    just stop it:
    I think you guys who are surprised that they fired Ted and Larry are missing the point. After Nick notified management and they looked into the situation, they discovered that the old servers were going on eBay. That is why Ted and Larry were fired. Stealing is the number one offense as far as your employer is concerned.
    Exactly this. If Larry was making the company money, he might get his chain yanked a bit to make him follow IT procedure but he'd stay. Ted wouldn't even have been an issue, had the replaced servers been used for other IT projects he'd only be the pushover IT guy who let Larry boss him around. And that means Nick would have been the one fired.
  • neminem (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Thinking about it, TRWTF is that it seems like this is a big enough of a company where there would be IT people who could see network activity, and realize that a box has gone rogue. Hitting tons of .ru sites and IRC traffic? How does any company that has an IT department with more than 25 people let this happen?
    Seems to me the bigger a company you work for, the more likely it is that any given issue would have everyone think, "eh, someone else's problem."
  • (cs) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    You assume the police would take a complaint by an ex-employee seriously. I sure wouldn't and I am reasonably familiar with the law on this. Ex-employee = disgruntled employee and just can't be trusted. They might claim bank data was lost but how can they prove it? they can't. Police 1, disgruntled employee 0.

    Where I live, the police have to take every report of a crime seriously. It may well be that (in the case of a simple burglary) it just gets logged (usually impossible to trace the culprits if they have taken basic precautions), but they at least have to make basic investigations. If it subsequently turns out to be a hoax then the crime of Wasting Police Time is recorded.

    But in cases of security breaches in a bank I believe the police will be all too eager to find out about it. If where you live they are likely to laugh at it - blimey, where the fuck do you live - Nigeria?

  • (cs) in reply to Sebastian Buchannon
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    Cbuttius:
    This story is not a WTF. The definition of a WTF is a story that makes you want to exclaim "WTF!".

    Someone misusing company property for illegal activity is reported and gets fired. Not a WTF.

    Sorry but if major theft isn't a WTF then what is? Put it this way, if you owned a shop selling widgets and someone walked in and took 5 widgets and ran out without paying, would you say "well that's not a WTF", or would you scream "WTF!!!" and chase after them?

    On a slightly off-topic, but related note, I always strongly advise people not to chase thieves. Instinctively people want to but you have no idea if the thief is armed or even has accomplices. Without the proper training civilians are apt to seriously injure themselves, the suspect, or an innocent bystander. Besides taking the law into your own hands is frowned upon by law enforcement.

    Fact: Your property is never as valuable as a life.

    Call, don't run. Call the police who are better equipped to confront criminals. I always say once you are 70 and shuffling round with a zimmerframe you won't be able to go chasing criminals anyway so you might as well get used to not running after thieves now.

    You'd think so, but the papers are full of reports of septegenarians overpowering gangs of muggers single-handed based on the combat techniques they learned while in the army ...

  • Aninnymouse (unregistered) in reply to ASheridan
    ASheridan:
    Garrison Fiord:
    You're butt hurt much, Remy?

    *Your

    That sort of does work.

    "You are butt hurt, Remy, no?"

    Captcha: eros People seem to be going on about the eros in Remy's article.

  • JJ (unregistered) in reply to MightyM
    MightyM:
    Severity One:
    * 'Did someone set us up the bomb?', is that actually English? The words are all English, but the sentence originated somewhere else, possibly in a translation of a Chinese user manual.

    Have people really forgotten about the "All your base" meme already?

    However, he even got that wrong. It's

    someone set up us the bomb

    not

    someone set us up the bomb

  • (cs) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    I entered a bunch of posts that painted Remy in a really bad light. He modified all of them to make me look like an idiot.
    Then he certainly had an easy task, eh?
    It's almost like I'm too stupid to get the hint.
    Only almost?
  • (cs)

    Such anger and hatred on todays thread. Where's the love. Can't we all just get along? HIBT? Am I the only one?

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    foo:
    Ted:
    “There are two Windows boxes in the data-center,” Larry explained. “Those are mine. Do not touch them. Ever.
    those boxes actually need a hardware upgrade
    So he is supposed to upgrade the hardware without touching it? I guess that might be vaguely possible with Linux boxes, but Windows? The magic in this story is more powerful than unicorns.
    You mean Windows doesn't support Remote Hot Swap(tm) yet?
    I did hear the story of an IBM mainframe in Japan somewhere that was up for seven and a half years, and during that time, every part of the hardware was replaced at least once, including the racks, with no downtime. (Well, of course, you take individual CPU boards (etc) out of service, but one at a time, until you have replaced them all.)

    But even there, someone had to touch the hardware that was being changed...

    I call shenanigans. I can't believe IBM could keep any machine running with no down time for longer than about 3 months. Apparently even High Availability systems (that theoretically keep running even through disasters) can't cope with patching without being brought down.... - i.e. we can deal with unexpected outages, but maintenance may kill us....

  • Uraguay (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    This story is not a WTF. [b]The definition of a WTF is a story that makes you want to exclaim "WTF!"[b].
    Noted. I've been misusing the term WTF all these years.

    Cheers!!

  • fha; (unregistered) in reply to Dann of Thursday
    Dann of Thursday:
    Garrison Ford is a much lamer troll than Nagesh and that says a heck of a lot.

    Why is it that this site has the most boring trolls? Come on guys, you can do better, pretend I said I liked PHP or something.

    You're only saying that....$10 says you're really a VB fanboi

  • Aussie Bob (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Sebastian Buchannon:
    You assume the police would take a complaint by an ex-employee seriously. I sure wouldn't and I am reasonably familiar with the law on this. Ex-employee = disgruntled employee and just can't be trusted. They might claim bank data was lost but how can they prove it? they can't. Police 1, disgruntled employee 0.

    Where I live, the police have to take every report of a crime seriously. It may well be that (in the case of a simple burglary) it just gets logged (usually impossible to trace the culprits if they have taken basic precautions), but they at least have to make basic investigations. If it subsequently turns out to be a hoax then the crime of Wasting Police Time is recorded.

    But in cases of security breaches in a bank I believe the police will be all too eager to find out about it. If where you live they are likely to laugh at it - blimey, where the fuck do you live - Nigeria?

    So...we waste time reporting a crime about time wasting - what novel ideas you Brits come up with.

    I wouldn't really have thought the Orifices in the Police Farce (nor the Defectives) would be the ones to investigate security breaches like this - surely there'd be another Agency to do that, no?

  • Bruce (unregistered) in reply to Garrison Fiord

    I presume you are deliberately avoiding the job yourself by misspelling 'write' as 'right'.

  • Decius (unregistered) in reply to MightyM

    What you say?

  • Noah (unregistered)

    I've always wondered, why the f*ck do people use windows server? It isn't even that good at being a desktop...

  • Ralph (unregistered) in reply to Noah
    Noah:
    I've always wondered, why the f*ck do people use windows server? It isn't even that good at being a desktop...
    Because Windows===Computer.

    And that's why mobile devices, Apple, Android, etc. will be the end of M$. People will finally realize there's a choice. And they will experience that they can learn how to work a user interface that doesn't overflow with arrogance and occasional inexplicable hostility.

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Severity One:
    If I can't spend some considerable income on a graphics card with the sound of an F-16 taking off, so I can watch salmon jump up the waterfalls in Skyrim, it's not worth it.
    I prefer to buy graphics cards that don't make more noise (it's NOISE, not sound, because it's a largely undesirable side effect) than a supersonic-capable aircraft.

    (And the benchmark for noisy aircraft, apparently, is a Tu-95, with eight propellers that spin fast enough that the blade tips produce sonic booms.)

    Well, I've read about the noise level of the Bear, but never experienced it. I have, however, been at an air show where a Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16 took off with the afterburner on, and me more or less in a direct line behind it (at a safe distance, obviously). The noise level was quite astounding.

    The noise level of the graphics card is usually quite reasonable, but the combination of a hot and dusty climate, together with a gaming rig, is not a very good one. But I'm not very keen on voiding the warranty by going the liquid cooling way.

  • ysth (unregistered) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    I'm not saying its ideal, but at least you can convert to verbal and get some meaning out of it.

    You lost me. Whose ideal?

  • (cs) in reply to Garrison Fiord
    Garrison Fiord:
    That asshat Remy modified my post, probably because I'm an idiot. I bet he deletes this one, because I'm a sucker and love losing bets.
    Maybe you're an idiot, maybe you're a sucker, maybe you're fake, maybe you're a troll, but there's one thing that you most certainly aren't: funny.
  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to John
    John:
    History Teacher:
    ...I guess we all know what trWTF here is.

    Mind boggling!

    Yeah; some company actually promoted the guy who found the malware and reported the culprits that supported and enabled it. The usual story ends with Nick being fired for violating the "Do Not Touch" order of his superior. I've seen any number of cases like that (and once been the firee after reporting a serious security issue). I've heard rumors of people being rewarded for such things, but I've never personally seen it happen.

    Someone higher up was getting suspicious or just sick of their expenses already, or just plain had personal differences with them, and jumped on the chance to fire and humiliate them. Nick just happened to be the grease to get the machinery in motion, and somehow avoided being dumped in a wholesale cleansing.

    His promotion is obviously just collateral WTF in the grand scheme of things.

  • Sebastian Buchannon (unregistered) in reply to Jerry

    [quote user="Jerry"][quote user="Sebastian Buchannon"]I always strongly advise people not to chase thieves. Instinctively people want to but you have no idea if the thief is armed or even has accomplices. Without the proper training civilians are apt to seriously injure themselves, the suspect, or an innocent bystander. Besides taking the law into your own hands is frowned upon by law enforcement.

    Fact: Your property is never as valuable as a life.[/quote]Wrong. My property is more valuable to me than a thief's life. If he feels otherwise, he should choose a different career.[/QUOTE]

    Everyone has a right to life, the law is very clear on that. You have no right to take someone's life for material gain or material retention*. Besides whatever government you belong to (UK? US?) you should let them deal with the situation as they are better equipped. I've seen it countless times civilians getting into bad situations because they thought they could do the police's job. You can't, just don't.

    *well this depends on juristriction but it's generally true.

    [quote]Call the police who are better equipped to show up a few hours later and write a report and then say they can't return your unique property when it is found because you didn't report the serial numbers[/quote]FTFY.[/quote]

    Then report the serial numbers. You can't expect the police to be psychic!

  • (cs)

    Makes quite a good idea for anti-thief technology.

    Make all hardware "report" its unique serial number diagnostics when you go online. If your computing equipment gets stolen, you can then report to the police and they can "trace" if any of these components go "online" later.

    Probably will happen eventually.

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