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universities are paranoid | 297 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
universities are paranoid
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 22 2013 @ 02:46 PM EST
I'm not surprised. In the 90s, I worked as a machinist in a manufacturing plant,
and when our company installed 486 PCs on the shop floor (in locked cabinets)
for us to log into and enter our work into a database, Windows 95"b"
was the software of the day.
One work shift, as I was waiting for the PC I was using to process a job I had
entered, I opened a command box on the desktop to see how much disk space the
system had free, since those 486s would slow to a crawl when the disk got
cramped for space. As I was looking down at the disk info, I noticed a plain
text file entitled "MGT.TXT" in the short list of root files. When I
opened it, it was an unencrypted plain file of management and supervision
employees, their names, employee numbers, home addresses and phone numbers and
(believe it or not) their computer passwords. The company issued computer users
passwords and, apparently, used the MGT file to track them.
Once I knew the information existed and was possible risk, I experienced a moral
dilemma and some soul searching. Should I tell someone? I doubted if anyone had
the technical expertise or knowledge at the time to even discover the file's
existence. I was probably one of only maybe ten people, out of 150, who had
personal computers at home. But still, it bothered me enough to tell and I did.
I was subsequently banned from using the computers in the plant, even the kiosk
ones used for work documentation, unless it was in the presence of a member of
management. That banning lasted my last four years with the company. Still, that
didn't stop company managers from coming and getting me when they needed
computer help, or a computer went down on night shift- they would call me in to
fix it, and on my own time. Officially, I wasn't actually there.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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