I see this in the day job, in my private life, everywhere I look…
*this* being the “I have done enough, I cannot be expected to do any more” attitude, the flip side of which is “The system is still functioning, therefore I can push it harder and get more out of it“.
It applies everywhere, from the mundane and humdrum details of everyday life and such basics as paying for utilities, to international geopolitics, and everything in between.
It’s an attitude fostered by a generation (or two) who have never witnessed, personally, and up close, what happens when the system in question destabilises and ceases to function.
Let me give you some examples.
In my private life I live in rented accommodations, my electric utility is provided by a large utility company that supplies the building, they have my name because when I moved in three years ago the landlord’s agents gave them my name.
Like all utilities, there is a meter for this electric as it enters the property, from there it goes to two coin operated put-a-coin-in-and-pay-for-your-electric-in-advance meters installed by the landlord / his agents the rental company, one for each section / floor / tenant.
So when the utility company threatens me with court action to enter my home and seize my shit and install a coin meter because *I* owe then 1200 bucks, *I* turn around and tell the rental company “not my fucking problemo, I already paid for all my electric in cash up front in the meter, which YOU empty… but, it’s gonna be YOURS in 7 days if this isn’t sorted, cos I’ll issue a writ”
Any same person would think this would get it sorted, because who needs or wants to be party to a lawsuit, especially an unwinnable one like this.
Naturally enough we must all be insane, because that’s what I’m 48 hours away from having to do, and no likelihood of a last minute resolution.
Expecting the other guy to blink first when you threaten them doesn’t tend to end cleanly when the other guy is too fucking retarded and incompetent to blink, they are too busy breathing through their mouth and watching “ow my balls”….
The landlords agents, (the landlord) the utility company and the utility company’s appointed debt collectors do not see the simple fact that I have and have always had a pre-payment coin meter as a MAJOR fucking problem for them all, there are 1200 bucks missing from the system and this is the hammer we always use on all these nails and we are TRYING to help but really, our hands are tied, and frankly, you’re not helping us to help you, you need to do this and this and this and then I’m sure we will eventually get this all sorted out.
So I get to issue a writ, and I’ll take the shotgun approach and name all of the above, and sue them for protection from harassment and for enforcement of my legal right to the peaceful enjoyment of my own home and for protection from threats of bailiffs seeking monies that I do not owe, and I take the shotgun approach and name them all, as otherwise there will be squirming and finger pointing at whoever is NOT named as being the guilty party.
Given that I have always paid in cash in advance for my electric via the advance payments meters installed by the landlord / rental agency, given that the agency has admitted in writing that I clearly have paid for all my utilities and clearly am not in arrears and clearly do not owe anything, given that the law states that any course of action that comprises two or more consecutive incidents can be classed as harassment and I’m being phoned daily by the debt collectors, given that the law guarantees a tenant the right to peaceful enjoyment of their own home while the bills and rent are paid up, it’s about as cast iron slam dunk a lawsuit as you can get.
That is the kind of lawsuit I like, and the only kind I bother with, the legal equivalent of put them all in a field and bomb the bastards and let god sort it out, or in this case, the presiding judge.
Of course, despite my urging these people to talk to their legal teams some days ago, the legal teams will only SEE any of this shit when the writ lands on their doorsteps, at which case the shit will hit the fan, and everyone will try to limit liability, which is tough when it is plain for all to see that there is plenty of liability to go around, and the plaintiff in the case really is the only innocent party.
It’s a slam dunk, so it’s a no brainer for the judge to order the utility company and the utility companies bailiffs to stop harassing me and to remove any records on their system saying I owe them any monies… and for the lettings agency to adhere to the law and enable me to live in the peaceful enjoyment of my own home… and so on…
But who will get sacked?
Nobody, of course.
Nobody at all.
You can’t sack people for breathing through their mouth when the entire fucking culture for the past 30+ years has been to hire people who breathe through their mouth and throw every other fucker under the bus.
So while I might well get my individual situation remedied, the culture remains the same.
And that, of course, is no accident.
The Dice guy in the video above does another one, JFK was shot yesterday, and another one, Oswald shot Jesus in the 1300’s, and so on, and so on.
The problem is, I’m now getting old enough, it’s not just the fucking proles that are retarded, it’s spread upwards like osmosis and now most of our so called pillars of society like engineers and doctors and lawyers and judges and bank managers and cops and managers and entrepreneurs and so on are also fucking retarded.
The working title of the Enron documentary was “The smartest guys in the room”, and it really isn’t that hard to be the smartest guy in the room any more, and it doesn’t really matter what the room is, or where it is, or how big it is, or what purpose it serves.
There is a line in Cisco configuration files, it comes towards the end of the config (bear in mind, I’m not cisco qualified or certified or any of that shit, I just do this shit day in…) and it deals with line vty 0 4
line vty 0 4 is what you telnet into from a remote location.
A typical one will look like this.
line vty 0 4
privilege level 15
password 7 (passphrase)
login local
transport input all
Two ways to break it are to insert a line about access-lists near the top, because of course the remote admin trying to get in is never included in the access-list, and changing the last line to “ssh” or “none” instead of “all”
Yet, so far in 2015 all I am getting is going to sites with preconfigured routers that have such errors, or being given configurations to fix things that have such errors, all of which mean that the problem I was sent to fix, remote admin not being able to access the router, don’t get fixed, unless I exceed my culture and fix it.
Of course, one the the things about cisco is this…. any change I make to the config of a running router stays in the volatile RAM ONLY, until and unless I do the “write memory” command to write the currently running config to nvram where it becomes the startup config.
The not so recent case of the american municipal sysadmin who was up on hacking charges, well basically you can put the config in RAM only and never write it to nvram, so when someone local to the router restarts the router to bypass the login credentials, what reboots is a blank box.
I had this discussion with a very qualified cisco guy yesterday, he was bemoaning and deriding draytek kit, which I like and rate and use myself, particularly, he was saying it’s shit on draytek because every-time you make a config change the draytek insists on a reboot.
He-ll-ooo I said to him, this is DELIBERATE, so it’s not a sign that draytek kit is shit, it is a sign that draytek makers knows users, and that includes network admins, are now shit.
Yes, it means you cannot experiment on a live fucking system and not use the wr mem command and end up locking yourself out, and not panicking, because all you have to do is ring the client and ask them to power cycle the router, because it will then reload discarding all those changes and you are back where you started.
It means if you lock yourself out you’re locked out until someone with local physical access changes shit, no more hiding, and you think this is a bad thing?
Draytek also go the “non human readable binary blob” config file route, not the human readable text file cisco route, so no password recovery, you factory reset the bastard to a blank box, and again, you think this is a bad thing?
Physical access to a cisco = root, so the only way to get any security is do what matey did in the states, and many still do, never write the config to nvram, because the only way to do that is in plain text.
Physical access to a draytek = the ability to factory reset it… and even if you manage to extract a config file from an archive somewhere or email attachment, it’s a binary blob, not human readable.
Cisco IOS of course came from an era when the people designing it assumed that the people using it would not be fucking retards, which is why cisco shit is so fucked up in 2015 in real life, too many fucking retards with “enable” access.
Draytek comes from the modern era, when the people designing it assume that the people using it will be fucking retards, you don’t get to fix shit on the fly, you get a more binary experience, that shit is either right, or it isn’t.
Draytek *know* that their shit is “edge” stuff, not “core” stuff, so they know physical security will be minimal at best, cisco don’t care, core or edge, it all assumes there is good physical security, and if there isn’t, which there never is at the edge at a user’s premises, mm, well, too bad.
The old school *assumes* that there is a network in place, which you can then use to tweak and fix and configure said network, draytek stuff *will* do that, after a fashion, but mainly it is built around the idea that you do not use the network to tweak and fix and configure said network, you either have a local guy on site set up the config manually, or you ship a binary config blob, or you ship pre-configured, and pre-configured better be right, or else.
It’s like using railways to build and maintain railways, vs using service roads built along side railways to build and maintain railways.
Guess which model my utility bill conundrum fits into, using modern management and procedure and accounting methods to build and maintain modern management and procedure and accounting methods, or having a back service channel that only ever gets used for “whoa, this guy is already on a prepaid meter, we need to pull this out of the management system where it will just loop around flowcharts until the dude drags us all into court, before this guys drags us all into court….”
