Babies and Bathwater
May. 25th, 2007 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksOne of the downsides of my laptop, which has done sterling service for a couple of years, is that it came with Norton installed. After a while, of course, Norton, like a crack supplier, says "oh yes, it was free, but now it isn't. Pay up".
So, you try to uninstall it. But, no matter what I do, I still get a notification at start-up that my Norton Anti-Virus is out of date. OK, I just have to click cancel, and the machine loads up, Norton-less, but, man, it really annoys me. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere in the registry that will turn this notification off, but I'm damned if I can find it.
Anyway, this minor irritation is as nothing to the sheer brilliance of Symantec last week. Last Friday an automatic update to the simplified Chinese versions (simplified Chinese, that is, not simplified versions) of Norton Antivirus decided that two important parts of Windows XP were in fact viruses. Without so much as a by-your-leave to the owners of the machines (we can see the pure IT mentality at work here, can't we?), Norton Anti-virus deleted the files.
Which caused Windows XP at about 4,000 businesses in China to, well, not to work.
All is quiet at Symantec at the moment on the matter of compensation, because sums of between $10K and $1m per company are being bandied about. I hope that they take the money out of the IT guy's wages. That might be the only way that we can get these coders to act in a rather more careful manner.
In fact, Symantec's PR person said that: "[The company's] primary focus is to ensure it responds to all technical enquiries first and then non-technical enquiries will be responded to accordingly,.
Yeah, right. because, well, basically, as an IT company, you really are like a fish out of water when the lawyers appear, aren't you?
This could be fun. Norton Anti-Virus gets its comeuppance in the courts.
The point here is, not that an incompetent geek created an update that identified components of Windows XP as viral (staggeringly icompetent though this achievement was) but that the system deleted the files without checking with the user. Because, of course, the user cannt be judged competent to decide, can he? Men in White coats syndrome, indeed.
At work, our IT centre, for reasons of their own, decided that the start-up script default in Internet Explorer would not have "auto-complete" turned on for forms. Now, one can understand turning it off for passwords, but to turn it off for forms is a bit of a pain. So, each day, I have to go into Tools/Options/Content/Auto-complete, to turn back the forms box to "on". This is quicker than me typing in "insurance reinsurance insurer* bancassurance" in the advanced news search box on Google News, plus "-medical -health -crop -NHL -CIS" in the exclusion box (a quick quizlet there on why those exclusions are in there).
All that I have to type instead is "ins" and "med". and wait for autocomplete to do its work.
Autocomplete is also useful because I have to upload issues each day to the web, and I can never remember the issue number. But with autocpmplete, I just type in the first two figures, and the form supplies me with the latest number that I typed in (i.e., yesterday's).
But was I consulted on the IT department's decision? Well, no, obviously. But I did e-mail them to ask who on earth makes these decisions, and the head of IT basically just said "We do", although he did emphasise that "consultations" took place. Well, OK, I'll believe him. Thousands wouldn't.
Another pain in the ass in my life is the "anti-spam company", (whom I shall leave nameless to avoid their scumbag lawyers sending me a writ) a company that I will be dancing on the grave of should they ever run into any difficulties similar to those currently being suffered by the dicks at Symantec.
Every so often, this anti-spam company (an industry leader, which boasts of its IT awardson its home page, by the way) decides that my newsletter is Spam. Of course, the first thing that my readers (most of whom are happily IT illiterate) know of this is when the newsletter fails to arrive. And the first that I know of this is when they e-mail me (usually about going-home time), to ask if I have sent it out. Because anti-spam company doesn't actually bother to TELL the recipient or the sender ('cos the sender must be a spammer, right, because our software says so!) that the item has been ruled to be Spam. Sure, they might send out some automated message to someone in the company, but that doesn't get to me or, most likely, to the recipients of the newsletter.
So, once every couple of months, I spend an afternoon manually rejigging things in an attempt to bypass the anti-spam software. Why is this? Because even Gass em Balls either won't tell you why the message has been blocked (they won't tell me, because I am not a client) or can't (they once told one of their clients that they didn't know. "Perhaps there are too many blank spaces in the message header", one guy said, rather mysteriously). Yep, they can write the algorithms, but they can't fucking understand how the algorithms work once they've written them.
What a company.
The thing is, anti-spam companies only deal with the IT people in their client companies (one of which we shall call "a leading international insurance broker") rather than with the people actually sending and receiving useful content (whom we shall give the technical terms "me" and "nearly the entire senior echelon of the company"). IT people are so keen to stop spam that they don't consider the impact that might ensue if some really important e-mail failed to get through. OK, my newsletter isn't "really important" in the grand scheme of things. But the entire system seems to be deliberately set up to make such a disaster a possibility. That kind of thing doesn't happen with the telephone.
So, may all incompetent IT "security" companies go bankrupt. May their executive boards rot in hell. And may my life become a bit less fucked.
So, you try to uninstall it. But, no matter what I do, I still get a notification at start-up that my Norton Anti-Virus is out of date. OK, I just have to click cancel, and the machine loads up, Norton-less, but, man, it really annoys me. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere in the registry that will turn this notification off, but I'm damned if I can find it.
Anyway, this minor irritation is as nothing to the sheer brilliance of Symantec last week. Last Friday an automatic update to the simplified Chinese versions (simplified Chinese, that is, not simplified versions) of Norton Antivirus decided that two important parts of Windows XP were in fact viruses. Without so much as a by-your-leave to the owners of the machines (we can see the pure IT mentality at work here, can't we?), Norton Anti-virus deleted the files.
Which caused Windows XP at about 4,000 businesses in China to, well, not to work.
All is quiet at Symantec at the moment on the matter of compensation, because sums of between $10K and $1m per company are being bandied about. I hope that they take the money out of the IT guy's wages. That might be the only way that we can get these coders to act in a rather more careful manner.
In fact, Symantec's PR person said that: "[The company's] primary focus is to ensure it responds to all technical enquiries first and then non-technical enquiries will be responded to accordingly,.
Yeah, right. because, well, basically, as an IT company, you really are like a fish out of water when the lawyers appear, aren't you?
This could be fun. Norton Anti-Virus gets its comeuppance in the courts.
The point here is, not that an incompetent geek created an update that identified components of Windows XP as viral (staggeringly icompetent though this achievement was) but that the system deleted the files without checking with the user. Because, of course, the user cannt be judged competent to decide, can he? Men in White coats syndrome, indeed.
At work, our IT centre, for reasons of their own, decided that the start-up script default in Internet Explorer would not have "auto-complete" turned on for forms. Now, one can understand turning it off for passwords, but to turn it off for forms is a bit of a pain. So, each day, I have to go into Tools/Options/Content/Auto-complete, to turn back the forms box to "on". This is quicker than me typing in "insurance reinsurance insurer* bancassurance" in the advanced news search box on Google News, plus "-medical -health -crop -NHL -CIS" in the exclusion box (a quick quizlet there on why those exclusions are in there).
All that I have to type instead is "ins" and "med". and wait for autocomplete to do its work.
Autocomplete is also useful because I have to upload issues each day to the web, and I can never remember the issue number. But with autocpmplete, I just type in the first two figures, and the form supplies me with the latest number that I typed in (i.e., yesterday's).
But was I consulted on the IT department's decision? Well, no, obviously. But I did e-mail them to ask who on earth makes these decisions, and the head of IT basically just said "We do", although he did emphasise that "consultations" took place. Well, OK, I'll believe him. Thousands wouldn't.
Another pain in the ass in my life is the "anti-spam company", (whom I shall leave nameless to avoid their scumbag lawyers sending me a writ) a company that I will be dancing on the grave of should they ever run into any difficulties similar to those currently being suffered by the dicks at Symantec.
Every so often, this anti-spam company (an industry leader, which boasts of its IT awardson its home page, by the way) decides that my newsletter is Spam. Of course, the first thing that my readers (most of whom are happily IT illiterate) know of this is when the newsletter fails to arrive. And the first that I know of this is when they e-mail me (usually about going-home time), to ask if I have sent it out. Because anti-spam company doesn't actually bother to TELL the recipient or the sender ('cos the sender must be a spammer, right, because our software says so!) that the item has been ruled to be Spam. Sure, they might send out some automated message to someone in the company, but that doesn't get to me or, most likely, to the recipients of the newsletter.
So, once every couple of months, I spend an afternoon manually rejigging things in an attempt to bypass the anti-spam software. Why is this? Because even Gass em Balls either won't tell you why the message has been blocked (they won't tell me, because I am not a client) or can't (they once told one of their clients that they didn't know. "Perhaps there are too many blank spaces in the message header", one guy said, rather mysteriously). Yep, they can write the algorithms, but they can't fucking understand how the algorithms work once they've written them.
What a company.
The thing is, anti-spam companies only deal with the IT people in their client companies (one of which we shall call "a leading international insurance broker") rather than with the people actually sending and receiving useful content (whom we shall give the technical terms "me" and "nearly the entire senior echelon of the company"). IT people are so keen to stop spam that they don't consider the impact that might ensue if some really important e-mail failed to get through. OK, my newsletter isn't "really important" in the grand scheme of things. But the entire system seems to be deliberately set up to make such a disaster a possibility. That kind of thing doesn't happen with the telephone.
So, may all incompetent IT "security" companies go bankrupt. May their executive boards rot in hell. And may my life become a bit less fucked.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-05-25 06:34 pm (UTC)Windows is largely viral so congratulations to Norton for dealing with it so suitably. I hope they both go down a giant plughole simultaneously blaming eachother for incompetence, like the maelstrom scene in Pirates 3.
matt
no subject
Date: 2007-05-26 12:42 pm (UTC)PJ
Tipping points
Date: 2007-05-25 10:24 pm (UTC)I know not, therefore, whereof you speak of "an IT guy." This is something to do with management, and I have profitably ignored management (up to and including not turning up to meetings) for the last twenty years. "An IT guy," I would surmise, is defined as "somebody who knows less about IT than you do, but has greater privileges."
This is not how it was supposed to be. Indeed, it is not how it was. We are all going backwards, but some of us are screaming louder than others.
As it happens, my first girlfriend is now the "Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer of Symantec Corporation."
Much as I still love Becky, and miss her, she knows fuck-all about computers. And that is how it should be. Selah.
Re: Tipping points
Date: 2007-05-25 10:35 pm (UTC)In the words of Birks: "basically, as an IT company, you really are like a fish out of water when the lawyers appear, aren't you?".
Rebecca A. Ranninger. BA something or other, Harvard, 1980. BA Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1982. Twat Stanford Law (Masters, I believe, although I sat in on some of the lectures and couldn't believe how dumb a bunch of blue-eyed, blond whiteboys could be. I was naive), circa 1985. Sharked around the Bay Area in corporate law between then and when she joined Symantec in (I think) 1993.
Beware, there are indeed geeks out there. There are also well-versed lawyers. And there always have been.
Becky is drop-dead gorgeous and funny, though. But she'll screw you through the law if you give her half a chance.
the green streak
Date: 2007-05-26 12:00 pm (UTC)http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/management/executives/bio.jsp?bioid=rebecca_ranninger
Re: the green streak
Date: 2007-05-26 12:34 pm (UTC)PJ
The green streak rides again
Date: 2007-05-28 09:24 pm (UTC)We made a mutual decision. She grows hers, I lose mine.
It's sort of like Samson and Delilah, except the pillars stay up.
And what, exactly, would "too much hair" mean? Is this quantifiable? Is there a carbon tax in here somewhere?
Are we to ban Afros for ever? (Please God, yes ...)
I'm thinking toenail growth. I'm thinking belly-button fluff. I'm thinking all sorts of biological side-effects that are either unappealing or downright bad for the environment. For example, on a personal level, I've really got to stop munching on spare motorbike parts.
But ... hair?
Re: Tipping points
Date: 2007-05-26 12:39 pm (UTC)And Doubleday, it's no use trying to hide behind the line of "I've been an administrator for a long time, so I'm okay". All administrative privileges are elitist shit put together by people who assume that "ordinary" staff will cause an entire collapse of the system unless they are blocked out. If that's what you think your staff will do, the solution is to employ different staff, not to implement administrator privileges and have the "computer people in white coats" "we know better than you do, so don't bother your pretty little head with it" attitude.
How could you have fallen into such a sad pit?
PJ
Noblesse de l'ordinateur
Date: 2007-05-28 08:33 am (UTC)Easy. I used to work on Stratus VOS, a million quids' worth of kit that had no system adminstrators. Nobody was any more privileged than anyone else. Upwards of thirty people worked on one of these things at a time, and nothing ever went wrong; or at least, no more often (and probably less often) than a "modern" system. Even the production systems were like this. It was a joy.
Now I work on Linux machines, which tout themselves as "Open Software." They seem pretty locked-down to me. Personally I do not believe that we will truly enter the brave new world of universal computer empowerment until the last CTO has been strangled with the entrails of the last System Administrator. Although I suppose we'd have to find a way to deal with the last Network Adminstrator and the last Database Administrator as well. Then there's the nitwit Web Administrators. And, I guess, the guy in the basement with the large spanner who hits the UPS every now and again to make it come back up.
Complexity breeds complexity, and stupidity breeds stupidity. (Comments re New Labour may be inserted here, to taste.)
The only reason to have "Administrative Privileges" on any system whatsoever is because we're all too lazy to take infinite pains with the firewall, and it's easier just to have two logins -- one for everyday use and one for installing rootkits and the like. Note that there is a world of difference between having "Administrators" and having "Administrative Privileges."
I haven't looked, but I seem to recall that this was the gist of my point in the first place.