[TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past

[cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> At an early one, when Gould first came out, we social-engineered their 
> booth-marketoid into giving us root access; the buggers never did pay the 
> bounty, claiming that we'd cheated.  Well, yeah...

In a former life, my employer was looking to have its Internet connection
audited by an outside party, and brought in Bellcore.  As the insider
most concerned with such things (which was why they didn't trust me),
I sat in on the kickoff meeting.  After they detailed the list of
penetration attacks they were going to use, I raised my hand and said
"What about social engineering?"  I feel morally certain that nobody
from $EMPLOYER except me and my boss knew what that was.

The Bellcore rep did, however:  "Oh, we never do that."

"Why not?"

"It always succeeds, so it doesn't form the basis of actionable
recommendations."

> At yet another, we had a Sun 3/50 window connected to a Convex, and acted 
> all innocent when various dweebs did the old "echo 99k2vp..." etc trick.

High-precision approximation to sqrt(2).  What's the trick?

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I read "upcoming" in [the newspaper] once more, I will be downcoming
and somebody will be outgoing.