Heh, I would view it as an opportunity to fail to comply with management. Historically I have always been on the lookout for such opportunities. I still remember the cool bit of code some joker wrote...first it displayed "Press any key to begin formatting C:", then it waited about 5 seconds, after which it displayed "Just kidding...Formatting...n/n/n" and it cycled through some fake head numbers while making a nice ominous clicking sound through the speaker. I think it would make a comeback if somebody ordered me to wear an IT droid shirt.

Bailiff, remove everyone from the courtroom, I want some peace and quiet so I can think of some politically correct way to respond to this in order to get re-elected.

Sure, if it could surf I could use it to monitor my nms while driving down the road or while sitting at the bar. It would be cool if it was more than a toy, (as in has an SSH client, etc) but even if it didn't I could cope with it. If it starts uncontrollably spewing Rollax, Vialis, Shrinx ads I will just have the bartender put it in the beer cooler for a while so it can cool down. I could take it to wally world and scan random barcodes for no apparent reason other than to confuse the ad targeting bot. I still have a USB cuecat around somewhere...I think it's filed under b for barcode, c for cool, s for stuff, or worst case, l for lost.

I think the fact that so many road warriors have retired from travel is good evidence that they won. Personally, I quit taking road warrior jobs not out of fear of terrorists, but simply because I am tired of pathetic TSA bullshit making me throw away my shampoo and mouthwash every week.

The TSA theatrical security is far more pathetic than security through obscurity ever was.

The real terrorists are the TSA themselves.

Actually, I did not previously know the origin of that line.

I thus acknowledge Cool Hand Luke, Rosenberg, Pearce and Pierson for the original work as well. ;)

What we have here is "Failure to Communicate", some orbits you just can't reach, which is what we had last night, which is the way we wants it, well we gets it. :)

Inspirational credit formally acknowledged to Axle Rose & the rest of G&R

Do you also refuse to utilize Firefox? If you are truly making this assumption then you really should refuse to use Firefox because those web forgery notifications probably meet your definition of censorship. I tend to visit the censored pages to make sure that I supply them with some worthless drivel. I wouldn't want the spam scamming nimrods to be left without any humor, plus the bogus information helps the ecommerce victims draw a crosshair bead on the perpetrators. If Elvis, John Wayne, and Jimmy Hendrix all show up at your store on the same day to buy Rollaxes your are probably worthy of a closer look by the fraud brothers in arms.

Perhaps Apple buyers are really just paying $500 to avoid Microsoft products. And judging from the loyalty of Apple users, one could easily conclude that they find it to be a good investment.

I was a regular business and personal customer for a long time. Sadly they sank the ship themselves, with Acer & Microsoft's help. Vista was and still is pathetic defective crap. Shoving it up so many customers asses was a sure way to go down in flames. I payed the restocking fee on returning the utterly defective and useless Vista Christmas laptops, and they lost me as a customer, not because 'they couldn't do anything about it', but because they never even tried. Billy's ability to suck a 5 mile freight train through a coffee stirrer even caught me off guard. After having paid $3k for the worthless OS/2 1.0 SDK I thought I knew what he was capable of. Vista is a greed scam that makes Madeoff look like a choir boy.

"Would you mean, perhaps, administrative policies that from all of this, it would appear to have been Childs job to implement?"

Yes, I think that is a fair conclusion. If it wasn't his responsibility to account for these archival processes then it sure should have been somebody's (like maybe his manager who locked himself out?). In any case, the problem was a lot bigger than his refusal to disclose IMHO.

I expect he will be able to find more than one Cisco certified security professional who will point out that devices with limited or no physical security can and should be configured with "no service password-recovery". Proper administrative policies would have had version control archiving router and switch configurations, thereby completely alleviating the impact of disabling break key recognition.

I don't call it secure until at the very least, I can't break in without extraordinary measures.

Actually, he may be an 'asshole' with more integrity than you understand. One strict interpretation of Sarbanes Oxley elements (albeit probably not intended) does prohibit such a disclosure in the context of systems affecting revenue(and networks he administrated did fall in that category), and would place the city in non-compliance. The reality is that the SOX rules that were supposed to govern shared accounts have really created some seriously misguided ambiguity. Unfortunately, what seems logical and intuitively right also seems to be directly at odds with compliance law. It's a cluster fsck with some inodes over-subscribed by politicians who can't count or add. To make matters worse you can have NDA crap that is pathetically written that imposes post employment disclosure prohibition that further complicates the issue. Without reading his NDAs I don't know exactly what he was facing but in over 20 years of consulting I have seen some real idiocy on paper mandated by lawyers, and in fact I have walked away from gigs where the paperwork was so contradictory at inception that it was impossible to comply with one doc without violating another. I backed out and walked away, no harm no foul. In short, I would say that the manager tried a heavy hand when proper direct pressure was more appropriate. A demand to seal and vault global enterprise credentials (root/enable/etc) could have been complied with, and a subsequent de-vault for documented appropriate cause would have complied with SOX where a demand for direct unauditable disclosure violates several SOX auditing factors.