Novell, who had Microsoft sell their distro on the premise that Microsoft owned hunks of Linux is one of the last bastions of Open Source? Google gives lots of code away and sponsors events to get student developers to cut their teeth writing for Open Source projects, and it's scary that they're big bad proprietary guys getting their "commercial hooks deeper into" their own invention? And somehow the article title is the name of a Rod Stewart song about people judging the town tramp?!?!?!?!?!? Jeesh. Things are murky enough without this guy trying to make it worse in hopes you keep coming back for the part where he sorts it all out for you.
the way it persists itself in autostart is really nasty,
Which simply shows that the lack of Linux malware isn't because Linux is somehow magically superior, but simply because nobody has taken the time to write any...
Um, no. It doesn't show shit. Not unless he explains that "the way it persists itself in autostart" is something harder to rectify than the readily-editable plain text files he listed. I've known IT professionals who couldn't come up with a way to salvage a machine hit by a "ransom note" trojan. Hell, at least once Sophos has decided it was easier to crack the password than provide cleaning instructions. Windows has lots and lots of places to hide files that start when you boot and log in, built in features for disabling everything you might do to fix a problem (so that your office peons don't do anything "dangerous"), and no way to get at the system without loading everything that's configured to load - well, almost no way. You can edit the Windows registry from a Linux CD. I'm sure that's totally easier than vi
OP, yes, it's unethical to release what you have. No one's going to thank you for choosing a worthy cause to donate their hijacked bandwidth and CPU cycles to. And unless you're the guy behind this, you didn't get there first and that thing you threw together in a week won't be giving qualified "security people" any revelations. If Linux wants to lay claim to Unix's heritage, those guys were decades behind the first people to exploit stupid security blunders. Stop having a chip on your shoulder about people who didn't put two and two together when they saw "Hardening Linux" on the shelf at the bookstore. Those aren't sysadmins who are going to be saved from their ignorance when "security people" - desperate for a way to tangibly illustrate that the worst-configured systems can be pwned - get your toolkit like manna from heaven.
...what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible.
That's not quite all there is to it. The phone monkeys are also working off a script. And probably haven't been working at that job long enough to learn anything else about what you'd like somebody to figure out. They might even be fielding calls as an "outsource support vendor" to too many companies at the same time to learn anything more. Your odds of talking to a subject matter expert are approximately zero. Their job is not to be good, their job is to cost less than somebody good. Speaking a mashed up creole version of the language in which they have titular fluency is just adding insult to injury a lot of the time.
Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.
There are as many different sets of roles for helpdesk employee as there are helpdesks. I work at a helpdesk and it is very much an interruption to my job if someone comes to me with any of the more mundane issues the desk as a whole handles. Analyzing trouble tickets for trend analysis, developing workarounds to new defects, trying to automate those workarounds so that we don't have 800 sites all calling us about the same thing, updating the knowledge base, evaluating new hardware and software releases (yes, it's some other department's job to do that first, but they like to bury things in 50-page release notes where people have to call the helpdesk to accomplish something basic, forgetting that that's the short definition of "defect"), writing database front-ends so that we don't have to have the frontline poking around in places we'd rather they wouldn't, and I can't even begin to describe the variety of conference calls I manage to get roped into. Even in the frontline of a generic helpdesk at a non-technology outfit he could easily have one set of responsibilities that involves someone running up to him and telling him to drop everything, and another that involves having something engaging, stimulating, and remotely resembling why he got into technology in the first place that he's being asked to drop. Oh, and RTF summary again - do you really think that web developers, dba's, and database architects get asked literally every five minutes to handle something stupid and boring without ever getting a few hours to sink their teeth into a task?
IT is a support function
Um, no. The people who design and implement the things that later get supported are also working in IT.
Yeah cause they killed all kinds of people before 1990 when all they had was paper.
Yes, and they still do. And that's not despite a sweeping adoption of IT, it's partly due to a lack of one.
If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information.
Do you have a blood type other than AB positive, and if so, do you have this information on a medic-alert bracelet? There's information that you expect to have in advance (you're right, it doesn't amount to much), information you gather and have to make note of (I give him drug X, so don't give him drug Y, it won't mix, and by the way, he says he's diabetic), information that has to get to and from other parts of the hospital (uh yeah, his potassium was high when he came in, you might want to take him off that banana bag). We don't know what was happening in that ER, what challenges they worked their way through for a day, how many people they turned away exactly between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M., or how badly they needed to be seen (I've had two ambulance rides and zero life-threatening medical emergencies myself). The same guy who blogged that this was "more about billing than patient care" without backing up that assertion in any way links to his own earlier post where he talks about what "an obvious slam dunk" Electronic Health Records are, because it will result in "tens of thousands of lives saved annually in the US alone". My point is that people (I don't mean people like yourself who make sensible points, swillden) who don't know the story - and you still don't when you RTFA - shouldn't be going "OMG! You turn amboolance away 2 catch up on teh paperwork? Me know wuld hav dun that!" should remember the old adage "Nothing's impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
Why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?
In an ER, "paperwork" includes information on whether they'll kill you if they give you a certain drug or transfusion. Stuff like that.
we have someone in IT who does Office training who normally will develop spreadsheets for a user if they need help
That poor fuck. That's like asking IT to show you how to use the toilet because it's got one of those fancy high-tech motion sensor thingies on it.
I once tried to take first shift sleeping and last shift driving home from New Orleans to Richmond. Unfortunately, I wasn't actually able to sleep when it was my turn - my feet were raw from walking around for hours in the rain. My brother got ticked when I woke him back up after only about 100 miles, until I explained that when we came up on green signs hanging off an overpass, I had thought I was driving on a 30-foot leprechaun. I probably would have gotten us all killed except I figured out that this thing that didn't make sense (at least, not after a second of "Hey cool. I didn't know leprechauns were highways") was probably related to this "spasming" feeling in my eyes and squinted really hard.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.