From what I am reading --

Article only states he refused to hand out the network admin passwords to a room and speakerphone full of people he felt were unqualified. There was no mention of who exactly wanted the passwords -- or if a follow-up attempt by 'a superior' was made while not on speakerphone. If he is in trouble for JUST the refusal to give the password out on speakerphone and in a room with a dozen people, I'd give him a pat on the back and a bonus for proper IT security.

When I was an IT assistant at a high school, I'd pull the same stunt if my boss (or the principle) asked me on speakerphone to give out the local admin passwords on the computers to a dozen people (Staff, teachers)...

Just like Terry (If i read correctly)... I'd be protecting the computers and the network security by withholding the admin passwords from people unqualified to have admin access without admin intelligence in the field (i.e. not sticky-noting the local computer password to the monitor on the computer for kids to see)

Already was hard enough keeping kids from installing kazaa and other security hazards without admin rights... give out the admin password to a dozen non-IT security-unaware people? yeah right....

One of terry's listeners probably would have put the admin password on a stickynote to his work and home computers..

While I agree with you that the City was irresponsible in not taking precautions against this crime, it doesn't justify the act.

Childs essentially held the City IT hostage. I have little patience for this kind of crap, after firing a little BOFH for being a BOFH, and discovered that the little prick had set up a chron job that regularly checked for the presence of his account in the userid list, and if missing, wiped the entire boot volume.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to backup the entire volume before allowing the new IT guy to touch anything. The poor guy was only on the job for about half a day before the entire system went down, and for a while there he was sure that would be his only day on the job.

Also shouldn't the manufacture's be responsible for this somewhat? It's obvious when you save a document to a computer that the drive needs to be wiped, not so obvious when it's a copy machine. Shouldn't there be big warning labels and a "wipe all" button on the back somewhere? Sharp apparently offers a product to wipe copy machine hard drives.... for $500:

I worked for a company a few years ago where one of the things I did was to oversee all leases and support contracts, including copier leases. Our support contracts had language specifying the requirement for drive wipes on location at the termination of the support contract (which, of course, coincided with the termination of the lease).

Even if Apple never responded, it wasn't -his-. He should never have kept it. It should have been turned in to someone who could get it back to the owner.

Most people choose to leave it at the bar and let the bartender handle it. Others choose the police station. For something this valuable, the police station was the better choice.

It was never an option to keep and sell it.

And those are ridiculously easy once you get the trick. The first ones that were out, I remember, hit in the very early 90's in magazines like Popular Science. In those, you had two dots right above the picture, and the instructions were to visually split the dots and combine them in such a way there were now three. That achieved, look down at the picture.

Most, if not all of the later ones removed those instructions, and it became a game of "stare at this until you get it." For the really old-timers, we understood the real trick is to cross your eyes slightly and vary the degree until you hit the magic separation necessary to resolve the picture.

I'm not entirely convinced the effects are related to those used for 3D movies, since Magic Eye works through the transposition created by overlapping the two visual fields by crossing your eyes.