The IT stories enterprise IT pros actually laugh at.
Volume 343, Issue 2 · 7 articles from 2 issues
A YouTube comedian pitted his own AI representative against a company's AI interviewer, with predictably messy results.
Comedian Graham Dot Zip has built a following by trolling the AI bots companies use for early-stage job interviews, with some videos drawing nearly 2 million views.
In his latest video, his AI representative 'Victor' faces an AI interviewer acting for a company, and Victor misstates Graham's qualifications and misrepresents his work on a project.
The Register draws the lesson that job seekers should not trust a bot to negotiate on their behalf.
It also notes widespread dislike of AI interviewers among candidates.
In this BOFH tale, a failing basement computer tied to the waste water system gets passed up the management food chain with smelly results.
In the latest Bastard Operator From Hell episode in The Register, an ancient basement computer connected to the building's waste water system stops working, and the BOFH and PFY doubt a replacement could cope with two mysterious ISA cards labeled only '#1' and '#2'.
As they warn that basement parkers will soon need waders, the problem is passed up from the Boss to the Director, HR, the CEO and finally a board committee while an unpleasant aroma reaches the lower floors.
Along the way, the pair meet 1990s heroes who know how to deal with bosses.
The Register's PWNED column: a small firm that refused security help was hit by ransomware and failed months later.
In The Register's weekly PWNED column on corporate security lowlights, Intrust IT consultant Dave Hatter shares two stories.
In one, a small construction company's new CFO wanted to hire Intrust, but the owner vetoed it, believing his business was too small to interest hackers and his one-person IT staff, a relative's acquaintance, was enough.
The company was later hit by ransomware and went out of business months afterward, while the second story shows how good defenses held up against a determined phishing campaign.
On Call: a 1990s field engineer who turned down a promotion spent his time cleaning up after the incompetent colleague who took it.
In The Register's reader-contributed On Call column, 'Preston' recalls being a senior field service engineer in the late 1990s who turned down a consultancy role because he liked hands-on work and the clients who made his coffee just right.
A colleague took the job and was soon reconfiguring Windows NT 4.0 servers for dual CPUs, setting up backups and installing UPSes.
That colleague left a trail of wreckage Preston had to repair, producing what the column calls invaluable case studies in what happens when incompetent people climb the ladder.
On Call: after a ransomware attack, a school IT hire's password policy hit a data manager who'd used 'letmein' since 1998.
In The Register's On Call column, a reader describes joining a UK school in 2020 after the previous IT manager left amid 'accounting irregularities' and ransomware took the network offline for three months.
His audit found a six-letter password policy with no complexity or expiry, and passwords that had never been changed.
When he forced resets, the data manager objected that she'd used the same password since 1998 and that everyone knew it so they could run reports; it was 'letmein', taped to her desk.
The principal made him revert the change, but a nonprofit that later took over the school reinstated it.
A reader trying to collect a parcel from an Irish OOHPod locker found a Windows command prompt on the screen instead.
In The Register's latest look at public displays behaving badly, a reader in Ireland went to retrieve a parcel from an OOHPod postal locker.
Instead of the normal interface, the screen was blank with a minimized window, and tapping it brought up a Windows command prompt.
No on-screen keyboard appeared, so the reader could not do any mischief.
The piece is a light reminder of what happens when kiosk systems are not properly locked down.
Who, Me?: a Sperry Univac operator cancelled the wrong print job and wiped out a week-long inventory run as US bosses watched.
In The Register's Who, Me? column, a reader recalls working at Sperry Univac's UK office in the era of punch cards, tapes and disk platters, when program output went straight to printers.
A weekly inventory job took five or six days to run and print, and three managers had flown in from the US to watch it.
When a smaller job started generating far too many pages, he got the programmer's OK to cancel its print stage but stopped the printer running the inventory job instead.
All the output, even the summary pages, was lost, and the visitors had to wait another week.