AdamSmith

Now THIS is the way to work. Until you get caught! Software developer Bob outsources own job and whiles away shifts on cat videosVerizon's hunt for firm's mysterious hacker exposes 'top worker' at firm who let Chinese consultants log on to do his daily work The Guardian, Wednesday 16 January 2013 13.12 EST Could this kitten possibly be more interesting than the job in hand? Secret outsourcer Bob probably thought so... Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images When a routine security check by a US-based company showed someone was repeatedly logging on to their computer system from China, it naturally sent alarm bells ringing. Hackers were suspected and telecoms experts were called in. It was only after a thorough investigation that it was revealed that the culprit was not a hacker, but "Bob" (not his real name), an "inoffensive and quiet" family man and the company's top-performing programmer, who could be seen toiling at his desk day after day and staring diligently at his monitor. For Bob had come up with the idea of outsourcing his own job – to China. So, while a Chinese consulting firm got on with the job he was paid to do, on less than one-fifth of his salary, he whiled away his working day surfing Reddit, eBay and Facebook. The extraordinary story has been revealed by Andrew Valentine, senior investigator at US telecoms firm Verizon Business, on its website, securityblog.verizonbusiness.com. Verizon's risk team was called by the unnamed critical infrastructure company last year, "asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs", wrote Valentine. The company had begun to allow its software developers to occasionally work from home and so had set up "a fairly standard VPN [virtual private network] concentrator" to facilitate remote access. When its IT security department started actively monitoring logs being generated at the VPN, "What they found startled and surprised them: an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China! As in this connection was live when they discovered it," wrote Valentine. What was more, the developer whose credentials were being used was sitting at his desk in the office. "Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed him logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor." Verizon's investigators discovered "almost daily connections from Shenyang, and occasionally these connections spanned the entire workday". The employee, whom Valentine calls Bob, was in his mid-40s, a "family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn't look twice at in an elevator." But an examination of his workstation revealed hundreds of pdf invoices from a third party contractor/developer in Shenyang. "As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him." He had physically FedExed his security RSA "token", needed to access the VPN, to China so his surrogates could log in as him. When the company checked his web-browsing history, a typical "work day" for Bob was: 9am, arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours, watch cat videos; 11.30am, take lunch; 1pm, eBay; 2pm-ish, Facebook updates, LinkedIn; 4.40pm–end of day, update email to management; 5pm, go home. The evidence, said Valentine, even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. "All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually". Meanwhile, his performance review showed that, for several years in a row, Bob had received excellent remarks for his codes which were "clean, well written and submitted in a timely fashion". "Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building," wrote Valentine. Bob no longer works for the company. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/16/software-developer-outsources-own-job

Many in the industry are making soothing noises to the effect that such teething problems are common with any new aircraft, and even some long in production such as the Airbus 380. The reason I am not so ready to swallow that assumption without a lot more data is Boeing's decision with the 787 to radically transform both the product design (all-composite airframe) and the production process (widely dispersed outsourcing of both design and fabrication of major product segments and systems). BMW's design engineering and manufacturing engineering organizations, to take just one example, have what they call (can't recall the German phrase but it sounds even more forbidding that way) an 'iron law' -- namely, never make big changes to the product and the engineering or production processes at the same time. That introduces too many new, unfamiliar sources of variance and uncertainty to make root-cause analysis of problems feasible within the limited program schedule. My suspicion is this may very well have happened, and is now beginning to bite Boeing in the hiney. Of course they did stretch out first delivery by three years or whatever. But some I know inside the company are disgusted that even with this, the time they had to spend helping subcontractors fix their mistakes still ate seriously into time that Boeing engineers would have preferred to spend on validation and quality testing.

If I said I like you the way you are, I suppose you would just call me a cheapskate.

After you grow your hair out, I will plait it for you into those sticky buns she wore on the sides of her head. You will however have to pay for your own breast and ass implants.

In high school physics, seems like we were forever rolling little steel marbles down ramps and trying to measure something or other about them. Of course it never worked the way it was supposed to. In our writeups we had to explain any source of 'experimental error.' Smartest guy in the class, bored stupid, would always just write: Scum on balls.

Scientists take to Twitter to reveal their less than scientific methods Scientists across the world are tweeting about how experiments really get done. Some are brutally honest, most are very funny Weird science … not all scientists are as methodical as you might have expected. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive Scientists are a precise bunch. Our experiments are carefully planned down to the last detail, the methods we use are selected with great care and forethought and our sample sizes are perfectly calibrated to ensure statistically valid results. But first our hypotheses are constructed only after carefully reading our peers' work. You can see evidence of this clearly spelled out in any research paper which will invariably present a logical series experiments that lead to a nice clear conclusion all carefully referenced to all the relevant prior-art. So if a reaction was left for 60 minutes there must be a sound scientific reason for this. And of course the equipment we use is carefully built from only the highest quality parts. At least these stereotypes are what we wanted you to believe in. That is until a couple of days ago. Since then, scientists from all four corners of the twitterverse have not just dismantled that pure-of-thought image but demolished it with repeated 140-character salvos all bearing the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods. Most of these tweets are jokes that rail against the stuffy and sometimes unclear way that scientific papers are written, but there is certainly more than a grain of truth in most of them. It all started with a neuropharmacologist researcher and blogger called Leigh when she tweeted "incubation lasted three days because this is how long the undergrad forgot the experiment in the fridge #overlyhonestmethods". It didn't take long for the hashtag to go viral. More tweets along similar lines followed including "…the chemicals were combined & stirred by hand for 2 hours by our project students as they were getting on our nerves" from @Simonleighuk, "The experiment was left for the precise time that it took for us to get a cup of tea" from @mahzabin and my favourite from @sciliz "the eppendorf tubes were 'shaken like a polaroid picture' until that part of the song ended". So maybe those reasons for particular reaction times aren't based on quite so sound scientific reasons after all? What about our equipment and sample sizes? Ecologists @biosciencemum and @bgrassbluecrab had something to say about that: "Our experimental equipment was a paddling pool, a bucket with a hole in, some gaffer tape and three cardboard boxes", and "we didn't test as many clams as oysters because we're pretty sure someone found the samples and ate them". You don't see that appearing in journals now do you? (But maybe you should.) Then there's that nice narrative describing that logical series of steps. Well, guess what: "The logical sequence of experiments and ideas expressed in this paper may not have actually occurred in the order given" from @upulie, and "There was no plan - we just tried stuff we thought would be interesting until something interesting happened" by @russelgarwood. As for those carefully read papers from our peers, well sometimes budget cuts get in the way: "We didn't read half of the papers we cite because they are behind a paywall," wrote @devillesylvain. So what started as a single tweet from a frustrated scientist has ended up becoming one of the most fabulous, frank and funny pieces of science communication I've seen in a long time. Some might worry that these tweets have presented scientists as hapless and undermined confidence in science. But I think they have provided a rare insight into the everyday lives of scientists and demonstrated that we are human like everyone else. Moreover, #overlyhonestmethods has managed to demystify science in a way that no other example of science reporting, blogging or broadcasting can quite manage. Overlyhonestmethods is still going strong. Take a look on Twitter or some selections of the best on storify and io9. • Mark Lorch is a chemist at the University of Hull. He also blogs at www.t2ah.com and www.chemistry-blog.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/10/scientists-twitter-methods More examples... http://io9.com/5974256/overlyhonestmethods-is-the-postsecret-of-the-science-world-and-it-is-amazing http://storify.com/BeckiePort/overlyhonestmethods

More dreadful royal portraits, with snarky comment... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jan/11/kate-middleton-best-worst-royal-portraits#/?picture=402244397&index=0 E.g. ... Can someone please reattach my right arm?

If you enjoy bottoming, your hole will open up for just about anything short of the Louisiana Purchase.

...so reports Musto: James Franco Reimagines The Controversial Gay Movie Cruising By Michael Musto Fri., Jan. 11 2013 at 10:13 AM Here's Leonard Maltin's description of the 1980 William Friedkin film Cruising, starring Al Pacino. "Cop Pacino goes underground to ferret out bloody killer of homosexuals in this distasteful, badly scripted film. Gay world presented as sick, degrading, and ritualistic. Filmed on authentic N.Y.C. locations." Funny, I always thought it was just the killer who's sick and degrading, while the leather gays were just being themselves and partying. But in any case, the movie caused a righteous controversy and has always been a sore spot for the community--in my case because 40 minutes of gay S&M footage was rumored to be cut from it (to avoid an X rating) and has never been seen! Until now--sort of. The fearless James Franco--who never shies away from gay content--has codirected and costarred in a film coming to the Sundance Festival called Interior. Leather Bar, which reimagines what was in the lost Cruising footage. It's a long way from Planet of the Apes--or is it? http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/2013/01/james_franco_re.php

Something I once woke up to find posted on the web site of a favorite (straight) watering hole, by the barmaid/owner, reporting on the previous evening... Big handsome construction worker: "AS, I may get drunk enough to go home with you, but I'll be thinking about our barmaid." AS: "Do you think my asshole knows the difference?" (Names changed to protect the guilty. )

If memory serves, only Michael Nesmith did.

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.” Dorothy Parker

I very much agree with your first 2 sentences.

Meanwhile, a counter-view. Can't quite tell if this is straight up (!) or tongue in cheek (!!) ... http://m.guardiannews.com/film/2013/jan/14/genius-jodie-foster-speech-golden-globes ... which could after all be the writer's point: is he honoring her, or subtly mocking through mimicry?

Or any of our various other religions?

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." Oscar Wilde

hito, I do not think you want a husband. I think you yearn for a fellow monk to share your cell in the monastery. OZ and I, meanwhile, would likely be unfaithful to the village priest and the Mother Superior at the same time.

Hm. So the speech shows she still can't write. (Viz. my post above.)

Comfort ye, on my account at least. I was hooked from age 21 to 32, then quit. Now I somehow can smoke for an evening, then forget about 'em again. No idea how but it is so. Some theory of competing addictions is probably in order.

My ignorance: has she ever written a script?

The old Balkan Sobranies for me. They were the same cigarette, same gold filter but a black body. (Now they are white, filterless, come in a neat little tin box. But the look was everything.)

You and David Souter. When he was nominated to the Court, PBS I think did a bio documentary on him. Some former law partners were interviewed; one, recalling Souter's (supposed) conservatism, said they had chosen as Souter's motto something first uttered by the Earl of Cambridge: "Any Change, of any Kind, in any Thing, is to be Deplored."

I don't know. My last couple months in NYC I lived with a straight guy, mid-30s, originally from Puerto Rico, who enjoyed my blow jobs and sleeping together. (Actually sleeping, wrapped round each other, tho no sex beyond the foregoing.) Not a hooker; a grunt in the music production biz. Several times he procured fuck buds for me from among his queer friends. He it was who introduced me to No Parking, come to think, a happy hunting ground for pickups, the one time I went there before moving away. And showed me how to live more or less on the streets for a few weeks when that became needful. Think the observations in Lucky's post on gender identity are relevant, and have some applicability in age ranges above those highlighted in that article.

Don't lean back and get complacent now! (And next time round, get a bf who doesn't mind yer hanging out here!)

Good lord. This has the selfsame tone as a rather exquisitely dreadful short story she submitted to an undergrad lit rag I worked on when she was a freshman at Jale. I was so taken by it that I kept a photocopy.