Slashdot Mirror
White Lies Help Stressed Computer Users
An anonymous reader writes "Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work."
People are lazy?!
Stuff like this could become the first direction all fingers point when a company goes down.
So much for it being because a company's product got beaten out by a competitor, or because its leadership embezzled it into the ground, or creative accounting.
Everyone now will be looking for the back office Richard Pryor type (I forgot the name of the movie) as a scapegoat.
American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
A (semi)-respected publisher puts out a book on how to shirk actual work?
Like any of you losers works anyways.
Back in my day, we had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow wearing a sun dress, just to submit our punchcards to the mainframe guy! And you complain about a little typing.
-- Lost the password to my two-digit uid.
"One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock"
Unfortunately "Received:" headers add their own date e.g.
Received: from mta02-winn.ispmail.ntl.com (mta02-winn.ispmail.ntl.com [81.103.221.42]) by mx2.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id xxxxxxxxxxxx for ; Sun, 17 Jul 2005 03:56:09 -0400 (EDT)
People have always been finding ways to cheat work. Whether its longer breaks, sleeping in the bathroom, yeah i know people who have done it, or god knows what else. My favorite though is the george costanza's method, building a bed under your desk to take naps in.
God i've thought about it myself a few times......
If you're resorting to lies and trickery to avoid the work you ought to be doing, then you should quit. If your job is so bad, don't carry on with it. Find one you actually like, that you enjoy, that isn't something you want to avoid. You'll be a lot less stressed and you'll find life a whole lot easier.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
While setting back you clock may fool some people, it wont fool anyone who knows about the "header" of an e-mail. A quick peek there and you find all the timestamps of each email server that passed the email along. If there is a "huge" gap inbetween when it was send form "localhost" and the first mailserver...something is up.
Also this doesn't work if one uses webmail where one would have to reset the server's time.
NOT that I don't resolve to such trickery once in a while. Most of our boses won't read the header of a message, and only the true geek has his e-mail viewer set to e-mail source instead of the nice outlook (evolution for me) display. If your cubicle is in a public place, virtual desktops comes in handy. gaim open on desktop 1, quickly move to desktop2 with source code open when you hear footsteps... or for the windows fans, alt tab to a full screen program where you have "actual work" open...
I would be interested in what other slashdotters do, I'm sure we have some pretty original ideas.
This seems likr a lot of effort to go through to not do nay work.
The SMTP server accepts email from any time -- you can be from a totally different timezone remember.
Also, did anyone else notice this at the end of the article?:
It took so many people to write that?
High-technology tricks once seen as the purview of hackers
Such as actually using the features included in your e-mail client and changing your time settings? Amazing high technology hacker tricks. *rolls eyes*
> Even then, why does the SMTP server accept e-mails from the past?
Yes, that's ridiculous! Imagine it would also accept a fake sender address...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Why aren't the message times marked by the SMTP server itself?
They are, just look for the Received: header. Some software (Outlook) makes it hard to look at these headers, but they are there.
Even then, why does the SMTP server accept e-mails from the past?
Because of the store-and-forward nature of SMTP. In a typical situation, your mail is first delivered to your local SMTP server and then sent to the remote SMTP server. And some sites have complicated setups with multiple servers even within their own organization forwarding the messages a few times. Since delays and downtime can creep in a few places, there's no good reason to deny "old" messages. Although unlikely dates are usually flagges by anti-spam software as being suspicious.
More generally, SMTP doesn't try to check the authenticity of message headers or content in any way. Which is why you can also "forge" the From-address, etc.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Hello, I am sending this into the future from 1908! How are you? I hope things are well in the 21st century! Anyway, I just wanted to say "hi". I'll let you get back to maintaining your underwater habitat and defending the Earth against the Martian aggressors now.
This message was sent from planetary node Alpha-7 at 15:27 on March 17, 1908.
"I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
It should be pointed out that this high-tech slackery and the widespread phenomenon of downloading music and other media are two aspects of a single process.
What is happening is workers, reduced in today's "service economy" (subservience economy would be a better term) to little more that soulless drones, are rejecting the labor and property regimes imposed upon them by the ruling classes.
Another instance of this historical turn is the acts of so-called "terrorism" taking place more and more often at present.
While these acts are clearly atrocities, and those who perpetrate them must be stopped, it is only a matter of time before the masses wake up to the fact that religious extremism is a mere superstructural stand-in for a more direct oppostion to the capitalist-imperialist system, their true downpressor.
Thus the global proletariat will eventually unite in opposition to the dehumanizing system of oligarchichal imperalist capital that today crushes so many spirits.
Resistance is taking many forms these days. These are times for those who desire true human liberty to be optimistic.
What ever happened to good ol' fashioned drawing eyes on your glasses so it looks like you're awake?
why does the SMTP server accept e-mails from the past?
Cause it's so much simpler than accepting e-mails from the future.
From what was described in the article, I don't understood how the "cheating" took any less effort than something novel like... doing the work.
That's like friends I have who shorten "thanks" to "thnkx," because it saves them time. They're right! Wow, in 50 years, they might have saved enough time to watch an episode of South Park!
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays. To the average person who walks past it looks like I'm working. They think I'm doing some work using the command line. As the IT area in my office is too full I'm sitting in accounts where they have no clue what you are doing, but had I opened a web page in a regular browser it would look bad.
I know plenty of guys that leave their desk set up so you'd have no idea they left for the day. A jacket on the back of their chair, a cup of coffee next to the keyboard, an open document, keys on the desk, etc.
One I discovered is that you can take a full-sized screenshot and use Windows XP's built-in slideshow screensaver to display that as a locked screensaver. Hide your clock, take a shot of a Word document, and your locked, idle PC looks like you're in the middle of work.
There's no way I'm working that hard to avoid working. I'll goof off the old fashion way, thank you very much.
Was out to go buy myself a few grammes of coke
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
or, at least, not when you compare between different businesses, cultures or payments.
So, american (resident) workers are lazier, compared to, well, the mexican workers in the same company, same position and for the same particular task.
When I read the title, I thought it was about the kind of white lies you tell users who get stressed out with their computer, in order to not make it too technical for them. "The big yellow 'E' was the source of the naked women who scared little timmy. Now when you want to get to your internet, just click the red fox on the blue ball. That's your internet now. Also, the blue bird with the envelope will get your mail for you now." Or when you try to hold your laughter when a user walks up to you and proudly declares he bought a "harder disk" for his movies, and just say "really? Thats cool." (pretty hard that one, though)
Fox can take the sky from you.
Seemed more like an ad for a book. I'll admit I only read half TFA because you need javascript enabled just to view the 2nd page. -Kevin
You could spend a lot of time and effort avoiding working.
But that's work. A true slacker wouldn't. Nor would a true slacker write a book about it, or read one.
A REAL slacker wouldn't even bother to fini
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Far better to avoid going to work in the first place. If I'm going to slack on company time, I'd rather do it at home, or at the beach, or pretty much anywhere but work, thank you very much. And low-tech solutions are usually the best - the ones where you know some 1337 sysadmin isn't going to be able to dig up evidence against you.
My favourite low-tech solution, like so many good ideas, was invented in desperation. Beautiful sunny day, and I was supposed to go and cook hamburgers in a sweltering kitchen which was in an airport terminal - and the terminal was essentially a massive greenhouse. No way. There's really only one way to guarantee getting out of work when your work involves food, and that's to have food poisoning or diarrhoea. But everyone gets the shits when the sun comes out. No problemo.
I prepared a squeezy bottle, filling it about two-thirds full of water, cleared the route to the toilet, and put the lid down. Then I went back into my room and called in sick.
"Hello, is that Gav? ... Sorry, Gav, I'm not going to make it in... diarrhoea, I think it was the fish I had last night... Gav, I know every other bastard has called in sick already, but I'm - hold on!" With that, I ran, phone in one hand and squeezy bottle in the other, along the hallway, burst into the bathroom, flung the seat up with a clatter, sat down, pointed the squeezy bottle between my legs and down into the pan, squeezed it and groaned like hell. Squeezing and releasing the bottle would result in a wonderful mix between high-pressure-liquid sounds and farting sounds, which echoed around the pan and in turn the bathroom. Acoustically, it was perfect.
Finally, gasping, I said, "Gav, you still there? ...Sorry man... yeah, you're right, I'd better have tomorrow off too."
I had to buy some factor 50 sunblock so I didn't have an awkward tan to explain, but by God it was worth it.
Always pretend to be annoyed. People think you're really busy when you look annoyed.
I used to rename all the executables for my playthings to the application names for editing, compiling, archiving and so on. [Its good to have privs.] If they sniffed my processes, I look like I'm bustin my hump for 'em
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Tip: In the UK, forward your mobile to a friend, and get them to forward back to you. Anyone dialling either of you will get the "network error" message.
Get your own free personal location tracker
If anybody was on to you, they could sit down at your desk and do some nefarious things under your network login and you'd be ultra hosed.
Sure, you could pretty much no matter what with physical access to the machine, but not locking up at night would practically be inviting it.
There was a book out recently called the cheating culture. I highly recommend it as it points out the cheating is a systemic problem in all levels, from school to business, and that it's pretty damaging to long term values. It also points out interestingly enough that in a lot of other countries such widespread cheating would lead to a revolt however in America the poor can cheat just as much as the rich. So everyone gets into a self perpetuating mindset of 'everyone else is cheating so why does it matter' thus continuing the vicious cycle.
They are; if you can look at all the headers on a mail message you'll see the arrival times as it hops from server to server. But the recipient normally only sees the "Date:" header, which is set by the mail client, and this is easily hacked, as TFA says.
Some related anecdotes:
I have a friend whose PC clock is about 20 minutes past, it's disconcerting to receive messages from the future, and weird when my reply is 10 minutes ahead of the question (hard to make sense of the mailbox later too). He ignores my pleas to get a simple NTP client.
A few months ago I found some of my messages were taking a very long time to get through to certain people. Getting them to bounce back the complete message showed their ISP had rejected my message temporarily (I forget the error number), which prompted my ISP's mail server to wait several hours before retrying. It turned out this was a braindead anti-spam measure, if any mail server sent "too many" messages" in a given period they were throttled. Of course, since my ISP is very large it was easy to trigger this with a spike in normal message traffic, let alone any rogue spammer.
Talk about putting the "fun" in funeral.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
"Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year."
I suggest people look at how those numbers are computed. Apperances can be deceiving.
The simple slacker's solution: StealthSwitch. It's a foot switch that automatically hides the window you're viewing in Windows.
Read the owner's about page to see what he's about. It's a pretty cool idea that jives with the theme of this topic. Of course, this assumes you're at the office and not boating at the lake, but it's a tool for "stressed computer users" *snicker*
No, I'm not affliated in any way, just a happy customer.
Hard work often pays off after time but lazyness always pays off now.
And of course being typical Slashdot moderators you got a +1 Insightful for should have been +5 Not-Knowing-What-The-Hell-You're-Talking-About by applying "conservatives" with the broadest brush possible. What we have in Washington are not conservatives. They're nothing more that political grandstandards who hide behind the conservative shielf because they think it wins them brownie points of some kind, not that this matters to the 75% of /. mods who seem to wring their hands waiting for a good ol' anti-conservative post to come along just so they can mod it up whether or not it has any basis in fact.
You should have added an anti-Fox News statements as well as an anti-Bush statement so that the mods could have given you a +5 insightful.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
With a typical Linux installation, a compromised process only has as much access as the user name it was run under. That is, a virus that remotely compromises a process will not have root access. Just about every Linux distrubution comes near to forcing this type of setup - it is possible to get around it, but it is far more work than simply going with it.
This is in stark contrast to the typical Windows configuration, where any remotely compromised process grants the attacker full access to the machine. It is possible to set up limited user rights, but this breaks a great deal of software. Also, such a setup is not encouraged by the Windows installer.
I was working for a startup company, and had been shunted into the role of network administrator. Not something I was fully qualified for, or even wanted.
But at one point in time we ran into cash flow problems, big surprise right.
So after about a month of not getting paid I decided to take some time off until the paycheck arrived in order to do some side jobs. I did not tell anyone else, I basically just locked up my office, and did not show up for a little more than a month. (Hey I needed to get food on the table, and I was pissed as all hell by that point)
I come back just to check on the server, which was still running ok, and I find out that everyone thought I was extremely busy and running errands or doing something around the office. (Since my office door was locked)
So I get my back pay, pay for the full month, a raise, AND a bonus.
For some reason I could not be bothered to correct their mistake....
Yeah, backdate your computer's clock. Then try to explain why the first Received header on your email, which is appended by the SMTP server through which you sent your message, is always x hours or days or whatever ahead.
Also, what of the possibility that an email server will just replace your date header? If this isn't a server configuration option, it should be. I haven't seen a server that does this, but I've seen NNTP servers do it, and some that also add an additional NNTP-Posting-Date header.
Liberty in your lifetime
It's nice that you can remember government figures... but if memory serves, we're at the tail-end of a soon-to-bust housing bubble, employment is much worse than released figures would have you believe (it only counts those who are still receiving unemployment benefits, which stop after 6 months, and not all unemployed opt to receive said benefits), CONSUMER inflation is not at a rate of 3% a year but is closer to 10-12% per year. CORPORATE inflation, due to tax cuts and imports from countries like China is below 1% which, when factored with Consumer inflation, brings it to around 3% (corporations are much larger buyers than we are as consumers, not only to they by the "stuff" that makes their product, but also their means of production). Look at the cost of going to the grocery store, the price of gas, the cost of housing, and the interest rates on unsecured debt. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones to get a nice job that offset these figures, but most people are not in that boat. Life is becoming much tougher, financially, to contend with.
Let's also not mention the ever widening trade deficit as we try to compete in a global economy where our wealth is being purposefully siphoned off into developing nations. How about the national debt?
It boils down to this: there are sectors of the economy that are experiencing very high profits (energy, housing, Military services). This performance is so very high that it currently offsets the poorly performing "rest of the market". That is not a "strong economy", that is an end-of-life "bubble economy". What do you think will happen when the housing bubble comes to an end and all of those fools who financed a $300k house are now sitting on only $100k in assets and another $200k in remaining debt (in the form of a mortgage) on their recently devalued property? Yeah buddy, the economy is strong, unemployment is not an issue and little green leprechauns will be at your door shortly with a big pot of gold for the hard working American family.
it could be that bosses have unrealistic expectations about their employees in the information age *cough* Electronic Arts *cough*
It's good to see that people are still civil in their discourse even though others, like myself, often times resort to sometimes rude jabs. Sorry if my points came off sounding a little arrogant.
Americans will become more aware as things get worse. If they don't get worse, people will pay no attention to it. Look at the london bombings and the Carl Rove fiasco. People are starting to see through things and doubt the often touted "official story". The current political structure in this country is going to be hit hard by a hard pressed, overworked and underpaid constituency and it's not going to be pretty. People are looking for any excuse to tar and feather politicians so I think we're starting to see this resentment come to a head.
If people want to learn, they have to first learn to question. Ask anyone if they trust the media and they'll undoubtedly say "no". But at the same time, they simply turn around and listen to what they have to say anyway, often taking it at face value as actual fact. These people need to learn not to believe everything that comes out of the glowing tube or is printed on paper or keyed into a web site somewhere. Just with the web, people can lookup far more information than previously possible.
The politicians are messing up and its becoming obvious to people thus, they are questioning. This will bring them around towards becoming more informed and as a result, more active. I expect to see the next election have record turn out.