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Microsoft Security Makes "Worst Jobs" List
Stony Stevenson asks, rhetorically, "What do whale-feces researchers, hazmat divers, and employees of Microsoft's Security Response Center have in common? They all made Popular Science magazine's 2007 list of the absolute worst jobs in science." Quoting: "The MSRC ranked near the middle as the sixth-worst job in this year's list.. 'We did rate the Microsoft security researcher as less-bad than the people who prepare the carcasses for dissection in biology laboratories,' Moyer said. Moyer didn't have to think long when asked whether he'd rather have the number 10-ranked whale research job. 'Whale feces or working at Microsoft? I would probably be the whale feces researcher,' he said. 'Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?'" Here's the Popular Mechanics list all on one page.
I guess I'll stick to computer science after I read that list.. Uhh.. There are true horrors in life.
Microsoft actually has security researchers? What do they actually do?
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
For giggles, here's the list:
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0203101256a23 110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
When staff is short I am sometimes stuck with help-desk duties of late. I am appauled by the lack of transparency when trying to troubleshoot Windows. There is no easy way to "X-ray the pipes" to see what is going in and out and where it is getting stuck. Thus, one ends up having to play Sherlock Holmes to figure out the crime based on random clues scattered here and there. One cannot open the blackbox, but rather has to tweak the front knobs, trying a Cartesion Join of all possible combos, or at least a random sample as an approximation.
It does not have to be this way. The OS should be broken up into fairly independent services and the protocol of each service known, shown, and loggable. One could thus isolate oddities. If a peice of software I build constantly has problems (or confusion) with certain processes or steps, I make trace modes and special reports that can echo and document the process as it is taking place. OS's don't seem to be built this way, you have to randomly tweak stuff until the problem (hopefully) goes away. It is like banging the Mellenium Falcon when it stalls. In the digital age I am stuck with analog-like troubleshooting techniques.
Table-ized A.I.
Are two different publications.
I don't think so.
I'm starting to wonder if Mike Judge's 'Idiocracy' may have been a serious film. The articles that make it to the front page on this site have gotten progressively worse over the years.
I fully expect a 'Microsoft = Ass' article by 2010.
Many years ago in my former career I had to treat a guy who had been in a ditch comotose for so long he had maggots well established in every available cavity. Took a while that did.
Not, it has to be said, my fondest memory of that time. It ranks right up there with the odd fact that all tramps poo contains giant lentils.
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
Microsoft has a right to innovate. And if it so-happens that most of what they do is duplication of effort long ago solved on *nix systems and creates a nightmare of obfuscation, well the important thing is that they were allowed to be "innovative" in their OS design.
Viva la innovation!
-- thinkyhead software and media
Am I the only one who thinks those jobs sound fairly interesting? The NASA 0g tester would be miserably boring but it pays great, over 120k for 21 days of work. All the other jobs seem pretty interesting and don't seem to be exceedingly dangerous. Considering this is their "worst" job list, I'd love to see their "best" job list.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
somebody mod the parent troll +5. the article is actually a pretty interesting read with neat pictures, and i'd much rather see a discussion on the benefits of elephant vasectomies instead of another M$ bashing thread. Yes... we get it... it's insecure... now scurry back to your *nixes.
So why on earth would anyone be sterilizing an endangered species? How to make a situation worse, or what?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"'Whale feces or working at Microsoft? I would probably be the whale feces researcher,' he said. 'Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?'""
Quite a lot if your standing near a naked flame when one of them big boys "Breach" 0.o
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Seems to me, with the depth of exploits coming in, you could learn so much from working that job, after a few years you could write your ticket to a good job in security at another company.
Not sure Id call a hardworking job like that a bad job, digging in a whale or crap would be allot worse....
No, that was the biology lab preparers.
The Microsoft guys deal with shit, and are in over their heads.
Oh, wait. THAT was the whale guys!
Mark_Lucovsky:He's going to ask me to work on Sunday and I'm going to do it, because I'm a pussy, which is why I work at [Microsoft] in the first place.
Bill Buxton:Hey, I work at [Microsoft] and I don't consider myself a pussy.
Tim Hanrahan:Yes, I am also not a pussy.
From TFA: "Liz Warren, a researcher at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, managed to convince 15 men to spend 21 straight days in bed..." Nothing to do with the /. summary, which has only narrowly focused only on one of ten jobs...
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
I know TFA is meant in an amusing way... but anyway, I reckon the people who do all of those jobs enjoy them - even the MS one (assuming they get to investigate the problems and it's not just talking about the people who answer the phones and get shouted at).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I know science. I do science. Microsoft security response is not science. It's the intelligent design contingent of the IT world. It can call itself science all it wants but it can't act like science. Sooner or later they'll tell you that you just have to believe them, while they're busily cooking up the next, more complicated batch of the same old same old and collecting more people with impressive credentials to preach it at you.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
While anyone with a clue on computers is crying out for more transparency/debugging logs/etc on Windows, to the average user, it is something they certainly don't want to see.
...
Most users calling a helpdesk go through this procedure:
User: "I have a problem, please help"
Tech thinks through every abusive/rude reply possible and almost (politely) says "Well duh, why would you be calling us if everything was OK?"
Tech: "Could you please describe the problem you are having?"
User: "IT DOESN'T WORK! COMPUTERS NEVER WORK! WHY DO YOU MAKE IT SO HARD FOR EVERYONE?!"
You get the idea. Even trying to step the most polite and most technological of the average users through the task of debugging is hell. They are in the mindset that they should tell you there was an error on their screen... but they'll never mention the important part about what the error codes were and other detailed information.
The same applies universally across Windows AND Linux AND Mac operating systems.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs.
I think you are correct in analyzing their behaviour. At the same time, however, this means their own developers are stuck with an increasingly difficult to maintain system. NOT breaking up a complex system into modules is a recipe for trouble, and it shows. Vista reviews are mostly negative, and the (few) people I know who actually tried it were not so happy either.
Thus I believe that keeping Windows obfuscated will protect their business model in the short run, but make it harder for Microsoft to compete in terms of quality. Vista seems to be a sign that such problems are already growing at Microsoft.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Maybe Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel can spend a day working at MS. It might top the time he had to wade through 3 feet of bat shit. I understand Ballmer goes bat shit all the time over there at MS. Of course, they might not let a fellow named Mike Rowe into their facilities after someone pulled this cute little trick.
...but it's classed as a "science"!
No sig today...
I really like Unlocker. A little freeware explorer extension that shows you what processes have locked a file, and lets you choose what to do about it.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Is threefold:
1) Because Windows is so prevalent it gets hit with more attacks than anything else.
2) Along those lines, it always makes the news, at least tech news, when there's a Windows bug. If you read security focus or the like you discover there's really quite a bit discovered in all OSes, including MacOS, Linux, Solaris and so on. However it rarely hits tech news and almost never mainstream. No such luck for MS.
3) People like to blame all their problems on MS. You get hacked because your password was "password"? MS's fault. A program you install have a security hole? MS's fault. Someone send you a virus "In order to have your advise"? MS's fault.
Basically, because Windows is so prominent, everything is magnified. You are under a much bigger spotlight, and much more gets attributed to you than normal.
"Here's the Popular Mechanics list all on one page."
Now, that's a unique idea. Saves the reader a lot of time.
Fata viam invenient.
..Steve is the best Jobs. ;)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Whale researching is fun. Only one thing explains it: Whale farts ..... light them up. I think they could have been mistaken a few times for weapons testing. An army of Whales has considerably more military might than a team of sharks with "lasers" anyday!
The death penalty has one big problem in my view.
Leaving aside religious considerations, if you kill someone, their problems, including facing what they did, are well and truly over. If you beleive the ideas of the various societies of people with imaginary friends [insert name of religion here], then whatever god they follow will deal with it. That seems a bit of a stretch to me, if this god would, then why do we have to do anything at all? I find the whole idea suspect in the extreme.
I would say a life in maximum security prison or isolation, and the memory of what they did that put them there would be far worse.
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
'Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?' *Thinks about it* Ohhhhh, he's talking about the whale-research job!
... Steve!
Ah, so that is why the next version of Visual Studio is code named Orcas
Unpleasantries.
Microsoft security researchers are paid a GOOD deal of money. I was asked to join the Microsoft Virus Research division by a friend I know. They are one of the few companies who will actually pay you to look through disassembly in IDA Pro. It is very difficult to find a job in reverse engineering.
This article is really stupid. They omit mentioning the fact that everyone researches this type of thing in a virtual machine or in non-executable format.
I actually regret turning down the job to finish school, even as a huge advocate of open source. (I'm also an advocate of making money).
"It surprised even me how much you can learn about a [mammal] through its feces,[...] You can even tell individuals apart."
Poop here to authorize transaction.
They forgot to include "adult theater janitor."
Inserting [insert witty signature here] here does not constitute a witty signature.
Well obviously, since Vista is far more secure than other operating systems, working MS security must be pretty boring. You basically just make sure the most secure OS on the planet... stays secure.
Bor-ing.
Now the REAL excitement comes from fixing the OS security on Lunix (free as in worthless) or OSX (OitSux!!!). They literally have more bugs than people to fix them: just look at the amount of "disclosed/unfixed" in the chart!!
It's always more fun and excitement fixing stuff that's totally broken. When you do security for Microsoft, you are basically just maintaining what is already the best. Very thankless: when you are #1, the only direction is down. But at least you can have the knowledge that everyone else is at least a decade behind an operating system your company put out in 1995.
To an extent, it's not surprising. We don't understand why people become criminals (when the economics are against it), so we don't know how to rehabilitate them.
The ones that we know how to deal with (i.e., they were in it for the money, and this had the most postive payoff that they could find) we also don't chose to deal with properly. The big criminals we give token punishments for at "gentlemen's clubs", the small ones we ensure that they have no other way to earn a livelihood. In neither case is there an attempt to convince them that they have made a mistake...except in getting caught. Or in playing politics so poorly that they became the fall-guy.
Still, when society ATTEMPTED rehabilitation, society was a safer place. And there were fewer criminals, overall.
So even though we don't know how to actually rehabilitate someone, we still ought to try. It makes society better for the rest of us.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Discovery has a "worst job" show, right?
Love to see Mike Rowe walk into MS's lobby and see Bill just tackle him out the door. Or Ballmer.
Yeah, I'm weird.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.