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The Dirty Jobs of IT
dantwood writes "In an Infoworld article, Dan Tynan writes about the '7 Dirtiest Jobs' in IT. Number three? Enterprise espionage engineer (black ops). 'Seeking slippery individuals comfortable with lying, cheating, stealing, breaking, and entering for penetration testing of enterprise networks. Requirements include familiarity with hacking, malware, and forgery; must be able to plausibly impersonate a pest control specialist or a fire marshal. Please submit rap sheet along with resume.'" Paging Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe to the IT desk.
One-page link.
who publishes stories on IT web sites and only puts a tiny amount of information on each page but has tons of pages in a desperate attempt to increase ad revenue? I think that should be #1 on the list.
Monstar L
For a time I was the primary (er, only) technical person for an eCommerce site. I learned one important lesson. Sales people have zero morals. They would lie to their own mother to make a sale. Hell, they would toss in sex with their baby sister to make a sale. I felt sleazy just keeping their servers running. I hope I never have to take that kind of job again.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Actually, this guy is the TV narrator, and this guy was sued by Microsoft.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
My teacher stayed in a nearby motel and hacked in over the telephone, but a military officer with expertise in security parachuted into the base at night - it's a big base, with lots of wide open space.
He started breaking into computer rooms. Interestingly, he was detected but not caught. My teacher intercepted emails from the base staff warning that an intruder had been seen in the area.
Eventually they went public, and submitted a report to the staff as to how they could improve security.
They emphasized that this sort of thing is meant to help, and not to cost anyone their jobs.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Would this then, be a description of Mike Rowe Soft?
Jus' wonderin'...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What is the point of linking to the Dirty Jobs entry on Wikipedia? What's wrong with the actual Discovery Channel site?
Well, I looked at your link and I see some ads and a big Flash thingy. (I'm using FlashBlock so I have to click to view Flash. Wonderful!) If I load the Flash, I see some fancily designed animated cruft with a bunch of buttons that may or may not lead to actual information. Much of text is at slightly random skewed angles, and there's no obvious place to find basic facts.
When I look a the Wikipedia article, on the other hand, I see no ads, no Flash, and some nicely formatted text, written to give quick answers, laid out in tidy sections, all using a standard format that I'm familiar with from a bunch of previous visits.
Other than that, no reason.
1) Dreamweaver webmaster
2) Keyboard cleaner (cheetos and pepsi and genetic splatter, oh my!)
3) Floating point wrangler
4) Monochrome wire detangler
5) Witnessing <body bgcolor="#FFFF00">
6) rpm dependency arbitrator
7) "Cowboy Neal option" writer
UTF-8: There and Back Again
So your grumbling boils down to a) Flash and b) your comparative lack of familiarity with the Discovery Channel sites.
No, my point is that Wikipedia is easier to get information out of. That's because they understand that fancy design reduces utility. Further, their only reason for existence is to provide answers, whereas the Discovery Channel has different purposes, like promoting their show, reinforcing the fan base, and selling my attention to advertisers.
And suggesting that it's somehow more efficient to become familiar with every primary-source site on the web rather than just one? You can't expect to be taken seriously with statements like that, can you?
it is silly to use Wikipedia when there are better/more direct sources. Basic critical thinking skills will allow you to see that.
Basic critical thinking skills? Yes, please use them before posting. It will save us all some time.
More direct sources are very rarely better for a quick overview, which is why I have shelves of dictionaries, almanacs, concordances, indexes, encyclopedias, guides, maps, analyses, abstracts, and literature surveys. I also have plenty of primary sources, and go to them when needed. But the whole point of an encyclopedia, on-line or off-, is to make basic info more conveniently available than primary sources. Which is what 99% of people want as a starting point. If you don't, fine. Post your little link and move along.
Pretty early on in my career, I worked at a Multi Level Marketing [read: Pyramid Scheme] company.
The company makes multi-millions, and I was personally in charge of the systems that calculates, tallies, and print out "reward" cheques every month. I had to be intimately familiar with all the details and clauses and sub-clauses and secret definitions of obvious words like "one week" or heck even what "50" means. I knew first hand that what our marketing people said was very different from what our sales people said, which is different from when people call our customer service, and which in turn is many miles away from how the system actually works.
They never lie, because you get sued when you lie.
But ever since, I have been convinced that it is dirtier to speak in half-truths and equivocations than out-right lies.
[confession]
I was young and dismissed my disgust at the company as my being too "picky" about jobs. I convined myself to tough it out. Eventually I found out the company was stealing from ME, and only then did I quit. So I already got what I deserved. [/confession]
sorry about posting as AC, but I have a rather unique handle I've been using for quite a few years.
You know, running a penetration testing firm sounds like an excellent cover for black-hat hackers.
Nothing gives you plausible deniability for your data heists like being paid to try stealing it in the first place...