I GTTFA and didn't see any explanation of how the employee who'd sent the alert "has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions."
Were those other occasions actually his fault, or was it because some jackoff above him in management writes things like "This is not a drill" into the script and doesn't bother to hint otherwise until after the message is done with "exercise exercise exercise". I'd probably make a mistake too if circumstances were like that and it was my job to warn an entire state about a missile attack.
How long is the message anyways? Was it repeated several times and THEN ended with "exercise exercise exercise "? Are you supposed to wait until the very end after hearing "this is not a drill" or are you meant to 'leap into action'?
We're given very vague details, but journalists are more than happy to run with the claim that it was the fault of an employee who "made some people feel uncomfortable" and is 'Incompetent' (likely misinterpreted really poorly worded alerts twice).
Well then his comments on 'supporters of Uber who are anti-regulation' doesn't apply to you I'd think.
You'd short circuit on the first logical evaluation dropping out of the statement; shouldn't even evaluate the second conditional.
in 2012, Blizzard sold the legacy servers off as part of a charity auction. I'm not entirely sure if that includes things like old storage media or not, but if it did they may have had the game server installed on them.
I see. So because you feel changes made to a game are 'garbage', people should be free to take the game and run it themselves however they like. The various private servers hosting realms and taking in profits from """donations""" in exchange for in game items and benefits is harmless legally, I'm sure.
Indie hosting old games that stopped receiving updates or official server support is one thing. It's a whole other thing to do it with a game that has been actively played for the past 14 years with official servers very much alive and well, patches coming out regularly, the company actively promoting and selling the base game (they did still sell it as part of the Warchest bundle, even before Classic was announced) etc. You can't play the game at all without owning 'Classic' WoW.
Things are going to be even less in favor of these private servers now that Blizzard is actively working on classic servers, the 'abandonware' claims are going to go up in smoke regardless of any veracity they may have held. Regardless of how 'trashy' you think the expansions are, there won't be much excuse when you can go back and play it the way it used to be on it's on classic only server.
Personally I've been keeping up with the story and have the events after defeating the Burning Legion to look forward to. I can't see why anyone would want to play an MMO of all things that never changes or gets updated. After you've run the same raids for one year, two years, three... got all the best gear, seen all the sights, killed every monster, what are you playing for after that? Friends? There are lighter applications if you want to chat with people.
Not sure you can call classic abandoned now that Blizzard has publicly announced new official classic servers at their last convention.
It's coming back, and the plan is "Classic as it was, nothing more". No word on which classic content patches will be included or if these patches will be introduced over time.
I don't respect any companies. They are businesses not people, regardless of how US law wants to treat them.
I respect a number of artists and programmers, many of whom I follow online or can chat with through apps like discord. One in particular, Minionsart, is an up and coming artist who has been using patreon to help fund their work by sharing tutorials on shaders and modeling techniques.
Don't trust the marketing department when they talk to you about their companies business plans.
Reminds me of another company who's marketing team said "You're doing this to build trust!". They were refering to a multi week process of performing repetitive tasks using their online service. This 'trust building' is needed to unlock a pre-order bonus for pre-purchasing their next big product release. (This pre-order sold so well it brought the companies payment service to it's knees by the way)
More than likely, it's intended to prop up subscriptions at a time the service is notorious for losing customers who temporarily halt their subscription to wait for the next product release. Can't drop your subscription if you have to keep coming back weekly to 'build that trust' for a couple months in order to get any use out of that 'pre-order bonus'.
Is it the same as slowing down older devices and claiming it's because of expiring batteries? I think it fits the pattern at least, one is for planned obsolescence, the other is as an attempt to extort more fees from customers.
You're right for calling out the 'generalising 50% of the population bit'. It's more like 100% of the population is ABLE to do it, and a certain portion of the population regardless of gender will pursue romance or marriage with an ulterior motive.
The terms 'marrying into money', 'gigolo' and 'gold digger'? These were not invented in a vacuum.
But hey who knows, maybe that hot 18 year old really is marrying the octogenarian with millions in the bank out of TRUE LOVE and their relationship is entirely healthy.
My own work experience with Intel isn't terribly great however. They are more than willing to drop contractors because of their disabilities, and more than protect themselves from the usual laws against discrimination through their paperwork. If Intel ever offers you work and you have any kind of disability requiring an accommodation, do NOT work for them as anything other than an employee protected by anti-discrimination laws. Fuckers left me stranded on the other side of the country after paying to fly me there and then dropping my contract because I had a nervous breakdown (I'm Bipolar).
I'm not sure how you're tripping over the 75% fabrication thing.
The factory in china is much larger than the plants in the US, while it's the only one in China, it has significant output, so yes, it makes up 25% of all chips produced by Intel. You don't really think you can build a town sized plant in the US like they allow you to in China, do you? They need bicycles just to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
My father was an Intel engineer for over 30 years (now retired). My family still lives in the neighborhood right next to the Chandler facility, and while it's admittedly large for the surrounding area, a third of it is R&D and small fab. There were quite a few times my Dad was flying off to China to work onsite, couple times a year at least. I'm sure on the internet that holds about as much weight as "My dad works at nintendo" without me showing off an Intel insurance card or something. Western Chandler is basically a company town, so having a Dad who works there really isn't uncommon here.
Yep, those cloud environments will be self sustaining on hopes and dreams, and never need anyone with experience in UNIX to touch them. Cloud services run on what, Windows Server yeah? NO. WORRIES./s
Notice how it's Xamarin/C#? C# is the language, Xamarin is the framework that you write C# into in order to make cross platform applications.
It's meant to be comparable to other things like Ionic/JS or ReactNative/JS.
Personally I find the way Xamarin does binding between the model and the view to be a cludge compared to the simplicity of using AngularJS (which is different from Angular mind you, which Ionic uses).
I don't see why anyone would want an artificially aged card, liable to die of from the constant abuse of being used to mine 24/7, doubly so if the previous owner did any overclocking. Fan wear, VRM failure... it's likely gamers won't be able to trust the used card market until the next generation after crypto fails.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are a number of people out there who run their cards responsibly to keep the cards health in check. But as of now there's a LOT of people in it to get rich quick pushing hardware way to hard.
It looks to me that Google is providing hosting services and possible financial compensation for content on their service and accepting near zero liability for issues arising from the abuse of their system. They have people essentially working for them as entertainers who they will stop paying at the drop of a hat at the first sign of possible trouble. (Issues like demonetizing on false/frivolous CC claims with little recourse for the content creator. Not to say it isn't used legitimately, but people are making successful claims on bird calls and white noise)
It's Google's show though, so I guess they're free to do that. Their creed is 'Do no evil', so I suppose that leaves them free to be as morally grey as they want. I think that if they continue to treat the majority of their content creators as disposable/interchangeable, it's only a matter of time before Youtube's source of good ad-worthy content begins to dry up. Google has made a lot of people reliant on Youtube for their income, if they stop paying then those creators are going to look for money elsewhere - right now there is a large shift from ad revenue via Google to ad revenue from product placement, endorsements, patreon etc. Things that Google makes zero money off of for use of their service.
There's a bit of difference between moving chess pieces, and writing/using software that actively interferes with the operation of someone else's software and their customers.
So he ran a website facilitating the commerce of identity theft - in the order of billions of records handled. In that time he managed to make just north of $120k per year (USD $96.6k/year). (This based on https://krebsonsecurity.com/20... saying the site began selling data in Oct 2015)
While the article doesn't give exact details on what apps they looked at, the category seems to be 'Industrial equipment control apps'. This could mean a lot of things - these could be apps that just act as a remote control interface to a machine unable to cause the machine to act unsafely.
...Or it could be an app used to update/program the machines firmware... in which case all bets are off when you can inject what you want into the brains of the machine if any of it's safety features are dependent on settings from the board. Current thresholds, temperature thresholds...
Look at the increasing popularity of industrial robots. A lot of their safety features are largely dependent on their programming - sensor readings/responses, movement ranges, even the series of motor movements performed in an action could be altered by a compromised update utility in an app. You don't even need to tamper with these things for them to be highly dangerous and lethal to people who get in their range.
Yes, mobile apps are being used to program hardware. I just recently released an app that can update the main boards firmware of our companies equipment over bluetooth or usb. It's entirely feasible to do this with any kind of re-programmable hardware designed with the feature in mind.
Honestly it probably wasn't even necessary since Gawker decided to go ahead and assert that not only were they happy to ignore court orders, they said they would post child sextapes if they felt it was newsworthy enough.
Who needs a billionaire backing you when the defendant is working so hard to earn the death penalty on it's own.
The death of Gawker was not that of a valiant news network, it was the just end of a sub-grade tabloid who'd post anything for a quick buck in ad revenue and had flaunted the law one to many times.
It's entirely feasible for bitcoin to have a negative valuation. The cost to perform transactions isn't free by nature of how it works - the cost is even growing as it becomes more popular.
It's wholly possible to have an amount of bitcoin you can't touch because it would cost more than it's value to use it. Right now, having around 30 dollars in bitcoin may as well be worth zero if you want to do anything other than hold onto it.
Amazing how he suddenly acts like he has remorse and a moral conscience now that he's facing significant consequences. This is the same person who very publicly announced how hilarious it was the man died, how him swatting left no responsibility of the mans death on his shoulders, that he had a right to do such things because he was a 'leet untouchable hacker', that he was obligated to severely punish people playing a video game of all things if they slighted him. Over the course of several years he called in multiple swatting and bomb threats to private companies, public events, schools and more because it was 'fun'. The things he's saying now are purely in the hope of reducing the punishments he is about to receive. I hope no one is gullible enough to buy his charade.
Since we're talking about the use of a robot capable of operating a check point, consider this. A robot can safely approach and inspect that suspicious woman and child for explosives because it doesn't need to fear for it's life like a human soldier does. It will perform that search because it is disposable and not free thinking. If woman is a suicide bomber then she kills herself and we lose a robot. We've eliminated the need to accidentally kill a civilian on suspicion alone. Activate another robot send the old one in for repair. Heck you don't even need to give the robot a gun. Have human soldiers watch over the checkpoint from a safe distance and have them behind protective cover - making the checkpoint even more difficult to take on because now soldiers don't have to stand out in the open if a firefight does break out.
I'd honestly expect suicide bombing checkpoints to drop in popularity since you're no longer terrorizing your enemies soldiers. Same goes for roadside IEDs and the like. Possible IED? No judgement call needed, send in the bots. What good is an IED meant to maim and kill if it's target can be repaired and back in the fight far quicker than a human?
Ah yes, 'micro-aggression' like man-spreading or fartrape.
Fartrape is "Farting louder the man is using passive-aggressive violence to position himself as dominant, this intimidates the woman to subconciously not release as much flatulence and thus the woman fearing for her safety doesn't far as loud as a sign of submissiveness, this in turn contributes to rape culture and women being opressed" - Ahsleigh Ingle, CUPE Leader & Teacher
#fartrape was a trending tag on Twitter at one point. People were accused of it and then harassed for farting by people they didn't know online.
Encryption enters into this point of the circle very little unless Quebec's law enforcement intend to hack into a database outside of the country.
The article states the machines in the office were logged out of the network remotely. There is zero mention of HOW they were logged out. It could have been they were simply logged out normally (but remotely), or just as likely they were logged out because something like revoked access rights to the network - which would result in a machine being logged out too.
Whomever put together and installed Ripley - and given it's intended use - likely didn't just log the machines out using the standard logout process. They would have done it irreparably (at least for as long as the raid was going on). Doing it this way would probably be even easier than running a logout script on each individual computer - just ban the raided offices IP addresses. Simple, low effort, efficient, and logs all critical systems out simultaneously.
Police would have no way to prove an employee had obstructed the raid using Ripley rather than it being a coincidence that the computers just happened to lose access to all relevant remote documents when they raided. Again, this is because it's all handled remotely - out of their jurisdiction and their reach.
Keep in mind that it WOULD be hard to finger who called in the Ripley activation if they could prove it because they probably weren't in the same room as the whistleblower when it was triggered. Look, it's unlikely Uber is using tiny offices. Police would have access to important computers the moment they burst through the entrance. If you're going to go as far as to put a system like Ripley in place, you're also probably not putting workstations with access to sensitive data within reach of a smash and grab in the lobby. Police would have needed to gain access to any areas of the building closed off by things like security clearance locks as well - a common security feature of tech offices. (Even my workplace with 100 employees has three areas behind RFID access locks). An employee would have the time it takes them to reach critical systems to phone it in or otherwise signal for it. Another post listed several ways to do it - closing a specific application on a computer, using a voip call, they could even have just had a big red novelty button with a RasPi in it that calls in a Ripley strike and then plays the song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap for comical effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I GTTFA and didn't see any explanation of how the employee who'd sent the alert "has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions."
Were those other occasions actually his fault, or was it because some jackoff above him in management writes things like "This is not a drill" into the script and doesn't bother to hint otherwise until after the message is done with "exercise exercise exercise". I'd probably make a mistake too if circumstances were like that and it was my job to warn an entire state about a missile attack.
How long is the message anyways? Was it repeated several times and THEN ended with "exercise exercise exercise "? Are you supposed to wait until the very end after hearing "this is not a drill" or are you meant to 'leap into action'?
We're given very vague details, but journalists are more than happy to run with the claim that it was the fault of an employee who "made some people feel uncomfortable" and is 'Incompetent' (likely misinterpreted really poorly worded alerts twice).
Well then his comments on 'supporters of Uber who are anti-regulation' doesn't apply to you I'd think.
You'd short circuit on the first logical evaluation dropping out of the statement; shouldn't even evaluate the second conditional.
in 2012, Blizzard sold the legacy servers off as part of a charity auction. I'm not entirely sure if that includes things like old storage media or not, but if it did they may have had the game server installed on them.
I see. So because you feel changes made to a game are 'garbage', people should be free to take the game and run it themselves however they like. The various private servers hosting realms and taking in profits from """donations""" in exchange for in game items and benefits is harmless legally, I'm sure.
Indie hosting old games that stopped receiving updates or official server support is one thing. It's a whole other thing to do it with a game that has been actively played for the past 14 years with official servers very much alive and well, patches coming out regularly, the company actively promoting and selling the base game (they did still sell it as part of the Warchest bundle, even before Classic was announced) etc. You can't play the game at all without owning 'Classic' WoW.
Things are going to be even less in favor of these private servers now that Blizzard is actively working on classic servers, the 'abandonware' claims are going to go up in smoke regardless of any veracity they may have held. Regardless of how 'trashy' you think the expansions are, there won't be much excuse when you can go back and play it the way it used to be on it's on classic only server.
Personally I've been keeping up with the story and have the events after defeating the Burning Legion to look forward to. I can't see why anyone would want to play an MMO of all things that never changes or gets updated. After you've run the same raids for one year, two years, three... got all the best gear, seen all the sights, killed every monster, what are you playing for after that? Friends? There are lighter applications if you want to chat with people.
Not sure you can call classic abandoned now that Blizzard has publicly announced new official classic servers at their last convention.
It's coming back, and the plan is "Classic as it was, nothing more". No word on which classic content patches will be included or if these patches will be introduced over time.
I don't respect any companies. They are businesses not people, regardless of how US law wants to treat them. I respect a number of artists and programmers, many of whom I follow online or can chat with through apps like discord. One in particular, Minionsart, is an up and coming artist who has been using patreon to help fund their work by sharing tutorials on shaders and modeling techniques.
Don't trust the marketing department when they talk to you about their companies business plans.
Reminds me of another company who's marketing team said "You're doing this to build trust!". They were refering to a multi week process of performing repetitive tasks using their online service. This 'trust building' is needed to unlock a pre-order bonus for pre-purchasing their next big product release. (This pre-order sold so well it brought the companies payment service to it's knees by the way)
More than likely, it's intended to prop up subscriptions at a time the service is notorious for losing customers who temporarily halt their subscription to wait for the next product release. Can't drop your subscription if you have to keep coming back weekly to 'build that trust' for a couple months in order to get any use out of that 'pre-order bonus'.
Is it the same as slowing down older devices and claiming it's because of expiring batteries? I think it fits the pattern at least, one is for planned obsolescence, the other is as an attempt to extort more fees from customers.
You're right for calling out the 'generalising 50% of the population bit'. It's more like 100% of the population is ABLE to do it, and a certain portion of the population regardless of gender will pursue romance or marriage with an ulterior motive.
The terms 'marrying into money', 'gigolo' and 'gold digger'? These were not invented in a vacuum.
But hey who knows, maybe that hot 18 year old really is marrying the octogenarian with millions in the bank out of TRUE LOVE and their relationship is entirely healthy.
My own work experience with Intel isn't terribly great however. They are more than willing to drop contractors because of their disabilities, and more than protect themselves from the usual laws against discrimination through their paperwork. If Intel ever offers you work and you have any kind of disability requiring an accommodation, do NOT work for them as anything other than an employee protected by anti-discrimination laws. Fuckers left me stranded on the other side of the country after paying to fly me there and then dropping my contract because I had a nervous breakdown (I'm Bipolar).
I'm not sure how you're tripping over the 75% fabrication thing.
The factory in china is much larger than the plants in the US, while it's the only one in China, it has significant output, so yes, it makes up 25% of all chips produced by Intel. You don't really think you can build a town sized plant in the US like they allow you to in China, do you? They need bicycles just to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
My father was an Intel engineer for over 30 years (now retired). My family still lives in the neighborhood right next to the Chandler facility, and while it's admittedly large for the surrounding area, a third of it is R&D and small fab. There were quite a few times my Dad was flying off to China to work onsite, couple times a year at least. I'm sure on the internet that holds about as much weight as "My dad works at nintendo" without me showing off an Intel insurance card or something. Western Chandler is basically a company town, so having a Dad who works there really isn't uncommon here.
Yep, those cloud environments will be self sustaining on hopes and dreams, and never need anyone with experience in UNIX to touch them. Cloud services run on what, Windows Server yeah? NO. WORRIES. /s
Notice how it's Xamarin/C#? C# is the language, Xamarin is the framework that you write C# into in order to make cross platform applications.
It's meant to be comparable to other things like Ionic/JS or ReactNative/JS.
Personally I find the way Xamarin does binding between the model and the view to be a cludge compared to the simplicity of using AngularJS (which is different from Angular mind you, which Ionic uses).
I don't see why anyone would want an artificially aged card, liable to die of from the constant abuse of being used to mine 24/7, doubly so if the previous owner did any overclocking. Fan wear, VRM failure... it's likely gamers won't be able to trust the used card market until the next generation after crypto fails.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are a number of people out there who run their cards responsibly to keep the cards health in check. But as of now there's a LOT of people in it to get rich quick pushing hardware way to hard.
It looks to me that Google is providing hosting services and possible financial compensation for content on their service and accepting near zero liability for issues arising from the abuse of their system. They have people essentially working for them as entertainers who they will stop paying at the drop of a hat at the first sign of possible trouble. (Issues like demonetizing on false/frivolous CC claims with little recourse for the content creator. Not to say it isn't used legitimately, but people are making successful claims on bird calls and white noise)
It's Google's show though, so I guess they're free to do that. Their creed is 'Do no evil', so I suppose that leaves them free to be as morally grey as they want. I think that if they continue to treat the majority of their content creators as disposable/interchangeable, it's only a matter of time before Youtube's source of good ad-worthy content begins to dry up. Google has made a lot of people reliant on Youtube for their income, if they stop paying then those creators are going to look for money elsewhere - right now there is a large shift from ad revenue via Google to ad revenue from product placement, endorsements, patreon etc. Things that Google makes zero money off of for use of their service.
There's a bit of difference between moving chess pieces, and writing/using software that actively interferes with the operation of someone else's software and their customers.
So he ran a website facilitating the commerce of identity theft - in the order of billions of records handled. In that time he managed to make just north of $120k per year (USD $96.6k/year). (This based on https://krebsonsecurity.com/20... saying the site began selling data in Oct 2015)
While the article doesn't give exact details on what apps they looked at, the category seems to be 'Industrial equipment control apps'. This could mean a lot of things - these could be apps that just act as a remote control interface to a machine unable to cause the machine to act unsafely.
...Or it could be an app used to update/program the machines firmware... in which case all bets are off when you can inject what you want into the brains of the machine if any of it's safety features are dependent on settings from the board. Current thresholds, temperature thresholds...
Look at the increasing popularity of industrial robots. A lot of their safety features are largely dependent on their programming - sensor readings/responses, movement ranges, even the series of motor movements performed in an action could be altered by a compromised update utility in an app. You don't even need to tamper with these things for them to be highly dangerous and lethal to people who get in their range.
Yes, mobile apps are being used to program hardware. I just recently released an app that can update the main boards firmware of our companies equipment over bluetooth or usb. It's entirely feasible to do this with any kind of re-programmable hardware designed with the feature in mind.
Honestly it probably wasn't even necessary since Gawker decided to go ahead and assert that not only were they happy to ignore court orders, they said they would post child sextapes if they felt it was newsworthy enough.
Who needs a billionaire backing you when the defendant is working so hard to earn the death penalty on it's own.
The death of Gawker was not that of a valiant news network, it was the just end of a sub-grade tabloid who'd post anything for a quick buck in ad revenue and had flaunted the law one to many times.
The construction of the wrong think concentration camps should be starting pretty soon.
It's entirely feasible for bitcoin to have a negative valuation. The cost to perform transactions isn't free by nature of how it works - the cost is even growing as it becomes more popular.
It's wholly possible to have an amount of bitcoin you can't touch because it would cost more than it's value to use it. Right now, having around 30 dollars in bitcoin may as well be worth zero if you want to do anything other than hold onto it.
Amazing how he suddenly acts like he has remorse and a moral conscience now that he's facing significant consequences. This is the same person who very publicly announced how hilarious it was the man died, how him swatting left no responsibility of the mans death on his shoulders, that he had a right to do such things because he was a 'leet untouchable hacker', that he was obligated to severely punish people playing a video game of all things if they slighted him. Over the course of several years he called in multiple swatting and bomb threats to private companies, public events, schools and more because it was 'fun'. The things he's saying now are purely in the hope of reducing the punishments he is about to receive. I hope no one is gullible enough to buy his charade.
Since we're talking about the use of a robot capable of operating a check point, consider this. A robot can safely approach and inspect that suspicious woman and child for explosives because it doesn't need to fear for it's life like a human soldier does. It will perform that search because it is disposable and not free thinking. If woman is a suicide bomber then she kills herself and we lose a robot. We've eliminated the need to accidentally kill a civilian on suspicion alone. Activate another robot send the old one in for repair. Heck you don't even need to give the robot a gun. Have human soldiers watch over the checkpoint from a safe distance and have them behind protective cover - making the checkpoint even more difficult to take on because now soldiers don't have to stand out in the open if a firefight does break out. I'd honestly expect suicide bombing checkpoints to drop in popularity since you're no longer terrorizing your enemies soldiers. Same goes for roadside IEDs and the like. Possible IED? No judgement call needed, send in the bots. What good is an IED meant to maim and kill if it's target can be repaired and back in the fight far quicker than a human?
Still don't quite have a grasp on how formatting works here, that post was much better laid out when I made it.
Ah yes, 'micro-aggression' like man-spreading or fartrape. Fartrape is "Farting louder the man is using passive-aggressive violence to position himself as dominant, this intimidates the woman to subconciously not release as much flatulence and thus the woman fearing for her safety doesn't far as loud as a sign of submissiveness, this in turn contributes to rape culture and women being opressed" - Ahsleigh Ingle, CUPE Leader & Teacher #fartrape was a trending tag on Twitter at one point. People were accused of it and then harassed for farting by people they didn't know online.
Encryption enters into this point of the circle very little unless Quebec's law enforcement intend to hack into a database outside of the country. The article states the machines in the office were logged out of the network remotely. There is zero mention of HOW they were logged out. It could have been they were simply logged out normally (but remotely), or just as likely they were logged out because something like revoked access rights to the network - which would result in a machine being logged out too. Whomever put together and installed Ripley - and given it's intended use - likely didn't just log the machines out using the standard logout process. They would have done it irreparably (at least for as long as the raid was going on). Doing it this way would probably be even easier than running a logout script on each individual computer - just ban the raided offices IP addresses. Simple, low effort, efficient, and logs all critical systems out simultaneously. Police would have no way to prove an employee had obstructed the raid using Ripley rather than it being a coincidence that the computers just happened to lose access to all relevant remote documents when they raided. Again, this is because it's all handled remotely - out of their jurisdiction and their reach. Keep in mind that it WOULD be hard to finger who called in the Ripley activation if they could prove it because they probably weren't in the same room as the whistleblower when it was triggered. Look, it's unlikely Uber is using tiny offices. Police would have access to important computers the moment they burst through the entrance. If you're going to go as far as to put a system like Ripley in place, you're also probably not putting workstations with access to sensitive data within reach of a smash and grab in the lobby. Police would have needed to gain access to any areas of the building closed off by things like security clearance locks as well - a common security feature of tech offices. (Even my workplace with 100 employees has three areas behind RFID access locks). An employee would have the time it takes them to reach critical systems to phone it in or otherwise signal for it. Another post listed several ways to do it - closing a specific application on a computer, using a voip call, they could even have just had a big red novelty button with a RasPi in it that calls in a Ripley strike and then plays the song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap for comical effect.