Fun with proxies and p0rn
Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy trolling my resume around, and with the 4th of July and the rest of the debauchery that accomponies summertime, I haven't had much time to blog.
But that hasn't stopped the madness. For example, the following request I received last week:
Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy trolling my resume around, and with the 4th of July and the rest of the debauchery that accomponies summertime, I haven't had much time to blog.
But that hasn't stopped the madness. For example, the following request I received last week:
I want to view the following website.I went to an unproxied machine and went to the URL the user was trying to get to, and what do you know? It redirects to a p0rn site. So, is this guy asking me to unblock it, knowing it redirects to a p0rn site?
http://nuclearweaponsarchive.org/nwfaq/nfaq6.html
for some research information on copper isotope production. The website was given to me by a contact at an isotope distributor.
The firewall prevents me from going there because it apparently activates
http://gogetsome.com/hardcore.html/?
which is a bad site.
So, if http://nuclearweaponsarchive.org/nwfaq/nfaq6.html website activates http://gogetsome.com/hardcore.html/?, and you want it unblocked, you are effectively asking me to unblock the porno site http://gogetsome.com/hardcore.html/?
Did I get that right? I checked out http://nuclearweaponsarchive.org and it is indeed a redirect to a porno site. If you are indeed doing research on copper isotopes, you need to realize that http://nuclearweaponsarchive.org is not related to that research.
My user was not amused:
thank you for your ignorant remarks. This ticket can be closed.
posted by diaryofanitmadman at 7/24/2006 09:06:00 AM
4 Comments:
Whoever sent him the link screwed it up.
http://nuclearweaponsarchive.org/ is a porn cybersquatter. If he wanted to surf for porn that would be a pretty site to do it from, frankly.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org is a real site with potentially useful information relating to physics. Note that "weapon" is not pluralized.
The correct link the FAQ page is:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html
It is a page related to radioactive material production. Sounds closer to legitimately useful for copper isotopes, I guess. Anyway, it is not porn.
I'll resist posting a snarky rant about how the ridiculous arrogance IT people have because they can operate glorified toasters better than others drives me a bit nuts. (Or maybe I haven't resisted, I suppose.)
Thanks for the comment, and I suppose I can see where my post comes off as arrogant.
However, take the technology out of the story, and what does it leave? Let's say it wasn't a web address that was given to this user, and let's say it was a physical address.
You'd still have a fable of a person, acting on someone else's direction, who, despite all the evidence screaming that something is wrong with the directions, continues to execute the task according to the original instructions. Don't stop and recheck things, just drive off that cliff.
You can scale this fable out, change the scene from an office and put it any where you want to. Instead of trying to overcome human fallabilty, ignore it and blame it on anything else but you. Blame it on the toasters and their masters.
I suspect that the percieved arrogance of a lot of IT people stems not from their mastery of advanced toasters, rather, maybe it stems from dealing with a lot of educated people who should know better and apply a little common sense to everyday tasks.
The technology is not the story. The story is the people who use it.
It's also interesting to think that maybe he was given the wrong link on purpose.
You never know.
In my opinion one should assume good faith and, at the very worst, technological ignorance/confusion that you should be trying to remedy (not chastise). People get confused. He e-mailed you because he was confused, because you were tech support, because you are the one who is supposed to tell him why it doesn't work. And in the end you failed at helping him.
If you had Googled the page name (Nfaq6.html) the page he wanted is the first thing that comes up. If you had spent as much time trying to investigate it as you did in writing up a gloating post to your blog, perhaps you could have figured out the answer. It's a pretty easy puzzle, or at least I would expect it to be for an "IT Madman."
It seems pretty unlikely to me that someone would have given him the wrong link on purpose. It is an easy URL to mis-remember (the only reason I found this page was because I couldn't remember if it was pluralized or not so I just typed it into Google -- you are number two for "nuclearweaponsarchive.org", congrats).
Anyway. I'm not here to judge you. I'm a very tech literate guy who often serves as go-between for IT people and non-IT people, and I'm often quite frustrated at the way that IT people treat others, as if their inability to grok XML makes them less intelligent, or less worth their time. Which is pretty silly. And it is frustrating when you do grok XML and you know the person you're helping has been fed a bald lie ("Oh no, that can't be done (because I can't be bothered to do it or explain it to you, even though that's part of my job description)").
So your little post, which I just stumbled across, pushed the same button, which I admit is a little knee-jerk (since I've never read any other of your posts -- perhaps you're a great guy, who knows).
Most people are experts at something. All people are ignorant of many things. I'm not sure it helps anyone in most cases to harp on the latter points. I think it's a lot cooler to demonstrate one's knowledge by using it to help others, rather than to denigrate them. But hey -- it's your show, your job, your blog, your life, and I don't pretend (or intend) to know much about any of the latter.
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