by CodeNinja | Apr 11, 2012 | Customers
Because its healthy to vent the spleen!
Now I’m sure I have Blogged about this customer before, but for the life of me I can not remember what name I gave him (Maybe I should keep track of the names I assign people). Anyway today we shall refer to the Customer/Company/Person as Gillid*
Heres an extract of a Phone conversation that just happened.
Gillid: “Hi, I was told that since TheArchivist* no longer works there you may be able to help me!“
CN: “I may be able to, whats your problem?”
Gillid: “I have a website where I upload loads of data to it every few months, and our CMS that RedBack* made does not work so TheArchivist normally does it for me!“
CN: “No problem. If you email me the data, and let me know what is what in it, I’m sure I can sort it out for you but getting your CMS fixed may be a good idea. Now I’m not sure what you’ve been charged for the data entry in past…….”
Gillid: “Oh TheArchivist did it all for free!“
CN: “Well we won’t be doing that, you’ll have to pay for our time doing it“
Gillid: “OH. can you give me TheArchivist’s personal email address or phone number?“
CN: “No. I’m not giving out peoples personal info!“
Gillid: “ok. I’ll upload it myself!!!!” *Hangs UP*
Thirty minutes after that phone conversation the Support Department get a ticket from Gillid asking for TheArchivists contact details. They guy is seriously trying to get hold of one of our x-employees in the hope that the guy will do work for him for free while no longer being associated to the Asylum?
And after all that If it was just a quick data import into a mySQL DB I’d have probably only charged him £15 or some nominal price.
As normal Names changed to protect me from lawsuits… err I mean to protect the innocent.
by CodeNinja | Feb 9, 2012 | Customers
Well technically I guess that should be “Customers are Stupid“. You do not believe me? Well here are two examples that happened this week.
Example 1:
I was being nice and answered the phone to help out the support guys, and the conversation went a bit like this :-
CN: “Good afternoon How may I help you?“
Customer: “Hi, Yes. I can’t send or receive any emails. its broke!“
CN: “OK. What error are you actually getting?“
Customer: “can not connect to server“
CN: “Ok, are you actually on the Internet?“
Customer: “YES. I am on the Internet doing things, the Internet is fine, it’s just my emails that is broken“
Customer: *noise of many people talking in background* ‘Yes. I’m on the phone to them now. Yes I have email issues. Ok I’ll pass them over to you when my mails sorted‘
CN: “You got other issues there?“
Customer: “Yes, they say we have lost the Internet. So Whats the issue with my emails?“
She honestly thought the fact they were not connected to the Internet had no connection with her problems in sending and receiving emails.
Example 2:
Now this was a ticket the Systems department had. A Customer had not been receiving any email conformation from their website for the last 3 months. And they knew from the orders that they should have had a fair few.
We had been looking into it on and off for a while since a grep of the site showed that it was not set up to actually send emails to the address they insisted received them.
So after many attempts I finally got them to check the header of an old email and give me the actual email address that the emails go to before being forwarded or downloaded to the end account.
So I have the real email address and decide to test it simply to start with. So I log into the account, and there sat in the INBOX are 50+ unread emails from the website.
Turns out they had forgotten to actually download the emails for the last few months.
Seriously, people get an IQ=IQ-100 as soon as they decide to contact our support department.
by CodeNinja | Jul 21, 2011 | Technology
This post has been brought to you By Windows 7, And trying to set it up to work happily with a Gentoo Server & Linux NAS.
Well, Just trying to get it to work in a useful productive way really. Or put simply, in deference to Microsoft, to just not FAIL.
by CodeNinja | Jul 14, 2011 | Media, Hacks
Unless you have been living in a small cave half way up an inhospitable mounting for the last month you would have heard of the News of the World (NotW) Phone Hacking Scandal. It’s especially bad if you live in the UK.
If you are that cave dwelling hermit let me say “How the frak are you reading this post? Did you follow the article on reading blogs on kindles? How have you got internet access? inquiring minds want to know!” *relax* I mean to say, that this scandal is about slime masquerading as reports who accessed a vast (possible 4,000) number of people’s (Celebrity’s, Sports Stars, Politicians, Victims of Crime) answer phone messages. Now there was such an amount of this going on that the paper has closed down after 168years in print.
I have no intention of writing about the incident itself, or any of the fallout, or anything directly in relation to this case. That has been covered in depth all over the Internet & Surviving media. What I would like to address is the term thrown about “Phone Hacking Scandal“. Why must everyone insist on calling it Hacking?
*NOTE: Phone Hacking is referred to as Phreaking
No where in any of the reports is any activity mentioned that even faintly falls into the category of “Hacking” under any definition. Even if you take the original definition of Hacking, as in using some piece of technology or item in a way that was different to the intended use. Or knowing or wanting to learn about the inner working of different things, you still can not fit the term “Hacker” or “Hacking” to what the NotW reporters actually did.
What they did was to access peoples voicemail’s. Yes this is wrong, its an intrusion of privacy, it’s probably illegal as “unauthorised to personal communication” but it is not Hacking. They phoned up the voicemail number, and using the Victims phone number, and the generic default pin number accessed they voice mail system in the way it was intended to, in the way we all access it, they just did it without the Victims permission.
Surely it should be called “illegal phone tapping” or “illegal access to mail” or by whatever legal term it is for the crime they committed. The media like using the term Hacker to scare the public about these faceless super-criminals with secret abilities that let them to do almost anything. I think its time to stop the mass-hysteria and excessive incorrect use of this term.
We do not call someone who sticks a plaster on a small graze a Doctor, We do not call the small child playing with a plastic gun in the street a terrorist, and we should not call someone who phones up a publicised phone number and follows the instructions the recorded message tells them a Hacker.
Come on Media People, Your reputation is tarnished over this NotW incident, don’t make it worse by not doing your homework, and just falling into your old scaremongering ways.
The Three Ninjas saying a few words about the misappropriation of the term “Hacker“. To quote Randal from Clerks II. “I’m taking it back”
by CodeNinja | Jul 1, 2011 | Work
The guys over at Buzby have been busy again. This time they have been considering “SECURITY” which I think is a very Important & Valid thing to be considering (Especially these days) Only I think they need to do some more work on it.
For example, they are concerned about sending customer data back and too to their CP’s. Now this I can understand, you would not like the idea of your personal details being handed about freely over the net. So this is how the details are now securely transferred.
I as a CP upload some data over SFTP to their sever, their systems runs on the data and does what I request (All nice and secure so far). I then have access (again by SFTP) to an output file telling me which records worked, if there was any errors, etc.
Only now I get an email to tell me if there is any problem with any records. But what if my email is compromised? its not very secure so they put the text they are sending me in a file, ZIP it up with a password protection and email me the password protected file. And then at the same time send me another email with the password to the file in it. So if my email had been compromised they person would be unable to access the file since the password was in a separate email.
In theory sending the data in locked files is good, but it should be with an agreed on password so the password does not get emailed. Or maybe a PGP encrypted email? Or I could just collect the file over SFTP which was set up wit certificates, encryption, blah, blah, blah.
I’m sorry, I’m all for trying to improve security (I need to hurt one of the drones at the Insane Asylum and point out his passwords are retarded) But emailing the password to a secure zip file to the same email address, at the same time? Madness.
Also, they are not very long passwords, I’m sure a zip password recovery program would access it in no time at all. (I may test that and tell them how easy it was to access the file without the password)
I do give them ★★ (2 Stars) for at least considering security!
