[980] in Humor
HUNOR? The Ultimate Tech Call
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Wed Jul 26 09:57:49 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:51:51 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 23:12:46 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: ... for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire
Forwarded-by: cgw <cgw@io.com>
Forwarded-by: susanp@tristero.io.com (Susan Pinsonneault)
Forwarded-by: who knows...
[Urban legend of the day...]
Subject: Stressful tech call
To: Customer Service; TechSports
This falls into the "Why did it have to happen on *MY* shift?" category.
A friend of mine is a chief engineer at SuperMac, and he related this
story to me.
SuperMac records a certain number of technical support calls at random,
to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. By wild "luck", they managed to
catch the following conversation on tape.
Some poor SuperMac TechSport got a call from some middle level official...
from the legitimate government of Trinidad. The fellow spoke very good
English, and fairly calmly described the problem.
It seemed there was a coup attempt in progress at that moment. However,
the national armoury for that city was kept in the same building as the
Legislature, and it seems that there was a combination lock on the door
to the armoury. Of the people in the capitol city that day, only the
Chief of the Capitol Guard and the Chief Armourer knew the combination to
the lock, and they had already been killed.
So, this officer of the government of Trinidad continued, the problem is
this. The combination to the lock is stored in a file on the Macintosh,
but the file has been encrypted with the SuperMac product called Sentinel.
Was there any chance, he asked, that there was a "back door" to the
application, so they could get the combination, open the armoury door,
and defend the Capitol Building and the legitimately elected government
of Trinidad against the insurgents?
All the while he is asking this in a very calm voice, there is the sound
of gunfire in the background. The Technical Support guy put the person on
hold. A phone call to the phone company verified that the origin of the
call was in fact Trinidad. Meanwhile, there was this mad scramble to see
if anybody knew of any "back doors" in the Sentinel program.
As it turned out, Sentinel uses DES to encrypt the files, and there was
no known back door. The Tech Support fellow told the customer that aside
from trying to guess the password, there was no way through Sentinel, and
that they'd be better off trying to physically destroy the lock.
The official was very polite, thanked him for the effort, and hung up.
That night, the legitimate government of Trinidad fell. One of the BBC
reporters mentioned that the casualties seemed heaviest in the capitol,
where for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire from the
government forces.
O.K., so they shouldn't have kept the combination in so precarious a
fashion. But it does place, "I can't see my Microsoft Mail server"
complaints in a different sort of perspective, does it not?
