Telling your wife why you were fired is the only punishment

If you don't want to be traumatised by people's pictures ...

... don't look at them. There. That was easy.

Many people have been arrested after they took their computer in for repair and criminal-level porn was found.

The (mostly) blokes who do the repairs do have a tendency to search for *.jpg to see if there's anything juicy that they can copy off. Not all of them, but enough that assuming they won't is a very bad idea.

I doubt it

"Management cut Terry a break: because he'd been a good worker they deleted the files and kept the police out of it. Their logic? By says “having to tell his wife he was fired and why would be enough punishment.”

It's a nice story but

1. Not even HR managers are stupid enough to think he'd tell his wife the real reason why he was fired

2. No manager would expose their company to such a risk: imagine "Terry" gets arrested in the future for similar activities. The first thing he does is wreak revenge on the company that fired him by revealing all.

The police arrive at company's premises and confiscate all servers and backups, and start interviewing the managers about destroying evidence relating to a criminal offence.

BTDT, shuddered at the pics.

My boss at the time asked me to fix her corporate laptop as it was "running very slow".

I dutifully accepted the machine, made an immediate image of the HDD, & began debugging what might have been the cause.

Memory still tight in their sockets, cables snug in their sockets, fans spinning up nicely, memtest & HDD tests indicate no problems, but it's still slow as molassus running uphill in a blizzard.

Examine the loaded software to make sure it's pure corporate (so I can uninstal anything that's not) & find that the Windows Image widget is choking on attempting to load something as a background process.

What is it loading, why is it trying to load it, & can I make it stop? Process Viewer, find the process, kill it, tell the image widget to stop loading automaticly, and reboot.

The desktop wallpaper immediately reverts to a solid colour backdrop as the image widget stops trying to render the background image that had been choking it.

Visit the folder where the images are stored & find it chock, mind boggling, smegheaddingly full of pictures with file names in a sequence (abc00001.jpg, abc00002.jpg, etc).

What are these images & why are they causing the widget to choke? They're single frame, stop motion stills of a video that someone had converted to individual images in an attempt to capture said video so they could use individual images as backgrounds. But she's selected *all* of them to be rendered, the widget is merely taking forever to churn through the massive que before displaying the first (of zillions) of pictures.

It's a capture of a porn film involving a horse, and there is NO way in HELL that it's appropriate for a corporate laptop.

I set the default background to a solid color, delete the entire series of sequential images, make sure the machine is running smoothly again, & hand it back.

When she asked the cause of the problem I told her as tactfully as I could that "it grew hoarse trying to swallow that load of happy horse apples".

I'm sure my pay raise was just a coincidence, just like her request for any back up I might have made to be purged.

I purged the backup & tried to keep a straight face whenever she'd make a comment about no horseplay at the office.

Just do NOT do this on work kit

What puzzles me is the stupidity of people doing this at work.

FFS, if you're so inclined, do it at home. At one point, I was project security manager for a company whose IT systems were under construction. The rules for everyone were simple: work kit is for work. If we give you an account, it is for work purposes and data you hold there is also work. We're talking about a major, well known brand that is rightfully VERY careful about its image and anything that is associated with it.

A couple of weeks into the project, I get an email from the people managing the core mail relay that they have caught an image that should really not be associated with the brand. As the project security manager, I get tasked by the CEO to investigate if this image indeed originates from the sender, and if the sender has more of this stored.

I log in as admin and soon find a subdirectory with pictures that are, well, let's call them "not exactly work related" but relatively tame, not "call the police NOW" level. They're the sort of images you'd receive from a friend with a mildly shady sense of humour, but he *sent* it.

The problem: mild as they are, the images do not belong there, nor should they have been transmitted from an account in name of the organisation so I now have to report back to the CEO (and HQ which is by now involved) about someone who otherwise does good work and - as the rest of the images show - has a family with little kids. The person involved is a contractor, so I know there will not even be a disciplinary stage, it'll go immediately to pack-your-bags-and-go. Over one stupid picture.

So let me repeat this: if you're so inclined, don't use work facilities for it, even for stuff that is probably "funny" like goatse and also be very careful with re-transmitting such stuff if you receive it (VERY common mistake). Especially brand managers don't have a sense of humour, and having worked with publicity teams I also understand why - especially with well known brands the press is really waiting for something they can blow up, using the brand name in the headlines to make the story sell.

Please, use common sense. It's not hard.

Re: Please, use common sense.

> It's not hard.

If you have any that is - common sense: so rare it should be considered a superpower.

I've had a couple of incidents in the past 18 years working at our site. About 15yrs ago our director had a new Sony Vaio laptop with a built in camera, bit of a novelty back then. Anyway he had problems with it brought it in to us to look at, we had a placement student working for us at the time doing 1st line support so he took a look. Found a pic of said director and his wife (wife was totally naked, he had shirt and socks on!) Anyway that went straight in to the IT pension fund! You never know when these tings might come in handy.

We had an open access computer room with about 6 PC's in it for anyone with an ID to use. A PhD student came to us with a delicate matter, they had found some pictures on one of the PC's. Anyway we went to have a look with the student and by this time he had be joined by his girlfriend (also a PhD student). Then came the immortal words uttered by the girlfriend when she saw the pictures. "I know her that's xxxxxx wife!" xxxxxx was another Phd Student at our lab. And xxxxx's wife was obviously just bending over to pick something up that she had dropped and happened to have no cloths on at the time! He got a stern talking to by my boss. Then about a month later a load of red flew up on the firewall monitoring screens that my boss happened to have opened at the time. Traced it to student xxxxxx who was trying to buy some female entertainment devices for his wife from some online sex shop. Another stern talking to.

A few mergers ago, let's see, in the late 90s sometime, I got the laptop of our former female system administrator after she'd been made redundant and pursued a new opportunity. I logged in to clean it up and saw the recycle bin was full. Took a peek at what could possibly be hundreds of megs.... and it was porn. I was shocked. I knew she was a bad sysadmin but forgetting to empty the recycle bin after you've deleted all your porn? Not knowing how to delete it directly without it going to the recycle bin??

Use your own machine!

I've never understood why people get caught surfing for porn on a company machine. If it's not your machine, assume someone is recording everything you do on it. They probably aren't, but it's a good precaution anyway. Use a cheap 2nd hand laptop or an iPad for porn.

I once found someone else's dick pics on a camera memory card when I was trying to recover a photo I'd deleted. I can't say for certain it was the person I'd lent the camera to, but posting anonymously just in case :).

Curiosity controlled

Doesn't matter if it's home or work, the stars may just hit an unlucky alignment. A few years back a friend's flatmate was heading home (abroad) and offered to sell my friend his laptop. Friend asked me to have a look over it. It was running quite slowly so I checked the % hard drive use - nearly full. So I did a search on all files over (I think) 50Mb. Up came a long list of movies, many with filenames that were definitely borderline. I immediately shut it down and my friend politely declined the offer...

Check your attachments

Reminds me of the time a rather good looking PMO girl was sending the monthly report she was tasked with to the whole of the Programme office at a well known FMCG manufacturer. A couple of hundred people on the distro list. And instead of the report she attached a picture of her tits taken on the laptop webcam . . . .

She tried to recall the message but we all know how reliable that Outlook feature is!!

Smut Server

I had the dubious pleasure of discovering that a former employees test server had in fact been doing duty as a pay-porn web server for quite some time. I considered informing management and then remembered that old saying about the bearer of bad news, so a quick FDISK /MBR and a complete repartitioning and a format or 2 soon got rid of the evidence. Gawd knows how long he'd been using company hardware and company bandwidth for personal gain. I would imagine that quite a few of his paying customers would have been screaming mad too.

Stupid things, stupid times...

To take a break from all the smut related ones, I still think the stupidest thing I've ever been asked to do at work was remove a pair of lesbian ducks* and their duckling from a lecture theatre.

The logic, apparently, was that they had gotten into the lectern and were disrupting the ability of a lecturer to use the computer, and it was ergo an IT issue.

It turns out that ducks defending a duckling won't run away from you so as to stop you touching them, but will go absolutely fucking mental once you pick them up and try and carry them away from their charge.

*Yeah, you read that right. If you want to read up on the breeding habits of the common mallard duck, feel free, it's pretty surreal reading.

They need to be cautious...

I personally wouldn't delete the images. I'd report it to the Police and allow them to deal with it. Unfortunately - deleting the images is - of course - concealing, altering, destroying or damaging the evidence in what might become a criminal investigation. In other words, how do you fancy having to explain to *your* wife, your kids, any future employers, the PTA and so on that you were fired from your last job for "destroying evidence against a sex offender"?

You might think "Nobody will ever know" - and you're probably right. BUT: - If that guy gets caught down the road and it somehow comes out that you had the images and didn't report it, you could end up in a world of hurts yourself. Maybe just if someone with knowledge of the matter gets downsized and decides to report it out of spite? Maybe if your systems become part of an

investigation into an unrelated matter and these are discovered by accident during that?

That's the entirely practical reason. The other one is that he's the arbiter of other's people's misery, so **** him.

linux VM on a windows server

At the time, I was doing linux kernel development (drivers, specialized firmware, etc.). As the linux kernel has case-sensitive files in it, some of which have name clashes with other files [if case-sensitivity is NOT in your source code repository], we had to install the source code repository software onto a Linux machine. Well, we were using a few VMs by then, being (often) cheaper than actual hardware, but for some odd reason we were told to CREATE THE LINUX VM for the repository on a WINDOWS SERVER COMPUTER, because, *ahem*, it was MORE RELIABLE that way. [it was previously hosted on the SAME windows box, which wasn't hosting ANY OTHER VMs at the moment, or anything important at all, as I recall]. Turning that windows server machine OFF and then replacing with a Linux server would PROBABLY have cost less, too. But NOooo... we had to put Linux in a VM to host the source repository, then host it on a WINDOWS SERVER computer.

Yeah. "More reliable." Well, my supervisor was a fan of C-pound, ".Net" and Windows Vista, too...

Dead and dying children at work

I was hired as a Business Consultant at a firm in the Netherlands, and then demoted to SysAdmin because my Scottish accent was too strong. I wasn't happy at that, and I never wanted to be the PC police especially in a country where laws and attitudes towards sex were so different.

Engineers and salesmen would dial in to use the (then) high speed and free office internet rather than take out an account of their own. Even the ones with their own internet connections would view porn via the office presumably as they assumed it gave them more plausible deniability. The company internet server cache was massive, and at least three quarters of it was porn, as I found out when I had to investigate exorbitant charges from our ISP. It was hard to look at any of my co-workers the same way, especially the women. I sent out a memo to everyone explaining what a cache is, and asking them not to view anything they wouldn't want me to have to view, and instantly the internet bill was halved (and nobody could look at me either).

I've had a few experiences of being surprised or shocked by porn at work, but nothing close to "call the police", maybe I'm just deviant. I worked for an imaging/workflow company once, and they were trying to prove their system to a local NHS, so I was made to scan in and process sample medical records they provided, perhaps illegally. That was the most traumatic two days I ever spent at work. All the records were dead and dying children: X rays, photos, case-notes, etc. When you lot talk about things you can't unsee, well nothing I saw hadn't already been seen by a dozen doctors and nurses who probably see that sort of thing every week. They have all my respect, because decades later just thinking about it has me crying and reaching for the brandy.

I was asked to fix a Belgian guys laptop once, it was running slow. AVG identified over 37,000 viruses on it. That was unusually high so I went to delete the internet cache, and it had already been deleted but all the sites were still there - IP numbers rather than URLs, all Russian. He'd been engaged to a local woman who privately accused him of being a paedophile, and I'd seen him groom, kiss and even lick her daughter, I was certain she was correct. I didn't have enough evidence against him to phone the police, but I kept tabs on him. He later joined a social group where he had access to their children as a figure of trust, so I warned them about him. He had me charged by the police for doing that. They dropped my prosecution when I mentioned I had a recording of his ex-fiancee discussing his behaviour.

On a US magazine website I recently had my first conversation with someone who admitted to being a reformed paedophile, which I found very interesting. I'm a hang'em and flog'em guy when it comes to adult abusers, so it was informative finally being able to "Ask me anything". I think I have a better understanding of it now but I'd still recommend that if you can take action against someone who is a child-abuser, or even against someone who gets off on images or video of child-abuse, then you should do what you can. According to the honest paedophile I talked to, one thing does lead to another worse thing.

Some wayne-kerr in my office

(IT division of large car manufactuer) sent through a pair of photoshopped pictures of the queen and her mother, sitting naked at a table from the waist up (Oh god, I hope they were photoshopped, the bodies were appropriate for their age). I was naturally deliriously happy, as this must have been a sacking offence and I hated the prick. Strangely he only got a warning and had to make an email apology to whoever received the files. Must have had some managers balls in his hands to be that untouchable.

I recall an answering machine that had come in for repair, and as part of the repair, you test by listening and perhaps recording something.

On this particular box, prior to repair, said boyfriend tried calling said girlfriend while she was out.

However, as time went on and on, he got drunker and drunker, and the messages got angrier and angrier.

Turns out she had been assisting a friend who had gone into hospital well into the wee hours, and that in part was the last message of the saga.

It doesn't happen very often, but quite amusing when it does.

Again, actual woman, in IT for over 20 years. Trouble started with Windows 2000, when directories with image files automatically turned thumbnails on. I work for an organization that does GIS & mapping, so had big monitors, so thumbnails were recognizable. When moving the clueless to a new computer, you plumb the depths of the filesystem, looking for stuff they need, but "dropped" somewhere odd. What I tell horrified "Women in IT" conference groups, you just shut up and do your job. The years you spent building trust with your users? The possibility that a woman will ever be hired in that position again if you complain? I WILL gossip about the porn collectors, generally something to the effect of "Doesn't make me want to touch HIS keyboard."

BTW, NEVER found porn on a woman's computer.

Had this happen here

Found old antique Gateway Windows 2000 laptop, broken.

Needless to say it got stripped of everything salvageable but the hard drive got put in a box marked "Burn/Shred".

Got it out a while back and decided then and there to nuke all drives received THE SECOND I GET THEM!!!! if they are mostly unused as it had Class A filth crawling out of the account I'd created to see if the install was in any way usable on the test machine it got installed into.

This was "OMGWTFGONNAGETBUSTED" level, Do not Pass Go, felt guilty just holding the drive.

Drive got sent on its merry way along with the placard with the Windows sticker on it and the WiFi card so hopefully someone is doing time now as a result.

The problem is

If the punishment for reporting the pr0n/NSFL/etc is equal that the punishment for just wiping it, then the problem is with the system being broken.

The correct thing to do would be to clone the drive with a reliable encrypted backup, then send a copy to a trusted third party with the instructions to send the drive to the Police with a copy of the logs proving you'd been asked to wipe out the evidence. This way not only do you have deniability and timestamps proving that the pr0n was on a given machine X at time Y in location Z but management committed a crime by asking you to destroy evidence.

Replacing the infested drive with an identical down to serial number replacement and putting the original in a safe place with (ideally) hard drive ATA locking as this is essentially unbreakable with current technology, is optional.

Refusing to hand over the key unless you are assured witness protection is also wise especially if it involves a Government official or other person in a position of power.

If it's genuinely call-the-police grade filth, then that's what you should do.

If you don't, then you're endorsing the behaviour and reinforcing it, potentially making it more likely this person will actually carry out these acts, rather than merely view them. At best you're normalising it, at worst you're encouraging it. You're also enabling it, of course, by not preventing them from accessing it again. Depending on the nature of the images people (or animals) that did not want to participate in these acts may well be exploited again as you're assisting in sustaining the market for them.

If that does not convince you - remember this. By destroying the evidence of the offence, you partake of it both morally and legally. If the guy gets caught and it ever comes out that you destroyed the evidence you could be charged with the offence under "joint enterprise", or just aiding-and-abetting. Imagine explaining that to your spouse. Your parents. Kids. Future Employers. Imagine going to the police station to sign "the register" (no.... not this one.... the other one..) You could, genuinely, go to prison for it, as a sex offender in a UK prison - you think that's gonna be a laugh?

It's exactly the same as disposing of a gun for a murderer, or driving the getaway car for a bank robber.