16 ms·
Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y agoI was hoping to see some usage of the RFC for Coffee Pot communication. Sadly, that was missing from the story, but the story does not disappoint.
- sidpatil 5y agoHTCPCP was published in the late 1990s, whereas IBM-Microsoft collaboration on OS/2 was in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 5y agoIPoCP can experience a very high jitter rate.
- dylan604 5y agoAlso susceptible to buffer under/overflows
- wing-_-nuts 5y agoNo no, it's 'I'm a teapot' https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
- cipheredStones 5y agoRead the RFC! It's Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and 418 is an _error_ because you shouldn't be brewing coffee in a teapot.
- 1970-01-01 5y agoIBM was and is the worst when it comes to Draconian rules.
- flarg 5y agoHave you ever worked in the Her Majesty's Civil Service? As an external you can't even go to the loo without an escort or signed pass.
- Aromasin 5y agoMundane, draconian bureaucracy is about as British as beans on toast. HMSC is just keeping the time honoured tradition alive.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI had to get a pass to go to the bathroom as a guest at a Google office once too.
- formercoder 5y agoBoth institutions with nation state level security threats.
- Spooky23 5y agoI’ve been to a lot of .gov offices in the US. It’s always surprising to me. The most intense over the top security process I ever ran into was an agency that disbursed grants to artists.
- karmakaze 5y agoI've heard worse about Electronic Data Systems (EDS), H. Ross Perot's company.
- csours 5y agoI got counseled by my boss about my shoes. I worked at a client site. A manufacturing plant. And they wanted me to wear fancy shoes. He also made fun of me for wearing a blazer.
- Giorgi 5y agoahh, stupid articles I waste my time on... But is it really waste if you enjoy it?
- qgin 5y agoShades of Lumon.
- CharlesW 5y agoI think people who enjoyed the absurdity of the linked story would enjoy Severance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series)
- greedo 5y agoI love Severance but sometimes it's just too close for comfort. CurrentCompany has periodic gifts given out to all employees. Sometimes it's a generic card with an attached candy bar. Or a note that just says "We appreciate you!" Every time we get something dropped on our desks, it's almost a race for our team to figure out how much money was wasted on this stupid stupid tsotchkes. I'd be tempted to ask for a Waffle Party, but that scene was a bit too creepy for my taste.
- chasd00 5y agoI work for a very large consulting firm and sometimes you get a little swag as a thank you for things not big enough to impact your bonus. The whole thing must be automated because I got on the list but didn’t get off it for a couple months. All kinds of blankets, mugs, cookie baskets, tumblers and other random corporate goodies kept showing up at my door once a week.
- greedo 5y agoYup, if our swag wasn't company branded, I would swear there's a fulfillment company that handles this for big corporations. SAAS (Swag As A Service).
- baud147258 5y agoMaybe the SAAS company(ies) also deals with the branding of the swag? Or just all companies buy from the same suppliers
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
- glitchc 5y agoThat is absolutely hilarious! Well done MSFT crew.
- crispyambulance 5y agoThis is HN, so I feel free to nerd-pick: IBM was right about the coffee maker! Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoIntended or not they have a proven track record of doing just fine in staff break rooms the world over. The hand wringing is not necessary.
- monkeybutton 5y agoDon't most consumer coffee makers shut off automatically some time after brewing?
- tyingq 5y agoMany do, a surprising amount do not, including some models from brands you would recognize. Edit: In the US, for sure. Like most of the ones on Amazon right now that are under $30.
- maccard 5y agoAny coffee machine sold in the EU in the last 7/8 years is required to have a 40 minute off switch.
- ericbarrett 5y agoI'll often drink several cups over 3-4 hours; a 40 minute timer seems far too short.
- lb1lf 5y agoBut surely, after several hours whatever liquid remains on the brewer hardly tastes like coffee anymore?
- mabbo 5y agoI heard a legend once that someone at IBM in the "blue suit and tie" days found himself to be irreplaceable. So at his next contract negotiations, he politely demanded the dress code be removed from his contract. And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain. I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all. I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
- smiddereens 5y agoLooking like shit to own the man.
- _eht 5y agoYour barometer for shit needs recalibrating, bud.
- goodpoint 5y agoEven a 180 turn.
- core-utility 5y agoI guarantee you, people can look like shit in a suit and tie. Many do.
- rzzzt 5y agoDo the same people look better in casual clothing?
- core-utility 5y agoUnlikely, but at least a T-shirt doesn't typically require tailoring or near-exact sizing to look good.
- autoexec 5y agoActual security issues like not swiping to enter a secured area are one thing, but I'll never understand the obsession with dress codes and small appliances. It just feels like power tripping or laziness. There can be problems with some devices and with what people wear (and hygiene in general), but I'd much rather work at a place that addresses those issues only when needed while treating everyone like adults instead of like children who can't be trusted to pick out their own clothes.
- mindcrime 5y agoThe small appliance thing is at least a little bit quasi-legitimate. I mean, true, very few modern small appliances are just going to randomly burst into flame, and that's as true whether they are sitting in your kitchen or living room, or sitting in a corporate break room, or at your desk. But... the devil is in the details. From a fire safety perspective, I'd cite two things that cause me to say "quasi legitimate" about this: 1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load. 2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire. On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
- tinalumfoil 5y agoThese are all things people do constantly in their own homes, and are willing to accept the risk. It seems inefficient that people go to work and accept all these risk-averse mandates (no consumer coffee machines -- they might burst into flames!) then go home and fall asleep to their 1500W space heater plugged into the same power strip as the 50" poorly mounted TV they fell asleep watching.
- t43562 5y agoOn being acquired by IBM things went downhill at the company I was working at - no kettles or coffee machines allowed and you had to buy your tea and coffee from the company store/machines (UK - probably run by Serco or some similar awfulness). All the cool computers taken off the desks and stuck in server rooms and you had to use a managed windows PC which in my case managed to crash once or more times a day thanks to some aspect of the Rational Clearcase filesystem driver. I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent. It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
- mindcrime 5y agoI did two separate stints at IBM, the most recent being back in 2017 or 2018 or so. I was part of the "Watson Health" <strike>organization</strike> debacle. And when I first got there one of the things I immediately noticed was that there was no longer any free coffee available. The only coffee availability was from the little embedded Starbucks stand near the lobby. Which both cost $$$ and conveniently closed well before most of us were done drinking coffee for the day. Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase. Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stuff4ben 5y agoIt's funny since IBM today seems totally different than what a lot of people are used to. Now we have GE refrigerators with built-in Keurig coffee makers along with the ice/water dispenser. Free coffee brewed daily in the breakrooms along with snacks and pre-covid, fresh fruits. At least two food trucks every Wednesday since the offices opened back up several months ago and it's free (for now). They still have some draconian rules and red-tape, but what large corporation doesn't these days? I'm sure Microsoft is the same now.
- nrdgrrrl 5y agoOh the old days at IBM... I almost got a security violation once for wearing shorts on a "casual" Friday, but my boss let me go home and change.
- astrange 5y agoDo people still use coffee makers? I thought it was all about pour-overs and Aeropress now. Though maybe the kettle would cause workplace accidents.
- sophacles 5y agoIts one of those things where enthusiasts dominate the conversation because non-enthusiasts don't care enough to provide a different viewpiont, leading to a skewed impression by a lot of folks. The way I see it in my life amongst regular coffee drinkers: * Coffee enthusiasts are all about the perfect pour so they select tools based on control and repeatability (and fads like all human things). You get the pourovers and areopresses and what-not from them. * some folks don't want to waste precious counter space, or hate cleaning the coffee pot, and end up with a kettle and something like a pour over or french press. * everyone else has a coffee pot.
- rzzzt 5y agoWhich category do automatic grind/compact/brew/eject coffee machine users fall into? One incarnation kept a tally of the number of cups consumed, which I always liked (and secretly wished for a serial port so I could get the number out of it programmatically).
- antiterra 5y agoPlenty of enthusiasts have regular coffee pots these days. You can get one with good brew temp control, pre-infusion and shower brew head at a run of the mill department store (eg Target in the US.)
- sgt 5y agoOf course. Doesn't everyone have one at home? Or some other method of making coffee for a bunch of people. I just bought a Moccamaster, hand made in Holland.
- astrange 5y agoI have a Zojirushi water heater and a French press for that. Admittedly I have no plan if I ever need to make coffee for more than 4 people.
- mcculley 5y agoI worked in an office with a fire hazard coffee pot. One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket. More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire. I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
- pierrebai 5y agoHow does an over-heated pot of glass and plastic catch fire? If coffee-making machine are fire hazard, most homes in the world must be regularly burning. Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
- mcculley 5y agoThis was effectively a heating element without a switch. Yes, the risk is low. Still stupid to do it.
- bena 5y agoI assume in that bypassing the switch, it also bypassed the automatic shut off. Coffee makers are relatively simple designs. They're basically hotplates with a one way valve underneath for the water. Without the shut off, the thing would just keep getting hotter. And while heated glass will not catch fire, it can shatter violently. And those heated shards can then catch things on fire. And that's outside the fact that just faulty wiring can cause sparks and fire itself.
- hex4def6 5y agoThey are simple things, but they don't go critical like you're describing. Simple ones often just have a mechanical bimetal thermostat device that opens / closes around a given temperature (a bit north of 100degC). In addition to that, they have thermal fuses that will blow if the temperature reaches over some threshold (I think 200degC?). My understanding is that they often use a pair of thermal fuses for safety. In this case, you would somehow need to have both thermal fuses fail closed, as well as the thermostat fail closed.
- bluedino 5y agoOh if employees back then could only see the cafes on campus at Microsoft now.
- mcculley 5y agoOver the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows were kept as built. For security reasons, there was a sheet of plywood painted white inside all of the windows. The building allowed no natural light to enter and emitted only a diffuse glow. It was a miserable place to spend long days, illuminated only by flickering fluorescent light. We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator. A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights. In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
- Aperocky 5y agoThe whole office would have grounded to an halt as people egress over essential items such as coffee and heated food, mission critical indeed.
- mikepurvis 5y agoYour story reminds me a little of Ed Snowden's description of his experiences working in secure environments in Permanent Record. Each individual measure may make sense in isolation, but just like with any long-lived project, the sum total of all of them can absolutely still add up to absurdity.
- walrus01 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y agoI've got to be honest with you guys: I know you think all these things are "dangerous" and a "fire risk" but my closer network of startup engineers extends to 200+ and zero of them have been involved in a company with a serious emergency despite all the things we did. This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake. No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoYou can’t be serious this was actual conversation
- renewiltord 5y agoHaha, no, I made up the vim pedal story as a positively outrageous example for humor's sake. I thought I was all the way into insanity and so it would be obvious as a joke. My bad.
- greedo 5y agoOMG. I would have killed for a vim pedal had I known they existed.
- renewiltord 5y agoHaha, the pedals do actually exist. I'm sure the guy who'd complain about the cable doesn't :D You can hook up like a guitar pedal or a cheap pedal from Alibaba over USB and it'll do the thing. Honestly, though, I found it quite hard to use in clutch or toggle mode because: 1. Had to keep foot in the same place 2. When had to raise foot it was annoying holding it up like that Here's a link for clutch mode: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch
- dejj 5y agoYou can see it on "Please Don't Touch Anything": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQpsiPO0L8&t=915s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQpsiPO0L8&t=915s
- TYPE_FASTER 5y agoWe wanted to run our own e-mail server and use Mutt on one team, so we repurposed an old desktop. Took the cover off, everybody assumed it was broken.
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoEarly Win use to crash with OS/2 errors.
- vijucat 5y agoThis sounds like a one-pixel attack, but on robotic corporate procedures rather than robotic neural networks. Corporate culture as an entity, with rules of it's own, that evolves just like a neural network trained on weights is a great analogy to chew on...I wonder what determines the architecture and weights of that NN?
- munificent 5y agoWhen I worked at EA, someone brought his own coffee maker to their cubicle because he liked brewing his own and having it just they way he liked it. No one had any problems with this as far as red tape or corporate policy goes. However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat. Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.
- chasd00 5y agoWell see what you do in that case is replace the breaker with a penny :)
- dlinder 5y agoThis brings to mind the legendary "property passes" from Commodore / Amiga. These were passes to remove property from the office, so if you brought in personal property, you'd need to get a property pass issued to remove it at the end of the day. Of course the security guy handing out the passes was clueless, so the engineers would get property passes for Boeing 747s, Cray X-MPs (just in case Commodore ever bought a cray, the lucky holder of the property pass would presumably be able to wheel it out the door), and so on. Dave Haynie records these stories in his "Deathbed Vigil", though the property pass story seems virtually unmentioned on the textual web, aside from an everything2 source.
- chris_wot 5y agoOne of my favourite subreddits in r/maliciouscompliance - this seems to be an excellent example!
- bombcar 5y agoFamously the way railroad employees go on strike (because it’s illegal to go on strike) is to work to rule meaning they begin following every single rule on the books. Which is as effective as a strike.