One of the views I had when I took my lunch walk on Thursday the 18th. I like the way the tree branches came out crisp and clear. I was trying different settings with my camera. I must look for the manual and read up on the darn thing. I have only had it for three years. You know us tech people. We read the manual as a total last resort.
I was called out to a school yesterday. As I may have mentioned before the schools are being attacked by a network worm inside our organization. Port 135 is the most common port under attack. DCOM RPC.
This may sound strange to some of you, others may know exactly what I am talking about. I have been working with some of these technology people for ten years. I am getting the impression that sometimes they are not doing all they can. For example. If a school district is hurting for money, they may begin to cut back on personnel that the administrators think are not needed. Instead of an administrator losing the secretary to their assistant they will cancel the job of the technology person's assistant. Human nature being what it is, I think that the technology person thinks to themselves, 'I'll show those bastards. I won't update some of the computers, let them get a virus. That will make them hire me more help. I'm only one person, dammit!"
Yeah. You can see how this can happen. Because as many times as I have called the district technology person to offer my help, they say "No thanks." The other schools are suffering because of it. My supervisors won't shut the school down completely. That is not allowed. It's a mumbo jumbo mixed up mess. Not everybody agrees on what is exactly happening, so no big decisions are made. A lot of people are getting frustrated. And here some of us sit with our hands tied, because we are only allowed to do so much to the schools' network. The other end of the connection is tied up in the home office, heavily protected by passwords and locked doors.
More PC's are slipping through the cracks in a school district. An example is our library person in our organization had districts order special computers to do the library software. They were setup and put in place. Most of the time the technology person in the school district wasn't aware that this computer was set up. Nobody bothered to see if an anti-virus program was installed on the machine, let alone any of the critical windows updates. Another example is the school's furnace system. The company that installed the furnaces come in and setup a computer in the boiler room. Again, nobody told the technical person. An anti-virus was not installed nor updates. The custodian may or may not have used the computer to browse the Internet. Cafeteria workers - same thing. Telephone systems - ditto. It happened in the office that I work out of. The tech person is a whiz. I notified him that he had a virus in his network. He nearly exhausted himself trying to find the damn thing. Finally he found the problem. The telephone company's computer. Sitting in a corner all by itself. Humming along nicely. Nobody checking it for critical updates. Nobody updating the anti-virus (If it even had one). Until one day it is scanned by another machine on another network and bam. In enters the worm.
Not to mention that the schools are now setting up wireless access points. Holy cow. The mess this brings. There are LAN switches, printers and digital copiers that I can access anywhere inside our network with no passwords assigned to them. I can print out a test page on about a hundred printers. Understandably this can cause some folks to think that there are ghosts in the machines. I can change the numbers of copies from 1 to 99. Of course I don't do it, but if I can do it then a high school or middle school student can do it. I tell the technology people that their equipment is vulnerable. What do I get? "Too bad. They won't hire me any help."
What a mess this all is. I can see why some school employees are getting frustrated and tired and give up. Nobody is taking responsibility. We've reached a point where you just can't scrap the computers in the schools. The phones would stop working, the cafeteria worker could not get her order to the state, the payroll would not be called into the banks. In order to work with the business world, the schools have to perform their work via computers. Banks, telcos and the state won't even consider turning back time just so the school systems can get their act together. Education has been thrust kicking and screaming into the technology age. Voters say that the schools have enough money, they won't pass any more levies. They say that management is handling the money incorrectly.
Administrators are saying that there is not enough money to keep the buses, buildings and materials up to date, let alone technology. Everyone suffers, especially the children. Then you have a few bad eggs in the classroom that have just enough knowledge to by-pass the filter and download a Trojan horse. The teacher is overwhelmed handling 35 students in their classroom. They can't monitor all of them.
Where will it end? Will it ever end? Will Microsoft ever begin creating quality software instead of continually focusing on the almighty dollar? For awhile the state government gets a clue and create programs to help. Then after four years or so, somebody else is in office and they decide that the schools don't need the money, that senior citizens or retirement homes do. All the money is then re-routed to those facilities. Or maybe they can pay the farmers more NOT to grow crops like they did for my sister's father-in-law. They paid him not to grow corn so that there would be less produce and they could increase the prices. Or, so I was told.
Which brings me to another story. My brother's ex-father-in-law (who is now long deceased) received two checks a month in retirement. Did he get it straightened out? No, he banked it. As far as I know nobody in a position to stop it ever found out. This was over 20 years ago. The man and his wife are long passed away. We are talking $900 a month for ten years or longer. I am not sure if it was from his place of employment or social security. What is that, $108,000 plus interest? I only found this out last month. I guess now that the people are dead the truth can be told. My brother is no longer a part of that family. I used to sing with the wife of the man in our church choir. May her soul (and his) rest in peace in the heaven she would sing about. Strong Christian examples, there. Yesiree.
Oh, sorry. Rant complete.
More PC's are slipping through the cracks in a school district. An example is our library person in our organization had districts order special computers to do the library software. They were setup and put in place. Most of the time the technology person in the school district wasn't aware that this computer was set up. Nobody bothered to see if an anti-virus program was installed on the machine, let alone any of the critical windows updates. Another example is the school's furnace system. The company that installed the furnaces come in and setup a computer in the boiler room. Again, nobody told the technical person. An anti-virus was not installed nor updates. The custodian may or may not have used the computer to browse the Internet. Cafeteria workers - same thing. Telephone systems - ditto. It happened in the office that I work out of. The tech person is a whiz. I notified him that he had a virus in his network. He nearly exhausted himself trying to find the damn thing. Finally he found the problem. The telephone company's computer. Sitting in a corner all by itself. Humming along nicely. Nobody checking it for critical updates. Nobody updating the anti-virus (If it even had one). Until one day it is scanned by another machine on another network and bam. In enters the worm.
Not to mention that the schools are now setting up wireless access points. Holy cow. The mess this brings. There are LAN switches, printers and digital copiers that I can access anywhere inside our network with no passwords assigned to them. I can print out a test page on about a hundred printers. Understandably this can cause some folks to think that there are ghosts in the machines. I can change the numbers of copies from 1 to 99. Of course I don't do it, but if I can do it then a high school or middle school student can do it. I tell the technology people that their equipment is vulnerable. What do I get? "Too bad. They won't hire me any help."
What a mess this all is. I can see why some school employees are getting frustrated and tired and give up. Nobody is taking responsibility. We've reached a point where you just can't scrap the computers in the schools. The phones would stop working, the cafeteria worker could not get her order to the state, the payroll would not be called into the banks. In order to work with the business world, the schools have to perform their work via computers. Banks, telcos and the state won't even consider turning back time just so the school systems can get their act together. Education has been thrust kicking and screaming into the technology age. Voters say that the schools have enough money, they won't pass any more levies. They say that management is handling the money incorrectly.
Administrators are saying that there is not enough money to keep the buses, buildings and materials up to date, let alone technology. Everyone suffers, especially the children. Then you have a few bad eggs in the classroom that have just enough knowledge to by-pass the filter and download a Trojan horse. The teacher is overwhelmed handling 35 students in their classroom. They can't monitor all of them.
Where will it end? Will it ever end? Will Microsoft ever begin creating quality software instead of continually focusing on the almighty dollar? For awhile the state government gets a clue and create programs to help. Then after four years or so, somebody else is in office and they decide that the schools don't need the money, that senior citizens or retirement homes do. All the money is then re-routed to those facilities. Or maybe they can pay the farmers more NOT to grow crops like they did for my sister's father-in-law. They paid him not to grow corn so that there would be less produce and they could increase the prices. Or, so I was told.
Which brings me to another story. My brother's ex-father-in-law (who is now long deceased) received two checks a month in retirement. Did he get it straightened out? No, he banked it. As far as I know nobody in a position to stop it ever found out. This was over 20 years ago. The man and his wife are long passed away. We are talking $900 a month for ten years or longer. I am not sure if it was from his place of employment or social security. What is that, $108,000 plus interest? I only found this out last month. I guess now that the people are dead the truth can be told. My brother is no longer a part of that family. I used to sing with the wife of the man in our church choir. May her soul (and his) rest in peace in the heaven she would sing about. Strong Christian examples, there. Yesiree.
Oh, sorry. Rant complete.
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