Technology, election, assault and family

That is pretty much how my time is filled up. Work and technology, decision on the election (thank god it's over), my huge family happenings and plans for the holidays and assault. Wait...what?

Yes. I won't go into a lot of detail. This post is not to elaborate on the assault. The person was my sister 1954. The assault was aggravated rape and aggravated robbery. She is okay. She is no shrinking violet. She has been in prison numerous times and is not a timid person, she survived but was afraid for her life. A knife was involved. That is all I am saying about the actual assault.

The real reason for the post is the technology part. The abuser stole her cell phone. She has a cell plan with her son (my nephew the technology guru/wizard). He called the provider and they set it up so that if the phone was turned on, it would beam the location to a tower and then shut down.

The "perp" turned it on. Technology worked, provider called my nephew, my nephew called the police and they picked the guy up right in front of his house sitting in a car. Wearing the same clothes my sister had described. Yes, it took a while to talk her into going to the police and hospital the next morning, but she did. So, her attacker was arrested within 24 hours of the crime. YAY!

She had already had plans to move out of that neighborhood - the plan was actually in the works. Two weeks notice at the job, plans for a new place - she had one more week, there. Let the healing begin.

Discreet

I may have mentioned a week or so ago about some techs having issue with a new feature our organization's filter has. It is a reporting feature. A school tech can run several reports to see what is going on in their network. At a school district you want to stay on top of things.

Here is my dilemma. I have to learn about the report features so that I can tell our techs that they have this, this and that available to them. So  I run plenty of reports to see what they are.

In doing so, there is one school district, the end user is logged in as an Administrator and several hundred hits are searches for p0rn.

Now, this is where I have to be discreet. The first thing I did was to run a report on just that end user for the past seven days and hand it over to my superior.

Remember - this could be an Admin user who is not logging off of their machine and a student is doing all the searching. Or, the student may have stolen the login credentials. The searches are very young-ish school age searches. The age of the girls searched for etc.

Now, what will be interesting to me is to see what my superiors instruct me to do. Of course, I am not the person to do anything as far as the school goes, but do they want me to continue to turn over this type of report or am I to turn a blind eye?

I mean - nobody was doing this for the dozen or so years before we purchased this feature. This feature was not purchased to do this. It was purchased to make the lives of our district techs easier. The tech should be the one pulling this type of report but this is all new - we are still in a testing phase.

Every end users signed an Acceptable use policy.

Here is my view. If the admin is viewing p0rn during school hours on a school owned computer - they need to stop and possibly be reprimanded. If a student is using the computer under the Admin's login - that needs to stop. Either way - to me - it needs to be addressed.

What I will really hate (and this is what I expect) is that it will be totally ignored. As if I did  not even send the message. Time will tell.

In my mind

When I was in my twenties, I thought it was pretty cut and dry. Decisions. How you chose to live your life, etc... I was confused and angry at women who remained in a violent environment.

As I grew older, became wiser (I hope) and read more, I came to understand a bit more about how the human mind works. About strength. I used to think that women who remained in this situation were weak until one day I thought "Maybe they are really, really strong!?"

I am so fortunate to have instilled inside my brain (as puny as it may be) the audacity to be independent and to stand up for my rights. Maybe not in everything all the time - but enough to matter.

My sister is a victim of verbal abuse. Fortunately, there is no physical (except one time many years ago). Verbal abuse is just as ugly and it tears away at your psyche on a daily basis until you don't know who you are any longer and you don't know up from down, night from day.

I believe it is a form of brain washing and victims are left so confused they no longer can make decisions for themselves. Especially when your genetic make-up was one where that was a weak area, anyway.

So, the above photo is lifted from the Internets, but it depicts pretty much how I feel when it comes to physical violence or verbal abuse in a relationship. I do not believe I know anyone (man or woman) who is the abuser (physical) in a relationship. I know they are out there, I am just glad I am not aware of it. I probably know plenty of verbal abusers and those who play mind games with their spouse. The subject seems to be taboo, whispered only with closest friends and trusted family members.

Don't even get me started on child or animal abuse. It will ruin my day for sure.