Me: omfg lol Dartmouth quarantined my Mac because they thought it was hacked...to make a long story short, it turned out to be caused by me looking at my webcam
Me: [respected coworker] is straightening it all out
My brother: holy shit!
Me: the webcam software for some reason spewed a zillion packets back at my Mac -- just too many in too short a time -- and because of the port it was using, their software thought it was an open web proxy and that my workstation was somehow compromised
My brother: HOLY shit cool
My brother: I mean interesting
Me: lol yes very interesting...sucks ass though
My brother: lol
Me: one of our honeypots is on that link and now we're getting no data from it because they also blocked that IP from talking to or from Dartmouth's whole network
Me: two-way clampdown
Me: my work IP is not allowed to talk to anyone, AND my home IP is not allowed to talk to Dartmouth
My brother: OMG
My brother: Jesus
Me: what bothers me is that if my name gets mentioned, which it probably will, then this is YET ANOTHER instance of false-alarm weirdness associated with me and they are gonna think I am some kind of rogue even though nothing bad actually happened.
Me: remember the clusterfuck with our HL server?
Me: it was using port 53 which is also DNS
Me: I did that to try to bypass [old high school's] firewall rules so that Amdusias could play HL from his school
My brother: LOL!!!
Me: and people started yelling at Dartmouth computing dept. because their stupid fw software was telling them they were being hacked by the server
Me: total bs, but it got blamed on me
Me: even though everyone had implicitly agreed that it was cool to run the server
My brother: lame!
Me: yeah they all acted like they had no idea -- [boss], etc. all feigned ignorance and made as if I was operating without their consent
Me: I was pissed.
Me: Anyway this is incident #3, that was #2. #1 was when [friend turned enemy] actually slandered me
Me: I had to go in and defend my rep to the head of Comp Svcs
Me: but they never really trusted me after that.
Me: I have to wait for all of them to retire or die before I will be respected as [various coworkers] are -- thanks to this stupid shit
My brother: this is 3 strikes -- if nothing happens you need to move onto committing felonies duh
My brother: JK there is no crime here -- just a bunch of losers
Me: lol
I'm SO SICK of the computer security industry. Because no matter how minor the actual event will be deemed to have been (whoa...it's the future-past-perfect tense!), the computing staff will still stand behind their decision because it "looked suspicious" and I will still be regarded as the bad guy for triggering the false alarm because whatever I did was "odd." It didn't fit their profile, so its actual harmlessness is moot; it showed up on their radar, so I am under scrutiny for that alone.
The politics of computer security reminds me a little of the Patriot act. Policies are set up to PROTECT THE ORGANIZATION and no matter how ludicrous, unnecessary, or incorrect they are, they're unimpeachable because IT'S FOR OUR PROTECTION! If you argue against them for any reason, then you're advocating anarchy at the very least. In fact, you're probably the enemy.
Fuck computers. Carpentry is looking good as a career right about now.