19 Aug 2005 nutella   » (Master)

"Like doing science back in the 80's..."
The above is a quote from one of my technicians describing the conditions at work. Our company has been paralysed by zotob for the last three days. This is no big secret as the gatehouse has had large signs draped across it ordering us not to turn on our computers until IT has given us the say so. The two main classes of response have been; a) "The sky is falling!" and b) "Hurray! We are free!". It is has been a glimpse of a little of what could have happened if the Y2k pessimism had come true. No corporate e-mail or calendar (and no access to the "database" of old e-mail). No outside access. No access to (most) programs stored on file servers. No access to data that people recommend we store on servers ("because it is backed up every night"). My office Linux box (and a colleague's Mac) worked just fine but couldn't get out because a link in the firewall includes a Windoze box. Most of my co-workers have never held an opinion (positive or negative) about Microsoft but the opinion they provided most commonly has been "This virus was written by Microsoft to force us to upgrade from Windows 2000!" which was a big surprise to me. The alternative explanation "This virus was written by the antivirus software people to keep themselves in business." was a very definite second. Armies of IT people have take three days to get the 10s of thousands of PCs working again. I am guessing that there will be consequences. Probably the nicest side-effect was that people talked to each other face to face. I haven't seen that happen in a long time. We actually got to know the people that work in the adjacent lab or the office on the same floor. We all had something in common. Hurray!

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