#40

Well, well, well. I told you so. OK, well perhaps not you, and definitely not you, but I definitely remember telling you over there and... you, yes you, yes I remember you. Bastards. By 'you' I mean all the people during the late 80's and early 90's that poo-poo-ed central high security computer systems saying they were old hat and how we should adopt the new fad of distributed systems and PCs and all manner of free love for computers... some of you were even honest enough and came-out and said it: [stand by for my poor attempt at a scorning and belittling paraphrase] "Oow why can't I have a PC instead of a terminal so that I can have pretty screen savers and a mouse and so that I can play minesweeper and run microbloodysoftbloodyword and arrange all my little desktop icons just so and have my own wallpaper to reflect my true useless inane personality, and design my own farty little data base for my vewwy-wewy own department that I'll design so amateurishly that it'll be unusable once it has more than ten records in it and cause me to plague you actual bothered-to-learn-how-to-work-these-computery-things-properly IT professionals to fix it on a weekly basis 'till the end of fecking time, blah, blah, fecking, blah". Well serves you bastards right: I bloody told you it would lead to the break down of civilisation as we know it (well OK I didn't say that exactly but I said it would be a very very very bad idea... no actually, thinking about it, I probably did say that knowing me). Well civilisation hasn't collapsed yet, thankfully, but the lackadaisical down-loading of data onto PCs and CD etc. and general freedom for all users to use vital data in their own cockamamie local way on their local computers has gradually created a climate that has shot a fair few rockets up your deserving ****s these last few months with yet more reports of laptops going missing with many many thousands of personal details on them, this time it's even worse than when Inland Revenue or your local council have lost stuff -- this time it's the MOD: which means it contains the details of military personnel who could not only be robbed through identity fraud but actually targeted by terrorists and killed. Whether it is laptops or CDs going missing it would have been very unlikely to have happened in the 'olden days' because the databases would have been on highly secure systems in locked rooms run at C2 level security by people like me. It simply would not have been possible for anyone to have copied an entire database, for starters they would have been accessing the system via some sort of terminal which wouldn't even have had any sort of disk drive or USB port, and secondly you would have had to apply for an access level (through your manager) to even see (let alone copy) personal details, and then you would have only been able to look at one record at a time. To get a tape, disc, or whatever, of the whole of, or of part of the database would have meant coming and asking a system manager, someone like me... AND HOW FAR DO YOU THINK YOU WOULD HAVE GOT WITH SUCH A REQUEST??????? HUH???? DO I SOUND LIKE THE SORT OF PERSON THAT WOULD GIVE YOU PART OF MY DATABASE????? FECK OFF BACK TO YOUR GAME OF FECKING MINESWEEPER YOU FECKER. Now-a-days you probably go and ask one of many systems managers (some of which may even have been out-sourced for pity sake) for a copy of this or that, and security is the least of their worries, they just want to get you off their back because they have a whole host of systems to take care of, running all sorts of badly set-up operating systems which they are just 'fire fighting' to keep up and running, not to mention their myriad of applications [which we used to call programs in the olden days] and anarchic users... so they will probably just copy you a disc, job done, and not think twice about it. Well don't say I didn't warn you. And to top it all your obsession with PCs and being able to manipulate your data locally has meant that the superb systems I used to work on (VAX VMS) and which I was an expert at are now practically obsolete, or at least niche. Bastards.