Re: [school-discuss] Roadblocks . . .

[Bill Kendrick <nbs@xxxxxxxxx>]

[what follows is an off-topic anecdote that part of your note reminded me of]

On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 01:38:15PM -0400, Bill Barowy wrote:
> Once, the network admin at one of our sites in S. Carolina nearly 
> flipped when I showed him knoppix and easily obtained the web, bypassing his 
> proxy.  He has definitely looked into it more, but I think mostly to better 
> secure his network, so I'm not sure we gained positive ground there.

My LUG attended the Government Technology Conference in California a few times
in past years, and one year there was a hardware vendor booth which was
interested in Linux, as they said their customers had been asking whether
their PCs worked with the OS.

So my friend came back to our booth, grabbed a Knoppix disc, and headed back.
They booted up, and he proceeded to look for an MS Word doc on the Windows
drive, and opened it in OpenOffice.org.

They were flabberghasted.  Apparently, they had some thumbprint bio-metric
security device hooked up to the machine, and they thought it was keeping
the docs on the hard drive secure.  Obviously not.  Take a Knoppix disc
(or, I presume, yank the drive and access it on another Windows or Linux box)
and the 'security' was easily bypassed.

That wasn't my friend's goal, obviously.  He just wanted to show them
Knoppix and OpenOffice.org.  :^)

-bill!