The Laws Have Changed

08 Dec 2006

Introducing for the first time, Pharoah on the microphone!

Sing: All hail what will be revealed today

From the fear of the great unknown, from the line to the throne.

"The Laws Have Changed", The New Pornographers

Thursday night was the USENIX Carnival Of Fun: lots of carnival games that got you more tickets for the door prizes (which were a huge pile of No Starch Press books plus a Monty Python box set). I wandered around for a while, looking at the huge crowd and fighting the temptation to run to the balcony and shout, "Carousel is a lie! You can LIVE!"

I talked for a while to a woman I'd been running into the whole week, a sysadmin at a defence contractor. She had been to Andy's talk as well. One difference between her job and Andy's is that she's responsible both for classified and unclassified networks. One effect of this is that she's able to contact more people for support...but there are limits.

For example, she had to send off logs from one app that was failing to the vendor for them to pore over. The app was on a classified computer; she was forbidden to copy any data from that machine directly to an unclassified network, so that meant no SSH, no ftp, no USB disk, no burning of CDs, nothing. What did she do? She printed out the logs, verified that nothing in there was classified, then put them through a scanner and used OCR to munge the images back into text.

Later, an engineer from another vendor came to poke at an app running on an unclassified computer, and it was her job not just to supervise him, but to run the big K-Mart Special flashing blue light to let everyone around her know that there was someone without clearance in the room, and to watch their mouths and adjust their monitors appropriately. In other situations, she's had to sit at the keyboard and type what the engineer told her to...because without clearance, you're not allowed to touch the machine.

I wandered on, and picked up a tracking monkey. There was a security consultant with a huge bag of stuffed monkeys that were meant to wrap around your arm or shoulder or something. I couldn't make that work, so I wrapped it around my neck. A little tight, but it was worth it: when people would ask what it was or where I'd got it, I'd fix them with a stern look and ask suspiciously, "Where's your tracking monkey, citizen?"

Eventually I hooked up with Noah (CSAIL) and Deb (FSF). Deb made us smack things (Noah won the strength test) and throw things (she cheated at skeeball, but I managed to win another ticket so that was okay). When the draw came over I dragged over Ricky the Bostonian/iite/aniananan for luck, since at least 8 people who'd been w/in 70 feet of him had won. However, turns out his luck function really peaks at 70 feet, and at 4 feet away it's pretty minimal. Oh well.

We went to check out the Google BOF, but on the way out Deb dared me to play Logan. I dragged her up to the balcony overlooking the ball room and yelled my line, but sadly it got lost in the noise. The lineup for the Google BOF was insane; someone told us that they were giving away a MacBook Pro. <post-hoc rationalization> We decided to form a Bass BOF and headed to the bar.</post-hoc rationalization> (Sorry I couldn't make your scotch BOF, Jessica!)

There was massive talk about salting the cod (which just sounds like the best euphemism anywhere, and I really want everyone to pick up on that, so go!), places to drink in Boston (incl. one place that has 100 beers on tap), and many, many other things. After a while we headed to the LOPSA room, where a lot of people ended up. I talked briefly to Andy, the guy who talked about Command and Control:

I got a lot of pictures with the tracking monkey, including Tom Limoncelli:

and dkap and Melanie Rieback:

And when the night wound down, we went back down to the bar to verify that their supplies were still good. (They were.) Man, it's been a long time since I've closed a bar. :-)