![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We employ two students each semester part-time. There are two basic qualifications to get hired: you must be receiving financial aid, and you have to pass an interview and a basic computer literacy test.
We had a new guy who started this fall semester unexpectedly quit on us last week before the semester ended. That was a bit annoying, having to rejigger the schedule with no notice. And if you quit, well, we're not going to bring you back. So we start looking at applications. And find a young person who allegedly wanted to work with us.
Their interview was this morning. And it became a "not only no, but hell no."
Well, this person was receiving financial aid. Completely blew the second half.
It rapidly became apparent that they held what we refer to as the 'Google View' of the information universe, that is, that all information can be found via Google searches. Well, it can't. There are huge tranches of information that aren't indexed by Google and never will be. The astronomer and author (of the Cuckoo's Egg, recommended read*) Cliff Stoll said it quite nicely in one of his books, though he might have been quoting someone - I can't remember - but the saying was that the internet is an information resource infinitely wide but only a millimeter thick.
ANYWAY, they were asked the question: what programs or activities would you like to see in the library to encourage students to use it. And the reply was "Well, people will use the library or not, libraries are on their way out." Yep, the Google Answer. Everything you need to know is online.
Additionally, they needed to complete a very basic Microsoft Word exercise. Load a document off a thumb drive into Word, follow the instructions in the document to make specific changes, save the doc, close it, return the flash drive. Should take no more than 5-10 minutes. 30 minutes later, they were not done. My boss goes to see what's happening: they'd plugged the drive into a monitor port that was not connected to the tower PC. Apparently they were not very familiar with PC hardware and couldn't be bothered to look at cable pathways to see if a USB cable lead from the monitor to the PC. Some basic PC knowledge is also considered useful for the job, as is asking for help if you're having problems, not wasting a half an hour of time.
"Thank you for coming, we'll be in touch." Or not, in this case.
* * * * *
*Cliff Stoll was an astronomy graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab (LBNL) in 1986, he ran out of grant money and was given the task of finding why two different computer accounting systems were off by SEVENTY FIVE CENTS. And he found it: in an account of a professor who was on sabbatical and out of the country, and thus did not have computer access - keep in mind that at this time there was the internet, but mostly only available at universities and gov't labs/military bases. No World Wide Web, that started in the early '90s.
Cliff was not a programmer, at this time he's an astrophysicist working on a PhD. To find what caused the error, he taught himself programming to understand the code of the two accounting systems to find out why the discrepancy.
Unix, in a server environment, has/had an internal accounting system for billing time/resources against individual accounts. On top of that, LBNL had written a second accounting system for whatever reason.
In studying the code, he figured out that a properly logged-in account would be accounted for by both accounting systems. But if someone hacked into LBNL's system, there would be a discrepancy because the hackers knew about the Unix accounting system and how to bypass it. They didn't know about the second accounting system and thus didn't know to bypass it and thus generated the discrepancy!
Stoll kept digging, and uncovered - I kid you not - an East German spy ring! They hacked into LBNL's system and used it as a gateway to bounce around the internet and get into various government and military networks across the country.
And it was all discovered because of a seventy-five cent error.
Cliff wrote two other books, Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic. The quote about the internet being a millimeter deep came from, I think, Silicon Snake Oil. But as I said, I highly recommend Cuckoo's Egg, it was made into a PBS movie! All three books are fun, and I think Cuckoo's Egg includes a cookie recipe.
The spy ring incident also resulted into a pretty gruesome murder and conflagration in East Germany when the identities of some of the people involved were subsequently uncovered by police.
We had a new guy who started this fall semester unexpectedly quit on us last week before the semester ended. That was a bit annoying, having to rejigger the schedule with no notice. And if you quit, well, we're not going to bring you back. So we start looking at applications. And find a young person who allegedly wanted to work with us.
Their interview was this morning. And it became a "not only no, but hell no."
Well, this person was receiving financial aid. Completely blew the second half.
It rapidly became apparent that they held what we refer to as the 'Google View' of the information universe, that is, that all information can be found via Google searches. Well, it can't. There are huge tranches of information that aren't indexed by Google and never will be. The astronomer and author (of the Cuckoo's Egg, recommended read*) Cliff Stoll said it quite nicely in one of his books, though he might have been quoting someone - I can't remember - but the saying was that the internet is an information resource infinitely wide but only a millimeter thick.
ANYWAY, they were asked the question: what programs or activities would you like to see in the library to encourage students to use it. And the reply was "Well, people will use the library or not, libraries are on their way out." Yep, the Google Answer. Everything you need to know is online.
Additionally, they needed to complete a very basic Microsoft Word exercise. Load a document off a thumb drive into Word, follow the instructions in the document to make specific changes, save the doc, close it, return the flash drive. Should take no more than 5-10 minutes. 30 minutes later, they were not done. My boss goes to see what's happening: they'd plugged the drive into a monitor port that was not connected to the tower PC. Apparently they were not very familiar with PC hardware and couldn't be bothered to look at cable pathways to see if a USB cable lead from the monitor to the PC. Some basic PC knowledge is also considered useful for the job, as is asking for help if you're having problems, not wasting a half an hour of time.
"Thank you for coming, we'll be in touch." Or not, in this case.
*Cliff Stoll was an astronomy graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab (LBNL) in 1986, he ran out of grant money and was given the task of finding why two different computer accounting systems were off by SEVENTY FIVE CENTS. And he found it: in an account of a professor who was on sabbatical and out of the country, and thus did not have computer access - keep in mind that at this time there was the internet, but mostly only available at universities and gov't labs/military bases. No World Wide Web, that started in the early '90s.
Cliff was not a programmer, at this time he's an astrophysicist working on a PhD. To find what caused the error, he taught himself programming to understand the code of the two accounting systems to find out why the discrepancy.
Unix, in a server environment, has/had an internal accounting system for billing time/resources against individual accounts. On top of that, LBNL had written a second accounting system for whatever reason.
In studying the code, he figured out that a properly logged-in account would be accounted for by both accounting systems. But if someone hacked into LBNL's system, there would be a discrepancy because the hackers knew about the Unix accounting system and how to bypass it. They didn't know about the second accounting system and thus didn't know to bypass it and thus generated the discrepancy!
Stoll kept digging, and uncovered - I kid you not - an East German spy ring! They hacked into LBNL's system and used it as a gateway to bounce around the internet and get into various government and military networks across the country.
And it was all discovered because of a seventy-five cent error.
Cliff wrote two other books, Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic. The quote about the internet being a millimeter deep came from, I think, Silicon Snake Oil. But as I said, I highly recommend Cuckoo's Egg, it was made into a PBS movie! All three books are fun, and I think Cuckoo's Egg includes a cookie recipe.
The spy ring incident also resulted into a pretty gruesome murder and conflagration in East Germany when the identities of some of the people involved were subsequently uncovered by police.
