Epic fail, Facepalm, Security
Serious but hilarious NSA anecdotes
(This one's for IT guys, perticularly crypto geeks, source is Schneier's blog)
NSA recently declassified a lectures book from 1973. It contains some real gems, such as these from pages 55/56:
KAG-1/SEC used to be the bible of US cryptographers, was held in every crypto-center and covered everything from message preparation to compromise reporting in considerable detail. While we viewed it as a model of clarity, this perception was not always shared in the real world. A frustrated Navy Chief stormed out of bis crypto-ccntcr on board a carrier at sea, banded KAG-1 to a sailor and jokingly said "Throw this dam' thing overboard." He did. Several ships thereafter steamed back and forth for several days, but never found it. Winds, tides, and currents were studied to predict where it might come ashore with results so ambitious as to offer little hope and, in fact, it was never recovered – at least by us.
This incident triggered an R 1 study on what happens to our documents in salt water. A tank was made, and a copy of KAG-1 immersed. It stayed there for a year or so with no sign of deterioration. Agitators were added to stimulate wave action for another few months, with still no appreciable effect. We never did find out how long such a document would last. Subsequent work, however, has shown that good paper is nearly impervious to salt water, apparently indefinitely. A visit to S2's exhibit of materials recovered from the sea bottom will bear that out. There you can see perfectly legible codes that had been under water since World War II, together with extraordinarily well-preserved items of hardware and magnetic tape that had been on the bottom for many years. These facts add to the previously expressed skepticism about jettison as a way to get rid of our stuff unless at very great depths and in completely secret location. (Shortly after WWII, small Army training crypto-devices called the SIGFOY were disposed of beyond the 100 fathom curve off Norfolk. Some years later, they became prize souvenirs for beach combers as they began washing ashore.)
UNSOLVED PUZZLE – We used to store a lot of cryptomaterial in a warehouse at Ft. Holabird. It was fenced and protected by a 24-hour armed civilian guard. One evening, such a guard saw an individual inside the fence, evidently attempting to penetrate the warehouse. He drew his weapon, cried "Halt!" and led the individual to the guard shack and started to call in for help. About that time, the intruder started running, climbed the fence, and disappeared.
We asked the guard why he didn't shoot – he said he was afraid he might hurt somebody.
CONFETTI – When we manufacture one-time tape, a by-product of the punching process is millions upon millions of tiny, perfectly circular pieces of paper called "chad" that come out of holes in the tape. This chad was collected in burn bags and disposed of. Someone thought it would make good public relations to give this stuff to high school kids for use as confetti at football games. Inevitably, one of the burn bags was not quite empty when the chad went in. At the bottom, were a couple of TOP SECRET key card book covers and a few assorted keys. They carried the impressive caveats of those days like "CRYPTO – CRYPTO-CLEARANCE REQUIRED" and were, to use a term earlier referred to, "fascinating" to the kids when they discovered them.
One of the girls, whose father happened to be an Army officer, tacked soine of this material on her souvenir board. When Daddy saw it, he spiralled upward. He decided that it must be destroyed immediately; but first made a photograph of it for the record. He tore it up, flushed it away, and reported in. With some difficulty, various cheerleaders and other students who had glommed on to some of this material were tracked down, and persuaded to part with it.
We no lonser issue confetti.
A History of U.S. Communications Security (Volumes I and II);
the David G. Boak Lectures, National Security Agency (NSA), 1973
Click to access Hist_US_COMSEC_Boak_NSA_1973u.pdf
cryptographyfinance-lawMilitaryNSAUS
Oh the joy of coding with German Office
So I'm maintaining an Access database, with lots of VBA code, which serves as an internal management tool.
Changing a report should be, and usually is, pretty straight forward. But there I am today, after all changes are done, stuck trying to understand WHY THE FREAKING F*** a format string doesn't work.
The offender is a text box with a date, and I'm trying to get it to be displayed like Nov-2015. So, according to Microsoft's documentation, the format string is mmm-yyyy. Needless to say, didn't work.
After an hour or so of banging my head on the wall, enlightenment comes: Year in German is Jahr !!! So mmm-jjjj, and, pronto, it worked like a charm.
By the way, Microsoft's german doc is wrong (seems like a copy-paste error): it mentions jj and yyyy, instead of jj and jjjj which work (giving 15 and 2015 respectively).
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR *#@$%
c#dateformatgermanmicrosoftofficereportvba