from Hacker News

Simple Sabotage for the 21st Century – Specific Suggestions

by RobLach on 11/29/24, 6:33 PM with 64 comments

• by skinkestek on 11/29/24, 7:55 PM

  You see this happening in russia these days.

  My favourite was from the start of the war when the guys who were supposed to plant incriminating evidence on the scene were they arrested some "terrorists" put the Sims 3 game on the scene instead of 3 sim cards and literally signed the fake documents they planted with "Signature Unclear". (Yes, real story, just search for Sims 3 and Signature Unclear.)

  As I understand it I understand this was FSB (or someone elses) way of "getting even" after their boss had been publicly humiliated for proposing to not invade Ukraine. (But that - except for the public humiliation which is well documented - is just speculation on my part although I might have heard it from someone else thinking loud.)

  Although sometimes I wonder if it was a genuine misunderstanding. I feel I have unusually many Russian friends and ex-colleagues, people who live outside of russia for good reasons and do not support it. Z-russians on the other hand does not strike me as the brightest bulbs in the box.

• by temporallobe on 11/29/24, 9:05 PM

  > Log users out frequently for "security reasons".

  This is exactly what happens on a contract I work on. Any software that is authenticated through our OKTA SSO very frequently signs users out and redirects to a logout page. This is especially annoying when using the project management software, where you typically have many tabs open to see various requirements, epics, stories, tasks, etc. Any inactivity more than 15 minutes, and all the tabs are logged out. Just like that, everything is gone. It forces us to use strategies such as saving redundant copies of things in notes and spreadsheets. I don’t think it’s necessarily sabotage but it feels extremely negligent. Moreover it’s completely unnecessary since everything is behind a VPN anyway.

  Another similar thing that does feel as if it’s somewhat malicious is the very aggressive logout and shutdown policy of our virtual desktops - these are the desktops we do everyday active development on and where we set up IDEs, database clients, web servers, testing tools, API references - anything you can think of. We use this in combination with our regular desktops where we attend meetings or do other non-development tasks such as using the above-mentioned requirements software. It takes a lot of time to set all of this up! If you’re inactive for more than 2 hours, your session is not only closed, it’s completely destroyed so that it can be reclaimed for another user. I don’t need to explain to experienced developers how incredibly frustrating and counterproductive this is, but leadership has been extremely dismissive of any complaints, and tell us that we should use our time more wisely or that we shouldn’t be inactive for so long (which is complete BS, there are a thousand valid reasons foe this). Apparently this is done for cost-cutting reasons, but something feels more nefarious here, because this very obviously leads to reduced productivity and demotivation. This has actually lead to me purposefully overestimating complexity and demanding a user story for every single little trivial action I take, whereas before I used to just go in and make quick fixes or knock out certain operational things in my spare time. It’s a waste of time for us and ends up being worse for our customers.

• by Animats on 11/29/24, 8:26 PM

  This is a takeoff on a well known WWII pamphlet, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.[1]

  That's not the real worry today. Today we have to worry about remote sabotage of key systems - water, power, comms. It's quite possible that we will see major blackouts in the US, Russia, Europe, or China as side effects of the various wars in progress.

  [1] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...

• by cjfd on 11/29/24, 7:32 PM

  Another one: when a colleague asks for something that is wrong, implement it as requested without questioning.

• by nmwp on 11/29/24, 7:16 PM

  Looks like government has already implemented a lot of these suggestions.

• by yawpitch on 11/29/24, 7:12 PM

  Just love this. My particular favorite is sending the http:// version of everything instead of https://.

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 11/29/24, 7:03 PM

  That site is kind of a riot.

  Click on "Exit".

• by OsrsNeedsf2P on 11/29/24, 7:26 PM

  "These seem kind of dated.. I feel like you could have more speci-"

  > Require wet signatures (ink on paper) for documents instead of digital

  Jesus Christ.

• by NelsonMinar on 11/29/24, 7:50 PM

  This is very funny. I just wish the Slack unfurls showed the specific suggestion from the link.

• by walterbell on 11/30/24, 2:24 AM

  heisenhelpful.

• by Oarch on 11/29/24, 7:23 PM

  We are all now immediately suspicious of certain coworkers...

• by hluska on 11/29/24, 7:29 PM

  I may be having an old fuddy duddy moment but I really dislike this site. My first suggestion was at least interesting. My second was to superglue things into place.

  Will supergluing things in place actually help the oppressed? Are you the Harriet Tubman of adhesives? Or will someone who makes minimum wage get yelled at and then forced to clean it?

  This is Tik Tok level pranks applied to serious political issues and frankly, oppressed people deserve better than this.

• by SavageBeast on 11/29/24, 7:45 PM

  This reads like a guide on how to get fired for cause. Additionally its quite childish. Why not just throw a tantrum and save the trouble?