Security, or something.

When I was in grad school, there was a big copier that you could use if you had a code. That was the only enforcement mechanism. Could you type a four digit number into the highly visible keypad to unlock the machine? I asked one of the admins if they did cost accounting per code, where each lab was charged for their copies based on the code they entered. Turns out, no. Each lab had a different number but nobody cared, the copier was in near constant use. 

This was also in the early email days, when POP3 clients were all the rage (remember Eudora?) POP3 was not encrypted in any way, so every five minutes your Mac would connect to the main server and send a username and password pair in cleartext. Of course when I say “connect to” in the context of a network, it means “broadcast to the whole world with a header saying ‘this is for that server, not you’”. The header is ignorable.

So anyway, within a day or two of starting grad school, I knew everyone's passwords (well, enough of everyone- some people still used PINE and telnet and I didn't feel like packet sniffing those sessions - I used ssh obvi), and had about six or seven copier codes to choose from. It is so hard to not notice and memorize a pincode if someone is punching it it in front of me, I don't know how you humans manage.

Not that I ever did  anything with those passwords (I did make a lot of copies though), to me this kind of thing is “can I?” rather than “what should I do with it?” The most visible hacking I did in grad school was using the HP printer control language and an unsecured printer to change the ready message from “Ready to Print” to “PC Load Letter” which amused me for a while but was so confusing to other people I just changed it to “PC Load Soul” or something obviously silly.

Anyway, yesterday there was a roaming outage that impacted a lot of Americans traveling abroad. Bad timing for me, as I was one of those people. I managed to get a lot of offline maps loaded to my phone using the open wifi provided by the hop on hop off tour buses that tended to congregate in front of the V&A while we waited for it to open (and indeed, it turned out that the V&A had free wifi and the outage was resolved for me before we left the museum). So I was looking for open wifi when I saw one named OfficeJet. This is a kind of default behavior for printers - if there's no network to attach to, they will make their own hotspot, and then you are supposed to connect to it manually and either print or configure the printer with your local wifi password and stuff.

Naturally, I connected and looked for printers. I only had my phone, so there wasn't a lot I could do with PCL. I did print this, which I had previously downloaded, because it amuses me to put shitposts into my photostream, between pictures I take.

So anyway, if you live or work near the V&A and found this on your printer recently, secure the printer. And the rest of you do the same. You can usually disable that feature (it really isn't that useful) or at least add a password. Before someone else adds a password for you. Or prints like fifty black pages.