White Lies Help Stressed Computer Users

An anonymous reader writes "Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work."

How to use this to make workers look bad

[Travoltus]

Stuff like this could become the first direction all fingers point when a company goes down.

So much for it being because a company's product got beaten out by a competitor, or because its leadership embezzled it into the ground, or creative accounting.

Everyone now will be looking for the back office Richard Pryor type (I forgot the name of the movie) as a scapegoat.

American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?

You're in the wrong job.

[onion2k]

If you're resorting to lies and trickery to avoid the work you ought to be doing, then you should quit. If your job is so bad, don't carry on with it. Find one you actually like, that you enjoy, that isn't something you want to avoid. You'll be a lot less stressed and you'll find life a whole lot easier.

Re:Why?!!!

[yiangocy]

Yes, the messages are stamped by the SMTP server itself. The article really should not be taken seriously. I was surprised that it was published by Reuters to be honest.

The SMTP server accepts email from any time -- you can be from a totally different timezone remember.

Also, did anyone else notice this at the end of the article?:

(Additional reporting by Duncan Martell in San Francisco, Reed Stevenson in Seattle and Kevin Krolicki in Los Angeles)

It took so many people to write that?

Re:You're in the wrong job.

[Travoltus]

Except then there would be the problem with paying rent. For most people nowadays, an enjoyable job is not one that pays, or at least pays well. Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year.

But yeah, lies and trickery on the job are not cool, either by the workers or by the executive officers...

Re:WHA?!

[Anonymous Coward]

no, people are lazy, they just like to collect a paycheck. Sometimes I think people work harder at not working then actually doing the work.

Why?

[Chasuk]

From what was described in the article, I don't understood how the "cheating" took any less effort than something novel like... doing the work.

That's like friends I have who shorten "thanks" to "thnkx," because it saves them time. They're right! Wow, in 50 years, they might have saved enough time to watch an episode of South Park!

their ignorance is your bliss

[FoxAche]

I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays. To the average person who walks past it looks like I'm working. They think I'm doing some work using the command line. As the IT area in my office is too full I'm sitting in accounts where they have no clue what you are doing, but had I opened a web page in a regular browser it would look bad.

Re:Backdate e-mails

[tero]

..or the companys mail/sys/netadmin, once The Boss gets irked enough of the "network delaying important work" all the time.
After that.. well, you can kiss your job goodbye..

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always say that your private mailserver only sends out emails every day at noon. But, punched out by the flu as you were, you didn't remember that when you sent the email 07:30 that morning.

There are millions of excuses, but I think one's better off with the truth. "Sorry boss, but I'm really burned out these days, can I please have a couple of days off?" is much better than if your PHB notices that you've been lying to him every monday for several months.

White lies?

[Heliode]

When I read the title, I thought it was about the kind of white lies you tell users who get stressed out with their computer, in order to not make it too technical for them. "The big yellow 'E' was the source of the naked women who scared little timmy. Now when you want to get to your internet, just click the red fox on the blue ball. That's your internet now. Also, the blue bird with the envelope will get your mail for you now." Or when you try to hold your laughter when a user walks up to you and proudly declares he bought a "harder disk" for his movies, and just say "really? Thats cool." (pretty hard that one, though)

Re:How to use this to make workers look bad

[Anonymous Coward]

American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?

If America is so productive, why does it have such an enormous balance of trade deficit?

Re:Backdate e-mails

[BiDi]

Do you think that bosses know how to check e-mail headers? 90% of them only know how to start Outlook if the icon is sitting directly on the desktop.

Re:You're in the wrong job.

[Anonymous Coward]

"But yeah, lies and trickery on the job are not cool, either by the workers or by the executive officers..."

The difference is that when I get caught, I get fired. When executive officers get caught, they retire with millions via a severance package.

As Confucius says....

[Emperor Stalin]

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

Liability.

[vhold]

If anybody was on to you, they could sit down at your desk and do some nefarious things under your network login and you'd be ultra hosed.

Sure, you could pretty much no matter what with physical access to the machine, but not locking up at night would practically be inviting it.

Conservatives are morons

[Anonymous Coward]

American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour).

If conservatives had their way they'd abolish things like statistics (and learning in general) then state conjecture about 'lazy american workers' as fact and vehemently deny that it was otherwise while spinning it back on liberals as a form of 'commie pinko' support of the working class.

Just remember it's the hard, intelligent, innovative real Americans outside the quasi-work of politics that do all the work in business, industry etc. that supports these asswipes, gives them a forum to air their views and made America such a great nation in the first place.

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent makes a good point. I realise how bad todays system with corruption and amoral capitalism, but I also realise on the other hand some of us in the west have also never had it so good. The thing is humans in social situation are going to try climb the dominance hierarchy anyway they can. I think it's even been shown in game theory that anyone who cooperates will always swap to competing if another actor starts competing. You can't stop it. It's sad and it sucks.

Me personally, I'm a 'disgruntled idealist' who has tried to find ways to come to grips with such things. A good quote that comes to mind was from the military strategist John Boyd.

"One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you're going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go." [Boyd] raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd raised the other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something - something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference." He paused and stared. "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"

Re:Why?!!!

[1u3hr]

Why aren't the message times marked by the SMTP server itself?

They are; if you can look at all the headers on a mail message you'll see the arrival times as it hops from server to server. But the recipient normally only sees the "Date:" header, which is set by the mail client, and this is easily hacked, as TFA says.

Some related anecdotes:

I have a friend whose PC clock is about 20 minutes past, it's disconcerting to receive messages from the future, and weird when my reply is 10 minutes ahead of the question (hard to make sense of the mailbox later too). He ignores my pleas to get a simple NTP client.

A few months ago I found some of my messages were taking a very long time to get through to certain people. Getting them to bounce back the complete message showed their ISP had rejected my message temporarily (I forget the error number), which prompted my ISP's mail server to wait several hours before retrying. It turned out this was a braindead anti-spam measure, if any mail server sent "too many" messages" in a given period they were throttled. Of course, since my ISP is very large it was easy to trigger this with a spike in normal message traffic, let alone any rogue spammer.

Re:Backdate e-mails

[Wrath0fb0b]

"One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock" For those that didn't RTFA, the next line was: "'It will certainly prove that you sent the e-mail when you said you did,' Saltzman said. 'You can just blame the delay on the network.'"

The point is that a large time gap between sent and received headers will be invariably be interpreted as `a technological problem, not a dishonesty problem.

You're in the wrong company.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year."

I suggest people look at how those numbers are computed. Apperances can be deceiving.

Re:How to use this to make workers look bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum wages are so low and without a wellfare state, some people have to work two jobs just to get by.

BZZZZT WRONG!!!. In fact, the best way to INCREASE unemployment is to raise minimum wage.

The comment you're replying to was not about unemployment. Put your Libertarianism back in your pants.

Re:Marx predicted this

[Neoprofin]

It's my freshman year of college again, and someone who just watched the Matrix is trying to look like the most enlightened philosopher in the world to impress drunk girls. Oh, and roll in a healthy dose of Marxist rhetoric, some rather shady connections (remember people, slacking and terrorism are two sides of the same card) and you've got a recipe for an insightful Slashdot post.

Re:You're in the wrong job.

[jackofallbrandnames]

Quit you say? OK I'll quit my job, so give me your e-mail address so I can send the details for you to deposit money into my bank account to pay for all my bills and costs of living.

Tip #1 -- Never quit your job until you have one to replace it.

Unless someone can think of a communist country I can move to where being unemployed doesn't mean you starve to death or live on the streets.

Unfortunately, this economic model causes poverty and starvation due to lack of resources. Why work extra or advance if there's no compensation for it and all people are paid the same? It makes you want to move to a country where you "can" advance.

What's wrong with lies and trickery? It's not like the management are doing much work either. At my job I'm going to do the MINIMUM not to get sacked. Nothing more. They don't pay me enough to care about my job, they don't treat me well enough to care about my job, so I'm going to do as little as I can get away with.

This quickly explains why you get passed up for advancement and pay raises. You offer nothing beyond your current value. It sounds like management has to waste time seeing if you will perform the MINIMUM.

The few 'enjoyable' jobs available are taken, and only open to people skilled and experienced in their field, for everyone else it's a choice between a miserable job and the dole queue.

You're so busy shirking, how do you expect to become the skilled or experienced to handle such a position?! Spend your spare time more wisely, even if just to advance your career so you can qualify for those 'enjoyable' jobs. Believe me, management will notice if you take this approach and put you beyond those lazy management dolts you complain about. The worst that can happen is you qualify for a better paying job.

Re:Conservatives are morons

[WidescreenFreak]

And of course being typical Slashdot moderators you got a +1 Insightful for should have been +5 Not-Knowing-What-The-Hell-You're-Talking-About by applying "conservatives" with the broadest brush possible. What we have in Washington are not conservatives. They're nothing more that political grandstandards who hide behind the conservative shielf because they think it wins them brownie points of some kind, not that this matters to the 75% of /. mods who seem to wring their hands waiting for a good ol' anti-conservative post to come along just so they can mod it up whether or not it has any basis in fact.

You should have added an anti-Fox News statements as well as an anti-Bush statement so that the mods could have given you a +5 insightful.

Re:White lies?

[CypherXero]

You mean "blue", not "yellow". IE has never been yellow, unless I'm colorblind.

Re:Conservatives are morons

[brsmith4]

It's nice that you can remember government figures... but if memory serves, we're at the tail-end of a soon-to-bust housing bubble, employment is much worse than released figures would have you believe (it only counts those who are still receiving unemployment benefits, which stop after 6 months, and not all unemployed opt to receive said benefits), CONSUMER inflation is not at a rate of 3% a year but is closer to 10-12% per year. CORPORATE inflation, due to tax cuts and imports from countries like China is below 1% which, when factored with Consumer inflation, brings it to around 3% (corporations are much larger buyers than we are as consumers, not only to they by the "stuff" that makes their product, but also their means of production). Look at the cost of going to the grocery store, the price of gas, the cost of housing, and the interest rates on unsecured debt. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones to get a nice job that offset these figures, but most people are not in that boat. Life is becoming much tougher, financially, to contend with.

Let's also not mention the ever widening trade deficit as we try to compete in a global economy where our wealth is being purposefully siphoned off into developing nations. How about the national debt?

It boils down to this: there are sectors of the economy that are experiencing very high profits (energy, housing, Military services). This performance is so very high that it currently offsets the poorly performing "rest of the market". That is not a "strong economy", that is an end-of-life "bubble economy". What do you think will happen when the housing bubble comes to an end and all of those fools who financed a $300k house are now sitting on only $100k in assets and another $200k in remaining debt (in the form of a mortgage) on their recently devalued property? Yeah buddy, the economy is strong, unemployment is not an issue and little green leprechauns will be at your door shortly with a big pot of gold for the hard working American family.

Re:The real question

[brsmith4]

It's good to see that people are still civil in their discourse even though others, like myself, often times resort to sometimes rude jabs. Sorry if my points came off sounding a little arrogant.

Americans will become more aware as things get worse. If they don't get worse, people will pay no attention to it. Look at the london bombings and the Carl Rove fiasco. People are starting to see through things and doubt the often touted "official story". The current political structure in this country is going to be hit hard by a hard pressed, overworked and underpaid constituency and it's not going to be pretty. People are looking for any excuse to tar and feather politicians so I think we're starting to see this resentment come to a head.

If people want to learn, they have to first learn to question. Ask anyone if they trust the media and they'll undoubtedly say "no". But at the same time, they simply turn around and listen to what they have to say anyway, often taking it at face value as actual fact. These people need to learn not to believe everything that comes out of the glowing tube or is printed on paper or keyed into a web site somewhere. Just with the web, people can lookup far more information than previously possible.

The politicians are messing up and its becoming obvious to people thus, they are questioning. This will bring them around towards becoming more informed and as a result, more active. I expect to see the next election have record turn out.