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Comment by jis | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I was told by a colleague that he was required to setup an administrative system that was NOT connected the network, but also had to be able to send and receive e-mail.

The inherent contradiction was lost on the people giving the orders. So...

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Well he was an expert.. wasn't he?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

(Draw seven perpendicular red lines)

+1, parenthetical

That sketch annoys me. Sure, marketing/sales/PM/design guys are idiots, whatever.

Here are 11 things "I can't do it" can mean:

I don't have time

I don't want to

I don't have anyone who knows how to

I want someone else to do it

I don't want to maintain it once built

I want to work on this other thing

Doing it would take away job security for me

I think it is beneath me

You're not going to use it anyway

I don't think it is worth doing

I think it is too expensive

I think it would be easyish to fill out another 10 reasons for what "can't" really means that are more common than "it is flat out impossible regardless of budget/resources".

Half of those are perfectly valid responses. "I don't have time" or "I don't know anyone who knows how" or "it is too expensive" - these aren't the passive-aggressive responses that you're implying.

Those aren't the responses, otherwise it would be fine, you would be accurately communicating the actual problem. Instead, those are the underlying reason for just saying "I can't do it" instead of being forthcoming.

>I think it would be easyish to fill out another 10 reasons for what "can't" really means that are more common than "it is flat out impossible regardless of budget/resources".

Yes. But the skit isn't about that.

I often get impossible tasks from managers. Luckily when I tell them why they actually listen and aren't purposefully obtuse like the team from the skit. But the obtuse manner of the meeting is part of the comedy. Sometimes the management/sales/marketing team just doesn't get it.

The most common request?

"Please enhance this 92x92 .jpg logo x5-x10 its current size without lowering the quality of the logo."

My most common pushback?

"Sure. Get with their designer and get me the original file, be it .psd or .ai so that I can work with a larger resolution copy of the image. If they don't have the original file for their logo, you are asking for one of two things: 1) Recreate their logo or 2) The impossible. If (1) my answer is no. If (2) my answer is with modern technology, I can't."

I've also been asked to uncrop photos. Not as in "restore a backup from before we saved over it with a cropped version" but literally uncrop a photo.

I don't necessarily blame these people or get angry with them. I blame CSI and other investigative shows where they "enhance" a blurry photo to 4k crystal-clear resolution and read the reflection off of a button of a guys' jeans to read the licence plate of his car. They've been told this shit is possible by TV shows that use just-enough real tech to make the fake tech seem real to people outside of the loop.

The crazy thing is that the fake tech is also often actually real, but real in the sense that there's a recent academic paper where in certain specific conditions they were able to do what is being asked ask by using lots of math, domain knowledge, and custom programming, at a total cost of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars when it's all done.

Does that help you in any way in a commercial setting? No, unless you are Google or Apple or the like and it's not a simple request but the basis of a new business division.

Are you talking about the paper where they replicate keys from the roof of a building across the street when the keys were on the floor some several hundred feet away from a photograph? :)

Not specifically, more just the occasional paper you see posted where they've found a way to recover missing data from surrounding context. I.e. something like reverse engineering redaction boxes from JPEGs by reversing a non-lossless algorithm twice, once to get the lossy image in raw form with redactoin boxes, and at that point again to determine what was likely under those boxes from the surrounding lossy compression as it existed before.

> I don't necessarily blame these people or get angry with them. I blame CSI and other investigative shows where they "enhance" a blurry photo to 4k crystal-clear resolution and read the reflection off of a button of a guys' jeans to read the licence plate of his car.

I wouldn't get angry with them, but I would certainly blame them for thinking something is possible which a small child should be able to tell is not. I would advise you avoid working with people who believe computers are literally magic, as your life will be much better.

>I wouldn't get angry with them, but I would certainly blame them for thinking something is possible which a small child should be able to tell is not.

Your domain experience is showing. ;) A small child doubtfully knows what pixels are, how computers represent data, how an image is actually displayed, and why you can make them smaller with minimal (meaningful) data loss but you cannot make them larger.

That part confuses lots of people. From children to adults to my grandparents.

Also photo restoration is black magic to some people - and a joy to my heart when I get the opportunity to restore a photo for someone.

Nah. I'm pretty sure I could have figured out that zooming in makes things fuzzy, just like if you hold it close to your face it doesn't any detail to a photo, at age 7 or so.

Photo restoration is more art than magic, assuming you're more or less drawing in the missing pieces.

Never thought I'd see it, but here's the solution to the expert problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM

Credit to D. Scott Williamson, Expert

My personal favorite solution: http://i.imgur.com/fdHpJS4.png

if the requirement is just email, seems like it would be quite feasible to set something up so that the MTA on the administrative system tunnels the email to the MTA of something network-connected in a non-tcp/ip kind of way (PTP microwave/laser link, printer-carrier pigeon-scanner combo, ...) that just passes the message over while remaining air-gapped

Oh neat... so i just have to own the system by sending a bad attachment (containing the malware), and having exfiltration happen via mail attachments. Got it.

I've seen actual near-airgapped systems that communicate by fax as risk reduction. Email-to-fax gateways rendered attachments and such in the DMZ, then dialed into the secure side, the theory being that owning a T1 fax card over the PSTN is much harder than sending a malicious email.

UUCP delivered email (and Usenet and file transfers) for a very long time before full time network connections became the norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

So, it is possible to send/receive email without an always on network connection.

Heck, you could even do it with a never-on network connection, if someone wants to periodically ferry the ingoing/outgoing email over on a drive.

That probably isn't what the requirements makers had in mind though.

I can see it now. You spend a month implementing a fancy, modern store-and-forward system that ticks all the boxes and provides an excellent blend of security and functionality. Then you get called into the big shot's office because he wants emails to go through in under ten seconds.

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