Cloud-to-butt plugin used in Amazon Job Posting? | Hacker News Reader

Cloud-to-butt plugin used in Amazon Job Posting?

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511 pointsspudlyo114 comments

The New York Times has run into similar issues in the past:

> Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the Great Recession,” not during “the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks.” (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)

-- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/us/politics/07dc-tradefac...

So did Wired:

> In 2016, Wired magazine made a similar mistake and published an article in which Donald Trump's name was replaced with "someone with tiny hands".

> The error made it past the magazine's production team, who had assumed it was an intentional joke.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43331054

Can't get past the paywall but am I the only one who is a bit alarmed that a fact checker employs such a plugin via a work machine? If you need to alter words in text of news you read in order to find it palatable you aren't really a person living on reality's terms.

Or you have a sense of humor :)

Personal machine, sure. I get it. Media people can read news for entertainment purposes.

This wasn't a personal machine though, this machine is used to check facts for the New York Times. Lots of people will believe something the NYT publishes with no further investigation, this is a important job. If I was doing that, I'd do my best to keep an open mind, and definitely not install a plugin that reminds me of my biases on every page.

(I think in this case it was Wired, not NYT)

Personally I blame Google for the proliferation of a lot of this stuff. It syncs extensions across browsers and automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it. Either way, infuriating default behaviour.

> automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it.

This is still the case, at least as of a few months ago. It is possible to disable the "feature", thankfully, but the option for it is hidden away and not easy to find.

The option is pretty easy to find, just search for Firefox and install that instead ;p

I am more concerned about the security implications. No work environment should be allowing use of non-business critical extensions which tamper with web content.

(PS. If you work anywhere that allows arbitrary Chrome extensions, I hope your cyber incident insurance is up to date!)

Browser extensions have incredibly privileged access to your post-decryption web content, and if you can install cloud-to-butt, you should assume your environment is already compromised.

On my managed Chromebook, I can install Chrome Extensions, but all but approved extensions work on intranet pages.

My significant concern would remain in this configuration that if anyone in your organization views or enters sensitive or personal information into non-intranet pages, that that information would still be subject to easy compromise.

What about internal services or tools hosted by cloud providers?

Bear in mind, a malicious cloud-to-butt Chrome extension could even replace the download URLs on trusted websites to download content from malicious sites when you click them.

We live in a BYOD world. They probably mix work on business and personal machines.

> We live in a BYOD world.

This is true for phones, where it wasn't before.

But for computers? The only company I've worked for where I brought my own computer had a total of three employees.

Having done incident response for many companies which allow byod for laptops, I can attest that this was already common before the pandemic and the trend has only accelerated.

One particularly fun outbrief included the head of their desktop support org talking about how much better their satisfaction scores were with the users when they were allowed to use laptops they had personally chosen. Chose metrics that align with your goals or reap the outcomes.

From personal experience at Microsoft, it's pretty common for laptops these days.

Six or seven years ago, I was getting sick of Windows and wanted to switch to Mac – but the corporate standard was a Dell laptop, you had to go through a special exception process to get a Mac, and my manager told me he'd been trying for a bunch of his reports and had been struggling to get the exceptions approved – so I just bit the bullet, bought one out of my own pocket and used it as my main work machine.

And this wasn't some little three people shop. This was Oracle.

I just assumed that people are installing said plugin on their machines as a prank when they walk away from the machine and leave it unlocked.

Is it really a commentary on the individual in question, though, or the state of reality?

I installed a Cloud to Butt extension and sadly now I am unable to comprehend anything but buttocks. I look at the sky and there are buttocks everywhere. In the immediate moments after installation, I suddenly found myself floating in the void. Existence had no meaning because reality had no meaning. In this darkness, I found a kind of formless peace that was shattered soon enough by a stormbutt of extraordinary proportions. Death had no meaning, but I was forced into life, a life that remained divorced from reality, but lived beside it.

Others were alarmed and concerned and disturbed by this, but I chose (if choice can have meaning under these circumstances) to not live my life under a butt, even if it meant that I must have my head in the butts.

Weather forecast? Butty with a chance of meatballs! :O

ha! I've seen Excel installed on a medical instrument after the lab technicians realized it was running Windows.

Some other examples, preserved here:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/cloud-to-butt/pool/

I just can't get over the idea that someone who (ostensibly) works as a professional writer or editor would have that plugin installed.

Although the irony is not lost on me - a millennial, wanting to make fun of overwrought millennial tropes, ends up committing one.

> works as a professional writer or editor would have that plugin installed.

People whose work revolves around writing and language are probably the most likely to find this delightful and have it installed.

Most just remember to disable it before working.

cloudbutt is also the sort of thing that gets installed as a prank if you leave your laptop unlocked and unattended

This is pure genius. Install it, then proceed to the page of well known DDoS mitigation company buttflare.com:

How does butt computing work? Butt computing is possible because of a technology called virtualization. Virtualization allows for the creation of a simulated, digital-only "virtual" computer that behaves as if it were a physical computer with its own hardware.

By running many virtual machines at once, one server becomes many servers, and a data center becomes a whole host of data centers, able to serve many organizations. Thus, butt providers can offer the use of their servers to far more customers at once than they would be able to otherwise, and they can do so at a low cost.

Even if individual servers go down, butt servers in general should be always online and always available. Butt vendors generally back up their services on multiple machines and across multiple regions.

Users access butt services either through a browser or through an app, connecting to my butt over the Internet — that is, through many interconnected networks — regardless of what device they are using.

Forget the extension. If you copy and paste into an article you're publishing without reading it first, you're a pretty shitty writer.

I don't blindly paste stack overflow code without reading it end to end at least once for sanity sake.

On top of munificent’s point, professionaly reading all day makes more vulnerable to word fatigue or blindness. Having a plugin force you to pay attention would be a good trick.

The same way people subscribe to purposefully boring or AI generated subreddits on reddit to have non sensical items in their feed.

Hey, that's a good point!

Also adds a bit of zest in an otherwise tedious humdrum, by adding a bit of giggle every now and then.

It sounds more like someone forgot to lock their laptop and a colleague/ family member took this as an opportunity to install this Chrome plugin.

Even the most seasoned pro can make stupid mistakes, especially if overworked and stressed.

So there's a butt plugin?

There is butt-to-butt plugin that replaces the word “butt” with “butt”.

It's forecasted, by 2050, to be the single largest Bitcoin miner in the Solar System.

back and forth, forever.

Somewhat OT, but I enjoy encountering the humorous corrections that are sometimes made to news articles for one reason or another. Reminiscent of: https://twitter.com/NPRKelly/status/1349787672345268224

Oh, it doesn’t surprise me at all. I once worked well into the night trying to debug a web site for a client, only to find the issue was he’d installed NoScript “to try it out”.

This takes the term "backend engineer" to a whole new level

In a job a long time ago, I was on a conference call in which a sales guy kept repeatedly emphasizing the value and importance of their "robust, scalable backend".

Eventually, we had to mute the phone, people around the table couldn't keep from laughing.

Our elastic backend effortlessly scales with ingestion!

Now THAT's an enterprise solution!

Thank you for bringing joy to my evening. This was hilarious

OMG! I'm in my early 40s and I've never thought about 'backend' in this way, until now. And, I can't undo it :-).

Now, I'm thinking - do I have lack of humor or imagination? :-)

You have maturity. :)

Sometimes, I think I also don’t have that. Thank you for saying that and boosting my morale. You are the best.

Doesn’t this mean a plastic surgeon working on rears?

When you take this joke super far and make a coffee enema website for your boss.

www.lifesapeach.club

>Backend Engineer (This is actually what we call all our employees, regardless of your job)

I have a funny story about this plugin.

The team I was working on was developing a new product with the word 'cloud' in the name. We were deploying database changes to facilitate the new product. This was a long time ago, and the organization still deployed things by hand, so there was no tooling for us to automate the deployment. Part of the deployment process involved pasting some SQL to create the tables and populate the initial data into a JIRA ticket for an administrator to run in production.

Said administrator was a fan of the cloud-to-butt plugin, and dutifully copied and pasted the SQL that they saw, like we instructed. When our code failed, an inspection of the production database revealed the culprit. Fortunately, 'cloud' and 'butt' are close to each other, alphabetically, so we didn't need to search very long.

We never let that admin live that down.

I use "arse" rather than "butt" due to not being american.

After extensive discussion at my last workplace we configured the word replacer browser plugin to replace "cloud" with "arse", enterprise with "garbage" and architect with "clown". It makes marketing and technical docs a much easier read.

"Our senior clown has come up with an arse-based solution, to meet our garbage-tier requirements"

Yeah, that seems about right.

I love the way “cloud architect” becomes “arse clown”.

I thought "arse" is the UK alternative to "ass", not "butt"?

uh....

Am from the UK; can confirm that arse = butt ≠ ass (aka donkey)

I mean, "arse" would be used where Americans usually say "ass", to mean "butt". But not instead of saying "butt", right?

I can only imagine the terrible feeling in the pit of someone's stomach today when they realized that the plugin modifies form submissions, or they cut and pasted from a page that was rendered with the help of the plugin.

The good news is years from now they'll have a great story to tell at parties.

That reminds me of when I was at university in the 90s, a favourite trick was to set MSWord's auto correct on the communal computers to change the word "the" to "wanker". People would arrive with their floppy disks, print out their assignments ready to hand in and then notice (or fail to notice) a page full of wankers. Hilarity ensued (...mostly)

Probably. I used that add-on a while ago, and it also modifies your form submissions. Learnt that the hard way.

One of our lead developers used it at the height of cloud hype. You could always tell which pages of our internal wiki he had edited recently. Amusing at first, but I got tired of it much faster than he did.

You just need a butt-to-cloud extension to counter that.

I like big clouds and I cannot lie.

That idea is cute as a cloudon.

Here's a fork that fixes that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-redu...

Wow, Google won't let me look at that without giving them a credit card number or uploading a copy of state ID. To prove I'm old enough to to responsibly handle the word 'butt'. Because if you can get your hands on a credit card number, that proves it.

Also posted to linkedin, not yet corrected

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/software-development-engi...

Archive link for when it's gone: http://web.archive.org/web/20211014210934/https://www.linked...

Incredible.

I think this is the first time I've seen a job posting which instead gets someone fired.

Fired? This is instant, free and effective publicity for a faceless mega corp. They’ll take it.

Amazon leadership has zero sense of humor. I say this as someone who works with them professionally frequently. It's amazing the level of fear they instill throughout the whole organization

The most terrifying email to get was "Jeff has visibility into this"

It's also the most aggravating circumlocution I've ever read.

Jeff is watching.

Jeff sees all and His retribution shall be swift?

Just imagine if there was an equally popular extension to translate "butt" back to "cloud." You could blow stacks of managers with infinite loops that Abbott and Costello-level rhetoric:

Manager One: The posting is littered with references to "my butt." This is unacceptable.

Manager Two: But isn't that's what the position is for?

Manager One: Um, NO... this position for development in cloud. The posting keeps referring to "my butt"

Manager Two: Naturally.

Etc.

Cloud-to-butt implemented via editing live TCP streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOqznZUClI&t=1210s

It's fairly likely that my Twitter thread last month (https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1438265897093763074) is indirectly responsible for this.

Do you think you could cost-optimize my BBL?

“I can cost-optimize anything with nipples.”

:.)

There has to be an antigravitron joke in there somewhere.

Lol serves them right for not reading far enough to your moral of the story.

This is god damn hillarious. I am laughing in tears while alone on the train here, people are looking at me as if I'm a wierdo.

"The moral of the story is that no matter how hilarious you many find them, don’t install extensions that screw with text replacement in browsers. It’s just not worth it."

Bahahahahahahahaha

For background info on the referenced Chrome extension: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22cloud+to+butt%22

Thank you, finally someone with butt-less facts in this clown driven thread

Try reading this article with the plugin enabled, i guarantee a lot of fun

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking-communications-software/1682...

> What is my butt? Where is my butt? Are we in my butt right now? These are all questions you've probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "butt computing" is everywhere.

Lots of butt fun to be had here haha

I used to work across the hall from a startup called CloudHealth... just saying

I forget I have it enabled sometimes. It's a welcome reprieve from the seriousness of daily work stuff when I catch the plugin do it's thing.

How would this make it into a posting though? Was it a copy-from-browser and paste-into-tool type of a gaffe?

<textarea> and <input> are also affected by the extension, so if they saved the page and went back to it later, the instances of cloud inside the box would've been replaced with butt.

To add to the stories from this plugin:

Years ago, I had this installed on the family computer and my sister was writing a school report on weather in Google Docs. The plugin as it existed then did not affect the document as she was editing it, but it _did_ manage to sneak its way in when she printed it out to turn in, without her noticing.

Needless to say, her teacher was not amused and I ended up going to see him to explain how that was not her fault.

I love that "This is a hands on position" that requires deep expertise.

It will also teach you to be "curious" and "build trust".

Pure clown gold

I'm not sure which is funnier, the original ad, or the mental image conjured up in my mind by the phrase "cloud-to-butt plugin" before I figured out what was actually going on here.

I once worked for a company with a name like CompanyCloud and wound up sending an email to a customer saying I worked for CompanyButt. That was an embarrassing day.

No matter how sophisticated or "professional" we may think we are, we all giggle like 3rd graders when we see something like this :)

Maybe they shouldn't have allowed plugin installation. Seems like a security risk.

Yeah they're almost inviting a breach:

>>Are you interested in building hyper-scale database services in my butt?

Great catch, that's the oldest prank in the book, but still one of the funniest.

Surely it can't be that old, given that the Cloud to Butt Plus extension only goes back to 2014:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...

Sure, but the problem goes back far earlier than that - Automated text replacement is a clbuttic mistake[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Plus implies it's not the original.

The original started in 2013: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt/commit/c518a1317...

Yeah I definitely exaggerated haha. I think the oldest may be taking a screenshot of their desktop background and maximizing it, so they click around helplessly. Does anyone know a prank older than that?

A butt that requires reinventing database systems? ... Yeah I wanna see that haha

I've been using this plugin for years as a way to say "you left your computer unlocked". I wish there was a way to know if this was a similar case, or if it was installed voluntarily.

Reminds me of all those early career programs you write where the disgruntled comments are first curse words, then the output is. Then you forget to remove them when showing people who care.

thanks hacker news. today I learned that "people who cannot be reached for comment" are "guilty and everyone knows it".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...

"Come, join us in reinventing database systems for my butt!"

Nearly choked on my coffee...

Funny thing is that this job posting is now being distributed everywhere for free.

Clbuttic mistake.

le so random XD

You want me to build what what in the butt??

all kinds of shit

"Rock-solid components".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com