US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.
And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
Yes
Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft, since RAM stick have no legs to just wander around by themselves. If it's gone, then an employee stole it.
Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.
My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.
The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y
The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.
RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.
Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.
I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.
A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070 and 32 GB of RAM.
I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.
personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.
Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.
Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...
Well, an 128kbit MP3 requires at least a 486DX2-66 but you also need to run the OS. /s
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)
Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.
Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.
If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.
> Any small pleasure vessel leaving a United States port into international or foreign waters, without a call at a foreign port, does not satisfy the foreign departure requirement. Therefore, certain fishing vessels, cruises to nowhere, or any vessel that leaves from a United States port and returns without calling a foreign port or place, has not departed the United States.
Dunno how much emphasis to put on the word "port"
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/pleasure-boats-private-flyers/ple...
While it's a more inland water, Large vessels effectively can't transit through Windows/Detroit shipping channel without multiple border line crossings: https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...
This is generally law enforcement all over. Given the power imbalance people don't question it due to fear of arrest/violence.
It turns out white people are the bigger thieves.
You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act
It’s not even a US-specific thing. Many countries recruit foreigners to their militaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recrui...
Gone are the days of accepting any criminal openly.
They do however, if you either complete your contract, or are injured, deem you eligible for French citizenship "by spilled blood".
they couldn’t get clearances easily if at all so a lot of filipinos worked in the galley (kitchens) which sometimes resulted in unexpected menu items. if it had been lumpia and chicken adobo that would have been great but usually it was stuff like spaghetti sauce with liver
i miss lumpia with banana ketchup so much
Yes, that was the misrepresentation.
geetee asked why is CBP hiring foreign nationals.
jeffbee answered that it's because the US is a "nation of immigrants that for centuries recognized the value of recruiting foreign people".
I corrected him that those "centuries long" attitudes only applied to whites, and excluded the Chinese national subject of the article. This directly debunks his assertion that American values until recently meant his acceptance.
My beliefs are only relevant in so far as it is against my beliefs to lie. Why is that so strange to you? You seem to believe debunking lies requires one to have some fringe beliefs. What does that say about what you think are mainstream beliefs? What does it say about yours? I've only referred to widely-known facts of US history, that I don't believe you're ignorant of. Why did you not only not correct the lie, but attacked the person that did? The only conclusion I can make is that you are so at odds with truth, that you see correcting obvious lies as an assault on your worldview.
Given that, I don’t know what to do with the rest of this. Knowing about the racial makeup of past immigrants is apparently super important for a bad answer to a question based on faulty assumptions.
And I guess you dropped in that little parenthetical about politicians promising that law wouldn’t change white-only immigration just as a fun little reminder about how people in the 1960s were super racist.
If you want to imply that what I corrected wasn't a misconception, why don't you say so directly? Is it because doing so would make it too obvious you're trying to deflect from the truth?
(0.1% of China's total population, but why let statistics get in the way of anecdotal reasoning?)
Are you really incapable of thinking statistically, even this little bit, or are you just playing dumb because it lets you avoid engaging honestly with the question a little bit longer?
But I was more polite, and merely said he "forgot to mention" that aspect. That's all it took to draw your objections. I'll leave you to your word games now.
Edit: Fine, you get one more reply.
> The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.”
But the topic was this guy.
> And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.
Yes, a specific choice that the US made, from its founding up until 1965. But you are more comfortable talking in vague abstractions divorced from real world implementations, talking about words without thinking what those words refer to, so I get why you're confused. It's just a way of thinking I find repellent, and refuse to humor. As I said, enjoy your word games.
Race baiting bullshit allows people to poo all over the discussion and avoid having to confront the actual reality of what kinds of people we make good immigrants and citizens and why, because the answers to those questions are gonna cast some shade domestically. Any correlation to skin tone is mostly coincidental or just a figment of how the cards fell historically.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]
However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]
Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.
But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...
[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...
You don't think it had anything to do with the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to whites, or the fact that even in 1965, congressmen felt the need to lie to the public and promise that law would not change US demographics? It was just because it was "expensive", that people from Europe immigrated, but not from South America?
Open to "U.S. Citizens, Nationals, or those who owe allegiance to the U.S."
As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.
But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.
Double crime
My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.
The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.