Conditions of ACME's Unconditional Guarantee

I read this book shortly after he wrote it. I was a junior engineer at a big company, and the final chapter (on humans being the weakest link in computer security) inspired me to run "crack" on the password (shadow) file of one of our networked Sun workstations. (I actually wrote some code to re-create the shadow file from the output of ypcat because we were running NIS.) Crack managed to obtain about 20% of the users passwords, including root. I wasn't an admin on that network, so I informed the admin and his reaction was that he did not care if I had admin on his network. (I ran a few others already.) One of the cracked user passwords struck me as funny so one day in the hallway I casually asked what that word meant (to the owner of the password). The terror-stricken user froze and asked me why I wanted to know. Instead of recognizing the issues associated with using a dictionary word for a password, he went and complained to my manager. I got called on the carpet for "hacking his windows account." (Apparently he used the same password everywhere.) Fortunately my boss had a good sense of humor and nothing came of it. This was before the company even had a computer security policy. A year or two later, doing what I did would become a fire-able offense.

I got one of those as a birthday gift in grad school, and it's a lot of fun, even 10 years later. I used to fill (yes) mine with tinted water for added joy.

It's a giant pain to get anything out of them, though, or, for that matter, to clean them (unless you have a trick for it?).

Every product should have a website like this.

That’s not a limerick, though. A limerick has 5 lines, for example:

There once was a young lady called Bright

Who travelled much faster than light

She left one day,

In a relative way,

And returned on the previous night!