this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy

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Like hosted a website or a server for your personal needs, or taken a smartphone given to you for work or something like that.

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[–] transientpunk@sh.itjust.works 48 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What's up with all these ask lemmy posts asking us to self incriminate?

[–] bob_lemon@feddit.de 31 points 9 months ago

To be fair: if your HR department can link your Lemmy posts to you, they are insanely bored and presumably over funded.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You mean legally when I'm allowed/entitled to? All the time. I max out my benefits.

[–] moreeni@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] viking@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Why? If I'm allowed, I consider it part of my salary, and would be stupid not to cash it in.

[–] Vode_An@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The majority of labor is cucked (unpaid overtime, not using their sick days before they expire, ect).

[–] richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 2 points 9 months ago

To be fair, the concept of having a cap for sick days is ridiculous.

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, I'm not stupid. Also technically everything you create on company time and/or company resources no longer belongs to you.

I did have a boss once (software development) who hosted his own website on the company servers. Not 100% sure if that was ever green lit by the CEO (maybe, maybe not). But I was really annoyed when the server had issues due to that private site, when I didn't have access to the code to fix them.

[–] Vode_An@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago

My boss tried to take some stuff I created on company time once, I didn’t mind though since I wasn’t keeping that shit.

[–] olizet@lemmy.works 15 points 9 months ago

The company's PCs were running XP, but had Windows 7 Pro license stickers on their back. I wrote down a few license codes for using them at home. One of those is now my Windows 11 Pro license.

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Any time I'm in the office, I make sure to take a nice long relaxing crap.

[–] Chozo@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime
That's why I poop on company time

[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My manager actually wants me to host a Minecraft server on company hardware to test our performance monitoring system, aren't I lucky

Now if only I knew how to get players on it who aren't my friends

[–] twei@feddit.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Could've just run a benchmark or mine monero or something... A Minecraft server is arguably one of the worst ways to test performance

[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago

There's a grafana exporter for it, can monitor the JVM

It's not testing the performance of the machine it's testing performance monitoring tools

[–] 8ace40@programming.dev 11 points 9 months ago

I was working in my (poor third world) government job, and our keyboard broke. Replacements took months, since they only bought mouse and keyboards in bulk once per year or so, and they ran out of.

I had a second job working as a contractor for a private company, where we were contracted for a public hospital providing system administration and technical support. We had some old PS2 keyboards that were to be decommissioned, but since they didn't have inventory number, I got hold of them and brought some to my other job.

So I donated some equipment from one area of government to another, but it was kinda illegal, lol πŸ˜†.

[–] SHamblingSHapes@lemmy.one 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was issued a monitor in the early days of COVID when they were sending us home to work. We already had laptops. They had literally pallettes of monitors, people were just grabbing one or two. Tracking was through the honor system, writing name and number taken on a piece of paper.

Now they're having us go back into the office ~3 days a week and want us to return the monitors. Lol, no.

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What's the justification for having you back in the office?

[–] SHamblingSHapes@lemmy.one 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

New people who don't know wtf they are doing because we don't have structured training and our written documentation is piss poor and we're overall bad at helping them. Some new college grad botched a multi-million dollar program and come to find out, they weren't getting any meaningful mentoring or guidance.

The thought is we will be better at seeing these sorts of gaps earlier if we're having real conversations, not just the routine PowerPoint presentations sanitized to show all is good.

Could a team train and mentor via virtual interaction only? Sure. Can this particular team? Nope.

[–] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 10 points 9 months ago

This was more of a community service, but when I worked for a university office I ran a TOR node on one of my PCs. After a while though, IT sent someone to ask me kindly not to make it an exit node. Other than that they didn't seem to mind. It was nice having excess bandwidth.

I also ran some distributed computing apps like folding@home.

[–] Fake4000@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I tend not to. Assume no privacy of any work device given to you.

[–] Mirrorgiraffe@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

My company has never touched my work laptop, it was shipped directly from Apple. But then we're a small start-up.

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 7 points 9 months ago

Apple can preconfigure a machine with any software a company requests at the factory

[–] nitefox@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

Same, I use it as my personal device too. I’m not even sure that I should send the pc back at all, probably yes

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

I've taken a PC that was laying around at work and donated it to a non-profit I'm involved with.
Was a bit surprised to find there was a Proxmox server installed with a customer's IP, but I just wiped it.

[–] Endorkend@kbin.social 8 points 9 months ago

I got a company to install an extra consumer grade internet connection with a different ISP on top of the main (already redundant) business one.

Sold it to them as being best for redundancy and to make sure that if sync traffic between our 6 locations was heavy, it wouldn't impact the main line.

The main line was actually more than sufficient to handle 100x the heaviest traffic we ever had. We were right next to a university, which got us a hookup to the national backbone on fiber (this was in the age of T1 and T3 lines being the norm, 2 of those 6 locations had to make due with 256KB lines), so it was rock stable, blistering fast and because it was backbone connected, utterly and completely unrestricted and unmonitored by third party.

But the advantage of consumer lines in that period was that cable and DSL were starting to become common for consumers, at speeds comparable to most business internet lines. These also usually had dynamic IPs.

This was simply so my and my colleagues internet and at the time Napster traffic wouldn't show up on the traffic logs and wouldn't be identifiable by our official IP range :p

[–] otl@lemmy.srcbeat.com 8 points 9 months ago

My colleagues back in the early bitcoin and cryptocurrency days were mining across any spare infra and customer servers they could get their hands on. Back when you could do it with just CPU.

[–] fixmycode@feddit.cl 7 points 9 months ago

a long time ago I worked at an event production company, we bought a plastic card (think credit cards) full color printer to print client logos on NFC cards, and I had to test them, so I printed McLovin's driver licence on a card, and I still keep it on my wallet.

[–] CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Instead of using a space heater like everyone else, I run Folding@Home on one of my work machines to pump out a few hundred watts of heat. That way at least someone is getting some Alzheimer's research out of burning that electricity.

[–] Starglasses@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's funny and cool! Do you know if it's using roughly the same amount of electricity as a space heater would? Idk if that's possible to know.

[–] CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Most of the space heaters that I've seen are like 1,500 watts. According to the UPS this computer is plugged into, it consumes around 650 watts. So it's not as powerful as a space heater, but when the exhaust is pointed directly at your legs, it gets plenty warm.

[–] Starglasses@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if one could create a computer that generates the heat while doing that cool computing stuff, but also have it regulate the temperature so that it slows down when it hits, say, 65 degrees in the room. I'm intrigued very much by this idea.

[–] Dogeek@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It already exists. There is a company that sells a space heater that mines crypto currency. You get like 50% or the profits which sucks, but you at least recoup a bit of the cost of the electricity to run the heater.

I think we should try to heat ourselves with computing as much as we can since the side effect of computing is heat generation (and minor RF losses). How cool would it be to make a large supercomputer out of millions of homes heating up in the winter?

[–] Starglasses@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 months ago

"The winter discovery boost"! I can imagine that. It would be so cool if humans cooperated together for these cool projects. Maybe if society was more like a beehive; meaning the way that everybee does some part to help out the whole hive instead of the widespread me-first individualism that neglects the problems they don't have.

[–] weeeeum@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Haha this is actually an awesome idea. My work has a bunch of super cheap servers for sale that could totally be used as a space heater. Actually a super cool concept because there are so many good servers and cpus being thrown out that could legitimately be used as a space heater.

[–] Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago

Nice try boss

[–] Pietson@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

I guess so if you count using software licenses. But it's not exactly a big secret. Not like the company is losing anything if I do.

[–] pelletbucket@lemm.ee 4 points 9 months ago

I worked at a car dealership that put out very nice, fresh muffins for the customers. I was a drug addict at the time and wasn't spending money on food so that's where I ate

[–] MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago

When I need to run multiple vms, work laptop is much stronger than personal laptop and there is usually no personal data related so sure. I've also used the only (work) iPhone I have for Apple related things, like using apple books, which is admittedly stupid but I consider anything I get from there single use either way and not particularly private either.

[–] vettnerk@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In 1999 when the entire town was on dialup, I set up this relatively small PC with FreeBSD 3.3 and eggdrop, and hid it in the school library. That way I had an IRC bot that worked while I was offline. After a while I also set it up to automatically grab files from FTP servers for me, but getting these out from the "server" offline was tricky due to 1.44MB floppies were the only removable storage I had available.

[–] rbn@feddit.ch 2 points 9 months ago

I'm allowed to use my company's laptop for private purposes as long as it doesn't have negative impact on work (like installing mallicious or unlicensed software). I don't use that priviledge a lot but I store some private backups on the company's OneDrive.

[–] booooop@hexbear.net 2 points 9 months ago

I’ve taken smartphones and laptops, given for work but then never returned when leaving. Nothing permanent for hosting but I have used our infra for games and file sharing.

[–] essellburns@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, totally. I lived rural with a poor connection at the time.

Company had a remote server in a data centre for our CRM, website and such as we had people in three locations. total overkill really for what we needed in my opinion and it was 99% idle in the evenings.

So I used it to host half life deathmatch and team fortress back in the day when these were cutting edge. Four to six players each night having fun we couldn't have had otherwise.

[–] Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Printing/scanning on the company printer. Was careful at a corporate job as I suspected they might monitor what I send to the printer or what the printer scans, so I was low-key with that

[–] Vode_An@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

I used a forklift to move a car that blocked me into my parking space. I’d already put in my two weeks though and the whole β€œlosing unemployment because I was fired with cause” sucked. Worth though.