I did a bit of clothes shopping the other day and it was only after I got home that I discovered that one store had cynically charged me an extra 15 cents for the paper bag that they had put my clothes in.
But wait. Why is the store the cynical one here? Shouldn’t I be happy doing my part to help save the environment from unnecessary waste?
Well, for starters, the store never mentioned the surcharge, meaning that they took my contribution to save the planet while also simultaneously advertising their store for granted. I was never really given the choice whether I wanted to help offset my ecological footprint with cash or by renouncing that bag completely. And I never really understood how paying for a bag that used to be “free” suddenly helps the environment so much as the store’s bottom line. Call me skeptical (once you’re finished calling me cynical naturally), but I somehow really doubt that those 15 cents are going directly to Greenpeace. Also, considering that I had just given them over 200 EUR, you think that they could spot the environment the spare change.
And, given that this shopping bag is now essentially a product, is it possible to return it for a refund if I’m unhappy with it? I’m pretty sure that this would be the case with any other bag I bought there. I still have the receipt and reusing the bag would indeed be environmentally friendly, which is what this is all about in the end. (Isn’t it?)
Finally, what right does the fashion industry in particular have to lecture anyone about environmental awareness? After all, we are talking about a segment of the economy where estimates are that anywhere between 80 to 150 billion articles per year are produced and of which 10 to 40% are never sold. (At the risk of being obvious, the reason that these numbers are estimates, and such vague ones at that, is because the fashion industry is not very forthcoming about the real numbers for some strangely unknown reason. To me, this is a clear sign that the real numbers are likely pushing the higher end of the estimated ones.)
Nevertheless, it remains that I am the cynical one for wondering how the end user paying for a bag that prevents five articles of clothing from ending up in a landfill is the vital cog in guaranteeing a future for our children …
A few weeks ago, the following sign popped up on the garbage bin on campus that I pop my dog’s poop down every morning forbidding this practice in the future.
Someone in Not-Bielefeld must be very proud of themselves. They need to work on their punctuation a little but did manage to use the genitive (possessive) case correctly. More importantly, they astutely identified a serious (first-world) problem and acted swiftly upon it! A little grass-roots action to save us from the stuff that kills little grass roots. Too bad that the solution was equally first-world. Instead of actually addressing the fundamental issue of smelly dog poop in a garbage bin, it merely shoved the problem to some other place where the person didn’t have to deal with it anymore. (You know. Like how most people use a leaf-blower.) By contrast, a real solution would have been to appeal to the University to empty the garbage bins more often.
Now, were I to actually pay attention to the sign, the dilemma for me would be what I should do with my dog’s poop. There are only three outdoor garbage bins on the entire campus and I’m pretty sure that using one of the many, many indoor ones would raise a bit of a stink. Leaving the poop where my dog leaves it is illegal and leaving the bag on top of the bin like in the picture obeys the sign, but is probably illegal too.
No, the solution for me in that case would be to adopt the passion Germans have for separating their garbage for recycling. The raw poop and its unleashed smell would go into the organics bin (something that is allowed by the city of Not-Bielefeld) and the poop bag would go into the plastics one.
Hmm …
Not only is this a much more environmentally responsible solution, something that the University is increasingly droning on about of late, but it’s also absolutely in keeping with the tagline of the company whose truck I saw on campus only today: “Everything that is left over after eating”. After all, ignoring the incredibly moronic name of the company (something that is incredibly hard for me to do), if shit isn’t the ultimate leftover tied to eating, what is?
Let’s see how serious they really are about everything …
World Mental Health Day is on the horizon (October 10th), something that, quite frankly, is stressing me out a little. Not the day itself, of course, just the attempts of the University of Not-Bielefeld to capitalize on it.
The background to this is a survey that the University recently conducted asking how its employees evaluated their own working situation. About 50% of the employees filled out the survey and the University got generally good marks across the board. The notable exception was that about 50% of the respondents indicated that work left them so emotionally drained that it was difficult to wind down afterwards. (Their words, not mine.)
Time to act and the University sprang into action, sending around an e-mail this past week that started with the following sentence:
“Leveraging its solid expertise, the University of Not-Bielefeld is committed to creating healthy working conditions for its employees by providing a wide range of heath-related classes.”
Vice President for Administration and Finance, University of Not-Bielefeld
One sentence in and I’m already cringing …
Actually, make that one word in. I simply have come to hate the word “leveraging”, which is an important-sounding but nevertheless meaningless, go-to word for PR people that don’t know what else to write. Poor Archimedes. He might have been right about being able to move the world given a long enough lever, but I bet he never foresaw also being able to bury it in bullshit given a big enough shovel.
Look at that quote closely to single out the doublespeak. How exactly does offering classes create a healthy work environment on the part of the University? At best, it only changes how the employees react to the shitty one on offer. And, in this case, those classes amounted to goal-directed, mental-health workshops to coincide with World Mental Health Day.
Workshops, of course, are the perfect pendant to leveraging: an important-sounding but nevertheless meaningless, go-to solution for management who don’t know what else to do. They make it sound like the organization is doing something proactive for its workers but in reality lets it largely maintain the status quo while shoving the responsibility for any problem onto the implied self-deficiencies of its workforce. In saying all this, I fully admit that this is a two-way street. Employees have to accept that there can be highly stressful periods in their jobs and have to be able to deal with them. But employers also have to ensure that these stressful times remain periods and not an unbroken line of ellipses.
In any case, let’s break these workshops down a little bit …
Of the 10 on offer, two of them provide pupillography examinations (a technique so obscure that even Wikipedia hasn’t heard of it) and another two electromyography measurements. Or, in other words, four workshops that don’t have anything to do with improving the workspace at all but merely ascertaining how much stress it’s currently causing for a select number of employees.
On top of that, all but one of the workshops are being farmed out to people outside of the University of Not-Bielefeld. And even that one exception is dubious because the person running that workshop is actually officially associated with the Student’s Union, which, although affiliated with the University, is not officially part of it and also serves other universities in the area. So much for the “solid expertise” on the part of the University, although, to be fair, they never actually mentioned what that expertise was in. At all. The phrase was just thrown out there with even less meaning and a hint more pretentiousness than “leveraging”.
Finally, despite everything revolving around mental health, none of the remaining six workshops are being led by trained psychologists or therapists but instead by professional coaches. Admittedly, those coaches could indeed have some training in those areas but they don’t have to because, curiously enough, except if it’s in the context of sports, coaching is one of the few professions in Germany where no professional training or certification whatsoever is required. Selling books in a bookstore? A three-year apprenticeship. Becoming a therapy dog? Three to six months of training plus an exam for the certification. (All of which means that therapy dogs are officially more qualified to deal with mental-health issues than any coach is.) Aren’t skilled enough to hold down a real job? Just declare yourself to be a life coach and join one of the few parts of the work sector I know of that outperforms German civil servants in terms of salary but underperforms them in terms of value to society.
Ok, probably a little harsh on my side. I’ve gone to any number of doctors where I could only wonder how they ever got their qualification. But then, every coaching session I’ve ever been to has left me wondering if the coaches had any qualification whatsoever beyond being able to point out the obvious. Now there’s nothing really wrong with reminding someone about the obvious in those times when it gets forgotten. However, most people will gladly do this simply to enjoy the look of embarrassment on the other person’s face instead of charging them at least 100 EUR an hour for the pleasure.
A personal example here speaks volumes. A few years ago I was feeling particularly stressed by work and proactively made use of the counselling service offered by the University of Not-Bielefeld to find a potential solution. After two hourlong sessions with one of the head coaches, it was recommended to me that I needed to delegate more of my responsibilities. Again, the obvious, although this suggestion would indeed create a healthier work environment for me, albeit by making someone else’s that little bit less so. However, it simply wasn’t practical, with anyone that I could delegate work to being just overworked as I was. And pointing this little fact out immediately got me chastised as being “overly confrontational” and “not open to help when it’s offered”.
In summing up, two last details are necessary to point out. First, this is the same office that is organizing the upcoming workshops. That’s scary enough on its own. But, second, the results of that survey have been known since June of 2024 and it is now September of 2025, meaning that it took them well over a year to put something (embarrassing) together to address a pressing need (remember, we’re talking about mental-health issues that are negatively affecting about half of the University’s employees) that would’ve taken anyone else a couple of weeks at most.
But, then, we wouldn’t want to cause those coaches to have any stress in their work, now would we?
As happens every couple of weeks or so, I got barked at again today for letting my dog walk off-leash at the University. The person complaining was new, but much of the conversation wasn’t. What was new, however, is that he volunteered the reason why all dogs on campus should be on a leash without me asking for one. The reason was new too as well as one of the stupidest things that I’ve heard in a long time, namely that free-running dogs distract service dogs from doing their work.
Right …
I might be mistaken on this, but I always thought that service dogs were specifically trained to deal with these and other kinds of distractions. It would be kind of counterproductive if the dogs kept dragging their blind owners across busy roads just to sniff some butt on the other side, wouldn’t it? Admittedly, that butt could cross the road to come and molest the service dog but this would seem to be a fairly general problem for service dogs everywhere (who can resist a butt in uniform, right?) and not one at all specific to the University of Not-Bielefeld.
New argument or not, the thinking here seems to derive from the desperate belief of many people that a leash is the only difference between a good dog and a bad one. But, put an idiot on the other end of that leash and their dog will still be distracting that service dog.
But, more to the point: what service dogs?
I’ve been at the University for getting on close to 20 years now and have not seen a single service dog in all my time there. Definitely no guide dogs and nary even an emotional-support chihuahua. And, running the numbers, chances are good that it’ll stay that way.
It’s estimated that there were about 2134 service dogs of all shapes, sizes, and duties in Germany in 2023 serving a human population of about 83.5 million. Assuming that the University of Not-Bielefeld is representative of something other than itself (I know, just go with me on this one), that works out to slightly less than half a service dog spread among its roughly 18 000 staff and students. Rounding to the nearest dog yields a final estimate exactly in line with my observations, namely zero.
Nevertheless, thank God for the University and its foresight to provide a safe haven for non-existent service dogs of all kinds to carry out their responsibilities without fear of distraction.
A hallmark of the University of Not-Bielefeld is how invested it is in teaching. Not in real teaching, of course, because that costs real money and if you want to build 1.4 million Euros worth of bike racks, something’s got to give, right? Instead, the University’s emphasis here lies much more on promoting its commitment to teaching rather than actually following through on that commitment. As a result, we get bombarded every other year or so with yet another new program they’ve dreamed up that is invariably focussed around the “classrooms of tomorrow”.
But what happens when tomorrow is already yesterday?
A case in point is the sign pictured on the right advertising the Tag des Lehrens and Lernens (Day of Teaching and Learning) with the meaningless tagline of “Classrooms of the future. Design the campus of tomorrow together!” Again, instead of this unrelenting focus on the future, how about a little bit more attention on the present for a change? More to the point, June 2024 has long since come and gone but the sign still remains. (Although, to be fair, it is only the next year and not the every-other one for the next bombardment. Substance like this requires thought.) Hell, even the magnets have long since lost interest and the whole poster is starting to sag southwards. Now if this isn’t literally a true sign of the University’s commitment to teaching, nothing is.
But what always amazes me about these campaigns is that the University of Not-Bielefeld loves coming up with names for them for which the mandatory acronyms are utterly unpronounceable. TdLL? (Bottom right in the picture.) Phonetically it sounds like TGIF. But on a Monday. (Or TTFN on any day.) Much better would be to flip the two Ls in the program name around and then use the English translation of it. That acronym—DoLT—is both eminently more pronounceable as well as probably much more representative of those people running these programs.
However …
Undoubtedly the greatest acronym to ever come out of the University of Not-Bielefeld was for their Schulische Hochschulinformationstag (School Universityinformationday), an open-house day intended to introduce graduating high-school students to the University. Unusually, the acronym for it was not only easy to pronounce, it was also highly memorable as well as being incredibly informative and honest about what it was standing for. All of which meant, naturally, that its days were numbered and it soon had to give way to the “acronym of tomorrow”, the literally punchier but less honest HIT to match the more parsimoniously renamed day (Hochschulinformationstag).
And the best part was that it took the University years to realize why they should make the change …
I’ve been living in the internet Stone Age for some time now, having never gotten around to upgrading my 16 MBits/s DSL hookup. (If you want to know how slow that is, put it this way: I can type these blogs faster than I can upload them to the web.) A lot of people today probably won’t believe this, but you can actually make do with a connection like this so long as you’re not uploading a bunch of stuff all the time or can somehow find inner peace with anything less than zoom chats in Ultra HD. (And have broadband at work.) The real problem is the price. Despite being the slowest connection on the market, 16 Mbits/s is proportionately the most expensive. By far. In fact, it’s the only connection speed where you pay more in EUR/month than you get Mbit/s in return for.
Unfortunately, my options for upgrading to even the Bronze Age aren’t great. According to the people managing my building, the Deutsche Telekom, in the spirit of free enterprise, apparently limits other providers to using a maximum of 16 MBits/s of its phone lines in my building. Furthermore, the promised land of fibre-optic technology is matched only by how fast the many promised deadlines for its installation have come and gone over the past couple of years. So, if I don’t want to pay monopoly tariffs on a faster DSL line, that leaves cable, which promises fibre-optic-like speeds but with already existing infrastructure.
Tired of paying too much for too little (another canon in the spirit of free enterprise), I decided to take the plunge two weeks ago and go for a 100 MBit/s connection. Might as well get some bits for the buck: 6x the speed at 1.3x the cost. The installation was pretty simple but came with this all-important but nevertheless extremely bizarre warning about avoiding possible sources of interference:
“Do not place your cable modem next to a baby monitor or large metal objects like refrigerator or flatscreen TV.” (Translated from the original German, obviously.)
For starters, metal? Is there anything really made out of metal anymore? I don’t think that my car even counts as a large metal object anymore.
More seriously though, the question of where I can put the modem is determined primarily by where the cable outlets in my apartment are located. This isn’t North America where there’s one in every room and there definitely isn’t one in the kitchen so that I can cook along with the Food Network. I’m also past the baby-monitor phase in my life and, even if I wasn’t, the baby monitor means that kid should be sleeping and not surfing the web.
But the TV? Let me repeat: this is a cable modem using the exact same cable that the TV does. Where else am I possibly going to put it? My Apple TV, which receives WiFi, seems perfectly happy right next to my TV (and, given the length of its supplied HDMI cable, doesn’t have much choice) so why not the modem that actually sends it out?
But, by far, the strangest part of the warning is that crappy grammar at the end of it where the articles for refrigerator and flatscreen TV are simply MIA. And, remember, we’re talking about German here, a language so obsessed with articles that it tortures foreigners with 16 forms of the word “the”. Even my Croatian wife who grew up without knowing what an article was could immediately recognize that the sentence was severely disarticulated. (My best guess is that the articles gave way to aesthetics because the warning could only be three lines long for reasons of symmetry. Again, however, I will point out that we are talking about German here, a language more renounced than renowned when it comes to aesthetics.)
In the end, it all didn’t matter anyway. Existing infrastructure or not, it sucked. In testing the connection, the new provider found that it wasn’t getting anywhere near the 100 MBits/s it should have been. The technician who came around to look for the problem wasn’t exactly sure why, but also saw that my building has only eight cable hookups for 12 apartments and guessed that I was one of the lucky people sharing a hookup with one of my neighbours.
So still stuck in the internet Stone Age thanks to the Bonehead Cable of (the) Day.
I’ve recently returned from a trip to Canada to visit family and wanted to take a few seconds to share a few of the new absurdities that my home and native land has come up with while I’ve been away.
As most people know, Canada is officially bilingual, with English and something vaguely resembling French as the two languages. (Ask someone from France what they think of Québécois. You’ll understand. And probably more than the French person will the Québécois.) Practically, however, it’s a different story and you’re really only threatened with both languages on packaging, Canadian airlines, and anything to do with the federal government. For instance, a quick look at the sign on the right from a local bank in my hometown makes it very clear that they speak every language except French.
So if you get annoyed with all those in-flight announcements in one language (who cares what city we’re currently flying over and that you can’t see through the clouds anyway), it’s officially annoying in two. The same goes for trying to call any Government of Canada hotline where their automated phone tree has that extra branch to climb from the start: “Press 1 for service in English. Appuyez sur 2 pour un service en français.”
Imagine then my bridled joy when I discovered that the Government of Canada office I needed to call had separate, dedicated English and French phone numbers. (Sounds sad, I know, but anyone who’s spent most of their formative years invariably grabbing the wrong side of the cereal box will know exactly what I mean. The scars run deep.) My joy, however, was short lived, with the very first branch of this supposedly English Phone Oak (Quercus telephonus anglicus) being the inevitable “Press 1 for service in English. …”.
And then there are the commercials on Canadian TV …
Unusual for someone used to German ads is that lots of commercials are for prescription medications of all shapes and sizes. Even more unusual, regardless of what country you get deluged with your commercials in, is that many of those ads never tell you what the medication is for. For instance, a pair of commercials I saw have a series of adults happily hopping, dancing, and otherwise excitedly jumping across the screen to some upbeat music, all for some medicine X that I “should ask my doctor about if it is right for me”. Forget asking. Whatever it’s for, I want some! As a white male over 50 now living in northern Germany, I could definitely use just a hint of the rhythm all those people seem to get from the stuff.
(For the interested, the two medicines weren’t for arthritis or depression, which seemed to me to be the most obvious candidates, but for extra-strength varieties of Ozempic designed for weight loss. Now although prescription weight-loss drugs like these probably have name recognition for North Americans, it still strikes me as extremely odd when a commercial doesn’t tell you what a product is actually good for. At all. Imagine how stupid I’d look if I asked my doctor if terconazole was right for me based solely on a commercial filled with happy, smiling, loving couples.)
Nevertheless, the one commercial that I still can’t get over, if only because I saw it several times a day, was one for a frozen pizza. Not just any frozen pizza but apparently some sort of deluxe variety. And to highlight that very point, the commercial features a symphony orchestra on a platform that is being hoisted up by a crane outside the panorama windows of some glamorous woman eating said pizza in her penthouse. What’s really unbelievable, however, is that the word “dramatization” explicitly appears at the bottom of the screen during this scene and only during this scene. Not before when a huge ball of pizza dough falls onto a table covered in flour so as to spray the flour in all directions in slow motion (which apparently is how all frozen pizzas are made), nor when an absolutely perfect looking pizza comes out of the oven (and not the dried-out hunk of cardboard that comes out of mine), nor for the very idea of there being such a thing as a deluxe frozen pizza (cf. oxymoron). Nope, only the scene featuring the orchestra was a dramatization and I’m guessing not because of the crane hoist but because of the female conductor. (Note to the lawyers and activists out there: the percentage of female conductors worldwide barely scrapes into the double digits, hence the sarcasm.)
And, more to the point, what commercial isn’t a dramatization from start to finish? I think we’re long past the point where we believe that those two old guys on the porch really were Bartles & Jaymes or that there really was some guy in a boat cruising around in our toilet tank.
Finally, there’s this warning sign that I found pictured to the left in the local supermarket. Sorry, but way too apologetically Canadian. First: well, duh. Second: the use of the word “may”. Now, I could be one of those grammar police everyone hates by pointing out that it should be “might” (which indicates probability) and not “may” (which indicates permission), but we’re all sick to death of those smart asses who tell us how to use “your” vs. “you’re” correctly, right? Nope. Instead, I’m going to be pedantic in a completely different direction to say that neither may nor might actually belongs there.
By means of comparison, think about the stark contrasts posed to this warning sign by those found on Canadian cigarette packaging, one example of which unrepentantly declares that “Smoking causes lung cancer.” (Et “Appuyez sur 2 pour fumer cause le cancer du poumon.”) Ok, true. But so does coal mining, asbestos, choosing the wrong ancestors, and just plain ol’ dumb luck. The undoubtedly purposeful invocation of causation, however, makes it sound deterministic: smoke and you will get lung cancer. Instead, the reality is that smoking only increases your risk of getting lung cancer compared to if you didn’t. Even smoking asbestos in a coal mine on Friday the 13th is no absolute guarantee of an early death from lung cancer. It just increases the odds. Hell, my mother is 88 years old and without any sign of lung cancer despite smoking for the last 65 years or so. Her doctor even told her that there was no real point in quitting anymore because if the lung cancer hadn’t dropped her already, chances are that it never will.
And, it’s the same in reverse with this grocery-store sign. Eating undercooked seafood is not a case of might / may / possibly / maybe / conceivably / perchance / perhaps increasing your risk of getting food poisoning. It absolutely does compared to if you didn’t. How big this increase exactly is, is another question, perhaps dependent on which grocery store I took this photo at …
Or, as one stand-up comedian whose name I now forget so beautifully put it, “I don’t play the lottery, which makes my chances of winning only slightly smaller than for those people who do.”
An e-mail came around from the Vice President for Studying and Teaching here at the University of Not-Bielefeld the other week informing us about the increasing number of student reports reaching her office about examinations, and final exams in particular, being scheduled during the 14-week lecture periods instead of immediately after them like they should be.
As always, any e-mail coming from central admin from the University always raises more questions for me than answers. For starters, what ever happened to memos? Admin always used to ruin your day with memos, not e-mails. Is there even such a thing as memos anymore? What about e-memos? (Or the Apple equivalent in the form of iMemos?) Sadly, the answer would appear to be no. A bit of exhaustive research later (i.e., my usual quick and dirty Google search) revealed that e-memos are really only being offered up by Microsoft these days with their only apparent customer being the Turkish Armed Forces, which tried the app out the one time way back in 2007 and then very unsuccessfully so.
Slightly more to the point, but still not really relevant, does the title Vice President for Studying and Teaching strike anyone else as being more than a little stilted? Granted, it is the literal English translation of Vizepräsidentin für Studium und Lehre, but I still feel that something like learning is the more appropriate counterpoint to teaching than studying is. Even “studies” would be an improvement. But, given that we are talking (eventually) about examinations here, let’s just run with studying for the time being and return to that e-mail.
Now, in addition to pointing out all the regulations that are being broken by holding final exams during the lecture period, the e-mail also goes beyond this simple and normally sufficient appeal to authority to actually and unusually explain why those regulations are there in the first place. The key reason here is that all the studying that is being done for those finals means that the students aren’t showing up for the teaching in their other classes, something that I’ve experienced many times firsthand in my lectures. And if the studying isn’t keeping the students away, then sometimes it’s the writing because those other teachers sometimes set their exams outside of the time slot of their course and inside of yours. But, fortunately, our VP for Cramming and Droning has promised to crack down on this slightly rude practice starting in the Fall.
It all sounds good, but then again this is exactly what lip service is supposed to sound like …
For starters, this problem is by no means a recent phenomenon and has been going on since I first arrived at the University of Not-Bielefeld over 15 years ago now. So either those reports have been really slow in arriving or the realization as to what they mean has. Take your pick.
And, just like with many other administratively illegal activities on campus, it is possible to get around this one too so long as you write a simple letter of justification as to why it’s necessary. So much for those regulations.
Most importantly, there’s no possible way that the President’s Office could not have known anything about all this until those increasing number of reports blew the lid off the “scandal”. You see, although we teaching staff set our own examination dates, we also still need to register all those dates with and have them approved by the central Examinations Office. (Well, we should be registering them all. Technically I also need to do this with eachand every one of the graded presentations I make the students do during the lecture period too but somehow I have better things to do than registering dozens of examinations per year. Like, for instance, actually teaching. Or grading those presentations.) In other words, there was no need to wait on those reports from the students because the profs were already dutifully reporting all their illegal activities for them. For years now. And the Examinations Office was equally dutifully rubberstamping it all for just as long.
All of which means that your guess is as good as mine as to why this issue was now suddenly worthy of such vice-presidential indignation …
We all know that the internet is a dangerous place, with lots of bad actors trying to scam us, spam us, doxx us, phish us, and troll us. And then there’s Facebook. In many ways, however, the real cyberthreat comes instead from all the IT people ostensibly trying to keep us safe.
It all started out innocently enough with IT advising us to use stronger passwords before forcing us to use those ones with an LSD-induced mixture of big and small letters, digits, and random punctuation. You know, the ones that you can’t possibly remember without writing them down? (Or that Elon Musk is tempted to use to name his next kid?) And then you invariably do forget because you’re not supposed to write them down anywhere or can’t decipher the piece of paper that they’re on anymore in your paranoid attempt to sort of keep them secure? And then it doesn’t matter anyway because you’re forced to change them every three months? And the ones that you’re still being advised to use even though the guy credited for pushing that system on us publicly acknowledged it as being wrong (long passphrases being more secure than shorter gobbledygook) and apologized for it way back in 2017?
And then it goes downhill from there …
Another invention that someone probably should also be apologizing for in 20 years is two-factor authentication (2FA), where login attempts need to be confirmed through the use of a secondary, time-limited code that is sent to you via e-mail, SMS, or some authenticator program.
It’s not that 2FA is a bad idea as such but the implementations of it often seem designed more to frustrate legitimate users than any would-be hackers. Often, the codes simply don’t work. Or they get sent to you by e-mail when you have no access to it at that time. Most often, however, the frustration derives from having to wait an inordinately long time to get the code, making you unsure if the code was even sent in the first place. (So you ask for another. And another. And then they all arrive simultaneously.) Or the code gets sent by default precisely to that app you’re trying to log into and for which you need the code. But, for a prime example of a really moronic implementation of 2FA, we need only turn—rather unsurprisingly—to the University of Not-Bielefeld.
Slow to the game but nevertheless eager to still play along, the University’s IT Department has been steadily tightening the cybersecurity thumbscrews on us. So we too have those impossible-to-remember passwords as well as those banners inserted at the top of external e-mails warning us that they originate from outside the secure ivory walls of University, banners that have long since faded into background noise. We also get regular e-mail updates informing us of the latest cyberthreats (usually phishing e-mails) and that always end with the same sign-off of “Stay alert” that gets about as much attention as those warning banners.
But, in the wake of a cyberattack that almost took over the University’s servers in 2023, IT decided that it was time to install 2FA to log in to the University’s most critical of online services (e.g., webmail, VPN, or the teaching platform but not those for downloading copyrighted, licensed software or any of the millions of admin forms). The first step in implementing this late last year was to divide the single login pages into two separate ones, one for the username and a second one for the password. I still have absolutely no idea how this increases security. Is the guiding principle here that hackers (or their computer algorithms) are somehow inherently lazy or give up easily?
(Interestingly, it would also appear that hackers only speak English. For instance, say your passphrase is something stupid like “Mypasswordispassword”. According to the Password Monster website, it ranks as very weak because it can be cracked in 0.02 seconds. But, use its literal German translation of MeinKennwortistKennwort and you won’t have to think up another password for the next 650 billion years. Hell, just use Kennwort alone and you’ll add 17 hours to the 0 seconds needed to crack “password”. Now, it’s widely said that German is not one of the easiest languages in the world to learn but really?)
The more defining step of true 2FA recently went online and, as proudly announced by IT’s “2FA Team” (and, yes, they are officially known as that), will be in full force as of this month. To avoid the hassle of constantly having to use an authenticator app, permanent staff were blessed in receiving a special dongle, to which the Mac person in me can only say, and then from the very bottom of my heart, “Great. Another fucking dongle.” We’re expected to keep this dongle safe and with us at all times, if not continuously plugged into our computer when we’re working with it. (Which is not easy when you’re using a laptop like me that only has two USB-C ports to begin with. Fortunately, however, my Mac somehow virtually swallowed the dongle so that I can access its functions via my password. This is actually very, very handy because plugging the dongle into my iPhone disables the keyboard from being shown in some apps on it and which is necessary during the whole process for typing in things like usernames. As such, the actual dongle is now languishing somewhere safe but not really with me, with its exact location entrusted to those same portions of my memory that I use to forget all my impossible passwords.)
So, with authenticator of your choice in hand, what was a comparatively simple two-step login—open the web page and have your device securely autofill the information—suddenly bloated to six: open the web page, fill in your username, select the 2FA method, fill in your password, get informed that you will be about to use a 2FA method, and finally really use that 2FA method.
And for our electronic teaching platform (StudIP, an anagram of stupid, BTW; just saying …), you can add a seventh step on top of that because the login page now defaults to one where you can select your status group for the login procedure: admins, people outside the University of Not-Bielefeld, or the 15 000+ members of the University for which the platform is actually designed (you know, those who actually do or, even more incredulously, receive the teaching?), who now have to click an extra box to even begin their official, patience-straining, but fabulously secure login journey.
Given those back-to-back home runs, it’s obvious that the IT Department recruited that 2FA-Team from the IT beer leagues. Seriously. How did anyone ever come up with that system and how did anyone else ever think that it was a good idea? Exactly none of the many other 2FA systems I have to use these days even use separate pages for the username and password because at least their IT people realize that it’s that secondary verification and not an endless number of webpages that is providing the security. Forget hackers, I don’t even want to log in to my own account anymore.
And the fun continues …
After that same hacker onslaught, all staff were required to install a sentinel program that apart from being a normal antivirus program also automatically monitors our computers for threats or other suspicious activities that are then blocked both on the computer and also centrally if need be. The former actually happened to me recently because of a threat that was menacingly identified as “persistence_deception” and which was severe enough that the sentinel program blocked my computer from accessing the internet anymore. But not to fear because the same program also provided me with the e-mail address and URL of our IT service desk for help, both of which are incredibly handy when you have no internet.
Fortunately there was also a phone number provided and it was quickly determined that the culprit was a program that I had just updated to its most recent version, namely Nextcloud. You know, Nextcloud, the program for file sharing and group documents that the University is forcing us to use instead of Google Drive? In any case, the IT person just sighed and said that they’d white flag it. (Probably again given that sigh.)
And then it all started from zero a few weeks later with the next Nextcloud update. In the end, my permanent solution was to simply stop using this University-approved program, which I always found to be a general pain in the ass anyway, and to go back to using Google Drive. I mean really. Let’s think about which is more likely to occur: a data breach at google or a(nother almost) successful hacking of the University’s servers, probably because someone wasn’t staying alert to that stupid e-mail banner and got reeled in by a phishing attempt in a split-second brain fart.
I heard on the radio yesterday afternoon that experts are predicting that this summer will see an insect plague in Germany, especially when it comes to ticks and tiger mosquitoes. Now, I can’t find any real support for this statement on the internet apart from all the conspiracy sites that have been making it for 10 years running, but it’s not an unlikely one to be made, even from serious sources, and the general point still stands.
First off, I know exactly who is to blame for any coming plague and I’m looking right at all the University of Not-Bielefelds with all their biodiversity-boosting, budget-balancing bits of bug bliss in the form of insect meadows. On our campus at least, these things are everywhere and are in full bloom right now, the plants having grown so high that you can’t even see those little signs justifying their presence anymore. (All except for a lawnmower-width stripe next to the sidewalks that is mown down to a biodiversity-lacking dog meadow on a regular basis. I have no idea what for. To keep the insects from crossing the roads? Nevertheless, it apparently hasn’t occurred to the University that they could use those stripes for us to see their little signs.)
But, more importantly, was everyone seriously expecting that these meadows would only be visited by the “nice” insects? (Or, as this working paper puts it, the “beneficial” ones?) As I said before, we can’t judge biodiversity because it just is. There is no such thing as good vs. bad or less vs. more biodiversity and we don’t really get to pick and choose exactly what kind we want to have. We don’t really get to choose what kind we don’t want to have either for that matter, with many of our efforts to wipe out pest species either failing miserably (think releasing genetically-engineered mosquitoes) or also taking out a lot of other “good” biodiversity as collateral damage (think insecticides).
Want some more food for thought? While looking for that online support for the coming plague, I found a summary of a scientific paper that found that insect biodiversity might still be decreasing not despite the insect meadows but in part because of them.
Apparently the argument goes something like this …
One of the major causes of global warming is the increasing levels of CO2, chiefly from our burning of fossil fuels. Plants (and thereby insect meadows by extension) are supposed to be our saviours here because they breathe in CO2 and, via photosynthesis, use it to grow. More CO2, more growth, more food for some insects.
But …
Although there’s more vegetation, it’s actually pound-for-pound less nutritious than before because it’s mostly just more cellulose, the plant fibre that’s difficult to digest and not very nourishing to boot. The other minerals and nutrients are present in about the same overall amounts as before meaning that the insects are chewing through more cellulose but building up less cellulite. In other words, the plants have become the equivalent of plain rice cakes: you can live off them but why would you want to?
So forget that insect plague. As that same summary puts it, we might be heading for an insect apocalypse anyway …
The Blog About Fog 