On Thu, 28 Mar 1996 rick@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca wrote:

> And if you live here in Canada, you may get a surprise visit from your
> friendly RCMP officer. A fairly popular hobby around here is the installation
> of hydroponic growth rooms for the production of hemp. The most common way
> to get caught doing this is an unexplained increase in residential hydro use,
> which the local power company is required to report to the RCMP.
> (Yep, those guys in the red jackets are our federal police force and do drug
>  enforcement, among other things:-)
> 
> Anyhow, if it's just a vax you are running, you should be alright. (Hmm, maybe
> that's a good cover?)

The *perfect* cover would be to convert the VAX and grow the hemp (what's 
that, anyway?) inside it. You could always hide a 3100 inside it 
somewhere as well so that you could show off a working console 
terminal... ;-)

Which reminds me of the time when three guys in grey suits suddenly 
turned up at one of my former employers and demanded to see our VAXen. 
Turned out they came from the American embassy in Oslo. They had made a 
routine inspection at our Oslo headquarters and discovered that all the 
VAXen that my employers had bought (sentralized purchasing) were not 
present in their computer room. General alert! They travelled around to 
all our branch offices and demanded to see our machines. They marched 
into our computer room and opened the front doors of all our CPUs to 
verify that they were not just empty shells. They even xeroxed our 
service logs and gave our CDC Cyber 180/840 the same treatment.

At that time I was responsible for security on our systems (both logical 
and physical) so I had installed a printer in our computer room and 
redirected all security related alarms from the consoles to that printer. 
Naturally I had labelled it "KGB". One of the guys in grey suits noticed 
the printer and it's prominent label, General Alert again! It took half 
an hour to convince them that it was just a joke...

Oops, there I go again... but those really were the days!

Gunnar

--
Gunnar Helliesen   | Bergen IT Consult AS  | NetBSD/VAX on a uVAX II
Systems Consultant | Bergen, Norway        | Jaguar Enthusiast/Ford owner
gunnar@bitcon.no   | http://www.bitcon.no/ | Vicki who? What .sig virus?