Expecting people to be smarter is a highly iffy proposition.

There is something about this story that doesn't make sense. The guy is making a good living why would he do something like this. Admittedly not all people are rational but computer people are usually at least logical.

During the Cold War, deep down in the missile silos, two keys were required for a launch. Those key input triggers where separated so that one man could not by himself launch a missile. Maybe it would be time to think about this with computer security - more than person to setup passwords, etc.

Just one quibble: wringing hands. Not "ringing hands."

[Thanks. Fixed.]

Either all the other employees there are idiots or they are using some sort of years-old legacy system. There are always physical mechanisms for recovering and resetting the base administrator password if you have personal physical access to the machine in question (which is why they are kept in locked rooms).

Of course, if the guy is clever he might have put in all kinds of damaging triggers, but....

In general, "you need to be smarter" seems to be the theme of our times. You can't just throw all your money into a single savings account and expect everything to be OK forever. You can't just say "give me a loan" and assume that the first thing you get is the best thing for you. You can't just click on every link in front of your face and assume that nothing bad will happen.

Sounds like the sysadmin just changed the "root" password and wouldn't give that supreme authority over the system to person or persons not trained or experienced enough to know when to leave well enough alone.

Postulating a new boss, who perhaps wants to bring in a "friend" of his who recently read a book on System Administration for Simpletons, one can understand why a professional admin would try to defend his users, and in fact, his company, from the horror that can be inflicted by a run-amok novice admin with a mandate to malfease.

n.b. NOT saying that such is the case here. Just that there ARE moral reasons for withholding information.

Crafty Hunter:

I think what's needed here is not necessarily individual intelligence (although that would be helpful), but institutional intelligence - having checks and balances that keep tragedy from striking even when we have less than brilliant (or even honest) people in one position or another.

From "The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis:

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant ‘a bastard nursed in a bureau’, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. ...

I am not thinking here solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment [1944]. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rules of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere hyle [Greek: matter, clay], specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration, and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligences, are sales-resistance.