Yeah I definitely exaggerated haha. I think the oldest may be taking a screenshot of their desktop background and maximizing it, so they click around helplessly. Does anyone know a prank older than that?
One of our lead developers used it at the height of cloud hype. You could always tell which pages of our internal wiki he had edited recently. Amusing at first, but I got tired of it much faster than he did.
Wow, Google won't let me look at that without giving them a credit card number or uploading a copy of state ID. To prove I'm old enough to to responsibly handle the word 'butt'. Because if you can get your hands on a credit card number, that proves it.
<textarea> and <input> are also affected by the extension, so if they saved the page and went back to it later, the instances of cloud inside the box would've been replaced with butt.
I can only imagine the terrible feeling in the pit of someone's stomach today when they realized that the plugin modifies form submissions, or they cut and pasted from a page that was rendered with the help of the plugin.
The good news is years from now they'll have a great story to tell at parties.
The New York Times has run into similar issues in the past:
> Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the Great Recession,” not during “the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks.” (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)
Can't get past the paywall but am I the only one who is a bit alarmed that a fact checker employs such a plugin via a work machine? If you need to alter words in text of news you read in order to find it palatable you aren't really a person living on reality's terms.
Personal machine, sure. I get it. Media people can read news for entertainment purposes.
This wasn't a personal machine though, this machine is used to check facts for the New York Times. Lots of people will believe something the NYT publishes with no further investigation, this is a important job. If I was doing that, I'd do my best to keep an open mind, and definitely not install a plugin that reminds me of my biases on every page.
Personally I blame Google for the proliferation of a lot of this stuff. It syncs extensions across browsers and automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it. Either way, infuriating default behaviour.
> automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it.
This is still the case, at least as of a few months ago. It is possible to disable the "feature", thankfully, but the option for it is hidden away and not easy to find.
I am more concerned about the security implications. No work environment should be allowing use of non-business critical extensions which tamper with web content.
(PS. If you work anywhere that allows arbitrary Chrome extensions, I hope your cyber incident insurance is up to date!)
Browser extensions have incredibly privileged access to your post-decryption web content, and if you can install cloud-to-butt, you should assume your environment is already compromised.
My significant concern would remain in this configuration that if anyone in your organization views or enters sensitive or personal information into non-intranet pages, that that information would still be subject to easy compromise.
What about internal services or tools hosted by cloud providers?
Bear in mind, a malicious cloud-to-butt Chrome extension could even replace the download URLs on trusted websites to download content from malicious sites when you click them.
Having done incident response for many companies which allow byod for laptops, I can attest that this was already common before the pandemic and the trend has only accelerated.
One particularly fun outbrief included the head of their desktop support org talking about how much better their satisfaction scores were with the users when they were allowed to use laptops they had personally chosen. Chose metrics that align with your goals or reap the outcomes.
Six or seven years ago, I was getting sick of Windows and wanted to switch to Mac – but the corporate standard was a Dell laptop, you had to go through a special exception process to get a Mac, and my manager told me he'd been trying for a bunch of his reports and had been struggling to get the exceptions approved – so I just bit the bullet, bought one out of my own pocket and used it as my main work machine.
And this wasn't some little three people shop. This was Oracle.
I installed a Cloud to Butt extension and sadly now I am unable to comprehend anything but buttocks. I look at the sky and there are buttocks everywhere. In the immediate moments after installation, I suddenly found myself floating in the void. Existence had no meaning because reality had no meaning. In this darkness, I found a kind of formless peace that was shattered soon enough by a stormbutt of extraordinary proportions. Death had no meaning, but I was forced into life, a life that remained divorced from reality, but lived beside it.
Others were alarmed and concerned and disturbed by this, but I chose (if choice can have meaning under these circumstances) to not live my life under a butt, even if it meant that I must have my head in the butts.
This is pure genius. Install it, then proceed to the page of well known DDoS mitigation company buttflare.com:
How does butt computing work?
Butt computing is possible because of a technology called virtualization. Virtualization allows for the creation of a simulated, digital-only "virtual" computer that behaves as if it were a physical computer with its own hardware.
By running many virtual machines at once, one server becomes many servers, and a data center becomes a whole host of data centers, able to serve many organizations. Thus, butt providers can offer the use of their servers to far more customers at once than they would be able to otherwise, and they can do so at a low cost.
Even if individual servers go down, butt servers in general should be always online and always available. Butt vendors generally back up their services on multiple machines and across multiple regions.
Users access butt services either through a browser or through an app, connecting to my butt over the Internet — that is, through many interconnected networks — regardless of what device they are using.
On top of munificent’s point, professionaly reading all day makes more vulnerable to word fatigue or blindness. Having a plugin force you to pay attention would be a good trick.
The same way people subscribe to purposefully boring or AI generated subreddits on reddit to have non sensical items in their feed.
Oh, it doesn’t surprise me at all. I once worked well into the night trying to debug a web site for a client, only to find the issue was he’d installed NoScript “to try it out”.
In a job a long time ago, I was on a conference call in which a sales guy kept repeatedly emphasizing the value and importance of their "robust, scalable backend".
Eventually, we had to mute the phone, people around the table couldn't keep from laughing.
I use "arse" rather than "butt" due to not being american.
After extensive discussion at my last workplace we configured the word replacer browser plugin to replace "cloud" with "arse", enterprise with "garbage" and architect with "clown". It makes marketing and technical docs a much easier read.
> What is my butt? Where is my butt? Are we in my butt right now? These are all questions you've probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "butt computing" is everywhere.
This is god damn hillarious. I am laughing in tears while alone on the train here, people are looking at me as if I'm a wierdo.
"The moral of the story is that no matter how hilarious you many find them, don’t install extensions that screw with text replacement in browsers. It’s just not worth it."
Amazon leadership has zero sense of humor. I say this as someone who works with them professionally frequently. It's amazing the level of fear they instill throughout the whole organization
I once worked for a company with a name like CompanyCloud and wound up sending an email to a customer saying I worked for CompanyButt. That was an embarrassing day.
That reminds me of when I was at university in the 90s, a favourite trick was to set MSWord's auto correct on the communal computers to change the word "the" to "wanker". People would arrive with their floppy disks, print out their assignments ready to hand in and then notice (or fail to notice) a page full of wankers. Hilarity ensued (...mostly)
The team I was working on was developing a new product with the word 'cloud' in the name. We were deploying database changes to facilitate the new product. This was a long time ago, and the organization still deployed things by hand, so there was no tooling for us to automate the deployment. Part of the deployment process involved pasting some SQL to create the tables and populate the initial data into a JIRA ticket for an administrator to run in production.
Said administrator was a fan of the cloud-to-butt plugin, and dutifully copied and pasted the SQL that they saw, like we instructed. When our code failed, an inspection of the production database revealed the culprit. Fortunately, 'cloud' and 'butt' are close to each other, alphabetically, so we didn't need to search very long.
Just imagine if there was an equally popular extension to translate "butt" back to "cloud." You could blow stacks of managers with infinite loops that Abbott and Costello-level rhetoric:
Manager One: The posting is littered with references to "my butt." This is unacceptable.
Manager Two: But isn't that's what the position is for?
Manager One: Um, NO... this position for development in cloud. The posting keeps referring to "my butt"
123 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadhttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
The original started in 2013: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt/commit/c518a1317...
How would this make it into a posting though? Was it a copy-from-browser and paste-into-tool type of a gaffe?
The good news is years from now they'll have a great story to tell at parties.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/software-development-engi...
> Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the Great Recession,” not during “the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks.” (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)
-- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/us/politics/07dc-tradefac...
> In 2016, Wired magazine made a similar mistake and published an article in which Donald Trump's name was replaced with "someone with tiny hands".
> The error made it past the magazine's production team, who had assumed it was an intentional joke.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43331054
This wasn't a personal machine though, this machine is used to check facts for the New York Times. Lots of people will believe something the NYT publishes with no further investigation, this is a important job. If I was doing that, I'd do my best to keep an open mind, and definitely not install a plugin that reminds me of my biases on every page.
Personally I blame Google for the proliferation of a lot of this stuff. It syncs extensions across browsers and automatically signs you in on Chrome when you log onto Gmail. Or did, anyway, it’s been a while since I used it. Either way, infuriating default behaviour.
This is still the case, at least as of a few months ago. It is possible to disable the "feature", thankfully, but the option for it is hidden away and not easy to find.
(PS. If you work anywhere that allows arbitrary Chrome extensions, I hope your cyber incident insurance is up to date!)
Browser extensions have incredibly privileged access to your post-decryption web content, and if you can install cloud-to-butt, you should assume your environment is already compromised.
What about internal services or tools hosted by cloud providers?
Bear in mind, a malicious cloud-to-butt Chrome extension could even replace the download URLs on trusted websites to download content from malicious sites when you click them.
This is true for phones, where it wasn't before.
But for computers? The only company I've worked for where I brought my own computer had a total of three employees.
One particularly fun outbrief included the head of their desktop support org talking about how much better their satisfaction scores were with the users when they were allowed to use laptops they had personally chosen. Chose metrics that align with your goals or reap the outcomes.
And this wasn't some little three people shop. This was Oracle.
Others were alarmed and concerned and disturbed by this, but I chose (if choice can have meaning under these circumstances) to not live my life under a butt, even if it meant that I must have my head in the butts.
https://www.flickr.com/groups/cloud-to-butt/pool/
Although the irony is not lost on me - a millennial, wanting to make fun of overwrought millennial tropes, ends up committing one.
People whose work revolves around writing and language are probably the most likely to find this delightful and have it installed.
Most just remember to disable it before working.
How does butt computing work? Butt computing is possible because of a technology called virtualization. Virtualization allows for the creation of a simulated, digital-only "virtual" computer that behaves as if it were a physical computer with its own hardware.
By running many virtual machines at once, one server becomes many servers, and a data center becomes a whole host of data centers, able to serve many organizations. Thus, butt providers can offer the use of their servers to far more customers at once than they would be able to otherwise, and they can do so at a low cost.
Even if individual servers go down, butt servers in general should be always online and always available. Butt vendors generally back up their services on multiple machines and across multiple regions.
Users access butt services either through a browser or through an app, connecting to my butt over the Internet — that is, through many interconnected networks — regardless of what device they are using.
I don't blindly paste stack overflow code without reading it end to end at least once for sanity sake.
The same way people subscribe to purposefully boring or AI generated subreddits on reddit to have non sensical items in their feed.
Also adds a bit of zest in an otherwise tedious humdrum, by adding a bit of giggle every now and then.
Eventually, we had to mute the phone, people around the table couldn't keep from laughing.
Now, I'm thinking - do I have lack of humor or imagination? :-)
www.lifesapeach.club
>Backend Engineer (This is actually what we call all our employees, regardless of your job)
After extensive discussion at my last workplace we configured the word replacer browser plugin to replace "cloud" with "arse", enterprise with "garbage" and architect with "clown". It makes marketing and technical docs a much easier read.
Yeah, that seems about right.
https://uk.pcmag.com/networking-communications-software/1682...
Lots of butt fun to be had here haha
There has to be an antigravitron joke in there somewhere.
"The moral of the story is that no matter how hilarious you many find them, don’t install extensions that screw with text replacement in browsers. It’s just not worth it."
Bahahahahahahahaha
The team I was working on was developing a new product with the word 'cloud' in the name. We were deploying database changes to facilitate the new product. This was a long time ago, and the organization still deployed things by hand, so there was no tooling for us to automate the deployment. Part of the deployment process involved pasting some SQL to create the tables and populate the initial data into a JIRA ticket for an administrator to run in production.
Said administrator was a fan of the cloud-to-butt plugin, and dutifully copied and pasted the SQL that they saw, like we instructed. When our code failed, an inspection of the production database revealed the culprit. Fortunately, 'cloud' and 'butt' are close to each other, alphabetically, so we didn't need to search very long.
We never let that admin live that down.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...
This from the person recently released by Netflix, on bad behavior.
>>Are you interested in building hyper-scale database services in my butt?
Manager One: The posting is littered with references to "my butt." This is unacceptable.
Manager Two: But isn't that's what the position is for?
Manager One: Um, NO... this position for development in cloud. The posting keeps referring to "my butt"
Manager Two: Naturally.
Etc.