Oddly the Tom's Hardware article, authored by "Zhiye Liu", omits this. But it's not really relevant - I'm sure there are lots of people with names like "Steve Robinson" or "John Wayne" in supervisory roles at China's CBP-equivalent.
If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.
The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you
obviously this isn't official advice, but are they misinformed and don't like you doing legal things that bother them?
> Any small pleasure vessel leaving a United States port into international or foreign waters, without a call at a foreign port, does not satisfy the foreign departure requirement. Therefore, certain fishing vessels, cruises to nowhere, or any vessel that leaves from a United States port and returns without calling a foreign port or place, has not departed the United States.
Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.
And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?
In this context it's not one individual stealing from another. This is a temporary reallocation of a dormant resource within the system to a more critical process that requires those resources to perform its function and ensure the system remains stable. In this framing I'd be inclined to argue not taking the RAM would be the unethical choice.
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
You're spending a ton of effort to try to craft implausible scenarios like the RAM only being "temporarily" taken or the work it was used for being critical. I could just as easily claim that the one who's RAM was taken had critical humanitarian work that didn't get done in time because their RAM was stolen so their coworker could play the latest game that required 16 MB. The actual facts that have been established make neither of these less likely than the other because they're both incredibly unlikely, and it's kind of bizarre that you seem to think otherwise.
Ethics aren't binary. The amount of harm caused to a company needing to allocate an extra 8 MB of RAM a single time is a lot lower than the amount of harm caused to an individual by forcing them to lose 1/4 of their workday.
> Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in.
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
> More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
Just to be clear, I'm more or less playing devil's advocate here as an exercise for myself. There's simply not enough context in the story to be able to have a concrete opinion on it for me personally and creating hypotheticals like the one in my reply have been a great way for me to explore concepts more thoroughly so I can form a more nuanced opinion to apply in the real world when the need arises.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
> The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
That's what I assumed, and found strange that the referenced article refers to him as a Chinese national. That said, that publication is also probably not very credible because I can't find anything backing up that claim.
US nationals are a tiny corner case that applies to people born in certain US territories. They’re functionally equivalent to citizens aside from not having the right to vote in federal elections.
As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.
IMHO a bigger worry is if they were opening the case then they could have modified it for spying or changing contents. I'd have thought stuff like this should have case alarm notification and inventory change alerts.
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.
I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally
45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.
personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.
Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.
Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...
For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.
Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.
We are on 3 year refresh cycles at my office. I always feel guilty when I am forced to get a new machine to replace the perfectly working but 3 year old one. At least a 3 year old machine will still sell as surplus.
At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.
i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.
I would also say in general that the federal government's software contractors are likely building tons of complex HTML5 / WebRTC / webassembly software packages that will choke a cheaper desktop PC. Ever viewed 20 cameras simultaneously in one browser tab in Frigate and seen the CPU usage? Now imagine something like that but for watching border sensor cameras and stuff...
Customs and Border Patrol has been granted huge budget increases this year.
Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)
Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world.
My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.
The copper theft thing happens in western nations too. There's videos of people driving up in cars, license plates and faces showing and just to add to the stupidity they use bolt cutters to remove live power cables from EV charging stations.
The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y
The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.
Wow, caught while at the airport trying to fly back to Guangzhou. He’s a Chinese national who posted that he voted in 2020. I thought those secret dual guys usually flew through an intermediary country to launder the passports.
But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.
Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much or is this some maximalist prosecution claim?
RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.
>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.
Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.
I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.
There's been ~40% inflation accumulated over the last decade. On top of that, storage and RAM prices have recently doubled or even tripled, as demand has outpaced supply.
A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070
and 32 GB of RAM.
I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.
Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.
Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.
If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.
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[ 18.3 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadOddly the Tom's Hardware article, authored by "Zhiye Liu", omits this. But it's not really relevant - I'm sure there are lots of people with names like "Steve Robinson" or "John Wayne" in supervisory roles at China's CBP-equivalent.
> Any small pleasure vessel leaving a United States port into international or foreign waters, without a call at a foreign port, does not satisfy the foreign departure requirement. Therefore, certain fishing vessels, cruises to nowhere, or any vessel that leaves from a United States port and returns without calling a foreign port or place, has not departed the United States.
Dunno how much emphasis to put on the word "port"
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/pleasure-boats-private-flyers/ple...
While it's a more inland water, Large vessels effectively can't transit through Windows/Detroit shipping channel without multiple border line crossings: https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...
This is generally law enforcement all over. Given the power imbalance people don't question it due to fear of arrest/violence.
But when your corporate policies put weeks/months for an upgrade, and you can do it in 3 hours by reallocating to the same business (no theft), that's just using broken business practices to people's advantages.
And also, what ethical frame work are you using? Or is this the 'feels' framework?
Unless this company was actively working against humanities survival, then the ethical thing to do would be to steal the RAM and not use it!
That would be the ideal way _if_ that person had a couple of hours to spare. In my meaningless anecdotal experience someone that would need to resort to this likely wasn't planning to do it.
More likely they were working on their TPS reports and it got so big they couldn't finish the work before their middle manager would be expecting it in 45 minutes so I'm a panic they sneak in and grab the extra RAM leading to them finishing the report with 1 minute to spare saving the company from insolvency!
> Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Bonus points if they include a blurb highlighting the importance of that person's PC being functional before they get in the office since that PC has the super important customer files needed for the big meeting in an hour and if they don't have them the company is going to have to make cuts and will likely start with the IT department.
I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
> On principle I agree but it's not the only option! The real pro wouldn't have just taken the RAM and walked away, they would have taken the RAM and then submitted a ticket letting them know you noticed another employee's PC case open and when you looked noticed the sticks were missing.
Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.
Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.
The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.
> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.
That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
Yes, and we have a word for people who think that their needs outweigh those of others: selfish.
> That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.
I don't even know what this means. Being selfish is bad and negative, yes.
> Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.
I can imagine them. I don't think they're particularly likely compared to someone being selfish, because there are many selfish people in the world, and almost no circumstances where getting more RAM immediately by stealing it from someone else is warranted.
I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.
Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's theft.
Open to "U.S. Citizens, Nationals, or those who owe allegiance to the U.S."
As far as I can tell, “those who owe allegiance to the US” doesn’t include anyone beyond citizens and nationals and is just there as boilerplate.
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.
personally I have an i7 in the lab that turned into a crawl on Youtube because they started sending VP9 video by default, but i7 doesn't have hardware decode for it. Got a plugin to force h264 (h264ify) and it's back to normal.
Then you have situations where a software update adds a CPU instruction dependency and straight up doesn't work anymore.
Had to install and force-retain an old version of Spotify client on a bench lab PC because the new versions require AVX-1/2. It's a streaming audio player...
Well, an 128kbit MP3 requires at least a 486DX2-66 but you also need to run the OS. /s
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
Bureaucracies generally need to spend all their entire budget to show that they "need" it to avoid losing it next year, so they are certainly going to spend it. (Also, expect increased corruption)
My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.
The damage they do is well over $1000 from the multiple they hit so a major federal charge qualifies. The scrap value once you pull out the copper is less than $5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqmythK_b6Y
The amount of effort to reward doesn't come near even a minimum wage job. Similar to the above. The guy sold $7800 over the course of more than a year and not to factor in this was a swap so he bought replacements. Stupid.
But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.
RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.
Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.
I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.
A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070 and 32 GB of RAM.
I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.
Double crime
Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.
Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.
If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.
It turns out white people are the bigger thieves.