FairPort Accused of Faking Network Readiness Test 144
wytcld writes "When Verizon spun off its Northern New England lines to FairPoint, FairPoint leased Verizon's computer network to manage them. This was costly, so FairPoint readied its own network. To prove its own network was ready for the switchover a demonstration was prepared for an outside auditor, Liberty. Now a whistleblower claims: '...when Liberty was watching what they thought was "flow thru" within a system and from one system to another, they were really only seeing a small program that was created to assimilate what they wanted the systems to do. They were not actually in the systems at the time nor were they in the test systems. They were in a newly created small program that used screen shots from the real system to deceive the audience into believing that they were watching a real demonstration.' How easy is it to find auditors who can be fooled by such a simple trick? Whether or not the test was faked, the network has proved so unready that FairPoint is close to bankruptcy, and may have its licenses to operate revoked in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont."
Re:So what does this mean for end users? (Score:5, Funny)
First, if you don't know what a word means, please don't use it. Even if you think you know, it's most likely that you will use it wrongly.
But that's the penultimate use for the word "assimilate" that I've ever heard!
Bankruptcy? Not here... (Score:4, Funny)
Proving once again... (Score:5, Funny)
...that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Re:Help! (Score:5, Funny)
No, he meant "assimilate". You see, by the end of the audit, the consultants had become part of the Collective, and were willing to sign whatever the Borg Queen told them to.
Share your fake demos here (Score:1, Funny)
We absolutely had nothing at that point except for design documentation (very much a 'waterfall' process type company.)
So the guys walks in, and we point him to two workstations, one manned by a team member, and both with headsets already layed out. He walks over to the workstation, puts on the headset, and starts talking to our guy.
"The voice quality is absolutely amazing! Tremendous! It's better than my landline at home!"
After that, we took him out for beers, and drove him to the airport next morning. Everything cool as can be.
Of course, both headsets were just plugged into POTS lines. We'd dialed over to the other workstation before he got there.
We didn't feel so bad in the end. We got that project done in time, and since the target network was way over-engineered and partitioned for just this purpose, we were able to actually use a codec that's better quality than POTS.
Re:Very Easy (Score:3, Funny)
What are you going to do when you get an auditor that asks you why you aren't using the Ovaltine decoder ring because that's what they read was recommended?
Re:Proving once again... (Score:5, Funny)
Canadian governent contractor was demoing the system. Part of the system to be used once the data was entered into the system was the report generation. This was demoed with some sample data The customer signed off and the contractor was payed.
Then about 6 months later they were trying to get the reports to be printed out but not matter what they did the reports all came out the same the dates were 6 months off. Thats right all the reports were hard coded and did not even touch the database.
auditors, hard to fool ?!?! (Score:1, Funny)
In a very large scale banking center we used to just change the color palates on the PC's used to display warning messages, and the managers and application auditors never noticed anything.