> Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.
How do you go about surreptitiously obtaining several dozen large moths?
this manual is several decades old. large moths (the size of your palm) used to be very common, and still are in some remote places. you could catch them easily near any lamp after sundown.
The Bay Area used to have cercropia moths in the surrounding foothills. They are enormous, 8" or more, and their wing flapping makes an incredible basso profondo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyalophora_cecropia
I haven't seen one in decades. No idea if there are any left.
Used to live in an attic in the presidio. Pretty sure one of these mfs flew into my face one time as I was on my phone, trying to read myself to sleep. Terrible experience.
Many of those guidelines are strikingly similar to what you find in pretty much most of big companies. Makes you wonder...
->
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Part of me wonders to what degree the authors of this were in on the joke. Bill Donovan was known to prefer independent-minded and creative people as OSS agents, and while the advice here is genuinely useful I wouldn’t be surprised if the authors were also intentionally satirizing the sorts of corporate and government bureaucracy that they had likely chafed against throughout their lives.
Local elections were especially contentious here in my city -- a former police officer switched to the GOP and lost, then in parallel a member of congress decided not to seek another term after it was pointed out he was in a cult.
Then on top of all that you had the presidential election.
I ended up reading a lot of Sun Tzu and python books because of it.
Given the severe shortages that existed in Germany by the end of the war I would imagine that even the most whimsical acts of small scale sabotage inflicted a surprising amount of pain.
> (1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
> (2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences...
> (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
> (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
> (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
> (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
So what you're telling me is my coworkers are all saboteurs!
Sounds like all my middle management meetings at Google. At least 10 people to make a decision, they all have the ability to veto, but none have approval authority.
"As early as 1973, the FBI was running a program aimed at securing information about reading habits of many library users; this program was ultimately called the "Library Awareness Program.... The FBI claimed that one of the major reasons this program was initiated was because hostile intelligence agents had been able to find some information that could be dangerous to the security of the United States. "
> you mean to tell me... the government has always wanted to know what I read? Call me shocked!
Not really:
> The FBI was particularly interested in learning this type of information about foreign diplomats or their agents.
> ...The area of greatest concern was the information at academic libraries that could be accessed through sophisticated databanks used for research. This point was illuminated by the report that a Soviet employee of the United Nations had been able to recruit a college student from Queens to obtain information at the library that was described as sensitive.
Wow, he's going on an on about keeping mung beans in jars, then I skip ahead and he's making homemade fuses for bombs? Then I noticed he's missing half his fingers on his right hand. WTF.
Most people you meet have at least some wacky ideas. I’m sure you do as well.
Yeah I agree guy was kinda nuts. Lol so what?
It’s the content that’s interesting. Didn’t see anyone else share something like that, so I did. He was one of the first in the “survivalist” movement, seemed relevant to the discussion as the document in the post was from a similar time period.
8. Arbitrarily assign points in sprints, making critical tasks more points.
9. Spend time “improving” the “UX” of your system. Use lots of metrics to justify hiding key functionality.
10. Tell everyone not to use code comments and make their code “self-commenting”.
11. Insist on 100% test coverage to waste time. Make most tests test the test suite and private methods.
12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
13. Delay updating software as long as possible. Never update to the latest version — if a new security fix comes out, deploy the old patch because the new one wasn’t audited. Disable automatic updates.
14. Validate data on the client side.
15. Never take tasks from an out-of-band request, no matter how easy or important. Always insist that tickets are properly triaged, assigned story points, and go through sprint planning first.
> 12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
hah, I saw some of that right here on HackerNews, on today's thread about someone cutting GTA's load time from 6 minutes to <2 with a few lines of code. A lot of stuff along the lines of "I can't believe you'd attack the engineers like that, they're just focusing on what's really important to the company"
Somewhat related, this cracked me up the other day:
> Mechanic tells crew what he found:
"Tank was out of fuel & broken down as you said. I found a leaking fuel line, timing belt snapped, puncture in oil reservoir & cracked radiator"
"A cracked radiator you say?" interjected one Russian soldier.
"Huh. I don't remember doing that."
My favorite bit of advice:
> Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.
How do you go about surreptitiously obtaining several dozen large moths?
…and getting them in a paper bag?
Vacuum
A butterfly net
Porch light in a dark rural location.
this manual is several decades old. large moths (the size of your palm) used to be very common, and still are in some remote places. you could catch them easily near any lamp after sundown.
The Bay Area used to have cercropia moths in the surrounding foothills. They are enormous, 8" or more, and their wing flapping makes an incredible basso profondo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyalophora_cecropia
I haven't seen one in decades. No idea if there are any left.
Used to live in an attic in the presidio. Pretty sure one of these mfs flew into my face one time as I was on my phone, trying to read myself to sleep. Terrible experience.
Scary to think about the ecosystem implications of that
Leave a lot of cotton clothes in a closet without mothballs.
They clearly got the idea from the opening scene of Strange Brew.
Check out section "(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production", if you have worked as part of a corporation it may feel familiar...
Many of those guidelines are strikingly similar to what you find in pretty much most of big companies. Makes you wonder...
->
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Part of me wonders to what degree the authors of this were in on the joke. Bill Donovan was known to prefer independent-minded and creative people as OSS agents, and while the advice here is genuinely useful I wouldn’t be surprised if the authors were also intentionally satirizing the sorts of corporate and government bureaucracy that they had likely chafed against throughout their lives.
If you reverse all the do's and don't in this manual it reads like a pretty good manual to go about your daily business and household maintenance.
I didn't know this was on Gutenberg, I think this is one of the stack of books I checked out of the library before COVID.
(It's no longer in my apartment, but that was a hell of an election.)
Election?
Local elections were especially contentious here in my city -- a former police officer switched to the GOP and lost, then in parallel a member of congress decided not to seek another term after it was pointed out he was in a cult.
Then on top of all that you had the presidential election.
I ended up reading a lot of Sun Tzu and python books because of it.
First rule of the sabotage club is that you don't talk about sabotage club.
Three can keep a secret if two of them are John McAfee and Dam Kaminski ;-)
Awesome! Just in time for being forced back to the office.
Has this ever been effective somewhere ?
Given the severe shortages that existed in Germany by the end of the war I would imagine that even the most whimsical acts of small scale sabotage inflicted a surprising amount of pain.
> (11) (a) Organizations and Conferences
> (1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
> (2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences...
> (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
> (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
> (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
> (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
So what you're telling me is my coworkers are all saboteurs!
Sounds like all my middle management meetings at Google. At least 10 people to make a decision, they all have the ability to veto, but none have approval authority.
And the bosses keep lavishing these workers with praise - are they in on it too? Possibly handlers of some sort ...
Saboteurs or bureaucrats -- they operate roughly in the same way.
The project managers at my company seem to be using this as their bible.
"As early as 1973, the FBI was running a program aimed at securing information about reading habits of many library users; this program was ultimately called the "Library Awareness Program.... The FBI claimed that one of the major reasons this program was initiated was because hostile intelligence agents had been able to find some information that could be dangerous to the security of the United States. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Awareness_Program
you mean to tell me... the government has always wanted to know what I read? Call me shocked!
> you mean to tell me... the government has always wanted to know what I read? Call me shocked!
Not really:
> The FBI was particularly interested in learning this type of information about foreign diplomats or their agents.
> ...The area of greatest concern was the information at academic libraries that could be accessed through sophisticated databanks used for research. This point was illuminated by the report that a Soviet employee of the United Nations had been able to recruit a college student from Queens to obtain information at the library that was described as sensitive.
Probably some piece of info you can search for in two seconds on the internet, nowadays.
Libraries used to be where you could obtain detailed maps of your area. Great stuff for planning invasions (which both sides were always doing).
I’d you like this...
Let me introduce you to Kurt Saxon
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tsxGX5F5SXg
https://archive.org/details/The_Poor_Mans_James_Bond_Vol_1_K...
https://archive.org/details/Granddads_Wonderful_Book_of_Chem...
> Let me introduce you to Kurt Saxon
> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tsxGX5F5SXg
Wow, he's going on an on about keeping mung beans in jars, then I skip ahead and he's making homemade fuses for bombs? Then I noticed he's missing half his fingers on his right hand. WTF.
> he's making homemade fuses for bombs? Then I noticed he's missing half his fingers on his right hand
After that first part, the second really shouldn't be any surprise at all...
> After that first part, the second really shouldn't be any surprise at all...
The surprising thing to me is that such a person feels they're qualified enough to instruct other people on this topic.
Personally, I'd be very keen to listen to the guy with no fingers telling me what not to do.
The first thing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Saxon
Kurt Saxon (born Donald Eugene Sisco on March 6, 1932) is an American neo-Nazi
Who knew the the man building bombs and poison darts is crazy!?
He was also part of the church of Scientology for a bit. Imo his political opinions are less interesting than the content he was teaching.
You knew. Lots of people post the same content or better and they aren't Nazis.
Most people you meet have at least some wacky ideas. I’m sure you do as well.
Yeah I agree guy was kinda nuts. Lol so what?
It’s the content that’s interesting. Didn’t see anyone else share something like that, so I did. He was one of the first in the “survivalist” movement, seemed relevant to the discussion as the document in the post was from a similar time period.
1. Introduce OKRs
2. Introduce scrum to direct the workflow.
3. The more layers of management, the better.
4. The more approvals for any simple action, the better.
5. The more meetings, the better.
6. ???
7. Profit!
8. Arbitrarily assign points in sprints, making critical tasks more points.
9. Spend time “improving” the “UX” of your system. Use lots of metrics to justify hiding key functionality.
10. Tell everyone not to use code comments and make their code “self-commenting”.
11. Insist on 100% test coverage to waste time. Make most tests test the test suite and private methods.
12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
13. Delay updating software as long as possible. Never update to the latest version — if a new security fix comes out, deploy the old patch because the new one wasn’t audited. Disable automatic updates.
14. Validate data on the client side.
15. Never take tasks from an out-of-band request, no matter how easy or important. Always insist that tickets are properly triaged, assigned story points, and go through sprint planning first.
16. Actually use your vacation days.
> 12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
hah, I saw some of that right here on HackerNews, on today's thread about someone cutting GTA's load time from 6 minutes to <2 with a few lines of code. A lot of stuff along the lines of "I can't believe you'd attack the engineers like that, they're just focusing on what's really important to the company"
Make pointless meetings and involve as many people as possible.
That should be against the Geneva Convention.
I imagine this must have been a lot more damaging before the days of Zoom meetings.
Make them use teams
It is not that bad. Have you ever used Skype?
You may have a point. Haven't had a good Skype experience in a long time. Weird to think that Skype almost became a common verb like Google.
Somewhat related, this cracked me up the other day:
> Mechanic tells crew what he found: "Tank was out of fuel & broken down as you said. I found a leaking fuel line, timing belt snapped, puncture in oil reservoir & cracked radiator" "A cracked radiator you say?" interjected one Russian soldier. "Huh. I don't remember doing that."