IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

Texas, 1978. Robert was working at a cotton co-op running what may have been one of the world's earliest online auction systems. Farmers received punch cards representing their bales of cotton - occasionally complete...

A modern pinball machine isn't just flippers, bumpers, lights, and a very large box making expensive noises. It's a connected computer with software updates, online score tracking, player accounts, remote management...

The Three Envelopes: Blame, Reorganize, Repeat There is an old management joke about an outgoing manager leaving three numbered envelopes for their successor. When the first crisis arrives: blame your predecessor. The...

Jack's Rants - Why You Need to Reboot : Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems "Have you tried turning it off and on again ?" became an IT cliché for a reason. Rebooting clears accumulated state, resets...

Testing software sounds simple enough. But what exactly should you test, where should those tests happen, and how do you decide which parts of a complex system need the most attention? Jack talks with Mooly Beeri about...

One day, a busy IBM-compatible mainframe began slowing to a crawl. Hundreds of programmers noticed immediately—some even resorted to banging on the server room window whenever the system became unusable. The problem...

Every year, the Melbourne Cup pushes Australia's betting infrastructure to its limits. In 1991, a known software bug turned one of the busiest days of the year into an IT disaster. As millions of bets poured in, CPU...

Scambaiters like Kitboga, Jim Browning and Pierogi educate millions, waste scammers' time, and undoubtedly prevent people from becoming victims. As a security professional, I genuinely appreciate what they do. But every...

Smart cities promise better transportation, connected infrastructure, and improved services—but what happens when everything is connected a little too well? In this episode, our guest shares the story of a security...

Opening a tab at a bowling alley shouldn't require handing over your driver's license or national ID card. Yet many businesses still ask customers to leave government-issued identity documents behind as collateral...

<p>Once upon a time, Change Management meant raising an RFC, preparing a rollback plan, and surviving the Change Advisory Board. Today, it also means stakeholder engagement, communication plans, adoption metrics...

<p>It was supposed to be a routine hiring exercise. A candidate receives a technical assignment, reviews the provided material, and prepares a solution. Then someone notices that the "anonymous" dataset isn't anonymous...

<p>Printing is one of those technologies everyone assumes should have been solved years ago — until someone can't print invoices, shipping labels stop coming out, or 50,000 customer letters suddenly disappear into a...

<p>Welcome to the story of a perfectly known and visible laptop that somehow became critical production infrastructure inside a warehouse environment — without going through proper validation, testing, or operational...

<p>We explore a hypothetical ransomware scenario that mirrors what many organizations could face today. Imagine a normal day where systems suddenly become inaccessible, data is encrypted, and the scope of the attack...