Wayback Wednesday: The fobbit
Pilot fish is deployed at a small military base in the desert in Iraq when a lone on-site IT engineer arrives. And he’s very gung-ho.
“He was tired of being a mere fobbit — someone who never leaves the FOB (forward operating base),” says fish. “He too wanted to be able to brag about his time ‘outside the wire,’ so he came up with a novel excuse.”
The base has a small wireless network using WEP encryption, and the engineer decides he has to make sure the network isn’t being cracked and monitored by insurgents.
Which isn’t a bad idea, except that 1) the base is in flat desert and any outsider is easy to spot; 2) wireless just doesn’t have much range; and 3) “I miss you, honey” emails aren’t exactly top-secret material.