Larry Osterman's WebLog : It's Funny :)

More fun with Amazon reviews.

LarryOsterman — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:35:01 GMT

A co-worker sent this around and I just HAD to share it… It’s not nearly as geeky as “The Story of Ping”.

For those that don’t want to follow the link, these are some of reviews for this:

“I bought this review based on all of the positive reviews, but am having some issues with space. The desk is great shape and fit for my 2004 Chevy Caprice, but I am really having a heck of a time fitting the Chevy in the office. I put my printer/fax, coffee machine, shredder, and inappropriate family photos snugly in the backseat, yet I still don't have enough room to walk around the Chevy. And worse, I can barely open the door and squeeze in. Most of the time I squeeze in the passenger side and scramble into the driver seat. I tried leaving the window open and crawling through, but Scrappy hops in and hangs his head out the window. I just don't have the heart to tell him we aren't going to the dogpark and that I am still working.
When the contractor comes to tear out the adjoining wall to my living room, I know he will ask me "Why don't you just use the garage?" But has he actually *seen* the garage! It's filled with stuff I never use like my treadmill, ab-lounger, roto-till, lawnmower... I couldn't work in that kind of clutter! NO WAY!
Don't get me wrong! I LOVE THIS PRODUCT! Now I can turn my Neil Diamond up as loud as I want to and not have Sandra from Accounting peek over my cubical with those angry little eyes. And when I want to go to Starbucks or McDonalds I can work while I drive AND in the drive thru, too! It works perfectly with my Universal Portable Urinal - Unisex and Reliance Products Hassock Portable Lightweight Self-Contained Toilet
Working from my car, and home, has never been easier. I finally threw out that crappy IKEA desk and printer stand combo! Good riddance! Best of all now I don't have to "tele-commute" to work, I "auto-commute." AWESOME.”

“My 16 year old daughter just got her license a few weeks ago. Since then, she's been going out for drives a lot after school. Unfortunately, all the time spent in the car for her has meant less time for homework. Her grades have noticeably slipped, but instead of taking away her car privileges, I bought this steering wheel desk. It's perfect for young drivers with heavy academic loads! Now she can work on her homework and still be out driving, improving her road skills and staying on top of her grades. I couldn't be prouder and would encourage all parents with new drivers to set their kids up with this super-portable work station!”

“My copilot and I both used these during our "daily grind" transcontinental flights from San Diego to Minneapolis. We had to modify them a bit to fit snug against the instrument panels (when we bought them we didn't realize the planes we fly don't have steering wheels!), but in the end it did the job. With our laptops firmly in place we were able to focus our attention on what really mattered, participating in raids with our WoW clan. During our last flight we were so immersed in trying to take down Eranikus that we overshot Minneapolis by a full hour and a half before some annoying flight attendant interrupted us, babbling something about "FAA and F16 fighters."
We'll definitely use this product again at our next gig, whatever and whenever that happens to be...
Highly recommended! “ [Editors Note: A reference to this]

“This is definitely one of the best products out there!
While commuting through downtown Seattle, I always had to make my sushi on the little center console in my Honda - try making a perfect California roll there! No way!
Now, I can safely make my California rolls, Spider rolls and Rainbow rolls - all while steering with my knee.
Downsides - it doesn't have a receptical for my egg drop soup bowl. Also, I have to keep my knife on the dashboard and my chopsticks tucked in my crotch. So, there are some flaws with this product. I would also recommend keeping your sake in a flask under the passengers seat.”

The reviews go on and on in this vein. Very funny.

Why are they called “giblets” anyway?

LarryOsterman — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:05:33 GMT

Five years ago, I attended one of the initial security training courses as a part of the XP SP2 effort. I wrote this up in one of my very first posts entitled “Remember the giblets” and followed it up last year with “The Trouble with Giblets”. I use the term “giblets” a lot but I’d never bothered to go out and figure out where the term came from.

Well, we were talking about giblets in an email discussion today and one of my co-workers went and asked Michael Howard where the term came from. Michael forwarded the question to Steve Lipner who was the person who originally coined the term and he came back with the origin of the term.

It turns out that “giblets” is a term that was used at Digital Equipment Corporation back in the 1980s. DEC used to sell big iron machines (actually I used DEC machines exclusively until I started at Microsoft). The thing about big machines is that you usually need more than just the machine to build a complete solution – things like Ethernet repeaters and adapters and other fiddly bits. And of course DEC was more than willing to sell you all these fiddly bits. It seems that some of the DEC marketing people liked to refer to these bits and pieces as “giblets”.

Over time Steve started using the term for the pieces of software that were incidental to the product but which weren’t delivered by the main development team – things like the C runtime library, libJPG, ATL, etc.

Later on, someone else (Steve wasn’t sure who, it might have been Eric Bidstrup) pointed out that the giblets that came from a turkey didn’t necessarily come from the actual turkey that you’re eating which makes the analogy even more apt.

Thanks to Craig Gehre for the picture.

Win7 Whoppers

LarryOsterman — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:39:00 GMT

Wow, one of my co-workers just sent this image out. It’s totally awesome (IMHO)…

http://twitpic.com/mehp6/full

Edit: The image tag didn't work for some reason so I removed it and just left the link...

Bonus: The first Win7 ad: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/10/21/multimedia/1247465293593/an-ad-for-windows-7-from-microsoft.html#

I get still more spam

LarryOsterman — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:02:49 GMT

This morning I awoke to find the following spam email in my inbox:

Greetings from Amazon Payments.

Your bank has contacted us regarding some attempts of charges from your credit card via the Amazon system. We have reasons to believe that you changed your registration information or that someone else has unauthorized access to your Amazon account Due to recent activity, including possible unauthorized listings placed on your account, we will require a second confirmation of your identity with us in order to allow us to investigate this matter further. Your account is not suspended, but if in 48 hours after you receive this message your account is not confirmed we reserve the right to suspend your Amazon registration. If you received this notice and you are not the authorized account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of Amazon policy to represent oneself as another Amazon user. Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law. Amazon is committed to assist law enforcement with any inquires related to attempts to misappropriate personal information with the intent to commit fraud or theft. Information will be provided at the request of law enforcement agencies to ensure that perpetrators are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

To confirm your identity with us click here: <LINK REDACTED>

After responding to the message, we ask that you allow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated. Emailing us before that time will result in delays. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for your cooperation as we review this matter.

Thank you for your interest in selling at Amazon.com.

Amazon.com Customer Help Service

In many ways this tickled my fancy. The first paragraph (“Greetings from Amazon Payments”) indicates that it’s directed to one of the Amazon affiliates and I’m not an Amazon affiliate. if it was directed to customers, it wouldn’t come from Amazon’s Payments department, instead it would come from some other department (maybe Amazon billing?).

But they immediately discuss “attempts of charges from your credit card” (let’s ignore the fractured English, it’s a phishing email so you sort-of expect crappy English). If I’m an affiliate, why would Amazon be charging my credit card?

They then go on and indicate that if this isn’t resolved right away they’ll cancel my Amazon account – very scary. In fact the risk is so severe, they’re going to ask that I provide a second confirmation of my identity. And Amazon is going to be totally helpful in ensuring that law enforcement is notified of the charges. How very helpful of them.

But what made this email stand out to me is the next to last paragraph. The one where they say:

“…we ask that you allow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated. Emailing us before that time will result in delays.”

To paraphrase that fragment: “we figure it’s going to take us at least 3 days to clean out your credit card and get away. So please don’t bother us before then.”

Somewhat OT: On a more serious note, a friend of the family recently had her email account hacked (we don’t know how it happened but it did). The criminals who did this then proceed to send fraudulent emails to all the contacts in her address book asking for money. The good news is that she complained to the Live Mail folks about it and they were able to reclaim the account for her within 24 hours, so hopefully the damage is minimal. And she’s gone out and changed all her online passwords in case they figured out those passwords while they had access to her email. Live email also has an excellent “what to do when you think your account’s been stolen” resource which lays out the various options available when this happens. The local police department also pointed her to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, it’s not clear if engaging them will make a difference (especially if the crooks are international) but it’s something.

XKCD tries Windows 7 and loves it!

LarryOsterman — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:14:36 GMT

Well I thought it was cute :).

"The Story about Ping", someone else's book review

LarryOsterman — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:09:00 GMT

I was looking up old favorite children's books on Amazon the other day and I ran into one of my childhood favorites: The Story about Ping, a family about ducks living on the Yangtze river in China...

I eventually scrolled down and noticed the first review of the book by John E. Fracisco:

Ping! I love that duck!, January 25, 2000

By
John E. Fracisco (El Segundo, CA USA)

This review is from: The Story about Ping (Hardcover)

PING! The magic duck!

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Problems With This Book

As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.

But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

'nuf said :).

Edit1: It appears that this review might not be original: http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html

Edit 2: I just realized that this is 2 "Duck" posts in a row. I guess I've been living that feature too much :)

I get more spam :)

LarryOsterman — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:58:51 GMT

I just received this phishing letter, I liked it simply because it was so remarkably brazen:

--

Dear Webmail User,

This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail which periodically checks the size of inbox, where new messages are received. The program is run weekly to ensure no one's inbox grows too large. If your inbox becomes too large, you will be unable to receive new email.

Just before this message was sent, you had 18 Megabytes (MB) or more of messages stored in your inbox on Webmail. To help us re-set your SPACE on our database prior to maintain our INBOX, you must reply

to this e-mail and enter your Current UserID: ( ) and

Password ( ) Select server ( ) if any

You will continue to receive this warning message periodically if your

inbox size continues to be between 18 and 20 MB. If your inbox size grows

to 20 MB, then a program on Webmail will move your oldest

email to a folder in your home directory to ensure that you will

continue to be able to receive incoming email. You will be notified by email

that this has taken place. If your inbox grows to 25 MB, you will be unable to

receive new email as it will be returned to the sender.After you read a

message, it is best to REPLY and SAVE it to another folder.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Webmail Help Desk

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

3webXS HiSpeed Dial-up...surf up to 5x faster than regular dial-up alone...

just $14.90/mo...visit www.get3web.com for details

The email was in plain text from “Webmail Service Support [general@3web.net]” (I don’t feel bad about including their real email address on a post on the web, after all they deserve to get spam, right?

As I said, I thought it was remarkably brazen and very low budget. Why bother trying to set up a domain when you can get the victim to send you their credentials by email :).

I get spam :)

LarryOsterman — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:13:04 GMT

I just received this spam message the other day:

From: Microsoft [mailto:customerservice@microsoft.com]

Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:13 PM

To: Larry Osterman

Subject: Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows

Dear Microsoft Customer,

Please notice that Microsoft company has recently issued a Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows. The update applies to the following OS versions: Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Millenium, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista.

Please notice, that present update applies to high-priority updates category. In order to help protect your computer against security threats and performance problems, we strongly recommend you to install this update.

Since public distribution of this Update through the official website http://www.microsoft.com would have result in efficient creation of a malicious software, we made a decision to issue an experimental private version of an update for all Microsoft Windows OS users.

As your computer is set to receive notifications when new updates are available, you have received this notice.

In order to start the update, please follow the step-by-step instruction:

1. Run the file, that you have received along with this message.

2. Carefully follow all the instructions you see on the screen.

If nothing changes after you have run the file, probably in the settings of your OS you have an indication to run all the updates at a background routine. In that case, at this point the upgrade of your OS will be finished.

We apologize for any inconvenience this back order may be causing you.

Thank you,

Steve Lipner

Director of Security Assurance

Microsoft Corp.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

Version: PGP 7.1

AN86DCS206WKI6IK8LIFD5S1VODA48SHXDCG6KT8V4C50MO21RUHP8O84T6P73YGX

EO755U27OA5JVX3U51QF8N2E97FQQDOC6IRHH7T3TSQJRFYYPR3434M634A375LAO

49ICIMQZ680BR307KVS857K6U9UYSBHE20RNI16HUB45SMTDF0DDMQZ4YIR2QIHLD

UVPMVD54LRY8HNLDA020KWMIFYYD9B1A07AM1VWIA0YO8QZO2WLY27KAPXBFDN6DT

48VYUVW7M7JZ5P2NIU7FGDRIGCM819WMKJ2==

-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Attached to the message was an attachment named “KB266311.exe”.

I’ve heard that these before but I’ve never received one. Apparently the email was sent from “koln-5d8184e2.pool.einsundeins.de (93.129.132.226)”, which I suspect is a trojaned machine in Germany. In this case I’m pretty impressed with the email – it’s in plain text with the name of a real Microsoft employee, it has a PGP signature (which tends to give credence to the email). On the other hand it has some grammatical errors (“Please notice that Microsoft company has…”, “We apologize for any inconvenience this back order may be causing you”) that give the scam away. I also don’t know what trojan was inside KB266311 because it was filtered by our email servers before it got to me.

For those that are wondering how I knew it came from koln-5d8184e2.pool.einsundeins.de, here’s what I did:

I started with the raw email headers (some servers and IP addresses obscured):

Received: from XXX.microsoft.com (n.n.n.n) by
YYY.microsoft.com (m.m.m.m) with Microsoft SMTP
Server (TLS) id 8.2.83.0; Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:13:52 -0700
Received: from koln-5d8184e2.pool.einsundeins.de (93.129.132.226) by
ZZZ.microsoft.com (o.o.o.o) with Microsoft SMTP Server id
8.1.291.1; Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:13:41 -0700
Received: from [93.129.132.226] by QQQ.hotmail.com; Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:13:17
+0100
From: Microsoft <customerservice@microsoft.com>
To: <<Larry’s Email Address>>
Subject: Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:13:17 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_000E_01C92C39.FF9CE480"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510
Thread-Index: Aca6Q862Q89QD80AN22RHXR0U7WZ61==
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4807.1700
Message-ID: <01c92c39$ff9ce480$e284815d@60GC7Q>
Return-Path: 60GC7Q@hotmail.com
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PRD: microsoft.com
Received-SPF: TempError (XXX.microsoft.com: error in
processing during lookup of customerservice@microsoft.com: DNS timeout)
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PCL: 2
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-Antispam-Report: DV:3.3.7011.600;SV:3.3.7011.1437;SID:SenderIDStatus
TempError;OrigIP:93.129.132.226
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 0
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SenderIdResult: TEMPERROR

RFC 2821 says that SMTP servers should prepend a Received: header to an email message whenever they process the email message. In this case the last email server was XXX.microsoft.com. XXX.microsoft.com received the message from YYY.microsoft.com which in turn received the message from koln-5d8184e2.pool.einsundeins.de (einsundeins.de appears to be a german ISP). The next bit of trace is confusing. The machine at 93.129.132.226 says that it received the message from QQQ.hotmail.com.

It’s possible that this spam email originated from hotmail, but I don’t think so. First off, as far as I know, you can’t relay through the hotmail SMTP servers and the sender of the email is “customerservice@microsoft.com” (the sender is included in the Received-SPF header which indicates that the “MAIL FROM” header in the SMTP exchange was “customerservice@microsoft.com”. Secondly the hotmail servers don’t set the X-Mailer header, but this header indicates that it was sent from Outlook 2003. Instead, I think that the bottom Received: header was forged to throw off people trying to figure out where the email came from.

Needless to say, Microsoft will never EVER send a security update to customers by mail, and customers should immediately delete any emails that claim to have security fixes from Microsoft.

Ok, I’m strange…

LarryOsterman — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:11:56 GMT

I was looking at the front page of MSNBC and ran into this picture:

(image copyright Sebastiao Moreira / EPA).

My first thought was “Why do these people all have hotdogs with yellow mustard pressed up to their face?”

I did say that I was being weird.

Oh Wow, Dr. Horrible is AWESOME!

LarryOsterman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:34:06 GMT

Someone just pointed me to http://www.drhorrible.com, which is Joss Whedon’s newest epic.

The first two acts are up on the web (the final act will go up on Saturday).

They are spectacularly cool, especially to a musical nut. I knew that Neil Patrick Harris had great musical chops (after all, he did Assassins on Broadway) but the rest was just fantastic.

Well worth checking out, there are some really funny bits. They did a truly great job on it.

BillG Memories, part 1…

LarryOsterman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:09:18 GMT

I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, so I won’t be able to post this on Bill’s last full time day at Microsoft, but I wanted to post a couple of anecdotes about Bill.

This one actually comes from Valorie, it was her first interaction with Bill…

Valorie was an intern back during the summer of 1985 in the Word group (she was working on testing Word for the ATT 3B5 minicomputer (yeah, we had a version of Word for Xenix machines back then)).

She was late at work one night and she noticed this madman skipping down the hall leaping at the ceiling tiles trying to tip them out of their frames. She thought this was weird, but back in those days all sorts of strange things happened. Employees used to have softball games in the hall (which were eventually stopped when someone accidentally smashed a relight with a bat), the Windows team used to climb onto the roof of the building and have impromptu jam sessions on the roof of the building. Stuff like that happened fairly regularly, so a crazy man running down the hall swatting at the ceiling wasn’t a big deal.

She asked Libby, the person in the office next to her who the madman was and Libby replied: “Oh, that’s just my brother.”

Valorie chalked it up to nepotism – over the years were a lot of siblings working at Microsoft (just off the top of my head, I can think of at least 4 pairs of siblings working there at the time), so she thought nothing of it.

Until a couple of days later when she noticed that her neighbors nameplate said:

Libby Gates

Valorie had several more interactions with Bill when she worked with Nathan Myhrvold, but this one was by far the most memorable. I absolutely love the image of Bill Gates, skipping down the hall swatting at the ceiling, it’s SO different from the stereotypical image people have of Bill.

I have a couple of other BillG stories I want to tell, but they’ll have to wait until I come back next week.

Who's on that banner?

LarryOsterman — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:40:27 GMT

For whatever reason, various groups at Microsoft love to run banners and posters that promote their products on campus. I'm not sure why they do it, I'd think that their money would be better spent advertising to (say) customers as opposed to advertising to co-workers, but hey, I don't control their budget.

Recently there's been a relatively cryptic series of banners circulating near my building that originally was a series of pictures of the back of people's heads, and recently changed to a series of faces (all with no text).

Yesterday I was on a shuttle with one of the PMs in my group and the conversation went something like this:

PM: Do you have any idea what those banners are advertising?

Me: Yeah, I figured it out a couple of weeks ago on my walk. They're Microsoft Advertising.

PM: I know it's Microsoft advertising, it's blindingly obvious that they're advertising something.

Me: No, it's Microsoft Advertising.

PM (somewhat exasperated): I know it's advertising. I'm just trying to figure out what they're advertising.

Me: Microsoft Advertising.

PM: If you don't know, then why did you tell me you knew what they were?

Bud and Lou would be proud.

News Flash: Spaces are legal characters in both filenames and passwords!

LarryOsterman — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:34:15 GMT

I recently figured out a problem that I've been having with one of our internal tools. The tool is used to automatically deploy our daily builds (extremely handy when you're doing that every other day to several test machines). As a part of the tool, you need to include the password for a test account.

We normally use the tool from an automatic test harness, essentially I enter the 4 or 5 parameters to the test and it automatically runs the tool (and other stuff if necessary).

The problem I had was that I would enter my account and password but the tool kept failing after reporting invalid parameter errors. It worked perfectly when I used a different account that is used by our testers, but when I tried using my preferred test account it kept on failing with some kind of command line parsing error.

Eventually I tracked down the actual command line being passed by the harness into the tool and I was immediately able to see the problem.

Being a security geek, my "password" is actually a passphrase - the theory is that passphrases are harder to crack than passwords because they are drawn from a larger dictionary. So my passwords tend to be things like "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain".

In this case, the test harness took my password and passed it to the tool as follows (assuming that the command line for the test tool is "testtool.exe -useuser <username> <password>:

testtool.exe -useuser testaccount The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain

Doh! Either the test tool or the test harness wasn't handling the spaces correctly. I tried an experiment and ran the test tool manually:

testtool.exe -useuser testaccount "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain"

and it worked! So it appears that the problem was that the test harness wasn't correctly handling the spaces in my password.

So I went to the maintainer of the test harness and described the problem to him.

His response? "I never knew you could have spaces in a password! Wow, I didn't even think of that."

Sigh.

On Microsoft operating systems, spaces have been legal in filenames since MS-DOS 2.0 (about 1982) and in passwords since MS-NET 1.0 (about 1984). I'm astonished that 25 years later there are people who still don't know that.

Somehow I managed to do another Channel 9 video and I didn't even know it!

LarryOsterman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:58:35 GMT

Dan Fernandez over on the Channel 9 team just let me know that one of my earlier videos was featured in their new Video Spam Filter intro.

It's weird - I hadn't realized how much I swore.

Go figure that one out :).

"We're back and..."

LarryOsterman — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:04:01 GMT

Raymond sent me an email yesterday asking me to confirm an old Lan Manager slogan.

Back in the Lanman 2.0 days, Brian Valentine (who ran the Lanman group) made up a series of T-Shirts for the team with the words:

Lan Manager... We're back and we're BAD".

I believe I still have one of those t-shirts. It had a relatively snarky attitude, which I love (and why I loved working for Brian, he shared many of the same sentiments). For the non-english speakers reading this, the use of "BAD" is an American idiom that means "nasty, in a really good way".

The reason that Raymond asked me the question was because of what apparently happened to the T-Shirt when it hit our international subsidiaries. Not surprisingly, many of them wanted to print up their own version, but sometimes the results were... less than perfect. According to one person, the Swedish had a hard time translating the "BAD" idiom. So they apparently fell back on a literal translation of the slogan and printed up their own t-shirts, which said (translated back to english):

Lan Manager... We are here again and we're not very good.

And now you know "The rest of the story(tm)"