IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day
An IT boss left a root session open on a Unix machine during a bring-your-kid-to-work day, allowing his nine-year-old daughter to cause significant damage. The daughter had seen a movie where a character typed a Unix command to save the day and decided to try it out, typing the command SHUTDOWN. The boss spent 36 hours repairing the damage caused by his daughter's actions.
- ▪The incident occurred in the 1990s at a company that ran an IBM RS/6000 Unix machine.
- ▪The company's IT boss had started the day's data processing early and left his office, leaving the terminals logged in as root.
- ▪The boss's daughter typed the SHUTDOWN command, causing significant damage that took 36 hours to repair.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/03/it-boss-left-root-session-open-for-bring-your-kid-to-work-day/5280931 |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:30:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T06:30:42.844Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T06:30:42.844Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7-zkC7AZudfC · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); OS PLATFORMS IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day Daddy, I typed a Unix command! Was it a bad one? Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor APAC Editor Published mon 3 Aug 2026 // 07:30 UTC WHO, ME? Comedian W.C.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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