Gather round practitioners and listen if ye dare

To hear this Halloween tale of possessed office ware—

A printer, one cursed by a dark, mysterious power

That spit out strange symbols three to four times an hour…

Ten Halloweens ago or more, Bobby Kuzma, now director of offensive cyber operations at cybersecurity company ProCircular, received a help desk ticket with a ghastly title: Help, my printer is possessed.

A client’s printer was regularly sending “garbled garbage” to the tray, Kuzma said. The outputs included letters and the full ASCII character set—similar to the output shown in this recent Reddit post. According to Kuzma, an IT consultant at the time, the client received a mysterious printout every 15 minutes or so.

“‘The printer keeps spitting out gibberish. It’s like the girl in [The] Exorcist,’” Kuzma recalls the client saying.

Keep it haunted.—BH

On the big screen, a gaming chair turns to reveal a person in a neutral-colored hoodie with headphones on. Behind them, a computer screen swirls with greenish-tinted code. They’re the IT hero of the movie who inevitably has to use their powers for good or evil tasks, like saving the world or heisting a gazillion in crypto.

You see them in the Spider-Man series (Tom Holland’s version), where Ned is tasked with being the “guy in the chair”; in a bedroom figuring out some bad business from a major corporation in the movie Hackers; or navigating the world of Silicon Valley in the eponymous television series.

While depictions of IT professionals in movies and TV is a fun trope, it’s important to remember that real IT pros transcend their onscreen clichés. They are people proficient in many areas, and ultimately tasked with protecting their organizations’ IT infrastructure.

Swing over to the sign.—CN

Are you keeping an eye on your protocols?

If not, you may have missed the importance of the model context protocol (MCP), a tool that assists large language models to integrate and communicate with external data sources. As Alex Salazar, co-founder and CEO of agentic AI firm Arcade.dev, told IT Brew, the speed with which AI has taken over the tech industry—ChatGPT exploded onto the scene just three years ago, in November 2022—has led to a proliferation of tooling-like protocols, many of which never see adoption.

Competitive balance. An open-source framework developed by software company Anthropic, MCP quickly became one of the dominant protocols in a field where companies like IBM and Google are also major players. Google’s agent-to-agent (A2A) and IBM’s agent communication protocol (ACP) have seen less adoption, though, as research firm Everest Group found in June, that’s not set in stone, given how A2A and ACP are picking up steam: “Enterprises should align protocol use with their architecture—centralized (MCP), collaborative (A2A), or local-first (ACP).”

To Salazar, the interconnectedness protocol war is largely over. Once MCP was adopted by Anysphere’s popular AI-coding platform Cursor, developer interest exploded and MCP was propelled into the mainstream.

Play it again MCP.—EH

CollabWORK connects you to the hidden job market through IT Brew and other trusted channels. Browse roles curated specifically for this community by clicking through to the job board.

• Vice President of IT Business Systems and Strategy at Valeris (in person)
• Manager Cybersecurity Governance, Risk & Compliance at Rogers Corporation (in person)
• Director of Cyber Security at WHSmith North America (in person)
• Director of Information Technology at IDR, Inc. (hybrid)
• System Engineer at ManTech (in person)