Sometimes, a Kali is just ... a Kali ...

The 1960's police procedural?Dragnet?began with a statement. "The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent." I am not going to reveal any names in the following story, with the exception of one -- without which, we don't have a story.

The company in question allowed users to be local administrators on their Windows machines, and to name their own machines. It also maintained a SharePoint system that indexed just about every document anywhere in the corporate network. Those searches returned quite a few documents. One bright Monday, our protagonist searched for the name of an older technology and started looking at links returned by the internal search. Once or twice, links that were returned would have links that led elsewhere. From time to time, some of those links would be to pages that our protagonist could not access.

The next day, sometime in the afternoon, the protagonists network connection stopped working. After a few basic troubleshooting steps, the protagonist called the helpdesk. The next day, some good folks from security called the protagonist and asked him if he had a machine called "Kali".

"If you check my HR documents", he replied, "you will find that the name of my partner is 'Kali'. Her father was working on his Ph.D. in Theology at Claremont back in 1969, and he presumably thought the whole thing was kind of funny". Mortified, the security engineer said that they had thought this had something to do with Kali Linux. Access was soon restored.

Some folks might draw from this the lesson that names shouldn't have meanings at all, lest they be misunderstood. The lesson I draw from it is actually a very hopeful one: that artificial intelligence (such as the risky sign-on capabilities of Azure Active Directory) has gotten so good, given the trillions of signals that it receives, that human interventions are going to often be harmful false positives.

Kali is the goddess of death, after all. Think back to the introduction to this little story. A detective going out to investigate a dead body is more likely to be working with the consequences of a suicide, not the victim of a homicide. If you had calibrated your intuitions based upon TV police shows, however, you would find yourself very mistaken.