Well, actually post Christmas Day now, but nonetheless, we had at least one of the ingredients for a Traditional(tm) Christmas here: it snowed. Now, you would think that a place this far North would see a fair share of snow. Nope. When an inch comes down Belfast drivers are about as prepared and perplexed by the white stuff as someone in South Carolina. Iceland and Greenland are not all that much further North, but the Gulf Stream keeps us from looking like Norway. Which is fine except for the long, long nights this time of year. That’s one of the reasons for the pub life I suspect… besides the lack of central heating of course… at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
On other fronts, someone hacked into Blogger and left a posting on Instapundit today. While the post was innocent enough, it was not quite an example of ethical hacking because if it were, we would not have seen a message: only the system administrator would have known.
Ethical Hackers can be helpful although many admins would publicly disagree with me. The facts of life are nearly every computer facility in the world is vastly undermanned. The result is a few heroic souls who do their best, but with the number of sources of information to watch and the rates of changes and updates to be dealt with they face a nearly hopeless task. if you visualize an anteater with ten anthills to watch you’ll have a good idea of the reality admins live with. In this sort of environment it is inevitable that something will be missed or an error will be made . If an Ethical Hacker spots the security hole and sends a nice polite private email to all involved stating what is open and what action should be taken to fix the problem, they are doing a service for all.
But if it is just a matter of putting a line on a blog or website so friends can see you did it… then you are just part of the problem. I would like that person to consider that they most likely pulled some guy away from his only day off in weeks, a day to feast with family and friends… Christmas Day fer chrissakes… just so they could show off.
To whomever did it: get some Christmas spirit in your soul. Someday you’ll be the one getting a call out in the middle of Christmas dinner.
