Misconfigured Webserver, Threats to Call FBI 564
the_harlequin writes "The Register is reporting that a city manager threatened to call the FBI over a misconfigured webserver. From the article: "The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker CentOS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server."
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Interesting study on incompetence (Score:5, Informative)
The PHB in question (Score:5, Informative)
So... here's his info: City Manager Jerry A. Taylor [tuttle-ok.gov], and his email address: citymgr@cityoftuttle.org [mailto].
Note that I am not "exposing" anything, all of this info comes directly from the publically available cityoftuttle.org website.
PS. I can't believe we fried centos.org but not cityoftuttle.org.
Yelling!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MSCE strikes again (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Law Suit! (Score:2, Informative)
At least he is not cheap.
Re:The PHB in question (Score:5, Informative)
--
Evan
Re:Interesting study on incompetence (Score:5, Informative)
In any event, my favorite example for when talking about this sort of thing is this --
In case an explanation is required (it shouldn't be, but some need one), most people have two legs. A few people have one or zero legs, but nobody that I'm aware of has three legs (we'll leave that joke alone) so the average (mean) number of legs that people have is 1.98 or so, and most people have more legs than that. The median and the mode are both 2, but the average is 1.98 or so.
Ultimately, not everything has a nice Gaussian distribution [wikipedia.org].
And as for `incompetent, and unaware of it', I'd consider those results to be pretty much common sense, or at least they mirror my experiences. One thing I've learned over the years is that it's not always about what you know -- it's also about what you do when you don't know (know how to look it up!) and most importantly, to know when you don't know. It's true that most of the really smart people I know know lots of things, but they also know what they don't know.
As for Jerry Taylor, I can understand him not understanding the message he found on the web page. Yes, it's there in relatively plain English, but people do make mistakes. But really, if somebody responds to you politely and points out that they're not to blame and that somebody else is, perhaps you should at least consider that they might be telling the truth and check into that before continuing the tirade. And his `apology' (I use the term lightly here) at the end (the site is down, but I read it earlier ... it was `it's unfortunate that it took all these accusations to get to the truth' or
something like that) ... if there was ever any doubt before, it tells us a lot about how Jerry responds to people who point out his mistakes. Jerry may have welcomed the publicity then, but I doubt he does now. I wonder if he even has a job anymore.
Re:Law Suit! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting study on incompetence (Score:2, Informative)
IQ's of 5 people:
1, 1, 10, 10, 10
Ave: 6.4
The majority are above average.
Re:!!!!~11111!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:tell this inbred bozo what you think of him (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The PHB in question (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I wonder how long it'll take him (Score:4, Informative)
mayor@CityofTuttle.org [mailto]
Let's all have some fun with this
Local Telephone Company (Score:2, Informative)
Now that Al Gore has brought us the Internet, up until a little over three years ago, this town only had ONE ISP : the local Telco. ALL surrounding communities with populations of 5,000, 650, and even 180 have had multiple ISP choices for years. In the surrounding areas today, multiple dial-up providers, DSL, wireless, and cable are available. Hence, this Telco has treated it's Internet service customers just like its phone customers. (The second choice now is a major cable provider.)
Anyway, a few years ago, I was on my Telco $39.95 dial-up and holy crap, I fingered myself at the ISP and discovered that my wife's and my full name, telephone number, address, and other account information items were displayed. No problem. I telnetted to the ISP server using my account info and edited my
A couple of weeks later, the ISP was having an issue with one of their cache servers which was causing me trouble viewing web pages. I phoned in the trouble and a couple of hours later, my account was disabled and the ISP "network administrator" with 25 years of experience called and said he was phoning the FBI because I had hacked his server (read as edited
Then, out of the dark ages we came as the Telco introduced DSL for $75 per month. This went well for several months. Until December 2002. During that month, latency was at >1300ms the entire month. Call #1 (3 days): Someone hacked our servers. Call #2 (10 days): Damned hackers! We're working on it! Call #3 (21 days): Um, we seem to have oversubscribed our T1 (SINGULAR!) We are working on adding capacity. Call #4 (33 days): Yeah anytime now. NO! We will not be offering a refund! I asked if they had heard anything about a major cable company providing Internet service soon. HAHAHAH! No one is coming to town. HAHAHAHAH!
I called the cable company and BEGGED to beta test. They said testing was closed. I offered to pay and explained the situation. An installer was at my house the next day and I went from 1300ms $75 DSL to 1.5Mbps, 80ms, $39.95 cable overnight and haven't had more than a couple of very small hiccups since. That cable is now at 6Mbps. The Telco still stinks, though, I hear their price is down to $45/month.
BTW, Caller ID is $12 per month here. We paid (and still do) nearly $3 per phone line into an E911 fund for about 8 years prior to said service being available. Funds taken in from this were used to modernize the phone companies network -- to give it the capability of providing CallerID. And ream us they still do.