Posted on 03/28/2006 9:07:54 AM PST by N3WBI3
Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker Our mistake is YOUR problem By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View Published Friday 24th March 2006 20:20 GMT New year, new job? Click here for thousands of tech vacancies.
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 Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.
This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure. SPONSORED LINKS
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"Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???," Taylor wrote to CentOS. "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma."
Few people would initiate a tech support query like this, but these are dangerous times, and Taylor suspected the worst. (Er, but only the world's most boring hacker would break into a site and then throw up a boilerplate about how to fix the hack.)
CentOS developer Johnny Hughes jumped on the case and tried to explain the situation to Taylor.
"I feel sorry for your city," he replied in an e-mail. "CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website. . . . Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly."
That response didn't go over so well.
"Get this web site off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!," Taylor responded, clearly excited about the situation and sensing that Bin Laden was near.
Again, CentOS jumped in to try and explain some of the technical details behind the problem. It pointed Taylor to this page, saying it was the standard page for a web server and noted that it provides instructions on how to fix the problem. The CentOS staffer suggested that Taylor contact his service provider or have an administrator look into the issue.
That response didn't go over so well.
"Unless this software is removed I will file a complaint with the FBI," Taylor replied.
Later he added,
"I have four computers located at City Hall. All of these computers display the same CentOS page when attempting to bring up Tuttle-ok.gov. Now if your software is not causing this problem, how does it happen??? No one outside this building has complained about this problem. This is a block of public access to a city's website. Remove your software within the next 12 hours or an official complaint to the FBI is being filed!"
And later,
"I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"
After a few more exciting exchanges, CentOS managed to track down the problem for Taylor. It turns out that hosting provider Vidia Communications is running CentOS on some of its servers and had not configured the Tuttle web site properly. CentOS informed Taylor of the situation, and, a day later, Taylor had calmed down.
"The problem has been resolved by VIDIA who used to host the City website," he wrote. "They still provide cable service but do not host the website. The explanation was that they had a crash and during the rebuild they reinstalled the software that affected our website."
"I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages. My initial contact with VIDIA disallowed any knowledge of creating the problem."
Er, so despite the fact that CentOS went out of its way to figure out the problem for Tuttle, Taylor still places the blame on CentOS for not fixing the problem - that it didn't create - sooner. In addition, Taylor didn't really start off the whole process on the best foot despite Tuttle being a town "Where People Grow - Friendly!" Grow friendly, threaten to bring in the FBI at the drop of a hat - what's the difference?
As of this writing, one Tuttle web site still had not been fixed, although you can find the charming Tuttle man Taylor over here.
Taylor has yet to respond to our request for comment.
It seems that Tuttle has quite the hacking epidemic on its hands. The Tuttle Times newspaper's web site, for example, has had its Forum section cracked. Click at your own risk to see it or have a peek at our screen grab.
To see the full transcript of the web server war, travel over here. It's classic reading. ®
I should have asked you first without tipping you off so you don't lie, but what is your spyware tool? AdAware, Sophos, XoftSpy and Spybot-S&D are all foreign. Foreign companies pioneered this market. Microsoft, McAfee and Symantec are all latecomers to the market.
Sorry GE, but the US doesn't pioneer everything. Even the Russians got into space first.
More defense of Stallman. And of course, this statement is bogus, neither correct or provable.
More praise of Russia. So what, they were still communists.
You're confusing things. Adaware personal edition is free as in no-cost, not free as in open source. It is completely closed and proprietary. They make money by selling more advanced versions. The OpenOffice you hate was also started by foreigners at no cost for personal use (although not open source). It took an American company to make it open source.
Giving away a low-end free product as a teaser is common in capitalism. ZoneAlarm got quite successful this way.
I know, obviously. I don't hate it, I just prefer American products. Like most Americans should. Yet you hammer me and push this foreign crap instead constantly.
Incapable of a substantive answer? Were you using one of those nasty pieces of foreign software without knowing it?
But back to the point, your spyware detected Opera as spyware because earlier versions of Opera were ad-supported. It was not spyware, as nothing sneaky happened, and all terms of the advertisment support were disclosed to the user. However, some anti-spyware programs lumped this legitimate ad-supported software in with spyware, thus the false positive.
Simple fact. You claim to have read all of Stallman's writings, so look up his perspective. Otherwise, any old computer hacker can tell you that tapes were shared all the time between programmers. Unix and its original utilities grew on the sharing of these tapes.
You seem to believe that Americans are the only ones who can contribute technology, you want that contribution stopped. I am trying to show you that a lot of technological innovation comes from foreigners. If we shut our doors, we will the the losers, we will be the ones who stagnate while the rest of the world innovates.
In case you haven't noticed, the first two W's in WWW stand for "World Wide."
Are you still saying "all programmers swapped tapes with each other" or are you finally backing off.
Unix and its original utilities grew on the sharing of these tapes.
Original Unix wasn't free to copy, infinitely. So those who did this did so illegally, in many instances, correct?
No I don't, I simply don't believe what we develop in the US should be given away to anyone who wants it for free. How freaking hard is it to understand. Obviously it's not, it's just diametrically opposed to your way of thinking.
So you don't believe that an author by virtue of his constitutionally-founded copyright has the right to control the distribution of his works.
You also don't understand that giving also creates getting in the reciprocal open source model.
Let's just say it was very common practice.
Original Unix wasn't free to copy, infinitely. So those who did this did so illegally, in many instances, correct?
You don't know Unix history. AT&T originally gave the Unix source to any academic or research institution (even in other countries) at the cost of tapes plus shipping. Don't harp on "it's only institutions" because those had most of the day's existing computers.
The Unix users greatly improved Unix, fixing a lot of bugs and porting it to sytems other than the PDP-11 (Unix's portability being large reason for its success). Users also produced the first good Unix manuals, including the code. It was several years before AT&T decided that Unix couldn't be copied anymore.
And as I said, the popular original tools that came with Unix (and which many still use to this day) were completely free in the academic tradition.
Unix also gave us the C programming language, as it was invented solely for the purpose of writing Unix.
Which was of course one of the biggest shifts in OS design ever seen. Operating systems written in a higher level language..
It seems that in many areas, open-source software is very equal to, if not at times superior to their closed-source counterparts (e.g. Firefox vs. IE, OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office). With open-source software, there are also fewer problems that sit for extended periods of time--hundreds, if not thousands, of people can fix the bug, write a patch, or provide a workaround should problems arise.
Plus, closed-source software makers in the U.S. are also charging way too much--hundreds of dollars for software where oftentimes decent (or near-perfect) substitutes exist at a much lower cost--often for free.
It's the same reason why Autodesk, Microsoft, Adobe, et al. have had problems with pirated software in recent years. People are simply refusing to pay out the rear end for software. And when they can't find a suitable alternative in the OSS community, that's when pirated software and file-sharing become rampant.
I'm not condoning piracy--it is illegal. What I'm saying is that maybe if software wasn't so overpriced, there'd be less of a tendency for people to seek alternatives to paying for software (be it piracy or OSS substitute). If Closed-Source vendor ABC Corp; puts out a software suite for $200 and an Open-Source XYZ Foundation creates a similar suite for free that does virtually everything ABC's product does, then why would people pay $200 for ABC's product?
Or, let me simplify it: If I have a choice between buying ABC's product for $200 or the clone for free, and assuming the products are virtually identical, which one do I pick?
It's a no-brainer. I pick the lower-cost one.
Finally, and having said all this, your diatribe doesn't make any sense at all.
Probably true, but don't forget there's a common type of software piracy that open source helped -- companies using open source without adhering to the license. Many hardware and software makers have been caught illegally using open source software (the copyrighted works of others) in their offerings.
Of course, GE will say that the prosecution of these pirates is wrong, just FSF strong-arming.
Though I was thinking more along the lines of people pirating ISO images or exes of major-ticket items by PnP methods such as Warez and Kazaa or by torrent (e.g. AutoCAD, Photoshop, MS Office, Windows, etc.)
LOL! Cheap rip offs are their specialty, obviously. If they had any sizable market share that wasn't fragmented a thousand times they'd have been hammered by patent suits long ago.
The big closed-source companies aren't coming up with new technologies--oftentimes they're playing damage control by implementing ideas--some already commonplace in open-source programs.
Example: Microsoft is adding tabbed browsing in IE7, something that has existed in Firefox and other browsers for at least a year and a half.
Go into your C:\Windows\system32 and open ftp.exe in Notepad. Scroll down a ways and tell me what you see.
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