132 DEAR HACKER
132 DEAR HACKER
activity? Even if he was writing down the name of every government agency he knew, so what? Having the words “Middle School” on an envelope really isn’t that unusual either.
We’re not faulting you for having this thought process. What we’re doing is asking you to examine it and try and understand why these simple actions could some- how plant the seeds of suspicion in your mind. Then imagine the entire country thinking along the same line.
The fact is you will not know if someone is up to something evil unless you know them very well or are highly trained in spotting such activity. There are a few lucky exceptions to this but they tend to involve rather large clues, none of which were apparent here.
You can rest assured that you didn’t do anything to make you a bad person. e
Dear 2600:
I am an engineering student at a Canadian university. As I am sure is the case in many post-secondary institutions nowadays, professors at my school are increasingly turning to the Internet to dispatch course information. Early this semester I was looking for one of my course web pages. Having lost the syllabus, I had only the first assignment from the class to guide me. I typed a few of the more interesting words into a Google search box and hit go. Much to my surprise, two links emerged: one to the assignment and another to the solution (both postscript files). Quite intrigued I clicked on the link to solutions. Rightfully, as the assignment is not due for another week, the link was dead. However, Google keeps a cached text version of the postscript files it encounters and it was broadcasting these solutions to the world. Now I know there are a lot of people in my class that would love to get their hands on this information—hell, some of them would probably
be dumb enough to print it off, put their name on it, and hand it in. My question is how do I get it taken off the web? If I contact Google would they be willing to remove it? How would I alert my professor
THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER
without appearing guilty (but still remain credible)? Or should I just tell him to do some damn work and come up with a new assignment every year instead of just recycling them?
eigenvalue It would be ridiculous to bother Google with this. Your professor is lazy, plain and
simple. If he gives out the same assignment every year, surely the possibility of a previous student passing on the solution to a current student must have crossed his mind. If you think you’d be somehow held responsible if you told him of this hole (at the same time offering to complete a different assignment), then we sug- gest going the anonymous route, either letting him know the specifics through some kind of anonymous note or telling the entire class in the same way.
Dear 2600: Al Jazeera is the cable network in Qatar that has acted as the propa-
ganda mill for Osama, Saddam, and any other Arab with an anti- American story to tell. Ironically, it is owned by the same rich fatcat who built us a giant airbase in Qatar so we would protect him from his rough neighbors. Here are the results of some basic reconnaissance: [output of whois lookup deleted].
Spams away! anonymous
We didn’t print this data only because it would have taken up way too much space and it’s very easily obtained by simply looking up the owner of the domain.