Hack attacks and soap boxes

Now that's a hack with style that had us laughing down the aisles (of Waitrose). Not that we condone hacking of course. Or dodgy rhymes, come to that.

Then came Oxfam, which was also hacked on Tuesday, when the email addresses of 300 people were accessed. A spokeswoman for the charity explained that a 'friendly hack' was suspected. The charity shut down the site as soon as it knew of the breach and contacted all those whose addresses had been downloaded. Safeway did likewise. No credit card details were compromised in either case.

The Oxfam incident raises some interesting moral issues. A director of the charity's ISP, Squaremark Computers, told us: "There is no such thing as a friendly hack. Oxfam takes donations online and while initial contact with the hacker was advisory, he still then hacked in causing damage and denial of service. This removes the ability of Oxfam to perform its core function - that of assisting poor and needy people in crisis. Whilst we appreciate the advice given in the initial contact, no one here or at Oxfam appreciates the damage caused."

Squaremark would like an apology from the hacker, who is known as 'herbless'. (Good thing he didn't get hold of any credit card details. He could have booked a holiday somewhere. It might be good material for a film. Called 'herbless goes to Monte Carlo'. Perhaps).

OK, so hacking is bad. Agreed. But a charity's site must be as watertight as any other - although no site can ever be 100 per cent hack proof - and herbless did the right thing by contacting them (although continuing the hack might have been a bit over the top.) So if his actions improved Oxfam's security, that must be a good thing. Isn't it?

Time to step down from the soap box now. Ooops, seem to have trodden in something unpleasant. Yes, it's the whiffy issue of unmetered net access. BT is facing a £37m lawsuit over allegations that it has failed to deliver on a contract for wholesale unmetered access (see 'BT facing £37m lawsuit over unmetered net access' http://www.silicon.com/a39059 ). The stories about companies withdrawing their unmetered offerings are now the stuff of legend (OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but see 'Leading ISPs pull plug on unmetered net access' http://www.silicon.com/a38630 ).

But more curious is the case of AltaVista, as The Register first pointed out: its service was supposed to have gone live at the end of June, but the hunt for anyone actually using it goes on. The Mirror followed the Register's lead. Then the BBC. Then the Telegraph. All have pleaded to hear from someone using the service. The result? The deafening sound of silence. So we'll join those calls: if you're an AltaVista customer, let us know.

It's a common perception that we have it bad here. But then our US correspondent, Richard Baguley, who files a monthly column for us called Transatlantic Cable, described his own San Francisco DSL nightmare (see 'Transatlantic Cable: My DSL Hell' http://www.silicon.com/a39021 ). This article provoked this wonderfully-written missive from a Mr Allan Clark in Florida:

"Richard. Your 'cautionary tale' is just the skin of the bloated corpse, concealing the rot inside. This is an industry made up of many of the same folks who were weaned from the telecoms (our closest industry to civil service in terms of worker attitude) which are morphing into whatever it is one becomes by placing a 'C' (Competitive!) in front of the erstwhile (smugly so) 'LEC' (Local Exchange Carrier).

"I have worked both as a land development manager (constructing the system), and telcom construction project manager, and have found that the industry is becoming increasingly reliant on a class of persons one might describe as those 'who know where the wires are'.

"Forget the managers who transferred in from East Out There to take advantage of a 150 per cent pay (from their BellCo days) hike to fill a contract position with no benefits or retirement, and who are in discussions with a collocator (another name for competitor) for 'just in case' sake.

"Managers are shuttling like flies between victims at a massacre. And the 'management systems' set in place to allow a project manager to track one of his 275 construction projects... you know, the fax shared by 80 others from which spews a steady stream of documents, each of which is a vital link, not just for your DSL line order, but to the installation within an exchange building of an entire infrastructural segment, a mini-exchange to be spliced into the system and serve hundreds to thousands of 'last mile' customers.

"Can you guess what happens when the Certificate of Occupancy notice from the installation contractor in Belle Glade, Florida gets shuffled into a stack of faxes intended for the manager of the South Carolina territory?

"And there are 274 other jobs in process with no shortage of similarly likely mishaps, because the relationships change weekly and managers of managers who only dream of competency just decided they need an annual report on a statistic which hasn't been tracked, so one is asked to manually cull the files while 275 jobs relentlessly, serenely merge with the bitstream as from a firehose.

"Some days I heard Mrs. Bloom's soliloquy, the hypnotic cadence with its surreal message telling me to plunge my face into the torrent and drink.

"And I longed for the days when I watched a backhoe operator named Ulysses take two pieces of copper ground wire, bend them to 'L's' and walk a circle till they crossed in his hands, drop them in place and plunge his bucket three feet straight underground to expose the end of a conduit installed three years previous on the edge of civilization and the Everglades. I have cable. I'm betting on fixed wireless.

"I will pray for you all."

Thank you, Allan. And may the god of broadband be with you.

The Round-Up will be back to next week, when we'll return to the thorny issue of ageism in IT. We're looking forward to the abusive emails already...