One of the joys of the Internet age is that … well, folks who do goofy things can be become well known for it, and, often, with documentation.
Take Jerry Taylor, City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma. He went to the city’s web site back in March and was dismayed to discover that a default Apache page for a newly-installed LINUX operating system was showing up there. Said web page explained what it was about, who to contact in case of problems, etc. Convinced the city’s site was under attack by Black Hats, he contacted the company, CentOS, that produces the OS (and who, like all Black Hats, of course, had posted their contact information on the default page).
Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???
Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!
I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
Hilarity ensues, as the owner of CentOS tries to explain that it’s nothing they’ve done and to get further info from Taylor, and Taylor fires back such missives as:
Get this web site off my home page!!!!!
It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!
I do not want this software!!!! This is the City of Tuttle, Oklahoma. Get rid of this software!!!!!
Second notice!
Johnny,
Unless this software is removed I will file a complaint with the FBI.
[…] I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. […]
Finally, CentOS managed to get the name of the hosting company for the city and passes it on to Taylor, who discovers the company had a crash on the server and had reinstalled the OS (but, evidently, not restored the web pages). All’s right with the world now — except for Jerry Taylor’s reputation, of course. Not that he’s particularly repentent about it:
Taylor said that he didn’t understand why so many people were concerned about an e-mail exchange between two people.
“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do,” he said. “When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”
Taylor said that the mistake could have happened to anyone, and he stands by what he did. “I’m not about to follow any instructions on an unknown web page,” Taylor said. “That could put a virus on my system.”
Indeed, he blames the CentOS people for not doing the research into who hosted the website to begin with (though they’d asked for that info from Taylor), and is pleased that his threat to go to the FBI prompted CentOS to take his complaint seriously and be polite to him.
What a maroon.
Amused and unproductive, I read through all the comments on the CentOS page about this story. Not one asked the burning question that was on my mind:
Why the heck did he demand the putative (in his imagination) hackers to fix the problem?
Amazing some people defended the city manager. He deserves a major wedgie.
One suspects that Mr. Taylor is a “Big Wheel” in the thriving megalopolis of Tuttle, OK, and so is used to people hopping when he says frog. It’s possible (anything’s possible, it seems) that he was thinking of spammers as much as hackers, and thought that he could deal with them as a vendor. That he would think “hackers” would (a) give contact info, and (b) acquiesce to his threats (“I’m a very close friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s grand-nephew!”) is, yes, more than a bit goofy.