Worst damage control ever?
Guest essay by Brandon Schollenberger
Despite my joking comments about having mad haxor skillz being a source of amusement for many people, it appears some people actually believe I hacked the Skeptical Science forum’s website. Rob Honeycutt, a key team member at Skeptical Science, has referred to my actions, saying things like:
“Back door” was used by me as a metaphor. Hack = “To break into comp sys with malicious intent.” An easy hack is still a hack.
when did theft become legal?
When Shub Niggurath expressed his disbelief at my actions being called hacking, Honeycutt explicitly said it was hacking:
Yes, accessing involved effort and some determination to filter thru 1000’s of images 2 locate 1s that cld be taken out context.
Clearly, Rob Honeycutt claims my “effort” to find this directory was hacking. The problem for Honeycutt is Google used the exact same process.
It crawled and saved a cached version of that directory.
That means, according to Rob Honeycutt, Google hacked Skeptical Science!
And according to Honeycutt, that makes Google dumb:
![dumb_zps70081796[2]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/dumb_zps700817962.png?quality=75)
Personally, I disagree. I think the only person who was “dumb enough to publicly expose private files” was John Cook for configuring his server to have “private files” displayed in a public directory. It seems to me Honeycutt is damning his own team with his comments. And he really nails them in the follow-up exchange:
![Priceless_zps4d11ebf1[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/priceless_zps4d11ebf11.png?quality=75)
If you look at this Skeptical Science post. That post currently links directly to six stolen documents. Those documents were illicitly obtained by Peter Gleick, and Skeptical Science happily promotes their dissemination. According to Rob Honeycutt, that is dumb and unethical.
Google hacked Skeptical Science. Skeptical Science was unethical in disseminating files Peter Gleick illicitly obtained. John Cook was “dumb enough to publicly expose private files.” That’s what Rob Honeycutt has basically said. And that’s pretty much all anyone at Skeptical Science is saying about their Nazi images.
Related articles
- LOL! ‘Mad Haxor Skillz’ Godwinize ‘Skeptical Science’ (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Skeptical Science takes ‘creepy’ to a whole new level (wattsupwiththat.com)
UPDATE: Lucia has an interesting discussion of the issue here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/the-sks-nazi-images-thoughts-on-fair-use/
‘and the skeptics are the Vietcong…..not fighting like gentlemen at all’.
If you don’t hear from me again, it’s because I died laughing.
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Oh man. The gift that keeps on giving.
“Yes, accessing involved effort and some determination to filter thru 1000′s of images 2 locate 1s that cld be taken out context.”
Oh, the old “out of context” ploy again.
Perhaps Rob Honeycutt can provide us with the “context” to correctly understand these images.
That would be really interesting to see.
Sorry, but in relation to SkS and their behaviour on this issue, only one word seems to fit – Jerks !
Don’t overlook the fact that there are several rule books by which they play. They simply use the one which is most convenient at the time. We call is shifting the goal posts.
Clearly two sets of rules. Actually, it’s worse than that. What’s perfectly legit is seen as unethical if we do it (glancing through a public directory), and what’s outright criminal legally (Gleick = theft and forgery) is seen as perfectly fine and dandy as it’s an attempt to further the Cause.
I used to think there were some wool-over-the-eyes issues with the CAGW crowd, but it’s looking more and more as though they are wilfully obtuse as they continue to present such discrepancies and imbalances as innocent or, worse, justified.
As for the uniforms they adopted… I don’t know. I the creepy feeling this is how they see themselves – the Master Race.
The irony of the pictures and them being upset about the old acronym is hilarious. Can we go back to referring to SkS simply as SS now? Somehow it seems apropos.
Have patience with Rob. He is a maker of purses and knows nothing of technology.
“Honeycutt…”Yes, accessing involved effort and some determination to filter thru 1000′s of images 2 locate 1s that cld be taken out context.””
Rob; don’t name your images “tankboy”. EVERYONE clicks on that.
When you GET/POST, you are effectively asking for, and receiving an official response to a request. You aren’t just reaching in and stealing something.
Or maybe it’s a bit like knocking and having someone come to the door. Whereas what Zuckerberg did to hack Harvard Crimson accounts (vis a vis using the identical passwords that the users stored in his Facebook database) is like copying someone’s keys and gaining access.
There are some blurry lines in the world of hacking, but this is not one of them.
“Yes, accessing involved effort and some determination to filter thru 1000′s of images 2 locate 1s that cld be taken out context.”
Fortunately, you 5uxorz pointed right to them by placing them in a directory called a11g0n3.
HTTP GET/POST, that is.
“I guess the theory is that you don’t have the right to enter a stranger’s house even if he leaves the front door unlocked. ”
No, that’s a bad analogy. HTTP access is a request/response paradigm.
What’s that mom? Nazi files? Why did Dad find that I have pictures of me and my playmates dressed as nazis?
Oh wait, Ma! Dad is a sneaky spy, that’s the real issue here! Let’s punish dad for noticing my nazi pictures that I left on the top of my desk! That’s really the problem here ma, really, not that I’m into nazis, stink of saurkraut, and walk with really stiff legs lately! So let’s straighten Dad out — no more looking at stuff I leave around in plain sight. Yavoltz?
James Smyth says:
August 13, 2013 at 2:19 pm
““I guess the theory is that you don’t have the right to enter a stranger’s house even if he leaves the front door unlocked. ”
No, that’s a bad analogy. HTTP access is a request/response paradigm.”
A webserver is not some stranger’s house. A webserver is a shop that sells newspapers. It’s MADE for publishing stuff.
The theory is therefore that you don’t have the right to enter a stranger’s NEWSPAPER SHOP if he leaves the front door unlocked… Shopowners HATE it when customers enter, donchaknow!
I hate the fact that the words crawler, Cook, Nazi and ilicit have all managed to make sense in any sentance written in the English language
A curious thing is that Rob Honeycutt suggests we had to scan through “thousands” of images to find the handful of Nazi images.
He’s wrong on two counts; a visual simple scroll of the cached Google listing can spot them easily, see http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sksforum.org/images/user_uploaded/
…and by my count (copying the listing into MS Word and assigning line numbers to the document) there are 329 images, not thousands.
I guess that they somehow missed website admin 101 that states “Never post anything in a public file/folder that you wouldn’t be happy being splashed across the front page of the (Insert your national newspaper name here/billboards) . I said last week they needed a 14 year old to run the admin side. I wasn’t joking. These blokes don’t have a clue what they are doing. Which is very entertaining for the rest of us. There are a number of For Dummies book that they could have read that would have pointed them in the right direction re web admin and security.
sometimes, when I don’t want to sort through them all at once, & I have a certain nagging suspicion that the webmastur[sic] will suddenly lock access to the directory in question I’ll use the old friend:
$ wget --mirror http://www.sample-url.com/files/directory_i_want/I suppose using the command line would be extremely criminal hacking, to some of these (not terribly sharp) tools.
Move along folks, nothing to see here. Extreme environmentalism is entirely consistent with nazism.
Mark: “You’d think a bunch of propagandists like the folks at SkS would have the sense to keep quiet about this so it’d blow over.”
Are they propogandists selling a message, or are they attention startved boys selling themselves?
I believe they did not destroy the images on discovery because they were proud of their craftsmanship, and happy that someone was looking at them.
See it all the time when someone accomplishes a work task that could be reported in a conversation with one person. It will be reported in a reply-all instead, possibly as a powerpoint.
“Perhaps they were not planning to use them to try to discredit skeptics. Maybe they just have a bit of a strange nazi fetish.”
I don’t think they have the collective brains to organise a black flag op. Jeez, they can’t even run a web server and get it right!
Nazi fetish, I doubt. More likely they think Nazis were tough and ruthless and devastatingly effective (for a while). Not having any moral constraints on how they take over the world probably appeals too.
They seem rather confused as to what role they wish to play in all these pseudo-military metaphors but they long to be tough (and effective).
In short they are the most pathetic bunch of losers imaginable.
That’s the missing “context”. No black flags, there’s nothing more complicated or confusing about it. Just a sorry bunch of jerks with high school mentalities.
Golden rule of the Internet:
Never post anything you don’t want the entire world to know.
Even if you were to accept the house metaphor instead of the shop metaphor, this isn’t like someone entering the house, this is like the residents taping pictures to the inside of the windows, facing out, and then being incensed that people walking by see the pictures.
Even worse, people are *thinking* about those pictures and their context, which is like evil horrible denier behavior.
RH is an idiot. A) Posted on an open server. B) the robots.txt tells all web crawlers not to read comments.php. No other files requested to be denied.
User-agent: *
Disallow: comments.php
I hate hypocrites.