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Misconfigured Webserver, Threats to Call FBI
the_harlequin writes "The Register is reporting that a city manager threatened to call the FBI over a misconfigured webserver. From the article: "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 CentOS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server."
"
If you don't remove this inflamitory comment I'm calling the FBI!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
He forgot the 1s but the tilda was creative.
The centos link is already /. or just mislinked?
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Overheard at the city council meeting:
"Someone unplugged my keyboard- Call the FBI Alice!!!"
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
This just confirms what we Texans have known for years...(ducking for cover).
Haha, I love how each of the Manager's replies show a complete ignorance of the previous, helpful message from the CentOS tech. I had a similar situation trying to explain to my uncle (who I was building a site for) about how SMTP works and why mail forwarding only worked before we changed his nameservers (since he only bought domain names and not hosting). I spent a painstaking 20 minutes explaining it in layman's terms, only for him to pause then say, "My email isn't working". The CentOS guy should get a medal for keeping so calm here.
So if I'm understanding the article right, this company screwed up installing their webserver and so they threatened to call the FBI because they did something wrong? Thats what it seems like to me.
In about 20 mins their web server will be "hacked" again by lots of people. I guess we are a group of what? :D
That's nothing. Over the years I've been the victim of some ruthless Native American terrorist organization that always seems to hack my webpage within minutes of installing the server.
This guy's the limit!
For some reason, this reminds me of the time that a woman called my branch of the company and said: "We're all out of paper over here... could you fax some over?"
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
...to complain about a DDOS attack. Behold, the power of Slashdot!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
CentOS was supposed to hack Buttle, not Tuttle. Information Retrieval will be in real trouble for this.
The Department of Records must have the name of the website wrong and confused it with Buttle instead of Tuttle, we will correct it as soon as possible. In the mean time, we do not apologize for disrupting your webserver, and we will not reimburse you one penny nor will we fix the damage caused.
My computer is routinely hacked by Microsoft, should I call. It happens at least once a month, sometimes weekly. I have another one that is hacked by commies, I know they are commies, they use GPL.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
After reading through the exchange on the CentOS site, I think he's going to regret making that statement. Normally, a dunderhead bureaucrat like this would try to sue or claim these e-mails shouldn't have been made public, but with this little statement on file...
I'd call the guy a "dumbass", but he's not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I have contacted the City's network administrator wnd he has done nothing to install your CentOS software. I have contacted our Internet provider and they know nothing about your software. I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Hmm... 22 years as a manager, maybe. As if that counted for anything. Then, to make matters worse, he talked to a 'network administrator', who thanks to MS always refering to windows admins as 'network administrators' is a just a windows admin. A case of the blind leading the blind. Or, the windows admins leading the windows users.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
"The CentOS guy should get a medal for keeping so calm here."
Why? I never got one. I do however have a lovely ulcer collection.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Would this be a good time for an IT Crowd Quote?
Hello..IT...have you tried turning it off and on again?
Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that's the music you hear when it comes on. No, that's the music you hear when...
I'm sorry, are you from the past?
Ok-La-Hom-A where the average IQ is only 10....
Isn't it gratifying and re-assuring to know that we have public officials who are intelligent and qualified enough to read an error page, and then savvy enough to: a) look up the company's web site, and then b) effectively and efficiently manage the problem to the satisfaction of all parties involved. We should bestow him with praises.
Rest assured people of Oklahoma, your IT is in good hands!
It seems it becomes our new way of life. We have no idea what we're doing, we have no idea what people are supposed to do, we have no idea who's to blame, but when in doubt, SUE! The more the other party knows, the higher your chances to succeed, because it seems the current creed in justice is that if you're clued, you should know what you do, while when you're clueless, you can't be held responsible for your actions.
Quite what we're currently facing in the area of viri and trojans. Your computer can be the biggest spambot on the planet, as long as you can credibly claim you're as clued as an aubergine when it comes to computers, you're not accountable for it.
So when in doubt, SUE! Especially if you're dumb as fu..
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...but, alas, they do not have email!
Can you imagine?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
At leasty them darn injuns is polite enuf to tell yez about it!
I once saw a survur that was taken by them folks in the black choppers! That's right, you know 'em, International Information Spooks, IIS!!!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
The tendency of the average person to believe he or she is better-than-average is known as the "above-average effect," and it flies in the face of logic... by definition, it is impossible for a majority of people to be above average. The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone's skill in that space, including their own. Here is the summary of the study. http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=406
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SE C={CC5DEFB6-1B2A-4783-A5F8-A92275C95081}
22 years and he has no clue how DNS or web servers works...
MBA, Raytheon consultant. No wonder America is in suvh serious trouble.
This bozo should be fired for incompetence!
i have been in oklahoma for 30 years. the schools here are not real well funded and few people have heard of unix, let alone linux. i went to volunteer at a junior high school one time and the kids didnt even have text books for algebra clas.
i know people in big cities get discarded old machines for almost free. well, that doesn't happen here very often.
the computers that people do have in school they are discouraged from learning about them. they are some magic box from 'somewhere else' and only magicians can deal with them.
if this incident 'bothers' you so much then i would suggest you donate some money to the schools in oklahoma, or stop charging so much for shipping when you sell crap on ebay.
it just goes to prove that you cant leave one part of the population ignorant due to lack of education money, while the other is given fancy education and expect the society to work smoothly.
Probably an MSCE with a whole stack of other MS certifications. Fits the profile to a t.
The PHB in question is the city manager. According to him: "My door is always open and I answer all calls."
So... here's his info: City Manager Jerry A. Taylor, and his email address: citymgr@cityoftuttle.org.
Note that I am not "exposing" anything, all of this info comes directly from the publically available cityoftuttle.org website.
PS. I can't believe we fried centos.org but not cityoftuttle.org.
If you noticed on his bio at the website - he was a manager for E-Systems. This is the way E-Systems managers manage - the yell about everything - get absolutely nothing done but yelling - but yell they do - until someone comes along and fixes it for them. He is classic E-Systems - everyone in the defense industry know about them - and has had to put up with their management technique. Finally the rest of you can start to deal with them too...
I hereby nominate March 27 as the International Misconfiguration Day!
Hmm, time to book tickets for the parade of Microsoft admins, maybe.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Thos bastards! CALL THE FBI!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
its a mistake, it was supposed to read BUTTLE....
I like microcars
To: citymgr@cityoftuttle.org
Subject: Need your help in entertaining the tech community
Jerry,
I understand that you have 22 years of experience computer systems engineering and operation are are computer literate. I need your help in entertaining the Internet technical community.
I think it would be hilarious if we loaded the default page on on a web server for the city (one with instructions on how to fix the problem) and then complained about it to the the maker of the operating system. Yuk, yuk! We can even (get this) whine that all the computers in the building show the same default page when you surf to the site. Bwaaahhhaaahhhaaa! Then (I can hardly contain myself) let's accuse the poor saps of hacking our server and threaten to call the FBI!!! Teeehhheeehhheeee!
Oh, oh, my sides hurt. This is going to be great. You setup the server and I'll.... Oh, I'm just reading slashdot and see that you already done it. Well, I guess you thought of it before me. Good one.
The guy's website provides further proof for the "low IQ and use of Comic Sans" correlation.
obviously he comes from the era of big iron, as the first sentence has not been proofread.
as of 0957 EST, City Of Tuttle is still showing an apache test page...
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
CentOS should send the city a bill for their tech support time. After all, they wasted the time of a primary developer whose time could be spent much better. Of course the chance of the bill getting paid is slim to none but it is the thought that counts, right? I hope Johnny Hughes found the man's ignorance as funny as I do and was not overly annoyed with the knucklehead.
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
Hi there,
o ryid=127
have you seen this one?
The world seems to be laughing about your city administration...
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?st
Cheers
Dave
Scott should sue this guy for competing with his PHB... and holding his own.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
While the general response is to call for his incompetent head on a plate (not undeserved), we as a community should be making an effort to be polite to this idiot. If we want to continue the march of linux, we need to be prepared to deal with incompetence and people like this in a warm fashion, and mock them later with dignity and respect. If all he gets are threats, harrassing calls etc, he's going to assume that all linux people are alike, and that we're all terrorists and hackers. Please, if you're going to email/call/mock him, do so with dignity and respect as a member of the community. Don't prove him right by getting on his level. We're all better than him, so act like it.
Jerry said: I am computer literate!
Jerry meant: See, I can spell "computer" correctly
Jerry said: I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Jerry meant: I have been using wordprocessors for 22 years, and once I had to plug a computer in!
All I have to say is: "I am please to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." Guess it is Texas, but sheez, it's called education!
Sorry, Builder, but all this shows is that incompetents shouldn't be left in charge of IT. I would say it demonstrates the exact opposite of what you say. Clearly the city manager is unqualified and ignorant. The open source project helped him -- for free -- even when he threatened litigation! Ultimately, CentOS solved the problem for him too, outdoing the ISP he presumably pays.
I would argue that this furthers the cause significantly, and as an aside, encourages towns to take IT seriously.
I was going to email the guy and ask him how someone with 22 years of experience in computer engineering and operations could possibly not understand what is involved in creating a webserver. However, as paranoid as this guy is, he may call the FBI on me for harrassment.
I enjoy my trips to Vinita oklahoma. Small towns like that are great in that just about everyone's home is a WiFi public hot spot. I just take a stroll down the street with my Palm TX, refresh my RSS feeds, visit some websites...
Actually, I was quite shocked how even more insecure people were with their WiFi than in my own town. But really, I guess they don't have too much reason to worry.
The soft underbelly of the heartland, indeed!
I could help but want to award this City Manager the highly coveted, never duplicated, Darwin Award. http://www.darwinawards.com/
E C=%7BCC5DEFB6-1B2A-4783-A5F8-A92275C95081%7D
;) he really is.
Please cast your vote to this wonderful individual.
http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&S
Or at least let him know how "Wonderful"
What I am I once was. What I now become I long to be. Life is a journey not a destination.
Here is a recent picture of our hero, Jerry, and here is a picture of him during his earlier years.
[alk]
...if CentOS staged this whole thing for publicity, or if the city manager is really that stupid.
A politician? Stupid? Nah, could never happen!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
My first thought was "They have computers in Tuttle, OK?" It's no wonder that my home state gets a reputation for producing belligerent idiots like that city manager or Michael "Your doin a heckuva job Brownie" Brown.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I found the problem... Jerry has an MBA. that explains it all.
Be sure that if you email him, to use crayon type fonts and only primary colors.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
Does he live with 6 other little people?
My website looks just fine.
If you look at his profile on the city website the third word is a typo. "I am please to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle." And that's the guy they elected to manage their city?
Well his stupidity has now caused their site to be /.ed. What's next? Is CmndTaco going to get a similar barrage of hate mail from the manager? :D
Their page looks like crap.
http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/
Funny, i also got a different impression. Namely that centos, and by your thinking ALL open source, provided clear feedback to the IT manager jerkoff, and maintained a level head throughout.
It definitely shows that most of IT management problems in the world are the result of overbearing, ignorant blowhards who know nothing about technology and only do their jobs by coercion and antagonism.
This is EXACTLY what should be shown on the net. It's time these assholes get a taste of HUMBLE PIE.
I sent him a nice little email "how does it feel to look like a dork in front of millions of people?"
LOL the "secret" word for submitting this is "childish"....how fitting..
Seing that the centos forums, or maybe entire site, didn't check, are down because of the /. effect, they should sue tuttle. They have caused, through their own error and strange sequence of events a DDoS on the centOS servers.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
(unless you're the city manager of some dust-bowl bible-belt 'burgh that sees nothing but hackers on teh intarweb)
Now the terrorist /. downtime commences at Tuttle-ok.gov...
bah.
How's he ever going to learn if we just make fun of him? I, for one, sent him a CentOS DVD and a kind note supporting him in his time of public embarrassment.
Come to think of it, why doesn't every one do that?
Hello, I have recently read the news story concerning recent terrorist attacks on your web site on http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/ 135221 and on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_cen tos/
Thank you for hours of entertainment for me and my family.
I hereby nominate you for the "Pompous Arrogant Prick 2006" award.
Best of luck on your "War On Terrorism (TM)".
CentOS is on a rampage! They broke into my server too last week, soon after I (1) downloaded CentOS 4.3 ISOs via BitTorrent; (2) burned them to a stack of CD-Rs; (3) installed the CentOS "Server" configuration to my box; (4) rebooted; and (5) started the httpd service.
What sneaks--they must be stopped!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Yeah you Texans know a lot.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
It occurs to me that very few people who have had 22 years of computer systems experience would merely refer to themselves as "computer literate". It would be more likely that such a person with the claimed amount of experience would have asserted instead that he "knows what he's talking about", followed by the proclaimation announcing his years of experience. "Computer literate", ironically, is generally only used as a self-label by people who still don't *REALLY* know how their computer works. At least as far as I've seen.
I expect, more likely, that has had had 22 years of experience of MANAGEMENT in the field, but not the actual hands-on stuff.
(Threats of calling the FBI aside, he reminds me for some reason of the pointy-haired boss guy in Dilbert).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Here is an email that a friend of mine sent out: redacted to protect identity.
From XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject Serving the citizens of Tuttle and making it a great place to live.
Date Mon, March 27, 2006 10:31 am
To "Jerry A. Taylor"
CC "Senator Debbie Stabenow"
Dear Sir.
As you can see, my email to you contains full disclaimer to my identity
and also will show on the radar of my Senator. So I am completely on the
level.
I would like to ask you a few questions, having read the recent events of
Tuttle's website incident, located at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_cen tos/, and your homepage
on your city's website located at
http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SE C=%7BCC5DEFB6-1B2A-4783-A5F8-A92275C95081%7D,
I am disturbed at the conduct of a goverment official that is supposed to
be setting the example for the rest of us. If I had kids, I would like
them to be able to look up to our politicians as they are the leaders of
our country.
I would like to ask you the following:
1. What qualities that make Tuttle great are you promoting, by viciuosly
attacking a software provider with blind accusations with a guilty until
proven innocent stance over a page that looks like the following:
http://centos.hughesjr.com/testing/noindex_new.htm l - where it correctly
states, that the webserver is working correctly and that what is missing
is content?
2. What evidence did you have that your website was hacked besides your
inability to see the page you expected despite your repeated requests to
"REMOVE" offending software which was "NEEDED" by your web pages in order
to be seen by the public?
3. What forensic testing did you complete prior to contacting the maker of
the software?
4. Did you shut down the server that you expected was hacked to prevent
any further "hacking" of your site's infrastructure?
5. Did you isolate your server by unplugging it from the rest of the
network to prevent the public from being affected by your hacked software?
6. Even a novice could see that the page you were shown was a help page,
but what led you believe this was a hacking attempt?
7. Is paranoia and general widespread panic the qualities you are
attempting to promote in Tuttle citizenry? What intel reports do you have
to support your feelings that Tuttle is targetted for this kind of
activity?
8. Given that any software maker has no knowledge of your infrastructure
setup, what questions did you ask of your own team prior to accusing the
software maker of hacking your site and not providing adequate assistance?
9. Have you done a review of your team's management and staff to determine
whether they followed procedure during this crisis, or was all of the
incident managed by you? Do you have a PMP certified staff member to
handle your project management issues and crises?
10. You state in your email trail with CentOS that you have "22 years in
computer systems engineering and operation." If such is the case, why is
it that you did not initiate tha activities required to remove the
offending sofware even from a management point of view? I have 17 years -
maybe not as much as your 22, but even at 5 years of experience managing
sites, when there was something offending, I knew which person on my team
would be able to remove the software or determine root cause. Please
elaborate on how you used your 22 years of experience to determine root
cause in this incident and how in your estimation your shouting match at
the obviously polite people at CentOS showed your citizenry the kind of
examp
Well THERE'S your problem!
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Oh yeah. Sure. What's that? 22 years of playing Choplifter on a Commodore64? No wait. You wrote "hello world" on a TRS-80 in the early 80's?
Yeah, I love how every script-kiddie who can insert a CD and install/run some canned software is a computer-support-tech and "Gee, wiz, I typed in foo.bas from Basic programming for Idiots and it ran, so I guess I be a computer system engineer."
That email exchange made me want to recomend Johnny Hughes for sainthood: while reading it I could feel myself sliding towards a BOFH attitude...
Oh. btw: anyone else notice that the City of Tuttle Seal looks like a view through a scope?
But wait! Is this the town named after "Tom Tuttle from Tacoma Washington?
Geez!
-dean
-----------------------
hey, well, its just my $0.02us
Looks like Mr Taylor has a crappy benefits package. He could sure use some collectively-subsidized Prozac.
It's trigger-happy imbeciles like him that make me such a great cynic. 22 years of "computer engineering" doesn't mean squat if you can't read the plain english instructions on the Apache welcome page. I'll bet he calls Homeland Security when he can't find his car keys too!
Me, I'm on the receiving end of many accusations in the wonderful world of retail. Almost every week I get psychotic middle-class bimbos who start bitching before I even start working on their PC, so what I do is I put down the screwdriver, give their money back and quickly shoo them out of my office. I don't give a damn who they work for and how much money they get paid for being idiots, if they can't be disciplined enough to show some respect, then I can't be bothered to flex my technical muscle.
These people fail to realize that BOFHs are made, not born. Piss someone off badly enough and they will seek revenge. It's human nature. It's the natural equilibrium of existence. Hell if I had been the CentOS guy getting these threats, I think I would have "helped" Mr Taylor "solve" his "problem" by giving me his system password so I could "restore" his files... of course!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They're linking back to Slashdot - Tittle for Tuttle?
/. /. itself?
Will
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Actually, it shows that you can insult the CentOS community, accuse them of defacing your web site, threaten them with legal action, and _still have them solve your problem for you_.
It's when you continue to complain that CentOS didn't solve your problem sooner even though they had nothing to do with it and it was caused by an unrelated third party that you get ridiculed.
If you believe that any other company would have been even more accomodating then allow me to welcome you to our planet. We hope that your stay on Earth will be informative and entertaining.
Taylor is a city official in a small town in OK. In general these people are hateful SOBs to anybody who isn't like him, you know like doesn't go to his Church, isn't one of th boys etc. They can be very polite to people who are just passing throuh, but never mistake that for being good people, to know them is to dispise them.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
With luck they will not be someone who reports to this fool, but one way or another they'll probably feel the heat more than necessary. There are few things more frightening in a workplace than a fool who is shown up to be a fool. His retribution is likely to be epic.
Have you noticed that his email address disappeared?
Concerned about spam?
Does Bin Laden prepare a new kind of email terrorism?
RTFA. Oklahoma. Idiot.
Unpleasantries.
I am still surprised people bother to respond politely to idiots like this one (note that his resume lists 22 years at Raytheon - jeezus!).
The boilerplate response for morons like this one is "FOAD" (fuck off and die). and when they take action against your poor balmeless you, you countersue them for harrassment.
How great that Tulsa can count on major assholes like this to run their town.
Netcraft confirms: Tuttle's city manager position is dead.
Netcraft confirms: Tuttle's career in IT is dead.
Also, to the people bemoaning the ridiculing of Tuttle by the "open source world". How in the hell are they supposed to support 1.) someone that doesn't listen to reason, and 2.) someone who doesn't read a basic webpage that tells the user what it is and how they can change it?
So, bill them for consulting services.
If the guys from CentOS has to debug the web site of someone he's never even heard of, and deal with this friggin' idiot, they should document what they did, and send a bill for consulting fees.
This guy clearly has no clue.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town...
I'm shocked at this report of such profound ignorance and stupidity on the part of a government official in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is normally such a liberal, tolerant, open-minded place.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
Check out the City jobs - "Public Works Technician" at http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SE C=%7B95EA530C-5936-40BB-8147-B632F5E55FF6%7D, which reads...
"Applicant ... Must be able to pass wastewater and water "D" license exams within 120 days of employment.
Classic.
BTW what's with the mega-long URLs, and this /vertical stuff, on the tuttleweb? What are those strings of hex all about?
This is why..US jobs are being offshored to India!?
were all the children are above average
I felt a little sorry for the poor guy, so I sent him an e-mail to try to clarify a few things. The text of the message follows:
Dear Mr. Taylor,
It has recently come to my attention through a widely publicized news story that you were involved in a slight misunderstanding related the nature of web servers and their operation.
Now, I understand from having read the archived copies of your e-mail conversation with the CentOS staff that you are a very knowledgeable and experienced man in the fields of computers and engineering. However, I do think that it would be worth reviewing a few basic facts in light of the recent, rather embarrassing, confusion.
CentOS is a Linux operating system. Much like the Microsoft Windows operating systems you may be familiar with, it is a platform on which you can run a variety of desktop and server software. Apache, a popular web server package, is one of these. When Apache is first installed, it displays a basic web page with some simple instructions regarding the process of configuring it, much like the one that you saw recently. This had nothing to do with either Apache or CentOS, but was simply an oversight on the part of your hosting provider.
I do hope that this has helped to clarify any remaining questions you may have had about this issue. I wish you the best, and hope that this unfortunate conflict will not have to result in your resignation.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Linux User
I would naturally blame the BBC.
Or maybe Charlotte Church's aunt. It depends. What's the current phase of the moon and the market price for wheat futures?
Yes, of course, it would be nice if only competent people were "in charge". Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
Instead of making fun of the Tuttle-guy, we should be talking about ways to diffuse people like that.
From what I could tell, the CentOS developer only inflammed issues by writing "I feel sorry for your city" to preface his email. Instead of exchanging hot emails to each other, perhaps everyone would have saved a lot of time by exchanging a couple of friendly phone calls.
"I am please to serve the citizens of the City of Tuttle. [All your city are belong to us!]",
this from a city that claims "The Place Where People Grow - Friendly!" (whatever that means).
The mayor probably hired him. Considering that concil members pages are down and e-mails erased from them, go to the local rag instead and let them know.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://cityoftuttle.org/ remains unconfigured. http://tuttle-ok.gov/ apparently was fixed.
From the article... (Program Manager 22 years
Raytheon(E-Systems, Inc.).
Raytheon is a defense contractor... isn't that scarey.
So I've sent nice mail to the City Manager and also to the Mayor, saying how much joy I've got from reading this article.
E C={817F3744-D1CC-4C36-810D-CCED7FF8486A}&DE=
:)
The Mayors email (mailto:mayor@CityofTuttle.org) can be found on this page: http://www.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&S
I could not find Manager's mail address on the city page anymore, maybe he removed it?
Um, sir, I don't think 'computer literacy' refers merely to the ability to read text on computers...
http://outcampaign.org/
Now, why stop there? why dont you upgrade your theory to 3rd degree?
Something like...
First you know what you don't know what you don't know
Second you don't know what you know what you don't know...
and henceforth...
Likely due to the exposure, "please" has been changed to "pleased," and his email address has been removed.
I get similar accusations fairly often, since I distribute several widely-used freeware httpds. My typical response: "I'm afraid you have misinterpreted what you saw on your screen. Please find someone other than myself to explain it to you before you further embarass yourself." If they come back after that, they go in my mail filter.
We apologise that the centos.org website has suffered a slashdot effect due
to a recent news story.
We are working hard to restore it.
My wife used to teach. At one point she coined the phrase "not so much stupid as militantly ignorant".
Several things wrong with that
1. I believe the was really being sincere about "I feel sorry for your city" in reference to the website being down.
2. The initial e-mail was rather inflamitory & abusive
3. No contact information other than e-mail was given by Mr Taylor.
You know the really interesting thing about this story is how the govt is trying trying to get us to grok that a website deserves as much solid protection as for instance in this case city hall itself, if not even more so. Because... when you deface a website the FBI gets called in and you can be put into prison for many years... while when you spray paint and deface city hall or some other "official" building you will do considerable less time (even though the damage you did costs more to remove / replace). That's what the really interesting part of it.
While you make a good point that he didn't *have* to say "I feel sorry for your city." It is usually easier to be nice in the beginning of a confrontation. The problem is that it can be very difficult especially when dealing with a first class ass-hat like this guy.
I suspect it's nicer than I would have been after being threatened "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!" And after reading the rest of the emails it's pretty clear Mr Hughes went out of his way to help this guy.
TODO create witty sig.
Yeah you Texans know a lot.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
With the forum down, I found the full text of the discussions on a blog, here; http://jaduncan.net/centos-vs-city-of-tuttle
I live in a small Indiana town near Monticello with a population of about 1,700. The local telephone company, for years, has told people when they complained of static on the line : "If you don't like our service, get phone service elsewhere!" *snickers in the background* (The offending Telco is NOT in Monticello.)
.plan (Boo!.) (And yes, the .plan was available outside their network for anyone to see.)
.plan.) I went to the office and sat with the owner and "admin" and insisted that they immediately call the FBI as it would be quite a hoot. A lot of staring went on before the owner yelled at "admin" and told him to turn the account back on. I explained to the owner how *stupid* it was to have that information available and that most knowledgeable entities had disabled external finger years ago. The finger and telnet services were disabled entirely for everyone a few weeks later. Smart move on both counts -- 12 years after it had become standard practice.
Now that Al Gore has brought us the Internet, up until a little over three years ago, this town only had ONE ISP : the local Telco. ALL surrounding communities with populations of 5,000, 650, and even 180 have had multiple ISP choices for years. In the surrounding areas today, multiple dial-up providers, DSL, wireless, and cable are available. Hence, this Telco has treated it's Internet service customers just like its phone customers. (The second choice now is a major cable provider.)
Anyway, a few years ago, I was on my Telco $39.95 dial-up and holy crap, I fingered myself at the ISP and discovered that my wife's and my full name, telephone number, address, and other account information items were displayed. No problem. I telnetted to the ISP server using my account info and edited my
A couple of weeks later, the ISP was having an issue with one of their cache servers which was causing me trouble viewing web pages. I phoned in the trouble and a couple of hours later, my account was disabled and the ISP "network administrator" with 25 years of experience called and said he was phoning the FBI because I had hacked his server (read as edited
Then, out of the dark ages we came as the Telco introduced DSL for $75 per month. This went well for several months. Until December 2002. During that month, latency was at >1300ms the entire month. Call #1 (3 days): Someone hacked our servers. Call #2 (10 days): Damned hackers! We're working on it! Call #3 (21 days): Um, we seem to have oversubscribed our T1 (SINGULAR!) We are working on adding capacity. Call #4 (33 days): Yeah anytime now. NO! We will not be offering a refund! I asked if they had heard anything about a major cable company providing Internet service soon. HAHAHAH! No one is coming to town. HAHAHAHAH!
I called the cable company and BEGGED to beta test. They said testing was closed. I offered to pay and explained the situation. An installer was at my house the next day and I went from 1300ms $75 DSL to 1.5Mbps, 80ms, $39.95 cable overnight and haven't had more than a couple of very small hiccups since. That cable is now at 6Mbps. The Telco still stinks, though, I hear their price is down to $45/month.
BTW, Caller ID is $12 per month here. We paid (and still do) nearly $3 per phone line into an E911 fund for about 8 years prior to said service being available. Funds taken in from this were used to modernize the phone companies network -- to give it the capability of providing CallerID. And ream us they still do.
With an idiot like this one, your city will never get any serious IT guys...
hmmm... dumb...
The tech support person should have told the idiot to go ahead and report it to the FBI. The city administrator would be facing a charge of filing a false report. You have to stop protecting idiots from the consequences of their own stupidity.
If they had just shelled out for RedHat to begin with, then those fargin' iceholes from CentOS wouldn't have hacked them. Will people never learn?
:)
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
Taking him at his word I think that perhaps he's suffering from an early senescence. Any number of things can bring it on, stress, blood pressure, alzheimer's, fatigue.
I've seen it up close. My brother was under an incredible amount of stress and started making nonsensical statements and connections like this guy has. At the time, I began to fear my brother had succumbed to Alzheimer's. It wasn't until he retired and unwound that his old self resurfaced. Bottom line was he couldn't handle the stress anymore.
Make fun of the guy if you will, but remember, it's a fate that awaits us all.
Insensitive elitist FOSS-heads! I'm an Okie from Muskogee (well all my relatives are, I had the misfortune to be born elsewhere while my dad was away in the military. Now, like all great Okies like Tom Joad and Merle Haggard, I live in California.)
We ain't as stupid as y'all think. Just last week I figured out how to configure a Solaris DHCP server. My grandpappy warn't no monkey!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It's tempting to insert an Okie joke (or more specifically a Tuttle joke), but since I grew up all of about 10-12 miles from Tuttle, I'll refrain from doing so.
This is naught but embarassing- Oklahoma's been trying to shed that ass-backwards image for years.
Computer literate, my backside. This man's not got a clue as to what he's running or his hosting
provider's running- and then goes about accusing the software vendor of hacking his misconfigured site.
Jerry, do all the Okies in the state and all the ones who've left the state a BIG favor, shut the hell up
and apologize for your being an idiot.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What a horrible website. Looks like a someone used a checklist (or worse, meeting minutes) of what had to be on the site. My children have a better sense of asthetics. I wonder if this will appear on Leno?
I have to give the guy a lot of credit for being helpful. If it were me, I'm afraid I would have said "OK, OK, we'll get it off there in the next update cycle", then blacklisted his email address and let him figure it out himself.
:)
Then I would have posted it on slashdot while the error page was still up for additional comic relief
Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
In my experience most businesses cannot afford NOT to have someone competent in charge of their IT. It doesn't need to be a full time job, a few hours per month is often plenty. The alternative is to have the "Office Guru", you know, they guy that has an X-Box at home and bought something on Ebay once, deal with it. The problem is that he/she probably has a real job they are supposed to be doing and will spend hours dealing with issues that would take a professional a few minutes to fix and will probably ignore any kind of preventitive maintence.
"Like it or not, Mr. Bush is dramatically reshaping our world, the nation and -- via tacit support of redistricting -- Texas."
I assume this is a parody site?
I think when you see mba on someone's resume, it should immediately
subtract one technical degree from the rest of their resume...
"Click on my name to send an email"
Really?
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
His 22 years were apparantly spent at E-Systems which was at the time a CIA shell company that ran Air America (among other freaky stuff).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
... in management.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It also means you've identified one of the problems, which means you're further along than MOST people in correcting it.
Realising you're being a moron is half the battle.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
When did my boss get a job in Oklahoma?
As an act of defiance against the pale face I have placed the tribal feather on your website!
(plays tribal music for effect -- slot machines)
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Sent to the 'Tuttle Times' (http://www.tuttletimes.com/):
e ntos/) Better get something posted on your site or your newspaper will be a laughingstock as well. It's too late to worry about local politics. Your integrity as a news source is at stake. The whole world is watching!
You are missing out on the INTERNATIONAL news going on in your community. Your city manager, Jerry Taylor, is so misinformed and clueless that he threatened a software company with an FBI investigation because he was too stupid to understand. It has now been picked up by many news web sites around the world and he has become a laughingstock. This guy needs to be removed from your local government before he further embarrasses your town. Here's an example of the news on your town from a huge web site in England. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_c
The thttpd (a lightweight Apache alternative) author has a similar story, but with more stupidity involved (see email history in link): thttpd author's "Attack of the Repo Men"
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Can I upload the log to bash.org? :P
Because there isn't a verb form of PHB. Yet.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
After the first miscommunication over email, pick up the damn phone. Could have cleared this up in 5 minutes, no matter how idiotic the customer.
$8.95/mo web hosting
-contact the wrong person for help, a person who has nothing to do with your problem.
-skip all the "help me out" stuff and go immediately to threats and accusations.
-ignore the friendly, informative reply the the person (who didn't even have to acknowledge you) gave you
and
-Attempt to take the technical high ground with your 22 (imaginary) years of computer systems engineering experience. Unless those years were 1945-1967, that's got to be super-false.
and deserving of ridicule.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The website is *still* displaying the default CentOS page. I'm not going to link as it likely wouldn't survive a slashdotting, but one of the users of the forum mentioned this and I did confirm that it is still no showing the city's homepage.
Rather amusing all-in-all.
Lets hope that sort of thinking doesnt make it into the legal system..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... They has a fit while I commit My social suicide
I'm a dancin' foo-oooo-oool
Identify:
Find a problem, task that needs done, etc.
Delegate:
Not necessarily to the party responsible; but to the party from you can get results.
Perfect example--staff is incompetent, so you hire a contractor to do the job.
Motivate:
Motivate the people to whom you've delegated to solve the problem.
Ask nicely, stroke an ego, intimidate, bribe, promise the next huge job to the contractor if he'll only take care of this one little...
Do whatever you have to do to get them to make it THEIR problem, then it's no longer YOUR problem.
This method works for *ALL* problems.
It worked for this problem.
What's the problem?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Or at least we are not supposed to. Elected officals on the local,state, and federal levels are elected to serve the people, NOT have power over us.
If this City Manager had gone first to the FBI, is there little doubt that the centos project would be currently in an evidence locker?
22 years experience in computing. i know many with his experience that "know" just as little, and don't know it.
scary isn't it?
actually, in the City Manager form of local government, the City Manager is hired by the Mayor and city council to administer the government...
--- I'm just rambling...
I've used CentOS for a couple years now to run various webservers. I've donated a couple times in the past, but this episode has just inspired me to send a little extra $$$ their way. Just seeing the sorts of things a successful FOSS project must put up with is making me feel generous today.
In fact, I'm also sending emails to Mr. Taylor at "citymgr@cityoftuttle.org" and the Mayor at "mayor@cityoftuttle.org" suggesting that in order to pay for the waste of time of the CentOS team in handling this, their town should make a donation as well to http://www.centos.org/donate/ .
For a good laugh in the same category, try: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html
... to just let him call the FBI.
There is a scary risk though that the FBI would either be just as clueless, or (more likely) take a 'seize computers now, ask questions later' approach, either of which would be really bad for CentOS.
During my friends last semester, and after four and a half years seeking a BS in mechanical engineering, he called me to help him "read" a wiring schematic for an old motorcycle. This guy, after all that time could'nt read a wiring diagram. His first job was with Raytheon in Tulsa, Ok then later down in Plano, Texas.
Just to note, he recieved his degree from Oklahoma State Univerity
Apparently this story will hit www.tuttletimes.com on Thursday. Look for it.
Afterall, it is the only thing that keeps me 'real geek' friends still talking to me.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuttle%2C_Oklahoma#Tr ivia
http://tastytronic.net/main/clippy.jpg
Dear Mayor Lonnie Paxton:
/ 135221
h p?id=2
I am writing to formally complain about the abusive behavior of Mr. Jerry A. Taylor, one of your highest profile City Managers. As of this morning's publication of an Information Technology news service titled Slashdot (see links below), I can assure you that he (and, by association, your town of Tuttle, Oklahoma) is the topic of derisive conversations throughout the entire computing systems world. Quite frankly, Mr. Taylor's alleged "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation," his unwillingness to consider the advice of professional peers, his inability to comprehend simple systems documentation, and his hair-trigger willingness to contact the FBI whenever your town suffers WEB server configuration issues, cast great doubts in regard to both Tuttle's IT infrastructure, as well as your town's slogan: "The Place Where People Grow Up - Friendly!" This is very bad publicity, Mr. Paxton. Until this morning, it's true that hardly anyone outside of Oklahoma knew where Tuttle even was. However, now millions of people know about Tuttle for all the wrong reasons. As a consequence, I am only half joking when I state that I would hardly be surprised to see your town spoofed without mercy on an upcoming episode of The Daily Show, for example. This is THAT big an issue.
In any event, I must commend the representative from CentOS.org, Mr. Johnny Hughes. Time and time again, as Mr. Taylor become increasingly impossible to deal with, as Mr. Taylor's words became more and more threatening (at one point, Mr. Taylor went so far as to report that "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity" - a statement which I believe he will soon regret, if he doesn't already), Mr. Hughes remained both patient and calm and did everything he could -- and I can't state this with enough emphasis, even though this was clearly neither an issue with CentOS.org, nor Mr. Hughes -- to help resolve Mr. Taylor's problem.
I use CentOS on a daily basis and I am positively grateful for the philanthropic efforts of this superhuman organization. I am extremely disappointed with your office because Mr. Hughes clearly did not deserve Mr. Taylor's unmindful harassment. To resolve this injustice, at the very least, I encourage you to prevail upon Mr. Taylor to publicly acknowledge an admission of discourtesy toward both CentOS.org and Mr. Hughes himself, accompanied by a written expression of regret. Your town should consider itself fortunate that CentOS.org, to date, has not issued you an invoice for payment of software technical support.
Thanks very much for your attention. I sincerely wish that we could be communicating under much more favorable conditions.
For your reference, here are some links referred to earlier:
Original story posted on Slashdot:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27
What is Slashdot and how large is it's following in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
CentOS's coverage of the abuse:
http://wwwf.centos.org/127_story.html?storyid=127
What CentOS is:
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.p
What LINUX is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
Yours Sincerely,
http://www.cityoftuttle.org/ is still not configured properly.
E-systems is a secretive government contractor that builds electronic warfare equipment.
He's obviously a clueless PHB, he has an MBA.
Any technical skills he had were no doubt erased by the pre-graduation labotomy required to get an MBA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Centos could use a lesson in customer relations. Their first response was "I feel sorry for your city". *Not* getting things off on the right foot. I've had to deal with far bigger idiots over the phone on occasion, and this is not the way to deal with it.
"I'm sorry, sir, must've been a configuration error somewhere down the line. Have your IT people call me at this number and we'll work it out." Would have been much better. Then you and the IT people can have a nice laugh about it later.
Sadly I'm originally from Tuttle, Oklahoma. It's a backwards little town, with a "good ol' boy" system of city management.
:)
While Mr. Hughes was able to contain himself from forwarding it on to the town's newspaper, I was not.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Anyone who uses Comic Sans as a positive design choice deserves everything they get...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
FIX MY CHICKEN COOP!
I sent the mayor of Tuttle an e-mail warning him of the error of Taylor's ways and the impending /. doom which may be headed for the web server of that fine city, but I also donated a few bucks to the CentOS team for having to put up with that moron.
Put your money where your mouth is... for who knows when CentOS is going to face a lawsuit for slandering Taylor?
-- Let him who is without spelling error ignite the first flame --
First off, this "IT" guy is total boob, and should have to pay out of his pocket the rate for the CentOS lead developer who did his homework for him. If he was, in fact, qualified for the job he has, he would have done those steps before he started threatening to call in the FBI.
That being said, though (and considering that CentOS has already changed the text of the boilerplate Apache start page since this happened), isn't the idea of advertising on the default start page odd? Isn't that a little like pasting ads onto airbags? There's no telling who's going to be reading it, or under what circumstances. All you can be sure of is that it's not going to be a good situation a good part of the time.
Feh, I don't guess there's much to do about it... personally, I always think it's a good thing when I see that page. It means the upgrade worked and it's time to get to work moving the site to the new server.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
But I have no idea what a computer, an O/S, linux, apache, a webserver, the intarweb, or any of those things are!!! I'm calling the FBI!! AAYYYYIIIIEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
http://www.tuttletimes.com/viewarticle.php?id=744 Is that a real PC in the background?
From the article. Now, can you tell me how to remove "your software" that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this "hacking".
rm -Rf *
I reckon that Johnny Hughes, in Centos support, deserves a medal - I would have spat the dummy at this fool!
Sorry had to be said.
<?php .= "People like you...no wonder the government is the way it is..."; .= "\nGo learn IT tech before you hurt yourself...seriously.";
{
// prepare email body 'from' text
$BodyFrom
$BodyFrom
for($j=0;$j<1000;$j++)
// send emails
mail("citymgr@cityoftuttle.org", "WTF is your problem??1??~?1?", $BodyFrom, "From: user@null.com");
}
?>
Pat
The Tuttle Times, with its hacked, misconfigured server, is too stupid, but try telling it to The Oklahoman of Oklaholma City. Tuttle is just a suburb of OK City.
...it's just his page (and the home page); the style sheet actually specifies "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" and that's what's used on most of the rest of the site. You know what they say about "a little knowledge" and comic sans...
some of my favourite - it really happened to me - IT customer service stories.
I spent a year or so working in a retail computer outlet in a large discout chain (I blame Apple for this, it was during their flirtation with selling Apples through non-reseller chains). It was during the same period that IBM compatibles changed from 5.25" to 3.5" floppy drives. I had a customer come in and buy a new 3.5" drive one afternoon. The following day they came back with the drive asking for a replacement, as it was clearly faulty. They complained that they had installed in into thier computer and tried to use their exisiting disks in it and none had worked. After further enquiy, it turned out that they had found their 5.25" disks had not fitted in the drive, so they had cut them down with a pair of scissors to make them fit, having done so, they found the new drive incapable to read them.
Same place, different customer. Came in wanting a warranty replacement on their new keyboard, it was giving erratic multi-keystroke responses. The keyboard was bent with a tire track across it.
Same place, yet another customer. Sold them a new PC with a fax modem as one of the items on the component list. The following weekend they came back into the store to find me. They had a question, could I perhaps show them on the floor demonstration unit where to load the fax paper.
Same place (I hated the place with a vengence), different customer. Came in with their brand new Apple Powerbook demanading a warranty replacement. It was a PB 180 (I think) with the grey rectangular power brick adaptor. The computer had shorted out and they demended that Apple replace it. The AC adaptor no longer had the block transformer on the end of the cable, instread it had a standard 3 pin plug on the end. When asked why this was the case, they said that the block had not fitted to the powerpoint on thier skirting board, so they had cut it off (the transformer) and installed the new plug on the end of the cable. They could now understand why I refused to process the claim as a warranty issue.
Different place, different customer. Was asked to do an insurance assessment on repairing a computer which had been sprayed with a chemical fire extinguisher some weeks earlier, it had not been cleaned in the interim...
I've got dozens more, but they're my favourites. So glad I don't do retail any more.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
http://www.city-data.com/city/Tuttle-Oklahoma.htm
Oooolala!!! Hot babe capital of OK!!!~!
In my case, I was working in field service for a small factory automation manufacturer (this was nearly 20 years ago, now). We get a call that a customer is having a problem with their system failing the security check at start-up.
At that time, our software was copy-protected by means of a parallel port dongle that absolutely would NOT work correctly if there was a printer daisy-chained off the dongle, and the printer was turned off. Because this was an entirely predictable failure mode, the error message read something like: "Security verification error. Make sure your software key is installed on the parallel port, and ENSURE THAT THE PRINTER IS TURNED ON (if you have one)"
So the first question I ask the guy when he gets transferred over to me is whether or not he has the key installed, and whether his printer is turned on. "Of course it is - I wouldn't be calling if I hadn't already checked that!". So I ask him exactly what the error message is, and he tells me it's the one I paraphrased above, which you will recall only happens if your printer is turned off.
Now, it's possible that his key has gone bad in a way that no other key we've had fail before ever has, but it doesn't seem terribly likely to me, so I ask him if he can check to make sure the little green light on the printer is illuminated. He claims that it is, and starts getting very agitated about how much of a problem it is for him that he can't run the analysis he needs to run, and we need to fix this pronto.
So, I load a new printer, a new key, a new cable, and anything else that might be useful into the company van, and drive out to this factory (2.5 hours one way). When I get there, I go into the plant, turn on the printer, and drive back.
Total time onsite: less than 5 minutes
Total drive time: 6 hours (rush-hour on the way back)
Total cost to customer: $350 (or about $600 in today's dollars)
1 hour minimum labor @ $50/hour
6 hours drive time @ $50/hour
[[ insert your own "priceless" MasterCard advertisement here ]]
He came a little prematurly! haha April fools day is a week away.
What a joke. This is better than anything on TBS. Hopefully he won't patent it.
This guy is currently being humiliated, and will likely experience national coverage when the print media get ahold of the story. Don't spam him, too. It's adding injury to insult, or something like that.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
There are few things more frightening in a workplace than a fool who is shown up to be a fool.
This whole thing was a disaster. The story should never have been posted on the CentOS forums in the first place.
Look, let's get our head screwed on right here. Sure, on first read the city manager guy looks like an insane nut going ballistic.
Now, go back. Read the dialog again. Assume that "CentOS" is equivalent in your mind to "Gator" (or Claria or whatever the hell they call it these days).
Actually, most of his responses were not that unreasonable. He blustered and was ready to go on the attack, but who hasn't done so on a bad day at some point in their life? I'd be more than happy to slag Claria at the drop of a pin. I remember once thinking that an online retailer had ripped me off and started threatening them, when in fact, I had simply misunderstood something about the product they sold me.
The initial response from the CentOS lead sounds kind of like the Claria people saying "it's free, so you should like it", and the "we provide it" sounds like the CentOS people put the thing on the website, from his standpoint. You have to realize that the guy thought that he had some sort of spyware, and figured that he was dealing with a rather nasty group of people.
I understand where the CentOS guy is coming from. I've had my own share of uninformed people that want tech support on the open source software I write. This is damned frusterating, he's a volunteer, and he went out of his way to resolve the problem to just be threatened even more. I would be very tempted to do the same thing he did (more likely, just ignore the sender). But...ultimately that's part of life when you provide software to a lot of people. Microsoft undoubtedly gets vast number of calls like this every day. This is why Tier I tech support exists -- because there are a lot of irate people that call up and insist that they know what they are talking about and are completely swinging at the air.
Now, here's why I think posting this was a really bad idea (at least from the CentOS standpoint). My manager is risk-adverse regarding Linux already. If something goes wrong, he doesn't want to be the one left holding the bag because he chose to try out Linux.
I can think of few things that will more rapidly sour an administrator towards a product than knowing that at one point before, someone tried to get technical support on the product, and had their (believed private) communications posted on a world-visible website with their real name attached, mocked, and then spread to major news sites. If my boss saw this, he would probably be very, very, very leery of ever letting me stick CentOS on any of our machines. He doesn't want even the possibility of being put in that situation. It doesn't cost *him* anything more to stick with Windows, and MS's tech people are not going to post his conversations with them and try to tell the world how stupid he is, which could be a severely career-damaging thing for him.
And despite all the bad things about Microsoft, they won't post private correspondence online. I'd feel pretty comfortable calling them and trust that they aren't going to use my conversation to make fun of me.
I understand the CentOS lead not wanting to do what Microsoft's tech support people do -- not wanting to have to deal with irate and ignorant people. He does this for fun, and dealing with abuse is not fun. But he also has to recognize that this is, to many people, a pretty damaging thing WRT his product's appeal.
There are solutions to this problem (and lots of people have been figuring out how to cash in on it for a while). Various companies sell support services for open source software. But it is very important that people make the decision to use volunteer-produced open source with both eyes open, and this is a significant drawback. The tech support can be very good -- but it can also be frighteningly damaging.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I can sympathize with the guy.
I had a similar problem working with a spreadsheet,
Seems some hacker gained control and put this little PAPERCLIP GUY in the lower right hand corner.
My ten year-old used the computer and he went away
Mr. Taylor:
We have heard that you may have had trouble with a new program called L-EE-nux. We too have had such problems, and invite you to try out the solution we developed.
Microsoft(A)(S)(D)(F) ****ING KILL 2.0
Worst Wishes,
The Borg CEO
P.S. Would you be interested in a Microsoft Bridge 3.1 license? The rumors that they crash into the sea regularly are just rumors.
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
I worked in enterprise tech support for a couple of years (only slightly less frustrating than consumer support). The tech's initial response took me off guard as well. He really should have left that first line out.
Always re-read what you're about to send to be sure it's really what you want to say.
An even better answer (and one that answered the question accused) might have been.
/boot
"I do not have the access rights to your computers. If you have the rights or know someone who does, logging in as root and executing the commands:
cd
rm vmlinuz [sub right answer]
will disable the CentOS software without removing any user data. I provide this only as information on how this task may be accomplished and do not recommend this course of action. The course of action that I do recommend is to determine why your webserver is misconfigured and to fix it. I also recommend that you consult with your technical staff before executing this command. Finally, I would like to point you to the licensing agreement at...."
The funny part is that with the JATs of the world a backhanded answer like this often works best. They tend to assume everyone is as much of an AH as they are so they assume right off the bat that you are f***ing with them. Giving a sincere, honest answer messes with their worldview and makes them angry and uncomfortable.
Jerry: if you read this, your biggest mistake was not admitting that you made one. I sincerely hope that you lose your job over this. There are thousands who deserve your pay more than you do.
A lot of people have noticed the mailto link on Mr Taylor's page has gone. In the interest of public saftey. I have found (thanks to the google cache) Mr Taylor's email address.
mailto:citymgr@cityoftuttle.org
Enjoy.
This has been a public service announcement. Friends don't let politicians drive the internet
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
When dealing with an irrational, rude or threatening client you almost always want to keep them on email if at all possible:
1) Records. What happens if this guy really calls the FBI? There is no indication (and some strong contraindications) that this guy would tell the truth.
2) Distance. This guy is threatening, abusive and quite possibly psychotic. Do you really want him to know where you live (maybe not so much this guy but read the repo story and think about it).
3) Cooling off. Even if the charmer on the other end gets irate (and he won't get as irate without the stimulus), you can take the time needed to glean what pearls he might leave. Are you going to take the time on a phone call to do that?
Here's how that scenario plays out on the phone:
- Call starts friendly
- Jerry gets rude and abusive
- Jerry gets VERY rude and VERY abusive. This may escalate to physical threats.
- You hang up
- He calls back...
Repeat until you fix the problem or call the police. When you call the police he is all sweetness and denials (in fact YOU were uttering threats). etc.
Went something like this. This was a variation on the one that I read.
Oh, and you shouldn't be so down on Oklahoma. They just have more important things to do than book 'learnin.
or does his nose look like it's been kicked in by a mule?
Must be from all the brown-nosing he had to do to get elected!
Apparently he isn't handling the publicity very well. Oklahoma man asks Reg to turn off the internet
This is the funniest thing I have seen for a long time.
less is more
I would like to propose that the next major Linux Conference be held at Tuttle, Oklahoma.
....
It would be even better if we could get the dates and times sorted so that the 'Burning Man' festival can also be held in Tuttle along with the Linux Conf, and why not chuck in a full on psy-trance concert at the same time ?
Just an idea anyway
Apple has a nice solution for the Caps Lock problem. In Mac OS X, password fields have an embedded Caps Lock indicator. It's not a cure for stupidity, but it does help alert the user.
(a) The CentOS guys don't get paid.
(b) Mr. City Manager was *not* his customer.
therefore...
(c) This CentOS developer responding *at all* should be considered a favor.
I mean, really. Think about if it'd been Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the machine - if he'd e-mailed or called Red Hat with that kind of crap, they'd probably (a) have charged him through the nose, (b) told him "you need to contact the hosting provider", and (c) told him never to contact them again because of the blind threats. Why should individuals working for NO MONEY put up with things no corporation would (or should, IMO) put up with? What idiot came up with this idea?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
His page in google cache:
w ww.tuttle-ok.gov/index.asp%3FType%3DB_BASIC%26SEC% 3D%257BCC5DEFB6-1B2A-4783-A5F8-A92275C95081%257D+& hl=en&gl=lk&ct=clnk&cd=1
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:PxCWwpAYRAEJ:
He has removed some mis-spelled words + email address [ citymgr@cityoftuttle.org ]after this incident
Maybe middle America just isn't ready for the internet
sadness
1 4M 4 133T H4X0R D00D3Z !!!!
Jerry Taylor citymgr@cityoftuttle.org
Remember, everyone: always write your email as if there was a real risk that it could end up on the front page of the New York Times. Because there is a real risk. Fortunately, it wasn't a slower news day, or the AP might have picked it up, too.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Well... as someone who ONLY gets work through word of mouth from head teachers at London schools and therefore relies on "customer service" in order to ensure a future meal, I'd have to disagree.
1) CentOS doesn't necessarily even HAVE customers, so there is no customer relations necessary. Customers would be people who PAID CentOS for the privilege of them licensing/supporting the software. This person was NOT a customer of theirs, if they even considered themselves to **have** customers. How would you react if I demanded that you professionally repair my garage door out of your own pocket just because you were the one who bought it and had it installed in a property you left five years ago?
2) If someone is talking crap and hasn't researched the topic at all, a polite correction is usually in order. If they persist, there's a point beyond which you cannot help them at all and therefore give up.
Personally, I would ensure that the boss of the person who was annoying me with such trivia was informed and would expect them to explain the situation to all concerned, even if that means telling them to back off because they don't know as much as me, **the person they are PAYING to know about stuff**. I have done this several times professionally and every time it's been well recieved and cured the problem for me.
However, when the annoyance if from someone who runs a city, there's nobody to complain *to* and, again, despite the fact that my livelihood would depend on dealing with such people politely, there is a limit beyond which I will not entertain garbage. For a developer of a free operating system not being paid for support, I don't EXPECT anything. It would be **nice** if they were polite at first, even it were "I'm sorry but you are mistaken. Contact your technical support team." but they aren't required to do anything, politely or not.
3) We don't know the context or the number of emails/calls. If may just be a badly worded comment that was supposed to sound genuine (something like "I'm sorry that your city is experiencing problems...") or it may just be taken completely out of context.
Personally, I find I get MORE work by talking honestly. If a company tells a client something which is complete garbage in a meeting where I am supposed to be the technical contact, I will have no problems about pulling them up on it. That's my job - to advise and I have done exactly that before now.
If someone is talking crap, I will tell them that (politely at first) and anyone else who asks. I have done that. If that person keeps bringing up the same INCORRECT or MISLEADING detail/quote/whatever, I will pull them up time and time again until they learn to correct it and each time my patience will wane... At this point they will be under no illusions as to what I think of what they are saying.
If I hear that a client has been given totally ludicrous advise, I make that clear in my response ("They said ***WHAT***?! And you're PAYING these people?").
Now considering that I have to be infinitely politer to these people because they ARE my clients, they are paying me and I only earn money from that single task, this episode isn't a million miles away from how I would respond to such incompetence if I were pushed enough. Now factor in that the guy isn't a customer, that you don't HAVE customers, isn't paying you for your time and didn't even bother to start off politely and the comments from CentOS (possibly taken out of context) are very mild in comparison.
Oh, and it's more than I would have done to have helped the bloke as much as they did. Fortunately, though, the saga has gone so public that the guy has only humiliated himself. Were it me, it wouldn't have got far enough for that to happen and instead I'd actually INVITE the FBI or whatever local authority he had threatened to use against me to tell him to shut up.
What prompted you to identify CentOS's reply as "not getting things off on the right foot", rather than starting at the beginning, with Taylor's initial email?
If you're going to blame the entire mess on the first person to act ignorant and abusive, then CentOS is clearly nothing more than a victim. Their response was clearly provoked from the very beginning by Taylor's bad attitude.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Stupid and unprofessional behaviour will only get worse if you make them angry - no matter how angry they make you.
If that's true, then how can you possibly blame CentOS for their attitude? By your logic, they were confronted with stupid and unprofessional behavior, and it could only have made them angry. Everything worked out exactly as you predict it should, and it was all caused by stupid and unprofessional behavior initiated by the City Manager. If he didn't want to be treated badly, he should never have started the way he did.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Fast forward 2 years to the end of the project. Even with *three* months of warning, it took a dozen emails - some shockingly like the ones from "Jerry" - to GIVE them the domains. The highlights included them:
- saying they didn't want them (this is after printing 1000s of pamphlets with the address on it)
- suggesting that we were holding it hostage and wanting to blackmail them
- trying to 'steal' it from us, to the point of discussing legal options with our registrar
- demanding, after repeatedly being told otherwise, to be given access to our registrar account so that they could move the accounts over
- refusing to let me speak to their techs
When I pointed out that the process for requesting a domain transfer hadn't changed in, well, forever, and that a link to follow that process was right on their registrar site, they accused me of being condescending.Sigh. Maybe Halliburton charged too little.
The mega-long URLs are keys to lookup the webpage in a database. It appears to use GovOffice, some Microsoft-based ware. Tuttle's new webserver is based on MS Windows.
CentOS the slowest Is CentOS not the slowest of RHEL rebuilds according to this post on the CentOS mailing list?
I actually live in this tiny little nothing town. I can certainly vouch for the fact that it is run by a bunch of incompetent old fools. This is a town whose claim to fame is a college football quarterback who no longer plays. Its on our water tower.
Perhaps I should go down to city hall and make fun of him to his face? It could be amusing in the very least.
You all are doing more to set back FOSS in Oklahoma than Microsoft could in a thousand years. Back off. The city manager was a startled old fart who thought he was being hacked. The CentOS tech was an asshole who poured fuel on the fire and then posted this crap to glorify his ego and unfortunately tarnish FOSS. Plus the web server was not misconfigured, rather the lame former ISP overwrote the redirect that pointed to the correct web server. NOW BACK OFF!!!!~!
1. he didnt grow up in oklahoma
2. the people who elected him did
3. youre an ass
...they don't arrest people for being drunk in bars ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
...is for every child to get left behind.
In other news, Town (Mis)Manager Jerry Taylor has threatened Apple with a FBI complaint - because their Tiger software has apparently mauled some townfolk... http://www.tuttletimes.com/viewarticle.php?id=949
"But this one goes to 11!"
It's posted in serious CYA fashion, but it's finally there. Taylor is still admitting no wrongdoing for being a clueless asshole.
0 1244.html
http://www.tuttletimes.com/local/local_story_0882