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." "

Comments

Interesting study on incompetence

[DiveX]

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

Re:Interesting study on incompetence

[dougmc]

It is perfectly possible for the majority of people to be above the mean [average] or modal [average] but impossible for the majority to be above the median [average].

Average usually refers to mean, as you're probably aware, but you're also right that people tend to be pretty loose with the definition.

In any event, my favorite example for when talking about this sort of thing is this --

Most people have more than the average number of legs.

... and it's not just most, but probably around 98%.

In case an explanation is required (it shouldn't be, but some need one), most people have two legs. A few people have one or zero legs, but nobody that I'm aware of has three legs (we'll leave that joke alone) so the average (mean) number of legs that people have is 1.98 or so, and most people have more legs than that. The median and the mode are both 2, but the average is 1.98 or so.

Ultimately, not everything has a nice Gaussian distribution.

And as for `incompetent, and unaware of it', I'd consider those results to be pretty much common sense, or at least they mirror my experiences. One thing I've learned over the years is that it's not always about what you know -- it's also about what you do when you don't know (know how to look it up!) and most importantly, to know when you don't know. It's true that most of the really smart people I know know lots of things, but they also know what they don't know.

As for Jerry Taylor, I can understand him not understanding the message he found on the web page. Yes, it's there in relatively plain English, but people do make mistakes. But really, if somebody responds to you politely and points out that they're not to blame and that somebody else is, perhaps you should at least consider that they might be telling the truth and check into that before continuing the tirade. And his `apology' (I use the term lightly here) at the end (the site is down, but I read it earlier ... it was `it's unfortunate that it took all these accusations to get to the truth' or something like that) ... if there was ever any doubt before, it tells us a lot about how Jerry responds to people who point out his mistakes. Jerry may have welcomed the publicity then, but I doubt he does now. I wonder if he even has a job anymore.

Re:Interesting study on incompetence

[Bohiti]

Wow, yeah, someone doesn't remember much from Statistics 101, or didn't think through a very simple scenario:

IQ's of 5 people:
1, 1, 10, 10, 10
Ave: 6.4

The majority are above average.

The PHB in question

[sethadam1]

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.

Re:The PHB in question

[JabberWokky]

Significantly more useful is this fellow's information. Mayor Lonnie Paxton can be reached at mayor@cityoftuttle.org. He may not be aware of how large this ugly little spat has spread and unaware of how inflated and incorrect his manager's knowledge of IT is.

--
Evan

Re:The PHB in question

[sane?]

Oh yes, and the City of Harrah's website is dead as well. However Google has a copy in the cache with Jerry's name on it. Choctaw Electric Cooperative has a new site which may or may not be his handywork.

Yelling!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:MSCE strikes again

[REBloomfield]

Or even an MCSE. If you're going to knock us, get the term right.

Re:Law Suit!

[beheaderaswp]

You are aware that his publicly posted salary is in the mid $60,000 range?

At least he is not cheap.

Re:Law Suit!

[James_Duncan8181]

Since CentOS are down, I have mirrored the whole exchage at http://jaduncan.net/centos-vs-city-of-tuttle.

Re:!!!!~11111!!!

[Palidase]

22 years in systems engineering, but he hasn't got a clue as to how web sites operate. This guy epitomizes problems we all see every day: Incompetents who don't recognize their own incompetence. Then he compounds it by being an arrogant bastard and an overbearing, threatening weenie to boot.

According to his website, he was a Program Manager at Raytheon for 22 years. To my knowledge, Program Manager != Systems Engineer. His issue isn't incompetence, it's a overinflated opinion of himself. But, I imagine that will be taken care of shortly, after this has been national news.

Re:tell this inbred bozo what you think of him

[WindBourne]

Don't bother. He has already removed homself and all the concil members. Since only the mayor has Instead, try the mayor and the Tuttle Ok Newspaper.

Re:I wonder how long it'll take him

[rainman_bc]

No, but you can email the mayor at:

mayor@CityofTuttle.org

Let's all have some fun with this :)

Local Telephone Company

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

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 .plan (Boo!.) (And yes, the .plan was available outside their network for anyone to see.)

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 .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.

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.