Putting Tuttle on the Map
Never heard of it either? Great, well, here's an exmaple of how NOT to put your town on the map.
Lets start with a quick background section. Linux is a (mostly) free OS. It's always free in terms of source code, and your rights to bork it however you see fit. Some distributions do cost money, but that's up the person who puts it out. So, its popular for servers, and web servers specifically. A default web server is Apache. When you first start it running, you get a page that looks like this. Take a second, and read that page. Do you think you can figure out what to do? (Or ask your sys admin to do?). Does it look at all like a hacked page would? Ok, on with the show,
CentOS is a Linux distribution. A guy in Tuttle, Oklahoma, somehow mistook this to be a hacker group, or virus that had infected his systems. Instead of reading that page above, or inquiring nicely (how many hacker groups have such a clean website, and easy to contact links?) he took the moral high ground and threatened to call the FBI, called the hackers, and all kinds of good stuff. To read the whole exchange (you will be laughing terribly hard by the end) go here.
Where does this guy get off being a public servant and acting in this manner? I will be writing him/his office expressing my displeasure at his actions, and while I can't encourage others to, I think it might be appropriate for legal residents of this country to express their displeasure as guranteed in the Constitution.
On an interesting note, i was about to get his email, but the link was apparently taken off his web page. Might he be trying to avoid people expressing displeasure? Bad move in a public office. I'll keep diggin, and if I find it will post it here. Now, keep in mind this guy (if you refise to read the whole exchange) says he "welcomes the publicity" of the story being leaked to the public. Ok, found it thanks to Slashdot. The guy's email is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org, and the mayor's is mayor@cityoftuttle.org
And the punch line to all this is the town's slogan:
"The City of Tuttle: The Place Where People Grow - Friendly!"
Edit: My email to him, the mayor, and a few newspapers can be found here.
