Light On Dark Water

Weekend Music

Rupert Murdoch's media empire is trembling because reporters for one of his newspapers "hacked" cell phones of several people on whom they were reporting, including, disgustingly, a murdered girl. Being involved in the computer trade, and not totally uninterested in it, I always wonder what people mean when they a system was "hacked." To me the term implies something technically clever, the discovery of a software flaw that can be exploited for access to a system, or something of that sort, done by someone with a good deal of knowledge and ingenuity. So I was curious as to the nature of this hacking. I finally found, buried toward the end of one of the stories, that it was simply a case of phones sold with very simple passwords, such as "1234", which the owners unwisely or in ignorance failed to change. The reporters apparently just tried some of these default passwords, and sometimes succeeded.

So here, by way of emphasizing the foolishness of this password practice, is a brief and bubbly story of cyber-revenge. ("Shell account" is a term from back in the days of BBS systems running some variant of Unix; it refers to an account that typically has more access and privileges than usual. The implication is that the young lady now has the power to do some damage. Though if she were really going to she would do first and taunt after.)

I love this song.

I tried your birthday

I tried your mom's first name

I tried your cat's name

I tried your favorite bands

So let this be a warning: don't use easily-guessed passwords.