Welcome to Earthlink, where security is something we...wait, what does that word mean again?

[tacit]

Welcome to Earthlink LiveChat. Your chat session will begin in approximately 1 minutes. Feel free to begin typing your question.
'Michael' says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Me: You have been hosting a "phish" page that is intended to steal sensitive financial information from people for more than two

Comments

Incompetence

[edm]

[A]ny sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

It seems to me that ought to be printed on T-shirts and sold (at least to sysadmins/netadmins!). (Perhaps with suitable reference to the original, which is also appropriate for most sysadmin/netadmin work....)

Sadly I've pretty much given up trying to report such things due to the general disinterest around in fixing them. So I very much admire your persistence in reporting it (including a complex URL via phone!) and getting it taken down (at last).

Ewen

Re: Incompetence

[gesundyke]

Make the shirt, I'll buy seven. :)

Re: Incompetence

[labelleizzy]

fuck, I'll even buy one for a friend who's sysadmin at a struggling church nonprofit.

Re: Incompetence

[whitefox77]

Oh yes, my entire department needs these shirts.

[greenquotebook]

any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

[addiejd]

But I don't think it really is incompetence; I think it's negligence and laziness. I have seen this type of behavior over and over again in several different forms in different types of institutions. It's not that the people are incapable of doing what you want, it's that they hope that the more hoops you have to jump through the more likely you'll just drop it and then they won't have to do any work.

[peristaltor]

I join in the last sentence love. I wear an extra-large.

Just finishing Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market. In the chapter "Do No Evil", he points out that the structure of the organization can lead to that organization's evil, be it by pitting departments against each other with sufficient stakes ("encouraging competition"), or by dividing the task responsibilities enough to prevent any manner of transparency. Sounds like Earthlink might be victim of the latter.

[tacit]

Ooh, I'll have to check that one out. I love Michael Shermer (I trust you've read "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "The Science of Good and Evil"?).

[peristaltor]

Yes, on Weird, not yet on Evil. I also enjoyed Why Darwin Matters.

Weird Things should be required reading in high school.

I'm Not Alone in Wanting This On a T-Shirt

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