What a Bunch of Hacks

To begin, let’s go ahead and make some clarifications:

1. Hacking is wrong.
2. Hacking can be justified if the outcome is entertaining.

It is important to keep these tenets in mind when reviewing some recent examples of funny and unfunny hacking successes:

News of the World hacking into telephone voicemail to find stories: not funny. (Although, angry protester subsequently trying to throw pie into the face of Rupert Murdoch: textbook funny.)

Hacking into someone’s bank account and using their financial information for personal gain: not funny.

Attending the Black Hat Conference and allegedly hacking into the conference hotel’s billing system to charge X-rated movies to the accounts of every priest staying at the same hotel for a religious conference, then watching from the lobby as many of them dispute the charges when checking out: funny. Hilariously so.

Posting photo of naked girls in a compromising position on someone’s Facebook page and then designating all of the women in that friend’s account as “tagged” in the photo: not very funny, but becomes slightly funny (and flattering that she thinks I’m exciting enough to have naked photos floating around in cyberspace) after you respond to a neighbor’s urgent text about the photo and explain that the account has been hacked and the photo is not really you.

The level of hacking I was exposed to was even more deviant when I worked for a network security company. It was a start-up company and the original six employees spent the first year in business working out of the company president’s basement, which gave them access to his children’s toys. They used this proximity as an opportunity to re-program his daughter’s Furby so that instead of saying things in Furbish, it would speak English … and say things like, “Satan is my lord.” Perhaps good taste and the amount of therapy required to undo the results of that particular incident should dictate that this example goes in the “not funny” category. But I’m still going with funny.

to display messages such as “Alien Spotted” and “Please use condom”: funny, and health-conscious, respectively.

This Hunter Mill Road sign incident is very entertaining. I remember a few years back when a lower tech version of the same thing happened to the Cox Farms marquee on Route 123. Someone had rearranged the vinyl letters on that to read, “Make love to your tomatoes.” That was definitely funny. (I hope!)

It seems that the people commenting on the Patch article about the VDOT signs being hacked appreciated the humor that the hacker obviously intended …

… at least until they saw the alien a couple of miles ahead.