CONIECTO

A place where stories, thoughts and ideas come together

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

KmWiki under attack

I was referring the KmWiki in a paper I wrote recently for the ECKM.
I had some trouble in finding the right way to refer to the KmWiki and Wikipedia in general, and not to a particular article.
This morning, I wanted to make sure I had put the proper link to it. And...surprise! The meta-index was gone, and instead, there was a referer to an escort service from Rusia! I won't reproduce it here, because I do not intend to bring them more traffic than they already have. It sounded like this:

"Be sure to read escorts works for me escorts etc... http://..."

My first thought was of announcing someone, asking for help for restoring the MetaIndex page.
The second thought was "Come on, this is a wiki! You must be able to do it yourself!"

I found the right button and rolled back to the previous version.
The log showed me that the ad was placed there 3 days before, on the 12 June. Oh my God, and for 3 days there was no entry page for the KmWiki!

1.771 - Current Revision (me)
revised: 2005/06/15
by: 213-202-169-221.bas503.dsl.esat.net


1.770 (the bad guy)
revised: 2005/06/12
by: adsl-ull-235-18.46-151.net24.it

I wonder who the hacker was and if he/she had the slightest interest in KM!

Came back home tonight to finish this post and discovered that the situation is worse than this morning - this is what I found!



Help needed! this goes beyond my expertise!

... or maybe I am just too tired after the volley ball game played this afternoon with the IDC colleagues!
|| Gabriela 11:56:00 AM
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Thursday, June 09, 2005

Fresh start

I arrived yesterday in Ireland, flying from Duesselforf -Weeze to Shannon airport.
I had to spend the night before in Cologne, as the airport bus was leaving at 5:30 am.
Picked up a place I knew years before, and it didn't disapoint me: no credit card needed, a clean, peaceful and friendly place, supportive people, and...more computers in the lobby!

In Limerick, I had one hour to get to the University, and another hour to take posession of my desk and brand-new Dell computer, to say hello to my new colleagues and to regain my breath, before attending Erran Carmel's presentation organised by the ISERC. I recorded it on my MP3 stick, but later on I found out it was actually recorded on video by the ISERC (the link to it can be found on the bottom of the page, and the slides are also available for download). The presentation was titled "Offshoring - Distance Matters", and it was a comprehensive review of the problems raised by offshoring (not the same thing as outsourcing).

Carmel's most recent book, Global Software Teams: Collaborating Across Borders and Time Zones (High Performance Cluster Computing), speaks about the same problems.

After the presentation, Liam Bannon's team of the SOC-GSD project (that's us!) and Brian Fitzgerald's team of the Agile Approaches project had the chance of a less formal talk with prof. Carmel - a sort of round table were different points oof view were exposed, and the guest tried to answer to a few questions.

All I could do was to sit there and listen - I was jetlagged/tired/impressed, I had been travelling for 2 1/2 days, but the important thing was that I was finally here, and I had the chance of attending that presentation.

In the afternoon, a supportive colleague gave me a lift and brought me back to my B&B - a Georgian style house located right in the middle of the city, where, to the great dissapointment of my landlady who intended to drag me to a pub, I slept like a baby for 12 hours.
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