Administrivia

The big news last week was the decimation of the Info-Mac archive site at <sumex-aim.stanford.edu> by an unknown cracker. This troglodyte seems to have gotten his jollies deleting hundreds of files at a public Internet resource and depositing kiddie-porn, along with an undoubtedly bogus email address. Needless to say, the Info-Mac archives will be down for a while as the moderators rebuild them from the mirror sites (yet another good reason for mirror sites!). Please use one of the mirror sites mentioned in TidBITS #213 to retrieve old files. If you have any clues as to who might have been so offensively stupid as to have done this, feel free to tell me or to <[email protected]> and we’ll hopefully be able to put the information to good use. Jeff Sikkema <[email protected]> was connected when the cracker was deleting files and watched, frustrated and helpless, as files disappeared. Jeff sent me email immediately, but I unfortunately didn’t receive it in time to do anything more than forward to the appropriate people, all of whom had already realized by that time. We’ll find out the proper course of action should anyone see this sort of thing happen again, an Internet 911 number as Jeff put it, and publish that information here. The Internet was built on trust and cooperation, and it’s unacceptable to allow this sort of vandalism to sully our community resources.