Something from the referral bag: Who is Jenny McTagarty, Girl Pirate?

Well, according to Creepy Steve of Off On A Tangent, who found a dead man's chest of pirate girls, Jenny can be found at Booty: Girl Pirates on the High Seas. Later, though, he lets us know the sad truth: Jenny McTagarty, Girl Pirate weblogger, she ain't a maiden, but none other than Elmont, the homeless man.

Excuse me?

Oh, yeah, in case you don't follow, Elmont is a comic strip character who has become "the blogger's blogger," at least in the series of strips Garry Trudeau dedicated to comment on weblogs on Doonesbury.

Which brings us to Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D., over at The Rhetorica Network, who also outed Elmont. He seems to have had a hard time with the whole series:

I was getting annoyed with the strip late in the week because it seemed aimless. Just what was Trudeau satirizing--bloggers, college students, internet sociology, all of the above? I would prefer he had focused on something more specific.

Though he does find the silver lining in the Elmont denouement:

...I liked that Jenny McTagarty turned out to be crazy Elmont. I suppose I liked it because this was a comment on identity. Now exactly what it is Trudeau is trying to say, I don't know. And I'm not sure I care. What the cartoon points up for me is that those of us who blog are ultimately judged by the quality of our ideas (or the correctness of our ideology). Some of us are famous. Some of us are obscure. A few of us are anonymous. But in the end, you dear reader do not really know us as corporal beings. We are blips on your screen.

The blips hide the physical differences. The blips cannot hide the ideological and intellectual differences.

Maybe that's all that Trudeau meant to say after six days of jabs at webloggers. Or maybe he was trying to say all webloggers are losers. If that's the case, we didn't need Trudeau to tell us that, we had Joe Lira to do so months ago. Still, where Trudeau beats Lira is he did it on "a more noble place of record than the Internet." (Syndicated comic strips, my friends, that's where it's at!)

Driver 8, the blog that allows its readers to create the content. Last week a cracker using the handler hax0redbyme broke into, of all things, Blogger's servers.

Y'know, on the one hand you want to shake your head and wonder what kind of weirdo freak would attack a blogger host. But hackers aren't in the business of attacking the bad, they attack the weak. They're the jackals of the wired world. Thanks to moves like hax0redbyme's, bloghosts learn where the weak spots are in their software; and while it would be reasonable to point out that he could have e-mailed them a warning instead of screwing with everybody, there's no payoff for the hacker that way. He gets his "cut" in the form of pain, but it isn't malevolent.

The Raven • 10/29/02; 4:51:49 PM

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"...it isn't malevolent." Except when it is malevolent. Let's forget that contradictory comment and move on.

I'm reading Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoos Egg," and as he mentions, the hacker (or, more correctly, cracker) is like a thief arriving to a town where everybody trusts each other and leaves their houses unlocked. After the thief has his way with said houses, they'll learn about security and locking their doors, but will they feel gratitude to the thief for showing them this fact of life? Can the act be consider not malevolent at all?

Of course, we should consider I'm quoting a well known sourpuss...

Charly Z • 10/30/02; 7:02:31 AM

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Charly: Except when it is malevolent. Let's forget that contradictory comment and move on.

Just a sec. Malevolence is "having, showing, or arising from intense, often vicious, ill will, spite, or hatred." [MWCD10] Now according to the given definition above, I'll argue that hackers (technically crackers, sure) are rarely malevolent. Pesky, irksome, and annoying as they may be, they strengthen the net far more than they endanger it. And I can't buy Stoll's "town thief" simile because hackers don't usually steal, nor do they wander into unprotected areas (generally). More often some company touts its security as being "impregnable" and that sets up a challenge the hacker finds irresistable. Consider some cases in point, like when a hacker gets into a government html directory (that they should not be able to penetrate). What do they usually do? Put up a jpeg and scribble some "gotcha" text on the Web page and that's it. Maybe there are some cases of a disgruntled ex-employee of some company getting back into a database and causing trouble (malevolent) but this isn't the norm. What I don't want is to see a foreign power hacking our systems and causing major damage or securing a military advantage, and it's our homegrown hacking community that ferrets out the flaws and keeps our telecommunicative immune system up to speed. The Blogger takedown doesn't make any sense to me, but bloghosts will be stronger because of it.

The Raven • 10/30/02; 9:48:48 AM

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Raven: Gotcha. Though most crackers are just pranksters, my comment arouse from concern about those who would actually attempt to steal information they could benefit from, be it credit card numbers, social-security numbers, any other numbers.

And there's also the issue of plain privacy or personal space. Returning to Stoll, he also posited what if the infractor was not a thief, but just someone who wandered into your unlocked house and took a look at your diary, eat in your dining room, took a nap in your bed. The damage is minimal, but the invasion still happened. Though I like as much as the next person to see some loudmouthed company or government office being cut to size after touting about impregnable security, the jones arising from the invasion are hard to shake.

P.S.: By the way, that "contradictory comment" phrase I wrote, I meant it about the way I constructed my response. "It is not malevolent except when it is." What is the right name for that, a feeble argument in that shape?

Charly Z • 10/30/02; 10:30:13 AM

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Charly: Re: self-contradictory statement. What is the right name for that...?

You got me. Maybe some kind of oxymoronic tautology - but the technique isn't weak, it's good rhetoric and forceful. By the way, speaking of language, I followed a link on Dolinov's page and found the Raven in German. See if you can get Driver 8 auf Deutsch over there. Man, I gotta kick out of that!

The Raven • 10/30/02; 11:18:42 AM