When the scientists in CERN pressed the button to kick start the experiment of the century that is widely feared as the Doom’s day come, they, in fact, accelerated to the speed of light the ambitions and the animosities of a small greek hacker group against another. Because, contrary to what Roger Highfield of Telegraph seems to imply, the hacker attack was not caused by fears that:
…the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.
Of course, to assess differently one had to actually read the hacker message that was in Greek, which is precicely what I did and what Panayotis Vryonis did too. Panayotis has shed some light on the issue posting a number of clarifying point. Number 3 of his points, is the most important:
3. The main “message”, is nothing radical or extreme. It is more or less an internal debate of the Greek Hacking Scene.
That is, one hacker team was trying to to prove to another they are more adept and skilled. CERN was simply chosen for the entailing publicity.
Now, I do not really know whether it was a big deal in terms of hacking virtyuosity to break in the CERN system, or, whether there was a black hole in the security policy of the organization, but, assuming that the attack could lead critical equipment astray, with fatal consequences for the mankind and the universe as we know it (ok, I said ’assumming’), what has been proven beyond doubt by the attack is that human stupidity will be the last to perish.
The screen shot is from the aforementioned Telegraph article.
