Experts troll 'biggest security mag in the world' with DICKish submission

Security researchers have taken revenge on a publishing outlet that spams them with requests to write unpaid articles – by using a bogus submission to satirise the outlet's low editorial standards. Hakin9 rather grandly bills itself as the "biggest IT security magazine in the world", published for 10 years, and claims to have …

[b b]

AWESOME!

I am going to use this when I make my next presentation to the board about IT spend!

Guaranteed funding :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet d***s against c***s

that in reply to your request for a comment, you will receive a request to come up with an article on their latest dicks.

p.s. as it's Friday, there's no greater ill-pleasure then to watch a "business" burying itself furiously with such legal threats. Perhaps it's a proof this Hakin9 is run by humans, not bots, as they are capable of learning from past case studies :)

[TRT]

Re: I bet d***s against c***s

Bunch of Wide Area Network Key Engineering Response Specialists.

[Rob Beard]

Re: I bet d***s against c***s

I'm going to make that my new job title :-)

Rob

[Gordon 8]

Classic

Planetary Scale Cluster

I want one.....

Well done to those who wrote this, one of the best reads in ages.. Was the BOFH involved??? sounds like hakin9 might be one of his little money making schemes

[FartingHippo]

Great graphs

The charts are funny too:

Title: The 10th-percentile latency of NMAP, as a function of popularity of IPv7

y-axis units: PDF

x-axis units: energy (GHz).

etc.

[Steve Crook]

Amazing...

"Furthermore, we reduced the effective tape drive throughput of our stochastic overlay network. Similarly, we tripled the effective floppy disk space of our Internet-2 overlay"

Once something has been done it all seems so obvious, and I'm just left wondering why no-one thought of this earlier. No doubt Apple have already patented it, and I look forward to the day that Apple include this marvellous advance in their iPhone. Shortly followed by the Samsung lawsuit.

[mark 63]

cool!, but depressing

Thats pretty cool, but its not that surprising a freeloading site like that was fooled

I was more amazed by the

"generates random Computer Science research papers"

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

mentioned in the article - those guys submitted similar bullshit to conferences and even delivered talks in person!

I know a lot of people on a lot more money than me who couldnt spot one of theses articles to save their life - in fact being highly paid seems to be a prerequisite - it means your watching people work ( aka managing or supervising) rather than doing it , therefore no need to actually know anything.

[Joe Drunk]

Re: cool!, but depressing

I take offense to that remark about managing/supervising. Well OK not really, like I give a rat's ass what anybody here or anywhere thinks of me. Some of us started as techs but it is true that you're just a glorified babysitter for those reporting to you and but-kiss/liar to those you report to.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/manager-achieves-full-mastery-of-pointless-manager,2622/

Parody yes but not far from the truth.

Beer icon because it's Friday and nearing that time!

[Kirbini]

Management IQ

The last place I worked we would throw a funeral wake for anyone promoted from front lines to management to mourn the IQ points they were going to be lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Freaking Users Can Keep On Freezing Files

wow

[Thomas 4]

Not a bad article

But I preffered their one about Penetrating Encrypted Networks In Secret.

[Pigeon]

I didn't read it fully, but...

Does this have to use the Completely Underground Network Tunnel?

--Basil Brush

[LaeMing]

Re: I didn't read it fully, but...

A small portion of the population claim they prefer to use the Asyncronus Networked Underground Systems. Not my own preferred interface method, but ... whatever works for them.

[Cliff]

2600 want free articles too

But then 2600 also edit them for content and relevance and produce a darn fine mag.

Oh, and send you 4 issues for your trouble.

[Rob - Denmark]

Re: 2600 want free articles too

"Oh, and send you 4 issues for your trouble."

So not exactly 'free' then?

[mark 63]

Re: 2600 want free articles too

wow just looked that up . not only is the mag still around, its printed and put on news stands.

can you belive it!

printed!

on paper!

[Pete 2]

How to tell a security specialist

> these security specialists are regularly spammed with requests to submit articles

Surely any self-respecting (or even slightly competent) security "specialist" would never do anything as naive as giving out a real email address to an online publication?

[GettinSadda]

My favourite quote:

"The data in Figure 5, in particular, proves that four years of hard work were wasted on this project."

[LaeMing]

Re: My favourite quote:

It's little things like that that give the article the gloss of credibility.

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Credibility?

No, absolutely no credibility. That one sentence should have given it away: every fule kno that data are plural.

[Peter Murphy]

There are some absolute crackers in there.

NMAP is elegant; so, too, must be our implementation. Our heuristic is composed of a collection of shell scripts, a homegrown database, and a server daemon. Continuing with this rationale, the homegrown database contains about 2371 instructions of SQL. Along these same lines, NMAP requires root access in order to allow B-trees. The code- base of 64 C files contains about 69 instructions of C.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just class :)

"Our experiments soon proved that exokernelizing our fuzzy Knesis keyboards was more effective than making autonomous them, as previous work suggested."

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Now, can we try this attack on the patent system?

[Chris 3]

Attacks such as this are launched every day. Quite a few succeed, sadly.

[TheRealRoland]

Too late for that

I think apple already beat you, by submitting the patent request for shaking the iphone / ipad to do certain things.

Wonder if they incorporated WANK in that document?

[ja]

Thanks a bunch smart-*ss

You have just invented the artificial lawyer (note to self, find words with mnemonic DILDO*). Apple will have more monety than there is matter in the gravitational complexity model. By Jove, I think he's got it!

* I live ten miles south of 'South Dildo, NL, Canada.'

[heyrick]

The way of the world...

They got punked, now they're screaming lawyers. Typical. Although I suspect the threats are "unspecified" as there is little they can devise that doesn't translate to "we were twats".

As for the article, some fine bull. Brilliant.

[Zobbo]

bogomips

"Unlike other authors, we have decided not to enable time since 1967 [20]."

I was in tears after reading that line. Also "bogomips" and "flip-flop gates" had me going. Great stuff.

[Deebster]

But bogomips and flip-flop gates are real things

BogoMIPS are Linus Torvald's fairly vague speed measure used in the Linux kernel for when time-based delays are too long.

And Flip-flop Gates: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/boolean4.htm.

The time line is definitely one of the best, although I was really tickled by "NMAP requires root access in order to allow B-trees" for some reason.

[nichomach]

One assumes that

in response to their lawyering up, Lyon will suggest that they eat a whole bag of DICKS...

[BenDwire]

7TB USB Key?

We may snigger now, but it will be reality soon enough.

Anyone else old enough to remember laughing at Hyacinth Bucket putting her milk bottles through the dishwasher? Who'd have imagined back then that we'd be forced to wash baked bean tins too!

[TheRealRoland]

Re: 7TB USB Key?

Bouquet, dear. Bouquet.

[ja]

Re: 7TB USB Key?

That's bouquet!

[Joe Drunk]

Now this is a Friday article!!

Well done El Reg!!!

[John G Imrie]

No mention of GlaDOS

and where's my CaKe hOLe

[g e]

Not forgetting

Completely Uniform Network Topology

Terabit Wan Access Technology

Wide Area Network Knowledge Enterprise Resource System

Secure Haptic Interface Touchscreens

for a few ;o)

[BoldMan]

"our heuristic prevents metamorphic epistemologies"

is almost as good as the Rockwell Turbo Encabulator's "sinusoidal depleneration"!

Can't wait to include some of this in my next Functional Design Document!

[Why Not?]

oh excellent, virtual beer on tap!

Surely they need to follow up with

Mapping Universal Ping Pathways Exercising Tangential Sources

Sourcing Periodical Articles Morally.

Utilising Spamming

Liberating Osi Structure Exponetially and Recursive Selection

[bill 36]

Credibility right down the pan

They compound the felony by not being able to spell properly either and continue it....

cheking :>)

[MissingSecurity]

Hakin9 obviously f-ed up...

but I still like reading it. I understand not wanting to be spammed left and right, but hell this is the same community that says we need to be sharing more. I guess I'll have to read that one in full since I havn''t yet.

[Digininja]

Hakin9 - Spam Kings

As the nmap guys were writing their article I was also writing my own about how I've been being spammed by the Hakin9 team for the past 3 years.

www.digininja.org/blog/hakin9_spam_kings.php

To the message above this, it isn't about the sharing it is about the constant nagging to write articles. I write articles which I publish for free on my own site, I am not interested in writing for Hakin9 and have been telling them for the last 3 years but they just won't listen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hakin9 - Spam Kings

Hey there, Mr Digininja, fancy writing on our site!

[Allan George Dyer]

Re: Flesch Readability Score

You probably shouldn't include the code sections and references when using a formula meant for English sentences.

[raving angry loony]

So Hakin9 is a high tech version of the Huffington Post? Good to know.

[Peter Mylward]

This is Brilliant!

Unlike other authors, we have decided not to enable time since 1967;

Emulation of Semaphores

Brilliant

[David Pollard]

Oh the delights

References to sources such as, "Journal of xxx, yyy zzz" bring back happy memories of writing a tabloid headline generator in BASIC on a Tandy TRS80.

[Unicornpiss]

Clearly...

Clearly the article on D.I.C.K.S. was talking about a security penetration tool, while the followup article will be talking about setting up honeypots...

[Lukin Brewer]

The funniest line IMO:

"I hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as much as the authors enjoyed writing their articles."

[streaky]

Low Bar

I wanted to play this game with 9/11 troofers but never plucked up the courage. Just write something so ridiculous no sane person would ever think it was legitimate and watch the magic unfold.