Posted on 08/18/2009 5:05:22 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday.
Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was back, and apparently fighting fit.
Members' discussion on the hack can be found in a thread here. Elsewhere on the forum, administrators report that they have bolstered security on the site and reported the attack to the FBI.
It's unclear what personal information was accessed during the attack, much less how it was carried out. Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro, quips the the attack is proof there's no “Intelligent Design” on Dawkins' forum.
Dawkins is noted for his no-holds-barred criticism of religion, which he describes as a delusion, and championing humanist and atheist views. The forum on the site boasts 68,083 members.
Ferguson's write-up of the attack, including screenshots, can be found here : http://countermeasures.trendmicro.eu/richard-dawkins-forum-compromised
I like a comment made by someone in another site :
Obviously this hack attack is the result of random bugs on the internet slowly developed over a long period of time by numerous, slight, successive modifications. Bit by bit, they became more and more adapted to attack networks and computers. This is self-evident, as any random viruses which could not hack it would be eliminated, and those that would would replicate preferentially. Unfortunately for this particular virus, it found itself on a doomed branch of the evolutionary tree, having run into an intelligent hostile force well adapted to destroy it.
That’s clever!!!
“at the end of the film, when Stein actually confronted Dawkins and forced him to answer the question “So where does life come from?” he was sincerely positing the proposition that life was seeded here from another planet...talk about being shown up for the arrogant imbecile he is.”
—I haven’t seen the film yet, but from a clip I’ve seen, which I believe is the entire Dawkins interview, it looks like Dawkins was just giving an example scenario of intelligent design and how to look for intelligent design after Ben asked him what he thinks the possibility is that intelligent design was involved in life and genetics. How some people took that to believe that Dawkins thinks we were created by aliens is beyond me. Why does that show him up as being arrogant or an imbecile?
“Stein also elicited from him that he believed that the existence of God was not a 100% impossibility, just that it was very very unlikely. He finally put it at 99%...but he’s not sure.”
—Now it sounds like you are criticizing him for not being arrogant enough and being too open minded.
It's tedious at times because of Steins comparison of evo’s to Nazis, however, Dawkins estimates that perhaps life on this planet was seeded by extraterrestrials.
He's a seething atheist, hardly a scientist.
Can’t be all that bad—he’s married to Lala Ward.
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