It really is true: nothing is quite as it seems. A couple of unconnected stories this week should give businesses of all sizes cause for reflection.
First up, comes the story from San Francisco of a disgruntled network manager who decided to play hardball with his bosses… by resetting every administrator password to the system. He effectively had control of the city council’s entire network and was able to hold them to ransom by refusing to hand over the new passwords.
The other news was the almost disastrous effects caused by a dateline on the website of a Florida newspaper. For reasons not entirely clear a spike in visitor traffic put a six year old story regarding United Airlines filing for bankruptcy onto the site’s most read business story charts.
The 2002 report, which when accessed from the most read story chart, carried a September 2008 dateline that snowballed the old news all over the US media. For within seconds Google’s spider had picked up on the story’s prominence and it too posted the article as a new story in Google News and everything went haywire then.
The blunder was eventually straightened out – but not before a market scare saw United’s stock nosedive by a heart-stopping 75 per cent.
So what to make of these events?
Firstly, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The network manager in San Francisco had built an empire that gave him the keys to the castle. Concentrating too much power and influence in one individual is clearly bad for business.
Secondly, the old-for-new article recycling highlights the danger of not properly time-stamping articles and the over-reliance on scripts that insert today’s date in order to make content appear fresher than it really is.
Further, there are a great number of people interested in who or what was behind this sudden spike in traffic. Could it have been criminally dodgy stock speculators hoping to cash in on cut price United Airlines shares? Or a disgruntled ex-employee hoping to take the airline down? Or was it just plain bad luck.
If the cause was deliberate, whoever was behind it would appear to have been armed with a degree of premeditation and sufficient knowledge to know that Google’s algorithms are not infallible and can be duped.
