Quoderat

In the search logs for OurAirports, I noticed a series of searches for URLs:

http://www.feliciano.de/Webgalerie/bilder/Italy/une/yiwul/
http://www.unduetretoccaate.it/codice/aseje/wocobo/
http://www.altaiseer-eg.com/ar/articles/jed/umut/

At first, I thought they might be a kind of link spam — some sites display recent searches — but when I checked one of the URLs, I found something totally unexpected:

<?php echo md5("just_a_test");?>

They’re all the same. This is almost certainly related to passwords: is there a known flaw in a PHP content-management system like Drupal, or in the PHP API for a search engine like Lucene, where this would do some damage, or is it just a test probing for weaknesses? Is the PHP code supposed to be served up literally like that, or should I be seeing the MD5 instead?

Some people compare blogs (and mainstream media) to an echo chamber, constantly repeating and amplifying the same messages, but the echoes usually die out quickly. Not so, today, when I found this story on the planenews.com aviation news feed:

21 Feared Dead in Munich Crash.

About twenty one of the 44 passengers and crew of the British European Airways airliner which crashed yesterday near Munich carrying the Manchester United football team and many journalists are feared dead. About eight others are in hospital, seriously injured. Frank Swift, the former international goalkeeper, who had become a journalist, died in hospital.

I didn’t hear about any crash yesterday, but according to the Wikipedia article on Manchester United, there was a crash near Munich on 6 February 1958 that killed eight of the team’s players. In fact, when you follow the full story link in the posting, there is a story about the crash. The phrase “From the archive” is hidden in the deckline, but the dateline is “Saturday February 2, 2008″ (probably automatically updated by the site). There’s nothing else in the online version to indicate that this is an archived story from 7 February 1958, though a Brit would probably know that British European Airways ceased operations in 1974.

This is an easy mistake to make trying to keep up a blog of current events, and I don’t mean to suggest that the maintainer is stupid, or that I couldn’t do the same thing — in fact, next December, watch this spot for postings about an air attack on Perl Harbor.