i L i n d . n e t

Oh, no! I learned this morning that Kaaawa.net was hacked again, greeting visitors with a black screen, and at the top of the screen a short message: “Hacked by ULPOW.NET; The Eliminators (spyMASter)”.

Brenda in Austin was the first to send me word of the hack attack.

Because I was so annoyed with this hacker situation, I did a bit of sleuthing on Google and found out that these people attacking your website are most likely from Turkey. I don’t know that for sure, but it appears that way. They may be from the U.S. or even from Hawaii, and simply hiding behind the Turkish language.

I found a website where you can look up sites that they’ve hacked, and who actually did the hacking. It’s almost as if they are proud of this! Here are the stats (and webpages) for kaaawa.net ’s hacking activity.

I can’t believe these people…they even have screenshots of the webpages they’ve hacked!! There doesn’t appear to be any activity for ilind.net or ilind.com, but that doesn’t really mean anything—ilind may have been targeted by some other hackers.

I managed a quick but limited restoration of the site but there turned out to be deeper problems. Now I have to go back and rebuild much of it.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition of stories in today’s Star-Bulletin. Up front, there’s the first part of a series on homelessness in Hawaii by Nina Wu. Then, buried in an inner section, is a Helen Altonn report on an interview with UH Tropical Agriculture dean Andrew Hashimoto, which questions whether Hawaii has already exceeded the islands’ carrying capacity.

Here’s the section that caught my eye:

The change from large sugar and pineapple plantations to small parcels presents other challenges, said Charles Kinoshita, associate dean of the college, who worked 10 years for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Experiment Station.

The plantations were “a vertical industry,” training employees and providing housing, irrigation and electrical systems for the community, which no longer is the case, he said.

Excellent point. Is part of the solution to our present housing crisis a new era of employer-provided housing? Safe housing should be a basic right for all, along with sufficient food, clean water, and medical care. While it’s true that few treasure the “company town” control that went with plantation life, we have yet to recreate a workable system for assuring all of our citizens get these basic services. But how this can be accomplished now that Hawaii real estate has been turned into a globally-desired commodity in which we all compete to some extent with the rich and mobile elite in a global marketplace? If we didn’t already own this house in Kaaawa, we couldn’t afford to buy it at today’s prices, which would require a monthly payment in the neighborhood of $5,100 even after a full 20 percent down payment. It’s hard to figure how working people will handle housing needs in another 25 years in a purely private housing market.

Meanwhile, my old friend Chuck’s blog, Of Two Minds, keeps churning out new insights into the problematic aspects of the national (and global) economy, a less-than-cheery backdrop to this discussion of how we’re going to meet community needs in the future.

In the meantime, I keep reading stories like this one on the ripple effects of the mortgage melt-down and wonder what kind of under-reported impacts this is having here at home?