“With the increased availability of high-speed, always-on
Internet connections and the fact that Linux has become so easy to
install that certain species of bacteria are now being hired by MIS
departments, what was once the domain of rigorously trained, highly
specialized professionals has devolved into the Dark Land of the
Monkeys. Over the course of the past year, millions of new
machines have appeared on the Net, each and every one of them with
a misconfigured port 25….”
“Nevertheless, in the Dark Land of the Monkeys, I am King, and
the small fact that I administer a sendmail installation does not
in any way require that I actually be a qualified sendmail
administrator. I keep waiting to be dragged off by the Competence
Police, but they’re apparently no better at their job than I am at
mine. Giving me the ability to put a mail server on the Internet
merely because I can compile the software and cobble together a
configuration file is the moral equivalent of letting the baby
drive the steamroller because “he looks so cute….”
“This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I were alone. But there
are thousands – no, hundreds of thousands of others out there, each
and every one of them exactly like me. Only not as handsome.”