Skip to primary content

Hacked | Mar 18 2003

Supposedly Google was briefly hacked this morning by someone inspired by my piece Circuits of Change. I’ve been inundated with emails about this, and just now someone sent me a screenshot of the hack.

Hacked Google logo Hacked Google logo; full screenshot

My first reaction, frankly, is one of dubiousness. Well, my first reaction is one of pride, actually. In some sense or another, someone took my idea and ran with it. And this someone was a damn good illustrator, for he/she managed to mimic the Google look to a treacly T.

According to the emails I’ve been receiving, the image appeared on Google at about 5:40 p.m. EST, and went down a few minutes later. Problem is, Google has a rock-solid reputation for geek invincibility, which makes it hard to believe that anyone could hack into their system. Could it have been hacked from within the company? One of the people who emailed me has suggested this, and while it at least seems possible, it’s undoubtedly a lot harder to pull off than we imagine.

There’s yet one more possibility, and that’s that Google “hacked” itself—even if only for two “unofficial” minutes on some subset of their ten thousand servers. However, whatever the political leanings of these folks, it’s hard to believe that they would to risk their business to make a two-minute anti-war protest.

The really sad thing, though, is that even if it happened, it makes no fucking difference. None. A piddly, meaningless, laughable, soon-to-be-forgotten zero of difference. Tomorrow we bomb Iraq.

That is, unless our president happened to go to Google this afternoon at just the right moment, see the hacked image, and through a series of associations known only to him, suddenly end up hitting himself on the side of the head and exclaiming, “Duh! Right! What was I thinking!”