Official White House Email Address (fwd)

[Rob Harper]

In <1993Jun8.001214.11194 at ncsu.edu> samodena at csemail.cropsci.ncsu.edu (S. A. Modena) writes:

>To Rob Harper, I'd just say that the U.S. is not (yet) organized along the
>lines implicit in your posting.

>In fact, it's hardly a partisan comment these days to note that the White
>House seems to be rehearsing for Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.  :^)

The whole point of my posting is to show that the whole Whitehouse
effort so far is rather amateurish. I have been employing nngrab
to scan though every single newsgroup on Usenet to see what other
people are saying. 

You get the hacker who tries to finger the president and gets the
following reply.

finsun ~> finger president at whitehouse.gov
[whitehouse.gov]

        Finger service for arbitrary addresses on whitehouse.gov is not
supported. If you wish to send electronic mail, valid addresses are
"PRESIDENT at WHITEHOUSE.GOV", and "VICE.PRESIDENT at WHITEHOUSE.GOV".

You then get some clever dick who replies.

>Gee, I tried it and here's what I got:
>
>ac13% ftp whitehouse.gov
>Connected to whitehouse.gov.
>220 Read DISCLAIMER.readme for our legal disclaimer
>Name (whitehouse.gov:rpwhite): anonymous
>331-Guest login ok, send e-mail address as password.
>331 Begin your password entry with a - (dash) to suppress the 
>helpful messages.
>Password:
>230-               WELCOME to The Whitehouse's anonymous ftp server
>230-                              The Whitehouse
>230-                     Office of Information Technology
>230-                              whitehouse.gov

And all the eager beavers immediately crank up a ftp session to the
whitehouse only to find that it does not work and the whole thing is a
hoax. But when your read through the fake ftp session it whets you
appetite... and you say hey these guys are really on the ball after
all

230-  For information on submitting documents to this site, retrieve
230-      /how.to.submit.
230-
230-  We archive most government documents and news releases as well as
230-  distributing Executive branch announcements. Pub/wais contains a Sparc
230-  binary for a  simple wais client that you can run in your terminal
230   window.
230-  We suggest that you download it and follow the installation instructions
230-  (they're simple) so that you may begin to use WAIS for your searching
230-  and retrieval.
230-
230-  Or telnet to whitehouse and login as swais to test a simple wais client.
230-  If you email to info at whitehouse.gov you will be sent help information
230-  about how to use the different services whitehouse provides.
230-
230-  We are experimenting with description based searches and downloads from
230-  this archive with WAIS. If you would like to try this, get the file
230-  /pub/wais/ftp-wais.readme.

Incredible isn't it the whitehouse is using all the latest technology
but it get better. There are directories for health, economy, bosnia,
etc. Wow this is fantastic! Even a gopher hole with wais sources for 
all sorts of things.

  Politics: White House Papers, Campaign 92, UN, Supreme Court, etc.

 -->  1.  Browse the Proposed US Budget for 1994 /
      2.  Search the proposed US Budget for 1994  <?>
      3.  Search  Bush campaign speeches <?>
      4.  Search  CIA World Fact Book <?>
      5.  Search  Clinton campaign speeches <?>
      6.  Search  Fascism Archives <?>
      7.  Search  Supreme Court Decissions <?>
      8.  Search  US Congress - Phones and Faxen <?>
      9.  Search  US Federal Judges <?>
      10. Search  US Government Programs <?>
      11. Search  White House Press Releases and Speeches <?>

My faith in the president has been restored. He doing the right
thing (OK that was from a movie not a song). But now we take a reality
check and find that what the whitehouse offers is two mailboxes.

However it is not all that desperate. If you do some detective work
you will find that the hoaxer in actual fact used an existing site
to fabricate the forged ftp session. I could tell you the site name
but I don't suppose anybody would use it since it is not at the
whitehouse and it does not have a big bold E-mail address.

Rob "let the sunsite in" Harper
--
 Rob Harper                        E-mail:          harper at convex.csc.fi    
 Center for Scientific Computing   Molbio/software: harper at nic.funet.fi
 Tietotie 6, P.O. Box 405          Telephone:       +358 0 457 2076
 SF-02101 Espoo Finland            Fax:             +358 0 457 2302