Friday, August 22, 2008

How Hacker Found Proof of He Kexin's Age - UPDATE

Stephen Hutcheon writes on The Sydney Morning Herald:

In his spare time Mike Walker likes to find things on web servers that were never meant to be found.

On Monday, after curiosity got the better of him, the 33-year-old computer security consultant toiled for hours without success, as he tried to dig up more information about the allegedly under-aged Chinese gymnast He Kexin.

On Tuesday, after redefining the parameters of his Google Hack, he hit the jackpot. Bingo! The mother lode.

On Google's cache he found evidence of a record of He Kexin's birth on a spreadsheet belonging to the General Administration of Sport of China - the country peak sports body.

But the data had been removed.

On the Chinese search engine Baidu, he went one better. He found two caches of Excel spreadsheet which had been published on the web and both of them showed He Kexin's birthday as January 1, 1994.

More here.

UPDATE: 23:28 PDT, 23 August 2008: Oh -- it was just a paperwork mix-up. Right. -ferg

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