By Frank Hayes Single point of failure. That's the right term for talking about the mess in San Francisco, where last week the city government finally

By Robert McMillan San Francisco | Monday, 28 July, 2008 Life on Mars (which screens at 8.30pm on Mondays on TV One) is a great TV series.

While the full story behind San Francisco city government computer engineer Terry Childs hasn't yet come out, one thing is certain: the mainstream media is ignorant about technology.
Moreover, either the city government and prosecutors are deliberately painting things in as negative a light as possible in order to force Childs out -- as he had reportedly claimed -- or they are as ignorant as his defense team is portraying them.
,100 modems around just in case he needed to break into the system? And say, maybe one could track such misuse? Perhaps by using "an ability to track anyone who tried to get into the system"?

Prosecutors portray Terry Childs as an unstable, power-mad computer engineer who held hostage the San Francisco city network he had built and awaited its destruction as revenge on bosses he saw as inferiors.
To Childs' friends, some former colleagues and his younger brother, that view doesn't remotely resemble the 43-year-old Kansas native they know: a reliable, self-made professional who overcame a troubled childhood and a stint in state prison that started when he was just a teenager.
r good or ill, with near-total control of the city computer network.

Only days after the city of San Francisco regained control of its computer network after an alleged hijacking, a new vulnerability has come to light--this time brought on by the city itself.
The San Francisco district attorney's office has apparently made public nearly 150 usernames and passwords used by city officials to gain access to the city's network. The list was submitted to the court as Exhibit A in a case against Terry Childs, a 43-year-old network administrator for the city who was arrested July 13 on four felony charges of tampering with the city's computer network.
avin Newsom earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Childs handed them over directly to the mayor.