Part II : Olympic Hacking - Let’s go for the Gold The Day After
Filed Under (All, Hacking) by Ph4][)HL1 R4Ph1Q1 on 22-08-2008
Tagged Under : Aa, Beijing, Case Of Mistaken Identity, Chinese Version, Document Cache, Fourteen Years, General Administration, google, Google Search, Gymnastics, Hackers, Memory Hole, Mistranslation, Olympic, Outpouring, Screenshot, Search String, Spreadsheet, Suspicion, Xls
The Day After
This blog has gotten a lot of feedback in the last 24 hours. If you haven’t read the original story, read that first to catch up. Today, the story continues.
In addition to the outpouring of mirrors and support for preserving the information I discovered, I’ve also received some very helpful information from other Google hackers. Specifically, I was encouraged to check out the Chinese version of Google: google.cn. Presented here are the results, not all of which I can take credit for.
What about google.cn?
When I woke up this morning, I ran my existing search string against google.cn. Interestingly, I got back two spreadsheet results: the original spreadsheet I blogged about, zctc.xls, and a new spreadsheet I hadn’t previously discovered, 05ticao.xls. Here’s a screenshot.
A few hours later after moderating comments, I refreshed my search. And wow, was it eye opening.
Expunged entirely from google.cn’s search index is my original find, zctc.xls. Down the memory hole. If the documents are false, why remove them? Why wipe their existence from the search index? I was intrigued. I decided to follow the trail of the second spreadsheet, 05ticao.xls.
Always one step ahead of me, the document was again missing from its original home, the home page of the General Administration of Sport of China. Undeterred, I decided to look again to Baidu to see if I could retrieve the results.
Could it be? More documentation? I followed the document cache link…
There’s He Kexin again, listed with a birthday of 1-1-1994, fourteen years old. Running that line through Google Translate, the chances of a case of mistaken identity diminish rapidly:
799, BB He Kexin CC female AA 1994.1.01 Beijing and Beijing Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, First Note
It is my suspicion that First Note is a mistranslation of First Place, as her world class gymnastics record speaks for itself. For those working to cache these documents, the direct link to the Baidu cache, for as long as it lasts, is here: cache link.
Conclusions
What is this post really about? I don’t really feel that it’s about the gymnastics age limit, or even really about whether fraud occurred. At this point, I believe that any reasonable observer already understands that age records have been forged. This story now is really about Internet censorship, the act of removing evidence while at the same time claiming that the evidence is wrong. For the first time I watched search records shift under my feet like sand, facts draining down a hole in the Internet. Will this stand?
For those interested in pursuing facts on their own, I should at this point cite my inspiration. If Johnny is the godfather of Google hacking, then his seminal book on the subject can be considered the bible of the field. There’s nothing I’ve done here that you can’t teach yourself from that book. Who knows what else can be accomplished; I am one, but You are Many. Good luck.
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