Yes

15 April 2013

Sharp eyed readers have spotted a common face appearing in some of my website's posts. From self-driving engineers to Vietnamese schools, and more. Her name is Quynh Neutron. She's a geek, a data analyst at Facebook, and the most wonderful woman in the world.

Last weekend I secretly hijacked Quynh's DNS and redirected the google.com domain to an account on my home server. It served a page that was virtually indistinguishable from Google, but with one important difference: no matter what one types, the same query is generated. Go ahead, try it. [Joy, Chrome and Firefox are now labeling that page as a phishing site.]

It didn't take long that morning before Quynh tried to do a search (for "PyData video"). At first she was confused that her keystrokes did not match the resulting characters. As a fellow Dvorak user, she assumed that her computer had suddenly reverted to Qwerty. Then she saw the pattern. And she pressed the 'Yes' button.

I am a lucky man.

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