Weekend, 19-20 February 2000

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS

As indicated in yesterday's "Friday Morning Update," the story of Harry Knowles, a guy and a list of possible Oscar nominees have eaten a lot of column inches here and will continue to today. So, for those of you who could not care any less, please bear with one more column on the subject, hopefully the definitive one, and come back next week to the Harry-free Hot Button. Also, if you had a hard time finding the column on Thursday, it did run - with none of this Oscar list stuff, thank you - and it's still there if you want to read it. Finally, there is no column on Monday because of the holiday. So, see you Tuesday.

And now, one last go round on the carousel known as "HARRY'S LIST".

It all started less than a week ago when Harry Knowles was sent, the following e-mail:

"Subject: "*** INSIDER INFORMATION! ***

As of February 12, 2000, the Academy Awards nominations have been narrowed down to the attached list.

(Please note that there are slightly more nominations in each category, because the vote counts are very close in those categories, and recounts are being finalized right now.)

An updated list will be sent as soon as possible, if available before the 5:38am announcement on Tuesday morning."

That was it.

Harry asked him for clarification about the source. And got this response:

"I happen to have access to one of the computers at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, where they are keeping tabs of all of this stuff in an UNPROTECTED, MULTI-USER FileMaker Pro database. Totally open to the world, if you know the IP address of the computer! (It's currently offline as I type.) The text file is in pretty shabby shape, I know, but it was the best I could do -- I had to export the information very quickly.

I only wish that:
1. I would have gotten it sooner, instead of just the day before the "official announcement."
2. I already had the "finalized list" of 5 nominees per category, instead of this preliminary list.
Hope this helps you out somehow!

See ya,"

So, what I was told by the source seems to have been a fabrication as well. He wasn't quite as innocent of spinning as he claimed. He did, in fact, lead Harry to water. Now it was time for Harry to decide whether to drink. Sunday night...the information does not go up on Ain't It Cool News.

Another e-mail comes on Monday morning:

"Hey Harry!

The database is back up and running! Here's the IP address for you to check out:

**.***.**.***

(DAVID NOTE: The numbers have been removed to protect the innocent. Then the source explains how to use FileMaker Pro to get to a file called "oscar_nominations." The e-mail continues...)

Sorry I couldn't export the titles of all the films at the time, and you had to subsequently go through all of that research!! Great job, BTW! The system was shutting down, and I had to do a very quick export of the fields that I could get a hold of within just a few seconds!

It turns out that this is the database earmarked for the Oscar.com webmaster -- she's getting ready to export this info and upload it to the oscar.com web site tomorrow morning. I certainly hope they haven't been feeding her database red herrings, or else I'm gonna be pretty damn embarrassed for snooping around their machines!"

And embarrassed he should have been. First, for "snooping around" their machines. Second, for making these leaps of logic with virtually no way of knowing what he really had. He assumed that this was a narrowed nomination list. Then he assumed the stuff was for Oscar.com because it was coded in html. As it turns out, the information was earmarked for ABC.com, but again, it wasn't on their servers either. It was on a private computer with, as he had previously written Harry, no protections at all.

Meanwhile, down in Austin, Harry tried to confirm what he had been given. He checked to make sure that all the credits and names for each "nominee" was correct. They were. He checked the list against the already official Special Effects and Sound nomination group. They checked out.

And then he asked trusted friends/sources to confirm the most important fact: Was this the Academy's server? And that's where a bit of Harry's logic falters. He was already told by his source that this stuff was for Oscar.com. So the first question should have been, what does one have to do with the other? But that wasn't Harry's question. Harry's question was, "Is that IP address really the Academy server?" And the answer from his friend/tech-whiz came back, "yes." But it was not the Academy server at all.

Sadly, it took readers of this column on Tuesday less than an hour from the time of publication to start sending me e-mail telling me that the I.P. address Harry had, which ran on his site, was not the Academy's I.P. address at all. As it turns out, the list was not only not on the Academy server and not on the Oscar.com server, it wasn't even on the ABC.com server. An employee of ABC.com took the work home and it was on his home computer, which was on a cable modem grid, which made it vulnerable to being found with what I am told was no effort by the source of all this. The source just happened upon it when going to open his own files.

But on the basis of a couple of time-consuming fact-checks and the word of his friend that the I.P. address led to 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Harry ran the list.

PAGE TWO: "More and an Oscar-interested ROTD"