Remember Terry Childs, the disgruntled San Francisco IT guy who locked other admins out of the city's network, but finally surrendered the passwords only to superuser-of-love Gavin Newsom? The city's Department of Technology has set aside $1 million to pay for upgrades to the network, which require a mix of pricey consultants and overtime pay for city workers. I hate to put it this way, but by showing the pooh-bahs how easily their critical information systems could be taken over, yet not making use of his takeover to harm anything other than his bosses' egos, Childs may have done us all a white-hat favor.

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