Why does it seem that a great swath of Romanian websites are improperly configured?

Did most Romanian system administrators attend, for example, university lectures by a single professor who was too lazy to teach properly?

Or is it that most Romanian webmasters never had formal training and merely bothered to learn the bare minimum necessary to appear competent to ignorant customers?

I’ve wondered this for years because a great many websites are not configured properly, resulting in companies looking very stupid thanks to the incompetence of system administrators at Romanian web hosts.

While it’s true that some bunici tend to always-and-forever-fara-sfarsit put “www” in front of every domain name (and sometimes every email address), the reality is that a majority of internet users have evolved beyond the petri dish stage and come to understand the “www” is unnecessary.

Bula sez “www.google.com” and it works. The rest of us save keystrokes with “google.com” …and… *gasp* it works!

Not so in Romania, where apparently a good number of dolts have been hired to pretend themselves website administrators. Their abject lack of professionalism results in (among other off-topic hilarity) damage to the public image of many Romanian companies. Users attempt to reach a website for Company X, only to be shown something entirely different.

Example: RIN Hotel, near Henri Coanda Airport in Otopeni.
Misconfigured URL: http://conforthotels.ro/
Result: An embarrassingly garish trash magazine with stories for idiots, horrible photoshop skills, poor writing, and no purpose to exist. It’s hard to imagine any hotel wanting to be associated with that pile of cacat.

Example: Colegiului Naţional Matei Basarab, a school claiming to teach informatica (IT).
Misconfigured URL: http://basarab.ro/
Result: Tumbleweeds rolling across the desert. Despite pretending to offer “intensive courses in Information Technology,” I think Matei Basarab have consciously chosen to misconfigure the website. While it is embarrassing to have an IT program appear ignorant about the internet, it would be even worse to actually server up their sorry excuse for a website as it would be a blight on the career potential for any unfortunate student enrolled in this pathetic institution by unknowing parents (whom, of course, would devastated and shocked if they actually found the site).

Example: Trident, selling sun protection technologies (fancy verbiage for screens, blinds, shades, etc) in Timişoara.
Misconfigured URL: http://trident.ro/
Result: Backdoor to their Windows Small Business 2003 server. Then again, if they chose a Windows server in the first place, then I wouldn’t have high hopes for them anyway. Meh.

Example: Villa Prato, a well-appointed boutique hotel in Braşov.
Misconfigured URL: http://villaprato.ro/
Result: Would-be guests wind up confused by photographs of a glass-manufacturing plant.

Example: Carrefour, an international hypermarket chain based in France.
Misconfigured URL: http://carrefour.ro/
Result: Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

Example: Total GSM, national reseller of Vodafone products and services.
Misconfigured URL: http://total-gsm.ro/
Result: It says the site is under construction. Throw on the triple dub and it shows a branded page (which, itself, isn’t quite working right).

Example: TopTV, a broadcast media consulting firm with rapidly growing revenue.
Misconfigured URL: http://toptv.ro/
Result: Please exploit known vulnerability gaffes in SquirrelMail v1.4.2 and for a bonus: poke around and discover someone doesn’t know Apache.

Example: CCBS, a mysterious non-entity of dubious origin.
Misconfigured URL: http://ccbs.ro/
Result: Welcoming hackers to the database and email server. Yay!

Must I go on or did you already drift off to go test your own favorite websites? Pa pa!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.