Je suis E-Kréta
A few days ago, a Hungarian hacker group (Sawarim) released the source code of Hungary’s officially mandated e-student management system, E-Kréta (e-chalk).
The hackers released the code after they saw internal communications of the developer/management team trying to smother the gross GDPR/security breach.
By now, some genuinely well-intentioned developers have uploaded it to GitHub, and now accepting pull requests to improve it as an open-source initiative to improve the system for the future of education: https://github.com/skidoodle/ekreta-src
In the past several days, the Hungarian Reddit/IT circles have been poking eternal fun at e-Kreta’s code, about just how low the code quality is, despite the insane amount of money funneled to the developer and maintainer company; how little it cares about security despite basically storing and securing all Hungarian elementary students’ data; and how creative and extensive it’s Hungarian exact-match profanity filter is.
Now, I’m not a security advisor, I’m a mere LinkedIn influencer and Medium.com writer (2 times Top 10% of something, Best gags award 2021 3rd prize, Most-tongues-in-one-cheek 2020 nominee, follow me for javascript tips and tricks if you agree, or not) but I think there’s a lesson to learn in this for all of us, bear with me…
Yes, the software is developed/operated from ~30M EUR per year…
Yes, it was acquired through a single-contestant government tender…
Yes, it’s absurd to know that the maintainer wanted to smother up the data breach, and potential leakage of 30k+ students data…
Yes, the code quality is sub-par even to a university-students’ standards…
BUT!
You all seem to forget something…
You forgot, that Kurt Vonnegut was born on this day exactly 100 years ago! (1922–11–11) — Sadly, he passed away in 2007, but he’s written many satirical and darkly humorous novels which will be with us forever.
Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut, rest in peace! 📚💯🎂
“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large…” — Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
And finally, to quote the developers…
…yeah, I’ll not quote them, get one for yourself: https://kretainsult.online/