I didn't expect I'd be spending my morning wrestling with the Periodic Table. Talk about back to basics. The back story is I was visiting my PythonAnywhere application, a teaching stack, Flask atop Python with SQLite on the side, and noticed my half-assed demo wasn't actually bullet-proof. I'd only disable any editing later, before the hack. A couple lines in my Glossary had been defaced.
In the process of refreshing the Glossary (geek terms, wrote it myself), I noticed the Periodic Table was for from complete, with less than half the 118 elements I knew were out there. That's when I fired up a new Jupyter Notebook, to document the process, top to bottom, of taking two CSV sources, merging them, and extracting just what I needed to fit a pre-existing mold.
That's all in the foreground. In the background, an out-of-control city-state known as The District (aka City of Morons in these journals) is threatening to attack Persia and destroy it, in retaliation for its own psychotic war of aggression. If this were a farm animal, we'd put it down, quick and easy, but given we're dealing with the Pentagon (now private sector), we have to factor in the criminal element (organized crime runs that shop, we all know).
I'm far away in Portland, Oregon and don't engage in any message traffic with any official DCers, except on Facebook maybe, where I'll write comments like "too late" if it's someone posing as from "the USA" (snicker). Sorry Charlie, you're not persuading me any more with that flavor of BS; we haven't had a real USA in some decades, per our Medal of Freedom winning hero.
BTW, I recommend not contacting the defacer sticking an email address in my database. I never did. But I wanted to show what enterprising hackers might accomplish. Actually, in this case, nothing all that special had to happen as the code's weaknesses were all mine. Fortunately, it's a learning application, designed to be hacked on. I'm learning.
Also, I'm not gonna try Manus through Meta. If I try Manus, it won't be in a way Meta knows anything about.
