The only winning move is not to play

Did you ever see the movie WarGames?  This featured a computer called the WOPR.  I really liked this movie.  I thought there was a good balance between the human story and the computer.  I liked most of the movie Twister up until the end.  Both movies climaxed with flashing computer lights.  In Twister it was just numbers scrolling on a laptop, which was lame.  In WarGames the flashing lights showed simulated attacks demonstrating the computer learning, and worked well.

Two recent things reminded me of the movie WarGames.  One item was an article in the Washington Post about students hacking into the school computer and changing grades.  The other was the new release of Oracle WebCache that includes a learning rule capability for request filtering.  In the movie, they use Tic-Tac-Toe to help the computer learn.  To try out the new WebCache learning mode I chose Nikto.  This is a web security scanner that sends thousands of requests to test the security of a web server.  This tool is easy to setup and use, and it rhymes with Tic-Tac-Toe.  Let's try it against the Webcache Oracle Process for Request Filtering (WOPRF), and see how it does.