Whoops, There We Go Again
Oct. 7th, 2001 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bryantWell, a month of buildup later, and we're in Afghanistan.
The CNN coverage is, once more, surreal. On the left side of the screen, we have the CNN reporters in the area talking about what's going on; the right side of the screen is dominated by this pea soup looking stuff with sparkles that might or might not be explosions. But it's live pea soup; the infographic says so. Bush'll be speaking soon.
Meanwhile, someone clever has hacked the CNN.com Most Popular Links system. Right now, if you click on Most Popular from any CNN story, you'll see something about Britney Spears dying at the top. It's a hoax.
(Parenthetical: here's the direct link to Most Popular Links page. But if you click it your browser will get all resized.)
After poking around a little, it looks like the site itself wasn't hacked. The link used to email articles to people passes the URL of the article to email in the link itself; easy enough to construct a link that'll register a hit for any URL you want, which is what happened here. The Britney Spears article isn't located on CNN; rather, it's on ihatelinux.com.
Someone didn't want to hide their tracks, I guess. Heh. Yay whois.
Anyhow, I digress, but it's yet another reminder of the weakness of Internet news sources. See also the guys who wonked with Yahoo stories last month. I bet the guy who did it is kind of regretting his timing just now.
Ah, here's Bush. We're hitting training camps and military installations. I thought we learned last time that hitting terrorist camps isn't a win in and of itself, but the military installations are good. There's discussion of followup forces from other countries... yup, he's stopping short of saying we'll put troops on the ground but he's hinting. Just a hint, though. Y'all are gonna read the speech for yourselves, anyhow, rather than trusting my interpretation -- right?
I'd give him some bonus points if he apologized to the rest of the world for failing to realize how serious the terrorism problem was until the US got hit, but that's really just nitpicking on my part. It's not as if he could have gotten popular support for this sort of thing until 9-11.
Good speech. Taliban is reported to be moving troops towards the Uzbekistan border. If I were the Taliban, I would be working my ass off to make this as messy as possible; muddying the waters with former Soviet states is a good way to do that.
The CNN coverage is, once more, surreal. On the left side of the screen, we have the CNN reporters in the area talking about what's going on; the right side of the screen is dominated by this pea soup looking stuff with sparkles that might or might not be explosions. But it's live pea soup; the infographic says so. Bush'll be speaking soon.
Meanwhile, someone clever has hacked the CNN.com Most Popular Links system. Right now, if you click on Most Popular from any CNN story, you'll see something about Britney Spears dying at the top. It's a hoax.
(Parenthetical: here's the direct link to Most Popular Links page. But if you click it your browser will get all resized.)
After poking around a little, it looks like the site itself wasn't hacked. The link used to email articles to people passes the URL of the article to email in the link itself; easy enough to construct a link that'll register a hit for any URL you want, which is what happened here. The Britney Spears article isn't located on CNN; rather, it's on ihatelinux.com.
Someone didn't want to hide their tracks, I guess. Heh. Yay whois.
Anyhow, I digress, but it's yet another reminder of the weakness of Internet news sources. See also the guys who wonked with Yahoo stories last month. I bet the guy who did it is kind of regretting his timing just now.
Ah, here's Bush. We're hitting training camps and military installations. I thought we learned last time that hitting terrorist camps isn't a win in and of itself, but the military installations are good. There's discussion of followup forces from other countries... yup, he's stopping short of saying we'll put troops on the ground but he's hinting. Just a hint, though. Y'all are gonna read the speech for yourselves, anyhow, rather than trusting my interpretation -- right?
I'd give him some bonus points if he apologized to the rest of the world for failing to realize how serious the terrorism problem was until the US got hit, but that's really just nitpicking on my part. It's not as if he could have gotten popular support for this sort of thing until 9-11.
Good speech. Taliban is reported to be moving troops towards the Uzbekistan border. If I were the Taliban, I would be working my ass off to make this as messy as possible; muddying the waters with former Soviet states is a good way to do that.
Hm.
Date: 2001-10-08 08:57 am (UTC)And there have been definite trigger events in his hatred of the US. Most notably, US troops basing out of Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Every indication is that he believes our presence in the Middle East profanes sacred soil.
One of the reasons I believe this is Usenet; I find it much easier to communicate on Usenet (or mailing lists) when I assume the person who just said something insane had a /reason/ for saying it. Very few people think of themselves as evil or malicious. We have to understand bin Laden, or we risk creating another one.