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Cyberterror! Project Gutenberg URL swiped for Saddam

Bound to be a clear breach of security council resolution...

A small hijacking will likely gladden the hearts of would-be cyberwarriors in the Pentagon. This morning, for reasons that are not entirely obvious, projectgutenberg.org seems to be pointing to the front page of the web site of the Mission of Iraq to the United Nations. Skulduggery by the Iraqi secret services, or fiendish cyberterrorists?

None of the above, we'd guess. It appears that projectgutenberg.org is supposed to be hosted by Maryland public information network Sailor, on whose front page you will currently see a duff link. Google cache attests to what it ought to look like, and you can actually get a front door to Project Gutenberg here.

The projectgutenberg.org url is owned by Outspan Web Services, whose domain, outspan.com, seems itself not to be entirely with us at the moment, while the lucky recipient of the redirect, http://iraqi-mission.org, really does seem to be owned by the Iraqi Mission to the UN.

As foaming propaganda goes, the Mission's site is pretty tame stuff, although it has links to news sources that do seem to be a tad less hinged (sample). The Mission itself records various Iraqi responses in the current contretemps, and includes mind-numbingly detailed reports of the inspectors' tours of the country. We hesitate to say so, but it's almost worthy, a journal of record, of sorts.

So we'd reckon the cyberterrorist responsible is just some techie with a misdirected desire to get the other side of the story out, and a slightly eccentric view of the kinds of urls you'd mess with in order to do so. We hear USA Today is easy, techie, don't you think that would work better? But if your activities end up triggering World CyberWar One, don't blame us. ®

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