********* From: Jonathan Byron <geodigestat_private> Organization: geodigest To: declanat_private Subject: Taliban Website Hack - A Hoax ?? Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 15:51:50 -0400 Recent claims that the official Taliban website was hacked should be met with suspicion. The page at www.taleban.com has changed frequently over the past few days, but I have cached it a few times at: <a href="http://64.128.176.121:80/nuke/html/article.php?sid=10&mode=&order=0">The Pacific Rim Weblog</a>. Google also cached the page at an earlier date, which indicated that the site was run by a company in India; India has had very poor relations with the Taliban, and it seems unlikely that they would have their official homepage hosted there. The DNS entry for the name of the Taliban official to contact has that person's name consistently misspelled in a way that is not consistent with the normal variations found when translating from Arabic to English. A more likely explanation is that the domain name was purchased by anti-Taliban individuals in India, and the "hack" was faked. Jonathan Byron -- Jonathan Byron Assistant Professor, Geography Jacksonville University Jacksonville, FL geodigestat_private jbyronat_private ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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