I’m in South Jersey this week, and while staying at the local Courtyard by Marriott, and using one of the computers in their lobby, I came across this message while attempting to access Instapundit, presumably because of this post. (Click screen shots below to embiggen):
That’s really lame; I wonder if the software filters all news sites that use that phrase, or if say, CNN, the Times, WaPo, etc. are exempt. (In case you’re wondering, this popped up on two different lobby PCs, one on Monday night, when I first noticed it, and this morning, on another lobby PC, when I went back for a screen capture.)
Fortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there are no filters on the broadband that’s piped into the individual hotel rooms, but the Interwebs themselves can have their own issues. F0r example, while attempting to log onto the American Enterprise blog (from my laptop this time), I got this error message, from Google:
Why yes, that message certainly did ring a bell; upon seeing it, I emailed Nick Schulz, the AEI blog’s editor in chief, who used to edit Tech Central Station (including my own articles back when I was a semi-regular contributor there). TCS was itself was the victim of a similar attack in 2007, along with the American Spectator’s Website, and around that time, if I recall correctly, Pajamas as well.
Perhaps because of that past experience, AEI’s technical boffins appear to have resolved this pretty quickly, as the site — at least of the time of this post — no longer generates that message on Google. I’m sure such attacks happen to leftwing and non-political sites as well, and that no side of the aisle is immune from mischievous pranksters. But given that this is an election year, and that there’s a past history of right-leaning Websites being attacked to reduce traffic from Google (and possibly other search engines as well), they should be aware of these sorts of attacks and how to defend against them.
The filtering and hacking I came across yesterday appear to be entirely unrelated, but both should serve as heads up for anyone in new media.
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