On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It looks like they probably hacked a style sheet or put in a chunk of php > code to alter common words and add links to the porn sites.
Knowing the subject matter of the article and looking at the placement of the links within the grammatical constructs used, I think it's deliberate substitution of URLs in hyperlinks created by the article's author rather than substitution for common words. The link titles and placement in juxtaposition to important points suggests to me that it's not an automated linking of common words. I'd expect to see a more random placement of links were it an automagic substitution of common words with hyperlinks. E.g., there are many phrases in the article that are clearly intended by the author to be hyperlinked, such as the link from the word "here" in "[t]here is a compilation being tracked in here[.]" I can conceive of a malwareware tool that automagically substitutes URLs from a common list of porn URLs once a web apps' editing permissions are penetrated. Of course the hyperlinks could be manually edited by a Third World worker earning a pittance. But a fairly powerful plain text editor's script for automating such substitutions after cutting and pasting the page content from an HTML editing form to an editing application would seem to be a fairly trivial hack to keep expenses even lower. After processing, just cut and paste the altered content back to the HTML form. Then on to the next page to be defaced, without even bothering to save the altered text in the text editor. Non-obligatory and only marginally relevant thread drift warning: Lord knows I've written enough similar scripts in my time to batch process a LAN's archive of WordPerfect document templates, document assembly document "parts," and documents for common misspellings, markup errors, incorrect or updated citations, etc. I will never forget an incident in the WordPerfect 5.1 days when I learned that about half of 20 paralegals working on summarizing documents produced in discovery had not followed instructions and had been cutting, pasting, and revising the form from completed summaries rather than working from the template for the form. And of course errors got dragged into the process, making the resulting database far less useful for search purposes because of replicated errors like the misnaming of data fields. My "BigClean" script stepped through over 60,000 files to fix 54 common replicated errors we identified in the document summaries resulting from the cute and paste defects . On a state of the art DEC DX 2-50, the script ran for nearly 40 hours but did the job without a hitch once debugged. Working around the WordPerfect 5.1 reluctance to process the next file without rereading all remaining filenames in the directory into memory was the major headache in the script development, although I can't remember what my hack was to work around that issue. I later adapted the script to correct common misspellings of people's names that appeared in the documents and a few other similar variables that got in the way of the Isys 3.1x search engine's usefulness. Our experience was one of the major reasons the Isys development team added synonym ring capabilities to Isys so users could easily compensate for common misspellings and the like without having to correct the indexed documents and to update the search index files. Isys is a tremendous tool that I really wish would run on Linux/Wine. E.g., I've got virtually all data on my system that my colleagues and I wrote or acquired since 1984. Isys is way out ahead of similar FOSS tools that run on Linux such as Apache Lucene and its derivatives. In the current version, it indexes over 200 file formats and data types and that's just for starters on its advantages. I regard it as the single largest advance in word processing since the storage of editable documents on magnetic media. If anyone is interested, I wrote a fairly thorough review of Isys back in 2000. <http://www.llrx.com/features/isys2.htm>. The limitations on the number of documents that can be indexed has since been removed, with the number now limited only by the data storage capacity of the local system. Best regards, Paul _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
