% fortune -ae paul murphy

When Linux gets cited as a matter of course, it's truly gone mainstream

I was feeding my political addiction just now when I ran across this - on a hugely popular right wing site after a long, and very nasty, quotation from a site rejoicing in the name sarahpalingayrights.com:

There's nothing else on the page. This sure looks like the work of the dastardly right-wing anti-gay attack machine, doesn't it?

But look who's really behind this.

In the Linux console, if you enter the following commands, you can learn the secrets of a political dirty trick. First, look up the host of "sarahpalingayrights.com" to get the site's IP address.

host sarahpalingayrights.com
sarahpalingayrights.com has address 74.208.74.232

Then use the same command to look up the domain name pointer of that IP address.

host 74.208.74.232
232.74.208.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer obamadefense.com

Well, well. "Obamadefense.com," eh?

And what happens if you enter obamadefense.com on your browser?s address line?

Why, you're redirected to none other than FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama site that's supposed to be defending him against smears.

Casual, unwitting, endorsements based on actual use are, I think, the best kind of advertising - and this went to millions of readers via the pyjamasmedia empire. So thank you Mr. Johnson!