A <pedant> writes </pedant>

Do Something To Scare Yourself Every Day

Deep breath. Here goes.

*cough*

Important things are so often left undiscussed, but it is terribly important that they are. They are so... important.

Like, is being a fugitive from the American criminal justice system sufficient grounds for producing so egregious an HTML error as found on the homepage of this little gem of a site by one Justin Petersen, who we only heard of recently.

He seemed cool until we realised that a) this guy probably has done most of the shit his pages say he's done, like teaching the FBI all about the hacker (security sense) community, and playing an active role in the Kevin Mitnick case, and b) he probably knows more about internet security matters than we do. We are quite scared of Justin Petersen, which, as far as we can tell, is how he makes a living.

What a great guy!

All with one leg, by all accounts, which reportedly does not appear to lessen the man's pulling power - surely a testament of extreme optimism for us all - until you realise that he didn't get fat and ugly, he lost a leg, and most of us are more likely to be prone to the former rather than the latter. But we, and our penis, digress.

We were hoping to have made some incredibly clever comment here, relating Justin Petersen to Hillel and Shammai, the noted Jewish sages of old, whose feud extended so far that the two men never agreed on any single point of Jewish law at all, to my (fairly limited) knowledge.

A man once came to Shammai and asked him to teach Torah while he stood on one leg. Shammai, noted for his temper, told him to get lost. The man then went to Hillel, asking the same question.

'Do not do unto others as you would not wish to be done by,' replied Hillel to the man on one leg. 'That is the whole of the Torah. All the rest is commentary. Now go and study.'

What does Justin Petersen have to do with Hillel and Shammai? Er, not a lot, really. The point is, we have been pondering the fact that we may have better HTML than Justin Petersen. However, we have also been seriously thinking of dropping the subject. If not the piece.

And Hillel? Or Shammai? In fact, how come we didn't try and fit Kevin Mitnick in somehow to provide balance in the Hillel-Shammai thing? Or someone else from that community?

The answer is that we don't know anyone else in that community. In fact, we don't know anyone in that community. We think. We're not sure anyone does. We do know, however, that we read a very interesting thing somewhere on Justin Petersen's site. It was the bit that said words to the effect of:

'If you're doing dodgy hacking type things and you let *anyone* else know about it or come to know about it, you have made your first mistake.'

Now that must be one fun fucking community. And a lonely one. But powerful, nevertheless, in it's own way - the online Hell's Angels who you really don't want to piss off. To say nothing of their wannabe contingent, of which we shall not speak.

When I read that 'you have made your first mistake' bit, a shiver ran through me, as I realised that I had come upon possession of a genuine Truth, which is a rare thing in these days of marketing and PR. This guy might be scary, but hell, work's work, you know? And he clearly has a number of, uh, interesting things to say.

However...

To Whom It May Concern: Your <BODY> tag doesn't go inside your <HEAD> tags, and you know it perfectly well.

Does having invalid HTML makes a site more secure to certain kinds of attack? Somehow I think that there are more powerful kinds of ju-ju than that when you're talking about that aspect of security.

Am I scared now? You bet. I might know enough about a few online technologies to do them for a living but I don't know shit about proper internet security. So, if I have just pissed Justin Peterson off, I could be in trouble. Like he has the time.

Mind you, tied against my will as I am to Windoze95, my entire hard drive is presumably a free playground for anyone with half a brain and a copy of Back Orifice. If some kind of attack should happen, though, it would be far more likely to come about as the result of someone taking this piece the wrong way or seeing it as a challenge, than it would to be to happen otherwise. Really, it isn't a challenge, and I don't mean to offend - as such - at all. The point is that most people aren't a bank or a military installation and are therefore about as likely to be hacked these days as one of their major business competitors is to hire someone in to do the job. Uh, oops.

(Unless you're on AOL, of course, where having your account hacked is just all part of the superlative Value Added Online Experience. Or so I understand.)

Meanwhile, let's face it, Reader. I ain't no-one's major business competitor. Since you're reading this, my strong suspicion is that neither are you. So, we're probably both alright.

(Let me know if the site disappears suddenly or anything.)

ok, so how stupid *was* this?.

<pedant>