Go ahead and sue!

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/penenberg/

Go ahead and sue!
Adam L. Penenberg

IT'S A SAD FACT, but whenever someone is cited as an expert in one
publication, he is almost sure to be quoted in another--and another and
another. The reason is simple: The first thing a journalist does when
beginning a story is to see what else has been written on the topic.
Culling sources from other news articles is a good way to get started.

The problem is, few reporters check out these "experts," figuring that if
a source made it into, say, The New York Times or The Washington Post, he
must be reliable and, well, expert. Think of it as an extension of Howard
Stern's media strategy. Stern once said he himself first coined the term
"King of All Media," figuring that the mainstream press would then start
to call him that. (It did.)

How else to explain the schizophrenic emergence of twenty-year-old John
Vranesevich, founder and operator of antionline.com, a web site that
purports to follow the hacker scene. In the realm of mass media, "JP" has
become a star, a youthful public figure who has been quoted extensively
for his computer-security expertise and inside knowledge of the hacking
world.

But in hacker circles he is a pariah. Perhaps only his close ally, Carolyn
Meinel (a.k.a. "The Happy Hacker"), inspires more vitriol. At this year's
Defcon, the hacker conference held in Las Vegas, Meinel had the dubious
honor of being bodily ejected from the convention hall.

It's hard to gauge just how elite JP's hacker and computer-security skills
are. But we do know his web site was taken down in August when someone
with an account in Russia tricked AntiOnline into downloading software
that redirected its visitors to another site. The hacker, obviously not a
fan of JP's, included this message: "Expensive security systems do not
protect from stupidity."

And online columnist Lew Koch, of CyberWire Dispatch, interviewed JP at
length, exposing vast gaps of knowledge. For instance, Koch questioned JP
about AntiOnline's alleged scoop of the hack of an atomic research center
last year, yet he couldn't remember which country housed the center. JP
kept insisting it was Israel, and, according to Koch, called the Bombay
Atomic Research Center the "B'Hadvah Atomic Research Center." When Koch
corrected him, JP admitted it must have been India. JP also claims he has
"semi-contractual" relationships with NASA and the Defense Informations
Systems Agency (DISA), yet Koch says both agencies deny this.

[snip..]

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