Be careful where you get your news from...

Credit where due (though it's one of the rare occasions that they've been anywhere near the truth) - Yahoo* reported this one pretty quickly. The story appeared on their homepage while the Sun's website was still compromised, as I found out when I went to have a butcher's and found the day's "headline":

Simple enough - traffic redirected from "www.thesun.co.uk" to" www.new-times.co.uk/sun", which featured an amusing but fairly tall tale about Rupert Murdoch's "demise" (Incidentally, "www.new-times.co.uk" appears to be a reasonably convincing-looking spoof of the official News International site - unless anyone knows better?). Nice prank; I had a good chuckle about it, and it's always nice to see Uncle Rupe looking a little silly.

Sites which redirect visitors, though, I'm always slightly twitchy about. Maybe it's just me, but as anyone who's ever frequented some of the less-sanitised areas of the web will know, it doesn't take too many wrong clicks to be redirected somewhere that'll make your virus-checker light up like a Christmas tree. Perhaps there's a case for saying that this is just part of the game when one's poking around into grubby, out-of-the-way corners they maybe shouldn't, and that anyone foolish enough to go looking for nuddy-pics or whatever without a decent anti-virus (surely we all know the risks of unprotected sex by now?) gets what they deserve; seems a realistic enough approach, anyway. But what a man's willing to risk for, say, a torrent of Red Hot Oiled Swedish Teen Volleyball Sluts vol.2, you see, is maybe not quite what he's willing to risk to satisfy idle curiosity piqued by a Yahoo Newsflash. In any case, I exited (or as the Murdoch press would have it, "made my excuses and left") pretty much as soon as I'd got a screenshot of the page, and left others to do their own investigating.

Clearly News International need to enhance their online security - mind, it seems these dark mutterings of mine about the perils of what lurks in deepest cyberspace have spooked me a little, and put me in the mind of maybe beefing up my own.

I'll be running a Complete System Scan and comparing the merits of various antivirus programmes if anyone wants me....

*Please don't judge me for this. Webmail's webmail in my eyes, and my opinions on the intrinsic worth of other aspects of the Yahoo "product" are well-known.....