what you say is true, but, In’ch’Allah, not for much longer.

Why start a new second career writing altenative history novels, right now he is gainfully employed writing science fiction, bad science fiction true, but science fiction.

Ranging from outright speculation, appeal to emotion, irrelevance (what has the difficulty in hacking a system got to do with the ethics of it?), smears, guilt by association… My personal favourite though is the slippery slope argument at the end (where he ramps knitting up to thermonuclear armageddon in six easy steps)

Revkin did the sceptics a favour by highlighting this post!

Revkin says:
Thanks for reminding folks what this “Your Dot” feature is about. I’ll be posting a voice rebutting the “cyberterrorism” assertion as soon as I can get someone who’s a non-anonymous contributor to step forward with a reasoned, substantiated counterargument.

I am not a writer; anyone here up for the challenge? My only thought is that “terrorism” is a loaded word that is tricky to use. I believe I once heard that the “christian science monitor” does not let its writers use it lest in injects opinion into their objective writing.

Alex

This morning, I retried. I was the ‘number of characters’ tally, edited and submitted.

“Back to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well.”

So maybe he was working with CRUTEM3 software/data.

Also:

“What about the ones I used for the CRUTEM3 work with Phil Brohan?”

Does this mean that Hadley Centre bods do work on CRUTEM3?

Also I wonder if this is the work of:

Mr. Ian (Harry) Harris:
Dendroclimatology, climate scenario development, data manipulation and visualisation, programming
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/

ALex

I would bet the spam filter because of length.

Andy has never deleted any of my comments which are generally more confrontational than yours.

[edit, I didn't Lucia's comment above before I posted].

Resubmit it.

“I also think the RC claim is BS. It makes no sense because any hacker would know that the material would be taken down immediately. If RC was, in fact, hacked the only thing the hacker would do is post a page linking to the download.

I think Gavin is telling the truth here. I read a longer discussion somewhere. It sounds as if someone tried to hack into the Wordpress account possibly with the intention of creating and publishing their own post.

Wordpress accounts can and have been hacked. My knitting blog was hacked long ago. There are bunches of things people can do to make it more difficult to hack their blog than other peoples. For example, you can add a plugin that will only let you try the login/password combination three times. After that, it locks you out for 15 minutes. (This slows people who might write a script to try login/password combination.) You can use htaccess to put a second layer of protection (either by second password or by IP) But… well.. those methods don’t always work.

Eitherway, I should think whoever did this might easily be motivated to upload material to WP. That still doesn’t prove there was any high level of sophistication. When my knitting blog was hacked long,long ago, I clicked the link they left in the post they added. It was to a link to a page that warned you to be more secure! I then googled around more and it appeared to be a band of teenager… playing a game! They were keeping score of how many blogs they defaced and they got points when their post appeared.