Looking Out To Sea

Helen just pointed out that ‘The Green Apple’, an ethical/Fairtrade craft store online, has been hacked by some Islamic fundamentalists. The main page currently has a “closed for maintenance notice” but if you click straight through to the store you see a protest page from some nutty religious group:

After thirty seconds the page directs you to some other site which is about the wonderful prophet.

From a quick look at the guy they’re protesting — Geert Wilders — I don’t really have any sympathy for either side. He seems like the Dutch equivalent of Robert Kilroy Silk (he even has the same daft haircut…):

Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!

Oh no! More mosques than churches!

On the other side, the Islamofascists are no better. I feel quite happy denouncing someone who would hijack a third party website for their own pointless protest and then claim “sorry for the inconvenience. Our aim is not to harm your system”. Er, yes it is. It was an effective online shop before and now it doesn’t sell anything — what other meaning of harm do you want to use?

Bunch of nutters, the lot of them.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy:

The Top Gear host [Jeremy Clarkson] revealed his account numbers [in his newspaper column] after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs.

He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.

But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

I’m pretty disappointed that they choice Diabetes UK and not, say, Friends of the Earth or some anti-motoring charity. That would have been the icing on the cake.