Well, I got hit by an advertisement this morning in the wee hours that was purportedly left in the commentary on an old entry by a US Army battalion commander in Northern Iraq. Interestingly, the gist of the comment was familiar and the email address and name left behind are real ones. The entry itself is over year old and was basically a pointer at a pro-war op-ed piece in the New York Times by Dennis Miller. OK, so far. But then the URL left behind was an Amazon link to a book, which was also written by the proported comment author. Not one of those pay-back Amazon Associates links, but just a straight one to a book about the Gulf War. Inspection of the web logs showed that the search from Google came in from a Guangdong ISP, with one IP address for the search and another for the posting of the entry. Typical spicy ham product. Turns out that not only are the name on the entry and on the book’s cover the same, but that this name is one that was in the news last year for sending out form letters to hometown newspapers from soldiers in his unit. (In fact, this colonel gets a lot of PR here in the States.) But, why does the Pentagon need Chinese help to advertise its war and books written by its mouth-piece? Who knows, but it was fun to delete it. I wonder if I should send the bill for my time to the Secretary of Defense?
Posted by jim at July 11, 2004 06:50 AM | TrackBack