I didn't say that, I _promise_

Ok, I'll admit it ... I google-alert my name. It's not as bad as it sounds, because I google alert lots of things. It's surprising to see how many people are named Roger Thompson, and it's even mildly amusing to see some of their professions, but that's a story for another day. Today, however, I got this alert...


"Even in spite of this it was a relatively benign episode as worms bearing of walking, Grey Goo is cost note, as it may be only the best ancient of this brand of malware for the future, warn Roger Thompson, CTO of anti-exploit software ..."

Now, I do like the occasional glass of shiraz, but I'm fairly confident that, even after a whole bottle of shiraz, I never said that. Heck, I can't even parse it.

It was in a blog whose identity shall remain private to protect the innocent (which may be all of us in this case), and a quick bit of searching found a second blog that opens with this amazing statement...

"A exotic resistant decisive against protecting computer user and business antagonistic zero-day attack aware to that occurrence exploit belt users' frozen drive launch a interview variation of its opening goods on Monday.", in an interview also attributed to me.

Although it was posted today, it was under a heading of "Antispyware pros launch SocketShield beta", which gives a bit of a clue, because that happened in early 2006, but I'm pretty sure I never said that either.

In fact, both blogs were full of incomprehensible and un-parsable english just like that. It looks like someone is picking up old articles, and translating them to non-English, and then back again... twice or more.

But the question is ... why bother? And my answer is ... I have no clue! What's the point? The blogs don't appear to be malicious as far as I and my software can determine, but who knows what might happen in the future?

As funny as the entries are, I think the best idea is simply regard them as potentially dangerous, and stay away. In other words, if you are googling for _anything_ and the summary that comes up on the search page doesn't make sense.... treat it like a crazy looking stray dog that might bite, and go to a different site.

Stay safe folks!

Roger

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