An ode to President George W Bush
Ok, so this doesn't really seem related to the subject matter of this Blog, but stay with me. It is.

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from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4501132.stm
< Pakistan's government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out "President George W Bush".

The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds.

Critics say it praises Mr Bush. Its rhyming couplets describe someone "solid as steel, strong in his faith". >
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No one seems to know where this poem came from. The BBC reports that someone in the Education Department downloaded it from a website.
A bit of googling produces http://www.rhlschool.com/read8n2.htm which is the poem, with spacing to emphasise the name of the Leader. There is certainly no attempt to hide the fact that this is about GW Bush.

Who or what is RHL School?
The site is fairly anonymous. 2 links to whitehouse.gov and a link to firefightersforbush.com, the news page has links to all sorts of right wing newa sites (but nothing to http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage). Otherwise no names, no nothing.

The site is hosted by Software Workshop, Inc (http://thebook.com/).
The company and server is in New York. The domain registration is hidden behind Network Solutions (something fishy here, don't you think?).

So this is what the it security community calls social engineering. A fairly well funded organisation with good engineers sets up a website to spread its propaganda. Type in "worksheet free pakistan" on the google site and the first page that comes up is ... well we will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Try "free teaching resource pakistan", or other combinations. RHL gets good rankings.
Its well funded because there are 3 listings on Yahoo and 2 on Dmoz.org - it looks amateur but the engineering is very very good. You do not get this and a huge amount of content for free.

Obviously the results are good. Getting your poem printed for free in Pakistani text books is an excellent result. One supposes that many other Pakistani teachers have downloaded material from this site.
- posted @ Tuesday, December 06, 2005