In a phone conversation with my brother yesterday, he said "You guys are mean!" In particular he was describing the manner in which the technical community has a tendency to go out for blood on hypocrisy and bad policy. Although I was unwilling to completely endorse it at the time, I do now.

Intrepid technical folks found (as reported in Wired) that Senator Hatch's web site had a link to the porn site BigNaturals.com (safe first page).

Apparently, this is another one of those situations where the link was fine until the previous site (apparently a site about natural beauty in Utah) expired and was taken over by a porn site.

More amusing, getting back to my brother's insight, is that this kind of thing would be noticed. I'm sure the folks at the company who do the site maintenance were unaware of the changes (no excuse for that, by the way, just like there still is no excuse for their using that UK gentleman's code without a license), but it does bring up the problem of expiring links, which is endemic to the internet.

Due to the system of linking, there are many different causes of bad links like this, and all of us with web sites must be aware of them. However, sites like Gaige's Pages are likely to contain dead or even misdirected links from time to time, just based on the sheer volume of the number of links off of the site.

Good thing I'm not a politician. I better be careful not to tick off any technical folks.