Via Diogenes:
The home-page of America Magazine ("essential reading for thinking Catholics") has this notice up:
Note from Webmaster: Someone is using our domain name, americamagazine.org, as the return address for spam advertising HoodiaLife, a diet pill. This is NOT being sent by us. This deception is known as "spoofing" — the use of false "From:" addresses to make a message appear to be from a legitimate sender. We have complained to the FTC.
Yes. Now with regard to the spoofing that’s been going on for the past forty years, how do the rest of us get in contact with the FTC?
Spoofing – now that is an excellent term to describe organizations and media that describe themselves as Catholic while having various degrees of separation from authentic magisterial teaching. Just try to read the mission statements of most Catholic universities without having the word spoofing come to you now.
In computing there is a technique known as phishing that allows people to fraudulently acquire information by pretending they are something they are not. They do this via email or websites and on websites they make use of site redirection in a hidden frame to make you think you are on a legitimate site when you are not. Newer browsers have phishing filters to warn you when a site is not what it appears to be. It would be great to have a magisterial phishing detection toolbar built into your browser to warn you about rad trad and progressive sites. "Warning this site contains information contrary to the magisterium of the Catholic Church" Now with experience most people do develop a Catholic phishing filter on their own. For myself I know it normally does not take long to determine the Catholic spoofing factor of a website often by their links. But some sites are rather crafty concerning their links so it would be nice to have in a Catholic phishing filter a buzzword algorithm that gives you a buzzword index which can be used to determine the character of a site. High uses of words like prophetic, dialogue, male hierarchal, sexual identity could easily be indexed to give you a clue. Of course sites like Catholic Culture have been doing good site reviews for years with detailed information that could be easily used as a database to get started with in a Catholic phishing filter.
