Dave Taylor:
While perusing my RSS subscriptions in NewsGator this evening, I bumped into what sounded like it might be an interesting article at Lockergnome. The piece was two paragraphs of commentary followed by a link to the “source article” at RealTechNews. But that wasn’t the origin of the story… the trail actually goes further and further back until the original piece is finally unearthed.

Here’s the trail I followed for this article “Ten signs your son is a hacker”:



Is Your Son a Hacker? Ten Signs to Look For at Lockergnome, linked to

Is Your Son a Hacker? Ten Signs to Look For at RealTechNews, linked to

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? at Albino Black Sheep, linked to

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? at Adequacy.org



What I find so interesting about this is that time and again instead of people tracking to the original source and then linking to it, in what I’d describe as a “wheel and spokes” model, Web authors are instead linking in more of a “daisy chain” fashion, perhaps never going all the way back to the original source (where it’d be quite clear that it was written back in December, 2001 and obviously a deliberate attempt to provoke the hacker community into a debate).



More here.