Tuesday 29 July 2003

What's all that about?

I'm deeply suspicious of this story. It has a link to a .mil website to try and convince you, but I remember that story from a few months ago about how it was outrageously easy to set up your own .mil domain if you were some kind of sick-ass hacker type guy and am accordingly suspicious. The fact that the site is now not working (presumably from all the people loading it) almost proves it as far as I'm concerned.

"The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. ... The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts -- essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong. A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown. Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as 'a market in the future of the Middle East,' the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea missile attack.

I call bullshit on this one right here and now.

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