Claire Perry: confused by the tubes

David Cameron's chief prodnose Claire Perry appears to have annoyed quite a few people with her anti-porn crusading, and someone with reasonably good hacking jobs has managed to compromise her site and add the Goatse.cx shock image to it. This caused no little mirth, and as the Ministry of Truth reports, political blogger Guido Fawkes couldn't help but comment on it. He posted a (thankfully trimmed) screenshot of Claire's "updated" website. So far so good, but it seems that Claire Perry doesn't understand the Internet:

That well known responsible campaigner @guidofawkes has been hosting a link that distributed porn via my website

— Claire Perry (@claire4devizes) July 23, 2013

Let's be clear, Claire. There was no link from Guido's site. There was an image - showing the URL of your website, true, but certainly not clickable. As for "distributing porn via my website" - your website was distributing porn all by itself. Guido certainly wasn't helping in any way. I wonder, if you get concepts like this so badly wrong, why exactly do you think that the advice you're giving Cameron on porn blocking is going to be so good?

And hey! it seems that Guido is now planning to sue Claire Perry (presumably not least for the entertainment it's going to provide:

Reluctantly, Guido has instructed m’learned friends who will be writing to her today...

Ah, Claire. Perhaps a little less time fulminating about porn and a little more time studying how the Web operates would have worked wonders. That Oxford degree in Geography appears to have given you a remarkable self-confidence about your knowledge on matters technical. And certainly, when someone you're accusing is telling you that your claims about them are defamatory, it would seem to be a good plan to at least check your understanding of the issue with someone who knows more about it than you do (in this case, a spotty 12 year old geek would have sufficed). Incidentally, if you want to make it harder for others to hack your site, my personal advice is to disable PHP - or at least, make sure you're always up to date with the security fixes.

I see this evolving in the near future into a donation from Claire to a charity of Guido Fawkes' choosing - if Claire has any common sense, or at least has a solicitor with the common sense that the good Lord gave gravel. I'm kind of hoping that Guido will pick a beneficiary like Wikileaks...