From "il Giornale", January 9, 2000

On the Internet, Pope's texts with words by 883*

The Vatican mocked by hackers: fake site, for one year nobody realised it.

For a whole year and up until two days ago a fake site of the Vatican, almost perfectly identical to the official one but with some malicious modifications, was consulted on the Internet by unaware visitors. The joke was discovered in these hours: who visited vaticano.org during last year found a copy nearly identical of the official site of the Holy See (www.vatican.va), but with "re-touched" contents. In the texts published on the site, included the Pope's interventions, were "heretical" proclamations, invented words, unpardonable errors and even songs by 883: everything put in a "plausible" context. The action, conceived in an anticlerical and antagonist context, came up thanks to Network Solutions (the company that sells Internet Domain Names all over the world) who decided not to renew the contract to the ones who registered it. "At the expiring of the contract - one can read in the messages that are circulating in these hours on the antagonist sites - Network Solutions sold the domain to a catholic association in Rome". At the moment the address www.vaticano.org hosts a site under construction that promises information on the Jubilee.
The domain, according to the archives of the society that sells them, seems to be registered by a software society in Rome. From the same archives comes out that, a site with a similar name, www.vatican.org, has been registered the 9 February 1999 by a certain Gerald Beals, a man who lives in the USA, Easton (Massachusetts).
According to the mailing lists that reconstruct the event, the work of detournement of the holy texts "involved tens of Blissett from the whole country, and was about to add German, Spanish and English language sections to the main, Italian one. For 12 months thousands of people visited "vaticano.org", and nobody realised that the contents of the site had been "re-touched".

 

* an Italian teeny-bopper band