Electronic Jihad? Maybe not...

Rumours have been a-circulating that al-Qaeda - whatever that is - is planning a "cyber jihad" attack on the West using, yep, Electronic Jihad Version 2.0 (the first one must have been too buggy).

Techworld is quoting several rather sceptical security experts who seem to think the scare - disseminated via an "online military intelligence magazine" called DEBKAfile - is, erm, dubious.

Electronic Jihad appears to be a collaborative effort based on a similar distributed computing model to SETI@home, except less benign. Of course, the first problem that springs to mind is that terrorism, when it really occurs, tends to be the work of a small band of clued-in people, rather than thousands of sympathisers happy to have a program called "Electronic Jihad" purring away on their desktops.

But hey, what do I know?