What Joe may not want you to know is that Mudcat is not a very secure site. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of computer hacking has access to your registration information, your Mudcat password and your "personal" messages.

Sites with much higher levels of security, think of Amazon.com or CNN.com, not to mention the FBI itself, have been hacked into by teenagers. In comparison, Mudcat is child's play.

BTW, if you want access to this message in the future, print it out NOW. Joe, or one of his Joe Clones, will probably delete it as soon as they're aware of it.

---

Actually, no, we won't delete your message. It's true. Mudcat does not have the money the government has available for security. We do the best we can, but it is the truth that a volunteer site like this is more vulnerable to hackers (but then, we have no top-secret information here, and the information we do have is of very little interest to most hackers). We do our best to protect your membership information and personal messages, but we cannot give a 100 percent guarantee. Your information is reasonably safe here, and that's about all I can say. We don't ask you to give more information about yourself than one might find published in a phone book. If you do not have this information published in the phone directory, don't submit it here. We do seriously request you to give your real name and real e-mail address when you register. We operate on an old-fashioned thing called trust and good will. I know that's hopelessly idealistic, but we still want to believe in the goodness of most of humanity. -Joe Offer