confusion

I found this story [indyweek.com] linked from Jeffery Zeldman Presents [www.zeldman.com].

Basically:
School sets up new computer system
Student starts online journal
Computer system has serious problem
Rumors at school say someone hacked the system

Student posts journal entry entitled ‘Someone hacked the Gibson’

School initiates investigation of computer system problem
Student is called to office
Student is interrogated by two supposed FBI agents—who turn out to be FBI Agents in training (no clearance yet!)

Best part of the story:

Freaked out by what she thought was a brush with the feds, Carter went home and decided to close down her experiment with online expression. True to its name, “Text into Nothing” disappeared with a few commands from Carter’s keyboard. In its place, she posted a farewell missive that warned her readers to lie low: “To anyone who has ever posted on my journal: I am sorry. The FBI most likely has your IP address and your blog address/e-mail address if you posted that. The FBI has been reading my diary.”

Carter described how she’d been interrogated about the blog, and wrote that, given recent events, “I am sorry that I’ve had an online journal. I would highly recommend anyone to take down theirs.” Carter says that the main lesson she’s learned is that it’s time to retreat from posting personal information online. “I know that the government now has forever my extremely personal teenage diary,” Carter concluded. “Hell yes, I’m mad. I will no longer be posting in this
diary.”

First off, any FBI agent working with or in training to be part of the ‘High Tech Crime Task Force’ should be familiar with movies like Hackers, Sneakers, War Games and the like. Because they are, no matter how unrealistic, a part of hacker culture.

Secondly, anyone who post ANYTHING to the Internet should have no expectation of any privacy. The Internet by default is in the public domain—and chances are that anything you have ever posted has been cataloged, categorized and indexed by Google and one or more branches
of the government. Not only are the things you put on the Internet out there for anyone to read—so is a lot of stuff you would not think about. Many localities and government bodies have been or are posting records to the Internet. Things that have long been in the public record but where only accessible by someone who bothered to go through the effort to fill out requests or go to the records building can now search for information online—court proceedings, police records and other things that could contain information on you. This is the stuff privacy advocates scream about. The Internet is no more than a ‘ministry of information’ which is not run by big brother, but is usable by him—or anyone else who cares to.

At least she got the moral: if you don’t want it to be public information—keep it off the Internet.

And honey! Use a brush!

issue number one :: So, I moved confusion.cc from my old web-host to a co-hosting site with codejunkie and several other sites. This caused a little bit of confusion last week with the site coming and going for several days. All is better now, my email works again and the site is up. I have some ideas for things I want to change—but they are ideas I have had for some time… maybe now I will change them. But probably not. C’est la vie.

issue number two :: Anyway, I was very depressed last week. Lazy, tired, unhappy. I think going to a my friend Rob’s bachelors party was the trigger. Hanging out with a bunch of guys talking about and staring at girls just drilled into my head how lonely I am because C███████ is in England. That on top of working long hours and the copious amounts of rainy days we have had in the past few weeks just got me down. Things feel much better now.

AAA! AAAAAA! AAAAAAA!!!! Ok… got that out of my system. Confusion.cc is back online! Been a week or so since I started the whole process of moving the website. Everything seams ok now, but if there is a f*uk up or two in the next few weeks please excuse me. Anyway. I am going to my parents house for the weekend, but I will fill in the gaps about the past week early next week.

If you have an AOL email account, you won’t be getting any email from me for a while… Why? well I sent an email to several people this afternoon and this is the response I got for the AOL mail exchange:

Return-path: <>
Envelope-to: b████@confusion.cc
Delivery-date: Mon, 19 May 2003 19:21:50 -0400
Received: from root by server786.dnslive.net with local (Exim 3.36 #1) id
19Htwz-0007c6-00 for b█████@confusion.cc; Mon, 19 May 2003 19:21:49 -0400
X-Failed-Recipients: f█████████@aol.com, T████████ @aol.com
From: Mail Delivery System 
To:b████@confusion.cc
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Message-Id: 
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 19:21:49 -0400
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none version=2.53
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.53 (1.174.2.15-2003-03-30-exp)
X-Evolution-Source: pop://b████@confusion.cc/
Mime-Version: 1.0
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

f█████████@aol.com
SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection:
host mailin-02.mx.aol.com [64.12.138.89]: 550-The IP address you're using to connect to AOL is either open to the
550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic
550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail
550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free
550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of
550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit
550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
T████████@aol.com
SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection:
host mailin-02.mx.aol.com [64.12.138.89]: 550-The IP address you're using to 
connect to AOL is either open to the
550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic
550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail
550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free
550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of
550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit
550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
Return-path: 
Received: from pool-141-156-198-70.res.east.verizon.net ([141.156.198.70])
by server786.dnslive.net with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1)
id 19HtwD-0007Zk-00; Mon, 19 May 2003 19:21:01 -0400
Subject: Oh man... do you talk like this?
From: ":: beggs ::" 
To: b███████████████@hotmail.com, l████████████@hotmail.com, T████████@aol.com, s███████@gmu.edu, f█████████@aol.com, b███████@postmark.net
Content-Type: text/plain
Organization: my own sick little world!
Message-Id: <1053368922.6012.35.camel@shiva.verizon.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.3- 
Date: 19 May 2003 18:28:43 +0000
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bithttp://www.thesourcefym.com/teenlingo/
-- 
---—---- - ----- ---------------- - - - ------- ------ - - ------ ---
-- brian jeffery beggerly :: b████@confusion.cc :: http://confusion.cc--
-—------- ----------------- -—------- ------------- ---  ----------

AOL no love me. No I figure aol did this because they are trying to fight spam, which I completely understand—I redacted the email addresses in this post for the same reason. Spam, bad! But, bottom line, I can’t email anyone with an AOL address… ‘Spam, spam, spam, spam. Lovely Spam!’

To all my friends who are graduating this year, I just wanted to say congratulations. I am proud of you. Finishing college is no small feat, you have all done well. So to A█████, C██████, J██, J██████, K██, S██████, S██████, and everyone else I know who has come to the end of their studies; Congratulations.