Online cheaters beware

Tracey, in a fit of pique, decided enough was enough - but didn't confront Taff face to face. Oh no. She booted up his PC and sent an email to 50 of his most important business contacts with the subject line: 'time to fess up'. She pretended to be her husband, and, in a 'confessional' message, described him as "despicable, deceitful and dodgy". She also made a rather unflattering reference to the size of his manhood, which, apparently, can't even excite a woman's nostril.

Taff, who owns a PR company, was away when the message was sent: the first he knew about it was when his friends started to call him on his mobile. Thanks must go to the Daily Mail for breaking that lovely story. The applications of modern technology eh? Marvellous. And it's good to see national newspapers giving IT such a good name. Taff's PR company is rather cheesily called Good Evans, by the way. Ironic that, considering he's been such a bad boy.

If you applaud Tracey's actions, you might wish to log on to a new website the next time you feel a company has been a bit shoddy. The enticingly named site, haveabitch.com, "makes it easier than ever before to bitch about all those companies and organisations that get up your nose... and make a difference". According to the press release, "the bitching service is free of charge." Now there's a sentence we've never read in a company's marketing blurb before.

And now into slightly less sordid (and arguably more important) territory. To all intents and purposes, Microsoft fell off the web on Wednesday. Unless you happened to know the IP addresses of its various sites (including microsoft.com, msn.com, msnbc.com and encarta.com), you'd have found yourself unable to gain access. And why? Well, to begin with, Microsoft's technical mandarins kept rather quiet about things - either that, or they didn't know what had happened. (http://www.silicon.com/a42250 )

But eventually, a statement was issued which put the whole thing down to one human's error: "At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday (PST), a Microsoft technician made a configuration change to the routers on the edge of Microsoft's Domain Name Server (DNS) network. The DNS servers are used to connect domain names with numeric IP addresses (eg. 207.46.230.219) of the various servers and networks that make up Microsoft's Web presence.

"The mistaken configuration change limited communication between DNS servers on the internet and Microsoft's DNS servers. This limited communication caused many of Microsoft's sites to be unreachable (although they were actually still operational) to a large number of customers." Comments posted on open source community site slashdot.org suggested Microsoft's own procedures contributed to the scale of the problem. All its DNS servers appear to be hosted on the same loop of its network - a clear breach of good security policy. One posting on the site described it as "engineering incompetence of the first order".

That'll tell 'em. The sites were down for the entire day, a day in which we received a press release from BMC, proclaiming a deal it had just signed with Microsoft to provide the software giant with back-up and continuity services. That's a timely decision. Looks like Gates and co. need a bit of help.

The lack of Microsoft on the web (can I hear cheering from the Linux community?) doesn't appear to have been the work of nasty hacker types, although on Tuesday, a group known as Prime Suspectz did managed to deface Microsoft's New Zealand website. The same group also defaced one of Ford's sites on Monday, according to Attrition.org. Attrition.org, which specialises in covering security issues and tracks incidents like this, also reported what it described as one of the "largest, most systematic defacements of worldwide government servers on the web" this week. The defacers, know as Pentaguard, took out various government sites in Australia, the UK and US. Attrition.org's staff were "intrigued by the fact that this was not a mass defacement of a series of government websites with an agency or even within a country, but three different nations in different time zones all for a period longer than 15 minutes."

BT's been at it again this week. The Round-Up heard from a few disgruntled people - one of whom works for silicon.com, no less - who had entered a BT Conferencing competition before Christmas. These lucky folk received a mail from BT about 10 days ago telling them they'd won a lava lamp (don't knock it - lava lamps are trendy again. Honest). But the funny thing was that all the mails were addressed to someone called Karen. Even the one sent to a reader of ours called Peter.

Then a follow-up mail arrived from BT, which read thus: "Due to a technical fault with our system, you were sent an email in error, stating that you had won a prize in our Christmas Cracker competition. As you will have seen from the header, this was meant for another named winner, who has been contacted separately. We apologise for any inconvenience and disappointment caused." BT Conferencing's marketing tag-line is "bringing people together". Maybe it should be: "driving people to distraction". My colleague really wanted that lava lamp. Boo to BT.

Talking of BT, remember when it claimed the patent on hyperlinking? Not to be outdone, AltaVista is threatening to go one better...

In an interview published by the US edition of Internet World magazine (and brought to our attention by our outraged friends at Bluewave), David Wetherell, chairman and CEO of CMGI (AltaVista's parent company), said: "AltaVista ought to leverage their position in search licensing to a greater extent. They happen to own 38 patents, many of which are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the web. And Digital [which originally owned AltaVista] did a good job of recognising the potential value of that intellectual property. They were very thorough in filing broad and deep and narrow patents. And we have another 30 patents that are in application. So we believe that virtually everyone who indexes the web is in violation of several key patents."

Can we expect legal action? You betcha. And how bad could it get? When asked for a specific example of a patent AltaVista owns, Wetherell said: "If you index a distributed set of databases - what the internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents." Oh dear. See you all in court then. After we've all logged on to www.haveabitch.com about AltaVista and/or BT of course.

Til next Friday...