Category Archives: Computers

Post-mortem of security breach on my Linux server

On the afternoon of September 15, I started getting some strange email messages from cron on my Linux server, which hosts my email, blog, DNS, and several web sites for various non-profit organizations I’m involved with. (Background: One of the web sites, an old Drupal installation, handles scheduled tasks through a cron job that periodically… Read More: Post-mortem of security breach on my Linux server »

IMPORTANT UPDATE on Brave New Foundation and Nation of Change

I wrote several days ago about spam I received from Nation of Change at an email address which had previously only been shared with Brave New Foundation. Earlier today, I wrote about Nation of Change apparently attempting to cover their tracks after their unauthorized use of email addresses was discovered and reported by me. I… Read More: IMPORTANT UPDATE on Brave New Foundation and Nation of Change »

Nation of Change trying to cover their tracks?

I wrote recently about spam I received from a new, shady-seeming progressive organization called Nation of Change, sent to an email address that I had only ever used to subscribe to another organization’s mailing list. I asked a lot of questions about Nation of Change, and thus far they’ve failed to respond to any of… Read More: Nation of Change trying to cover their tracks? »

Oracle (née Sun) joins the club of companies who can’t keep their mailing lists secure

In September 2009, I registered as a developer at sun.com. When doing so, I used a tagged email address, i.e., an email address part of which was unique to my registration at that site. I’ve never used that particular email address anywhere else or published it anywhere. In January 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of… Read More: Oracle (née Sun) joins the club of companies who can’t… »

Mysterious identity thief uses my email address to create Skype account

As I previously reported, somebody has been interacting with Web sites using my email address. I suspect that in addition to the ones I know about, this individual is probably also doing things that I don’t know about, because I assume that not all the web sites at which he’s using my address are kind enough… Read More: Mysterious identity thief uses my email address to create Skype… »

Semaphore Corporation continues to canonicalize addresses wrong and refuses to admit it

Long-time followers of my advocacy may recall my story from years ago of attempting to get the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deal with the fact that they sent several of my kids’ social security cards to the wrong address because the software they were using to canonicalize mailing addresses was buggy. Some sleuthing on… Read More: Semaphore Corporation continues to canonicalize addresses wrong and refuses to… »

“Nation of Change”, who are you and why are you spamming me?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of August 12, 2011, it appears that Brave New Foundation had nothing to do with the spam reported below and in fact they are as much a victim as I am. Please see this posting for details. Dear Nation of Change (along with Brave New Foundation), Let me tell you about a little strategy I… Read More: “Nation of Change”, who are you and why are you… »