Bloggerheads

The following exchange was published under this post on Iain Dale’s website this morning and then deleted in its entirety within the past hour. Comment moderation has been switched back on, as it usually is when Iain would rather avoid certain questions regarding problematic issues such as his comment moderation policy.

Rather than rabbiting on, I’ll simply reproduce the deleted exchange here and let the content – and the fact that Iain would rather risk being caught deleting it than facing it – speak for itself:

Tim said…

How about coming up with your own ideas and material for once? You can start the process by removing my material from this collection.

Alternatively, you just just delete this comment and pretend that I’ve never asked you to stop stealing my stuff.

October 22, 2007 12:40 PM

–

Iain Dale said…

of coure, if you told me which were yours, I’d happily delete them. But you never do, do you? Provide me with a list and they will be deleted. With pleasure.

October 22, 2007 1:03 PM

–

Tim said…

Not an entirely honest line to take Iain, considering that:

a) this is the first time you’ve even acknowledged the request, first made 8 months ago.

b) my work that you’ve stolen and marked ‘copyright Iain Dale’ is clearly watermarked and/or part of the fun and games with Tim Yeo that you personally congratulated me for when you first began sucking up to me for a blogroll link.

You know which ones to delete, so stop making excuses and get on with it.

You can then get on with removing any images of mine that you’ve used on your weblog.

PS – Your ‘ban’ is equally dishonest; you have never publicly announced the reason(s) for the ban or terms of same, but they appear to be as follows:

You only allow comments of mine on your website when you think you have an answer to them or no answer is required; the rest of the time, you just delete them.

Where’s the transparency? Where’s the consistency? Where’s the accountability?

October 22, 2007 1:48 PM

PS – No, Iain still hasn’t deleted the stolen material from his Flickr collection (as he has finally promised to do)…. just the comments highlighting them.

Shhh! I’m busy writing (as opposed to recycling stealing other people’s ideas and begging my readers to do most of the remaining work for me).

I have two quick items for you:

Garry Smith has a new home.

The Society of Homeopaths ‘pulls an Usmanov’

Yesterday, Iain Dale posted an image mocking the recent queue-jumping antics of MPs. The image had, originally, been posted by Kerron Cross. Iain gave no indication of this.

[Note – Recess Monkey also used the image without initially crediting Kerron Cross, but it looks like he only did this because he was under the impression that Dale was the primary source.]

Under comments, Chris Paul piped up with this:

Chris Paul said…

I’m looking for the hat tip to Kerron Cross Iain, the so small it’s not there print.

Come on man play the game.

October 18, 2007 10:20 AM

The ‘game’ Chris Paul refers to is the web publishing game. It involves certain points of etiquette that Iain Dale often ignores, and I’ll cover this key point of etiquette shortly. That the image had already spread to another blog with the link-hungry Iain Dale getting the credit should be enough for now.

Anyway, Iain Dale countered in a clearly sneering tone whilst berating Chris Paul for his allegedly sneering tone:

Iain Dale said…

Chris, if I had got this from Kerron Cross I would have given him a hattip. I was emailed it by someone. However, it is clearly the same picture, so I suppose it is possible that person lifted it from Kerron’s site.

As you know I ALWAYS give hattips if I use material from other sites so you can cut the sneering tone.

October 18, 2007 10:25 AM

That last bit is an outright lie. I called him on it with this:

Tim said…

As you know I ALWAYS give hattips if I use material from other sites

Not ALWAYS, Iain. You’re still hosting a bunch of my stuff without permission and no link credit.

October 18, 2007 10:49 AM

Please note that at this stage Iain is lying and I know that he’s lying… but I haven’t called him a liar yet, because I don’t want to give him an easy ‘out’. (“What?! How dare you call me a liar? Insulting comments like this will be deleted etc. etc. etc. hissy hissy blah blah…”)

Nevertheless, this comment was deleted. With no indication that it had been deleted.

Iain did, however, moderate his claim somewhat for this update within the post (the highlight is mine):

[Iain Dale] UPDATE: When I originally posted this I didn’t realise Kerron Cross had already done the story. The picture was sent to me from another source within Parliament. Apologies to Kerron, but it was an innocent mistake. Regular readers will know I always provide hattips where I know the source.

An ever-so-slightly mealy-mouthed statement, which pretty much amounts to Iain backing off from the outright lie and instead taking the rather shaky stance that – if an image gets sent in by a reader – he shouldn’t bother asking where it came from. One can only wonder why Iain’s readers are under the impression that they shouldn’t offer this information in the first place.

So, on I went with the exercise of calling Iain on his initial lie, addressing a key weakness in his moderated assertion, and pointing out that the old fraud makes a regular habit of censoring comments that show him to be an old fraud:

Tim said…

Iain, you said something that was incorrect, I corrected you, and you deleted my comment.

What’s up with that?

Am I still banned for reasons you have yet to make clear or do you just not like being shown to be wrong… or a liar? (Actually, I suspect that’s the very reason why I’m banned, but you’re not going to come out and say that, are you?)

You do not ALWAYS give hat tips if you use material from other sites and you’re STILL hosting a bunch of my stuff without permission and no link credit. You still haven’t addressed the latter matter, despite my bringing it to your attention months ago and making it absolutely clear that, due to your repeated use of my stuff without hat-tips, you no longer have permission to use any of my work.

BTW, the “someone sent it in by email” excuse just doesn’t cut it. If the reader who sent it in didn’t have the good manners to mention the source, YOU should have had the good manners to ASK.

You should also have the courtesy to address this comment openly and honestly in the thread where it was raised, instead of using repeated deletions and/or the sudden introduction of comment moderation, and THEN bitching about it when I’m forced to address it elsewhere.

[If you have problems with the tone of this message, blame certain webmasters with a bad habit of moderating their comments only so far as to protect their own interests/reputation.]

October 18, 2007 2:18 PM

Iain deleted this comment, too.

But he hasn’t deleted the many images of mine that he still carries in this little collection, despite my making it absolutely clear to him nearly 8 months ago that – because of his repeated image theft – he no longer had permission to use any of my images.

Not one of the images in his Flickr collection that are mine carry a link credit, and Iain knows – watermark or not – that this is an important aspect of web etiquette; and I know Iain knows about the importance of links, because he spends so much time begging for them (admittedly in a far more commanding way that he used to, but I digress…)

Kerron Cross, seeing a storm on the horizon, gracefully accepted Iain’s self-serving half-apology and called for calm:

Kerron said…

Oh yeah, apology accepted by the way. I guessed you hadn’t done it intentionally.

And you do usually credit other sources – which is why I was a bit surprised.

Just in case this threatens to blow up beyond all proportion! ;-)

October 18, 2007 4:01 PM

But it needed to be pointed out that these storms arise because Iain is so precious and so manipulative that he sees fit to censor his comments in a way that allows to get away with outright lies just like the one that started this exchange:

Tim said…

Well, Iain could just admit that he doesn’t always give hat-tips, even though he claims to, and that it might have been polite to ask the person who sent your image in where it came from.

There’s no need for it to go any further, but if I know Iain, he’ll exacerbate matters by refusing to admit that he’s wrong and then having a go at me for daring to suggest otherwise.

October 18, 2007 4:49 PM

This comment was also deleted.

Iain then went on to post an item that castigated Des Browne for misleading the house and suggested that his being caught out this way should be grounds for his removal from cabinet.

Hypocrite.

Dale can bitch about scale as much as he likes, but you either believe in the principles of honesty and accountability or you don’t. Iain clearly doesn’t, and it was time to say so in a perfectly on-topic manner:

Tim said…

Is this why you yourself are so reluctant to admit it and/or apologise when you get things wrong, get caught lying, or get things wrong and then get caught lying about it, Iain?

October 18, 2007 5:35 PM

This comment was also deleted.

I sent an email to Iain asking why he was forcing me to call him on this on my own blog. He ignored it. He did, however, take the time to make the following comment under a post about the Independent regurgitating an FCO release:

Iain Dale said…

I don’t know why you think I am in a rage. I am merely pointing out something that if I did it, it would get Tim Ireland foaming at the mouth again. Not difficult, I know.

The signing of this treaty with no referenmdum, as promised by Labour, is nothing short of a disgrace. It’s got nothing to do with being anti EU. Plenty of Europhiles feel exactly the same.

October 18, 2007 5:47 PM

But not before – as predicted – turning comment moderation on so he could dump any compromising responses to this in the trash without them seeing the light of day.

The man is all class, isn’t he?

1) That’s an outright insult involving a myriad of falsities that are easily countered with the facts… but where’s my right of reply?

2) This, from a man who screams “You insulted me!” if you ever catch him lying. If he doesn’t want to be called a liar, then he should stop lying.

3) But he does lie. He lies persistently and shamelessly, and uses techniques just like the ones outlined here to hide it from his readers. If I press the matter and/or speak up elsewhere, he will often pretend that the initial exchange(s) never took place and instead attempt to give the impression that I’ve had a go at him for no good reason. Often, these exchanges are peppered with suggestions from him or anonymous comments on his blog that suggest I’m not of sound mind, and any frustration you see is nothing to do with his infuriating pig-headedness, but rather the result of my failing to take prescribed medication. This is a disgusting tactic that in an insult not just to me, but to everybody with genuine mental health problems *and* the intelligence of his readers; Dale also appears to be blissfully unaware of the company he puts himself in when he plays these games and the potential consequences of crying ‘wolf’ with the related ‘stalker’ tag.

4) He has done this so often that he now feels confident that he can claim that this happens repeatedly for no good reason.

5) Iain appears to be suggesting that I’m a hypocrite for potentially calling him a hypocrite. For this claim to carry any weight, he would have to prove that I’ve regurgitated a political press release verbatim without revealing the source as he has done and/or attempted to defend the Independent over this matter in much the same way that he handled the Grant Shapps affair.

Normally, with people like this, it pays to simply walk away; politicians lie, and Iain is a known partisan hack and MP wannabe.

However…

It is simply not on for Iain Dale to call for honesty, transparency, civility and/or accountability in others when he clearly doesn’t stand by these principles himself.

More importantly, Iain has a responsibility in his dishonestly-engineered role as the very bestest political blogger in all of Britain, and yet he abuses his position on a regular basis for personal or party-political gain…. often with an appalling disregard for the potential consequences.

We all lose if the politics of perception and deception is allowed to take hold in weblogs.

I was all revved up to do a charming, well-meaning post about the people at Fasthosts being in need of a pint this afternoon, so I checked out Google Maps to see where the nearest pub might be. I did not set out to suggest that said pub(s) might be a source of anything other than after-hours comfort, but…

Well, just take a look for yourselves.

Here is the head office of Fasthosts:

View Larger Map

And here are the pubs they have available to them:

View Larger Map

Please note that one of them appears to be inside their building. Make of it what you will.

Via Dave Cross:

The Register – Fasthosts customer? Change your password now: Fasthosts, “the UK’s number 1 web host”, has fired off emergency emails telling customers to change all their passwords after police were called in to investigate a major data breach… We’ve asked Fasthosts why the passwords were not encrypted in the first place. It said: “Historically, Internet companies have rarely encrypted passwords to aid customer service.”

As many people under comments at El Reg have pointed out, that last bit (probably from the desk of Richard ‘I get paid to hide under my desk’ Stevenson) is absolute bullshit.

Poor security is not a usability feature. They should have done far better far earlier.

Additionally, yesterday it was reported that Fasthosts admitted to a botched update to its mail server that permanently deleted customer emails. As with this latest disaster, they then went on to assure customers that they had taken new measures to ensure that such a disaster would not happen again when, by most accounts, with a quality host it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

If you are currently using Fasthosts, I urge you again to start your move to an alternative provider TODAY.

I’ve read many published reports from other Fasthosts users that would appear to suggest that Fasthosts make it difficult for their customers to move on without fuss and fees, but after these two disasters, I’m sure you can throw their terms and conditions in their face and see how they like it.

Fasthosts do, after all, make the following promise;

“We will endeavour [sic] to provide a continuous high quality service.”

And – just between you, me and the gatepost – I’m not seeing much endeavouring going on, just a fuck of a lot of dawdling.

UPDATE – Those with a taste for irony may appreciate that Fasthosts released their first press release for months yesterday, offering a new range of dedicated servers. In it, they claim:

Servers are located within Fasthosts’ superior data centre in Gloucester, where all data is continually protected against fire, gas, water, power failure and unauthorised access.

For added irony, if you go back to earlier press releases (i.e. before recent incidents highlighting extremely poor examples of customer communication on their part) you’ll see a release titled; Slow response to customer emails fatal for UK businesses.

For added extra high-octane über-irony with sprinkles, revisit yesterday’s post, which includes – totally coincidentally, I assure you – a hypothetical situation involving those moments when public confidence and awareness is key and cites a new product launch as a primary example.

UPDATE – Via this discussion thread comes this worrying claim and call to action; If anyone has an account on Fasthosts, I would advise them to keep an eye on their credit card / bank details, as these used to be held unencrypted along with the passwords.

I’ll give Clive a heads-up, just in case historical data has been compromised in this way.

UPDATE – Clive has received the following response from Fasthosts (What? Suddenly they’re talking to us again?): Fasthosts: I can confirm that credit card details are stored in an encrypted format on our systems and we do not currently have any evidence to show that those details have been accessed at this time.

[Note – UKreg is part of the Fasthosts Internet group, which in turn is a subsidiary of United Internet AG.]

If Fasthosts were a human being, I would have them rushed to the nearest hospital for observation; they appear to be operating without a spine, and the lack of coordinative function between the left and right hand alone is a clear sign that there is something seriously wrong with the brain.

Late last Wednesday, the UK-based site BobBear was the victim of a dual attack involving a DoS attack and a joe job; a clumsy effort to damage the site’s operation and reputation which was almost certainly the work of one of the many scam artists the anti-fraud website targets.

Early on Thursday, the highly reputable IT security company Sophos reported the joe job, and BobBear site administrator Bob Harrison was in touch with his provider Fasthosts informing them that a joe job was in progress.

On Friday, Fasthosts removed the website from service – without warning – by suspending the domain.

Bob Harrison tried repeatedly to find out why, but received nothing beyond the initial domain suspension notification.

It wasn’t until late Monday afternoon that Fasthosts reactivated the domain name, and that was only after a round of (yet more) negative publicity for the company and the support of the police!

Fasthosts then responded by refusing to respond to related enquiries from the press:

vnunet.com – Spammers trash anti-money laundering site (with a little help from the hosting company): The British site, run by Bob Harrison, is frequently targeted by malware writers eager to take it down. Now, after a new attack, his domain host UKReg has done it for them. A dual-pronged assault launched this week consisted of a denial-of-service attack against the site, and a spam campaign which purported to come from the site and requested that money be sent to support the operation via an e-gold account… No-one at UKReg was available for comment at time of going to press.

The Register – Anti-fraud site turfed offline after joe job attack: Bobbear’s host Fasthosts responded to the bogus emails by suspending the Bobbear.co.uk domain, much to the annoyance of site administrator Bob Harrison. “They [Fasthosts] took the website down on Friday morning without any warning, despite the fact that I had notified them on Thursday that there was a massive ‘joe job’ in progress and that they would probably receive lots of unwarranted abuse reports,” Harrison explained. “Since Friday morning I have tried via email and telephone to get an answer from them as to what was going on but I never received anything apart from the initial domain suspension notification. The spam emails, which were badly worded and full of grammatical errors, were coming from zombie machines – none of which were on Fasthost’s domain.” … Bobbear enlisted the help of Sophos and its contact at Scotland Yard on its behalf, bearing fruit on Monday afternoon when the site was restored. “To have the domain go down so soon after a spam attack has hit the credibility of the domain,” said Harrison. “Without the publicity and help from the police I don’t think the service would have been restored.” … No one from Fasthosts was available for comment at the time of going to press.

All of this sounds strikingly familiar (and newcomers can see a timeline of my own personal experiences here), but Bob Harrison should count himself lucky that Fasthosts didn’t also respond to their foul-up by bad-mouthing him while they held all the cards.

Let me make the guts of this absolutely clear; it was the intention of an unknown money-laundering criminal scumbag to bring the BobBear site down and damage its reputation, and it only managed to do so with the (hopefully unwitting) cooperation of Fasthosts.

To paraphrase Craig Murray, I think I should make my views on Fasthosts quite plain to you…

If you are currently hosted by Fasthosts, and/or if your domain name is managed by them via UKreg, you should move to another service provider and you should do it TODAY. Otherwise, you risk the sudden removal of your website as a result of a nuisance complaint.

A false or baseless complaint could come from a political or business rival, someone with a personal beef, or even a mischief-maker simply out to cause trouble. There is no certainty about where it will come from or what form it will take; the only thing you can rely on is that you should not rely on Fasthosts when such problems arise.

They will leave you high and dry, they will shut you out, and when it finally becomes clear to them they that got it wrong, they will either refuse to admit it, or simply refuse to speak of it.

And if you doubt my word on that, check out what I did (and didn’t) manage to wrestle out of Fasthosts yesterday:

At midday yesterday, I called Richard Stevenson, who is in charge of PR for Fasthosts. He initially claimed to be rushing off to a meeting, but did take the time to express surprise at any suggestion that he was contacted by vnunet.com or The Register and subsequently “unavailable for comment”. He asked me to put my questions(s) in writing, so I did.

In my email, I put 7 questions to him, and informed him that I planned to publish a report on the BobBear.co.uk matter (and how it related to the Alisher Usmanov affair) that afternoon, and would therefore appreciate a timely response.

Richard Stevenson, who appears to earn a living from hiding under his desk most of the time, responded by taking it right down to the wire with an email response at – get this – 5:26pm!

Just before scuttling out the door for a well-earned pint? I’d ask, but wouldn’t expect a straight answer. My first and primary question related to him claiming over the phone that he had not been approached by vnunet.com or The Register for comment, and he skipped right over it.

Here’s that statement in full:

Concerns were brought to our attention regarding a website being hosted by Fasthosts. In this case, Fasthosts received in excess of 20 separate SPAM complaints regarding UCE spamvertising bobbear.co.uk. In line with Fasthosts’ set procedure, the company’s Abuse Team reacted to the complaints and in adhering to our Terms & Conditions, took the single domain off-line.

Once Fasthosts had received validations that the site was legitimate, the website was restored as soon as possible.

Fasthosts hosts hundreds of thousands of websites and manages over 1 million domain names. It is therefore not possible for the company to routinely monitor the content of these websites. Our anti-SPAM policies are an important aspect of our service and are in place for the protection of all Fasthosts customers.

I’ll get back to the questions that were ignored in a moment; first, I want to spell out what Fasthosts are saying here and how it reinforces my point:

Contrary to what this statement suggests, nobody asked Fasthosts to routinely monitor over 1 million websites; they were only asked to take certain circumstances into account for one single website in pretty extraordinary circumstances. This is called customer service. Bob Harrison informed them directly that this was a ‘joe job’ and he had the backing of Sophos at this time!

In this statement, Fasthosts deny that the circumstances were in any way extraordinary and send a message to their customers that – if put in the same situation in the future – they would act in exactly the same way…. i.e. favour a bunch of money-laundering gangsters ahead of their victim, just to be on the safe side, and not reinstate the website until Scotland Yard speaks up for the victim!

I’ve been threatened with false submissions to “distributed blacklists” and the like by the administrator of a certain high-profile right-wing website that shall remain nameless, but I can’t help but wonder if that person knew how easy it would be to shut me down as a then-customer of Fasthosts.

If you are hosted by Fasthosts and/or your domain name is controlled by them, all I have to do to have your site taken offline – manually or via a joe job – is generate roughly 20 false complaints that you have violated their terms of service.

Further, the Alisher Usmanov affair teaches us that – if you are persistent/convincing enough – there is a very good chance that Fasthosts will eventually decide that they’re better off out of it and terminate their relationship with you entirely.

The resulting downtime could stretch into days or weeks. Often, in this busy world, that marks the beginning and the end of a story, even if there is no conclusion.

Am I reaching you yet?

You do not have to run a political website or say anything contentious about a business rival to be a potential victim. You could lead a blameless life running an ethical business and eventually come to the attention of a rival not unlike this truffle-squishing moron.

He simply chooses a time when public confidence and awareness is key (say, the launch of a new product or a vital moment on the stock market) and engineers a series of false complaints about your website to coincide with this.

Result? Regardless of whether or not he gets caught, the damage is done. Your entire website is out of action just when you need to communicate with the public the most.

So allow me to repeat:

If you are currently hosted by Fasthosts, and/or if your domain name is managed by them via UKreg, you should move to another service provider and you should do it TODAY. Otherwise, you risk the sudden removal of your website as a result of a nuisance complaint.

To close, here are all of the questions that Richard Stevenson of Fasthosts ignored. I present them to you in the hope that you will gain some idea of what it feels like to be shut out after being shut down by this pisspoor excuse for a service provider:

From: Tim Ireland
Sent: Tue 10/16/2007 12:03 PM
To: Fasthosts Press Officer
Subject: Journalist / press enquiry (Fasthosts)

Dear Richard,

This should do for starters:

1. Did either of these parties attempt to make contact with you, your department, or your organisation seeking a comment about the suspension of the bobbear.co.uk domain name?

The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/15/bobbear_joe_job/
“No one from Fasthosts was available for comment at the time of going to press.”

VNUnet
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2201110/spammers-money-laundering-site/
“No-one at UKReg was available for comment at time of going to press.”

2. Do you stand by this statement issued regarding the Alisher Usmanov matter?
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2174406,00.html

“In this case, we examined a website for potentially defamatory material and communicated to the customer that they had indeed breached the terms and conditions for Fasthosts Internet hosting. The customer was repeatedly advised of the breach and upon failing to permanently remove the content in question, their customer account was terminated, the unfortunate result being the possible downtime of other unrelated websites … of which we understand boris-johnson.com was one.”

3. Why has there so far been no response to any of the requests made in this post?
http://b-heads.blogspot.com/2007/09/requesting-response-from-fasthosts.html

4. Can we expect a response to any of the requests made in that post?

5. Why has your weblog been removed from service?
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/blog/

6. Has your company been in contact with Schillings since Thursday 20 Sep 2007?

7. What comment do you have, if any, regarding this published assertion from Schillings?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2508108.ece
“But Mr Usmanov’s spokesman blamed a technical glitch by the web host.”

I plan to publish a report on the Bobbear.co.uk matter and how it relates to the Alisher Usmanov affair this afternoon, and would appreciate a timely response.

UPDATE – It may interest you to know that neither Fasthosts nor UKreg appear on the list of members of the Internet Services Providers’ Association. All members of the ISPA are expected to follow the ISPA Code of Practice; Fasthosts and UKreg are not.

Move. Today.

Dump Fasthosts before they dump you.