Anonymous blog?
Posted on December 02, 2002 @ 12:38 in Blogosphere
[This entry updated and edited after I'd taken it off my site. Why? Read below...]
After Dave wrote:
A promising new anonymous weblog. Check out the tagline. Interesting hexadecimal name.
I went and visited the site. Nothing spectacular, another blog, and indeed, the author wasn't very obviously stating his name or even a pseudonym. Normally I wouldn't have thought about it twice, but the adjective "anonymous" in Dave's remark made me curious. So I thought, "Anonymous? Really?"
I logged in on the Unix shell server and perused the WHOIS command. There are several websites that will also allow you to a whois lookup, but I never bother with those. Just too lazy to remember where they are and I know by heart where that shell server is sitting. Anyway, I do a lookup on the blog's domain name and see that it is registered to an individual person's name. Ah... I had also noticed that the blog used the Trackback function of MovableType, but the Trackback URL did not point to the blog's own domain, but to another domain. I also did a WHOIS lookup on that domain name and it was registered to the same person. I put this other domain name in my browser address bar and this person's personal website popped up. Looked like he was into blogging.
So, without thinking too much about it, I figured, well the author is not trying to be all that anonymous and I wrote up a little note for my blog saying that this 'anonymous' blog was registered to such-and-so's name and wasn't all that anonymous after all. The next morning I woke up and found a very polite e-mail from this person in my inbox asking if I would be so kind as to edit out his name from my posting. I hadn't realized he really wanted to remain anonymous and heck, it's not like it was important in the first place, so I took the post offline. And now I have a couple of minutes to update this post and make it available again.
The lesson from this story? It's pretty hard to cover all your tracks and do stuff on the Net really anonymously and it's pretty hard to get something that was available at some point off the net again, especially once Google's been there.
Comments and Trackbacks
Anonymous can be hard work, but Google is actually pretty easy.
http://www.google.com/remove.html
Posted by 0xBADFEED on December 06, 2002 @ 23:56
http://anonymous.bloghorn.com/
Posted by another anonymous blog on March 21, 2003 @ 10:43
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Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.