In case you’ve never visited Oregonlive.com, I’d suggest you take a look. It’s not just that it’s the most poorly designed newspaper site in the world — there are clones, all run by Advance Internet — it’s an example of almost complete un-usability.
But there is one interesting feature, thanks to the horrible design and coding: you can easily spoof an email address when you send an article to someone else. How do I know this? Someone sent articles to a friend of mine, using my employer-assigned email address that included vulgar messages. Thankfully, my friend contacted me to ask me what the hell I was talking about. But I don’t know who else received messages allegedly written by me, using my email address paid for with your tax dollars. And it’s disturbing to think what else might have been sent and to whom.
So when I contacted Oregonlive.com with my complaint, I got the brush off, despite polite inquiries over the course of several weeks. When I finally got someone on the phone, she admitted she’d been contacting people at Advance using a web form, waiting for their (typically techie and unhelpful) responses. Eventually I got the editor-in-chief, who informs me that I cannot have the IP addresses of the senders of messages using my email address as the return. You read that correctly. Oregonlive.com provides an easy way for you to harass other people and make it look as though someone else is the culprit.
So I intend to approach this situation in several ways. First, I’ll be spoofing a few messages to the media in Portland and beyond. Second, I’ll point them to this blog entry. Finally, I will be subpoenaing the server logs for the time involved. I was hoping to leave Oregonlive.com out of this, but once I get the information I need, I will go after both the sender(s) and the company which allows the harassment to take place.
Oh, and even though they won’t reveal the IPs to me, I already know who it is, thanks to the searches I believe Oregonlive.com (or someone connected to them) performed on my site the day after I complained. There are no secrets on the Internet. Updated. See newer posts.
[...] a bunch of emails to the media using Oregonlive.com’s “email this feature.” But I spoofed the return email addresses on all of them to make it appear as though they were from rival reporters. Some of them were [...]
That’s lovely. I couldn’t agree more – it’s possibly the worst CMS ever. It’s really sad that it’s used by so many papers too.
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[...] Talked to RG’s secretary about the subpoena. [...]
[...] York) has denied my request for records to determine who is impersonating me by using Oregonlive to send harassing emails to various people. And just for fun, I will also mock their site, even though it’s almost [...]