[Techtalk] Getting names and addresses of forum users

[Meredydd Luff]

Update:

For his second salvo, Walt went on the technical attack, and found my various 
machines, services and usernames quite accurately. Portscans, identified my 
websites, etc. Nice work.

Matt Bunter (Matthew.Bunter at renaultvi.com) sent me an impressive set of 
information, using not only the technical profiling that Miriam used, but 
also the electoral register to do some quite accurate stuff. However, despite 
some research on the Winchester website, he didn't pick up that it was a 
boarding school, and therefore that I did not necessarily look in Hampshire 
(whose electoral roll he searched). :-) He also uncovered my family email 
address - more on that below. Good use of Google turned up my opinions on the 
current head of computing here (uh-oh!), and that I did quite a lot on the 
Everybuddy mailing list. Pretty accurate tracking, and with the electoral 
roll stuff, certainly beginning to break into information I didn't 
deliberately put or leave in the public domain.

James (jas at spamcop.net) did some good mail-header analysis, and told me all 
my contact details (which are readily available anyway). More interestingly, 
he told me where I hang out on IRC, and identified my school username, as 
well as Sourceforge and Freshmeat. He also successfully identified my 
boarding house (1 of 11), and its street address (although he may have just 
given the main school address and omitted the word "Winchester", in which 
case he did the same as Miriam). From my sourceforge and freshmeat pages and 
a google search, he identified the projects I'm associated with, both open 
and closed source. Again, although extremely thorough, not quite private info 
yet...

No-one, however, has yet found any non-school information about me (with the 
exception of my family email address). Is there anyone else still interested?

By the way (and sorry for not saying this earlier) - a couple of ground rules 
if anyone does want to take it further:

-	Information about my person and my machines is free-for-all (just don't 
broadcast it everywhere)
-	If a security breach is found, please do NOT open or touch any files on any 
storage media whatsoever. If you want to prove that there is a hole, please 
don't do it by telling me something private about myself - touch 
/tmp/yourname_woz_here or something :-)
-	The one thing that's out of bounds is the rest of my family. Any 
information about me at home, i'm interested in. But the rest of the family 
haven't issued this challenge, please don't bother finding out my mother's 
maiden name or anything - information about *me* only please. Leaving me a 
phone message is probably just about acceptable, but warn me first! Snail 
mail is fine, if anyone feels silly enough ;-)

That said, please do give it a go!

Meredydd

-- 

MSN Developer, Everybuddy project
http://www.everybuddy.com/

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