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Politicians and political parties love to throw around buzzwords.
In Ireland we have got used to terms like:
“digital economy”
“knowledge economy”
and, of course, “celtic tiger”.
Labour have released a document with the rather pretentious title of “Plan for Digital Ireland”. Download it. Read it and try not to spill too much coffee all over yourself.
Their headline:
Next-generation broadband is an essential component of our economic recovery. The availability of high speed broadband is crucial for business and job creation, as well as being key to attracting outside investment.
Um .. really? Ok, it would be nice if higher speeds were available everywhere, but the reality is that companies are offering faster speeds in most of the population centres. UPC, for example, have a 30 meg product which is available all over the country as far as I know.
Do we really need to spend 20 thousand euro per household on broadband?
Seriously?
And for a document that purports to be a roadmap for Ireland’s digital future, why isn’t there a single mention of IPv6 in there? It’s not mentioned once. There’s no mention of security in the entire document either.
There are, of course, plenty of nice fluffy words that are going to make some journalists’ mouths water..
Of course if an Irish political party were to actually make a statement about technology that actually made any sense I’d probably die of shock!
Irish politicians love to coo about our “knowledge economy” and how they see Ireland as some form of “digital hub”.
It probably used to help with votes. I wonder does it still?
Of course, as we all know all too well, the track record of Irish politicians and the digital world is far from stellar.
Fine Gael got their site hacked, The Greens spammed loads of bloggers and made some “interesting” statements via their Twitter account.
So now the Irish Data Protection Commissioner has felt the need to send a pre-emptive warning to all the Irish political parties (unfortunately he’ll have missed the independents!):
The Irish Examiner reports that the Data Protection Commissioner has written to political parties to warn them about texting and emailing people in the run-up to the general election. Commissioner Billy Hawkes has warned parties against using information from third parties to contact voters. The office said it had received numerous complaints during previous campaigns. According to the office of the DPC, “in many cases, the individual had no previous contact with the political party or candidate and was concerned at the manner in which their details were sourced. Subsequent investigations revealed that contact details were obtained from sources such as sports clubs, friends, colleagues and schools.”
Yeah – Irish political parties can be really trusted with email and the internet .. NOT!
Once upon a time and it wasn’t really that long ago, you would post a blog entry and people would either comment on it directly, or they’d write their own post and link to you.
In 2011 with people cross-posting their RSS to multiple targets such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (and a load of other places) some people are saying that they aren’t getting the volume of comments they used to. At least not on their blogs. They’re seeing the reactions on the other platforms / networks
I’ve seen this to a certain degree, but what about other people? Is this common? A trend? A fad?
Although I don’t do it that often, I sometimes have to make calls to the US from home in the evenings. This evening, for example, I’ve been dialed in to a call for about 3 and a half hours!
At present I’m using Skype, which works out pretty cheap and has the added advantage that I can use it on my laptop when I’m overseas.
Other friends are using services such as VOIPGate and JustVoip
I’m really fascinated by a new project we’re working on inhouse – RSS.me
What is it?
Well if you know what RSS is you can probably guess.
And no – it’s not an RSS reader. There are plenty of them out there already and we can’t really compete with them .. nor would we really want to.
At the moment there isn’t a huge amount for the public to see .. there’s a holder page on the site inviting people to signup to find out more .. We’ve also got a Twitter account setup and a Facebook page ..
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to start using the service myself this week and that we’ll have “normal” beta testers on it later during the week .. though we may end up adding a week to that timeline.
I can’t remember who sent me a link to this, but it’s very cool:
It’s a combination of a hardware accessory that you slot your iPhone into and an iPhone app. I’ve no idea how it works, but the video (above) looks really cool.
Apart from their issues with their site getting defaced, Fine Gael have made some very odd decisions about their new domain.
To start with, why on earth are they dropping their .ie domain name in favour of a .com?
Does this mean that Fine Gael isn’t happy being Irish?
(not that using a com means that, but you’d have to wonder)
But more importantly, why on earth are they using a whois privacy service to hide the domain name registration details?
Have a look at the whois output here:
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States
Registered through: ElectionMall Technologies Inc Domain Name: FINEGAEL2011.COM Created on: 08-Dec-10 Expires on: 08-Dec-11 Last Updated on: 08-Dec-10
Administrative Contact: Private, Registration FINEGAEL2011.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Fax — (480) 624-2598
Technical Contact: Private, Registration FINEGAEL2011.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Fax — (480) 624-2598
Domain servers in listed order: DNS1.STABLETRANSIT.COM DNS2.STABLETRANSIT.COM
Is it even legal for an Irish political party to obfuscate their domain’s details like that? Even if it is legal it hardly sends a positive message about “transparency”, does it?
UPDATE 2135: The Fine Gael site is now completely offline with this default holder up instead:
By the sounds of things the defacement was due to bad coding. People were able to post comments including Javascript which was actually executed, instead of being stripped out. As Homer would say – doh!
UPDATE 00:20 There is now a more official looking holder page up:
Wait for the wonderfully vague (and inaccurate) excuses and explanation from Fine Gael spokespeople in the coming days …
Update 0930 The Fine Gael website is back up and running with no evidence of the defacement in sight. It’s also not clear whether they have taken any measures to improve the coding of the site to stop the kind of attack that that happened last night. It seems that they had another message on the site during the night which tried to spin the hack (via Kieran Lane) :
I have a few problems with this message and the total lack of any message on the site at present. To start with trying to spin the defacement in this manner is really not that bright. Either they think we’re all dumb or their spin doctors are more naive than I thought. Secondly it’s not clear if the defacement’s attack vector has been patched properly or not. Under normal circumstances I would assume that it had, but considering how simple the “hack” was I wouldn’t be overly confident of them having fixed it.
UPDATE 1038: It now transpires that the defacement was a lot more serious and several thousand people’s contact details may have been compromised. No mention of any of this that I can see on the Fine Gael site.. And their WHOIS data doesn’t exactly instil any confidence in them ..
UPDATE 1135 the spin continues. Fine Gael are now claiming that the site was “professionally hacked”. Even though several people have pointed out how the site was easily compromised they seem to be ignoring this completely. They sent the following email to their “supporters” with the subject line: FG Website Professionally Hacked / Authorities Notified
Update 20:05 At some point today, probably after they sent out the email above (?) the Fine Gael website was taken offline and the following message put up:
It’s basically the same text as they used in their email. Some sources are stating that the FBI has now been contacted. This is quite normal and has nothing to do with the site’s profile.
Update Tuesday 11 January 19:25
At present Fine Gael does not have a functioning website. The .ie (finegael.ie) which they had been using for years is still redirected to the .com, which has been offline since yesterday. FineGael.com is currently pointing to a default IIS7 page. So the main opposition party in Ireland is basically “offline”
UPDATE Wednesday 12 January 17:45
While searching for an article related to this incident I got the following (click to enlarge) :
You’ll not
ice a couple of things:
Fine Gael are paying for Google Adwords to drive traffic to a holding page. I’ve no idea how much they’re paying per click, but it’s a waste of money at present due to the site being completely offline.
The link to Enda Kenny’s page on the Fine Gael website no longer works, as they’ve redirected ALL traffic for *.finegael.ie to the new site, which is still offline. Oddly enough Fine Gael sub-sections in the format www.politicianname.finegael.ie are still working.
According to an article on Forbes the Anonymous group are denying responsibility for the hack and have also given some very plausible explanations as to why they could not have been involved. Worth reading.
UPDATE Friday 14 January 19:00
The Fine Gael website is back online. It’s now carrying a message from Enda Kenny about the hacking incident:
A couple of weeks ago I said that I wanted to hear from you and despite the recent interruption to the website, I still do.
You may be aware this website was hacked on January 9, 2011 and Fine Gael is now assisting the relevant authorities in their ongoing investigations. We very much regret that contact data that the public supplied as part of an open and genuine conversation about the future of our country was accessed in the course of this hacking incident. For now we have removed the email and mobile phone sections of the Comment forms but we still want to hear your views, opinions and concerns about the issues facing our country.
This video I recorded at the end of last week was a response to the overwhelming participation on the site, since going live. The message in the video remains the same, even if we have been delayed in posting it to this site.
I am looking forward to hearing your comments on what’s needed to change our country once more.
I’m a little confused by the removal of the email and phone sections of the comment forms. Does this mean that they still haven’t secured the site completely, or is this some kind of attempt to make people feel that they’re being more careful about personal data?
Speaking of Enda Kenny .. …
Googling for him at the moment gets some rather “interesting” results.
His page on the Fine Gael site is not reachable, as mentioned before. However it is quite easy to get to endakenny.com. You’d think this was either his site or that of the folk singer based in Australia. It’s not. It’s a Bebo page which is obviously a “spoof site” setup by someone who doesn’t particularly like Enda Kenny or Fine Gael ..
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