July 2012 – Paul Gregg

July 11, 2012October 16, 2019

Leaving Menshn for good

I’ve decided to close my Menshn account, folks. It’s over. After four weeks of micro-menshning and meeting great friends and colleagues (largely not on Menshn), I’m off. It’s been amazing but it never provided the community feeling it once promised.

So I’ll be posting my rants on twitter and my blog instead, and I’ll be blogging more here and writing for a range of other channels.

Friends can email me via the usual address, add me on Facebook or connect with me on twitter.com, where my username is pgregg.

So to my hundred (automatically assigned) followers – see you around – it’s (mostly) been a pleasure, but largely a technical disaster.

July 11, 2012October 16, 2019

Menshn: Another password design flaw

Ok – so I forgot my password on Menshn, again, and went to reset my password. Normal email address+token thing – except I noticed another problem.

Menshn emails you a link in the form:

pwreset.php?e=email@address.com&c=8chartoken

At least they are not emailing plain text passwords again. But, I noticed that the token link can be used both multiple times, and it does not expire.

Requesting a new token to be emailed to you invalidates earlier tokens – however it remains the case that the most recent pwreset token stays valid.

Ooops. Bad Menshn, bad. Back to the naughty corner for you.

At least clear the stored token when the user uses it once (and ensure you don’t accept blank tokens).

July 10, 2012October 16, 2019

Menshn DNS is a (technical thingy).

So Menshn changed their DNS and stopped their site working for a number of users.

Users pointed it out and Menshn did what Menshn does and blamed everyone else but themselves. I call it the Apple Defence. Or #You’reHoldingItWrong.

What Louise probably doesn’t know is that whoever is advising her*, plainly doesn’t know the first, or last, thing about DNS.

*assuming she has an advisor, perhaps Bozier, as no geek worth his (or her) salt will ever say “technical thingy”.

No Louise, DNS migration does not take 24 hours. It is not the fault of the other ISPs. It is your own fault.

Now Louise and Bozier have both blocked me on twitter, but I’m a magnanimous chap – in the words of Sid [Ice Age] “I’m too lazy to hold a grudge” – so I’ll tell them how to fix it next time.

DNS records have this little number attached to them called a TTL – or Time To Live. Normally the domain TTL is 86400 seconds, or, as you’ve found, 24 hours. This number is entirely within your control. It is the number *you* give to other ISPs when they ask for your zone information. So when their systems receive that data, they can, rightly, assume that the data is good for the next 24 hours.

Thus, when you are planning a domain/DNS change – what do you do? You lower the number to an acceptable outage window, e.g. 60 seconds on your original DNS zone(s) servers. Further, you need to do this at least 24 hours in advance of the change to allow the existing longer TTL records out there to expire.

Thus when you switch DNS servers, or server IPs, your maximum outage window is the new lower TTL.

Welcome to the Internet. It’s a technical thingy.

July 9, 2012October 16, 2019

Louise Mensch, MP, brands me a spammer.

So after my latest round of tweets with Corby MP Louise Mensch nee. Bagshawe, she has effectively called me a spammer and forbade me from tweeting her any longer (or I’ll be blocked). So be it. I won’t tweet her any more.

She has invited me to email her – but why would I do that? That just makes everything private – and I can be more easily ignored in private. I did highlight the latest copyright infringements on Menshn to her, however that has yet to be rectified on the site.

So, since I’m now apparently a spammer it is time to question Ms. Mensch’s understanding of a few words.

1. Democracy. You would think a Member of Parliament would get this one right. Apparently not.

We’ll take Wikipedia’s opening paragraph:

Democracy is an egalitarian form of government in which all the citizens of a nation together determine public policy, the laws and the actions of their state, requiring that all citizens (meeting certain qualifications) have an equal opportunity to express their opinion.

2. Censorship.

Again, lets take Wikipedia’s opening paragraph:

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body.

3. spam. (using lowercase because Hormel trademark requests the capitalised version remain for the lunch meat product).

Again with Wikipedia:

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media…

So, I’m not quite sure what the metaJesus thing is all about – but basically I’m a spammer.

All my messages (see previous blog posts), including *everything* on Menshn and tweets has been critical comment. Pointing our flaws in their web site, security, and actual Copyright Infringement. Not complaints; and most certainly not spam by any definition.

Is there a lesson here? Yes. If you talk about something that Mensch doesn’t want to talk about or hear, Louise will define your message as “spam”, delete, block or otherwise censor you. Thereby enabling Menshn to claim they do not censor (except when they want to).

Ironic however, that Louise doesn’t want me to tweet her, yet does invite me to comment via email – which is closer to the definition of spam!

Perhaps one of her Corby constituents will pass her a dictionary. It appears she may have use of one.

I will not be tweeting this message to Louise or I’ll be blocked from her twitter feed also, but please feel free to let her know yourself.

I’m also done with Menshn. I am obviously not welcome as my preferred topics of conversation are not catered for.

July 8, 2012October 16, 2019

Further examples of Copyright Infringement by Menshn

Following on from my earlier article on Copyright Infringement by Menshn and a find on Menshn co-founder Luke Bozier’s personal web site, I found a few more copyrighted images that Menshn are using without proper attribution.

When you create an account on Menshn, you get randomly assigned a profile picture from their library of, supposedly, Creative Commons images. Except, Menshn’s view of Creative Commons appears to amount to “I found it on the Internet so it must be OK”.

Here’s one of Eleanor Roosevelt, original image is owned by “onecle” with a license of “Attribution, Share-alike”. Menshn has no Attribution.

Here is another one of a cast of Susan B. Anthony, original image owned by “cliff1066TM”, again with an Attribution license.

Menshn’s other co-founder, Louise Mensch has at least taken some interest in my articles – so I expect they will be gone* soon. (*rather replaced, because if they are deleted, many individuals are going to have a broken profile picture).

Now taking bets on how long it’ll take before I get bored of all this. (#joke, lest I fall foul of some gambling law somewhere)

July 8, 2012October 16, 2019

First rule of Menshn is talk about Menshn, unless you are on Menshn.

The first rule of menshn is you do talk about menshn. Please feel free to invite your friends, spread the word, and post about us on Facebook and Twitter. (c) Menshn, Screenshot below:

Yet, if you do talk about Menshn within Menshn – you will get banned.

Yes, I got banned. I talked about Menshn in the Menshnabout room (and before that existed, the politics ones).

Here is Menshn co-founder admitting this (because all I ever posted in Menshn were messages about Menshn, mostly critical, or pointing out that they were committing Copyright Infringement offences).

Edit: Found a cool plugin that lets me import tweets as comments, so I have pulled in the relevant conversations from twitter. Louise did not post what you see below, I used the plugin to pull them in.

Let’s use Wikipedia’s page on Censorship, which defined it thus:

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body.

In this case, the controlling body is Menshn, or to be more precise, its co-founders and staff. The speech or public communication is criticism of Menshn. Menshn admits it will block this speech. Therefore, Menshn engages in censorship. Q.E.D.

Now, would any reasonable person be able to say Censorship does not exist on Menshn? I believe the evidence speaks for itself and the evidence is damning.

July 8, 2012October 16, 2019

Why Menshn will fail

One of the driving factors of social media is the human need to be heard. The belief that somewhere, out there, someone is not just interested in what you say, but more fundamentally, has the ability to hear (or see) what you say (and write).

When the Social Media platform fails in that most fundamental of principles then you have to wonder about its long term prospects for survival.

I created several different accounts on Menshn, using different browsers and networks to simulate how multiple individuals would interact. (note that the rules do not prohibit this)

One thing stood out above all others – any posts by these accounts in any “room” or topic, does not appear in that room. Even when I wait hours, none of the posts appeared visible to the other accounts watching that room. The posts are visible to the account who posted the message – just not anyone else. That, my friends, reduces the confidence in the service and as others begin to realise the futility of their efforts will result in the demise of the network.

When you lose the trust of the public, the network is doomed.

Abiding by the first rule of Menshn, please spread this article. 🙂

The first rule of menshn is you do talk about menshn. Please feel free to invite your friends, spread the word, and post about us on Facebook and Twitter.

Final note: I did not, and do not, engage in any unauthorised intrusion attempts to collect any information in my research. All research is purely from observations that could be made by any individual.

July 7, 2012

Blog change to WordPress

Well, I thought after calling out Menshn for security flaws, I ought to check if my Movable Type was up to date. It wasn’t and one of the changelogs suggested I should upgrade.

However, the upgrade went badly leaving me unable to login at the blog level, or anyone to comment. Admin area was fine.

My upgrade path to Movable Type 5 was blocked because they decided to remove Postgres support. So it put it into the same camp as WordPress. Conveniently there is a PG4WP “plugin” (hack) that lets (most of) WordPress work on Postgres, yay!

Cut to the chase, WP + PG4WP installed. Blog exported/imported. Comments migrated – however I lost a few comments because of a bug in the WP Import incorrectly creating SQL for some articles. Didn’t like the <span style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 187);”> one little bit.I recreated the 4 missing entries manually, but the comments from the originals refused to import.

A mod_rewrite rule to strip the .html from the old MT page urls, and things should be up and running.

July 5, 2012October 17, 2019

Luke Bozier of Menshn has form on Copyright Infringement

3rd in my series of articles about Menshn.

So, today (or last night), Luke Bozier blocked me on twitter. Seems like a pointless act since anyone not logged into twitter can read all his posts anyway. However, it did cause me to google his name and I came up with two personal web sites of his for his blog at:

Out of interest I had a click through some articles and came across an image on:

Change party? You might think I murdered somebody.

Well no, not murder, but yes Copyright Infringement.

You see the image of the Chernobyl Guard is (c) Trey Ratcliff at http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-433927398 (article https://stuckincustoms.com/2007/02/02/nuclear-winter-in-chernobyl/) and all he asks for the use of the image is Attribution. However, Luke Bozier does not provide that attribution.

Screenshot of Luke’s site at the time of this article (because Luke is quite efficient at removing the images when I call him out on his law breaking).

July 5, 2012October 16, 2019

Menshn does not censor, Allegedly.

Officially:

However, my messages on menshn.com do not appear to be visible to others. Compare this screenshot of the same “menshnabout” topic/room.

On the left is Firefox – not logged in. On the right is Chrome – my account logged in.

My message is only visible to me when logged in.

And, I checked…. Private Mode is Off.

Am I being singled out or is there a more widespread censoring going on?