How not to Transfer Your Domains Between Registrars

UPDATE IV - Dec 2018 - Four years on from my original debacle I've given Gandi another shot. The main reason being that I've bought a pair of FIDO u2f keys and have managed to drop all TOTP sites. Gandi is one of the few registrars to offer u2f support and I was really unimpressed with Hover support's reply when I asked about it. Gandi also seems to be very well respected amongst people that I respect.

The good news is that Gandi appears to have seen sense and has overhauled their system to allow an account to use a different email address to the domains that it manages. Having said that I wasn't taking any risks this time and made sure all the owner info matched up with the Gandi account.

The small hitch with the transfer this time seemed to be at the Hover/Tucow end as I only received their Transfer Away email after manually prompting their support and then I found the email to be rather misleadingly worded. Reading the description below would you expect to be able to confirm the transfer to proceed immediately at the linked page?

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Original post:

TL;DR: i) Before transferring your domains to a new registrar Gandi.net make sure every single piece of contact information on them is EXACTLY the same. ii) I can't recommend Gandi.net.

I own several domains, one of which I use for my primary email address. A while ago I read Naoki Hiroshima's account of being held to ransom due to someone taking over the domain he used for his primary email address. At the time I contacted my registrars to ask what security measures they had in place to make sure this wouldn't happen to me (not that I think I have much of value to steal). Their replies didn't fill me with confidence. More recently I read of a registrar that can enforce two step authentication on accounts, Gandi.net. I decided to take the plunge and initiated the transfer of my two .co.uk domains (free), three .com domains (£8.63 each) and one .it domain (£9.20) to Gandi.net.

The .co.uk domains transferred very quickly, apparently without issue, however I noticed that the "owners" of the two domains were two different accounts to the one I was currently logged in as. Upon contacting Gandi they told me that because my details were slightly different for each of the two domains and for the administrative/technical contacts three accounts had been created. I could have used the two owner accounts and ditched the admin/tech account, but that was the account that I had also requested the .it and .com domains be transferred to. Gandi told me that to transfer the domains between accounts I would effectively be changing the owner of the domain. So I initiated the process to transfer the two domains to my main account, which would apparently cost me £4.60 per domain, not too expensive, and hopefully they'd be renewed in the process. But after following their instructions I was further notified that I would need to initiate the transfer with Nominet and pay them a further fee of £12 per domain. Considering I wasn't even transferring the domains between people I felt this was getting a bit ridiculous and gave up.

After three days I was notified that there had been an error transferring the .it domain. Gandi's wiki said that the error message meant that my previous registrar had blocked the transfer, so I contacted Livetodot. Livetodot said that the domain had been successfully transferred away from them and pointed out that the whois record even specifically said so. So I went back to Gandi. Another day later I got an email confirmation from Gandi saying that the domain transfer was complete, but gave no explanation as to what had gone wrong. During this period DNS had been failing on my domain for at least three days. It was at this point that I realised how stupid it was to use my primary email address on the domain that my primary email address uses, and I started to get nervous. While the .it transfer had now been successful, the domain owner apparently didn't exactly match any of my three Gandi accounts and so a fourth account had been created and marked as owner.

Luckily my three .com domains, including my primary email domain, eventually transferred without incident, and with the original Gandi account as the owner. I can now use this account as a central account to administer all of my domains as it is at least the technical contact for all my accounts. However I now have another issue besides the four accounts. As I said above I think it's stupid to have the contact email address of a domain using that same domain, so I would like to change the email address on just that domain. However Gandi's system doesn't seem to allow for that, only allowing one account to have one email address, so to change the email address for one of my .com domains I have to change it for all the domains owned by that account.

All in all I don't think I can recommend Gandi.net. Their system seems to be based on the incorrect assumption that each account is a different entity and each entity will only have one email address. I also wonder if other registrars (and why Gandi doesn't) just recognise an email address as a unique identifier and not worry if other details are slightly different.

Having done a bit more research there are other registrars that can do two step authentication, including Hover and EuroDNS. Reading Naoki Hiroshima's post again I notice that the hacker actually recommended NameCheap and eNom as secure registrars, although that information is a bit dated now and besides, I'm not sure if we should trust a hacker.

UPDATE: When I was initially thinking of going through with transferring the .co.uk domains to a single account I created an account with Nominet and I seem to remember being able to see both of my domains, but now I can only see one. Nominet and Gandi both say that this is because the two domains have different email addresses on the owner contact, but in the Gandi control panel they both look the same to me.

UPDATE II: After getting pretty much nowhere with their support I emailed their batline, nobullshit(at)gandi.net. Coincidentally or not the very same day their support agreed to transfer my .co.uk domains to my central account if I were to change my email address at Nominet. Nominet let you change your email address without any sort of confirmation with the old email address or the new email address, something that I pointed out to them was likely to get domains lost or stolen. A week later my domains still haven't been transferred. I also got a direct reply from Gandi's COO and "Chief Evangelist". Unfortunately this email confirms that their "no bullshit" tag line is just that, bullshit.

UPDATE III - Sept 2015 - A year on my renewals have come up again and I decided to put my money where my mouth is and join Hover. So far the move has been a joy by comparison and the transfer has worked the way that I would expect, you create one account and transfer your domains to that account. The one gotcha being that they don't automatically update your domains to use their DNS servers.

Sexism at theregister.co.uk

I think it's fair to say that The Register has always been the red top of tech publishing, I haven't minded in the past, I'm partial to a bit of puerile humour myself, but their sexist and sexualised headlines seem to have been particularly bad over the last few months. It also seems to have been a very bad year for women in tech, as they say, although maybe every year is a bad year for women in tech.
There sometimes comes a point where you have to vote with your feet, I've tried to give up Google, and now I'm giving up The Register. It's a shame, I mostly like the content, it's only the headlines and the odd Andrew Orlowski polemic that I object to.
The examples below are a few stories I've noticed, ranging from genuine IT stories with arguably offensive innuendo crowbarred into their headlines (the first one is a good example), through vaguely IT-y stories with a sexual element (see the Oracle story for example) to non-IT non-stories that allow a titillating headline and/or picture (take Pamela Anderson, please). There's a bit of everyday sexism too.
Incidentally Bridget Christie Minds the Gap has been excellent.

Facebook turns on frigid Swedish ice-maidens in new data centre And by maidens, we mean slim, 'vanity-free', low-maintenance models

NSA PRISM deepthroat VANISHES as pole-dance lover cries into keyboard Blogging bikini babe blubs about 'the ones I never got to bid adieu'

Shy? Socially inadequate? Fiddling with your phone could help

Fusion-io opens trenchcoat, flashes cheap PCIe cards

Girls, beer and C++: How to choose the right Comp-Sci degree for you

Tearing a strip off Microsoft's Brazilian: That's no way to attract mates

Pussy galore: Bubble-bath webcam spy outrage

'That time I hired a call girl to do my taxes while I f****d my accountant'

Edinburgh students' heaving racks: UK's only hope for cluster-wrestling glory

US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him Deep penetration femme fatale fancies PRISM deepthroat

Tickle my balls, stroke my button and blow the fluff from my crack "Give yourself a little blow job every morning and your working day will be a happier one!"

Is it a BIRD? Is it a plane? Right first time - and she's in SPANDEX Huawei's superheroine Purple Reign upstages new mobe

Apple drops hints about future low-cost iPhones Maybe just older iPhone models, maybe something new entirely. We report, you decide

Village-swallowing MUDCANO was no accident, say boffins Forget 'Sharknado': the Mudcano is real, destroyed 10,000 buildings and is still erupting

Apple FINGERED our personal packages every day, claim shop staff Hired fanbois demand thousands of dollars in sueball

Chubby-chasing SEX TROLLS ran me offline, says fashion blogger

Think your smutty Snapchats can't be saved by dorks? THINK AGAIN Snapchat Save app promises hassle-free image and video capture

China has another go at rare earth dominance First exchange will 'stabilise the market' as crackdown targets 'smugglers'

Leaked photos of iPhone 5C parts portend ugly Google legal battle Slavish copycat behavior will certainly unleash the lawyerly hounds

Amazon DISAPPEARS from internet Last week Google, this week Amazon, next week

Amazon tightens grip on cloud market, report shows Data reveals cloud inferiority complex in other vendors

Billionaire Google founder splits with wife, allegedly beds Google Glass minx

Women in IT: ‘If you want to be taken seriously, dress like a man’

Boffins lay bare exotic Lara Croft meteorite element ununpentium

10,000 app devs SLEEP together in four-day code-chat-drink tech orgy camp Hey, geeks: Hate the great outdoors? Now you can stay in a tent in a big tent

Beat the UK's incoming smut filter: Pre-censor your grumble flicks Oh NO, we don't have money to pay you! Bow-chicka- EDIT *bzzzzt*

Vote NOW to name LOHAN doomsday box
BRA - Ballocket Remote Abort - (Harvey Trowell)
BRASTRAP - Big Red Abort Switch To Release Aerial Payload (Steve Davis)

TPG flashes cheeky 'down under' CAPTCHA Bum's the word on who's responsible

Oracle sued over $33,000 bill for SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE Company credit card allegedly racked up thousands on the other kind of rack

Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation Search me, baby, one more time

Japanese pussies slurp 'meow meow' sex wine

Alarming tales: What goes on INSIDE Reg hack's hi-tech bedroom

Not so Saucy after all: Ubuntu reveals Mirless Salamander... and what, no Britney?

Meet the 'KARDASHIAN Phone' – what Apple bods nicknamed the iPhone 5s

Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson battles bullfighting

Swedish teen's sex video fine slashed: Unwilling co-star girlfriend furious 'It feels like a slap in the face' says ex

LOHAN's vital statistics splashed across fruity display

UPDATE: Ok, they're just trying to rile me now.

In a meeting with a woman? For pity's sake DON'T READ THIS Just put that gadget away, or she's liable to do one

I am a recovering Superwoman wannabee

San Fran tech hub wants hookers and hackers for Halloween

UPDATE 22-Jan-2014 : I've been keeping an eye on it and they really seem to have cleaned up their act, both in respects of the images and the headlines.

Giving up Google

For a while now I've been mulling over quitting Google. I started to think about trying out Yahoo Mail for its tabbed interface, which I quite like; Gmail is starting to look dated. But more than that I felt like a bit of a hypocrite, I don't like Google (especially now they've killed off the Location History API), I often bitch about them, and yet I was using many of their products virtually every hour of every day.

Products and services of Googles that I use include search, email, maps, location recording, mobile OS, calendar, blogging (oh the irony), price finding, Keep (their mobile notes app), YouTube, I even use Google for my SMTP server from home, although in practice that's only data from RSS feeds. The only one of their big products that I don't use is their browser, Chrome, I've always thought giving them that extra bit of control over my life a step too far.

Switching email providers was easy for me as I've always used my domain registrar to forward my mail to Google, so switching to a Yahoo address was easy. If you don't want to lose your Gmail address you can use their pop/imap service with any other email service/client of your choice. While this won't stop Google from reading scanning your mail, or sharing it with the NSA, it will remove one of their ad revenue streams and can allow you to gradually migrate, slowly changing your address with third parties. Of course, moving to Yahoo won't completely stop the NSA, but it might help a bit, and I feel happier spreading my eggs between many different baskets.

I used Yahoo Mail for a bit, but was then pointed in the direction of FastMail.FM, and haven't looked back since. It feels a lot more professional than Yahoo Mail and offers threading, but doesn't offer the same inbox configuration options. But that's about the only configuration option that FastMail.FM doesn't offer, the configuration pages are labyrinthine, the Alternative Login options being a particular gem. The domain options are good too, similar to Google Apps I suppose. I've left what I originally wrote about Yahoo Mail at the bottom of this post, in case you're interested.

FastMail's privacy policy is written in plain English and is worth a read.

There are a few options for search, I've been using DuckDuckGo and StartPage. StartPage feels like cheating a bit as it uses Google's results, but using DuckDuckGo I became paranoid that I was missing the best results. DuckDuckGo does seem to return decent results, but I do feel that you need to craft your queries slightly differently, adding a subject or context which you might not have had to do with Google search, and I do occasionally check Google results if DDG hasn't returned the solution I was looking for.

I am still using an Android mobile phone currently (my cursed HTC One), but I plan to get a Lumia 1020, just as soon as they are out in the UK. And become affordable. And Three pay out, which they have promised to do.

Maps and calendar are two things that I am not only not too bothered about, but will also probably be forced to migrate once I switch to Windows Mobile.

Google+... only joking.

Google products that I am left using fall onto a scale of so important, frequently used and/or apparently irreplaceable that I can't move away from them, such as Google Talk for chatting to my friends who I can't force to move to another medium (at home I use the third party client Pidgin, but at work I seem to have to use the Google app to get past the firewall), image search and location history, which is invaluable to me for geo-tagging photos, to not really that bothered about and don't use very often, but easily replaceable, such as Blogger, Drive and Docs and YouTube.

Of course the elephant in the room is Facebook. I've tried to minimise the amount of stuff that Facebook knows about me, lying about my date of birth, removing all my employment and educational details. Although none of that will help when the tabloids want to find an incriminating picture of me.

UPDATE: I have just received my Nokia Lumia 1020 and can report that Windows Phone 8 is definitely usable. My only complaint so far being that the keyboard takes up half the screen, doesn't do any numbers/symbols as long presses and doesn't support Swyping.

Yahoo have updated their mail interface making the following even more redundant. I haven't looked in detail but the update seems to include threading, and making the preview setting sync between settings.

Having used Yahoo Mail for a few weeks I can report that it is definitely usable, though it does lack many features (threading's a biggie*, I now understand why people top-quote) and many options (you can't configure your inbox** or sending format for example). However the Android app is fine, and I got used to the niggles quickly. One issue that concerned me, spam filtering, turned out not to be an issue. A couple of spam messages have got through, but hopefully with training they will trail off. Yahoo Mail even has some advantages over Gmail, including the fact that the orientation of the preview pane is specific to each local machine, so my work PC with its portrait monitor can remain different to my home PC in landscape, with Gmail I stopped using the preview pane due to having to constantly switch.

* If you're missing threading, I might point out Yahoo Mail has a feature to mitigate this. When you hover over the subject of a message in the inbox a magnifying glass appears next to it. Click this and Yahoo Mail will show you all messages with the same subject line. The same can be done with senders too.

** Not being able to configure my inbox to default to showing unread messages first has made me rethink how I manage my emails, which in the long run might be a good thing.

Giving eBay Negative Feedback

A couple of weeks ago I gave an eBay user negative feedback. It was a little harsh, but I felt fair. The member in question has nearly 600 positive feedbacks, and with my single negative still has 99.8% positive and is still rated as a "Top Seller". Be this as it may, he wasn't pleased. At first he pleaded with me to remove the negative feedback, and I replied with my reasons of giving him the negative feedback. Then he made a small threat, and then he started trying to bribe me, offering me £10 to remove the negative feedback, none of which I responded to. Then, using a different account, he bought something I was selling. At this point I contacted eBay by phone, which was a fairly pleasant and reassuring experience. Having blocked him, and after a week of silence I thought that the situation had been resolved, but no, last night he sent me another email offering me £20. So this morning I called eBay again, mainly to query how a blocked user was able to message me. The man I spoke to said that members who you were already in a transaction with would always be able to message you, but assured me that he took the situation very seriously and that it would be looked into. After putting the phone down I received a transcript of the call. Unfortunately it bore very little resemblance to the conversation that I'd just had. I've no idea why his name is Sandra, and the time is out by at least ten minutes. The seller and item details are correct, so I think it's the right call.

jamiekitson 09:44:02
Hi

Sandra Long 09:45:24
Thank you for contacting eBay Live Help, my name is Sandra. How may I help you today?

jamiekitson 09:46:30
Hi i would like to report a seller for forcing me to remove the feedback that i left

That much is true, and fairly close to what I actually remember of the conversation, but from here it gets further and further from the truth and what I actually said.

jamiekitson 09:46:37
can you please help me

Sandra Long 09:47:31
Hello, Jamie.

jamiekitson 09:47:45
yes

Sandra Long 09:48:02
I understand you want to report your seller as they are forcing you to remove the feedback you left. I'll be happy to look into this for you. While I'm reviewing your account, are there any additional concerns you would like me to address for you today?

jamiekitson 09:48:25
that's it

jamiekitson 09:48:32
here;s the info that you need

jamiekitson 09:48:42
Seller: ***********

jamiekitson 09:48:49
Item number: **********

Sandra Long 09:49:42
Don't worry, I will do my best to help you resolve this matter. Please bear with me for a few moments while I investigate this for you.

jamiekitson 09:50:11
thankyou12

jamiekitson 09:50:19
thankyou!

Sandra Long 09:54:20
Thanks for waiting.

jamiekitson 09:54:30
ok

Sandra Long 09:54:36
We want to assure you that we'll take appropriate action if necessary based on our site rules.

Sandra Long 09:54:49
The action we take may include formal warnings, temporary account restrictions and indefinite suspension, depending on the severity of the policy breach. Members who receive a warning or a temporary suspension will be able to continue to trade on eBay.

Sandra Long 09:54:53
As I'm sure you'll understand, member privacy is one of our top priorities, so we won't be able to update you about the results of this investigation

Sandra Long 09:55:13
It will still be your own discretion if you will remove the feedback, Jamie.

jamiekitson 09:55:24
ok

jamiekitson 09:56:07
but this seller is already warn that it is not allowed to harrass an ebayer nor threat them if you cant get what you want right?

I didn't know that, so it's quite unlikely that I would have said it. Especially like that.

jamiekitson 09:56:24
Definitely i wont remove the feedback

Nope, didn't say that.

jamiekitson 09:56:35
so the other buyers will know how bad he is

Didn't say that either.

Sandra Long 09:57:41
Yes, it is your right to leave the appropriate feedback.

jamiekitson 09:57:57
good

jamiekitson 09:58:22
but what i am trying to say is what kind of warning that you will be sending to this seller?]

Didn't ask that.

jamiekitson 09:58:46
it should be a serious issue because he is trying to tell me that he can come here and break my neck

I definitely didn't say that, and he has never threatened me with violence.

jamiekitson 09:58:53
i already reported this member to local police

Also completely untrue.

Sandra Long 09:59:44
I assure you that we will be taking the appropriate action.

jamiekitson 09:59:49
246

jamiekitson 09:59:59
Thank you

jamiekitson 10:00:10
that's it

jamiekitson 10:00:11
cheers

jamiekitson 10:00:15
have a great day

Sandra Long 10:01:28
It's my pleasure to assist you, will there be anything else I can help you with?

jamiekitson 10:02:46
none so far

jamiekitson 10:02:47
thanks

System10:02:55
The chat session is being wrapped up.

System10:02:55
The chat session has ended.

System10:02:55
This chat was on 08/16/2012. All times in the above transcript are in the following time zone: (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London

So now I am left feeling like I want to contact the eBay member to tell him that I didn't accuse him of these things and take his side against eBay.

UPDATE: After emailing eBay with a couple of my comments above, I received the following reply:

Thanks for emailing us back about this seller. I understand your concern that they are still selling on eBay...

Sigh.

Extracting Images from SWF/Flash Websites

My brother is the head chef at the Foragers Pub in Hove. They recently won an award at the Sussex Food Awards. So far so good, apart from the tiny photo on the awards page and the fact that their pages are written entirely in Flash.

I know that the picture is available bigger, because I can zoom in, both by ctrl+mouse wheeling and using Firefox's zoom and by right clicking and using Adobe's zoom. However Firefox's zoom does not go far enough and I cannot scroll down the page while using Adobe's zoom. So to extracting the image, a simple enough task I thought. Except it's not, because the SWF file referenced by the HTML is virtually empty and once I had located the files they were apparently corrupt.

The best tool I found to get all resources used by an SWF is called SWF Web Vampire and if you need to do this a few times I would recommend buying it, $30 is not a lot of money.

SWF Decompiler, SWF Picture Extractor and the more Linux-y (ie, command line) SWF Tools all looked good, but all reported that the SWF image files I was getting from the website were corrupt. In the end I loaded them in IE and took a screen shot.

Incidentally I feel that the Sussex Food Awards have missed a trick here, if they made their photos easily available, but stamped their logo, and the logo of the company sponsoring the specific award on the image that would surely be a better situation for everyone involved?

HTTP Headers to Disable Caching in Firefox

It took me ages to find this:

Cache-control: no-cache
Cache-control: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

To alter headers in the IIS7 GUI go HTTP Response Headers. It won't allow you to add two headers of the same name so either add no-cache,no-store or you can set no-cache by expiring web content immediately in Set Common Headers at the top right and add Cache-control: no-store manually.

Linux Colour Management and Monitor Calibration (or Do You Really Want a High Gamut Monitor?)

I am writing this purely because a couple of the highest google hits for things like "linux colour management" and "linux monitor calibration" are worse than useless and useless respectively (imho). I won't name their URLs but their domain starts with linux and ends in .com.

Loading default colour profiles (.icc, .icm files) in Linux is a surprisingly simple matter, there's Argyll (see dispwin) and xcalib for the CLI lovers among you and things like gnome colour manager to make things even easier.

I actually found that Argyll and xcalib didn't work for my chosen screen, apparently because the nVidia driver does not properly support XRandR (yet). However the gnome colour manager *did* work, despite it apparently being just a front end for Argyll. Having said that it did apply the same profile to all my screens, so it wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for me, applying the chosen profile to all the important programmes such as eog, firefox and Gimp, the notable exception being flash, which of course is a big deal in a world of flash video and I have to admit to using picnic on flickr an awful lot.

Google Chrome Browser Issues

I've used Chrome a few times since it was released, and it's very fast, but for me, it's just not quite there yet, there are these tiny little niggles:

1. Search as you type. I know I can press ctrl+f, and I know it occasionally mucks up keyboard shortcuts, but I don't care, I want it. Apart from that it makes browsing with the keyboard much easier as you can just hit enter on links, instead of having to hit escape and then enter.
2. Fonts in Linux aren't quite right, see the flickr menu for example, it goes onto two lines.
3. Little website specific bugs, for example, in flickr's organiser, if you press enter after adding a tag to a group of images it seems to hit the cancel button rather than the "thanks" button.
4. I'm getting used to using the history page rather than the missing recently closed tabs feature, but the jury's still out on that one. Ah, there is a recenetly closed list on the new tab page.
5. Would really like to be able to increase the number of thumbnails on the new tab page.
6. While using the debugger, alt+left/right should still navigate back and forward.
7. On Linux it has that same annoying issue that firefox has/used to have: if you kill X chrome thinks that it's crashed and wants you to confirm re-opening your tabs.
8. The spell checker is not as intelligent as firefox's, for example, "exersie" returns no suggestions.
9. The icon is too similar to Visual Studio's, I get confused :)
10. It does not check for a site before googling for what you type into the address bar, eg, if you type "intranet" into the address bar you get google results for "intranet", not your local intranet.
11. The speed boost just doesn't seem as pronounced on Linux.
12. RSS feeds don't seem to show up like they do in Firefox.
13. Chrome seems to "steal" Firefox's saved usernames/passwords and history, which I'm not sure I'm happy about.

I also have an issue with Buzz whereby a Buzz that is in both your inbox and buzz-box doesn't get marked as read in one when you read it in the other. I think that it's just delayed, but it does mean that I click on both boxes to see one message. Also, maybe if you're viewing your buzz-box and a new one comes in it should be marked as read straight away.

AND a couple for gmail: gmail search doesn't split words with underscores and the contact autocomplete doesn't search for words after a period.

Using Outlook Web Access

Since my work seem to be refusing to enable IMAP on their new Exchange server and I refuse to use Outlook, which is just too slow and cumbersome for my simple needs, I've spent the last few days getting to know Outlook Web Access, Microsoft Exchange's webmail offering. Here are some tips:

1. If you're using Firefox and are miffed to find that you can only use the "light" version of OWA, don't be, I prefer the light version and would recommend it to IE users too. And no, OWA does not work on Firefox if you fake the User Agent.
2. Don't worry about the missing autocomplete/drop down functionality in the To, CC, etc. fields, type in the names of your recipients separated by semicolons and click Check Names.
3. If you need to import contacts use the desktop version of Outlook.
4. There is no Discard button on the Compose form (my one annoyance so far), so go straight to the drafts folder, use the check box and click Delete.

It's not too bad really.

Facebook Stream_Get, Offline_Access and getFilters Not Working

I am not sure whether I am being stupid, the Facebook API documentation is really bad or the Facebook API just doesn't really work very well, but if you want to display a user's own profile feed on a page (eg, your own feed on your homepage) here are some pointers: (I do not guarantee any of this information is up to date or even correct.)

o) Setup your application on Facebook, it may be easiest to use the sample/example code they give you to start your project. Fill in the Canvas Page URL and point the Canvas Callback URL at your own domain URL. Then visit your Canvas Page URL.

i) To be able to have a page request restricted information from Facebook while the user is not logged in on a particular machine you need to request off line access, you can do this in these two ways, among others:

<fb:prompt-permission perms="read_stream,offline_access">
Grant
</fb:prompt-permission>

<script type="text/javascript">
FB.Connect.showPermissionDialog('read_stream,offline_access', ondone);
function ondone(a){ alert(a); }
</script>

ii) You then need to grab a persistent session key, in PHP this is available like so:

$key = $facebook->api_client->session_key

$key = $_POST[fb_sig_session_key]

iii) Once you've got this key you (or your script) can "become" the user like so:

$facebook->set_user($user_id, $key, 0)

iv) You can then get an array of streams using stream.get:

$streams = $facebook->api_client->stream_get($user_id, $user_id...)

v) I have not worked out how to "filter" stream_get to return just posts, or links, etc. getFilters will return a list of filters, but I have not had any success in changing the return value of stream_get, at all. There are also apps on the filter that is returned that I am sure I have not installed, Doodle Jump for example, wtf?

The $stream[posts][x][type] value in my streams reflects the following:

11 - create/join? group
46 - post
56 - wall post
80 - link
237 - flickr
none - profile pic, note

Changing the content type of my page rid it of some nasty characters:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Remember that PHP's htmlentities() can also take a charset.

See the result at http://kitten-x.com/#facebook.

The ridiculous thing is that you can save an awful lot of time and effort by using the Facebook RSS feeds, such as:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_posts.php?id=userid&viewer=userid&key=akey&format=rss20

To get your key (and userid) go to your notifications page and click on the "Via RSS" link, you can then change "notifications" in the URL to "share_posts", "status", etc.

Hendry Kai Ian Car Sale Scam

If you are a (potential) victim of this scam please email: frauddesk@cityoflondon.police.uk.

Some general rules to live your life by:

• If it seems to good to be true then it probably is.
  
• If it quacks like a scam, swims like a scam and waddles like a scam then it's probably a scam.
  
• Even if the deal is reeeeeeeeeeeally good.
  
• Especially if the deal is really good.
  
• Especially if they are selling a new VW Bora in excellent condition for "4000EUR".
  

Things that should raise suspicions:

• A seller does not seem to know which way around their own names should go, for example, Hendry is a surname and Ian is a first name , not vice versa.
  
• You google the person, and find a big fucking warning in RED and YELLOW on their homepage warning idiots people like you not to fall for the scam.
  
• Complicated stories that involve selling goods internationally, eg, I am on business in KENTUCKY USA and I need the iPhone for my son who is in Lagos Nigera... etc, or, the car is in London but for some reason I am selling it on a German website to German users only. See also below.
  
• Random capitalised words, eg: "YOU will ask a friend to come with you to Western Union Office. HE will make a transfer so that HE will be the sender and YOU will be the receiver. YOU will receive the money from Western Union in UK,London"
  
• Native English speakers making simple errors, eg: "If you are not agree with this depozit i will not have eny problem, you can come to my when you want i dont have problem but i will not keep the car for you until you are here..Let me explain to you way i want this depozit:" (Ironically there is a distinct lack of capitalisation here, as well as uses of Z and missing As that wouldn't even be acceptable in America.)
  

Things not to trust on the internet:

• Images of passports. This does not prove anything apart from the fact that the seller has a picture of a passport. That image may have been doctored, the passport may not be real, or they may have just found a picture of someone else's passport that they rather inadvisedly put on flickr.
  
• Western Union. It seems that it is very easy to retrieve money from Western Union that is not meant for you.

UPDATE: If you want to scam the scammers a fake Western Union receipt might be in order.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hendry Kai Ian is now offering a BMZ Z4 Cabrio for €5500. Yes, it's still a scam, no matter how much you wish it wasn't.

UPDATE: And a Jeep Wrangler.

eBay Annoyances

It's been a bit love-hate-hate between me and eBay recently. First eBay managed to set me up with a very nice guy who was very grateful to get a pair of tickets for Daniel Johnston and Laura Marling. He was due to be taking a young lady and had forgotten to get tickets, so he was very pleased to be able to buy a pair from me at face value. Then eBay refused to let me cancel the auction, which was still running, as they have some stupid there must be at least 12 hours remaining to cancel a sale rule. I mean, I didn't have a genuine reason, but what if you were selling a hamster and it died? Or a cigar that got wet? So having gone through the rigmarole of cancelling every single bid by hand, giving the reason as "Item no longer available." and quickly selling them to my girlfriend at £5 I thought that was the end of the matter. But no, this morning I get an arsey email from "flying giraffe" demanding to know why he didn't win the tickets for his £10 bid when they sold for £5, despite the fact that they were at £26 when I cancelled the bids. Here is my reply to him, all the text of his second email is contained within.

> I'm sorry,

Are you really?

> but why have they become unavailable?

They were tragically lost in a terrible tickets-left-in-pocket washing machine accident.

> When you put something up for auction you are
> legally obliged to go through with the sale.

No you are not, there is no contract at that point, otherwise eBay would not let a seller cancel an auction at all. If what you say were true then everybody who cancels an auction would be breaking the law. The only reason eBay stop a seller cancelling an auction 12 hours from the end is that they want to make as much money as possible.

Perhaps I should have just replied "So sue me." Serously, do not email a stranger with some bullshit story about how they've just commited a crime. eBay buyers are quickly becoming my second favourite group of people, just behind pedestrians who jump out in front of me from between (not parked) cars.
Meanwhile my other eBay saga continues.

A Christian Response

Last Friday the Register drew my attention to a post by Australian Christians regarding their find of a "witch's sacrificial stone" covered in "blood". I left a comment pointing out that there is no such thing as witches and that the "blood" was far more likely to be paint or rust, being as it was, on some sort of construction site. Today I received this reply by email, in red ironically enough. (I would like to point out that I am not Australian.)

May the one true living God bless you Jamie and all Australians with His Saving Truth and Everlasting Love! (John 3:16-21)

We at Catch the Fire Ministries will keep praying for you Jamie and all Australians to believe the Bible (Word of God) as the mighty Voice from Heaven that calls, “I died on the cross for you and rose from the dead to save you from eternal death, hell and destruction! Repent of your unbelief / doubt and surrender your life (past, present and future) to Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord before it is too late!”

Time is running out as we will soon stand before Him face to face as our Final Judge! (Revelation 20:11-15)

Say, 'Yes to Jesus, Yes to Heaven Forever!'

Say, 'No to Jesus, Yes to Hell Forever!'

Make the Right Choice Australia, Your Eternal Future Depends On It!

I was slightly economical with the truth in my reply.

I am a Christian, and I do believe the word of the bible, but the bible says nothing about the existence of witches, nor that red stuff is always blood. You wrote to me in red, am I to assume that this is blood too?

Jamie

ps, I am praying for your misguided souls.

Jesus is coming back very soon as the reigning King of kings and LORD of lords! (Revelation 19:11-16)

At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father! (Philippians 2:10-11)

Are you ready Jamie?

I'm ready!

ps

Does Revelation 19:11-16 really capitalise "LORD"?

WeGame.com Spam

I got these two spammy looking messages this morning informing me that "Fioleau" waned to show me a picture. I marked them as spam and clicked the unsubscribe link. But then a friend of mine said he'd received the same thing and that we did actually know a "Fioleau". Curiosity getting the better of me, I foolishly clicked on the "YES" link. Of course, I had to sign up, so I did*. The hilarious, amazing, funny, life-changing image is shown, top-right. Once I had got up off the floor from ROFLMAO I looked for the "delete my account" button. There must be one somewhere, surely? No. In fact I can't even see a "logout" link.

Did "Fioleau" really want to ruin my day with that image, or did WeGame go through her address book spamming every address she had?

* I signed up using a different address to the one that I was spammed on, and at no point did WeGame check I had access to the address I used.

The Mess That Is The Mobile Web

I wanted to check an ebay auction on my mobile the other day. I typed in m.ebay.co.uk as the m subdomain seems to be the common mobile web shortcut (see m.google.co.uk and m.flickr.com). But that didn't work. Next I tried ebay.co.uk/mobile (I think I might have googled for that) which linked to pages.ebay.co.uk/mobile/web/ which in turn promised me that the address I was after was ebaymobile.co.uk. But that didn't work either! Eventually, I think through googling some more I found it at wap.ebay.co.uk. eBay isn't the first company to use the wap subdomain, see also wap.tfl.gov.uk. I think the most rediculous mobile subdomain I know of is nationalrail's pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk. Kai is against the .mobi TLD as he believes that it will fragment the web, but as all these subdomains suggest, we do need separate pages for devices with small screens, as good as CSS is, it cannot do it alone, and once you admit that we need different pages for mobiles wouldn't it be easier if we all knew that we could use the .mobi address? I really do prefer the m subdomain over all of this though, purely because it's fewer letters to type on a tiny keyboard. Incidentally wap.ebay.co.uk is pretty good and ebay.mobi forwards to ebay.com.

UPDATE: Another thing that annoys me is browser detection. If I go to a mobile site I do not want to be redirected to the desktop site just because the site in question doesn't know about the browser I am using.

UPDATE: I emailed ebay about their issue, and surprisingly they responded. In their email was this gem: "We do have carrier-specific mobile sites." WTF?

Technology Bites

I received what looked like a piece of spam from one of my contacts today. I called him to check and sure enough he hadn't sent it. It seems that spammers are more and more turning to cracking peoples' accounts in order to get spam through filters.

Various issues with the EasyJet website:

• Insurance is still added automatically, despite orders by EU regulators to do otherwise.
• Once you have provisionally chosen your flights, you don't seem to be able to change them without actually "removing" them first.
• Baggage costs £8 per journey leg, but booking a return journey you are only given the option for the entire return journey at £16. As far as I can see the only way to get individual £8 option is to book the two legs separately, and then you have to pay the card fee twice, which is £3 for debit cards and £6 for credit cards, so you may not be much better off anyway.

Booking train tickets is also a bloody nightmare, the train companies seem intent on hiding return fares and promoting single fares. Yes two singles can be cheaper, but you often have to be very flexible with your times otherwise you can end up spending twice what a return would have cost. Bring on renationalisation I say.

My HTC Touch HD is finally back from the repair centre working!

Something That Sucks About news.bbc.co.uk

I really like the BBC News site, but there is one aspect that completely sucks: search. First you type in your search terms, so far so good. Now press enter or click "Search". What's this? A random list of results from the entire BBC site. But I was on the news site, blatantly I want news results only. So click on "News & Sport". Now I want the most recent result, so I click "Order by date". But I'm not getting the video I want. Oh, videos are separate, of course, on the right. So I click "more like this" under the videos, but it's not there. Now how do I get back to the normal results? How many clicks is that? I don't know, I've lost the will to live.

Eventually I gave up and found the video I was after on YouTube. Albeit in worse quality.

Another thing they could do would be to provide links to new stories from previous articles on the same story, currently they only do it in the opposite direction.

What I Learnt Today

When you get spam messages from your friends on Yahoo! Messenger! and the like about pills to reduce the size of your measurement in one direction or increase it in another, it is apparently not because that friend has a virus on their computer as I mistakenly assumed, it is apparently because their password has been compromised and there is some presumably automated process out there sending messages remotely. So my replies of "you have a virus" were wasted, you actually need to email your friends and tell them to change their passwords. So if you happen to be reading this Sonia, Diana, Morgan or Raquel, change your passwords.

rss2email Update

Setting up rss2email on your own server and then adding functionality to allow anonymous users to subscribe to your blog is a bit long-winded and would feel a lot like reinventing the wheel, so let me introduce you to FeedBurner. To be honest I am not sure what the point of FeedBurner is, but hidden away in its functionality (Feed -> Publicise -> Email Subscriptions) is the facility to offer users the ability to subscribe to your blog updates by email. See the Subscribe by Email link on the left for example. This is still a little bit of a long-winded option as the setup isn't the most straight forward and there seems to be a lot of functionality on offer if all you're interested in is updates by email.

Oh FFS

For a long time now I have been wondering why I can't login to my Nationwide account in linux. There's no error message, I am just returned to the login page, which isn't very helpful. This evening I decided to try a fresh firefox install. So I started firefox with -ProfileManager and created a new profile. And I could login. I don't have a lot of plugins installed, in fact the only one I could think might have any effect modifies the referer, I usually have it set to not embed the referer. It turns out the Nationwide site needs the referer. So there you go if you've been wondering about it too.