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Recent posts using the name George Irvine and the email address betchacantfindme@ho*.co* may seem funny and entertaining, but posting fake emails with someone's real name can have some repercussions. First, there are many who believe that the posts are genuine; these people may form an unfavorable opinion about the person whose name is on the post. Next, in order to protect himself or herself, the affected person often spends time and sometimes money trying to find and stop the perpetrator. In this particular case, the perpetrator's hotmail account was cancelled within days of the original post. George is especially sensitive to this issue, because in the past, his enemies have intermingled fake e-mails with real ones and taken this information to WKPP sponsors and even to his employer. So, a hostile fake e-mail posted by enemies, and even a joke fake e-mail can be used to discredit someone. Since I now work in network security, I understand how seemingly harmless things like this can cause big trouble. As an example, we use a utility here called "strobe" in order to check customers' firewalls (the gateway between a company network and the internet) to see if they are up and are listening on the proper port(s). In most systems, this creates a number of messages including "unauthorized remote connection attempt" and "port scan detected on..." which alarms system administrators. On several occasions, customers (including government entities), thought they were being hacked, and initiated investigations which led back to our department. Of course, once we explained what was going on, all was well, but unnecessary time was wasted. So let's stop with the fake posts. They're not that much fun, you can be found out, and they waste the time of people trying to get stuff done. Sincerely, C. Randy Bohrer, President Underwater Applications Corp 15 Brewster Rd Framingham, MA 01702 tel: 508-628-9520 fax: 508-820-3337 http://www.geocities.com/~uwapplications -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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