identity

Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual.

So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring out how to be a parent for the first time. Well, a crazy woman set up a ‘blog” which hotlinks images from Mojan’s blog and falsely represents the child in the photos. Ick. I offered to help with this identity theft issue.

Once upon a time, I was annoyed with people taking images from my last employer’s web site. Since I was the campus web designer, I created an image which said, “All your image are belong to VSU.” Also, as the web server administrator, I figured out how to defeat hotlinking with .htaccess by using mod_rewrite to give them my annoyance rather than their content. For the next couple days I watched the perpetrators try and figure out what was wrong. The hate mail I got was fantastic! I recommended Mojan do the same. When she agreed, I went researching to do what I did once upon a time. This is the .htaccess file I recommended she try.

# Basics
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

# Condition is true for any host other yours
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mojansami\.com/ [nc]

# What to change gif, jpg, png to which target. In this case does not exist.
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://mojansami.com/images/stolenpic.jpg [nc]

My directions were not all that specific. So the next thing I know, her site is sporting an Internal Server Error. *headdesk* She used Dreamweaver to create the .htaccess file and upload it to her site. She reported the file she uploaded disappeared. Eventually, it did occur to me to look for the error.log and see what it said. The log complained about DOCTYPE in the .htaccess file in the home directory. A file which did not show in the FTP listing. So, replacing the bad .htaccess file with a blank one fixed the Internal Server Error.

The .htaccess file in the right place, of course, resolved the issue with the crazy woman hotlinking.

Nothing can fix the pain of another person committing identity theft against you or your loved ones. I really hope Mojan doesn’t become discouraged and abandon blogging entirely. Between moderation and authentication she might find a better balance.

Do you have any stories of online identity theft?

Yeah, I keep writing about identity management. [1][2].

Few Internet users say they Google themselves regularly - about three-quarters of self-searchers say they have done so only once or twice. Study: Googling Oneself Is More Popular

People admit to having looked themselves up once or twice, but few people regularly monitor themselves. I guess its not like one’s credit report?

Of course, calling it a vanity search would keep people from looking themselves up online. Few want to be considered vain, right?

Normally, I consider John Dvorak a crotchety old-timer who doesn’t get human-computer interaction due to his myopic self-centered view. (His use isn’t usually my use, so he gripes seem inapplicable.) Finally, he got one right… almost. In his most recent blog post… er… opinion article, he described people using social networks as “marketing” themselves. Actually, the phrasing is identity management. People use these online tools to appear better than who they really are. Well… Duh. I’ve always thought I should use technology, especially social networking tools, to control what others think about me.

Back in the old days, as a Webmaster, I discovered the friend of a friend of a friend had a LiveJournal (one of the first social network sites, predating even Friendster) blog where she posted a bit of her art work from her classes. I’m not a freelancer, so I gave her some of the freelance web design leads which she turned into experience to help her get a real graphic design job. Rands might just be understanding getting a job is a potential use of Twitter. Given employers Google their job candidates, why not? I am sure there are many reasons for why one should strive to maintain a positive image for those taking the initiative to check.

The technology is new, but the purpose is as old as natural selection. We all wish to succeed. Stone tools allowed my distant ancestors to accomplish monotonous tasks faster than others and attract more advantageous mates. Maybe social networks are the modern stone tools?

I’m so vain…. I probably think this post is about me….

Probably only people who do vanity searches notice this, but there are spiders pulling names off web sites. They link the names to companies, blogs, and other web content. Supposedly, these sites allow online reputation control. Rather than you claiming your identity as others in this market, they list you in their database with the hopes you claim it.

See, you probably have accounts on several web sites. The idea is to both aggregate the accounts and prove ownership. If your name is John Smith, then you probably are getting confused with other John Smiths. You’ll provide where you work, contact info, which sites belong to you. The site will provide a feed showing your activity in each of these.

My name is pretty unique. If you saw my full name on a site, then would you doubt that its me. Okay, let’s forget the guy who masqueraded with my name a few years ago. Lots of people say I have the best names. He took it too far. By contrast, there are others with my first name who pop up higher in Google. So, you’d need the whole thing. I notice people arrive at this site by putting that name in search engines, so I am pretty sure it works. Naturally, all the sites where I wish to stay under the radar don’t have my name on them.

See… I knew I’d make this post about me.

Am I the only one who remembers fascination with the Deep Web (aka Invisible Web)? The idea of these online reputation services, I think, is to bring positive content up in rankings up to the more shallow areas. Trick is, the users need to be aware of what is and is not positive. Linking your name to your Facebook (used to be Deep Web but less and less of late) profile and giving the world access to pictures of you passed out drunk probably isn’t positive online reputation control.