Brain on Fire » Blog Tim McCormack, distilled

Many sites require email verification to prevent impersonation by spammers (and to ensure that a user can retrieve their password, should they forget it.) Since this practice is a bit of a hassle for the user and does not require any thought on the user's part (sign into email, see registration email, click link), it should be automated. I've written a proposal of how to implement this.

Four days ago, a group calling itself the "MediaDefender-Defenders" released a torrent pointing to 700 megabytes of corporate emails from MediaDefender, a company providing "BitTorrent protection services" to record labels and movie studios. The emails expose company strategy, confidential contracts, passwords and login information, lists of servers and IP addresses, and reactions to mentions of the company in the news [read them here]. This post is a summary of recent events, along with a heaping of speculation as to what happened behind the scenes.

Underspecified CSS is the name I am giving this sort of code:

h2 span
{
	color: black;
}

I'll show you why this code is the bane of large sites.

Amazingly, people are still looking for free GMail invites. (You'd think there'd be enough floating around, but apparently not.) There are several sites that accept invites and spool them back out to anyone who asks, my favorite of which is ByteTest. Sending invite after invite to ginvites@xn0.org is not my idea of fun, but I still like the anonymizing effect of the spooler, and I wanted to help. So, I hacked together a clod of javascript to automate the process.

This is a quick explanation you can send to folks who are a little too trusting of what ends up in their inbox.