I was at first *very* confused by how some information was implied but
not stated in David's email. The mixed top/bottom posting order also
confused me.
I'd like to rephrase what David wrote, for the record -- just in case
others might be as confused as I was:
1.
David privately replied to the disgruntled.developers@googlemail.com
email address in response to the email that started this thread.
He sent the following to that "disgruntled.developers" address:
2.
As can also be seen at http://preview.tinyurl.com/2uhlqpy , this
tinyurl.com redirect in turn redirects to
http://www.mindcry.org/why.html -- which David created and at that
point hadn't told anyone else about. Mindcry.org is David's own web
site. He set up that why.html page to in turn immediately redirect to
http://www.trollaxor.com/2010/06/why-i-left-openbsd.html :
So by making the "disgruntled.developers" sender go to mindcry.org
first instead of right to trollaxor.com, David could see in his HTTP
server logs what IP address the "disgruntled" person had.
And by using tinyurl.com, David could hide the fact that his site was
involved at all. Tinyurl.com is often used to shorten URLs that get
included in emails (to avoid line breaks breaking the URL). So the use
of tinyurl.com seemed innocuous, and David correctly figured that Mr.
"disgruntled" would be more likely to click on a tinyurl.com link than
on one that's obviously from his own domain.
3.
The trick worked:
4.
If you do whois 83.101.24.229 , you can see that this is Belgium. On a
good hunch, David looked up the IP address of kd85.com:
Kd85.com of course is known to be the domain of the Belgian Wim Vandeputte:
5.
David also received the following response from the
disgruntled.developers@googlemail.com email address after he sent his
bait email. The response --probably correctly-- said that Mr.
"disgruntled" (i.e. Wim Vandeputte) had nothing to do with the
trollaxor.com site. Of course, linking Mr. "disgruntled" (Wim) to
trollaxor.com was never the point. That was just the bait, in order to
identify Mr. "disgruntled".
On 16 August 2010 04:51, David Hill <dhill@openbsd.org> wrote:
===============================================================
PS:
What I personally found really annoying/insidious about the
"disgruntled.developers" email that started this thread is how it
quoted an email that Theo had sent to Henning (and cc'd to the list),
and how the "disgruntled.developers" email then was signed "H."
I believe that this was intentionally done, to make it look as if it
was Henning who was Mr. "disgruntled".
Despite all the static in the past, I had still been hoping to save
some money and buy a Lemote YeeLoong from Wim (as they're hard to get
otherwise).
I now no longer intend to do so.
