in recent months i've been the subject of attacks by an individual who has figured out a clever way to forge aliases here on TER.  i've discussed this matter with some of the seniors here (among them greywolf who himself was subject of a slightly different type of forgery). it was then that i realized that this matter must come to the attention of all TER users since it's not something that the Moderators can easily catch by themself (it happened again today on the PS board to two other individuals, see link below).  ultimately, you yourself must be vigilant and protect your handle and identity.  if you see something suspicious report it to Staff/Mods


the way it's done is by putting an "invisible character" in front of a handle when creating a new alias.  on the board it shows up like this

my message header --- singleton (12/8/03 8:34:32PM)    ... REAL

my message header ---  singleton (12/8/03/ 8:34:32PM)  ... FORGERY

if you don't see it, imagine an extra space character before the "s" in singleton in the subject line.  that's where it lies

inside the message body you should be able to see the same effect.  up in the top left hand corner where it says

Posted by singleton  .... REAL
Posted by  singleton .... FAKE

but also if that name is a TER handle with a mailbox, you WON'T SEE THE MAILBOX if it's forged (cuz it's an alias).  but if it's a forgery of a name that's already an alias to begin with then it becomes very hard to detect

Thank You, for the information Singleton.

My question is, are there any steps we can take, to prevent this from happening?

Thanks,
Kelly

-- Modified on 12/8/2003 6:44:01 PM

Are they doing it to post innocuous musings that are to be read or are they posting stuff we need to avoid.

I mean we are all pretty much interchangeable parts, to a certain degree-  or are they setting up dates and getting you in trouble?

Are we seeing the long arm of John Law?  

I can assure you that it was I who stirred up that hornet's nest on the TS board!  (Don't worry lads- I wasn't trolling)

But are folks' names getting taken and used?

He was posting under other people's handles, really variations of them, to stir up trouble. Lots of flaming and trolling. The moderators can spot it most of the time. However we need everyone to keep an eye out for posts that are out of character for the poster.

Would you mind describing what you believe to be the perpetrator's motives?

Also, as I posted elsewhere, TER should be able to prevent this with some server-side validation and by trimming leading/trailing whitespace.

cy

you yourself can not prevent it, that's why you must remain vigilant

but it is possible to alter the alias script to NOT accept anything but the base ASCII alphabet and ancillary characters (like ordinary space, underscore, #$%@,^&, smileys and whatnot) ... what needs to be forbidden is any special alt/cntrl-character that renders invisible (there's not too many of them)

as to motives, it's all too convoluted to rehash here.  suffice it to say that it was malice, revenge, envy and half a dozen of those 7 deadly sins ... ultimately to wreak havoc on the board

ok, I'm a geek but here's how you might solve this particular
problem.

You could determine the maximum length of a handle, and use a
handle that uses all visible letters up to the max.  This way, no one is going to be able to insert additional hidden
characters into you handle.

I wouldn't recommend it because it may take some time to figure
out and most people wouldn't want to switch to a new handle.

It turns out that TER's max length for aliases is 25 which is still practical.