A few odd bits of detective work...

Posted October 4, 2005 9:28 PM.

So after accepting their apology late last night I should probably really let this one lie, but I just thought people might be interested in a couple of updates. I'm going to have a phone conversation with the people from Cohn Wolfe later in the week or next week (quick point of order - nasty website with a horrible flash intro - easily fixable too), and I'll be asking them a little bit about how this happened and probably trying to give them some suggestions on how they can avoid this kind of thing in future.

In the meantime, for those few of you who were interested in piecing together some of the other final details about how it all fits together - I got a really interesting e-mail from a couple of people on other sites about comments they'd received from the same e-mail address as my Barry Scott in which the guy concerned specifically talked about the fake weblog, so there's another connection there (thanks particularly to the b3tans). But more importantly after a really interesting suggestion from a commenter called "Lou" over on the apology thread, I had a dig around in the 'long headers' of the e-mails I got from the people at Cohn Wolfe for IP addresses and the like - and what did I find:

Received: from lon30ex01.yr.com (HELO lon30ex01.emea.corp.yr.com) (213.86.119.211)

If you remember from this post the IP address of the original Barry Scott commenter on the site was 213.86.119.210, and Sam Spade correlated that with lon30ex01.yr.com. So I guess, my friends, that we have a winner!

All this detective work is really quite good fun. I should run a little masterclass or something in the kinds of things you can find out online. Anyway, that's pretty much it for the moment. My acceptance of the apology still stands but I just thought people might find those particular connections interesting.

And the final thing is that I saw the bloody Cillit Bang advert for the first time this evening! God it's appalling! Why did no one tell me!?