The REAL "fancy pants"

[Manjul Apratim]

Hey Vikram,

Thanks for the clarification! My concern is this - if this user created a
genuine Launchpad account merely to spam the documentation, and that too
twice already, then that is one hell of an evil determination. In this case,
can we not take more drastic steps to prevent such spam - like banning the
user's ip address, or something of the like?

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Vikram Dhillon <dhillonv10 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Manjul Apratim
> <manjul.apratim at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Whilst objections are being raised over a perfectly good Google solution,
> > there is a REAL "fancy pants" who keeps messing up
> > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UserDocumentation. Apparently he has
> the
> > nick "SammyWilson", and he inserts spurious links to some "loan
> > modification" web page in there - this has happened twice in the past few
> > days already, and thanks to the vigilant Ubuntu warriors out there such
> spam
> > has not prevailed for long. What bothers me is not the fact that the page
> > was vandalized, but that changing something on help.ubuntu.com requires
> a
> > Launchpad account, and this entity's account does not exist now, but
> > apparently did when the page was exploited. I remember seeing the
> discussion
> > that Launchpad was hard to register at in the first place, particularly
> > because of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, and I remember that that was my
> first
> > tryst with GPG keys. So either this person goes through a lot of trouble
> > each time, or there is a security flaw in Launchpad, and either issue is
> a
> > cause for concern!
> >
> > --
> > Manjul Apratim
> >
> > --
> > ubuntu-doc mailing list
> > ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
> >
> >
>
> Manjul, I read your previous reply to the other conversation about
> using google for internal search. While we appreciate that you took
> the time to look through revision history, there's no problem there.
> Here's what I mean:
>
> [DIFF]  MediaWiki       06:33   Info    Tom [1-2]
>                                                        SammyWilson [3]
>
> [DIFF]  Community Documentation         06:32   Info    Tom [1]
>
>         SammyWilson [2]
>
> The first edit was made at 6:32, then the next one at 6:33, the
> account was removed after the second edit therefore both of them were
> made before the user was removed and at that time he still had editing
> privileges. The launchpad security model is one of the best I've seen
> around, so there's nothing wrong with it.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Vikram Dhillon
>
> ~~~
> To perceive is to suffer.
>



-- 
Manjul Apratim
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