fast reactions

At some point I signed up to a dating site, maybefriends.com. And I payed a subscription, and got one date out of a year on the site. So I didn't bother renewing, just changed my profile to link to my website and put a mailto: in there for good measure. Yes, they allow arbitrary HTML in the profiles. Not so smart. Anyway, that was months back. In my mailbox this morning:

From: them
To: me
Subject: MBF Profile
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 09:30:49 +0100

Hello,

We notice that you have included your email address in your profile. For
security reasons (yours as well as ours) we do not permit email addresses or
phone numbers to appear in profiles. Please amend your profile by clicking
on "update" in the left hand side bar after you logon and remove your email
address.

Your profile will be checked with in the next two days and if your email
address has not been removed we will have no option but to delete your
profile from the database.

If you have any queries please contact me on info@maybefriends.com

Kind regards,

Jill McGrath
MaybeFriends.com
Ireland's Favourite dating and social website

Three things strike me as amusing here: firstly, that it took them so long to notice (one would imagine that setting up a nightly search for "@" or strings of numbers in profiles and flagging them for manual inspection wouldn't be hard); secondly, that this is for their safety (and, of course, mine) as opposed to, say, stopping people from circumventing their subscription system; and thirdly, that while phone numbers and email addresses are out, it's quite okay for me to link to my website. Which has my phone number and email address and, hmm, postal address and a whole lot of other stuff.

binary world redux

C'mon, Hamid, are you for us or against us?

perpetual notion machine

For example, panel investigators said in January that they concluded that knives with small blades, rather than the famous box cutters, were used to take over the aircraft. But a search on Lexis-Nexis found more than 50 stories written in various publications since the disclosure that stated box cutters were the weapons used.

Now, why would that be?

more on UK ID cards

Mr Blunkett claimed the biometric system would make UK ID cards impossible to forge - unlike cards used elsewhere in Europe.

(link) I can't wait for someone to show up at a checkpoint with Blunkett's ID.

and more...

"as we're putting this on a clean database this will not be forgeable." (link)

Uhhhhm. Right. And, er, everyone else started off with dirty databases, yes?