One week to go until most of the activists in the UK converge on Scotland for the G8. Yesterday evening police seized the Bristol IMC server. Anyone spot a coincidence?

Indymedia is one of the only truly independent open-publishing news forums where anyone can voice their opinions and post news as they see it, as it happens, without fear of censorship. When the world’s mainstream media almost completely fails to cover the real issues behind protests, and regurgitates police press-releases in the face of the brutal oppression we’ve seen at previous G8 protests, an outlet for real, grassroots coverage from the people on the ground is vital to preserving free speech. Like I said, anyone spot a coincidence here?

The main UK Indymedia site seems to be buckling under a slashdotting of this story, so here are the details:

On Monday, June 27th, Indymedia Bristol’s server was seized by the police. An Indymedia volunter was also arrested during the raid. Last week, police demanded access to the server to gain the IP details of a posting. The alternative media outlet is receiving advice from civil liberties organisations and the NUJ. Before being legally forced to hand over the server, Indymedia Bristol stated: “We do not intend to voluntarily hand over information to the police as they have requested”. A further statement from Bristol Indymedia volunteers is expected soon.

This is the second time that law enforcement authorities have attacked Indymedia servers in the UK in the run up to a major event. Last October, just prior to the European Social Forum, Indymedia servers in London were seized in an international law enforcement operation – prompting a wave of protests and solidarity statements from a wide range of organisations [report]. This time, events are unfolding one week before the G8 Summit begins in Scotland.

In order to provide grass-roots non-corporate coverage during the G8 protests and events, Indymedia UK needs additional http mirrors to help decrease bandwidth costs. If you would like to help, you can donate here.

It’s been long overdue. On the train back from San Francisco I finished the redesign of the Rising Tide website. Along side a standards-based redesign of the original site structure, using a fluid 3 column css-layout, I’ve built the site around Drupal, an open-source Content Management System that alows for collaborative publishing rather like Indymedia (actually, Drupal is used by a number of Indymedia sites.) Hopefully that should go some way to redeeming me for routinely failing to get London Rising Tide‘s events up on the Rising Tide UK site in time!

I’ve been working on some basic integration of webcalendar and wordpress for the Guelph Students for Environmental Change site. It took a tiny bit of hacking, and I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else online, so I thought I’d post how I did it…

The idea I had was fairly simple – to have an online calendar where people in GSEC could login and add events, but that was publicly accessible to anyone visiting the site. Webcalendar seemed an obvious choice, but I also wanted an ‘Upcoming Events’ list on the home page. Webcalendar has some support for this, but the default upcoming.php spat out a complete html page, so the only way to integrate that to the site home page would have been with an iframe. Not ideal. The solution is quite simple, involving stripping all the superfluous html generation out of upcoming.php, so it just returns the definition list of events.

Here’s my version of upcoming.php

Instructions for use:

1. If you’re using WebCalendar v0.9.45 (13 Dec 2004), the same version I customised, you should be able to download that file, rename it to remove the .txt extension, and drop it in as a replacement for upcoming.php. If you’re using a different version, who knows!

2. On the page where you want the events list, add the following line, with the URI pointing to upcoming.php on your site:

   <?php include("http://example.com/webcalendar/upcoming.php"); ?>

This modification to the original Webcalendar file is released under the GNU GPL.

Look what landed in my inbox this morning:

We’ve all heard of the online banking fraud that goes on, but I hadn’t seen such a blatant example still live on the web until today. As part of the Rising Tide server switch, I’ve had to temporarily alias a couple of mailing list subscribe / unsubscribe address to my own email account, and I got a spam email to one of them this morning. To me it was immediately apparent that it was a fake, but it’s easy to see how a large number of non-technical internet users are drawn in by these extremely realistic looking scams.

Check out these screen shots:

The real Lloyds TSB online banking site.
The fraudulent site.

My first reaction was to check out the domain name the fraudsters were using — lloydstsb-bank.biz — turns out it’s registered through the New Orleans Leftover Data Center, a rather dubious company who I’ve come across before – they bought up theyellowhouse.info, the domain name for a site about eco-housing one of my colleagues made (now located at www.theyellowhouse.org.uk) when he accidently missed a renewal payment. Even though the site was part of a non-profit doing some really great work, they refused to even consider selling it back.

They didn’t answer their phone, so I emailed them to tell them they really should pull that domain name off the web, and I then called Lloyds TSB online… turns out they already knew about the fraud, and are trying to get it shut down, but at the time of writing this the fake site is still live. I won’t link to it though, that would be stupid.

I doubt Lloyds will make public how many accounts are compromised, but I know there will be some. It is sad the lengths some people will go to driven by greed. (Put it this way, I doubt the perpetrators were planning to donate the money to OCAP.)

Update: It gets better. I had a look in more detail at the site, and – can you believe it? – they’re pulling all the images and the css straight off the real Lloyds TSB site! Not only are the scammers trying to rip off customer details, but Lloyds TSB are paying for most of the bandwidth! Incredible. I called them up again to let them know that they could simply and easily make the fraudulent site look, well… not so much like Lloyds TSB online anymore. By simply changing the names of the images they use on the real site, and maybe replacing the old image with a different image of the same name that would then be served as part of the fake site… “This site is a fake – don’t enter any of your online banking information” ought to do it. Or even more simple – just swap out the css file and replace it with:

body { display: none; }

Personally I’d probably go for a more creative edit

Of course their tech department closed at 5pm UK time and the poor people on the Internet Banking helpdesk don’t have access to do that kind of thing. I’ll check the fake site again tomorrow morning – hopefully it will look a little different!

This one caused me a headache for a bit, trying to figure out what was wrong. Don’t use something like this in internet explorer…

<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js" />

For some reason, ie doesn’t understand the xhtml tag properly, and up goes your page in a puff of smoke – the source looks fine, and validates, but explorer renders a blank page. For xhtml compliance, just use:

<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>

…and it works fine.