Tuesday, March 27, 2007 

Insert "Anne Milton out-smarted by..." headline here

BBC - How a six-year-old beat the House of Commons computer system: Now that Brianagh had managed to smuggle her keylogger into the House of Commons, Anne Milton, Guilford's Conservative MP, agreed to help Inside Out put the secure House of Commons computer system to the test. Anne Milton agreed to leave her computer unattended for just 60 seconds. But it took six-year-old Brianagh just 15 seconds to sneak into Anne's room and hide the keylogger on her machine. And, although Brianagh had effectively attached a bug to a sensitive computer, not a single alarm was raised.

There's not a lot I can say about Amme right now, as my hospital is being held hostage... but two things do need to be noted for the record:

1. This turn of events provides Anne & Co. with a potentially plausible excuse for the highly questionable Wikipedia edits and smear-blogs. Dennis Paul is already primed for this, as he loves to scream "Hacker!" when he gets caught doing naughty things with his computer.

2. All producers of factual programmes should be made aware that - if they ever need a publicity-hungry MP who can convincingly say "Gosh, I didn't know that!" - then Anne's their man.

Cheers all.

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Friday, January 12, 2007 

Peek-a-boo!

There will soon come a day when the Conservative Party will want to be able to deny any knowledge of Anne Milton's antics. But I'm not going to let them get away with it.

Below is just a recent sample of the traffic from Conservative Head Office to this specific area of my website:

I can seee you!


The good people who work for the Conservative Party have also been directly informed of a number of developments, and have even been provided with the relevant evidence. Each and every time they have fobbed me off.

Finally, I know for a fact that David Cameron was made aware of these disgraceful personal attacks by Anne Milton's activists, just a few weeks before he maintained a 'dignified silence' while his activists screamed "Personal attack!" on his behalf. That makes him a very special kind of hypocrite.

Conservative Party Peeps, I have two messages for you:

1. Here's something really special for you to look at; one of Anne Milton's cheerleaders has been making deeply personal and libellous claims about me in Wikipedia (while making empty accusations of libel in the process... and accusing anyone who seeks to correct their vandalism of being me acting as some kind of magical sock-puppet):

Take a look at this, this, and *especially* this. Go on, take a good look. Here's a hint for you if you're confused; the bits highlighted in green are the parts that Milton supporters have added; thereby compromising your party and placing Wikipedia at risk of legal action. Oh, and take a few moments to browse through this website before you claim that this could be the work of a well-meaning member of the public; it was established long ago that the bulk of Anne Milton's endorsements came from Conservative councillors, activists and/or family members.

[Oi! I was arrested for hacking in 2005? Funny, I don't remember that. I don't even remember being questioned by the police. Surely something like that would stick in my mind for a long time to come. No? Oh well. Maybe the experience was so traumatic that I blanked it from my memory. Oh, and speaking of memories, I seem to recall that the *only* person who has *ever* accused me of hacking (mainly because he doesn't know the difference between hacking and tracking) is Dennis Paul, who currently claims to be 'a member of the Executive Committee of Guildford Conservatives and an active Branch Member in Worplesdon'.]

When I saw early abuse of the Wikipedia system that was focused primarily on Anne Milton's entry and tracked it back to a Parliamentary IP address, I sent a complaint to Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin. Surprise, surprise, he fobbed me off... not only with a vague suggestion that perhaps an over-zealous staff member was to blame, but also with the assertion that it was quite an acceptable and valid use of an MP's time to make 'corrections' to their Wikipedia entry. I found this reply to be particularly galling as the bulk of my letter read as follows:
Circumstances would suggest that these edits originated from Anne Milton’s office, but if you require a greater level of certainty before taking action, all you need do is request the HTTP/access logs from the relevant IT department for the times/periods specified above.

Now, I can understand the need for an MP to spend a small amount of time ensuring that their Wikipedia entry does not contain any inappropriate content or factual errors (this strays into a grey area, as part of an MPs duty is to ensure that their constituents are well-informed), but I do not think your average taxpayer would approve of this type of vanity-editing and/or censorship using time and facilities that they pay for.
McLoughlin didn't even acknowledge this section of the letter, and failed to follow the matter up with a simple technical exercise which could easily have confirmed or ruled out Anne Milton's involvement.

The HTTP/access logs I mentioned all those months ago are sure to have been deleted by now in the natural course of server maintenance. So now there's no way of clearing Anne Milton outright.

And since that exchange, the abuse of Wikipedia centring on Anne Milton's entry has escalated. All that these people have learned is (a) how to better cover their tracks and (b) that nobody in authority is going to do a damn thing to stop them.

How often do you find yourself wondering why they call you 'The Nasty Party'?

2. Much shorter this one... but I'm not sure that you'll thank me for it:

You chose her. You backed her. Hell, since all of this happened you even *promoted* her.

Do yourselves a favour... next time you pop by to check what Anne Milton has done recently that compromises you, take a good, long, hard look in the mirror and think about how you have compromised yourselves.

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Thursday, October 05, 2006 

A minor irrelevance

If it weren't for this entry on this weblog, Anne Milton and her staff would have remained blissfully unaware of a little thing called Wikipedia, and they certainly wouldn't have known about the vandalism of her entry there. This new level of awareness led to repeated attempts to cleanse the entry of all impurities (most notably from inside Parliament during working hours, showing these people had no idea that this activity would be tracked and recorded).

From this exchange alone we can determine at least three things:

1. Anne Milton and her supporters are completely without a clue
2. Anne Milton and her supporters are very touchy about links/references to this weblog
3. But... Anne Milton and her supporters rely on this weblog for information (see: #1)

There are plenty of past exchanges that set all of the above in concrete, but today, I'm going to bring you a fresh one...

The New Statesman is running a special weblog for conference season. One of the many MPs contributing is Anne Milton.

What immediately caught my eye was this final passage in her first post:
"Also meeting up with a crowd from Guildford for a quick drink - they are such good people (as are all political party activitsts [sic] - such a loyal and supportive crew!)"
This follows recent posts made by Dennis Paul (and recent comments made by Dennis Paul pretending to be other people) after he 'quit' blogging...

1: "A short plug for colleague Mike Chambers website. He is a local campaigner in Onslow whose site can be found at www.ycge.com and is doing tremendous work in Onslow and the University."

2: "I am delighted by the swift action taken by Conservatives to improve safety at Ashenden estate following a brutal attack there. Mike Chambers who promptly set up this campaign has shown local leadership in bringing the key parties together to get improvements in safety."

3: "Local tory troubleshooter Mike Chambers was reported in the press today having got heads together to improve security at Ashenden. This is just the kind of leadership our community needs."

Yes! This is just the kind of leadership our community needs!

Why, it's almost as if a memo has gone out about improving the image of local Tory activists in general and one Tory activist in particular. One can only wonder why.

But... what really had me chuckling yesterday afternoon was the blogroll next to this post (that also appears on every other page of the conference weblog):

Oops!


Yes, among the links to weblogs by MPs is a link to this weblog about an MP.

Now, it remains to be seen if this is the result of someone at the New Statesman having a laugh or lacking a clue, but one thing is certain:

Anne Milton, and her staff and her supporters all would have seen these pages, but nobody appears to have spotted this... and Milton is so thin-skinned that there is no *way* that she'd contribute to the conference blog if she knew that link was there.

But she sure as hell knows about it now.

Stand by for ACTION!

Anything can happen in the next half hour!



[PS - Psst! Amme! Going to bed at 2am is a late night. Going to bed at 2pm is a nap. Just thought I should clear that up. Oh, and when you next meet up with your neighbouring MPs, do let them know that I haven't forgotten about them... and please tell Jeremy that he's first cab off the rank.]

[NOTE - Having just checked spelling and links prior to publication I can see... *sigh*... that the Wikipedia 'cleansing' debate has kicked off again this morning. While it's fun to watch Miltonites embarrass themselves with a 'fair and balanced' approach that's on par with FOX News, Wikipedia is not the place for this kind of partisan crap.]

[UPDATE - Anne Milton's new website has just gone live (after spending well over a year 'in development'). I've just added it to the navbar. Oh, and whoever took this picture will want to check their memory cards, as I was standing right behind her at the time. Seriously.]

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Monday, June 26, 2006 

Regarding Anne Milton's Wikipedia entry

The silly stuff mentioned in this earlier post is gone and I'm quite pleased about that, but - since the peeps at Anne Milton's office became aware of her entry at Wikipedia - they've found themselves unable to leave it alone.

One thing they appear to be overly-sensitive about is a link to this weblog that - having been in place and left undisturbed for some months - is now subject to repeated deletion.

Quick message for Anne: if you're going to censor and/or vanity-edit your Wikipedia entry, please do it in your own time, not at 2:35pm from inside the Houses of Parliament (when/where you are supposed to be Doing. Your. Job.)

(Oh, and a quick note for the record: I would regard the removal of this picture to be fair enough as it classifies as a factual correction. But I find it quite telling that the factually-incorrect phrase "Anne has been linked to many celebrities during her time in the public eye" was left undisturbed during this same edit. This edit I would also regard to be fair enough, but the IP address used and the edit history of the person involved would suggest that Amme has a close associate who works for the food manufacturers' lobby group the Food & Drink Federation. If the person involved is a really close associate, then perhaps this is something Anne might consider adding to her Register of Members' Interests when she finally gets around to updating it.)

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    Hi. I'm Tim. I live in Guildford. I've built a few political weblogs here and there. If you're wondering why I decided to start this particular blog, click here.

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