|
Emergency announcement from SFcrowsnest.com: please help
|
SFcrowsnest
|
Nov 15, 2008 04:36 PST
|
Hi all,
Stephen here, in the rather ridiculous situation of having to write to
you and all of SFcrowsnest.com’s others readers to ask for your help.
Yesterday afternoon, a minute after posting an update to the two
FaceBook groups I founded, the SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook group at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 (for the magazine),
and the Rule Jackelia FaceBook group (for readers of my novels) at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34257537930, FaceBook sent me an
automated message to say this was spamming and immediately cancelled my
account.
An hour after that I started being flooded by personal complaints from
members of the SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook group saying that the group now
had someone called ‘Tore Heimstad’ installed as administrator (not
appointed as admin by me, I assure you!) who was using the
SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook group’ admin ‘message all’ function to send out
a spam via FaceBook to our sci-fi magazine’s thousands of readers that
began ‘Hey guys. if u think that u look good and if u have CONFIDENCE,
then join our pageant group on eupee .’ (don’t ask, groan).
I can only presume that this breech of our FaceBook group is a major
hack of the recently upgraded FaceBook system, but I am currently in the
ridiculous situation of not even being able to contact my own FaceBook
friends to inform them of this terrible situation, with my account now
being cancelled.
I have repeatedly been contacting FaceBook’s staff e-mails since
yesterday (Friday 15th November 2008) and as of twelve hours later have
received nothing but canned autoresponders in return.
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP…
If you are a FaceBook user, please note, the SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook
group has been hijacked. As of yesterday, any messages sent by it are
NOT from SFcrowsnest.com staff or myself and should be treated as
hostile – e.g. potentially containing or leading to scams, malware,
compromised web pages and the like.
Please post news of this on your FaceBook profile and let all of your
own FaceBook friends know as a matter of urgency.
Secondly, if you run a blog or zine, please spread news that the
SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook group at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked by
hostiles and refer them to our warning which is now prominently linked
from our own home page and can be found at
http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/facebookhijack.php – I will keep this page
updated with developments and any explanation/apology from FaceBook as
and when (or if) I get it.
So far only the SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook group at
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked, but
seeing it was myself that was singled out by FaceBook hackers, I would
suggest also treating any messages from the Rule Jackelia FaceBook group
at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34257537930 and my personal
Stephen Hunt FaceBook account at
http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen_Hunt/1321736585 as being fatally
compromised, as I’m certainly not in control of these two accounts
either anymore.
THE APOLOGIES
On a personal note, this is grief I really don’t need at the moment.
I’m in the midst of finishing my fourth fantasy novel for HarperCollins,
provisionally entitled The Fires of Jago, and am also working furiously
with HarperCollins on the February 2009 launch of my third title in the
Jackelian sequence, The Rise of the Iron Moon. These are both big calls
on my time, and I could do without crisis management of someone else’s
technical failings – something that was only intended to provide a bit
of extra community for my loyal readers.
As fans of my novels know, I came to the social networking ‘revolution’
a good few years after everyone else, taking the rather curmudgeonly
view that it was all a big time-suck and could only be a distraction to
my writing. And hey, I was one of pioneers of the Internet, and all this
new-fangled web 2.0 stuff was just a cunning ploy to squeeze more money
out of gullible venture capitalists etc, right? After being barraged by
requests to join various social networks by readers of my novels and
friends, however, I belatedly decided to bow to the inevitable and
signed up with FaceBook.
I did this in the face of strong and continual opposition from my dear
friend and SFcrowsnest.com’s own editor, Geoff Willmetts, who has always
refused to join social networks, citing all the usual security concerns
you hear trumpeted in the media – they’re a den of identity thieves,
you’ll find yourself ripped off, mortgages being taken out in your name
by ID creeps etc.
I wrote those views off as being unduly influenced by media hysteria and
joined FaceBook anyway. So here my first apology – to Geoff. You were
right, old chum. I was wrong. Humble pie eaten. I’ll be sticking to the
first rule of web-mastering that has always stood me in good stead with
SFcrowsnest.com – if you don’t code it yourself, don’t trust it (it’s a
variation on the old adage: if you want something done properly, do it
yourself). No more FaceBook for me.
My second apology is to the members of the SFcrowsnest.com FaceBook
group – you should really be getting it from the staff at FaceBook, but
I suspect we’ll all be waiting a long time for that one. Sorry for you
getting rubbish e-mails from the mysterious FaceBook group hijacker,
Tore Heimstad. And Tore, or whoever you really are, all I have to pass
onto you is an old Circlist saying much favoured in the Kingdom of
Jackals - what goes around, comes around. Sooner or later, Tore, you’ll
be getting yours.
And lastly, a word to the ghosts of my fellow fantasy authors at
HarperCollins, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, in whose shadow I always
inexpertly stumble; guys, you don’t know how lucky you were to have been
writing your novels in an age when Bebo was a sound you would only hear
gurgled from inside a pram, and a FaceBook was a school jotter that
someone had inked with ‘Kilroy Was Here’.
Yours, deeply frustrated and angry
Stephen
www.StephenHunt.net
www.SFcrowsnest.com
|
|
 |
|
