{"id":1816,"date":"2011-05-12T21:46:38","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T20:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2011-05-12T22:36:23","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T21:36:23","slug":"open-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=1816","title":{"rendered":"Open Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

We hear a lot about open data these days. Organisations embrace it differently- Southampton University have a huge amount available<\/a> in machine-readable formats, others think that posting a PDF is the way to go, despite the fact that it isn’t<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anyway, you have to be careful what data is released: data protection laws mean that you shouldn’t release personal data.<\/p>\n

Walsall MBC have fallen foul of this: if it’s not actually illegal (though this<\/a> suggests it is), it’s not good to reveal the email addresses of everyone that signed a e-petition to all the other people that did. It’s a social engineer’s dream: a list of people with a common interest. I’m in there, but just guessing my email address is easy, but I now know several people’s email addresses I didn’t before and couldn’t have guessed.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I only noticed because the mail got trapped by Spamassassin<\/a>, and I thought it was odd that anything from Walsall MBC would hit the filter- this made me look at it in detail.<\/p>\n

Because the mail was badly formatted, it got scored like this:<\/p>\n


\n pts rule name description
\n---- ---------------------- -------------------------
\n 1.8 BAD_ENC_HEADER Message has bad MIME encoding in the header
\n 0.2 SUBJECT_FUZZY_TION Attempt to obfuscate words in Subject:
\n 0.6 SPF_SOFTFAIL SPF: sender does not match SPF record (softfail)
\n 1.6 DEAR_SOMETHING BODY: Contains 'Dear (something)'
\n-0.2 BAYES_40 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 20 to 40%
\n [score: 0.2723]
\n 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
\n 1.4 MIME_QP_LONG_LINE RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 chars
\n 0.1 RDNS_NONE Delivered to trusted network by a host with no rDNS
\n<\/code><\/p>\n

Bad form, Walsall MBC. As for all of you people that signed the library petiton, watch out for phishing<\/a> attempts.<\/p>\n

[edit 22:34]
\nJust to clarify: In my opinion, this is a training or systems issue- the individual that sent the mail should have been shown\/trained how to do this, or the system should do it correctly with no intervention. A proper mass-mailer would do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We hear a lot about open data these days. Organisations embrace it differently- Southampton University have a huge amount available in machine-readable formats, others think that posting a PDF is the way to go, despite the fact that it isn’t. Anyway, you have to be careful what data is released: data protection laws mean that … Continue reading Open Data<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-general","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}