Identity theft.

[elfs]

I have been the victim of identity theft.

If you go to my old website, http://www.halcyon.com/elf, you'll see a single directory, and in it a redirect to another website. That is not me. Whoever it is, they took the old alt.sex FAQ and reproduced it precisely, registered my name with Yahoo to get my email address, and used that to get a domain name registry. And he's using it to sell porn. Bad porn, at that.

All of this would have gone unnoticed but for one detail: they had the earnest chutzpah to email catherine yronwode, the original volunteer who took over hosting the FAQ when I left halcyon, demanding that she take down "his copyrighted material!"

The faq is available under the OSDL (now called the Free Documentation License)!

I'm seething right now, but this man has made a mistake: I have done business as Elf Sternberg, and I will have notarized affidavits from two publishers stating that I am and have always been Elf M. Sternberg, official maintainer of the alt.sex FAQ. And I may not be rich, but I can afford a lawyer when I need one.

What was this guy thinking, anyway?

Comments

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

The page appears to have been taken down.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I pointed out to the registrar that the contact information is forged. DirectNIC does not allow PO Boxes as contact points, and there's no phone number, but they don't take a site out until someone complains about it. I complained. Problem number one cared for.

Now, to find out if someone's paying for the redirector and, if so, whom... bwahahahaha.

P.S. Not that it's any comfort...

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

but I have poem on my poetry web site on the subject of identity theft.

Re: P.S. Not that it's any comfort...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's actually a pretty nifty poem there.

It's a recent theft.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess this isn't all that encouraging, but when we were meandering around in early November it wasn't redirecting us anywhere (I was showing a friend how to look up things and track down active sites, and I used the old halcyon site as one of the examples )

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I just wish the alt.sex FAQ had been around when I reached the locally legal age -- it would have been great to know that the weird stories were just unusual.

In one part of England, they used to nail the skin of pirates to church doors.

Motivations

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Who would steal Elf Sternberg?

...

Well, ok. The identity, the public presentation of Elf M. Sternberg, via his writing and whatnot, is pretty specific. It's really not just smut, there's a whole... I dunno, kinky geek slut intellectual chic thing that goes with 'Elf Sternberg'. If he just wants to hawk bad porn, aren't there better identities to hijack that don't come with as much baggage?

Re: Motivations

[(Anonymous)]

I'd trust smut I thought came from Elf (not to be badly written, not to be bad, not to take my credit card number, not to give me "Join the Crew") over and above the general mass of the stuff. It's not like there's so little porn on the Internet that getting an endorsement for yours doesn't make a difference.

personna stealing

[dion.livejournal.com]

Something like this happened to me. Sarah found a site that had taken all (like maybe 5?) of my early 1990s a.s.b. posts, and was running them on a site as part of a weird pay to read or pay to see site.

Since it seems this sort of thing is becoming commonplace, would it be worth it do you think to go after them? My "body of work" was so small that I really never thought someone would want to steal it.