BLOG STOLEN?

It's always amazed me that Australia pretty much shuts down over the Christmas - New Year period. It can be a real pain in the arse if you're trying to get something done but since sitting on my arse is one thing I'm really good out at, I'm not going to complain. Not only that, I'm on leave in Perth for the holidays and finding it hard to concentrate on anything beyond the cricket.

The weather is also contributing to my low productivity. It's always hot at this time of year but the usually reliable Fremantle Doctor (afternoon sea-breeze) hasn't made a house call since before Christmas. Instead, we're getting a puffy little late-afternoon westerly that doesn't cool things down but does pump up the humidity. In short, the weather is miserable.


A Larvatus Prodeo post on the hijacking of the blogs of "everyone’s favourite catblogger" (Anonymous Lefty, aka Walter Jeremy Sear) motivated me to stop watching TV and actually do something that requires some effort. AL may be someone's favourite something but in all honesty he is, more than anything, an attention-seeking whiner and victim.

Don't get me wrong, I condemn the hacking of AL's blogs and the flushing of their content, if that is indeed what happened. I do, however, find these events, well, curious. By AL's admission he has an unusual blogging history:

Christmas 2004: Melbourne Lefty blog exposed to my then employer, deleted, and then hijacked by some nefarious fellow with a business selling chemical cures for impotence. (Whereas under me the blog had just caused impotence.)

Christmas 2005: Having pieced together a reasonable guess at my identity from the revelation that my name was Jeremy and that I'd just gone to the Victorian Bar, certain (then ironically anonymous themselves) bloggers launch a campaign to publicise my full name far and wide, whether I want to use a pseudonym or not.

Christmas 2006: Having spent the previous month pretending to be me around the internet, my new stalker deletes my blogs and steals the URLs.

Having a blog hacked and stolen must be pretty rare, but to have it happen twice... what are the chances? I mean, if my blog had been stolen, and unknown people continued to stalk me, I'd be pretty damn careful with my password, changing it regularly and making sure it was too elaborate to guess. Maybe AL took appropriate password precautions and his computer was hacked; he doesn't say but if he had been hacked I think he would have told us. So it looks like someone somehow got his password. It beats me how this might have happened. Regardless, he's had a big whine in the direction of Blogger, complaining that its staff aren't taken the theft seriously. (He might want to read Blogger's terms of service, paying special attention to the part about password security.)

AL also had a recent whine about Google when his Google ads were taken off him for violating the terms of service. Hmm, you'd reckon a lawyer would read and understood the fine print.

It almost seems AL thinks there is a conspiracy to make his life miserable. Today, for example, he has a big sad about council roadworks near his home.

AL has also been involved in numerous whiney spats concerning his real name. Despite it being proven beyond doubt that AL's name is Walter Jeremy Sear, he continued to deny it. This hasn't done his credibility any good.

Anyway, seeing the cat-blogger post at LP made me remember yet another example of AL as victim. It started with AL accusing Iain Hall of stalking him and stealing a cat photo, with thinly veiled threats of legal action. Tim Blair got involved along the way. In the end it turned out AL was not only a chronic user of other people's images, he was also a blatant bandwidth thief. Such behaviour from a lawyer; go figure.

Is AL just a victim of circumstances beyond his control or is the guy contributing to his own back luck? Regardless, I'll bet he isn't finished whining.

Right, back to the sofa.

Update: In comments AL explains that the 2004 blog loss was not a hacking:

No, at Christmas 2004 I deleted it, but didn't realise at the time that once a blogspot blog is deleted it's immediately up for grabs for anyone to take. So I was surprised to find it immediately taken to sell viagra.