Ewan Aitken wrote:
I am absolutely horrified to discover that what was the work of two students as a course project has been abused in this way.

Some years ago I was approached by two students who asked if they could use me, in the context of my work as a Councillor, as the subject of a website for a course project. I agreed and the site was produced. I was unaware until recently that it was still live on the web.

Until a journalist rang me today (May 6th), I did not know the site had been abused in this manner. I am shocked and disgusted that this has happened and apologise to anyone who has been offended. I am doing everything I can to have the site removed as quickly as possible and am taking legal advice on the matter.

Ewan Aitken

After we received the reply from Councillor Aitken we emailed him with some instructions on how to get the offending site down - We really are nice people. Unfortunately censorship is so rife at the City Council that our message was bounced back because they won’t accept emails from our domain.

So in the interests of fair play, we phoned the Hippy Rev’s phone number at the council and gave his assistant all the information to search their mail server and get the email.

In the interests of good citizenship, we hereby present our message to Ewan in case his IT people can’t figure their system out.

Councillor Aitken,

Thank you for your contact. Please feel free, at anytime, to leak information to our site. We are a ‘leak-friendly’ site without political party affiliations and our only interest is, like yours is supposed to be, the good of the residents of Edinburgh. To further this aim, we are willing to be helpful to you.

With all due respect, it is not legal advice you need. You need common sense! For this to be on the web since 2001, and with you having posted on it, I find it exetremely hard to believe that neither you nor your Council minders in the press department had any idea of this site’s existence. It beggars belief. All your legal advice will do is cost the residents of Edinburgh more money for your stupidity. However, we are willing to give you the information for free.

Indeed, upon searching Google for your name the site comes up #1, even before that of the counci site with your name. Searching the Yahoo! search engine for your name, you’ve guessed it, that site comes up first. Finally, searching AOL
and yet again your porn advertising site comes up first.

I have above quoted the top 3 search engines in the internet garnering about 89% of the billions search queries on the internet monthly. For you to tell me that you were unaware that the site was still on the internet is asking me to stretch my immagination rather past the limit.

For free, what you must do to have the site closed down is the following. Contact GeoCities, now owned by Yahoo! on Council headed paper. Tell them who you are, point them to your biography on the Council web site (with the full URL). I would suggest a fax is the best way of communication to YahooInc. For the first point of contact I would suggest:
Yahoo! Inc.
Customer Care - Privacy Policy Issues
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
(408) 349-5070

I would inform them of the fact that it is a GeoCities site, give the site’s URL the site’s username which is ‘dot_rob’ and ask them to remove it. I am sure they will help you. If you are still having problems, feel free to contact me and I can use my Yahoo! contacts.

There is also the possibility that because of certain laws here in America including the constitution (1st Amendment) that you will not be allowed to have the site taken down without even with a lengthy and costly court fight. In the last American elections both Democratic and Republican parties tried many legal ways to take down disparaging blogs or websites - all without success. Your website is hosted on IP address 66.218.77.68 in Sunnyvale California. Normally the only person who would have access to this account is “dot_rob” and he would have the password to allow you to go to the interface to take down the forum where your porn ads are appearing.

Where your stupidity shone through, as bright as ever, was that you allowed someone to put information up on the Internet about you with your permission and you never asked for access to the material so that you could amend it in case what has happened, happened.

The Basa.

It would seem that Rev. Aitken is being a little economic with the truth.

Further investigation of the hippy rev’s claims takes me to the ‘credits’ page on his site. This can be found at http://www.geocities.com/dot_rob/ea/credits.html. (We have a screenshot in case it is taken down!)

One will immediately notice that in fact David Reilly and Robert Crowther from the company Net Resources (http://www.netresources.co.uk) are the designers of the site. Far from it being a couple of students as Aitken claims, it seems as though this is a full service web design shop offering not only Web Design but also Training, Search Engine Marketing and all sorts of other services.

In fact Net Resources are based just along the road from the council headquarters, 26 Palmerston Place to be exact and their telephone number is 447-7127.

What makes this whole situation worse is that Net Resources lists on it’s website that it has associations with Scottish Enterprise, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, ScotlandIS, and is a CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster) authorized academic partner which of course is a dodgy qualification which is not accepted in the United States at all.

Other than Rev. Ewan Aitken’s obvious misrepresentation of the truth, other questions should be asked here - what is this company ,who doesn’t mind using free software to display porn ads on a councillor’s site, doing working with Scottish Enterprise?

We received the following message from the Managing Director of Net Resources:

Sara Dodd wrote:
I write to complain that you have posted libellous and incorrect information about our company Net Resources on your website http://www.edinburghsucks.com, 9th May 2005. I would ask that you remove or correct your ‘Update3’ immediately as it is not only malicious but ill-informed and untrue.

We are an independent internet training, design and consultancy service. We have been key training supplier to Scottish Enterprise under the Training for Work programme since 1998 offering a highly successful course in internet technologies and web design to unemployed graduates. You have highlighted a site created by two students (not employees) David Reilly and Robert Crowther, for Councillor Ewan Aitken. The site was originally created with full input from Councillor Aitken in early 2001 as a student project site. This is a service to the wider community which allows individuals and organisations to have a site created for free whilst giving students the chance to practice and improve their web skills. Both David and Robert left the course in March 2001 and went on to professional roles within the internet industry.

We do not, and never have, advocated the “use of free software to display porn ads� on any site that is produced on our premises whether for commercial clients or as part of students’ work. All students’ work is overseen and monitored throughout their time here to achieve the highest possible quality and standards. The site is handed over to the client at the end of the project cycle. What we cannot do is maintain responsibility for sites that change once the course and project have been completed, nor can we stop trainees completing their own work in their own free time.

It is always possible, as you are well aware, that a site which is not regularly maintained will experience the hand of hackers and fall prey to misuse. It is ultimately the site owner’s responsibility that this should not happen – not the original site designers.

So, in the interests of good citizenship, I would also like to point out that your tendency to blame everyone but the bandit in an effort to promote dodgy journalism is unjustifiable when a company’s reputation and good work is represented in such a mean- spirited and incorrect way.

Sara Dodd
Director
Website: http://www.netresources.co.uk

We replied as follows:

Sara,

With all due respect to yourself and your company, I feel I must point out that in your email you have agreed with what I said in the article in your email below. I will answer you queries in-line to save you time scrolling.

Sara Dodd wrote:
I write to complain that you have posted libellous and incorrect information about our company Net Resources on your website http://www.edinburghsucks.com, 9th May 2005. I would ask that you remove or correct your ‘Update3’ immediately as it is not only malicious but ill-informed and untrue.

If there is something that is untrue, we will not only remove it but we will also issue an apology. Lets see…..

Sara Dodd wrote:
We are an independent internet training, design and consultancy service. We have been key training supplier to Scottish Enterprise under the Training for Work programme since 1998 offering a highly successful course in internet technologies and web design to unemployed graduates.

Very good. I applaud you helping with the unemployed graduates - I hope you do some for free as well as the paid work. However, I don’t appreciate your sales pitch in an email especially when I never requested the email.

Sara Dodd wrote:
You have highlighted a site created by two students (not employees) David Reilly and Robert Crowther, for Councillor Ewan Aitken. The site was originally created with full input from Councillor Aitken in early 2001 as a student project site. This is a service to the wider community which allows individuals and organisations to have a site created for free whilst giving students the chance to practice and improve their web skills. Both David and Robert left the course in March 2001 and went on to professional roles within the internet industry.

I did indeed highlight the site - excellent observational skills. Now you mention that the site was created by two students. Hmmmmm. Interesting. I am afraid you failed to mention this fact on the credits page for the site. Indeed a big graphic link to your home page is there giving the assumption that you created it. No mention of students there at all - just the people’s names and a BIG link to your company. This obviously gives the impression that YOUR COMPANY CREATED THE WEBSITE which indeed it did. Whether by students or full time employees, for free or for payment, your company created the website. Period. Full Stop. End of Story. The attached image file will only enforce the fact that we are correct.

Sara Dodd wrote:
We do not, and never have, advocated the “use of free software to display porn ads� on any site that is produced on our premises whether for commercial clients or as part of students’ work.

And never did I mention that your company advocated the use of software to display porn ads. I did mention that on Councillor Aitken’s site the Network 54 hosted board contained ads which in my opinion, and obviously the Evening News’ were pornographic in nature.

Sara Dodd wrote:
All students’ work is overseen and monitored throughout their time here to achieve the highest possible quality and standards. The site is handed over to the client at the end of the project cycle. What we cannot do is maintain responsibility for sites that change once the course and project have been completed, nor can we stop trainees completing their own work in their own free time.

I am not entering into a contract with you, the above information on how you run your company really has nothing to do with me. However, as you bring it up, if it were my company and I had put my name to it, I would be very careful of what appeared on it.

I also would not have used a hosted board solution which contained advertising on the board, over which I had no control - especially for a politician. Now I can expect a student doing this because they may not know any better, but as you have mentioned above, “all work is overseen and monitored throughout their time here” so that means that employees at your company actually approved the work. I am sure that your company keeps records of your projects and you will be able to find out who the culprit was that allowed this amazing faux pas.

A quick search on Google (using quotes) throws up 62,100 returns for the search term “free bulletin board”. If you take the quotes out the number jumps up to 131,000,000. Perhaps there was a better solution, what do you think?

Sara Dodd wrote:
It is always possible, as you are well aware, that a site which is not regularly maintained will experience the hand of hackers and fall prey to misuse. It is ultimately the site owner’s responsibility that this should not happen – not the original site designers.

This is where I nearly fell off my seat. You are now trying to blame the ads on hackers. I take it you are not a programmer or developer of any kind. You maybe should have passed email through them first to stop you looking so stupid. Are you seriously trying to tell me that hackers attacked both Network54 and Yahoo’s Geocities systems which contain millions upon millions of web sites and decided to choose on Ewan Aitken’s to stick some dodgy ads and then only do it sometimes. You state on your website that you have over 8 years commercial experience on the internet. I myself have getting close to 15 (going back to the old compuserve days - before your time. I even remember eTown - the Apple online service because I was a beta tester for it, again before your time.) and it shocked me when you picked on the quote.

Taking the information from the article in the Evening News was not such a good idea. Because, you see, the person quoted obviously either does not know what he is talking about or did not have all of the information available to him when making the quote. That is just a fact - check it out with your programmers/developers.

Sara Dodd wrote:
So, in the interests of good citizenship, I would also like to point out that your tendency to blame everyone but the bandit in an effort to promote dodgy journalism is unjustifiable when a company’s reputation and good work is represented in such a mean- spirited and incorrect way.

To get something done in the interest of good citizenship it is always preferable not to attack the person you are asking to do you a favour. You have obviously failed on this account, as you have with showing me where there were inaccuracies about your company on EdinburghSucks.com. Your compnay’s reputation has been damaged further by your email. You have shown, in full living colour, that you don’t know of what you speak.

You have failed miserably in your quest. Upon legal advice, we shall not be removing anything about your company from EdinburghSucks.com as nothing libellous nor indeed incorrect can be found. Further, we shall be adding this email exchange as a comment to the post - in the interest of good citizenship.

I might also inform you and your company that false accusations of libel are taken very seriously by all of us involved here and we are more than willing and able to prosecute such false accusations to the full extent of the law.

For your further information, below is the quotes from EdinburghSucks.com which pertain to your company:

Further investigation of the hippy rev’s claims takes me to the ‘credits’ page on his site. This can be found at http://www.geocities.com/dot_rob/ea/credits.html. (We have a screenshot in case it is taken down!)

One will immediately notice that in fact David Reilly and Robert Crowther from the company Net Resources (http://www.netresources.co.uk) are the designers of the site. Far from it being a couple of students as Aitken claims, it seems as though this is a full service web design shop offering not only Web Design but also Training, Search Engine Marketing and all sorts of other services.

In fact Net Resources are based just along the road from the council headquarters, 26 Palmerston Place to be exact and their telephone number is 447-7127.

What makes this whole situation worse is that Net Resources lists on it’s website that it has associations with Scottish Enterprise, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, ScotlandIS, and is a CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster) authorized academic partner which of course is a dodgy qualification which is not accepted in the United States at all.

Other than Rev. Ewan Aitken’s obvious misrepresentation of the truth, other questions should be asked here - what is this company ,who doesn’t mind using free software to display p__n ads on a councillor’s site, doing working with Scottish Enterprise?

and

Fact 2 - The site was a framed site where the communication forum was called into a frame. The forum was a free service and as such, the terms of use would have included the users (Net Resources - http://www.netresources.co.uk) to agree to take the advertising that came with the use of the forum. I don’t know if Net Resources actually were given the opportunity to filter out p__n ads. If they were, then they did not take this option.
One obvious word has been changed to allow the email to go through the council’s kinda dodgy filter.

If you feel that a meeting is necessary, I will happily have a teleconference with you or indeed an in-person meeting when I am next in Edinburgh - in the interest of good citizenship.

Signed: The Basa.

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