The Times has a potential scoop HERE. They have discovered that the Red Rag website, planned by Derek Draper, Derek McBride, Charlie Whelan and Kevin Maguire, was registered to the House of Commons. I wonder which MP's office it was registered to. No, stop it.
Well, I guess it keeps the story going for another day, as the hacks try to sniff out which MP will be fingered for it. Of course, the only way of tracking the person down would be for the registration company, Easily, to release the credit card details of the person who purchased the domain name, or Nominet to release their contact details. And they would never do that, would they? Well would they?
One thing you can bet though is that whoever Ollie Cromwell is, he or she will have found it irresistible to gossip about what they had done. "Now you can't tell anyone this, but..." And then the other person will share the secret and in the end someone will share it with a journalist or a blogger.
The truth will out.
23 comments:
As I've said on my post about this story, Nominet declined to make any data public about the operator, if the operator hadn't been from parliament they could have easily said that without giving anything else away.
Good news:
I've just used Easily.co.uk to run a Nominet search and the domain name:
"dollydraper.co.uk" is available for £8.99 for the next two years. As are most of the variants on this name.
"garraways_cuckold.co.uk" and most variants can be had for a similar price.
Isn't the interwebby thing great value for money?
The story gets better and better!!
Who will turn out to be the mysterious 'Ollie Cromwell'? Will they spill the beans on who knows what? Will Gordo be implicated?
Oh, the suspense!
Tony Holden > The first rule of personal information is a denial is as much an unauthorised release as a confirmation.
But if Ollie Cromwell isn't the persons real name *cough* then the registration falls foul fo the following Nominet rule: "Registrants of domain names are obliged to provide us with accurate details under the terms and conditions of registration."
Tony, that's right, isn't it?
So the registration was invalid? Another stunning victory for New Labour!
@Tony Kennick
That's not just a Nomnet rule, it's a far more serious ICANN rule.
If a web address is registered with false information then the ownership of it will be revoked if not corrected in a short period of time.
In other words, if someone actually contacts Nomnet about this to complain, there is a fair chance this domain could be revoked.
Another thing's being overlooked here. Red Rag is mapped to a wordpress.com domain. That's not free....
Wonder if wordpress.com will tell who exactly paid for that?
Oh yes, what a scoop
Name Ollie Cromwell
address House of Commons
About as good as it gets in Daley world.
Sherlock Holmes strikes again
contact-hdl: CCOM-131784
person: Guido Fawkes
email: guido.fawkes@gmail.com
address: The Cellar
address: C/O Houses of Parliament
city: London
postal-code: SW1A 0AA
country: GB
phone: +44.7092840531
John @1.30am
Wordpress is free.
The operators of redrag.co.uk have simply used a hosting plan at webfusion and loaded up the wordpress script there.
If it's registered to the House of Commons, you can bet that someone (maybe an MP) has claimed the cost as expenses...
When are the MP's expenses being published?
If brown Watson etc all shared the same office I wonder who got their credit card out to pay. Now in my xperience it's usually the boss who pays for these things.
"you can bet that someone (maybe an MP) has claimed the cost as expenses..."
unless of course it was paid for by the Union, the Party or the Civil Service
But there is another way to test this. What about an FOI asking for :-
1 all calls made from the No 10 offices to the web design company (in Borough High St) and what extesnion at No 10 they were from and who owned that extension
2 all emails from No 10 to the Web Design Company
3 all emails from McBride to Draper (if Guido doesn't have them!!)
Of course if anyone does decide to sue it would be very easy to prise open Nominet etc with a disclosure order
By the way, why hasn't anyone asked Brown yet why the Web Domain was registered in a false name and address
Above all, that shows just how sleazy and underhand the plan was
Surely this should be declared in the register of members interests!
The purpose of the Register is to encourage transparency, and, through transparency, accountability. It has hitherto been set out as being 'to provide information of any pecuniary interest or other material benefit which a Member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in the capacity of a Member of Parliament'
I remember when there were accusations of Blair having a secret network at number ten they said they used the same network as the house of commons (I did the graphic for guido of Blair and levy under the stairs - so I remember what happened)
how come the times got the where and not the who. Surely they know who it is and we will get a resignation today??? They would have had to contact the company who did the actual registration to know the URL of the registrant that company would also know the credit card number and name. If the times know where I would also think they know who.
I have a vague memory of going to school with Ollie Cromwell. Perhaps it's a real person...
OK this I what I figured. Redrag was registered at
http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=theredrag.co.uk&WHOIS+Submit.x=32&WHOIS+Submit.y=12
via the company, and this is there privacy policy.
http://easily.co.uk/index.php3?exe=terms&page=privacy
They keep the following info ... name, the name of your business, your postal address, email address, telephone number, fax number.
They also keep the the IP address. They say
"In addition, when you use our website we store your IP address and may use this information to administer our website and help to diagnose any network or server problems. "
So they times found out from them that it was the house of commons.
They also say
3. Credit Cards
Credit card payment for our services is processed by our secure payment service provider. We do not record your credit card details on our database and the payment service provider does not record any other information about you.
So this is why the times does not know who paid for the site.
@Ed The Shread
John @1.30am
Wordpress is free.
The operators of redrag.co.uk have simply used a hosting plan at webfusion and loaded up the wordpress script there.That's wrong Ed.
Wordpress.com is a free hosted blog service by wordpress. You get a whatever.wordpress.com domain name when you use it, and there are a few paid addons like css editing and domain mapping.
Wordpress.org is the open source blog software that's free to download and use for anyone.
If you go to theredrag.co.uk you'll see that it's hosted at wordpress.com under the address aredrag.wordpress.com and someone has paid for the upgrade of domain mapping for it.
So Wordpress.com should have details as to where that payment came from. I wonder if they were stupid enough to use their personal credit card.....
This is funny Iain.
It's not that serious. It's almost Guido-esque. Where did he first register order-order? Did he actually use a real address or something amusing? Was Draper or whoever involved in some homage to their hero?
While Draper or someone had this silly joke using the HoP for a jape the Tories physically used the buildings for illicit fundraising activity for ages. Which is worse?
[Obviously it didn't have to be an MP's office. Any competent address would do. Whoever it was could have used Buckingham Palace. Or 10 DS. Or CCHQ. Or 18DS. For a joke.]
I note that Tom Watson has been nominally dropped from your list re Red Rag. But didn't I hear you say he was cc'd into all the emails OWTTE?
Anyways, as I said on my blog around midnight, at least this is something we can smile about.
Other questions I'm asking:
is graphology a science? and is Guido a Tory stooge?
“Things can only get better, can only get better, now that we found you.” Ollie that is.
Great news, lets hope more digging is done to find the real home of this.
I bet all roads lead to Rome, sorry 10 Downing Street
John, my bad. Sorry (see I can use that grown up word easily and mean it!). I looked up the records for redrag.co.uk instead of theredrag.co.uk. It was a mistake, I really was not trying to smear you, honest! :-)
Anyway, methinks that redrag.co.uk has a good case against theredrag.co.uk. This is especially so as the registrant of theredrag.co.uk is self evidently a false name - Ollie Cromwell indeed.
If I was the owner of redrag.co.uk I would feel that my business has been tarnished by the recent goings-on that may have involved theredrag.co.uk and may consider redress. Maybe I should contact Pushpinder Khaneka and alert him to this possibility?
iain, it is evidently a false name... some labour jokers having a chuckle - you need an address for a website but it never gets used to it's all good for them...
:D
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