[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: (Re: Launchpad: Merge of Accounts Requested) What?!
From:       Jonathan Riddell <jriddell () ubuntu ! com>
Date:       2006-12-05 19:18:04
Message-ID: 20061205191804.GU3858 () muse ! 19inch ! net
[Download RAW message or body]


I notified the Launchpad admins and a reply from Christian Reis is
below.  But in summary someone has tried to claim your e-mail address
(accidently or malitiously) for an account on Launchpad and the e-mail
you received of course stops that happening.  That can happen on any
website that has user accounts, it's off topic for this list so please
send any replies to me or Christian or just ignore and no harm will
come.

Jonathan

-----

In reference to: 

    http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=116532648924441&w=2

> Subject:    (Re: Launchpad: Merge of Accounts Requested) What?!
> From:       "doutor.zero" <doutor.zero () gmail ! com>
> Date:       2006-12-05 13:48:40
> Message-ID: 457578B8.4030706 () gmail ! com
> [Download message RAW]
> 
> Today I received this message below for Canonical, asking me to merge my 
> Launchpad account with another one.

Hello there. Jonathan pointed this email out to me and I'd like to
comment on the issue a bit.

> But I'm not a Ubuntu user and never had a Launchpad account, so how they 
> create, without asking me, a account there?! And worst, now I have to 

The message wasn't sent by Canonical, but by Launchpad (is there something in
the headers that caused that confusion?). But more importantly, it's not that
you have an account on Launchpad; it's just that a page exists to credit you
with having worked on translation in one or more open source projects [*]. In
technical terms, accounts and 'people' are separate things -- and people are
essentially places to attach a record of work done. Accounts have passwords and
logins and that sort of thing. They are separate (though conspiracy theorists
love to try and prove the contrary <wink>).

You can however claim an account as your own, if you manage to find it in
Launchpad. That's what appears to be happening here -- another user,
launchpad.net/people/wgmorais, has for some reason tried to claim your account.

> take care of it, because someone want to steal it?! I have other things 
> to do (besides translating) and now I have to go and tell they that i 
> don't want to merge nothing? And there is no even a link inside the 
> message to report it as a fraud...

That's a good point -- I've filed a bug on this issue:

    https://launchpad.net/products/launchpad/+bug/74548

This is the first report we've had of any trouble like this, so forgive us for
not having a simple process defined for dealing with this.

> This means that my SVN account can be in danger? I know that this is 
> almost impossible, but reading here that KDE is talking about some 
> collaboration with Rosetta makes me afraid.

No, there's no danger of that. The only danger here, really, is that somebody
else take credit for your translations.

> And this means that some other guy is taking my translations and doing 
> something with them only for Ubuntu? This is dangerous, translating 
> something like K3b, you know, if very difficult, so I'm afraid that my 
> name appears in some poorly, incomplete translated stuff. There is also 

Well, nothing really prevents someone from submitting translations as
"Doutor Zero <doutor.zero@yahoo.com.br>" to any public mailing list; similarly,
nothing prevents someone from registering with a similar name to yours and
submitting translations to Launchpad. Of course, if the software you are
translating uses the structured translation mode, someone needs to review those
translations before they become official, so we do provide a way to at
least triage what comes in.

To put it differently, there are quite a few Tom Lanes in the open source
world, but only one of them is the PostgreSQL superstar; the others are just
wannabes <wink>

> a danger that some Ubuntu guy get a svn account and start to commit a 
> lot of stuff just because thinks he is the official translator of a 
> given application, so more headaches for us...

I'm not sure how that could be the case. If an Ubuntu translator received an
SVN account to commit KDE translations, it's because he managed to prove that
he was trustworthy to do so, I would assume.

> I'm sending this to ask if any of you had received similar messages, and 
> if I can simply ignore it. Also I want to hear what you think about this 
> kind of issue.

Ignoring it is fine, though when the bug above is fixed there will be an
explicit way to report the action as abuse. Thanks for bringing this to our
attention, by the way -- it's a first for us.

I'll be contacting the user wgmorais to understand why he initiated this merge;
if it is indeed malicious we'll take action, but I'm assuming it is just a
misunderstanding.

Please feel free to follow up to me or to the launchpad-users mailing
list:

    lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/launchpad-users

[*] This is similar to CIA statistics which collect CVS committer information
across various projects: I have a page on CIA even though I have positively
never registered with them:

    http://cia.navi.cx/stats/author/kiko

The original Launchpad email follows for context:

> > Hello
> >
> > We received a request to merge the Launchpad account named 
> > 'doutor.zero (doutor-zero)' -- which have registered the email address 
> > 'doutor.zero@gmail.com' -- into the account named 'wgmorais'.
> >
> > If you made this request, please click on the link below
> > and complete the process to merge the 'doutor.zero (doutor-zero)' 
> > account into your existing Launchpad account.
> >
> >     https://launchpad.net/token/h4fv2pPVxWd3RSk1qMdF
> >
> > If you did not make this request, in Rosetta or Malone or any
> > other Launchpad system, then please ignore it or report it as
> > a possible attempt at a security attack on your data.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > The Launchpad Team 
> >
> >

Thanks,
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]