Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Is the Labourist Editor a guy called Matthew Birks?

A few posts ago I posted about a new website called "No Fourth" which has clearly been set up to paraody the Labour Party's "Go Fourth". It has been brought to my attention by Jag Singh that the site sits on exactly the same server as the Labour List copy, Labourist.
dizzy@desktop:~$ host nofourth.co.uk
nofourth.co.uk has address 173.45.237.188
dizzy@desktop:~$ host labourist.org
labourist.org has address 173.45.237.188
Coincidence? Maybe. There is a guy called Chris Birks that is linked to Conservative Future. A relative maybe? Who knows!

UPDATE: I see Labourist's navbar has started to link to No Fourth as well.



UPDATE II: As pointed out in the comments, each "slice" of hosting on the provider for these sites gets it own IP address so the fact they share an IP means either (a) Labourist and Nofourth are run/designed by the same person or (b) Labourist has provided free hosting to Nofourth.

UPDATE III: Matthew Birks has posted a comment on Unity's blog saying he has nothing to do with Chris Birks, but no denying he has anything to with Labourist. It's also worth noting that Chris Birks also appears to have been fibbing somewhat about his former life as a BNP activist before joining the Tory Party.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Look very carefully at the right hand side of the Labourist navigation

The Huntsman said...

One reason why the new Labourlist blog is likely to fail is not so much the quality of the articles but the comments: see this example (http://tinyurl.com/cg78gt) where the original post is about 200 words long and (if burying your head in the sand is your bag) to the point.

The first comment is 2300 words long and about as appetizing as eating a pair of hobnail boots. This is how lefties operate, by boring one another to death until the last man remains standing.

Who wants to scroll through that?

Anonymous said...

Ip2Location shows 173.45.237.188 to be in St Louis!

173.45.237.188
UNITED STATES
MISSOURI
ST. LOUIS
SLICEHOST LLC

dizzy said...

Well yes, its hosted by Slicehost

dizzy@desktop:~$ host 173.45.237.188
188.237.45.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 173-45-237-188.slicehost.net.

Oldrightie said...

I wish we could promote Go4TH as "go to fourth place" i.e one better than in Henley!

Anonymous said...

"Well yes, its hosted by Slicehost"

OK, I see.

And each Slicehost customer has it's own IP address.

dizzy said...

Maybe, maybe not. That why I said that maybe its just a coincidence.

Anonymous said...

http://www.slicehost.com/

Every slice gets a dedicated IP address

Anonymous said...

http://www.slicehost.com:

Included in every slice:

Dedicated IP address and Tier-1 redundant bandwidth

Tim said...

Either someone is having some fun with us, or the secret moderator is from Canada after all.

Labourist sharing a server is a recent development, BTW.

dizzy said...

dizzy@desktop:~$ host 72.47.203.140
140.203.47.72.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer dv.mattbirks.com.

Now slicehosts

Anonymous said...

dude, this is sooo techie !
just out the guy and get on with it

:)

Tim said...

Google Analytics account/project code for matthewbirks.com:

UA-1331494-2

Google Analytics account/project code for labourist.org:

UA-1331494-14

Matthew Birks is the creator of Labourist, or so intimate with the creator that it makes no real difference if he's not the specific account holder.

Anonymous said...

speaking as someone who has a fair bit of experience you should note the following..

1. Have a good look at the source code.Anything strike you as odd?
2. What is the purpose of signing the guest book?
3. Everyone is on a budget, you get better pricing from your host the more business you put their way.
4. Links are a tad important to google, and webmasters generally do not understand the objective of the site.
5. keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Zanulab have a lot to learn, but even though this is clumsy,they are getting there.

Even Guido fell for it!

Isn't creative marketing a wonderful thing!

My expertise is available to anyone who will rid us of the monsters.

Anonymous said...

So Labourlist are close to the No Fourth campaign? This is strange and very interesting. God digging Dizzy....

dizzy said...

LabouRist not LabourList

Anonymous said...

Just a technical point on hosting and IP addresses.

Each website *does not* get its own IP address - many website names can, and do, point to one IP address. The webserver knows which site you want by looking in the header your browser sent - that will contain the website name. This is all part of the HTML 1.1 spec.

We're already running short of IP addresses - if every single registered web site name had its own IP we'd be in deep doo-doo by now :)

Anonymous said...

ok, hands up, who didn't read all the comments first?

That'll be me then ! oops...

My point is still valid, but I hadn't read the part about each *slicehost customer* getting their own IP...

Off to hide under a stone now.

Anonymous said...

Dizzy,

Could you explain to us non-nerds what's going on? Is this a Labour fake so they can get our email addresses and then, say pass them to their friends at the BBC so I can be blacklisted?

rwendland said...

whois mattbirks.com gives a plausible phone no and address for Matthew Birks, if anyone is interested enough to contact him.

FWIW it looks like the VPS was setup about 10 Jan 2009, going by the Last-Modified of an "It works!" page you get from a HTTP GET on the bare IP (173.45.237.188).

Some more similar Google Analytics account/project codes are:

www.matthewbirks.com UA-1331494-2
www.birksworks.ca UA-1331494-13
www.labourist.org UA-1331494-14
www.nofourth.co.uk UA-1331494-16

dizzy said...

Each website *does not* get its own IP address - many website names can, and do, point to one IP address. The webserver knows which site you want by looking in the header your browser sent - that will contain the website name. This is all part of the HTML 1.1 spec.

Technical point, but the webserver can only know what to do with it if, assuming it is Apache, it has the relvant VirtualHost directive declared in the correct parts of httpd.conf

We're already running short of IP addresses - if every single registered web site name had its own IP we'd be in deep doo-doo by now :)

errr IPV6?