John D - your Trojan Horse concerns

[ban-all-sheds]

Perfectly valid, and now of course swept away by the moderators in their usual heavy-handed way.

If those concerns are their reasons for repeatedly deleting all the posts that mention that site then I think that just proves that I am right in saying that they should explain themselves rather than treating us like children who just have to accept things.

FYI - I've sent this email to the regular email addresses for Dr. Steven Furnell & Dr. Andy Phippen:

This site: http://not.going.to.give.the.mods.even.specious.justification/ asks questions about the level of security that people have, what kind of financial activities they carry on and what their attitude is to providing personal information online.

It also asks for their email address.

Potentially this is a worrying combination, a worry not helped by the fact that the email addresses on the page are not your regular ones, and the phone numbers and post codes of the registrant information for the site do not match those of Plymouth University.

Are you able to confirm that this site is genuine?

I'll let you know what they say.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I have now had a reply from Dr. Furnell

Thanks for your message.

Yes, I can vouch for the legitimacy of the survey. It is being conducted by an MSc student, Peter Bryant.

Although the survey offers the option for people to leave contact details, this is entirely voluntary and is intended for the purposes of facilitating potential future study. Unlike scams, the other questions do not ask respondents to divulge specific personal information (e.g. although it asks whether passwords and financial data are stored by a user, it does not ask the user to say what they are).

The email addresses Peter has listed for us are variants of our university accounts, and still within the plymouth.ac.uk domain. However, I take your point that this looks a bit odd, and we will get the site amended to reflect the same addresses for both myself and Dr Phippen that someone would find if searching for us on the University website. The registrant information for the site is attributed to Dr Phippen, one of the investigators named on the page.

Thanks for the input.

Best regards
Steve

Once the change has been made, I will re-post the link to the survey site, unless of course it has been explained which rule that breaks.....

 

[Pete1]

I thought those messages might have come from here, i was forwarded them earlier today.
The site and posts are strongly linked to the university, if it was not ligitimate it would not be long before it was discovered that someone was pretending to be working for the university and the site would be closed down. I hope your fears can be reduced.

cheers

Pete

 

[ban-all-sheds]

My fears are allayed, but given the prevalence of phishing I hope you understand them..

 

[Pete1]

yep of course,
iam probably more paranoid than most, especailly after taking this degree (hense one of the reasons i didn't give out too much information in my profile)

 

[empip]

(hense one of the reasons i didn't give out too much information in my profile)

ThruTheDiyNutters.Window

 

[Steve]

ThruTheDiyNutters.Window

cant believe they named a spoof site after ours!