Credit Where Credit is Due

Yesterday (October 14) I received the following private message through Facebook's message service:

Connie...

Someone passed this link onto me today....

http://xxxxx/xxxxxxx/xxxxx.html

Not quite sure what it all is, but the top seemed like it had some private information. Please advise me what to do with this, I honestly do not want to be recieving your personal information online and I will try to stop the person(s) from passing this around.

Corey

The URL was to my home page, an html page with a table of three rows and eight columns filled with live links (169 of them). These links are the quickest way for me to access websites I visit most frequently -- quicker, even, than using a browser's dropdown favorites/bookmarks menu.

Normally, the links page resides on my C: drive and loads automatically as the home page of whatever browser I'm using -- most often, IE or Firefox. (I also use Opera and Chrome to view the webpages I design for Word Slinger Boutique customers, but I rarely use them for my own browsing.)

Anyhoo, for the past several weeks, I've experienced much grief with my computers, as I've written about a couple of places. Because the disk drives on both machines were corrupted and/or unreliable, about three weeks ago I uploaded my home page/links page to private webspace provided by my ISP, so I would have access to it regardless of what computer I was using.

When our machines finally got stable enough to use fairly normally, I started using the home page on my C: drive again and used the one on my ISP's server only when my browsers were were being difficult ("Webpage cannot be displayed.") rather than precipitating a blue-screen crash. As the systems stabilized, the misbhaving occurred less frequently and, frankly, I forgot about the page being on my ISP's server.

When I got Corey's message, I hafta tell you, I flew into a bit of a tizzy. There was indeed private info (log-on info) to a couple of very important websites. I immediately deleted the page from my ISP's server and changed the log-ons at the websites.

Since Corey is a member of the loyal opposition, I assumed someone from his circle sent him the URL to my page. Right now, I am in the crosshairs at Crossroads, so I asked Professor Simpson if he was the one who sent the link to Corey. In reply, Andy Hall posted on the comment thread to explain to me that when I clicked one of those links, it would send the URL of my page to the site I was visiting, so likely my personal page had been sent to any number of sites and blogs. Anyone checking their hit log could see a live link, click it and go to my page. Of course, I knew this, but it didn't occur to me because I normally browse using my home page on my C: drive, which cannot be accessed that way.

Andy was right -- it's my doing, and my responsibility, that the URL went to people's visitor logs; but I was mainly curious about who would email the link around. Corey ain't sayin', which is certainly his prerogative, so I likely won't find out who it was.

In any case, through my own oversight, because of my almost total focus on these misbehaving machines, very sensitive personal, private information (mine and my husband's) is now floating around out in cyberspace. The log-ons are no longer functional, but they would be -- for no telling how long -- if Corey had not notified me.

So Corey, we may be on opposite sides of the Civil War, and we may irritate the hell out of each other, and frankly, I don't have a lot of patience with some folks in your cyber-circle, but I have to tell, I do appreciate what you've done. My gratitude is plentiful and sincere.

Thank you, sir.