New FamilySearch Delayed

The possible rollout delay for New FamilySearch (NFS) that I reported last time has materialized into a major shutdown of the rollout.

On February 21st, Judy Thomasson of the Melbourne, Australia district reported receiving this e-mail:

The new FamilySearch has been implemented in several temple districts. At this point, there are a few issues that need to be resolved before adding more temple districts onto the system. As a result, the implementation date for your temple district has been postponed. You will be notified as soon as a new implementation date is determined.

We apologize for this delay and encourage you to continue your preparations to use the new FamilySearch when it becomes available. (Source)

While no reason has been announced, one rumor has it that the problem lies not with the website portion of NFS but with the software that runs inside each temple. However, there have been no reports of temples already active with NFS needing to take precautionary actions or supplemental procedure.

Others speculate that the 700 server NFS system in Ashburn, Virginia has already hit its limits and needs to be expanded before additional users are added. Several users have complained that performance of the website has gradually declined until using the system has become painful.

It is entirely possible that various anomalies seen in several districts earlier this month can be attributed to the rollout freeze. Consultants in Colorado found they can get on NFS, despite not receiving any announcement. The rollout of the Washington, D.C. temple was announced to the staff, but not members of the district. The Hague, Amsterdam received the rollout DVD media, but nothing else.

Coincident with the freeze, the expected release of NFS version 0.92 did not happen on 15-February. Perhaps the release was always planned for the end of the month. Or perhaps the two delays are connected.

Regardless of the reason for the delay, it is expected to last for at least four weeks. Stay tuned.

NFS Rollout News for Presidents' Day

I wish I had some cute tie-in between the New FamilySearch (NFS) rollout news and Presidents' Day, but I don't. In fact, it isn't even Presidents' Day. Not even Presidents' Day weekend. So if my headline built you up too much, my apologies. On with the news...

I've been keeping the tables in my article, Temple Districts Using New FamilySearch updated. You can usually check there anytime for what is currently known about the release schedule. But after 2 weeks, as you can see I've finally updated my rollout map.

• Since my last map update NFS has been deployed in 8 temple districts! Both Arizona temples, the Oakland temple (which leaves just 2 California temples), Boston and Detroit temples, the 2 Hawaii temples and Asunción Paraguay.
• I've added lots of European temples to the table of districts in transition: Frankfurt, Freiberg, Helsinki, London, Stockholm and Swiss. Stateside I've added Chicago. I don't know the official announcement dates for most of these. Do you? How long were they told the transition would take? Are they still being told 4 months?
• I've added a release date for Dallas, and approximate dates for the Australia temples.

I've not heard any more about Washington, D.C. and Denver. Has anyone in those districts been informed that they are being transitioned?

The Great November Announcement

Do you remember the Great Announcement of 8-November-2007? Nearly 2 dozen temple districts were announced nearly simultaneously. (See this post followed by this one.) Since that time, FamilySearch has been working their way through these districts.

At this point, only a few remain. Las Vegas and Redlands California are scheduled for next Tuesday, the Australian temples for March and Dallas for 11-March-2008.

That leaves Bismarck. Has anyone heard when Bismarck will be going live?

Other districts I think will be going live soon are Buenos Aires, Costa Rica, Houston and maybe Newport Beach.

Other FamilySearch News

• NFS 0.92 is scheduled to go live this month. The beta was released 25-January and has already ended. This is a regularly scheduled quarterly update. These will continue until, well, until the work is declared finished. The head engineer over NFS has said that by two years from now the program will have a completely different look than it has today.  (Source)
• Rollout to all temple districts is expected by the end of 2008. The Wasatch Front will be last.
• Someone has said that an issue has arisen that will delay the stated rollout. If the rumor is true, poor Las Vegas won't get New FamilySearch next week as planned. (Source)
• One of the most looked for features in NFS 0.92 is on the Summary view. When a data field has a drop-down menu arrow you can select the data that you believe is most correct without adding a redundant opinion.
• Other improvements in NFS 0.92 clearly separate deleting and disputing information, easily allow navigation through more than 10 combined records, indication of disputed data on the Combined Records view, clarified format display of possible duplicates, a warning on the Contribute GEDCOM page about duplication of data and improved name part identification when adding or editing names. (See beta notes.)
• FamilySearch Labs would like to get feedback from the general public on their new Family Tree design. Previously, only those with New FamilySearch accounts could use and provide feedback on Family Tree. See Dan Lawyer's post for more information.
• The latest test of the FamilySearch Wiki is up. It can be accessed at https://wiki.familysearch.org. This version uses MediaWiki which was developed for Wikipedia.
• As more and more Family History Consultants along the Wasatch Front are able to get New FamilySearch accounts, FamilySearch has provided the ability to print ordinance cards. Take your FOR to the Salt Lake Family History Library.

Google Views Ancestry & FamilySearch Streets

Google announced today that Salt Lake City along with 8 other areas has been added to Google Map's Street View, which displays street level photographs of supported cities. While Salt Lake City is mentioned in particular, coverage extends up and down the Wasatch front, including offices of both Ancestry and FamilySearch. The blue area in the map below shows where Street View is supported.

Blue shows Street View coverage along the Wasatch Front

The offices of both Ancestry and FamilySearch are included in Street Views. Here is a view of The Generations Network (TGN), parent company of Ancestry.com. You can see the sign out front with the company name. Zoom in to get a better view... Wait a minute. When I zoom in, the "Generations Network" logo is replaced with "Google." What does that mean? You can click the arrows going North to see the seedy side of Ancestry.

Google's name over the top of TGN logo

Click this link to see the offices of FamilySearch and parent, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I believe FamilySearch has some offices in the Joseph Smith Memorial building (the white building on the left with the small dome—a beehive—on the left) and some offices in the Church Office Building (the tower on the right). In between you can see the Salt Lake Temple. Try moving completely around this block. See if you can find the Family History Library. It is directly West of your starting point.

Privacy concerns follow Google Street View where ever it shows up. One TGN employee found photos of his wife and child in front of their house. When Google launched Street View last year an editorial in the Salt Lake City Deseret News said,

George Orwell got a lot of things right about the future in his novel "1984." The thing he missed, however, is that wholesale intrusions today come from [the Internet], not his fictional government-imposed "big brother."

Should you come across a photo that you believe invades your privacy or is otherwise inappropriate, click the "Street View Help" link above the image and in the resulting popup window, click the "Report inappropriate image" link at the bottom.

The Google Car

Car with camera,
© All rights reserved

Perhaps you saw Google's specially equipped vehicles driving around taking these pictures. An alert iPhone owner snapped the shot to the right as the car approached Salt Lake back in September 2007. Click on the thumbnail to the right, as well as this gallery of Google Cars and this link.

Here are some more views from our neighborhood for you to explore:

• A southern view of TGN.
• Slightly different closeup of the TGN sign.
• The "seedy field" behind TGN.
• This view shows the Salt Lake Temple on the left and the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB) on the right. A statue of Brigham Young stands between them.
• Try moving a little South; the view looks like this.
• Or go East in front of the JSMB to see the chandeliers through the windows.
• The JSMB used to be the Hotel Utah, so it has a grand exterior.
• The Family History Library. Let me know if you are one of the people or know one of the people standing out front.
• An interesting juxtaposition of horse-drawn carriage and limousine in front of the Church Office Building. See how close you can get to the limousine.
• Mt. Timpanogos from the Squaw Peak road. You can almost spit on our offices at TGN from this spot.
• Further down the road you can see Mt. "Timp" on the right and Utah Lake on the left.
• Bridal Veil Falls, up Provo Canyon, is much prettier than this photograph can show.
• Entrance to Robert Redford's Sundance Resort. Drive past the couple on the road and take a look at the lady's hiking shoes. Continue up the road and look off to the left to see the buildings and parking lot of the resort with Mt. Timpanogos towering above. Google missed the gorgeous fall colors along this road by just a couple weeks.
• Here are some hikers googling at the odd, camera-bearing vehicle. At least they have sensible shoes.
• In the early '60s our station wagon bearly made it pulling our trailer to Timp Lodge for a family reunion. Grandpa wore a wig and played the fiddle. I hoped I was adopted.
• At the trail head to Stewart Falls, the Google driver stops to google a young hiker paying her forest service use fee. She's not really going to hike to the falls in those sandals, is she?
• A multi-car accident in Phoenix.
• Move past this fender bender to see behind the car.
• Here is where one of my ancestors lived in 1850. (BTW, if you know who I am, please keep it to yourself. There are those who have and are determining my identity through the various clues dropped over time. Send me an email to my non-Ancestry Insider email address explaining how you determined my identity and I'm happy to confirm your deduction. Asking an employee of Ancestry or FamilySearch is cheating, since I've been open with these two organizations. Once you've determined my identity, please do not disclose it to others!)

Paula Stuart-Warren explored the genealogical uses of Google Street View in a recent article on Ancestry's 24/7 Family History Circle.

Myra Vanderpool Gormley

This is one in a series of encyclopedia articles describing people, products and companies in the genealogy industry. When you hear a noted genealogist's name, do you find yourself thinking, "I know I know that name," but you can't quite get the ol' noggin to access the data? I'm right there with you! For that reason, these articles are.

Myra served as the editor of the RootsWeb Review from its inception in 1998 until her retirement at the beginning of 2007. See a biography here.

Myra began doing genealogy as an eleven year old, when she went to the local library and did research that disproved a family legend about Jesse James. But it wasn’t until she was in her thirties that she began consistently researching. After experiencing a measure of success doing her own genealogy, Myra proposed writing a column on genealogy to the local newspaper editor. It took several years for Myra to convince him that genealogy had a wide appeal, but from the moment her column, “Shaking the Family Tree,” launched in July of 1983, it experienced tremendous success. Soon the column was picked up by the Los Angeles Times syndicate and passed to other newspapers and readers around the nation. Myra continued writing the column for nineteen years.

Some of Myra’s other accomplishments as a genealogist include spending nine years writing a column and answering genealogy questions for Prodigy, an early Internet Service Provider, publishing numerous magazine articles and three books on family history, and helping to found the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors. (Source)

Her website is here, which includes her email address.

From the archives of Genealogical Computing, vol. 22, no. 2, Oct/Nov/Dec 2002.

Buick Heritage Sweepstakes

To commemorate African American History Month and in conjunction with the release of African American Lives 2, Buick and Ancestry.com have teamed up to offer you the Buick Heritage Sweepstakes.

Ten lucky winners will receive a complete Ancestry DNA Test Kit. One thousand lucky winners will receive a Family History Kit consisting of Family Tree Maker Essentials software, a DVD of African American Lives and a hardcover copy of In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past.

To enter, go to the African American Lives 2 (AAL2) website. While there, the 7 minute promo for tonight's premier is a must watch. It looks like Dr. Gates has done his usual superb job. After watching the preview, click on the Buick logo at the bottom of the page.

Or, if you see the ad to the right anywhere on the Internet, click on it.

When you get to the Buick Heritage Sweepstakes website, take a moment to view one or more of the videos. They are all quite short and you have the time. The contest doesn't end until the end of March.

NFS Rollout News for Super Tuesday

The 24 US states holding presidential primaries may not be the only thing making today super. If Mesa, Oakland and Snowflake successfully go live with New FamilySearch (NFS) today, 21 temples will be using the new program.

I've made the following updates to the map, above, and to the tables at Temple Districts Using New FamilySearch.

• Four temples have gone live since the last map update: Los Angeles, Colonia Juárez, Guadalajara and Columbus Ohio.
• Denver is shown half red/half yellow. Consultants are able to register despite the lack of an e-mail announcement.
• The Washington, D.C. temple staff have been informed that the announcement for their district has been made, although no one in the district has received the e-mail as yet. I wonder if the e-mails were delayed so they would not be a distraction from Gordon B. Hinckley's funeral services last Saturday.
• I've added red dots for the Utah temples. I'm guessing that the outliers in Utah will get New FamilySearch before the heavy-volume Wasatch Front temples.
• I've added a red dot over the top of the Rexburg temple which will be operational after dedicatory services starting Saturday.
• I've added lots of international temples to the tables: Adelaide, Asuncion, Brisbane, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Madrid and Preston.
• I've added a target date of 26-Feb-2008 for Las Vegas and Redlands, CA.

Unbelievable Name Count Claims

What are we to understand by genealogy vendors name count claims? When WorldVitalRecords.com claims "872,278,874 Names in 5,389 Databases," aren't we led to believe these are counts of people names? But WorldVitalRecords.com claims 337,484 names in Lippincott's Gazetteer of the World, 1895. This is a gazetteer! Yeah, yeah; many places are named after people. But the database information notes there are only 125,000 place names on 2,895 pages. The claim of 337,484 names amounts to, on average, 2.7 names per place and 117 names per page!

Ancestry.com claims 2,112 in Lippincott’s Gazetteer of the World, 1913. A little experimentation shows the book has grown to 2115 pages, which means Ancestry claims about 1 name per page.

I picked a page from the 1913 edition at random to examine. Page 1000 is about half-way through the book. (Click on the adjacent image to see it yourself.) I pulled it up and started looking for names. I ignored people-place names such as Baltimore, St. Louis and Clay County. The only name I found was Albus Dumbledore. Oops, Albertus Magnus. A sample of one is hardly scientific, but I find the claim of 117 names per page in a gazetteer quite incredulous.

I don't think WorldVitalRecords.com is all alone. I know Ancestry has some isolated problems as well. I call upon genealogy vendors to provide transparency with published name counts. Consumers have a right to know when counts are exact and when they are estimates. Vendors should disclose basic definitions and methodologies. Only transparency will provide consumers the information necessary to make intelligent purchase decisions with their limited funds in an increasingly competitive market.

Why make it hard to volunteer for FamilySearch Indexing?

Why does FamilySearch make it so hard to find the FamilySearch Indexing site? Yes, yes, I know that FamilySearchIndexing.org ought to be easy enough to remember. Yet still, many patrons at my Family History Center raise a hand, confused that the FamilySearch Indexing website no longer has the links they want. I walk over and find they are on FamilySearch.org.

Do you realize there are no links to FamilySearchIndexing.org on FamilySearch.org, New.FamilySearch.org or LDS.org? At least no obvious ones. You'd think if FamilySearch wants everyone to index, they'd make it a little easier to get there.

The signup page has bigger problems. It is, literally I think, easier to do actual indexing than it is to successfully navigate the sign-up-to-volunteer page. First off, the Enter key seems to execute the "Sign On" link near the top left of the page rather than the "Continue" button at the bottom right. If you haven't signed up before (which most users haven't!), you think you have successfully submitted the form and are now being asked to sign on with your new user name and password. Wrong! Up goes the hand.

"Brother Incisor, can you help me?"

Then, almost everyone chooses a user name that has already been used, but they are not told until they fill out the entire form and submit it. They go back and try one or more times to find an available user name. By the time they do, the password they chose has been cleared, so they have to enter it again—twice...

...Only to find that they've chosen an invalid password. No one sees the password restrictions, even though they are right there in plain sight. FamilySearch needs to make the password instructions more visually prominent.

It would be pretty trivial to check the validity of the password as soon as the user moved to the next field. Don't wait until they submit the form. While you're at it, FamilySearch, it would only be a little more difficult to add some AJAX script to check the user name as well.

How about it, FamilySearch?

Where have all the Mailing Lists Gone?

Way back in the frontier days when we circled the wagons at the end of the day and hooked up our 300 baud modems, mailing lists were one of the first electronic tools we used for genealogy. As far as mailing lists are concerned, FamilySearch was late in and today they announced they would also be one of the first out.

Users of their mailing list system received notification today. "Effective 13 February 2008, the Collaboration E-mail List feature on the FamilySearch.org web site will be discontinued." Users who wished to remain in contact with one another were advised to exchange e-mail addresses.

RootsWeb Mailing Lists

It is only coincidence that today the Utah Valley PAF User Group (UVPAFUG) used RootsWeb's mailing list system for the last time. List members received a message that began, "A Final Message to All Participants in this Mailing List." UVPAFUG has used RootsWeb's system since July 2000 to announce their monthly meetings. UVPAFUG (no, I don't know how they pronounce that) is abandoning RootsWeb's system in favor of a blog and FeedBlitz subscriptions.

The Ancestry Insider has been hearing rumors of dissatisfaction from several groups with the RootsWeb mailing list system. Ignored for many years by RootsWeb owners—the Generations Network (TGN)—the Insider was told that TGN switched the software used for the mailing lists several months ago and list administrators are not happy with the loss of some key features.

HTML E-mail Formatting

While other solutions allow HTML formatting, or rich text as it is sometimes called, TGN has invested very little in upgrading RootsWeb-related e-mails. Mailing lists are still plain text. The RootsWeb Review became available in HTML just last week.

Message board notifications are another ugly step child. In yet another coincidence, at least some of today's notifications went out with bad links. Here's a representative message showing the ugly formatting as well as the link error.

My Notifications

Board : Boards > Surnames > Rencher
Subject : Nancy Rencher, daughter of John Nelson
Author : BMarshall0572
Date : 29 Jan 2008 4:24 AM GMT

http:///mbexec/msg/an/nEB.2ACE/86

Board : Boards > Surnames > Rencher
Subject : Re: Nancy Rencher, daughter of John
Author : brencher
Date : 29 Jan 2008 5:20 AM GMT

http:///mbexec/msg/an/nEB.2ACE/86.1

Board : Boards > Surnames > Rencher
Subject : Re: Nancy Rencher, daughter of John
Author : BMarshall0572
Date : 29 Jan 2008 5:31 AM GMT

http:///mbexec/msg/an/nEB.2ACE/86.1.1

The Message Board Administration Team



It may be that mailing lists powered by genealogy companies may one day soon disappear entirely.

New FamilySearch offered to all consultants

FamilySearch has announced availability of New FamilySearch accounts to any consultant that finishes a 1 hour course. Said the announcement,

FamilySearch Support is pleased to announce that they will be offering all registered Family History Consultants and Priesthood Leaders an opportunity to obtain a new FamilySearch account early. To take advantage of this opportunity we ask that you attend one 1 hour class entitled, "How Consultant's Support the new FamilySearch." After your attendance to the class you will be notified that your account is activated allowing you to register, participate in on-line training and become acquainted with the system.

There are currently 9 times scheduled for the class running from Thursday, 7-February-2008 until the Thursday prior to General Conference weekend. Classes are held on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. You can see the list of available times and register for one by clicking here.

Gordon B. Hinckley dies at 97

Gordon B. Hinckley, 15th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died tonight at 7 pm MST from causes incident to age. He died in his apartment overlooking the historic Salt Lake Temple with family members at his side. Hinckley presided over the church of about 13 million members for almost 13 years.

One of Hinckley's lasting accomplishments will be the great expansion of temples during his presidency. On 12-March-1995 when he became president, the Church had 47 operating temples. Today there are 124 with another 12 in various stages of construction.

New FamilySearch owes some of its existence to Hinckley's insistence that tools be developed to further genealogy work among Church members, allowing collaboration and preventing duplicate submissions of ancestor names to the Church's temples.

A Piece of Paper Out of Nowhere

This is another in the Ancestry Insider's series called Serendipity in Genealogy.

"When it came time to make a trip to Delaware from our home in Alaska, it was a big adventure, and our main focus was to gather as much information as possible and bring it home to sort out." Steve and Nancy Lealos would spend almost two weeks researching Nancy's genealogy. They called and visited anyone and everyone with any information.

Steve says they would be at libraries, courthouses and other locations from the moment they opened until the moment they closed. He praised the staff of these institutions. "They helped every way they could."

Their hard work hit a dead end with Nancy's great-great grandfather and the time had come to go.

While I was taking some last photographs on a lawn, I happened to see out of the corner of my eye an older piece of yellow legal paper on the ground. As I picked up the paper, I was absolutely stunned to realize that I had in my hand a handwritten document that was at least 50 years old, written in ink without a smudge on it, that listed Nancy's great-great grandfather, his parents, his wife's family and continuing back even further with parents, husbands, wives and children, with dates, places, etc.

To add to the amazement, they could find no reason for the paper to be there. "No one knew about it, no one claimed it." On a lawn in Delaware a piece of paper had appeared out of nowhere.

 

Adapted from "Out of nowhere," Steve Lealos, LDS Church News, 19-January-2008, p. 16.

NFS Update: I'm OK, "Your" OK

Since Monday's update, I've learned a few more things. Snowflake is going live 5-February. (Thanks, E.) Birmingham, Alabama received notification they will go live in the next 4 months, as did Lubbock. (Thanks, C.) If Seattle got their notification as rumored, no one has mentioned it.

Here's an updated map. Green is live; yellow, announced; red, not yet; purple, under construction.

Notice we now have an unbroken band of states with green and yellow dots from one coast to the other: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, (sorry Miss.), Alabama and Florida.

Oklahoma has hit the rumor radar again. As the rumor goes, "your" OK district could be live as soon as March and as late as May. Given the projected pace of the rollout and the size of that window, that's a pretty safe prediction. (See Renee's article, Pace for NFS Roll-out to Quicken.)

Those betting that Las Vegas would go live 5-February received enormously disappointing news last week. Their rollout has been delayed with no word on how long the delay might last! (Thanks, F.) I didn't hear if a reason was given, but I think temple-specific delays might be caused by equipment related issues. I wonder if high growth in the Vegas area, coupled with the Temple's location far from the city center could make it difficult to get the high-speed Internet connectivity required by New FamilySearch.

New FamilySearch Schedule Update

I've updated my Temple Districts Using New FamilySearch article (but not the map) with the following changes:

Gone live: San Antonio, Sacramento, Winter Quarters.

Going live 5-Feb: Mesa, Oakland, Snowflake.

Going live 12-Feb: Boston, Detroit.

Going live 4-Mar: Costa Rica, Houston.

Received their 3 month notification: Halifax, Toronto.

Rumor has it they'll receive their notification this week: Seattle.

 

"You're Going Live" message

Wonder what the email looks like announcing your temple district is going live with New FamilySearch? Sometimes exactly three weeks before their go-live date, family history consultants are receiving this message:

To: Priesthood leaders, family history center directors and family
history consultants in the ___________ temple district.

 

Beginning [go-live date], the new process for printing temple name cards using Family Ordinance Requests will be used in the ___________ Temple. New FamilySearch will be available to the general membership of the Church who live in the ___________ temple district early in the morning on the previous [3 days before?]. No additional notice will be sent to priesthood leaders or members of the Church in the __________ temple district concerning these dates.

 

We ask that family history consultants and center directors encourage members who have existing TempleReady disks to take them to the temple and have their temple name cards printed before [go-live date]. Beginning immediately, please do not create any new TempleReady disks in your family history centers for processing at the ___________ temple.

 

If you have not done so already, please complete the new FamilySearch online training prior to [go-live date] in preparation for helping members to use new FamilySearch as part of the new process for preparing ancestral names for the temple. Please contact FamilySearch Support by e-mail or phone if you have any questions or problems.

 

Thank you for your support of temple and family history work.

Sincerely,

FamilySearch Support

The latest go-live dates are all Tuesdays. Sometimes the notifications arrive on a Tuesday. Watch your In-boxes!

New Ancestry TV Ads

Ancestry must have liked the results of their last TV ad campaign. An announcement in their MediaRoom reveals today that they have launched a new set of ads to run throughout 2008.

"The new ads depict how the lives of our ancestors influence our lives today," the press release states. They extend the theme Ancestry has used in previous ads, associating the traits of ancestors with their modern descendants.

One way to see the MediaRoom announcement and the 3 advertisements is to go to www.tgn.com and click on Press Room. In the "Search MediaRoom" box, type Ad Campaign. Select the first item, titled The Generations Network - Ancestry.com Ad Campaign.

Alternately, you can see the old and new commercials on YouTube.

Alternately, click the play button in turn on each ad below to see the ads. If you still can't play the ads, click the link under each.

Gladys (30 sec)

Jane (30 sec)

Robert (30 sec)

The ad campaign is expected to run throughout 2008 on national cable channels including A&E, Food Network, TNT, AMC and many more.

Part 3: A Virtual Private Hijacking

MyFamily.com's Browser Hijacker

"Business Hack," © fluca

The Ancestry Insider suffers from a problem that has affected many: his browser is sometimes hijacked to MyFamily.com. Frustrated to his fill, he finally fixated on finding and fixing this problem.

In part 1, An Unholy Alliance, the Insider investigated his first suspect: TGN's former use of Gator. In part 2, the Insider's second suspect was browser hijackings caused by the MyFamily DNS Poisoning problem.

It wasn't either of these; what, then, is it?

Part 3: A Virtual Private Hijacking

Some Windows operating systems will let you see your DNS cache by running (Start > All Programs > Accessories) Command Prompt and typing this command:

ipconfig /displaydns

Someone with the poisoned cache problem described in part 2 would see this somewhere in their cache:

familysearch.org
----------------------------------------
Record Name . . . . . : familysearch.org
A (Host) Record . . . : 66.43.25.130

What I saw on my laptop was

xyz.familysearch.org
----------------------------------------
Record Name . . . . . : xyz.familysearch.org.cc.myfamily.com
A (Host) Record . . . : 66.43.25.130

My DNS cache was poisoned, but not in the way explained in part 2. When I specified a non-existent domain, somehow my DNS was appending "cc.myfamily.com" on the end. As we learned last time, the misconfigured MyFamily name servers will willingly claim any domain name passed to them and return the address to MyFamily.com[66.43.25.130].

Virtual Private Networks

The diagram below/left shows that companies operate private networks (in green) that connect to the web through a firewall. The firewall blocks access to the private network.

Some companies provide access to their private network to select employee computers outside the firewall by establishing a virtual private network (VPN) as illustrated in the diagram below/right.

To include an employee computer in a VPN, special software is installed on the employee's computer that allows the computer to use the Internet to create a virtual cable that plugs the computer into the company network. Even though the virtual cable actually communicates using the Internet, the information is secured and protected, making it as private as if a real cable had been strung from the employee's home all the way to the employee's workplace where it was plugged directly into the company's private network.

Resolution

I was playing with some of the other name server commands Michael Ditto mentioned in his poisoning article when my computer showed this list of DNS options:

Set options:
  nodebug
  timeout=2
  retry=1
  srchlist=cc.tgn.com/cc.myfamily.com

There it was! "Cc.myfamily.com" was the same string appended to xyz.familysearch.org!

When I installed the TGN VPN software on my laptop, it had added to the srchlist option anything necessary for machines connected directly to the company network. From that point forward, anytime I entered a domain that could not be found, the DNS system searched for it by appending in turn each item in the search list. Once cc.myfamily.com was added, the misconfigured MyFamily name servers would poison my cache. The unintended side-effect was my browser hijacking problem.

My long search was over. I removed cc.myfamily.com from the srchlist and revved up my browser.

I typed xyz.familysearch.org and...

A 404—page not found—error never looked so good!

Part 2: DNS Poisoning

MyFamily.com's Browser Hijacker

"Business Hack," © fluca

The Ancestry Insider suffers from a problem that has affected many: his browser is sometimes hijacked to MyFamily.com. Frustrated to his fill, he finally fixated on finding and fixing this problem.

In part 1, An Unholy Alliance, the Insider investigated his first suspect: TGN's former use of Gator.

What could possibly cause hijacking of multiple browser versions, multiple browsers on both Macs and PCs and not show up in malware scans?!?

Part 2: DNS Poisoning

Computers like numbers. People, on the other hand, don't. Every website on the Internet has a name for people to use and a numeric address for computers to use. The names are called domain names. Some examples are www.ancestry.com and www.familysearch.org. The numeric addresses are called IP addresses. Some examples are [66.43.22.49] and [204.9.225.200], respectively.

Domain name	IP Address
www.ancestry.com	66.43.22.49
www.familysearch.org	204.9.225.200

Example showing domain name translations

The domain name system (DNS) in your computer asks a DNS server (at your Internet Service Provider) to translate domain names into IP addresses. To speed up the translation, once a domain name has been translated to an IP address, the pair are saved or cached.

© fluca

A DNS cache entry is poisoned if the wrong IP address is saved for a domain name. For example, the IP address for www.myfamily.com is [66.43.25.130]. If a domain name such as xyz.familysearch.org is placed into the cache with the wrong IP address, then the cache has been poisoned.

Domain name	IP Address
www.ancestry.com	66.43.22.49
www.familysearch.org	204.9.225.200
xyz.familysearch.org	66.43.25.130
www.myfamily.com	66.43.25.130

Example of a poisoned DNS cache

Ditto's Investigation

Michael Ditto was a senior software engineer with Sun Microsystems nearly 3 years ago when his Linux system started acting weird.

Several people have observed a problem on their networks where various web sites, apparently at random, would be replaced by www.myfamily.com. The problem comes and goes without obvious cause, and affects different web sites at different times. I started encountering this problem a few days ago. I clicked on a link to, say, www.imdb.com, and found myself looking at the home page for www.myfamily.com.

Ditto investigated the situation and wrote an article with his findings. It is titled The myfamily.com DNS poisoning problem.

He found that the mfns*.myfamily.net name servers incorrectly claim the authority to translate any .com domain name. And when asked to do so, they always return the address of MyFamily.com. In Ditto's words,

So, the reason that the problem appeared suddenly one day is that a piece of spam caused my name server to contact the misconfigured myfamily.com name server and thereby become poisoned. Once poisoned, the name server will behave improperly until it is restarted or the cache flushed somehow.

DNS poisoning would explain how the problem could affect all browsers and browser versions, both on Macs and PCs. It would explain why scanners could never detect any malware on my notebook. It seemed I had finally solved my mystery. Now, how do I solve the problem on my laptop?

MyFamily Should Fix the Problem

"Of course the administrator of the myfamily.com domain should fix their DNS and/or server configuration," said Ditto... three years ago.

The Measurement Factory does periodic surveys that look for DNS cache poisoners. Their September 2007 survey found the MyFamily name servers are still poisoning caches for .com, .net and .org domains and gave them an "evilness" rating of 2.0.

Not all current operating systems can be fooled by the errant MyFamily name servers. The Measurement Factory notes that Windows NT 2000 is vulnerable to poisoning while Windows 2003 is not, unless the administrator unchecks the "prevent cache poisoning" option. But even if your computer is immune, you can still be affected by this problem if a cache "upstream" from you gets poisoned.

Following the notes in Ditto's article, I verified that the MyFamily name servers have not been fixed. Mysteriously and unexpectedly, I also found that my laptop, running Windows XP, was unaffected by the MyFamily name servers' erroneous authority claims.

Now that I thought about it, my symptoms were different from those described by Ditto. Instead of the random hijacking of existing websites, I suffer from consistent redirection of nonexistent websites.

What then, is causing my browser hijacking?!?

Next time: A Virtual Private Hijacking.

Who's In at TGN?

It's that time of year. The time when we find out who's in and who's not at the Generations Network (TGN).

More specifically, it's time for the new RootsWeb Calendar and time to see who is pictured!

The Ancestry Insider is honored to be pictured again in this year's calendar.

Each year Donna puts in hours and hours of work collecting photographs, designing and putting together each month, identifying those pictured, writing up a key identifying each name, getting the calendars printed and then distributed. Whew; it makes me tired just thinking about it.

The previous year's calendar becomes a treasured keepsake, filed close by, as if that will keep cherished coworkers from wandering too far afield.

Thank you, Donna. You are definitely in.

MyFamily.com's Browser Hijacker

"Business Hack," © fluca

Probably unknown to current management of the Generations Network (TGN) and new owners, Spectrum Equity Investors, they have inherited a problem that has affected many: something is sometimes hijacking browsers to MyFamily.com.

The Ancestry Insider suffers from the problem on his laptop. Frustrated to his fill, he's finally fixated on finding and fixing this problem.

Part 1: An Unholy Alliance

On my laptop, when I enter a non-existent domain, say http://xyz.familysearch.org, my browser is redirected to MyFamily.com. Over several years I've tried several respected malware scanners, trying to detect and fix this problem, including Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware Free and Norton AntiVirus. When I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, the problem remained. When I downloaded and tried Firefox, the hijacking still occurred.

My investigation thus far has been unable to determine if this situation is an unhappy accidental alignment of technology settings or the last vestige of an unholy alliance the company made years ago with aggressive Internet marketer, Gator.com.

Gator.com

According to Beau Sharbrough in a 2004 article in the Ancestry Daily News,

Spyware is unwanted software, hidden on your computer. It might include the following:

--- Adware. These programs serve you popup ads. They might also send information to advertisers. One of the more insidious examples is Gator. They produce popup ads that don't come from the site you are visiting. For a fee, they will put up Ford ads on pages that have “Honda” on them

Gator's adware technology was installed during the installation of some program offered for free in exchange for the permission to display advertising. Some of Gator's programs were eWallet, GotSmiley, Dashbar, Precision Time, Screenscenes and weatherscope. After installation, a user would be shown popup advertisements that matched their interests, which were inferred from the websites they visited. (Source)

Spyware legal expert, Benjamin Edelman, says,

Users who manage to read the [63-page Gator] license find surprising terms: Users must not run third-party tools (like Ad-Aware or Spybot) to remove Gator, and users must not investigate what personal information Gator tracks and sends.

Because the popups sometimes obscured the websites of competitors, and because Gator fought being described as "spyware", Gator and its software were involved in legal actions with or among: the Internet Advertising Bureau, Virtumundo, L.L. Bean, PriceGrabber, the New York Times, the Washington Post (among other media companies), Weight Watchers, DiscreetDrugs.com, DietWatch.com, Extended Stay America, Hertz, Lending Tree, Metrodate (representing a class of websites), Overstock.com, Quicken Loans, Six Continents Hotels, TigerDirect, UPS, Wells Fargo, Teleflora, Nordstrom's, JC Penney, Atkins, Gevalia, Interlinx (budgetlife.com) and PC Pitstop. (Source)

Paul Allen

In a 2004 Paul Allen, former Ancestry executive, wrote a blog article titled Gator files for IPO as Claria Corporation in which he acknowledged the use of Gator's technology at Ancestry.com.

My team at Ancestry.com used to advertise on Gator. It was cool to think that we could “gator” our competitors web sites and pop-up our advertisement just as a web user was thinking of subscribing to, say, genealogy.com [a competitor at the time]. I don’t think this should be considered illegal. If an end user wants a Gator tool on their machine to monitor what they are doing and save them money by giving them competing offers or coupons just in time, what is wrong with that?

Allen shows a clear understanding of Gator's deceptive practices but still expresses admiration.

Gator [is] much hated in the industry by web site publishers and much beloved by aggressive Internet marketers. ... The numbers are amazing...

Gator has about 43 million customers that have downloaded one of their software applications, knowingly or unknowingly. These applications are mostly completely useless, but they get downloaded inadvertently...

Getting people to download software for free which stays resident and helps Claria make money is actually quite brilliant...

I think they are just taking advantage of the naivety of many web users...

I think Claria has some clever tactics and end users have been gullible.

Claria has since announced exiting the "adware" business, although its software remains on download sites and continues to be installed on computers. Claria also announced it has shut down the servers that supply popup advertisements to the Gator Advertising Network (GAIN).

List of Suspects

I admit Gator was my first suspect. But is it possible that starved of responses from the GAIN ad servers, Gator's software degrades into default or unintentional behavior that causes or contributes to the mysterious MyFamily.com browser redirects?

When I learned that even Mac users have been hijacked to MyFamily.com, I knew it was time to start looking for another suspect.

Next time, we'll look at suspect 2: DNS poisoning.

New FamilySearch Update for 25-Dec-2007

I've updated the map and list in Temple Districts Using New FamilySearch.

Newport Beach has been announced, completing announcements for California. Manhattan and Johannesburg have been announced. All have been given the new preparation length: 4 months. We're on a Lubbock watch. Rumor has it that they may be announced by the end of the year. Let me know if you hear anything. (AncestryInsider@gmail.com)

FamilySearch support personnel can share:

• What new FamilySearch is
• New FamilySearch is coming
• Names and dates for temple districts that have gone live

Support can not divulge:

• Names and dates for temple districts that have not gone live
• Packet information
• New FamilySearch Rollout DVD