History of Rainbow Digital Media

Rainbow Digital Media was started back in September 2006 as recorded by Wayback Machine at which time was using the .co.uk domain ( along with adding www. which confuses the Wayback Machine crawling ). I am not sure just what was being offered at that point as the history from 2006 on WM makes interesting reading referring to large amounts of money. James took over the business in 2012 from Christine and Nick Morton as Nick was having some medical problems and had been unable to give clients his full attention. James was looking for a source of income as he had parted company with Phoenix Security and had to then stay out of his preferred security field for a year. He perhaps should have done a little bit more investigation into just what he was taking over as it certainly was not what it seemed. I still think he paid Nick too much for the good will of the client base is that then existed. Even at that stage a number of the sites were not actually being paid for as their owners had already stopped trading or were doing their own thing. I became involved when James got into trouble with problems on the maze of hosting that had been build up.

The initial problem was getting control of the existing hosting. While all hosting was on same provider, it was spread across three different hosting packages. The original hosting was based on a Microsoft windows framework using .ASP web format which had not been updated with first being commissioned. A similar situation existed on both of the Linux based hosting with old versions of PHP powering an assortment of PHP frameworks (? codes used). James had problems from day one and I stepped in to help. The major problem was that security holes that allowed hackers to take control of a number of sites and inject their own code and material. A lot of this was being used to create forwarding links to аdult sites and feed fraudulent activity, something that was exacerbated by the way Google boosted site ratings based the number of different sites linked to the one being promoted. The RDM hosting was also being use as a free storage system for images which obviously we were funding instead. It took some time to clean everything up and wipe the both the third party code and the images. I have a clean method of maintaining material by duplicating the sites on our own hosting using one of the only packages I paid for - BeyondCompare. The live site can be very quickly compared with a clean copy, but it took a couple years before I was happy that we had cleaned everything out and updated code to remove the original security holes. At this time we were hosting most things on our own hardware at Serversure. The original windows based hosting still with CS New Media which had since been moved from the North West to London and was eventually bought by (?).

By this time over half of the sites has been switched off so actual income was much lower than that projected as part of the original sales agreement. James decided to help out by taking over another web design business, AdWit, and while I was not concerned about that there were questions about some of the sites. Communication with some of the end customers initially supported the initial 'due diligence’ and it seemed that like RDM, these customers just needed support that Adam was failing to provide. Long story short, Adam was/is just a con artist, and some 'active domains‘ James paid money for were never handed over. We should have pursued recovery when one of the real customers furnished his new identity, but this was not done and now I have none of the information James built up along with dates being too long ago.

Tidying up all the sites that we had taken responsibility for took a substantial time. Many of the same problems I'd had with RDM were duplicated, but complicated by hosting accounts being spread across a numbers different providers. Basically when a free account was filled on one provider he would stare again another free account. The cash flow problem that this created was that these free accounts were only free for a period and many needed to be funded to keep sites live.

In parallel with james's attempts to improve profitability of the web business, I had already been hosting clients on the back of my own personal web sites. There was already some overlap with some of the RDM clients being local businesses I or James already dealt with. I have also been active in the Open Source community since the 90's so have connections with many groups that deal with the after-mark of all the problems we tackled with RDM and advise others. I had already been aware of pigtialsinpaint.com as it had been one of the sites being used by the adult site hackers on RDM. The site has some interesting articles on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and other material that was safe to use by schools (the whole site is safe for school use!). The hackers were using it to create links to their own commercial porn sites and there were also spoof pages with unacceptable content all of which Google were indexing and then displaying with totally unsuitable material. Google still makes substantial income from adult sites and it's 'safe viewing’ filter is still very crude in it's identification of adult material. Certainly in 2020 it was still identifying ‘software’ sites as unsuitable so one had to switch it off when search for such results.

My involvement with Pigtails in Paint came about when the .com domain was hijacked and started directly hosting adult content! The the site had originally been hosted on Wordpress but was closed down there as 'unsuitable‘ (place for another debate! Wordpress has no right to contest a closure). The Swedish host who took it over was always a little difficult to communicate with and when the domain came up for renewal in 2016? it was replaced by the adult site links. All attempts to recover the .com domain failed, so I registered a .uk domain and put up a temporary site while we tried to recover the original 1000+ articles. when the recovery of the .com domain failed, pigtailsinpaint.org was registered as a more international alternative. Even the .org domain had problems as my domain registrar received threats from their top level registrar that all my .org domain would be switched off ’because the site was hosting live child sexual content’. Since the Internet Watch Foundation had already advised that they had no interest in the site this information was passed on, everything went quiet and there were no replies to the questions and no further action taken. The site was active on a new host after BT threaten to switch off all James's internet broadband because they did not like two sites. They were happy to agree that there was nothing illegal on the site, and this was essentially only their personal taste. It is interesting that the reasons used to elaborate matched the unsubstantiated allegations made previously by the police, and James had a visit from them (Aug 2020) about it the day the letter from BT arrived. The letter also included agapeta.art which is an English/French poetry site that was deleted from Wordpress in 2017? and which the client rebuilt on my hosting.

Following the police visit James made a decision to close down my server completely as he could not risk his own services being closed down by the police, so my sites were not active for a while. Pigtails & Agapeta were taken over by the clients, and they took over Graham Ovenden's site which the police are not happy with, but at least that investigation has now been dropped. Other sites currently down include Samantha Gates's biography site and the Ruralists site from the early 1990's which I was not charging for. James moved a couple of the RDM sites who were still paying over to his own hosting which he has been maintaining for me. ( ljridertraining.co.uk & blackminsterbusinesspark.co.uk ). Also missing at the moment is our family tree. Which other members of the family were using. Currently the rdm1 server is running with a much reduced set of websites. Many of those were left hanging following James's death and while I now have control over his domains there is little reason to keep them active. Many forward to Cotswold Security Group who James helped set up and who have not been very coperative following his death and are providing no income so will slowly disappear as they come up for renewal.

Today, the website is mainly maintained for historic reasons and to maintain the cribsheets supporting my bitweaver framework. (Need to update that page as well ...)