links for 2007-06-03
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This is what would happen if this blog was written by the LOL CATS! (Created using http://lol.ianloic.com/.) [Via]
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“Tim O’Reilly…has posted a tremendous case study on a book that was available as a free download as well as available in stores. The case study isn’t iron-clad proof that giving away books sells books, but it’s the best evidence I’ve seen to date.”
Upgrades, Deletions, Apologies … and a Little Anger
Visitors to this blog may have noticed many things broken or not got anything but a 404 for the last 12 hours. My apologies – most is now fixed, but let me explain. Last night, about 5 minutes before I went to bed, I got this email:
from: “support@secureserver.net” <support@secureserver.net>
subject: Update [Incident ID: 2110748] – Information Regarding Your Account for tamaleaver.netSupport Staff Response
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to our attention that your tamaleaver.net hosting account is running a vulnerable version of wordpress. This has caused an attacker to upload malicious content to your hosting account. We have removed the malicious content and have disabled the vulnerable script.
To prevent further attacks, we request that you update your version of wordpress as soon as possible. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
Regards,
Advanced Hosting Support
I was a little surprised since I was running 2.1.3 which, to the best of my knowledge, was fine (and I was not running the buggy 2.1.1). However, I figured I’d check in the morning what had been deleted – I presumed a script that wasn’t part of the standard WordPress world, so that was fine. However, to my horror this morning when I checked, I found that “support” (and I use the term very broadly) had done at least two things: deleted my entire wp-admin directory, and deleted a number of image files (the reason for which I can’t even begin to fathom). As a result, this blog has been rather stuffed for the last 12 hours. Since it was broken anyway, I’ve now upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and got almost everything back and running. However, a month’s worth of uploaded images were deleted, and I’ve not backed up since the end of April, so they can’t be recovered (thus, if you find a blog post with an image missing … primarily from posts in May 2007, this is why; I’ll try and replace them at a later stage.)
So, sorry for the downtime, if I had any control over it I’d promise it wouldn’t happen again! That said, the support folk at secureserver (whom GoDaddy use) will be getting a rather frank email about the over-deletion of my files, and, more to the point, a request to exactly what they think happened since I’ve seen no evidence myself of any malicious content.
links for 2007-06-02
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“Sad but true: “Battlestar Galactica” will end its run next year after its fourth and final season.”
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NYTimes on Google’s StreetView: ‘“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said.’
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“Korea has just finished negotiating a free trade agreement with the US that is a complete disaster on copyright. Korea has agreed to give up all fair use to copyrighted works, and has agreed to shut down many of its web-hosting businesses.”
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“The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.”
links for 2007-06-01
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Surprisingly, completely safe for work …
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“More than 25 per cent of all Australian homes accessed video content from the internet last year, a groundbreaking report by the broadcasting regulator has found.”
Google Gears Into Offline Applications!
The line between Microsoft and Google just got fuzzier with the release of Google Gears, a humble browser extension that suddenly allows GMail, Google Reader and other previously web-based applications to work offline! The competition for Microsoft’s cash cow, the Office Suite, just got stronger.
This little tick marks a radical transition for Google…
… every one of those brilliant online applications from Google Docs and Spreadsheets to Google Reader just started to mark their way onto your offline desktop. Sure, Google Gears are very in Beta (as opposed to, say, the last 12 months which GMail spent in Beta), but as those kinks are worked out, Microsoft’s competition just got stauncher!
links for 2007-05-31
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LOL Cats meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show! (Framegrab silliness and laffs ensue!)
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