Slashdot Mirror
Blogger Hacked
WCityMike writes "Blogger has been severely hacked into, with users' passwords and e-mail addresses being replaced with 'hacx0redbyme' or 'hax0redbyme.' Apparently, attempts to change your password or other information do not succeed due to a major database problem. Blogger currently has no official news: its main page simply apologizes for being down for repairs and its status blog has no information, probably suffering from the same accessing problem as other blogs. In the meantime, discussion, information, and advice is appearing on the weblogs of Anil Dash and Tom Coates, as well as this QuickTopic thread. Glad I use another journaling service." We usually try to avoid "Site X Hacked!" stories, but since this affects so many people - and, heh-heh, they don't have anywhere else to talk about it - here you go.
Slashdot, for example, is a lot more of a news and current events site than it is Taco's personal weblog. k5 is more about essays and news. Occasionally, however, I'll stumble across a blog while looking for something else. If I don't know what it is at first, I tend to read it for a few seconds before going back.
LiveJournal blogs are the worst, IMHO. People go on and on about events and parties with people that 99.99999% of their readers have never met. Once I realize I've stumbled across something like that, I leave it as soon as I can.
Is it exhbitionism/vouyerism? If I read stories about a person's private life, I'd much rather they beging with a line like, "Dear Penthouse, I've always read the letters in your magazine but never thought that something like that could happen to me..."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Gee, my life just isn't the same without being able to read all the inane blogs. Read books, not blogs.
Sure, but for a majority of web users, a simple blogging application is the way to go. And because these easy-to-use blog apps have been provided, that's why they have become popular.
I hope they did backups.
And I hope they patch the hole before restoring from the backups.
More likely they'll dot-bomb.
Do you know who has your passwords?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
MS in blog parody takedownl
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27774.htm
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
It's a pity that Microsoft's Beth Goza, who we teased here last week, has taken down her weblog. Far from wanting to see it disappear, it ought be preserved in a time capsule.
But not only has Beth's blog gone underground - so has the parody which inspired our story. It's disappeared from no less than five mirror sites.
Even more extraordinary, a witch-hunt is on to find the perpetrator. One member of the PocketPC community says legal action is being threatened against the author, whose identity remains a mystery.
"The phrase 'it will soon be out of our hands' was used by one figure close to Beth," we're told.
It would be remarkable if Microsoft's expensive legal and public relations machinery were deployed in what is essentially a private matter.
And highly unlikely, too, as parodies are protected under the First Amendment.
Microsoft's approach to the press is singularly enlightened, when compared to say an Apple. The company takes barbs in good grace, and doesn't deploy feudal divide and rule tactics. It's never, to our knowledge, sued a journalist. Of course it has its favorite hacks, but in general the philosophy is - they're always going to be mean to us, they'll always be around: meanwhile, we have a message to convey, and stuff to sell.
Evil and elitist?
So were we being evil and elitist, as some of you suggested?
As I replied to Jonathan at StretchingThoughts.com, it's onlyelitist if you think that blogs are folks' only form of expression.
The king of webloggers Jorn Borger - he was the first to use the term and it's still the best - used to use a quote by Tolstoy in his Usenet sig:- "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very touching, even beautiful... There always is." And there is something bewitching about Beth's ruminations such as " just for the record i like it when my foods touch" a line worth of Ralph Wiggum.
No, what's strange is when an attack on one blogger is perceived as an attack on blogging in general. That implies that there can't possibly be a quality threshold in blogdom, and confirms John Dvorak's worst fearsabout groupthink. This is an unnecessarily defensive reaction and quite wrong. If blogs are writing, there's good and bad writing.
Of course, John was being satirical, and he wasn't decrying blogdom: only the mentality that blogging is in of itself revolutionary and no criticism can be voiced, and no quality threshold can be drawn; that we must not differentiate between good and bad, because it's all somehow equally valid.
The parody itself was pretty mean and spiteful. But it's a parody. We hope that groupthink doesn't extinguish parodies, as they help us see that the Emperor has no clothes.
Please let us know if you've been contacted in relation to this investigation. And in the meantime, enjoy some other fine online journals by Microsoft staff:- which might be low on cheap laughs, but high on content:- min jeschwad, Inkblog, and more highlighted in this Kuro5hin thread.®
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Movable Type is indeed excellent weblogging donationware. The folks at Movable Type are great at providing requested features and documenting their software. Installation takes (and I mean this) fewer than 15 minutes, set-up maybe 1/2 hour for even the most non-technical of users.
I would rather run the latest release of Slash and went so far as to even check out chromatic's Running Weblogs with Slash (NB: /.'ers, /. is a weblog) after reading this recent /. story about "Building Online Communities."
My problem though is that Slashcode requires a dedicated server--or one on which you have root acces--to install. I'm sure this gives Slash many advantages, but those of us who can't afford dedicated server solutions can't make use of those advantages. My web host doesn't even allow shell access.
Movable Type (and a few other brands of weblog software) offers people with cheap web-hosting solutions to successfully install high-quality, customizable, open-source weblog software. The couple who run Movable Type produce a quality product. Check them out if you want to run weblog software but don't have a lot of money.
I wonder if the /. crew couldn't be persuaded to come up with a version of Slash that doesn't require a dedicated server . . .
blog
But there is more to it than that. Everyone wants to spout off sometimes. If you have an easy forum for writing stuff down, eventually you'll rant about something. And doing so helps you "save state". You can go back a year later and see where you were mentally. And as you said, it helps people who are at a distance figure out what you've been up to. Having it web-accessible means you can write from anywhere.
There's nothing wrong with keeping a web journal.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I'm waiting for the day I can host my own web again. Why should anyone have to go any further than their own 486 to put up a website? The quality of free software available and ease of set up is astounding. There are a dozen or so web servers in Debian, and many fine automation programs for putting content onto those sites. It's as easy as:
/apache
1. type deselect
2. press spacebar
3. type
4. press +
5. repeat steps 3 and 4 for igal and other programs you want.
6. press enter a few times.
7. pull up a browser, a command line and an editor and enjoy building your site.
I'm not sure why everyone interested has not done this. OK, ipchains takes a little more work, but it can be done in a few days with knowlegable help, so you can look at the rest of the web with the rest of your computers. The problem has something to do with the last mile, greedy and stupid publishers and fools that listen to them.
My cable company has made all but ftp impossible and ftp is painful to most of the people I'd like to reach. Outbound port 80, and 25 are blocked. Most cable companies don't block port 21 because that would kill AOL's instant messenger. Still, the upload rate is crimped worse and worse, and html files don't work well over the system. The overall performance is poor, but I'd rather send my mom there to look at baby pictures than send her to some advert filled crap I don't have any control over now or ever. Eventually they will block port 21.
It's stupid. My cable company could make more charging $20 a month to three people than $45 to one. I'd recomend people move to cable if cable were really worth anything to me, but it isn't so I don't.
blogging services are nice, but only needed because the net is not free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...or the Osbournes, or Anna Nicole Smith's show, or...
You're just sitting around watching (reading about) someone else living his* life. Perhaps the Sims is a little better, as you can direct the action.
Wouldn't it be great to have a life so good that you didn't have time to read about someone else's, or better yet, publish the details of yours (and your thoughts)?
Well, it is.
And no, I'm not being lifeless by writing this because I have to be at my computer now; I'm at work This also means I'm getting paid to write this, so double bonus for me.
* his is used instead of the incorrect "their" or the annoying "his/her". The author recognizes that women have blogs but has chosen to standardize on "his"
But don't compare blogs to a BBS... those were the days when you actually had to have a brain to get online, versus now, when Bertha Walmartski can blog it up to tell the world that one of her three toy poodles is depressed.
P.S. some of those awful personal pages still exist. I'd tell you where, but you'd go blind viewing them ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Basically, blogs are just online diaries where people sprout off their random synapse charges... so why not just create it in html and upload it to a server.... I'm confused.
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
I'm the admin of diary-x. A few months ago, when I was setting up the server into its current configuration, I thought "I should have a mod_rewrite rule that redirects traffic from slashdot away, so that the hordes won't crush my poor server if I should ever get linked."
:)
I'm glad the rule actually works, I never had a chance to test it out
I should change the message though, the "you look like you could use some sun" comment is probably a bit harsh.
this is a sig.
But not many.
HTML is all I use. I've never thought it was that difficult; what's difficult about writing a little HTML and using FTP? (Of course, I started because I had a school webpage and didn't know how to fill it; a year later someone told me that was a blog). I have a PHP script for comments; though no permalinks or automatic archival or other nice features that don't matter that much to me. I do it this way because I'm a control freak, and I hate having to depend on other people for my blogging.
But most people whose blogs I read don't go through all this trouble. Is it because they're not technically savvy? Some yes, but some of them run their own servers. These types are usually running MoveableType or B2, though, which run off one's own server/webhost, which gives you a large amount of control over what you do.
So, I am as confused as you. Basically, I think it's just laziness--it's easier to have everything set up for you (or set it up first, if you're tech savvy and a bit of a control freak) and just type a little and push a button, then to type the HTML and upload the page every time.
Of course, I've been writing HTML, and by hand, for so long now that I find it difficult to *not* type angle brackets, and have been known to put <p> tags by accident when typing papers or using a BBS, so maybe it's just me.