Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

Update WP 2.1.1 to 2.1.2 – code compromised!

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That’s right. All you WP 2.1.1 users who went to all the trouble to upgrade just a short time ago now need to upgrade urgently. Notification (Courtesy of John Chow) included the following warning:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

I didn’t upgrade to 2.1.1 as I’m still on the old branch of WP! I had just upgraded to the latest version of that when 2.1 was released to my surprise! I was just too lazy then. Now, I’m wondering: with 2.1.2 out already, upgrading should be soon. It’s just so much trouble upgrading, that I’ll think I’ll just upgrade the necessary files, file by file. I have so many plugins, downloads, a theme that is tweaked beyond easy redoing… I hate upgrading… Anyway, that is no excuse: I have to bite the bullet.

Copyright: does a blogger’s blog have copyright?

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After a real incident in a workplace, I was inspired to think about the issue of copyright.
I was wondering about the issue of copyright after someone in my workplace tried to claim my work as theirs. I was annoyed as anyone would be. However, it started me thinking about the issue of copyright. How is copyright claimed? How is it asserted? How is it protected? What are the limits on copyright claims?

Now I’m not a lawyer, but I do believe that copyright does affect bloggers like you and me. Once your blog becomes popular enough, scrapers may steal your content, unscrupulous bloggers may copy and paste your entries, and fakers may even in some extreme cases replicate your entire website.

If your blog is important enough to you, financially or otherwise, it might be a good idea to seek out legal counsel in your jurisdiction about how to protect your investment.

In the meantime, I’ll be creating a copyright notice for the bottom of this page. And I’ll be reading Brad Templeton’s notes on copyright, too.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience on this matter, just post your story on the comments or register and submit an article via email!

Something odd happened on Alexa… What does it mean?

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I just noted that I don’t have a traffic rank for 3-months on Alexa at the moment, but I recorded a daily traffic rank:
Yesterday 1 wk. Avg. 3 mos. Avg. 3 mos. Change
78,860 110,773 — up 2,465,450

This is the first time I ever recorded a daily stat. I’m very puzzled why. It’s still stated at the top of the page (740,860). Perhaps Alexa is updating its stats as we speak.

edited: I checked Alexa again, and it seems that my top line score is unchanged at the moment, but I have moved under 100,000 ranking for the first time. Other top websites no longer have 3 months’ ranking, just daily and weekly. That’s what my website has right now.

While there are many criticisms of Alexa, and how it can be manipulated, in the absence of any other 3rd-party reasonable medium for monitoring and reporting website success, I’ll stick with Alexa, Technorati and Google right now. I haven’t tried to manipulate Alexa at all, even though there are ways to do that. I’d prefer to just blog and promote the ‘old-fashioned’ way. It’s more fun!