Musings from Bill
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
If you live outside the United Kingdom then the BBC website at bbc.com has a surprise for you, in the form of some prominent advertisements.
While the license-fee supported sites provided to the UK population remain free of ads, the BBC has started treating the web in the same way as it does the TV channels it broadcasts around the world by trying to generate revenue from them.
The old proverb that ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’ has been replaced by one in which the blog post has made the trip before the lie has done up its laces. It is a better world, but it is a different world and those of us who grew up under the old dispensation are challenged.
I wrote a column for the BBC website about my growing despair over the lack of technical understanding among the wider population, and I thought I’d found a hook in the coverage of Sky broadband’s decision to move its customers to Google Mail.
[As ever, you can also read this on the BBC News website]
Like most journalists of my acquaintance I’m very sloppy about keeping my online communications secure.
I rarely encrypt email messages, leaving them to be read by anyone in the electronic chain between me and the intended recipient.
And I use public chat services like MSN Messenger and iChat, even though they send messages as plain text across the network.
[As ever, this is also on the BBC website, edited to take out the Yeats…]
Sometime in October a malicious program exploited a security flaw in the WordPress software I use to host my weblog and injected some extra commands into one of the widgets I use to add features to the site.
They opened up a connection between the blog and a site that tried to download a malicious piece of software to any site visitor unfortunate enough to be using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Anyone who visited my site would have been prompted to install a clearly unwanted piece of software, although as far as I know nobody was affected. However I can’t be sure and hope that I didn’t unwittingly cause damage to anyone else’s computer.
Continue reading “Tread softly, because you tread on our websites”
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, though the headline isn’t one I’d have chosen for a piece that’s about IT education rather than malware..]
At some point this evening I am going to have to sit down with my fourteen year old son and have a quiet, paternal word with him about hygiene and trust.
It’s nothing to do with how frequently he showers or changes his socks, and only indirectly related to how freely he should accept sweets from strangers.
The problem is with his computer, as only six months after he moved from using a virus-prone Windows PC to a Macintosh computer the first serious threat to Mac users has been observed ‘in the wild’.
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website too]
The British Computer Society is the professional body for those working in IT, and is one of the bodies that defines the working practices for those responsible for ensuring compliance with data protection legislation.
Sending out an email to seven hundred people with every email address visible to each recipient is about as far from good practice as you can get, yet that it what a hapless member of the Society’s staff did last week.
And in a twist worthy of the most clichéd sitcom, the email was an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey. Somehow I think the results will be slightly skewed towards the ‘could do better’ end of the response scale.
[This is also on the BBC News website, as usual]
Three Sheffield Wednesday supporters who posted anonymous abuse on the ‘Owlstalk’ website will be staring into their cornflakes this morning as they wonder whether they will soon be receiving a libel writ in the post.
The club has obtained an order from the High Court requiring the site’s administrators to hand over the email addresses of users ‘halfpint’, ‘ian’ and ‘vaughan’ after they posted abusive comments about the club’s directors.
It seems that sometime last week my blog was hacked and a discreet little <iframe> linking to a malware hosting site was added to the 30boxes widget you can see on the right. It wasn’t 30boxes fault – the widget code hadn’t changed, so I assume that something managed to inject the relevant line of code into my database by exploiting a flaw in WordPress.
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and have checked what I can, but am still investigating as I’d like to know what the hole was so I can be sure it is patched. And I apologise to anyone who got a nasty alert message when they visited when using IE.
Special thanks go to John Warlow, who was trying to figure out how to fix the RSS feed coming from the del.icio.us entries (something that bugs me too!) and took the time to email me about the site’s attempt to download VBS.Phelp onto his PC. And no thanks to Google/Stopbadware who flagged the site as infected but didn’t bother to tell me they had done so, or offer any indication as to what the problem actually might have been.
[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]
The military regime in Burma has controlled access to the internet for many years, but when information about the recent protests appeared all over the web, from YouTube videos to personal testimony on blogs, the generals showed that there were other options available to them and effectively cut the country off from the worldwide network.
This drastic action worked, up to a point, forcing those who wanted to communicate with the rest of the world to take significant risks by using satellite phones and other links and limiting the world’s awareness of the severity of the current clampdown.
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
The restrictions placed on downloaded music files using one of the various digital rights managements (DRM) systems have always annoyed me, to the point where I’ll generally buy a CD and rip it as a high-quality AAC file rather than pay out for a song I can only play on selected devices or copy a few times.
Existing DRM-free services like eMusic, or those with some non-DRM inventory like MusicNet and of course Apple, are out there but don’t cover a lot of the artists I like and have nothing like the inventory you’d find in a decent record shop.
And I know that you can take the songs you buy from the iTunes Music Store and burn them to CD and then re-import them, but doing so further reduces the quality of the music you’re listening, especially when compared to a CD. It also takes time.