Geek Practitioners Blog

I came over here to update the blogroll and noticed a funny thing:

Someone was able to hack WordPress in a way that gave them access to the blogroll. No idea when it happened, but the links all redirected through this WordPress blog using a trailing structure in the form of:

?q=cash-loans

At the end of the URL to which I linked. Not sure offhand what the ?q is and how it differs from the ?s format used to return search results. It did the job, anyway, redirecting to an entirely different location. I suspect the blog in question was also victimized and had no active role.

The lesson? This is probably why there have been security-related updates to WordPress that I should have installed periodically. I’m pretty sure none of the WP blogs in our “empire” are fully updated except the newest one. Oops.

The other lesson? If I posted here regularly as I really do plan to, I would notice these things promptly, limiting any benefit accruing from the linkage.

Now multiple WordPress updates are on my list of things that must be done sooner rather than later.

HP now has in-house blogs. Always an interesting thing to see a major company opening up the communication lines that way.

This is a good report on and review of Microsoft’s new MSN Spaces blogging feature for the masses.

I can actually see there being a market, especially at a price of free, for an even easier to use blogging tool than anything else yet on the market. I also don’t see how Microsoft could have stayed out of the particular market if they are serious about internet services directly in competition with the likes of Google, whose decision to buy Blogger makes increasingly more sense. Whither Yahoo in all of this? It will be interesting to see what, if anything, they do.