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Blogger Hacked
Posted by
michael
on Fri Oct 25, 2002 12:01 PM
from the it-must-be-friday dept.
from the it-must-be-friday dept.
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.
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Blogger Hacked
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A bit mean. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A bit mean. (Score:5, Funny)
oh thank goodness. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A bit mean. (Score:4, Funny)
Without blogging capabilities we would be just like animals you would see on The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet [discovery.com], Wed. and Sat at 8pm, 11pm, and 3am.
All in all, blogging gives us purpose, and gives us a sense of comfort, similar to the new E-Class from Mercedes-Benz [mercedes.com]
And in other news (Score:4, Funny)
I'm glad I don't use a blog (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, everyone can do that.
Doh!
Re:I'm glad I don't use a blog (Score:4, Funny)
no where else to talk about it.... (Score:3, Funny)
Blogger's troubles (Score:5, Informative)
Movable Type put the moves on me. (Score:4, Interesting)
Movable Type is indeed excellent weblogging donationware. The folks at Movable Type [movabletype.org] 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 [wgz.org] Running Weblogs with Slash [amazon.com] (NB: /.'ers, /. is a weblog) after reading this recent /. story about "Building Online Communities." [slashdot.org]
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 . . .
Blogs, who need em? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blogs, who need em? (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically ... (Score:4, Informative)
The site blogger.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Re:Blogger runs windows..... (Score:5, Informative)
Apache, perl, and php are vulnerable to the same type of hacks, it's not just Microsoft.
hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate the word blog and all its derivatives, they deserve it for promoting this pop-culter-esque net phenomenon. Either you run a news site, a discussion site, a community, a personal journal or something along those lines. Blog is a stupid term someone made up to sound cool.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like "blog" was created by an ad agency, or by some company to sell it's product. It's a contraction of "Web Log", which is what these types of sites are. Don't like the word? Don't use it. But don't wish an attack on someone because you find time in your day to hate a contraction.
Meanwhile.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:4, Funny)
Someone hacked my blog. Ignore previous post about "Mandy is a sorry loser". Do not ignore October 20th post with the same title, as this was intentional.
Re:Meanwhile.... (Score:5, Funny)
That's cruel and completely not true.
The 4 of us handled it completely without anger and substituted by sending each other text messages on our cell phones.
Blogout. (Score:5, Funny)
recommendation (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really get blogs... (Score:5, Interesting)
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..."
Re:I don't really get blogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why put it on the web? Well, there are often times, on irc and in email, when I want to point someone to something I've written... plus, if anyone is visiting my website, then it's possibly they want to know more about me. If they don't, then fine. If they do, then the weblog is there.
Re:I don't really get blogs... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The obvious response is that you're not their audience. Most bloggers write to keep up with their circles of friends, not to impress the general public with the minutiae of their daily lives.
Re:I don't really get blogs... (Score:4, Funny)
AND (this gets even better) because it's publicly accessible, you can meet new people with whom you can make friends! You may not have grown up with access to the online world, but for the generation that has, the internet is a great venue for social interaction.
Does that help you understand why blogs appeal to some?
If you come across a blog whose contents do not interest you, it probably wasn't meant for you to read. That doesn't mean there aren't people who do care about that person and enjoy keeping in touch with them.
Oh yeah, and like the other guy said, your web page seems suspiciously weblog-like. And I liked the rant where you bitch about the Taliban's web page :-)
Re:I don't really get blogs... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't get anything out of the little circle o'exhibition because it's really not there for your benefit. Move along.
But... but.... (Score:4, Funny)
Shameless plug for my weblog. (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you have 28 years of once daily entries.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A good flat file system lets you reuse the VFS of Linux for smarter caching, and it's easy to NFS or SMB mount it via any machine on my private network. This also means that for someone to compromise my setup and mess with my changelog, they'd also have unrestricted access (pretty much) to my local network, meaning I'd have a whole lot more to worry about than losing my journal entries.
How will we do without blogs? (Score:4, Funny)
I have a blog, but I only use it to say things like, "Fdisk overflowed when I tried to format my hard drive. Now it is negative 15 Gigs!"
So yeah, I need to be shot.
Blog = weblog (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never used one, or intend to. For some unknown reason, it bacame popular to just ramble out your thoughts into an online journal. Whatever. I don't see why this made the news though...
Oh no! (Score:3, Funny)
While Everyone (Score:5, Informative)
Status Blog now has info (Score:5, Informative)
Blogger has suffered a security intrusion by a "haX0r." We have all the data that was changed backed up within a couple hours of the attack, so we can have things pretty much back to normal soon. Of course, we're assessing the situation as thoroughly as possible to make sure it doesn't happen again. Also, if you store your FTP login information in Blogger, it wouldn't hurt to change that on your server--though it is unlikely that information was accessed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Is it just me... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to wonder what kind of life someone must lead when an attack on their favorite website is as traumatic as the events of that day.
Re:Is it just me... (Score:4, Insightful)
One outside of NYC, obviously.
9/11 may have been horrible and dastardly and evil and all--but "tramatic" it was not for me or anyone within a hundred miles of where I am, exempting those few who lost relatives.
one more pointless joke about blogs (Score:5, Funny)
Sept 11?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
"This is like September the 11th all over again."
Does that mean the attack on the WTC was a noble cause, causing many to rejoice, point, laugh, and snicker? For humanity's sake, I hope this was the thickest sarcasm ever to form.
Related story (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27774.htm
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco [mailto]
It's a pity that Microsoft's Beth Goza, who we teased here [theregister.co.uk] last week, has taken down her weblog [216.239.53.100]. 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 [stretchingthought.com] 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 [robotwisdom.com] - he was the first to use the term and it's still the best [theregister.co.uk] - 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 [google.com].
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 fears [pcmag.com]about 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 [theregister.co.uk] 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 [netcrucible.com], Inkblog [inkblog.com], and more highlighted in this Kuro5hin thread [kuro5hin.org].®
For all those bashing "Blogs" (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal web pages were 50 times worse than any blog. It's evolution--not revolution
Anyway... My friend has a blog. It's is like the BBS I ran when I was 14. Some friends log in. We talk about intersting things (or not) publicly. Eventually when I did things right, a few extra people came along and we had some good conversations.
Re:For all those bashing "Blogs" (Score:4, Funny)
You never signed on to my BBS did you
Re:For all those bashing "Blogs" (Score:4, Informative)
Give this man a 5, Funny!
I used to frequent a BBS. The rank stupidity I encountered there still amazes me -- I kept a few logs of some of those exchanges, and my reaction varies between thinking they must have been joking and wondering how they could even operate a keyboard.
Incidentally, that particular BBS is still running, more than seven years later. I've checked in on a couple occasions, only to find the exact same users, arguing about the exact same things, obsessing over the same miniscule and irrelevant BBS policies, carving the same mountains out of molehills -- seven years later. It gave me the chills. I sometimes wonder if they're not trapped in some kind of Sartrian hell.
The tools have advanced, there are a lot more people on the net now, but the general level of intelligence (on both ends) is about the same as it always was. What you see in an average blog isn't any more or less insightful than what I saw in the "Grips" or "Non Sequitur" forums on the old BBS.
In additional developments... (Score:4, Funny)
-Rob
What the hell...it's only karma... (Score:5, Insightful)
90% of the posts in this thread are all "Holier Than Thou"-type Slashdot posts from fellow geeks that obviously feel some sort of insecurity about their own lives and are thus insulting those that use weblogs.
I don't use a weblog to achieve an inflated sense of importance or to boost my ego. I use it to keep track of what my friends and I are doing. A year from now, we'll have all graduated college, and it's nice to be able to keep tabs on everyone's day-to-day events...and to continue to do so even when we've gone our separate ways.
Just because you *think* the Internet is full of 12-year-old girlie bloggers discussing the drab details of their lives doesn't mean it's the truth. And even if it was, who appointed you "critic of all those lowly masses"? Get a life of your own, man...
blogger back up (Score:5, Informative)
Negative comments about weblogs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you personally don't find the content of the average weblog interesting, should this really mean weblogs don't have a reason for existing?
Personally, I'm extremely grateful for weblogs, as they allow a lot more people to communicate, and for me to discover that communication, then would happen before.
* I read the weblogs of my favorite authors, knowing as one of the first people in the world when they finish the next chapter, decide on a title of the book, but far mroe important, getting all sorts of interesting insights into the creation of the book, into the links to real world events and the reasons for why certain things are what they are - this heightens my appreciation of said books.
* I read the weblogs of the key people working on developing the next version of my favorite software. A lot of Mozilla (to name one of
* I read the weblogs of various friends and acquaintances I have scattered all over the world. Weblogs are to email what usenet is to mailinglists. Pull, rather than push. I get the information when I want it, adn it still allows me to keep in touch with people I'd otherwise not have time for. Sure, the stories about their cats and dogs are completely irrelevant to 99.999% of the people out there; why would this not be perfectly okay? It matters to them and to the people who matter to them. Nobody's forcing you to read these weblogs... And every now and then one of these people will have something very profound to say, or will have dug up a really interesting piece of information, or came up with a really good joke... And then other people link to that, often in other weblogs, and the information propagates. And that's good too.
No matter how all of us might feel superior to the average 'blogger', no matter how all of us can whip up a solution that's both more convenient and technologically superior to this "Blogger" in a matter of hours... these are things that don't matter. It's the sharing of ideas, the communication, the links and bonds... that's what matters. Most of it is static, most of it will never be read by anyone. But all of these people maintaining weblogs are part of
After previewing I pulled almost all links from this comment - if you're really interested in the weblogs of the people I mentioned here, go and search for them...
Re:script kiddies are sickoes (Score:5, Funny)
They should be treated as if they burned down a building with cute little kitties living inside of it! Because, inside of every blogger there's a cute little kitty, just waiting for you to discover it.
What these hackers have done is atrocious. It's far, far worse than petty graffiti or vandalism. They have trampled the hearts and emotions of sensitive bloggers everywhere. And for that, there can be no justice -- only bitter revenge.