Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of Wordpress, but recently his blog entries feature mostly galleries of jealousy-inducing photographs taken on jaunts around the globe on some high-end camera equipment. Few, if any, have anything to do with the Wordpress blogging software. Most Wordpress-focused posts now come from the official Wordpress blog.

Since half of the items in my dashboard are currently irrelevant to me as a Wordpress user, hopefully the time is approaching when Matt’s personal feed will be replaced or removed.

I was watching the MacWorld 2009 Apple Keynote live when a message appeared in the feed–”STEVE JOBS JUST DIED”–surprising everyone. In a few minutes, the MacRumors feed was full of coordinated hacked spam:

Highlighted is the beginning of the spam

MacRumors apologized for the incident: “Our MacRumorsLive keynote coverage was hacked today, inserting inappropriate content into the text and photo feeds. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore our services.” However, it was simply negligence on their part for having a control panel which was publicly accessible rather than some kind of nefarious hack. One of the nicer 4chan readers took this screenshot of it before it was taken offline:

See also When Livestreams Go Wrong and 4chan’s /g board where the chaos originated. Hopefully this will teach bloggers and web startups to pay more attention to the security of their websites, as hacking websites is growing more and more popular with savvy internet pranksters.

I just received an interesting email, which “offers” to help me secure my .com domain name in the Chinese varieties .cn and .hk. It’s more of a threatening piece of spam, because it carries the fear that if I do not avail myself of their services, them or another company will steal my brand!

Subject: YOUR DOMAIN NAME (elliottback)’S CURRENT SITUATION

Dear ELLIOTT C.Back

We are the domain name registration organization in Hong Kong, ,which mainly deal with the domain names’ conflicts of the company in China and Asia regions.We have received an formal application online from one company named “TianHaiYuanTong (China) Investment Co.Ltd” who is trying to apply for the domain names(www. elliottback.cn www. elliottback.hk etc.) and the Internet keyword(elliottback) as their domain name and internet brand on Oct 6,2008.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names being applied are the same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you don’t know this company, we doubt that they buy these domain names with other aims. We have not started the registration for TianHaiYuanTong company until now. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Boyce Meng

Tel: +852-31757931 (ext8048)
Fax: +852- 31757932
Email: boyce.meng@hk-nsc.org.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited
website: www.hknsc.hk

However, as far as I can tell, there is no such “Tian Hai Yuan Tong” company, and I am not replying. I advise you to do the same, and post any more samples of this spam in the comments!