blog.species5618.net

Well upgrade to 2.8 went real smooth, as it always does

not sure if i will ever find the chance to use the new features, or if I am brave enough to re-enable the file permissions need to make them work.

I must look at enabling FTP from localhost at some point to get the self updates to work..

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

I am not known for being observant, in fact quite the opposite, I normally miss the bleedin obvious. However over the past week I have seen the same black BMW parked up the road from where I live (not facing my house I may add)?? several times, with one or two bloke sat inside, making notes about something they can see.
So what are they, I wonder who or what they are???.

• Bailiffs: I doubt it, they did not look like thug type, , and why come back at least three times.
• Spooks: I doubt it, they are too obvious
• Police/CID: could be , but again I doubt it, they are too obvious.

So I reckon they could be private investigators looking at adultery or medical insurance fraud, or benefits agency, investigating benefit fraud.

But I guess I will never find out for sure

[UPDATE]

It was there again last night wed 6th may 2009

Shame it arrive late and i missed it, Due to the reliable delivery system that is “pupil post” , but the local Jnr School ran a “ICT information evening for parents” this week

The note went on to say this….

“A true story which happened in Gloucestershire during the February holiday..

A 10 year old girl was attending her aunt’s wedding, by the time of the reception she was board and her aunt [an IT consultant] spotted her sitting quietly in a corner with her hand-held games console. The aunt enquired what she was playing to which the girl replied ‘don’t tell Mum or Dad, but someone round here has a wireless network and I’ve logged onto the internet’ ”

Unfortunately I missed the event to see what stance they presenter took on children and the internet, but I recently had a similar discussion with an English teacher from a local secondary school and was pleased to hear their personal view point was the same as mine.

Over recent years I have too much negative press about the Internet being a dangerous place. The real world is a dangerous place, but you instinctively know NOT to walk done a dark alleyway. That same level of self preservation needs to be instilled into today’s internet users. The internet is a community, and like any community (physical or virtual) it has places you would rather not go. With this in mind I believe you should not try and stop your children from using the internet, but instead encourage safe, knowledgeable and managed used of the internet.

My son for example was not only made to sign an internet use agreement when he started his secondary school, but also, in his first week was not made to read a leaflet on internet safety, but had to produce one. For me that was a fantastic approach, just reading a leaflet would may have gone in one side and out the other, but i am fairly sure some of it actually sank in.

At the end of the day the Internet, Mobile phones, Media player are here to stay, we must embrace the new technology and educate accordingly.

Just??found a .NET twitter api class, i can feel some automated twittering comming on http://is.gd/3a9X

After my recent fight with HTC to get my son’s phone repaired, i may have to do it again, for mine

My HTC TyTNii is convinced te battery is flat, despite the fact it works OK in another phone,

so it is going off for repair, which me luck
Hopefull this experiance will be less painfull than the last

OAPs are driving me nuts, they complain about rude teenagers, but the OAPs are just as bad.
They get their free bus pass, and collect at the bus stop as early as 8:45 and hurl abuse at the drivers who won???t let them on before 0900.
They do it every day, and then know the driver has corporate rules on his case, and that if caught they will get disciplined, yet they continue to heckle the driver to allow them on before 0900
Then when they do get on, they barge there way on past anyone stood between them and a seat
Then you get to town an try and get down the stairs, I have had more youngsters let me f the stairs than OAPs, they just blank you and carry on
AAARRRGGHHHH

i have just deployed wordpress 2.7.1 across my entire estate
5 instances including the wife , son and a few local friends

Well this is one very embarrassing day. Given my day job

The brand new Wordpress 2.7 instance I setup for my wife, got hacked
Still not sure how, the access logs are not very conclusive, but someone managed to edit every header.php file under the themes folder and inject a trojan “exploit-iframe.gen.c”

I found a similar story hear. http://photocritic.org/wordpress-exploit-iframe-gen-c/

Yes, I admit I allowed apache write access to the themes folder. which i have now fixed

The Code also included a refernce to “search_bot111″

The searchbot code seems to be a bit of PHP?? to hide the site/trojan from search engines

needless to say i am VERY annoyed

I won’t expect much at the moment, but my 12yr old son has entered the blogsphere

http://jakehampton.co.uk