Aug 8: Bad News

It looks like Oracle-WTF has been kidnapped. If anyone has William's email address to hand, perhaps they could let him know?

:-(

Posted by Doug Burns Comments: (12) Trackbacks: (0)

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#1 - APC said:
2007-08-08 12:34 - (Reply)

Well at the least the poster's name is honest about it: splogger.

Cheers, APC

#2 - Sidhu said:
2007-08-08 12:54 - (Reply)

Today, in the morning in my Netvibes, the feed to Oracle-WTF threw an error :-( But now its showing that only post.

Right now even Oracle Forums are not working :-( (A way to reach William)

Sidhu

#3 - APC said:
2007-08-08 14:14 - (Reply)

I have sent William an e-mail. Apparently he has had a run in with the Blogger Anti-Spam bots, similar to mine. The difference is they appeared to have killed off his site and allow some nimrod to claim the name.

Cheers, APC

#3.1 - Sidhu said:
2007-08-09 03:02 - (Reply)

So experts

Is there something like taking backup of all the posts on blogger ? (Or the best thing is to switch to wordpress ;-) )

Sidhu

#4 - Niall Litchfield said:
2007-08-08 14:53 - (Reply)

An I like an idiot have also sent him an email, but before reading the comments. doh!

#5 - Eddie Awad said:
2007-08-08 19:58 - (Reply)

One more reason to switch from (or a better word: ditch) Google's Blogger/blogspot. Heck, even my employer has blocked the blogspot.com domain, not to mention the nation of China. Luckily, I can still access wordpress.com from work.

#5.1 - Doug Burns said:
2007-08-08 21:15 - (Reply)

This isn't good news for Blogger, but then it wasn't when it happened to me and I'm sure they've gained plenty of users since.

In a reasonably small Oracle blogging community, that's two of us that have beem splogged and APC was shutdown for a while.

You're right, Eddie, people should look elsewhere ...

Does anyone know of any examples of Wordpress being abused in this way?

#5.1.1 - Niall Litchfield said:
2007-08-08 21:54 - (Reply)

http://www.optiniche.com/blog/87/a-case-against-using-the-default-wordpress-theme/

I don't believe any platform immune, though unusual choices (serendipity) may help.

#6 - joel garry 2007-08-09 03:35 - (Reply)

Sidhu: One way is... popularity! See http://www.rittmanmead.com/category/the-great-blog-disaster/ Another way might be to register with one of the web history services, haven't really verified that. Some things can be gotten through google caching: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:xFkOUgEclzYJ:oracle-wtf.blogspot.com/2005/09/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed.html+oracle-wtf+william+robertson&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
I was able to get to that by googling oracle-wtf william robertson and clicking on cached on the result page.

I've considered whether it would be a good idea to stuff things into a moderated google group (you can create your own) as a backup. Of course that would still have the sitenapping possibility, but at least redundancy helps protect against that.

But really the only way to be sure is to back them up yourself, onto a system that has a proper backup. Just ask the department of redundancy department!

Eddie: Neener neener you can't see my blog! (That's just a joke, I only registered there to post on other blogs.) But compartmentalization is a serious problem for technical information transfer.

#6.1 - Sidhu said:
2007-08-09 08:18 - (Reply)

Thanks Joel

I made a bit of effort and Googled for the same. There seem to be a plenty of options to backup the posts. Will try some and then write about that. BTW one can go through

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/07/tool-for-backing-up-blogger-blog.html

http://www.codeplex.com/bloggerbackup

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/11/back-up-your-blogger-blog/

Sidhu

#7 - Doug Burns said:
2007-08-10 06:14 - (Reply)

Looks like Oracle-WTF is back where it belongs.

#7.1 - William Robertson said:
2007-08-10 11:15 - (Reply)

Looks like we're back as of around 6 this morning, so the occupation lasted just under two days. We were suspended by Blogger's ASbots (thanks APC) two days earlier. From our and others' experience it seems possible (not that I know anything about this stuff) that the suspension itself made the site vulnerable to attack.

Thanks for the links - I'll be looking into backup strategies, and possibly alternative blogging services.


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