Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

It appears that this blog has been recently compromised.  Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know.  Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice - one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.

I am still looking into when and how this happened.  The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update).  I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions.  I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).

If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.

Since my Gmail account gets all my mail from all my email address, I have a huge list of filters configured to sort all that mail the way I want.  After reading this post, I got a bit worried and went to check if there were any filters in my account that I haven’t created.

That was the moment when I got this idea for a new feature - filter activity report. This should work similar to how feed activity works in Google Reader.  With a tiny bit of statistics it easy to drop inactive feeds to clear up the  list of your subscriptions.  The same way, it should be easy to drop old and inactive filters from Gmail.  It should be pretty trivial to do.  Even interface-wise it should be pretty easy with something like “Last used on [insert date here]” indication near each filter in the filter management screen.

… what would happen if your Google account get stolen?  I know I haven’t.  And I don’t want to.  That would like losing a house in the flames, with all valuables inside it turning to ash.  Something of that magnitude, but worse.

I need to do a backup or something.  Do you?

Most of today I spent in the Mediterranean hotel. Together with about twenty other administrators from most Cyprus ISPs, I attended DNS/DNSSEC course given by RIPE NCC.

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Everyone and their brother is talking about the new Google service - Google Analytics. Basically, this is a smart way of getting website statistics. Instead of installing and configuring a local web log analyzer, you just sign up for the Analytics, insert some JavaScript code into your website and have the best stats ever made ready for you. Or not.

Google Analytics is called the biggests failer release by many. Things didn’t work as they were supposed to. Instead of fast and dynamic stats, people wait in queue for their statistics. Lots of bugs and lots of misbehaviors. I signed up myself and I had to wait for alsmost 12 hours for the site to be accepted. And now I have to wait for another 12 hours (or so I am promised) to get the first reports.

For me the idea of having stats done by Google is a pleasant one. If I think Google can do one thing right that wold be data aggregation. The paranoids all around us make lots of noise about privacy concerns and Big Brother is watching you conspiracies. Well, I simply don’t care.

Those of you who do care and want to avoid being tracked by Google can easily do so. All you need to do is block your browser from doing HTTP requests to “www.google-analytics.com”. Read this good article on the subject.