Davinian

Problems and Moving House

Ok, so this is the quick version of what happened.

In the middle of moving house, I received an email from my hosting company saying my account was in violation of their Terms and Conditions.

It took ten days to get connected to the net at my new house, and by then my host had suspended my account and nothing was working.

Fortunately a good friend of mine allowed me to lug my iMac up to his house and use his internet for a day so I could sort out the mess - in short… I was using old versions of Wordpress that had vulnerabilities. A very bad idea as these vulnerabilities were being abused by someone or something which caused my T&C violation.

I had plained to return davinian to its previous state ASAP, but what with all the DIY and sorting out my new house I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway, I’m back and I think everything is sorted. I have sucessfuly moved house, and I’m now living in Dorset, not far from the coast and to be honest, enjoying having my own place again.

Dealing with Numpty Hot-Linkers

Man, what is it with silly pictures of monkeys and numpties who like to hot-link images?

Funny monkey portraits. Scarily human don’t you think? click to enlarge

I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.

Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this - a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).

Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.

If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.

Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times - but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!

Just because your paranoid (Mac Security)

The perils of not password protecting your computer.
The Joy of Tech.

Security is always a good idea, it protects you from all those nasty viruses and evil hackers that you just know are lurking in the darker corners of the web, waiting silently to slip into you computer and take over your life!

But even if you have the best security in the world, it wont protect you from your office mates or so called friends who you invite around for a cup of coffee and a chat.

The perils of not password-protecting your computer is just as bad, we can laugh about it, but it can be a lot more dangerous than not running a firewall or not having anti-virus software installed. If you’re laughing at this right now, ask yourself, would you really let the person sitting next to you freely browse the contents of your computer?

Below are 5 simple steps to password protecting your Mac*

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