The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

Monday, 31 October 2005

We were hacked.

After having spent the whole weekend restructuring the server farm to better address the growth of the number of blogs that we are hosting, we woke up this morning to an alert that our servers had been hacked.

The result was that motime.com was down, posting and commenting was impossible, yet all of your blogs were still able to be read, thanks to the way that we have built the platform.

I don't know if this was a Halloween prank or just someone's idea of weekend fun, but it sure was not fun for us. Or for you.

As far as I know, no blogs were touched by these foul-fingered ne'er do wells, just the platform that supports the system. Oh well. Stuff happens and, unfortunately, there are those who get their kicks by applying their technical know-how to wasting other people's time. We have installed even greater security controls against this type of hack and made sure, to the best of our ability, that your blog's content is securely protected and backed up.

We're sorry that it took so long getting back online, but apart from fixing the platform, we needed to take some precautionary and defensive measures against future attacks. There may still be some nagging problems as we try to clean out all the nasty code.

posted by: howard at 14:49 | link | comments (24) |
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Monday, 10 October 2005

Kashmir earthquake

This blog was never intended to focus on tragedies, but the earthquake in the Kashmir region was a devastating event of great magnitude and I wanted to point you to the latest citizen-generated reporting: words, photographs and links to relief efforts.

• The wikipedia entry for 2005 Kashmir earthquake (collaborative article with frequently updated information and links).

• Blogs: Metroblogging Lahore | Metroblogging Karachi | South Asia Quake Help | Photos posted on Flickr, tagged earthquake + pakistan | A Mo'time blogger in Karachi, meet Lewana.

• The BBC has set up a "Reporters' log".

If you come across any other blog-oriented, citizen-journalist links, please let me know and I'll add the best among them.