Compromised.

My shell account at Dreamhost was compromised and this site was vandalized. It appears this was a wide spread event and a number of other sites hosted at Dreamhost were affected. If you have an account at Dreamhost, I recommend you change your passwords for your shell and email and check your web content for modifications.

I’ve cleaned up the mess (I think). Although as far as I can tell the Spider.xpi was not modified, I have generated a new version of Spider 0.0.2.7 to force an update to any Spider users.

Gumption

This has been a gumption killing week for me…

Sunday

The network ports on my old Direct Way 4020 Satellite modem died leaving me entirely without a net connection.

Net withdrawal began.

Monday

Told numerous depressing options for replacing dead modem before managing to get the “upgrade” option without resetting my contract period but with a potential 2 business week delay on receiving the new modem.

Tuesday

Over to sister’s to take advantage of the Hughesnet system I got her last year…

Updated her system, downloaded virus|spyware scanners etc, scanned her machine to make sure no spyware, rootkits, bots on the local network.

Hit the new HughesNet Fair Access Policy (FAP) limit on her “consumer” grade account. FAP throttled my connection to about 2KB/s with no recharge for 24 hours.

Wednesday

Scheduled delivery and installation of new HughesNet 7000S Satellite modem for Thursday!

FAP still in effect at sister’s.

Thursday

Satellite modem installed and net withdrawal symptoms receed.

Back to work!

Friday

Desk collapses onto the floor while rearranging office to discourage Miss Kitty from using my desk and possibly causing additional hardware failures. Fortunately only monitors were involved and were not damaged.

Found sturdy tables at Office Depot to use for work surfaces. (Staple’s tables were crap and staff were no help, but Office Depot’s tables were pretty sturdy and the staff ere very helpful. Thanks!).

Finish rearranging office

Backed up laptop across all other machines.

Saturday

Back to work.

Discovered that my mozilla local mail folder had been wiped sometime on Wednesday…

Realized had wiped all good copies of the mozilla local mail folder.

I hope next week is better.

YASU 0.0.2.6

Spider has been updated to 0.0.2.6. This update adds the command line argument uri as a synonym for url to work around a bug in Thunderbird which tries to process any command line argument named url as a mailto url.

This will allow Spider 0.0.2.6 or later to be used in the “download checker” tool to download, install and report on Thunderbird 2.

Current users of Spider can simply update. New users can install from spider.xpi.

Thanks to Scott MacGregor for finding and fixing the problem.