We Stayed Dry (This Time)

This is rumor control. Here are the facts: Yes, this site runs WordPress. No, to the best of my ability to determine, we are not compromised by the “SoakSoak” malware that has been infecting lots of WordPress sites. (The link in the previous sentence leads to a description of the malware in question, not an example of it.) No, we don’t run the Slider Revolution plugin which apparently contains the exploitable vulnerability (“RevSlider“) used by SoakSoak. We have no plans to migrate mythopoeic.org from WordPress to something else, given that 1) the security issue is in a third-party plugin, not WordPress itself and 2) the WordPress team seem to generally act like adults with respect to infosec.

Dwi Handayani is a Thief and a Liar

I just submitted my first DMCA takedown notice, and even though it was obviously justified, it sure didn’t feel very good. Everything I write here, I share under what I think is a pretty generous license, so I get a bit peeved when people repost my writing elsewhere without the minimal courtesy of attribution. The entire sordid story is after the jump.

Wherein the author both tests WordPress and inaugurates the site…

Is this thing on?

I’ve been henke@insync.net for a long damn time.

To the best of my ability to recall, my first email address was something or other @lanl.gov. This would be around or about 1987. After a four-year (somewhat overlapping) stint as something boring @rice.edu (Go Owls!), I wallowed in low-grade snark and minor infamy as henke@netcom.com and henke@scaly.ssc.gov. This would bring our timeline to approximately 1993.

After that, it was a move to Houston and henke@phoenix.net. I have fond memories of the phoenix account, notably the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of my email stream stemming from the inability of stupid people to spell “phoenix”. This was about the time spam was becoming a real problem, so although I was a frequent poster to UseNet, I munged addresses.

That brings us to 1999 (party as though it were same) and henke@insync.net. As of this writing, that account it still active. As of the dawn of 2010, it will not be. Alas, the fantastic, local, hacker-run insync.net was too good for this troubled world, and was gobbled up by texas.net lo, these many years ago. While the original domain still stands, I’ve grown tired of shelling out the Croessian sum of twenty bucks a month for a simple email forward and POP mailbox.

Thus, I’ve hired hostmonster and registered the domain ‘mythopoeic.org’, at which I’m dhenke (as there’s an ahenke also, with whom I desire email parity — while I’m still Henke of Clan Henke, that’s only for formal occasions).

While hand-crafting HTML (and/or XHTML) with a plain old text editor has long been my habit, I have come around to the view that time spent on that sort of attention to detail is time that would serve both my readers and myself better were I to spend it on content. And, Hostmonster had an easy way to install WordPress, so, well… here we are.