Monday, July 21, 2014.\u00a0 -( 20\u00b0C \/ 68\u00b0F @ 10:15 pm, Halifax Time)<\/p>\n
I went a bit nuts this morning, thinking we’d been hacked and somebody’d reset all the accounts to “Author” that had been given Administration level access.\u00a0 (I couldn’t find the password to this account and the other one I had set up as a back door in case my absent mindedness left me in a strange place without my password book and I had something important to write about.)<\/p>\n
So I contacted Doug Otterson, who I thought had admin access and he logged in and couldn’t get the full menu, couldn’t do appearance changes or invite new authors or check through the spam files to see if something on hold was actually a decent comment from somewhere. So I was close to 99% sure we’d been hacked. ((I stopped wondering why anybody would want to hack this silly newsy blog a long time ago when somebody from Turkey hacked into an even sillier guestbook, left me some really nice photos of dolphins and a huge headline, “Ha Ha, you’ve been hacked, We OWN You!” I took a screen shot because I liked the dolphins and scratched my head and wondered why anybody would bother- I mean if that was a feather in some Turkish hacker’s hat, that person’s goals could not have been set too high….))<\/p>\n
I had a couple mundane tasks to get through and things that had to be done kept me busy until I stumbled across an older password book, that I’d copied stuff from with cryptic little notes to myself so anybody who got a hold of the book would not have an easy time trying to log into anything important and would probably be locked out after a certain number of bogus attempts. I flipped to the right\u00a0page, saw the not-cryptic password and went, “AHA! That’s what those underlines and asterisks meant.”<\/p>\n
And *!* the password worked, and I got in at the admin level and I could actually see the “Users” icon in the left side panel of the dashboard… I don’t have to go crazy looking for a way to contact wordpress dot com, prove who I am ((( like, did I have a secret answer to a secret question written down somewhere that the dog might have eaten or the visiting cat had diarrhea all over…? )))<\/p>\n
So, I’m not exactly doing a happy dance (((( the dog might want to dance with me and he could get a bit over zealous and do real damage with his claws. He still wants to be the world’s first five hundred pound Labrador Retriever… ))))<\/p>\n
Yay! It works. I got something good done today. ( I accomplished a\u00a0couple good things today, but now the day is not clouded by the feeling that I failed as a wannabe geek by suffering the humiliation of being hacked by a nine year old whose parents blocked him from getting to porn sites and, well, he had to take his frustrations out on somebody-)<\/p>\n
We are back out there in digital ones and zeros world of the not quite so free as we thought it was… internet.<\/p>\n
And here we are, feeling like the poster child for “egg on the face” (and if you remember anybody actually using that expression, you’re probably older than I am)<\/p>\n
And this silly blog might see a little bit of action that might actually mean something to somebody, somewhere… the world did not end in a cloud of dust or a gasp of shame.<\/p>\n
Yay!<\/p>\n
—————Aerendel<\/p>\n
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