During the five years we’ve been publishing FOSS Force, I’ve never spoken to you while wearing my publisher or editor hats, because I don’t want…
Posts published by “Christine Hall”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Website publishers using the popular free and open source WordPress content management system (CMS) woke up this morning to find that their sites had been upgraded to version 4.2.2. Users who’s sites somehow missed being automatically upgraded are urged to update immediately, as this update addresses several important security issues. According to Wordfence, maintainers of a popular WordPress security plugin, this release fixes one recently discovered vulnerability and further hardens a security issue that was addressed in version 4.2.1.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.

Putting a popular conference on hold for a year could easily have proved to be a big mistake, especially since POSSCON takes place in IT-oLogy’s hometown. Not to fear, however, as the crowds returned, like the swallows to Capistrano, to Columbia’s Vista district where the conference is held.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Anyone who runs sites using the WordPress platform and the plugin Simple Ads Manager will want to read this and learn from our mistake. Even those not using this particular plugin, but who have deactivated plugins not being used but still residing on their servers might find this useful. Luckily, in our case no harm was done, but that’s only because the incident occurred on a test site, so we were able to just take the site down. Lucky for us, it wasn’t FOSS Force or one of our other active sites.
Early Saturday evening we began receiving numerous email notices with two worrisome subject lines from our server. One subject was “LOCALRELAY Alert for sitename,” being sent to us at the rate of about every five minutes, with each showing info on the “first ten of 101 emails” that had been sent by the server since the last email notification. The other subject, “Script Alert for /path/to/script” was coming with the same frequency. To make a long story short, someone had hacked into a site we use to evaluate and test WordPress plugins before possibly deploying them on active sites, and was using it to send spam. Our test site had been turned into a spambot in other words.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux