For those of you running WordPress blogs, you might be interested to know that version 2.6.1 has been released. The highlighted improvements for additional languages, IIS users and installations with lots of plugins don’t provide much benefit to me personally, but it’s good to see that development is still pressing ahead at a decent speed. As always, a full list of changes is available, and my advice would be to upgrade as soon as possible.
On the company’s blog today, Twitter announced that they would be ceasing all SMS updates in the UK. As usual, TechCrunch UK was hot off the mark with a report, and I’m sure that plenty of other opinions will fly around the Web over the next few days.
Quite frankly though, I’m amazed that the service has lasted this long. Twitter appears to lack a viable business model, and each time you update your status it could be sending that out, via SMS, to tens, hundreds or even thousands of recipients. Even if Twitter received a small amount for each incoming SMS, this would be dwarfed by the number of outgoing messages. The more popular Twitter gets, the more they will lose. The sensible option would be to charge users for receiving texts—which is fairly simple to do—but it looks like the site is run by a bunch of techies who have been blinded into thinking that providing a service which costs money to run without a long-term source of revenue is somehow a good idea. Then again, they’re running a Web 2.0 site, where having basic accountancy skills on your CV will ensure that you never get hired.
From a personal perspective, I’m actually quite pleased to see this happening. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen companies pour millions of dollars into these web 2.0 companies, which have produced virtually no returns and are an appalling waste of capital which could be put to far better use elsewhere. Perhaps now investors will look again at opportunities to “invest” in companies like Twitter, Facebook et al and see them for what they really are—a highly speculative bet on the success of a company with no assets, no business model and virtually no revenue.
For those of you who were not able to make it to OpenTech 2008, or want to listen again, audio recordings of many of the talks are now available from the OpenTech website. I’m not sure if other talks are going to be uploaded soon (the session I was chairing was definitely recorded, though the microphones were a bit iffy) but the ones which are already online are well worth listening to.
Phishing, the art of obtaining information from users by pretending to be from a reputable known source, is surprisingly effective, despite attempts by numerous organisations (particularly banks) to educate users about this issue. Recently, the University of Manchester, where I’ve been a student for nearly five years, was hit by a barrage of emails pretending to be from IT Services (the department which runs most of the University’s email, amongst other things) which encouraged students and staff to reply with their username and password. Unbelievably for an organisation which supposedly consists of intelligent people who are working towards obtaining one of the highest qualifications in the country, more than seventy people replied with their login details. As a result, millions of spam messages were sent from University accounts, causing some major mail providers, including Hotmail, to block all incoming mail from manchester.ac.uk addresses and their subdomains.
Phishing relies upon the fact that it doesn’t matter if only one in ten thousand people are completely lacking in common sense (given the University’s size, it’s probably actually more like one in five thousand)—spam enough of them and you’ll eventually get some hits. It amazes me that people still fall for this trick, because to me it seems so painstakingly obvious that a bank would never ask for information such as your PIN, but it would appear that the message has still not got through to everyone.
Following on from its first survey in 2007, well-known web magazine A List Apart is launching a 2008 survey for those of us in the web business (design, programming, development etc.) . An analysis will be published in a later edition of the magazine, and the anonymised raw data will also be made available so that anyone can run their own analysis too. I’m not sure how useful the end result will be, but as a freelance web development myself I’m certainly interested in seeing the final analysis and statistics.
Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS (via: Matt)
I’ve been looking for a half-decent content management system for some time, as until now I’ve been writing my own code for each site that I run (Game Demos is just one example of this). This is a real pain, as I never have the time to write an admin interface—and therefore end up using phpMyAdmin—and I’m not as good as designing interfaces as other people. However, I have thought several times about using WordPress as a content management system—even though it started as a blogging platform—which is why the above article is particularly of interest to me.
Reasons why I would consider using WordPress as a CMS:
I don’t have much time at the moment to play around with WordPress, as I’m busy writing up my MPhil thesis, but once that’s out of the way I think I will give it a whirl on Politics Watch as an experiment and see how far I get.
Spring 2009 is the next annual UKUUG Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference, organised by yours truly (with help and assistance from many others). Scheduled to be held in London from the 24th to the 26th March 2009 (venue to be confirmed), this time the conference will be focusing on security and system administration. The call for papers is now open, so if you are interested in giving a talk or delivering a tutorial session, we’d love to hear from you.
The Open Rights Group have recently launched a fundraising drive, under the name ORG-GRO and the slogan “Protect your Bits”. Conceived three years ago at OpenTech 2005 with 1,000 people pledging £5/month in financial support, the ORG is often seen as the UK’s equivalent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a well-known US lobby group working for digital freedom.
At present, the organisation seems to be doing a lot of good work on a very small budget. The only thing that worries me at the moment is that ORG gets their office space for free. Whilst this is obviously a fine thing in theory as it saves the organisation a significant amount of money which can be spent on forwarding the aims of the group, it does raise the possibility that they could be kicked out of their office at short notice and forced to find somewhere else.
I personally don’t support the Open Rights Group at the moment, because environmental organisations seem to sweep up most of my spare funds, but if you have a fiver a month to spare and want to see your digital rights protected, then you should sign up to support ORG now. Just one minor note though, if at all possible you should setup a standing order rather than a PayPal subscription, otherwise a proportion of your donation goes towards propping up a credit institution in Luxembourg.
“You spend 50% of your time hacking scripts to get around bugs in other people’s poorly documented and unmaintained code, and the other 50% cursing the users of your system.”
– Paul, today, after spending several days trying to get JTidy to work, only to realise that the documentation is out of date and he had to checkout the latest SVN, compile the classes manually (no build scripts provided), create a jar file and copy this over the existing one before everything would work.Linux 2008 is the latest in a series of conferences run by the UKUUG. This year it is going to be held in Manchester, so I will probably be around, and the Call For Papers is now available. The closing date is the 18th August, so you have some time to submit an abstract, and the final papers are due by the 20th October (which, coincidentally, is my birthday).