Techno-badness & femdom

So July was a bad month for me, technically speaking.

I mean birthday and all, so presents and booze and loveliness which is awesome (and thank you all for the good wishes :)).

But wow, technically: Bad month.

Those of you who are very observant may have noticed some oddness on my blog for a couple of weeks in July. My web host’s server was hacked.

The first indication I had that something was wrong was that my admin password didn’t work. When I finally clicked ‘reset password’, I got an email that included an admin username which I did not recognise: It had been changed to ‘haha-urhacked’ (okay not really, it was something else, but YOU GET THE IDEA).

At the peak, they were changing my admin username every couple of hours, had changed my 404 page to a hackers signature page that included a backend login for themselves, and they changed the title and menu on my blog to advertise their presence.

My Fabulous Man Who Knows Everything (MFMWKE) figured out who the hackers were pretty early on, and it seemed that they were running a competition to see who could hack the most sites: Conveniently, they listed the hacked sites on a competition board as they went. By the time the hacking attack was dealt with by my host, they had hacked 216 sites on the shared server that I’m on. It took two weeks for my host to sort out.

Part of the ‘sorting out’ was a rollback of all of the impacted sites to a backup taken at the end of June, which meant I had to recreate posts and all the back-end updates/tweaks/changes that I made after that.

My web host has assured me that they have addressed the security issue that allowed the hackers access, and have better silo’d sites on their shared server so that it’s not a case of someone having access to all websites as soon as they have access to one.

That’s not all for my technical woes last month though.

I changed internet service providers, and we all know how that goes, right? OF COURSE WE DO! What should have been a simple changeover did not go to plan, so I was without regular internet service for about 6 days. . Quelle surpris. I am not a happy Domme without internet. That’s fixed now.

On another note, Facebook is working on their security, and part of that is that they have shut down the ability for third party applications to post status updates from outside of FB. While that sounds perfectly reasonable because of course that stops bots from flooding FB with guff, my Facebook feed consists purely of me auto-sharing my twitter posts over there because I know lots of folks are on FB and not on Twitter and I wanted to reach out to them. So with a FB presence, but no active content, my FB page is essentially dead air. I’m not sure what to do about that, if anything.

So all in all, that adds up to about 3 weeks of paralysing issues on my end and a dead social media page.

Wait, there’s more!

Out in the real world, but still tech: Carl, my beloved coffee machine, has decided that he will not work properly for me any more. He still makes coffee (touch wood), but he refuses to texturise the milk (did you know that was a thing? It is). This is entirely a first world problem (well, they all are, but this one truly!), but going from waking up and looking forward to perfectly beautiful silky coffee to ‘eh, it’s okay, kind of watery’ coffee makes me cranky.

I’m still looking for things to try with him myself before I take him to the hospital: I suspect he can’t be ‘fixed’ since the steam wand still works, it just no longer *works*, and I imagine that kind of subtlety will be difficult, if not impossible, to repair.

Okay, have you managed to stick with me through my cataloguing of woes this far?

Good.

Hi :).

On the femdom side (yes! femdom stuff! on a femdom blog! whoddathunkit? *faints*), the cougarling and I have finally firmed up a weekend visit for him. He’ll be up here next Thursday night, staying until Sunday. I haven’t seen him for quite a while, so it will be a bit ‘stranger in the house’ until we get re-familiarised. But I don’t think it will take long: Hard to forget 6’3 of pretty.

On the agenda: Kissing and rope. I haven’t thought beyond that. Not sure I need to, frankly. Because kissing! And rope!

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8 comments

  1. You’re a busy Lady, Ferns – so much to cope with and yet You still find time to keep us all by Your side! Thank You, and i do hope Your milk will be ‘texturized’ again soon!!

    David

    1. Hard to diagnose a failing coffee machine remotely with only a scant description f the problem, but if you have hard water (containing minerals, no water softener in your home) it could be that it built up a lot of scale inside the steam making part and some has broken off and is clogging your ‘texturizer’. Maybe try soaking with white vinegar for an afternoon to dissolve the scale. Rinse and repeat if you see improvement, but not back to original performance. Good luck. Love your site, and especially love listening to your podcasts -please make more of those.

      1. @mr. best wishes:

        You could be right: I’ve already soaked the only part that comes off (which is only the very end of the wand). The only way to do the rest is to put vinegar water in the receptacle and actually run it through the steamer and they explicitly say not to do that.

        I’ve been googling my arse off and trying every suggestion I can find :/.

        The pump has been pulsing instead of running steady, so it might be that. Oddly, it was steady this morning, so I ALMOST got some decent milk out of the process.

        Maybe Carl has decided he’s bratted enough and is going to come good now… :).

        “Love your site, and especially love listening to your podcasts -please make more of those.”

        Thank you! And I will :).

        Ferns

  2. Is your Facebook presence of “Page” or a “Profile”? If it’s the former, you can still crosspost from Twitter. Not sure if it’s possible directly within Twitter, but Zapier offers an easy and free way to do so.

    Also, are you running WordPress? If so, Updraft Plus is a good free backup solution. You can set it to send the backups to Dropbox (or a host of other options) and choose how long you want to keep them. I’ve found it useful for recovery when things go wrong.

    -Bruce

    1. It’s a profile, so that’s really useful info, thank you. I had a look and I can ‘convert’ one to another, so I will have to do a bit of research to understand what that means exactly.

      And yes, I have backups BUT (did I mention ‘bad technical month’?) when I tried to access them, they were corrupt. I think something was happening to the files in the upload to dropbox :/.

      Ferns

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