A little blip…
Please pardon the mess around here while I re-construct the site. A portion of the site had been hacked, and I lost a fair amount of data recovering from that. I have backup data for almost everything, but not always in the best format.
I’m taking the opportunity of rebuilding the blog to strip out some of the less valuable posts, and I’m looking for a new theme. I have also removed the Dezignstuff.com web site, since no one ever visited it much anyway. That URL now redirects automatically to the blog (dezignstuff.com/blog). It’s easier to see what worked and what didn’t from the distance of months or years. I’m going to try to get the comments back in, because the comments are definitely part of the appeal of this blog, in my view.
It might be a week or so until things settle down and stop changing. I guess bragging about the 5000 comments was an invitation for something to happen.
Of course cyber discipline can go both ways. Users might stage denial of service protests against their cad providers in the future if they misbehave. This would be like a cross between a flash mob and a class action.
Don’t like a release or a fee hike – hit them with a dos. Food for thought.
Hallo Matt,
First, please accept my congratulations for being not such blind to repeat 1000 times one lay in hope it become a truth … But the propaganda guys do not like such a freedom of expresions – rather they gona burn any book, stating SolidWorks is not the best one – now and forever!
Yeah, you have to have at least a sneaking suspicion that someone connected with DS had this site taken down – VARs who dont like their customers talking about a weak SW2012, DS who dont like their faltering cloud project being examined in public, or the eminent death of SW being considered. Coupled with the pending release of SW2012 in a few days it seems actually plausible…despicable but plausible for a corporation looking out for their own self interest and one who is rather at ease lately with exceeding their boundaries.
You would think if it was just a random hack, other than the obvious front page substitution, there would have been porn or something injected but it seems the main target/casualty was the comments? and the general chatter and traffic.
Guess we wont ever know but if there are people out there thinking we would never suspect a strategic take down of what they might arrogantly regard as a corporate unfriendly (but very user friendly) blog they are mistaken.
Things like this have a way of blowing back and causing serious damage and this right at a time where they dont need to make their situation any worse than they have for themselves. It would be a good idea for DS, if they or some associated party are indeed behind this, to pull their heads well in and behave like good CAD citizens from now on, IMHO.
Matt, You must have an enemy with friends in low places. That’s one way to keep you quite for a while.
Hi Matt, sorry to see your site was hacked. Hope you have a recent backup.
The recent bot attention here might be related. I see there is something still amiss though.
At the top of the page:
Warning: in_array() [function.in-array]: Wrong datatype for second argument in /home5/dezignst/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/BAStats/BAStats_logger.php on line 114
Possibly there is still some script injected somewhere that you need to hunt out. I read addons can introduce a vulnerability. Change passwords etc in case you are still vulnerable.
I really hope this is a genuine random hack and not corporate sabotage.