We’re big fans of Futurama here at Tiger Technologies, so we’re excited about its return to the Interwaves. (We hesitate to make the “Good news, everyone!” reference, but it’s just so obvious…)
We thought the recent 2-hour movies were OK if a little, um, “uneven.” But we have high hopes (“higher than sugar cane growing on Mount Everest”) that the Futurama team will hit their stride and churn out some great episodes.
The fun starts with two back-to-back episodes tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10pm on Comedy Central. Set your TiVo’s!
Do you login to your WordPress blog securely? Are your username and password encrypted so that “hackers” can’t steal them and then break into your blog? (Probably not!)
By default, each WordPress blog is configured to send the login username and password as plain (unencrypted) text. If a hacker can see what you are sending during your login, they can easily steal your username and password. This can happen if you have a virus installed on your computer. It can also happen if your computer is virus-free but connects via WiFi. If your main computer uses a wireless connection, or if you or other users of your blog ever login with their laptops — blogging from a coffee shop, anyone? — remember that these connections can be insecure, and could be susceptible to revealing your password.
You can protect your blog by installing an “SSL certificate” and configuring WordPress to require secure logins. Your browser will then encrypt your username and password so that no one can intercept them.
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Today we tried to call Microsoft and spent a while getting bounced around through different voicemail systems, none of which seemed to have the option we needed. Finally, we reached some sort of dead-end and their system disconnected us. You’ve probably had similar experiences.
Worse, some companies don’t even offer phone support at all. Have you ever tried to call Google for GMail tech support? Or find a way to send them an e-mail for assistance?
Tiger Technologies offers support via Web pages, e-mail and telephone. While most of our customers find what they need on our Web site or by e-mail, we’re also proud to offer high-quality, free phone support from our own employees (not an outsourced call center) Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm (Pacific time), at (510) 527-3131. You’ll almost always be quickly connected to someone who can help you.
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In the last few days, there’s been a lot of talk on the Internet about the security of WordPress blog software.
Several shared hosting companies apparently allow customers to view the text of other customer’s files by default, and that allows malicious customers to discover the database password of another site (from the “wp-config.php” file) and alter the site.
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We’ve recently heard from several customers who have received what appears to be a domain name renewal invoice from a company called “Domain Registry of America”.
These “invoices” are a scam. Domain Registry of America is unrelated to our company, and has been cited by the FTC for “deceptive conduct”.
If you look closely at the “invoices”, they actually say something like “This notice is not a bill, rather an easy means of payment should you decide to renew your domain with us.” However, that small print is easy to miss.
We have a page about Domain Registry of America scams with much more information. We encourage you to make sure that whoever pays your invoices is aware of it.
We keep coming across WordPress customer sites that have hurt their performance by switching from the “WP Super Cache” plugin we recommend to a newer plugin named “W3 Total Cache”. Unfortunately, their site often ends up being far slower after switching to W3 Total Cache.
If you care about the performance of your site, please stick with WP Super Cache unless you have a very good reason to switch. It works, and it works well.
Some people tell us that W3 Total Cache works just as well if it’s properly configured, and they may well be right — but it seems like it’s difficult to configure properly. Our experience is showing that it’s easy to get wrong, and performance ends up suffering. WP Super Cache makes it easy to get great performance.
We’ve got a lot of customers running WordPress, and we definitely recommend running WP Super Cache to improve performance. It can help dramatically!
But recently we’ve seen a number of our customers getting hammered by a ton of requests from FeedBurner. Usually the request is of this form:
/somepost?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=SomeCampaignString
We’ve also seen FeedBurner going crazy and making thousands of duplicate requests. One of the sites we host has gotten 45,000 simple status requests (HTTP “HEAD” requests) from FeedBurner today, for no good reason that we can see.
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One of the most frustrating things we deal with is helping customers transfer domain names from other “registrars” (domain name companies) to us. To do this, we ask the old company to release the domain name, and they then have five business days to either release it or reject the transfer.
There’s an obvious potential conflict-of-interest here. An unscrupulous company could easily make more money by rejecting the transfer and forcing the domain name owner to renew it there instead.
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An earlier blog post described how several of our customers got their personal computers infected by a new virus that has been spreading across the Internet. Initial versions of the virus spread themselves by reading a Web site’s FTP username and password stored on the PC, then downloading Web pages, inserting an “iframe” tag, and re-uploading the Web pages back to the server. As a proactive measure, we started scanning all uploaded files and stripping out any malicious “iframe” tags.
We are now seeing newer versions (commonly called “Gumblar”) which spread by inserting “script” tags with encoded JavaScript code. Because there are several variations of this approach, and because some legitimate commercial scripts use the same technique to hide their source code, we cannot perfectly identify and strip out these infections. Therefore, we will not automatically strip out the “script” tags from any upload file that looks suspicious.
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Recently, several customers have told us that pages on their Web sites have been modified without their knowledge. Upon investigation, the customers found their computers had been infected with a virus that steals saved FTP passwords, such as the “Gumblar” or Trojan.PWS.Tupai.A virus.
We’ve taken a step to protect you against this problem (described below), but it’s wise to protect yourself, too.
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