I just disconnected every single site that was authorized to access my Google account. There doesn’t seem to be much else I can do right now.
Category: rants
ruby’s rants & randomness
If you’re not outraged, you’re not reading my blog.
More hacked
Update: The hacked account @notrubyyo has now disappeared from the face of Twitter. So I have no way to log in there now unless I make a new account.
I did get one (robotic) e-mail reply from Twitter in response to my pleas for help, so I’m still hoping that once they understand what is happening they will fix it all and restore my tweets and my followers.
I have a lot of history in 6 1/2 years on Twitter!
Sooo hacked
Well thank goodness, at least I still have access to this! I have lost my whole site on lotusmedia.org (for now).
Ever since reading last year about the epic hacking of Mat Honan, all for his short Twitter ID “@Mat” I have been worried the same thing might happen to me. Fortunately, I haven’t handed over quite as much of my life to Apple as Mat had done. But I still get nervous whenever people try to hack into my Twitter account, which has happened before. Twitter has always ignored my requests for attention to this.
That shit did hit the fan today, and while I’m still locked out of some very important accounts, nothing has been irreversibly damaged that I know of.
What happened:
At 4:15 pm today, I got an e-mail from PayPal about “How to reset your PayPal password.” I was in the car on the way to a party so I just ignored it assuming the usual e-mail authentication barrier would be adequate.
Then at 10:39 pm I got two notices from Yahoo saying my password had actually been changed. And at 10:40 pm Dreamhost (who owns my domain name, web hosting, and accounts for many friends and former clients) said “Your password has been successfully reset from the IP address 24.234.193.4.”
Not good! I can’t tell if they’ve done anything to Dreamhost because my website (lotusmedia.org) was already having technical difficulties that I just noticed yesterday. Then I go to check Twitter. Although I haven’t received any messages from them, I know this was the target in the @mat case.
Sure enough, my account has been involuntarily changed to @notrubyyo, and @ruby has been taken over (by some fool with no friends and no tweets). I still have access to all my followers, etc, but I have lost my name!
So far I have successfully reset my passwords at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Facebook. I have not yet accessed Dreamhost, and I’m afraid to find and enter the data that I would need to get in to PayPal. I have an old Apple ID and I can’t access that either. I don’t think there’s malware on my computer, but I can’t be sure it’s not compromised.
I’ve contacted Twitter using their reporting system (as well at tweeting @ them, which never works), and have also e-mailed Dreamhost.
Just now I checked Twitter to see if there was any response, and now @notrubyyo is gone completely. I’m not sure but I think my 7 years of Twitter just got flushed down the toilet.
Love flying out from the same airport I used as a kid when flying from my mom to visit my dad (and to come home, importantly).
“I’m the guy that helps Canada.” I swear that’s what he said. Don’t know why.
Niagara Falls! on Flickr.
Was it worth almost missing our flight so I could take this picture at Niagara Falls? I hope so.
Niagara Falls!
Was it worth almost missing our flight so I could take this picture at Niagara Falls? I hope so.
HASTAC Features
I’m very proud of some work I’ve been doing on the Drupal site that I manage at work. Here’s a blog post I wrote about some of the newest features:
Today I am excited to officially launch several new features on the HASTAC web site, including Collections, Similar Content, Knowledge Base, and more. I think these additions will do a lot to help people connect with and utilize the rich and deep content of the site.
Collections (beta!)
The culmination of two months of very hard work, HASTAC Collections is a beta feature of our site that brings together content from across the site in a hand-curated list of posts which can be viewed in a large tiled display (at right), or in a multifunction list view (below left). Collections are not limited to highlighting hastac.org content, links to other sites are highlighted with yellow buttons. When viewing as a list, users can sort and filter the collection by type of content, topics and tags, and keywords in the title or body.
I invite you to check out our two inaugural collections, Digital Badges and MOOC HQ, and look for more soon. The staff are using and testing this feature now, and we hope to be able to expand it to more HASTAC members later this year. (It will require additional programming and may even result in a new module that we can contribute back to the Drupal community. As a result it will take considerable time.)
Visitors can browse our Collections by visiting the Topics landng page.
Similar Content
When looking at any content on the site you will now see a list of posts that may be about similar topics. It is generated by an algorithm based on the title, tags, and topics of the post. (See example at right.) If your post doesn’t seem to be generating revelant content, try adding more tags. These are the best way to tell the site what you are talking about and to properly connect related ideas.
Knowledge Base
The Help pages of our site have been in place since 2011, but don’t get much attention. We have now moved them into a proper knowledge page, and added a Frequently Asked Questions section. You can also use the Contact Support link there to create a ticket when you need personal assistance. This is being combined with our existing site feedback tool (see tab in lower right of your browser) which allows users to suggest and vote on improvements for the site.
Other goodies
I have also uncovered or enabled a few other goodies on the site that members might enjoy.
- Get Random is a button you can find on the Recent Content page (linked to from the Recent Content column on the front page) that will let you trip back through 9 years of HASTAC community content, 20 randomly-selected posts at a time.
- Two great ways to see what’s happening on HASTAC right now are the Tracker (a list of content sorted by latest comments and newest publication) and the Heartbeat (a stream of activity including new posts, comments, relationships, and users).
- The site-wide Tag Cloud is exactly what it sounds like!
I hope you enjoy all these new features. If you have more ideas for improving the site (and I know you do) please fill out our Usability Survey (it only takes 5 minutes) and post your suggestions in our Feedback forum. Thanks for your engagement, it’s what makes HASTAC great.
Super Duper Izzy on Flickr.