After a late night of cleaning up the blog, I hope everything’s back to normal now. As noted last night, my primary source regarding removing the hack the blog suffered was Personified. If you run a WordPress blog, I urge you to read through the linked post and check your blog’s database and files thoroughly, just in case. Pharma hacks can hang around for months before activation, and there’s still confusion regarding how they get in. (Note that shared hosting isn’t necessarily to blame—Pearson notes he was hacked while on an $800/month dedicated box.)

For the record, the hack here was pretty textbook: two plug-ins had compromised files with very sneaky names, and a new file showed up in the root. Since I lack encyclopaedic knowledge of the names of every file on my server, it took file-count comparisons with clean downloads to find the bad files. I also had several counts of malicious code in the database, along the lines of those outlined in Pearson’s piece.

iOS dev Bob Koon was also on hand last night, providing further helpful tips, and so Revert to Saved now has a seriously beefed up .htaccess, along with a slew of new plug-ins that lock down various elements of WordPress and inform me when any changes to files are made. (Obviously, I also changed all my passwords too.) CloakingDetector seems to think compromised pages are no longer seen any differently by users and GoogleBot, so I’m hopeful that over the coming weeks Google will respider the site and things will be back to normal.

Only time will tell if everything’s fine, though, because these hacks have a tendency to reappear at random if every little last bit hasn’t been cleaned out.

I don’t tend to look at Revert to Saved in search engines much, but perhaps I should have done more vanity searches, because it appears this site has been hacked, with some variant of the pharma hack. (Search for ‘reverttosaved’ on Google and you get lots of lovely bullshit about drugs being for sale here. Great.) I’m currently lucky in that the site’s not yet been blacklisted, but that luck may not last.

What the incident has done is utterly demolish the momentum I’d been building up posting as of the New Year (something regular visitors might have noticed/been shocked by); however, until I can figure out how to deal with the exploit and fix everything, RTS is on hold.

(Note: if anyone reading this is some kind of demon when it comes to cleaning up this kind of crap, please get in touch. Unless you hate me, in which case feel free to laugh heartily.)

UPDATE: Props to Chris Pearson for some tips that have got me some way to (I hope) fixing this mess.

I suspect the response to this will be a resounding silence, or “we don’t care”, or, if most of the Mac fans who showed up yesterday are still around, “you’re a shit designer and an moron who should die in a fire, so who cares?”, BUT! As a pun, I messed about with the blog’s style sheet yesterday, replacing the yellow with a subtle grey background.

The original red/yellow scheme was, as precisely one guy noted on a surprisingly lengthy discussion about yesterday’s article, inspired by classic communist propaganda graphic design. Those guys weren’t fluffy bunnies, but they knew great colour and design. But I also know at least one person found the contrast a struggle, despite me dialling down the yellow a few times.

So, did you like the yellow? Do you prefer the grey? DOES ANYONE CARE? Answers on a postcard (comment) to the usual address. Randomly chosen winner gets sent a kicked swan. ← This is a joke, people all over the internet who are now accusing me of being Evil Animal Cruelty Person.

December was a tough month, and it probably didn’t escape people’s notice that RTS was rather GRRRRR for much of it. Now, however, I’m immersed in house-cleaning-fury (fury of a good kind) and looking forward to a pleasant couple of days off, followed by two days of crazywork, followed by some more days off. Therefore, RTS is shutting down for the year and will return in January.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s read this blog over the past year, anyone who’s linked to it, and those who’ve left comments, regardless of whether they rabidly agreed with what I said, or considered me some kind of idiot-face who should be bricked up immediately (or somewhere in-between—AS IF THERE’S ROOM FOR COMPROMISE).

So, happy whatever-you’re-doing-over-the-next-week-or-two, and I hope you’ll continue to visit, read and debate in 2011.

Another one from the archives, and perhaps my favourite: Why the new iMac sucks. This was published on the original version of Revert to Saved, way back in February 2002 (the ‘iMac’ in the article refers to the desk-lamp model), and met with an interesting response, almost taking down my web-hosting account, due to the number of hits it got.

The context of the piece was that, at the time, anything Apple did got slammed by lazy journalists, so I thought it would be fun to satirise this. Unfortunately, a rather large group of Mac users didn’t really understand the concept of satire.

While I’m well aware that Mac users can be sensitive, even I wasn’t expecting the deluge of email I got, including the prize gem “you are a biased computer nerd who cannot accept that most people don’t give a s—— about all the lame insider c—— that you talked about when you reviewed the imac [sic]” and helpfully finishing off with the wonderfully friendly line “you are an idiot and it makes me laugh”.

So, here’s the original article in all its glory—see if you can spot other things I got flamed for. This time, of course, no-one has any excuse for missing that this is satire, although I’ll bet I get at least one angry message from a militant Mac user who reads half the title and furiously fires off an email to me via their new USB-port-challenged MacBook Air.

A totally informed and unbiased account from our leading technical expert, Phil Clive Lover. ©ZealotDumbassNet.com

I watched the MacExpo webcast (and even bore the sickening player that is QuickTime—why Apple can’t use the excellent Windows Media Player like the rest of us is beyond me). I saw Steve Jobs strut around the stage like an over-excited chicken in his ‘oh so cool’ black sweater that made me want to vomit—twice. But then I cheered up, because he announced the ‘new iMac’ and I saw that Apple—so long a thorn in the side of proper PC users everywhere—is finally doomed.

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